If Broadway composer, lyricist and performer Lin-Manuel Miranda had not taken a vacation to Mexico during the run of his Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights, he might never have written his hip-hop history lesson, Hamilton. In the airport on his way to Mexico, you see, he popped into a bookshop and bought Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton and read it while … [Read more...]
Zoetic triumphs with powerful ‘American Son’
Lawyer-turned-playwright Christopher Demos-Brown, a co-founder of Zoetic Stage, is one of the area’s most prominent dramatists. That status took a quantum leap upward when this South Florida favorite son took his ripped-from-the-headlines play, American Son, to Broadway in late 2018. While some of the reviews were brutally negative, the production managed to play 97 … [Read more...]
Splendid leads make Maltz’s ‘Chicago’ unmissable
Somewhere deep inside the Cook County Jail, circa 1920s, lies the intersection of blind justice and show biz. It is a cynical spot to be sure, but also extremely entertaining, thanks to composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, director-choreographer Denis Jones and a skilled Maltz Jupiter Theatre company of performers and designers. The show is Chicago, based … [Read more...]
‘To Life 2’ takes another look at Great Jewish-American Songbook
With very few exceptions, the composers of the Broadway theater during the 20th century were of Jewish heritage, some of them immigrants from Eastern Europe. That cultural anomaly was examined in song a year ago in a revue dubbed To Life, named for a number in Fiddler on the Roof. Since it proved popular with the audience at Boca Raton’s Willow Theatre, that show has now … [Read more...]
Wick’s ‘Evita’ recycles Hal Prince, comes up with a dud
The Wick Theatre uses director Norb Joerder so frequently because he has staged most of its musicals already, often many times over. He could, as the expression goes, direct them in his sleep. And with the current production of Evita, that is exactly what it looks like he has done. The Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice biographical musical about Argentina’s power-hungry Eva … [Read more...]
‘Chicago’: The 1920s have something to say to the 2020s
By Hap Erstein Although based on a play from 1926, that was adapted into a musical in 1975, Chicago “just feels like it was written five minutes ago, the way that it examines our culture and the cult of celebrity in our country.” So says Denis Jones, a veteran of the concert-like revival that continues in New York after 23 years, the longest-running American … [Read more...]
Appreciation: Jerry Herman, proudly old-fashioned man of the theater
In describing Broadway composer-lyricist Jerry Herman, who died Dec. 26 in Miami of pulmonary complications at the age of 88, most use the terms “optimist” and “old-fashioned.” And throughout his long, illustrious, lucrative career, he embraced both labels. As he commented to me back in 1985, as his final mega-hit show, La Cage aux Folles, was beginning its victory lap … [Read more...]
‘Bronx Tale’ derivative, but strong performances compel
Whether or not actor-writer Chazz Palminteri is concerned about ecology, he owes much of his career to recycling. Consider A Bronx Tale, which he first wrote and performed in the late 1980s, a semi-autobiographical one-man show about his coming of age in the New York borough. In the show, a young Palminteri surrogate named Calogero is caught in a tug-of-war between … [Read more...]
2019’s Top 10 in theater: ‘Streetcar’ stands out
It was an odd year at the theater in South Florida. Try as I might to include them in the year’s best, two of the region’s most reliable companies – Maltz Jupiter Theatre and GableStage – failed to make the cut of the top 10. Nor did Broward Stage Door, but that is less surprising, since the organization folded in March, after 25 years of operation and eight months after … [Read more...]
‘Villainous Company’ improbable, but actresses make it compelling
Are you in the mood for an old-fashioned parlor game of “who’s conning whom?” None of the three female characters in Victor L. Cahn’s Villainous Company are to be trusted, you see, and unless they are not what they claim to be, a lot of their dialogue rings false. Or perhaps it is playwright Cahn who is doing the conning and we in the audience are the conned. … [Read more...]