NEW YORK --- At 84, Tom Stoppard concedes that Leopoldstadt will probably be his final play, If so, he concludes a major career at the top of his game with this epic, deeply personal history of a Jewish family moving through the first half of the 20th century and, inevitably, encountering and falling prey to the Holocaust. Absent is Stoppard’s affection for whimsy and … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway, No. 1: The ‘Parade’ passes by
I’m here in New York for a week of theatergoing, but it did not start well. On Saturday night, I had tickets for a designated press preview of Parade, the revival of the Alfred Uhry-Jason Robert Brown musical that got Brown his first Tony Award for best score. This production, which stars Ben Platt (of Dear Evan Hansen), began in CityCenter’s Encores series with enough … [Read more...]
Wick production winningly revives enduring charms of ‘Damn Yankees’
Baseball and musicals are two purely American institutions, so why not put them together, reasoned songwriters Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. The year was 1955, and they had just struck gold with The Pajama Game, so Broadway was eager to see what they would come up with next. Improbably — in the way that most ideas for musicals seem improbable until they work — they became … [Read more...]
‘Pretty Woman’ musical sticks too close to its movie model
Since romance is a cornerstone of the musical theater, perhaps it was inevitable that Pretty Woman — the most popular rom-com of all time — would make its way to Broadway It did so in 2018, thanks to an adaptation by Garry Marshall and J.F. Lawton — the film’s director and screenwriter, respectively — as well as a score by Canadian pop composer Bryan Adams and his frequent … [Read more...]
LWP serves up another fine whodunit in ‘Dial M for Murder’
By Dale King Lake Worth Playhouse has spent the last couple of seasons polishing up its capacity for presenting thought-provoking, plausible and entertaining murder mysteries. The theater company earned plaudits last year for its adaptation of Agatha Christie’s popular murder mystery Mousetrap. A year earlier, it kept the audience entranced with an edge-of-your-seat … [Read more...]
‘Nostalgia and heart’: Stars say you gotta have ‘Damn Yankees,’ at the Wick
Polled for their preferences in musicals, the Wick Theatre’s audience has consistently ranked 1955’s Damn Yankees very high. What is it about this Tony Award-winning show based on Douglas Wallop’s tongue-in-cheek novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, that is so appealing? Jeffrey Moss, who directs the Wick’s production that begins performances Thursday, sums it up … [Read more...]
‘Good People’ speaks its truth in searing Maltz production
“Write what you know” goes the clichéd but all-too-true route to theatrical success, and playwright David Lindsay-Abaire knows about escaping poverty. Born and raised in a blue-collar neighborhood of South Boston, he became a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist (Rabbit Hole) as well as the adapter of his play Kimberly Akimbo into a much-acclaimed musical on Broadway this season. … [Read more...]
Slow Burn offers hugely entertaining ‘Honeymoon in Vegas’
Slow Burn Theatre Company was established in 2009 with the express intent of producing contemporary, challenging musicals that few troupes in South Florida would attempt. Sure enough, it went out on a limb with its inaugural show, Bat Boy, earning the admiration of the critical community for its artistic and financial risk-taking, and audiences soon followed. When the … [Read more...]
At Boca Stage, ‘Grand Horizons’ goes for the laughs
In the prologue to Bess Wohl’s Grand Horizons, before we learn that Nancy and Bill French have passed their 50th anniversary, we watch as they wordlessly ready their breakfast as a team, the familiar exercise of a much-married couple. So it is more than a little surprising when the first words out of her mouth are “I think I would like a divorce.” Responding without … [Read more...]
Sharp cast helps lift subpar musical remake of ‘Tootsie’
Men have been dressing up in women’s clothing, for comic effect on stage and in the movies, about as long as those media have existed. In 1982, a committee of writers that included Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal kept that tradition alive with a film called Tootsie. It certainly earned its laughs, but it also had something to say, exploring the nature of and differences … [Read more...]