Wednesday is a two-show day on Broadway, and I saw a couple of major productions of the season. At the matinee I saw Parade (after the canceled performance when I first arrived in town on Saturday), and in the evening, I saw Some Like It Hot, the new musical adaptation based on the 1959 Billy Wilder classic film comedy. Parade is a revival of the show that first opened … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway No. 4: A high-energy ‘& Juliet’ captivates
Yesterday’s show was the tongue-in-cheek take on Shakespeare, & Juliet, a jukebox musical with pop hits from the recent past that asks what might have happened if Juliet Capulet had lived instead of taking her own life. The infectious results are a little heavy-handed with its female empowerment message, but is ultimately a winner thanks to some clever plotting and a … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway No. 3: New Broadway museum worth a visit
Those who are envious of my being in New York this week should know that the temperature is in the 30s, and when the wind whips up it is bitter cold. So it is an ideal day to get off the street and into the new Museum of Broadway at 145 W. 45th St., an interactive collection of hundreds of original costumes, props and artifacts that bring Broadway history to life. … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway No. 2: Stoppard’s stunning swan song
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...]
‘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...]