The cast of Shuffle Along performs “Broadway Blues.” (Photo by Julieta Cervantes) My New York trip is starting to wind down. Saturday, was my last two-show day, beginning with the dramatic immersion into the world of dementia, The Father, by French playwright Florian Zeller. In the evening I saw a new musical based on a 1921 show called Shuffle Along. But this was no mere … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway No. 7: Earnest ‘Tuck Everlasting’ falls a little short
Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Sarah Charles Lewis in Tuck Everlasting. (Photo by Joan Marcus) Before tonight's show, a new musical called Tuck Everlasting, I caught a little culture at the Museum of the City of New York. In addition to an artifact-rich exhibit on the Yiddish Theater and its influences on Broadway, the 5th Avenue treasure trove is currently featuring a … [Read more...]
Weak Handel, strong Rimsky at Lynn Phil’s final season concert
The current season of the Lynn Philharmonia, which ended April 17 with a concert at the Wold Performing Arts Center, has been largely triumphant. Continuing on its path of notable improvement under the direction of conductor Guillermo Figueroa, the students of the Lynn Conservatory have displayed impressive chops and discipline in their concerts this year, which have been … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway, No. 6: Newsmaker interviews, disarming ‘Bright Star’
With only one show on my schedule today, I could have relaxed, but this is New York City, where so many artists, writers and producers of shows on tour, heading to South Florida, reside. So I arranged to interview a couple of them today, to bank them stories for when the shows arrive at home. This afternoon, for instance, I met with Doug McGrath, screenwriter (Bullets Over … [Read more...]
‘Papa’: Inept film leaves old man, and even Cuba, at sea
Papa: Hemingway in Cuba, a memoiristic drama about Ernest Hemingway’s paranoid twilight in Havana and the Miami Globe reporter he “adopts” into his entourage, holds a significant distinction: It’s the first Hollywood film to shoot on location in Cuba since the 1959 revolution, an achievement reached over a decade of legal wrangling. It’s a shame that it was all in vain. The … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway No. 5: Two searing, powerful plays
Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams in Blackbird. Wednesday is, of course, a matinee day, so I saw two productions today and, as it worked out, they were two highly intense, intermissionless plays, which packed a lot of gut punch in roughly 90 minutes each. The one with considerable star power was David Harrower's Blackbird, making its Broadway debut although it is … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway, No. 4: Semi-sort-of seeing ‘Hamilton’
Oh well, the odds of winning the Hamilton digital lottery are said to be 80,000 to 1, and — what a surprise — I did not win. But the next day, I ended up seeing Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton performing anyway. OK, they weren't actually performing the show Hamilton, but they appeared at the 30th annual Easter Bonnet Competition, where they did a new number … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway, No. 3: Guilty pleasures of ‘Psycho’ win out
Benjamin Walker in American Psycho. If you work at it, Sunday can be a two-show day, for me capped by the malevolent musical American Psycho, based on Bret Easton Ellis's icy novel of a 1980s Wall Street account executive and serial killer. Yes, Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd came first in making multiple murders an apt topic for the musical stage, but unlikePsycho's … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway, No. 2: Great cast enlivens so-so ‘Waitress’
Keala Settle, Jessie Mueller and Kimiko Glenn in Waitress. (Photo by Joan Marcus) So I arrived in New York on an uneventful flight late on Saturday morning, and two and a half hours later I was sitting down to my first show — the penultimate preview of a new musical, Waitress, based on the 2007 film of the same name that starred Keri Russell as a diner waitress and … [Read more...]
Chameleon’s piano quartet rarities delight, impress
By Robert Croan Two of the three composers represented on Chameleon Musician’s season finale Sunday afternoon were names that few, if any, members of the audience had ever heard before. The delightful and enthusiastically received concert, in the Josephine S. Leiser Opera Center, featured rarely heard piano quartets by Dora Pejačevič and Zygmunt Noskowski, along with a … [Read more...]