You have to admire the dedication of Slow Burn Theatre to revive musicals that got insufficient love on Broadway. (Yes, we’re looking at you Big Fish, Side Show and Parade.) Still, you have to also accept, no matter how well the company performs them, some of these shows are simply subpar. Which brings us to Groundhog Day, the stage adaptation of the 1993 Bill Murray … [Read more...]
Slow Burn’s production turns so-so ‘Shrek’ into a winner
How can you tell that the pot-bellied, antenna-eared green ogre named Shrek and assertive, yet incurably romantic Princess Fiona are meant for each other? They fart and burp with compatible pride. In the shorthand of musical comedy – well, in Shrek, the Musical at least – that means love. Chances are you know that already from the 2001 Oscar-winning Dreamworks … [Read more...]
Wick’s ‘Pirates of Penzance’ comes together in winning topsy-turvy style
The year was 1980, when director Wilfred Leach and choreographer Graciela Daniele took the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance and gave it a comic, anything-for-a-laugh spin, captivating audiences in Central Park and later on Broadway. Surely the Wick Theatre’s Norb Joerder was taking notes, for he has recreated that Hellzapoppin’-style production, right … [Read more...]
‘I Love You, You’re Perfect …,’ no better in update, but MNM performers make it work
A lot has changed in the past 22 years, and much has remained the same. Take, for instance, a modest musical revue about relationships, I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, which opened off-Broadway in 1996 and ran 5,003 performances. Along the way, the show became an international hit too, translated into at least 17 languages and entertaining audiences in dozens … [Read more...]
MNM’s ‘La Cage’ falls short, but packs a relevant punch
A few years ago, as same-sex marriage was becoming legal all across the nation thanks to the evolved support of the president, the once daring 1983 musical La Cage aux Folles – which features two gay main characters and Broadway’s first male-male kiss – was looking a little dated. But as MNM Productions correctly points out in its program notes for the show, its message of … [Read more...]
MNM mounts respectable ‘Company’ at Rinker
That sound you hear is the third shoe dropping in a surprisingly Stephen Sondheim-rich summer in South Florida. Following FAU Festival Rep’s Into the Woods and Palm Beach Dramawork’s current steampunk Sweeney Todd comes MNM Productions with the master of ambivalence’s take on marriage, 1970’s Company. In addition to launching an extremely fertile decade for composer-lyricist … [Read more...]
Entertaining ‘Georgia McBride’ anything but a drag
Measured by the usual hard-hitting fare at GableStage, Matthew Lopez’s The Legend of Georgia McBride isn’t much of a play, but it does have the makings of one hell of a drag show. Sure, you could argue that the 90-minute evening is a celebration of the tawdry lower depths of show business and a look at how one unlikely cross-dresser gets in touch with his feminine side, but … [Read more...]
Dramaworks to give ‘Domestic Animals’ its first audience encounter
Palm Beach Dramaworks has been serving up thought-provoking productions of classic plays for 17 seasons, but it also understands the importance of developing new works for the theater. So it created the Dramaworkshop, a program of staged readings, workshops and bare-bones productions, searching for material for its mainstage, plays that can vie side-by-side with Albee, Williams … [Read more...]
Even the revue is beautiful: Songs of Kander and Ebb at the Rinker
Busy as an adjunct theater professor at Florida Atlantic University, Lynn University and Broward College during the school year, Bruce Linser has to confine his freelance directing to the summer months. No sooner had he opened his production of Once Upon a Mattress at FAU’s Festival Rep, then he began rehearsals for The World Goes ’Round, MNM Productions’ revue of songs … [Read more...]
Stripped-down ‘1776’ reveals show’s thinness
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, the hip-hop hit musical about the first secretary of the Treasury and its massive success, has forever relegated Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s 1776 to be “that other show about our Founding Fathers.” Yet this tale of how the contentious Continental Congress debated declaring independence from Great Britain is Palm Beach … [Read more...]