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...]
‘Andy and the Orphans’ deals thoughtfully with Down challenges
If the term “orphans” conjures up those adorable tykes from the musical Annie, playwright Lindsey Ferrentino asks us to adjust our sights and consider the more common situation of adults whose parents have died, leaving them with clean-up chores, both physical and emotional. That is how it is in Ferrentino’s Andy and the Orphans for siblings Maggie (Patti Gardner) and … [Read more...]
Gardner helps lift Simon’s minor ‘Gingerbread Lady’ at Primal Forces
Nine years after he made his Broadway debut with the wisecracking Come Blow Your Horn, long after he was proclaimed the commercial theater’s reigning king of comedy, Neil Simon made a drastic tonal shift with the darkly dramatic The Gingerbread Lady. This tale of an alcoholic nymphomaniac and her emotionally needy friends did have glimmers of the serious Simon of his later … [Read more...]