Put away your grade-school uniforms and bring out the transvestite footwear. After Sunday night’s 67th annual Tony Awards telecast, Matilda is out and Kinky Boots is in fashion. The Cyndi Lauper-Harvey Fierstein musical walked off with six statuettes including Best Musical in what has to be considered an upset over the Olivier Award winner from London. (Translation of … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York, No. 3: ‘Finks’ addresses dark pages in show-biz history
Mondays are sparse on Broadway, but I’d go through withdrawal symptoms without a play to see. I was scheduled to see a new musical called Hands on a Hardbody, based on the little-seen film about a truck dealership's marathon promotion, but it failed to attract much of an audience and closed two weeks ago. Instead, it was back to off-Broadway, to Ensemble Studio Theatre far on … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 17-19
Art: One of the least well-known painters of the Ashcan School was Theresa Bernstein (1890-2002), a Philadelphian who moved 100 years ago to New York with her husband, fellow artist William Meyerowitz. His work is well-known in modernist circles, and Bernstein’s has grown in reputation since her death at 111, and her pictures fit in well with the George Bellows-William Glackens … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York No. 5: Magnificent ‘Porgy,’ listless ‘Once’
Most of my theater-obsessed friends here in New York are pretty depressed by the state of this season's crop of musicals. And it is easy to see why, based solely on the two shows I saw Wednesday. At the matinee, I saw a superlative production of Porgy and Bess, one of the great "they-don't-write-em-like they-used-to" pieces of musical theater, hailing from 1935. And … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York No. 2: ‘City Club’ and ‘The Columnist’
Saturday, the day I arrived, was sunny and slightly brisk. Sunday was continuous rain and much colder. The theater also was inclement. Few Broadway shows perform on Sunday night, so I headed off-Broadway to the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, where a new musical called The City Club had its final preview prior to opening Monday evening. With so many shows opening … [Read more...]
Caldwell makes a virtue out of musical by bringing back ‘Vices’
Belying the proverb about opportunity only knocking once, here comes another chance to see the steamy, quirky, Carbonell-award-winning dance musical Vices: A Love Story, back at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton, where it had its world premiere in the summer of 2009. Vices is a series of eclectic songs about obsessions and addictions, tied together by a pair of lithe, … [Read more...]
Musical piety, vocal purity make for absorbing concert of French Baroque
In the days when Louis XIV was an actual presence and not merely the name of a favorite rococo interior design fashion, the faithful gathered in churches for communion with the Almighty but also for music, for the sound of a pure, unclouded voice ascending into the severe angles of a sacred space. That very same experience, without the king, was that of an audience Saturday … [Read more...]
‘In the Heights’ electrifies at Broward Center
It is ironic how much electricity courses through every minute of In the Heights, and yet the Tony-winning musical’s story turns on a power outage. In early 2008, a major new voice of the musical theater, composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda, staked his claim on a piece of Broadway with his salsa-flavored show, a slice-of-life in New York’s Washington Heights. Merging Latin … [Read more...]