I finished my week of theater-going in New York on a high note, seeing a quirky new musical called Kimberly Akimbo, with music by Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home, Caroline or Change) and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole, Good People), based on his play of the same name. Both play and musical center on a teenager named Kimberly who has a rare aging disorder that gives … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway No. 5: A powerful ‘Parade,’ and a joyful ‘Some Like It Hot’
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...]
LWP serves up another fine whodunit in ‘Dial M for Murder’
By Dale King Lake Worth Playhouse has spent the last couple of seasons polishing up its capacity for presenting thought-provoking, plausible and entertaining murder mysteries. The theater company earned plaudits last year for its adaptation of Agatha Christie’s popular murder mystery Mousetrap. A year earlier, it kept the audience entranced with an edge-of-your-seat … [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...]