Des McAnuff

The Who’s Tommy

April 8, 2024

But, as the book's co-writer with Townshend, McAnuff is self-aware enough to recognize that "The Who's Tommy" needs to blow one's mind through sensory overload. That way, thoughts can't interfere with the emotional gloss covering the bizarrely bleak world, replete with both Nazis and Nazi wannabes, the show's "deaf, dumb, and blind" protagonist must endure. Its cheeriest passage is, in fact, the British victory over Germany in World War II, which occurs early on and quickly curdles after Captain Walker (Adam Jacobs), an airman thought killed in action, returns home to London in 1945, to discover that Mrs. Walker (Alison Luff) already has found another fella (Nathan Lucrezio), who her rightful husband promptly murders. [more]

Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations

March 30, 2019

"Ain't Too Proud to Beg," “Get Ready,” “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” “Since I Lost My Baby,” “You're My Everything” and of course “Papa Was a Rollin' Stone” are among the show’s more than 30 numbers. Besides those by The Temptations, there’s a choice selection of songs by their contemporaries such as The Supremes. All of them are rousingly performed by the orchestra and the company under the direction of conductor Kenny Seymour. [more]

Summer: The Donna Summer Musical

April 30, 2018

Mr. McAnuff who worked wonders with his direction of "Jersey Boys" here offers a chilly vision that evokes a sterile landscape replicating a heavenly waiting room in connection with Robert Brill’s austere scenic design. The décor is an all-white barren universe with trap doors, platforms and floating panels on which so-so illustrative images by projection designer Sean Nieuwenhuis are shown as well as functional furniture tossed in. The opening image is of an old record player rising from the floor. McAnuff’s presentation is of calculated professionalism absent of spontaneity or joy. [more]

Doctor Zhivago

April 27, 2015

Where is John Doyle when we really need him to whip new life into a musical? [Answer: he’s directing another Broadway musical, "The Visit."] There’s a moving chamber musical hidden amidst all the incessantly dashing chorus kids, shifting scenery, smoke effects, loud explosions and eerily surreal video projections that are the raison d’être of this production from the Nobel Prize winning novel by Boris Pasternak. This more-is-more approach to the new musical "Doctor Zhivago"—written by Michael Weller (libretto), Michael Korie & Amy Powers (lyrics) and Lucy Simon (music), choreographed by Kelly Devine and directed by Des McAnuff—dulls any emotional impact the story and the characters might have evoked. [more]

Dracula The Musical

September 28, 2004

o, here is the plot, for those unfamiliar with the Dracula saga: In Transylvania, Count Dracula (Tom Hewitt) sucks the blood of young Jonathan Harker and sets his fangs on the innocent, English girl Mina Murray (Melissa Errico), Harker's fiancé, who we are told is of "good blood." And about twenty minutes into the show, the Count is young and powerful again, and, set to a keyboard synthesizer-influenced band, he breaks into the pop cry "Fresh Blood." [more]