Tammy Faye
Katie Brayben in a scene from Elton John’s new musical “Tammy Faye” at the Palace Theatre [more]
Broadway
Death Becomes Her
“Glitter and Be Gay” is not just a Leonard Bernstein aria from Candide, but the perfect description of the campily funny new musical "Death Becomes Her" which just hit the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre like a friendly tornado. Double entendres explode in all directions. Take the song titled “For the Gaze,” as a tongue-in-cheek example. Based on the 1992 film of the same name, the creators of the musical—Marco Pennette (book), Julia Mattison and Noel Carey (music and lyrics)—have taken the smarmy, star-studded film and turned it into an entertaining, equally star-studded musical. [more]
Swept Away
Besides the fact that many know the story of the Essex (later told in Melville’s "Moby Dick") or the Mignonette told in The Avett Brothers’ album of the same name, Logan has made his main characters totally generic without given names. We learn too little about each for them to be three-dimensional characters: the Mate, cynical and corrupt; the Captain, at the end of a long career, melancholy and philosophical; Big Brother, religious and judgmental, and Little Brother, innocent and curious. A knife is flashed soon after the survivors find themselves on the lifeboat and we know how that will end. Just like the voyage of the whaling ship, their time on the lifeboat is a waiting game: how long can they survive and who will be the first to go? [more]
A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical
Great in entirely predictable ways, especially its rich musical orchestrations and arrangements from jazz genius Branford Marsalis (he's assisted by Tony Award- winner Daryl Waters), "A Wonderful World" wastes its decided advantages by keeping Armstrong at a distance while incongruously tasking him with narrating his own life. An impassive witness to himself, Armstrong is also a bizarrely unreflective one as he meanders from place to place and wife to wife, before finally appearing with his wronged women to sing "What a Wonderful World" as an ethereal eleven o'clock number on Adam Koch and Steven Royal's protean set. To say the least, it's a lackluster concluding statement on the complexities of Armstrong's marriages, as well as his feelings about a world that, despite all of its "trees of green" and "red roses too," caused him so much pain. [more]
Elf the Musical
While incorporating the film's most memorable lines and story beats into their book, Bob Martin and the late Thomas Meehan also excised what they could to make room for composer Matthew Sklar and lyricist Chad Beguelin's brassy score, though it's not enough to prevent "Elf the Musical" from being about an hour longer than its cinematic version. Still, fret not accompanying adults, Sklar and Beguelin humorously reward persisting through the added length, with the laugh-inducing cleverness reaching its creative heights in the numbers that respectively kick off Acts I and II: "Happy All The Time," performed by a ridiculously high-spirited elven chorus line, and "Nobody Cares About Santa," a hilarious cry for appreciation from a despairing group of professional St. Nicks. Choreographer Liam Steel delightfully enhances the silliness, especially for the former number in which he cuts his impressively adaptable dancers down to an appropriate size. [more]
Maybe Happy Ending
Helen J Shen and Darren Criss in a scene from the new musical “Maybe Happy Ending” at the [more]
Sunset Blvd.
Now, director Jamie Lloyd has taken the clunky—but entertaining—Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Sunset Blvd." (1993) and stripped it of all realistic scenery—and a few songs—hoping to get to the nitty-gritty of its Hollywood characters and period with enormous projections which suggest an expressionistic silent film. The results are decidedly mixed mostly due to a failure to settle on a tone plus some head-scratching additions that have nothing to do with the story. Lloyd, most recently represented by his dreary, stripped-down A Doll’s House and an equally spare production of Pinter’s Betrayal, has shepherded this production with a combination of brilliance and self-indulgence. [more]
Once Upon a Mattress
Foster is a joy as the princess from the swamps who can swim, lift weights, dance all night, commit multiple contortions as she tries to get a good night sleep, and field any disaster that comes her way including the queen’s disdain. She is quick on her feet and in her tongue. She also stops the show with her rendition of the score’s most famous song “Shy” (used as the title to Mary Rodgers’ memoir published in 2022) but she is also memorable singing “The Swamps of Home” and “Happily Ever After,” with their witty lyrics by Barer, who often collaborated with Mary Rodgers. Is there anything she can’t do and anything she can’t make funny? [more]
The Wiz
The eye-filling sets by Hannah Beachler and video and projection design by Daniel Brodie include subtle tributes to Black Culture that not all theatergoers may notice on a first look. When Dorothy first lands in Oz, the landscape and houses are reminiscent of Tremé, the Black neighborhood in New Orleans decimated by Hurricane Katrina. The overhead set piece is inspired by the arch in New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong Park as well as incorporating patterns found in quilts on the Underground Railroad. African symbols are carved into the bark of the trees along Dorothy’s path on the Yellow Brick Road as well as depicted on the sides of the theater proscenium arch. When Glinda enters, she comes out of house at the address 1804, commemorating the year of Haiti’s independence. The red and black sets and costumes (by Sharon Davis) for the sequence in the Castle of Evilene are a tribute to West African culture. [more]
Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club
The lead of the show is film star Eddie Redmayne, who won the Olivier Award for his performance as the Emcee in the London production and is also Tony nominated for this show. Director Rebecca Frecknall’s staging (with her British production team) is imaginative and innovative, quite unlike any Cabaret you have seen before. The new Sally Bowles is Scottish American actress Gayle Rankin who appeared as Fraulein Kost on Broadway in Sam Mendes’ 2014 Broadway revival of "Cabaret" which appeared at Studio 54. Frecknall’s interpretation is more dissolute and dissipated than most versions so that when American writer Clifford Bradshaw arrives in Berlin to get material for a novel the city is already deep in the throes of degradation and degeneracy when he meets second-rate singer Sally Bowles as the party girl par excellence and lead female singer of the Kit Kat Club. [more]
The Heart of Rock and Roll
"The Heart of Rock and Roll" at the James Earl Jones Theatre is one of the more pleasant entries in the jukebox musical derby. Using the musical catalog of Huey Lewis and the News, Tyler Mitchell and Jonathan A. Abrams, (book by Abrams), have fashioned an amusing story of a working class Joe who is torn between his love of rock music and his need to make a living in business. Heart began its Broadway-bound journey in 2018 at the Old Globe in San Diego, but is set firmly in the 1980’s. [more]
Hell’s Kitchen on Broadway
The new musical "Hell’s Kitchen" has made a successful transition to Broadway from The Public Theater and the new version seems to have corrected some of the flaws from before. This juke-box musical with a score by singer/songwriter Alicia Keys and a book by playwright Kristoffer Diaz (The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity), is a big ambitious show, a love letter to New York, and inspired by the coming of age story of Keys’ 17th year. It is no longer over-miked by sound designer Gareth Owen, characters seemed to have deepened, the plot seems to have gelled into a distinct coming of age story, and the redesigned set by Robert Brill has moved much of the action closer to the audience. It is a crowd pleaser with the iconic Keys’ songs “Girl on Fire,” “Fallin’” and “Empire State of Mind.” Excitingly performed by its cast made up of a handful of characters and a large ensemble of 15 singer/dancers, its most famous leads Shoshana Bean and Brandon Victor Dixon as Ali’s parents are given less to do as this is the daughter’s story. In the leading role of 17-year-old Ali, making their professional Broadway debut, is Maleah Joi Moon who proves to be an exciting musical personality who can hold a show such as this together. [more]
Suffs
The transfer to Broadway has brilliantly expanded the show. The new production designed by Riccardo Hernández (scenery), Paul Tazewell (costumes), Lap Chi Chu (lighting) and Charles G. LaPointe (wigs & hair) brings Taub’s script to vivid life, much better than the more didactic and spare Public Theater rendering. These artists put Taub’s script into historical context making the battle all the more vibrant. The new version also has rethought the casting, reshuffled and improved the songs and, more importantly, is more focused and effective in telling about the conflicts—internal and external—that plagued the suffrage movement. These included dissonance between Catt and Paul; the thorn-in-the-movement’s side of the Black contingent led by the brilliant Ida B. Wells (a charismatic Nikki M. James); and the far left, Socialist ideals of the hothead Ruza Wenclawska (Kim Blanck, brilliantly avoiding caricature). [more]
The Great Gatsby: A New Musical
As for previous theatrical takes on the classic Jazz Age novel--and a few cinematic ones, too--the understandable allure of Fitzgerald's breathtaking sentences has represented a deathly siren's song for those tempted to dramatically interpret Fitzgerald by emulating him. Adopting a much smarter tack, book writer Kait Kerrigan avoids crashing into the tony shores of Long Island, where the story is mostly set, by remembering that imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery but also usually very boring. Kerrigan still dutifully opens ("In my younger and more vulnerable years...") and closes ("So we beat on, boats against the current...") with the literary hits, also leaving in place the unhappy character arc of the novel's Midwestern narrator Nick Carraway (Noah J. Ricketts), but she lets the transplanted naif enjoy a friskier journey arriving at the disillusionment that he eventually feels from witnessing the cruel machinations of the East Coast elite. [more]
The Outsiders: A New Musical
The cast of "The Outsiders: A New Musica"l bring their own substantial charisma to the stage, but it's been dramaturgically constrained by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine's book, which sacrifices poetry for explanation. That unfortunate choice is abetted by a score from Levine, Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance (the latter two comprising the folk duo Jamestown Revival) that, influenced by "Oklahoma!" instead of pure sentiment, is far too Rodgers and Hammerstein, when it should have aimed for Rodgers and Hart. [more]
Lempicka
In telling the life story of Tamara de Lempicka, the show begins with a fascinating premise. Unfortunately, neither the score nor the book lives up to her high standards. Unlike "Sunday in the Park with George" which showed us the workings of the artistic process, "Lempicka" is more interested in the social aspects of the 1920’s and 1930’s Paris than in Tamara’s revolutionary paintings. The cast works hard to put over the new musical but they are defeated by commonplace situations, banal song lyrics, and over-used pronouncements. The musical of Tamara de Lempicka’s life still has to be told. [more]
Water for Elephants
Playwright/bookwriter Rick Elice has written the greatest jukebox musical (so far) in his 2005 Jersey Boys. In his adaptation of Sara Gruen’s bestselling novel Water for Elephants, he may just have written the best stage musical about circuses by making the animals as real as the human characters. The indie folk band Pigpen Theatre Co. has written a varied collection of songs, ingeniously orchestrated, that are always exciting as they both forward the story and reveal the emotions of the people who sing them. However, it is director Jessica Stone assisted with circus design by Shana Carroll who has done the most inventive and original work. [more]
The Who’s Tommy
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]
The Notebook: The Musical
While the characters age, the use of diversity here has them switch races, so that while one couple has a Black Allie and a white Noah, another has a white Allie and a Black Noah, as well as Allie’s parents being played by an interracial couple. Although it is easy to follow, it is somewhat distracting until one gets used to it. The setting has also been updated from the 1940’s to the 1960’s so that Noah fights in Vietnam now rather than World War II. Brunstetter’s book is faithful to both the novel and the movie, except that while the earlier two versions were recounted by the older Noah reading to his increasingly distracted wife from the notebook that she wrote in chronological order, here there are flashbacks within flashbacks, backtracking some of the events. Brunstetter has also made the ending more explicit than either the book or the film, as well as keeping much of the original sentimentality at bay. [more]
Days of Wine and Roses: The Musical
Reteaming with O'Hara and book writer Craig Lucas for the first time since the 2005 Tony-award-winning "The Light in the Piazza," Guettel's hodgepodge of a score equates jazz with blithe inebriation and opera with soul-crushing regret, a mostly tiresome juxtaposition that includes the gobsmacking discordance of Kirsten drunkenly bebopping around her apartment while vacuuming it. That O'Hara is never less than luminous, coordinated, and note-perfect during this ill-conceived pas seul fundamentally captures what's wrong with the musical: it's much too beautiful. [more]
How to Dance in Ohio
Based on an identically titled 2015 HBO documentary by Alexandra Shiva, "How to Dance in Ohio," in its musical form, works best whenever that magnificent seven is completely together onstage and falters mightily if none of them are present. Their characters' bond comes courtesy of Dr. Emilio Amigo (Caesar Samayoa), a psychologist--in both real and theatrical life--who specializes in social therapy for autistic people. To assist them in the closing stage of their adolescent development, Dr. Amigo's creative approach is to hold a spring formal, a traditional rite of passage that, of course, generally produces a lot of anxiety even if you're not neurodivergent. Through the voice of Marideth (Madison Kopec), the newest and most studious member of the group, Rebekah Greer Melocik's high-minded book makes sure to point out this hoary event's gendered baggage, though simply as an annotation rather than as the basis for any intriguing character conflict. [more]
Spamalot
Still, whatever faint accommodations he grants it, for Idle, structure is the enemy of joy, which every aspect of "Spamalot" is relentlessly intent on delivering, not only from a few well-performed and well-known old Monty Python bits (the Knights Who Say "Ni!"; the French Taunter; the Black Knight) but also through amusing allusions to classic Broadway musicals that Aaron Sorkin was never given the chance to ruin. To be sure, it is fan service on a couple fronts, forming a Venn Diagram highlighting anyone who adores, for example, how Idle's brainy, irreverent silliness transforms Stephen Sondheim's song "Another Hundred People" from "Company" into a running plague count. It takes incredibly varied abilities to appealingly belt out Sondheim while landing that joke, which Ethan Slater, as the dejected Prince Herbert, does impressively and without remotely shortchanging either responsibility. [more]
Harmony
The musical "Harmony," the lovechild of pop music greats Barry Manilow (music) and Bruce Sussman (lyrics and book), has opened at a time when anti-Semitism has peaked once again and lessons to the contrary are in short supply. Harmony’s dive into Nazi era anti-Semitism, though, may fall on deaf ears, but Harmony is also very much an entertainment, not a message show. Certainly, Manilow and Sussman couldn’t have predicted the “perfect timing” of this staging, the last in a long line of productions, most recently at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in April, 2022. The current iteration is basically that production with most of the cast intact and a classier, mirrored set by Beowulf Boritt. [more]
Gutenberg! The Musical!
How much you enjoy 'Gutenberg! The Musical!" likely depends on a combination of factors entirely unrelated to that German fellow: familiarity with the tropes it's skewering; your own level of disdain for such hackney execution; and your tolerance for Rannells and Gad's incessant mugging. In their first Broadway pairing since "The Book of Mormon" over a decade ago, Rannells and Gad are less a comic team than a comic rivalry, with neither willing to be the Abbott to the other's Costello. Fortunately, their ping-ponging, look-at-me dynamic only occasionally grows tiresome, usually when either of them is trying to gin up laughs that aren't there or shouldn't rise above a tee-hee. [more]
Melissa Etheridge: My Window
Melissa Etheridge is a bona-fide superstar. So, why is this artist, used to appearing in huge venues, “slumming” in a Broadway theater with a capacity of less than 800? Let’s not look this gift horse in the mouth. This is a gem of an opportunity to see Etheridge up close and personal in her My Window autobiographical show at the Circle in the Square. This is a memoir in song, songs that sprang from her adventurous life that went from entertaining in saloons to becoming a lesbian icon and a major rock concert star. [more]
Back to the Future: The Musical
"Back to the Future: The Musical," the time travel adventure, joins a long line of problematic screen to stage musicalizations which do not improve on the originals in any way. Joining the list that includes in recent memory "Pretty Woman," "King Kong," "Tootsie," "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "Almost Famous," Back to the Future, using one of the original movie’s co-writers (Bob Gale without Robert Zemeckis), attempts to transplant the film in toto to the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre without adding anything new to the mix other than having the characters sing and dance. If theater is meant to surprise us, then like the stage version of "Almost Famous," "Back to the Future" slavishly follows its source material so that we feel like we have seen it all before – and better. [more]
Here Lies Love
"Here Lies Love" unreels like an MTV music video with the emotional content lost in the technique. The real issue of this musical is that it’s impossible to feel anything for the lead characters, with the possible exception of Estrella. They are moved about the extraordinarily gimmicky set like chess pieces with Imelda checkmating everybody. Jacobs evinces the boldness of Imelda, the script limiting her ability to show any tenderness or vulnerability. Llana's Ferdinand is written pretty much as a stolid symbol, hardly human at all. [more]
Once Upon a One More Time
The only problem with Hartmere’s plot is that it remains undeveloped. None of the princesses get to read Friedan's book (there is initially only one copy) and they take it on faith that it offers them alternatives. The plot goes off on a series of tangents (Prince Charming’s assistant Prince Erudite the Celibate reveals that he is gay when he meets Snow White’s assistant Clumsy, the Cinderella’s Stepmother attempts to get the Narrator to choose one of her daughters for Prince Charming after Cinderella’s defection) but these narratives turn out as you would expect with no surprises. As staged by director/choreographer team Keene & Mari Madrid, whose credits up until now are mainly in film and music video, (creative consultant: British director: David Leveaux), the many production numbers look like aerobics for a rock video which may please Spears fans but look incongruous in a Broadway musical based on 18th and 19th century stories. Spears’ fans will be pleased that the show includes eight of her top ten hits: “Oops!... I Did It Again,” “Baby One More Time,” “Gimme More,” “Toxic,” “Circus,” “Lucky,” “Work Bitch,” and “Stronger,” almost all with lyrics tweaked by Hartmere to fit a story of princes and princesses. [more]
New York, New York
"New York, New York" is a big, jazzy show in the style of golden age musicals we have not seen for a while. While it removes the abusive relationship between Jimmy and Francine from the film, in doing so it waters down the story to a rather old-fashioned “newcomers make good in the big city” tale we have seen before. The theme of racism is handled rather simplistically, borrowing parts of the Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge stories. Characters seem to come and go and are often gone for too long a time. The new collaborations by Kander and Miranda are fun to hear but they do not come up to the standard of the Kander and Ebb songs that we know. The show becomes a showcase for the much loved songs “But the World Goes ‘Round” and “New York, New York” which are given pride of place. [more]
Camelot
Unfortunately, though Sorkin may have made this "Camelot" more politically correct, scientifically accurate and less supernatural, it is much less entertaining and magical than earlier productions and certainly much darker as well as less funny. Whereas the original 1960 Broadway production billed itself as “the most beautiful show in the world,” Bartlett Sher’s revival has an almost empty grey stage most of the time (designed by Michael Yeargan) and drab costumes from Jennifer Moeller. Although the cast has 25 performers, the court scenes always look underpopulated as though not enough courtiers have shown up and there is almost no pageantry which one expects for a royal court of the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages. [more]
Shucked
In addition to a surfeit of approximate rhymes, the score for Shucked includes a paean to corn and a reprise of the following ready-for-Hallmark advice: "maybe love is like a seed/a little sun is all you need." Meanwhile, Horn blithely salts the earth with acerbic observations about how "marriage is simply two people coming together to solve problems they didn't have before." Foregoing any accountability for this philosophical inconsistency, director Jack O'Brien instead attempts to cover for it with turbo-charged pacing that not only sacrifices thought for an admittedly infectious energy but also, as a part of this devil's bargain, undermines the comic timing necessary for a lot of Horn's jokes to land properly. But the amiable cast never falters, even when the laughs do or the score becomes more saccharine than corn syrup. The cast is adept, too, at executing Sarah O'Gleby's inventive choreography on scenic designer Scott Pask's ramshackle barn of a set. Particularly enchanting is a rolling barrel dance that Durand daringly pulls off with impressive grace. It's just too bad that this delightful surprise isn't accompanied by many others. [more]
Bob Fosse’s Dancin’
Perhaps it’s the difficulty of finding dancers who can perform the intricate, body isolation moves so emblematic of Fosse’s very individual style, but to those who know and experienced his brilliance when he was hands on, this cast is a bit too clean cut and even-tempered. (The late Ann Reinking, a Fosse muse, was more successful staging her revival of "Chicago" still setting records on Broadway after moving from its New York City Center Encores! birthplace.) Nevertheless, Cilento is using a great deal of the original vignettes, excluding a few (most particularly Fosse’s perfectly ludicrous sexualizing of a ballet class) and adding more spoken lines, including an intermittent narration given by the charming, solid Manuel Herrera who also shows off his great dancing chops. [more]
Bad Cinderella
The book of "Bad Cinderella" plays like a series of unfunny "Saturday Night Live" sketches. Laurence Connor (who also directed the earlier London production) has given the show no particular style and each scene seems to be in another genre. The show can’t decide if it is taking place now - with its references to rock band Guns N’ Roses (parodied in the song “Buns ‘n’ Roses”),its use of both diversity and inclusion, a female Vicar, its erotic baker, reference to a “spare” prince, and its shirtless muscle hunks seen in the palace gym – or the Middle Ages. [more]