St. Luke's Theatre

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Stranger Sings!

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Stranger Sings!

When the fourth season of the Netflix hit Stranger Things premiered this past summer, it seemed like the show’s popularity had reached its zenith. From pushing a certain decades-old Kate Bush song back onto the Billboard Hot 100 to causing fangirls to rave online about the magnetism of breakout star Jamie Campbell Bower as Stranger’s newest baddie, the show’s powerful reach could rival the telekinetic abilities of one of the series’ other iconic characters, Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown). So it’s only natural that a musical parody of the show about superpowered teens, demonic beings and alternate dimensions would be the next step—here called Stranger Sings!, of course.

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Love Quirks

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Love Quirks

The soundtrack as you walk into St. Luke’s ought to provide a hint: it’s American songbook standards, like “In Other Words” and “Fever,” rendered by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, respectively. It primes the audience to expect a retro evening, and Love Quirks, the new musical by Seth Bisen-Hersh (music and lyrics) and Mark Childers (book), while set in the present-day New York of Instagram and Grindr and Twitter, is retro. It wants to be a sweet old-fashioned evening of melody and humor and light romance, and some of the time it succeeds.

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It Came From Beyond

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It Came From Beyond

Like a comet in an irregular orbit, It Came From Beyond has returned to menace Manhattan, bearing down on Off-Broadway while emanating just enough charm and good will to keep from crashing. This sci-fi musical was spawned in 2005 at the New York Musical Festival, then rose again the next year in Los Angeles. Now, back for an oddball run of Tuesday-only performances, it turns out that, despite the threatening title, it has come in peace. And that’s the problem. Meant as an homage to the 1950s and as a parody of that era’s Cold War monster flicks (most obviously, It Came From Outer Space), playwright Cornell Christianson’s script is campy, but not sufficiently outrageous; other-worldly, but not scary. And opportunities to freshen the writing to reflect current political and societal upheaval have gone untaken.

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Wicked Frozen

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Wicked Frozen

Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked has played somewhere around 6,020 performances and counting, and last week the show cleared $2.7 million. The newly opened Frozen, despite some dreadful reviews, was at 99.9% capacity. And both musicals—Wicked since its 2003 opening, Frozen via the 2013 Disney animated smash that inspired it—are cultural phenomena, especially among musical-loving teenage girls who respond to the heroines’ frustrations, bonding with other young women (a sister, in Frozen’s case), and their eventual triumph over adversity. Both shows have earworm empowerment anthems that have saturated social media since their premieres, Wicked’s “Defying Gravity” and Frozen’s “Let It Go.” And both would seem ripe for spoofing, of the Forbidden Broadway sort. Who, except possibly their most die-hard fans, wouldn’t want to have a little fun at these monoliths’ expense?

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Frankenstein

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Frankenstein

Young Frankenstein, a revised version of Mel Brooks’s 2007 Broadway musical parody, is winning accolades over in London, but Eric B. Sirota’s version of the Frankenstein story, receiving its world premiere on a budget a hundredth of the size, is surely much more faithful to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. Sirota, who wrote the book, music and lyrics for Frankenstein, imbues his show with the serious philosophical underpinnings of Shelley’s original: the dangers of man playing God, the belief in a higher power, the pitfalls that science may hold for overweening practitioners. But even with capable performers, the more adult approach comes up short.

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Baghdaddy

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Baghdaddy

A night at the newest production of Baghdaddy might begin with a cup of coffee, a doughnut, and a name tag. From the start, the audience is thrown right into the midst of Marshall Pailet and A.D. Penedo’s punchy political musical. Actors sit in the audience, and audience members sit on the stage as the show begins with a support group for the CIA operatives and others who played a role in starting the war in Iraq.

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