Musical

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Romeo and Bernadette

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Romeo and Bernadette

It’s rare that a musical synthesizes genres and influences from popular and high culture and succeeds at integrating them all, but Romeo and Bernadette does. With book and lyrics by Mark Saltzman, and music adapted from traditional Italian melodies, this show incorporates elements of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, with a bit of The Sopranos to boot. Northern vs. southern Italian (Sicilian) class prejudices and contemporary renditions of classical Italian operas are thrown into the mix for good measure.

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Emojiland

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Emojiland

Is there any way to review a show called Emojiland besides 🆕🎶📢🎨⚡? That is to say, this new musical is loud and colorful and has lots of energy, but some parts work better than others. (Hmm, there doesn’t seem to be an emoji for that last thought.)

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Anything Can Happen in the Theater

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Anything Can Happen in the Theater

Be prepared for an evening of delight at Anything Can Happen in the Theater, a revue that features the music and lyrics of acclaimed Broadway composer Maury Yeston. The numbers, primarily chosen from Yeston’s shows—Nine, Grand Hotel, Titanic, and In the Beginning—run the gamut from whimsical, poignant, upbeat, and celebratory to seductive, satirical, and altogether charming.

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Love Actually? The Unauthorized Musical Parody

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Love Actually? The Unauthorized Musical Parody

If ever there was a film that deserved to be satirized, it is the 14 men meet 13 women across 10 subplots glorification of romantic, platonic and familial love known as Love Actually. Why it took 16 years for a work such as Love Actually? The Unauthorized Musical Parody to arrive on the scene is anybody’s guess, but the timing is right in at least one aspect. ’Tis the season when quirky Christmas musicals dot the Off-Broadway landscape, and this one, with its many flings being flung across five weeks of winter, is as full of holiday cheer as it is overflowing with whirlwind performances and witty pop-culture shout-outs.

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Einstein’s Dreams

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Einstein’s Dreams

Albert Einstein may be best remembered for hard scientific theories—but a new musical is exposing the humanity that lies beneath the formulas. Directed by Cara Reichel and based on a novel by Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams offers a cerebral exploration into one of history’s most brilliant minds.

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Cyrano

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Cyrano

The New Group playbill says Cyrano is “adapted by Erica Schmidt from Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand.” Schmidt is a distinguished mid-career stage director and author of All the Fine Boys, a gritty, unsettling 2017 drama which, like Cyrano, was given its New York City premiere by The New Group. As “adaptor,” Schmidt has dismantled Rostand’s 1897 masterpiece, reassembling a few of its elements as a streamlined libretto with a prevailing tone of melancholy.

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An Enchanted April

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An Enchanted April

Enchanted April has been around longer than you think. If you know the title, it’s probably as a 1991 prestige picture, with Joan Plowright, Alfred Molina, and a small cast soaking up the Tuscan sun. But it’s based on an old, old novel by one Elizabeth von Arnim, turned first into a 1925 stage comedy, then a 1935 RKO vehicle that did Ann Harding no favors, then the 1991 remake, then a second, enjoyable stage adaptation by Matthew Barber in 2003. All along, it’s curious nobody saw a musical in it: The lush setting, several love stories, and singable emotions might have been ripe material for, say, a 1954 Lerner and Loewe opus. Which is essentially what the adapters Elizabeth Hansen (book and lyrics) and C. Michael Perry (music and lyrics) have attempted—a radically old-fashioned romantic musical.

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Soft Power

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Soft Power

Soft Power, the thrilling new musical by David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori at the Public Theatre, wears many hats: it’s a funny and touching East-meets-West love story, a postmodern Rodgers and Hammerstein–style book musical with multiple narratives and commentary, and a dazzling celebration of the rhapsodic power of Broadway song-and-dance. But its most potent identity is as a cri de coeur from playwright Hwang on the violence he suffered before the election of Donald Trump and the palpable fear that Trump’s white-supremacist presidency has instilled in non-white Americans.

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Scotland, PA

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Scotland, PA

Greasy fast food certainly takes its toll on the health of Americans, but it’s not usually so direct as death by Fry-O-Later. Such is the grisly fate of Duncan, at the hands of Mac and Pat McBeth, in Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Scotland, PA, a musical adaptation of Billy Morrissette’s 2001 film, which was a dark-comic send-up of 1970s Middle America using the plot of Macbeth in a fast-food setting.

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Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation

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Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation

It has been five years since the last edition of Forbidden Broadway, titled Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging. (It always did.) The long hiatus, however, hasn’t dulled the ruthlessness of Gerard Alessandrini, the Drama Desk–winning lyricist and director who satirizes a range of theater shows and foibles, often using classic show music with his own deft lyrics. And he has probably never been more ruthless than in Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation. Smart, vicious and superbly cast, it’s sublime.

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Little Shop of Horrors

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Little Shop of Horrors

Walter Kerr’s New York Times review of the original production of Little Shop of Horrors in 1982 started with a bloviating discourse on special effects’ ruination of good theater and its threat to the jobs of live actors. Then he added: “[T]he lyrics aren’t really witty enough to keep us eagerly attentive while the Equity membership is disappearing.” In our post–King Kong world, though, time has had its revenge. His clueless review is now an embarrassing read, while Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s creation has an unassailable stature.

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Felix Starro

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Felix Starro

The decision to avoid going into the family business can be a wise one, especially if that business involves the questionable practice of psychic healing. However, if that choice also means surrendering not only the family name, but one’s entire identity, then scamming the sick and elderly might seem to hold merit. Such is a young man’s quandary in Felix Starro, the sincere and split-focus new musical by Jessica Hagedorn and Fabian Obispo that opens the Ma-Yi Theater Company’s 30th anniversary season. Under the direction of Ralph B. Peña, this nearly two-hour dive into the meaning of faith is the first musical created by Filipino Americans to appear Off-Broadway.

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Forbidden Broadway to return

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The award-winning Forbidden Broadway will return to New York after a five-year absence. Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation will appear for a 10-week run at the Triad Theater (158 West 72nd St.) beginning Sept. 18 and run through Nov. 30. Opening night is Oct. 16. Gerard Alessandrini’s continuing series of Forbidden Broadway entries has been spoofing theater seasons since 1982; it has won seven Drama Desk awards and a special Tony Award since its inception. The new edition will castigate Hadestown, Moulin Rouge, the recent Oklahoma! revival, The Ferryman, Tootsie, Beetlejuice, Frozen, the Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof, Dear Evan Hansen, and What the Constitution Means to Me, along with stars such as Ben Platt, Billy Porter, Santino Fontana, Karen Olivo, and Alex Brightman. For more information, visit www.forbiddenbroadway.com.

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Bat Out of Hell: The Musical

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Bat Out of Hell: The Musical

Jim Steinman’s Bat Out of Hell: The Musical is a high-octane show that has a way of staying with you long after the curtain closes. The songs are taken from Meatloaf’s 1977 debut album, Bat Out of Hell, which provided a narrative about love and teenage angst for a generation of rock-and-roll fans. Director Jay Scheib, best-known for contemporary stagings of classical and contemporary works, has combined straightforward musical theater elements with avant-garde practices (such as a handheld camera that isolates and projects the faces of the characters in situ). The overall affect is of a raucous rock musical that captures the spirit of a concept album.

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Queen of Hearts

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Queen of Hearts

If ever a show were able to make the word eclectic seem insufficient, and excess seem wan, Austin McCormick’s Queen of Hearts is it. Retelling the story of Lewis Carroll’s Alice for his Company XIV, McCormick primarily uses Alice in Wonderland but borrows characters from Through the Looking-Glass. That slight mashup aesthetic is more pronounced, though, in the show itself, which is an amalgam of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, The Rocky Horror Show, Cirque du Soleil, and Minsky’s. It’s a wildly exuberant ride, but it helps if you are familiar with the original, since there’s no dialogue.

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Dog Man: The Musical

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Dog Man: The Musical

Dog Man the Musical is a children’s show based on the bestselling books by Dav Pilkey, whose Dog Man series has sold more than 23 million copies. Dog Man the book has translations available in 30 languages, and the musical, with book and lyrics by Kevin Del Aguila and music by Brad Alexander, is faithful to the books. It focuses on the same witty protagonists, Harold (Dan Rosales) and George (Forest Vandyke), who are now now in the fifth grade at Jerome Horwitz Elementary and “way more mature and cultured.”

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The Wizard of Oz

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The Wizard of Oz

Harlem Repertory’s The Wizard of Oz is a theatrical romp accompanied by a lively jazz trio. Directed and choreographed by Keith Lee Grant, themes of self-discovery, connection to family and facing one’s fears are well tackled and performed by a wonderful multicultural cast. They bring to life the events that propel the Kansas schoolgirl, Dorothy, on a magical mystery tour as she follows the yellow brick road.

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Two’s a Crowd

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Two’s a Crowd

Rita Rudner is not quite a household name, but when she shows up in Two’s a Crowd, the new little musical for which she cowrote the book with her husband, Martin Bergman, and in which she stars, she commands entrance applause. If you don’t know who she is, here’s the scoop: The comedienne first showed up on 1980s late-night talk shows, usually Letterman or Johnny Carson, selling the persona of the modern, put-upon woman—frustrated with technology, female powerlessness, and men. She had a good run with it, wrote some books, and moved from network TV mostly to Las Vegas, where she has been steadily performing for almost two decades.

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Camp Morning Wood

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Just in time for World Pride celebrations comes Camp Morning Wood, a quirky new nudie musical full of bouncy tunes, cheeky good humor and glitter that gets everywhere. It stars an attractive cast getting into some pretty hairy situations in the woods. Following in the footsteps of revues like Oh, Calcutta! and Naked Boys Singing, Camp Morning Wood takes it up a notch by incorporating nudity into a real plot. 

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Madame Lynch

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Madame Lynch

Eliza Lynch is Paraguay’s version of Eva Perón, Argentina’s famous class-climbing first lady. Madame Lynch, as she was known, was born in Ireland, emigrated with her family to France during the Irish Potato Famine (1845–49), and became a highly admired courtesan. In 1845 she met General Francisco Solano López Carrillo, who later became president of Paraguay, and she became the country’s most controversial de facto first lady. (The pair never married.) Once reviled by Paraguayans but now celebrated, the self-named “Empress of Paraguay” is the basis for the Drunkard’s Wife production of Madame Lynch, which is subtitled a “spectacle with music and dancing.”

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