Musical

¡Americano!

¡Americano!

If Antonio (Tony) Valdivinos, the hero of the new musical ¡Americano!, had been born before the millennium, and especially before World War II, the chances his true story would reaching a wide audience would have been slim to none—and even less likely echoed in an Off-Broadway musical with the momentum of a Broadway hit. But ¡Americano! is a vehicle that delivers the messages behind Tony’s story and those of other “dreamers” and serves as a catalyst for activism. Under the direction of Michael Barnard, the production reflects the uncertainty and frustrations facing dreamers, particularly those desiring to serve their new homeland as true Americans.

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H*tler’s Tasters

H*tler’s Tasters

Much about Adolf Hitler was incongruous. Infatuated with his own greatness and that of the “Fatherland,” he pontificated about Aryan superiority, order, and sacrifice, yet his life was chaotic, fueled by anger and drug-induced delusions; he was obsessive and paranoid. In H*tler’s Tasters, playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks has brilliantly adapted the true story of 15 women who were employed to taste the paranoid leader’s food. It’s a timely drama with dark humor and music.

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How the Hell Did I Get Here?

How the Hell Did I Get Here?

For Downtown Abbey aficionados, it is an unlikely stretch to imagine Lesley Nicol as anyone other than the series’ jovial, wise cook, Mrs. Patmore. The leap of imagination that transforms Patmore into a painfully shy, insecure, aspiring and often overlooked actress is a dilemma with which the audience for How the Hell Did I Get Here? must grapple. Ironically, Mrs. Patmore and Ms. Nicol may share a Northern British accent, but that’s where any comparison ends. The former’s “extreme makeover” as fashionable Lesley Nicol is not a makeover at all, but an internal and external transformation from her early childhood. Isn’t that what good acting is all about?

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Harmony

Harmony

It is a quirk of American theater that some of its most beloved musicals involve the specter of tyranny overseas. Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret and The Sound of Music each serve up friendship and love in the face of vanishing personal freedoms. There are echoes of all three shows in Harmony, a musical by Barry Manilow, with book and lyrics by Bruce Sussman, receiving a beautifully staged New York premiere by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, after some 25 years of revision, delays and productions in La Jolla, Calif., Los Angeles and Atlanta.

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Songs About Trains

Songs About Trains

If you’re sentimental about past-their-prime forms of transit, and if you can look past the infelicity that is Amtrak, it’s easy to fall in love with trains. They occupy so many iconic moments in American literature and film, and there are so many songs about them. It’s enough to send you into Songs About Trains, a new musical revue, waxing nostalgic. Then note the subtitle: A Celebration of Labor Through Folk Music. If you’re fond of Woody Guthrie and his ilk and tales of Casey Jones and John Henry, well, the show’s already halfway down the track. But Songs About Trains turns out to be even richer than that. It’s not just songs about trains: It can be seen as the whole damn history of American expansion.

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Oratorio for Living Things

Oratorio for Living Things

Oratorio for Living Things, Heather Christian’s new music-theater piece, was supposed to open on March 30, 2020. Two weeks before that, New York City’s playhouses closed precipitately in response to Covid-19. On the second anniversary of the aborted premiere, Oratorio has returned. After 24 months of isolation and loss, there’s a miraculous feel to this piece of theater.

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Space Dogs

Space Dogs

It seems a near-impossible task to take on an historical, highly politicized, and contentious international topic, and successfully morph it into a high-tech, semi-satirical pop-rock musical. Nevertheless, with Space Dogs, playwrights-composers-lyricists Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire have done exactly that. They have etched out the broader landscape of what was perhaps the most frightening, longest-running, and potentially deadliest conflict of the late 20th century—the Cold War.

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Black No More

Black No More

At the Act One climax of Finian’s Rainbow, which premiered 75 years ago, Billboard Rawkins, a bigoted white Southern senator, turns into a black man by the power of a wish. There’s a blackout, and the actor playing Rawkins hurriedly smears blackface on. Obviously you can’t get away with that anymore, and these days, if anyone dares to do Finian’s (they should), there’s a blackout, and a black Rawkins rushes on to replace the white one. However, in the Act One climax of Black No More, a new musical adapted from George S. Schuyler’s 1931 satirical novel, an opposite racial transition happens.

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Whisper House

Whisper House

After all those months with no live performance, it’s heartening not only to have theaters back up and running but also to see companies picking up right where they left off. Like the Civilians, who are finally getting to mount the New York premiere of Whisper House. The show had been set to begin performances of the Duncan Sheik/Kyle Jarrow musical on the very day in March 2020 when all theater was shut down.

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Kimberly Akimbo

Kimberly Akimbo

Take a slew of New Jersey jokes, opening notes played on a ukulele, onstage ice skating, songs about scurvy and parasitic infection, and a tuba and a mailbox being lugged across the stage, and you’ve got some idea of what the delightful new musical Kimberly Akimbo has to offer. For good measure, there’s a lead performance by redoubtable Tony winner Victoria Clark.

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Cheek to Cheek: Irving Berlin in Hollywood

Cheek to Cheek: Irving Berlin in Hollywood

As if the pandemic shutdown weren’t enough, the York Theatre Company was forced out of its longtime home last January by a water main break that flooded buildings on its Midtown block. The company has relocated, at least for the foreseeable future, to the Theatre at St. Jean Baptiste on the Upper East Side.

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A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet

A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet

What do you get when you throw two struggling souls in search of success together in a high-stakes campaign to rebrand an assertive, middle-aged, ex-pop icon named Regina Comet? You get two talented but anxiety-ridden young men, reaching for the stars and stumbling all over each other in semi-slapstick style. They also search for their own awakened, perfected selves as they strive to create the ideal jingle to launch Regina—and her fragrance line—back into the mainstream.

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Trevor: The Musical

Trevor: The Musical

Back in 1995, the Oscar for Best Live Action Short went to the edgy comedy Trevor. Set in 1981, it chronicles a 13-year-old boy’s suicidal tendencies and homosexual awakening, complete with clueless parents, a worrisome priest and plenty of Diana Ross fanboying. The screenwriter, Celeste Lecesne, would go on to co-create The Trevor Project, the LGBTQ suicide-prevention nonprofit, as well as to pen and perform the delightful solo show, The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey.

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Brecht on Brecht

Brecht on Brecht

German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was a world traveler—not by choice, but by conviction. His larger-than-life, highly controversial career caused him to flee Nazism and take refuge in several countries before he was granted permission to settle in the United States. The Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB) production of Brecht on Brecht tracks the playwright’s odyssey using his songs and writings, which include The Threepenny Opera, The Life of Galileo, and Mother Courage and Her Children.

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Friends: The Musical Parody

Friends: The Musical Parody

If you’ve never watched Friends, the TV megahit that aired from 1994–2004, that wouldn’t preclude you from enjoying Friends: The Musical Parody. It’s hysterically funny, and concisely captures the idiosyncrasies of every one of the six characters who provokes, pairs off with, or parts ways with another.

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Love Quirks

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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Seven Sins

Seven Sins

The work of Austin McCormick, the polymath artistic director and choreographer of Company XIV, may be handily classified as burlesque—costumer Zane Pihlstrom provides more than enough feathers, fringes, and pasties to justify it—but that label doesn’t really fit a production that incorporates dance, opera, pop music, and acrobatics as well. All are on display in his newest effort, Seven Sins.

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The Unsinkable Molly Brown

The Unsinkable Molly Brown

When Dick Scanlan files his taxes, under Occupation, does he put “Richard Morris rewriter”? Morris, a middling mid-century scribe, penned the screenplay for Thoroughly Modern Millie, revised successfully for Broadway by Scanlan in 2002. Now Scanlan has “revitalized,” as the marketing for it goes, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, a 1960 Broadway hit, with a book by Morris, that was Meredith Willson’s follow-up to The Music Man. Scanlan’s Millie, to these eyes at least, was a sloppy rehash of an awkward premise that didn’t know exactly what it wanted to be. (You can judge for yourself when Encores! encores it in May.) But on Willson’s Molly, it turns out, Scanlan has done a bang-up job.

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Darling Grenadine

Darling Grenadine

It’s not long into the new musical Darling Grenadine, after a brief direct address to the audience by Adam Kantor’s ingratiating lead character, Harry, that the first song comes, but it takes till the top of the second act to get to the song that gives the show its bizarre title. It’s an ode to the pomegranate syrup that goes into a Shirley Temple, and by that time what began as a romance of struggling artists in New York City has found an unexpected path through the shopworn trappings of such tales.

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Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

How exciting and new the film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice must have seemed when it hit pre-multiplex screens in 1969. Along with such contemporary classics as Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, and with the added inducement of major movie stars wearing few clothes, Paul Mazursky’s satire proffered trendy sex; inspired materialistic adults to question their values; laughed about pot, one of the first big releases to do so; spoofed middle-class mores; and served up newly permissible bare breasts, though not Natalie Wood’s or Dyan Cannon’s. As a time capsule, the movie holds up. But why, in 2020, do a musical version?

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