Aaron Wallace - Page 4

Visiting THE PROM in original stage form will be refreshing for those who know only the Netflix version. It's as if someone grabbed a theatrical scouring pad and scrubbed away all the glitzy, feel-good 'Glee'-dom that made Murphy's take feel slightly sugar-rushed. On stage, THE PROM is refreshingly edgier, campier, and just a smidge more foul-mouthed than in the movie, albeit still unrealistic and all too tidy in the end...

BIG props to the artistic team behind BIG: THE MUSICAL at Garden Theatre. They built a BIG all-wood roller coaster right on stage. It's a beauty to look at, honestly as dazzling as the famous real-deal I rode at Dollywood two weeks ago. You can't ride the Garden's, but it does move. The show's various scene settings, whether a two-story apartment or a Manhattan office building, are hidden within the coaster's twisting support beams and break out to roll downstage. It makes a BIG Impression...

Read our full review of Cirque Du Soleil's New DRAWN TO LIFE show. DRAWN TO LIFE's stagecraft and special effects are second to none. People and objects move about the stage - and through the air - in ways they shouldn't be able to....

CABARET and Theater West End are a match made in the heavens of art direction, so much so that it’s nearly a wonder they hadn’t staged it here til now. The plexiglass partitions even hint at the giant mirror that faced this show’s earliest audiences on Broadway — I caught reflections from performers and patrons on several occasions (including my own) and smiled in appreciation of the unintended nod.

But when all is said and done, after the big speeches are made and the morals have been imparted, TOOTSIE's 1982 DNA proves inextricable. Its parting lesson is fundamentally that women should be women and men should be men. The show's progressivism is limited to a fairly surface-level, lighthearted second-wave feminism that never rises above a 'very special episode' of any '80s sitcom. (Indeed, Michael's apartment set looks strikingly sitcomish, and all the dialogue there fits the bill.)

Actually, LOOPED is more specific than that. The movie in question is Die! Die! My Darling!, and by the time Act I opens, filming has already wrapped. We meet Ms. Bankhead as she barges into a post-production editing room with an F word so boisterous and stylish it could only leap from the lips of a diva. Film editor Danny Miller needs her to dub over a single line of garbled audio. He hopes to wrap that up in mere minutes. Tallulah’s Scotch-drenched dramatics have other plans. The play proceeds in pursuit of that single successfully uttered sentence over two acts...

It is a marvel to fathom the many aptitudes required of Tymisha Harris in crafting and delivering JOSEPHINE, a 75-minute, one-act, one-woman show that the Orlando native co-created and took to New York and international tour. She, like the trailblazer she honors, is a singular force of manifold talent...

This latest production puts the classic tale of Don Quixote and its author in an almost shocking new context - one that's as powerful as it is surprising... Though the dialogue stays the same, with references to the Inquisition intact, Cervantes's prison is very clearly a U.S. immigration detention center in the 21st century...

Spot-on casting is nothing out of the ordinary at Theater West End, nor are tasteful set direction or an overall atmosphere of well-themed festivity. But for all the production's successes, Dennis T. Giacino's musical, as written, never fully realizes its potential...

“THE BODYGUARD on stage sounds fun,” I thought, “but is there really anybody in Winter Garden who can handle Whitney Houston songs for two whole hours?” It turns out there are at least two people up to the task, and The Garden’s got them both...

Twice, ONCE won awards I thought the competition deserved. In 2012, the Broadway musical knocked out Newsies for the Tonys' top prize. Another Alan Menken musical, Enchanted, lost an Oscar to ONCE thrice - its trio of nominees falling swiftly to 'Falling Slowly' and my anger rising rapidly at home...

Louise’s long monologues between Patsy’s numbers aren’t nearly as timeless, but then her ability to talk about a single celebrity sighting for two whole hours is something I find both deeply and embarrassingly relatable...

Filling those water-walkin' sandals is Orlando native Eddie Ortega. His is the Jesus of the Bible - cool, chill, funny, sharp, smart, wise, surprising, radical, and full of love. He occasionally sings in Spanish, while his disciples add that and sign language too - your friendly reminder that nobody in the Bible spoke English...

Fate couldn't have found a more fitting show for the Garden Theatre's 2020 return than one with a whole song about getting out of the house and hitting the town... The Garden has done just about everything a theatre of its size can do to mitigate risk and keep its patrons safe... It did feel very good to be back in a theatre again...

a?oeThat's the worst thing I've ever seen,a?? said an elderly woman on her way out the door. a?oeI couldn't have said it better myself!a?? her friend agreed. Far be it for me to differ a?' they probably saw Ben-Hur in theatres while I still didn't know who was going to win the chariot race a?' but I loved it.

It's symptomatic of SPAMILTON's inconsistency: quite funny and thoughtful in one moment, down a rabbit hole the next. For every inspired sequence in which Lin-Manuel engages 'Stephen Sondheim as Ben Franklin' in a lengthy debate about the density of rhymes, there's a lazily written riff like 'not throwing away my pot' (an extended refrain that comes out of nowhere and exists only for the cheap laugh of a weed joke). Too many of the rhymes are moon-and-June; too many of the jokes are merely references in disguise; too many of the allusions are a crutch.

It's revitalized. It's funny (with new jokes). It's Facebook - er, Instagram. It's Mean Girls meets 2020. Fey's stage book is so thoughtfully transliterated from its early-aughts source, it's the familiar lines that earn the smallest laughs (except from those who've never seen the movie... shout-out to the couple who nearly died when they heard 'too gay to function,' clearly for the first time).

A single-act show, it could use an occasional shot in the arm. Some of the songs drag and none are especially memorable. As bus stories goes, the pacing is a long, long way from Speed. The central love triangle between Violet and two boys on the bus (military officers Monty and Flick) feels all too familiar, and its engagement with the theme of interracial romance (Flick is African-American, Monty and Violet are white) feels underserved in a show that is ultimately about self-shame and misguided faith. Still, the show...

Why? Every time I answer that, I start to feel like the Genie in a?oePrince Alia?? when he's counting all those elephants, peacocks, and camels. There are a lot of problems here. Maybe not fifty-three or seventy-five or however many Persian monkeys he has, but I can definitely point to at least five things that keep this stage version one jump behind its cinematic counterpart.

...but it's the humanity underpinning the comedy that really surprised me. The a?oestudentsa?? are so earnest in their efforts. It's their Muppet-ish instinct to make the best of a bad mistake under a spotlight that makes the show so relatable. Aren't we all just trying to do our best as the set pieces of our lives malfunction all around us?