Ben Peltz - Page 7

Review - Magic/Bird: High Flying, Adored

April 14, 2012

“Are you the great white hope?” a Boston sports reporter asks the Indiana-grown college star newly acquired by the home team; a player expected to help his suspiciously pale-hued group of teammates win basketball championships.

Review - Jesus Christ Superstar & The Morini Strad

April 9, 2012

In October of 1971, three days after the original Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar began its week and a half of previews, the title song of what is considered to be the world's first rock opera was heard on American television's highest-rated show.

Review - End Of The Rainbow: Clang! Clang! Clang! Went The Subtext

April 3, 2012

If energy and physical commitment equaled craft and technique, Tracie Bennett's performance as Judy Garland in End Of The Rainbow might be considered one of the great triumphs of the season.

Review - Once & Death Of A Salesman

April 2, 2012

Before the audience members began to take their seats for the Off-Broadway premiere of Once this past December, members of the press were already sent an email announcing that the production would be moving to Broadway following its limited run at the New York Theatre Workshop.

Review - Pipe Dream & Now. Here. This.

March 30, 2012

Despite the loveable antics of those hard-working ladies from Texas, Broadway musicals have always been a little awkward around prostitutes.

Review - No Place To Go & The Broadway Musicals of 1950

March 26, 2012

In the years between the fall of vaudeville and the rise of Comedy Clubs, Americans looking to enjoy some live stand-up would frequently gather at their local jazz venue, where rising stars like Lenny Bruce and Mort Saul would offer their observations in a rhythmic style that many would say mimicked

Review - Damn Yankees & Through The Eyes of Eak

March 18, 2012

With its funny, sexy and sentimental book by master craftsman George Abbott and a catchy and clever score by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Damn Yankees is a textbook example of the kind of big and brassy musicals that made Broadway's Golden Age glitter.

Review - Mike Daisey & This American Life: Yes, But Is It Journalism?

March 16, 2012

About ten years ago, Tommy Tune was starring in an Off-Broadway revue; a nightclub-style act he had been performing in Las Vegas.

Review - Hot Lunch Apostles & Gotham Burlesque

March 10, 2012

Sidney Goldfarb's Hot Lunch Apostles might have been quite the shocker when The Talking Band's original production, with its run-down carnival setting that has strippers trying to spice up business by presenting religious tableaus, premiered at La MaMa in 1983.

Review - An Iliad

March 8, 2012

Somewhere around the middle of Denis O'Hare and Lisa Peterson's solo play adaptation of Homer titled An Iliad, the storyteller, known simply as The Poet, halts his detailing of the Trojan War because something he just mentioned reminds him of an event that occurred in.

Review - Assistance: Caffeinate-the-Plow

March 5, 2012

In its opening moments, it would be completely understandable to assume that Assistance, Leslye Headland's viciously fun satire of the cutthroat dealings among entry-level twenty-somethings, might be mimicking David Mamet's dark comedy of film executives, Speed-the-Plow.

Review - Rutherford & Son / The Best of Jim Caruso's Cast Party

March 2, 2012

Review - Blood Knot

February 28, 2012

It's not your garden variety playwright who can draw you into a two-person drama with an extended dialogue comparing the healing effectiveness and fragrance of competing brands of foot salts.

Review - Beyond The Horizon: We've All Got Our Junk

February 27, 2012

Though Eugene O'Neill was a grownup thirty-one years of age when Beyond The Horizon, his first full length play, opened on Broadway in 1920, the landmark domestic drama is boiling over with so much youthful angst you might expect its trio of lovers to start whipping out microphones to belt out emo

Review - Galileo

February 26, 2012

Shortly into Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, the 17th Century Italian scientist shows his young companion a model of the Ptolemaic system of the universe, a gyroscope-looking creation depicting the sun and planets and other celestial bodies revolving on golden bands of orbits around the earth.

Review - Mike Daisey Upgrades 'The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs'

February 23, 2012

The controversy remains fresh as a Daisey down at The Public Theater, where extemporaneous monologist Mike Daisy returns for a new engagement of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

Review - Shatner's World: We Just Live In It & Tokio Confidential

February 17, 2012

Oddly enough, the most interesting personal observation to be pondered in Shatner's World: We Just Live In It is spoken, not by the titular William Shatner, but by Patrick Stewart.

Review - How I Learned To Drive

February 14, 2012

Given its pedigree as a Pulitzer winner that swept every playwriting award an Off-Broadway entry could win during its premiere run in 1997, you would think that Paula Vogel's How I Learned To Drive would follow the lead of other Off-Broadway successes like Driving Miss Daisy, Steel Magnolias and, mo

Review - Merrily We Roll Along: Back To Before

February 13, 2012

The original Broadway cast album of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along is one of those handful of recordings - like Mack and Mabel and Candide - that a musical theatre lover can listen to hundreds of times without hearing a clue as to why the show flopped.

Review - Myths and Hymns & Broadway Ballyhoo

February 11, 2012

When The Public Theater premiered Adam Guettel's Myths and Hymns in 1998 - under the title Saturn Returns - it was presented as a simple song cycle using chamber arrangements of pop, gospel and classical styles in a loose theme of exploring the human relationship to faith, utilizing traditional hymn