Michael Dale - Page 12

Though her time on Broadway has been relatively brief up until now, Adrienne Warren is no stranger to dazzling theatre audiences with portrayals of legendary entertainers. She did it twice in her last outing, SHUFFLE ALONG, OR, THE MAKING OF THE MUSICAL SENSATION OF 1921 AND ALL THAT FOLLOWED, playing both the exuberant Gertrude Saunders, whose cutesy singing would be appropriated by the white mainstream as the model for the iconic Betty Boop, and Florence Mills, one of the great singing artists of the early 20th Century.

Of the many common features shared by the eight (thus far) plays that make up playwright/director Richard Nelson's 'Rhinebeck Panorama' series, perhaps the most unusual is that they all take place on the date of their opening night at the Public Theater.

After enchanting Broadway sophisticates with his fizzy entertainments of the 1920s and 30s, Cole Porter went decidedly middle-brow at the start of the next decade with a trio of musicals about average Janes and Joes, all including some swell comical characters serving in the U.S, military.

For the past couple of years, the sumptuous vocals of bluesy diva Storm Marrero has been seducing New York audiences in the erotic theatre/dance productions created at Company XIV, but the Brooklyn-born artist has found more family-friendly surroundings as the new ringmaster of The Big Apple Circus.

It's a bit of a longshot, perhaps, but given the organization's tendency to honor less-than-traditional terpsichorean achievements, don't be too shocked if Raul Esparza is named as one of this season's Chita Rivera Award nominees as Outstanding Male Dancer in an Off-Broadway show.

'When shall we three meet again?' the eight weird sisters ask each other in unison at the outset of director John Doyle's Classic Stage Company production of Shakespeare's Macbeth, shaved down to 100 minutes.

Back in 1976, when Ntozake Shange's ravishingly written celebration of survival, FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENOUGH, transferred from The Public Theater to The Booth, if would have been a safe bet to say that Broadway had seen nothing like it before.

There's more than one meaning to the title of Sylvia Khoury's relevant, absorbing and quite heartbreaking drama, Power Strip, being granted an excellent premiere production by Lincoln Center Theater's LCT3.

On June 3rd, 2017, 25-year-old United States Air Force Intelligence Specialist Veteran Reality Winner was arrested due to evidence that she had leaked to online news source The Intercept a classified government report suggesting that Russian hackers had accessed a voting software supplier, enabling them to interfere in the 2016 United States presidential election.

a?oeThis boy's club crap can't last. One day women will figure this out... And the whole world will change on that day when women take hold of their power.a??

For those of us who began making regular pilgrimages to Palsson's Supper Club back in the early 80s to see Gerard Alessandrini's smart new revue pack with parody lyrics and impersonations that skewered the gods and goddesses of Times Square, Broadway just isn't Broadway without FORBIDDEN BROADWAY around.

As Maira Kalman's illustrated curtain rises for David Byrne's choreographed concert, which takes its name from his 2018 album, American Utopia, the singer/songwriter is seriously contemplating the human brain. Specifically, his recently-acquired knowledge that that the abundance of neural connections in an infant's brain decreases significantly as the tyke grows into adulthood.

Bucking the current trend of rewriting and reinterpreting older musicals to suit current sensibilities, director Michael Mayer's buoyant and bouncy revival of Little Shop of Horrors, with a story involving a hero who murders and a leading lady who defends the actions of her physically abusive boyfriend, pretty much delivers Howard Ashman and Alan Menken's 1982 smash hit with the same brand of beloved quirkiness that has made it a favorite for high schools, community theatres and regional productions for over three decades.

Long before Broadway's saturation with jukebox musicals and song catalog shows, Ben Bagley, a producer of modestly-financed Off-Broadway revues, added to what was then musical theatre's long title trend (HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESSWITHOUT REALLY TRYING, A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM...) and created a charming revue titled THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF COLE PORTER.

'Beyond her somewhat forgiving brown eyes,' the subject of Adam Rapp's subtly riveting character study, The Sound Inside says of herself, 'your narrator could be described as unremarkable. In that thorny subjective bureau of classification known as the Looks Department, if she's being brutally honest with herself, she'd say she's perhaps four or five degrees beyond mediocre, also known as 'sneakily attractive.' She is the equivalent of a collectible plate mounted to a wall.'

The preteens dressed in their matinee finest seemed to be having a swell time when this critic attended The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical. So really, if this review seems less than enthusiastic, it's written with the full understanding that pleasing an overly-seasoned playgoer who, until recently, thought this was going to be a jukebox musical about some songwriter named Percy Jackson, is not a priority.

A version of American, and of American musical theatre, as seen through a Chinese lens as inaccurate as Rodgers and Hammerstein's lens when focused on Siam.

The countless number of pink plastic flamingoes populating the upstage reaches is your second clue that director Tripp Cullman, that master of finding touching emotions through a quirkily altered reality, does not have naturalism on his mind for Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo.

Songwriter Ross Golan has frequently ranked high in the pop charts with hits for the likes of Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber, and for his first venture into musical theatre, he's got some pretty high-ranking stars on his team as well, in director Thomas Kail, music supervisor/arranger/orchestrator Alex Lacamoire and, most valuably, powerhouse singer/actor Joshua Henry.

It may not be recognized by the U.N., or by any other nation, but ever since 1967, when squatter Paddy Roy Bates, a retired British army major, declared it so, the Principality of Sealand, located on an abandoned British fort built in international waters off the coast of Suffolk during World War II, has its claimed sovereignty.