Review: SPAMALOT at Théatre De ParisOctober 27, 2023After the huge success of the Mel Brooks musical 'The Producers', 'Monty Python’s Spamalot' was a logical choice to follow suite with another stage adaptation of a hilarious and sometimes bawdy movie, just like it happened on Broadway, where both shows followed one another, winning Tonys.
Review: BLACK LEGENDS at 13ème ArtOctober 26, 2023After many different incarnations since it first appeared as Swinging Life at L’Alhambra in 2009 and 2012, Valéry Rodriguez’s brainchild—now called Black Legends—has just begun its second 'season' in the new 13ème Art auditorium, following its sold-out run at Bobino last winter. With a lot of new numbers added, a hip-hop medley, lively LED walls and lighting, and enhanced choreography, Black Legends fully deserves a second visit.
Interview: Nathan Guichet on Directing the Madonna Musical HOLIDAYS at L'AlhambraOctober 23, 2023A Madonna Juke Box Musical in Paris. In the sub-genre of the juke box musical that doesn’t tell the story of the star from whose oeuvre the songs are taken, but rather works those songs around an original story, comes Holidays on the heels of several predecessors, notably Broadway’s Mama Mia and Jagged Little Pill.
Review: WEST SIDE STORY at Château Du KarreveldAugust 27, 2023After venturing into British musicals with Blood Brothers in 2021 and Viennese musical theater with Elisabeth last year, the Bruxellons! Festival is getting back to Broadway with a completely new take on West Side Story, arguably the best musical ever—certainly the best-known and most well-loved one in Europe.
Review: EGO-SYSTÈME at Théâtre EssaïonMay 21, 2023With seven nominations for the French Trophées de la Comédie Musicale (Best Musical, Direction, Book, Score, Leading Man, Leading Woman), Égo-Système is bound to be among the winners during this year's ceremony at the Casino de Paris on June 12th.
Review: AL CAPONE at Folies BergèreMarch 3, 2023Just when the Broadway flop Bonnie and Clyde is about to come back to the West End for the 2nd time, trying to build a popular hit off a cult following, a new musical about another famous criminal, Al Capone, one of the most infamous personalities from America's prohibition era, arrives in Paris.
Review: COQUELICOT at Théatre de la ContrescarpeFebruary 26, 2023French actress, singer, and dancer, Prisca Demarez made fruitful use of her time in lockdown during the initial stages of Covid to create an autobiographical show, part standup routine and part solo concert, called Coquelicot (French for poppy flower), which debuted earlier this month at the Théatre de la Contrescarpe in the Latin Quarter of Paris.
Review: CHÂTELET MUSICAL CLUB at ChâteletFebruary 24, 2023For the 2nd year, the Châtelet Musical Club is growing, inviting artists from different countries and backgrounds to share their love and talent for musical theater in the intimate grand foyer of the Théâtre du Châtelet, which, under the helm of Jean-Luc Choplin, has for the past decade been the new temple of musical theater, introducing the French to the genius of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein (among others) and serving as the home for the first ever tryout in Paris with An American in Paris in 2014.
Review: 42ND STREET at ChâteletDecember 27, 2022After two postponements, the revival of the 2016 Châtelet production of 42nd Street is finally on till January 15th, with a brand-new cast but the same creative team as the original. Stephen Mear had already directed and choreographed the piece for the Parisian public six years ago. In the meantime opened a London revival of the first Broadway version with the original staging and choreography of the late Gower Champion, brilliantly enhanced by Randy Skinner, which took the work to another level of spectacular, so grand was the scale of the production value and money spent! That particular once-in-a lifetime and never-to-be-seen-again production was luckily preserved on video for posterity, but it doesn't take away from the qualities of this more intimate Châtelet version.
Review: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS at Opéra ComiqueDecember 27, 2022In sync with the off-Broadway revival currently playing in New York until 2024 comes to the Opéra Comique the first legitimate Paris revival of the 1986 French adaptation of The Little Shop of Horrors by the late Alain Marcel, which first opened at the Théâtre Dejazet in June and then transferred to the Théâtre la Porte St-Martin. A previous French revival, also at the Dejazet in 2001, starring Hervé Lewandowski as Seymour and Franck Vincent as the plant, was cut short because the rights didn't allow for the vegetal monster to be played by a human! Of course, this has now changed. As in the excellent Maria Aberg production at Regent's Park Open Air in 2018, the plant appeared in the human form of American drag queen Vicky Vox! In this new production, the plant made bigger and sensibly more frightening, is a giant puppet manipulated by Daniel Njo Lobé whose powerful voice gives the vegetal its identity.