Advanced chemistry lessons are now being held eight times a week at the Longacre Theatre, where newly-added stars Harvey Fierstein and Christopher Sieber not only score individual triumphs as drag entertainer Albin and his dapper committed partner Georges in the Terry Johnson-directed revival of La Cage aux Folles, but combine to make the kind of irresistibly fun couple you want to invite to every dinner party, go in on a summer share with and, in a more perfect world, watch on television hosting the Tony Awards.
Although performances of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark will be suspended from April 19th through May 11th while the cast and new creative team work on implementing major revisions to the show, ticket-holders will still have an opportunity to see the webbed superhero in a musical, as the Foxwoods Theatre will be housing a limited run of The Spidey Project: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.
If Bill Clinton really was, as Toni Morrison put it, America's first black president, then perhaps it's about time we crowned David Lindsay-Abaire as America's leading female playwright. Since first gaining major attention in 1999 with Fuddy Meers, and including major productions such as Kimberly Akimbo, Wonder of the World and the Pulitzer-winning Rabbit Hole, Lindsay-Abaire (whose surname is a hyphenated combination of his and his wife's last names) has been continually filling stages with unique and interesting women as his leading characters.
For nearly 300 years, theatre scholars have doubtEd Lewis Theobald's claim that his Double Falsehood was an adaptation of Cardenio, a lost collaboration by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. But the recent acceptance of highly-regarded publisher Arden Shakespeare has, in the eyes of many, provided a new entry for the Bard's canon. But while Brian Kulick's well-acted production for Classic Stage Company is a worthy mounting, the mystery of the play's origin stirs up more interest than anything left on the written page.
No, dear playgoers, the fact that you've ventured into an unmarked building on a dark SoHo street, walked down a long hallway draped in red and are now in an open loft sitting mere inches away from a young couple enthusiastically going at it in a standing position up against one of the building's pillars does not mean that you've accidentally wandered into a sex club that somehow survived the ax of Giuliani. You've just found yourself at Transport Group's marvelously mounted staging of Michael John LaChiusa's tensely erotic musical drama, Hello Again.
With a solidly funny book by Larry Gelbart and Bert Shevelove and a clever, under-appreciated score by Stephen Sondheim (It remains Broadway's only Best Musical Tony-winner with eligible music and lyrics that were not even nominated for Best Score.), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is one of the more dependable titles of musical theatre's standard repertoire.
Although I'll admit to not being completely familiar with Cole Porter's See America First and George M. Cohan's The Governor's Son, it's quite possible that Frank Loesser's score for Where's Charley? could be considered the finest Broadway debut for a composer/lyricist who would eventually occupy a place on musical theatre's top tier.
Stephen Sondheim famously commented that his Sweeney Todd is an opera when performed in an opera house and a musical when performed in a theatre. A similar comparison might be made for composer/lyricist Joe Iconis' Things To Ruin, which in the past several years has played New York engagements in a legitimate theatre (Second Stage), two quasi-theatre/music spaces (Ars Nova and the much-missed Zipper Factory) and two music venues (Joe's Pub and its current home for two more performances, (Le) Poisson Rouge).
In the roughly five years between November of 1935 and December of 1940, the team of Rodgers and Hart opened nine new musicals on Broadway. These included revolutionary shows like On Your Toes, which changed the use of dance in musical theatre, and the underappreciated Pal Joey, which brought new sophistication to the characters and themes that could be featured in a musical. There were also popular hits like Babes In Arms, The Boys From Syracuse, Jumbo and Too Many Girls that introduced classic American songbook entries like 'My Funny Valentine,' 'The Lady Is A Tramp,' 'Falling In Love With Love,' 'My Romance' and 'I Didn't Know What Time It Was.'
Though the sexual revolution was revving into full force in 1965, you'd never know it by America's popular entertainment. Barbara Eden may have been dressed in a belly dancer outfit while starring in the new hit series, I Dream of Jeannie, but the network censors made sure her belly remained covered. The next year Marlo Thomas' That Girl would begin a five-year TV relationship with her boyfriend Donald, but at the end of each romantic date they'd end the evening alone in their own separate apartments.
The thought crossed my mind more than once during the intermission of Rick Elice's delightfully funny romp, Peter and the Starcatcher, now playing at the New York Theatre Workshop. Why was the versatile comic actor, Christian Borle, fresh from an acclaimed dramatic turn as Prior Walter in Signature's Angels in America, now regulated to a perfectly respectable but not exactly choice ensemble role in this prequel to J. M. Barrie's tale of Peter Pan?
With celebrity anti-Semitism once again making headlines very shortly after The Public Theater's production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice ended its Broadway run, it almost seems a well-timed retaliation that Theatre for a New Audience's excellent mounting make a return visit to Gotham.
While BroadwayWorld follows a policy of not reviewing productions before they have officially opened, after careful consideration both this reporter and the editor-in-chief concluded that an exception must be made for 'The Spidey Project: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.'
It isn't just Curtis Moore's action-accenting electric guitar licks that give Richard Thomas a rock star presence in director Barry Edelstein's swift and rowdy production of Timon of Athens, a stinging morality tale attributed as a collaboration of sorts between William Shakespeare and the younger scribe, Thomas Middleton. Though scholars will call the piece incomplete and problematic, the star gives a charismatic performance that glides through the rough patches.
When one of the wittiest satirists of our time and his comedienne sister write a play together, you know it can't be anything short of hilarious. From Grammy-nominated humorist/author David Sedaris and his sister Amy Sedaris comes the crazy comedy The Book of Liz, closing February 27 at the Costa Mesa Playhouse. The play is directed by Michael Dale Brown.
The Costa Mesa Playhouse is pleased to announce its 2010-2011 season-a season filled with classic and contemporary comedies, award-winning musicals, and a humor-laced drama.
The most touching, delicately nuanced and beautifully realized work in The Public Theater's premiere production of Compulsion is, quite honestly, a wooden performance. Rinne Groff's fictionalized tale of the Broadway dramatization of Anne Frank's diary begins with a life-sized marionette depicting the young girl, pencil in hand, innocently writing down thoughts that she most likely never dreamed would be so immortalized. As a voice quotes how the adolescent feels, 'in spite of everything,' Matt Acheson's creation, manuevered by Emily DeCola, Daniel Fay and Eric Wright, moves with remarkably understated detail, her frozen face and stiff body nevertheless communicating heartbreaking sincerity through Anne Frank's words. Unfortunately the rest of the evening seems freakishly overplayed by comparison.
