Michael Dale News

Need inspiration? The BroadwayWorld team has come together to help guide your musical quarantine journey. Today, we bring you just a few recommendations for: A cast recording that will make you want to dance...

Need inspiration? The BroadwayWorld team has come together to help guide your musical quarantine journey. Today, we bring you just a few recommendations for: A movie musical that's better than the stage show...

For over two years, the Chicago-based Candle House Collective has been creating non-tradition, immersive theatre for both site-specific locations and virtual enjoyment. But with the current health crisis putting live theatre on hold, their virtual plays can be especially inviting for audience members seeking an artistic connection.

As theatre fans everywhere prepare for another two months without Broadway, BroadwayWorld wants to make sure that you stay sane while social distancing. What better time to brush up on some of the movie musicals you always wanted to see, but never had the time to; or to listen to that cast recording that always eluded you; or watch that Youtube performance that everyone's been talking about?

When thinking of site-specific theatre, visions of following actors through a forest as they play out A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM or sitting in a musty old playhouse for a performance of FOLLIES may dance through your head, but in these days of government-regulated social distancing necessitating the suspension of live performances, one must think even further outside of the black box.

Today's top stories: the West End has officially shut down, Idris Elba tests positive for Covid-19, and more.

From the mind of our theater critic Michael Dale, we present: Wave at Me, Kate, Inside Story, Nobody Goes, and more. Which #SocialDistancingMusicals can you come up with?

As someone who has indulged in all the creations concocted by the genius director/choreographer Austin McCormick for his spectacular mix of performing artists, Company XIV, since the early years of this century when they displayed their talents in modestly-scaled productions on East 4th Street, this reviewer will say without hesitation that SEVEN SINS, a lavish feast of biblical misbehaviors, is their most gloriously achieved blending of athleticism, artistry and eroticism.

For BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON, Michael Friedman whipped up an emo rock score that comically skewered white male privilege. For LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST his music and lyrics embraced the open-hearted awkwardness of lovers testing the waters of adulthood, and in THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, they nostalgically provided a tapestry of pop harmonies, soul and rap. And then there was the abundance of fresh material created for The Civilians, the investigative theatre company he co-founded.

If it were up to Billy, the sweet-natured Unitarian pastor who opens Hilary Bettis' 72 Miles to Go... speaking to audience members as if they were members of his Tucson, Arizona congregation, the play about his family would be one of those warm domestic comedies where the kids learn valuable life lessons guided by their wise, but somewhat goofy dad.

From the Marin Headlands, a hilly peninsula north of San Francisco that overlooks the Golden Gate Bridge, a father points out to his ten-year-old son the spot across the bay where he first met the boy's mother.

After spending two full careers as a Broadway composer, first writing jazzy smash hits with lyricist Lorenz Hart and then adapting more dramatic and character-driven styles for scores penned for classics with Oscar Hammerstein II, Rodgers, upon his second partner's passing, for the first time supplied the complete set of lyrics for a musical's score.

Even the best written of Broadway's jukebox musicals tend to sacrifice dramatic content in order to showcase the beloved hit songs that fans came to hear. But it would be misleading to label playwright/director Conor McPherson's lovely, introspective drama Girl from the North Country, which incorporates twenty selections from the extraordinary songbook of American folk legend Bob Dylan, a jukebox musical.

Girl from the North Country celebrates its opening night tonight at Broadway's Belasco Theatre!

It seems every four years, as political primaries come upon us, Americans start thinking more about those far off people in drastically different communities we share this country with. If New Yorkers have had many thoughts about the coal industry recently, they probably had to do with President Trump's vocal support of it in the face of cleaner options.

Family secrets, political history, moral dilemmas in the face of genocide and loud, kick-ass rock tunes mix terrifically in Lauren Yee's gripping and (for this reviewer) informative new drama Cambodian Rock Band, an often horrifying, but ultimately exhilarating reminder that if there's one thing totalitarian regimes fear, it's artists.

Today's top stories: Company and Diana begin previews tonight!

'I'm tired of Negro dreams. All they ever do is break your heart,' contemplates an unemployed nightclub singer after an audition that turned out to be for a mistress rather than for an entertainer in Pearl Cleage's ravishingly written post-Harlem Renaissance portrait, Blues for an Alabama Sky.

'Revitalized' is the new euphemism for 'about 80% rewritten', or at least it appears that way in regards to the new musical that carries the name The Unsinkable Molly Brown.

It's been said that movies are made in the editing room. To some extent, the same might be said of Lucas Hnath's unconventional, and very personal docudrama, Dana H.