Director Brian Kulick sets Classic Stage Company's interesting and spirited new production of Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle during the fall of the Soviet Union, 'when the hammer and sickle were replaced by the Coca-Cola bottle.' The production's Playbill cover depicts a satisfied looking Christopher Lloyd scribbling over that iconic communist emblem with a piece of chalk. This is certainly an unusual take for a play that, when it premiered in 1948, was intended to depict the fairness to be found in Soviet leadership.
It's here! The 2012 Tony Awards will air on CBS tonight, June 10 at 8pm and, as usual, BroadwayWorld.com will be your one-stop shop for all things Tonys on Tony Day, Night and Beyond!
If I were a classical music critic I might describe The Giacomo Variations as an ambitious exploration of common themes expressed in the three operas Mozart composed with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.
The last time Mark Brown's charming and witty stage adaptation of Jules Verne's Around The World In 80 Days played Off-Broadway, it was in a pocket-sized production highlighted by a pair of on-stage Foley artists providing live sound effects. But in the eye-popping new Off-Broadway production, director/designer Rachel Klein is working with considerably larger pockets.
One Chekhovian country house exits the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and a new Chekhovian country house enters. But Richard Nelson's Nikolai and the Others, enjoying an elegant staging by director David Cromer, is a more sober-minded effort than the venue's last tenant, Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike.
Earlier this week I posted how I voted for this season's Outer Critics Circle Awards, so now here are the picks from my ballot for the Drama Desk Awards, which will be presented Sunday night.
The Constitution is the only document you get more knowledge of it, the drunker you get. Why? It was written during a four month drunken binge. The bills from those days show thousands of dollars in wine, port, beer. They were all drinking.
If Betty Comden and Adolph Green were both born in Bombay, Singin' In The Rain might have wound up resembling The New Group's new musical, Bunty Berman Presents…. Not that Ayub Khan Din (book, music and lyrics) and Paul Bogaev's (music) Bollywood-set musical comedy is on the same level as that masterwork, but the spirit of silly 1950s MGM hijinks abounds throughout the evening. It's got laughs, it's got tunes and it offers a fun, mindless time.
I suppose Richard Foreman doesn't have many talkbacks after performances of his plays because, really, how many times can you respond to an audience member asking, 'What the f***?'
Five months… FIVE MONTHS after their previous musical comedy, Jumbo, opened at the Hippodrome, the trio of Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and George Abbott had a brand new one at the Imperial. But far from seeming a rush job, their 1936 On Your Toes can easily be argued to be a huge step forward in refining musical comedy into a sophisticated art form.
Mark Nadler is one of those cabaret performers who serves up his entertaining antics with healthy portions of art education and history lessons. In I'm A Stranger Here Myself, now transplanted from its nightclub roots to the York Theatre stage, Nadler gives a frequently fascinating overview of the pre-Hitler period known as the Weimar Republic; Germany's first democracy and a haven for individualists and eroticists who gleefully indulged in a period of artistic freedom.
Quite appropriately, Jekyll and Hyde is one of the most polarizing musicals ever to hit New York. Despite running well over three and half years in its initial 1997 Broadway run, Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse's pop rock adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic horror tale of a young scientist who uses himself as the guinea pig in an experiment to separate the good and evil in man and then proceeds to murder those who called him mad is regularly mocked as a prime example of Broadway ineptitude. And yet the show maintains a loyal following of fans that are no doubt thrilled at its return.
At separate moments early on in Sara Cooper (book/lyrics) and Zach Redler's (music) ambitious and noteworthy The Memory Show, each of the musical's two characters refers to herself as being a funny person while acknowledging that funny people are often the sad ones.
For those who would enjoy David Mamet plays if there wasn't so much cursing and misogyny, I offer Lyle Kessler's very funny, testosterone-laced drama, Orphans.
Apparently, not all upper west side Jewish families spend Christmas Day going out for Chinese food and a movie. Take the extended family of Richard Greenberg's The Assembled Parties, who spend two December 25ths, twenty years apart, in a perfunctory celebration of the holiday while complaining about the inability to find a plumber to come right over fix a leaky pipe (Even when offered a 'Nativity surcharge.') and referring to the season's continual playing of Bing Crosby singing 'White Christmas' as, 'a tiny acoustic rape every time you leave the apartment.'
The only thing that'll keep you from dancing in aisles at The Public Theater's production of the enormously fun and exhilarating new musical, Here Lies Love, is the fact that there are no aisles. In fact, there are no seats, save for a handful up in the balcony for this strictly standing room only show.
I suppose the problem with being the greatest Broadway comic actor of your generation is that once the label sticks you rarely get the opportunity to prove that you can also turn in great dramatic performances. (Conversely, not since Garbo laughed has anyone been surprised to see a great dramatic actor excel in a comic part.) In Douglas Carter Beane's ambitious, provocative and lovely protest drama/romantic comedy, The Nance, Nathan Lane finally gets to originate the kind of role that highlights what makes him a genuine stage star. He sings, he says funny lines, he plays love scenes… but most of all he perceptively plays a strikingly original character in what will most likely be considered, up to this point, the best stage performance of his career.
It was the best of musicals, it was the worst of musicals. It was a score of wisdom, it was a book of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief in the entertainment value of songs like 'Dancing In The Streets' and 'My Girl,' it was the epoch of incredulity in hearing lines like 'Your little Stevie is a wonder' and 'You built a legacy of love.' We had everything before us, we had nothing before us.
Theatre writers who were lured to that other coast by Hollywood greenbacks have been known to express their disillusionment with the film industry via the Broadway stage. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart based their comedy Once In A Lifetime on their maddening movie studio experiences as did Betty Comden and Adolph Green with the musical Fade Out – Fade In.
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