Michael Dale News

With its many supporting roles for older performers, one of the great pleasures of productions of Follies is the opportunity to see some of the theatre's senior members making a triumphant return to the Broadway stage.

There would be far fewer complaints about having too many revivals on Broadway if they were all done the way the Mint Theater Company does them.  Under artistic director Jonathan Banks, each piece mounted in their intimate space has an interesting story behind it, usually that of a forgotten playwright or a rarely-produced piece by someone few associate with writing plays.  Their productions define the most positive aspects of museum-quality theatre, with visuals and interpretations that take you back to the time when the play was contemporary, rather than dressing the play in a manner that forces it to relate to contemporary times.

Though Hero: The Musical, is being pushed as, 'the first Korean Broadway-style musical to be shown overseas,' it's really of a theatrical style firmly rooted in the West End. Commissioned to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the death of Korean freedom fighter, An Chunggun, Hero comes off at best as a well-intentioned imitation of the power-ballad heavy pop operas of Broadway's British invasion, frequently reminiscent of the revolutionary sexiness of Les Miserables and the military pageantry scenes of Miss Saigon.

It's inevitable that The Woodshed Collective's The Tenant, a site-specific theatrical interpretation of Roland Topor's novella via Roman Polanski's film adaptation, will be compared with the downtown hit, Sleep No More. Both require audience members to freely walk through several floors of rooms, exploring the contents and running into actors playing out scenes. But despite its less elaborate production values, I found The Tenant to be a far superior and much more entertaining experience.

The obligatory Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark spoof that everyone figured would be a part of the 2011 New York International Fringe Festival obviously did not benefit from a series of workshops and readings before making its debut at the Bleecker Theatre. This one had to be a rush job.

Back in June of 2007, I reviewed a very enjoyable production at the Paper Mill Playhouse titled, Pirates! (or Gilbert and Sullivan plunder'd).  It was, as I wrote then, 'a fast and rowdy adaptation of the English duo's irreplaceable The Pirates Of Penzance conceived by Nell Benjamin (additional book and lyrics), Gordon Greenberg (director) and John McDaniel (music supervision, new arrangements and orchestrations).

There isn't much to say about playwright/director Tony Georges' muddy drama of a dysfunctional East Texas marriage, Tricks The Devil Taught Me, except that what seems like a perfectly capable company of actors and designers have found themselves employed in the service of a play that is simply nowhere near ready to be seen.

On Saturday afternoon, August 27th, that revival will chalk up its 6,138th performance, surpassing A Chorus Line as Broadway's longest running American musical. Sure, there are three Broadway productions higher on the list of total performances - Les Miserables, Cats and the still-running Phantom of the Opera - but the distinction of Chicago being an American musical is a significant one.

The best known works of playwright/cross-dressing actor Charles Busch fall into two distinct categories. There are the plays he stars in and there are the plays populated by characters that probably regularly attend the plays he stars in.

The unfortunate case of laryngitis inflicting Death Takes A Holiday's leading man, Julian Ovenden, divided press reservations for the new musical into 'before' and 'after.'  I was originally scheduled to see the show the week of its opening, but when understudy Kevin Earley began filling in, many of us were, understandably, put on hold to wait for his return.

In a week where we've been reminded how even the classics of the American musical stage are rarely revived in Broadway or Broadway-bound productions without their deceased authors' work being anything from tweaked to drastically rewritten, it's very refreshing to see a major revival where the material has been kept as it was and the show has simply been creatively refreshed. Director Michael Greif, who staged the original New York Theatre Workshop production of Rent that quickly moved to Broadway, gives us a new Off-Broadway mounting at New World Stages that looks at the material from a wholly different angle without any noticeable changes to the late Jonathan Larson's text. While still a life-affirming celebration of youthful passions and the need to create, this presentation is grittier and more realistic than the original, performed by an excellent ensemble placing their own interesting stamps on what, after 12 years on Broadway, many would consider iconic roles.

If Mike Nichols and Elaine May ever had a routine about two theatre geeks discussing their favorite unsuccessful musicals, it probably would have resembled the kind of banter that goes on between Jennifer Tepper and Kevin Michael Murphy as creators/producers/hosts of the concert series, If It Only Even Runs A Minute.  Monday night's edition, their seventh, was my third visit to their collection of one-nighters where musical theatre well-knowns and not so well-knowns join music director/pianist Caleb Hoyer to sing selections from underappreciated and/or forgotten musicals between quick histories of each production by Tepper and Murphy.  Frequently, original cast members will be on hand to give first-person accounts of the bumpy roads to opening night.

If the Vineyard Theatre's Off-Broadway production of [title of show] had concluded its run in 1986, or even 1996, the story of the musical where composer/lyricist Jeff Bowen and bookwriter Hunter Bell played themselves creating the musical that the audience was watching most likely would have ended right there. But it was October or 2006...

Lenny Bruce used to say that if you used a hurtful word often enough it would lose its meaning and its power to harm.  I think Broadway has reached that point with the F-word.  You know the F-word I'm talking about.  Flop.

When Barry Connors' frothy family comedy, The Patsy, enjoyed its seven-month at the Booth during Broadway's 1925-26 season, it was a three-act play utilizing one living room set and seven actors.  Transport Group's new production, directed by Jack Cummings III, reduces the piece to an intermissionless 75 minutes, minimizes the set to a sparsely furnished room and casts each role with five time OBIE Award winning actor/playwright David Greenspan.

As I wrote five years ago, regarding the first edition of Town Hall's Annual Broadway's Rising Stars concert, the traditional middle evening of their Summer Broadway Festival, this is an event where I have absolutely no intention of writing anything the least bit negative about any of the young performers who were hand-picked by Scott and Barbara Siegel to sing an evening of showtunes.  I have no desire to be the critic who drives some 22-year-old to tears with a bit of constructive criticism, inspiring him or her to angrily vow to the heavens, 'Someday I'll show that Michael Dale!'

If I were delusional enough to think my scribblings could turn an unknown into a star overnight, then I'd be writing these words fully confident that by tomorrow morning every Broadway producer in town would want to sign a young musical comedy actress named Oakley Boycott.  Yes, Oakley Boycott is her actual name and as a performer she's as unique as her moniker.  I first saw her two years ago at one of Town Hall's Broadway's Rising Stars concerts, where she floored the place as a rhythmically-challenged singer awkwardly pounding her way through John Kroner's 'Where's The Beat.'  Since then it seems her New York appearances have been limited to Scott Siegel's Town Hall concerts and doing concert musicals for Mel Miller's Musicals Tonight!

'That's me up there,' said the gentleman sitting to my right at Tuesday night's performance of Hair when I ask him at intermission if he was having a good time.

They look a little like Blue Man Group, they sound a little like Toxic Audio and they talk a lot like Andy Kaufman and Carol Kane playing Latka and Simka on Taxi, but while Voca People might give the appearance of being a bit too tourist trappy for we jaded New York theatre types, it's the kind of family friendly, good clean fun that's legitimately clever, catchly and often downright adorable.

The year Avenue Q asked Tony Voters to 'Vote Your Heart.'