Amazing Grace
Two hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission
Amazing Grace - 2015 Broadway History , Info & More
Nederlander Theatre (Broadway)
208 W. 41st St. New York, NY 10036
Amazing Grace is a new original musical based on the awe-inspiring true story behind the world's most beloved song. A captivating tale of romance, rebellion and redemption, this radiant production follows one man whose incredible journey ignited a historic wave of change.
John Newton (Tony Award nominee Josh Young), a willful and musically talented young Englishman, faces a future as uncertain as the turning tide. Coming of age as Britain sits atop an international empire of slavery, he finds himself torn between following in the footsteps of his father-a slave trader-or embracing the more compassionate views of his childhood sweetheart (Erin Mackey). Accompanied by his slave, Thomas (Tony Award winner Chuck Cooper), John embarks on a perilous voyage on the high seas. When that journey finds John in his darkest hour, a transformative moment of self-reckoning inspires a blazing anthem of hope that will finally guide him home.
Amazing Grace - 2015 - Broadway Cast
PREVIEW Amazing Grace - 2015 - Broadway
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FEATURED REVIEWS FOR Amazing Grace
'Amazing Grace': Theater Review
5 / 10
There's no questioning the sincerity of Amazing Grace... Heartfelt sentiments relating to the nation's shameful history of slavery and racism no doubt contribute to get audience members standing at the conclusion of this musical, as the full ensemble's voices unite in an uplifting rendition of the title song. But that emotional release is a long time coming in a 2½-hour show in which the stories of the secondary black characters are invariably more involving than those of the blandly drawn, white central figures...Young and Mackey both give committed performances, but their singing has no emotional range - he's all one-note intensity while her light soprano is pretty and period-appropriate but short on passion - and their romance is the stuff of trite melodrama...The most affecting moments come from Cooper's Thomas and Michelle's Nanna, both of them figures of great dignity and contained sorrow; and oddly enough, from Hewitt's Captain Newton...
Theater Review: Amazing Grace, Too Sweet, Unsound
5 / 10
Amazing Grace, a new musical purporting to tell the story of the 18th-century British abolitionist John Newton, is the 'first work of professional writing' by Christopher Smith, a 45-year-old former police officer from suburban Philadelphia. (He wrote the music and lyrics himself and co-wrote the book with the more experienced playwright Arthur Giron.) What he has somehow gotten produced, and offered with good intentions to Broadway audiences and critics, is the equivalent of a child's drawing: naïve, sincere, glowing with an unimpeachable if hard-to-pin-down vision of what it wants to be. (I'd guess that it wants to be a Christian family entertainment with a bold message about the power of redemption.) It is also a confusing cartoon so lacking in craft that it ruins any chance of being taken seriously. Certainly it can't be recommended as history; it's riddled with falsehoods that alone would sink it. But it also fails as musical theater, on two counts: the music and the theater.
Amazing Grace History
Other Productions of Amazing Grace
| 2014 | Chicago |
World Premiere Production Chicago |
| 2015 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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