All 3 play revivals this Broadway season have squandered special casts with staid at best, paltry at worst direction
— Steven Strauss (@aintnohero) March 22, 2017
Continue reading “The Broadway Season in Play Revivals (Tweet-of-Consciousness)”
Category: Boogaloo Down BROADWAY
Theatre Roundup (Tweet-of-Consciousness)
THIS WEEK’S LINEUP
Bull in a China Shop (LCT3)
Dear Evan Hansen (Broadway)
Escaped Alone (BAM)
THE GABRIELS: Election Year in the Life of One Family (Public)
Hamilton (Broadway)
Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway)
The Object Lesson (NYTW)
The Present (Broadway)
The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (McKittrick)
Sunday in the Park with George (Broadway)
Tell Hector I Miss Him (Atlantic)
SUNSET BOULEVARD: Six Paradoxes in Search of a Resolution
Back in New York, back to Broadway. First stop, the current revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, whose conflicted quality can be summarized in these artistic paradoxes:
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Tweet of Consciousness: Weekend News Roundup
News regarding Escape to Margaritaville; Sweat; Hamilton in London’s quest to stop scalpers/touts; the Stuttering Association for the Young (and Bruce Springsteen, kinda); the Ambassador Theatre Group/Colonial Theatre; and the Nassau Coliseum:
Continue reading “Tweet of Consciousness: Weekend News Roundup”
Dear Second Stage: WHYYYYYYY?!?!
The Sparknotes version of the essential background information that you need to understand my impending temper tantrum: one of the best off-Broadway, nonprofit theatre companies – Second Stage (2ST) – recently upped their digs to the Great White Way by buying the Helen Hayes Theatre, the smallest on Broadway and thus perfectly suited for plays and more intimate musicals. For anyone who bemoans the lack of new plays on Broadway, this is objectively a stupendous development because 2ST has long been devoted to exclusively producing such work (they also stage new musicals like Next to Normal and Dear Evan Hansen, but despite the superior quality of these, I just can’t be AS excited about the prospect of more always-prevalent new musicals on the Great White Way). To quote lyrics from the former musical: “It’s gonna be good/It’s gonna be good/It’s gonna be great/It’s gonna be fucking great!” Or is it?
Boogaloo Down Broadway or: My Worried yet Loving Thoughts on How to Stop a Bruce Springsteen Musical from Bombing
Earlier this week, Michael Riedel of the New York Post reported that Bruce (Springsteen…for those who don’t know me) – after years of purportedly refusing to sell his music for others’ artistic (and financial) gain – is now open to lending his vast musical oeuvre to a Broadway musical.
I – and Now Tony – Told You So…
A majority of what I wrote regarding the disappointing current Broadway revival of Cats focused on its creative team having the lazy gall simply to re-stage basically their same work from the original 1982 production. I’m not going to take a page from their book and just re-hash what I wrote in that piece, but I did want to call your attention to this little bit of news:
CATS: Don’t Let the Memory Live Again
I spent much of the duration of the current Broadway revival of Cats pondering not what the felines prowling around on stage in front of me were doing but rather the Great White Way-wide implications of this production’s chosen tagline:
Write All Nite 