The musical Working has always held a sort of fascination for me. Opportunities to see it staged live are somewhat rare, but it's one of those shows that, when I listen to the original cast …
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 02:59PMEvery few seasons or so, a musical comes to Broadway that just warms the cockles of my heart. (And as Woody Allen says in Love and Death, "Nothing like hot cockles.") Avenue Q was …
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 01:50PMIf any of you happened to be in the Times Square area on the night of Saturday, December 14th, 2013, you may have heard some blood-curdling screams emanating from the Lyceum Theatre. But it …
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 02:23PMOK, now I can breathe. It has been one busy semester here at The Boston Conservatory, let me tell you. Of course, amid the hullabaloo, I continually remind myself that I'm teaching what I lo…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 01:22PMThe end-of-the-semester crush is upon me, and I find myself scrambling to grade papers, plan finals, meet with students, and yet still keep up with my blogging backlog. As Tevye said, "…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 12:52PMOne of the great unexpected pleasures of the new Broadway season is After Midnight, an effervescent tribute to the joys and spirit of Harlem in the 1920s and '30s, in particular the fabled C…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 01:49PMEvery once in a while, a musical comes along that restores my faith in the art form. Fun Home, the shattering new musical now playing an extended engagement at The Public Theater, is one of …
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 09:21PMIf you're going to create a musical about the magic of storytelling, you had better have some genuine magic on display, either in the piece itself, or in the presentation. Unfortunately, the…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 06:00PMWhen I started this blog in April of 2006, it was really just an effort to find an alternate outlet for my theatrical rants and ravings. My friends were sort of sick of my posturing and peda…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 12:07PMThe Huntington Theatre Company in Boston announced today that its current production of The Jungle Book is now the highest-grossing production in the company's history, with three weeks stil…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 07:58PMEvery few seasons or so, Broadway seems to attract a WTF musical. You know, as in, "WTF were they thinking bringing this to Broadway?" The kind of show that, even if it was any good, just di…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 02:12PMOne thing I've noticed lately is that my tolerance for flaws in a musical depends on the overall feeling that I'm developing as I'm watching a performance. When a musical, overall, is well-c…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 05:14PMI'm going to be honest. When I first heard that the new musical First Date was coming to Broadway, I was beyond dismissive. The show wasn't really on my radar prior to the announcement, desp…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 08:59PMI have a confession to make: before last week, I had never seen Hello, Dolly! on stage. Oh, I had read the libretto, and listened to the cast recording countless times. And I've seen the mov…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 02:17PMThis past month, I saw 25 musicals in 17 days. Even for me, that's a lot. Eighteen of those shows were at the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). As one might expect, many of those sho…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 06:02PMI had the opportunity to see the new musical Nobody Loves You a few years ago while it was still under development. Some backstory: For the past three years, a handful of students from the B…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 01:52PMHere's round-up number three, out of four, of my reviews of the shows at this year's New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). As in my previous review round-ups, there's a fairly wide range…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 11:34AMA few days ago, I published my first of four batches of capsule reviews from the 2013 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). At this point, I have seen 13 NYMF shows in all, and I will be…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 12:38PMI've never really been a summer person. I get bored at the beach, and I assiduously avoid the sun. Thankfully, summer provides lots of heavily air-conditioned theater-going opportunities, wh…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 03:58PMTwo of the shows that I cover in some detail in my musical-theater history course are On Your Toes (1936) and On the Town (1944). My students often confuse the two with each other, which is …
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 03:05PMImmersive theater is clearly the flavor of the month, both on and off Broadway, which I guess is fine. I'm not automatically for or against it, as long as I don't have to climb up and down s…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 03:24PMComposer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie really seem to like a challenge. The first musical of theirs to gain widespread attention was Grey Gardens, an admittedly flawed but nonethe…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 05:47PMOne of the most entertaining musicals I saw last year was Murder Ballad at the Manhattan Theater Club, Off-Broadway at City Center. (Read my review.) I found the show smart and sexy, and dra…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 01:42PMThe 1920s was a heady and busy time for American musical theater. Musicals were still a relatively new art form, and the rules for creating them were only just emerging. That didn't stop com…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 05:01PMNever let it be said that I won't give a show a second chance. I was considerably at odds with both critical and public opinion on the recent American Repertory Theater production of Pippin.…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 06:45PMAs often happens with me at the end of the semester, I've got a bit of a blogging backlog to make my way through. Although some of these shows are still running, there have been some product…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 02:30PMWhat's that, my friend? You say that you love Gilbert & Sullivan, but you don't have the...er... patience to sit through an entire Savoy Opera? You're not alone. I mean, I love me some G&S, …
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 02:54PMIn his review of the current Broadway revival of Jekyll & Hyde, New York Times critic Charles Isherwood referred to Frank Wildhorn musicals as "the crab grass of Broadway." Som…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 03:11PMThere are some musicals that achieve cult status, despite - or perhaps because of - relatively short runs in their initial incarnations. Often these musicals live on through their cast recor…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 07:22PMRegular readers will know that I have a love/hate relationship with the Tony Awards, with all awards, in fact. On the one hand, I'm as interested and fascinated as the next showtune queen wh…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 10:34AMSo, Motown: The Musical. OK, let's do this. Yes, it's bad. But we knew that was going to be true. But the genuinely surprising thing about Motown is that it's not entirely disastrous. Sure, …
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 08:52PM
