177 stories by "Brad Hathaway"
"the masses don't want it … it's like coating bitter medicine with sugar, this business of feeding plot to an audience.” Who said it? Larry Stempel explains this and much more i…
Review of the newly released DVD's from mid-50s tv productions of Naughty Marietta, The Desert Song and The Great Waltz.
Vocalist Linda Eder, foremost interpretor of Wildhorne's music, sings 12 songs including 'Mad Hatter' from Wonderland and others never before recorded.
For Brad Hathaway, Kelsey Grammer's stellar performance is faithfully captured, and A. J. Shively's performance outshines that of Douglas Hodge on the PS Classics release.
While it might seem improbable that a flop musical about the Holocaust ("Springtime for Hitler" without the irony) would get preserved on both a CD and DVD, Imagine This did.
Some cast recordings sound almost as good as the show sounds live in the theater. The Decca recording of The Addams Family sounds better.In the Lunt-Fantanne Theatre the sound system emphasi…
Consumer safety alert! This disk contains more songs with catchy rhythms that stick in your head than most heads can hold. Listen only when you have time to push repeat repeatedly.
A review of the PBS series, and of Michael Kantor's six hour exploration of the history of the Broadway musical stage, and its newly released paperback book
His view of the world of musical theatre concentrates on the light, fun, even chipper side - which you might expect of the man who conceived, wrote, composed, and co-directed The First Nudie…
Brad Hathaway says,"Here is a book that explains just why it is so hard to make a musical - what “collaboration” actually means over the months and years that it takes to carry a…
Making the Scene: A History of Stage Design and Technology in Europe and the United States This handsome volume is both an impressive coffee table book with an almost endless progression of …
Brad Hathaway reviews the "shortest (28 minutes) original cast album in recent memory."
Philip Lambert takes on the seven musicals of Bock and Harnick one by one in six chapters covering 190 pages sandwiched between two introductory chapters on the pre-collaboration lives of th…
Dionne Warwick, Placido Domingo, Gloria Estefan in Maury Yeston's musical. Hear them sing 'If I Loved You with this review.
The grandson of Oscar Hammerstein II (and, thus, the great-great grandson of the first Oscar Hammerstein, the impresario who all but established Times Square) pulls his theatrical family's s…
For over four years, this column has brought you reviews of theater-related CDs, DVDs and Books that you might want to have on your very own theater shelves. It has been a pleasure as well a…
So many of the great musicals of the 1940s, 50s and 60s have remained in the standard repertoire, being revived again and again and recorded over and over that you could be forgiven for thin…
The 2013-14 Broadway season has produced a wide variety of scores from musicals that we are fortunate to have had recorded commercially. Indeed, the season has been marked by a notable raft …
One storyline in the history of the evolution of what we now know as “a musical” has been the progression of lyric writing from light verse to less rigid but often more potent fo…
One vocal treatment of a Styne score that has been laying under the wraps of near obscurity for 45 years has just re-emerged in a digital re-release of note:"Diana Ross and the Supremes Sing…
We’ll take a look at the recordings of the Tony nominated musicals before the June 8 award telecast but, right now, there’s an original cast album of an Off Broadway musical that…
Read any good plays lately? I have a confession to make. I can’t read a play and come away with anything approaching the emotional satisfaction I get from the experience in the theater…
Some artists who put together a cabaret show just pick a bunch of songs that they like to sing or that show off their talents. Others pick a theme or turn their cabaret show into an autobiog…
Who is this Eddie Shapiro? How did he get to spend all this quality time with twenty (or twenty-one " more on this later) Tony Award winning leading ladies of Broadway fame including the lik…
When show folk put their minds (and hearts) into it, they can raise any roof. On January 28th of last year, the roof that couldn’t contain their touching contributions to a benefit con…
