39 stories by "Ccaggiano"
I can't be bothered to write a lead for this review. Perhaps if the authors had bothered to write a show, I might be so inclined. Instead, Baby It's You, currently defiling the venerable Bro…
The essence of theater is artifice. As audience members, we know that we're being manipulated, and yet we're eager to submit, as long as the production in question exhibits craft and genuine…
We've come to expect the worst from Frank Wildhorn. The composer who gave us Jekyll & Hyde, The Civil War, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Dracula, the Musical has certainly made a name for himse…
At various points throughout the new musical Catch Me If You Can, leading man Aaron Tveit turns to the audience to flash a toothy grin amid the glow of a pin spot to indicate that his charac…
Things haven't been going all that well for the Roundabout Theatre Company over the past few seasons, particularly when it comes to musical theater. Two seasons back, Pal Joey was a thorough…
A few days ago, the good folks at the Public Theater announced that the national tour of Hair, currently wending its way across the country, would settle onto Broadway this summer for a ten-…
Each semester for the past two school years, I've used the students in my musical-theater history class as academic guinea pigs, as it were, and put on a staged reading of a historically imp…
OK, let's get to the burning questions right up front: Can Daniel Radcliffe sing? Yes. His intonation is spot-on, although he did have trouble sustaining some of the longer notes. Can Daniel…
Is The Book of Mormon the funniest musical ever? Well, I've only been attending musicals for the past 33 years, so I can only speak from that experience. But I will say it's one of the most …
Yet another entry in the movies-into-musicals genre opens tonight on Broadway, and this one actually makes sense, at least on paper. The 1994 breakout Australian hit "The Adventures of Prisc…
Pardon me if I start with a wee digression here, but I happen to be personally acquainted with a couple of the cast members of the new musical Prometheus Bound, which is currently running at…
OK, I think it's time to explain my relative silence on the whole Spider-Man fiasco. Last September, I was admitted into the Outer Critics Circle, an august organization of theater writers w…
Ah, spring break. Time for me to catch up on some long-overdue blogging. Towards the start of each semester, the students in my musical-theater history course at the Boston Conservatory emba…
The sheer number of new musicals and revivals opening this spring in New York is fairly daunting. Don't get me wrong: more shows is certainly better than fewer. But my full-time schedule of …
