179 stories from Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals
I'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…
I 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…
This 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…
I 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…
Here'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…
A 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…
I'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…
Two 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 …
Immersive 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…
Composer 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…
One 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…
The 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…
Never 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.…
As 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…
What'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, …
In 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…
There 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…
Regular 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…
So, 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, …
Yeah, I don't get it. I saw the new musical Here Lies Love recently at The Public Theater, and found it reasonably diverting, if shallow and repetitive. But the reviews were overwhelmingly p…
I don't often get the chance to see Broadway shows twice. By the end of the season, I'm lucky if I have time to see things once. But I recently had the opportunity to see the current Broadwa…
I don't know how my fellow critics feel about this, but I find it much harder to write a rave than to write a pan. I guess that says something about me as a person, but I think it's also...
Let dreamers dream what worlds they please; Those Edens can't be found. The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees Are grown in solid ground. We're neither pure nor wise nor good; We'll do the …
I've been a bit disheartened of late by crowds going full-tilt bug-nutty during, and at the end of, shows that, at least from my perspective, are seriously deficient in quality. It happened …
One of the hottest tickets in New York right now is the Classic Stage Company revival of Passion, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine. (The show has been ext…
