Thrilling musical theater can come from the most unlikely places. As I'm forever reminding my students, there's no such thing as a bad idea for a musical, only poor execution. If you amass t…
Before posting my recent review of A Minister's Wife, I thought long and hard about my reaction to the show. I went in genuinely wanting to like the show, but somehow it left me rather cold.…
On Wednesday, the producers of the new Off-Broadway musical Lucky Guy announced that the show would be closing this coming Sunday, May 29th, after only 14 regular performances and 23 preview…
When My One and Only had its out-of-town tryout in Boston back in 1983, word got around town rather quickly that the show wasn't working. Avant-garde opera director Peter Sellars was origina…
The Independent Theater Bloggers Association (ITBA) is proud to announce the 2011 recipients of the Third Annual Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Awards. Patrick Lee was one of the ITBA's foundin…
In a theater season replete with commercial-minded, but artistically spare, musicalizations of Hollywood properties (Catch Me If You Can, Sister Act, Priscilla Queen of the Desert), it's rat…
You know what's really humbling? Being in a room with a bunch of people who know a lot more than you do, about a subject that you thought you knew a whole lot about. And you know what's even…
The movie "Born Yesterday" is easily one of my all-time favorites. I love to pop in the DVD on a rainy afternoon and luxuriate in the warm glow of Judy Holliday's star-making performance as …
Playwright Tony Kushner has been much in the news lately. A well-received revival of his award-winning Angels in America recently ended a much-extended run at the Signature Theatre Company i…
Hmm, maybe this year the Tony Awards won't be a complete and utter embarassment. It seems as though the Tony nominating committee really took to heart the rampant (and warranted) criticism t…
In all of the hubbub of the end of the Broadway season and the end of the Boston Conservatory semester, it totally slipped my mind that my blog turned five in April. Five years of blogging. …
As a member of the Independent Theater Bloggers Association, I am pleased to announce the nominations for the Third Annual Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Awards. Patrick Lee was one of the ITBA…
Phew. I'm finally caught up with my blogging on this season's musicals. (And it wasn't always pretty, m'kay?) Also, I've submitted all of my grades at the Boston Conservatory, so I have a ch…
Readers who only recently entered the EIKILFM fold could be forgiven for thinking that I hate everything. True, many of my recent reviews have been negative, to say the least: The People in …
After the final curtain for The People in the Picture, the couple seated next to me saw that I had been taking notes and asked if I was a critic. I said yes, but that they might not like hea…
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…