Gordon MacRea and Howard Keel DVD’s
February 8, 2012 By 2 Comments
The pickings from the Bell Telephone Hour that Video Artists International delves into must be getting slim. It isn’t that the material on latest releases in VAI’ Music’s series isn’t first rate. Indeed, there are some tasty morsels in these collections of musical segments from the ten year run of that television variety show which Donald Voorhees conducted between 1959 and 1968. [Read more...]
Seminar
February 6, 2012 By 1 Comment
Theresa Rebeck is a playwright who combines the politically active mind of the late Lillian Hellman and the brittle wit of the late Jean Kerr, two formidable playwrights who greatly enriched Broadway seasons from the 1930s through the 1960s. [Read more...]
Show Tunes: The Songs, Shows and Careers of Broadway’s Major Composers – Fourth Edition
January 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I may be excused for presuming that, if you have a theater shelf, it already sports a copy of Steven Suskin’s book. Equal parts reliable reference book and entertainingly written opinionated history, your shelf may have the first edition from 1985 when it instantly became indispensable as the book to check for quick information on any one of 30 of Broadway’s best composers. [Read more...]
Acme and UnSaddest team up for Rogue Waves
January 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Last summer, for this column, I took a brief look at Baltimore’s Ten-Minute Play Festival, hosted by the UnSaddestFactory Theatre. The most mind-blowing feature of that weekend of occasionally brilliant controlled chaos was the audience. First, the audience was standing-room only. Many of the chairs were filled with members of Baltimore’s DIY community. [The acronym DIY isn't part of your common parlance? It stands for Do It Yourself, tends to gravitate around the city's booming music scene, but includes do-it-yourself film makers, performers, artists, and mixes of all four.] [Read more...]
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (revisited)
January 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I caught a matinee of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying this week, and as I watched young Nick Jonas prancing about as J. Pierrepont Finch in the current Broadway revival of the Frank Loesser-Abe Burrows master work, I suddenly had a revelation about the recent and current Broadway scene. [Read more...]
Wit
January 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Margaret Edson is that rare bird, a playwright whose first play, Wit, earned a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That alone makes her unique, but she becomes more so when we realize that she has never had another play produced and is “committed to teaching, now”, but unlike the heroine of her play, who as teacher specializes in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, she confines her work to exposing kindergarten children to the joys of reading and the written word.
The Burnt Part Boys – Original Off-Broadway cast recording
January 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Few scores establish their “voice” quite as rapidly as does the score for this poorly titled but highly intriguing one-act musical that had its Off-Broadway premiere in 2010. [Read more...]
Porgy and Bess
January 23, 2012 By 1 Comment
The battle has begun.
I’ve been reading followup columns from the critics of the New York Times and other prominent commentators admitting that some of their nitpicking reviews of the current revival of Porgy and Bess are not consistent with the reaction they have been receiving from their readers. [Read more...]
The Road to Mecca
January 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Athol Fugard, South African playwright, had been writing plays for 20 years when The Road to Mecca was first mounted in 1988. Clearly a personal diatribe against the platitudes inherent in so much of organized religion, he should have known by the time he wrote this play that a debate between two opponents a play does not make. [Read more...]
Death Takes a Holiday
January 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Do you look for ravishing romantic beauty in your musicals? If so, Maury Yeston is probably on your list of favorite composers. Think of “Only With You” (Nine), “We’ll Meet Tomorrow” (Titanic) or “Love Can’t Happen” (Grand Hotel). If you are a regular follower of this column and took my advice last February, think of “I Will Paint Sounds” from Goya … A Life in Song. [Read more...]
