The tenth anniversary season of this valuable festival, New York Musical Theatre Festival, is just concluding. By final curtain on July 28th, it will have presented some 350 new musicals in nine years, 24 of which have moved to off Broadway, 3 to Broadway, 86 of them have gone on to other productions after starting […]
Archives for July 26, 2013
Unexpected area debut of Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van
What could be better than one Alan Bennett? How about two? The British playwright (The History Boys, Talking Heads) often injects pieces of his personal life into his work. In The Lady in the Van, Bennett not only recounts a unique fifteen year portion of his life, he is both major character and Greek chorus […]
WIGGERLOVER [whiteboy+blackdad=greyareas]
It is an unpromising start. The title is a slur describing comfortable suburban white boys who pretend to be black. It is based on a much worse slur, an expression which white bigots used when they discovered, to their astonishment, that not all whites were bigots.
The Yellow Brick Road and Beyond
This relatively short (less than an hour) and occasionally interesting documentary deals with, as its subtitle says, “The History of L. Frank Baum’s Classic Books and Movies.” It doesn’t however, deal with them very comprehensively and leaves quite a lot uncovered.