Over the course of its 20-year run, Nickelodeon cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants has been blamed for everything from causing ADD to promoting violence. Despite these criticisms, the show has survived to earn over $13 billion dollars across its many iterations of books, movies, video games, and even roller coasters. Given the franchise’s reach, a Broadway musical […]
Only Queen Latifah’s fabulosity kept ABC’s The Little Mermaid Live! afloat
In 2013, NBC made a splash in event television by airing The Sound of Music Live!, attracting over 18 million viewers to a live telecast of the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical. Ever since, other productions and networks have tried to whip up a magic combination of nostalgia, stunt casting, holiday viewership, and integrated marketing […]
Review: Rent, Fox’s TV version, turns Larson’s grit into Disney squeaky clean
La Vie Boheme is not mort. On the contrary, it is shiny and perky as all get out. That could be a problem for those who consider Rent, the late Jonathan Larson’s groundbreaking 1996 rock musical, a gritty yet ultimately hopeful tribute to young people struggling to survive in the bohemian squatter scene of New […]
How actor Jeff Wincott manages his busy TV and film career from DC
Editor’s note: Carrie Coon was an unknown Chicago actor before landing the role of Honey, the “pliant and sweetly sozzled soul” in Steppenwolf’s Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (seen here in 2011). Coon now manages a busy screen career from Chicago. According to last month’s New Yorker profile, she is on the same career path as […]
Review: Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert
If this was the concert version, what on earth will they add to a fully-staged version? Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert was the latest in the string of musicals being broadcast live on television with starry casts. But the “concert” we saw on NBC last night had about as many sets, costumes, effects, actors, […]
From stage to screen: fall recommendations
Thanks to the Washington Post’s This is Your Brain on Art we understand what you and I have known all along – that nothing quite compares to live performaning. But great theatre can still be enjoyable on the big screen and on your own small screens. Below are some upcoming broadcasts by National Theatre Live and […]
King Charles III airs on PBS Sunday evening
King Charles III, a filmed adaptation of the London production of Mike Bartlett’s Tony-nominated play, airs this Sunday night at 9:00 p.m. EDT as a one-off episode of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. The play was a success on the West End and on Broadway, with Timothy Pigott-Smith in the lead role.  Here in DC, Robert Joy played the […]
Playwright Bekah Brunstetter: why NBC’s This Is Us is connecting with millions of fans
While women writers struggle for parity on American stages, television series have been hiring them. Six of the eleven writers on NBC’s hit night time drama This Is Us are women. Playwright Bekah Brunstetter, whose Oregon Trail was produced by Flying V in the first Women’s Voices Theater Festival, is writer/producer for the series that, if last week’s […]
Hairspray Live! Between commercials and cutaways, NBC proves they CAN stop the beat (review)
Now that we’re mired in Trump America, there’s unexpected profundity to the pop confection Hairspray Live!, the live TV version of the 2002 musical that aired Wednesday night on NBC. If Trump and his minions have their way, it’ll be the early 1960s all over again (the musical is set in 1962)—and we’ll have to fight […]
Grease Live Review: A New Genre of TV (but not Theater)
Grease Live was so smartly cast and so inventively staged — and so much communal fun — that it was easier to forgive the fact that it was still Grease, a dopey, dated, leather-deep show about the 1950’s manifestly inferior to such sharper, similarly-themed entertainments as Bye, Bye Birdie and American Graffiti. Danny Zuko (Aaron […]
Peter Pan Live!, did NBC delight the musical’s fans?
When The Sound of Music Live! aired on NBC last year, reactions were, you could say, mixed. And yet, despite the devil’s advocates, the optimists, the doomsdayers and naysayers, one thing was pretty consistently said: “YES. Please try again!” And so we’re back, one year later. This time the musical is Peter Pan, and the […]
Peter Pan Live! tonight on NBC – first look at Christopher Walken’s Hook
Last year, beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, NBC’s broadcast of The Sound of Music Live!, starring Carrie Underwood, managed to shatter ratings records and break the Internet in ways Kim Kardashian could only dream. (For my complete thoughts on both the broadcast and the social media firestorm, click here.)
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