Bandstand, the Tony Award-winning swing style musical is making a brief stop at The National Theatre. A story of five World War II  veterans trying to rebuild their lives through music, for some in Tuesday night’s opening audience the story of the struggles of homecoming was a familiar one; forty military survivors were there, through […]

The King’s Speech, the true royal story told in an Academy Award-winning 2010 film, brings its American debut as a play to the National Theatre.  Early in, King George V (who in 1932 became the first British monarch to give a radio address) laments the demands of the modern media age.  The gruff king (John […]

There are a few ways to handle the often reviled, increasingly prevalent form we know as the “jukebox musical.” Sometimes (Mama Mia!, as an example), the music catalog of a popular artist or group is incorporated into a concocted plot. Other times (as with Beautiful: The Carole King Musical), the music is part of a […]

Some music gets inside your head and stays there. Think “Sherry”, “Big Girls Don’t Cry”, “My Eyes Adored You”. It’s pretty much a guarantee you can at least hum at least one of these. After all, you’ve been hearing them on the radio since the early 1960s. That’s because the music of Frankie Valli and […]

In the 1980s, my parents fled the Soviet Union to begin new lives in the United States. Though they spent years learning English and acclimating to American culture, their identities remained steeped in their Jewish-Soviet traditions. To this day, my mother always wears a scarlet string to ward off the evil eye, and my father […]

“Take me for what I am. Who I was meant to be.” So sings Maureen in one of RENT’s most famous ballads. Those famous lyrics are also perfect advice for people headed to the National Theatre for the iconic musical’s 20th Anniversary Tour. Sure it’s a little rough around the edges, but if you take […]

Comedian and storyteller Mike Birbiglia has a rare sleepwalking disorder – one that almost killed him.  As he tells it, one night—in the throes of a particularly vivid, bad-guy-chase-sequence dream—a sleepwalking Birbiglia launched himself through the double-paned, second-story window of a La Quinta hotel room. He awoke to find himself openly bleeding amidst a scattering […]

“The saddest thing in life is wasted talent,” Lorenzo the bus driver tells his son, Calogero, in A Bronx Tale. There’s no wasted talent in the rock-solid touring production of the musical that swaggered into the National Theatre Tuesday night. A Bronx Tale has a tale of its own. It began as Chazz Palminteri’s autobiographical […]

Seems poetic that The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up is well over 100 now and still as impish as ever in Finding Neverland. Peter Pan, the eternal boy, sprung from the mind of Scottish novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie during the Victorian era. And he has endured, from becoming a Disney stalwart to being featured in […]

They say you should never meet your heroes, but what about crowd-surfing them? That was what I was thinking the night of February 8, as I helped keep John Cameron Mitchell aloft as he made his way through the orchestra on the hands of adoring Hedwig and the Angry Inch fans. We had gathered to […]

The jukebox musical is the red-headed step-child of contemporary theatre. The worst reviews you could ever read in, say, The New York Times will be of jukebox musicals. (Okay; maybe King Kong is the exception to that rule.)