musicals
bella.todd
Revivals of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion are generally too busy making an artistic case for the play over the My Fair Lady musical to worry about listening out for contemporary resonances. But in many ways Simon Cowell is the Henry Higgins of our day: betting with his fellow X-Factor judges that he can pass off such-and-such under-privileged teen as a pop star; putting them through their paces before a rigorous public test; and showing little regard for what will happen once they have been torn out of their reality and developed a taste for limos and red carpets, and Judgment Day has come Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Menier Chocolate Factory could scarcely be on mightier form, or so it seems, punching far beyond its weight as a small, out-of-the-way south London playhouse that is nonetheless responsible at the moment for five commercial transfers between London and New York.The other three are Broadway musicals of different vintages and of differing degrees of renown, ranging from an alternately plaintive and raunchy product of the 1960s (Sweet Charity) to an arty 1970s Stephen Sondheim favourite (A Little Night Music) and on to a 1980s crowd-pleaser (La Cage aux folles) that won a Tony for Read more ...
David Nice
It's been quite a week for youth and the vernacular in the world of so-called “classical” music. Multiply by four the seven fledgling stage animals currently firing up John Adams’s “earthquake-romance” in London's East End, add an orchestra of 13-to-24-year-olds from four continents, student dancers, amateur choirs young and old and just a handful of professionals, and that's only the starting-point for this hair-raising, goosebump-inducing, 500-strong performance of what many of us believe to be Bernstein's most cohesive masterpiece.The real starting point, in fact, was nine months ago, this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
She starred in the original film, not to mention the low-rent sequel, as a counterfeit nun on the run from criminal psychopaths. She became involved in the stage version as a cheerleading producer. Now Whoopi Goldberg is getting back in the habit.
Sister Act the Musical, with a pastiche disco songbook by Alan Menken, has been entertaining audiences at the London Palladium for over a year now. In the autumn it moves out to accommodate the latest product of the BBC/Lloyd Webber talent-hunting industrial complex. But it will leave a whiff of cordite as it departs, with Goldberg taking over Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the musical theatre (Paradise Found, anyone?), along comes The Fantasticks, and we are returned to square one. How can this be, I hear you asking, given the record book entries clocked up by a Tom Jones/ Harvey Schmidt confection that ran Off Broadway continuously for over four decades before closing in 2002? (It then reopened at a midtown Manhattan venue in 2006.) Well, what may seem charming and whimsical in one context can be wince-inducing in another. Let's just say that I arrived at The Fantasticks infinitely willing to surrender to its Read more ...
howard.male
My excuse is that I was comfortably settled on the sofa next to my wife when the first episode of Glee aired, and I just got drawn in. I know, it’s not much of an excuse - and it hardly explains the fact that I then went on to watch the next 20 episodes - but there we are. And as a heterosexual middle-aged ex-punk rocker, I’m certainly not the obvious target demographic for this latest American television phenomenon, so perhaps I should explain further.Glee is probably the most aptly named TV show ever devised, in that the dictionary defines “glee” as “open delight or pleasure; exultant joy; Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's bizarre, and then there's Paradise Found, a new musical that falls so short of the not always clearly defined mark that audiences may likely be mulling over what went wrong for years. What do the two acts have to do with one another? What in heaven's name is the point? How much weight in water is leading man Mandy Patinkin losing per performance? Those are just a few of the questions spectators will be left pondering during what for many will nonetheless be essential viewing, notwithstanding the show's self-evidently inchoate status. Not in a quarter-century of playgoing this side of Read more ...
judith.flanders
Nigel Simeone’s engaging study of Bernstein’s score of West Side Story could almost be entitled “Collaboration: The Manual”, so deftly does it interweave Bernstein’s originality with the contributions of his stellar team-mates. Jerome Robbins conceived, choreographed and directed the Broadway show; Arthur Laurents wrote the book; Stephen Sondheim, in his first Broadway outing, wrote the lyrics; Hal Prince came in at a late stage when the original producer quit. (“It’s about a bunch of teenagers in blue jeans...a cast of total unknowns, and it ends tragically.”)Certainly the gestation was not Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For many years the composer who made his name with Little Shop of Horrors abandoned the theatre to work in Hollywood. He returned to Broadway in 2008 with an enlarged songbook for The Little Mermaid, but it closed within a year. Later came the gospel-tinged Leap of Faith, based on the 1992 film starring Steve Martin as a faith-healing charlatan, and the stage version of the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle Sister Act (pictured below right). Menken’s contribution was a parody of Seventies disco kitsch, a delicious palette stretching from Barry White to the Weather Girls, plus an eponymous ballad, which Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway tends to go into overdrive in May, that time of the theatrical year when New York stages are at their buzziest in the run-up to the Tony Awards (to be awarded on 13 June). Heavyweight star vehicles (Denzel Washington back on Broadway after five years in Fences) vie for audiences with London imports (Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne in Red), while musicals generate their own considerable clamour: literally so in the case of the Green Day-scored American Idiot, a 95-minute aural immersion that has prompted more delicate members of the show-going public to plump for earplugs. But amidst Read more ...
David Nice
Many of us younger opera-goers have never had a chance until now to see Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers in action. Opinions have been divided on its status as one of the great operas of the last half-century, but it certainly brought out the composers: the night I went, both Thomas Adès and Mark-Anthony Turnage were in the audience, and at Saturday's final performance the 83-year-old composer was there for what must surely be the most perfectly co-ordinated, visually beautiful production he could ever hope to see.After an evening of Birtwistle's The Minotaur, a venerable old friend Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman didn't make the cut; Denzel Washington and Broadway neophyte Douglas Hodge did. And so the race is on for the 2010 Tony Awards, heralding the best of the 39 shows that opened on Broadway across the past season. As always, the British presence is formidable, and this year ranges from Catherine Zeta-Jones (A Little Night Music, pictured above) to Alfred Molina (Red) and on to composer and sound designer Adam Cork, who snared an astonishing three nominations, including one for Enron's original score. (Huh?)But while the Donmar is doubtless celebrating its nine Read more ...