Originally published on CastAlbums.org.
I’ve had The Fortress of Solitude cast album on my phone for a week and I can’t stop listening to it. Michael Friedman has given us one of those scores that offers new delights on each visit, brought to life through fantastic performances by Adam Chanler-Berat, Kyle Beltran, Kevin Mambo, André De Shields, Rebecca Naomi Jones, and the rest of the cast. Continue reading
Originally published on Flavorpill.
Jose Llana’s American Songbook concert had no title or theme. He sang songs from shows he’s appeared in, a few pop numbers from the likes of Billy Joel and George Michael, and one ballad in Tagalog from his uneasy attempt at pop stardom in the Philippines. Despite the fairly standard cabaret structure, there was nothing ordinary about what happened on the stage of The Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center on Thursday night. Llana demonstrated that he is an exceptionally versatile performer, thrilling the audience with contemporary pop songs and Broadway standards alike. Continue reading
Originally published on Flavorpill.
Last season, Soho Rep’s An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was one of those plays that everyone was talking about and not enough people got to see. Theater for a New Audience has brought it back, to their beautiful new Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, with a run that extended before it even opened.
An Octoroon has so much going for it, it’s not hard to understand why. The play is a deconstruction of an 1859 racist melodrama rethought through the viewpoint of a black playwright, BJJ (Austin Smith), who happens to share the initials of the actual author of the show.
The play begins with BJJ questioning that very label, and from then on An Octoroon leaves little unchallenged, including the very nature of reality versus fiction. Continue reading
Originally published on Flavorpill.
It take balls to celebrate Billie Holiday’s centennial by inviting a white drag queen from downtown to sing Lady Day’s songs in one of the most uptown of venues, but that’s exactly what Lincoln Center did at Wednesday night’s American Songbook concert featuring Joey Arias. The intersection of uptown and down, black and white, male and female set the perfect tone for an evening devoted to Holiday, herself a complicated figure too often remembered lately for her struggles with drugs rather than her artistry. Continue reading
Originally published on Jewschool.
The news of Leonard Nimoy’s passing hit me unexpectedly hard today, so I wanted to take a minute to examine why. As a Jew from Boston, Nimoy’s celebrity loomed large in my upbringing. Besides Star Trek, which was omnipresent in those pre-cable days of UHF syndication, Nimoy was a constant presence in the news. He loaned his voice to the Mugar Omni Theater, the first IMAX theater in Boston, located at the Boston Museum of Science. He published a book of Jewish, erotically charged photos. He narrated documentaries. He directed. He sang. But no matter what else he did, he was first and foremost, always and forever, Mr. Spock. Continue reading
Originally published on Flavorpill.
There were a lot of good ideas on display at the Appel Room on Wednesday night: Giving Judy Kuhn the American Songbook spotlight before she returns to Broadway in Fun Home later this season was a good idea. Pairing Ms. Kuhn with Todd Almond as her arranger and musical director was a great idea. Giving them six additional musicians to play charts by Josh Clayton was a wonderful idea. Crafting a show around the three generations of composers in the Rodgers-Guettel family was a superb idea. Why then did the finish product feel much better in theory than in execution? Continue reading
Originally published on Flavorpill.
Lincoln Center stretched the definition of American Songbook with Reich and Sondheim: In Conversation and Performance, but the audience at Saturday night’s concert at the Appel Room was glad they did. There’s no question that Stephen Sondheim and Steve Reich are titans of American composition, the former in the realm of musical theater, the latter in contemporary classical. Each man has a Pulitzer, a Gold Medal in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, multiple Grammy Awards, the Praemium Imperiale… you get the idea. It turns out they are also friends and admirers of each other’s work, not to mention innovators and iconoclasts in their respective fields. Continue reading
Originally published on Flavorpill.
The New York Neo-Futurists’ new show, The Human Symphony, is a play with a lot of layers. On its surface, it’s an exploration of dating in the internet era, created and directed by Dylan Marron, best known outside of the theatrical world for his roles on the podcast Welcome to Nightvale and the webseries Whatever This Is. On another level it’s a symphonic metaphor, looking at the dating habits of humans as themes that develop and interplay across different movements, adding up to something much greater than any specific instrument’s line or any individual song. And on a third level, there’s the technical engine on which the show runs: six audience members are chosen to become the cast and crew, pantomiming along to a prerecorded soundtrack, moving props and set pieces, and even operating the sound system, all by following orders delivered to them via iPod. That’s a lot to chew on, which is both a strength and an occasional liability for the show. Continue reading
Originally published on TalkinBroadway.com.
If you dive into Warren Hoffman’s The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical expecting it to be a catalog of minorities on stage, you might want to take a second look at the title. Hoffman’s book does indeed cover shows like Show Boat and Flower Drum Song, which focus on the experience of minorities in this country, and it takes a look at all-black productions of traditionally white shows like Hello, Dolly! and Guys and Dolls. But Hoffman is quick to point out that an understanding of race and the Broadway musical can’t possibly be complete without an attempt to understand Whiteness on stage as well. Hoffman asks readers to consider not only what shows like West Side Story (which place white characters in opposition to characters of other races) might have to say about being white, but also to focus on shows like The Music Man and 42nd Street, which white audiences have typically seen as “not about race.” The Great White Way provides an enlightening experience with the potential to open the reader to radical reconsideration of classic and contemporary shows alike. Continue reading
Originally published on Flavorpill.
Any trip to Oz can be measured by the magic encountered on the journey, and by that scale, The Woodsman should be high up on your itinerary. A genre-defying offering from Strangemen & Co. written by, co-directed by, and starring James Ortiz, The Woodsman employs poetry, music, dance, and most memorably puppetry to give Dorothy’s tin companion the Wicked treatment, taking us from his parents’ romance through the moment the little girl from Kansas finds him rusted in the forest. Continue reading
David Levy 