Category Archives: Reviews

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July 22, 2014

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CastAlbums.org, Music, Reviews, Theater

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CastAlbums.org: REVIEW: Bullets Over Broadway

Originally published on CastAlbums.org.

Recording Cover

When it was first announced that Woody Allen and Susan Stroman were teaming up to bring Bullets Over Broadway to the musical stage, the news was greeted with tremendous anticipation, tempered only slightly by the news that the show would feature a score cobbled together from songs from the 1920s, the era in which the show is set. As the show approached Broadway, anticipation built around the casting of Helen Sinclaire, the role for which Dianne Wiest won an Oscar in 1995. When Marin Mazzie won the role amidst rumors that the show’s creators were hoping for a star but couldn’t find one who matched Mazzie’s winning take, Broadway fans rejoiced. And then the show opened…  Continue reading →

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July 20, 2014

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CastAlbums.org: REVIEW: Nice Fighting You: A 30th Anniversary Celebration Live at 54 Below

Originally published on CastAlbums.org.


Nice Fighting You

Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty have the kind of versatility that makes it hard to consider their output as one body of work. Do the Caribbean rhythms of Once On This Island have anything in common with the Americana of Ragtime or the soft rock of Rocky? This new release on Broadway Records argues not only that they do, but that each of these scores and the rest of the Ahrens and Flaherty catalog bear revisiting.

Recorded live over the course of three nights at 54 Below, the New York City nightclub in the basement of Studio 54, Nice Fighting You offers 36 of the duo’s songs performed by a starry cast of Broadway talent, many of whom have (or, in one case, will) played these roles in original productions and Broadway revivals. Your favorites are all here, sounding their best: Liz Callaway revisiting “Journey to the Past,” which she introduced in the film Anastasia, Mary Testa proving she can belt “Rita’s Confession” and “Fancy Meeting You Here” from Lucky Stiff as thrillingly as she did in 1988, and Marin Mazzie proving that “Goodbye, My Love” and “Back to Before” work as well in a tiny cabaret as they did in the gigantic original production of Ragtime. Kevin Chamberlin‘s gentle reading of “Solla Sollew” from Seussical may leave you wondering how that show could have possibly flopped. And Jeremy Jordan‘s introduction of “Dancing Still,” from the upcoming Little Dancer may compel you to research tickets to Washington, DC, where the show will have its first production at the Kennedy Center this fall.

That new song isn’t the only surprise on the album. Continue reading →

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March 1, 2014

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Best Of, Books, Reviews, The Sondheim Review

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The Sondheim Review: It’s Their Time – Author Weaves ‘Merrily’ Into A Young Adult Novel

Originally published in The Sondheim Review, Spring 2014

The Reece Malcolm ListStephen Sondheim’s influence occasionally pops up in the most surprising of places. Having already made an impression on punk music (e.g. the album Punk Side Story), Ben Affleck (who performs “God, That’s Good” in the film Jersey Girl), and My Little Pony (which features numbers that resemble Sondheim’s work), a Sondheim-infused young adult novel is hardly surprising, but in the form of The Reece Malcolm List by Amy Spaulding, it’s unquestionably delightful.

Readers of The Sondheim Review are likely to recognize the book’s heroine and narrator: a teen more familiar with the ins and outs of high school show choir than athletics, with an iPod full of original cast albums and more Playbills than friends. Devan Mitchell has always been a bit of an outsider, with only one close friend and a strained relationship with her dad and step-mother. Having stumbled onto her mother’s identity when reading the dedication of author Reece Malcolm‘s first New York Times bestseller – clearly aimed at her – Devan begins the titular list to uncover whatever she can about her famous (and famously “un-Googleable”) mother. When Devan’s father dies in a car accident and she’s shipped off to Burbank, CA to live with the mother she’s never met, the quest to know more about the mysterious Reece Malcolm intensifies. Continue reading →

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January 29, 2014

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Jewish, Jewschool, Reviews

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Jewschool: Where Hipster Brooklyn and Youth Group Nostalgia Meet

Originally published on Jewschool.com.

Sermon SlamA couple of weeks ago, an email came over the Jewschool contributors’ listserv asking if anyone wanted to cover a SermonSlam taking place in my neighborhood. As someone who has enjoyed other kinds of slams in the past (poetry, story, and grand – IHOP, not baseball), I jumped at the opportunity. I’m still something of a Brooklyn newbie, having lived here for less than a year. So I want to fully own that my preconceived notions of what a SermonSlam might be were entirely colored by an outsider’s stereotype of Brooklyn hipster culture. Now, to be fair, I have lived here almost a year—it will be a year this Shabbat—and so I have been around long enough to know that most of the stereotypes about Brooklyn hipster culture are true. And I should have been tipped off by the fact that the event was being held at Congregation Beth Elohim (known in the neighborhood as CBE), a very large Reform synagogue that often plays host to community events, many of which I have enjoyed this year.

You see what I’m getting at, right? What I had pictured as a cool, vaguely underground event, perhaps in a dark room with a stage and a bar, turning words of Torah into performance art, was in fact more like a youth group program for young adults, held in a large, well-lit synagogue social hall, with the performers relying a little more heavily on the “sermon” than the “slam.” The only drinks were of the cola variety, and the evening was padded with games straight from my synagogue youth director playbook like Jewish Geography 2.0, affably executed by hosts Ben Greenfield and Samantha Kuperberg, who themselves seemed to have arrived straight from a summer on the staff of Camp Ramah.

BUT! And this is a big BUT! (I like big BUTs and I cannot lie…) I’m pretty sure if you went in to the event with fewer or different preconceived notions, you would have been thrilled.  Continue reading →

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December 24, 2013

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Books, Remedial Queens, Reviews, The Craptacular, Theater

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The Craptacular: Remedial Queens: The Making Of Chronicles

Originally published on The Craptacular.

The Making-Of Chronicles

I’m not sure when gift cards became a controversial gift (are they lazy? are they thoughtless?) because frankly, I think they’re the actual best. Seriously. The only thing better than money, is money that comes with the explicit designation that it can only be used for a particular kind of frivolity. When I was younger, gift cards meant one thing: cast album binge! But as I’ve matured (and acquired a Spotify Premium account), I find myself more and more drawn to filling my bookshelves (and my Kindle library) with books about our collective favorite obsession: Broadway musicals.

Actually, there is a particular sub-genre of books about Broadway that I love most, and that’s the Making-Of Chronicle. (This should come to no surprise, given that you are currently reading a column I write about the history of Broadway musicals.) Like a good Behind the Music episode, the best of these manage to break through the necessary conventions of the form to bring to life the dramas behind the drama and the personalities that gave birth to the shows we love – or occasionally, the shows we love to hate.

Right now, the Making-Of Chronicle spotted most frequently on the subway is Glen Berger’s Song of Spider-Man. Certainly, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has all the elements of a great making-of story: huge personalities, high stakes, and a disastrous journey from idea to opening night. I haven’t seen any version of the Spider-Man musical, but I will admit that reading the book makes me want to try to catch it before it closes on January 4th. Berger, the show’s book writer, acknowledges from the start that he can’t really create any sort of distance from the events he documents, and you may find his editorializing and finger-pointing exciting or exasperating, depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing.

But if you’re like me (or aspire to be), you’re probably more interested in Chronicles of shows long gone than documents of disasters still running (however fleetingly) on Broadway. So here’s five suggestions to add to your Amazon Wish List today, so you can order them with your gift cards on Christmas morning. I can’t claim to have read every “Making-Of” book. Hell, I can’t even claim to have read every “Making-Of” book currently sitting on my bookshelves… or even on this list. But these are the five (plus one honorable mention) that spring to mind first when the subject comes up, and you won’t go wrong starting with any one of them. Continue reading →

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December 9, 2013

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The Craptacular: Remedial Queens: Who Will Love Side Show As It Am?

Originally published on The Craptacular.

Every so often, a show that flops hard on Broadway leaves in its aftermath a corps of fans devoted to keeping its memory alive. With shows like Candide, Merrily We Roll Along, Carrie, and countless others, these vocal proponents ensure that while the show may have closed quickly, they will not be forgotten. In the case of the most beloved of these shows, including the three I just named, their fans go so far as to spend countless hours “fixing” them, figuring out how to solve the problems that caused the shows to flop in the first place. When this works, the shows can go on to great acclaim: Hal Prince’s revision of Candide ran for years in the mid-70s, Michael Grandage’s London production of Merrily We Roll Along won the Olivier Award for Best Musical, and Carrie‘s recent off-Broadway return spawned a series of regional productions which will surely give way to high school, college, and community theater productions for years to come.

The latest cult musical to get this fan-fueled revisal treatment? Why, Side Show, of course. Continue reading →

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November 18, 2013

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Best Of, Books, Remedial Queens, Reviews, The Craptacular, Theater

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The Craptacular: Remedial Queens: The Five “Bs” of Bob Fosse

Originally published on The Craptacular.

Even though Bob Fosse’s been dead longer than many of our readers have been alive, I can’t imagine that anyone here doesn’t have at least a passing familiarity with his work. After all, two of his signature shows (Pippin and Chicago) are currently running on Broadway, each in a hit revival received even more enthusiastically than the original. And what do those revivals have in common? Both took great pains to create choreography “in the style of Bob Fosse,” including recreating Fosse’s own steps for big numbers in each – “The Manson Trio” (the dance break in “Glory”) in Pippin and “Hot Honey Rag” in Chicago. With no disrespect to the other great choreographers of Broadway, while original dances from De Mille, Robbins, and Bennett have been recreated, no one else created a style so recognizable and enviable that people today still strive to work (and market their work as) “in the style of” anyone other than Fosse.

Given Fosse’s enduring popularity and fascinating personal life—more on that in a sec—I predict that Sam Wasson’s excellent new biography will be as in demand as Pippin tickets. The 700-page opus takes us from Fosse’s funeral back to his childhood dancing in the slimiest burlesque houses Chicago had to offer, through the romances and bromances of the showman who made history as the first (and still only) to win the best director Oscar, Tony, and Emmy awards all within a year. Continue reading →

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November 4, 2013

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The Craptacular: Remedial Queens: Smile

Originally published on The Craptacular.

When I moved to New York in February, I was thrilled to learn that one of the most notorious flops in Broadway history, Moose Murders, would be receiving its first New York revival off-off-Broadway. I excitedly bought my ticket and headed down to Alphabet City (OMG just like in Rent!) to the theater, which looked a little like the rec hall at the Sharon Community Center where I made my community theater debut as the Munchkin Coroner in a suburban Massachusetts production of The Wizard of Oz when I was seven years old. Before I left the theater, I tweeted:

All of this serves as a preamble to today’s column, which is about my trip last week to see another notorious ’80s-era flop, Smile, which just concluded a run off-off-Broadway in a concert staging by the Musicals Tonight company. There are, at most, five reasons why anyone cares about Smile nearly thirty years after it played Broadway for just over a month: Continue reading →

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October 18, 2013

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The Craptacular: Remedial Queens: One Touch of Venus

Originally published on The Craptacular.

A couple of weeks ago, you may have felt a disturbance in The (Broadway) Force — the sound of a thousand queens suddenly squealing with a mixture of delight and disbelief. The momentous occasion? The long-delayed complete recording of One Touch of Venus was finally released on iTunes, a mere fourteen years after it was first announced.

Did you feel that? This time I’m pretty sure the disturbance is the sound of several thousand Craptacular readers asking “What the fuck is One Touch of Venus?” Continue reading →

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October 5, 2013

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Jewish, Jewschool, Reviews, Theater

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Jewschool: Bad Jews, Great Performances

Originally published on Jewschool.com

Tracee Chimo, Michael Zegen and Molly Ranson in Bad Jews. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Tracee Chimo, Michael Zegen and Molly Ranson in Bad Jews. Photo by Joan Marcus.

As the organized Jewish community debates the changing nature of Jewish identity in America uncovered by the recent Pew study, theatergoers in New York are engaging in a similar debate spurred on by Bad Jews, a new play by Josh Harmon being presented off-Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company, following a developmental production last fall at the Roundabout Underground Black Box.

On its surface, Bad Jews is a dark comedy about cousins reuniting at their grandfather’s shiva, butting heads about who should inherit a chai necklace their beloved Poppy had managed to hold on to through his time in a concentration camp. But Bad Jews is really a play of ideas, offering one hundred minutes of debate about what Jewish identity means for the grandchildren of survivors and contemporary twenty-something American Jews. Representing the “religion matters most” camp is Daphna (Tracee Chimo), a strident senior at Vassar who hopes to marry the Israeli soldier she slept with on Birthright, make aliyah, and attend rabbinical school. Taking the opposing view is Liam (Michael Zegen), her elder cousin who has little to no interest in Judaism or Jewishness, but feels a deep familial connection to what the chai necklace represents. Liam’s younger brother Jonah (Philip Ettinger) just wants to be left out of the argument. The ensuing battle, which is further intensified by the presence of Liam’s perky, privileged, non-Jewish girlfriend Melody (Molly Ranson), will either fascinate or exhaust you, depending on how many times you’ve had this conversation yourself. Continue reading →