… doing it all …
In a 90 minute fest of music, wit and insight, the multi-talented Hershey Felder sings, talks, and plays the piano through the life and art of Leonard Bernstein.
Category: Musical Theater Page 2 of 4
… great ….
This My Fair Lady is so good it made me feel that this wonderful show was even more marvelous than I thought. I saw new things in it! It’s thrilling!
Contact: Ron Lasko @ 212-505-1700 / ron@spincyclenyc.com
NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL FRINGE FESTIVAL
Returns for 20th Anniversary Season
August 12-28, 2016
Directed and Choreographed by Martha Clarke
Here again Martha Clarke has given us a lovely new creation of her unique vision, a theatrical union of dance, music and narrative. Although Angel Reapers, about repression and ecstasy among the Shakers, is a smaller, less commanding theater piece than Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights and her staging of Threepenny Opera, it has her mark.
… a terrific new musical is born …
Here is a really amazing idea – Songbird is a country music musical based in Chekhov’s The Seagull. While it stays quite close to the plot of the symbolist and heavily psychological end-of-the-19th century Russian drama, it soars on its own life-affirming wings.
Inspired by the film starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron
This new Broadway musical, American in Paris , has absolutely spectacular dancing and choreography, magnificent scenes and scene changes, and wonderful Gershwin songs. The story, well, it’s a little weak but never mind. American in Paris will fill you with joie de vivre.
And if you know the movie — though not always in the same ways this is every bit as good!
… nothing missed …
Teri Madonna and Friend Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum
The opening afternoon of The Nomad was a cold winter Sunday: we made it from the subway to The Flea as falling snow cloaked everything in all-over veils of white to gray … and then the show began. What a burst of color, brightness, and music, what delicious vibrance, as the play carries you to North Africa and its hot deserts.
With insistent percussive music saturated with North African overtones, theatrical effects to delight and astonish, and the superb performance of Teri Madonna in the lead role, it tells the story of Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), a well-educated Swiss woman who left Europe to immerse herself in North Africa culture and the Sahara desert. She dressed as a man for the freedom it afforded her, converted to Islam, married an Algerian, wrote about North Africa, and died in a flash flood and died at the age of 27.
What a wonderful evening of theater. Two short American operas, narratives set to dramatic music, superbly performed. One leaves thrilled and elated.
L-R Jennifer Roderer, Sarah Beckham-Turner, Alexander Charles Boyd in SLOW DUSK. Photo Buckman
Slow Dusk takes us from commonplace to ecstatic, to tragedy, from afternoon to dusk. Aunt Sue is shelling peas on the porch of a farmhouse in the Carolinas when Jess comes in from the fields, we learn of their concern about their niece, Sadie, who’s seeing to much of Micah — his family belong to the Truelights and they belong to the Disciples, and anyhow she’s smart and he never finished eighth grade. They’re wild for one another and agree to marry but — not family as in Romeo and Juliet — accident intervenes, as fast as it can in life.
It feels exciting and even uplifting to attend the first performance of a new show. This one, My Life Is A Musical, has a cute idea, some amusing moments, and some fine performances from its principals and excellent ensemble players. On the other hand, the characters are thin, the story loose with predictable outcomes, and the music uninventive.