Director Gregory Mosher’s production of the Arthur Miller classic “A View from the Bridge” starring Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber has been earning great reviews since the show opened on January 24th. The producers are even considering extending the show due to the demand at the box office. The play set in a Italian-American neighborhood of Brooklyn centers around Eddie Carbone and his struggle with his obsession over his adopted daughter Catherine. When Catherine falls in love with her mother’s cousin Rodolpho Eddie does anything he can to keep the young lovers from marrying.
This adaption of the classic tale of blue-collar Americans has already made $500,000 in ticket sales. Playing at the Cork Theater, New York Times critic Ben Brantley hailed the production saying “Without your being entirely aware of it, you have been ushered to exactly where Miller wants you to be: the realm of classical tragedy.” With the extension of the show hanging in the balance all Broadway lovers should get a move on to the box office if they want to catch a show.
Though without any big name actors on the bill, Memphis, has become a smash hit due to its soulful music, passionate performances, and timeless storyline. Set in 1950’s Memphis, Tennessee the musical follows charasmatic white radio DJ Huey Calhoun as his love of music leads him to beautiful black singer Felicia Farrell. The pair fall in love as the world around them struggles to accept them. Memphis, currently playing on Broadway, revels in the music of the 1950’s when rock ‘n roll was in its infancy struggling to grow between the tense racial lines.
The original musical was written by renowed playwright Joe DiPietro of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change fame and features a fantastic score from Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan. In the spirit of period musicals Ragtime and Showboat, Memphis puts you in streets of Memphis where a social and musical revolution is about to explode. Just recently passing the show’s 100th performance, Memphis is sure to have nice long run on Broadway as it has all the elements of good musical theater.
I wanted to be reviewing Spiderman in the next few weeks, but that doesn’t appear that it’s going to be possible. Why not? The show has been on tap for awhile now, but it didn’t work out the way it was supposed to. The show is written and composed by members of U2: the Edge and Bono. But they haven’t been able to construct the funding structure that they probably need in order to get the show on the road. This has been one of the most twisty and turny shows that we’ve seen in awhile. It looked like it was going to be a huge show with great music, fabulous sets and so on. But they’re going to have to wait awhile before they actually get it in action. It might be later this spring or summer when they actually get the program going again. We’ll have to be patient, but we’ve been hearing good things about this show for awhile. Hopefully it will come out as soon as possible!
One of the musicals with the biggest buzz currently is the Addams Family musical with all of its great stars. It’s finishing up its trial run in Chicago, where it has been retooled and designed for success. They have made it fun, popular, and artistic all at the same time. The show stars such great actors as Nathan Lane, who has been seen in many different shows and movies over the last few years. It also stars Bebe Neuwirth, who was well known as the Lilith, the wife of Frasier Crane on TV. There are other great players in there too. I haven’t heard much about the kinds of music included in the show, but it seems to have caught people’s attention too, in some areas of the web. Anyway, if you get a chance to see this show, make sure that you do so, especially now before it heads to Broadway and becomes the next hottest thing.
I’m shocked that I never connected the dots. I heard this song a few months back and didn’t realize it was the Four Seasons. It’s a common song called December 63, but for some reason I just didn’t put the info together. It wasn’t until later that I realized that this song was in the musical Jersey Boys and that the musical was about them. The musical has been really good, according to almost all the reviews that people have put together about it all this time. Frankie Vallee is really talented and the person who sings his parts in the show are also great. And the best thing is that they don’t change the music into some kind of strange Broadway style. It is respectful of the original while being big enough for performance onstage. It’s a great show and hopefully we’ll be able to see it in smaller venues around the country for a long time to come.
I announced several weeks ago that Ragtime was opening on Broadway at the Neil Simon Theater. Well, now the show is going away already after about 6 weeks in action. It’s a disappointing result for a show that was expected to do so well after a very successful audition period and exciting previews. The show ended yesterday with a decent showing. It remains a little bit of a mystery to me as to why it was closed. They were getting good reviews; in fact, some of the reviews were downright stellar. Perhaps not enough people went in for it, because their money intake was relatively low compared to usual. Now that Ragtime is closed, do any of you have any idea what’s going to take its place? Or do you have some shows that you would especially recommend in that particular space?
God of Carnage has been getting good reviews, even with its newest cast. They aren’t a bad bunch and they are even very talented in ways that the previous cast was not. More than that, they are in large part big names. That’s why it’s so hard to understand why the show dropped over ten percentage points in the most recent grosses. Maybe I’m just not seeing something, but usually you don’t want a show to drop that far at all, let alone over the course of a week or two. Mind you, this isn’t a longer-term trend. We haven’t seen them dropping in a major way much recently. Perhaps they had one less performance than the previous week or grosses and that’s what made them lose that much. By the percentages, that would make sense. Nevertheless, we’ll have to keep watching them to make sure that the trend doesn’t continue for too much longer!
While I didn’t plan to discuss the Second City anniversary show for a second post in a row, I was struck by the Variety review of the show. One of the things that it mentioned was that not all the sketches were simply funny. Yes, a lot of them were, but some of them started to verge on the serious or emotional. This showed some of the finest comics and actors displaying their great acting abilities. The style of scene construction hasn’t changed all that much since the early days of the show, although it has slightly evolved in the meantime, honing the improv-to-script style. The show was nearly 4 hours long, and the show only happened once. You’ll not get to see it, but the Second City is performing shows practically every night, so you can see the next generation onstage instead!
While not strictly Broadway, it’s important to note the importance that Second City Comedy Troupe has had on American theater and culture. There are many humorists on Broadway who are directly from the Second City world. They are smart and they’ve been working hard to get into the world of comedy. The place has been a place that is practically as good as a comedy factory with a lot of funny people attached to it. This year, they celebrated their 50th anniversary in great form. They brought back many of the troupe’s most famous members who joined for a great anniversary celebration. Hope you got to go to it or that they’ll be able to release some of the event on DVD at some point!
The musical Hair has always been the kind of show that creates good and bad reviews. The people who love it really identify with the 60s feelings of freedom, peace, love, and free-style stuff. The current version of the show is good, according to viewer ratings for Hair that you can read for yourself. They love the music and come out of it feeling bouncy and having a lot of fun. Others, however, find it to be vulgar and uninteresting. It is kind of a polarizing show this way, but by far the show seems to be less shocking than it used to be. People are enjoying it and if they don’t worry too much about it, they really like it a lot more. If they’re concerned about very high standards of production, then they might not find it, but if they’re looking for an overall audience favorite, they’ll get it!
