Are we ready for the pandemic musical? Musicals, unlike straight plays, almost always inherently demand that we sit inside the internal experience of a singing character, as song elongates and amplifies each emotion it depicts. Not everyone will be ready to stare into the maw of our memories from four years ago. And if individual mileage for audiences reliving shared horror may vary, the more pressing question may be whether the pandemic musical is ready for us. To judge from Dave Malloy’s Three Houses, by far the most unflinching depiction of life in lockdown on a New York stage yet, the answer is: not quite.
It’s not that Malloy, the multi-hyphenate creator of works like Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 and the a cappella choral-theatrical Octet, is afraid to plunge rawly into the depths of isolation. Rather, Three Houses, in wading through its excesses of ideas and often free-associative images,...
It’s not that Malloy, the multi-hyphenate creator of works like Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 and the a cappella choral-theatrical Octet, is afraid to plunge rawly into the depths of isolation. Rather, Three Houses, in wading through its excesses of ideas and often free-associative images,...
- 5/21/2024
- by Dan Rubins
- Slant Magazine
Image: Bleecker Street, Photo: David Apuzzo/Mainframe Pictures, The Criterion Collection, Vivien Killilea (Getty Images for TCM), Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures UK (Getty Images), Apple, Melinda Sue Gordon (Universal Pictures), Graphic: The A.V. ClubI.S.S. review: Ariana DeBose’s sci-fi outing fails...
- 1/20/2024
- avclub.com
Clockwise l to r: Some Like It Hot (Marc J. Franklin), Waitress (Josh Lehrer), Spamalot (Joan Marcus), Legally Blonde (Paul Kolnik)Graphic: The A.V. Club
It’s nothing new for Broadway creatives to look to Hollywood for inspiration, but the trend has gotten a little out of hand in recent years.
It’s nothing new for Broadway creatives to look to Hollywood for inspiration, but the trend has gotten a little out of hand in recent years.
- 1/15/2024
- by Cindy White
- avclub.com
“Segregation is a ridiculous institution and it makes decent people do ridiculous things,” playwright, actor-director, and activist Ossie Davis told the New York Times on September 24, 1961, four days before his play Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch opened on Broadway, co-starring himself and his wife, Ruby Dee. “Maybe if they can be made to laugh at it they can see how absurd it is.”
Especially on a Great White Way where actors played predominantly to white audiences that had seen few comedies by Black playwrights, let alone satires on segregation, Purlie Victorious must have been a jolting event. Though the play, which ran for nearly eight months on Broadway, begat a film adaptation in 1963 (Gone Are the Days!) and the successful musical Purlie in 1970, Davis’s comedy about an aggrieved “self-made minister” righteously “disembezzling” a racist plantation owner has largely faded from popular memory.
Opening one day...
Especially on a Great White Way where actors played predominantly to white audiences that had seen few comedies by Black playwrights, let alone satires on segregation, Purlie Victorious must have been a jolting event. Though the play, which ran for nearly eight months on Broadway, begat a film adaptation in 1963 (Gone Are the Days!) and the successful musical Purlie in 1970, Davis’s comedy about an aggrieved “self-made minister” righteously “disembezzling” a racist plantation owner has largely faded from popular memory.
Opening one day...
- 9/28/2023
- by Dan Rubins
- Slant Magazine
Twenty years after it first arrived to shake up a complacent Broadway and make a Pulitzer Prize winner of its author Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog has lost none of its vitality and power and cunning. Director Kenny Leon proves that in a vibrant new production opening tonight at the Golden Theatre.
Stars Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Watchmen) tear into this play with a force that captivates from start to finish. Like the Three-card Monte sharks they portray, the actors are in full control, pacing their game and teasing out buried histories, secrets and longings with all the grace of a master illusionist.
They play brothers Lincoln (Hawkins) and Booth (Abdul-Mateen II) – named by their father as a cruel joke, just one among many lifelong burdens the sons inherit. With Lincoln, the elder, newly separated from his wife, the...
Stars Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Watchmen) tear into this play with a force that captivates from start to finish. Like the Three-card Monte sharks they portray, the actors are in full control, pacing their game and teasing out buried histories, secrets and longings with all the grace of a master illusionist.
They play brothers Lincoln (Hawkins) and Booth (Abdul-Mateen II) – named by their father as a cruel joke, just one among many lifelong burdens the sons inherit. With Lincoln, the elder, newly separated from his wife, the...
- 10/21/2022
- by Greg Evans
- Deadline Film + TV
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