Category Archives: Musical

West Side Story (360° version)

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  • West Side Story (360° version)

8/18/19 (Sun), Tokyo

The highlight in this specially packaged production of the ever-popular West Side Story was not the show but the theater. Inspired reportedly by a similar venue in Amsterdam, the IHI Stage Around Tokyo has a donut-like structure with a stage that wraps around the audience, who sit at center on a revolving platform. Unlike Kabuki, where the stage revolves, it is the audience seating that turns in this case, stopping in each scene at the point at which a specific set has been arranged. Since the sets do not have to be struck for each scene, this allows for incredibly lifelike scenery decked out in eye-popping detail. Nearly all the locations – New York streets, tenement housing, dress shop – were more like movie sets than stage scenery. Doc’s drugstore happened to be positioned near the exit at intermission, and I nearly walked in, thinking it was the theater bar. The image that came to mind was the NBC Live musicals, which use huge sound stages rather than normal sets. This is complemented by intricate lighting effects and curtain projections (designed respectively by Broadway veterans Ken Billington and 59 Productions) as we revolve to the next scene, such as the shadows of a dancing Maria projected against the curtains as Tony strolls and sings her praises. The actors would often walk with us along the 360° stage or out into the audience as we revolve toward the next scene, passing other actively engaged set pieces along the way to create a continuous momentum. It was an innovative approach, to be sure.

Whether that in itself will appeal to audiences is an open question. Continue reading →

Harold Prince’s final bow

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  • Harold Prince’s final bow

It is frustrating that the last show presented by Harold Prince, the immensely influential Broadway producer and director who died yesterday at 91, will be the misconceived retrospective of his career, Prince of Broadway, that played mercifully short runs in Japan in 2015 and on Broadway in 2017.

That career is eminently worthy of a retrospective, encompassing some of the greatest musicals in Broadway history. Indeed, it is arguable that the entire trajectory of musical theater would have been different without him. As director, he changed the look and feel of musicals with productions like Cabaret, Company and Evita that took on weightier themes and bolder approaches than what was then the standard fare, changing the game for all subsequent musicals. The history of Broadway in the second half of the 20th century can’t be written without him.

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Fiddler on the Roof (Trevor Nunn)

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  • Fiddler on the Roof, 6/12/19 (Tues), West End

I had no intention of seeing this show for the umpteenth time, especially so soon after the magnificent Yiddish version on my last New York visit. But I was attracted by the rare Tuesday matinee, and the Trevor Nunn production and this cast had been very well received.

The show is indestructible and works beautifully here as always. But the acting is variable and overall not very Jewish, at least by the Yiddish-theater-inspired standards as conceived originally. Continue reading →

Encores! and… Millie??

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  • Encores! and… Millie??

What is Encores! thinking? New York City Center’s celebrated limited-run concert series of rarely performed Broadway musicals, offering starry casts and an onstage orchestra playing the original orchestrations, is either running low on imagination or falling victim to some serious governance issues. Its three shows for its 27th season next year include two eminently worthy choices in cult musical Mack & Mabel and the Kurt Weill-Alan Jay Lerner curiosity Love Life, along with – wait for it – the 2002 show Thoroughly Modern Millie, a limp adaptation of the limp 1960s film spoof.

What a letdown. Continue reading →

“Man problem” at NY Times

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The NY Times has printed yet another theatrical essay bemoaning the male supremacist content of classic Broadway musicals (“The Broadway Musical Has a Man Problem”, May 2, 2019). The author, one Amanda Hess, states,

“In 2019, a central obsession of American culture is the reassessment of all of its previous obsessions. We are reviewing our stories with a skeptical eye and banishing outdated plots on feminist grounds.”

Really? And who is this we, Tonto? Continue reading →

Ya Got Jackman

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3/16/19

I didn’t think producer Scott Rudin could top himself after the perfect pairing of Bette Midler and Dolly Levy in the recent mega-popular production of Hello, Dolly! But that was Till There Was Hugh: he’s landed musical man Hugh Jackman for The Music Man, bringing together a bona fide Broadway sensation with one of the greatest musicals and musical roles ever written. The show is set to open in October 2020.  Continue reading →

Follies (National Theatre Live)

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  • Follies (NT Live)

9/22/18 (Mon), Tokyo

A full-scale production of Follies is always an event given the huge cast, glamorous setting and the show’s complexity, and the National Theatre production had been widely praised. It also featured one of my favorite British stage actresses, Imelda Staunton, so I wasn’t going to miss it. But the pleasures of the production need to be separated from the dreariness of what’s on stage. A bit of background.

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Carmen Jones

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  • Carmen Jones

7/20/18 (Fri), New York Off Broadway

Oscar Hammerstein II completed this English-language version of Carmen, reset in a black community in wartime America, just before turning to the starkly different world of Carousel, which I saw on Broadway a few days earlier. Carmen feels almost like a musical in the first place (Carousel, for that matter, sometimes feels like opera), so it makes much more sense as a Broadway show than, say, the La Boheme staging some years back. Still, the vocal requirements for this show must be a killer for an eight-performance week, and other issues, not least some less-than-PC black dialect, make productions pretty rare – the last time I saw it was in London several decades ago. So I wasn’t going to miss this.

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Fidler Afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof)

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  • Fidler Afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof)

7/19/18 (Thurs), National Yiddish Theatre

A Fiddler in Yiddish – sounds crazy, no? This was a Yiddish version that played in Israel in 1965, just a year after the show debuted on Broadway, and has evidently not been seen since. I was going to take advantage of a rare Thursday matinee – the show doesn’t play on Fri nights or Sat matinees, for reasons obvious if you’re Jewish – but a friend happened to be going that night and had an extra ticket.

As it turns out, this was not just another Fiddler. The use of Yiddish, which would have been the language of the characters in real life, provided an unexpectedly fresh perspective on the familiar show. Continue reading →

Carousel

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  • Carousel, 7/17/18 (Tues), Broadway

I hadn’t initially intended to see this production of Carousel. The show is notoriously tricky to get right, and the last Broadway production, an import from London, set an extremely high standard. The typical British approach of darkening the material, which sank Oklahoma!, Oliver and Mary Poppins among others, worked spectacularly for this already dark show in what is still one of the best revivals I’ve ever seen. Beyond that inevitable comparison, this new production was further burdened by feminist complaints in these more enlightened times, not entirely unjustified, over the lead’s penchant for smacking his wife, making me suspect that the director would hold back from some of the show’s unpleasantries. But the word was generally good, including a rave by a good friend. So, when I ended up here after all, just five minutes before curtain (other shows were sold out), I went in with reasonably high expectations.

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Evita (2018 tour)

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  • Evita (2018 tour)

7/6/18 (Fri), Tokyo

I hadn’t seen the stage version of Evita since Harold Prince’s original London production in 1978, which I caught 2-3 weeks after it opened. That and A Chorus Line, which was also in its initial run, were the first shows I ever saw on a West End or Broadway stage. With ACL also due in Japan next month, this is a real nostalgia trip for me. Thinking back, I realize that both productions represented a triumph of direction over material, with astonishing staging concepts that not only disguised the weaknesses in the shows but practically made them irrelevant. My experience to that point had been local or touring productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Man of La Mancha and such, so these concept-driven productions were pretty mind-blowing. Evita has been revived in various incarnations since, but this international tour is a recreation of the original overseen by Prince himself. I wasn’t going to miss it.

Continue reading →