photo by Julieta Cervantes Most musicals feature two or three impressive dance numbers, numbers that leave the audience breathless. However, often those dances are incidental to the story. Then there’s the revival of “Bob Fosse’s DANCIN” which begins …Read more
photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman The good news about “Bad Cinderella,” the new musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by David Zippel is that it’s not all that bad. The costumes are frothy, colorful and delightfully gaudy, alt …Read more
Photos by Julieta Cervantes Today most celebrities are on social media, so everything they do is shared with the public. It was quite different years ago when celebrities like Neil Diamond performed. If they chose to keep their lives private, they st …Read more
photo by Joan Marcus It’s hard to imagine a show by Stephen Sondheim that wasn’t an immediate hit; yet “Merrily We Roll Along,” first produced in 1981, left the critics and audiences unimpressed. It was not the success that previous collaborations by …Read more
photo by Matthew Murphy How would you define an old-fashioned musical? Maybe a show with non-stop singing and dancing, storylines that we accept even when implausible, a love story or two and a happy ending. Those of you who love shows like “Music Ma …Read more
Photo-by-Matthew-Murphy A show about rock music should be loud. So loud that you feel the music going through you! When the cast of “Almost Famous: The Musical ” took the stage and performed “Ramble On,” I felt the vibrations pounding through my ches …Read more
Often a visit to the theater can be an opportunity for discovery. That’s what happened when I attended a performance of The Butcher Boy at the Irish Repertory Theatre. The musical, based upon the novel by Patrick McCabe features two exciting young ta …Read more
Mr. Saturday Night I’m a staunch Billy Crystal fan, and judging from the audience’s reaction at the Nederlander Theatre the other night, I’m not alone. I love Crystal’s quick wit, easy laugh and perpetual grin, even as he delivers a barb. Yet, sadly, …Read more
Once upon a time there was a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan called The Five Points. For over 70 years, it was a crowded slum, populated mostly by newly -freed slaves and ethnic Irish. Although there was much tension, historically the area is conside …Read more
Photo by Julieta Cervantes When TV’s Murphy Brown was mocking singer Barry Manilow, I was buying his albums and attending his concerts. I was unabashedly a Fanilow. So I looked forward to “Harmony,” the musical that Manilow wrote with Barry Sussman, …Read more