Results tagged “marymartello”

Poor Hamlet (the play, not the character). It's one of those plays that just can't catch a break. Hell, there's even a play called I Hate Hamlet. And yet, it manages to be one of the most quoted plays in the canon, one of the most frequently taught plays from its time, and (one could argue), one of Shakespeare's most analyzed (and over analyzed!) works.

Cherry Bomb, the title of 1812 Productions' current production is intentionally self-descriptive: the show chronicles the very real Vaudeville career of the Cherry sisters—who, in every performance, bombed. And yet for a while, these teetotaling, uppity Midwesterners sold out some of America's largest theatres. People came from miles away to see just how bad the Cherry Sisters could be. And the answer was: pretty damned bad. Clearly, this story had great potential for the kind of comic fodder that 1812 thrives on—potential that Jennifer Childs (book and lyrics) and James Sugg (music) were well aware of.

Leonard Bernstein's Candide isn't performed often, and whenever it is, it's usually been given a completely new book. The songs remain the same, as they say, but the script is ever-changing. The version of the show running at the Arden through this Sunday features a new book by John Caird that seems, finally, to have captured the feel of the original Voltaire work from which it was adapted.

I have to be honest here for a minute: I was pretty pessimistic about The Walnut's production of Les Miserables, more or less from the second it was announced as the season closer. It wasn't lack of faith in The Walnut that led to my lack of optimism. Rather, it was a familiarity: nothing about Les Mis—not the music, not the costumes, not the set*—is easy, and bad productions are far too common. Not only that, the better known a musical is, the greater the chance that the audience, used to hearing the original Broadway soundtrack, or having seen the production in London or New York, will be tough to please. Perhaps I should re-phrase my initial statement. It's not that I was pessimistic about The Walnut's production—it's just that I entered the theatre with a healthy sense of reality.

Mary Poppins, or at least Disney's Mary Poppins, makes the British Suffrage movement look like fun. You paint signs and you go out and sing songs about equality.

Linda Griffiths' play, Age of Arousal, currently being produced at the Wilma Theater, takes a different approach, showing things in what is likely a far more realistic light.

One of the most common, and legitimate, criticisms of the music of Stephen Sondheim by performers and critics alike is that he's not tuneful enough. "Hummable," I think is the word most often used by these critics.

It's been nearly a week since I went to see the Arden's production of . And yet I haven't reviewed it until just now. This is for a couple of reasons: (1) I've been insanely busy; (2) I left the program at a friend's, and still don't have it back, so I can't cite actors by name, and would have liked to, so I was hoping that I'd get that program back before I wrote this (but I just found the cast list on the Arden's website, so we're all good); (3) I may have forgotten a little; (4) something happened during the second intermission that made me so angry that I wanted to calm down to prevent this from becoming a sequel to last week's Monday Manners. So let me just say, very quickly, that if you want to leave a play at intermission because you're not enjoying it, that's fine. But if you're going to stand in the aisle, loudly trying to persuade your friends that the play sucks and that they should skip the end and go drinking with you, it's not.

. It's a show that we know quite well and we felt that we were in a good position to be tough critics if that's what was required of us.