Thomas Antoinne

FINDING YOUR TRIBE Theatre of Identity is a fascinating phenomenon: this genre promotes a particular people’s cultural identity and invites members of that culture and other cultures to experience that culture’s joys, problems, history, traditions, and point of view.   Plays like Torch Song Trilogy, The Boys Next Door, and Yellow Face were written to shed…

DOG OF A MUSICAL The musical theatre canon is filled with bad ideas that made very good musicals. Stories of vengeful barbers, decadence in Nazi Germany, and even wife beaters have all gone on to become gold standards. Unlike Sweeney Todd, Cabaret, and Carousel, Dogfight, which is currently on the boards at the Second Stage,…

MUSICAL ERRANT Expectations should always be lowered a bit when seeing revivals of musicals written before Oklahoma!.   In pre-war musicals, songs weren’t intended to move plots forward or reveal new depths of characterization.   Laced with inappropriate racial epithets, the original musical version of Nymph Errant (1933) by Cole Porter and Romney Brent would have been…

DOWNTOWN DINOSAURS The Off-Broadway Musical is an endangered species.   The perfect storm of escalating real estate rents, union expectations, and production costs render producing commercial Off-Broadway musicals a dubious venture at best.   Enter Triassic Parq, The Musical, the 2010 Award-Winning FringeNYC show for Best Musical, eager to please and ready to challenge the conventional wisdom….

MAGNIFICENT CHARACTER ACTOR ON THE BUMPY ROAD TO DAMASCUS When Andrew Weems enters the stage to perform Damascus, a solo play he also wrote, the 4th Street Theater immediately fills with his rich inner life.   Weems is one of the great unsung actors of the American stage, the one whom you took for granted in…

A HAPPENING OF THE HIGHEST THEATRICAL ORDER The Flea Theatre’s young resident acting ensemble, The Bats, is re-mounting their production of These Seven Sicknesses.   If you’re looking for an engaging summer theatrical event in New York City (and have already seen Sleep No More), These Seven Sicknesses might just be your ticket. Under Ed Sylvanus…

PLENTY OF NOTHING Even before The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway, it was fraught with controversy.    A New York Times puff piece on the Boston American Repertory Theater production was pitched in such a way that director Diane Paulus, adaptor Suzan Lori-Parks, and star Audra McDonald came across as arrogant, which  inspired Stephen Sondheim to…

DON’T EVEN BOTHER Broadway producers often hope lightning will strike twice as they mount shows very similar to past successes. We have recently seen the creative team of Hairspray unsuccessfully try to replicate that triumph with the flop Cry Baby. The folks who brought you a competent Lombardi are now serving us a mediocre Magic/Bird.  …

THEATRE GHOST In uncertain times such as these, audiences crave familiarity and nostalgia.   Broadway, which once turned plays into movies, is now glutted with adaptations of popular films because it’s easier to sell a show as a known quantity based on a “title.”   While producers play on our nostalgia, they usually diminish the source material,…

LIVING EVITA LOCA Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber – together with lyricist Tim Rice – released the Evita “rock opera concept album” in 1976, a few years before the first theatrical production came to life on the West End and ultimately Broadway, a production that I vividly remember.   It was truly exhilarating to witness Patty LuPone…

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD Ever since Crimes of the Heart won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1981, a cloud of skepticism has followed the award.   The announcement that last year’s winner Clybourne Park was coming to Broadway was met with a blend of excitement and cynicism.   While Clybourne Park also won several major new…