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Theater Review: AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (National Tour reviewed in Chicago)
PARIS AS A PAS DE DEUX The opening image’”a baby grand piano under the Arc de Triomphe’”suggests the rest. The hopeful harbinger of a new normality, the beloved 1951 film An American in Paris employed George and Ira Gershwin’s gorgeous songs and supple lyrics to celebrate a postwar romance that healed, well, whatever wounds musicals can fix….
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Theater Review: PARADE (Chance Theater)
SEE IT BEFORE THIS PARADE PASSES YOU BY The emotionally pile-driving Parade by bookwriter Alfred Uhry and composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown reprises an ugly and evergreen tragedy. Their driven musical chronicles the reflexive racism that, a century ago, doomed a suspect stranger, Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-born Jew in 1914 Atlanta. Here the bigotry is anti-Semitism, a xenophobia…
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Theater Review: SOMETHING ROTTEN! (National Tour reviewed in Chicago)
SOMETHING SILLY; NOT QUITE ROTTEN BUT HARDLY FRESH What is it about William Shakespeare that inspires lesser authors (namely, everyone else) to try to take him down? George Bernard Shaw spent his life seeking to supplant or at least discount that other playwright. In Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard imagines the world’s greatest writer as an opportunist who…
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Theater Review: THE BOOK OF MORMON (National Tour reviewed at Hollywood Pantages Theatre)
FAITH IN FANTASY One of the best and certainly funniest shows of this century has returned. Beginning its latest national tour at the Hollywood Pantages last night, The Book of Mormon remains a perfectly packaged fusion of the satire our world desperately needs and a sassy musical comedy. From the wizards who concocted the all-offending South Park…
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Theater Review: JERSEY BOYS (2017-18 National Tour)
JERSEY CASH COW Jersey Boys, the terrific 2004 jukebox musical inspired by the story of pop sensation Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons, is one of the greatest triumphs in Broadway history, spawning a spate of companies around the globe and a slew of national tours. So what’s a producer to do since the Broadway…
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Theater Review: THE BODYGUARD (U.S. Tour at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre)
REQUIEM FOR WHITNEY Even if you’ve never seen the 1992 film that gave birth to the musical in 2012 in London’s West End, the story is familiar: A pop superstar falls in love with her bodyguard. He takes a bullet for her. Though they can never be together, their love lingers on in her music….
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Theater Review: ALADDIN (North American Tour)
A WHOLE NEW WORLD FROM BROADWAY: A MUSICAL THAT TRULY SOARS “Open sesame” indeed! It’s “Abracadabra” times ten as the arrival of Aladdin in Chi-town feels as triumphant as Prince Ali’s magnificent entrance into Agrabah at the top of the second act. A theme park of a musical, Disney Theatrical Productions’ eye-popping transformation of the…
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Theater Review: CAVALIA’S ODYSSEO (North American Tour Under the White Big Top at Soldier Field)
260 HOOVES AND 96 FEET Pegasus would be proud: The vast White Big Top commanding the south parking lot of Chicago’s Soldier Field barely hints at the $30 million “theatrical adventure” beneath this tent. From the Canadian-based creators of 2011’s Cavalia comes Odysseo, an elaborate extravaganza celebrating the bonds between people and horses. What we…
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Theater Review: AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (National Tour reviewed at the Hollywood Pantages)
THE DANCING ENTRANCES, BUT THE BOOK DOESN’T STAND A CHANCE Back in the era that spawned musicals with tunes by Gershwin, Kern, Porter, and Rodgers, the Broadway Musical Comedy book was almost unnecessary. The 1920s and ’30s saw shows constructed piecemeal’”a comic star here, a songwriting team there, whoever was available, really. The cliché-ridden plots and dubious groaners…
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Theater Review: RAIN: A TRIBUTE TO THE BEATLES (U.S. Tour at the Oriental Theatre in Chicago)
SGT. PEPPER’S AT 50; LET IT RAIN For baby boomers wanting to share their childhood with their kids, for all the true-blue or late-blooming fans of the Fab Four whose great regret is that they never got to see the world’s greatest quartet in concert, or for folks who like to watch great songs return…
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Theater Review: HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (National Tour)
PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MORE INCHES “I’m the new Berlin Wall. Try to tear me down!” That defiant dare marks the flaming arrival of Hedwig Schmidt, survivor-heroine of John Cameron Mitchell’s riveting 1998 rock opera, a work that inevitably honors the freak-show pizzazz of The Who’s Tommy and the free-spirited androgyny of the late…
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Theater Review: THE ILLUSIONISTS – LIVE FROM BROADWAY (North American Tour)
MATURE MAGIC No spells get cast here, no phantoms materialize. There is no mystical suspension of the laws of physics, just our disbelief. Now in a too-short stop at Chicago’s Oriental Theatre, the national tour of The Illusionists is an awe-striking evening of artful dodging (notice it’s not titled “The Magicians”). This kleptomaniacal bonanza comes rich with the kind…
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Theater Review: FUN HOME (National Tour)
IN AND OUT AT HOME The Tony-winning 2013 coming-of-age memory play/chamber musical Fun Home’”based on Alison Bechdel’s 2006 semi-autobiographical graphic novel’”is a worthy coming-out tale. We get the inside portrait of a lesbian daughter who learns more than she wanted from her gay dad. With music by Jeanine Tesori (Caroline. or Change, Shrek) and lyrics and…
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Theater Review: FINDING NEVERLAND (National Tour at the Hollywood Pantages)
NEVERLAND MORE LOST THAN FOUND Playwright Alan Knee called Sir J. M. Barrie “the man who was Peter Pan.” If so, it was an author’s compensation as much as creativity. James Barrie was a shy Scotsman, awkward and diffident in public with an extroverted artistry to compensate for self-effacing insecurity. In the 2004 tearjerker motion picture…
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Theater Review: PICASSO AT THE LAPIN AGILE (The Old Globe in San Diego)
THEATER’S BLUE PERIOD Steve Martin wrote Picasso at the Lapin Agile in 1993. The offbeat meta-theatrical play opened at Chicago’s Steppenwolf, went to Los Angeles’s Westwood (now Geffen) Playhouse, and ended up in New York for a relatively successful run at Off-Broadway’s Promenade Theatre. The story (well, not “story” really; it’s more of an idea) concerns two…
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Theater Review: CIRCUS 1903 — THE GOLDEN AGE OF CIRCUS (National Tour)
COME JOIN THE CIRCUS As if to compensate for the unpopularity of animal acts, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus began to beef up their productions in recent years, but that lack of intimacy kept the show from being as thrilling as it used to be. (And can we talk about the clowns? The…
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Theater Review: EVITA (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
AND EVITA KEEPS ROLLING IN That great balcony scene is back. No, not R&J. It’s the one with Eva Duarte Perón’s valedictory aria “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.” As this princess of the pampas in a prom dress chokes, then belts out, the second-act opening of the 1978 musical, all the right buttons get pushed: The…
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Theater Review: THE BODYGUARD (U.S. Tour at the Oriental Theatre in Chicago)
PROTECTING YOUR ASSET The best thing about The Bodyguard, Lawrence Kasdan’s Oscar-nominated 1992 film, was how it put the late Whitney Houston on the map and in our hearts. Despite zero chemistry, erotic or dramatic, between Houston’s driven diva and Kevin Costner’s title character, Houston’s celebrity survivor scorched the screen, buttressed by Whitney’s terrific breakout numbers….
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Theater Review: AMÉLIE, A NEW MUSICAL (Pre-Broadway Run at the Ahmanson Theatre)
WHIMSY WASHOUT Adapting a film or play into a musical is a dicey proposition. There’s no perfect formula, but theater’s great librettists—Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, et al.—knew that however well the source material worked, scenes had to be shuffled, characters dropped, and songs written to establish character and advance plot. The creators of Amélie,…
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Theater Review: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (2016 North American Tour)
DROPPING THE DROPPING CHANDELIER Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mega-musical wants to be an opera about opera to end opera. Ironically, “Hannibal,” its first-act spoof of a 19th-century grand opera of the Meyerbeer persuasion, is no more overwrought or grandiloquent than the show that surrounds it, beloved as it is by countless legions. Like Webber’s early hit Joseph…
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