Tours

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….

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…

DETECTING LOVE At first Christopher John Francis Boone seems a defective detective: A 15-year-old math whiz, this only child has Asperger’s Syndrome. The anomaly is enough to push adolescence way beyond awkward. Christopher’s autism manifests in manic multi-tasking, an inability to focus (or to lie), attention deficits, a maddening literal-mindedness, and a disarming directness that…

A HIGHLY ORGANIZED ENCHANTMENT 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 motion picture Finding…

STILL BANGING FOR THE BUCKS The incredibly basic concept behind Stomp, a phenom now in its third decade, remains: “Make a rhythm out of anything we can get our hands on that makes a sound.” (Luke Cresswell, co-founder/director). The result: four global productions, including permanent venues in New York and London’”and the rousing tour now…

SO’”JUST EXACTLY WHEN WILL THE SUN COME UP? (HINT: 2020) The first Christmas special came early this year: another national tour of the  industrial-strength 1977 heart-warmer, Annie. Resistance is futile to this cunning confection. Again we warm to the tale of the plucky, Depression-era orphan redhead with an equally scrappy dog who never finds her parents…

LEARNING TO LOVE FROM WHAT DAD DIDN’T DO Dedicated memory-mongering, the 2013 chamber musical Fun Home–based on Alison Bechdel’s 2006 semiautobiographical graphic novel–is a worthy coming-out. We get the inside portrait of a lesbian daughter who learns more than she wanted from her gay dad. With serviceable songs by Jeanine Tesori and persuasive lyrics and…