Word: broadway
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...with most of the critics, garnered the most nominations among the musicals - 13. But the two straight plays that drew the most nods - The History Boys, with 8, and the revival of Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing, with 9 - left me cold. For my own picks of six new Broadway shows that are worth a visit, see this week's magazine. (Add one more play that I touted earlier - Festen, the grueling and gripping family drama from London that, for some reason, got snubbed by both the critics and the Tony nominators.) And here are my picks of the shows...
...plait, / Encore, Chevrolet coupe") and real Yiddish, as when French soldiers sing, "A vous toot dir veh, a vous?" and the nine Supreme Court justices declare, "We're the A.K.'s / Who give the O.K.'s" - A.K.'s meaning alterkockers. (For this lore I thank Alan Abrams, Time's Broadway-musical scholar in residence, who played Wintergreen in summer stock a few years back...
...Just as buoyant is the score. How could it not be, with Broadway's premier songwriting siblings near the top of their form? The title tune got to #8 on the hit parade, and two others, "Who Cares?" and "Love Is Sweeping the Country," still put a 2/4 spring in the step of many a geriatric. But the score was no succession of stand-alone ballads and dance tunes. Ira referred to the show as an operetta and, in the Gilbert and Sullivan mode, each song fits into the plot, advances the improbable story and fleshes out the characters...
...Political parties have conventions, and concert versions of Broadway shows do too. The main requirement is that each actor-singer holds the script in a black loose-leaf binder, but after 10 days' rehearsal, most of the performers have memorized their parts and use the book as a prop. Last night, one actor, feigning tears, ripped a page from the script and wiped his pseudo-tears. Near the finale, Powers, her body frozen in a jackknife posture with her hands on the floor, adjusted her position slightly and turned a page in the script...
...Broadway songs don't swing votes. Ira Gershwin discovered that when he rewrote his "Love Is Sweeping the Country" lyrics for Adlai Stevenson's noble but doomed 1952 campaign against Dwight D. Eisenhower. (A sample, from Kimball's The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin: "What a man for our future! / Equal him if you can. / Fearless attitudes / With no platitudes; / Inspirational - / He's sensational! / Adlai's sweeping the country! / America - here's your man!") But they can buoy spirits. Mel Brooks knows that, as do the Drowsy Chaperone team. All the 21st century fashioners of musical comedy are marching...