Word: broadway
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...show by the sculptor Martin Puryear, attended the opening night of Wagner's Die Walkure at the Metropolitan Opera, caught a couple of movies, including an old Robert Mitchum vehicle at an Otto Preminger film festival, and scored tickets to the revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming on Broadway. (Long Pinteresque pause here.) On the seventh day I rested...
...equipment shops. Fashion designers can find any fabric sample among the garment-industry retailers on Seventh Avenue. The local cultural eco-structure combines nonprofit institutions that can take chances on commercially risky productions with profitmaking enterprises seeking big returns. This means that an actress can work in an off-Broadway production of The Seagull at night and still make the rent shooting a TV spot during the day. Meanwhile, a critical mass of institutions of higher education - the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Parsons School of Design, the Julliard School...
...fact, I think it comes closer than any Disney show since The Lion King to combining story, song and inventive staging into something that lifts our spirits and renews our faith that theater for "children" can be enjoyed by everyone. Acclaimed opera director Francesca Zambello, doing her first Broadway show, can't match Julie Taymor's innovative staging in The Lion King (but then, who can - not even Taymor since then), but she has the same inventive, less-is-more, determinedly theatrical approach. Instead of wires and pulleys or complicated stage effects to simulate the undersea life, she simply equips...
...credit for that, but book writer Doug Wright (Grey Gardens, I Am My Own Wife) at least managed not to screw it up. Composer Alan Menken (with Glenn Slater replacing the late Howard Ashman as lyricist) has added several catchy new songs to his already fine score; the Broadway-razzmatazz number in which the Ursula, the sea witch (a sharp Sherie Renee Scott), celebrates her evil ways, "I Want the Good Times Back," would have made the Devil in Damn Yankees jealous. The young newcomer who plays Ariel, Sierra Boggess, gets to show off a pretty voice and, once...
...fairy tale, aimed chiefly at children. But would it be rude to ask why Broadway's fairy tales for adults (Oklahoma!, Guys and Dolls) can become musical theater classics while the ones directed at kids become critical dartboards? Or to point out that most of the children's theater I've seen in the past few years has had more theatrical verve and originality than most of the serious stuff I've had to sit through on Broadway? Or to wish, just once, that Disney might get a little credit for recruiting some of the most adventurous theater artists...