Word: broadwayize
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...perks of being a theater critic, in those dog days of the season when you find yourself struggling to sit through the latest Chekhov revival or pretentious little comedy about tightly wound New York singles, is the Broadway-musical revival. Yes, you can complain - as I often have - about unimaginative commercial producers who keep recycling surefire classics like Gypsy or Guys and Dolls. But there's good reason they're recycled so often: they are surefire - unfailingly entertaining, no matter how uninspired the production, the indomitable high points of a genre that is America's great contribution to world theater...
...someone who likes to think I have a fairly complete education in the Broadway musical, however, one show holds a special place: West Side Story. Of all the widely accepted masterpieces of the genre, it's the one I have never seen onstage. Nor even - until a few weeks ago, when I finally broke down and rented the DVD - the multiple-Oscar-winning 1961 movie. Of course, I know most of the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim score; I've seen enough clips to be familiar with the famed Jerome Robbins choreography; and I'd have to be a pretty benighted...
Still, last week's opening of a new revival of West Side Story - the first on Broadway since 1980 - gave me the rare opportunity of encountering an American musical classic in the way, by rights, every show ought to be encountered: as if for the first time. No memories of the original to protect - or, conversely, any need for a radical reinvention to renew my interest. No, I came to West Side Story simply to find out whether, in 2009, the show still entertains, excites, lives up to its gargantuan reputation. And my verdict, alas, is: Not quite...
...sure, you can't look at West Side Story totally removed from the era that produced it. When it opened, in 1957, Broadway musicals were almost all comedies, set in sentimental fantasylands, whether exotic (The King and I), nostalgic (The Music Man) or contemporary but cartoonish (Guys and Dolls). Here, instead, was an effort to use the musical form to explore serious contemporary social issues: urban slums, race prejudice, the scourge (ah, the '50s!) of "juvenile delinquency." It was also a groundbreaking marriage of pop entertainment and "high culture": choreography that featured classical ballet moves, a score with elements...
...Motherhood did not keep Richardson from taking strong stage roles. On Broadway, she was one of the four erotic flagellants in Patrick Marber's biting comedy Closer as well as the one touch of tattered grace in a plebeian revival of Streetcar. And though Londoners shouldn't have been surprised by the way Richardson could wrap an audience in her spell, she was a revelation in Trevor Nunn's take on Ibsen's Lady from the Sea. The plot is high harlequin: a dark and stormy night, a chronically sensitive young wife aching for a strong rogue to free...