Word: broadwayize
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...went to Madison Square Garden to see Tyler Perry's new musical, Madea's Big Happy Family, a day after I sat through a Broadway revival of Noel Coward's 1939 play Present Laughter. I noticed a few differences. In Coward's play, the main character, a famous stage actor, spends most of the evening in a dressing gown delivering bons mots to an entourage of fellow theater people. In Perry's show, a sharp-tongued grandmother delivers sassy put-downs and motivational lectures to a brood of squabbling family members. Coward's plot reaches a climax as the actor...
...nearly full Madison Square Garden theater, one of the early stops on a tour that will stretch into May. (Next week: Jacksonville, Fla.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and Winston-Salem, N.C.) It was a bracing reminder that popular theater is still thriving in America - well under the radar and way off Broadway...
...another king now. Since 1993, with the opening of Mystère, the Montreal-based Cirque has come to dominate Vegas entertainment with such theatrical extravaganzas as the water show O and the martial-arts epic Ka--pieces that in scope and technical éclat are to the typical Broadway show what Avatar is to the 1933 King Kong. In 2006, Cirque pulled off a Beatles homage, Love, but that was sedate stuff next to this audiovisual-balletic-acrobatic explosion from director Vincent Paterson and "director of creation" Armand Thomas. They've concocted an experience that's both symphonic...
...Chip Heath and Dan Heath; Broadway Books; 305 pages...
...about the time the show reaches off-Broadway, the shtick starts to get a bit stale. Hunter's attempt to exclude the too-committed Heidi from the Broadway run puts an exceptionally cliché bump in the fabulous foursome's trail, while the inclusion of any of the musical’s developments or numbers starting with the song "Change It, Don't Change It/Awkward Photo Shoot" only serves to supplement the uncomfortable, forced mood in the most unfortunate of ways. "A Way Back to Then" is the exact sort of mushy, heartfelt song that Jeff stops Hunter from singing...