Word: broadways
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Looking for one place that seems to be surviving the economic crisis quite nicely? Try Broadway. After a bleak January, during which nearly a dozen shows closed (including former hits like Hairspray and Spring Awakening), things are looking improbably bright on Broadway this spring, at least judging by the number of openings. No fewer than 20 new shows will have premiered between the first of March and the end of April, bringing the total number of new productions for the 2008-09 season to 43 - more than in either of the past two seasons...
...Less surprising, alas, is how forgettable most of them are. It's probably too much to expect Broadway theater to reflect our current economic troubles, but there's something particularly rarefied and irrelevant about the plays arriving this spring. Most are short (waiting out an intermission is apparently too much to ask of an audience these days), slight and largely oblivious to much that is happening in the world outside the theater. Even the season's hit political satire, Will Ferrell's You're Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush, is one Administration - and what seems...
...Even the Broadway dramas that deal with more contemporary characters and issues seem intellectualized and aloof. In 33 Variations, Jane Fonda (making her first appearance on Broadway in 46 years) plays a musicology professor suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease who tries to solve a musical mystery: why Beethoven, late in his life, became obsessed with writing variations on a minor waltz by a now forgotten contemporary composer. Writer and director Moises Kaufman (The Laramie Project) jumps back and forth in time - we see Beethoven in flashbacks - as the professor races to finish her research before the disease incapacitates...
...Reasons to Be Pretty is another fairly slight play (but with an intermission!), and it was frankly more comfortable on the small off-Broadway stage where it was introduced last year. But it is tight, tense and emotionally true, and it portrays characters who actually seem part of the world that the rest of us live in. Its four no-name stars (Thomas Sadoski as Greg is the empathetic standout) won't draw the crowds the way Jane Fonda and James Gandolfini do. But they're bringing to life the best new Broadway play of the season...
...service, which includes free personal shoppers. Customers can call ahead for an appointment with a "style adviser" in the store or have a selection of up-to-the-minute merchandise brought to their home for free. Not too shabby, but the question remains: Will London street style play on Broadway...