Word: longbottom
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What does the future hold for Neville Longbottom...
Director Robert Longbottom (Side Show) skillfully adds Asian seasoning to a gourmet spread of Broadway showmanship. In the opening scenes, Mei-Li's escape from China is pantomimed simply, with the help of bamboo poles manipulated by actors. In the big production number Chop Suey, the chorus girls are dressed as Chinese-takeout boxes. Even that delightfully retro standard I Enjoy Being a Girl, which starts in Linda's dressing room and ends as a number at the club, comes roaring back as if it were brand...
...radical revision at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, playwright David Henry Hwang treats the original like "some kind of weird Oriental minstrel show," as one character puts it, and wraps its assimilationist anthems into a merry multicultural trip from Tiananmen Square to San Francisco's Chinatown. Director-choreographer Robert Longbottom adds a dollop of kitsch--and somehow the mix is funny and clever. It even jerks a tear or two. Broadway, get ready...
There's some admirable teamwork in Side Show, not just by Emily Skinner and Alice Ripley, joined at the hip as Daisy and Violet, but by composer Henry Krieger (Dreamgirls) and director-choreographer Robert Longbottom (Christmas shows for the Rockettes). The show percolates best in a couple of brisk, ersatz-vaudeville numbers (one features dancing Egyptians, swan-shaped harps and a crocodile) and in a soul-inflected showstopper, The Devil You Know. And there's at least one anthem-like ballad, Who Will Love Me As I Am? that should have Whitney Houston on the phone to her agent...
Well, he could hope that A Christmas Carol lasts as long as the Radio City holiday show, which has been going since 1933 and never looked better. Under the direction of Robert Longbottom (Pageant), the show struts the ageless panache of the 36 Rockettes in five precision prances, notably as a parade of wooden soldiers and as Raggedy Anns whose letter blocks eventually spell out merry christmas and a happy new year. A new version of The Nutcracker, with teddy bear dancers as sugar plum fairies, Arabian houris and Chinese pandas, is delicate, funny, winning. The climactic Nativity tableau -- teeming...