Word: off-broadway
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...sure enough, now it is one, opening last week off-Broadway with a contradictory set of expectations. On the one hand, it's a rare case of a musical with lots of hype potential that has emerged fully formed--book, lyrics and music by newcomer Paul Scott Goodman--with almost no advance publicity. On the other hand, the musical is burdened, rather unfairly, by comparisons with a very different show, Rent, simply because it originates in the same downtown theater (and with the same director) as that trend-setting hit. Can theatrical lightning strike twice...
...Musical Bright Lights Big City opens off-Broadway; critics sorely tempted to write reviews in second person...
DIED. JOSE QUINTERO, 74, Panamanian-born Tony Award-winning theater director and founder of Circle in the Square, a group credited with sparking the off-Broadway movement; of cancer; in New York City. Quintero was best known for his devotion to the dramas of Eugene O'Neill. Often working with Jason Robards, Quintero directed more than a dozen of O'Neill's works, including the original Broadway production of Long Day's Journey into Night...
...strange that rock 'n' roll in all its flamboyance so rarely finds common ground with theater. The rock musical Hedwig is an exception. A bona fide off-Broadway smash and soon-to-be-movie, Hedwig also makes a captivating rock-'n'-roll album. The tale of a transsexual trailer-park denizen, Hedwig echoes the gender-blending audacity of late 1970s David Bowie and the hormone-stoked feverishness of early Meat Loaf. But John Cameron Mitchell's vocals and Stephen Trask's music have their own raw poetry. The spirit of Hedwig shines through: cheeky, resilient, wounded but triumphant...
...vagaries of buzz. Nicole Kidman comes to Broadway in a David Hare trifle, and the theater world foams at the mouth in anticipation. Uma Thurman, another hot film star, makes her off-Broadway debut in a Moliere classic and gets a big yawn. To be sure, her performance betrays inexperience: slouchy and tentative instead of brittle and biting. But the production around her is smashing. Director Barry Edelstein puts slick designer duds on Crimp's smart update of the play to the phony '90s show-biz world, and the terrific Roger Rees, as Alceste, could teach any young actress...