Word: robs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rock ("Hair"). I applaud the whirlwind schedule of each production (first rehearsal to closing night in two weeks flat). I'm won over by the subtle elegance of its productions, with scenic consultant John Lee Beatty merely suggesting the settings in front of the stage-wide bandstand that holds Rob Fisher's Coffee Club Orchestra. I'm awed by the scholarly passion for detail Fisher, Encores!' musical director, brings to the restoring of each score...
...Reassembling an old musical requires a mix of showmanship and scholarship - a paleontologist's digging and Poirot's powers of inference. "Did they use this harmony, or did they mean it to be that harmony?" said Rob Fisher. "I agonize over this, because I want the score to sound exactly as it did originally." No reclamation project was as daunting as that of "St. Louis Woman," the 1946 Arlen-Johnny Mercer musical revived in 1998. "There was no score," Fisher said, "just scraps of material." Ace orchestrators Ralph Burns and Luther Henderson re-created - and, for the overture and dance...
...becomes Goto Schmidt, owner of Dresden's notorious night spot Klub "21." (Both roles are played, with an expert counterfeit of charm, by Brian d'Arcy James.) Goto and his girlfriend Gita Gobel (Emily Skinner) are forever threatened by the pompous Police Commissioner (Imus' man of a thousand voices Rob Bartlett), but even more by his tendency to snap from one personality to the other whenever he gets bopped on the kopf, and to forget one half of his personality when the other half...
...Ives made a pretty, witty something of the script. Director Gary Griffin made it sing, sumptuously; Russell Warner touched up the orchestrations to these just-short-of-classic Gershwin songs; and Rob Ashford staged some sublimely silly choreography. (My notes read, "six dancing couples form a giant pretzel," but I may have been hallucinating.) In a nifty cast, I especially liked Felicia Finley, who played Magda the saucy parlormaid. Finley has looks, a voice and that ageless soubrette pertness - the total musical comedy package. But then, that's what you almost always get at Encores...
...team effort. When we play as a team, we win. When we play as individuals our playing is fragmented, and we don’t play well,” Harvard coach Rob Keller said...