Word: stroman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that we talk about the "cutting edge" in America, the plainest evidence of mastery comes from men and women who have thought hard about the past and whose work builds ingeniously but simply upon it. The choreographer Susan Stroman is a living repository of Broadway dance history. The excellence of Cassandra Wilson is a function of her mastery of the canon of the jazz vocal that she so beautifully extends...
Stro--that's what everyone calls Susan Stroman--really understands that theater is about giving the audience a complete show. She knows about lighting, sets, costumes, you name it. Even when she was growing up in Wilmington, Del., whenever she heard music, she would picture hordes of people dancing through her head. Her biggest influences back then were the old black-and-white Fred Astaire movies. Her father was a great pianist, and Shall We Dance? and The Gay Divorcee were treated as works of art in her house. Those are movies that really blow the dust off your soul...
...Springtime for Hitler." Great musicals have love stories that are organic to the plot, not tacked on the way the romance between Leo Bloom (Matthew Broderick) and his buxom Swedish secretary (Cady Huffman) has obviously been here, just because the movie had none. Finally, as sharp as director/choreographer Susan Stroman's work in staging the show has been, her source material were pretty surefire. Let's face it: Is there a choreographer on Broadway who could have botched "Springtime for Hitler...
...Indeed, for all the praise Stroman has received for the mirror effect that mimics the overhead shot of the swastika dancers in the movie, I haven?t heard a peep about the same device that director Mark Bramble uses to create an even niftier Busby Berkeley effect in "42nd Street." This show, a revival of Gower Champion?s 1980 reworking of the 1933 movie, is hardly one that I was clamoring to see back on Broadway. Yet it packs in so much precision tap-dancing, lavishly appointed production numbers, talented performers and delightful Harry Warren-Al Dubin songs (including three...
...accounts, Stroman and Brooks were a smooth-running team, the old Catskills tummler deferring to the surehanded Broadway director--though Brooks attended every rehearsal and made constant suggestions. "He's totally attentive, watching like a hawk," says Broderick. "And he picks up even the subtlest things." The cast got used to the occasional Brooksian outburst--"No, no, you're ruining my masterpiece!" he yelled on arriving at one rehearsal--and to his barrage of (sometimes bad) ideas. In one scene Brooks urged Lane and Broderick to try a bit of physical shtick when they exit the door at the same...