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Saw Lempicka on Broadway (about time!) and I have thoughts – which I will hopefully write up within a few days.

#lempicka musical #lempicka

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Catching up on posts for things I have seen recently —

The Wiz at the Pantages Theatre in February:

(My memory of this show is a bit fuzzy so comments are kind of vague)

I was looking forward to this show since it's a well-known show that somehow I have never seen in any form, so I have no comparisons except the other adaptations of The Wizard of Oz. It was often campy and over-the-top but once I got a feel for the tone, I didn't find it overbearing. (For comparison, examples of fun shows that nevertheless felt like a little too much: Moulin Rouge! and Beetlejuice.)

There were three things that worked in sequence to get me on board with the show:

The orchestra

The orchestra sounded great and set the tone with the overture. Sometimes I want to leave as soon as possible after bows but in this case I also stuck around to hear the exit music.

Addaperle's escalating series of jokes about Evamene

The show had jokes that I actually found funny (!) which is not something I expect in comedies, because humor is subjective, etc. etc. (I sometimes brace myself for disappointment going into comedic shows. Little worried about Shucked next year.)

The repeated iterations of "Ease On Down The Road"

The riff that opens the song is cool and catchy and full of anticipation. As a viewer who is familiar with source material and characters, seeing the band of travelers built up one by one with a joyful & hopeful song is really enjoyable setup. Each of them has great individual moments (particularly liked Kyle Ramar Freeman as Lion) but it is most fun to see them all together.

(Honorable mention: the "Emerald City" dance sequence that opens Act II)

The audience was very responsive and I think it really improved my viewing experience. One couple to my right seemed to be on a date night and were evidently having a great time; they got "RIP Evamene" t-shirts at intermission. (I do wish the guy hadn't sung along to part of "Home" but oh well.)

Several of the songs were familiar to me outside the context of the show, and in this case seeing them as part of the show was a pleasant surprise (contrast with "Don't Rain On My Parade" in Funny Girl).

Projections worked reasonably well in Oz to illustrate a mood; the semi-realistic landscapes that represented Kansas were a bit anticlimactic after all the wonder of Oz. It still felt like a touring show more so than a Broadway show, possibly due to sets that felt scaled down. Would that be less of an issue in a significantly smaller Broadway theater?

Overall, performances were good, I had a good time, and I was glad I didn't miss it.

#the wiz #the wiz musical

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Funny Girl at the Ahmanson Theatre, unsorted comments below, including spoilers:

At this performance, Hannah Shankman was on for Fanny Brice.

My knowledge of Funny Girl has largely come from the news and the discourse (sigh) about the most recent revival, with a little bit from Lea Michele as Rachel Berry performing "Don't Rain On My Parade" on Glee. I was aware that this was a star-making vehicle for Barbra Streisand and that its general strengths were in the character of Fanny Brice and its score, but not its book.

Watching "Don't Rain On My Parade" is certainly more disquieting in context. My two primary reactions were 1) you're ditching a successful (but relatively new/not well-established) career for this guy? and 2) how is this going to fall apart later?

During "Temporary Arrangement" I was wondering if the song was suggesting that the money itself was the temporary arrangement (i.e. a loan), or was it the relationship? Based on their scene in Monte Carlo, it seemed like the marriage was something Nick just kind of went along with, as opposed to being part of a mutual agreement (let alone an enthusiastic one). Later on he seems to realize that he does care strongly for her, while in the meantime the audience is realizing that these two are not good for each other.

According to inflation calculator at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis website, $68,000 in 1920 (a couple of years after the real Fanny Brice and Nick Arnstein got married) is equivalent to over $1 million now. That is a lot of money to be casually writing a check for.

Does Fanny ever get over her neediness for this dude? At the end of Act 1 she is ready to drop her career for him, and at the end of Act 2 it's the same thing. It's a bit weird that she doesn't seem to have changed much through the second act; it's only once he tells her they should split up that she accepts it. I suppose the point of the ending is that she is resilient in a "show must go on" kind of way, but oddly unsatisfying because I didn't get the impression that she learned anything from the experience. Nick seems to go on the emotional journey through Act 2, and Fanny maybe (?) has a journey in the last five minutes or so.

I am a little puzzled by Ziegfeld Follies-style entertainment. Just not my thing.

Melissa Manchester was very good as Mrs. Brice; I thought her comic timing was solid.

The audience was appreciative overall and was responsive to the occasions that invited crowd response. Even so, the standing ovation didn't quite fill the crowd until Hannah Shankman took her bow as Fanny.

This is the first program I've seen at the Ahmanson since last summer (Into The Woods) in which the actors' pronouns were not included. I assume that is at the discretion of the production, but I guess I'll see when the next show comes around (which is A Strange Loop).

Finally, a fun little mistake in the digital program – the dancers who played Juliet in Matthew Bourne's Romeo and Juliet apparently also moonlight as Fanny Brice alternates. What talent!

#funny girl #funny girl musical

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"God of Nowhere" from The Lonely Few musical, playing April 27 through June 2, 2024 at MCC Theater.

#the lonely few #zoe sarnak #lauren patten #helen j shen #thomas silcott #damon daunno #unlikely I'll be able to make it there while it's playing so I'm glad there's at least one recorded song #what i'm listening to today

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New musical Lempicka has set a release date for its original Broadway cast recording. Matt Gould and Carson Kreitzer's biomusical following the life of the titular artist began performances at the Longacre Theatre March 19 ahead of an April 14 opening night at the Longacre Theatre. The cast recording will be available for purchase and streaming July 5; click here to pre-order.

#lempicka musical #lempicka #lempicka the musical #my pre-order is in

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LEMPICKA (2024) Production Photos

#lempicka musical #lempicka #lempicka the musical #finally going to see this next week

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Catching up on posts for things I have seen recently —

Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet at the Ahmanson Theatre in early February:

It has been years since I've encountered Romeo and Juliet in its Shakespearean form, so for a good part of the show I was trying to map the characters in this adaptation to West Side Story, which was a little distracting and probably didn't help me understand the show any better. The basic storyline was easy enough to follow once I stopped trying to figure out which secondary characters were which.

Dance-centric shows can be a bit difficult for me to evaluate because I don't have a good feel for the meaning in the way that I do for words and music. On the whole I enjoyed it, at least.

This version of R&J is set in some kind of psychiatric facility called the Verona Institute. The Montague/Capulet feud seems to have become a conflict between the institutionalized teenagers and the authorities that place them and keep them there. Romeo's parents do make a couple of appearances, but there aren't really any direct analogues to the Capulets that I could discern.

Favorite scene was what I guess would be The Dance at the Gym because it shows a lot of the teenagers' relationships to each other as well as between them and the Institute's authorities.

Hard to recall all of the individual performances at this point, but I remember thinking Paris Fitzpatrick was a likably callow Romeo, enjoyed Tasha Chu as the Reverend and recall that Bryony Pennington (Dorcas) and Eve Ngbokota (Lennox) stood out to me.

Spoiler discussion below:

I was a bit underwhelmed by the ending, because it didn't seem to have a lot of dramatic weight. If I remember correctly, in the end Juliet accidentally stabs Romeo because she is having a trauma-induced hallucination in which she perceives Tybalt assaulting her (again), so she reacts. But it was actually just Romeo, who was trying to help her.

I was expecting a chain of events spiraling toward a tragic conclusion, driven by characters' motivations and decisions. The decision that Juliet makes to stab her attacker happens in a way where it seems she would have some kind of diminished responsibility, which makes it a different sort of tragedy than one driven by deliberate actions (but poor communication).

One can argue that it is still the misguided and/or malignant adult authorities that drove them to this ending, but it removes a bit of agency from both Romeo and Juliet such that you can still imagine the adult authorities saying, “what an unfortunate turn of events, we really need to vet our staff better” rather than “this is our doing, our whole approach leads to harmful outcomes.”

#matthew bourne's romeo and juliet

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there's a cherry blossom tree in DC that keeps blooming every year even though it shouldn't and the park service keeps thinking it's dead and then it keeps blooming! well they're removing a lot of trees to rehabilitate the area and they've said it's finally time for stumpy to go and they're going to mulch it and use the mulch to enrich all the other trees so it can help everything else keep going. and they're also going to plant spliced little pieces of it all over so that stumpy can live forever and this is genuinely sending me into a spiral

#trees

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We do not control the world  We control one flat rectangle of canvas at a time LEMPICKA (2024)

#lempicka musical #lempicka #won't see it for another month and I am torn between reading up on all the changes vs. just waiting to experience it #so far I have read almost everything though lol

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Received one of those spammy photo texts asking for political donations, though this one was from Mandy Patinkin. His intro:

I’m an actor and singer and humanitician. You might know me from my work in Homeland, The Princess Bride, my concert career, or my work as an advocate for refugees with the International Rescue Committee, or you might not know me at all.

1. What is a “humanitician”?

2. Clearly not a message targeted to musical theater fans.

#excuse me sir #I may know you from the OBCs of Evita and Sunday in the Park with George

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MEAN GIRLS 2004 — dir. Mark Waters

#mean girls

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he had it coming

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EDEN ESPINOSA & AMBER IMAN in rehearsal LEMPICKA the musical

#lempicka #lempicka musical #lempicka the musical #amber iman #eden espinosa #previews start next week!

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#how dare he

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Did Loreen leave after the beginning of the show?

#melodifestivalen #melodifestivalen 2024

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So I am imagining how Eric Saade would have performed "Unforgettable" and it seems to work pretty well.

#melodifestivalen #melodifestivalen 2024

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Looks like they may have changed the background color and lighting of Jacqline's song? It seems easier to see her this time.

Oh the thing I thought was a mistake initially ("call the-") looks like a deliberate choice. This was a better performance all around.

#melodifestivalen #melodifestivalen 2024