Tuesday, December 31, 2013
OK, now I can breathe. It has been one busy semester here at The Boston Conservatory, let me tell you. Of course, amid the hullabaloo, I continually remind myself that I'm teaching what I lo…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 01:22PMSunday, December 8, 2013
The end-of-the-semester crush is upon me, and I find myself scrambling to grade papers, plan finals, meet with students, and yet still keep up with my blogging backlog. As Tevye said, "…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 12:52PMSaturday, November 23, 2013
One of the great unexpected pleasures of the new Broadway season is After Midnight, an effervescent tribute to the joys and spirit of Harlem in the 1920s and '30s, in particular the fabled C…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 01:49PMMonday, November 11, 2013
Every once in a while, a musical comes along that restores my faith in the art form. Fun Home, the shattering new musical now playing an extended engagement at The Public Theater, is one of …
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 09:21PMWednesday, October 30, 2013
If you're going to create a musical about the magic of storytelling, you had better have some genuine magic on display, either in the piece itself, or in the presentation. Unfortunately, the…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 06:00PMSaturday, October 26, 2013
When I started this blog in April of 2006, it was really just an effort to find an alternate outlet for my theatrical rants and ravings. My friends were sort of sick of my posturing and peda…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 12:07PMMonday, September 30, 2013
The Huntington Theatre Company in Boston announced today that its current production of The Jungle Book is now the highest-grossing production in the company's history, with three weeks stil…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 07:58PMFriday, August 16, 2013
Every few seasons or so, Broadway seems to attract a WTF musical. You know, as in, "WTF were they thinking bringing this to Broadway?" The kind of show that, even if it was any good, just di…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 02:12PMTuesday, August 13, 2013
One thing I've noticed lately is that my tolerance for flaws in a musical depends on the overall feeling that I'm developing as I'm watching a performance. When a musical, overall, is well-c…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 05:14PMThursday, August 8, 2013
I'm going to be honest. When I first heard that the new musical First Date was coming to Broadway, I was beyond dismissive. The show wasn't really on my radar prior to the announcement, desp…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 08:59PMMonday, August 5, 2013
I have a confession to make: before last week, I had never seen Hello, Dolly! on stage. Oh, I had read the libretto, and listened to the cast recording countless times. And I've seen the mov…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 02:17PMThursday, August 1, 2013
This past month, I saw 25 musicals in 17 days. Even for me, that's a lot. Eighteen of those shows were at the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). As one might expect, many of those sho…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 06:02PMWednesday, July 31, 2013
I had the opportunity to see the new musical Nobody Loves You a few years ago while it was still under development. Some backstory: For the past three years, a handful of students from the B…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 01:52PMSaturday, July 27, 2013
Here's round-up number three, out of four, of my reviews of the shows at this year's New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). As in my previous review round-ups, there's a fairly wide range…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 11:34AMWednesday, July 24, 2013
A few days ago, I published my first of four batches of capsule reviews from the 2013 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). At this point, I have seen 13 NYMF shows in all, and I will be…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 12:38PMThursday, July 18, 2013
I've never really been a summer person. I get bored at the beach, and I assiduously avoid the sun. Thankfully, summer provides lots of heavily air-conditioned theater-going opportunities, wh…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 03:58PMTuesday, June 25, 2013
Two of the shows that I cover in some detail in my musical-theater history course are On Your Toes (1936) and On the Town (1944). My students often confuse the two with each other, which is …
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 03:05PMThursday, June 20, 2013
Immersive theater is clearly the flavor of the month, both on and off Broadway, which I guess is fine. I'm not automatically for or against it, as long as I don't have to climb up and down s…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 03:24PMSaturday, June 8, 2013
Composer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie really seem to like a challenge. The first musical of theirs to gain widespread attention was Grey Gardens, an admittedly flawed but nonethe…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 05:47PMTuesday, May 28, 2013
One of the most entertaining musicals I saw last year was Murder Ballad at the Manhattan Theater Club, Off-Broadway at City Center. (Read my review.) I found the show smart and sexy, and dra…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 01:42PMThursday, May 23, 2013
The 1920s was a heady and busy time for American musical theater. Musicals were still a relatively new art form, and the rules for creating them were only just emerging. That didn't stop com…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 05:01PMTuesday, May 21, 2013
Never let it be said that I won't give a show a second chance. I was considerably at odds with both critical and public opinion on the recent American Repertory Theater production of Pippin.…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 06:45PMMonday, May 20, 2013
As often happens with me at the end of the semester, I've got a bit of a blogging backlog to make my way through. Although some of these shows are still running, there have been some product…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 02:30PMFriday, May 17, 2013
What's that, my friend? You say that you love Gilbert & Sullivan, but you don't have the...er... patience to sit through an entire Savoy Opera? You're not alone. I mean, I love me some G&S, …
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 02:54PMMonday, May 6, 2013
In his review of the current Broadway revival of Jekyll & Hyde, New York Times critic Charles Isherwood referred to Frank Wildhorn musicals as "the crab grass of Broadway." Som…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 03:11PMSunday, May 5, 2013
There are some musicals that achieve cult status, despite - or perhaps because of - relatively short runs in their initial incarnations. Often these musicals live on through their cast recor…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 07:22PMThursday, May 2, 2013
Regular readers will know that I have a love/hate relationship with the Tony Awards, with all awards, in fact. On the one hand, I'm as interested and fascinated as the next showtune queen wh…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 10:34AMMonday, April 29, 2013
So, Motown: The Musical. OK, let's do this. Yes, it's bad. But we knew that was going to be true. But the genuinely surprising thing about Motown is that it's not entirely disastrous. Sure, …
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 08:52PMSaturday, April 27, 2013
Yeah, I don't get it. I saw the new musical Here Lies Love recently at The Public Theater, and found it reasonably diverting, if shallow and repetitive. But the reviews were overwhelmingly p…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 08:53PMFriday, April 26, 2013
I don't often get the chance to see Broadway shows twice. By the end of the season, I'm lucky if I have time to see things once. But I recently had the opportunity to see the current Broadwa…
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 09:23PMSaturday, April 20, 2013
I don't know how my fellow critics feel about this, but I find it much harder to write a rave than to write a pan. I guess that says something about me as a person, but I think it's also...
SOURCE: Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals at 07:05PM 
