BY SCOTT STIFFLER | Take the studied mimicry of a musical tribute act, add the dead-on burns of a Friar’s Club Roast, and top it off with the showy vocal flourishes of a Kennedy Center Honors cover, performed as the iconic originator looks on from their box seat. Whisk together and bring to a near-boil—and […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | No, the Broadway musical Hell’s Kitchen isn’t about gay guys who live in affordable walkups and go to Empanada Mama. With songs by 16-Grammy-winner Alicia Keys, it loosely draws on the long-running music star’s experiences, using Keys’ own hits (and three new songs she wrote) to illustrate a 17-year-old girl’s relationships […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | If you think the idea of suffragists bursting into song is absurd, you’re forgetting Mary Poppins. (“We’re clearly soldiers in petticoats/And dauntless crusaders for women’s votes.”) Well, now, they’re crusading for Tony award votes with the ambitious musical Suffs, based on the American women’s suffrage movement, with a book and score […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | The Broadway transfer of the award-winning Off-Broadway play Prayer for the French Republic could not be more timely. As written by Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews, Significant Other), it concerns various clashes within a Jewish family in France in 2016-17 as nerves fray due to the latest rise of antisemitism. Arriving at […]
BY TRAV S.D. | One never knows what to expect when one sees a show at the Torn Page space on West 22nd Street—but you can usually count on surprise, and can certainly bank on an intimate experience. Based in the old Chelsea townhouse of stage and screen giants Rip Torn and Geraldine Page, most […]
BY EILEEN STUKANE | On the stage where I Need That is in performance, the curtain, playing the part of a canvas, offers a painted aerial view of streets and houses—a grid of suburbia in Anywhere, USA. My Playbill is even more specific: “Place: New Jersey” and “Time: Now.” Spilling from beneath the curtain and […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | A Holocaust musical by Barry Manilow? Relax, it’s actually good. Harmony has been gestating since 1997, when it premiered in San Diego, and now—after playing the Museum of Jewish Heritage last year—it’s finally arrived on Broadway. With music by long-running pop star Manilow and book/lyrics by Bruce Sussman, who’s written film […]
BY CHARLI BATTERSBY | Spooky Season in New York is off to an early start this year. An interactive haunted house has been running just off Times Square since a week before Fall officially began. The premise of Terror Vision is that the audience members are visiting HorrorWood Studios. They are guests of a film […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | Spoiler alert! Yes, the car flies! And it does so much more dexterously than in the lame 2005 Broadway adaptation of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In fact, the car is a DeLorean that lights up, turns, zooms, spins, and eventually levitates over the orchestra seats, then turns upside down. With people […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | Who says the nightlife is dead? It’s alive and well and living in the form of a musical about Imelda Marcos. An immersive show about the onetime Filipina First Lady, with music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim (based on their concept album) and additional music by Tom Gandey and J Pardo, Here Lies Love […]