how to save a world
There is a bleak, doleful new play entitled “Bergen” that is being presented as part of The Broadway Bound Festival at the 14th Street Y. More a play with songs than a musical, “Bergen” is set in the near future in Norway where a motley group of mediocre rock musicians try to decide what to name their band. They set…
“What I set out to do was make an experimental musical theater. Broadway is a museum that’s not moving forward, and musical theater should reflect what and how we are now — our pop culture, our political situation.” (Elizabeth Swados 1951 – 2016) Broadway is no longer a museum with the recent arrival of “School of Rock – The Musical”…
Walking into the Palace Theater to view the new musical extravaganza “SpongeBob SquarePants,” your senses are attacked by a barrage of Crayola colors, shimmering tinsel, happy music and an array of ornamental objects that appear as though Pee Wee Herman went overboard at Party City, shopping for a big beach bash. As you scrutinize the multifarious audience, there is a…
Part I of Ice Factory Festival’s “The Anthropologists Save the World!” currently running at New Ohio Theatre, is entitled “The Lecture” and begins with the announcement of a lecture by utopian novelist Aldous Huxley (unfortunately not named in the program). Huxley begins to expound about “Man and the Potentialities for Human Change.” Sue, the absent member of the smoker’s cessation…
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.” – “The Second Coming,” W.B. Yeats “Pity in History,” currently running at PTP/NYC 2016…
Now, we don’t want to say, “Where do we come in?” or, “Where do we go out?” Because we would like, I think not to leave, but to stay here, now that we’re here. – He There is nothing like watching theatre directed by SITI Company’s Anne Bogart. Her attention to detail is unparalleled and her signature staging that includes…
The National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) has been hard at work since 1989 introducing writers and their new musicals to significant theatre industry leaders. Now in its 28th year, NAMT attracts theatre producers from around the world for this industry-only event to discover eight new musicals presented in 45-minute concert presentations over two days. All production costs are underwritten…
Joe Sutton’s “Orwell in America” imagines what might happen if George Orwell were to embark on a book tour in post-World-War II America with his publicist. How would an American audience receive his “Animal Farm” and his deep commitment to Democratic Socialism? There is really nothing new in Mr. Sutton’s exposition: other than the fictional visit to America, all of…
The New York Musical Festival (NYMF), previously known as The New York Musical Theatre Festival, announced the initial slate of artists participating in NYMF 2016, taking place from July 11 through August 7 in Midtown Manhattan. Tony Award winner and four-time Tony Nominee Victoria Clark (The Light in the Piazza) will direct NEWTON’S CRADLE, with book, music, and lyrics by…
“I like your sweater. That color’s good on you. Is that purple? (Ellis to his daughter) “So sometimes when I close my eyes there are cats and ocelots and burning trees. And sometimes the trees run like men on fire and sometimes there are ocelots up in the branches and they’re burning too.” (Ellis in “The Purple Lights of Joppa”)…