| 'The Baker's Wife' tries to rise to a great musical
"The Baker's Wife" is a charming little show that thought it was a Broadway musical. You can understand its confusion. It's a charming little show with a great big cast: 18. The show, which never made it to Broadway, seems right at home on Performance Network's cozy stage. It has a Broadway pedigree: music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz ("Pippin," "Godspell" and, much later, "Wicked"), book by Joseph Stein ("Fiddler on the Roof"), but the show died on the road in 1976. You can understand that, too. .
'Frankenstein' tries to raise a goosebump
NEW YORK -- Considering how "Frankenstein" centers on the forging of a man-made creature, it's bitterly ironic that this ambitious new musical refuses to blaze into life. Thunder. Smoke. Discordant music. And the poor stiff just lies there. Despite the valiant efforts of a solid company and the earnest intentions of writers determined to musicalize a story closer to Mary Shelley's 1816 original than subsequent Hollywood variations, "Frankenstein" was dead on arrival at 37 Arts, where the off-Broadway show was unveiled Thursday. A serious-minded treatment of the saga about a scientist whose bungled attempt to create a man backfires hideously and haunts him for the rest of his days, the musical has been constructed with a sober book and lyrics by Jeffrey Jackson and gloomy music by Mark Baron.
Will Grey Gardens Grow in London? Creative Team Has Hope
A London production and a national tour were mentioned as possibilities for Grey Gardens when the musical was still running in Broadway in spring 2007, but those prospects now look to be vague. That doesn't mean there isn't hope � or that there isn't a wide future life for the quirky musical inspired by the film documentary of the same name. The lead Broadway producers of the show about the eccentric aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis no longer own the rights to the Tony Award-nominated script (by Doug Wright) and score (by composer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie), so the writers are looking ahead to future productions. There are no plans for a national tour based on the 2006-07 Broadway production, Frankel told Playbill.com, but Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
Disney favorite stops at Kelsey
"Disney's Beauty and the Beast," yet another stage musical based on an already popular movie, garnered several Tony Award nominations in 1994, but lost out across the board to the more sophisticated Stephen Sondheim drama "Passion." Yet all across America, tours of the Broadway production were eagerly attended, and community theaters hankered for the day when they could stage the extravagant fairy tale. Now, Playful Theatre Productions brings the fractured fairy tale to the Kelsey Theater stage with a vibrant cast that keeps the nearly three-hour show consistently exciting. With a book by Linda Woolverton, music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Howard Ashman ("The Little Mermaid" and "Little Shop of Horrors" team) plus Andrew Lloyd Webber's former partner, Tim Rice, "Beauty and the Beast" offers something for everyone.
Remix this: anime gets hijacked
He's already "ripped" footage from the anime series "Genshiken" from one of his DVDs to his computer. Now, 34-year-old Park is loading up a CD soundtrack of the comedy musical "Avenue Q." Using editing software, he's going to make the characters created in Japan sing a tune written for a Broadway show by painstakingly matching the mouth movements in the video to the lyrics of the song. Park is one of a growing community of so-called fan editors who "remix" Japanese pop culture by themselves, then upload the results online for others to see. "A lot of my videos are comedic," says Park, who works as a video-game programmer. "I think of a footage/song combination and wonder if it will work." Until recently, few outside the world of anime fandom knew, or cared, about the anime music video (AMV) phenomenon.
Sterling to talk tunes, baseball on Broadway
When a guy as obsessed with baseball as John Sterling utters the sentence, "I love music as much as I love sports," you know he's serious about his songs. Sterling, the longtime Yankees' radio man known for his famous moment-of-victory chant, "Yankees win! Thuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhh ... Yankees win!" might soon be known for another type of dramatic public performance. The self-described Broadway fanatic will appear at the stately Irvington (N.Y.) Town Hall Theater on Saturday Nov. 24, along with two of his Broadway-actor friends, Brad Little ("Phantom of the Opera") and Barbara McCulloh ("The King and I"), and composer Neil Berg ("The Prince and the Pauper") in a one-night-only show called "An Evening with John Sterling: Broadway and Baseball." As Sterling described it, he's been friends with Little, McCulloh and Berg for years, and during recent conversations, Sterling brought up a show that the late lyricist Sammy Cahn put on in the 1970s in which he would discuss his craft in a retrospective while professional singers provided the soundtrack.
Sound is familiar, but the songs are new
"The Musical of Musicals," opening Thursday after previews at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, promises an entertaining tour of 1940s and '50s Broadway musicals. The show uses one plot, but will show how differently the musical might sound by using the varying styles of some of the most renowned Broadway composers and lyricists to write for the Great White Way. Using original songs, not the composers' works, "Musical of Musicals" parodies the styles of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jerry Herman. For its plot, "Musical of Musicals," which originally opened off-Broadway in 2003 and had another run there in 2004, borrows from a classic melodrama plot to frame this tour through Broadway musicals. "When we decided this is the show we were going to write," we thought it's got to be a very simple plot without too many details," said Joanne Bogart, who not only performs in the show, but who also wrote the lyrics for composer Eric Rockwell's original music.
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