Archives for December 2011

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Apr. 29, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Chinglish (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 29, reviewed here)

• Follies (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 22, reviewed here)

• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, reviewed here)

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren’t actively prudish, reviewed here)

• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Seminar (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Dancing at Lughnasa (drama, G/PG-13, closes Jan. 15, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

“Most people would die sooner than think–in fact they do so.”
Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity

Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, and Artur Rubinstein play the first movement of Mendelssohn’s D Minor Trio:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“I knew what it was, or thought I did. Something about the dreadful simplicity of true goodness, the infuriating innocence which can accept, and perhaps rightly dismiss as irrelevant, those minor vices (pathetic snobbery, insecure egotism, scared conventionality) which madden the more complicated and drive them to desperate measures.”
Francis Wyndham, “Ursula”

From the 1943 film Du Barry Was a Lady, Tommy Dorsey plays “Well, Git It!” with Ziggy Elman on trumpet and Buddy Rich on drums:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Fellow hobbyists share something important to them which the outside world considers unimportant and frivolous, so that in a small way all hobbyists are social outcasts; a true social outcast can become less noticeable in their midst.”
Richard Stark, The Rare Coin Score

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I do the job on Bonnie & Clyde. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
“Bonnie & Clyde” isn’t the worst musical to open on Broadway in the past decade. It isn’t even the worst Frank Wildhorn musical to open on Broadway in the past decade. (That would be “Dracula.”) It is, however, quite sufficiently bad enough to qualify for the finals of this year’s What-Were-They-Thinking Prize. Why would anyone not obviously deranged put money into a show with music by a composer whose last three Broadway outings tanked? And who thought it was a good idea to write a commodity musical whose title gives the impression that “Bonnie & Clyde” is based (even though it isn’t) on a 44-year-old movie that is no longer well remembered save by upper-middle-aged baby boomers? Nor have Mr. Wildhorn and his feckless collaborators managed to beat these long odds: “Bonnie & Clyde” is so enervatingly bland and insipid that you’ll leave the theater asking yourself why you ever liked musicals in the first place….
As awful as Ivan Menchell’s book is–and it’s hopeless–it’s the score that makes “Bonnie & Clyde” unendurable. Mr. Wildhorn’s tunes sound like half-remembered middle-of-the-road AM-radio ballads from the ’70s, touched up with banjo and dobro to give them a theme-park period feel. Don Black’s gimcrack lyrics range from the instantly forgettable to the indelibly horrific…
Everybody in “Bonnie & Clyde,” Laura Osnes and Melissa van der Schyff in particular, can sing. The ability to act, alas, does not appear to have been so widely distributed among the members of the cast, though the phony-sounding regional accents might be confusing the issue somewhat….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.