This is the week to look back, and look forward. First, the immediate future:
Last Minute Planning for New Year’s Eve in NYC
Then a look at next year: Broadway Spring 2016 Preview Guide
Top ten lists from 2015:
Top New York Theater Stories of 2015
(Top 10 lists of Top 10 Theater of 2015)
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
The villagers in a Russian shtetl toast “To Life” in “The Golden Bride,” too, but they’re singing it operetta style in Yiddish, with English and Russian super titles, in a musical that predates “Fiddler on the Roof” by 41 years. Both Fiddler and Golden Bride were big hits in their day, but Fiddler is still everywhere, while Golden Bride was last staged in New York in 1948, as once-popular Yiddish theater largely disappeared from city stages. Now, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in its 101st season has meticulously reconstructed the silly script and the sumptuous score with a sublime 14-piece orchestra and a superb 20-member cast, for a top ticket price only one-quarter that of the Broadway Fiddler’s.
Colin Quinn The New York Story
Colin Quinn, former Weekend Update anchor for Saturday Night Live, has brought back “The New York Story” to the Cherry Lane Theater, where it ran this summer. This strikes me as terrible timing. Now is not the right time for a stand-up routine full of ethnic jokes….It would be unfair to assume that Quinn is an active supporter or even grudging admirer of fellow angry, offensive native New Yorker Donald Trump. But spending an hour with even a mock-similar persona has lost much of its entertainment value
Thornton Wilder, best-known as the author of “Our Town” and the inspiration for “Hello, Dolly” (which is based on his play “The Matchmaker”), used to be considered in the same breath as Miller, O’Neill, and Williams. The Peccadillo Theater Company may help some theatergoers start to see why in its first-rate production, with a uniformly spot-on cast, of two of Wilder’s early one-act plays,
The Week in New York Theater News
‘Hamilton’ on Broadway generates one million tweets this year
Just a million? Counting #HamiltonMusical, @HamiltonMusical, #Ham4Ham, #Hamiltunes AND @Lin_Manuel? https://t.co/vyupbcmpXV
— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) December 22, 2015
$25 TodaysTix lottery to David Bowie’s Lazarus at New York Theatre Workshop, Dec 28-Jan 20
The Secret Garden in concert, with Ramin Karimloo, Sierra Boggess, Cheyenne Jackson and Sydney Lucas at Lincoln Center, February 21 and 22, presented by Manhattan Concert Productions (Their terrific Broadway series concerts over the past few years have included Ragtime, Titanic, and Parade.)
The thrilling uncertainty of the understudy, New Yorker article prompted by Jon Rua’s subbing as Hamilton
Discovering Theater: A look back at the fall season from a class of New York newcomers
Before Rahm Silverglade took avant-garde director Erin Mee’s course at NYU entitled “Drama in Performance”—in which twenty undergraduate students spent the Fall seeing and discussing sixteen shows—he thought that “good, compelling theatre” was “difficult and rare,” and suspected that regular theatregoers go more out of habit than anything else, “because they were theatre majors, or they don’t have Netflix accounts, or they want to do something different.”
After the course, the Chicago native feels the same way, even more so.
Some narratives don’t turn out the way you hope or expect.
Yet Silverglade says experiencing a different live performance each week for the last four months also has broadened his definition and deepened his understanding of what he calls “a beautifully bizarre, intimate, tangible art form,” one with the “rawest power to move you.”
…The point driven home by the course is that, in the year of Hamilton, there was plenty of other theatre in New York of value. The fresh perspective of newcomers to New York theatregoing, and the wide variety of works to which they were exposed—including some that traditionalists might not consider theatre at all— struck me as an instructive alternative way to look back at the Fall season in the city.
