The quartet of Broadway openings this past week were split between a feel-good nostalgia for two real-life Americans, and a mostly feel-good look at the future – anything but what for many theatergoers is the feel-bad present. It is odd that both musicals about the real-life figures killed them off before the show was finished, but their afterlife felt feel-good too.
The one Off-Broadway show I saw last week offered a different take on the future – not so much a competing vision, but a different emphasis, on the effects of climate change.
In any case, they were all a welcome distraction from the political news. One fallout from the election: A huge surge of people — among them theater people, including me. — signing onto Bluesky (which I pronounce as Blue Sky), the Twitter-like social media platform.
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Maybe Happy Ending
“Maybe Happy Ending” starts out cute, combining the conventions of several familiar genres — science fiction, romantic comedy, road trip, chamber musical — for what at first seems as light and evanescent as those fireflies. But it somehow turns into something just as rare – an original show, charmingly acted and cleverly staged, with a touching take on love and mortality…Full Review
A Wonderful World The Louis Armstrong Musical
In its effort to make their show both a serious portrait and a Broadway entertainment, the creative team seems to have taken to heart a line they give Armstrong to say a few times: “Jazz is about the choices we make in between the notes.” But the choices they make beyond the music don’t always work. “A Wonderful World” winds up musically comforting but narratively annoying. Full Review
Elf
The music is pleasant enough, the dancing at times exciting, and there are some wondrous moments in it, especially when the characters’ Christmas spirit provides the energy to lift Santa’s sparkly sleigh out over our heads. But this latest production — overlong,, more dopey than witty, and mostly missing the spark of the original — largely demonstrates that, sometimes, Christmas spirit is not enough to keep a vehicle aloft. Full Review.
Tammy Faye
“Tammy Faye,” a British import about the rise and fall of American televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, struck me as essentially hollow, without a clear reason for existing. The score sounds largely generic; the sets look deliberately chintzy; the book mistakes crudeness for cleverness. Full Review
Walden
A few years in the future, the debate will no longer be whether or not climate change is a “hoax,” as the president-elect in 2024 claims, but whether there is any possibility of surviving on Earth, or if the focus should be on attempting to colonize Mars. That is the premise of “Walden” [which] suggests a way forward for other playwrights who want to imagine the effects of the climate crisis without having to feel hemmed in by the conventions of science fiction. Full Review
The World According to Allee Willis
Allee Willis, a Tony-nominated songwriter for “The Color Purple,” had trouble getting the gig. “You’ve never written for the theater before, and you’re not Black,” Broadway producer Scott Sanders explained to her, as he recounts in “The World According to Allee Willis,” a fascinating documentary film in cinemas this weekend …His objections were silly. This was a woman, after all, who not only had a remarkable songwriting career…but she found that particular career artistically insufficient. “Writing the songs for a recording artist is like being an attendant in a restroom making sure the fresh towels are there,” we hear her say. Willis was also a producer, director, collector, visual artist, production designer, art director, early Internet visionary, expert party host and – perhaps most to the point – her own work of art. . Full Review plus my 2016 Q&A with her
The Week in New York Theater News
The last show in the Encores! series is now Wonderful Town, April 30 – May 11 (replacing The Wild Party due to “scheduling conflicts”)
Americans for the Arts will present a Webinar Nov 21 on the impact of the election on the arts Register here
The estate of composer Jerry Herman auctioned off about one hundred of his possessions, to raise money for the Jerry Herman Legacy Programs at The ASCAP Foundation. The highest bids: $12,800 for the brass bugle Angela Lansbury used in “Mame”; $9,600 for Herman’s Kennedy Center Honors; $8,960 for his grand piano. Also: a red feather and sequin headdress from “Hello, Dolly” for $2,176.
7 Days in the Cultural Life of Broadway Stage Manager Cody Renard Richard (NY Times)
Richard, currently stage manager for Once Upon a Mattress, tracked a week of his cultural life in October, which included visiting the Banksy Museum in Lower Manhattan, teaching a graduate theater class at Columbia University and an unexpected run-in with Beyoncé.
Sample theater “skeets” ( a portmanteau of “sky” and “tweets”) on Bluesky, which over the past week has seen a doubling of users, to more than 15 million :
In Memoriam
Judith Jamison, 81, an international star with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, first as a majestic dancer and then as the troupe’s director, building it into the most successful modern dance company in the country. She starred in two Broadway shows, including Sophisticated Ladies with Gregory Hines, based on the music of Duke Ellington
