Danny Scheie as Nero and Susannah Schulman as Poppaea. (SCOTT SUCHMAN/Arena Stage)
Or maybe it’s about how a bad upbringing can damage you beyond the reach of art’s rehabilitative prowess.
Or mediocre art’s rehabilitative . . . I’m still thinking about this, is the point. Which suggests Freed was successful, even if the ending is kind of a mess. Continue reading
It’s aliiiiiiive!
Well, sort of. In places. For a while.
But not really.
The stage-musical adaptation of Mel Brooks’s beloved 1974 horror film spoof Young Frankenstein will haunt the Kennedy Center Opera House through the holidays, and it’s an utterly explicable choice for this season of multi-generational out-of-town guests: bland and familiar even if you’ve never seen the movie, offering neither challenge nor much reward.
Sporting a brow even lower than that of the stitched-from-corpses creature at its center, and with about as much to say, the show — which began its 14-month Broadway run two years ago — represents Brooks’s attempt to repeat the success of The Producers. As with that 1968 film-cum-2001 Broadway smash, Brooks once again joined new music and lyrics to a story he brought to the screen more than three decades earlier. Continue reading
Posted in theatre
Tagged horror, Mel Brooks, musicals, The Washington Examiner, theater
Remember Evita, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 70s bio-musical about the beloved Argentine political icon Eva Perón? Cinema-tized with Madonna in the 90s? No? Well, it did tend to linger on the relatively dull early section of Perón’s story: the part where she’s alive.
It turns out that when Perón traded cancer for immortality at the martyrdom-enabling age of 33, her role in steering her country’s future was just beginning.
Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Argentina, GALA Hispanic Theatre, mummies, musicals, The Washington Post, theatre
No, it’s good. Really. Are you at all surprised? I wasn’t. Which is why my review is less than a rave, even though the choreography and especially the sets and costumes are all topnotch.
Posted in cinema, DCist, theatre
Tagged Akria Kurosawa, Julie Taymor, Kennedy Center, musicals, The Lion King, Toshiro Mifune
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