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. (more…)
Categories: 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.
(more…)
Categories: 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.
Categories: DCist · cinema · theatre
Tagged: Akria Kurosawa, Julie Taymor, Kennedy Center, musicals, The Lion King, Toshiro Mifune
