Profile for Charley Kringas Inc

I love how many times this show gets on a roll where the laughter from one joke spills over into the next joke and the energy builds on itself into the most deliriously stupid crescendo possible. I legit couldn’t breathe at some points I was laughing so hard. It’s like if Mark Rylance had dropped acid and chewed on an adrenaline gland before going onstage as Olivia - absolutely unhinged and yet bizarrely refined and always on target. If they don’t make a pro-shot of thi

This is the first production of Merrily I've seen where Franklin is the main character. Groff's performance is absolutely no joke - he wrings Franklin dry, bringing a fully realized and bizarrely empathetic human being to life where there's usually just a shambling vehicle for the Charley, Mary and Gussie show. Even in the first scene, where Frank is typically at his most offputting, Groff gives Frank an aura of piteous entrapment by speaking low and resigned, and when he tells Gu

This show's score is jawdropping, oh my god. Though I love Welch's work, I was a little worried that her poetic tendencies would struggle to cohere over an entire evening of musical plotting, but it's so thoroughly enveloping and of a piece that it feels monumental. I do think the last thirty minutes could use some finessing, somehow it just doesn't quite cohere dramatically ("The Damage That You Do" is too lyrically on-the-nose), but America She Breaks is a

My take on the lack of rhymes in the Bishop's song is that it reflects the fact that he doesn't have it together as a priest. The whole song is flighty and distracted, and his attempts to get a Music Man-style rapport going are met with hostility. It also feels like a joke by Sondheim - by removing his ability to rhyme, Sondheim makes the Bishop totally and utterly out of step with his own role as a musical character, just as God might be said to remove an actual Bishop's abi

JSquared2 said: "Charley Kringas Inc said: "Yeah, the fact that Lempicka has been in workshops for over a decadeis really notable, vs Merrily being put together over the course of (iirc) a year and change. I'm not sure if that more likely indicates that they hit a wall in development or if they're just confident about what they put onstage (or both). That whole opening really felt like the kind of thing too many people have spent too much time hammering away at.

I liked a lot of Lempicka, but those sore loser speeches are a bad look. It’s lovely that they have their gaggle of superfans, and critics aren’t always right, but sometimes you just need to take the L and figure out how to move forward.

NYadgal said: "It’s hard to remember. They went on and on and on and on and on and on. . . And on and on and on. . ."

🎶 Broccoli, hogwash, balderdash, it’s not our fault this show bled c

Ugh, it's so wonderful getting to hear this again. I said this in the review thread, but it really amazes me how sure the lyrics are. No filler, no words stuck in just to fill out the meter, nobody sings anything that doesn't sound like something they'd say, all of the punch lines make sense and all of the lyrics matter.

An embarassment of riches. Yes, it's tempting to fantasize about Sondheim working himself to pieces on the second act as he alwa

And I'm a 30-something gay male theatre operations professional, lol. My mom used to take me backstage when I was a kid and it wasn't the applause that hooked me but the magical sense of creation. It never fails to amaze me how you can take this big black box and invent a whole world that lives inside of it.

Though I absolutely do not have the funds to see everything, or even most things, I've been collecting bootlegs long enough to know how to get the most out of what I ca

I don't think I've ever attended a performance where trauma trigger warnings were included in the pre-show speech, typically they're just on the website in their own section, often with the details hidden behind a drop-down interface. Obviously lots of people have very esoteric triggers that can't be reasonably included but a general inclusion of common triggers can't hurt. It's one thing to "be shocked, to be arrested out of ourselves" as Dench puts it, and

I think Lempicka is awkwardly trapped between trying to celebrate her life and using her life story as a jumping-off point for broader commentary. A big part of the show's advertising was all about bringing Lempicka herself back into focus as a historical figure who was unfairly sidelined, but when so much of it is fictional, it blurs the portrayal.

The awkward fluctuations in tone and clumsy staging also make it harder to ignore the structural flaws. Hamilton has a wide assortment

Very curious to see if they make any changes in transfer. I thought it was fantastic, but it would benefit from some judicious editing (the dinner scene in the first half and the chase at the end could both be snipped down, imo).

They do a brilliant job of shaping the text in a way that prevents it from feeling foregone, though, and I loved the visual theme of the flowers multiplying until they're this overwhelming, cloying force of artifice. That scene towards the end in Lord