Profile for Miss10036

All this week, I kept getting ads for this on YouTube.  It was always the same one, featuring rehearsal footage of the "Godspeed Titanic" number.  Each time I thought, I should skip this ad to avoid score spoilers since I wanted to go in cold this weekend as a newbie to the show, but I never could click past that snippet because it just sounded too sublime to ignore...  Wow, finally hearing the full score live blew me a

I didn't feel that compelled to see this, but the decent reviews and best musical nomination made me reconsider.  I went tonight and I kind of enjoyed this?  I was pleasantly surprised that I found quite a bit to like.  Jessica Stone gives us some neat staging and if anything, I appreciate that this shows off more of what she can do.  Her direction certainly papers over the weaker elements and adds interest, and I thought she did well, overall,

I finally went last night and found a lot to like here: a genuinely wonderful and varied score, vocals in spades, a standout performance from Ciara Renée, and a rich premise that centers the stories of two complex Black women and their experiences navigating their race, identities, and family dynamics.  I think the show does need work and I want to post more detailed thoughts on here later in case it has a future life, but its issues largely seem solvable.

Maria Friedman, not that there was any doubt she'd get nominated.  I have such vivid memories of seeing her Huntington production back in 2017 and thinking it was a shame a production that good wasn't playing in New York.  She took a "shambles" that lasted on Broadway for 16 regular performances and made it sublime.  Took a minute to get here, but we finally got her magnificent production.  So much of Merrily's redemption arc is a resul

Count me as another vote for Broadway Breakdown!

I recently discovered and highly recommend Broadway Bound: The Musicals that Never Came to Broadway.  It's also hosted by Rob Schneider, and it dives into shows that closed out of town.  He analyzes what doomed each show, what the bright spots were, and what went wrong behind the scenes.  The first season, which recently wrapped, was about musicals based on movies (which are sometimes based on books)

It’ll be interesting to see if this can catch on.  It succeeds as a concert but falters as a book musical.  I can see this building word of mouth on the strength of the concert aspect, since it’s got a lot of crowd-pleasing and beautiful songs and the band and dancers sell it.  They’ll need to work on the book or at least get it to a point where it’s a neutral.

Hopefully they get a smaller house for this. Part of

That was some spellbinding storytelling!  I loved this tonight.  Especially the second and third "acts" which settle into one particular, affecting narrative, as opposed to the first "act" which is more individual stories - those numbers are enjoyable, but the show really came alive for me once we got to Henry's story.  It's exquisitely choreographed and directed, the vocals and orchestrations sound fantastic, and the dancers perform i