Profile for Auggie27

I was at the Wednesday matinee, Scherzinger's first performance since opening night, and she left it all on the stage. The vocals, much discussed here, seemed in the go-for-broke range, so taxing and full it's hard to imagine that she'd have anything left for the evening. Count me among her admirers; the performance is both a new Norma and yet mysteriously the traditional one as well. She has the gravitas of Swanson, to my surprise, and wisely realizes that her Norma's weight

I have to agree again with Queen Alice on this point about the score. I'm a fan of the music, yet feel Lloyd's staging does something masterfully fresh with it; by making the show so score-forward - it's so perfectly balanced at the St. James (there yesterday), the people who usually need the headsets just put them around their necks - the music explodes with the ferocity of a rock concert. It pulls us forward from the outset, the lushness one of the fasci

I wrote a post similar to the Queen Alice defense of Lloyd’s world building in this thread and the comment above leads me to ask a bigger question: are demographics unfamiliar with either the musical or its source more likely to accept the Lloyd conceit(s)? If this tale unfolds with the contemporaneity that if does here, isn’t this iteration’s storytelling accessible on its own terms? Is Swanson and Close aren’t in the audience consciousness, do they suspend disbelief

I've read every report so far, and I have a broader question about the subject's suitability for a lavish Palace-ensconced musical in the 2020s: Is Messner all that compelling a figure in today's culture? Yes, the film offered a revisit of her life and times. But it made less than $4 million at the box office and is notable mostly for Chastain's Oscar-winning performance. (The documentary is generally considered superior, Chastain aside.)  Musical comedies have captu

"But I can’t help feeling that Lloyd’s talent and that of his designers, let alone Scherzinger’s, would be better lavished on better material. Making “Sunset Boulevard” a hit again — the original Broadway production ran two-and-a-half years, grossing more than $100 million — is not so much an achievement as a stunt, like reanimating that dead chimpanzee."  Jesse Green

This seems presumptuous, smugly prescriptive, arguabl

I've seen modern dress versions of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and - man of the hour, Wilder - since I was a teenager, not a word changed to match anachronistic properties or costuming, to interfere with the non-era specific world building. The conceit creates immediacy, but it's constructed on a shared premise: text and physical manifestation of story elements are by design contradictory, technically at odds, yet together suggesting "timelessness" in theme and em

One thing we've all gotten used to since the post-quarantine re-opening of Broadway; the last minute substitution of a cover. The positive: it's placed these heroic but too often marginalized theater artists front and center. That first year back, I saw so many (Jennifer Blood on for Mare Winningham, Christopher Innvar on for the poor never-appearing Greg Kinnear - but those two - brilliant, both - are just off the top of my head). I found it a new adventure. The negative: audien

I'm intrigued by the shortcomings of the play, in particular its weakness as a piece of satisfying theatrical storytelling, independent of its topicality, which admittedly serves the cultural moment.  I'm a big admirer of Disgraced, the Pulitzer winner that put this playwright on the map. Yet its brilliance - its central character daringly conceived and shaped as counterpoint in a post-9/11 world -  is almost independent its plot machinery. Which is contrived a

I also joined in 2003, a lifetime ago, because internet participation in impromptu salons was still a relatively new pastime, and the discussions that arose here were full-throated and impassioned, with richly debated topics, highly subjective takes, a little rage, a little glibness, a few wounds but seldom permanent scars, and much enjoyment. I made a handful of friends here that I cherish, away from this board; they have lasted over two decades, and I never forget - or t

Can't quite get over the hand-wringing above about the removed intermissions. The play was written when the three act form was routine in modern drama, a strictly if not universally observed structural conceit in a world with a different attention span, a different expectation of audience behavior/needs, and different ideas as to how theatrical storytelling best serves a venue and captive witnesses. The play is in three distinct and labeled movements, to be sure, but directors have long f

NO SPECIFIC SPOILERS. Saw this last night, and come down in the middle of the reactions I've encountered on the boards. The play ultimately gains genuine power, once its second of three acts burrows deeply into the core event defining the heartbreaking story. Butterworth's ability to shape an overly familiar situation - a stage mother who will sacrifice literally anything for her children's success - into something new and disturbing earns attention and respect. And when the plot

Last spring, two friends - admirers of her work in film - wondered if Farrow would be up to matching her stage-dwelling duet partner. Remembering her strong work in Romantic Comedy my first year in NYC, I had my fingers crossed. From a quick scan of the reviews, it seems that her performance is the de facto centerpiece of this production, in effect its raison d'etre now that it's been unveiled. A lovely turn in a vividly front and center career (and life) that features a trul

As I noted elsewhere, one model, or at least, recognizable example, of this particular type of two-hander might be the much produced - and off-Broadway, brilliantly cast/recast - A Couple of White Chicks Sitting Around Talking. Though the plot proper is not similar, this feels like the sub-genre: sharp women with oppositional characteristics who find a Venn diagram of overlapping issues and try to inhabit that space; consequences ensue. My reductive frame is not intended to minimize;