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SUNSET BLVD. Reviews Oct 24
2024, 10:35:49 AM
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
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SUNSET BOULEVARD 2024 West End Cast Recording Thread Oct 24
2024, 09:31:25 AM
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
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SUNSET BLVD. Reviews Oct 22
2024, 09:30:55 PM
Thank you, CreatureKitchen that's a really solid and nuanced answer to my question about demographic-specific differences in responses. I get it. This production doesn't necessarily function as standalone telling of the story; it's that yet also a comment on the piece's origin story, both film and gilt house ensconced mega-musical. I am seeing it tomorrow afternoon and feel my appetite whetted anew
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SUNSET BLVD. Reviews Oct 22
2024, 01:59:26 PM
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
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TAMMY FAYE Previews Oct 22
2024, 09:33:32 AM
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
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SUNSET BLVD. Reviews Oct 21
2024, 10:26:02 AM
"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
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Scherzinger in SUNSET BLVD. Previews Oct 19
2024, 11:07:34 AM
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
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Scherzinger in SUNSET BLVD. Previews Oct 10
2024, 09:52:46 PM
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
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Scherzinger in SUNSET BLVD. Previews Oct 9
2024, 12:31:01 PM
Thanks for the update on the score. I see that the album drops on Spotify on October 25th; the title tune is up now, and well sung indeed. And the score is mostly intact, from the preview track listing. I'm excited to be seeing the show on the 21st.
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Scherzinger in SUNSET BLVD. Previews Oct 8
2024, 11:44:08 AM
Going later this month. What's cut besides "The Lady's Paying"? It's the most expendable number, but I do like the score as a whole, and hope it hasn't been too diluted. It's a vivid piece of world building, capturing mid-century L.A. and the Havisham-like sealed off lair of Desmond.
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Scherzinger in SUNSET BLVD. Previews Oct 4
2024, 05:00:15 PM
Critical: this production is relatively affordable. I bought October matinee seats at the box office yesterday for $89 per. They’re front row second section of mezz. But you can see the show for as little as $59. In 2024, this is good news. The pricing structure is “reasonable.” I’m using the word with care because disposable income for theater isn’t in everyone’s budget. I’m a lucky TDF member, gaining access to 90% on Broadway.
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The case against Stereophonic Oct 2
2024, 11:57:48 PM
Some posters are conflating intellectual property violations with plagiarism, two very different issues. This feels like a fairly obvious case of only the second, or the suit would have no standing nor would it have reached the public arena. It may prove hard to pursue to verdict but it doesn’t seem gratuitous or frivolous.
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MCNEAL Reviews Oct 1
2024, 09:49:33 AM
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
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SUNSET BLVD to transfer to Broadway Sep 29
2024, 02:14:37 PM
I'm in the minority: more interested in the production that this one performance. I'm happy to see it with Mandy, yet cannot find which performances. Only SeatGeek is supposed to indicated the outs/substitutions. It's not a standard day of the week? If I'm looking in the wrong place, don't scold, just direct us.
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Why Did You Join BWW? Sep 21
2024, 12:07:18 PM
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
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OUR TOWN Previews Sep 18
2024, 11:34:24 AM
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
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THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA Previews Sep 18
2024, 09:41:09 AM
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
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THE ROOMMATE Previews Sep 13
2024, 10:23:45 AM
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
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THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA Previews Sep 10
2024, 01:00:58 PM
Back on TDF again, this time with a handful of matinees - and at 1 p.m. yet. Can't wait to see this.
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THE ROOMMATE Previews Aug 30
2024, 12:12:29 PM
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;
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