Profile for Auggie27

Count me among the disappointed. I wanted to love it, and the first 10 minutes gave me hope, since it begns in medias res. Yet. This take will infuriate those who were enchanted, yet ... from strictly a craft standpoint, it must be noted that an efficient hour second act on Broadway has been expanded to 2 hours 17 minutes, and the resulting padding (a wedding, origin story flashbacks, 2 new but unmemorable songs, one with almost indecipherable lyrics) leaves the audience co

I'd add The Humans, by Stephen Karem. It's a grim forced-reunion Thanksgiving play set in a lower Manhattan two-tier basement duplex that manages to make suburban domesticity threatened by an urban environment something palpable. Much goes on, the neighbors are mysterious presence, and yet very little. Adultery is revealed, and mysterious doings happen around the core event. But it created an ominous atmosphere that captured something frightening about such family gather

The eloquent Shaw review - highlighting the distinct Americana in Hunter's story - is, in the best sense, triggering. The play is closing in no small part because it's a non-event offering in an "event" forward ecosystem. Ticket pricing as a liability remains a controversial topic, because we're told that even short runs require a preponderance of near premium seats to ensure return on the dollar. But here's where we hit a sociological wall: A show like Hun

Some of us believed Criss was returning briefly, to play the show only through the holidays. But apparently that was conjecture. Not that the website was always accurate about what company ticket buyers were purchasing seats to see (infamously, Criss's name didn't disappear from advance sales until just before he left; I know because I checked it often last summer). If memory serves, the show ultimately stayed near 100% capacity during Feldman's run, albeit with lower b.o.&nb

TotallyEffed's take is so useful at this late date, the comparison with Gleason's je ne sais quoi attributes informing her Baker's Wife the perfect illustration: some actors inhabit roles, creating an alchemy of character and artist that's impossible to frame with words. Acting is both a science - craft - and a mysterious art, the morphing into another via an almost chemical synergy. Here, we see a gifted musical comedy star tackling a role outside her resum

I saw a towering performance of this play with Liv Ulman in my youth (mid-20s) in DC, opposite a fine John Lithgow (and Mary McCarty) and I remember then believing the talky, creaky play inaccessible for modern audiences. Along came a B'way revival with Natasha Richardson that people adored, and proved me 100% wrong. But this is a curiosity, and not only because Williams is on the other side of 40. It seems to me that it needs a radical new frame - maybe not as stylized as Van H

MrsSallyAdams landed on a core problem: the musical "cleaned up" the captured verisimilitude in the documentary, sanitizing defining elements in all of the wrong ways. The creatives seemed to believe that the final reveal of the McVersailles would be so breathtaking as a theatrical coup, its completion alone would somehow validate the navel-gazing heroine's tortuous arc. "Look what she built!" Yet if the design dared to end with a whiff of Grey Gardens if not

My favorite projection in this thread is the suggestion that the Queen of Versailles will turn up at the Muny Opera. The idea of families hauling their four children out to swat mosquitoes and eat soft serve ice cream before this story unfolds takes the prize. I especially enjoy pondering the discussion in SUVS on the way home. "What happened to the girl with the rainbow hair?" "She got sick." "How come?" "She took the wrong medicine.&

For the final Wednesday matinee, 12/17/25, about 45% of the house is unsold, maybe more. The upstairs is wide open. There are few left left to see this, other than a handful of people who won't miss a (almost) legendary flop. 

The producers' comments that strategically blame "audience behavior" - must believe that outlier NY Times Critic Pick was the true appraisal of their show, and thus in Before Times Broadway, the COVID sh

They know the show won’t recoup on broadway, but they will make their money back from licensing."

Long game? What long game?

What theater company, stock venue, college - leave high schools out, with the language, drugs, and deaths - will produce this piece? It has no future. I can't see a Menier Chocolate Factory production re-inventing it with a cast of 10. But who knows? There was never an audience for this musicalized story, and without eithe

This news of a Chenoweth injury is horrifying. She has already endure two terrible unrelated head/neck injuries, and her problems date to Wicked in SF (at one Wicked preview I saw, she wore a bedazzled neck brace). If she's physically harmed again via a backstage accident, it's a dreadful turn at any point in a career; to occur with this show in its final struggling hour just heartbreaking. We can parse the flaws but this was a major marker for this actor. She believ

Sherie’s take on Jackie is wildly different from Kristin's. While Kristin brings her cloying “aw shucks, y’all” ditzy charm to the role, Sherie leans into something colder, sharper, and almost dead-behind-the-eyes. Never once does Sherie's Jackie try to win the audience over or be likable - something I thought Kristin tried a little too hard for."

 

Now this sounds more compelling. Which brings up a bigger

Several people have fairly raised Evita as a parallel subject, likely because like Jackie Eva possessed a bigger than life ruthlessness. Yet Eva Peron harnessed ambition and tied it to a nation's hunger for a proxy in government, or at least adjacency to the seat of power. Eva honed a message, against staggering odds (gender, class) became a communicator, and forged a connection to a swath of her culture that made her rise the stuff of myths. Eva was compromised and arg