Profile for darquegk

I think it's less that they don't understand it, and more the fact that the world Rocky Horror reflected and subverted in 1973 no longer exists. The show's commentary on the transition from the naivite of the 1950s to the jaded cynicism of the 1970s, and the grotesque Americanization of Britain, were a blast to hip 1970s audiences across the UK. The Roxy production was hip, contemporary and funky when rock musicals and sexual transgression still felt naughty.

The production

blaxx said: "Kad said: "They had an invited dress last night and have another tonight."

Friend in the production said it's a snore fest without the callbacks and produces unintentional laughter when everyone knows the obvious ones. They police the silence like they do cellphones.

I imagine it will be a couple performances before they go back on this."

I was an invited “guest heckler” at a major regional product

I've expressed this opinion before, and I stand by it: those shows are masterpieces exploring dated themes and social mores in timeless ways. Mame is a masterful but ultimately slight show that is very much of its era, and survives primarily on a mix of nostalgia and diva worship. Everything it does well, Hello Dolly does better.

Mame the musical (which bears rather little resemblance to the pleasantly barbed dark comedy of the novels) was probably a cultural escape valve for pre-S

It sounds like what you want/need, and I hope this doesn't sound TOO flippant, is "Gay Blues Brothers." This sort of awareness of mortality and the end of an era was what drove John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd to invest their SNL money into making The Blues Brothers film, giving the aging generation of blues and soul legends a final moment in the spotlight (and then another in the sequel).

The divas are no longer what they once were, any more than Cab Calloway in the eighties

Some of you may remember an article Concord Theatricals posted a few years ago when Show Boat went public domain, about what you could and couldn't do with the material and the song stack. It was helpful but also somewhat condescending: it ultimately boiled down to "who are you to think YOU can fix Show Boat? We already fixed it; we can't stop you from doing your own remix of the show's PD material, but we can strongly suggest you just license the revival version from us inst

Any time that song comes up in conversation, I love sharing this story. A decade or two ago, I went to see a community theatre production of South Pacific. They had cast a very dignified older actor in the lead, but he couldn't sing a note. So he spoke his lyrics dramatically, a la Sebastian Cabot.

The other trouble was, he wasn't very good with accents either. So he shot for an Italian accent, but came away with a Hungarian one instead. And do you know what it sounds like when

It feels like there were three Sondheims: the “god” with his carefully crafted persona, the relatively conventional for his era gay man, and the enthusiastic, eccentric nerd with a number of spectrum-adjacent traits and quirks. 
 

He reminds me much more than I would have expected of another cult hero, Edward Gorey, who also shared that holy trinity of curated personalities. The one big difference I can think of? Gorey was a technophobe while Sondheim was fam

Big musicals never left. Great Gatsby is crammed with sets and pyrotechnics, Lost Boys is attempting a Spider-Man level of immersive special effects. What's changed is that most musicals are shooting for a midbudget instead, and the current musical theatre sounds rarely demand casts of sixty or more and an orchestra over 25 pieces the way they used to.

If you think every new musical is Two Strangers or Mincemeat levels of pared-back intimacy, you're just raising a strawman. The