Profile for cfbrrr

“Parade,” with its monumental Jason Robert Brown score, was ruined by Hal Prince’s production — pure and simple.

Who knows what’s greatest?But five unmentioned great ones are:“I’ve Never Been in Love Before” (Guys & Dolls) “The I Love You Song” (Putnam County Spelling Bee) “True Love” (High Society) “Imagining You” (Birds of Paradise) “Once Upon a Time” (All-American)

To me, whether there’s a balcony or not isn’t as problematic as there being no platforming at all. “WSS” ain’t “A Chorus Line.” It needs levels. As it is, the stagings of “Something’s Coming” and “Maria” are pathetically bad, with Tony either ambling about aimlessly or running around in circles to simulate (stimulate?) excitement. It’s not enough for Tony to sound pretty and to look as if he’s sufficiently emoting. I’ve seen many, many fully staged “WSS”s, and these solo numbers can be visual...

“Too Darn Hot” from “Kiss Me, Kate.”

Alan Alda, Charles Strouse, Joan Baez — in addition to a number of others already mentioned.

A few things about the cutting of “I Feel Pretty” and the “Somewhere Ballet” that I don’t believe have been mentioned. First of all, many, perhaps most, people tend to envision/remember “West Side Story” from the 1961 movie rather than via the 1957 original Broadway version — a significant issue given that many things were changed/adapted for the movie, a number of which were attributable to neither Bernstein nor Laurents nor the demoted-as-director Robbins. In the original, “I Feel Pretty” c...

I realize that most people on this chat board are way too sophisticated to watch the Disney half-hour comedies (like “Austin & Ally“ or “Jessie”), but Jordan Fisher’s recurrent role on “Liv & Maddie” revealed him to be an extraordinarily good actor with plenty of, where called for, sensitivity and charm, in addition to expertly calibrated theatrical timing. He’s far more talented, I think, than either the “Rent”-live or “Grease”-live presentations would lead one to bel...

The number of injuries on “Starlight Express” was, for obvious reasons, legion.

I saw Mia Pinero, the understudy, go on the other night as Maria, and I think she maybe could be the next Audra NcDonald, she’s that good.

Of course Jerry Herman’s comment about “hummable tunes” at the 1984 Tony Awards was a direct, unsubtle jab at Sondheim and, in particular, at “Sunday in the Park with George,” the main Tony competition that year for “La Cage aux folles.” Herman’s show may have bested Sondheim’s at the awards ceremony, but “Sunday” had been the clear preference of the “important crowd,” prime among them The New York Times, whose relentless promotion of the show toward a Pulitzer Prize, which it did receive (de...

My first post. Some comments on “The Inheritance.” 1) A possible derivation of the requiemesque ending of Part 1, the most oft-cited portion in the play, can be detected at the very end of the musical “March of the Falsettos/“Falsettoland,” as produced at the Hartford Stage Co. in 1992 — a production that, revised, went to Broadway to become the sandwiched-together “Falsettos” we know today. At show’s end, after the character Whizzer dies of AIDS (though the disease-name, not yet known in the...