Just want to mourn the loss of Linda Winer’s reviews, I nearly always agreed with her and she was always one for finding the heart and soul of a piece.
Additionally if you’re going to cast an unknown Higgins Equity should be kicking up a fuss that’s he’s not American. If they were going to cast young anyway there were Americans there.
wicked_beast4 said: ugh I TOTALLY forgot that pregnancy only happens when it's planned!"Most women with high-stakes careers plan their pregnancies, what an obtuse thing to say.
I was interested in all of the parts separately: historical musicals, PTSD, swing dancing, pastiche jazz music, Laura Osnes and Corey Cott. The problem is all together they add up to the most whitebread show in years. Laura Osnes and Corey Cott are just so wonderfully square on their own that they've got to be paired with more daring material or more daring people (that's why Bonnie and Clyde worked for me). It didn't help that the show was so straight, white, male in the rest of the cast as ...
Came back to add Before the Parade Passes By: Gower Champion and the Glorious American Musical which marks an interesting counterpoint to The Abominable Showman as well as Razzle Dazzle's history of the Shuberts. I find the different factions that developed in the sixties and seventies fascinating.
Alan Jay Lerner's The Street Where I Live may be my favourite, as well as the vastly underrated Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff.I'm currently in the middle of Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theatre Story Ever Told which I'm enjoying; Riedel's Razzle Dazzle also dealt with the same period in an intriguing way.
For my money, Howard Sherman in The Stage has it right: https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/2017/howard-sherman-bad-producing-decisions-made-great-comet-musical-crash-earth/ The Great Comet is burning out, and taking Natasha and Pierre with it. Unlike the recent closing of the play Indecent, which managed to go out as a triumph, with its final week also its bestselling after a six-week reprieve, Natasha,