Encores! 2023: LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA with Ruthie Ann Miles, DEAR WORLD with Donna Murphy, and OLIVER!- Page 6

[MarilynMonroeSmash]

Posted: 3/6/23 at 6:34pm

Does anyone know if there is a place to listen to the original unrevised Dear World score?

[inception]

Posted: 3/6/23 at 9:12pm

MarilynMonroeSmash said: "Does anyone know if there is a place to listen to the original unrevised Dear World score?"

Like, do you mean the Original Cast Album?

It is on Spotify, so maybe also on other streaming services as well.  Probably on YouTube. 

[Cape Twirl of Doom]

Posted: 3/6/23 at 11:38pm

ggersten said: "

 That is if you ignore Reviewing the Situation, Pick A Pocket or Two "

Neither “Reviewing the Situation” or “You’ve Got to Pick a or Two” have any references to Fagin being Jewish. 

[hollebolle]

Posted: 3/7/23 at 8:36am

I may have missed an announcement, the New York City Center, website lists the complete (?) Dear World cast (anyone bold hasn’t previously been announced):

Featuring Brooks Ashmanskas, Giuseppe Bausilio, Andréa Burns, Ben Fankhauser, Christopher Fitzgerald, Ann Harada, Kody Jauron, Phillip Johnson Richardson, Stanley Wayne Mathis, Donna Murphy, Caesar Samayoa, and Samantha Williams.

With Darlesia Cearcy, Cicily Daniels, Brian Flores, Blair Goldberg, Aaron Kaburick,Eddie Korbich, Josh Lamon, Will Mann,Manna Nichols, Andrea Jones-Sojola,Phumzile Sojola, Jessica Tyler Wright,Franca Vercelloni, Kathy Voytko.

 

 

 

 

[TaffyDavenport]

Posted: 3/8/23 at 5:01pm

 

[BCfitasafiddle]

Posted: 3/10/23 at 4:03pm

Wow! Donna Murphy got COVID the first week of rehearsal and was out until her birthday, the 7th! An already short process cut in half for her. 

[Play Esq.]

Posted: 3/10/23 at 4:27pm

Donna is a consummate professional: Covid be damned, she's been working on this score since she landed the role (...and probably a month before that).  Can't wait until seeing this next Sunday!

[Play Esq.]

Posted: 3/15/23 at 8:11am

Anyone going to tonight’s first performance or go to last night’s dress? Very excited about this one…haven’t seen Donna on stage since Dolly!

[musikman]

Posted: 3/15/23 at 9:16am

Play Esq. said: "Anyone going to tonight’s first performance or go to last night’s dress? Very excited about this one…haven’t seen Donna on stage since Dolly!"

I’ll be there this evening.  Can’t wait.  

[bwaylyric]

Posted: 3/15/23 at 12:20pm

DELETED

Updated On: 3/16/23 at 12:20 PM

[halfhourcheckwithmerman]

Posted: 3/15/23 at 5:14pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMz1jaX4a-w

This looks fun! No clips of Donna singing in it, though... 

Really kicking myself I won't be able to see this. Hoping to live vicariously through reports tonight. 

[musikman]

Posted: 3/15/23 at 11:02pm

Just got back home.  I think in reviewing this production, it needs to be put into two separate categories:

1) The show itself is utter dreck, save for a few songs.  There’s a reason it’s rarely revived and you only ever hear one or two songs from it. It’s bizarre, wacky, incoherent, and head-scratchingly weird, and it can make sitting through some scenes difficult.  The themes of the show are obviously very topical, though, so I understand why it was chosen  

2) That being said, this harkens back to a very traditional encores presentation: mostly simple and very straightforward staging and presentation that really lets the material “shine,” led by a really terrific ensemble of actors and singers.  I just wish they all had better material to work with, but they certainly make the most of whatever they can.  Donna Murphy is - unsurprisingly - luminous, especially in Act 2.  She manages to form a fully realized character even while still carrying a script around. All around, not a single weak link in the cast.   The 28 piece orchestra of course sounds sensational, but the score rarely gives them a chance to shine.  
 

I’m thankful that we have encores to present things like this.  Despite the terrible quality of the show itself, you’d never get the chance to see a show like Dear World otherwise, and in such a well produced production.  

 

[chrishuyen]

Posted: 3/15/23 at 11:11pm

I knew nothing about this show going in and I thought it was entertaining enough, with some really charming moments, but somewhat bland overall.  The show feels at times like it wanted to be a satire but got caught up in its own whimsy and decided to go that route instead, but some plot threads are just picked up and dropped at will so it doesn't quite feel fully satisfying.

The performances though are excellent.  Donna Murphy is fantastic as the lead (she still had a script in hand for the book scenes and had to work around that but I really enjoyed her performance).  Ann Harada continues to be a comic genius, and Samantha Williams has a really great solo number (I could probably listen to her sing anything).  Christopher Fitzgerald and Brooks Ashmanskas get nice showcases as well.  The songs seem standard "hummable" Jerry Herman fare, but nothing to me seems like it really stands out amongst other Jerry Herman scores, though they are great to listen to with a full orchestra.

I actually wonder if a slightly more fully staged production would help this show along.  It really lives in a slightly fantastic/whimsical world, but it's hard to buy into that when there's not as much going on visually to suggest that (I thought Amelie actually did a fairly good job of this).  And I feel like leaning into that aspect a bit more would allow me to forgive some of the shortcomings of the plot itself since it's all supposed to be make-believe anyway.  It could be a direction issue too, but I feel like something prevented me from buying into that as much.

I'm also curious from those who are more familiar with the show and its past iterations.  I found it interesting that they mentioned it was originally envisioned as a chamber musical and then got bigger before they tried to cut it down again in later productions.  This production uses the "original score order" as listed on Wikipedia, but I noticed that the cast album seems vastly different so does anyone know what happened there?  Was it just a matter of limited time or something else?

I think this show is worth seeing for its performances, but I do see why it flopped originally.  Also, I was sitting somewhat far right mezz and there was a little bit of obstruction (I could just barely see Donna Murphy's entrance, and I could mostly tell just based on the applause).

[inception]

Posted: 3/16/23 at 12:30am

The critiques of people new to this show echo what was said of the Giraudoux play it is based upon, The Madwoman of Chaillot.  The play is definitely a bit of a battle to sit through for thise accustomed to more modern,  realistic works instead flights of poetic fantasy.  It also proved a struggle even for Katherine Hepburn to carry when it was made into a film. 

But for me the score is what makes this.  It's like Mame on acid. A beautiful hallucination.

[ErmengardeStopSniveling]

Posted: 3/16/23 at 1:25am

I am very glad Encores finally produced Dear World. What a treat to hear those original orchestrations and vocal harmonies live, especially the accordion. 

The book is a mess. I don't know how this compares to the original book (Sandy Rustin did the concert adaptation), but this is one of those situations where it needed to be chopped down to 1-2 pages between musical numbers (like Superman). There's way too much book, and the pacing of the direction isn't great -- a classic unavoidable Encores problem. Major second act trouble and kind of a slow start.

Donna Murphy is, predictably, excellent, and she'll be even better by Sunday. She carries script pages but only looks at them during the book scenes. That she's giving this fine a performance after missing a week of rehearsal is mind-boggling. Chris Fitzgerald, Brooks Ashmanskas, Ann Harada, and Andrea Burns ham it up. Burns and Harada's roles are the show at its most experimental and random, so they don't work as well as they should (could be a direction issue too). Authors attempting a Mame-Vera-Gooch dynamic.

Shout out to that wonderful dancer who used ASL or miming.

There were some definite first-performance jitters, not helped by a pre-show speech by Lear explaining the Covid situation and brief rehearsal time.

I only knew the score going in, but the show is a fascinating companion piece to ANYONE CAN WHISTLE, and both shows would benefit from an over-the-top, hyperstylized production.

Updated On: 3/16/23 at 01:25 AM

[UWS10023]

Posted: 3/16/23 at 1:42am

I found the staging to be quite boring and at times the actors blocking was unmotivated. The orchestra took up so much room that the downstage acting area was cramped. There is nothing wrong with simple staging if it has a sense of flair but unfortunately it was lacking. The actors were all fine but the production itself seemed mediocre. To be fair the book isn’t that great. The stage design was one of the weaker Encore designs I have seen, cluttered and visually unappealing.

[Play Esq.]

Posted: 3/16/23 at 6:08pm

Dear World is a NYT critic’s pick!

[JasonC3]

Posted: 3/16/23 at 6:11pm

It's on TDF for the weekend.

[Jarethan]

Posted: 3/16/23 at 7:54pm

This show was a mess when it originally opened, but i loved it all three times I saw it, three very different versions, from Boston tryout to early previews to post opening.  Why did i love it if it was such a mess?   Angela Lansbury and Jerry Herman. 

Lansbury was perfection and her voice was very strong.  To this day, the score is my favorite of Herman's, although I do play Mame more frequently because it is so joyous.  

They clearly never figured out how to make the book work and even as an 18 year old, I felt that the production was too big for the story, that it should have been performed in a much smaller theatre.  Ironically, to this day, I think the best version was the first in Boston.  Each Tomorrow Morning was a  wonderful number, which was never as good as it was in Boston.  They were 'fixing' the parts that did work and not fixing the bad parts.

The one issue that I always had and have to this day is that, as much as I love the melody and the vocals and the orchestrations, the title song is just stupid.  I managed to enjoy it by never listening to some of the dumbest lurics Herman ever wrote.  It was clearly intended to the the showstopper, but never achieved that objective because it didn't belong in the show.

I am really upset that I am missing it in Encores because I think that Donna Murphy should have been the successor to Lansbury.  To me, she has it all, in a way that I do not thing that LuPone or BP or Foster or Chenoweth or Menzel or O'Hara have.  I have no doubt that I would have loved it and still had all the issues that I had almost 55 years ago.

[binau]

Posted: 3/16/23 at 10:09pm

Maybe things have turned around in a day or I’m on a different planet but I thought that was pretty damn special. 

[BorisTomashevsky]

Posted: 3/17/23 at 12:27am

What a great night. Stunningly done in every aspect - that lighting was really transporting - and the orchestra fills one with vigor.

A brilliant cast (where the only downer among overwhelming talent was the inability of some to deliver one-liners with standard-musical-comedy-style/timing in the first act). Too much physical space - a classic Encores symptom - plus too much space between and even during(!) gag lines is killer, right as we’re meant to be being enticed and charmed. But this negative energy phase was brief overall and soon supplanted by people like Brooks, Chris, Andrea and Ann. I’m still laughing about the dog stuff.

A broad and deep sentiment of hope and joy and humanity (even when the piece is really a lot smaller than the sum of its parts). 

See this if you can. It was a lovely and loving experience. 

Updated On: 3/17/23 at 12:27 AM

[ColorTheHours048]

Posted: 3/17/23 at 10:31am

I’ll admit, I knew next to nothing outside of the minimal plot listed on Wikipedia before seeing this last night, and I have to say I wasn’t taken with it at all. One of the more “it’s clear why this flopped” evenings I’ve had at Encores! Although I was willing to stick around for act 2, unlike I Married An Angel (rough).

Donna Murphy was mostly playing on the wavelength I wanted to whole cast to be on, but even she leaned into an earnestness that just makes the show feel dreadfully boring and preachy. There’s about 5 too many “brush yourself off and look at the bright side”-style anthems, and WAY too much book. This kind of story should move at a clip, and it mostly kind of lays there and luxuriates. Which I guess is… Parisian? But it moves at the pace of an old black and white melodrama, rather than a colorful musical comedy.

I can always appreciate the orchestra, and they did sound really lovely, but the score is so insignificant, I even felt myself feeling bored by that.

I suppose good they got this one out of their system so we don’t have to see it again for a long time. Maybe next time, get someone to punch up that book; make some internal song cuts; and get Leslie Kritzer to go all-in on the zany, farcical qualities that actually work about the book. Then maybe - maybe! - it might be worth celebrating outside of a niche audience presentation for a weekend. Not that all Encores! productions have to be Broadway-bound, but I do think there’s an opportunity especially with the “forgotten gems” to showcase why a show shouldn’t be “forgotten” and could have a more viable life. This production was not that, in my opinion.

[binau]

Posted: 3/17/23 at 5:52pm

I just loved the show last night. 

 

The orchestra sounded beautiful and there were so many beautiful musical moments, from the long overture to the underscoring at various moments to the magical, melodic songs (e.g., each tomorrow morning, I never said I love you, I don’t want to know, kiss her now, and I was beautiful etc). 

 

The decoration around the stage, costumes, choreography and blocking etc all felt tasteful, beautiful even at points - and made the whole event feel closer to a realised production than a concert. Would love to have seen what they could do with a bit higher budget. 

 

Obviously, Donna Murphy is the central figure of the production. She is giving a powerhouse, Tony-worthy performance and makes each of the most moving songs “I don’t want to know”, “and I was beautiful” and “kiss her now” a mini play full of the very complex acting Donna always brings to roles (at points I wondered if Donna might have been too broad but she needs to play to the balcony in a barn, the show is not exactly subtle and I was sitting quite close so I think it’s ok). She commands attention and owns that stage, plus she is in INCREDIBLE voice. On pitch, powerful belt, nuanced vulnerability - the score also fits so well in her voice and I love hearing Donna’s lower register at points. I was quite surprised how strong she sounded. 

 

But what really saves the show and makes it ‘work’** is the strong supporting cast. Brooks Ashmanskas makes a cartoon villain hilarious with his flipping between gay and violent, Christopher Fitzgerald manages to have so much conviction he can overcome awful material to almost steal the show, Samantha Williams gives a STUNNING performance of her song, Ann Harada brings so much humour and personality to nothing material. It’s amazing!

 

** to be clear I don’t think the show works in the traditional sense of the word. It doesn’t make any sense. But I think the cast and production works enough to have an entertaining evening. I actually think if Donna Murphy were a bigger name right now I could see it working on a Broadway stage as a kind of curious quirky fun evening centred around a tour de force lead performance. 

 

All I can really hope is someone can get Donna Murphy in a recording studio to lay down some of these tracks. 

 

 

[Jarethan]

Posted: 3/17/23 at 8:23pm

binau said: "I just loved the show last night.



The orchestra sounded beautiful and there were so many beautiful musical moments, from the long overture to the underscoring at various moments to the magical, melodic songs (e.g., each tomorrow morning, I never said I love you, I don’t want to know, kiss her now, and I was beautiful etc).



The decoration around the stage, costumes, choreography and blocking etc all felt tasteful, beautiful even at points - and made the whole event feel closer to a realised production than a concert. Would love to have seen what they could do with a bit higher budget.



Obviously, Donna Murphy is the central figure of the production. She is giving a powerhouse, Tony-worthy performance and makes each of the most moving songs “I don’t want to know”, “and I was beautiful” and “kiss her now” a mini play full of the very complex acting Donna always brings to roles (at points I wondered if Donna might have been too broad but she needs to play to the balcony in a barn, the show is not exactly subtle and I was sitting quite close so I think it’s ok). She commands attention and owns that stage, plus she is in INCREDIBLE voice. On pitch, powerful belt, nuanced vulnerability - the score also fits so well in her voice and I love hearing Donna’s lower register at points. I was quite surprised how strong she sounded.



But what really saves the show and makes it ‘work’** is the strong supporting cast. Brooks Ashmanskas makes a cartoon villain hilarious with his flipping between gay and violent, Christopher Fitzgerald manages to have so much conviction he can overcome awful material to almost steal the show, Samantha Williams gives a STUNNING performance of her song, Ann Harada brings so much humour and personality to nothing material. It’s amazing!



** to be clear I don’t think the show works in the traditional sense of the word. It doesn’t make any sense. But I think the cast and production works enough to have an entertaining evening. I actually think if Donna Murphy were a bigger name right now I could see it working on a Broadway stage as a kind of curious quirky fun evening centred around a tour de force lead performance.



All I can really hope is someone can get Donna Murphy in a recording studio to lay down some of these tracks.


I agree with your last sentence.   I would love a DM cast recording.  Re the prior statement, I will only point out that, fresh off Mama AND after winning a Tony for her performance, Angela Lansbury couldn't get people in the theatre.  It would need to be a huge box office attraction and I am not sure there is one out there who could cause this to run.  For every person who likes/loves it, there has always been another person who disliked/hated it.

Of course, I would love to see Murphy in it in a mid-sized (at most) Broadway house, but I have set my expectations exceedingly low.

 

[BCfitasafiddle]

Posted: 3/17/23 at 11:17pm

So, the bad news is that I had a ticket for Sweeney Todd tonight. And although I know for a fact Nicholas Christopher is giving a FABULOUS performance: I ultimately decided to return my ticket and see the show in a few weeks. 

The good news is that I managed to get a ticket for Dear World tonight at City Center. What a joy it was. Donna Murphy could carry a script onstage for the rest of her career for all I care. She was simply heavenly. Terrific performance by the entire company. Samantha Williams is WONDERFUL. Mary Mitchell-Campbell and that glorious orchestra were thrilling. I felt so uplifted as I walked out humming Jerry Herman's melodies.