Finian's Rainbow Review

[muscle23ftl]

Posted: 12/12/09 at 5:12pm

I went to see this show and had a blast. What a wonderful, innocent, cute show.
Cheyenne Jackson is the hottest actor on Broadway, what a great talent! Chris Fitzgerald was hilarious and very sexy with short- shorts.
Jim Norton was charming and Kate Baldwin(who I've previously seen in Wonderful Town) might get a Tony in June. She was brilliant and I predict she will become a big Broadway star.
Terri White was very good too. She can be seen on DVD in Liza Minnelli's concert at the Radio City Musical Hall.
Don't miss this show!!!

[frontrowcentre2]

Posted: 12/13/09 at 8:17am

I have to 2nd mmuscle23ftl's endorsemaent. This was the most fun I have had at a Broadway show in a long long time. It may be old-fashioned in its construction, but the score is evergreen. The book has been very judiciously abbreviated to make each plot point and then zip along to the next musical number. An absolute delight!

[elmore3003]

Posted: 12/13/09 at 10:08am

Pace, Frontrowcentre2, because my comments about "old fashioned" are not directed to you, but to all of the show's critics who use terms like "hackneyed," "outdated." to put it down. Since I suspect a lot of the name callers consider "Cats" a period musical and really know little about shows written before 1980 beyond what they find in a book. Since period musicals are a specialty, I see little about FINIAN'S RAINBOW that's hackneyed or old-fashioned. It certainly doesn't follow the ususal formula for mating in the traditional musical wherein Act One sets up the romance, the Act One curtain kiboshes it, and Act Two gets them together. Because FINIAN'S RAINBOW is essentially a political rant by Harburg and because he has to have a romance, he makes a bit of fun at it - as well as romantic sentiments in general - and gets it out of the way as quickly as possible. By the middle of Act One, the couple has completed the full course of a more traditional musical plotline.

The rest of the time, the show is about whimsy, social satire, and politics. Has no one noticed that it's the southern redneck group of bigots - our conservative religious right/moral majority group devoted to the idiocies of Sarah Palin and her ilk - taking the term "witch hunt" literally and burning the heroine to death for witchcraft? Miller's THE CRUCIBLE is still a few years in the future.

There's a great deal of FINIAN'S RAINBOW that owes its writing, staging, layout of musical numbers to the traditions within which it was written, but it's quite unlike usual pattern of a traditional, perhaps "hackneyed," musical from the 1930s or 1940s.


Updated On: 12/13/09 at 10:08 AM

[perfectlymarvelous]

Posted: 12/13/09 at 2:12pm

I'm so happy you enjoyed the show! It is really one of the best things out there right now and I've been recommending it to everyone I know since the first time I saw it.