#26
Posted: 11/21/08 at 10:03am
Talkin' Broadway is Mixed to Negative:
City Center Encores! has become renowned around town for its annual commitment to presenting elaborate concerts of musicals' scores that might otherwise misplace or diminish. But with the new Encores! production of On the Town, running through Sunday, there's reason to suspect that the venerable series may heretofore have missed - or at least undervalued - an even higher calling: dance.
The score, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (also the librettists, and two of the original stars), has never been in danger of evaporating. The anxiously optimistic opener "New York, New York," the appetite-sating (and -inspiring) comic showpiece "I Can Cook Too," and the touching acknowledgement of love and friendship's fleeting effervescence "Some Other Time" are too firm a part of musical theatre history, and our own World War II consciousness (On the Town opened in December 1944), to ever just vanish.
Other elements have, though. George Abbott's reportedly breakneck staging must have been marvelous in holding together a show so chaotic and wonderfully messy, because John Rando's Encores! staging is sluggish and pensive, never suggesting a beat-the-clock game with life. Jerome Robbins's landscape-altering choreography didn't survive the first production, but in some form Robbins remains: He devised anew three of the show's key routines for his 1989 revue retrospective Jerome Robbins' Broadway; those have been transplanted here, and augmented with new ones, by Warren Carlyle. What a revelation the men impart...
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/ob/11_20_08.html
City Center Encores! has become renowned around town for its annual commitment to presenting elaborate concerts of musicals' scores that might otherwise misplace or diminish. But with the new Encores! production of On the Town, running through Sunday, there's reason to suspect that the venerable series may heretofore have missed - or at least undervalued - an even higher calling: dance.
The score, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (also the librettists, and two of the original stars), has never been in danger of evaporating. The anxiously optimistic opener "New York, New York," the appetite-sating (and -inspiring) comic showpiece "I Can Cook Too," and the touching acknowledgement of love and friendship's fleeting effervescence "Some Other Time" are too firm a part of musical theatre history, and our own World War II consciousness (On the Town opened in December 1944), to ever just vanish.
Other elements have, though. George Abbott's reportedly breakneck staging must have been marvelous in holding together a show so chaotic and wonderfully messy, because John Rando's Encores! staging is sluggish and pensive, never suggesting a beat-the-clock game with life. Jerome Robbins's landscape-altering choreography didn't survive the first production, but in some form Robbins remains: He devised anew three of the show's key routines for his 1989 revue retrospective Jerome Robbins' Broadway; those have been transplanted here, and augmented with new ones, by Warren Carlyle. What a revelation the men impart...
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/ob/11_20_08.html
Tonya Pinkins: Then we had a "Lot's Wife" last June that was my personal favorite. I'm still trying to get them to let me sing it at some performance where we get to sing an excerpt that's gone.
Tony Kushner: You can sing it at my funeral.
Tony Kushner: You can sing it at my funeral.
Updated On: 11/21/08 at 10:03 AM
