Tag: musical theatre

Mauritius : A musical chairs of con artists is fast moving and absorbing.

Mauritius : A musical chairs of con artists is fast moving and absorbing.

Photo. Maria Vartanova

You don’t have to be an avid philatelist to be entertained by this drama about stamp collecting.

Essentially, Mauritius is a caper story with two legendary error-laden stamps as the treasure at the end of the rainbow. Conceived as musical chairs of con artists and propelled by the greed of all the participants, Mauritius is fast moving and absorbing. However, in focusing on the well-researched, main theme of a grab for rare stamps, playwright Theresa Rebeck chooses to allude to dark secrets and previous conflicts among the characters, without giving more than a hint of the back stories, a ploy that works only some of the time. Why, for instance, are the half-sisters who claim ownership of the family’s stamp collection so hostile to each other? What happened eight years earlier between the knowledgeable owner of the store and the psychopathic philatelist who craves the stamps? And did the third crooked philatelist have a connection with the younger sister before the con game began or did they simply come together because of the similarity of their goal?

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Hedwig and the Angry Inch. An unrecognizable Tim Oberholzer with star quality is stunning. An exciting and expertly mounted musical show that is not to be missed!!!

Hedwig and the Angry Inch. An unrecognizable Tim Oberholzer with star quality is stunning. An exciting and expertly mounted musical show that is not to be missed!!!

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Photo. Andrew Alexander . Tim Oberholzer as Hedwig and Rebecca Noelle in the background as Yitzak .

The Vanity project’s version of this glizty transvestite gender bender musical inspired much by David BowIe’s feminine Ziggy Stardust personality and her (his) tranformation to the male Bowie, shows us  Hedwig , accompanied by  her East German colleagues,  frantically searching  for the other half of her being. The epitome of Post-Wall divided culture, she  takes us through her beginnings in post war torn East Germany in the aftermath of the destruction..bringing together all the music of the period including that of the biggest German and international stars of the time. With her ragingly campy non stop  poetic banter , Mr. Hansel Schmidt  (alias Hedwig)  tells us the story of her personal evolution, her need to leave  East Germany and  her mother, and find freedom. Her escape, thanks to a  throaty voiced male American, her tortuous gender shifting,  closely linked to the  symbolic of a split postwar Germany  emasculated  and  divided by the wall. Identified to other splits such as its destructive German Jewish past. She speaks of   ethnic cleansing,  of post-wall European and American  politics. Her alter ego Tommy Gnossis  taunts her and shines across the way and  brings us into the world of the "Who” bathed in parodies of the later Beatles, Nina Hagen and all the music of the period. Rebecca Noelle (a Johnny Depp look alike) but the lead singer of the local  PepTides group and a magnificent voice that rivals Whitney Houston’s  ( I will always love youuuuuu! ) is Hedwig’s sidekick. There are four back-up musicians  including Stewart Matthews playing lead guitar!! Who would have believed that!! It’s one big surprise after the other.

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The Sound of Music: a Dismal Wrong-headed Revival of this Musical

The Sound of Music: a Dismal Wrong-headed Revival of this Musical

The next time the National Arts Centre English Theatre tackles something like The Sound of Music perhaps it should seek guidance from people who know what they’re doing.

Perhaps someone like Ottawa’s distinguished community theatre group, Orpheus, which has been around for more than a century and enjoys a solid reputation for maintaining professional standards in the staging of its musicals.

The NAC’s godawful treatment of a seminal Rodgers and Hammerstein hit will no doubt have its admirers. After all, familiarity breeds contentment, and there’s no surer way to ensure audience approval than to schedule a show so familiar, so popular, so ingrained in our cultural conscience, that we enter the theatre already humming the music we’re going to hear. Furthermore, there’s nothing like audience participation to ensure a further stilling of our discriminatory senses — hence the invitation we received the other night to sing along with the singers. If audience response seemed somewhat tepid on opening night, maybe that’s because some of the on-stage singing was falling lamentably below basic adequacy.

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Flashdance: Lots of Dance but Little Flash

Flashdance: Lots of Dance but Little Flash

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Handout  photo: Broadway Across America. Jillian Mueller as Alex in “Flashdance”.

The show’s big number is What a Feeling, but What Feeling? might better describe the touring version of Flashdance: The Musical which arrived in town Tuesday. A stage remake of the hit 1983 film Flashdance, the live version is written by Canadian Tom Hedley who created the original story and most of the screenplay, and Robert Cary. Music is by Robbie Roth who also wrote the lyrics with Cary. The film, a commercial success although generally mauled by the critics, catapulted Jennifer Beals in the main role of Alex from obscurity to stardom.

Hedley hopes to take his stage version – it’s not the one that played in England a few years ago – to Broadway after touring it for the next several months. Unfortunately, while there’s ample dance there’s little flash, at least in this production. Granted, the company was operating at a disadvantage because a badly balanced sound system left performers overwhelmed by the orchestra (Nicholas Williams conducts) and rendered their voices unpleasantly reedy…….read more…

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Review+Lots+dance+little+flash+this+remake/9073433/story.html

The (Post) Mistress: Sweet but not sizzling!

The (Post) Mistress: Sweet but not sizzling!

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Martha Irving as the Post Mistress. Photo: Jay Kopinski

The (Post) Mistress, playing at the 1000 Islands Playhouse in Gananoque, is clearly a culturally hybrid stage event that slowly works itself out through moments of story- telling, of singing, of music, of striking lighting effects (thanks to Paul A. Del Motte). Adapted from a Cabaret style that Highway has already produced in other one woman musical shows (The incredible adventures of Mary Jane Mosquito, and Rose) this one suffers from the inadequacies of the lone actress, Martha Irving who is not quite able to sustain the extraordindary and rapid changes in music and spoken word styles. To work well, this show needs a much stronger and more transformative dramatic presence.

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The (Post) Mistress in Gananoque – Entertaining, but a Play?

The (Post) Mistress in Gananoque – Entertaining, but a Play?

Martha Irving

Martha Irving. The (Post) Mistress at the Thousand Islands Playhouse, 2013. Photo:  Jay Kopinski.

The second production of the season in the Firehall, “THE (POST) MISTRESS” written by Tomson Highway, has opened at the 1000 Islands Playhouse. A one-woman musical, it features Marie-Louise Faucon, a small town post mistress who seems magically able to read the letters from local friends that she sorts and files. Along the way we learn a little about Marie-Louise herself. Unfortunately we don’t learn enough to care much about her.

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Ups and Downs “In the Heights” at the Boston Centre for the Arts

Ups and Downs “In the Heights” at the Boston Centre for the Arts

Diego Klock-Perez and Cast 2

Photo: Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo  “In the Heights”

In the Heights, the 2010 Tony award winner, is a feel-good, much loved musical about the trials, tribulations, and joys of a group of Latinos living in a barrio in New York City’s Washington Heights. The show’s optimism would seem, at least in part, the product of composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda’s youth when he first conceived it as a student at Wesleyan College in 1999. He wanted to develop a musical about the Hispanic community where he had grown up, drawing on Latin and contemporary musical influences. Unlike the earlier Latino-themed musicals West Side Story and The Capeman, In the Heights is devoid of gang violence. Violence has been replaced by solidarity. While Miranda’s decision to break with clichés is laudable, the result, in this case, is a lack of dramatic conflict and sentimentally drawn characters.

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Bat Boy The Musical: Gladstone Production Enhances the Material

Bat Boy The Musical: Gladstone Production Enhances the Material

Photograph by Barbara Gray

The cult status of some shows can often be mystifying. Take the 1997 off-Broadway musical Batboy which has romped onto the Gladstone Theatre stage in a spirited production far more worthy than the material itself.

With its unapologetic excess of camp, its determination to send up the conventions of both the horror movie and the Broadway musical, its cheeky disregard of the need for psychological plausibility or characters which go beyond the stereotype, Batboy (which was inspired by a spoof news item in the satiric publication, Weekly World News) may strike purists as a mess. However, rather like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, it’s a mess that insists we like it — but to serve that purpose, you need ensemble playing which goes beyond the call of duty. We get that thanks to director Dave Dawson, obviously an adroit ringmaster when it comes to this sort of thing. Even so, what we’re left with is the tritely familiar story of the loner kid who wants to belong; that the musical is also seeking to send up this cliché plot merely adds to the thematic confusion, given that despite the show’s anarchic disposition, we actually feel sorry for the title character.

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The King and I: A Challenging Musical for a Community Theatre Company

The King and I: A Challenging Musical for a Community Theatre Company

The title of The King and I is a clear indication of the viewpoint of the 1951 Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein’s musical. After all, it is a first-person account of the experiences of a Victorian widow teaching in Siam.

The story educator Anna Leonowens told in her memoirs is still regarded as unfair and distasteful in Thailand (previously known as Siam). The characterization of the king — a Buddhist monk before he ascended to the throne — as presented in Margaret Landon’s 1944 book, Anna and the King of Siam, the fictionalized account of Leonowens’ The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and Romance of the Harem (1872) is also disputed.

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Avenue Q by the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, a 2004 Multiple Tony Award winner.

Avenue Q by the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, a 2004 Multiple Tony Award winner.

Avenue Q, the long-running 2004 multiple Tony Award winner (best musical, best lyrics, and best book) opened at the Lyric Stage here inBoston on May 11 for an eight week run. Such is its popularity that the theatre’s management extended the show for an extra two weeks even before it débuted. The house was full, the audience enthusiastic and on the young side.

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