Pages Tagged “Musicals”
Reviews
- Beauty and the Beast (2010 Tour)
★★★☆☆
San Diego, 2012
The simpler staging & costumes work well enough, but the big numbers suffer from the smaller cast. - Beauty and the Beast (3D Theatricals)
★★★★★
Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, 2016
An elaborate production by a local company with great performances from the leads, and a surprise understudy. - Belle’s Dreams of Adventure I never thought Belle gave up her dreams of adventure. I figured she had one, and gained the opportunity to have more. That’s why I hate the song ‘A Change in Me.’
- Chess in Concert: Post-Cold War Edition
The cold-war musical Chess works surprisingly well set in the present day. - Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog A campy take on the super-hero genre, from the point of view of a D-list villain trying to make it to the big leagues.
- Ordinary Days
A slice-of-life musical about four people living in New York, their paths intersecting. - Ragtime
Ragtime has even more emotional impact on stage than the songs do alone, and the historical themes resonate strongly with the present day. - Subspace Rhapsody ★★★★☆ The first time through my reaction was: OK, that was fun. The second time I really appreciated the way it was put together and immediately went looking for the soundtrack.
- Xanadu (Stage Musical)
★☆☆☆☆
Segerstrom Center, 2009
The stage musical of Xanadu is a silly, self-aware parody that revels in its camp. I really liked about 10% of it. The rest, not so much.
Les Misérables
- Les Miseranimals Review (Animaniacs) The cartoon Animaniacs parodied Les Misérables in a Rita and Runt segment, with a dozen songs translated into a comedic story of dogs and cats.
- Review: Les Misérables 25th Anniversary Stage Production Overall the new staging works very well, though the barricade sequences suffer from the loss of the rotating stage. Musically, the show feels rushed.
- Thoughts on Les Misérables: The 2012 Movie Musical - A Fan’s Review As a fan of the stage musical from way back, I'd say it's good, but has its flaws. Time will tell whether it's great. Here's what did and didn't work for me
- Don’t worry, it’s okay… She's Less Miserable at the end of the play.
- RED!
- I Watched Three Les Mis Parodies Last Night A Youtube binge got me watching Sesame Street's Les Mousserables, Animaniacs' Les Miseranimals, Forbidden Broadway's extended take(that), and On My Phone.
- Revisiting the Movie Musical After Re-Reading the Novel I liked the film of Les Misérables better on second viewing, and also was able to see just how much they brought in from the novel.
- “One Day More” - Les Mistranslated One Day More, run through Google Translate a few times back and forth, then sung. The whole Google Translate Sings series on YouTube is worth checking out.
- I Am Groot
- A Visit to Thénardier’s Inn A local theater company transformed the musical into a fun, immersive cabaret-style parody of the show.
- Bring the Martian Home
- Les Misérables at 30 Looking back on, well, not 30 years of fandom, but closer to 25 since I first saw the musical.
- Agency: Cosette vs. Éponine vs. Florence Listening to Judy Kuhn as Florence in Chess made me think about how she differs from Cosette in Les Misérables, and what sets Cosette apart from Éponine.
- No Canon One reason the singing style in the movie didn't bug me: I've listened to so many different cast recordings that I'm *used to* different performances.
- Vinyl
- “On My Own,” Mis-translated Google Translate Sings returns to Les Misérables with On My Own, run through several layers of machine translation with hilarious results.
- Lobster Jean Valjean?!? 🤪 Saturday Night Live's sketch with Jean Valjean as a singing lobster is utterly bizarre. And it gets stranger as it goes along
- Authority Javert is authoritarian, but he's not a leader. He's a follower, because he craves certainty.
Blog Posts
- Chess in Concert: Post-Cold War Edition
The cold-war musical Chess works surprisingly well set in the present day. UCI Drama’s production is a concert staging of the show, with the orchestra and choir onstage, and the actors carrying handheld microphones with minimal props. It works well, especially for the more 80s-pop numbers like “Nobody’s Side” and the big ensemble songs like […]
- Symbolic Costuming: Stage vs. Screen
We took the kiddo to see his first live theater play today, A Year With Frog and Toad. It’s a children’s musical based on the Frog and Toad books, with each song adapted from one of the stories. The costumes in this production tended toward symbolic representation rather than realism. Frog and Toad themselves just […]
- Les Mis / Chess: Cosette vs Florence (and Eponine)
Judy Kuhn sings both Florence on the Broadway cast album of Chess and Cosette on the Broadway cast album of Les Misérables. My recent Chess-listening binge got me thinking about the two roles, how much stronger a character Florence is (at least when looking at the stage version), and how Eponine’s greater degree of agency […]
- Listening to Chess
I recently went through a few weeks listening to Chess over and over again. This happens every few years when I find a new (to me) recording of the musical, and then I forget about it for a few years until I stumble on another version and the cycle starts again. I’ve never seen the […]
- Going “Into the Woods” on Stage & Screen
I finally saw a stage version of the Sondheim/Lapine musical just a few weeks before the movie came out. Thumbs up to both!
- I Finally Saw “Ragtime”
Ragtime has even more emotional impact on stage than the songs do alone, and the historical themes resonate strongly with the present day.
- Surprisingly Popular Song
I was mostly ignoring the music until my brain latched onto a familiar sequence of notes. That couldn’t be a dance mix of Popular from Wicked…could it?
- Cassette…Now I Remember
I tried to explain what an audio cassette was to a two-year-old. It turned out to be trickier to demonstrate than I expected.
- SCR at Night
Photo of South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, early in the evening.
- Planning for 90s Nostalgia
One day, someone will take a collection of popular songs from the 1990s and turn it into a nostalgia musical. Update July 2016: I was wondering if this had happened yet. I suppose you could count “American Idiot,” but apparently the album was intended to tell a story, so it’s not quite the same as […]
- La Mancha
Home from seeing Brent Spiner in Man of La Mancha. Very good. Update: Here’s a friend’s review of the production.
- Wicked Spammers
Spam subject: Wicked in the Sack. Come on, spammers, leave Elphaba out of this!
- Frozen Shows
I ordered tickets for an upcoming production of The Phantom of the Opera (the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical) and something occurred to me: In all likelihood it’s going to be an exact replica of the 22-year-old London production (with a few concessions to the realities of touring). When did this start happening? Most of the […]
- Who invented the gay artist?
Over the weekend, Something Positive’s Monette met her girlfriend’s half-brother, who wants to write showtunes when he grows up. Friday’s Real Life featured Tony taking Greg to task over singing a song from Monty Python’s Spamalot. Where did the showtunes=gay (or at least effeminate) stereotype come from? While we’re at it, where did the art=gay […]
- Singing Monkeys on Stage!
Just got an email from Disney on Broadway (I assume I must have given them my email address when I bought Lion King tickets several years ago) offering me advance tickets to their new Broadway show, Tarzan. WTF? Admittedly, I thought The Lion King was an odd choice for a stage musical, and it turned […]
- Watching Evita: Deja Vu
The production of Evita was based on the original staging, just like the one I did in college. Also, musings on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s story structure.
- Maps and Music
Leave it to MapQuest to remind you that the nearby railroad actually is the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe (and immediately lodge the song into your mind). Actually, I’m also reminded of a Forbidden Broadway bit on a musical version of Anna Karenina, which finished with the parody, “On the Ashkabad, Tblisi and the Kiev […]
- Random Rent
Someone’s virus-generated email message sent me an attachment: the complete lyrics to the stage musical RENT. Um, okay…