Aaron Wallace - Page 3

Frankie Valli introduced his ninth song at Dr. Phillips Center on Sunday night as one of his all-time favorites: a 1964 B-side called 'Silence Is Golden.' He might have taken the title a little too much to heart. It's a golden oldie for sure, and Valli sounded great... impossibly great for an 87-year-old on a live concert stage...

Powerful as that theme may be, DOGFIGHT as written isn't fully the righteous proposition it hopes to be. At its core are some deeply troublesome male figures who engage in truly horrendous behavior, and while theatre is always welcome to put unseemly or complicated characters on the stage, DOGFIGHT never entirely deals with their deeds, which include among other things attempted rape. Playwright Peter Duchan clearly understands his character to be problematic, but their brisk redemption by way of jaunty music and degrees of forgiveness from the women on stage can at times feel like unearned absolution...

An OG, indeed. She is voulez-vous coucher's iconic 'moi,' the phenom who gave us 'New Attitude' but is every bit as famous for her own attitude - the diva who in 2019 famously lamented all of Top 40's 'little heifers who can't sing' and here tonight in Orlando was calling her own high heels 'heifers that got to go.' Ladies and gentlemen, that is rock and roll...

As news of Nazi rallies throughout Orlando and a white nationalist conference just outside of Walt Disney World rock Central Florida, Garden Theatre opens a musical this week that meets the moment: PARADE...

Caroline Bowman approaches Elsa with a studied understanding of this show's central themes: the inner confusion of outward identity, the struggle between family ties and the daggers of life that threaten to slice them, and the feeling of danger inherent in any quest for self-acceptance - especially on the part of those marginalized by the masses. It's a story of coming (out?) into one's own. It is a love letter to the fairy tale form and the Disney classics of yore, but also a challenge to their conventions and ideals. Bowman's dynamic performance contains all that turmoil and triumph within it, the totality of it exploding in Act One's 'Let It Go' (reworked here for even greater musical might than the movie) and Act Two's brand-new 'Monster' (which has more oomph in the studio cast recording than on the tour stage, but it's still a powerful identity statement and an indisputable jam.)

Those who haven't encountered INTO THE WOODS before won't miss anything at Theater West End. It's still the story of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Jack the giant chaser, and a baker and his wife and the witch that cursed them all heading into the same woods at the same time for very different reasons. Their journeys intersect in song and scandal as Sondheim spins the yarn of didactic fantasy into the gold of complex moral quandry. The result is a work as nuanced and astute in its reflection on the human condition as any that music theatre has ever had to offer...

It's not every day that Audra McDonald stands twenty feet in front of you and says, 'Tonight, we are all a part of history.' Then again, it's not every day that music history gets made in Orlando - real-deal, textbook-worthy history - so when it does happen, I reckon Audra McDonald is as eager to be a part of it as anyone else...

But even if AIN’T TOO PROUD commits a few sins on its way to Motown glory, it is at least absolved to some extent by the sheer quality of that songbook. And, in the current touring production at Dr. Phillips Center, it gets some extra absolution from its incredibly talented cast...

THE MOUNTAINTOP is a daring and compelling piece of theatre, powerfully staged this month at The Garden Theatre in downtown Winter Garden, FL. It wastes no time in restoring King from the marble statues and speckled newsreels of history to beating heart and flesh and blood...

When Jennifer Hudson sang 'I Will Always Love You' at Dr. Phillips Center on Saturday night, harkening back to her legendary performance of the same at the 54th Grammys, she braced for the 'And I' but, overwhelmed, went with a 'SIR! The way you played that HORN!' instead...

Visiting THE PROM in original stage form will be refreshing for those who know only the Netflix version. It's as if someone grabbed a theatrical scouring pad and scrubbed away all the glitzy, feel-good 'Glee'-dom that made Murphy's take feel slightly sugar-rushed. On stage, THE PROM is refreshingly edgier, campier, and just a smidge more foul-mouthed than in the movie, albeit still unrealistic and all too tidy in the end...

BIG props to the artistic team behind BIG: THE MUSICAL at Garden Theatre. They built a BIG all-wood roller coaster right on stage. It's a beauty to look at, honestly as dazzling as the famous real-deal I rode at Dollywood two weeks ago. You can't ride the Garden's, but it does move. The show's various scene settings, whether a two-story apartment or a Manhattan office building, are hidden within the coaster's twisting support beams and break out to roll downstage. It makes a BIG Impression...

Read our full review of Cirque Du Soleil's New DRAWN TO LIFE show. DRAWN TO LIFE's stagecraft and special effects are second to none. People and objects move about the stage - and through the air - in ways they shouldn't be able to....

CABARET and Theater West End are a match made in the heavens of art direction, so much so that it’s nearly a wonder they hadn’t staged it here til now. The plexiglass partitions even hint at the giant mirror that faced this show’s earliest audiences on Broadway — I caught reflections from performers and patrons on several occasions (including my own) and smiled in appreciation of the unintended nod.

But when all is said and done, after the big speeches are made and the morals have been imparted, TOOTSIE's 1982 DNA proves inextricable. Its parting lesson is fundamentally that women should be women and men should be men. The show's progressivism is limited to a fairly surface-level, lighthearted second-wave feminism that never rises above a 'very special episode' of any '80s sitcom. (Indeed, Michael's apartment set looks strikingly sitcomish, and all the dialogue there fits the bill.)

Actually, LOOPED is more specific than that. The movie in question is Die! Die! My Darling!, and by the time Act I opens, filming has already wrapped. We meet Ms. Bankhead as she barges into a post-production editing room with an F word so boisterous and stylish it could only leap from the lips of a diva. Film editor Danny Miller needs her to dub over a single line of garbled audio. He hopes to wrap that up in mere minutes. Tallulah’s Scotch-drenched dramatics have other plans. The play proceeds in pursuit of that single successfully uttered sentence over two acts...

It is a marvel to fathom the many aptitudes required of Tymisha Harris in crafting and delivering JOSEPHINE, a 75-minute, one-act, one-woman show that the Orlando native co-created and took to New York and international tour. She, like the trailblazer she honors, is a singular force of manifold talent...

This latest production puts the classic tale of Don Quixote and its author in an almost shocking new context - one that's as powerful as it is surprising... Though the dialogue stays the same, with references to the Inquisition intact, Cervantes's prison is very clearly a U.S. immigration detention center in the 21st century...

Spot-on casting is nothing out of the ordinary at Theater West End, nor are tasteful set direction or an overall atmosphere of well-themed festivity. But for all the production's successes, Dennis T. Giacino's musical, as written, never fully realizes its potential...

“THE BODYGUARD on stage sounds fun,” I thought, “but is there really anybody in Winter Garden who can handle Whitney Houston songs for two whole hours?” It turns out there are at least two people up to the task, and The Garden’s got them both...