Michael Dale - Page 19

The willingness to suspend disbelief is a long-standing tradition in live theatre, and as long as playwrights and directors firmly establish their boundaries of realism, it's reasonable for audience members to go along with them.

During the first half of the 20th Century, there was no artist as important to the development of American musical theatre from strictly light entertainment to a legitimate dramatic art form that addressed controversial issues and exposed the country's uglier norms than bookwriter and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.

While audiences gather at Lincoln Center to see Lerner and Lowe's musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's classic, there's a different kind of Pygmalion story being played out at Studio 54, where Mark Medoff's 1980 Tony winner for Best Play, Children of a Lesser God is receiving its first Broadway revival.

The current American president is never mentioned in bookwriter/lyricist Quiara Alegria Hudes and composer/lyricist Erin McKeown's lovely and touching chamber musical MISS YOU LIKE HELL.  But even though the piece has been in development well before anyone thought of the former reality TV star as a serious candidate, his presence is well-felt in their story of an undocumented Mexican-American mom who is facing deportation while trying to rebuild her relationship with her citizen daughter.

There's a theory, hopefully an accurate one, that the things that make you an outcast in high school are the things that make you awesome as an adult. And maybe that's why scenes in the buoyant new musical Mean Girls are often stolen by the Mathletes, the activist artist, the tap dancers and the kid who decided to attend the Halloween party as sexy Rosa Parks.

Magazine ads and television commercials may reach millions more, but perhaps the highest compliment I can pay Havana Club Rum's immersive theatre experience, AMPARO, is that it effectively guides visitors through a brief history of the company's trailblazing founding family, including generous tastes of both Cuban culture and their sugar cane libation, without ever feeling like a sales pitch.

Broadway's legendary composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim will be making a guest appearance next season on Rachel Bloom's musical romantic comedy television series 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' in an episode which will premiere a song from his upcoming musical based on two films by Spanish director Luis Buñuel.

Older character men hungry for fresh scenery to chew will certainly look forward to the day when Shem Bitterman's The Stone Witch becomes available for regional and amateur productions.

It's been nearly three decades since the superb stage artist Glenda Jackson took her last opening night bow on Broadway, playing Lady Macbeth in 1988. Since then she's been working in the somewhat less scripted field of British politics, serving in Parliament for over twenty years.

As with the Broadway season's earlier pop concert extravaganza, HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS, this theatre critic readily admits to not exactly being an ideal arts journalist to authoritatively review the touring rock anthem/classical music fusion concert called Rocktopia that has made a stop at the Broadway Theatre. Though my knowledge of the highbrow oeuvre is perhaps slightly higher than a layperson's, my experience with classic rock power ballads rarely extends further than the snippets heard at baseball and hockey games or during the occasional car commercial.

The best news coming out of 44th Street these days is that the refurbishing of the Helen Hayes Theater has been completed and that Second Stage, while retaining its longtime Off-Broadway home one block down, has set up residency, making the intimate playhouse Broadway's only venue exclusively dedicated to works by living American authors.

It wasn't exactly a stellar weekend for Donald Trump. Nationwide protest rallies condemned his party's relationship with the NRA, a woman revealed on national television that her life was threatened if she went public with details of their affair, and as for the cherry on top, ANGELS IN AMERICA: A GAY FANTASIA ON NATIONAL THEMES, has returned to Broadway.

Though the songwriting team of Robert Wright and George Forrest is best remembered by Broadway enthusiasts for adapting the music of Edvard Grieg into SONG OF NORWAY and similarly using the melodies of Alexander Borodin to create their score for KISMET, their greatest success came when director/choreographer Tommy Tune took interest in a musical of theirs that fizzled into obscurity on its way to Broadway, then known as AT THE GRAND.

It was less than five years ago when little girls around the globe were presented with a computer-animated rebellious role model who was fed up with hiding her true self to conform to other people's ideas of what it meant to be a 'good girl' and, quite literally, dropped her gloves in defiant celebration of what makes her unique.

Typically, the immediate attraction between Cinderella and the handsome prince is presented as simply a matter of physical chemistry, but in Company XIV's newest variation of Charles Perrault's classic, the true bonding between the two occurs because they're both captivating aerialists.

The smiling, bobbing head and swaying shoulders of the self-proclaimed Parrothead who accompanied this Jimmy Buffett neophyte to the breezy fun new jukebox musical comedy, ESCAPE TO MARGARITAVILLE, seemed proof enough that fans of the Mississippi-born singer/songwriter known for carefree Caribbean-inspired melodies should have a swell time.

Innovative genius Norman Lear will forever be remembered for expanding the limits of what television comedy could do by bringing Archie Bunker, and his everyday brand of casual and not-so-casual bigotry, into American homes every week and hold him up to public ridicule.

Teaser:  There is a knockout of a surprise moment, cleverly devised and wonderfully played, contained within Pulitzer-winner Bruce Norris' mini-epic THE LOW ROAD, now getting a rollicking production at The Public, with a terrific ensemble of players guided by the talented hand of director Michael Grief.

'We take care homes,' a Polish immigrant living in New York's Borough of Queens bluntly explains to a young newcomer from Ukraine who has yet to get settled. 'Us kinds people, we take care house. Men, they build them and women, they clean them. Take care children. Rest this country handles rest this country. But us, we do homes.'

Historically, it hasn't been unusual for writers like Amantine Lucile Dupin (better known as George Sand) and Nelle Harper Lee (published as Harper Lee) to take on traditionally male or androgynous names to help advance their careers in a patriarchal world by allowing publishers and readers to make their own assumptions regarding the author's gender.