Review: NAUGHTY MARIETTA at Kirkwood Performing Arts Center
by Steve Callahan - Mar 11, 2024
Winter Opera continues it’s seventeenth season with another iconic operetta—Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta. This lovely old show premiered in 1910. It was produced by the first Oscar Hammerstein (the grandfather of you-know-who). In 1935 a movie version was made—with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.
KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival @ Home Announces Day 8 Lineup
by Stephi Wild - Sep 22, 2020
Have you ever wondered why the KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival takes place in mid-September? It's because the festival began with a group of representatives from area universities as well as arts and cultural organizations.
BWW Review: LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST at Winter Opera St. Louis
by Steve Callahan - Mar 9, 2020
St. Louis's wonderful Winter Opera closes it's thirteenth season with a fine production of a rarely-seen work by Puccini--La fanciulla del West, or The Girl of the Golden West. Now Puccini was fond of choosing exotic settings for his operas--look at Madama Butterfly and Turandot. Well, to a European, Fanciulla is equally exotic. It's set in a mining camp in the Sierra Nevadas during the California Gold Rush of 1848.
TV: FROZEN Cast Surprises Audience with Tribute to OKLAHOMA! on its 75th Anniversary
by Robert Diamond - Apr 1, 2018
Jelani Alladin (Kristoff), Greg Hildreth (Olaf), John Riddle (Hans) and the entire cast of the new Broadway hit Frozen surprised the sold-out house at the St. James Theatre this afternoon with a tribute to Rodgers & Hammerstein's classic musical Oklahoma!, which opened at the St. James Theatre 75 years ago today, on March 31, 1943.
BWW Review: THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE at Marquee Theater Company
by John Lariviere - Aug 2, 2017
Marquee Theatre Company and Producer Miles McKee proudly present the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie at the West Boca Performing Arts Theater. Based on the 1956 British musical Chrysanthemum, the successful film version of Thoroughly Modern Millie in 1967, starring Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore, Carol Channing and Beatrice Lilly, sparked a bit of a cult following that paved the way for a Tony Award winning stage version in 2002.
Tickets Go On Sale 7/15 for Artist Series Concerts' 2017-2018 Season
by A.A. Cristi - Jul 11, 2017
Tickets for Artist Series Concerts of Sarasota's 22nd season will be available online beginning July 15 at www.artistseriesconcerts.org. The season, which features a dynamic line-up of established and emerging classical, cabaret, jazz and pops artists, runs September 2017 through May 2018. The performances will be held at a variety of venues throughout Sarasota County.
Liliane Montevecchi and Karen Akers to Star in WE'LL TAKE A GLASS TOGETHER
by BWW News Desk - Jun 19, 2017
Tony Award winner Liliane Montevecchi headlines an all-star cast in in The Ziegfeld Society's We'll Take a Glass Together: The Songs of Wright & Forrest from MGM to Grand Hotel, the final event of The Ziegfeld Society's 2016-2017 season. The musical revue will be presented for one performance only, on Saturday, June 24th at 3:30 pm at Lang Concert Hall (69th Street between Park and Lexington).
BWW Review: National Tour of PHANTOM Continues to Enchant Nashville Audiences
by Jeffrey Ellis - Mar 12, 2016
After 28 years, more than 10,000 performances on Broadway (where it reigns as the longest running show in history), countless tours and with rabid fans greeting the show at every stop, Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera continues to amaze and delight, as noted in its press opening at Nashville's Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Andrew Jackson Hall on March 11.
BWW Review: SUNSET BOULEVARD at The Larry Keeton Theatre
by Jeffrey Ellis - Feb 26, 2016
There is an iconic scene in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of Sunset Boulevard - based on the memorable film by Billy Wilder - in which Norma Desmond returns triumphantly (in Norma's myopic view of life since the talkies spelled an end to silent pictures, in which she made her fortune with her expressive face) to Paramount studios for an impromptu meeting with Cecil B. DeMille on the set of Samson and Delilah. Impressively played by Ginger Newman in the Nashville debut of Sunset Boulevard at The Larry Keeton Theatre, Norma is beautifully clad in haute couture, generating star power and unaware that she has slipped into obscurity for the most part, her legions of fans decimated by time and the general vagaries of life.
BWW Reviews: 'Don't Sit Under the Chandelier with Anyone Else But Me' - PHANTOM Haunts the Orpheum
by Joseph Baker - Sep 29, 2014
When Gaston Leroux published THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA back in 1911, little did he realize the numerous chandeliers that would come crashing down through the decades, and I've witnessed a good number of them. First, in 1925, there was 'the Man of a Thousand Faces,' Lon Chaney, Sr., who frightened poor Mary Philbin (a well-done version, even IF the film was silent); then, for Universal in 1941, Claude Rains (Bette Davis' favorite co-star) was a more subdued vocal coach for soprano Susanna Foster (a wooden Nelson Eddy, alas, is a greater impending horror as 'Raoul'). I could go on - even Herbert Lom, the actor who was the harried police superior to Peter Sellers' 'Inspector Clousseau,' took a swing on the old light fixture. (And let us not forget diminutive Paul Williams in the slightly askew PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE.) All of these pale, of course, in comparison to the legendary interpretation by Michael Crawford in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which first brought the audience to its feet in 1986.