Ariana DeBose

Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song

September 30, 2024

The spate of Sondheim shows both this past season and opening this fall is given prime place in this musical revue. Unsurprisingly, the new "Merrily We Roll Along" which ran all of last season comes in for the most ribbing as the subtitle hints. Collins-Pisano plays Daniel Radcliffe in a parody of the show’s “Good Thing Going” and then is joined by Stern and Hayward as his co-stars Lindsay Mendez and Jonathan Groff as they review the troubled history of the show which famously flopped in its first Broadway iteration in 1981 in a revised version of the song “Old Friends.” Collins-Pisano sings to that show’s “Franklin Sheppard, Inc.” about Radcliffe's stage career after the Harry Potter films. This is followed by a tribute to "Company" which had a female Bobby to the tune of “Bobby, come on over for dinner.” Most if not all of the "Forbidden Broadway" revues have featured one of its actresses as the ubiquitous Patti LuPone and here we have Stern belting “The Ladies Who Crunch,” the scenery that is, satirizing "Company"’s most famous song. [more]

Summer: The Donna Summer Musical

April 30, 2018

Mr. McAnuff who worked wonders with his direction of "Jersey Boys" here offers a chilly vision that evokes a sterile landscape replicating a heavenly waiting room in connection with Robert Brill’s austere scenic design. The décor is an all-white barren universe with trap doors, platforms and floating panels on which so-so illustrative images by projection designer Sean Nieuwenhuis are shown as well as functional furniture tossed in. The opening image is of an old record player rising from the floor. McAnuff’s presentation is of calculated professionalism absent of spontaneity or joy. [more]

A Bronx Tale

December 14, 2016

On Beowulf Boritt’s set of three apartment towers of fire escapes and store fronts, the musical begins with a doo-wop group singing a cappella in close harmony under a Belmont Avenue sign, setting a properly nostalgic mood. The musical follows the plotline of the original. The main character, the Chazz stand-in, is young Calogero, first seen as a youngster (a wonderfully unaffected Hudson Loverro) and then as a young man (handsome and passionate Bobby Conte Thornton), whose father Lorenzo (Richard H. Blake, totally believable) is a hard-working, honest bus driver and whose mother is a housewife Rosina (Lucia Giannetta who makes the most of a small part). [more]

Motown: The musical

April 18, 2013

In this huge and loving tribute to himself, his music, his stars, Berry Gordy is producing and writing an overstuffed, overcharged, oversized musical in thirty-six settings, fifty-eight songs, twenty-two musicians, forty-one performers, to an additional complement of twenty-nine production entities, and three producers, one of which, of course, is Berry Gordy. [more]