My Broadway Review

The newest production of Our Town is playing in New York and it’s a very new kind of production. Some people go for it on the expectation that they will get a nostalgic feel that they don’t get from most other plays and movies. The new version is more of a modern feel with new kinds of people: it’s much more like a newer kind of town, rather than a 1950’s small town. It seems to work. Plus the audience is put in a place with the rest of the production. They sit pretty much on the stage, with actors in the audience at times, weaving in and out, or sitting down. Don’t worry though, they wont force you to play along the way some shows do. This is a great new interpretation of Wilder’s older show, a little edgy, but it still works for children and families as it always has.

It’s been awhile since we brought up the weekly grosses of the Broadway world. And things have turned around a little bit, at least if you look at the numbers only. But if you look at the particular shows that are doing well, a lot of the ones that are selling better are the same as those selling well back in November and December. But there are a lot more shows up than down. Our guess is that the reason for this is that a lot of the shows that were flailing at that time have since closed their productions. As a result, it doesn’t look so bad. Plus there are fewer shows to compete with one another, so people who visit to see a Broadway show, no matter what, have only x number of shows to choose from. Thus, the shows that remain will go up a little bit. The top two were Chicago and Speed the Plow.

The new musical “The Story of My Life” has been lauded again and again as one of the best shows of the year. But it was kind of odd that people aren’t really noticing what the show actually is. Some of the reviewers really don’t like this show. It has two people in the show, one of whom is an author that went to New York to pursue his career, while the other one is a friend from back home who hoped that he could be friends with the author still. But it didn’t work. But this is about all there is. The reviewers seem to think that the the characters are hard to believe and also just don’t accept very much in the way of the plot pieces. The actors are good, but the material is bad. Read more about Story of my Life.

Without much to think about on Broadway, we have continued to review things that may come to Broadway at some point in the future. Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is one of the exciting recent shows that is playing. Perhaps exciting isn’t the right world. But it’s definitely a great show, being performed well. It holds the fun irony that Chekhov apparently had in mind with this particular show, which explores way that unreasonable women can take the best minds and take them off their game. It’s kind of an interesting show and the acting is great. The only problem that the reviewer had was that the set was a bit impractical and distracting, being two stories high and kind of hard to use in the production. Otherwise, it seems like a worthwhile show to check out if you’re in the area.

While it isn’t Broadway as such, it is a major professional show right now. Rod Blagojevich Superstar! is one of the funniest shows onstage right now. The show takes the former Illinois governor and mercilessly mocks him, his wife, and several other characters in this real-life political drama. They don’t really tone down the well known Blago cursing and get his wife really into the deal. It doesn’t take much to make comedy out of these characters and the Second City crew has put together a great new show. Last year, they did between “Barack and a Hard Place” and now they have this in their continuing line of timely shows. Read about Blagojevich Superstar! here.

A virtually unknown Rogers and Hammerstein show is being performed by the Encore! theater company. “Music in the Air” is one of the shows that you don’t hear much about. It is over 70 years old, like many of their early musicals. It is about two rural musical writers from Bavaria who go to Munich for their big break and end up stuck in the hidden world of musical theater. It’s a good show, because it allows the writers to sharpen their satirical chops. But the satire of that many years ago seems a bit overdone or hokey now. It’s kind of a sad thing to see such a good show get so worn down, but that’s natural after all that time.

As you surely know, Will Ferrell has been on Broadway this winter and into the spring in his “You’re Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush.” People really this show! It is considered to be one of the better shows on Broadway at the moment. It is what SNL hasn’t been very much in many years. Clever. Pithy. Right on the mark. For the full 90 minutes, Ferrell entertains the audience and gets a lot of the issues out of the way that have happened over the course of the last 8 years. It’s sort of unfortunate that we have to make fun of leaders, but when you see someone all day every day for a long time, it gets easy. Ferrel has put all of that together into a fun concentrated bit of comedy.

The Eugene O’Neill Sea Plays are some of his least performed works of all time. We’re not sure why it’s so rarely played, but it does seem to be a good work to see. At the Goodman Theater in Chicago, these one-act plays were performed until this last weekend. And they were apparently very good performances. It was presented by a theater troupe out of Brazil and it was performed in Portuguese. One of the things that I find most interesting is in one of the plays where they bring the audience onstage to show them the “fall of a sailor” and then they take them backstage to see what seems like the inside of a ship. It’s a cool sounding show. It’s closed now, but maybe it’ll be shifting off to another city along the way.