“Do I think these virtual concerts and productions are replacing live theater and shows? Nope. Not even a little bit. But they are helping to fill a void in my life.”
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If you had asked me before last weekend which of the two shows I was going to see would have the most profound impact on me, I would have said Come from Away. The music and lyrics to that show moved me to tears before seeing it on stage. And yet it’s Dear Evan Hanson that caused the ugly crying (multiple times) and is the one I’m still pondering days later.
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A local community opera company, Greater Worcester Opera (GWO) is performing, “The Mikado” in June. When I first saw the notice for auditions, I was perplexed. Admittedly, I don’t know much about opera, but I do know a few things about The Mikado. It’s a Gilbert and Sullivan piece, written in the latter half of the 19th century, and is fraught with controversy with yellow-face” performances (in the not-to-distant-past) and for its stereotyped portrayal of Asian people and cultures. In 2019, it seemed an odd choice to perform. I reached out to the Executive Director, Elaine Crane, to ask why. Why this opera and why now.
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A meme or photo (not sure the difference tbh) posted on this site made a joke about time traveling to see closed Broadway shows, which made me think about shows I'd see if time travel was possible. To keep this piece under 10,000 words, I limited myself to five shows. I further narrowed it to shows that are no longer running (i.e., not going back to the opening night of Hamilton) AND limiting the list to shows I never saw if they originally ran during my lifetime. Here are my time travel shows in no particular order.
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Since I last posted my life has turned upside down. In the best way- my daughter arrived 8 weeks ago. Now that I'm starting to understand this new normal I can finally write again. One of my previous articles discussed the songs and musical soundtracks I made baby girl listen to in utero. This first article back highlights my Broadway baby's lullabies!
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Recently Newsies announced that its rights are open for community theaters to perform. What made this announcement even more special was the knowledge that part of the Newsies ensemble could include females. (Someone needs to give me a couple years to have my baby and get back into tapping shape so I can be in that ensemble but I digress.)
In the community theater world, there’s always talk of gender swapping within shows and roles. This is the first major production I’ve heard of which explicitly allows for the inclusion of females into what has been traditionally a male ensemble. I want to look at some other shows and roles that might benefit from a male to female gender swap. Granted this is just a wishlist, knowing that doing anything like this would require permission first.
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Last month, I saw the movie release of the musical Bandstand. Thank God for cinema releases (seriously industry people keep them coming!) because this show resonated with me in a way few have and in ways I wasn’t expecting.
At first glance this looks like another post-World War II story; boys returning home from war, picking up where they left off, finding love, etc. That’s not this show at all. It’s a real, gritty, perfectly imperfect look at what happens when men and women have seen and dealt with horrific circumstances, and how each individual deals with those demons. This is the first time I’ve seen a show that so accurately portrays the horrors of war and what it must truly have been like for the majority of soldiers returning. This is the first time a show with such a seemingly unrelated topic resonated so much with my life.
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Imagine you’re a chemistry or biology college student. You’ve spent weeks preparing your lab and have timed everything perfectly. You and your lab partner double checked the equations, and experiments are chugging away. There’s still a couple more weeks of monitoring to go before your work is finished, but you’re feeling pretty good. Now imagine being told that the lab is needed to host a special visitor and that your experiments must be removed. The “compromise” is that you can move to a smaller lab which doesn’t have the right equipment, so all your months of hard work will be lost. You have no say in the matter and nor does your faculty advisor- the college administration made all these decisions for you and without your knowledge or input. This would never happen, right? No one would dream of asking a science student to uproot their work at the last minute. Yet this is exactly what played out at Westfield State University (WSU) and their theatre students.
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I want to offer a rebuttal to the piece submitted on this site regarding three upcoming musical revivals, Kiss Me Kate, My Fair Lady and Carousel. Upon first glance they all seem horribly outdated, misogynistic and not conducive to the landscape that is 2018. I argue that with the right direction and treatment, they can be very timely and have important lessons to share.
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