All tagged Max Von Essen

My Fair Lady: What Does the Perfect Cast Look Like?

This week we received some exciting news via Lincoln Center announcing that Bartlett Sher will be directing My Fair Lady for LCT’s Vivian Beaumont in 2018. My Fair Lady has not returned to the Broadway stage since Richard Chamberlain and Melissa Errico starred in a 1993 revival, and that production was not exactly embraced as definitive. Bartlett Sher is a master of staging in the Beaumont’s space, a luxuriously open thrust where the audience wraps around the playing area. He has mined many magical moments on this stage, probing the possibilities of the space with productions of The Light in the Piazza, South Pacific, and The King and I. My Fair Lady is an elegant show, one of the wittiest and most-intellectual of Broadway musicals (based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion), featuring a lush and literate Lerner and Loewe score. How can we not be excited to see how Sher marries this sparkling property with the space where he works his best magic?

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An American in Paris and Gigi Cast Recordings: Are They “Magnifique”?

Two Broadway musicals opened this spring, each one set in Paris and each one based on a film directed by Vincenete Minnelli. An American in Paris and Gigi both won Academy Awards for Best Picture, and both boasted the involvement of Alan Jay Lerner as screenwriter (Lerner also provided the lyrics for Gigi). One of these musicals bowled critics and audiences over, receiving awards and ticket sales. The other limped along with mediocre attendance, disappointed critics, and was mostly ignored by the Tony nominating committee.