All in Music That Makes Me Dance
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?
Read More »
Auditioning for musical theatre can be a daunting, stressful, enjoyable, exhilarating, adrenaline- inducing experience all rolled into one short bid to secure yourself work as a performer. Dedicated musical theatre performers are always looking for ways to improve their auditions as singers, actors, and dancers. Having been on both sides of the table as an actor and a director, I have looked at this issue from two perspectives. Having consulted with other casting directors over the years, a pattern has emerged in what we directors most-want actors to be ready for when they enter that audition room. Here are some items that focus on the singing and acting do’s and don’ts you may (or may not) have thought about, but that will hopefully lead to a more successful audition experience for you.
I remember being in college in the early 1990s and bussing into NYC from SUNY Cortland to see Broadway shows. The early 1990s was an exciting time on Broadway. This was just around the time that Times Square started to shift from a place of dilapidated XXX movie houses interspersed with the occasional Broadway show, the classy theatre havens looking glaringly out of place amid the seediness, hustlers and hookers. It was a glorious place.
Have you ever picked up a Broadway cast recording that you’d only vaguely heard of (or had never heard of), listened to it and said “This score is so good! Why isn’t this show being performed all the time?”. Just because a Broadway show has problems, it doesn’t always mean that the score is bad. In fact, many flop or troubled musicals have superior scores that will make you keep wondering “Was that musical AWFUL or WONDERFUL?”. Here are nine cast albums that will keep you wondering why that musical wasn’t a bigger hit.
