The summer of 2009 was the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock and the end of the sixties. It was also a short summer in New York City. Storms and gray skies reigned over the city for much of the months of June, July and August; but for those still hoping to let the sun shine in a little longer (figuratively or metaphysically) there is one way to reheat the memories of summers’ past: the current Broadway revival of Hair.
Set during the infamous “Summer of Love” of 1967, Diane Paulus’ staging of the Tony-winning musical by Galt MacDermot, James Rado and Gerome Ragni, has a giant sun painted on the back of the theater wall and it is hard not to be warmed by its rays which are metaphorically brought to life by the classic songs and a young, energetic cast.
The legendary original production of Hair began at the downtown Public Theatre in 1967 and then went to Broadway the following April where it ran for four years; this production debuted last summer in Central Park before re-opening on Broadway in March. read more
As if it weren’t enough doing eight Fionas a week in Shrek on Broadway, Sutton Foster has squeezed in two Monday evenings this month at Feinstein’s at the Regency. I missed her February performance in Lincoln Center’s “American Songbook” series, so I made it over to Feinstein’s for the first of these, which took place on April 6 and spotlights songs from Foster’s CD released in February on Ghostlight Records. A second date follows on April 20.
If one of the goals of an evening of cabaret-style songs is to get a more personal view of a singing artist, the picture that emerged from the between-songs banter was of a sweet ingénue with a steely interior: an intensely ambitious and intelligent performing animal who can never get enough of being onstage. On a chilly evening, the 34-year-old Foster flounced onstage in a sleeveless yellow sundress, as if willing the stubbornly slow spring into the room. Yellow seemed like the right color choice for her sunny brand of charm, as she chatted about her childhood in Georgia and played a recorded excerpt of her assertive audio Valentine’s Day message to a childhood sweetheart, saved from a cassette tape she made when she was ten. read more
In his new autobiography, Put on a Happy Face, composer Charles Strouse at one point writes, “If you speak of musical failures, to most people, it’s as boring as hearing about ‘the four hours I spent waiting for a plane at the Buffalo airport.’”
Most people—except for musical-theater fans, that is! America is said to be obsessed with success, but Broadway has a singularly obsessive relationship with failure; no wonder one of the most beloved books about theater, Ken Mandelbaum’s Not Since Carrie, is subtitled “Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops.” It’s not surprising, then, that the most interesting parts of Strouse’s books concern his misfires. read more
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