Bob Abelman covers theater and cultural arts for the Cleveland Jewish News. Follow Bob at Facebook.com/BobAbelman.3
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Shakespeare believed that all the world’s a stage, but only Edinburgh, Adelaide, Prague and a dozen or so other world cities offer international theater and fringe festivals. Add Cleveland to that list.
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Earlier this year, there was an utterly charmless revival of “Man of La Mancha” in London’s West End that was set in modern day surroundings and featured in the title role an unpersuasive actor — Kelsey Grammer — who is famous for things other than musical theater.
Epic. That’s how the $10 million musical “Ragtime” was promoted and critiqued when it arrived on Broadway in 1998.
The sobbing you hear underscoring the production of “Dear Evan Hansen” – currently on tour and on stage at Playhouse Square after being recognized as the best musical on Broadway in 2017 – is coming from both sides of the proscenium. It is the sound of actors lost in their astoundingly hones…
The question to ask theatergoers these days is not “have you seen ‘Mamma Mia!,” but “how many times?”
In 1949, love was legislated in South Africa.
“Nothing will come of nothing,” says Lear, the elderly king of England, when his favorite daughter refuses to dote on him the way her opportunistic, two-faced older sisters do. And so, upon the honorable but undemonstrative Cordelia’s disinheritance and exile, Lear’s great tragedy – triggere…
Chances are good that a film like “The Last,” which takes place during Rosh Hashanah and is about a Holocaust survivor and three generations of her Jewish-American family, will be about rejoicing, introspection and repentance.
Imagine if Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s political satire “Threepenny Opera,” where the characters make life decisions based solely on the desire for material things, was about the Ohio real estate industry. Then picture this play-with-music living inside the grotesque world of a Hieronymu…
Critics whose beat is Broadway were not kind to “Aida,” the Giuseppe Verdi/Antonio Ghislanzoni 19th-century opera-turned-Elton John/Tim Rice pop musical, when the show opened in 2000.
“Little Miss Sunshine” – a wonderfully idiosyncratic 2006 Academy Award-winning indie film – has been turned into an ambitious but poorly conceived and poorly received musical by otherwise successful composer William Finn and writer James Lapine.
Pubs are great places to set a play.