Home > June, 2008

San Francisco’s unique musical theater company, 42nd Street Moon, kicks off its 16th season with a celebration of Tony Award-winning Broadway composer Charles Strouse on Monday, June 30: You’ve Got Possibilities: Celebrating the Musicals of the 1960s and an 80th Birthday Salute to Charles Strouse.
Strouse won his Tony Awards for Bye, Bye Birdie in 1960, [...]

Before we get started, here’s a taste of A Chorus Line with current cast member Mario Lopez and the cast on “Dancing with the Stars”

If you think you’re “uncommonly rare, very unique, peripatetic, poetic and chic” then this contest may be for you.

In preparation for the arrival of the A Chorus Line national tour at [...]

Cabaret review: Andrea McArdle

Posted by Chad Jones on 27 Jun 08 - 3 Comments

Andrea McArdle, famous for being a Broadway belter at age 12, swears she’s going to write a book. “But I need to wait for a few people to go to a happier place,” she says.

I, for one, can’t wait to read the book. If McArdle’s opening-night at the Rrazz Room on Thursday is any indication, [...]

Variety reports that Andrew Lippa’s musical version of The Addams Family is moving full steam ahead.
In a closed reading in August, Gomez will be played by Nathan Lane (not often you think of Lane in a role once inhabited — onscreen — by Raul Julia) and Morticia will be played by Bebe Neuwirth. How perfect [...]

My fair Julie: Ms. Andrews recalls `Home’

Posted by Chad Jones on 25 Jun 08 - 0 Comments

I share the above photo not because I have a huge ego and want the world to know I had a few quality moments with Dame Julie Andrews, one of my favorite people on the planet. Wait – that’s exactly what I wanted by sharing the photo, which was taken at a stem cell research [...]

`Blonde’ boredom begins

Archived in the category: Broadway, Legally Blonde, MTV, Seth Rudetsky, TV, musicals
Posted by Chad Jones on 24 Jun 08 - 0 Comments

The girls meet the dogs on MTV’s “Legally Blonde the Musical: The Search for Elle Woods.”
Photo courtesy of MTV.
It’s Week 4 on MTV’s “Legally Blonde the Musical: The Search for Elle Woods,” and we started with eight girls and ended with six. By the end of this recap I’ll tell you who got dumped, so [...]

Jeune Lune closes shop

Posted by Chad Jones on 23 Jun 08 - 0 Comments

Tony Award-winning Minneapolis-based theater company Theatre de la Jeune Lune will cease to exist as we know it. And those of us in the Bay Area know it thanks to Jeune Lune’s frequent collaborations with Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The company was just here with its gorgeous production of Figaro, and now comes news that there [...]

As a critic at the Oakland Tribune and its sister newspapers, one of my greatest pleasures was instituting a teen theater critic internship, and it was my luck to launch the program with Leslie Ribovich, who was then a senior at Albany High School. For much of her final year in high school, she would [...]

Review: `Snapshots’

Archived in the category: Stephen Schwartz, TheatreWorks, theater review
Posted by Chad Jones on 22 Jun 08 - 1 Comment

Opened June 21, 2008 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts

The cast of TheatreWorks’ Snapshots creates scenes from the life of a married couple set to recycled Stephen Schwartz songs. Photos by David Allen

 
Stephen Schwartz songbook turns into Snapshots revue«««

The idea of a musical revue was green before we even knew what green [...]

Continues through July 26 at the Campbell Theatre, Martinez

Michael Scott Wells and Alexandra Creighton scare off Candarian demons in Evil Dead: The Musical, a Willows Theatre production at the Campbell Theatre in Martinez. Photos courtesy of Willows Theater.
Singing and bleeding in horror musical«« ½

Adding the words “the musical” to a title is, in some cases, [...]