Category: theatre

“But how could I have missed this feline phenomenon? Me, an honest-to goodness cat-person, always bunking with a few lovable rescues and unable to resist preparing a wet-and-dry banquet for any stray sneaking into my backyard. More to point, how could I have turned a blind eye to a show that set the touristy tone for Broadway for more than a generation?”

“Yasmina Reza, zee French lady who wrote zee play, has OK’d the idea, and so the search is on for four major stars. … Broadway shows with black stars can be box-office gold — and, in many cases, the productions are critic-proof.”

Monday’s “symbolic ground-breaking at the downtown theater complex that produced ‘Hair’ and ‘A Chorus Line’ launched a $35 million, two-year project to expand and modernize the building’s facade and cramped common areas.”

“I’ve sat through ‘anti-war’ theatre from the satire on Lyndon Johnson, McBird, through Rolf Hochhuth’s conspiracist anti-Churchill play Soldiers, to David Hare’s relatively subtle Stuff Happens. I’ve seen dozens of ’em. The thought is — or was — could there be a pro-war play?”

“Both of us lost sensation in the right leg first, and that meant we both stopped feeling the pain of the opera glasses embedding themselves into the right knee. We talked about the show and discussed the prices. She thought they were disgraceful.”

“I should say that I have no truck with those ghoulish groupies who’ve seen The Phantom of the Opera 852 times and regard any sequel as equivalent to painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. No masterpiece has been besmirched. But there is a crucial difference between the two shows.”

“Of course, bad advance word on the Internet has sometimes proved false. (Ever hear of ‘Avatar’?) And I would be delighted to tell you that’s what happened here, especially since ‘Love Never Dies’ is scheduled for Broadway this fall. But how can I, when at every opportunity Mr. Lloyd Webber’s latest sets itself up to be knocked down?”

The new owner of the theatre, “which closed last year after accumulating $10 million in debt,” said that “this first season back is meant to offer stability to a theater that, at one point, was the largest nonprofit theater in the region, with close to 350,000 people attending annually.” The shows will go on with a far smaller house staff.

“Lloyd Webber says the idea of writing the sequel came to him some 15 years ago, in a conversation with Maria Bjornson, the set designer of the original Phantom. ‘I remember saying to her, “You know, I think it’s slightly unfinished business, because all we do is we just leave a mask on a chair,” and what happened?'”

“To understand why East West Players loves Ken Takemoto, ask about ‘the duck.’ The fake fowl – a Rube Goldbergian contraption he created for a 2008 revival of Pippin – shows just how clever, conscientious and cheap the 75-year-old prop master can be.”