Monthly Archives: May 2019
Razzle Dazzle Redux
Chicago – Broadway in Chicago
For a show that’s been around for almost four decades, Kander & Ebb’s Vaudevillian satire of the American justice system and, more specifically, of criminals emerging as celebrities, shows no signs of running out of steam. Indeed, the 1996 Broadway production (upon which this National Tour is based), sprang from a crowd-pleasing, well-reviewed NYC City Centers Encores! concert version, and set a record in 1997 for earning the most Tony Awards for a Broadway revival. It’s now the #1 Longest Running Musical, and is still playing in New York after over 7,000 performances. Productions of the show have broken attendance records all over the world and each National Tour proves more popular than the one before it.
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Going Off Road
Mad Beat Hip & Gone – Promethean Theatre Ensemble
I have a confession to make. I have never read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It didn’t make it into a reading list in high school or college, and I think that’s the window for reading it. After that, it’s just never going to float to the top of my perpetually lengthy To Read list. Like Mark Twain once said, a classic is a book everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read.
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Sleuthing the Night Away
The Secret of the Biological Clock – Eclectic Full Contact Theatre
Back in the 1930’s, following the earlier success of his Hardy Boy mystery series, Edward Stratemeyer created a young female sleuth who would become the star of her own string of whodunnits. He named her Nancy Drew. As he did with the Hardy Boys, Stratemeyer wrote the plot outlines and then hired various ghostwriters to flesh out the stories. The Hardy Boy books are credited to the fictional Franklin W. Dixon, while the Nancy Drew novels were published under the pseudonym of Caroline Keene. Nancy is a precocious, independent 16-year-old, greatly influenced by her fictional lawyer father, and an old-fashioned model of the American Girl. Over the years, Nancy’s popularity has never waned, although the character has been continually modernized, bringing the supergirl sleuth into the 21st century.
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