Patrick Honoré reflects on a few Off-Broadway gems from a recent visit to New York… Wonderful Town, New York City City Center Encores! Wonderful Town, as part of Lincoln Center’s venerated Encores! series, continued to affirm its status as a Broadway classic, primarily thanks to Leonard Bernstein’s immortal score, which includes iconic compositions such as […]
Tag Archives | Encores
New York cabaret and Off-Broadway round-up
Cabaret is back, alive and well in New York, as is Off-Broadway, writes Patrick Honoré. Karen Mason: Kander & Ebb and All That Jazz – Birdland ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Directed by Barry Kleinbort and expertly accompanied on the piano by her longtime musical director Christopher Denny, with Ritt Henn on bass, Broadway veteran […]
Flashback: Mack And Mabel – Encores! – New York City Center
Mack and Mabel, an Encores! production, played at New York City Center. Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ With the sudden death of the great Jerry Herman late December, the presentation of Mack and Mabel, one of his own favourite works, as the first musical at City Center this year was a fitting and well-deserved […]
Road Show – Encores! Off-Center – New York City Center
Road Show, an Encores! Off-Center production, played at New York City Center. Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Road Show is a brilliant but daunting enterprise, so all kinds of credit and thanks have to be heaped on the Encores! Off-Center series for giving us another look at it. […]
Me and My Girl – New York City Center
Me and My Girl, an Encores! production, played New York City Center. Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ “Everyone knows Joan of Arc was married to Noah.” Get the audience in the right mood, and a line like that can bring down the house. And that’s exactly what happened as the Encores! series […]
Grand Hotel the Musical – Encores! – New York City Center
Grand Hotel the Musical, an Encores! production, played New York City Center. Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Things don’t go too grandly for the inhabitants of Grand Hotel the Musical. They’re variously faced with heavy debt, murderous threats from creditors, fading and imperiled careers, and fatal disease. Nevertheless, the opulent six-performance revival of this […]
Hey, Look Me Over! – Encores! production – New York City Center
Hey, Look Me Over!, an Encores! production at New York City Center. Star rating: five stars ★★★★★ Hey, Look Me Over!, the first offering in the 25th season of the esteemed Encores! Series at New York City Center, is like a revival meeting, designed to restore any faltering faith we might have in the power […]
The Golden Apple – Encores! – New York City Center
The Golden Apple, an Encores! production, was performed at New York City Center. Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ The Encores! staged concert series of Broadway musicals from the past has closed out its 2017 season in spectacular fashion, with its mounting of a nonpareil gem from 1954, The Golden Apple. With […]
The New Yorkers – Encores! – New York City Center
The New Yorkers, an Encores! production, was performed at New York City Center. Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ “What kind of a show is this, I ask you?” Thus inquires a character in the midst of Act II of the Encores! re-creation of Cole Porter’s 1930 musical The New Yorkers. And […]
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – New York City Center
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, an Encores! Off-Center production at New York City Center, continues until 30 July. Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is hardly a well-known title in the musical theatre canon, but it turns out to be a terrifically entertaining gem that’s spookily relevant […]
Runaways – New York City Center
Runaways, an Encores! Off-Center production at New York City Center. Rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Homeless youngsters flooding the urban streets may not be the news-making epidemic they were some 40 years ago. However, in a superb remounting by Encores! Off-Center, Runaways, Elizabeth Swados’ exploration of the phenomenon, proves to be as relevant and gut-grabbing […]
Cabin in the Sky – Encores! – New York City Center
Cabin in the Sky, an Encores! production, at New York City Center. Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ For reasons perhaps now known only to the musical theatre gods, Cabin in the Sky, when it opened in 1940, was only a moderate success. The critics pretty much liked it, and its African-American […]
Zorba! – New York City Center
Zorba!, an Encores! production, at New York City Center. Star rating: 4 stars ★ ★ ★ ★ Encores!, the series of fully staged concert revivals of musicals from the past, is winding up its 2015 season with a well-crafted mounting of Zorba!, a Kander and Ebb work that premiered on Broadway in 1968. The production makes a case for the […]
Paint Your Wagon – Encores! – New York City Center
Paint Your Wagon – an Encores! production – continues at New York City Center until 22 March. Star rating: 3 stars ★ ★ ★ After Brigadoon but before My Fair Lady and Camelot, the team of book-and-lyric writer Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe explored some Americana in Paint Your Wagon, set during the California Gold Rush […]
Lady, Be Good! – Encores! – New York City Center
Lady, Be Good!, an Encores! production, continues at New York City Center until 8 February. Star rating: 4 stars **** It’s almost worth the price of admission just to hear the orchestra of some 30 musicians romp through the overture of Lady, Be Good!, the 1924 musical that’s being joyfully resurrected as the first offering in the […]
Preview – Tony winners aplenty in Off-Broadway season
Ron Cohen previews an Off-Broadway season packed with Broadway names. As is its custom, Off-Broadway is moving into the New Year with an eclectic array of musical offerings, packed with both revivals and new creations. Some boast prestigious names – including a batch of Tony winners from Broadway – and some are quite curious indeed. Here are some highlights […]
The Band Wagon – Encores! – New York City Center, New York
The Band Wagon continues as an Encores! Special Event at New York City Center, New York until 16 November. ‘That’s Entertainment’, the Arthur Schwartz-A Dietz ode to theatrical storytelling, is practically synonymous with the classic 1953 movie musical, The Band Wagon, where the song was first heard. And the new stage adaptation of The Band […]
Irma La Douce – Encores! – New York City Center
Irma La Douce, an Encores! Production, continues at New York City Center until 11 May. The Encores! series at New York City Center winds up its three-show season with a sprightly rendering of a Broadway hit from 1960, Irma La Douce. This tale of a Parisian streetwalker and the poor law student who becomes her […]
Violet – American Airlines Theatre, New York
Violet continues at the American Airlines Theatre, New York until 10 August. Violet, the eponymous heroine of the musical Violet, tells us early on that she has a “scar that cuts a rainbow clear across my cheek”. It’s the result, we eventually learn, of an accident some 12 years earlier when Violet was 13. Violet was […]
Little Me – Encores! – New York City Center
Little Me, presented by Encores!, continues at New York City Center until 9 February. Little Me, with its book by Neil Simon and its score by lyricist Carolyn Leigh and composer Cy Coleman, captures the joy-giving essence of those two oft-maligned words: musical comedy. This show from 1962 has plenty of great comedy and plenty […]
