Miscast ‘24 – Broadway Unlocked Click here for tickets Regular readers know that this annual cabaret is one of my favourite shows of the year and I never fail to recommend it to you. The Miscast gala is a one-night-only musical spectacular featuring Broadway’s hottest stars performing songs from roles in which they would not traditionally be cast. This is always fun and frequently spectacular as singers who would be too tall, too short, too fat, too unsuitable for the roles they long to play, render songs they will never have the opportunity to sing in the show for which they were written, and sing their socks off. This year’s show will include a tribute to Jason Robert Brown and the singers who have appeared in his shows. Miscast is never less than entertaining and all proceeds go to a good cause. Funds raised from Miscast help to produce some of the most talked-about new work Off-Broadway and support the Youth Company and in-school partnerships that serve New York City public high school students. Some of the stars who will be performing are Lea Salonga, Brian D'Arcy James, Vanessa Williams and a host of others, some of whom will be a surprise on the night. This year’s show will be filmed live at the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC on April 29th and will be available On Demand April 30th-May 5th Gurre-Lieder – BR-Klassik BR-Klassik Index - Click here to browse Click here to watch My friend Hazel has found us a new platform for online classical music concerts. It’s called Br-Klassik, check its Index, and it has a splendid roster of videos including this superb,”Gurre-Lieder”. "Gurre-Lieder" is an oratorio in three parts for soloists, speaker, choir and orchestra by Arnold Schoenberg, performed here by the Isarphilharmonie conducted by Simon Rattle, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchesra with the Bavarian Radio Choir and international singing soloists including Simon O'Neill, Dorothea Röschmann, Jamie Barton, including Thomas Quasthoff as speaker. Sir Simon Rattle describes it as "the wildest, most beautiful, most romantic work imaginable." And he describes why the performance of the Gurre-Lieder has special meaning for him: "As an eleven-year-old in Liverpool, I was fascinated by the largest orchestral score that was in the music library - Schönberg's Gurre-Lieder. The volume was almost as big as me and it was really difficult to bring it home! And now, many years later, I am here to celebrate the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra's 75th birthday with this piece by Arnold Schönberg!" With their gigantic effort of musicians and singers, Schönberg's Gurre songs push almost every concert venue to its capacity limits. A border crossing that is, however, rewarded with an unforgettable music and sound experience, beyond the usual concert experience. The Bavarian Radio Choir and Symphony Orchestra are reinforced by the MDR Broadcasting Choir. I envisage that we’ll be dipping into the BR-Klassik catalogue often in the future. Secrets Behind 'Woman Reading a Letter' – Rijksmuseum Click here to watch The Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) lived and worked in Delft. His work is best known for his tranquil, introverted indoor scenes, his unprecedented use of bright, colorful light and his convincing illusionism. Some of his most famous works are The Love Letter, The Little Street, The Milkmaid and Woman Reading a Letter all of which are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In this video, unusually, the experts take them off the wall and show how and why they photograph the paintings. They show us how they analyze the photo and what they do with the results. The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands dedicated to Dutch arts and history and is located in Amsterdam. The museum has on display 8,000 objects of art and history, from their total collection of 1 million objects from the years 1200–2000, among which are some masterpieces by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Johannes Vermeer. I can’t get enough of these short videos showing the “backstage” of the fine art world which highlight the care with which these paintings are preserved and shown. Here the presenters are Pieter Roelofs, Head of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum, Anna Krekeler, one of the Museum’s conservators and Junior Conservator Mitra Almasium who uses a number of very high-tech pieces of equipment to measure the layers of paint which are invisible to the naked eye. A Man For All Time – Shakespeare Masterclass Click here for tickets This is a four-part series where the great Shakespeare director Trevor Nunn discusses Shakespeare’s plays, why they work, why they’ve lasted, and how to act in them. In this task he has some very high class help, he is aided and abetted by Judi Dench and Roger Allam, along with some very talented and brave drama graduates. In this week of Shakespeare’s birthday, it is well to try to understand why and how these plays endure and give each generation of actors and audiences food for thought, delight in discovery, and joy in experience. In this first part, Trevor Nunn shares a lifetime of insight and familiarity which has led to a deeply personal relationship with William Shakespeare’s canon of work. He directs selected scenes and shares his techniques from Shakespeare's plays in this exclusive masterclass, performed by some of Britain's greatest actors - Dame Judi Dench, Roger Allam, and recent graduate actors Rowan Robinson and Charlie Norton. All four parts are worth seeing but you have to access them one at a time. The last part of this 4-part series concludes with Dame Judi Dench reciting Prospero’s farewell from The Tempest which I tell you without fear of contradiction, is worth the price of admission alone. MORE NEW YORK POCKET REVIEWS Illinoise – St James Theatre Illinoise is a storybook in dance form. A large cast sits around a campfire and each initiates a danced story. Each unrelated story – one about friendship, another about John Wayne Gacy, another about a love affair that goes sour, several others – is told not with dialogue but with gesture and movement. Three fine singers take on the vocal accompaniment of songs by Sufjan Stevens which, if you can understand them, tell the stories in lyrics, and an excellent, widely varied, on-stage orchestra does the job of illuminating the stories with music. Justin Peck is a great ballet choreographer but the modern dance vocabulary he uses here is repetitious and narrow. In contast with his expansive and exquisite dances for Carousel several seasons ago where he used the full range of ballet and modern dance choreography for his ballet-trained dancers, here he limits himself to a small repertoire of ‘music video’ movements, giving his talented but mostly non-ballet dancers little scope to stretch themselves within the stories. Once I’d ‘got’ the emotional point of each story and/or the narrative, I found myself watching the musicians far more than the dancers because the dancesteps and sequences he uses are too similar to one another to differentiate between them. In addition to the choreography, Peck is credited with co-writing the book for Illinoise, with Pulitzer Award-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. This is brave but not entirely successful as, using oft-repeated sequences of movements for different segments makes the storytelling fuzzy. Clearly, early audiences found the show confusing so the programme contains a booklet purporting to be the leading character’s rationale for the show’s frame. There is also a butterfly theme here with the singers wearing butterfly wings but the reason for that escapes me. The Great Gatsby – Broadway Theatre Big, glitzy, encompassing every cliché of the Roaring Twenties, but lacking heart and substance, this looks like a Las Vegas floorshow wasting perhaps the greatest of all American novels by using it as fodder. Despite its star casting, The Great Gatsby musical is a sad disappointment. Doubt: A Parable – Todd Haimes Theatre Just about to close on Broadway is Doubt, with stunning performances from Liev Schreiber as the priest accused of inappropriate behaviour with a student he is trying to help, and Amy Ryan as the nun who, in her inability to recognise a different humanity, accuses him. This is a wonderful play in a spendid production. Zoe Kazan, the young nun who is trying to make sense of the rigid orders from her superior while retaining her own sense of right and wrong, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine as the mother of the boy, are also excellent.
0 Comments
|
AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|