| Phone lines cause Broadway delay | | Posted Sunday, August 27, 2006 2:22:19 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | City officials say they are at "wit's end" over a Broadway street resurfacing job that should have taken only three weeks but instead has taken most of the summer. Private contractors, however, say the city should have known about buried utility lines, which are to blame for the delay. At issue is a 900-foot section of Broadway near the entrance of Southeast Missouri State University. Due to the discovery of an AT&T phone line and various shortcomings on the part of contractors and subcontractors, the city engineer's office said, the project will not be finished until Sept. 4. It began June 28. "We're almost at our wit's end with this one," said city engineer Jay Stencel. The $130,000 project is just one component of the city's summer resurfacing program. Contractors are widening Broadway by 2 feet, replacing sidewalks, curbs and gutters, and overlaying asphalt.... | |
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| | | A Chorus Line (1975 Original Broadway Cast) | | Posted Friday, August 25, 2006 8:11:42 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | Michael Bennett's 1975 tale of Broadway's gypsies--the chorus dancers--resonated with audiences as few shows ever have, examining with both hilarity and heartbreak the grueling life of ordinary performers always auditioning for an opportunity to be members of a faceless chorus line. And along the way, it picked up the Pulitzer, the New York Drama Critics Award, and nine Tonys, and became the longest-running show in Broadway history. The original cast (eight of whom contributed their real-life memories to the show) included no major stars, but are unmatched on this cast recording of Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban's score, including Priscilla Lopez's poignant "Nothing," Donna McKechnie's yearning dance number "The Music and the Mirror," one of Broadway's most famous torch ballads in "What I Did for Love," and the ultimate high-kicking chorus number, "One." Fans of the show will welcome the 1998 remastered CD, which adds two and a half minutes to "Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love." While still incomplete, the montage now includes "Four-foot ten," "Little brat," and "The worst thing in school...." --David Horiuchi... | |
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| | | [title of show] (2006 Original Off-Broadway Cast) | | Posted Wednesday, August 23, 2006 8:11:44 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | The mysteriously monickered [title of show] turned into an unlikely-but well-deserved-Off-Broadway hit in 2006. A large part of the show's appeal is that it's a true Broadway geekfest. It tracks the songwriting team of Jeff and Hunter as they attempt to come up with a musical very, very quickly if they're going to make a festival's deadline--kinda like the real authors of [title of show], Jeff Bowen (music and lyrics) and Hunter Bell (book), who also are part of the cast. We follow them as they race through various stock plots and characters, and then negotiate obstacle course such as finding backers, casting singers, and dealing with publicity. Bowen and Bell ingeniously integrate in-jokes about musical theater and its place in the culture at large ("Who wants to see Paris Hilton in The Apple Tree?") and set them to music so catchy it transcends the minimal arrangements (that'd be piano and...well, that's it). [title of show] shows what you can do with little money but lots of ideas and what seems like a bottomless reservoir of fun. Think of it as an update of the old MGM musicals in which Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney would put on a show in a barn. --Elisabeth Vincentelli... | |
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| | | Grey Gardens (2006 Original Off-Broadway Cast) | | Posted Tuesday, August 15, 2006 6:11:54 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | Based on the Maysles brothers' cult 1975 documentary of the same name, this musical is an endearing--and sometimes genuinely heartwrenching--oddity propelled by Christine Ebersole's exceptional, for-the-history-books performance. The movie followed the kooky duo of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie Beale, as they lived with their 52 cats in a derelict East Hampton mansion. The show's first act, set in 1941, is a prologue of sorts, while the second act, set in 1973, follows the movie closely. Ebersole plays Edith in Act I (which she concludes in dazzling manner with "Will You?") and Little Edie in Act II (when Mary Louise Wilson comes in to play the mother). And while Wilson is superb, this is Ebersole's show. Technically, she is flawless--just listen to the way she changes her voice between the acts--but she also makes Little Edie a poignant eccentric, a lost soul stuck in a world of deluded, decaying grandeur. It all peaks in the poignant "Around the World," the show's best song and an Ebersole tour de force. Note that this recording documents the Off-Broadway production; the show transferred to Broadway in the fall of 2006 with a slightly altered first act. --Elisabeth Vincentelli... | |
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| | | Tarzan - The Broadway Musical | | Posted Wednesday, July 19, 2006 2:11:46 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | With its rich film catalog, Disney has a natural advantage when it comes to expanding into musical theater. But 1999's Tarzan wasn't the very best choice for a stage adaptation. Unlike, say, Beauty and the Beast, whose score was written by show-tune vets, Tarzan was associated with a musical-theater newbie, Phil Collins, who expanded his original score for the show, writing nine new numbers in addition to the five from the movie. But while he does come up with agreeable pop melodies (as, for instance, the hit "You'll Be in My Heart" and the new "Waiting for This Moment" and "For the First Time"), his greenness shows in the lyrics, which tend to spell things out way too much ("In learning you will teach/And in teaching you will learn," etc.) This CD certainly is kid-friendly, but unlike the best Disney material, it lacks that extra layer that would entice adults as well. --Elisabeth Vincentelli... | |
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