Photo: Joan Marcus Joel Fields had me at “Hello.” He began our phone conversation like this: “A quick hello and let me tell you I can’t believe I’m getting a chance to talk to someone at the Forward. It was such a big part of my childhood. My dad, who passed away in January, was…
Photo: Carol Rosegg Growing up in Australia, Danny Ginges was both fascinated and fearful of the atomic bomb, and as an adult delved deeper into the story of the scientists who created the monster. The more he discovered of these men (and woman) and their top-secret Manhattan Project, the clearer it became that one name…
Photo: Jenny Anderson Bert Berns is the best pop songwriter you never heard of. “Piece of My Heart: The Bert Berns Story” is the best new musical of the summer, and you heard that here first. Berns was an angst-ridden Jewish kid from the Bronx, haunted by a weak heart and a doctor’s predictions that…
To hear it described, or perhaps even to watch it, the thing can seem uncomfortably like a “Family Guy” fantasy-cutaway parody of a Broadway musical. Consider, especially, its finale: two women, quite literally joined at the hip, belting a tender, plaintive anthem titled “I Will Never Leave You.” There is the pathos, the self-seriousness, the…
The plot of “Bullets over Broadway,” the new musical by Woody Allen (with essential help from director Susan Stroman and music “adaptor” and lyrics tweaker Glen Kelly), is built around an elaborate setup. David Shayne, a Greenwich Village artiste in the vein of Eugene O’Neill, discovers to his astonishment that one of his experimental, symbol-laden…
Somewhere in the universe of critics, a Broadway purist will dismiss “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” as just another jukebox show. But don’t mention that to Jarrod Spector, 32, who portrays Barry Mann: “A jukebox musical is something like ‘Mamma Mia,’ where you take a bunch of songs and make up a story around them….
Glen Berger wasn’t surprised when the announcement came. He’d had an inkling that “Spiderman: Turn off the Dark” was on the last of its eight legs well before producers made it official. “I was speaking to some of the actors back in August, and the general feeling was that unless a miracle happens we were…
The publication of Alisa Solomon’s “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof” has seemed to reassert the prominence of “Fiddler” as the Jewish musical to end all Jewish musicals. “Fiddler,” Eileen Reynolds wrote in her review of Solomon’s book, “has achieved something like folklore status in the American imagination, and grapples,…
די ווערק פֿון דרײַ קינסטלער גיבן איבער אַנדערע קוקווינקלען אויף דער אויסראָטונג פֿון ייִדישן לעבן אין מיזרח־אייראָפּע.
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