Word: broadway
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...strange fever has gripped the New York theater world. It's called The Producers. Mel Brooks' smash Broadway musical reduced even the hardest-boiled critics to Jell-O, snagged every Tony Award in sight, and doesn't have a good seat left until the end of the Bush Administration. It's the musical theater's Second Coming...
...quite. The Producers is a lot of very good things (We love you, Mel!) but adventurous and groundbreaking are not among them. That old Broadway dazzle is fine, but musicals can also provoke us, engage us in fresh ways, push the boundaries of the form. For that you have to look beyond Broadway--where, by chance, three inventive new musicals have arrived to give us something of what Mel and Max Bialystock (Honest, we love you both...
...thing. The late composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson earns our tears even before we walk into the theater. He died, tragically, of an aortic aneurysm just weeks before his soon-to-be-a-hit Rent opened. Now one of his earlier works, Tick, Tick...Boom!, has been revived off-Broadway. It's a slight, autobiographical piece (with a script worked over by David Auburn, author of Proof) about the struggling composer's own angst at reaching his 30th birthday. Yet this Portrait of the Artist as a Young Neurotic makes up for its self-involvement (Jon tries to get his agent...
Whereas Larson's show is sweet and cuddly, Urinetown is blunt and in your face. This Brechtian fable--a sellout hit in its tiny off-off-Broadway theater that is moving to Broadway in August--is set in a city where the water shortage is so dire that private toilets have been outlawed. The play overdoses a bit on winking self-references ("Everything in its time, little Sally," one character says to another. "Nothing can kill a show like too much exposition"), and the promise of sharp political satire is lost on the way to a generic cartoon...
DIED. JERRY STERNER, 62, playwright who penned the 1989 off-Broadway hit Other People's Money; of a heart attack; in New York City. Back when the New York subway cost 15[cents] to ride, Sterner worked the graveyard shift as a token seller. During nearly six years manning his booth, he wrote seven plays...