Word: schonberger
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Miserables After 10 years on Broadway, the Alain Boublil-Claude-Michel Schonberg musical had fallen into serious disrepair. So directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird became their own show doctors, replacing much of the cast and giving the production a thorough overhaul. Mon Dieu! Les Miz is back and as rousing as ever. Now, about Miss Saigon...
Stripping the Guerre story of its suspense, composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and lyricist Alain Boublil establish from the start that the new, improved Martin is a fraud--and a godsend to the virgin wife Bertrande. That's fine; we want to know why she connives in the deception. But the plot is hoked up with religious pieties (Huguenots are the new Bosnians) and a psycho villain desperate to take any Martin's place in Bertrande's bed. It's Romeo and Juliet without the poetry, or an Oklahoma! that...
...peasants' garb, nicely creased and Rinso white. One thing about these villagers: they've all seen Riverdance; Bob Avian's choreography has the heavy-footed agility of that hit Irish dance show. The choral harmonies do have a vaulting magnificence, as 30 or so voices pump out Schonberg's anthems. But director Declan Donnellan (who, for his own Cheek by Jowl troupe, staged a superb As You Like It) can't make the drama sing. Guerre is big; it should have been grand...
...miniature. Based on P.G. Wodehouse's tales of the supreme upper-class twit Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves, a Zen master of irony, By Jeeves has a blitheness that makes the audience feel as if it's on a holiday from the huffery and puffery of the Boublil-Schonberg musicals (and of Sir Andrew's overblown Sunset Blvd...
...endless applicability, Les Miserables is successful simply because it is one of the most entertaining pieces of theater to surface during the last decade. In 23,000 performances since Cameron Mackintosh and the Royal Shakespeare Company first produced it in London, thirty-six million people have enjoyed Claude-Michel Schonberg's memorable melodies and Herbert Kretzmer's powerful, alarmingly addictive lyrics...