No question: ticket sales are vital for any performing arts organizations. No creative work is complete until the audience is brought into the mix. It is the lifeblood of the artistic experience. But, the arts also constitute the same realities of business and economics that any other sector of society must contend with in order … Read more
It has been a banner year for musicals in Pioneer Theatre Company’s (PTC) 63rd season. There were the exuberant cavalcade of pop music excellence in Jersey Boys, roof-raising performances in Beautiful, The Carole King Musical and while not a musical per se, the two-hander Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins was … Read more
Looking at current news headlines, one would struggle to find a scintilla of evidence to make a case for the existence of God. The extant American realities are visibly ugly and demoralizing but we also can hope that in countless inconspicuous spaces, there is still fertile ground for human connection, decency, conscience and spiritual intelligence. … Read more
… I’d like to know that your love Is a love I can be sure of So tell me now, and I won’t ask again Will you still love me tomorrow? (Gerry Goffin and Carole King) In 1960, Gerry Goffin and Carole King posed the question in the lyric, “Will you still love me tomorrow?,” … Read more
If World War II had not intervened, Frederick Knott might not have written a play like Dial M for Murder. Before the war, Knott, a talented tennis player at Cambridge, had set his sights on Wimbledon. However, after serving in Britain’s Royal Artillery during the war, he saw writing mainly for the purpose of making … Read more
For the impetus of his 1999 book, For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, Wayne Booth, a prominent American literary critic, recalled how in his sixties he stumbled over the hurdles of trying to master the thumb position down toward the cello’s bridge. An amateur musician, Booth already had been playing for more … Read more
“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past,” James Baldwin wrote in a 1965 essay for Ebony magazine (titled, The White Man’s Guilt). He added, “On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the … Read more
At the end of Jersey Boys, Tommy DeVito says to the audience, “Everyone remembers it how they need to, right?” When the Tony Award-winning musical about Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons premiered on Broadway in 2005, it was among a substantial string of biographical musicals that have emerged during the first two decades of … Read more
The electropop opera Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812 draws the audience into the stage action in ways unlike conventional experiences with musical theater. Take, for example, the rapid-fire exuberance of the Act II sequence comprising Balaga, The Abduction and In My House. On opening night for Pioneer Theatre Company’s (PTC) Utah premiere … Read more
The idea of turning even a rather small part of Leo Tolstoy’s monumental novel War and Peace into a musical would seem daunting, if not damn near impossible. However, Part 8 of the story, which occurs just before the novel’s midpoint, inspired Dave Malloy to do precisely that. Tolstoy, who achieved the epitome of rich … Read more