Reviews of the Bosch

It seems like pro-shot films of popular stage musicals are starting to have a comeback with movie audiences. Quite a few people turned out last year when Merrily We Roll Along , the multi Tony-winning 2023 revival of a previously underrated and unsuccessful Stephen Sondheim show came to a theatre nearby. When I attended Hadestown last weekend, it was very nearly a sold-out show, which rarely happens for even the most popular movies. There’s an appetite and I hope it continues to grow. Because it means that those of us not privileged to live in London or New York can catch these extremely popular shows in their full context rather than piecing them together from soundtrack albums, low-quality bootlegs, or often lower-quality amateur performances. Waiting for them to come to you on stage can be impractical or inconceivable -and even then it would likely be a very different experience than the one everyone raves about. Much as musicals are ideally meant to be produced and performed by a...

  We arrive at the end of Musical Theatre Month with the one show I have seen before. Twice in fact; and I’ve listened to the original West End and Broadway recordings, and seen the tenth anniversary concert performance from 1995, and watched the bad movie adaptation. Les Miserables  is probably my favourite musical, as it is for so many people who aren’t avid musical lovers. It’s one of the only musicals that has really transcended its’ form in a way and spoken to those outside of the interest sphere of musical theatre. I mean there’s a lot in there that resonates: the call to revolution and condemnation of cruel and incompetent government, the Dickensian sympathy towards the poor, the theme of redemption, religious piety vs. following the precepts of Jesus, star-crossed romance, the list goes on. And all of these are emphatically represented in the fervor of the songs and the passion behind every one -the only musical I’ve seen where just about every song is great. Victor Hu...

Kinky Boots  is by far the most recent musical I’m covering this month. Twenty-two years separate it from the last, and along with it, numerous changes in the development and culture of musicals themselves. This was not a choice by design,  Kinky Boots  was merely a popular musical that had a good filmed version readily available. But it is a fortunate one. Because  Kinky Boots  is really a staple modern musical, indicative of what a lot of modern musicals are trying to be and to achieve. For one thing, it is a good example of a relatively new phenomenon, one that didn’t really exist when  Phantom of the Opera  or  Jesus Christ Superstar  or  Miss Saigon  premiered: the musical based on a movie. Shows like  The Lion King  and  The Producers  can arguably be pointed to as having started the trend, but the last decade especially has been inundated with so many musicals based off of movies that it’s become a cliché....

I was both excited and nervous to see Miss Saigon . Excited because it is a musical by Claude-Michael Sch ö nberg and Alain Boublil, the team that created Les Mis ; nervous because they are white men writing about Vietnamese characters, their relationship to America, and the Vietnam War. I was right to be both. Miss Saigon  is therefore a complicated musical for me that I find I like and dislike in about equal measure. A transplant of the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly , already a pretty problematic source, from imperial Japan to wartime Vietnam, it is the love story of a poor Vietnamese prostitute and an American G.I., and her attempts to reunite with him in the years following his discharge. It premiered in 1989, so naturally the version I watched was the recorded 25 th  anniversary show in 2014 at the Prince Edward Theatre in the West End, and we’ll talk about the problems with that later. Firstly, the shows’ plot is rather typical and rather typically melancholy for storie...

Round two with Andrew Lloyd-Webber!  Jesus Christ Superstar  was only his third musical and the appropriate thematic follow-up to his second,  Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat . A relatively minor figure from the Old Testament is one thing though, Jesus Christ himself is a hell of an ambitious subject for such an inexperienced artist. Like that earlier Biblical show, it was co-written with Tim Rice and initially conceived and released as a rock opera, only to be adapted into musical form in fairly short order just a year later, premiering on Broadway in 1971. As its’ title might suggest, it’s not the purely faithful adaptation of the Gospel story your Christian grandmother might prefer. The sung-through musical depicts the last week of Jesus’ life accurately enough, though with a fondness for deliberate anachronisms in aesthetic and lyrics that directly equates him and his followers with the youth counterculture movement of the era. Certainly Norman ...

      You know, I realize this may not be the ideal time to talk about musicals. Broadway is shut down for the foreseeable future, theatres all over North America will be as well. This is not a time anyone can or should go out to see a live performance. And so devoting my annual theme month to something no one can properly engage with right now might not seem like a smart idea. It's probably not. But I'm going to defend it anyway.       The idea to do a series of musical reviews came about out of two things. One is the Disney recording of Hamilton from back in May which I quite liked not only for its performances and production values, but because it reminded me of that spontaneity and intimacy I love about live theatre. The other is the podcast Musicalsplaining , hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Kaveh Taherian, which I've been listening (and re-listening) to quite a bit, and is a lot of fun. The conceit of the podcast is in Ellis, an unabashed musical love...