By Drew Grant 3/12 11:21pm

Sing sing

Where everybody knows your name...if your name is Stephen Sondheim. (Photo via Yelp)

Marie’s Identity Crisis

On a recent Friday night, the Transom arrived on the early side at Marie’s Crisis, the piano bar in the West Village known for its propensity for show tunes. What can we say, sometimes it’s been a rough week and the only cure is singing Sondheim while surrounded by fabulous men, Broadway wannabes and the occasional semi-pro.

The place is practically an institution, with Dexter Watson on the ivories and the occasional solo performance of a number from Jekyll and Hyde as interpreted by one of Marie’s roving bartenders. So color us surprised, then, when we got to the block and saw a chorus line of people waiting outside the venue. Was Kristin Chenoweth making a guest appearance at the literally underground musical hangout? Alan Cumming? Read More

By Foster Kamer 4/27/12 5:28pm

TEENAGERS

Via The Beacon School.

High School Musical, Uncensored: At Spring Awakening’s First Uncut High School Performance

The Scene: A bunch of high schoolers, in a room full of their parents, teachers, and friends, performing a musical. In the musical, they play a bunch of teenagers not too unlike themselves.

And they are simulating masturbation, unprotected sex, abortion, teenage homosexuality, teenage lesbianism, group masturbation, masochism, child abuse, insubordination, and out-and-out total adolescent rebellion, all to the rapturous tune of musical numbers with titles like “The Bitch of Living” and “Totally Fucked.”

Oh, if Tipper Gore could see them now. Read More

By Drew Grant 1/19/12 12:57pm

Broadway

Video

Cast of Newsies performing on The View

Kings of New York: Scrappy New Jersey Cast Headed to Broadway with Newsies (Video)

Since we first saw Christian Bale prancing across dusty Manhattan streets belting “Santa Fe,” we’ve held a torch in our heart for the 1992 Disney live-action flop Newsies. We don’t even care the Roger Ebert once likened the film to “warmed-over Horatio Alger,” since deep down we knew that one day, we’d have the chance to audition for a stage production of the show. (In our fantasy, we weren’t Christian Bale/Jack Kelly’s love interest, Sarah, because she was a goody-goody. We were always Ann-Margret‘s brassy saloon singer, Medda Larkson.)

Now our dreams are that much closer to coming true, as the New Jersey production of Newsies at the Paper Mill Theater has just announced the full line-up for its Broadway debut on March 15th. Read More

By W.M. Akers 8/02/11 6:52pm

theater

Rent.

Rent Musical Returns to New York

Guitars  swelled during an early preview of the new revival of Rent, and the delighted crowd squealed. Across the orchestra section, fans accustomed to using the play’s soundtrack as karaoke fodder fought the urge to sing along. Many failed. The excitement was understandable. After three torturous Rent-free years, the city is once again graced by Read More

By Jesse Oxfeld 3/22/11 11:24pm

theater

Entropy, Algorithms, and Laughs: 'Arcadia' and 'Priscilla Queen of the Desert The Musical'

It’s not easy to dramatize the almost sexual excitement of intellectual discovery. Aaron Sorkin has failed at it twice: in Broadway’s The Farnsworth Invention, which chronicled the birth of television and played as a well-produced book report, and in his Oscar-winning screenplay for The Social Network, which required HTML coding to masquerade as legal procedural. Read More