All tagged Jim Dale

Remembering Barnum

Remembering Barnum

Mark Robinson
Music That Makes Me Dance

Long before there was a film called The Greatest Showman, Broadway had its own musical version of the life of P.T. Barnum. This show, simply called Barnum, featured a score with music by Cy Coleman (Sweet Charity, City of Angels), lyrics by Michael Stewart (I Love My Wife) and a book by Mark Bramble (42ndStreet). Using the three-ring circus as the conceit for telling Barnum’s rise to fame as the King of Flim-Flam, much in the way Cabaret was set within a cabaret and Chicago within the confines of a vaudeville show, Barnum utilized its setting as a metaphor the risks that come with becoming a success, walking that proverbial tightrope known as “life”. 

My Fair Lady: What Does the Perfect Cast Look Like?

My Fair Lady: What Does the Perfect Cast Look Like?

Mark Robinson
Music That Makes Me Dance

This week we received some exciting news via Lincoln Center announcing that Bartlett Sher will be directing My Fair Lady for LCT’s Vivian Beaumont in 2018. My Fair Lady has not returned to the Broadway stage since Richard Chamberlain and Melissa Errico starred in a 1993 revival, and that production was not exactly embraced as definitive. Bartlett Sher is a master of staging in the Beaumont’s space, a luxuriously open thrust where the audience wraps around the playing area. He has mined many magical moments on this stage, probing the possibilities of the space with productions of The Light in the Piazza, South Pacific, and The King and I. My Fair Lady is an elegant show, one of the wittiest and most-intellectual of Broadway musicals (based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion), featuring a lush and literate Lerner and Loewe score. How can we not be excited to see how Sher marries this sparkling property with the space where he works his best magic?

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On the “Pete’s Dragon” Wagon

On the “Pete’s Dragon” Wagon

Mark Robinson
Stage To Screen, Second Star to the Right, Cinematters

When it was originally released as a film, the Disney movie musical Pete’s Dragon was mostly dismissed by the critics. Many thought the film was too long (it does run 128 minutes) and many found Helen Reddy’s performance as the character “Nora” to be cold and detached (she isn’t the warmest of Disney characters), but her story is about a woman trying to be strong in the face of personal loss, who only begins to melt when a young orphan comes into her life. Seldom has a character in a Disney film been played with such complexity, and even if it does cast an icy pallor on the story, it is appropriate in telling “Nora’s” portion of the story. I have always had a deep affection for Pete’s Dragon and, considering how much I hear it maligned by critics and historians, I come in contact with a lot of people who also grew up loving this film.