All tagged Michael McGrath

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

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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She Loves Me: A Review

Lately, I have been bemoaning the absence of pure joy in musical theatre. In fact, it seems that most Broadway musicals have to be emotionally eviscerating or screaming, over-microphoned, power belting diva battles to succeed. If comedy is attempted, musical theatre has to be salacious, mean-spirited or vulgar. Sometimes it is nice to go to the theatre and just get absorbed in a delightful plot, a comedy of errors with characters who make you smile and songs that stick in your brain because they actually have a melody. Is it any wonder, then, that I find myself in a state of euphoria over The Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of the 1963 Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joe Masteroff musical She Loves Me.