The Season Ahead on Broadway
"The Visit, a 2015 Tony nominee for Best New Musical, is the final collaborative work by the legendary team of John Kander and the late Fred Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago) and is now playing on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre. Two-time Tony winner Chita Rivera (who is also nominated for this performance) and Tony winner Roger Rees star in the show with a book by Terrence McNally, based on the play by Swiss author Frederich Durrenmatt. Directed by Tony winner John Doyle, The Visit featuring music by Kander and lyrics by Ebb, tells the satirical story of the fabulously wealthy Claire Zachanassian (Rivera) who returns to her hometown to get revenge on the man (Rees) who spurned her when she was a girl." - NewYork.com
In the wake of The Visit’s success, here are some more unlikely musical adaptations coming to the Great White Way.
Journey! The Musical!
No one – including the executors of Eugene O’Neill’s estate – was expecting this prog rock “mellow drama” based on the Nobel Prize winner’s posthumously published family saga “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Featuring an emotional score by legendary band Journey, this is also the first self-titled musical of all time.
Don’t let the running time or the lack of intermission scare you off. The seven hours fly by. Who knew that some catchy anthem-like tunes, epic guitar solos and killer riffs could make depression, alcoholism, drug addiction and illness this much fun?
Titus Andronicus! The Musical!
Hard to believe, but this is the first Broadway musical based on a Shakespearean tragedy since West Side Story in 1957! Influential Scandinavian death metal bands Darkthrone and Dark Tranquility collaborated on this musical shocker, which features the blood-thumping numbers “Queen of the Goths,” “Revenge, Murder and Rape,” and “Eat Your Darlings.” Film legend Sam Peckinpah directs, despite having been dead for over thirty years. Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics.
Death of a Salesman! The Musical!
This season, the death of the American dream is the rebirth of the American musical. Reportedly, Arthur Miller wanted to collaborate with Leonard Bernstein on a musical adaptation of his 1949 Pulitzer-Prize willing masterpiece, but the composer was sidetracked by what Miller referred to as “some puerile-sounding urban Romeo and Juliet rip-off.” Marianne Faithfull’s dramatically incisive songs (“Better A Lo-Man Than A No-Man,” and “Dark, But Full Of Diamonds”) will stay with you long after the ride back to Yonkers. As Linda Loman puts it in her number of the same name, “Attention Must Be Paid!”
The Maids! The Musical!
This is Jean Genet’s coldblooded classic of incest, sadomasochism and murder, as you’ve never seen it before. On ice. Mary Zimmerman’s boldly unconventional staging was the hit of last year’s Helsinki Theater Festival and features a talented, hardworking cast of Finnish figure skating sensations. The production seems guaranteed to make the names Maikki Uotila and Olesia Karmi synonymous with Theater of the Absurd Ice Ballet. Pop sensation Chisu, Finland’s answer to Lana Del Ray, wrote the evocatively Nordic and noirish cycle of songs, which include “You’ve Maid All My Dreams,” “Murdering Madame,” “So Long, Solange!” and “I Only Have Eyes For You (Apologies to Harry Warren”).”
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf! The Musical!
Wallace Shawn does a brilliant rhyming adaptation of Edward Albee’s firecracker dialogue for his first-ever collaboration with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. Shocking in its day, Albee’s 1962 play was passed over for the Pulitzer Prize. We see no reason why the trustees of Columbia University should make the same mistake twice. Starring Sarah Brightman and Andrea Boccelli backed by a 100-piece-orchestra, the three-CD original cast recording will deserve a place of distinction between your box sets of Phantom and Cats. And we’ll be darned it if you don’t leave the theater whistling the title song, whose melody is under exclusive license by Walt Disney.
No Exit! The Musical!
Jean-Paul Sartre himself couldn’t have put it better; Hell really is other people. Which is also the foot-stomping main number in this musical adaptation of the suffocating, existential drama about three strangers who wind up sharing eternity together in a hell of their own imagining. Featuring an inspiredly drunken score by Tom Waits that includes his new hits, “I’ll Be Your Mirror (Apologies To Nico)” and “I Stare Into The Abyss (And It Stares Back At Me).” Break out your black turtlenecks and berets for a nausea inducing evening that brings new meaning to the words “pop philosophy.”
Oedipus Rex! The Musical!
The original title of this long-forgotten standard of the Yiddish Theater was “As Long As He Loves His Mother.” Tony Kushner’s translation of Zalmin Libin’s 1910 hit moves the action out of the shtetl and back to Thebes. Rest assured, though, that neither the change of locale nor of garb does any violence to Joseph Rumshinsky’s infectious score. And you’ll be amazed at what sort of puppetry magic director Julie Taymor can conjure with just a handful of columns, a few togas and some sharpened daggers. It doesn’t hurt that Brian Stokes Mitchell is on hand to lend matinee idol charm to the original mamma’s boy.