Colin Quinn is one of the better comics doing political satire – he communicates highly complicated ideas through the most mundane and absurdly funny examples. I thoroughly enjoyed his Broadway hit Long Story Short, which told the history of the world, brought wittily down to a comprehensible human scale.
What a great way to end the Broadway season! I’m definitely a fan of Bette Midler, and, somewhat more randomly, a fan of the real-life woman she’s portraying, Sue Mengers, the first female Hollywood superagent, who dominated the town during the wild and woolly 1970s. So I had a great time simply being in the presence of Midler and Mengers, as squired onto the Broadway stage by a writer and director who are among the best and brightest Broadway has to offer (John Logan and Joe Mantello, respectively).
I really enjoyed the circus acts that populate director Diane Paulus’s revival of Pippin. They did nothing, however, to make me reevaluate my lukewarm feeling toward the show as a whole.
Mark Nadler is one of the greatest showmen of our time, capable of leaping from floor to piano bench, tap-dancing madly, singing and keeping steady eye contact with the audience, all this while playing a complex passage on the piano without even glancing at the keys. However, in his latest, I’m A Stranger Here Myself, he takes a somewhat more low-key approach – the abundant theatrics and virtuosity are still there, but applied in a different way. Stranger was originally a cabaret show, but Mark has worked with director David Schweizer to craft it into an even more thoughtful multimedia theatre piece.
