Category: Theater
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To See or Not to See: The Outsiders
Minimum Familiarity: None (this article aims to provide you with just the right amount of familiarity as you decide whether you want to see The Outsiders on Broadway) Welcome Back! Sure, it’s been five months since the first entry in this series, but I (mostly) didn’t forget about this series of articles about whether you,…
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Debriefing the 2023-2024 Broadway Season
Minimum Familiarity: You’ll probably get more out of this if you watched the Tony Awards, but that’s the only recommendation. The Tony Awards happened a few weeks back, on June 16th, and I thought it was a great awards show overall. The Tonys tend to be at least twice as enjoyable to me as other…
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Tony Awards Predictions – 2024
It’s officially Tony Sunday, and the only awards show that I’m happy is absurdly long starts at 6:30pm ET this evening (with the main televised ceremony kicking off at 8pm on CBS). Loyal readers have already seen the drama of my attempts to predict and then understand the nominations this year, and now the time…
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Debriefing the 2024 Tony Nominations
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How Long Has It Been Since the Last Successful Original Musical?
Minimum Familiarity: None, I try to explain any requisite terminology as we go. I’ve been thinking lately about how much I like Hadestown, and it occurred to me that Hadestown may be the last original musical that has run for more than a year or two on Broadway. So I did some poking around (during…
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Authoritative Tony Nomination Predictions – 2023-2024 Season
Minimum Familiarity: Heard of it. It’s useful to have a sense of what the Tony nomination categories are. If you don’t care about the Tony Awards or haven’t heard of any shows this season, this post probably won’t be the most engaging for you. This blog is known for having its finger on the pulse…
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Introducing To See or Not to See: The Notebook
Minimum Familiarity: None (this article aims to provide you with just the right amount of familiarity as you decide whether you want to see The Notebook on Broadway) A Brand New Series! Welcome to the first post in a series called “To See or Not to See.” As implied by the title, this series (in…
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Take Me Back to the End of Back to the Future
Minimum Familiarity: Heard of it. It helps if you’re familiar to a mild extent with Back to the Future, either the movies or the musical. I avoid spoiling plot details, but I do talk about my overall impressions of the Broadway musical, so I recommend waiting to read this if you plan to see the…
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Introducing Re-prizes: “Raise a Little Hell”
Minimum familiarity: None A reprise in a musical occurs when we hear a song that we’ve already heard before, often in a new context and with modified lyrics. And the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a “re-prize” as “The word you’ve entered isn’t in the dictionary.” Which means I can define it here however I want. A…
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Why Is “Wait for Me” So Good?
The iconic not-quite Act I finale of Hadestown is musical theater at its finest: a perfect intersection of dozens of art forms that transcends them all. Wait for What? “Wait for Me” is probably the single song most associated with the musical Hadestown, thanks to a performance at the Tony Awards in 2019. And yes,…