What: The Broadway transfer of the West End two-hander musical about a young British man visiting New York for the first time to attend the wedding of a father he's never met, and his antics with the sister of the (much younger than the groom) bride.
And? It's cute. It's definitely cute. Both actors are doing good work (nice to see Christiani Pitts again). I like Soutra Gilmour's seemingly simple but magic box surprise of a scenic design. Several of the songs in the second half are clever. But I was not in a good headspace when I saw this--which is not the show's fault--so I found a lot of the humor unimpressive, the plot turns predictable, the first half of the score unsurprising, and the piece as a whole not unusual enough to transcend any of that. Someone said to me it's being described as this season's Maybe Happy Ending, and I can see that, in terms of a small-cast chamber musical telling a sweet story of two polar opposite people on a quest learning to appreciate each other. But Two Strangers slides closer to a number of movies I've already seen, whereas MHE surprises in staging, scenic and projection design, clever lyrics and earned character arcs, and ultimately managing to skirt a number of predictable archetypes of this type of story to show us something new.
Two Strangers doesn't show us something new, even if it is charming enough at what it's showing us. I don't want to come down to hard on it. But I think it got overhyped for me, and then with my brain being what it was when I saw the show, I was underwhelmed.
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| Christiani Pitts and Sam Tutty as Robin and Dougal. Photo by Matthew Murphy. |
What: The Off-Broadway revival of Rachel Sheinkin and William Finn's adorable musical about, well, what the title says, and the oddball kids who compete.
And? A perfectly fine and fun revival, if not particularly transformative. The sweet and tart nature of the show remains intact, as well as the humor. And it's good to hear this score live again. I had hoped to catch Justin Cooley, a delight in Kimberly Akimbo, but he was out; luckily, his understudy Jahbril Cook did excellent and endearing work. The contemporary script updates were mostly fun, and a good way to keep surprising people who already know the show well from its original run. I particularly enjoyed a number of the women in the cast: Jasmine Amy Rogers (Miss Betty Boop herself!) is an endearingly earnest Olive without being cloying, Leana Rae Concepcion's Marcy is a hilarious taut wire until her euphoric explosion in my favorite song in the show, "I Speak Six Languages," and the always excellent Lilli Cooper is polished, wryly funny, and in excellent voice as the bee's emcee Rona Lisa Peretti. My one real beef with this production is the missed opportunity seized by the original production. When this show first arrived on Broadway back in the aughts, it featured three principal roles played by larger bodied actors. It was great representation of three talented performers (and their talented understudies and replacements--I got to see Josh Gad), and there were no jokes made about their size. With this revival cast, there is none of that, and it's a damn shame.
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| The company of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
Streaming Theater
- Original Theatre's Murder at Midnight.
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