This is a shame for a work that was in many ways more ambitious than much of what reaches Broadway. Unlike the recent closing of the play Indecent, which managed to go out as a triumph, with its final week also its bestselling after a six-week reprieve, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 is closing amid controversy, rancour and disappointment. The Great Comet is burning out, and taking Natasha and Pierre with it. Howard Sherman: How bad producing decisions made Great Comet musical crash to earth | The Stage Kait Kerrigan has joined tumblr and you should give her a follow!
That’s where the most exciting work comes from.
#Ragtime broadway how to
We have to write the things we don’t know how to write. We have to write the songs that haven’t been written. They put me in the ill-fitting docksiders of a little girl who’d prefer lace-up boots. Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori wrote a character that has no exact blueprint in musical theater. What we musicalize should be used to broaden the scope of the audience’s empathy. Musicals make you identify with someone who is different than you. That “Fun Home” is an adaptation of the brilliant Alison Bechdel’s writings and illustrations doesn’t undermine the point. Writers are always trying to make something that feels new but, in the commercial hubbub of Broadway, we inevitably fall back on tropes and stock characters and we rarely write moments, songs, or experiences that haven’t been written before. Was this the first song ever written from this perspective about this feeling? My eyes filled with tears and I felt gobsmacked that I’d never seen this kind of character musicalized before.
Your short hair and your dungarees, and your lace-up boots and your keys - your ring of keys.
“Your swagger and your bearing and the just right clothes you’re wearing. Their song “Ring of Keys” opened up young Alison’s world to me - a little girl standing in a coffee shop identifying with a kind of adult woman that she didn’t know existed and immediately wanted to become when she grew up. Until “Fun Home”, no one ever asked me to go with a little girl who was trying to figure out her sexual identity as she comes of age.īut Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori did, and I went. I have almost nothing in common with any of these people but in that darkened theater, I’m game. Over my many years of theater-going, I’ve identified with orphans, a very loud stage mom, salesmen, plenty of sociopaths, even knights and kings. I’ll search until I find my protagonist and when I do, I’ll stick with him, because let’s be real, it’s usually a him. I’ll identify with a dog or a fish or a dictator.
I sit in a darkened theater and I’ll go with you on any joyride you want to take me on. That’s one of the reasons why I like them.
#Ragtime broadway movie
“Fun Home” is a musical and musicals have an extraordinary ability to make you identify with someone who’s different than you - even more than a movie or play. I have enormous talent crushes on all of the artists involved so it was not very surprising that I loved it and it was one of my favorite productions of the season. I went into “Fun Home” at the Public Theater prepared to fall hard. This is a reprint of an essay I wrote for The Dramatists Guild Magazine in the Spring of 2014.
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