Broadway by the Year
The Musicals of 1990-2004
The Town Hall, NYC, June 23, 2014
Reviewed by Rob Lester for Cabaret Scenes
As if we needed reminding, Broadway’s Golden Age of Broadway originality seems over, replaced by golden oldies in “jukebox” shows, staged Disney films, power ballads, and British mega-musical/soap operas. So Broadway by the Year—surveyed by the quarter- century this year—sampled 1990-2014-mounted shows, showing mounting evidence of rampant recycling. Resisting panning for each year’s new gold, more “successful” familiar re-runs from long runs showed up, often cheered, though many weren’t conceived as theater songs. Example: “Sing Sing Sing (with a Swing)”—Swing! AND Fosse—were 1999 revues having another swing at the mid-1930s romp. The show ended with not one of this year’s new entries, but director Scott Coulter warmly leading the cast with 1970’s warmed-over hit “You’ve Got a Friend” heard in Beautiful.
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But beautiful moments came: Bobby Steggert (pictured) (blissful, gently disarming, with Falsettoland’s “What More Can I Say?”); soprano Sarah Jane McMahon’s (glowingwith The Light in the Piazza’s title number). Comedically madcap, young up-and-comer Oakley Boycott was astutely a hoot with Young Frankenstein’s nutty “He Vas My Boyfriend.
” And pros took prosaic pop and made something of them: like mega-charismatic Lucas Steele finding drama in Mamma Mia!’s “The Winner Takes It All,” making it ABBA-solutely riveting.
