"Ain't Too Proud, The Life and Times of The Temptations"

 

The 2021-22 Broadway in Pittsburgh season came to a close last week with "Ain't Too Proud", the musical based upon the story of and the music of the Temptations.   It is a show that I have wanted to see ever since it opened on Broadway.  Marilyn and I even talked about traveling to New York to see it.  Alas, that was never to be, but the show finally arrived in Pittsburgh, and I finally got to see it.

I'll be brief....It is the music and that dance moves of The Temptations.  THE TEMPTATIONS!!!!!  Four Stars from The Grandstander.

How great it was to be back in the theater and seeing live performances once again.  Here is The Grandstander's Final Scorecard for the 2021-22 season.

1. Hamilton
2. Ain't Too Proud
3. To Kill A Mockingbird
4. Summer, The Donna Summer Musical
5. Pretty Woman
6. Oklahoma
7. The Band's Visit

I feel bad that To Kill A Mockingbird sits at #3 on the list.  As a straight play and not a musical, it really should be judged on a separate scale.  However, since the entire series is more a musical series/experience, The Temps get a slight, very slight, edge over Atticus Finch.

The subscription has been renewed for the 2022-23 season, and we look forward to seven more magical nights at the Benedum Center in the year ahead.

And how can I wrote about The Temptations without showing one of their legendary performances.   So get ready and watch it RIGHT HERE.

Catching Up...Stage and Screen

The Grandstander has fallen behind in his stage and movie comings and goings, so let's try to catch up, shall we?

This past Saturday I attended the Broadway in Pittsburgh Series touring production of "Hamilton."  You all know how much I love this show.  It is the third time that I have seen it on stage, and this particular production was top notch.  The actors, led by Pierre Jean Cortez as Alexander Hamilton, Warren Egypt Franklin as Lafayette/Jefferson, and Stephanie Jae Park as Eliza Schuyler were terrific.  Every time that I have seen the show, I see something different, and in this particular production, I was especially impressed with the choreography and the music of the climactic "Yorktown" number in Act I.  Just fantastic.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

Of course, going to this production was bittersweet because, of course, Marilyn is no longer with us.  I was thrilled, however, to have as my "date" for the show on Saturday our 21 year old great-niece, Anna Sproule, currently a junior at the University of Notre Dame.  Anna had not yet seen the show performed on stage, but she has long been a fan of the amazing music of the show.  It was truly a pleasure to take her with me that night, and I know that Aunt Marilyn is thrilled that her ticket that night was being used by Anna.

Through a series of circumstances that I won't get into here, I am actually going to be seeing "Hamilton" two more times in the next ten days.  That's almost embarrassing to admit, but I will also make no apologies for it!

Earleir in the month, the Broadway Series treated us to a production of "Pretty Woman", a musical adaptation of the hit 1990 movie that starred Julia Roberts and Richard Gere.  While I liked the movie when I saw it all those years ago - Marilyn positively LOVED it - I was not a diehard fan, so I went into this show with modest expectations, which was probably a good thing, because I ended up liking the show quite a bit.  Was completely unfamiliar with all of the music, but that didn't spoil the show at all.  Interesting casting note:  the part of Vivian, the Julia Roberts role, was played by Olivia Valli. She is the granddaughter of Frankie Valli, the original Jersey Boy himself.

I gave "Pretty Woman" Two and One-half Grandstander Stars.

Five shows down in this season's Broadway in Pittsburgh Series, and here is how they stack up for me:

1. Hamilton
2. Summer, The Donna Summer Musical
3. Pretty Woman
4. Oklahoma
5. The Band's Visit

Still to come..."Beautiful" in March, "To Kill A Mockingbird" in April, and "Ain't Too Proud" in May

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Regular readers are no doubt asking "Hey, the Oscar nominations came out a couple of weeks ago. Where is The Grandstander's usual cutting edge analysis of the nominations?"

You all HAVE been asking that, right? Right?

Well, the analysis has been missing for the simple matter that I have not seen many of the nominated films.   Of the ten Best Picture nominees, I have seen only two: Licorice Pizza (good, but certainly NOT the best picture of this or any other year) and West Side Story, which I loved, and would be happy to see win.

Of the other eight nominees...

Dune.  I'll pass on this one.  I am not a sci-fi fan, so it has no appeal to me. However, I will not criticize it, nor will I begrudge the glowing opinions of many of my pals who have seen it.

Drive My Car.  It's in Japanese with English subtitles.  In and of itself, that's not a deal breaker (see "Parasite" of a couple of years ago).  It is also three hours long, and the descriptions of the storyline that I have heard makes me want to scream.  So put this in the "Didn't see, don't wanna see it" category.

Belfast, CODA, Don't Look Up, King Richard, and Nightmare Alley are all movies that I want to see and will see before the Oscar ceremonies at the end of the month.  All are available to see via the various streaming services so it should take no great effort to see them over the next few weeks.

That brings us to The Power of the Dog which leads all movies with a total of twelve Oscar nominations including Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Director, Cinematography, and Adapted Screenplay.  I tried to watch this.  I really did.  I fought against falling asleep while doing so and then gave up after 45 minutes.   I suppose that I could have just been having a bad day when I tried to watch it, and I should probably give it another shot, but I am finding it difficult to work up the motivation at this point.  We'll see.

One other movie that intrigues me is the Best International Film nominee The Worst Person in the World.  It is from Norway and is in Norwegian with English subtitles. Some critics that I respect on one of the podcasts that I listen to have spoken highly of it, so I may just have to seek that one out.

I shall be reporting in with my thoughts and comments as I see some of these other nominated movies.  

Oh, and one other cool Oscar factoid that maybe interests only me......Ariana DeBose is nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Anita in "West Side Story".  Rita Moreno won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing the same role in the 1961 movie version of "West Side Story."

Rogers & Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!"

Historians of American musical theater will tell you that one of the transformative plays in the history of that particular art form was "Oklahoma!".    It was the first collaboration of Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II. It opened on Broadway in 1943, ran for over 2,200 performances, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944, has had numerous award winning revivals on Broadway, the most recent in 2019, was a hit movie in 1955, and to this day remains a staple for amateur theatrical productions and high school musicals.  It is credited as being the first musical that used the songs and the dancing as an integral part of the story being told.

Like I said, it is significant and historic in about a dozen and one ways, and - confession time - until this past Saturday night, I had never seen a production of "Oklahoma!".  While I knew many of the songs, I wasn't really even sure as to what this play was even about.  It arrived this year as part of the Broadway in Pittsburgh 2021-22 season, and is based upon the 2019 revival production which, we are told, is a re-imagining and "different" look at this old war horse of a show.

What can you say about the music?  Many, many classics:  Oh What a Beautiful Morning, Surrey With the Fringe on Top, I Can't Say No, People Will Say We're In Love, and, of course, the title tune, which isn't sung until the end of the show.  All great.  I really enjoyed the first act of the play, but was surprised by the rather dark turn that the show took in Act II. Was this the "reimagining" of the story that everyone was talking about?

To find out, I sought out the 1955 movie adaptation and watched it this week.  

That production starred Gordon MacRea, featured Rod Steiger, Eddie Albert, James Whitmore, and several other older Hollywood stars with whom I was not familiar, and "introduced" Shirley Jones to the silver screen.  It was her first movie role.  Jones, by the way, will turn 88 this coming March 31.

The movie did tell the same story as the play I saw on Saturday....a romantic rivalry for the fair Laurey Williams between well scrubbed hero Curly McLain and the brooding not-quite-all-there hired hand Jud Fry....comic relief provided by cowhand Will Parker and his fiancee Ado Annie, the girl who can't say no, and itinerant peddler Ali Hakim...all presided over by fiesty Aunt Eller (who was played much younger on the stage than in the 1955 movie)....and a tragic turn of events before the requisite happy ending.

I was surprised to see that the movie was directed by Fred Zinneman.  A highly regarded director, Zinneman was known for dramas such as High Noon, A Man for All Seasons, A Hatfull of Rain, and Day of the Jackel.  Oklahoma! was the only musical that he ever directed.

So what did I think?  I thought that the movie sort of brushed off the "tragic turn" to which I referred earlier and swept it under the rug so they could quickly get to the happy ending.  The stage production made it more of the focal point for Act II, so in that regard, perhaps it was more realistic and made for the dark tone of the current touring production.

The Grandstander will give Two and One-half stars to the show he saw on stage last Saturday, and Two Stars to the 1955 movie, which comes across as dated and somewhat cornball here in 2022.

Three shows into the current Broadway in Pittsburgh season, and here is how I would rank the shows that we have seen thus far:

1. Summer, The Donna Summer Musical
2. Oklahoma!
3. The Band's Visit

Coming up in February: "Pretty Woman" and "Hamilton".

"Miss Saigon"

Show Number Four of the 2019-20 "Broadway in Pittsburgh" series arrived this week, and last night we attended "Miss Saigon."  This show debuted in London in 1989 and on Broadway in 1991.  It has been revived in recent years and is touring nationally once again.

Based on the Pucini opera "Madame Butterfly", it tells the story of life in a Vietnamese brothel, run by an incredibly sleazy character known as The Engineer, in 1975, just before the fall of Saigon that ended the war in Viet Nam.  An American Marine, Chris, visits the establishment one night and falls in love with a seventeen year old orphan girl, Kim,  just recruited off of the streets by The Engineer.  

Saigon falls, the Americans evacuate by helicopter, which is depicted by a simply breathtaking bit of stagecraft, and, alas, Kim is unable to gain access to the American embassy and leave with Chris.  

Flash forward three years to a reunified Viet Nam, Chris is back in America and happily married, although he still has nightmares about his time in Viet Nam, The Engineer has seemingly been "re-educated" by his Vietnamese captors, and Kim is working as a bar girl in Bangkok, and, oh, yes, she has a three year old son by Chris.

I have really oversimplified the plot line here, but let me assure you that seeing this show was an incredibly powerful experience.  A large and incredibly talented cast (as they always are in the Broadway Series) and very moving and emotional songs and performances.   This is one that will stay with you for awhile after seeing it.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

I know that when this show first toured, we saw it in Pittsburgh.  This would have been in 1992 or 1993.  However, in spite of how I just said that it was show that "will stay with you", my only memory of seeing it back than was the scene with the helicopter.  As I watched this show unfold last night, I had absolutely no memory of its storyline.  Funny how that is.  Perhaps an almost thirty years younger Grandstander just wasn't emotionally equipped to handle a tale as complex as "Miss Saigon" back then.  Maybe I've grown up a bit over the years.

Four shows into this season, here are my rankings of the shows thus far:

1. A Bronx Tale
2. Miss Saigon
3. Jesus Christ Superstar
4. Mean Girls 

Broadway in Pittsburgh - "A Bronx Tale"

"A Bronx Tale" began its life as a one-man play by actor-writer Chazz Palminteri about his life as a young boy and man growing up in  New York City and his interactions with Sonny, the local wiseguy who oversaw various underworld activities in the Bronx neighborhood where he grew up.  In 1993, it became a movie that was directed by Robert De Niro and starred both Palminteri as Sonny and De Niro as Lorenzo, the honest bus driver who strove to keep his son, Calogero, from falling into the life led by Sonny and his crew.  In 2016, "A Bronx Tale" opened on Broadway as a musical, a musical that is now touring nationally and that is now playing in Pittsburgh as part of the Broadway in Pittsburgh series.

We recall watching this movie back in 2011 at the urging of our good friend Bill  Montrose, and we enjoyed it a lot, as you can read here....

https://grandstander.blogspot.com/2011/10/movie-review-bronx-tale.html

However, when we saw that this would be a part of the series this season, we really didn't know what to expect.  As my friend Wendy often tells me, sometimes going into something with reduced or low expectations can be a good thing, and that was certainly the case last night.  Dan, Susan, Marilyn and I were completely blown away by this show last night.  To paraphrase what I wrote about the movie in the post linked above, the play is about the Mob, it's about family values, it's a coming of age story, it's funny, and it's deadly serious, and in this iteration of the story it has some great songs and terrific dancing numbers.  Unless you are a regular listener to the Broadway channel on Sirius XM, you won't know any of the songs, but they are all really good and fit the show perfectly.  Our favorite was the eleven o'clock number, "One of the Great Ones", sung by Sonny to Calogero.

As always, I am in awe of the talent of the actors who perform in these shows.  The names are not familiar to me, but their credits in the Playbill are always a mile long, so I want to recognize the three main stars of this company of "A Bronx Tale":  Jeff Brooks as Sonny, Alec Nevin as Calogero, and Nick Fradiani as Lorenzo.

There are five shows remaining in this season of Broadway in Pittsburgh, and it is hard to imagine that any of them will top "A Bronx Tale".  It gets the full Four Stars from The Grandstander.

"Dear Evan Hansen"

When we learned last year that Tony Winner "Dear Evan Hansen" would be a part of this season's Broadway in Pittsburgh series, we began listening to the music from this show and learning as much as we could about it.  The best  summation of it that I came across was this from the 2017 Tony Awards ceremony:  "A letter that was never meant to be seen generates a lie that was never meant to be told and leads to a life that a young man never dreamed he could have."

"Dear Evan Hansen" is about a lot of things.  It is about being teenagers who don't fit in and feel lost all the time.  It is about anxiety that can lead to the worst possible outcomes.  It is about parents who constantly worry about their children and struggle with their own issues, and it is about how families, friends, and acquaintances struggle with death and grief.  From our ten years of volunteering at the Caring Place and working with families who have experienced death and loss, we know that the emotions and experiences seen in this show are presented in very real terms.  It is a powerful and an almost emotionally overwhelming show.

The music and songs are wonderful: "You Will Be Found", "For Forever", "Waving Through A Window", "Words Fail", and "So Big/So Small" are among those that are so haunting and beautiful that they may well stay with you, well, "for forever".

Ben Levi Ross as Evan

It is a small cast, only six actors, that perform this show.  In the touring company, young Ben Levi Ross plays Evan, and he is on stage for almost the entire show.  It is a fabulous role.  Also noteworthy in this cast are Jessica Phillips as Evan's mother, Heidi,  and Christiane Noll as Cynthia Murphy, the mother of Connor, the young man who commits suicide (but still "appears" throughout the show).

Ross and Jessica Phillips

I mentioned earlier how we had been listening to the music from this show for several months, and knowing the music ahead of time certainly adds to the enjoyment of the play, but seeing the full show certainly added to the meaning, impact, and enjoyment of the music as well. 

Much of the audience at Heinz Hall on Tuesday consisted of young people, teen aged boys and girls, who were there with their parents.  You could almost see and feel the emotions that were being felt by those young families around us as they watched "Dear Evan Hansen."

This was not a "musical comedy" in the traditional sense, although there were humorous moments in it.  I would describe it as a "musical drama", if there is such a genre in the American musical theater.  It no doubt deserved its 2017 Tony for Best Musical.  It is a show that is well worth seeing, and I can certainly see why it is so popular with younger audiences.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

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This show wrapped up the 2018-19 Broadway in Pittsburgh season.  None of the shows disappointed us, and, indeed, a few of them were very pleasant surprises.  Herewith is a presentation of The Grandstander Theater Rankings (a variation of The Grandstander Power Rankings used during the past NFL season) for the Broadway In Pittsburgh season:

1. HAMILTON
2. COME FROM AWAY
3. DEAR EVAN HANSEN
4. FIDDLER ON THE ROOF
5. THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG
6. ANASTASIA
7. CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

(If you are interested in what I had to say about each of these shows at the time I saw them, just type the name of the show in the search box that appears in the upper left corner of this screen.)

Any of the first four shows on this list are shows that I would happily and eagerly see again if ever given the opportunity.  We have already renewed out subscription for 2019-20 and are looking forward to seven more terrific nights in the theater next year.

"Come From Away"

Last night we took in the latest show in the Broadway in Pittsburgh series, "Come From Away".  If you are in the Pittsburgh area and love musical theater, I hope that you have tickets for this one.  Simply stated, it was fabulous.

"Come From Away" is the story of the small Canadian town of Gander, Newfoundland.  On September 11, 2001, when American airspace was closed in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, and rural Pennsylvania, thirty-eight airplanes were diverted and forced to land at the airport in Gander.  This tiny town on the edge of North America ("somewhere in the middle of nowhere"), population 6,000, was forced to accommodate over 7,000 visitors for over five days.  The story is told with humor and emotion, and it left you both teary-eyed and uplifted.  Great music and dancing and wonderfully staged with about a dozen actors portraying several different parts, both the visitors and the native Newfoundlanders.

Oh, and the musical finale, "Screech Out", that is played after the actors make their curtain call is absolutely fantastic!  Don't miss it.

A great show that gets the full Four Stars from The Grandstander.

"Come From Away" was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Musical in 2016.  It lost out on that award that year to "Dear Evan Hansen", which will be the next and final show of the 2018-19 Broadway in Pittsburgh series.  What a great season it has been!