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Where Are the Deaf Children at Aladdin?

Yesterday I sat in the New Amsterdam Theatre for the interpreted performance of Disney’s Aladdin. The show was fine. The interpreting was fine. Neither held my attention the way the audience did. It was Scouts Day. The hearing children came dressed as princes and princesses, sashes weighed down with badges, parents fussing over phones and snacks. The aisles filled with the small chaos that always attends a children’s matinee. Within all of that, in a designated seating block to the side, sat the Deaf audience. I counted, roughly, sixty of us. The youngest among us looked sixty herself. Most of those sixty people were between sixty and eighty-five years old. A handful of hearing family members translated stage business in side conversations. Deaf children were absent from the section. Deaf teenagers, if any were present, were too few for me to identify in a careful sweep.

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A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.

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Carrie Underwood’s Wooden Live Performance in the Sound of Music

I wasn’t planning on writing about Carrie Underwood’s painfully wooden live performance last night in NBC’s misbegotten, and ill-fated, “dead” re-enactment of the fabulous Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, “The Sound of Music.”

All the promotional wind leading up to the live event immediately prickled senses in the wrong direction.  The show was being sold as some sort of feel-good, happy children, sparkling story full of singing and wonder and dancing when, in reality, the musical is actually extremely dark and threatening and dreary.

The musical moments in “The Sound of Music” drive the frightening plot forward into a total, creeping, Nazi occupation — and it is in the artful context of that delicate balancing between whistling in the graveyard while staring death straight in the face — that made Rodgers & Hammerstein musical geniuses.

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A Memory of Marvin Hamlisch

I had the great honor of meeting SuperGenius composer Marvin Hamlisch many years ago when I first left Nebraska and lived in Washington D.C. for awhile on my way to graduate school in New York City.  I was stunned to learn Marvin died yesterday at the incredibly young age of 68.

In my January 11, 2010 United Stage article  — A Final Walk with Jim Brady — I mentioned Marvin’s kindness to me as a young student of the theatre:

The Victory Awards were intended to honor achievements of the human spirit. The show was hosted by Frank Langella and Marvin Hamlisch was the musical director.

Frank did not speak to any of the workers on the show while Marvin Hamlisch struck up a conversation with me backstage — I was a new transplant from Nebraska to D.C. — and he told me we’d one day “write a musical together” because “that’s just how things happen.”

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Julie Taymor as The Goat

In the past, I have written here in The United Stage of America about “On Not Becoming the Goat” —

The Goat is usually the least experienced person on the show in an important position and, unfortunately, that usually means the author gets the Goated label, and once you have that finger pointed at you as the root cause of all trouble, there is really no escape until the roller coaster everyone is riding slams into the concrete wall and kills everybody.

— and who would have ever thought that such a deep and magnificent talent such as Julie “I am the Lion King!” Taymor would ever, or could ever, become the goat of any production?

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Texas Mud and Racism in The King and I

When I was in grade school at Brownell Elementary, our music teacher was married to a University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Music professor named Roger L. Stephens.  Roger died in February of this year, and his death propelled me back to the fourth grade and his direction of The King and I at UNL’s Kimball Recital Hall.

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Julie Taymor and the Revenge of Spider-man

I have been patiently waiting to write about the $65 million Broadway musical tragedy that is currently known as “Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark” — but since the show may never officially open — the time is now to take a look at the ridiculous flop of a fantastic idea.

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Why the American Musical Theatre Must Have an Aesthetic Morality

The American Musical Theatre needs to have an Aesthetic Morality — because it does not yet have any sort of directional mandate for excellence — other than the annual, presumptive, parade of giving out incestuous Tony and Drama Desk awards to their own for shared masturbatory adoration.

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The Irreparable Insult: John Denver Does Not Star on Broadway as Will Rogers

Few people know that when “The Will Rogers Follies” was readying itself for Broadway, John Denver was supposed to play Will Rogers.  The role was originally written for him:  The book (the script) and the music and the lyrics were sculpted to fight John Denver’s sense of humor and singing range.

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Guitar Pro 6 Review

Guitar Pro 6 was released last Thursday, and this upgrade is a total reinvention and reimagining of version 5.  From the moment of the first sight of the GP6 splash screen, you know you are in for a much more wild, but refined, ride:

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