For 90 minutes of ecstatic storytelling, you are transported to a place where love, death and consequence are dancing together and where a victory for true love might just not be what you first think it will. Chita Rivera, an incandescent star of the Broadway stage in undiminished glory, is faultless. One of the best of Kander & Ebb’s musicals, The Visit is the best, most important, musical currently playing on Broadway.
The Scottsboro Boys relies on the skills of its acting company, giving them chairs and tambourines and a few costumes, as their only tools and the show becomes all the more powerful as a result. This is an unbeatable, incredible ensemble of performers who manage to inject incredible humour into a story that by its very nature inspires indignation.
Congratulations to Broadway composer John Kander who yesterday was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barrack Obama in a White House Ceremony. As one half of the dynamic writing duo with Fred Ebb, John Kander is the composer of classic Broadway musicals including Cabaret, Chicago, Woman Of The Year, Steel Pier and Kiss Of The Spider Woman. The duo also wrote an enormous amount of material for film and television including the song New York, New York, immortalised by Frank Sinatra. Following a sell-out season last year at London’s Young Vic their show The Scottsboro Boys will open at the Garrick Theatre on 4th October 2014. Tickets are onsale now.
This is, by far, the best version of Cabaret I have ever seen. Do anything to see it.
The nine boys are, in an unqualified way, magnificent: the line-up here is better than the Vineyard line-up. Each of the nine can sing, dance and act. They are simply tremendous: with special, remarkable turns from James T Lane (seriously, just get the awards engraved now), Kyle Scatliffe, Clinton Roane and Carl Spencer. When they all sing together, it is unarguably thrilling.
