Saturday Night Fever – The Musical has mediocre disco dancing that was both uninspiring a tad mechanical. Usually Drury Lance Theatre’s musicals contain more creative and spirited choreography with stronger dancers. I also had a problem with the female singers who seemed flat or so unlike The Bee Gees that it hurt the production.
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Here are the 12 Best stage performances for 2016:
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The top 12 musicals of 2016 in Chicago by Tom Williams
Read MoreIf three supernatural visitors can turn a man’s life around — as do the visions of Christmas Past, Present, and Future for Ebenezer Scrooge — how much more effective would five magical visitors be? The splendid answer lies in Five Guys Named Moe, where Little Moe (Daryn Stewart), Big Moe (Philip Beltan), 4-eyed Moe (Micah Jeremiah Mims), Eat Moe (Dan Seward) and No Moe (Christopher George Patterson) amazingly appear in the bedroom of drunken, despondent Nomax (Brandon Hanks).
Read MoreFox takes audiences on a sidesplitting romp which pulls the rug from underneath the stuffy denizens of a private golf country club. The 43rd annual grudge match between rival golf clubs is thrown for a loop when the best golfer switches teams on the eve of the competition. It’s a hilarious romp with classic elements like mistaken identities, huge consequences riding on the match’s outcome, marriages on the brink of disaster, and secret romantic shenanigans that recalls the Marx Brothers in their heyday. Add over-the-top characters, a furious pace, terrific physical comedy with brilliant plotting and fabulous comic touches by the expert cast and Fox is a well-oiled comic farce.
Read MoreUnder director/choreographer Tammy Mader, dancing and tongue-in-cheek humor fuels the fun-filled romp back to the 20’s where the girls wore short hair and skimpy dress and the guys donned stripped pants and loud jackets. It was the era of fun times, especially at speakeasies and dance clubs.
Read MoreTom Williams discusses the following stage plays with Carl Amari: Busman’s Honeymoon at Lifeline Theatre; Crazy for You at the
Read Moreby Tom Williams 1. Show Boat by Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein II 2. Les Miserables by Alain Boublil,
Read MoreThe opening ten minutes of a Broadway Musical are critical. Every great show has a great opening. Even if a musical gets the opening correct, the show can still fall apart. But, get the opening wrong and the show surely will fail. The audience’s expectations are sent in the wrong direction and once they realize that they have been misled, they will feel cheated.
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The press release describes this production as “An irreverent comedy that imagines Shakespeare’s ‘lost years’”—the years for which we lack historical record of his life and activities—“as a rousing romp through the streets and across the stages of Elizabethan London.” To that, I chuckle. “Romp” is fitting, but surely “irreverent” is a misnomer: something so inane and infantile cannot possibly bear the prestige of “the irreverent.” We must hold to some standards.
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