Twin Cities Community Theater Beat

Welcome to Part 2 of my year-in-review!  Part 1 is here . In this post, I will be telling you about the Broadway shows I came across in 2021 that I think are somewhat or completely unknown but have a lot of potential for the local community theatre stage. Some of the questions that I thought about when selecting shows included: Is the music good?  Does the story still hold up today?  Would audiences want to come see it?  Is it feasible for the limits of community theater?  (For example, Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark  would definitely be a NO on that last question.)  Could I see a local community theater group succeeding at putting on this show? [The fact is, I've seen shows from a lot of local groups in the past several years.  I haven't seen a lot of racial diversity.  The reasons are complex, and I know that some people are actively working on attracting and keeping diverse talent, but in the meantime, I don't know any community theater ...

In the winter of 2020, I was scrolling through TikTok when I saw a video by Stacy Moscotti (@theatrekidauditioncoach), a vocal coach specializing in musical theater.   She had a crazy idea: listen to every Broadway musical.   In order.   When Stacy crunched the numbers, she found that, if she listened to two shows every day, she could cover 1950-2020 over the course of a year.   When she started talking about it on TikTok, hundreds of people seemed into the idea, and so began the Broadway Two-a-Day Challenge. This challenge – listen to “all” of Broadway in a year – intrigued me.   There were plenty of shows I’d heard about but didn’t really know, and plenty of shows I’d never even heard about!   I thought it would be nice to broaden my theater knowledge as a general sort of enrichment, but also, I thought I might find some forgotten gems that would be good for community theater.   As a reviewer, I may get tired of seeing the same shows repeatedly, bu...