Twin Cities Community Theater Beat

  Welcome to Part 3 of my year-in-review!   Part 1 is here  (link) and Part 2 is here (link) . In Part 2, I told you about Broadway shows that I think should be performed again, by community theater groups.   In this section, I’ll tell you about the shows that I think are worth revisiting just to listen to and appreciate.   Many of them are available to be performed, but for various reasons they didn’t make my previous list.  Again, each musical is listed with the year of its Broadway debut, the organization who holds licensing rights, and information about the musical.  Most of the musicals have recordings on Spotify, and for the others I have provided links to recordings that others in the Broadway 2 A Day community have found.    ***   1. Shinbone Alley 1957, Music Theatre International (under the title archy & mehitabel ) Synopsis: A cockroach writes a newspaper column about his life and about his love, a wayward all...

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...

When I first heard about Elf: The Musical , I wasn't sure it was necessary. Did we really need another film-to-musical adaptation? Actually, yes, I think we did. The thing about a lot of holiday musicals is that they are mostly about and for adults. Shows like White Christmas  or A Christmas Carol are largely about adult problems, even if there are occasionally children in them, and even though A Christmas Story is about children, it's told through a nostalgic lens that speaks more to adults than current children. Elf stars a grown man, but he experiences things as a child and his problems are problems of a child—he wants to have fun and believe in magic, and the conflict comes from the adults around him who put up boundaries and have their priorities mixed up. It's got to be easier for a young theater-goer to step into Buddy the Elf's perspective than Ebenezer Scrooge, for example. Not to mention that  Elf  has a lot more roles for young actors (beyond Tiny Tim and ...

This past weekend, theater groups across the world held performances of a special, limited-time event: Musical Theatre International's All Together Now!: A Global Event Celebrating Local Theatre . MTI is a licensing company that holds the rights to many popular musicals (and plenty of unpopular musicals), which means that usually theater companies pay MTI for the right to perform their shows, and for the rental of scripts and music. All Together Now! is a revue that MTI offered for free, with the goal of supporting small theater groups that may have struggled under the pandemic.  Multiple groups in the Twin Cities participated in this event, including Cross Community Players. CCP used All Together Now! as their fall fundraiser, but did not charge admission; I appreciate that this event was more accessible for that reason, but it does seem unusual for a fundraiser! In addition to collecting cash donations for their own organization, CCP encouraged audience members to bring dona...

Little Shop of Horrors is the story of Seymour, a working-class guy with nothing to his name but a dead-end job in a failing flower shop. He finds an unusual plant that quickly changes his life, but the plant can only thrive when fed human blood. It seems like everything is within Seymour's reach — money, fame, a family, and even love ⁠— so long as he's willing to pay a price that gets steeper and steeper. This has always been one of my favorite shows because of the way it blends humor and horror. The story is dark enough that test audiences for the film adaptation got very upset ⁠— leading to an ending that is much more cheerful than the stage play's. But overall Little Shop has such a delightful camp energy, and such amazing music, that you might even find yourself rooting for the murderous plant. In 4 Community Theatre's recent production, Director Sharayah Bunce made some clever creative choices in the blocking, for example, playing some sequences in silhouette. She...

The summer is drawing to an end, and with it, the series of local productions of Mamma Mia . By my count, Ashland Productions is the fourth group this summer to perform this show (though I could be under-counting). It's strangely common for the same show to pop up multiple times in short succession, but I think Mamma Mia 's got to be one of the best shows to see repeatedly. Sure, the script doesn't always hold up, but the music is ridiculously catchy, and if nothing else, you can pretend for two hours that you're with the characters on stage, partying on the sunny Mediterranean coast. I find it hard to believe any adult hasn't seen at least the film version of Mamma Mia (featuring Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan, among many other famous faces), but for the outliers: in this story, 20-year-old Sophie finds out she has three possible dads, and she secretly invites them all to her wedding. When they arrive, old feelings and new conflicts arise. Will Sophie and her fia...