ChannelTim

  My new YouTube series examines the musical legacy of John Kander and Fred Ebb. Watch the video here, or, if you’d prefer, you can read my script for it below.  Over the next few months, I will be listening to the original Broadway cast album for the 15 musicals Kander & Ebb wrote together that have such a recording, one at a time, in chronological order, and ranking them.  So, why Kander & Ebb? I don’t know why the idea occurred to me, actually. I’m not really a Kander & Ebb guy. There are other composers who I rate more highly, and about half of these shows I have never listened to at all, but that’s what makes this an exciting journey of discovery.  I’m coming to them fresh. I have a few favorites, but I don’t know already what show is going to wind up on the top of my list. This’ll take us from 1965 to 2023, so we’ll be spanning the eras of the Broadway musical, and, of world history Unlike say, movies, it’s difficult to rank musicals because the...

ChannelTim must keep up with the times, so I’ve joined TikTok! I am reviewing the New York spring theatre season over there, so go throw a follow  my way . For those of you not on that app, I’ll be doing a couple of review roundups here. Below are the scripts for my videos.  Monte Christo It’s no easy task to take a work of 19th literature and adapt it into a musical. For every Les Mis , there are half a dozen Jane Eyre s and Dracula s. But that track record has not daunted the writers of Monte Christo: A New Musical , who approach the source material, The Count of Monte Christo by Alexandra Dumas, with a bewildering combination of pep and disinterest. For a show that was only two hours long including an intermission, there was always going to be a lot of truncation of the plot, and that’s fine, but Monte Christo is also lopsided structurally. Most of act one is is taken up by the set up of Edmund Dantes getting set up, and he doesn’t take on the identity of the Count until ...

ChannelTim must keep up with the times, so I’ve joined TikTok! I am reviewing the New York spring theatre season over there, so go throw a follow my way . For those of you not on that app, I’ll be doing a couple of review roundups here. Below are the scripts for my videos.  Every Brilliant Thing Daniel Radcliffe returns to Broadway in Every Brilliant Thing,  on the very stage where he last appeared, in the Tony-winning revival of Merrily We Roll Along . Whereas Merrily showcased his chemistry with his co-stars, this time around, Radcliffe’s the only credited actor on the stage, although he’s not entirely alone, as Every Brilliant Thing incorporates a good deal of audience participation. Now, I know a lot of you out there are weary of shows with audience participation, I know I am, but here I thought it was not awkward at all, and that wasn’t an easy task considering there are multiple scenes that require these audience members to play character and hit emotional beats. Espe...

A champagne problem of mine is that, having grown up in a suburb of New York, my knowledge of the theatrical canon is largely confined to the plays that have been revived on Broadway in my lifetime. And since Thornton Wilder’s seminal Our Town was last produced on the Main Stem when I was four years old, I had never encountered it until I saw Kenny Leon’s new revival, opening October 9th at the Barrymore Theatre. My theatre-going companion, hailing from a Midwestern small town not dissimilar from Grover’s Corners, was intimately familiar with the material via multiple high school interpretations. Despite being an oft produced play, Our Town had eluded me for so long that I was floored by the daringness and perceptiveness of the text when I finally saw it for myself. But that was all that floored me. Remarkably meta-theatrical for a play written in 1938, Our Town is both a play about life in a small town at the turn of the twentieth century and a play about a play about life in ...