Reimagining Done Right: 42nd Street at the Ordway

The Ordway caps its 2018-2019 Broadway season with a smashing production of the old-fashioned musical 42nd Street, playing through August 11.

42nd Street isn't the classic Broadway musical you might think it is: It didn't open on Broadway until 1980, the year after Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita  premiered.

More about the show's history later, but first, the big question: how do you reimagine a musical that was already a period piece when it opened on Broadway?  You revisit the music and the dance.

This "Ordway Original" 42nd Street reprises a version first performed at Chicago's Drury Lane Theatre in 2017, directed (as is the Ordway's production) by Michael Heitzman. The production features the 2017 show's exciting new musical arrangements and orchestrations by Everett Bradley and amazing choreography by Jared Grimes.

42nd Street is a classic backstage musical, in which a talented newcomer shows up at a Broadway audition and manages to impress the creative team and the cast. When the leading lady can't perform, the ingenue becomes a star. Although the story is, as always, set in 1933, the musical arrangements are jazzier than we are used to hearing, and rather than using just the classic line of time-stepping chorines we expect, the tap dancing of the ensemble is loud, percussive, athletic, and thoroughly exciting to watch.

Roe at Mixed Blood Theatre

Laura Zabel and Tracey Maloney
Photo by Rich Ryan

If you see one play this year, go see Roe at Mixed Blood Theatre. DO IT. GO. BYE.

Still here? Okay, here are the details:

When: March 15 - 31, 2019
At: Mixed Blood Theatre
Running Time: Two hours with intermish

About:
"Roe, a theatrical survey of the complicated and fiery underpinnings of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established a womxn’s right to an abortion. Roe precisely illustrates the fractured and fracturing history of one of the most polarizing social issues of the modern era. Sarah Weddington was a 26-year-old lawyer when she argued Roe v. Wade, and accidental heroine Norma McCorvey was a 22-year-old poor, hard-living lesbian bartender seeking to end her third pregnancy when she first agreed to be the plaintiff under the pseudonym 'Jane Roe,' decades before she renounced her involvement in the case and became an anti-abortion advocate."

Photo by Rich Ryan

What We Thought:
Holy cats. Where do we start?

This Bitter Earth at Penumbra Theatre

This Bitter Earth is an absolute must-see. This new play by Harrison David Rivers is having its area premiere at Penumbra Theatre through May 20, and it is an intensely personal look at an interracial relationship during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

As One - Skylark Opera Theatre at North Garden Theater

One of the beautiful things about having this blog is having the opportunity to share when a show is truly outstanding and needs to be seen. The blog works much better than standing on the street corner shouting at passersby. (I think. I haven't really tried that yet.)

Friends, go see As One at Skylark Opera. Now at North Garden Theater (St. Paul! Represent!) only through Sunday, March 25.