Wonderland Ends Its Less Than Wondrous Run

Frank Wildhorn's latest musical Wonderland will be ending its run at Broadway's Marquis Theater on May 15th after 31 previews and only 33 performances.  The show was completely savaged by critics and received ZERO Tony nominations.

Now I never got to see the show myself but, of the few people that I know who did see it the best they could say was, "The cast is trying very hard."  That's not exactly a rave review.

I personally think that Wildhorn, himself, gets a bit of a bum rap when it comes to his shows. He only writes the music.  Someone else writes the lyrics, book, directs it, builds the sets, etc.  So why is he the one who seems to take all the blame when they fail?  Maybe someone else should choose who he works with?

But I digress, it's always sad when an open ended show closes abruptly because it puts everyone in the cast and backstage out of a job.  So, here's a little video of a trailer for the show.  What do you think?  Too soon?  Not soon enough? If you were in town, would you have gone to see it?



Until next time...

Recit

Well, it seems as though I'm going to be starting off my summer doing a one-act musical in this year's West Village Musical Theatre Festival!  The show is called Recit and is the story of the King family's annual holiday trip to The Tea Room at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.  Naturally, things at the dinner don't run so smoothly.  I'll be playing the featured role of the restaurant's host who has to get involved in the family squabble.

From the WVMTF website:

---"The West Village Musical Theatre Festival (WVMTF) was founded in 2010 by PCC Productions as a way for emerging professional artists to work with established artists on an original musical theatre piece, and for audiences to get a sampling of new theatre that wouldn't cost them a lot in money or time.  We presented 12 works in two separate "series", each series consisting of six 10-15 minute one-act musicals - giving audiences lots of different performances to see in one night and taking the cost of producing a full length production off of the creative teams."

Our show will be presented during the second weekend of June.  As I find out more info, I'll be sure to pass it along.  To learn more about the festival, click here.

Until next time...

MTI - Constant Improvement

I'm not sure if anyone read my post a while back about my newest Broadway Blogspot article, "Constant Improvement."  Well, it seems that it's also been posted on Music Theatre International (MTI) Showspace.  I think that's pretty cool!

MTI is a theatre licensing company that handles the rights of hundreds (probably more) musicals.  MTI Showspace is the company's own social media network that's "where theatre people click."  Anyway, they added my article to their blog a while back and I just found out about it.

If you haven't had a chance to read it, check it out here.  Let me know what you think and if I made any sense.

Until next time...