If you, like many among us, thought that Fred Astaire maybe didn't have any feelings about Steve Martin, allow me to gently correct you. He hated him for making Pennies From Heaven, that bonkers-depressing 1981 musical that Pauline Kael loved (which, aside, I have always meant to develop an Opinion about Pauline Kael, because it seems like something that smart people do!)
American society is always interested in what makes us Asian; it is rarely, if ever, interested in what makes us American. If no one understands what can happen when that second half of the term is stripped from us, no one can keep the injustice committed against Japanese Americans from being committed against other communities.
The first Republican Presidential debate for the 2016 presidential campaign aired while Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, a musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton, celebrated its opening night on Broadway. While Bobby Jindal declared that “immigration without assimilation is invasion,” an opening night audience watched a musical about the Founding Fathers that rests on an ideal explicitly stated in the first act: "Immigrants / We get the job done." Hamilton opens with the same lines that…
Kathryn Funkhouser's previous work for The Toast can be found here. Not every Broadway musical should have a reunion; to insist upon this would be fatal for the quality of the actors’ tall tales at the bar afterwards, and deny theater the allure of something that ends. But Into The Woods has always been about what is discussed in the bar afterwards -- about people coming to understand the impact of their stories, even the…
Amy Laburda last wrote about Oklahoma! When I was 14, Rent was important to me in a way I find it hard to overstate. My parents were well used to my latching onto a musical and playing the cast recording over and over again. But when I had been toting around Phantom of the Opera five years earlier, I didn’t need a perfectly trained memory to know when to turn down the volume so…
Joel's last piece for The Toast was "No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians."
You could say Whoopi started a movement.
I am of course speaking about a very niche, a very important corner of our pop culture landscape: the inspirational singing competition movie. What would the late twentieth century and early aughts have been without the tried and true formula of a group of misfit teens getting together, ignoring racial
Sunday In The Park With George This play began with some promise. I liked the part about the genius doing brilliant work based on scientific principles that nobody around him has the capacity to understand. But then everybody started bothering him about his emotions and singing about loving him all the time and I lost interest. Cats I was once beaten with a lead pipe in a Turkish prison. If given the choice between returning…
The real question posed by Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! is this:
Would Ado Annie and Laurey's problems be solved if they just set themselves up as spinsters in a romantic friendship on Laurey's farm and dumped Jud, Curly, Will and Ali on a wagon bound for California? (All Most of the problems!)
One need not be a fan of Audrey Hepburn to consider it a moral outrage that My Fair Lady ends with a continuation of Henry Higgins' weirdly critical, sexless relationship with Eliza Doolittle (you can always pretend it's the Julie Andrews stage version, if that helps). No man who wears hats that unbecoming has any right to be such a prescriptivist in matters of dialect (what is that brown, shapeless mess he has on his head…
