To advertise the Toronto run of Evil Dead: The Musical, the marketing staff have come up with a pretty clever poster campaign. You might have seen these before, but I finally found some decent scans and decided to post them. If only the musical itself were even half as clever or as funny as the posters, they might have a winner on their hands. Unfortunately, the musical is a stinker. (Read my review of the Off-Broadway production.)
The Manhattan Theater Club presentation LoveMusik has closed on Broadway, but it won't be going away completely. A recent article on Playbill.com says that a cast recording is "in the works" and that there are already concrete plans for international productions, including one in Japan starring someone named Masachika Ichimura. There won't be any commercial Broadway transfer, as if anyone was expecting one.
Here's my problem with future productions of the show: there were two reasons that the Broadway production was worth seeing, and they were Donna Murphy as Lotte Lenya and Michael Cerveris as Kurt Weill. Without them, I really can't see the show working. As I said in my review, the book is plodding and the direction pedestrian. I'll certainly be getting the CD, because I adore Kurt Weill's music, and the cast performs it splendidly.
I got a call the other day from someone at the MTC looking for a donation or something, and she started off by asking me what I thought of LoveMusik. I told her.
"Ouch," she said. "I guess you didn't like it, huh?"
No, I didn't like it. I was supremely disappointed in the work of Hal Prince and Alfred Uhry, both monumentally talented men. I told her that I commended the MTC for taking a chance on such an ambitious undertaking. I mean, if Hal Prince says he wants to do a show, you do it, right? And the MTC is not typically known for producing musicals, so they were taking a risk. But without serious and significant rewriting, any future productions of LoveMusik will likely fall flat, as the Broadway production did.
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