By Burton Lane (music) and E.Y. "Yip" Harburg (lyrics)
St. James Theatre, 246 West 44th Street, New York, Wednesday November 25th 2009
I was amazed at the Broadway Tickets line that stretched for four blocks from 42nd Street, so I kept walking, to the St James Theatre at West 44th Street, and bought tickets for a 60% discount direct from the box office. No waiting, no delay. It makes me wonder why people line up for tickets that cost more. Perhaps half the fun is standing in the rain in Times Square.
Finian’s Rainbow was revived this summer at City Center’s “Encore” series and was so popular and critically successful that it moved to Broadway with most of the "Encore" cast intact and was given raves by the New York Times (and every other paper as well, as if they count).
I do not really care for leprehauns, of whch this musical brought forth an effusion (the lyricist, Yip Harburg also wrote the book for "The Wizard of Oz"), and the absence of any emotional sympathy with the play was compounded by the fact that the only song I recognized (“How are Things In Glocca Morra?”) took me back to rainy Sunday evenings in Launceston with the ghastly Dawn Lake mooning on the Pye TV set.
But it was charming to hear all the other the wonderful songs in this show (including "Old Devil Moon" which you can hear in the video below this), which are now forgotten despite the expectation, 50 years ago, that they would live forever. Instead, they died with the commencement of the Eisenhower era. I guess leprechauns were inconsistent with McCarthyism.
Although the elementary production, comprising a vile green scrim dotted with fake flowers, was outrageously terrible, the cast was strong and worked so well as an ensemble that individuals were almost indistinguishable. The exceptions were the redoubtable Terri White who appropriately stopped the show with her torch song, “Necessity,” the female lead Kate Baldwin whose voice was just right for the role and whose Irish dialect coach must have been a genius, and the eponymous Cheyenne Jackson whose narcissism was as pulverising as his effectiveness in proving wrong those who say that actors cannot be openly gay without ruining their careers.
Watch Broadway.com's promotion of Finian's Rainbow starring Kate Jackson and Cheyenne Jackson:
St. James Theatre, 246 West 44th Street, New York, Wednesday November 25th 2009
Finian’s Rainbow was revived this summer at City Center’s “Encore” series and was so popular and critically successful that it moved to Broadway with most of the "Encore" cast intact and was given raves by the New York Times (and every other paper as well, as if they count).
I do not really care for leprehauns, of whch this musical brought forth an effusion (the lyricist, Yip Harburg also wrote the book for "The Wizard of Oz"), and the absence of any emotional sympathy with the play was compounded by the fact that the only song I recognized (“How are Things In Glocca Morra?”) took me back to rainy Sunday evenings in Launceston with the ghastly Dawn Lake mooning on the Pye TV set.
But it was charming to hear all the other the wonderful songs in this show (including "Old Devil Moon" which you can hear in the video below this), which are now forgotten despite the expectation, 50 years ago, that they would live forever. Instead, they died with the commencement of the Eisenhower era. I guess leprechauns were inconsistent with McCarthyism.
Although the elementary production, comprising a vile green scrim dotted with fake flowers, was outrageously terrible, the cast was strong and worked so well as an ensemble that individuals were almost indistinguishable. The exceptions were the redoubtable Terri White who appropriately stopped the show with her torch song, “Necessity,” the female lead Kate Baldwin whose voice was just right for the role and whose Irish dialect coach must have been a genius, and the eponymous Cheyenne Jackson whose narcissism was as pulverising as his effectiveness in proving wrong those who say that actors cannot be openly gay without ruining their careers.
Watch Broadway.com's promotion of Finian's Rainbow starring Kate Jackson and Cheyenne Jackson:
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