Inner Voices: Review Roundup

Posted on December 10, 2012 by boz

Alexandra Silber

In 2008, inspired by Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, Premieres inaugurated Inner Voices: Solo Musicals. This year’s collection, the third biennial presentation in the series, included Arlington (book and lyrics by Victor Lodato, music by Polly Pen), directed by Jack Cummings III and starring Alexandra Silber; Borrowed Dust (book and lyrics by Martin Moran, music by Joseph Thalken), directed by Jonathan Butterell and starring Hunter Foster; and Farhad or The Secret of Being (book and lyrics by Nilo Cruz, music by Jim Bauer), directed by Saheem Ali and starring Arielle Jacobs.

Michael Feingold (Village Voice): A one-character musical raises two basic theatrical questions: Who is the person singing to, and what can possibly happen that’s worth singing about? … The first, Borrowed Dust, by Martin Moran, shows a young man describing, presumably to us, the events and feelings that followed his younger brother’s death in a Colorado mountain town. The events are interesting; their narration is clear and feelingly delivered. … Victor Lodato’s Arlington, music by Polly Pen, also mainly conveys information, this time psychological. … Short on data, the piece frustratingly lacks forward motion. … Farhad, or The Secret for Being, by Nilo Cruz, masters the form by simply answering the questions.

Adam Feldman (Time Out): Good things may come in threes, but not all things that come in threes are good. Inner Voices, a triptych of solo musicals, contains one highly accomplished piece: the middle panel, Arlington, in which the prodigiously gifted Alexandra Silber plays a soldier’s wife with a dawning sense of her husband’s darkness. … Arlington is bookended, however, by two less successful attempts at musical monologue. Martin Moran and Joseph Thalken’s meandering Borrowed Dust … has the feel of a loud drama-therapy session, and not a breakthrough one. And although Arielle Jacobs brings full-throated intensity to the role of a Muslim girl who has been raised as a boy in Farhad, or The Secret of Being, Nilo Cruz’s libretto provides uneven support for Jim Bauer’s evocative, well-arranged music.

Anita Gates (N.Y. Times): This sweet, sobering drama [Arlington], by Polly Pen and Victor Lodato, the poignant standout in the latest production in the Premieres series Inner Voices. … The opening musical, Borrowed Dust, by Joseph Thalken and Martin Moran, is a straightforward study of grief. Maybe too straightforward. … The songs (they actually feel like one long, long number) emit strong hints of Sondheim, but there is a deadly sameness to them. … Arielle Jacobs closes out the evening in Farhad, a disturbing and intriguing portrait of a gender-identity crisis. … The lyrics sometimes threaten to be obvious (“I want to be more than just a girl”) but then take sudden, sharp turns into insight (“With something more to do than hide”).

David Gordon (Theater Mania): The selections in Inner Voices are not all triumphs, but each contains the same primary virtue: a remarkably acted and sung performance. … In Martin Moran and Joseph Thalken’s Borrowed Dust, the least successful of the three pieces … Foster gives one of his strongest performances to date … but the actor is let down by Moran’s book and lyrics … and a needlessly complicated score by Thalken. More successful is Arlington, written by Polly Pen and Victor Lodato. … Director Jack Cummings III guides the first-rate Silber through a remarkably nuanced and gorgeously sung performance. … Farhad or The Secret of Being … is not only the most intriguing of the three pieces, it is the only one that could actively benefit from being expanded into a full-length musical.

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Elf: Review Roundup

Posted on December 7, 2012 by boz

Jordan Gelber and
Wayne Knight

The Broadway return of Elf, the 2010 musical based on the 2003 film written by David Berenbaum, has received mostly positive reviews. This revival features a revised book and a new opening number, “Happy All the Time.” The creative team includes Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin (book), Chad Beguelin (lyrics), Matthew Sklar (music), Casey Nicholaw (direction, choreography), Doug Besterman (orchestrations), Phil Reno (music direction), David Rockwell (sets), Gregg Barnes (costumes), Natasha Katz (lights), Peter Hylenski (sound), Zachary Borovay (projections), and Josh Marquette (hair). The cast includes Jordan Gelber (Buddy), Leslie Kritzer (Jovie), Mark Jacoby (Walter Hobbs), Adam Heller (Mr. Greenway), Michael Mandell (Macy’s Manager), Valerie Wright (Deb), Mitchell Sink (Michael), Jason Eric Testa (Little Boy), Beth Leavel (Emily) and Wayne Knight (Santa).

Suzy Evans (Back Stage): There is so much to love about the movie Elf. Fortunately, many of those same charms grace the stage in the returning holiday musical. … One major factor is missing from the production, however, and it’s really no one’s fault that it’s gone. … It is completely unfair to compare actor Jordan Gelber to Ferrell. … Gelber takes a while to warm up to his approach, though he is endearing by the show’s conclusion. The most jarring lack in the performance is his singing. … The best number in the show is a scene that doesn’t come from the film. A group of put-upon, soon-to-be-out-of-work mall Santas sing a hilarious number in a Chinatown restaurant, bemoaning how nobody cares about or believes in the big man anymore.

Neil Genzlinger (N.Y. Times): In the remounted Broadway show … Jordan Gelber, one of several new cast members, draws the thankless job of trying to make fans of the movie forget Mr. Ferrell. He and the director, Casey Nicholaw, never quite find a comfort zone for the character the way that Mr. Ferrell did. …. But the show does have just enough nice supporting performances and successful comic moments to amuse easily amused kiddies and leave grown-up ticket buyers grumbling no more loudly than they would after any of the other holiday shows. … Although no new holiday standards are likely to emerge from this show, a couple of the musical numbers do have a respectable zing. … The second act opens with a funny number called “Nobody Cares About Santa” featuring a bunch of grousing department-store Clauses who have gathered for a bite to eat in a Chinese restaurant.

Tanner Stransky (Entertainment Weekly): In two years at the North Pole, Buddy the Elf & Co. haven’t changed much. The show opens with a new musical number, but most of the changes involve casting. … The biggest difference involve the leads: Jordan Gelber creates a softer, more childlike Buddy at the center of the show, while Leslie Kritzer is more pensive and understated as love interest Jovie, a role that still never quite gets its due. Still, it’s the wonderful supporting cast that steals the show. … Elf won’t change your life, but it will brighten your holiday season a little bit. This line is repeated in the show over and over and over: ‘‘The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.’’ Mission (still) accomplished. B+

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2013 Grammy Nominations

Posted on December 6, 2012 by boz

The National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences kicked off the nomination announcements for its 55th annual Grammy Awards yesterday during a concert at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville hosted by Taylor Swift and LL Cool J. The roster of works vying for the trophy as Best Musical Theater Album this year include the 2012 Broadway revival cast recording of Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 musical Follies, the 2011 Broadway revival cast recording of the Gershwins’ 1935 musical Porgy and Bess (which won the Tony for Best Revival of a Musical), the original Broadway cast recording of the 2012 stage adaptation of the 1992 film Newsies from Alan Menken and Jack Feldman (who won the Tony for Best Score), the original Broadway cast recording of the 2012 Gershwin retro musical Nice Work If You Can Get It, and the original Broadway cast recording of the 2012 stage adaptation of the 2006 Oscar-winning film Once (which won the Tony for Best Musical).

Among the nominees for Best Song Written for Visual Media is the Emmy-nominated “Let Me Be Your Star” by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, which was sung by Katharine McPhee and Megan Hilty, the dueling Marilyn Monroes in the fictional Broadway-bound musical Bombshell in the backstage series Smash. The winners will be revealed at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 10, 2013, during the ceremony broadcast on CBS at 8 p.m.

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Civil War Christmas: Review Roundup

Posted on December 5, 2012 by boz

Bob Stillman

New York Theatre Workshop’s production of A Civil War Christmas, Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel’s new musical play that interpolates period songs, has opened Off-Broadway to very positive reviews. The show made its world premiere in 2008 at Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, Conn. The creative team includes Paula Vogel (book), Daryl Waters (music arrangements), Tina Landau (direction), Andrew Resnick (musical direction), James Schuette (sets), Toni-Leslie James (costumes), Scott Zielinski (lights), and Jill BC Du Boff (sound). The cast includes Sumaya Bouhbal (Jessa, etc.), Jonathan-David (Ely Parker, etc.), K. Todd Freeman (Decatur Bronson, etc.), Amber Iman (Hanna, etc.), Karen Kandel (Elizabeth Keckley, etc.), Sean Allan Krill (Robert E. Lee, John Wilkes Boot, etc.), Chris Henry (Ulysses S. Grant, etc.), Rachel Spencer Hewitt (Mary Surratt, etc.), Antwayn Hopper (Walker Lewis, etc.), Alice Ripley (Mary Todd Lincoln, etc.), and Bob Stillman (Abraham Lincoln, etc.).

Melissa Rose Bernardo (Entertainment Weekly): Paula Vogel has the perfect holiday antidote: A Civil War Christmas. … There are carols – of the “O Tannenbaum” variety, as opposed to “Frosty the Snowman” – but they’re interspersed with a heavy helping of period tunes. … And though they’re beautifully sung and filled with joy, there’s nothing jingle-bell jolly about them. … In fact, she’s crafted something both timely and quietly moving: a Christmas-themed portrait of a politically (and racially) segregated nation and a controversial president about to embark on his second term. … With 11 actors and more than 30 characters populating the Christmas Eve 1864-set tale, a little confusion is inevitable. … But Landau’s staging is mostly taut and uncluttered. … A-

Jennifer Farrar (AP): Who knew Abraham Lincoln could play the violin and accordion? In Paula Vogel’s warm, non-saccharine vision, the Lincoln character pitches in to do that and more in her sprightly, intellectual musical play, A Civil War Christmas. The crazy-quilt production … is a sweeping, literate and entertaining tale of intersecting spiritual myths and American history on the bitterly cold Christmas Eve of 1864. Pulitzer Prize-winner Vogel includes racism and prejudice, yet also goodness and tolerance. … Landau’s creative staging inform affecting vignettes and foreshadowings. … For a country still cleaved by politics nearly 150 years after the Civil War, Vogel’s focus on decency and commonalities sends a hopeful message.

David Gordon (Theater Mania): This compelling theatrical experience weaves together dozens of characters, fact, fiction, Christmas carols, spirituals, and Civil War songs into an unapologetically messy ­– richly crafted – patchwork quilt. … Tina Landau’s staging … is smooth and swift, despite occasionally confusing double and triple casting, a necessity for a small production with a cast of characters as large as this. Stillman and Ripley bring appropriate gravitas to the Lincolns, imbuing them with a haunted quality, as if they know that the glimmers of hope they experience as Christmas occurs will be short lived. For us, this is especially sad, knowing how their story tragically concludes just four months later.

Charles Isherwood (N.Y. Times): Written with an embracing expansiveness by Ms. Vogel, and featuring handsomely sung hymns and carols of the period, this unusual holiday pageant represents an illuminating alternative to the often garish or sentimental holiday fare. … A Civil War Christmas is rich in precise historical detail, but it never feels like a series of talking dioramas in a history museum. Even the most quickly sketched characters exude the warmth of real human beings, thanks to vivid performances from the cast. … And when the actors’ voices rise together in song … there arises from the dark history being told an ineffable sense of wonder at the survival of faith and humanity even in hearts ravaged by loss.

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Scrooge: Review Roundup

Posted on November 30, 2012 by boz

Tommy Steele

The latest West End revival of the 1992 musical Scrooge, adapted from the 1970 film version of the Charles Dickens novel A Christmas Carol, has opened at the London Palladium to poor reviews. The creative team includes Leslie Bricusse (book, lyrics, music), Bob Tomson (direction), Paul Farnsworth (design), Paul Kieve (illusions), Lisa Kent (choreography), Stuart Pedlar (musical direction), Nick Richings (lights), and Ben Harrison (sound). The cast includes Tommy Steel (Scrooge), Barry Howard (Jacob Marley), Sarah Earnshaw (Christmas Past), James Head (Christmas Present), Halcro Johnston (Fezziwig), Tessa Vale (Mrs. Fezziwig), Edward Handoll (Bob Cratchit), and Louisa Maxwell (Mrs. Cratchit).

Dominic Cavendish (Telegraph): Bricusse’s version faithfully follows the outline of the tale but amplifies the materialist side of its message: Ebenezer Scrooge learns in the nick of time to stop hoarding and start spending. In Bob Tomson’s opulent revival … Tommy Steele’s transformed miser finally comes on as Father Christmas, dispensing gifts. … I don’t mind [Steele] in small doses, but alas you get a lot more of the former heartthrob than is easily stomached. There are innumerable unwrap-and-discard songs to endure and while our Tommy can still hold a tune his performance is remarkably one-note. … To be fair, he’s as much an institution as figgy pudding but could not a touch more plausibility have been added by staining those gleaming and beaming gnashers of his?

Lyn Gardner (Guardian): There is probably only one way to stop Tommy Steele from playing Scrooge … and that would be to cancel Christmas entirely for the next decade. It would be a small price to pay to save theatregoers from this cheery but dreary spectacle. … Leslie Bricusse’s music and book are completely inoffensive, Paul Farnsworth’s design goes for lashings of theme-park Victorian atmosphere, and Bob Thomson’s direction moves the cast efficiently about the stage as they deliver the entire show with the kind of fixed-smile sincerity. … It’s the relentless perky sweetness of the whole thing that wears you down, exemplified by Steele’s star turn. … His Scrooge is never prepared to appear unlikable and wants us to love him so much that the redemptive power of the story is squandered.

Rachel Halliburton (Time Out): Tommy Steele looks thoroughly at ease as cartoonish misanthrope Ebeneezer Scrooge. Those teeth look far too white and shiny for a Dickens character, but who cares? This is musical-land, where dazzling dentistry and tales of redemption always go together. … If you’re looking for a strong formula musical complete with anodyne songs and a little (but not too much) substance then this slickly executed package might be just what you need. … It is, of course, Dickens stripped down to the basics, and in his bicentenary year there are many more meaty ways of celebrating him. But as comfortable Christmas fayre, Scrooge: The Musical does what it says on the tin.

Paul Taylor (Independent): Tommy Steele is not the first performer that you’d associate with Dickens’s misanthropic old tight-wad … but you don’t have to wait too long for a flash of that trade-mark grin in Leslie Bricusse’s relentlessly bland and cheery musical version of the story. … [Steele] is still in his element working this huge house and his singing voice is in relatively good nick. But beginning with Christmas carols harmonized round chestnut-roasting braziers by well-scrubbed, theme-park Victorians and ending with Scrooge as a gift-distributing Santa, Scrooge is a show that keeps substituting gooey sentiment and knees-up Cockney jollity for the unsettling strangeness of the original. … “Are you looking forward to Christmas?” a lingering Tommy asked us at the end. Answer, in my case: slightly less so now.

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Aladdin: Review Roundup

Posted on November 29, 2012 by boz

Ed Swidey

The world premiere of Aladdin: A Musical Panto, the ninth annual holiday panto at People’s Light and Theatre Company in Malvern, Pa., has opened to positive reviews. The creative team includes Samantha Bellomo (book, choreography), Pete Pryor (book, direction), Michael Ogborn (lyrics, music), James F. Pyne (sets), Rosemarie E. McKelvey (costumes), J. Dominic Chacon (lights), Mike Hahn (sound), Ryan Touhey (music direction), and Jorge Cousineau (video). The cast includes Justin Jain (Aladdin), Mark Lazar (Widow Twankey), Meera Mohan (Mai Tai), Kim Carson (Sultan), Ed Swidey (Fu), Brad DePlanche (Manny the Monkey), Andrew Kane (Morris the Mantis), Mal Whyte (Genius of the Ring), Larry Malvern (Genius of the Lamp), and Susan McKey (Nurse) with Karen Peakes, Conrad Sager and Antoine McClary.

Debra Miller (Stage Magazine): People’s Light & Theatre Company continues its signature holiday tradition this year with … one of the company’s best Pantos yet! … In keeping with English tradition, Bellomo and Pryor combine elements from the familiar children’s story with … enough adult allusions to keep the grown-ups every bit as interested and amused as the kids. Directed by Pryor and choreographed by Bellomo, Aladdin’s charming cast conjures a world of enchantment, danger, fun, and romance. … Mark Lazar assumes the role of the outrageously buxom dame and does a hilarious job. … Ed Swidey is superb as the dastardly Fu. … Swidey proves once again that he numbers among Philadelphia’s finest, and most versatile, talents.

Wendy Rosenfield (Philadelphia Inquirer): In the pantheon of People’s Light and Theatre pantos, Cinderella, the company’s 2009 Barrymore Awards-sweeping vaudevillian adaptation, stands as a Jupiter of the form. … So, let’s call this year’s Aladdin their Juno. Coming in a close second … Aladdin again pairs composer-lyricist Michael Ogborn with director Peter Pryor. … This winning production team also includes returning videographer Jorge Cousineau, with a hilarious tribute to silent film melodrama. … While it’s great to see old favorites return … this year’s newcomers bring the story’s real magic. … [Ed Swidey] conducts the audience response like a maestro. … The excitement on this stage beats a sugar rush any day.

Margie Royal (Delco News): Pryor and Bellomo’s Aladddin favors dance, frenzy and constant movement. It’s amped up and active and thus will appeal even more to younger audience members who won’t miss plot points so much. … Choreographed movements, dances and chases are big in this production. Original numbers written for the show are sung and supported with some nifty choreography. And these actors can really sing! … The stellar cast pulls it all off in winning fashion. … Ed Swidey is terrific in the role of the bad guy, Fu, and seems to be thoroughly enjoying the chorus of boos he gets from the audience. Aladdin: A Musical Panto is light entertainment performed with high artistry and polish by some of the area’s finest actors.

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Newsies Chorus Honored

Posted on November 28, 2012 by boz

The chorus of Newsies

The chorus of Newsies has won Equity’s sixth annual ACCA Award for Outstanding Broadway Chorus. The winners, all members of the Broadway musical’s March 29 opening night, are Aaron Albano, Mark Aldrich, Tommy Bracco, John E. Brady, Ryan Breslin, Kevin Carolan, Caitlyn Caughell, Kyle Coffman, Mike Faist, Michael Fatica, Julie Foldesi, Garett Hawe, Thayne Jasperson, Evan Kasprzak, Jess LeProtto, Stuart Marland, Andy Richardson, Jack Scott, Ryan Steele, Brendon Stimson, Nick Sullivan, Ephraim M. Sykes, Laurie Veldheer, Alex Wong and Stuart Zagnit.

“This award acknowledges and honors the enormous talent and contributions members of a chorus make to a Broadway production,” said ACCA chair Rebecca Kim Jordon in a statement. “The chorus members of Newsies are gifted professionals who exemplify the hard work, dedication and talent it takes to be outstanding in a Broadway musical.”

In reviewing the chorus of each Broadway production, the ACCA considers the requirements made on each chorus by the director, choreographer, and musical director as well as the caliber of technical skill used to execute those requirements and the contributions made by the entire chorus to the overall production. Past recipients include the choruses of Legally Blonde (2007), In the Heights (2008), West Side Story (2009), Fela! (2010), and The Scottsboro Boys (2011).

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Amy Winehouse Show Is Back to Black

Posted on November 27, 2012 by boz

Amy Winehouse

London’s Daily Telegraph has reported that Koda, the Danish copyright agency, has withdrawn permission for the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen to use Amy Winehouse’s music in Amy, a play about the late British singer that was to open Jan. 30 starring Johanne Louise Schmidt. “It is Amy Winehouse’s father who has thrown a spanner in the works,” Koda spokesman Nicolaj Hylten-Cavallius told Agence France-Presse. Koda had previously given its approval, but shortly after the play was announced in October, Mitch Winehouse told Yahoo! News that the play was “a load of rubbish” and a blatant money-making exercise. Artistic Director Emmet Feigenberg responded that “the performance won’t be any cash cow,” since it would be performed only about a dozen times in the theater’s 220-seat venue. Written in Danish by the 11-member ensemble Det Røde Rum (The Red Room), the play was to depict the “enormous pressure a sensationalist public put on a young superstar when her problems began,” according to press materials, using interviews, speeches, and letters as well as songs from the albums Frank and Back to Black.

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Cabaret: Review Roundup

Posted on November 26, 2012 by boz

Will Young

The fourth West End revival of the 1966 musical Cabaret has opened at the Savoy to positive if somewhat guarded reviews. This limited-engagement London run, a revised version of the 2006 Olivier-nominated production, is the final stop of a UK tour that began in September at the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton. The creative team includes Joe Masteroff (book), Fred Ebb (lyrics), John Kander (music), Rufus Norris (direction), Katrina Lindsay (design), and Javier De Frutos (choreography). The cast includes Michelle Ryan (Sally Bowles), Will Young (Emcee), Siân Phillips (Fraulein Schneider), Matt Rawle (Cliff), Linal Haft (Herr Schultz), Nicholas Tizzard (Ernst), and Harriet Thorpe (Fraulein Kost) with John Brannoch, Jessica Ellen, Allessia Lugoboni, Edd Mitton, Ian Parsons, Nuno Silva, Rebecca Sutherland, Shahla Tarrant, Laura Tyrer, Cydney Uffindell-Phillips and Matthew Wesley.

Theo Bosanquet (What’s On Stage): It’s a dark, jagged and ultimately harrowing production that brings some welcome shade to a West End overrun with the lightness of “enforced standing ovation” jukebox fare. The restaging also offers the opportunity for Will Young and Michelle Ryan to make their musical theatre debuts. Young excels as the Emcee. … Ryan struggles to lend Bowles the darker edge necessary as the show progresses, but proves an excellent dancer and a more than capable vocalist. … Not everything works. … Nevertheless, the ending remains brutally effective and produces an all-too rarely seen spectacle; an audience filtering out of a West End theatre in contemplative silence.

Lyn Gardner (Guardian): The final 20 minutes of Rufus Norris’s revamped revival of Cabaret are shockingly good. … This is worth the price of a ticket alone, although Norris’s take … always wants to have its cake and eat it. It seeks star casting … and artistic credibility; both divine decadence and political clout. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s all a little conflicted. … Until Norris shapes up and gets tough in “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” which has the Emcee as a puppet master manipulating his marionettes, this production operates very cosily at that point where Nazism and eroticism meet. … The evening finally redeems itself. Had Norris dared more from the outset, however, this could have been a rare piece of musical theatre, challenging as well as entertaining.

Charles Spencer (Telegraph): Six years ago the director Rufus Norris directed a West End production of Cabaret. … Now he has revisited that production … but something has been lost, too. Michelle Ryan proves an attractive and unusually wholesome Sally and puts over the big numbers with great assurance. But she never plumbs the emotional depths of the role. … [Will Young] has a genuinely disconcerting stage presence with his slicked-down hair, lustful eyes and predatory stillness, and there is a potent mixture of malignity and glee in his performance…. Norris’s unexpected ending to the show, which it would be a crime to reveal, is even more chilling, and one leaves this patchy but inventive production with a shiver of deep unease.

Paul Taylor (Independent): The show is back in a re-imagined version in which Norris and his choreographer, Javier de Frutos, often find fresh and arresting way of expressing the same conception, with certain key numbers staged completely differently. … At the same time, the production seems to have some lost some of its dangerous edge (the depravity can look a bit strenuously dutiful rather than driven). Young, of Pop Idol fame, sings beautifully and has bags of stage presence in his leather hot pants. … Michelle Ryan, by contrast, signally fails to rise to the occasion of Sally Bowles. … The show is still worth seeing for its bold imaginative sweep and for Sian Phillips’s deeply touching Fraulein Schneider, even if coming to this Cabaret is not quite what it was, old chum.

Ben Walters (Time Out): It’s a strong production, staging tight, slick numbers in a hard, flexible set whose design is laced with hints of German Expressionism. … Young proves a compelling ringleader, his voice expressive, his presence snaring the necessary combination of charm and grotesquerie. … The show’s conspicuous weakness lies in what should be its central relationship, between naïve American newcomer Cliff and iconic demimondeuse Sally. … This leaves a significant gap, admirably filled by Sian Phillips and Linal Haft as landlady Fräulein Schneider and her Jewish suitor Herr Schultz. … As the show builds to its sucker-punch climax, Cliff and Sally come to seem like the silly children Cliff suspects them to be, with Schneider, Schultz and the Kit Kat cast the tragic victims of history.

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Yoshimi: Review Roundup

Posted on November 23, 2012 by boz

Kimiko Glenn

The new rock musical Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, based on the 2002 album of the same name from The Flaming Lips, has received mixed to negative reviews for its world premiere production at La Jolla Playhouse, where the show has been in development since 2007, with director Des McAnuff recently stepping in as librettist after the departure of Aaron Sorkin. The creative team includes and Wayne Coyne (book, lyrics, music), Des McAnuff (book, direction), Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins (lyrics, music), Ron Melrose (music direction), Bradley Rapier (choreography), Robert Brill (sets), Paul Tazewell (costumes), Michael Walton (lights), Steve Canyon Kennedy (sound), Sean Nieuwenhuis (video), Basil Twist (puppets), and Bill Brendle (orchestrations). The cast includes Kimiko Glenn (Yoshimi), Paul Nolan (Ben), Nik Walker (Booker), and Tom Hewitt (Dr. Petersen).

James Hebert (San Diego Union-Tribune): The inventive and at times fantastical Yoshimi … draws much of its emotional punch from the mysteries of being vs. nothingness that robots can evoke. … The production’s technology can be thrilling, especially in robot-battle scenes that masterfully calibrate elements of music, lighting, sound and visual design. And if at times McAnuff seems a bit too in love with such tech gambits as the text-message-style super-titles (which over-explain the action), he doesn’t let the show’s humanity or its central love story get crowded off the stage. That’s right: There are people in Yoshimi, too. Talented ones – particularly the irresistible Kimiko Glenn as the title warrior. … Someday our robot overlords will be writing their own musicals (their own reviews, too). In the meantime, though, we can also thank the daring and ingenuity of McAnuff … for bringing this one to vivid life.

Charles McNulty (L.A. Times): Futuristic theatrical effects are deployed like a hypnotist’s pocket watch in Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. But the real mesmerizing aspect of this new musical … is the way it sounds. Our ears are delighted at a higher level than our eyes – or our minds, for that matter. … The literary sensibility behind Pink Robots is markedly inferior to its visual imagination. This show needs a book writer, STAT. … It’s the singing of these performers, rather than their acting, that stirs up the emotions – just as it’s the haunting sound of the show, rather than its dazzling sights, that has stayed with me. If you want to go to a deeper place with Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, you’ll have to close your eyes and travel there via your own imagination.

Bob Verini (Variety): There’s electronic wizardry out the wazoo, but it’s surrounded by a thin, uninvolving storyline literalizing a lymphoma patient’s treatment into bouts of kung fu fighting. Glum, over-engineered Yoshimi is a concept in search of a demographic, much effort expended to remarkably little effect. Many tuners have book problems; this one’s problem is there’s no book. … Throughout the show, lyrics either clash with the given situation or illustrate it blandly. … The repertoire of a band famous for excitingly theatrical shows never soars on La Jolla’s stage. … You leave the playhouse not conscious of a single memorable moment of spontaneity or high spirits, which could be the biggest adversary Yoshimi has to battle.

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