This week, Los Angeles Times critic Charles McNulty offered “ten reasons to be grateful in another sputtering theatrical year.” He noted some “memories that cry out for commemoration,” since “ranking of the best productions of 2021 makes little sense in light of what we’ve been through.” His “personal record of gratitude for the productions, performers, visionaries and venues that have kept the art form dazzlingly alive on our stages and screens during yet another impossibly difficult year” included a handful of musicals.
First is the Los Angeles premiere of the 2016 Tony-winning The Band’s Visit, which stopped for a three-week run at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre in November during the show’s first national tour. McNulty found the production “renewed my flagging spirit.”
Next is the L.A. return of the 2015 Tony-winning Hamilton, whose Eliza company opened in August at the Pantages, where the Angelica company had premiered the show in 2017, and “delivered what everyone in the room had for too long been missing.”
Third is the production of the 2018 musical Head over Heels at Pasadena Playhouse, which reopened in November with this jukebox musical of Go-Go’s hits in “a high voltage shock of communal joy.”
The final show is the original Lizastrata, a mashup of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Liza Minnelli, which Troubadour Theater Company brought to the Getty Villa in September, “motored by the music hall pizzazz of the show’s Lizastrata (Cloie Wyatt Taylor).”
Cloie Wyatt Taylor and cast. (photo by Craig Schwartz)
Rounding out McNulty’s commemoration of theatrical memories is the Broadway community’s gathering on November 28 in Times Square to sing “Sunday” (from Sunday in the Park with George) in honor of the late Stephen Sondheim, which “has become 2021’s 11 o’clock number.”