The four nominees for Best Musical Revival are from six shows: “Camelot,” “Dancin’,” “Into the Woods,” “Parade,” “Sweeney Todd” and “1776.” Here’s what our reviewers had to say about recommended products:
Bartlett Scher-Helmidt revival of the 1960 Lerner and Lowe musical “Camelot,” A show based on TH White’s Arthurian stories, with book adaptations by Aaron Sorkin. Although Jesse Green felt that the production, starring Andrew Burnab, Phillipa Sue and Jordan Tonica, failed to recapture the magic of the original film, Burnab and Sue wrote that Burnab and Sue’s performance of “West Wing” was “visually and sonically beautiful”. The castle mockery is beautiful.”
actors “Into the woods,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s half-dozen Perrault and Brothers Grimm fairy tales include Sara Bareilles, Julia Lester, and Philippa Sue. “When the lights came on,” Alexis Solosky wrote in her review of the sparsely staged production directed by Lear de Bessonette, “the crowd screamed, screamed, screamed.” He also praised the sets designed by David Rockwell. “On a mostly blank canvas, DeBessonette paints in rich and abundant tones, aided by Lorin Lataro’s playful choreography,” he wrote.
“parade,“ It transferred from New York City Center to Broadway in a 1998 production of the musical about the lynching of a Jewish man by an antisemitic mob, starring Ben Platt and Michaela Diamond. In her review, Greene called the revival “reviving” and “timely”, singling out Diamond, who plays the murdered man’s wife, making Lucille Frank “a story we can walk away from”.
“Sweeney Todd,” Thomas Gale’s revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical about a “ghost barber” who slits the throats of his clients stars Josh Groban and Annalee Ashford. Green wrote that the show, with a book by Hugh Wheeler, was “charmingly sung, deeply emotional and strangely hilarious”. Groban, he added, “makes sure every word is clear,” while Ashford is a “brilliant comic” who, as Mrs. Lovett, “is a brutal schemer for whom zaniness is a useful cover.”
