A Theatre-Goer's Thoughts

  Britney Coleman as Bobbie (center) and the North American Tour of Company . Photo credit: Matthew Murphy for MurphyMade. Director Marianne Elliott’s “gender swapped” production of Company was in previews on Broadway in March 2020, scheduled for an official opening on the 90 th birthday of its composer and lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, when the pandemic caused the closure of all theatres. Previews resumed in November 2021, just a few days before Sondheim’s death. The production was acclaimed, winning five 2022 Tony Awards, including Best Musical Revival and Best Director of a Musical. Sondheim had worked on (and approved of) Elliott’s production in London when it opened in 2018. In truth, though, I would argue that this production, the national company of which is currently playing in the Kennedy Center’s Opera House, is not, in fact, a revival, but a significant revision. It shares the score and most of the libretto with the original, but it is a total re-conception, updating the 1

  Derrick D. Truby Jr. (Seymour) in the 2024 Ford's Theatre production of Little Shop of Horrors , directed by Kevin S. McAllister, choreographed by Ashleigh King, and music directed by William Yanesh. Photo by Scott Suchman. Little Shop of Horrors had its origin as a cheaply made B-movie, a comedy/sci-fi/horror film, by Roger Corman, filmed on the leftover set of another film, on a budget of less than $30,000. The original 1960 film became a camp cult classic, known for its wicked humor and outlandish premise, as well as helping introduce a young Jack Nicholson, appearing in his third film. As if comedy/sci-fi/horror was not enough of a genre collision or mash-up, librettist/lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken decided it should be a musical, too, which was originally produced off-Broadway in 1982. Why not? Its success introduced its creators to the Disney Animation Studios, where it inspired a Renaissance of animated musical films (“The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty a

  Edward Gero, Mark Nelson, and Rene Thornton Jr. in The Lehman Trilogy , produced by Shakespeare Theatre Company. Photo credit: Teresa Castracane Photography. “Epic” is a word I mostly think of as something episodic, giant, sweeping, and larger than life, so to use it to describe the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s current three-actor play, The Lehman Trilogy , may seem an odd choice. But despite the small number of actors involved, the play is sweeping in terms of the events and personalities involved. Its length (a bit more than three and one-half hours, including two intermissions) and the density of its often-poetic language, does, in fact, take on epic proportions, portraying events from the 1840s to the early 21 st century. “Lehman Brothers” as a financial entity attained its greatest prominence by its failure, becoming synonymous with the 2008 financial crisis due to its bankruptcy, the largest in U.S. history. But “Lehman Brothers” was more than just a name on a giant corpora