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GREASE @ The Paramount Theatre - Aurora, IL
Chicago Sun Times
WITH ‘GREASE,’ PARAMOUNT STAYS HOPELESSLY DEVOTED TO QUALITY, FUN
Last week, the Paramount kicked off its second Broadway series with a supremely fun production of “Grease,” which maintains the high standard set by last year’s knockout shows. “Grease”, directed by Michael Unger, has little on its mind except entertainment. It’s a celebration of the 1950s in song and dance. And even though things get heavier in the second act, it remains fun from first note to last. And wait until you see the special guest during “Greased Lightning”: a real ’56 Chevy. It’s impressive. If you’re cruising for a good time, this production is a blast.Daily Herald
PARAMOUNT STAGES SUPER-SLICK ‘GREASE’
The Paramount’s production team, securely led by director Michael Unger, definitely put on a finely produced “Grease” that wows with its sophisticated stagecraft and a vocally assured cast who can riff rock ’n’ roll melismas to stratospheric heights… a rousing production of the show. Director Unger does root the production with some realism, which gives this “Grease” a bit of genuine bite. The legions of “Grease” fans out there will find plenty to love in Paramount’s spiffy rendition.Around The Town - Chicago
★★★★★
While this is a play that belongs in a smaller theater allowing the audience to feel as if they are truly peeking in on the lives of these teens, I must admit that the Paramount Theatre, under the direction of Michael Unger, is able to transform the intimacy to a larger stage… on a magnificent set by James Dardenne, which in a way becomes a character itself. The set is designed to have the back wall filled with projections and for the “Greased Lighting” number as well as the Drive-In, a 1956 Chevrolet has been rebuilt to bring on stage. It adds to the overall magic of Unger’s direction and the slick choreography by Dana Solimando. The technical part of the show is awesome and the talent very strong. Some new twists to the show have been added to give it some new life.Downtown Aurora Magazine
GREASE VS. YOUR HOPES AND EXPECTATIONS
… seeing Grease on stage knocked me out… a must-see… It’s a different “Grease” than you might expect, but it’ll knock your socks off. -
THE HAPPY TIME @ Signature Theatre
Washington Post
… a little charmer… effervescent. The Happy Time became the first Broadway show to lose a million dollars. Watching this charming and modest production, you’d never guess that such a fiscal debacle was possible.
Variety
The Happy Time” receives a fresh and earnest revival, staged by Michael Unger with ultimate intimacy in Signature’s tiny Ark Theater. Unger keeps the kid-filled cast in perpetual motion…
Broadway World
The Happy Time is definitely a fresh look at an overlooked jewel of a show. Featuring a spectacular cast, production values evocative of simpler times and fresh, tight direction, The Happy Time will certainly cause (and rightly so) historians to re-evaluate what is a deeply heartfelt and charming show. Mr. Unger has masterfully utilized the tiny space with a simple concept and beautifully paced staging. Wondrous staging and technical craft… one of the most dazzling jewels of the season.
Theatre Mania
Signature Theatre’s illustrious Kander & Ebb Celebration might end up being most remembered for reviving The Happy Time — Like a lost family photograph that is re-discovered while rummaging through an old trunk, the show generates quietly powerful sentiment with the fleeting moment it captures. Director Michael Unger, aided by composer John Kander, has stripped away the Broadway trappings to reveal a quaint but emotionally intense chamber musical.
The Washingtonian
A picture-perfect production.
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THE RINK @ Cape Playhouse
Boston Globe
Director Michael Unger has delivered a musical with quirky, captivating charm that is reminiscent of the debut of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” at Barrington Stage two summers ago, which he also helmed. That offbeat phenomenon quickly found a home on Broadway. This show has the potential to make a comparable leap.
TheatreMania
It takes considerable legerdemain to balance a story of family dysfunction with the periodic upbeat numbers that a musical needs to stay afloat. Fortunately, director Michael Unger never lets the pace flag or the tone go maudlin. The show’s “sour” quality reads today as refreshingly astringent… if there’s any fairness in the world, this show will eventually find its way back to Broadway. Do what you can to catch this stellar production of The Rink during its short run.
Cape Cod Today
Director Michael Unger takes a real bite out of the word “challenge.” The Cape Playhouse has a small stage and he maneuvered the actors amazingly well.
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THE 25th ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE @ Barrington Stage Company
Boston Globe
In a word, ‘Spelling’ is marvelous
By Ed Siegel
SHEFFIELD — “25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” has everything a rollicking musical should have: wit and grace, heart and soul, charm and a bit of a bite. None of these attributes will be surprising to fans of William Finn (“Falsettos,” “Elegies”), who wrote the music and lyrics. What is something of a surprise, though, is that the songs are really the sidekicks to the delightful book by Rachel Sheinkin, a Brooklyn playwright and librettist, whose crisp writing and wide-ranging humor keep the proceedings lithe and lively.
As you can guess from the title, the musical concerns the competitive world of school spelling bees, as six enormously talented actors do battle with one another, their own adolescent demons, and spellers from the audience.
Sheinkin is politically incorrect enough to have fun with brainiac stereotypes — the lispers and the cross-eyed, the boy who’s done in by his erection and the fat kid who knows he’s the smartest of the bunch (“I’m the Yankees, not the Red Sox”). At the same time, her fondness for each character is so obvious that it’s hard to imagine many will be offended at touches such as the lisping girl, Logan Schwartzandgrubenierre, getting the word “cystitis.”
And how can you be offended when the show is so marvelously executed? The all-adult cast is letter-perfect, but Dan Fogler as the weighty William Barfee is hysterical, dancing out each word he spells and reminding us of kids we used to love to hate.
Directors Michael Unger and Rebecca Feldman use the company’s Stage II as a transformed gym. The students pull at their unfashionable stockings or their hair trying to come up with the right spelling, but Finn’s and Sheinkin’s sympathies are with them. A girl is given “chimera” to spell, which leads to a touching song about the love she imagines from her self-centered parents.
Finn’s music, which works seamlessly with the book, is his usual mix of Stephen Sondheim and Randy Newman, with big up-tempo numbers like “Pandemonium” that allow the whole cast to go a little crazy, as well as the pretty but sad “The I Love You Song.”
In any case, we haven’t heard the last from William Barfee and company. They’re likely to be casting their spell, sans spell-check, for years to come.
Variety
By FRANK RIZZO
In “The 25th Annual Putnam County Bee,” receiving its world preem at Barrington Stage Co., Finn turns to a special kind of American ritualistic self-abuse known as the spelling bee and creates one of the funniest, sweetest and quirkiest small-scale musicals to come along in a long time. It’s destined to have a life on many professional and amateur stages alike.Six adult actors playing bright young bulbs — joined by four audience members at every perf — struggle with their pubescent insecurities as they get swept up in the great American quest to be the last speller standing. (At the perf reviewed, New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin was plucked from the aud. He did well among his competitors and took defeat gracefully, along with his consolation prize of apple juice.)
The pleasure quotient remains high throughout the intermissionless show. With a splendid cast, terrific music and savvy writing and direction, “Spelling Bee” shows how to produce a musical “in an alphabetter way.
Berkshire Eagle
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee’: A contest in which even the losers are winners
By Jeffrey Borak
SHEFFIELD — H-O-M-E-R-I-C L-A-U-G-H-T-E-R: laughter that is uproarious and irrepressible. It also can be E-P-I-D-E-M-I-C. If you want proof, you need only wander down to Barrington Stage Company’s Stage II — if you can get a seat — where you’ll find an awful lot of people C-A-C-H-I-N-A-T-I-N-G for a solid 100 minutes or so.
The cause of all this M-I-R-T-H and R-A-P-T-U-R-E is “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a new musical created by a team of divine madmen and women — William Finn, music and lyrics; Rachel Sheinkin, book; Rebecca Feldman, who conceived this material in an earlier non-musical version with an off-Broadway company, The Farm, and who co-directed this production with Michael Unger; choreographer Dan Knechtges; and music director Vadim Feichtner.
At first glance, it would seem easy to assign dislikes and sympathies. Ah, but how each of these characters reveal themselves. What we find instead is a group of characters who are endearing and irresistible. (I dare anyone to resist, for example, a scene between the ego-inflated Barfee and the timorous Olive during a break in the contest). In that regard, even the losers are winners.
Life may be pandemonium, as the kids sing in one of this musical’s most ebullient moments, but life also is filled with surprises, with acts of personal courage in which individuals discover who they really are and then act upon it.
Neither “Spelling Bee’s” creators nor this cast make it easy either to predict the outcome or to pick a favorite. As contestants drop out one by one, we feel their loss, their absence. These characters each have been created with compassion and respect. The humor here is not at anyone’s expense; rather it is shrewdly observed, wonderfully antic, and, in many ways, daring.
“Spelling Bee” is the product of tremendously smart minds who have created characters that are fully dimensional and distinctly individual in ways that go well beyond their idiosyncratic methods for arriving at the correct spelling of a word.
The production moves smoothly and effortlessly across an impressive setting by Beowulf Boritt that redefines BSC’s Stage II space and embraces the entire room.
“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” is at Barrington Stage only through Aug. 1. With any luck, it will be back. Better yet, with any luck “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” will enjoy never-ending F-L-O-R-E-S-C-E-N-C-E.
TheatreMania
Reviewed By: Sandy MacDonald
Quick, count on your fingers — one hand might suffice — the shows you’ve seen that were so enchanting, you savored every moment and prayed that the curtain call would never come. Now get ready for another: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which recently debuted at the Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires. The whole thing clicks and hums — and surprises — like an especially ingenious cuckoo clock.
If two hours of solid laughter strikes you as a worthwhile prospect, rush out to the Berkshires — or pray that this utterly perfect production will soon make it to Manhattan.
Curtain Up
If you bring tissues to The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, you’ll be using them strictly to wipe away tears of laughter. This is essentially a light-hearted, feel-good show that prompts such easy to spell adjectives as charming, sweet, endearing and quirky.
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is not only blessed with Mr. Finn’s bouncy melodies and clever character building lyrics, but an ensemble that fully inhabits those characters.
While I’m not generally enamored of adults playing children, all these twenty-somethings are enjoyably full of over the top twelve-year old ticks. While the show has a casual let’s put on a show feel, make no mistake about it — this is a real musical. It’s chamber sized, with an “orchestra” consisting of a piano and minimal choreography, but all the songs are well integrated to allow the students taking their turn at the microphone to weave bits and pieces of back story into the contest set-up.
Is this world premiere destined for a bigger things.
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CALIGULA @ NY Musical Theatre Festival
New York Times
Michael Unger, the director, handles the traffic nicely and keeps it all balanced on several tightropes at once: the show is almost camp, almost parody; almost funny, almost a tragedy.
Broadway.com
With the help of director Michael Unger’s admirably kinetic staging, [the show] highlights the majesty in Caligula’s madness and its seductiveness.
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BEHIND THE LIMELIGHT @ NY Musical Theatre Festival
New York Post
A genuinely moving portrait that well deserves development.
The evening is most effective early on, in its depiction of Chaplin’s troubled childhood and his early beginnings in British music halls and vaudeville. The story is framed as a flashback, with the elderly Chaplin (a very moving Robert Langdon Lloyd) reminiscing about his life and watching the proceedings from a chair at the side of the stage.
Also well done are the sequences involving Chaplin’s breaking into the “flickers,” particularly the sequence in which he develops his on-screen persona before our eyes.
Director Michael Unger’s staging is highly effective, particularly in the moving final moments featuring all three Chaplin incarnations onstage together.
Backstage
Behind the Limelight — is just about a perfect template for a Broadway musical circa the 1960s, and that’s meant as a compliment. It celebrates without irony a mythic personality — in this case, Charlie Chaplin — with a script that deftly sketches characters and events and an ample, melodious score that helps move the story along. Build a few big production numbers around some songs and smooth the second act’s rough edges and it should be ready to go.
Granted, Anthony Newley did a Chaplin musical in 1983 that never made it to New York. But it would be nice to think that Broadway today might still have a stage available for this accomplished new effort, even with its traditional trappings.
The show, under Michael Unger’s artful direction, takes Chaplin from impoverished childhood in London to overwhelming success and philandering in Hollywood, capped by his expulsion from the country to spend his final days in domestic bliss with his last wife, Oona.
CurtainUp.com
The best way to describe this musical biography of Charlie Chaplin is to quote one of its own songs—”it is wonderful.” It’s a superb combination of song, dance and story.
“It is wonderful when the life you wished for becomes real,” Charlie writes in a letter to Syd. It is also wonderful when a fantastic show is made from it.
Talk Entertainment
With the bases loaded, a grand slam right out of the Theatre at St. Clements with this new musical Behind The Limelight – based on the life and career of the infamous “Little Tramp” Charlie Chaplin. What a fantastic show. What an entertaining backstage look at Chaplin – as a child, as a star and as an old man. It takes three actors – all superb – to fill Chaplin’s controversial shoes. As a young boy (Danny Hallowell) who learns from his mum to watch people and learn from them to the vaudevillian on his way to stardom (Luther Creek) who does a smashing job of inhabiting the soul of Chaplin without making a caricature out of him to the old man (Robert Langdon Lloyd) who bookends the show with grace, dignity and wonderment. [There is] some super help to mount this complicated yet clear as can be story in the name of director Michael Unger – who deserves his own bottle of champagne to celebrate their joint success.
There are times when a show begins and you just know that you are in for something extraordinarily special – this is such a show. It has a great story that is told in a concise and taught manner – you get all the points needed to me made without any excess fat which lead right into what matters most in a musical. I can’t remember the last original cast recording I purchased but this one will be immediately scooped up when it’s available.
Whatever you feel about his political alliances, Chaplin was a consummate performer, known worldwide, and you will be moved to tears by the last song of the show, “This Man”. Charlie Chaplin wanted to make the world laugh and cry at the same time – at the foibles of humanity. Behind the Limelight does just that with Chaplin’s life. Splendidly. See it.
Edge NY
Musical biographies of icons are tricky: Audiences come in with some knowledge and an image in their heads. Often, there’s a lot of history to cover. Charlie Chaplin is certainly a legend of early cinema history; the decades of historical distance combined with the fame coming from silent movie visuals give Behind The Limelight a better shot. Others have tried to step into his shoes and capture his magic before, and this attempt is respectable, intriguing and noble. I’m glad I saw this production and find many positive aspects in it and its heart is in the right place.
When it’s all complete, the audience bursts into applause because they’ve been let in on the magic rather than shut out. Michael Unger directs this ambitious, full-length show with some bold choices and it fills the eye, the mind and the heart.
The Theatre Addict
This was the most polished and wonderfully orchestrated show I saw. The story was told in a very moving and clever fashion. The final moment in which the old Charlie tips his hat to the audience and walks into a screen that then shows the real Chaplin walking with back towards the audience was a memorable theatrical moment. It was breathtaking. A sequence in which Charlie takes on his persona with costume and physicality was stage brilliance. The moment received a wild round of applause. I do see this show arriving on Broadway in the near future.
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KNICKERBOCKER HOLIDAY @ York Theatre (Mufti)
Kurt Weill Newsletter by Howard Kissel
… revelatory… The plot is strained and complicated. It was a tribute to Michael Unger’s direction that its convolutions were were amusing rather than irritating.
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MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS @ The MUNY
St. Louis Post Dispatch
The dances fill the stage, the trolley number is fully realized and the finale goes all-out for a spectacular period look. …director Michael Unger draws many good performances from a cast of MUNY favorites.
KDHX Radio
As the director, Michael Unger elicits the best efforts from the strong cast, as well as the Muny stage and production staff as a whole… I highly recommend this production of Meet Me In St. Louis.
KMOX Radio
An ideal night of St. Louis memories and a totally wonderful show for the entire family.
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THE MIKADO @ Depot Theatre
Glenn Falls Post Star
At the Depot Theatre, a highly talented group of singers and actors is transporting delighted audiences to the Gilbert and Sullivan topsy-turvy town of Titipu. The comic opera, “The Mikado,” is staged with color and elegance, much light humor and pointed satire that has been updated to include references to current events, politicians like Gov. George Pataki and President Bush and even a brief mention of nearby Lake Champlain’s reputed underwater resident Champ. The familiar tale of lovers Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum unfolds with an exciting freshness, even though it was first performed in 1885.
Director Michael Unger’s expert touch is evident everywhere and he has another show of which he can be justifiably proud.
All of the cast sings from the heart, knowing exactly when to emote, when to soften and when to be lightly humorous.
Add the simple but effective set suggesting the Oriental locale, its quick changes and the attractively authentic costumes and you watch beauty unfold before your eyes.
