Cadillac Palace

A Beautiful Noise – Cadillac Palace – November 19, 2024

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There’s a lot to like in this show about Neil Diamond’s life. If you’re a fan of his music, as I am, there’s lots of that, with a rocking band.

And Nick Fradiana sounds just like Diamond. According to Broadway.com, Fradiani “spent a year and a half analyzing videos on YouTube and absorbing Diamond’s voice (speaking and singing), mannerisms and general aura.”

Hard work is great, but it’s not as good a story as when Stephanie J. Block won a Tony as Cher after she found her voice while wearing a teeth-whitening device,

Diamond’s first two wives play a big part in the show. Hannah Jewel Kohn as his second wife, Marcia Murphey, grabbed the spotlight with her rendition of Forever in Blue Jeans, while lighting up the stage throughout with her dancing and non-stop motor, even when she was “just” part of the outstanding chorus, which was backed by great choreography and a couple of very clever entrances that looked like magic.

I also really liked Kate Mulligan’s spirited turn as record producer Ellie Greenwich, but wouldn’t have minded a little more background on the woman who had her own impressive list of big time songwriting credits, which earned her a place in the Songwriters Hall of Fame with Jeff Barry, who also played a part in Diamond’s career, but not in the show.

The real Greenwich and Barry can be seen in Bang! The Bert Berns Story, a highly-rated documentary, promoted on IMDB as “music meets the mob,” about another character in the play who merits more attention.

The energy in the house started dragging a little at a point in the second act when the psychoanalysis that constitutes the framework of the show went on too long, while the audience craved more music.

But all was forgiven when the cast led the audience in the mandatory reprise of Sweet Caroline.

 

Some Like It Hot – Cadillac Palace – October 29, 2024

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If you go to the musical Some Like It Hot merely expecting to see a live replica of the movie with songs inserted in a perfunctory fashion, you’ll be disappointed. It’s much better than that.

As Cole Porter said in Anything Goes, “times have changed.” It was true then and it’s true now.

Thus, at a few key moments when the show veers from the original, or rather openly annotates with 21st century sensibilities, there was no shortage of appreciation from at least a portion of the audience, and no interruption of the comedic flow.

The plot is mostly the same, but the characters are much more three dimensional, or dare I say, four dimensional, given that the show is still set in 1933.

But enough of that. Go for the dancing. Casey Nicholas deservedly won the Tony for Best Choreography.  The extended, madcap, dizzying, dazzling, dance denouement alone, complete with enough entrances and exits to inhabit a dozen door farces, left me delighted and drained.

And go for the music. Marc Shaiman, as always, hits the nail on the head.

And, by the way, the cast is great. High energy, great voices, terrific timing, tap dancing the night away.

Finally, contributing to my thorough enjoyment of the evening, an usher quietly told the woman sitting in front of me to turn off the screen on her phone during the performance (which she then did). No need for Patti LuPone to appear and take the phone away.

Death Becomes Her – Cadillac Palace – May 28, 2024

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Not more then 10 seconds into the show the crowd began a deafening cheer spurred on by Destiny’s Child’s Michelle Williams rising from beneath the stage in a sparkling dress and exhibiting perfect posture.

Had she then immediately descended from whence she came, it undoubtedly would have been accompanied by raucous laughter, which, as it turned out, was the theme of the night.

First, the mundane stuff. One song after another was extremely clever and Williams, Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard have got the powerful voices and impeccable style, to do them justice.

Enough of that. The show features one not-too-subtle double entendre after another, with great comedic timing by all, until it climaxes with Simard, suffering from a rather interesting gunshot injury, telling Hilty, not in the angry fashion that Charlton Heston once said “Take your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape’”, but rather in a straight-faced comedic moment, to, and I paraphrase for the censors, keep her hands to herself.

If the Tonys give out an award for best-costumed dance ensemble, Death Becomes Her should dance off with it. But it was the choreography and performance of a solo moment that was a show stopper as Hilty’s stunt dance double executed a slow motion, gymnastic, grotesque fall that was the best use of a staircase since the Nicholas Brothers.

Not to be forgotten also is the strong performance of Christopher Sieber, highlighted by a song and dance in his lab that included a cast of characters that was a combination of kitchen items from Beauty and the Beast and Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.

The only thing that was missing in the show was Ponce de Leon lounging with a drink by a fountain at Viola Van Horn’s palace of a home.

The Hip Hop Nutcracker – Cadillac Palace – Dec. 13, 2023

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While Tchaikovsky waited in the wings, and I let my mind wander, the show opened with special guest emcee Kurtis Blow doing a bit of an opening act, as if we were in Las Vegas.

Then Marissa Licata walked out, violin in hand, and got things going in a direction more to my tastes, the first act culminating, as stated in the program, when the “Nutcracker, aided by a magic pair of sneakers, defeats the Mouse King.” As Mars Blackmon told us in 1989, as if he were watching the dancing on the stage, “it’s gotta be the shoes.”

The beginning of the second act goes back in time to a nightclub, in 1984, using cool video effects that convinced me that time travel, via a very fast subway train, apparently is possible.

That setting provided the opportunity for the cast to show off their acrobatic dance skills, one-by-one, as if they were competing in an Olympics gymnastic floor exercise. I awarded each and every one of them a ten. Simone Biles would have been hard-pressed to keep up with this crew.

There were lots of moves that should be physically impossible, demonstrating remarkable strength and flexibility, all to the beat of the music, but I was most intrigued by Jessie Smith’s ability to move six or seven body parts simultaneously in different directions.

A Wonderful World – Cadillac Palace – October 18, 2023

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The first big dance number gave me great hopes for this pre-Broadway show, but they were dashed.

James Monroe Iglehart does a great Louis Armstrong, though he’s the biggest seven-year-old I’ve ever seen. Dewitt Fleming, Jr. is a terrific tap dancer, whose one scene wasn’t enough. A Wonderful World is too long, too talky and has too many endings – I counted three.

I was fine with the show depicting Armstrong’s four wives, who represented different phases of his life, but did we really have to suffer through his courtships and marital spats, when all we wanted was his music. And how many times did we have to see a motion picture assistant director tell Armstrong the same thing? No times would have worked for me.

To help keep it from becoming a four hour show, Armstrong’s gangster manager goes from tough guy to wimp in about two seconds. And, thankfully, all of Armstrong’s alleged hundreds of extra-martial affairs aren’t itemized.

Despite all the problems, it might still have been an okay, if not wonderful world, if the guy sitting behind me hadn’t insisted on singing along with every song, even though his name was not in the cast list in the program.

The Book of Mormon – Cadillac Palace – April 5, 2023

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I try to imagine what an edited-for-TV version of The Book of Mormon might look like. I can’t. There’d be nothing left except commercials.

This is the third time I’ve seen the musical, but the first since some shut-down-for-Covid revisions were made by the authors to, according to the New York Theater Guide, “center and deepen the Uganda characters . . . clarify satirical points; and remove ‘white savoirist’ depictions of the Mormon missionaries.”

If you loved it before and haven’t seen it for a while, don’t worry, the actors work it and the dancing’s great, and either you’ll like the changes or you won’t notice them, as you’ll be too busy laughing and shaking your head in disbelief once again at the dialogue and lyrics, none of which I choose to repeat in this space. Let’s just say, somewhere, George Carlin is smiling.

I think it’s more a statement about mainstream acceptance than softening that I didn’t see anyone walk out of the theater this time, not even during Hasa Diga Eebowai, a made up phrase (which is apropos given that one of the other songs is Making Things Up Again) that accidentally translates, in a combination of Portuguese and Japanese, I am told, as the nonsensical “just tell picture ebony”, but, trust me, means something totally different in the show.