Cadillac Palace

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

Posted on by admin

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

Posted on by admin

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

Posted on by admin

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.