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TheaterMay 2008 Friends & neighbors by Brooke Allen On In the Heights at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, Almost an Evening at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street, Parlour Song at the Atlantic Theater, and The Four of Us at Manhattan Theatre Club. A couple of weeks ago I went to see a low-budget, concert-style production of the 1960s musical Half a Sixpence at an off-Broadway revival house. Half a Sixpence was a crowd-pleaser that had successful runs both in London and New York; having been taken to see it as a child (I must be one of the only people left to have a vivid memory of its Broadway run), I was curious to know whether its unsophisticated charms would hold up in the cynical and knowing yet dumbed-down twenty-first century. Well, not really—and I couldn’t quite figure out why. The lack was not in the Edwardian setting, or the substance of the story, for the show’s authors had based it on the H. G. Wells novel Kipps, a clever sociological parable that still has much to tell us. It was more the style of the telling that rings false now, for Half a Sixpence epitomizes the big, brassy, Sixties musical (think Oliver ...
Subscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 May 2008, on page 48 Copyright © 2008 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Friends---neighbors-3840
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Already a print subscriber? click for online access by Brooke Allen On the revival of Mark Twain's Is He Dead?, the Steppenwolf production of August: Osage County, and the return to Broadway of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming forty years after its debut. by Brooke Allen On Rock 'n' Roll at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, The Farnsworth Invention at the Music Box Theatre, Pumpgirl at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and Speech & Debate at the Roundabout Theater. by Brooke Allen On the Wooster Group's Hamlet, the Manhattan Theater Club's The Receptionist, and Things We Want at the New Group. by Brooke Allen On Gypsy at the St James Theatre, Boeing-Boeing at the Longacre Theater, and The New Century at Lincoln Center. by Brooke Allen On Conversations in Tusculum at the Public Theater, The Cherry Orchard Sequel at LaMaMa ETC., Gray Area at the Barrow Group, and Next to Normal at the Second Stage Theater. by Brooke Allen On Jerry Springer: The Opera at Carnegie Hall, The Lifeblood at the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, New Jerusalem at the Classic Stage Company, and Two Thousand Years at the New Group. New from The New Criterion: ‘Free speech in 
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