TDF Stages Archive

Why 007 would make an amazing musical

Cynthia Hopkins looks at the many sides of addiction —

What if you took everything in our culture that was indebted to Cinderella and put it on a single stage? Just think of all the songs, ballets, fancy shoes, and enchanted mice you’d have to account for. In one sense, you’d be confronted with aesthetic chaos, but in another, you’d experience a carnival of genres that cohered into a familiar story.

The show – which follows the 18th-century travails of the European banking family – suggests walls between husband and wife, walls between generations, and looming most large, walls surrounding the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, where Mayer Rothschild aspires to wealth and inspires his five sons to chase international success.

The three main characters of Sylvia , A.R. Gurney’s comedy famous for its love triangle of a Manhattan couple and their newly adopted dog, travel in a kind of pack. Trekking through conflict and crisis, they sniff out their story together, seeking a family.

At that, Morgan quips, “That’s just how it works in musicals.”

It helps, of course, that the play is so stimulating. The first act takes place in colonial Africa in the 19th century, where Martin, a British administrator, lives with his family and tries his best to uphold his country’s ideals. These include the presumed superiority of straight, white men, and that perception is ingrained so strongly that Betty (Martin’s wife) is played by a male actor in drag

Twenty minutes in, Robert O’Hara’s new play Barbecue seems to be about just that: a barbecue. You see a family gathered in a public park, grilling, drinking, barking at each other the way only family members can. Then all the rules change, and you realize you were wrong about what’s happening.

Welcome to On the Record, where we celebrate original cast recordings. Today’s title: the just-released Hamilton .