Barbra Streisand’s tribute to the late Marvin Hamlisch was one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen (or heard). I’m still crying from this sweet, deeply touching performance which is officially the highlight of the evening.

Hamlisch and Streisand were great friends and collaborators since she began her career. He was as much responsible for her success as she was.

Streisand’s delivery of that old chestnut, “The Way We Were” was a masterclass in what makes a performance a transcendent experience.

True, her voice has gained warmth and huskiness over the years, but that makes it all the more beautiful. She sang the entire song with pianissimo phrasing, and direct, emotional honesty. 

I don’t even know what to do with my emotions right now. Mr. Hamlisch wrote one of the most moving musicals in history. He and Ms. Streisand are both legendary artists who’ve given the world beautiful music.

We were lucky to have Mr. Hamlisch in our live, and we’re even luckier to have Ms. Streisand…enough of that, back to more crying

Somewhere, buried deep inside the bloated, stultifying film adaptation of Les Misérables, is a story of oppression, suffering and salvation. If you can find it, kudos to you because I sure couldn’t.

Cameron Mackintosh’s juggernaut of a mega-musical is now wearing concrete shoes, weighed down by inept direction, literal-mindedness and bad acting. When it’s good, it’s boring, when it’s bad, it’s unwatchable.

Oh how I kept waiting for this film to move me. I expected the singing to be sub-par (as is the case with most movie musicals today), yet it’s the acting and the execution that make this pallid movie such a drag.

Apparently, Hugh Jackman - this century’s sad answer to Gene Kelly - felt compelled to bring Les Miz to the screen, making good on a project that had been years in development, only to continuously fall apart over casting and budgetary issues. I wish Mr. Jackman had let that bee in his bonnet go silent, because the film he and director Tom Hooper have come up with is the pits, a kitschy, lugubrious - and at 2 hours and 37 nauseating minutes, over long - dirge, relentless in its excess.

As directed by Mr. Hooper at his most lackadaisical, the film is a noisy, disconcerting piece of overblown hokum. Hooper films his actors in a farrago of queasy, claustrophobic close-ups as they employ the more is more method of acting. When Hooper doesn’t have a musical number or performer to zero in on, his direction becomes a frenetic jumble of cross-cuts and swooping camera angles. You get the sense that the director doesn’t have any faith in the material or your attention span.

Hooper’s decision to regurgitate virtually every note of the score on screen is also a curious misstep with unfortunate consequences. The interim scenes of dialogue-driven recitative feel perfunctory and mind-numbingly endless. And while I applaud Mr. Hooper’s one innovation, to film the singing live, the paucity of musicianship and strong voices on screen make the whole affair seem strained. In attempting to achieve intimacy and verisimilitude, Mr. Hooper has, paradoxically, made every song seem deeply artificial and laughably grandiose. He has over inflated material that wasn’t very subtle to begin with.

This is not to say that Les Miz couldn’t have been successfully adapted to the screen, but it would need to be seriously rethought to approximate the stage show. Alas, Mr. Hooper hasn’t made any changes or offered any ideas that might show an understanding of the differences between film and theater. Instead, he has merely placed a frame around the characters, and situated them in photorealistic environs, saliva, gaping mouths and all.

The cast is uniformly disappointing. Anne Hathaway can be an adequate singer, but her “I Dreamed a Dream,” pitched entirely on one high-strung level, doesn’t stir the emotions because her overripe emotionalism, and the proximity of the camera are far too distracting. 

As for Mr. Jackman, the less said the better. I have never been a fan of his wobbly, steely voice, which was dismaying in Oklahoma! and is even worse here. His approach to the music exposes every slight deviation of pitch and, true to form, he takes great expressive liberties with his singing  — sometimes prolonging, sometimes rushing phrases. His bleached tone tends to obscure the notes he is singing. At times, I thought he might be trying to talk-sing, but his inelegant phrasing made no sense musically or dramatically. His natural strengths - effortless charm, irresistible charisma - are oddly muted in a role that calls for stoicism and introspection.

Curiously, Russell Crow is the only person giving a believable, consistent performance that’s scaled for the screen. His voice may lack refinement (and any discernible technique), but he handles the music ably enough, and sings the material as written without any of the fussy, melodramatic flourishes that afflict the rest of the cast. (This is the first time I’ve seen Les Misérables where Javert’s only number, “Stars,” became the highlight of the show.)

Even watching the most talented members of the cast becomes an enervating experience. As madame Thénardier, Helena Bonam-Carter is uncharacteristically wan and gets no support from her co-star, Sasha Baron Cohen, whose scenery-chewing shtick has never felt more exhausting. As the idealistic Marius, Eddie Redmayne whips his whole body while attacking certain phrases, as if physically willing his larynx to cooperate. (I never does.) A trilly Amanda Seyfried is appropriately doe-eyed and vacant in the thankless role of Cosette. And as Eponine, the lovelorn street urchin, Samantha Barks is stymied, forced to rein in her usually impressive voice to accommodate Mr. Hooper’s style.

Quibbles with singing aside, the gravest sin of this movie is how boring it is. The stage Les Misérables zips along with breathtaking exuberance. The three-hour running time flies by as the show grabs your attention and keeps you engaged. Paradoxically, the film Les Misérables seems to lumber on and on with no end in sight. A little pathos goes a long way, but some decent direction would have gone even further.

Did anyone else watch “Animaniacs” as a kid? I used to watch that show religiously. One of my favorite characters was Rita the Cat. She would constantly break into song only to have things thrown at her by anyone near by. It turns out that Bernadette Peters provided the voice for Rita! So I guess I’ve been a Bernadette Peters fan since I was a little kid…who knew?

HAHA! This is sooo wonderfully awkward…god I LOVE Babs. She’s insane, but I love her…

“In the central role of Cathy Whitaker, a happily domesticated wife and mother in 1957 Connecticut who embarks on a romance that shakes up her tidy little world, is Kelli O’Hara. Her bright soprano and natural grace, now being shown to fine effect in ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’ on Broadway, are among the happy wonders of the New York musical theater.” - Charles Isherwood

Caution: Rentheads, don’t hate me. I’m speaking from a strictly musical standpoint

One of the many things that bothers me about ‘Rent’ (and there are quite a few) is the recurring use of Quando men vo as a leitmotif for Mimi and Rodger’s love.

If you actually go back to ‘La Boheme’, and look at the text of that aria, it is basically just Musetta bragging about how much of a whore she is.

There’s almost nothing romantic about the aria, particularly for Rodger and Mimi. It would make far more sense to apply that motif to Maureen, as she is the character who is actually based on Musetta.

But whatever. The first time I ever saw ‘Rent’ (on Broadway) I had no idea what was going on. The sound design was far too abysmal to distinguish Quando men vo from Seasons of Love.

Coming soon…

Can we all just agree right now that Audra McDonald is going to be the sexiest Bess ever! I’m so friggin’ excited for this. I have been dreaming of staging a production of ‘Porgy’ with Audra for YEARS! Also, I couldn’t be happier that Norm Lewis is playing Porgy. If nothing else, this is going to be the most lusciously sung ‘Porgy’ ever.

by Stephen Sondheim

The article by Mr. Healy about the coming revival of “Porgy and Bess” is dismaying on many levels. To begin with, the title of the show is now “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.” I assume that’s in case anyone was worried it was the Rodgers and Hart “Porgy and Bess” that was coming to town. But what happened to DuBose Heyward? Most of the lyrics (and all of the good ones) are his alone (“Summertime,” “My Man’s Gone Now”) or co-written with Ira Gershwin (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”). If this billing is at the insistence of the Gershwin estate, they should be ashamed of themselves. If it’s the producers’ idea, it’s just dumb. More dismaying is the disdain that Diane Paulus, Audra McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks feel toward the opera itself.

Ms. Paulus says that in the opera you don’t get to know the characters as people. Putting it kindly, that’s willful ignorance. These characters are as vivid as any ever created for the musical theater, as has been proved over and over in productions that may have cut some dialogue and musical passages but didn’t rewrite and distort them.

What Ms. Paulus wants, and has ordered, are back stories for the characters. For example she (or, rather, Ms. Parks) is supplying Porgy with dialogue that will explain how he became crippled. She fails to recognize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are archetypes and intended to be larger than life and that filling in “realistic” details is likely to reduce them to line drawings. It makes you speculate about what would happen if she ever got her hands on “Tosca” and ‘Don Giovanni.” How would we get to know them? Ms. Paulus would probably want to add an aria or two to explain how Tosca got to be a star, and she would certainly want some additional material about Don Giovanni’s unhappy childhood to explain what made him such an unconscionable lecher.

Then there is Ms. Paulus’s condescension toward the audience. She says, “I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.” I don’t know what she’s sorry about, but I’m glad she can speak for all of us restless theatergoers. If she doesn’t understand Bess and feels she has to “excavate” the show, she clearly thinks it’s a ruin, so why is she doing it? I’m sorry, but could the problem be her lack of understanding, not Heyward’s?

She is joined heartily in this sentiment by Ms. McDonald, who says that Bess is “often more of a plot device than a full-blooded character.” Often? Meaning sometimes she’s full-blooded and other times not? She’s always full-blooded when she’s acted full-bloodedly, as she was by, among others, Clamma Dale and Leontyne Price. Ms. McDonald goes on to say, “The opera has the makings of a great love story … that I think we’re bringing to life.” Wow, who’d have thought there was a love story hiding in “Porgy and Bess” that just needed a group of visionaries to bring it out?

Among the ways in which Ms. Parks defends the excavation work is this: “I wanted to flesh out the two main characters so that they are not cardboard cutout characters” and goes on to say, “I think that’s what George Gershwin wanted, and if he had lived longer he would have gone back to the story of ‘Porgy and Bess’ and made changes, including the ending.”

It’s reassuring that Ms. Parks has a direct pipeline to Gershwin and is just carrying out his work for him, and that she thinks he would have taken one of the most moving moments in musical theater history — Porgy’s demand, “Bring my goat!” — and thrown it out. Ms. Parks (or Ms. Paulus) has taken away Porgy’s goat cart in favor of a cane. So now he can demand, “Bring my cane!” Perhaps someone will bring him a straw hat too, so he can buck-and-wing his way to New York.

Or perhaps in order to have her happy ending, she’ll have Bess turn around when she gets as far as Philadelphia and return to Catfish Row in time for the finale, thus saving Porgy the trouble of his heroic journey to New York. It will kill “I’m on My Way,” but who cares?

Ms. McDonald immediately dismisses any possible criticism by labeling anyone who might have objections to what Ms. Paulus and her colleagues are doing as “Gershwin purists” — clearly a group, all of whom think alike, and we all know what a “purist” is, don’t we? An inflexible, academic reactionary fuddy-duddy who lacks the imagination to see beyond the author’s intentions, who doesn’t recognize all “the holes and issues” that Ms. Paulus and Ms. McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks do. Never fear, though. They confidently claim that they know how to fix this dreadfully flawed work.

I can hear the outraged cries now about stifling creativity and discouraging directors who want to reinterpret plays and musicals in order to bring “fresh perspectives,” as they are wont to say, but there is a difference between reinterpretation and wholesale rewriting. Nor am I judging this production in advance, only the attitude of its creators toward the piece and the audience. Perhaps it will be wonderful. Certainly I can think of no better Porgy than Norm Lewis nor a better Bess than Audra McDonald, whose voice is one of the glories of the American theater. Perhaps Ms. Paulus and company will have earned their arrogance.

Which brings me back to my opening point. In the interest of truth in advertising, let it not be called “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” nor even “The Gershwin-Heyward Porgy and Bess.” Advertise it honestly as “Diane Paulus’s Porgy and Bess.” And the hell with the real one.

Here’s our first preview of Broadway’s new Fanny Brice. Lauren Abrose singing “My Man.”

For once the vapid, disappointing world of Broadway has thrown me a genuine curve ball. Lauren Ambrose, of “Six Feet Under,” will play Fanny Brice in the upcoming revival if “Funny Girl” directed by Bartlett Sher. This comes as a genuine shock, as I was sure it was going to be Lea Michelle and I don’t think Ms. Abrose was on anyone’s list as a contender for the part. In recent years, Ms. Ambrose has proven herself a gifted, young theater actress in plays such as “Exit the King” and “Romeo & Juliet” for which she received rave reviews.

“It was a wonderful surprise. She wasn’t honestly a front-runner for the part until she called me, asked to audition and came in and blew us all away.” said Bartlett Sher, ”Lauren was the only person I saw with the deepest acting skills, the capacity to sing everything in this role and an emotional richness that really worked for Fanny at all ages.” Mr. Sher added that Fanny Brice is “the toughest role I’ve ever had to cast,” and apparently saw a number of Broadway actresses including Laura Benanti (from the 2008 “Gypsy”), Kelli O’Hara (“South Pacific”), Stephanie J. Block (“9 to 5”), Leslie Kritzer (“A Catered Affair”), and Lea Michele (“Spring Awakening,” the Fox series “Glee”).

“I was drawn to reviving the musical for other reasons, chiefly the story of women who work in the theater and the arts and want love and success and happiness but have to choose among them,” said Mr. Sher, who despite having a checkered track-record at the Metropolitan Opera, directed one of the most revelatory productions of “South Pacific” in Broadway history. Mr. Sher added, “It’s very important that no one think I was trying to cast someone to replace Barbra Streisand. Anyone who thinks they’re coming to see the next Barbra Streisand should not come see ‘Funny Girl.’”