“Per Sylvam ad Astra” blog on katieriegel.com

Can we please have a moment for Seussical? I was just having a TV-less minute at home and slipped the silvery disc out of its stack on my desk and into the stereo. Pure bright and colorful joy. It’s probably Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s most under-rated work; not that everything they’ve done isn’t a little under-rated, in my humble opinion. Listening to it now–which I haven’t done in years–I’m still sort of in shock over how they managed to perfectly give voice/noise/music to the incredibly specific and dear, dear Dr. Seuss. The score is bouncy and whimsical and wonderful. Michele Pawk was divine. Janine LaManna gave the best performance (BY FAR) I’ve ever seen her give, especially with her second act show-stopper, “All For You.” Kevin Chamberlin was adorable. And Tom Plotkin as a monkey? Sigh. Looking back it’s sort of hard to remember/figure out what went wrong, especially being that it was the first Broadway show I worked on from the start (to the sad finish) during my days at the Weissler’s office. (For you non-Broadway-ites, it played for less than six months. A not-so-successful but not embarrassing run: November 2000 to May 2001.) It was a time when I was learning a lot and also extremely excited to get to do things like deliver Rosie O’Donnell’s Christmas gift to her doorman. I do know that stunt casting Aaron Carter was bad…and stunt casting Rosie was gooood…but those things happened after the show had been trashed so hard by the industry that it couldn’t have recovered. It seems that Mrs. Brantley’s opinion in the New York Times was that it was a small show trying to be too big / that there were too many cooks in the kitchen. I can probably understand that sentiment, though listening to it I have nothing but fond feelings. After all, who could really criticize a show with lyrics this: Oh, the thinks you can think Think and wonder and dream Far and wide as you dare… When your thinks have run dry In the blink of an eye There’s another world there. or A person’s a person, no matter how small. Have a heart, people! Give it a chance when some high school does it near you next year.

September 5th, 2006
Categories: Theater, Broadway, New York, Musicals, Flashback, Seussical . Author: Katie

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