Entries By Pearl Chen
With PSAT scores through the roof, 15-year-old high school student Emma Dorfman has become a hot commodity. In the world of Monetizing Emma, Felipe Ossa’s inventive off-off-Broadway play now running (once again) at the FringeNYC Festival, she is not just a smart teenager; she’s an investment. In 2013, the Jane Austen-loving teen is part of [...]
I will be honest: I can’t understand why The Addams Family got slammed by so many critics. For a show that provides such a quintessential Broadway experience – spectacular art direction, big-name stars, laugh-out-loud comedy, and crowd-pleasing musical numbers – judging it on anything other than its fun-spirited energy seems beside the point. Forgive me [...]
With the 64th Tony season underway, Best Musical nominee Million Dollar Quartet just might be the dark horse come awards night June 13. On the surface, it looks like a musical that grandparents would like — a soundtrack of early rock ‘n’ roll hits by legends Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee [...]
Before Angelina and Brad, Lucy and Desi, Marilyn and Joe, there were Zelda and Scott. The Fitzgeralds were the “it” couple of the Roaring Twenties: young and beautiful, impulsive and idealistic, glamorous and hopelessly restless for a life that even the Great Gatsby might not have dreamed of. Their story, from their passionate love affair [...]
When I first learned Green Day’s American Idiot was opening on Broadway April 20, 2010, I was ecstatic. The rock musical, about young people coming of age in post-9/11 America, looked like it had the potential to be the next Spring Awakening – winner of 2007’s Tony Award for Best Musical. And it certainly seemed [...]
As Act I stretched on, a daunting reality set in: These people are never really going to talk, are they? Sure, the choreography to Come Fly Away, Twyla Tharp’s new jukebox “musical” based on the Frank Sinatra songbook, was undeniably high-caliber, and the romantic moonlit stage atmosphere transported audiences to the magic of a bygone [...]
A year ago this month, Barack Obama was inaugurated President of the United States. Over the past 12 months, the celebratory fervor for this country’s first black President has ebbed and flowed along with the ripples from the stock market, the unemployment rate, and the endless political mud-slinging that has perhaps become most symbolically visible [...]
It’s the twentysomething Catch-22: You can’t get experience without a job. You can’t get a job without experience. But in the throes of the worst economic recession since the 1930s, this crisis gets all the more menacing for young adults. No job (or trustfund)? No apartment. No relationship. No survival. And maybe for some, the [...]
