Donna Summer musical Bdway

[jerrybythesea]

Saw a preview perf yesterday. Really enjoyed it....great singing by all the leads. A bit short at 1 hour 45 mins but a tuneful night at the theatre with all her great hits intact. The out of town critics gave it mixed reviews so not expecting much better here in NYC, a tough town. The sold out audience really enjoyed it. The last 10 mins almost blew the roof off of the theatre LOL. I enjoyed it much more than Jersey Boys.

[samhexum]

The new Donna Summer musical is not hot stuff

By Johnny Oleksinski NY POST April 23, 2018 | 9:45pm |

Ariana DeBose, who gives the most impressive performance of the 3 women playing Donna Summer, can't save this hot mess of a bio-musical.

"SUMMER"

Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission. Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 W. 46th St.; 212-575-9200

 

“When I’m bad, I’m so, so bad,” Donna Summer sang in “Last Dance,” and that perfectly describes the new Broadway musical about her life.

 

“Summer,” which opened Monday, is borderline incoherent. It turns a complex woman’s life into a hagiography, a slide show of events — Boston childhood, stint in Europe, fame, motherhood, illness — minus context or emotion.

 

Three women play her at different points in her life, which they narrate like Bible passages. Storm Lever’s Duckling Donna, Ariana DeBose’s Disco Donna and LaChanze’s Diva Donna are excellent, especially DeBose (late of “Hamilton”), and they sing the heck out of “MacArthur Park,” “I Feel Love,” “On the Radio” and more. Trouble is, they also play the woman’s mother, friends and sisters. Keeping track of the double casting is a struggle.

 

You’d think the songs would redeem this show. Summer sang some of the best dance music of all time, and 23 classic numbers are jammed into less than two hours. But some of the tunes here — including a rendition of “No More Tears” Summer belts out while being beaten by her German ex — are hard to enjoy.

 

Des McAnuff, who gives us more ups and downs than a heart monitor, directed this mess. Remarkably, he’s the same man who made a hit out of “Jersey Boys.” This time he seems to have Scotch-taped together some wonky ideas, such as having women play producers David Geffen and Giorgio Moroder. That might have been fine if McAnuff actually committed to it, but Casablanca Records president Neil Bogart is played by a dude, as are Summer’s lovers, so whatever point McAnuff was trying to make is lost.

 

For a show that openly encourages theatergoers to stand up and dance, their only real opportunity to do so comes at the end and lasts all of three minutes. Before then, we get some awkward business about the anti-gay remarks Summer reportedly made at a 1983 concert. Although she denied she’d said them at the time, many of her most devoted followers were upset. In “Summer,” the singer, who died of lung cancer in 2012, offers an explanation, an apology and a declaration of how much she loves her gay fans. True or not, it’s a cheap moment.

 

Enough is enough!

[edjames]

Thanks Sam, critics seem to agree the new musical is awful!

Review: Hot Stuff Turns Cold in ‘Summer: The Donna Summer Musical’

SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL

Broadway, Musical

1 hr. and 40 min.

Open Run

Lunt-Fontanne Theater, 205 W 46th St.

By JESSE GREEN. APRIL 23, 2018

 

The biographical jukebox musical — of which “Jersey Boys” provides a shining example, thanks to all the Brylcreem — is the cockroach of Broadway. It has a small head, a primitive nervous system and will probably outlast the apocalypse.

 

Even by that standard, “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical,” which opened on Monday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, is a blight. Despite the exciting vocalism of a cast led by the formidable LaChanze, it reduces the late Queen of Disco and pioneer of electronica to a few factoids and song samples that make her seem profoundly inconsequential. You could learn more (and more authentically) by reading a thoughtful obituary while listening to her hits — “Hot Stuff,” “

,” “She Works Hard for the Money,” among many others — online.

 

But then you would not be contributing to the music publishing enterprise that keeps jukebox musicals coming no matter how hard they get stomped on by critics.

 

Among the producers of “Summer” are Tommy Mottola, who helped reboot a version of the label that released Ms. Summer’s early hits, and Universal Music Group, which oversees her catalog. (Universal also has a hand in “Mamma Mia!” and “Escape to Margaritaville.”) I don’t doubt the sincerity of their interest in brands that can still make them millions. It’s the sincerity of their interest in musical theater I question.

 

That’s because I found myself asking throughout the show’s intermission-less 100 minutes: Can’t they do any better than this?Certainly Ms. Summer’s life merits a more sophisticated treatment. Born LaDonna Adrian Gaines in Boston in 1948, she sang in church, dropped out of high school to try her luck in New York and by 1968 was

While in Germany she not only married (briefly) the man who would provide her last name and first child but also met Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, who would produce 11 of her 20 albums. In 1975 they recorded the song “

,” which in

became her first hit and made her world famous.

• 
  
  Ariana DeBose, center, and the ensemble performing “Bad Girls.” CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
   
  The story of Ms. Summer asking the two men to dim the lights and close their eyes while she writhes on the studio floor singing the hypersexed number is too good not to stage, and yet apparently not too good to stage poorly. The director Des McAnuff, who with Colman Domingo and Robert Cary also wrote the musical’s book, skitters away from it after about 10 seconds, just as the show over all skitters away from almost everything even slightly awkward or troubling — and thus interesting — about Ms. Summer’s life and career.
   
  It totally botches, for instance, her relationship with the gay community, which instantly embraced her on the radio and the dance floor for reasons the show doesn’t explore. Comments that Ms. Summer later made about God not creating “Adam and Steve” (let alone others she denied making about AIDS as a punishment for sin) left many gay men feeling betrayed — a betrayal they attributed to her resurgent Christianity.
   
  Rather than dramatizing this fascinating conflict head on, the musical brushes it aside as an ancient misunderstanding and uses Ms. Summer’s gay publicist as an alibi. (Singing “Friends Unknown,” she mourns his death to show she couldn’t have been homophobic.) It does not even mention her 1979 announcement that she was born again; she sings “
  ” instead.
   
  Similarly, “Summer” sketches years of sexual abuse by her pastor with little more than a leer, a shoehorned number (“
  ”) and a few vague remarks. It’s dramaturgy by song hook.
   
  At the core of all of these missed opportunities is the split between Ms. Summer’s manufactured image as a sex goddess and her self-image as a good girl. The musical makes its only stab at conceptual expressiveness by dividing Ms. Summer into three avatars to theatricalize that split: the mature Diva Donna (LaChanze), the young adult Disco Donna (Ariana DeBose) and, a bit desperately, the preteen Duckling Donna (Storm Lever).
   
  This is hardly new. “Lennon” gave us five John Lennons; “The Cher Show,” scheduled to open on Broadway in December, has three title characters. But as used in “Summer,” the triple casting comes off as a gimmick, possibly necessary to spare any one performer a grueling sing but always dissipating whatever narrative energy the authors manage to gin up.
   
  Still, I welcomed the division, because the script is otherwise appallingly banal, taking as its format the line of least resistance: a “concert of a lifetime” in which Ms. Summer recalls her highs and lows. None of them, including a 1976 suicide attempt and a homicidal ex-boyfriend, are dwelled upon long enough to register.

[bostonman]

I just found out that one of my former students has a sizable role in the creative/production staff for this show. Which leaves me with very conflicted feelings...

[+ WilliamM]

Culture Desk The New Yorker

Grace Jones, Donna Summer, and the Power of Disco

By Michael Schulman

 

4:00 P.M.

 

 

Donna Summer, called the Queen of Disco, performs onstage, circa 1975.

 

Photograph from GAB Archive / Redferns / Getty

 

Disco may never overcome the collective yearning for the “classic” rock era it supposedly ruined. Synthetic, tacky, decadent, dead—disco’s had plenty of invective hurled at it, even as it persists in the form of late-night infomercials and books of louche Studio 54 photographs. It’s easier to snort at the processed cheese of disco’s end than to celebrate its jagged beginnings, buoyed largely by gay, black, and Latino audiences who found a second home (or a first) on the dance floor.

 

This spring, two projects revisit two of disco’s reigning queens, with mixed success. One overexplains its subject, and the other explains too little. In the broad outline, Donna Summer and Grace Jones had plenty in common: both are black women who made music careers in the seventies, translating their bold sexuality to the dance floor. Both were molded by European men (for Summer, the music producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte; for Jones, the French director-photographer Jean-Paul Goude). Both grew up in the church, though Summer became a born-again Christian at the height of her fame, and Jones never looked back. Both weathered physical abuse, record-industry greed, controversy (more on that soon), and the decline of disco, the genre that catapulted them to fame. “I definitely had one foot in the 54 world, but not really for the music—more for the theatre of the place, the combination of people craving spontaneous excitement,” Jones writes in her autobiography, “I’ll Never Write My Memoirs.” “Musically, I was going with the flow along with the DJs who were resisting disco as a trend, as a headline, a dead end.”

 

Summer, who died in 2012, also tried to go with the flow, pivoting to pop songs such as “

” in the eighties, but she didn’t share Jones’s flair for reinvention, and “Queen of Disco” became her permanent honorific. “For the longest time, people had me convinced there was something wrong with this music,” she tells us at the beginning of “Summer,” a new Broadway bio-musical at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. “ ‘Dance music.’ Like the term was some kind of insult.” The layered rhythms of her 1977 hit “

”—a precursor to today’s electronic dance music—pulse in the background, as Summer (LaChanze) is joined by a chorus of women in John Travolta drag. “Once we found that bass line, it was a whole new world,” she continues. “A world of mystery and androgyny, blurring all the lines.”

 

Soon we’re off to the races, with no less than twenty of Summer’s infectious hits (ending, inevitably, with “Last Dance”) shoehorned into a Wikipedia account of her life. In the late sixties, Summer moved from Boston to Germany, to be in a production of “Hair.” There, she teamed up with Moroder and Bellotte and recorded her breakout hit, “Love to Love You Baby,” which was extended into a seventeen-minute dance track. The story of the recording session—Summer turned out all the lights and lay on the floor, making orgasmic noises—is, naturally, recreated onstage. If Summer was the Queen of Disco, the director Des McAnuff is the King of Slick. McAnuff, who helmed “Jersey Boys,” uses many of the same tricks in “Summer”: familiar melodies building with anticipatory excitement, glittering scenery that never stops moving, and multiple narrators whisking the action along. Since there were four Jersey Boys but only one Summer, McAnuff splits her into three, played at different ages by LaChanze, Ariana DeBose, and Storm Lever—each of them dynamite. There’s almost enough stagecraft to make you overlook the fact that the show never finds a coherent story to tell. Incidents from Summer’s life fly by, from her childhood cameo in a murder case to her religious reawakening, strung together with truisms such as, “Once you’re on a roller coaster, it’s real hard to get off.” McAnuff is counting on it.

 

Least convincing is the musical’s treatment of Summer’s reported homophobic comments at a 1983 concert (“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”), which cost her many of her ardent fans. She later apologized, but denied reports that she had called aids a divine punishment. Toward the end of “Summer,” she sits at a piano, surrounded by vintage photos of gay men, and explains that the “Adam and Steve” comment was a “bad joke.” Then she declares that “God made Adam and Steve and Eve and Louise.” It’s a cheap applause line, and the musical’s attempts to fashion a “woke” Donna for 2018 miss an opportunity to interrogate her contradictions: the born-again Christian who was also a gay icon. (When she died, Hilton Als wrote about Summer’s queer appeal.)

 

 

Grace Jones performs at the Carré Theatre, in Amsterdam, on September 23, 1981.

 

Photo by Rob Verhorst / Redferns / Getty

Grace Jones is a gay icon, too—still hula-hooping topless in her late sixties—but her controversies stemmed from her outrageousness, which is exactly what we want from her: the will to be herself. In 1980, she

the British talk-show host Russell Harty live on the air, because he had been ignoring her. The present-day Jones recounts the incident midway through “

,” a new documentary by Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph and Joseph). “I don’t mind Russell, except the fact that he died—but I didn’t kill him!,” Jones says backstage, when someone asks for his own souvenir slap on the cheek. She then tells a garbled version of the story, but Fiennes doesn’t cut to the videotape, sticking rigorously to cinema-vérité pretensions: no talking heads, no archival images. Instead, the camera follows Jones driving around Jamaica, putting on makeup, and catching up with Goude, her onetime collaborator and lover. (“You’re the only man who made me buckle at the knees,” she tells him.)

 

Nothing about Jones is boring—she’s one of the world’s great eccentrics—but Fiennes is too lax in shaping our understanding of her. It would be helpful, for instance, to know how Jones’s fiercely androgynous look made her a groundbreaking fashion model in the seventies; how her 1977 disco version of “

” from the first of her three albums produced by Tom Moulton, made her an international star; how, with the producers Alex Sadkin and Chris Blackwell, she moved from disco into her own brand of reggae-infused New Wave; or how she played off her scary-exotic persona in films such as “A View to a Kill” and “Vamp.” Still, it’s understandable to want to focus on the present, which Jones compulsively uses to make trouble. (A few years ago, I got to interview her in New York, and we promptly got kicked out of a hotel spa together—a career high.)

 

The documentary comes alive, though, when Jones performs, usually in headgear that defies geometry. Her vocal ability was always more limited than Summer’s, but her art was her ferocious presence—captured by Goude in his indelible photographs or in the 1982 concert film “One Man Show.” Here we get the older Jones, sweating in a corset as she delights her audiences with the double-entendre-laden “Pull Up to the Bumper” (“Pull up to my bumper baby / In your long black limousine.”) One thing the documentary gets right: Grace Jones is funny. We know she’s got a temper; in the film, she describes her disciplinarian stepfather, called Mas P, and her later epiphany that she had repurposed his forbidding stare onstage. Her diva antics are absurd, but she’s more or less in on the joke. Her book includes her complete tour rider, which requires two dozen oysters be supplied to her dressing room—unopened, because “Grace does her own shucking.” In one scene in the documentary, she complains that her lingerie-clad backup dancers make her seem like a “madam in a whorehouse.” The dancers are dismissed.

 

Perhaps Jones defies explanation, at least as long as she’s around to entertain us, even as she perpetually slips through our fingers. It’s impossible to imagine a jukebox musical like “Summer” reducing her to platitudes, because she subverts anything resembling a life lesson. Donna Summer found God; Grace Jones demands our worship.

[bostonman]

It's revealing to me that McAnuff has really only had 1 or 2 successes as a director of musicals - obviously Jersey Boys, and maybe Tommy. Which tends to make me wonder how much he himself really did to make Jersey Boys the successful production that it was. Most everything else he's directed has bombed - jukebox shows, new shows, and classic revivals (he managed to turn two of our greatest musicals - Guys and Dolls and How To Succeed In Business - to mud - and in fact doing the same exact thing wrong in both productions, by upstaging the actors with too much projection work.)

 

About jukebox shows - I'm truly surprised and frustrated that by this point in the "jukebox" era, that directors, producers, and writers haven't really come to terms with two simple realities. One, that the draw of such shows is really for audiences to hear those hit pop songs they (largely) already know, just in a different visual format. As a general rule, most jukebox shows' scores strive to recreate the sound of the original arrangements - familiarity is key - instead of finding new ways to hear the song (as Kyle Riabko, for instance, dared to do, and artistically successfully, in his Bert Bacharach piece). And two, that the "lives of the stars," when reduced down to a formulaic musical theatre book concept, are rarely interesting in the least. Again, Jersey Boys, with its smart and energetic book by Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman, broke that mold - but I can't think of any other "bio" show that's been recognized for its solid book writing. And even then, it seems to me that the only jukebox musical to successfully use a book which tells a story NOT about the songwriters/performers is Mamma Mia. Others have come and gone without much staying power.

 

I have no inherent problem with musicals created around pop song catalogues. The music is part of our history - why not? But I do think that the best way to do these shows is in a revue format. Let the music speak for itself, without a need to have to explain the songwriter's life (bo----ring) or even create a huge story around the songs (what we tend to call shoehorning). I still think that, truly jukebox or not, Ain't Misbehavin' is still the king of musical revues - celebrating Fats Waller's songs (and really just the songs) in the context of a Harlem nightclub cabaret, with 5 actors who relate to each other in ways that hint at their possible romantic histories without making that the focus of the show. In terms of a purely rock score, I think Smokey Joe's Cafe comes closest, with a "just the songs" approach to the wide-ranging careers of Lieber and Stoller - without having to "teach" us who they were. (Another similar revue, Five Guys Named Moe, is musically as successful, but gets bogged down in its attempt at a "storyline.")

 

Anyway, I wish they'd learn to ditch the stories and biographies, and just give the audiences what they really come for - a chance to steep in nostalgia as they hear all the hit songs they remember from the radio or MTV. By now it should be clear that the other stuff just isn't necessary or wise.

[samhexum]

Summer: The Donna Summer Musical Ends Broadway Run December 30

 

The bio-musical about the life of the late disco icon closes after 289 performances