Xanadu. On Broadway. Seriously.

"Cackling and hiding.  It's like children's theatre for forty year old gay people."  Or so one of the evil muse sisters exclaims in the middle  of Xanadu.  Honestly, she hit the nail squarely on the head, that is if anything in this musical is butch enough to swing a hammer.  If Broadway's butch quotient is normally, let's pretend, a ten on a scale of one to ten, Xanadu sashays in at about a negative two.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Xanadu is one of the funniest things to land on a Broadway stage in ages.  I laughed and groaned from beginning to end.  This show is far far over the top.  It might even be over the top's top, but luckily it knows it and knows just what to do with that material to make an audience laugh.  This super campy production is about the only thing that could have been done with the movie to make it work on the stage.

The casting of Xanadu was well done.  Jackie Hoffman as Caliope proves to be a wonder at comedy again, as do many members of the supporting cast.  And this cast has heart.  So often I feel that the gap between a Broadway audience and the stage is about as wide as the gap between the cast and how much they don't care about their characters.  Not in Xanadu.  The small size of the theater may have helped to make this connection with the audience.  In fact, the stage is so small, that we wondered how they were going to roller skate on it without landing in the audience's laps. 

However, the cast showed us once they hit the stage.  The stage never felt crowded, even when everyone and the onstage audience members were all on it.  In fact, it was so well used, and the set so well built for the size of the show, that it was almost a marvel to watch.  What wasn't there was easily filled in by our imaginations, and it worked better than many an over done Broadway set.  Who needs gimics when you've got content!

Xanadu is well worth seeing, and there are plenty of discount ticket offers available that are even better than going to TKTS.  See the show now, as it will probably have a hard time hanging on for long.  It might just prove to be too gay for Broadway.  Then again, you never know.  It could turn out to be the smash hit of 2007.  Xanadu is scheduled to open July 10th.

P.S. Who knew there was a Xanadu Preservation Society.  Check it out!

tags: xanadu  olivia newton john  broadway  musical  theater  douglas carter bean  comedy  muse  muses  gay  

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