Latest news with #DavidYazbek
Forbes
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Ahead Of Tonys, ‘Buena Vista Social Club' Drops Broadway Cast Digital Album
Tony nominee Natalie Venetia Belcón performs in 'Buena Vista Social Club.' There's great anticipation for the critically-acclaimed Broadway musical Buena Vista Social Club ahead of the Tony Awards, where the show - inspired by the story of legendary Afro-Cuban musicians who created the Grammy-winning 1997 album of the same name - has scored 10 nominations. The electrifying production, with its colorful imagery, captivating rhythm and compelling story, is making Broadway history as the first musical to feature its entire score sung completely in Spanish, while the scenes are performed in English. Just ahead of the award ceremony, the producers have released the Buena Vista Social Club original Broadway cast recording digital album, giving audiences a chance to experience the Cuban rhythms that have captivated theatergoers. Produced by Dean Sharenow and David Yazbek, the digital recording is distributed through World Circuit Records. Physical formats will follow, with the CD available July 25, and vinyl later in 2025. The original cast recording features the original Broadway cast as well as the Buena Vista Social Club Broadway band, which has been awarded a 2025 Special Tony Award. They include Marco Paguia (piano, music director), David Oquendo (guitar), Renesito Avich (tres), Gustavo Schartz (bass), Hery Paz (woodwinds), Eddie Venegas (trombone), Jesus Ricardo (trumpet), Javier Díaz (percussion), Mauricio Herrera (percussion), Román Diaz (percussion), and Leonardo Reyna (piano). The recording features the following tracks: 'El Carretero,' 'De Camino a la Vereda,' 'Veinte Años,' 'El Cumbanchero (Rehearsal),' 'Veinte Años (1950),' 'Qué Bueno Baila Usted,' 'Bruca Maniguá,' 'Murmullo,' 'Drume Negrita,' 'Candela,' 'El Cumbanchero (Tropicana),' 'Dos Gardenias,' 'El Cuarto de Tula,' 'La Negra Tomasa,' 'Chan Chan,' 'Silencio,' 'Lágrimas Negras,' 'Bruca Maniguá' (reprise), 'Silencio' (Instrumental), and 'Candela (Finale).' Broadway's "Buena Vista Social Club" has 10 Tony nominations. The Buena Vista Social Club is tied with Death Becomes Her and Maybe Happy Ending for the most of any show this season. While there are strong expectations that Buena Vista Social Club will pick up several awards, the show has already secured its legacy and its future. The production is hitting the road, embarking on a multi-year North American tour in September 2026. "Our show redefines what a new Broadway musical looks like, showcasing the beautiful artistry and heritage of this beloved Cuban music," says show producer Orin Wolf, who also co-produced the original Broadway cast recording album with music director Marco Paguia. Buena Vista Social Club's Tony nominations span nearly every major category: The Broadway cast includes Tony nominee Natalie Venetia Belcon (Omara), Julio Monge (Compay), Mel Semé (Ibrahim) Jainardo Batista Sterling (Rubén), Isa Antonetti (Young Omara), Da'Von T. Moody (Young Compay), Wesley Wray(Young Ibrahim), Leonardo Reyna (Young Rubén), Renesito Avich (Eliades), Ashley De La Rosa (Young Haydee), Justin Cunningham (Juan de Marcos), Angélica Beliard, Carlos Falú, Carlos Gonzalez, Héctor Juan Maisonet, Ilda Mason, Marielys Molina, Andrew Montgomery Coleman, Sophia Ramos, Anthony Santos, Martín Sola, and Tanairi Sade Vazquez. The Tony Awards broadcast live on June 8, starting at 5 pm PT/8 pm ET on CBS and stream on Paramount+.
New York Times
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
13 Great Songs of the Tonys Season
Great Broadway musicals must feature great songs, but not all the great songs are found in great musicals. That's why I collect cast albums: There are obvious gems and hidden ones. To explore that range at the end of a generally fine and unusually eclectic Broadway season, I picked a song from every show that received a Tony Award nomination in any category. (The exception: 'Pirates! The Penzance Musical,' which will record its New Orleans-inflected Gilbert and Sullivan score after the awards are doled out on CBS this Sunday.) Some of the songs are delicate, others brassy. Some jerk tears, others laughs. Some forward the show and others stop it cold. In any case, even if you never see them onstage, they all repay a deep listen. 'Up to the Stars' from 'Dead Outlaw' For most of its 100 minutes, 'Dead Outlaw,' a death-dark comedy about a man who became a mummy, accompanies its posthumous picaresque with songs (by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna) in a genre you might call rockabilly grunge. But near the end, the palette radically changes, when a formerly secondary character emerges as the show's perfect avatar. He is Thomas Noguchi, the real-life Los Angeles 'coroner to the stars' from 1967 to 1982. In a hilarious yet philosophical number called 'Up to the Stars,' filled with sparkling, macabre lyrics, he details his most famous cases and corpses in the finger-snapping Rat Pack style of Dean Martin. As Noguchi, Thom Sesma sells what may be the best number ever about buying the farm. 'With One Look' from 'Sunset Boulevard' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
CNN
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
‘The saddest, darkest stuff is often the funniest': Composer David Yazbek on ‘Dead Outlaw'
Broadway luminary David Yazbek speaks with Bianna Golodryga about 'Dead Outlaw,' the bizarre-but-true story taking the theater world by storm.
Globe and Mail
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
In Stratford's Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, never before has cheering for the bad guys been so fun
Title: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Written by: Jeffrey Lane and David Yazbek Performed by: Shakura Dickson, Jonathan Goad, Liam Tobin, Sara-Jeanne Hosie, Derek Kwan, Michele Shuster Director: Tracey Flye Company: Stratford Festival Venue: Avon Theatre City: Stratford Year: Until Oct. 25, 2025 Critic's Pick The Stratford Festival sure seems to have a thing for the French Riviera. Last year, the fest's Avon Theatre was transformed into La Cage aux Folles's colourful Saint-Tropez nightclub. Now, just six months after that soft hug of a musical closed, the theatre has once more been vaulted to warmer climes with a gangbuster production of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels – complete with many, many palm trees. One of the early 2000s' lesser-produced musicals, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the eponymous musical adaptation of Frank Oz's 1988 film, is a hoot and a half – and its relative obscurity suggests that most audience members will get to enjoy the twists of its story and score. David Yazbek's songs, equal parts catchy and clever, teem with earworms and sneaky double entendres – good luck getting the musical's penultimate Dirty Rotten Number out of your head when you leave the theatre. The show's basic premise is quite simple: Lawrence Jameson (Jonathan Goad) is a con man worthy of Saul Goodman, living large in an expensive villa on the sea. His chummy accomplice Andre Thibault (Derek Kwan) helps him to steal women's jewellery and cash – it doesn't hurt, risk-wise, that Andre is the resort town's chief of police. When one day a younger cad appears on the scene, a syrupy southern drawl on his lips, Lawrence realizes his reign as the Riviera's chief sleaze might be in danger. And so, reluctantly, he takes Freddy Benson (Liam Tobin) under his wing. A perfect mark soon appears – soap heiress Christine Colgate (Shakura Dickson) – and before long, a strange love triangle emerges between the coast's most vile swindlers and its sweetest, most generous guest. Of course, chaos ensues. Jeffrey Lane's whip-smart book, though somewhat devoid of authentic pathos, is surprising, edgy and nimble, resulting in a vibrant, uncomplicated musical that hardly feels its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Originally slated to be directed by the late Bobby Garcia – the run is instead dedicated to his memory – Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is instead efficiently steered by Tracey Flye. It's a highly enjoyable yet imperfect production. Stephanie Graham's choreography is at times overly busy, and Ranil Sonnadara's sound design could use a few tweaks. Particularly at the top of the show, Yazbek's lyrics have a habit of getting lost in the brass. (That's not helped by the actors' faux accents – Kwan's French joual, in particular, is often quite muffled.) Acting-wise, Flye's cast simply flies – Goad and Tobin work in terrific synchronicity, and Dickson, charming as ever, doesn't broadcast the musical's cheeky ending before it arrives. Sara-Jeanne Hosie's Muriel, too, is funny and swank. Musically, the production is less consistent – opening night sound issues aside, Dickson's belted high notes are occasionally a hair flat. Goad, too, often approximates songs' notes rather than landing squarely on them. Tobin, meanwhile, saddled with the show's most demanding song-and-dance numbers, gleams in the role of Freddy – he's reliably tuneful and relentlessly witty. Michele Shuster is another standout in the impactful side role of Jolene Oakes – it's a shame we don't see her much after the first act. On the technical side of the Riviera, Lorenzo Savoini's attractive set makes a fab playground for the titular scheming scoundrels. Sue LePage's costumes, on the other hand, occasionally feel a touch random, neither anchoring the show in any particular time period nor telling us much about the characters wearing them. These are all fairly minor gripes, though, for what's so far been the most watchable of the Stratford Festival's four openings this year. Yes, the show shares more than a few similarities with last year's La Cage aux Folles, and that show wore its heart on its sleeve in a way I found myself missing here – at a certain point, laughing at oily thieves starts to feel a bit icky in the absence of less superficial subplots. (A budding romance between Muriel and Andre, played almost entirely for laughs here, tries to fill that gap, but only to moderate success.) On the whole, though, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is a damn good time, a creative programming choice that's been given a hilarious, mostly well-executed production by Flye and her team. In all truth, I'll probably catch it again before it closes this fall: Never before has cheering for the bad guys been so fun.
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown review – a gorgeous take on a flawed musical
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is one of those films you really should have on your bucket list. Pedro Almodóvar's 1988 Spanish farce (currently streaming on SBS on Demand) follows actress Pepa, whose lover Iván has broken up with her over answering machine, and her long day trying to get in touch with him. Along the way, she collides with Iván's ex-wife, a young couple who turn out to also be connected to him, and her best friend Candela. Men are ruining everyone's day. It's funny, clever and dark. The musical adaptation, written by Jeffrey Lane (best known for his musical adaptation of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) with music and lyrics by David Yazbek (also Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and more recently the freshly Tony-nominated Dead Outlaw) premiered on Broadway 15 years ago – to middling (at best) reviews. Both its New York and West End seasons were cut short due to poor sales. So why is this musical getting a fresh run in Australia? Three words: director Alexander Berlage. He's the perfect fit for a show that needs to be stylish down to its bones – and needs a new vision. Berlage started out on the experimental side of indie theatre before he found his way to musicals (often as a lighting designer as well as director), immediately committing to theatrical rigour, camp and playful subversion. His first outing at the Hayes, Cry-Baby the Musical (based on the John Waters film) restored an anarchic spirit to a show that had turned saccharine on Broadway; the follow-up, a deliciously complex and sleek staging of American Psycho, was another success in finding the right tone for a show that had flopped in New York. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Who better, then, to take on Almodóvar's camp farce and make it pop? And this production really does pop: Hailley Hunt's set – Pepa's apartment – is a dream to look at, and cleverly evokes all of Madrid through just a few set pieces. It's red curtain-ringed and deliciously decorated, and when Phoebe Pilcher's lighting drenches the space in reds and blues, it's gorgeous. Amy Hack (who most recently starred in Yentl in Melbourne and Sydney) is glorious as Pepa: it's a deeply lived-in, individuated performance that takes inspiration from, but does not copy, the film. This is a character in crisis, but also comic and genuinely complex – the key is in the title, this woman is on the verge of a breakdown – and Hack gives a gorgeously risky and boldly funny performance that will be one of the year's best. Together, Berlage and Hack are doing great, inventive work (there are delightful staging choices, especially small moments of character and tableau detail, that elevate scenes). It's genuinely a pleasure to watch. There are, however, two big problems. The first, which is fixable, is the sound design and engineering: on opening night, it was often difficult to make out the lyrics. Musicals reveal key plot and character information in songs, from facts and exposition all the way to moments of revelation, so if we can't hear it, we're lost. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion The second is that it's just not a very good musical. Yazbek's Spanish-styled score sounds bright but isn't varied enough to have us leaning in and listening closely, especially when it's already hard to hear. The show has a male narrator (Aaron Robuck, playing the taxi driver who Pepa encounters several times in the film) who feels extraneous to the narrative. More broadly, the book is a mess. When taking a farce from film to stage, you need to recalibrate your narrative. In a musical, everything is already heightened, so you need to establish an emotional reality in your farce for it to have a sense of stakes. Lane and Yazbeck's musical saves the bulk of stripped-back emotional realness for the second act, but it's too late by then to introduce them – we've been dialled up to 11 since the first scene. Berlage does his best to mitigate this – and the ending is strikingly, surprisingly, moving – but he can't change the book or the score, which do not rise to the greatness of Berlage, Hack or the original film. So, should you see it? If you love musicals and want to see a performer at the height of her powers, yes. Hack is well worth the trip, and you deserve a treat. Otherwise, give the film a try. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is at Hayes theatre, Darlinghurst, until 8 June.
