Marc Miller takes a look at Welcome to the Big Dipper at York Theatre Company:
What was the last musical you saw where the first three songs were all waltzes? A Little Night Music, maybe, and even that's cheating, as "Now" is in 6/8. But a veritable cascade of 3/4 opens Welcome to the Big Dipper, the York Theatre Company's new musical. It seems an effort to disarm its audience, to plunge us into a nostalgic, optimistic, humanistic nature of mind, almost Rodgers and Hammerstein territory. Heaven knows we could use some of that, and it's inspiring, if perplexing, to read that Welcome to the Big Dipper is "based on a true event." But a lot of it doesn't ring very true, and we have to blame the authors for that. |
