CHATTER AWAY: Overnight Open Thread

In tonight’s Broadway news, after a month of previews the Donna Summer musical officially opened this week to some of the most scathing reviews you’ll read.

From the New York Times:

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,” “Last Dance,” “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. If ever there were a diva unsuited to the expurgated, down-talking children’s book treatment, it’s Donna Summer. Her conflicts were adult ones, the stuff of real drama; her music more original and, to those who loved it, more liberating than it ever seems in “Summer.”

I attended one of the first previews thanks to a friend who had broken up with the guy he intended to take. But even a free ticket and a seat in the second row was hardly worth the unending cringing.