By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) NEW ORLEANS – It has become almost fashionable for many in the theatre world to find disfavor with the final collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The Sound of Music, The almost antiseptic manner in which the vile anti-Semitic Nazis are addressed in the book…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) No one can ever claim that Michael McKelvey is an underachiever. Following his triumph at the Jefferson Performing Arts Society’s massive production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the artistic director at Summer Lyric Theatre at Tulane returns to JPAS with a fresh and lively holiday production…
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out”) Perhaps the darkest of the Disney animated films, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” was the last of the film series known as the Disney Renaissance that began with “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” in 1998. Like earlier projects by Menken and his celebrated lyricist partner Howard Ashman (“The…
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out“) In 1999 the Walt Disney Animation Studios released “Tarzan,” which would be its final major animated film during the Disney Renaissance era that began a decade earlier with “The Little Mermaid.” Based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel “Tarzan of the Apes,” told the story of the…
