RUTH LEON RECOMMENDS… Breathe in, for $25
UncategorizedBreathe: The Musical
Click here for tickets – $25.00
The best artists have always reacted to what was around them and so it was inevitable after the shock and destruction of the past year that Covid-19 would generate multiple works of art and they’re beginning to emerge now. One of the most intriguing is Breathe , a musical told in five interlocking suites, each by a different songwriting team.
Breathe follows five couples grappling with the virus’s impact on their lives, families, society, relationships, and health. Written by novelist Jodi Picoult and playwright Timothy Allen Macdonald, with songs by some of New York’s top songwriters, the show is directed by Jeff Calhoun.
Breathe has attracted a spectacular Broadway musical theatre cast that includes Tony Award-winners Kelli O’Hara and Brian Stokes Mitchell, Patti Murin, Colin Donnell, Denée Benton, Rubén J. Carbajal, Matt Doyle, Max Clayton, Daniel Yearwood, T. Oliver Reid and Josh Davis.
On demand from May 14 until July 2. $25
Read more here
I can’t think of anything I’d like to see less. After a year plus of Covid, let’s all go to a musical about Covid! Reading the New York Times review doesn’t help:
“Breathe” as a whole suffers from the same ailment. Instead of expressive story development it depends on arbitrary structural tactics for its effects: not just the reversals and the symptoms-as-titles, but also the pointless weaving of characters into one another’s stories. Alison turns out to be Devon’s sister; Devon delivers Uber Eats to Kate and Adam. So what?
Contrivances like that may have made it possible for a project written by so many hands to cohere under such difficult circumstances, but they can’t make the result mean much. Even the pandemic is eventually sapped of its importance in a brief epilogue that, in tying all the knots, resolves them way too happily. Worse, it offers a trite moral that, however true of life, is rarely true for musicals: “So much can happen in a second.”