Film review By Michael Reubens I’m of a certain age, but I hasten to add, not that old! Having said that, films about WWII and Hitler are everywhere globally at a cinema near you, and will continue to educate and surprise all of us with facts, fiction and even poetic license. Case in point Operation Finale, a thriller on the capture and subsequent trial of Adolph Eichmann, indisputably the chief architect of the holocaust and an amazing covert operation to abduct and capture him in Buenos Aires circa 1960, where he subsequently was brought back to Tel Aviv to stand…

By Michael Reubens, New York. Adapting Shakespeare’s plays into stage or film musical comedies has succeeded on Broadway, Hollywood and London’s West End, so it’s no surprise that this latest incarnation shouldn’t be a hit. Twelth Night (Your Own Thing), Two Gentlemen of Verona, Cole Porter’s Kiss me, Kate (The Taming of the Shrew) and even a Rockabye Hamlet come to mind. Described in the program as “a musical comedy gone wild” Desperate Measures at the New World Stages is wild, alright. In fact there’s never a dull moment as this musical farce proves. Adapted loosely from Measure for Measure,…

By Michael Reubens, New York If you say Velma Celli really fast it could be easily transposed to the Italian pasta Vermicelli – and that’s done on purpose. In part, a food pun but more importantly the character, as in Velma Kelly, in the Broadway hit Chicago, immortalized by the incomparable Gwen Verdon many years ago, which Ian Stroughair aka Velma Celli as a solo performer succeeds admirably in a metamorphosis so brilliant that every song, every choreographed move, every nuance, had me spellbound from beginning to end at New York’s premiere Supper club, Studio 54 Below. This import from…

By Michael Reubens New York Musical reviews by Stephen Sondheim have come and gone and graced the world stages for decades and in many formats and languages. I, for one, grew up in London in the sixties and fondly remember Millicent Martin in “Side by Side by Sondheim”, a smash pastiche of delicious music and lyrics by America’s genius, which went onto Broadway and beyond. This latest incarnation SondheimMontage: 40 songs in 7 pieces in 70 minutes does wonders and more as we are given a relaxing musical evening of 7 pieces, as illustrated in the title above, at the…

By Michael Reubens It is a rare find to have a talent that can channel a superstar from the past and, like magic, transform the off-Broadway cabaret room, The Triad into the Tatania Palast Theater, Berlin, cerca 1960. Cindy Marinangel does just that in the guise of Marlene Dietrich as she sweeps us back in time from her perspective backstage in her dressing room in Berlin. In conversation with an American journalist, a suspicious man appearing at her door and numerous telephone calls, she reminices about her life in Germany, fleeing tbe Nazis and her film career including “The Blue…