A Day in Hollywood / A Night in the Ukraine review

A Day in Hollywood / A Night in the Ukraine Review - Broadway musical

One of the main actors of one of the parts painfully similar to … wait for it, wait for it ... a legendary guy who wrote a bible of best friend – Barney Stinson from "How I Met Your Mother" TV serial movie. Just look at him in the song I Love A Film Cliché – resemblance immediately become apparent to you. The voice is also the British, though without the same infinite charm.

To say that this musical is very musical – will be the same cliché. After all, they are to tell the public about something, in the style of singing, but there is a whole musical quite strange. Here the songs – sung by very good voices – are interspersed with a stand-up comedian shows. It turns out something like this – every actor that comes on stage (well, at least in the second part), starts to sing first, and then tells something funny. Either (s)he first says something funny, and then sings. Sometimes they manage to do it all together, interrupting the singing with joking, or suddenly starting to sing while making a joke. In general, the public fell in love with this style of performance, while almost as many as 600 shows (well, ok, 588 if you keep up the accuracy in everything), this musical has held on the stage.

The essence of what is happening on the stage – is obviously to tell a lot of small and almost independent stories. In some of them, there is an interesting plot. In the others – there is only a slight hint on anything interesting (for example, if we talk about the history of the first piece of a scene that called It All Comes Out of the Piano).

The first part of this musical is an attempt to combine the tap dancing with singing and with an interesting narration. The second part is, among everything else, an attempt to show the most authentic clothes of Ukrainian people, not having enough thoughtful study of actual national trend in clothing. So many of the elements were lost. But many were reflected. In fact, it is unclear until the end why this musical has decided to combine these different parts, which could easily be as separate musicals (and in life, they are different works actually).

Tap dance lovers will be happy with at least the first part, where this dance takes probably at least one hour of total time. If this happens without any musical accompaniment (which is quite nice and created by Frank Lazarus), it does not look good, frankly. They are not second Michael Flatleys nor outstanding singers. Choreography is frankly messy – if we talk from the perspective of lover of musicals and a person who has seen more than a couple dozens of them. Musical makes a lot of flaws, on which you can close your eyes, because the second part becomes the better than first one (literally in everything: music, humor, histories, plots) and covers all the bad things.

It's hard to believe that between the parts of one whole there may be such a big difference, but it is a reality. Tangible advantage you can feel this one – the impression that for the price of one ticket you have been on two different shows this evening.
Last Update:July, 25th 2016