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Walter Kerr Theatre

  • Theater
  • Midtown West
  • price 4 of 4
Walter Kerr Theatre
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Time Out says

With 931 seats, this is one of the Main Stem’s smaller houses, ideal for plays and chamber musicals. Designed by Herbert J. Krapp in the sumptuous Italian Renaissance style, the Shubert family opened it in 1921 (the space is now owned by Jujamcyn) as yhe Ritz Theatre. The space was used as a radio and TV studio between 1943 and 1965, and lay fallow from 1965 to 1971, when it reopened. In 1990, the Ritz was renamed after Kerr, a beloved and respected theater critic (yes, such creatures once existed).

Details

Address:
219 W 48th St
New York
10036
Cross street:
between Broadway and Eighth Ave
Transport:
Subway: A, C, E to 42nd St–Port Authority; C, E, 1 to 50th St; N, Q, R to 49th St
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What’s on

Hadestown

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Musicals
  • Open run

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Here’s my advice: Go to hell. And by hell, of course, I mean Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s fizzy, moody, thrilling new Broadway musical. Ostensibly, at least, the show is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes to the land of the dead in hopes of retrieving girl, boy loses girl again. “It’s an old song,” sings our narrator, the messenger god Hermes (André De Shields, a master of arch razzle-dazzle). “And we’re gonna sing it again.” But it’s the newness of Mitchell’s musical account—and Rachel Chavkin’s gracefully dynamic staging—that bring this old story to quivering life. In a New Orleans–style bar, hardened waif Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) falls for Orpheus (Reeve Carney), a busboy with an otherworldly high-tenor voice who is working, like Roger in Rent, toward writing one perfect song. But dreams don’t pay the bills, so the desperate Eurydice—taunted by the Fates in three-part jazz harmony—opts to sell her soul to the underworld overlord Hades (Patrick Page, intoning jaded come-ons in his unique sub-sepulchral growl, like a malevolent Leonard Cohen). Soon she is forced, by contract, into the ranks of the leather-clad grunts of Hades’s filthy factory city; if not actually dead, she is “dead to the world anyway.” This Hades is a drawling capitalist patriarch who keeps his minions loyal by giving them the minimum they need to survive. (“The enemy is poverty,” he sings to them in

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