Alex De-Bard: Last News

Private Jones poses a thrilling musical adventure in story and in form.The company’s first world-premiere musical since the pandemic, produced in association with Goodspeed Musicals, shrewdly deploys sign language, practical sound effects, and silence, along with Pailet’s compelling score, to shape the world of Private Gomer Jones, a deaf Welsh sniper in World War I.Inspired by a real-life WWI marksman who was deaf since infancy, Private Jones comes firing to life in Johnny Link’s feisty take on the role.Gomer, who loses his hearing as a child, is gutsy enough at 16 to fake his way past British Army recruitment officers so he can join up and fight alongside his fellow Borderers from Breconshire.Backed by the production’s robust ensemble, he sings, bursting with hope, in “The South Wales Borderers” of answering the nation’s call. Moments later, innocence still guides him, as Gomer and company march through “Part of the Sound,” his vow to not simply soldier in step, but truly prove his value in combat.Link ably captures Gomer’s boyish voice and outlook, and evolves the character in his dark, humbling descent into the trenches of war, though it’s not the performer’s singing that carries the characterization.Distinctly pleasing voices do surround him — notably, David Aron Damane, lending his deep baritone to Gomer’s father and other roles, and Leanne Antonio as Army nurse Gwenolyn, leading the transporting ballad “Every Soul’s a Soul.”Later reprised as “Every Soldier,” the intoxicating melody ripples like water, floating Gwenolyn’s simple wisdom, that every soul is a soul.

tick, tick…BOOM! (★★★★☆), the brilliant, semi-autobiographical, nineties rock musical the composer debuted as a self-performed monologue around the time he started working on RENT.Licking his wounds following the failure to launch Superbia, the musical he hoped would be his masterpiece, Larson bared his longing, self-doubt, ambition, and anger in a boldly firsthand account of an ambitious composer hellbent on mounting his masterpiece Superbia before he turns 30.In the show, reworked from Larson’s original monologue into a stage musical for a three-person cast, the clock is ticking for Jon, who’s prepping for a Superbia workshop performance that could change his life. Or, it could augur the end of his theater composing career before it’s truly begun.As he sings in the show’s opening number “30/90,” the clock is ticking for every Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, time inexorably racing ahead of their dreams, faster than they can keep up with bills and obligations.Fearing failure, and, whether motivated by a sense of his own mortality or just propelled by ego, Jon’s drive to create something great, and taste the spoils of his labor, feels especially urgent in Christian Montgomery’s impassioned performance.Urgency might be a calling card for four-time Helen Hayes Award nominee Montgomery, who’s distinguished himself on D.C.