G.H. Harding

BACHARACH FOR SURE — Regular readers of this column know that I hold a special place in my universe for Burt Bacharach. His music, from “Alfie” to “What The World Needs Now” are just exquisite works. Each one totally special but fused with Bachrach’s complex chord structures and time signatures. More often than not, you can spy a Bacharach-tune immediately.

 At the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater on NYC’s West Side, located in a YMCA no less, there’ s majestic show going on called Going Bachrach. 

With a terrific band led by Adrian Galante, and singers Ava Locknar, Meecah and John Pagano, they tackled Bacharach songs that are simply delightful to hear. Be it “Alfie,” or “Don’t Make Me Over,” these are just timeless classics in the Great American Songbook. They also did another personal favorite, Burt’s own “This Guy’s in Love With You.” A classic for sure from 1968!

I am a Bachrach fan, but the album he did with Elvis Costello in 1998, entitled Painted From Memory, is my all-time favorite. It’s even the album I’d take as a Desert Island Disc. Costello said that when the pair decided to team up, the songs they would create would be about lost love. Each and every song on the album is joyous and bittersweet. My favorite track on the album is “God Give Me Strength” and the team performed it. Just incredible. Take a listen:

Burt Bacharach and John Pagano

Pagano, who toured with Bacharach for decades, paused at one point to introduce a special guest in the audience, Burt’s widow Jane.

One of the best shows I’ve seen this year. Bacharach’s art was his marvelous songwriting. Staggeringly sensational show.

GOIN HOME — Enroute to my Going Bacharach show, I arrived in midtown a bit early to see what if anything had changed since I worked there some 11 years ago. I got off at 49th and 7th and walked uptown, passing the just re-opened Carnegie Deli. Now it sits about two blocks south from where it originally opened. At 5:15 PM it didn’t look all that crowded, but impressive nonetheless.

I continued on 7th to see the decades-old Wellington Hotel gone, and I suspect a new condo is in-store.

Nordstrom now occupies most of 57th and Broadway, TJ Maxx still occupies 57th and 8th, but Lee’s Art Shop and Salon Ziba are gone forever. Also, the Red Eye Grill is empty too, but the wonderful Trattoria Dell’Arte and sweet-shop Myzel’s,still stands.

I said to Tom Cuddy, after a brief, but satisfying dinner at the Astro on 55th and Sixth and who would join me for the show, it’s amazing what’s new, but also amazing what has stayed. It felt basically the same, but the foot traffic as well as the actual traffic has increased substantially.

I guess you can go home again!

SHORT TAKES – RIP Duncan Sheik. Loved his “Barely Breathing” and Broadway’s Spring Awakening. So sad. Take a read here: https://www.ocregister.com/2026/09/18/duncan-sheik-obituary/?utm_email=5484F4615516C44984F46420F6&g2i_eui=03856d5b039d3c9a315bd8ce19c296fb5da104b4694ec00c727ed48a7a8ae1ea&g2i_source=newsletter&active=no&lctg=5484F4615516C44984F46420F6&utm_source=listrak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3a%2f%2fwww.ocregister.com%2f2026%2f09%2f18%2fduncan-sheik-obituary%2f&utm_campaign=scng-orange_county_register-newscycle&utm_content=curated …

Micky Dolenz at Ameoba/West Hollywood

Here’s Micky Dolenz’s at last week in-store appearance at Amoeba Music in Hollywood tub-thumping his new EP Timeless … Happy Bday Donnie Kehr; Mark Bego; Richard Branciforte; and Suzan Kressel!

NAMES IN THE NEWS — Jarvis Cocker; Tom & Lisa Cuddy; John Boulos; Tony King; Pete Bennett; Allan Steckler; Cori Gardner; Roger Clark; Tom & Lisa Cuddy; John Sykes; Keith Sherman; Bill McCuddy; Tony Bennett; Bill Maher; Cindy Adams; David Fricke; Ken Sharp; Tone Scott; Mark Simone; Herb Rosen; Judy Kaufman; and CHIP!

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Spring Awakening Ken Fallin

There is something almost unbearably poignant about the timing.

On September 16, Seaview announced the young actors who will inherit Spring Awakening, the revolutionary musical Duncan Sheik created with Steven Sater. One day later, Sheik died in Manhattan at the age of 56. His family announced his death Friday, saying that he died Thursday night surrounded by love.

Duncan Sheik

So a production that was already about introducing one of the defining musicals of this century to another generation suddenly becomes something more: a continuation of the artistic life of the man who gave it its extraordinary sound.

Sheik had already lived one successful musical life before Broadway claimed him. His 1996 song “Barely Breathing” became one of those records inseparable from its decade, remaining on the Billboard Hot 100 for 55 weeks and earning him a Grammy nomination. But the introspective singer-songwriter never seemed particularly interested in spending the rest of his career repeating the thing that had made him famous.

Broadway gave him somewhere far more interesting to go. With Sater, Sheik took Frank Wedekind’s once-banned 1891 play about adolescents trapped between sexuality, ignorance, repression and authority and gave those young people a contemporary musical language. Spring Awakening didn’t merely put rock music into a period story. Its great theatrical trick was allowing the music to become the interior world its characters could not otherwise express.

When Spring Awakening opened at Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre in 2006, it introduced Broadway audiences to a remarkable young company that included Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele, John Gallagher Jr. and Skylar Astin. The production won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Sheik received Tonys for Best Original Score, shared with Sater, and Best Orchestrations, and the cast recording later received the Grammy for Best Musical Show Album. More importantly, it changed the sound of Broadway.

The Civilians, Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow

Sheik understood that contemporary music didn’t need to dress itself up as traditional musical theatre before being allowed through the stage door. His music could remain intimate, restless, erotic, angry, melancholy and startlingly modern while serving a story written more than a century earlier. The result was not simply a successful rock musical. It was a score that made an entire generation of young audiences feel that Broadway might actually be speaking their musical language.

Now Spring Awakening is about to speak to another one. Beginning November 27, the musical returns to New York for a limited 12-week Off-Broadway engagement at Studio Seaview, officially opening December 17. Tony Award winner Danya Taymor directs, with choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall, making her theatrical debut, and music supervision by Or Matias.This isn’t a production built around established stars. It is deliberately handing the material to young performers who may become tomorrow’s. The newly announced principal company features Jack Bateman as Georg, Jada Simone Clark as Thea, Leif Coomer as Ernst, Ryo Kamibayashi as Moritz, Ashlyn Maddox as Wendla, Nando Morland as Otto, Antonio Porciello as Hanschen, Khadija Sankoh as Martha, Grace Slear as Anna, Tyler Jordan Wesley as Melchior and Amalia Yoo as Ilse.

Duncan Sheik

There is something particularly appropriate about Bateman and Porciello reaching the production through its open casting call, where 2,532 performers were seen. Twenty years ago, Spring Awakening helped introduce Broadway to actors whose names would become enormously familiar. This production is once again looking toward the unknown.

The revival intends to return the musical to the rawness of Wedekind’s original play, placing its young people in an intimate space where desire, fear, repression and discovery cannot easily be escaped. That intimacy feels particularly right for Sheik’s music. These songs were never really about spectacle. Their power came from hearing everything these characters were forbidden to say suddenly explode into sound.

MCC theater presents ‘Alice By Heart’ book by Steven Sater with Jessie Nelson, music by Duncan Sheik, lyrics by Steven Sater, choreographed by Rick and Jeff Kuperman, directed by Jessie Nelson starring, in alphabetical order, Mia DiLena, Zachary Downer, Noah Galvin, Molly Gordon (Alice), Ari Groover, Michael Hartung, Zachary Infante, Andrew Kober, Grace McLean, Andrew Mueller, Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, Catherine Ricafort, Colton Ryan, Heath Saunders, Wesley Taylor and Natalie Walker

Sheik’s theatrical life extended far beyond Spring Awakening. He wrote music and lyrics for American Psycho, collaborated again with Sater on Alice by Heart, and composed for The Secret Life of Bees and Whisper House. He remained an unusual Broadway figure: cerebral, musically sophisticated and never particularly interested in sounding like everyone else.

Remarkably, Spring Awakening isn’t the only Duncan Sheik musical moving forward without him.

On Monday, September 21—just four days after his death—the cast and creative team of the new Off-Broadway musical Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen are scheduled to meet the press in New York and perform one of its songs publicly. Sheik wrote the music, with a book by Leah Nanako Winkler.

Sophie Ann Caruso, Duncan Sheik, Jamie deRoy photo Stephen Sorokiff

The musical stars Sophia Anne Caruso, who made an indelible impression as Lydia in Beetlejuice, as Colette; Cory Jeacoma (Beautiful) as Léon; Nkeki Obi-Melekwe (Tina) as Nana; and Drama Desk Award nominee Jenny Powers (Little Women) as Madame. Tony, Olivier and Emmy Award winner Rob Ashford directs and choreographs, with Or Matias serving as music supervisor.

That gathering was planned as an introduction to a new Duncan Sheik musical. Instead, it will inevitably become something else as well: one of the first occasions on which theatre artists will perform new Sheik music after his death.

The timing is almost impossible to ignore. On September 16, New York learned who would inherit Spring Awakening. On September 17, Sheik died. On September 21, performers are scheduled to sing from a musical he never lived to see fully arrive.

That is not simply legacy. That is work interrupted in motion.

Sheik’s theatrical career extended well beyond Spring Awakening. He wrote music and lyrics for American Psycho, collaborated again with Steven Sater on Alice by Heart, and composed Whisper House and music for The Secret Life of Bees. But Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen now occupies a different place in that body of work. It isn’t something being rediscovered from his past. It is part of the future he was still creating.

His colleagues and performers began paying tribute almost immediately. Michele, Astin and members of the Spring Awakening family remembered not simply the composer whose work helped establish their careers, but a generous musician and mentor who had been there when many of them were themselves young artists trying to discover who they were. Which makes what happens at Studio Seaview this November especially moving.

Duncan Sheik could easily have remained the handsome singer-songwriter forever introduced as the man who recorded “Barely Breathing.” Instead, he followed that success somewhere much stranger and more consequential. He found Wedekind, found Sater, found the theatre and helped create a musical that altered Broadway’s vocabulary.

Twenty years later, another generation has just been handed those songs. At the same time, another company is preparing to introduce music he had only just finished creating. Sheik will not be there for either.

But on Monday, someone will sing one of his newest songs. In November, another young actor will begin singing one of the songs that made him part of Broadway history.

Duncan Sheik is gone at 56. His music, remarkably, was already on its way to the next stage.

Going Bacharach: The Songs of an Icon celebrated its opening night with a room filled not only with the music of Burt Bacharach, but with some formidable Broadway talent there to cheer on the show and its company.

David Green and Judy Kaye

Photographer Genevieve Rafter Keddy was on hand for T2C to capture the evening, which brought out three-time Tony Award winner Judy Kaye

Beth Leavel

Tony winners Beth Leavel,

Debra Monk

Kelly Strandemo and Debra Monk

Debra Monk

Donna Murphy

and Donna Murphy

Dee Hoty

along with Dee Hoty,

Adam Heller and Beth Level

Adam Heller and Tony-nominated writer and lyricist Bill Russell.

Bill Russell

Bruce Bossard and Bill Russell

Meecah

Hilary Kole

Adrian Galante

Adrian Galante, Hilary Kole, Jack Lewin, John Pagano, Meecah, Ava Locknar and Alyssa Wray

Adrian Galante, Hilary Kole, John Pagano, Meecah, Ava Locknar and Alyssa Wray

They joined the cast and creative team of Going Bacharach, which brings together John Pagano, Hilary Kole and Meecah, with Adrian Galante serving as arranger, musical director and pianist. Conceived by Our Sinatra creator Jack Lewin, the production was co-created by Lewin, journalist and music historian Will Friedwald, Tedd Firth and Galante, with direction by David Zippel.

Opening night Tonight’s – Marci Panascia, Kristin Cappuccino, David Rourke and Corey Rawls

The opening-night crowd was particularly fitting for a show devoted to Bacharach. His music has always occupied that rare territory between popular music and theatrical sophistication—songs seemingly effortless on the surface while doing remarkably complicated things underneath. Seeing artists who have spent their own careers interpreting great American songs turn out to celebrate his catalogue added another layer to the evening.

Producers Stuart Ross, Donna Trinkoff and John Katz

Jamie deRoy and Catherine Adler

Will Friedwald

For T2C, the opening also came just as Going Bacharach has undergone a considerable evolution. Returning to the production eight months after first seeing it, I found a show that has grown enormously—more cohesive, better balanced and far more confident about what it wants to be. Most importantly, it now allows its extraordinary singers to take center stage.

Dominick Fulco

On opening night, Broadway came to welcome it.

Andrew Scott is returning to Sea Wall, the Simon Stephens play written specifically for him, but this time the performance will exist somewhere between theatre, cinema and documentary.

Scott will perform the intimate monologue for 19 performances at Studio Seaview, 305 West 43rd Street, from October 16 through October 30. Yet the audience walking into the theatre will not simply be attending a limited theatrical engagement. They will also become part of a feature film being created around the performances.

Directed by Peabody Award winner Tina Satter, the project is conceived as a film about the creation and experience of theatre itself. Cameras will capture not only Scott performing Sea Wall, but everything surrounding the performance: backstage, onstage and inside the house. Most unusually, the audience at each of the 19 performances will become an essential part of the finished film.

It is an intriguing idea because theatre and film usually approach performance from opposite directions. Film can stop, repeat, edit and choose exactly what the viewer sees. Theatre disappears the moment it happens. Even when a stage production is professionally filmed, what remains is generally a record of the performance rather than the complete ecosystem around it.

This Sea Wall appears determined to capture something more elusive: what happens before an actor walks into the light, what happens in the room while he is speaking, and what happens between performer and audience that cannot be recreated in an empty studio.

Scott is an ideal actor for the experiment.

Few performers understand stillness quite as well. His work can be remarkably quiet while remaining electrically alive, which matters enormously in Sea Wall, a piece that depends less upon theatrical machinery than upon the relationship between one man, his story and the people listening to him.

Andrew Scott

Stephens wrote Sea Wall specifically for Scott, creating an intensely personal monologue centered on Alex, a photographer speaking about family, love and a devastating event that fractures the life he believed he understood. Its power lies partly in its apparent simplicity. One actor. One story. Almost nowhere to hide.

That simplicity should make the filmmaking experiment particularly revealing. Instead of attempting to turn the play into a conventional movie, Satter and her creative team are making the theatrical act itself the subject. The performance remains at the center, but the camera will be allowed to look beyond the frame normally imposed by the stage.

The theatrical creative team includes lighting designer Isabella Byrd and sound designer Ben Williams. For the feature film, Paul Yee serves as director of photography, with Parker Lutz advising on production design.

The production also brings together an extensive producing team. Sea Wall will be produced onstage by Seaview, Spencer Ross, Steven Demmler, Mickey Liddell and Pete Shilaimon, Linden Productions, Both/And Productions and Pam Hurst-Della Pietra and Stephen Della Pietra, with Wessex Grove and ATG Productions serving as executive producers.

What ultimately makes the project exciting is that it is not simply filming theatre. We already know how to do that. This is attempting to capture the strange living organism surrounding theatre—the preparation, the waiting, the audience settling into its seats, the performer entering the space, and the invisible exchange that occurs once everyone agrees to believe in the same story for a little while.

And because each audience will be different, no two performances can produce exactly the same film material.

That may prove to be the most fascinating part of the experiment. Theatre audiences are usually treated as witnesses. Here, they become part of the work itself.

Andrew Scott will perform Sea Wall at Studio Seaview from Friday, October 16 through Friday, October 30. Tickets are now on sale. Details regarding the feature film’s eventual release will be announced at a later date.

For a play built around one man standing before an audience and telling the truth as he understands it, turning the people listening into characters of their own feels strangely appropriate.

Theatre has always depended upon the audience.

This time, the camera intends to prove it.

Twenty-five years after Our Sinatra became one of Off-Broadway’s unexpected musical pleasures, Eric Comstock, Christopher Gines and Hilary Kole have returned to the material that started it all. What is remarkable is how little dust has gathered on either the songs or the performers.

Our Sinatra: A Musical Celebration, now at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, isn’t an impersonation show. Nobody is trying to become Frank Sinatra, and that is precisely why the evening works. Instead, three exceptionally accomplished interpreters take on the extraordinary catalogue Sinatra made famous and allow the songs to breathe in their own voices. “Fly Me to the Moon,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “Come Fly with Me,” “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Where or When,” “One for My Baby” and “The Lady Is a Tramp” arrive carrying all the memories we associate with Sinatra, without becoming museum pieces. Ironically missing is “My Way.”

Eric Comstock, Hilary Kole, Christopher Gines Photo Genevieve Rafter Keddy

The chemistry among Comstock, Gines and Kole is the evening’s greatest asset. After all these years, they fit together musically with an ease that cannot be manufactured. In harmony, their voices match beautifully, yet individually they couldn’t be more distinct. That contrast keeps the evening alive.

Eric Comstock Photo Genevieve Rafter Keddy

At the piano, Comstock is brilliant, with the kind of musical intelligence that makes everything look considerably easier than it is. As musical director, his choices feel intuitive and instinctive rather than arranged within an inch of their lives. As a singer, he is suave, personable and completely at home in this material. His patter is equally important. Comstock understands that Sinatra’s catalogue came from a world in which the space between the songs mattered almost as much as the songs themselves.

Christopher Gines Photo Genevieve Rafter Keddy

Gines brings a wonderfully smooth, creamy vocal quality that simply melts you. There is warmth in his singing without sentimentality, and he understands the conversational nature of this music. Sinatra’s greatest performances never sounded as though he were demonstrating how beautifully he could sing; they sounded as though he had something to tell you. Gines understands that distinction.

Hilary Kole Photo Genevieve Rafter Keddy

Then there is Hilary Kole, whose sophisticated jazz sensibility makes her particularly thrilling in this material. She honors the Sinatra sound without ever becoming imprisoned by it. Her scatting on “I’ve Got the World on a String” is worth the evening by itself. It is playful, technically dazzling and completely alive—a performer taking a familiar song and reminding us that a standard becomes a standard precisely because there is always another way into it.

Eric Comstock,m Hilary Kole, Christopher Gines Photo Genevieve Rafter Keddy

That is what makes Our Sinatra so fabulous. These performers aren’t trying to preserve the songs under glass. They make them their own.

Eric Comstock, Hilary Kole, Christopher Gines Photo Genevieve Rafter Keddy

Kole’s stories about her father and Sinatra give the evening an unexpectedly personal dimension, while Comstock’s patter provides both history and humor. Those stories matter because Sinatra wasn’t simply a singer with an enviable songbook. He represented an era when popular music was built around lyricists and composers who assumed an audience was listening to the words. Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen and the other writers whose work became inseparable from Sinatra understood sophistication without mistaking it for pretension.

The musical economy of the production is another pleasure.

Marco Panascia Photo Genevieve Rafter Keddy

Backed only by the superb bassist Marco Panascia, Comstock’s piano provides everything these singers require. There is nowhere to hide in an arrangement this exposed, but there is also nothing unnecessary competing with the lyric. The result has the intimacy of a great New York supper club—the kind of room where the performer wasn’t some distant figure across an arena, but someone telling a story a few feet away.

Richard Maltby Jr. Photo Genevieve Rafter Keddy

That intimacy is particularly appropriate because Our Sinatra began in precisely that world. Created by Comstock, Gines and Kole, the revue premiered in 1999 at the legendary Algonquin Oak Room before moving into a commercial run in 2000, first at the Blue Angel Theatre and later the Reprise Room. It ultimately played more than 1,000 performances during its two-year run, followed by national tours and regional productions. Now the original trio has come home to celebrate its 25th anniversary, with Richard Maltby Jr. supervising the production and Kurt Stamm directing.

David Zippel Photo Genevieve Rafter Keddy

There is inevitably nostalgia in Our Sinatra, but nostalgia isn’t what makes the show work. The songs do. In an age when so much music is produced, processed and digitally perfected, there is something wonderfully luxurious about sitting in a small theatre listening to three singers, a pianist and a bassist trust melody, lyric and musicianship to do the work. And they do.

Jamie de Roy and David Zippel Photo Genevieve Rafter Keddy

Our Sinatra takes us back to another time, but it doesn’t feel embalmed by that time. Comstock, Gines and Kole remind us why these songs survived in the first place: extraordinary writing becomes new again when extraordinary musicians know what to do with it.

Twenty-five years later, Our Sinatra is very welcome back.

Our Sinatra: at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, 10 West 64th Street, through November 29th. The regular performance schedule is Tuesday at 7:30PM, Saturday at 5PM and Sunday at 1:30PM.