Justin's Theatre Reviews

   The 2017/2018 Broadway in El Paso season got off to a great start when the national tour of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical began it's week long engagement at the Plaza Theatre. As implied by the show's title, the show tells the story of Carole King from the time she was a young songwriter getting her start in the business, all they way up until her first concert at Carnegie Hall. A large plot point in the musical is her relationship with her first husband, Gerry Goffin, and her friendship with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. The show is a jukebox musical that features the music written by Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weil, with a book by Douglas McGrath.   The show is extremely entertaining and it's hard not to become invested in the story and all of "the characters". In quite a few jukebox musicals, you could really tell that they are trying too hard to fit as many songs as they can in the show, but in this show all of the songs are s

   Although Hello, Dolly! might not have been the very last musical of the golden age of Broadway, in a way it was. This is because the creator of the title role, Carol Channing, played the role on and off from 1964 to 1997, totaling in over 5,000 performances for Channing in the role of Dolly Gallagher Levi. Every time Carol Channing returned to the role, she was able to restore a small piece of the golden age of Broadway. Towards the end of Channing's final run as Dolly Levi, her final touring production of the show was professionally filmed in Melbourne, Florida. Although this filmed version of the show was never commercially released, it can be viewed on YouTube for ages to come.    Hello, Dolly! is a musical comedy that is based on Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker and tells the story of a widow named Dolly Gallagher Levi who intends on marrying the well known half a billionaire, Horace Vandergelder. Also in the mix are Vandergelder's employees, Cornelius Hackl and