Children's Theatre just opened "Locomotive" and Youth Performance Company will soon highlight Civil Rights activists in "Inspired by Claudette & Rosa."
By far the biggest problem with NBC’s
Grinch is the musical source material itself. Mel Marvin’s painfully tuneless score makes
Seussical look like a masterpiece in comparison, with the show’s only memorable songs pulled from the 1966 and 2000 film adaptations. And the unnecessarily convoluted script by Timothy Mason isn’t much better. This version of
The Grinch is narrated by an older version of the Grinch’s dog Max (Denis O’Hare) reflecting back on his life as a younger pup (Booboo Stewart) living at the mercy of his hairy green owner (Matthew Morrison). The show has little in the way of logical character arcs, meaningful themes, or even basic plot momentum. And between the rhyming dialogue and a whole underdeveloped subplot for Cindy-Lou Who (Amelia Minto) and her multi-generational family, the scattered production could barely get into a storytelling groove before another commercial break would come along to break up the flow.