Broadway My Way
Winter Park Playhouse
Spotlight Caberet Series
Starring Shawn Kilgore
Special guest Natalie Cordone
Musical Direction by Chris Leavy
Winter Park, FL
This is great! You get to see all the good stuff from the climax of “Phantom of the Opera,” and didn’t have to sit through the boring parts. Shawn Kilgore has a long history art the WP Playhouse; he’s done drag in “Nunsense” and played more than a few romantic leads on this stage. Tonight, he’s back with anecdotes about his career and snippets of all your favored B’way hits from the golden era of Rogers and Hammerstein. True, he starts with some Sondheim, but that’s just to clear the guns. Soon Kilgore settles into the show tunes you want to sing along with but just don’t have the pipes to do so I public. We get: “Oh, what a beautiful morning!” and “Put on a Happy Face” and “Lullaby of Old Broadway.”
Then Kilgore gets personal: his goal in life is to play Tevia in “Fiddler on the Roof.” He sounds Ashkenazi enough, but he needs more white hair to pull off this pinnacle of Yiddish tsores. Anther prize role he seeks is leading “Man of La Mancha”. He does a quickie audition, and I would certainly hire him for the role based on his rendition of “Dulcinai.” He has other desires and plans, certainly, but out time runs short. Ms. Cordone appears for the big blow out material from “Phantom.” On This Enchanted Evening, after we’ve Climbed Every Mountain he produces another special, Aviva Ezery, to close us out with “Why Won’t My Dream Come True?” I can’t help her on that issue, but it’s a powerful little cabaret packed with all our favorites.
