music-all

“A Night With Janis Joplin,” a Broadway musical that has been a modest seller at the box office, will close in February and then aim to reopen in March at another space in New York City, the producers announced on Tuesday evening. They declined to specify a closing date or identify the possible new space, only saying in a statement that they were “finalizing a wonderful option to move to another venue.”

I’ve got a long-standing rule when it comes to theatre: I try not to see jukebox musicals. First of all, I think they’re lazy: it’s like watching musical theatre karaoke, or perhaps more like a concert for people who are too old to go to concerts anymore. (Sorry for the ageist joke, but there’s a reason why, with the exception of Green Day’s American Idiot, most jukebox musicals appeal to the baby boomers.) The other reason is that when you randomly stuff popular songs into a narrative, the result is rarely strong, whether the songs form a biographical tale or, in the case of Mamma Mia!, a nonsensical musical backdrop for the insane goings-on depicted on stage. A new musical, which opened last week, suffers from the same failings, although A Night With Janis Joplin is more than just a bad jukebox musical: it’s an uncomfortably irrelevant celebration of the titular blues singer.

The party onstage at the Lyceum Theater, where “A Night With Janis Joplin” opened on Thursday night, turns out to be more crowded than you might expect.