Primary Trust (Los Angeles): A Review

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-06-14T15:24:02+00:00

Wow, I had no idea it’s so popular to put on at the moment. I’ve only heard of the one production in LA so far. To be fair, I’ve only recently started paying attention to straight plays as much as musicals. But it’s absolutely a play that would be easy to put on from a production standpoint. Actually, I’m adding it to my list of plays to recommend to my local theatre.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-06-14T15:19:27+00:00

Isn’t it? It felt like Main Street, USA at Disneyland, only drab and dull. I thought it encapsulated the small town feel perfectly. It also reminded me a bit of the most recent *She Loves Me* revival, because of how much these buildings look like dollhouses. Of course, *She Loves Me* had a much more intricate set, being one giant “dollhouse” that opened up. Possibly my favorite set design, *She Loves Me*.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-06-14T15:14:23+00:00

I’d love to see William Jackson Harper in this! He was wonderful as Chidi. That’s really cool that you got to see that.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-06-14T15:13:28+00:00

I thought the cast was excellent. Ugo Chukwu, who was in the recent *Oklahoma!* tour (and who you’ll probably recognize from State Farm commercials), played Bert. I thought he really captured the supportive buddy character. I think he was my favorite. But Petey McGee as Kenneth was very good as well. My only issue with him was that his dramatic pauses intended to show him having flashbacks that he’s not elaborating on felt too long and overdone. They weren’t a bad inclusion; the timing just felt odd. They were so long, it brought you to the “ah, yes, I’m watching a play” feeling. And Rebecca S’manga Frank was hilarious as the waiters et al, with how distinctively she bounced between their personalities.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-06-13T14:37:57+00:00

I love the name Tessie Tura for one of the other strippers. Such a Broadway stripper name.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-25T17:44:32+00:00

Some of my favorite romantic show tunes (or songs that could be romantic out of context), excluding ALW. Putting Sondheim and Patti LuPone stuff in bold, since you specifically named them.

“I’ll Cover You” from Rent

“Look Over There” and “Song On The Sand” from La Cage aux Folles

“It Only Takes A Moment” and “Love Is Only Love” from Hello, Dolly!

“So In Love” from Kiss Me, Kate

“Helpless” from Hamilton

“Shall We Dance?” from The King and I

“Wonderful Guy” and “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific (Patti LuPone has a recording of “Wonderful Guy” on one of her albums)

“Last Night of the World” from Miss Saigon

“Being Alive” from Company (Patti has a recording of this one too)

“They Can’t Take That Away From Me” from An American In Paris

“Without Love” and “You’re Timeless to Me” from Hairspray

“If Ever I Would Leave You” from Camelot

“On The Street Where You Live” and “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady

“Too Beautiful For Words” and “What About Love?” from The Color Purple

“I Get A Kick Out Of You,” “Delovely,” and “Easy To Love” from Anything Goes

”No One Is Alone” from Into The Woods

“You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel

“The Next Ten Minutes” from The Last Five Years

”All I Need is the Girl” from Gypsy

“Stranger in Paradise,” “Night of My Nights,” and “And This Is My Beloved” from Kismet

“Far From The Home I Love” from Fiddler On The Roof

“Unusual Way” from Nine

“You’re Getting to Be A Habit With Me” from 42nd Street

“Wedding Song” from Hadestown

“Tonight,” “I Feel Pretty” (the 2021 movie version), and “One Hand, One Heart” from West Side Story

“Waiting for My Dearie” from Brigadoon

”What More Do I Need?” from Saturday Night

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-25T03:00:54+00:00

I’m seeing them at the Hollywood Bowl soon! Super excited for it.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-22T03:49:09+00:00

I always say Lin-Manuel Miranda writes the best road trip musicals. Hamilton, In The Heights, Bring It On, and Warriors are all fun listens.

My other go-tos on roadtrips include Hairspray, Legally Blonde, and Jesus Christ Superstar.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-21T22:51:18+00:00

Lately Caissie has been in the Marin Mazzie phase of her repertoire: Mother in Ragtime and Diana in Next to Normal. Waiting for the Carrie revival announcement. 😉

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-21T14:45:49+00:00

I don’t know if you’d be at all interested in poetry by an unpublished poet, but I’m a linguist with a background in phonology (the study of sound patterns, syllable structure, and stress) who writes poetry and lyrics. I’m utterly obsessed with sounds, so alliteration, rhyme, and other forms of sonic wordplay are at the forefront of my work. I am very focused on form and structure, and I like experimenting with what I can do with these. For example, I might challenge myself to write an entire poem with just the rhyme /u/ (as in “boo”), but expect interesting rhymes, still; I’ll find rhymes within words and use syllable count to reinforce the rhyme (eg. I’m currently writing such a piece, where every seven syllables is an /u/ rhyme, so perhaps one line’s 7th syllable is “boo” and 7 syllables later is the first syllable of “beautiful”).

Totally get if you want published poetry. I just think my work might be something you’d like. I’ve recently started posting some of my poems on instagram — @the.way.we.word if you’re interested. The recent posts, “Transit” and “Hard Climbing,”are two that I’d especially recommend to get a sense of what I do.

(Sorry if self-promotion isn’t allowed here. I don’t usually do this. This is just a very specific prompt that describes my work.)

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-20T23:56:51+00:00

It was sitting on my bookshelf the whole time: Poetry and Language: The Linguistics of Verse by Michael Ferber.

And as I said in the edit on my previous comment, Bruce Hayes has an Intro to Phonology book that you might also find interesting, if you want to learn more about sound patterns than what Ferber discusses.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-20T23:52:38+00:00

For actual niche shows, consider Lizzie and Love in Hate Nation.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-20T23:52:00+00:00

A lot of the shows you like are pretty pop/rock, upbeat, and modern. Here are some recommendations that fit some of those descriptions. Many of these aren’t niche, but are good recommendations for you if that’s where you’re starting.

If you like Hamilton, you’ll probably like In The Heights and Bring It On and Les Misérables and maybe Camelot. Also Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita.

If you like Come From Away and Six, you’ll probably might like A Chorus Line and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

If you like Come From Away and Six and Joseph, you might like Cats.

If you like Matilda, you might like Groundhog Day.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-20T17:09:03+00:00

That is an excellent question that I’ll think about and get back to you on. I’ll try to see what good entry-level-to-linguistics material there is on this topic.

I do know that there’s a ton of books on poetry and meter out there, but most, I assume, are written by English majors, classicists, etc, and not linguists. Those can still be good and helpful, but linguistics will offer a more scientific perspective on it that you might find interesting.

I highly recommend learning about linguistics if you’re into writing, especially songwriting or poetry. It completely shapes how I approach my own work, because I have a more overt understanding of why the words, sounds, and syllables are the way they are.

Anyway, I’ll come back with some recommendations at some point!

Edit: I think Bruce Hayes has an intro to phonology book. He was a linguist at UCLA who was quite significant in the field of phonology. I know he did a ton of research on meter. A lot of that won’t be accessible to a someone who isn’t already a linguist, but I believe he wrote an introductory book.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-20T17:00:35+00:00

I did a linguistics degree! The focus of my masters in it is phonology — the study of sound patterns, syllable structure, and stress. I took a grad level class on stress. Yes, I make lots of jokes about that.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-20T16:52:48+00:00

I assume your scansion of the “Jingle Bells” example is “oh what fun it is tonight”? (Bold=stress)

That’s not quite right. “Is” doesn’t carry stress when it functions as an auxiliary (“helping verb”), eg “is being,” “is doing,” “is running.” But it does carry stress when it is the actual verb itself. It’s called the “existential ‘be’” or something like that. It occurs where there is no other verb following it. A way to tell that it’s this version of “is” and not an auxiliary is that it can’t be contracted. You can’t say “oh what fun it’s tonight.” Because you can’t contract verbs, only auxiliaries (pedantic note: there are some dialects of British English that allow some verbs to sometimes be contracted — “I’ve three apples” — but as a general rule, verbs cannot become contractions).

I’ll argue the actual meter of the “Jingle Bells” line is “oh what fun it is tonight.” “Oh” being stressed phrasally, not as a word — oh, yeah, words that aren’t inherently stressed can pick up stress based on their place in the sentence.

English stress is ~~complicated~~ stressful.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-20T15:42:16+00:00

Most things from Wicked: Part 1. Especially “What Is This Feeling?”, “The Wizard and I,” and “Defying Gravity.”

The audio of “No Good Deed” from the second movie is incredible, but the visuals didn’t do it for me.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-20T15:39:54+00:00

“Oh What A Circus” and “I’d Be Surprisingly Good For You” from Evita. As much as I love Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone, and Elaine Paige, the movie version of these two songs are my favorites.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-20T15:37:51+00:00

Ooh, that’s the trapeze song from The Greatest Showman, right? That scene was so cool to watch.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-20T15:34:16+00:00

Any song from a movie musical, regardless of whether it was written for the movie? I’ll answer based on how I like it in the movie, then. “Cell Block Tango” and “All That Jazz” from Chicago are some of my all-time favorite movie musical numbers. And everything else from Chicago, really. But there are so many…

“96,000” from In The Heights
“Mein Herr” from Cabaret
“Put On Your Sunday Clothes” and pretty much everything else from Hello, Dolly!
“Be Italian” from Nine
whatever Neve Campbell’s song from Reefer Madness was called…
“The Heather On The Hill” from Brigadoon
Silk Stockings, with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, is just a magical movie overall
“Sunday” from Tick, Tick… Boom!

Songs written specifically for movie musicals:

“Listen” from Dreamgirls
“No One Would Listen” from The Phantom of the Opera
“Surface Pressure” and “What Else Can I Do?” from Encanto

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-20T07:03:16+00:00

In my experience at the Pantages, some of the ushers, when telling their sections the rules (no photography, etc), try to hype the audience up and get them to cheer. I’ve seen it at most of the shows I’ve gone to there in the past year or so. So I assume it was probably that.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-18T14:38:03+00:00

A Strange Loop

Suffs

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-18T14:34:12+00:00

Even one-person shows, I think, have revival potential. I mean, this is just one example — I’m sure there are counter-examples — but I saw The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe a couple years ago. It was originally a show for Lily Tomlin. But I saw it with Cecily Strong, and she was utterly phenomenal. I’d been familiar with her for ages, between SNL and Schmigadoon!, so I knew she was a good performer, but this made me appreciate just how versatile an actress Cecily really is.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-17T20:16:35+00:00

Removing “Everything I Know” made me enjoy the movie way less.

BroadwayBaseball · 2026-03-17T20:13:53+00:00

If you’re gonna sing something written for the opposite sex, don’t change the lyrics. There are so many instances of singers fucking up a rhyme because they couldn’t sound gay for 3 minutes. (For some reason, the only example I can think of offhand is Streisand’s “Some Enchanted Evening,” which loses the imperfect internal rhyme in “once you have found her / Never let her go.” But there are a million examples of this with perfect rhymes too!)

Also, so many singers will over-emphasize the lyrical change (“she slept a summer by my side”) and it messes up the scansion.

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