Paradise Square
Opening Night: April 3, 2022
Theater: Ethel Barrymore
Website: paradisesquaremusical.com
New York, 1863. As the Civil War rages on, free Black Americans and Irish immigrants live and love together in the unlikeliest of neighborhoods – the dangerous streets and crumbling tenement houses of Lower Manhattan’s notorious Five Points slum. The amalgamation between the communities took its most exuberant form with raucous dance contests on the floors of the neighborhood bars and dance halls. It is here in the Five Points where tap dancing was born. But this racial equilibrium would come to a sharp and brutal end when President Lincoln’s need to institute the first Federal Draft to support the Union Army would incite the deadly NY Draft Riots of July 1863.
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April 3, 2022
But in hammering these large-scale events into individual stories, and in manipulating them so performers have reason to sing at top volume and dance nearly nonstop, the uplifting, star-making, overwrought new musical, which opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, turns history on its head.
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April 3, 2022
The problem is that the writing doesn’t support the spectacle, yielding a ponderous hash of good intentions that often feels like a training-wheels version of Ragtime.
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April 3, 2022
Paradise Square makes quite the reach. A musical about the build-up to New York’s horrific Draft Riots of 1863 reaches to the past to tell us about the present. It reaches across cultures to tell us about assimilation and appropriation. It reaches across styles of music and dance to celebrate diversity and commonality. It reaches to contain both epic realism and mythical nostalgia. And somewhere along the line it reaches a point of no return, when all that reaching just wears itself out.
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April 3, 2022
The show genuinely wants to be entertaining, of course, and much of the time it succeeds. It movingly celebrates the power of love and of families we make for ourselves. But it does not want to offer the traditional cathartic comfort of musicals; rather, it seeks to reflect all the pain these struggling characters feel. And thus “Paradise Square” will survive on Broadway only if audiences are willing to see that these artists are doing their best not just to reckon with the past, but to make the radical (for a musical) point that the present is not so much better.
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April 3, 2022
Despite this, “Paradise Square” is the kind of new musical that Broadway needs more of: an original story that is ambitious, moving and entertaining, with a diverse cast singing in formidable harmony
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April 3, 2022
Looking at the lone lamppost on the playbill and marquee, you likely wouldn’t know what Paradise Square is about. Oddly enough, the musical itself, despite an elaborate set (by Allen Moyer) does not feature a single lamppost. The lamppost remains an enigma; I only wish we had had a lamppost to illuminate the show’s unclear goals.
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April 3, 2022
“Paradise Square” has so many big issues crammed into it that the book writers (Christina Anderson, Craig Lucas and Larry Kirwan) leave no room for characters.
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April 3, 2022
The plotting of the stories is a miasma. They stop and start, and develop in rushed coda at the ends of bombastic music and dizzying dance. Songs restate plot and thoughts, without moving anything forward.
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April 3, 2022
Is there a place on Broadway for epic historical musicals anymore? The continuing success of Hamilton suggests so, although that show benefits from a far more distinctive and confident authorial voice. And even though it wasn’t a hit in its last Broadway revival, I keep hoping that someone will bring back Ragtime, a historical musical that successfully brought together its many moving parts, and which has only appreciated in value (Paradise Square lead producer Garth Drabinsky also produced that gem in 1998). Until then, we’ll have to make do with the likes of Paradise Square, which (like all utopias) overpromises and underdelivers.
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April 3, 2022
And you know what? I enjoyed it. Moisés Kaufman sharply directs a fantastic cast way beyond what the thrown-together book provides. I suppose it’s appropriate that a show about a New York neighborhood that served as a joyous petri dish for the country’s many communities would have three different writers: Christina Anderson, Craig Lucas, and Larry Kirwan. The result is as tumultuous as the story itself
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April 3, 2022
Dance and history and race and loss tempered with hope — what a subject for a musical this would be, if only Paradise Square had managed to theatricalize it. There’s room for it in its two hours and 45 minutes, but the gluey (and clearly glued-together) book by Christina Anderson, Craig Lucas, and Larry Kirwan uses the real setting and events without, somehow, actually telling their story.
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April 3, 2022
In an ideal world, the original new Broadway musical “Paradise Square” would live up to its fascinating historical source material: the 19th century Lower Manhattan slum of Five Points, where free Blacks and immigrants lived together up until the Civil War. Although well-meaning and filled with some striking visuals and pointed political commentary, “Paradise Square” is sappy, overstuffed, overlong, and tiresome.
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April 3, 2022
The body can sometimes say more than words, but even the most expressive moves cannot make a coherent case for “Paradise Square.” The blunt and belabored history lesson of a new musical set in Manhattan’s Five Points, and produced by Garth Drabinsky, purports to be a fable of American race relations. But while conflicts between the neighborhood’s Black and Irish residents at times come thrillingly to life through dance, “Paradise Square” is wrong-footed from the jump.
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