Ruthless
Opening Night: July 13, 2015
Closing: September 10, 2016
Theater: St. Luke's Theatre
Tina Denmark is a pretty, charming and diabolical eight-year-old girl who “was born to entertain.” With the encouragement of slick and overbearing potential agent Sylvia St. Croix, Tina will do anything to play the lead in her school play, and we mean anything. The question is, where does such remarkable talent and unstoppable ambition come from? The answer may shock you when you see this award-winning Stage Mother of all musicals.
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July 19, 2015
A spiked Shirley Temple of a show, “Ruthless!” opened 23 years ago with the likes of Natalie Portman and Britney Spears playing its occasionally homicidal ingénue. Those little tykes have grown up. Aside from the occasional topical joke (the Olive Garden, Donald Trump), this musical, revived by its creators, has not. Joel Paley’s book and lyrics, set to Marvin Laird’s peppy ballads, tell of Tina Denmark (Tori Murray), a perky prepubescent in tap shoes, willing to do whatever it takes to get the lead in the school play. (In this case, it takes offing a rival with a playground toy.) She’s assisted by an ethics-free talent manager, Sylvia St. Croix (Peter Land), and a monomaniacal drama teacher, Miss Thorn (Andrea McCullough). Her mother, Judy Denmark (Kim Maresca), a Lemon Pledge-scented pushover, initially coddles her, but eventually gets wise to Tina’s manipulations.
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