The Road to Qatar!
Opening Night: February 3, 2011
Closing: February 27, 2011
Theater: York Theatre Company
The Road to Qatar is a new true musical comedy about two American musical theatre writers commissioned to write a larger-than-life Broadway-style musical for the Emir of Qatar. Surprises abound as the self-professed "short Jewish writers" soon find themselves traveling the globe in their own version of a madcap Bob Hope/Bing Crosby adventure.
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February 5, 2011
There’s good news for those who find hilarity in the idea that people who are not native English-speakers tend to speak English imperfectly: “The Road to Qatar!,” a new musical from the York Theater Company, stands ready to pummel them with that fact for 90 intermissionless minutes. But anyone with a higher threshold for humor, or with a low tolerance for mocking people of different nationalities, will find little to laugh at here.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 4, 2011
At the York Theatre Company, The Road To Qatar! is a slap-happy show about the real-life saga of two nerds who got hired to write a musical in the title country in 2005.
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February 4, 2011
In 2005, songwriters Stephen Cole and David Krane received phone calls asking them to create a musical comedy of Aida-like proportions for a first-ever Middle East premiere and threw themselves into a madcap experience that ended in their not being paid. While they may see The Road to Qatar, their new musical at the York Theatre Company, as gleeful revenge on their deadbeat employers, the 90-minute tuner feels more like they’ve taken out their unresolved frustrations on audiences by unleashing a relentlessly unentertaining show.
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February 7, 2011
The Road to Qatar is paved with good intentions, but not with a surfeit of skill. In this modestly mounted vanity trip, Stephen Cole and David Krane jauntily musicalize the high jinks surrounding their 2005 commission to write a massive tuner called Aspire for an oil-rich Middle Eastern emir. “Everything you will see and hear is true,” brags the opening number, presumably excepting a lot of false rhymes. (Even when mispronounced as “catarrh,” Qatar doesn’t pair well with caviar.) Hope is what this would-be Hope and Crosby are selling, but their show doesn’t offer too much of it.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 3, 2011
Exclamation points in the title of musicals are usually a promise of fun, merry confection ahead. Think "Oklahoma!" or "Hello, Dolly! or "Mamma Mia!" That’s definitely not the case with "The Road to Qatar!" — a bad musical that is based on the creators’ real experience writing an apparently even worse musical for the emir of Qatar in 2005.
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