Six years after its closing for a major renovation that hoisted the mammoth 1913 vaudeville house 30 feet higher, Broadway’s legendary Palace Theatre reopened Tuesday for an 18-concert residency for Tony winner Ben Platt — who acknowledged the venue’s history with vocal callbacks to Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli who had signature performances on the same stage. (The show’s PR team says Platt’s concert series “is not open for review,” so what follows is merely a description of the event.)
The 30-year-old singer drew a star-studded crowd that included Anna Wintour, Sandra Bernhard, Beanie Feldstein, Ethan Slater and more to the lushly refurbished venue that has hosted productions from Judy Garland’s iconic 1967 concerts (and Bette Midler’s in the ‘70s) to the original productions of Sweet Charity, La Cage aux Folles, and Disney’s Aida. (Elton John’s new musical, Tammy Faye, is due to arrive this autumn following a successful run in London.)
Now the 1913 venue has joined the ranks of the Marquis Theatre just across Times Square that are sandwiched between several floors of retail space below at the sidewalk level and hotel rooms above (the whole project had a reported cost of $2.5 billion). Theatergoers ride escalators (or elevators) to get to the main lobby, which has been tricked out with handsome wall panels and deco-ish chandeliers with dangling glass tubes. The theater itself offers a similarly luxe richness with its three tiers of seating and scalloped box seats along the side wall.
Platt acknowledged the history of the Palace, both in his onstage banter as well as in his song choices. (His shout-out to the theater hosting the finale of MTV’s reality series Legally Blonde: The Musical: The Search for Elle Woods drew knowing laughter from an audience of millennial theater geeks.) The bulk of his set was drawn from his three solo albums — the latest, Honeymind, is out this Friday. But he also juxtaposed some of his original tunes with similarly themed numbers by divas who made their mark on the Palace stage over the years: the Liza Minnelli Cabaret classic “Maybe This Time” (for which he donned a white feathered wrap), Judy Garland’s “The Boy Next Door,” and, of course, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” an encore that drew the crowd to its feet at the end.
His original songs owe a deep debt to ’70s singer-songwriters like Kris Kristofferson and James Taylor, both in their narrative lyricism and guitar-forward instrumentals. Platt nodded to his songwriting inspirations by performing Taylor’s 1977 hit “Your Smiling Face” as well as Joni Mitchell’s “River” (which he had previously sung on the Ryan Murphy series The Politician). Over the years, that soft-rock singer-songwriter aesthetic has drifted into the country genre so Platt’s choice of a guest performer for his opening night made perfect sense: Kacey Musgraves, who dueted with Platt on her 2019 hit “Rainbow.”
While Platt is a self-described musical theater junkie, there was a surprising dearth of show tunes on his song list — the one Dear Evan Hansen number he sang, “Requiem,” was originally sung by the show’s female characters. Still, he offered stories about his experience landing that Tony-winning part — after getting passed over for key young-male roles in a touring production of Next to Normal and Evan Hansen composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s earlier musical Dogfight.
Platt performed in a bedazzled black tux with bellbottom pants, a jacket with a wide white lapel, and a blue button-down shirt underneath (he shed the jacket two thirds of the way through the 90-minute set). He also flashed a simple gold band on his left right finger and gave several shout-outs to his partner, Noah Galvin, an actor who played Evan Hansen on Broadway several years after he left the show. (The two got engaged in November 2022.) He was backed by two additional singers (Shaunice Alexander and Allen René Louis, who also did vocal arrangements) and a seven-piece band, including a cellist and violinist (Chase Foster, who also served as music director). They were stacked up on a multilevel set with a shag-carpeted stairway down to center stage, a giant flat orb floated in and out of the upstage back wall.
Culture Sauce 