Mark Dundas Wood

Mark Dundas Wood is an arts/entertainment journalist and dramaturg. He began writing for BistroAwards.com in 2011. Currently, he writes the "Bistro Bits" column for the site. Other reviews and articles have appeared at theaterscene.net and talkinbroadway.com, as well as in American Theatre and Back Stage. As a dramaturg, he has worked with New Professional Theatre and the New York Musical Theatre Festival. He is currently literary manager for Broad Horizons Theatre Company.

Marquee Five

Mark Dundas Wood
What fun it was to start off Tony Awards weekend at the Laurie Beechman Theatre with Broadway By The Letter, an hour of musical-theatre songs from the vocal ensemble Marquee Five (Mick Bleyer, Lynsey Buckelew, Adam West Hemming, Vanessa Parvin, and Sierra Rein). Musical director Hemming wrote the lush and intricate arrangements that the group...

Lane Bradbury

Mark Dundas Wood
The title of Lane Bradbury's Don't Tell Mama show, Let Me Entertain You Again, suggests that the singer-dancer-actor will be dealing largely with her participation in Broadway's legendary 1959 premiere of the musical Gypsy. That proves to be the case, and for good reason. Bradbury was a girl of 16 when she took on the...

Carol Shedlin

Mark Dundas Wood
"I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," Carol Shedlin declares emphatically in the opening number of her current Don't Tell Mama show, Serenade in Blue (directed by Linda Amiel Burns). While there are, of course, no legal restrictions on blues singing, there's long been disagreement about who has and who lacks the credentials to do...

Wendy Scherl

Mark Dundas Wood
In her current Metropolitan Room show, New Scherl in Town (directed by Barry Kleinbort), Wendy Scherl reveals herself to be an assured (and reassuring) singer who envelops you in a protective bubble of good will. She opens with a song whose lyrics embody her optimistic bent: Irving Berlin's "I Got the Sun in the Morning."...

Matt Doyle

Mark Dundas Wood
Actor/singer Matt Doyle recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday with a single-night engagement at The Green Room 42, a commodious, spanking-new showroom on the fourth floor of the Yotel on West 42nd Street. Known mostly for his theatrical appearances in such shows as Spring Awakening, War Horse, and The Book of Mormon, Doyle began a side...

Jazz in the City: The New York Connection

Mark Dundas Wood
At the Duplex, Jazz in the City: The New York Connection combines narrative by historian and music aficionado Charles R. Hale with song selections by the David Raleigh Trio (which is really a quartet if you count pianist-singer Raleigh himself). Raleigh's fellow musicians at the performance I saw were saxophonist/clarinetist Tony Carfora, bassist Evan Gregor,...

Carmen Cusack

Mark Dundas Wood
Singer Carmen Cusack has amassed an extensive collection of vocal riffs and shadings from pop, rock, folk, country, gospel, and R&B genres. Her background is as a musical-theatre performer—which may help explain her chameleonic quality. Though she hails from Denver, she gained much experience in London's West End, where she appeared in Les Misérables and...

A Mexican Affair

Mark Dundas Wood
It's not every day that a cabaret performer hits on an audience at the top of his set. But on the night I attended, that's essentially what Rafa Reyes did in his Metropolitan Room show A Mexican Affair. "Would you like to have a Mexican affair?" he asked coyly. "Or would you like to have...

Deborah Stone

Mark Dundas Wood
Early on in her show at Don't Tell Mama, Still Exactly Where I Belong, Deborah Stone sings a pairing of Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer's "I'm Old Fashioned" and Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's "Simple Little Things." The first of these numbers seems to define this performer well. And I don't mean that in a...

Kim Sutton

Mark Dundas Wood
With Live to Tell: My Life, Madonna's Songs, performer Kim Sutton, director Lennie Watts, and musical director Steven Ray Watkins have created an immensely ambitious cabaret event. Using songs associated with—and often written (or co-written) by—pop star Madonna Ciccone, Sutton presents a sort of sung-through musical pageant based on her own personal history. We see...