Musical/Concert | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: West Side Story [1961]

2022/01/102022/01/11 Jared Mobarak

I’m frightened enough for the both of ya. What started as an idea to contemporize William Shakepeare‘s Romeo and Juliet on the East Side of Manhattan with star-crossed lovers of Irish Catholic and Jewish descent eventually found itself reworked to the opposite side of the island with religion removed so ethnicity could take its place. Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents altered things to hew closer towards the 1950s’ rise of street violence by embroiling rival gangs (descendants of Polish immigrants versus newly arrived Puerto Ricans) into a turf war. With…

REVIEW: Sing 2 [2021]

2021/12/212021/12/22 Jared Mobarak

I love sky-fi! Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) and his ragtag bunch of heart-of-gold singers have their sights on leaving their small-town theater for the bright lights of Redshore City if talent scout Suki (Chelsea Peretti) thinks they have what it takes. Their rendition of Alice in Wonderland with shy Meena (Tori Kelly) belting out the lead part opposite Johnny’s (Taron Egerton) Mad Hatter, Rosita’s (Reese Witherspoon) Cheshire Cat, and Gunter’s (Nick Kroll) Caterpillar has sold out every night, so their hopes are as high as poor Miss Crawley (Garth Jennings)…

REVIEW: Cyrano [2021]

2021/12/152021/12/24 Jared Mobarak

My fate is to love her from afar. We were about three songs into Joe Wright‘s Cyrano when my partner and I looked at each other and said, almost in unison, “These songs are pretty bad.” I don’t need rhymes (and especially not ones as rudimentary as “know” and “go” and “Cyrano” back-to-back-to-back), but I’d love some sort of dynamism to make me believe there was a reason someone wanted to turn Edmond Rostand‘s “Cyrano de Bergerac” into a musical. What about the material screamed song? What kind of exciting…

REVIEW: Annette [2021]

2021/12/082021/12/08 Jared Mobarak

Shut up and sit. When a “provocateur” such as comedian Henry McHenry’s (Adam Driver, who thanked Chris Rock and Bill Burr in the credits) crudely ambiguous “jokes” are as unfunny when he’s all the rage pre-marriage as the ones told after fatigue ravages his brain post-birth of his daughter, it’s tough to really dig into the reality of what’s happening on-screen. Was I supposed to find the initial stand-up gig at the beginning of Leos Carax‘s Annette (original story and songs by Sparks brothers Ron and Russell Mael) funny? I…

REVIEW: The Sparks Brothers [2021]

2021/12/03 Jared Mobarak

They’re the best British band to ever come out of America. I played a game in my head while watching Edgar Wright‘s equally informative and entertaining deep dive into the joined career of Ron and Russell Mael, The Sparks Brothers. It was called: what decade did I first experience the band my brain has no recollection of ever knowing? Let’s face it. No one who has followed music, movies, pop culture, etc. for the past three-to-four decades can legitimately say they never heard of a group as prolific and groundbreaking…

REVIEW: tick, tick … Boom! [2021]

2021/11/152021/11/17 Jared Mobarak

What workshop? Despite any prescience on behalf of its subject matter, I’m sure even the playwright himself, Jonathan Larson, would have looked back on his big-budget, science fiction Broadway hopeful “Superbia” with enough hindsight to acknowledge there was no way it would ever see the light of day. As the relatable cartoon shared by artists all over the internet of an iceberg attests: the amount of work produced to get to the one piece that finds an audience (in any medium) is too high a multiplier to even begin hypothesizing.…

REVIEW: Dear Evan Hansen [2021]

2021/09/212021/09/21 Jared Mobarak

Just be yourself. A bad day—exacerbated by Connor Murphy’s (Colton Ryan) unchecked, diagnosed rage—has Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) leaving the motivational platitudes behind when writing a therapist-assigned letter to himself that can easily be interpreted as a suicide note. We know this because Connor fatefully steals it, folds it into a tiny square, and puts it into his pocket before killing himself. Since the self-addressed page had “Dear Evan Hansen” at the top and a non-descript “Yours, Me” at the bottom, the bereaved parents (Amy Adams‘ Cynthia and Danny Pino‘s…

TIFF21 REVIEW: Listening to Kenny G [2021]

2021/09/082021/11/02 Jared Mobarak

I don’t think I’m a personality to people. I think I’m a sound. While the premise of Penny Lane‘s Listening to Kenny G unfolds through the comedic question, “Why do so many people hate Kenny G?” it quickly reveals itself a rather intriguing tight rope walk upon the line separating art from commerce. Because this question cannot be answered without first acknowledging who the “people” are. Kenny G has fans. A lot of them. He’s sold seventy-five million records to become the best-selling instrumentalist of all-time. So, they aren’t those…

TIFF21 REVIEW: Jagged [2021]

2021/09/072021/11/02 Jared Mobarak

There’s hope even when the song is hopeless. It really is strange to look back almost thirty years later and realize just how huge and seminal Alanis Morissette‘s Jagged Little Pill was to rock music. I was only thirteen at the time of its release and therefore didn’t understand then what I can with hindsight now. “You Oughta Know,” “Hand in My Pocket,” and “Ironic” were on constant rotation every time the radio was turned on, but my brain processed them as songs just like any other. When you hear…

FANTASIA21 REVIEW: Sukutte goran [Love, Life and Goldfish] [2021]

2021/08/142021/08/15 Jared Mobarak

It was uplifting to some extent. There are two types of people in this world. Those who find a ninety-minute romantic comedy musical with a ninety-second song serving as an intermission break twee and those who find it charming. Middle ground doesn’t exist in this equation and director Yukinori Makabe rightfully refuses to pretend otherwise. His film Sukutte goran [Love, Life and Goldfish] (adapted by Atsumi Tsuchi from Noriko Otani‘s manga of the same name) wears its idiosyncratic feel-good sentimentality on its sleeve to provide the dreamlike environment Makoto Kashiba…

REVIEW: Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) [2021]

2021/07/032021/07/03 Jared Mobarak

It was the ultimate Black barbecue. 1970. That was the year Michael Wadleigh‘s epic film showcasing the August 1969 Woodstock Festival debuted. Woodstock won the Oscar for best doc, was nominated for best editing (Thelma Schoonmaker), and entered the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in 1996. It took five months for this counterculture phenomenon that occurred near Bethel, New York to be seen by the world. Five months. And yet it’s taken until in 2021—50 years—to finally get the chance to see a different concert series (the…