“Vibrant and funny, desperate and elegiac… will shatter your heart”

NYT Critic's Pick

“More of a song cycle than a traditionally structured, plot-driven musical, ‘The Beautiful Lady’ is set at the Stray Dog Café, a real-life St. Petersburg cabaret where the owner, Boris Pronin (Starr Busby), hosted such literary luminaries as Anna Akhmatova (Kate Fuglei), Osip Mandelstam (Henry Stram), Marina Tsvetaeva (Ashley Pérez Flanagan) and Alexander Blok (George Abud, from “The Band’s Visit”) in the years leading up to World War I. They’re high on ideas and ideals — and, for some of them, on each other — and dream of a political, sexual and artistic revolution.

Swados and Paul Schmidt, who translated many of those writers’ poems (large chunks of which are incorporated into the show), wrote the book, which was revised by Jocelyn Clarke and serves mostly as a thread linking the songs. And, oh, what wonders those are: vibrant and funny, desperate and elegiac, with some so lovely they will shatter your heart.”

-Elisabeth Vincentelli

“She vividly does during this hallucination on the final night of her life”

“Like Hair or Swados’s own Tony-nominated musical, Runaways, The Beautiful Lady is most interested in capturing a specific time and place (in this case, St. Petersburg’s Stray Dog Café) by introducing us to the people who frequented it: There’s Alexander Blok (George Abud), a poet who wrote 800 love poems to ‘The Beautiful Lady’ (a secret identity much-claimed by the city’s prostitutes). Sergei Yesenin (Andrew Polec) is a country-bred Casanova who married four times before age 30. Poet-essayist Osip Mandelstam (Henry Stram), the long-suffering Marina Tsvetaeva (Ashley Pérez Flanagan), and futurist Velimir Khlebnikov (Tom Nelis) are all regulars at the Stray Dog. So is Vladimir Mayakovsky (Djoré Nance), whose cheerleading of the Bolshevik Revolution doesn’t save him. It is up to the only survivor of the bunch, Anna Akhmatova (Kate Fuglei), to remember — and she vividly does during this hallucination on the final night of her life.”

-Zachary Stewart

“Lively and inviting… memorable performances”

“The opening number of this resurrected musical from the late Elizabeth Swados is so lively and inviting that it reminded me of  ‘Comedy Tonight’ in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forum…  Thanks to the score, Anne Bogart’s engaging, energetic direction, and some memorable performances, the show rewards a broader audience than might normally be drawn to ninety minutes of poets and poetry.”

-Jonathan Mandell