Green Day's Rock Opera Hits the Stage

Michelle Williams plays Roxie in Chicago

(NEWSER) - Often labeled “the third one” in Destiny’s Child, Michelle Williams is swinging the spotlight her way, the Independent reports, playing Roxy in a production of Chicago in London’s West End. “People just think I’m the quiet one. Or not talented,” Williams says of comparisons to ex-bandmates Beyoncé Knowles and Kelly Rowland. “Well, I wouldn’t be in the West End if I wasn’t talented, dummy!” More»

(NEWSER) - After Green Day’s multi-platinum American Idiot, anticipation is off the charts for today’s release of 21st Century Breakdown. And it doesn’t disappoint. Here’s what critics are saying:

• It’s “so masterful and confident it makes Idiot seem like a warm-up,” says Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone. Green Day’s become “the sort of band that isn't supposed to exist anymore—raging with heart-on-sleeve passion, willing to risk falling on their faces with a grand statement.”

Production can be uneven, but still enjoyable

(NEWSER) - The highly anticipated revival of West Side Story on Broadway opened last night to solid reviews, with critics applauding an unusually tender interpretation in which the women rule. Highlights:

• “Even when they’re flashing switchblades and kicking people in the ribs, the teenage hoodlums who maraud through Arthur Laurents’s startlingly sweet new revival of West Side Story seem like really nice kids,” writes Ben Brantley in the New York Times.

Marx's treatise gets some much-needed singing and dancing

(NEWSER) - Karl Marx's Das Kapital offers hundreds of pages of dense German prose on class struggle and modes of production—so why not add some singing and dancing? That's the idea of several Chinese producers who are mounting a Das Kapital musical, which promises a live band and Vegas-style theatrics to liven up the communist's magnum opus. As the Guardian notes, the team will be adding a barebones plot to make the economic treatise stageworthy. More»

Where? Where but Branson, Missouri?

(NEWSER) - Hold on to your camels, folks: A full-blown Biblical gala is opening tonight in Branson, Mo., in the form of Noah—the Musical. The show will feature more than 40 actors and 150 animals, half live, half animatronic, the Economist reports. More»