Carmen:
Rosalinda! is closing Sunday, and before the nostalgia machine fully spins up, I need to say the thing I have been saying since opening night at the Carrington: this show was never as good as its box office.
I saw it four times. Opening week at the Carrington, six months in, once after the first lead replacement had settled into the role, and once more this past spring when three different people told me it had finally clicked into something real. My verdict did not move. Rosalinda! is a spectacular production. Spectacular is not the same as great. Broadway keeps confusing these two things, and the confusion is going to cost us eventually.
What the show does well is genuine. The staging of the Act Two finale, with Teodora Vann’s voice cutting through the orchestration like she is daring it to keep up, is the kind of moment that fills a room with held breath. Vann earned her notices. Her replacement, Clelia Sorensen, earned different notices for different reasons. Both of them were working harder than the material deserved.
Here is what I wrote after opening night: “Lavish enough to buy forgiveness it hasn’t earned.” Three years and a fistful of awards later, I stand by every word. The score by Nestor Quiñones-Park has a gorgeous title song and eight serviceable neighbors. That ratio should have been reversed. But the production, directed by Fiona Kemmerly with so much visual noise it passes for vision, made sure you never stopped to notice the gap.
You loved Rosalinda! I understand why. So did the room, every single night. But love is not a verdict.
Estamos aquí.
Priya:
Carmen is right about the gap, and I want to locate it more precisely. The problem with Rosalinda! is not the score, though I agree the title song does most of the heavy lifting. The problem is the book. Davina Ostroff-Chen’s libretto is a structural submission to a form that Hammerstein codified and American musical theater has been rehearsing ever since. The show moves through its stations with genuine confidence, which is almost worse than if it moved through them awkwardly. Confidence looks like intention. It isn’t always.
I saw Rosalinda! once. That was enough to understand what Kemmerly’s production is doing with the architecture, which is papering over it. The spectacle is not concealment exactly, but it functions that way. When the Act Two finale hits and the room holds its breath, you are not responding to a story reaching its formal resolution. You are responding to Teodora Vann doing something extraordinary inside a structure that doesn’t deserve her. That distinction matters, and a three-year run has done a thorough job of blurring it.
The awards got this one wrong. Not scandalously. Just wrong in the way theater awards often get it wrong when they cannot separate a performance from the machinery surrounding it.
A closing is not automatically a loss. What’s closing here was never winning on the terms that count: the formal ones, the ones that determine whether a piece of musical theater has found a genuinely new grammar. Rosalinda! found a very polished way to do what it has always done. That’s a real achievement. It is not the same achievement.
Imani:
Listen. Both of you are right, and both of you are missing something I need to put on the table.
Carmen said spectacular is not the same as great. Priya said the spectacle papers over the architecture. I hear both of those arguments. But I need to talk about what choreographer Luz Amara-Winthrop actually built in this production, because dismissing the spectacle as cover is itself an error.
Here is what Luz did in the Act One closer that nobody has properly credited: she staged twenty-six ensemble members in a radial formation, then collapsed it inward by having upstage bodies drop while downstage bodies expanded. The visual effect from the mezzanine is a flower closing in real time. The precision required to make that readable at that distance is EXTRAORDINARY. That is not papering over anything. That is a choreographer solving a geometric problem at a level most critics never notice because they are watching the lead.
The lead is not the show. The lead is the face of the show. Vann and Sorensen both gave everything they had because the ensemble gave them a world to stand inside, and that world was meticulously constructed by Amara-Winthrop and a lighting design from Sera Bellcourt that knew exactly when to pull focus and when to scatter it across the whole stage.
Is the book a confident submission to a form? Yes. Carmen and Priya have that right. But the artists who built the physical production on top of that book were working at the highest level of the craft. They deserve the record to show it, even as the thing closes.
Go see it tonight. Watch the ensemble, not the lead. Watch what twenty-six bodies do with the spaces the star isn’t standing in. That’s where the real argument lives.
