I've seen some musicals this week that were part of the New York Musical Theater Festival, which closed today. Backstage.com has reviews of three that I saw:

Monica The Musical

The Tutor

The View From Here

I basically agree with the reviews, and don't have a ton more to add, except that I do want to say that "The View From Here," which I saw this afternoon, was really quite good. It's an 80-minute song cycle, where one actor just gets up there and sings for a while, but there's a real story, and there's forward motion, and it was very compelling, very well done. And a lot of it's online. Well, the songs at least. You can listen to the songs here, sung by the composer, not the actor who did it on stage. I hope they put out a CD of the actor doing it, because he was exceptionally good. Most theater stuff I've seen recently is okay but doesn't make me want to come home and write about it, so I figured having seen something that does, I would.

I also saw a neat show earlier this week called "Listen, Kid," which was a musical that presented off-kilter life lessons to children, through song -- like, it's good that your parents are getting divorced because you get two sets of presents. Cute stuff, nicely written and performed.

Of course, neither of these shows are playing anywhere anymore, so, until their next incarnations, all you've got are my reviews. Oh well.