Applause Reviews
Stage and Cinema- Recommended
"...Applause won the 1970 Tony Award for Best Musical. It was, unfortunately, a lackluster season, with the other nominees being Purlie (starring Melba Moore) and Coco, the bio-musical starring Katharine Hepburn. Charles Strouse and Lee Adams never matched the score they wrote for Bye Bye Birdie, and turning All About Eve into a musical was never an entirely natural fit."
Stage Scene LA- Recommended
"...Leslie Stevens and Savannah Mortenson deliver matching star turns as Margo Channing and Eve Harrington in the Group Rep’s Summer of 2026 revival of Applause, but the stage adaptation of the Hollywood classic All About Eve pales in comparison to its fellow 1970s Best Musical Tony winners Company, A Little Night Music, A Chorus Line, and Sweeney Todd."
Stage Raw- Recommended
"...In the musical, The Sarah Siddons Society is swapped out for the Tony Awards; the first character to be jettisoned is drama critic/narrator Addison DeWitt, which may be a fair indication of how theater people actually feel about cynicism in general, and drama critics in particular. This disregard has a legacy dating back to Hamlet, in which it’s the players, not the critics, who provide “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.”"