The reviews for Amazing Grace are in and ouch! With music by a newcomer to the stage, Christopher Smith, and a book by Mr. Smith and Arthur Giron, the critics found the show clunky, uninteresting, melodramatic, overly-sentimental and soapboxy. Producers spent money on this, but not in the right places. The score, though passable and sung well by a great cast, pales when the show’s title song and inspiration, Amazing Grace, is sung at the conclusion, and the show as a whole simply falls flat. If these critics have anything to say about it, Amazing Grace will not be on Broadway long.
NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF AMAZING GRACE
The timing is fortunate for “Amazing Grace,” a Broadway musical about the unusual life story of the man who wrote the lyrics for that classic hymn. President Obama ended his stirring eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a victim of last month’s gruesome killings in a South Carolina church, by singing the song…
TIME OUT NEW YORK REVIEW OF AMAZING GRACE
In 18th-century England, the scion of a slave-trading family works in the business for years, then has a crisis of conscience, repudiates the evil practice and becomes a man of God and an ardent abolitionist. Later in life, he writes the classic soul-lifting hymn “Amazing Grace.” Could be the basis of a rich histo…
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER REVIEW OF AMAZING GRACE
There’s no questioning the sincerity of Amazing Grace, which recounts the true story of the penitent slave trader who penned that popular hymn. This ambitious new musical braves a Broadway landscape in which matters of faith tend to be filtered through irreverent satire — think The Book of Mormon, Hand to God, An…
NBC NEW YORK REVIEW OF AMAZING GRACE
A one-time Pennsylvania police officer and Broadway newcomer is the composer and lyricist of “Amazing Grace,” an earnest and well-intentioned original musical about the creation of the famous Christian hymn by British poet John Newton. More to the point, “Amazing Grace” focuses on Newton as a bratty young man in t…
AM NEW YORK REVIEW OF AMAZING GRACE
On the heels of President Barack Obama breaking into “Amazing Grace” during a eulogy, a well-meant but embarrassingly uninteresting musical depicting the life saga of the hymn’s writer has opened. Watching it, you keep thinking, “How in the world did this get to Broadway?” Although it culminates in a beautiful cho…
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