Were Critics Moved by Amanda McBroom in A Woman of Will?

Amanda McBroom and Joel Silberman's A Woman of Will is the musical adventure of a writer in crisis--both personal and professional. Hired to finish the lyrics of a Broadway-bound musical version of The Merchant of Venice, Kate McBroom faces the demands of an unrelenting deadline in addition to important decisions about her marriage and future. In desperation, she reaches out to Shakespeare's leading ladies for guidance. Did New York critics think the show was meant to be... or not to be?

William Stevenson in his Broadway.com Review: "The title of Amanda McBroom's highly literate new solo show has a double meaning: She looks to Will Shakespeare, particularly his heroines, for inspiration; and she shows that it takes considerable will power to sit in a room and write. Working with her longtime collaborator, Joel Silberman, McBroom conjures up several Shakespearean characters while the character she plays works on a musical. It's an interesting concept, and for the most part it's well executed. But A Woman of Will isn't for everybody."

Jason Zinoman of The New York Times: "Poor Jennifer Lopez. If you thought Gigli was rock bottom, get a load of her new project, a musical version of The Merchant of Venice set in Cuba in 1959 called The Merchant of Havana. At least that is the premise of this wrongheaded solo musical, A Woman of Will… , which features the songwriter and actress Amanda McBroom as Kate McNeill, the lyricist for Merchant. At a creative dead end, McNeill is waiting in a hotel room for inspiration for a big second-act ballad… Even Shakespeare pipes up at the end, providing words of wisdom, like "Growth is change and change is terrible. But not to change is death." Only in a musical as silly as this one could the greatest writer of all time sound like Dr. Phil."

Justin Bergman of The Associated Press: "In Amanda McBroom's new one-woman show, A Woman of Will, the famed composer plays a frustrated lyricist trapped in a Cleveland hotel with her inner demons and a severe case of writer's block. Many in the audience may feel trapped as well--in the theater. McBroom's off-Broadway musical, playing at the Daryl Roth Theatre, is an overproduced, tedious and passionless affair that can't seem to make up its mind whether it's a comedy, drama or off-kilter musical revue."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "The title is the most coherent idea in A Woman of Will, the Amanda McBroom showcase that pretends to connect Shakespeare's women with the plight of a blocked menopausal lyricist in a hotel room during a tryout in Cleveland. Still with us? McBroom, who wrote "The Rose," Bette Midler's hit song from 1979, opened at the Daryl Roth Theatre on Sunday in an 80- minute solo soaper that manages to be both simple-minded and eye-rollingly grandiose. Imagine 17 schlock-pop confessional songs in search of a cabaret, shoehorned into an unrelated story with the inevitability of the most ungainly jukebox musical."