MUSEUMS/GALLERIES

 Memorable

Ruckus Manhattan: Wall Street – Newsstand, Lamppost and Bum, 1976 [by Red Grooms in collaboration with Mimi Gross and the Ruckus Manhattan Construction Company, 1976-1977]. Mixed media construction

Causing a Ruckus
New York’s Red Grooms is still working tirelessly to enhance the artistic overtones of the city we love.
 
Red Grooms New York: 1976-2011
Marlborough Gallery
40 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
212-541-4900
Through Oct. 22.

James at opening night press preview with Red Grooms.  Photos: Hal Drucker

Rarely does one enjoy one’s self as much at a gallery as I did on the 21st of September when I visited the Marlborough Gallery ‘s press premiere of Red Grooms, New York: 1976-2011. Grooms is a master of perception and explosive color, and he wields both happily like a berserk in the field of battle, firing away. 

Easter Parade. Mixed media construction.

One of the most consummate works in the exhibition, is Easter Parade, not of the actual parade but its spectators, with a view of Fifth Avenue unlike even its real-world counterpart.  Certainly Grooms works the perspective of the viewer with a hand not unlike that of Michelangelo, if he had once discovered papier-mâché.  The crowd is purple and pink, too loud to ignore, dressed in bonnets and rabbit ears with smiles far too wide for their faces, as St. Patrick’s Church, rendered in a powerful beige, rises dominantly and behind the grinning lookers-on, balloons and birds swoop through the air.

But Grooms’s work is different.  It’s larger than life, louder than the background noise, and most of all, three-dimensional.  Unlike the average artist weeping before his easel as he smears his repressed childhood across the page, Red Grooms does not rely on us to create a world from a painting.  He sculpts one for us. Easter Parade gives us a new story from every side.  There are new things to see from each new angle.  This is true with every piece Red Grooms has ever created.  He knows what the art community needs, and that’s to be stimulated.  You see too little of this these days, but I saw much of it at the exhibit. 

 
Saks Fifth Avenue, 1994. Mixed media construction.


Greetings from Coney Island. Mixed media construction.

Grooms has created representations of everything from Saks Fifth Avenue to Coney Island, and in great and admirable detail.

Red Grooms has had two loves in life—the cinema, and New York City.  The city is explored at Marlborough, while the cinema is showcased at the Museum of the Moving Image, which I visited this summer in Astoria, Queens. 

 
Tut’s Fever Movie Palace. Commissioned art work by Red Grooms and Lysiane Luong in "Behind the Screen," the core exhibition at Museum of the Moving Image. Mixed media (1986-88). The Museum presents daily screenings of classic films in the theater.  Photo: David Sundberg,
  
At MOMI, Grooms has created a life-size masterpiece, Tut’s Fever Movie Palace, a theater in the style of an ancient Egyptian tomb.  A white-cloaked sculpture of a woman sells Egypt-themed candies in the “lobby,” a shrine to Mickey Mouse lies past the entryway, and the sarcophagus of James Dean greets you on your way out.  This is what makes Grooms’s art so great—its interactivity and bold, enormous size.

Something like this takes hold at New York: 1976-2011.  A “bookstore” (really a pornography shop for the “open-minded”) takes up part of the first room, and recreated alleyways from all over the city stand tall in the main hall.  In these, Grooms captures the essence of what goes on behind the glitz and glamour as a drunken man who appears more like some sort of beast loiters at a newsstand and vagrants build a trash fire in a bucket of hazardous waste. 

The Bus 1995. Mixed media construction.

But the real jewel in Grooms’s life-size repertoire is The Bus. This crowning achievement, which holds a proud place in the center of the gallery, is a 21 foot long and nine-foot high recreation of a New York 5th Avenue bus, complete with full-size passengers and a suave driver with wraparound sunglasses,  classily ignoring boarding commuters.  Full-color ads on the side of the bus complete the image—Big Boy bulk-up powders and Bingling Brothers Circus “in the Garden.”  It is the pinnacle of the work in the gallery simply because it is so real and yet so unreal.  Phantasmagorical images such as these are what complete, round out if you will, the magnum opuses that constitute the art history of Red Grooms.

THEATER

James with Lyricist Jack Feldman at “Newsies” Press Preview.

   Not to be missed
Newsies
Paper Mill Playhouse
22 Brookside Drive
Millburn, Nj 07041
973-376-4343
Though October 16

The World Will Know.
A star-studded team brings the cult classic “Newsies” to the stage.
 
People have asked me why I love the theater.  (They haven’t, but this is a good lead-in, so just play along.) My answer is always spectacle.  The sets, the songs, the book, the acting ability—these all lead to the final blast of extravaganza that makes musicals what they are, a commanding opportunity to showcase ultimate talent in every sense of the word from all sides of the project.

As long as we’re discussing spectacle, it was an honor to be adjacent to such raw energy as was displayed in the new musical Newsies, which premiered on September 25th at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey.  It’s hardly surprising that Disney Theatrical chose Paper Mill for its newest project’s home base, as Broadway musicals such as the new production of Godspell have begun there.  This musical in particular, though, has some great talents behind it, like lyricist Jack Feldman (Disney’s Oliver and Co.), who co-wrote Barry Manilow’s hit “Copacabana”; and composer Alan Menken (Aladdin, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Enchanted… I’ll just stop here) and boasts a book by Broadway legend Harvey Fierstein (La Cage Aux Folles).  Some might call him a writer, but at the press conference for the new musical Fierstein introduced himself as the show’s “savior.”  (And indeed perhaps it was Fierstein who plucked the musical from the depths of its Disney discount rack purgatory and transferred it basically without blemish from stage to screen.) Starring in the lead role of Jack Kelly is experienced actor Jeremy Jordan (Rock of Ages) who will soon go on to star in the new Frank Wildhorn musical Bonnie and Clyde (which shares the director Jeff Calhoun with Newsies).

Similar to the hit 2007 musical Xanadu, Newsies is adapted from a movie that some might call “bad” or “cast and directed with the hand of an infant.”  Kenny Ortega’s wide but unsweeping, up-close-and-impersonal dramatic shots destroyed the movie, which ended up losing $12 millon.  (Ortega went on to direct and choreograph the High School Musical movies, so you can probably fathom this man’s “talent” without checking for yourself.) Christian Bale attempted to warble but managed to croak in such an off-key manner that even Rex Harrison would cringe.   And truly, it was a shame, because Newsies: The Movie had so much to offer.  Being the optimist that I am, I tend to give Alan Menken the benefit of the doubt, but the film’s script and slogging storyline did not live up to its musical compositions.  Changing famed newsboy union leader Kid Blink to a rough-rousing dreamer named Jack Kelly fighting with his orphaned troops against the regime of Joseph Pulitzer, the movie tried as hard as it could but failed miserably.

There was one thing, however, that kept Newsies afloat, and that was the sensational group numbers.  Menken’s original music, a powerful, stirring score with just enough rhyme scheme to scrape an A grade, remains as brilliant as it was when the film premiered in 1992.  However, filling out the score for the stage means that there are numbers, like John Dosset’s solo turn as the bearded Pulitzer, in the uncomfortably brief and unfunny “The News Is Getting Better” and Jack’s new love interest Katherine Plumber  (Kara Lindsay) doing “Watch What Happens” both of which fall flat in comparison to songs like the musical’s opening, “Carrying the Banner,” a masterwork worthy of a spot on Broadway for sure.  Widening the film for its new role is no crime, but drawing attention away from the original score definitely is, as Dosset vainly attempts to turn his song into a showstopper.  

Still, you can’t fault a fantastic musical like this one for its few flaws.  Perhaps instead you could see it, and marvel at Disney’s ability to churn out hit musical after hit musical as DreamWorks on Broadway fumes in the wreckage of Shrek the Musical.  Sorry, Katzenberg!

Josh Grisetti (center) with full cast. Photo  Jerry Lamonica

The origins of Enter Laughing, the new production which we saw in August at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater and a Broadway musical in the offing.

 
 
Carl Reiner, the brilliant director/actor who brought us some of the greatest comedy in Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and 22 fantastic films including The Jerk, was an avid author.  His first novel, Enter Laughing, a semi-autobiographical account of a young Jewish boy’s adventures Off-Broadway, was adapted first into a play of the same nameby the famed Fiddler on the Roof book-writer Joseph Stein, who died in October 2010.  After the play succeeded spectacularly on Broadway in 1963 (with Alan Arkin as its main character—he won a Tony for his work), Stein attempted to adapt it into a musical, re-titled So Long, 174th Street with Mary Tyler Moore Show producer Stan Daniels writing the music and lyrics.  The musical boasted an all-star cast, including famed performers Robert Morse and George S. Irving, but 174th Streetran 16 performances, failing abysmally both at the box office and in the eyes of the critics.  The New York Times claimed, “[It] leaves us yawning.”

After extensive rewrites, the show reopened Off-Broadway under the play’s original title.  George S. Irving returned to his original role (the small-time producer Harrison Marlowe) and the title role went to Josh Grisetti, whose first Broadway credit was snatched from his fingertips after the Great White Way production of Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound was cancelled two weeks prior to its premiere.  Grisetti took to the role quickly and for his efforts was granted a Theater World Award.

Now, a new production of Enter Laughing, directed by a relatively untested Stuart Ross (Starmites, Forever Plaid), is in the works for a run on Broadway.  For a show like this one, there could be few venues better suited for its premiere than the Sag Harbor institution Bay Street Theater, a proud local, not-for-profit founded by, among others, Alan Alda, Warner LeRoy, and famously generous arts philanthropists Linda and Mort Janklow.  For this fantastic staging, Bay Street employs the services of such top-notch actors as Richard Kind (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Scrubs), who plays Irving’s role with the sniveling enthusiasm he retains in every role, and the husband-and-wife team of LA Law fame, Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker, as the overbearing Jewish parents (or Jewish parent clichés) of the main character, David Kolowitz, based on the early Carl Reiner.

For whatever reason Enter Laughing has enjoyed so little press in its history is lost on me.  There is little, if anything, about this musical that can be described as less than sensational.  The actors perform beautifully, Joseph Stein’s book shines in the way of humor, and the music and lyrics, for a composer whose only credit is an all-African-American Cinderella TV movie musical, the score is nothing less than fantastic.  Quite simply, I’m impressed.

And apparently, so are the producers bringing it to Broadway sometime in the future.  Listed as “In the Works” on the Playbill upcoming productions list, the new version of the Stein/Daniels magnum opus boasts the Bay Street version’s director, Stuart Ross, so presumably it’ll take a few of the cast along for the ride.  And one can’t fault it for that.  I’m hard-pressed to imagine any but the current troupe in their current roles.

So is Enter Laughing the right choice for Broadway’s future? Well, it has big shoes to fill after the unmatched season we’ve seen in 2010-2011.  But all I can say is, if anything can captivate and amuse the audience like this show can, then Broadway deserves it.  And it deserves Broadway.