In my previous My Kind of New York column, I listed MKONY preferences for Best Shows and Performances of the 2009/10 season. Surprising to me, my choices corresponded to six Tony Award winners from a fair number of key categories. This despite my including Off-Broadway selections, which are not recognized by Tony voters. (To their credit, both the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle for which I’m a voting member, do include Off-Broadway and Off-off Broadway plays and musicals.)
Best Play
“Red” (MKONY, Tony)
Best Revival of a Play
“Fences” (MKONY, Tony)
Best Musical
“Sondheim on Sondheim” (MKONY) “Memphis” (Tony)
Best Revival of a Musical
“Finian's Rainbow” (MKONY) “La Cage aux Folles” (Tony)
Best Performance By a Leading Actor In A Play
Alfred Molina, “Red” (MKONY) Denzel Washington, “Fences” (Tony)
Best Performance By a Leading Actress in a Play
Viola Davis, “Fences” (MKONY, Tony)
Best Performance By a Leading Actor in a Musical
Jim Norton, “Finian’s Rainbow” (MKONY) Douglas Hodge, “La Cage aux Folles” (Tony)
Best Performance By a Leading Actress In A Musical
Kate Baldwin, “Finian's Rainbow” (MKONY), Catherine Zeta-Jones, “A Little Night Music” (Tony)
Best Performance By A Featured Actor in a Play
Eddie Redmayne, “Red” (MKONY, Tony)
Best Performance By a Featured Actress in a Play
Scarlett Johansson, “A View From the Bridge” (MKONY, Tony)
Best Performance By a Featured Actor in a Musical
Chris Cooper, “Finian’s Rainbow” (MKONY), Levi Kreis, Million Dollar Quartet. (Tony)
Best Performance By a Featured Actress in a Musical
Katie Finneran, Promises, Promises (MKONY, Tony)
Best Director of a Play
Daniel Sullivan, “Time Stands Still” (MKONY), Michael Grandage, “Red” (Tony)
Best Director (and Choreographer) of a Musical
Warren Carlyle, Finian’s Rainbow (MKONY), Terry Johnson, La Cage aux Folles (Tony)
Here is a recap of the 38 plays and musicals, I saw and reviewed this past season.
Since Closed
Red
In the British import, Red, Alfred Molina as the artist Mark Rothko, sits with his back to the arriving audience, a soon-to-be-savored bon bon in John Logan’s absorbing two-character bio-drama. He is locked in, viscerally to the painting before him in a striking depiction of Rothko’s studio, circa 1950s (thanks to scenic designer Christopher Oram). Rising from his chair, the artist scrutinizes the painting up close and runs his hand across the surface, as a young man, Ken, enters the studio; and requests a job interview. Without turning to him, Rothko waves his visitor and audience in with the words “What do you see?” The play follows the initiation of Ken, portrayed by Eddie Redmayne, into the obdurate universe of Rothko who at that time was working on a commissioned series of paintings for the new Four Seasons restaurant (where I spent many a client lunch in the ‘60s) in the heralded Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building on Park Avenue. Redmayne appeared with Molina in the Donmar Warehouse production in London and in the process, garnered an Olivier Award. As fascinating to me as the confrontational Socratic dialogue that engages the two, was the wordless business of preparing, stretching and painting the oversized canvases that appeared from our Row F view, cunningly and convincingly “Rothkos.” It is the finest stage performance I’ve ever experienced by Molina. Much as I admired Denzel Washington in Fences, Molina in my view deserved a Tony.
Fences
Cort Theater
138 W. 48th St.
212-239-6200
Of the 10 plays in the August Wilson cycle, governing 10 decades of the 20th century, Fences comes after The Piano Lesson and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in my personal pecking order. It takes place in Homestead, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, home to the fabled Homestead Grays Negro League team, a powerhouse, owing to the presence of Josh Gibson, arguably the best catcher in baseball history and Satchel Paige, the most illustrious name in the Negro Leagues. I saw Gibson, Paige and Cool Papa Bell play with the Grays opposite the all-white Bushwicks semi-pro nine in Ridgewood, Queens. In the play, Denzel Washington is a retired Grays player, now a sanitation worker, who rides herd over his aspiring ballplayer son Cory (Chris Chalk) and cuckolds his saintly wife (Viola Davis). The original production which I saw in 1987 had James Earl Jones and Mary Alice as the two principals. Jones’ performance, was visceral, physical and uncompromising, whereas Washington’s is more vulnerable and introspective. Davis who shone in a brief sequence of the movie Doubt is shatteringly glorious.
A View from the Bridge
In 1955 I saw two one-act plays of Arthur Miller directed by Martin Ritt. The shorter of the two, A Memory of Two Mondays, featured Biff McGuire; the second, A View from the Bridge, starred Van Heflin as Eddie Carbone, the longshoreman who had an obsessive predilection for his comely niece Catherine. I recall the stellar performances of Eileen Heckert as his wife Beatrice, and of J. Carrol Naish who could do more bona fide dialects than Sid Caesar, as the lawyer Alfieri. Naish also had a meaty role in Two Mondays. As I recall it, the dual one-actors received a lukewarm reception from the NY critics. Perhaps that was the reason Miller later separated the twins and extended the script of View. I would never include A View from the Bridge in the heady atmosphere of Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, nor even The Price, until I saw the 1997 revival, in which Australia’s Anthony LaPagliagave a blazingly visceral portrayal of Eddie. Playing opposite him as Beatrice, was Allison Janney. As for Liev Schreiber, he is indisputably among our finest young American actors, but in stark contrast to the volcanic LaPaglia, his is a more incipient passion which does not reach its nadir until late in the second act when Catherine defies him and determines to wed Rodolfo (Morgan Spector) an Italian illegal boarder, and kinsman of Beatrice, played by Morgan Spector. Michael Cristofer, who did an admirable comic/dramatic turn in last season’s Primary Stages’ A Body of Water, is outstanding as Alfieri. Bouquets to Director Gregory Mosher and peonies to scenic designer John Lee Beatty. Yet, in this testosterone-laden play, two women stand out, Jessica Hecht as Beatrice, who was marvelous as the mother in the short-lived Brighton Beach Memoirs which opened this season, and surprise, surprise, a Hollywood star, Scarlett Johansson as Catherine, who made the transition from screen to proscenium seamlessly in an extraordinary Broadway debut.
Superior Donuts
Playwright Tracy Letts, late of Chicago’s Steppenwolf, who last season walked away with both the Pulitzer Prize and Tony for his meritorious August: Osage County, penned one of the freshest new plays of the season. In a charming variation of The Odd Couple, Arthur Przybyszewski, the philosophical pony-tailed proprietor of a donut and coffee shop matches wits and sentiments with a teen, Franco Wicks, who practically wills his way into a janitorial job with the gentle Mr. P. In the process, John Michael Hill as Franco brings an enterprising spirit, incandescent charm and not a few laughs to a shop that has gone into disrepair, and lifts the spirits of the insouciant widower shopkeeper, played congenially by Michael McKean. Franco’s penchant for gambling with knee-breaking street hoods is the major source of conflict in the proceedings. It is also this vastly entertaining comedy’s single weakness.
A Steady Rain
The steadiest reign in town was abetted by a spare formula that practically guaranteed big bucks for the most cautious producer. Hire two superstar heartthrobs (viz. Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig.) Place them in a bare bones setting that makes Our Town seem opulent. Teach them to effect a Chicago accent as street cops and give them an 80-minute script that would pale against a Law and Order re-run.
Brighton Beach Memoirs
Here is Exhibit A of a show, that garnered glowing reviews, but lacked a Jackman, Craig, Law or other star name (other than the writer Neil Simon), to prevent it from summarily closing in a week’s time. With the original quasi-biographical work fresh in mind from its 1983 debut, I questioned the notion of bringing it and its sequel Broadway Bound (1986) back. Having seen it, I contend that this winning revival was notable for introducing the enormously talented and funny Noah Robbins in his Broadway debut to New York audiences as young Eugene Jerome.
Hamlet
Hamlet as rock star! Who would have thought it? Well, Jude Law, like his neighbors a block away, Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig, packed them in at the Broadhurst. His out-traspective performance – in effect splitting the ears of the groundlings - was a Captain Marvel approach that I found more stimulating than those of Ralph Fiennes in 1995 and Sam Waterson in a Shakespeare in the Park production some years back. The finest Hamlet on stage I’ve seen was the Richard Burton production in 1964. Notice I said “on stage” … for the Hamlet of Hamlets to me was Olivier’s memorable Oedipal approach in his 1948 movie, followed closely by Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film. Mel Gibson’s forgettable 2000 cinema mounting actually excised the entire Players speech. There is no more important speech in all of Shakespeare since it is a paradigm of how the greatest of playwrights wanted his lines presented. Here too, “Speak the speech I pray thee as a I pronounce it to you trippingly on the tongue” and its remaining instructive orders from Hamlet to the chief player are inconveniently dropped. Yet, the redundant Rosencrantz and Guildenstern remain. As for the other roles, Gugu Mbatha-Raw was desultory as the fair Ophelia, while Ron Cook was ploddingly doctrinaire as that amiable bumbler, Polonius. However, later he plays the Gravedigger so convincingly and humorously, that he reminded me of the great Stanley Holloway.
Sondheim on Sondheim
In a down year for new musicals, this olio of well-known, lesser-known and unknown Sondheim songs was driven by the dexterous cinematic techniques of Beowulf Barrett who provided a giant video representation of the composer/lyricist discoursing winningly and humorously from his apartment about his craft. It is an entertainment, but with a single exception, this is not the glorious, spine-chilling mind-blower of Wall to Wall Sondheim done five years ago at Symphony Space. No longer the clarion-voiced presence of The Music Man, She Loves Me and the concert version of Follies, Barbara Cook still has the pipes to do (let us hope) many more one-woman shows. What she should not be doing is lumber around the proscenium with lither performers like Vanessa Williams and Norm Lewis. The highlight of the show was that single exception of which I spoke, Williams, stage left, doing Losing My Mind (from Follies) in counterpoint to Cook, stage right, doing Not a Day Goes By (my favorite of all Sondheim melodies, from Merrily We Roll Along.)
Finian’s Rainbow
On my list of 50 Top Musicals, published five years ago, Finian’s Rainbow, in my estimation, ranked #20. I wrote: “Yip Harburg and Burton Lane’s message musical was notable for its parodies of Senator Bilbo and other oppressors of African-Americans. David Wayne was immense as the leprechaun, who loved ‘the girl I'm near.’ To the credit of the producers of this fine revival, they have caringly and cunningly retained such pearls from the show-stopping song: “If This Isn’t Love, I’m Carmen Miranda/ if this isn’t love, it’s red propaganda.” Indeed, I had to explain these lyrical references to my three grandkids, and also to point out that the opening number, This Time of the Year,was probably the first time a Broadway ensemble was comprised of African-Americans and whites sharing the stage equally. I relish the memory of that first production of Finian’s with the bravura performances of David Wayne as Og, Donald Richards as Woody, Ella Logan as Sharon and Anita Alvarez as Susan Mahoney, the Silent. In 2004 I witnessed a delightful minimalist production Off-Broadway by the talented Irish Repertory Theater. This revival at the historic St. James Theater, had stellar performances from Kate Baldwin as Sharon, Alina Faye as Susan Mahoney, Christopher Fitzgerald as Og, Cheyenne Jackson as Woody, and Terri White as Dottie and Chuck Cooper in such show-stopping numbers as Necessity and The Begat. Towering above them all was the diminutive Jim Norton, that great Tony-winning Irish classical actor as Finian é féin [his very self], who sang, step-danced and sparked every scene in which he appeared, with not a scintilla of caricature.
A Lifetime Burning
This is a play of contrivance and contrition that was only intermittently funny. Jennifer Westfeldt as Emma, authored a book that fabricated a life story about her purported Incan and Cherokee heritage, neither of which struck any kind of a chord with her sister, Tess (Christina Kirk).
A British Subject
As part of the Brits Off Broadway series at 59E59 Theaters, this true tale in semi-documentary form, told of the campaign to free Mirza Tahir Hussain, who in 1988 at 18, traveled to Pakistan to visit family. Upon his arrival he is arrested for the murder of a taxi driver, a killing he contended was in self-defense. Hussain spent 18 years on death row, and as his execution date approached, he was visited by Don Mackay of London’s Daily Mirror. Mackay’s reporting propelled a movement to free Hussain, a cause that was eventually taken up by Prince Charles. Mackay’s wife Nichola McAuliffe, not only authored A British Subject, she portrayed herself in the play.
Nightingale
Sadly, Lynn Redgrave’s final appearance on a New York stage was in this unwinning, fantasized depiction of her grandmother. I prefer to recall her previous one-woman show about her father Sir Michael Redgrave which was fascinating and inspirational.
Roundabout Theater Company’s
The Understudy
This simpleton tale of a young man with designs to wrest away the leading man role in an off-off Broadway play, was strained and mean-spirited.
Present Laughter
This is – count ‘em - the third revival I had seen of Noël Coward’s lark of a play, modeled after Coward himself as the dashingly egoistic matinee idol, Gary Essendine. The first revival I witnessed was the 1985 Circle in the Square production with George C. Scott as Essendine and such other worthies as Kate Burton, Christine Lahti, Dana Ivey, and the debut of Nathan Lane, and, more recently, the 1996 production starring Frank Langella and – Allison (C J on West Wing) Janney. Victor Garber, whom I have admired for years for his musical comedy prowess, was splendid and the height of urbanity as Essendine. Also equal to the task were Lisa Banes as Gary’s insouciantly affectionate wife Liz and Harriet Harris as Gary’s Girl Friday Monica who reminded me not a little of Eve Arden. Director Nicholas Martin kept the traffic moving unimpededly in Alexander Dodge’s spectacular Art Deco London flat set.
Ragtime
I was not a fan of the original big scale production of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1998 musical take on the famed E. D. Doctorow book, save for the performance of Brian Stokes-Mitchell as Coalhouse Walker, Jr. This revival had been toned down visually and aurally with constructive results; pity it didn’t catch on with the public.
Bye Bye Birdie
It is a safe assumption that on any given day, Bye Bye Birdie, which was spawned in the wake of Elvis Presley’s unanticipated induction in the U. S. Army, may be the most-performed musical in the 50 states, if you count high school and summer stock groups. Charles Strouse’s music (Put On A Happy Face) and Lee Adams witty lyrics (Kids “What’s the matter with kids today?) in the right hands (Read: Dick Van Dyke, Chita Rivera, Paul Lynde) could well ensure a socko revival. Two performers comported themselves admirably, in the face of desultory staging, one being Jane Houdyshell who was Mom to the romantic lead Albert Peterson; the other being Noland Gerard Funk in his Broadway debut as Conrad Birdie, the Elvis character. Bill Irwin, mime and dramatic actor par excellence, never had a misstep in his distinguished stage career… until now. As Harry MacAfee, whose daughter, Kim (Allie Trimm), a Conrad Birdie Fan Club member, is selected to be kissed by her idol on The Ed Sullivan Show, his buffoonery is bizarre, his singing stilted and his stage walk appeared to be the end result of a proctoscopy.
The Miracle Worker
Reviewed by Jessica Drucker and Abigail Drucker
Jessica: I liked the show considerably more than I thought I would. I thought Abigail Breslin did a fantastic job portraying Helen Keller as a deaf and blind person. Though I read her autobiography, Breslin made me poignantly aware of the troubles in Helen’s life and how difficult it was to connect with her. And when they did, it was such a miracle. I thought that Alison Pill as Anne Sullivan was outstanding. When the script called for it, she could be genuinely funny. Her wit gave her a fresher outlook on the obstacles she had in getting through to Helen and it prevented the play from becoming maudlin. It was the first time I witnessed an in-the-round staging, which on balance, versus the typical proscenium stage, I admired. We were so close we were almost in the living room or bedroom with the actors. I also thought highly of Director Kate Woriskey’s blocking and set designer Derek McLane’s placement of the props and furniture that were suspended overhead and strategically lowered for each particular scene. The drawback of the circular stage were the rare times when an actor was directly in front of me in my second row seat with his or her back to me. I thought that Matthew Modine as Captain Keller, Helen’s father, was annoying at times, because he was yelling his lines. As Helen’s brother James, Tobias Segal was insignificant in terms of the plot. Annie’s dead brother Jimmie, (Lance Chantiles Wertz) appeared and disappeared randomly and was a complete distraction. If they wanted him in the play they should have provided more background about the hardships both he and Annie endured. I thought the ending was too abrupt. I wondered to myself, how could she possibly manage to miraculously say Wah- wah for water as Annie worked the pump on stage.
Abby: I liked it a lot, but I didn’t like the scary boy who played Annie’s dead brother, who came out to the side of the stage and twisted his body. I thought Annie and Helen were played by very good actors but I also didn’t think the acting was that good with some people. Also, they kind of left things out. When they went to the special little house that Captain Keller built there was no one else that accompanied them. There was just those two. And just one room. I liked the round stage a lot, but there was a pole that came down in front of my view from time to time that was annoying.
‘Broke-Ology’
Lincoln Center Theater
Nathan Louis Jackson’s earnest, but slight play, directed by Thomas Kail, takes place in Kansas City, Kansas in 2009 with flashbacks to 1982. The principals are the King family, consisting of a father, William, afflicted by MS, played with characteristic humor and grace by Wendell Pierce and his two sons, Ennis, Francois Battiste and Malcolm, Alano Miller, who are conflicted by the necessity of personally caring for their father, vis-à-vis selecting an assisted living center of dubious quality. The fourth cast principal, Crystal A. Dickinson (their deceased mother Sonia) reappearsed intermittently and affectionately to William. As many of you know, Pierce just added another memorable HBO portrayal to complement his cigar-chomping, iconoclastic Baltimore detective, Bunk Moreland of TV’s most lauded series, The Wire. It is Antoine Batiste as a post-Katrina trombonest, in the series Treme, which takes place in his native New Orleans.
Looped
Valerie Harper, known primarily for her role of Rhoda Morgenstern on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its spinoff Rhoda, is one of the nicest people I’ve ever interviewed, the polar opposite of everything I‘ve read or heard about Tallulah Bankhead. What I remember most about Tallulah, was in the early 1950s when television was steadily gaining popularity over radio, Tallulah hosted network radio’s last gasp, The Big Show with aplomb, exchanging pleasantries, risqué innuendos and daaahhlings in that husky voice, with music director Meredith Willson (five years before he mounted The Music Man), and celebrity guests. Looped is set in 1965 in a recording studio where a young post-production technician attempts to cajole Bankhead into “looping” a small portion of dialogue from “Die! Die! My Darling, one of those dreadful faux horror movies that she and Bette Davis appeared in, in the twilight of their careers. As she phumpers and stutters, while expressing scorn and derision for the dreary process, she peppers the air with snappy one-liners on her favorite sexual objects, male and female, booze and drugs.
The Correspondence of Poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
92nd St Y.
May 24, 2010.
This was a beautiful evening offered under the auspices of the Unterberg Poetry Center, with two of my favorite actors, Kate Burton and Michael Cumpsty as the subject characters whose correspondence back and forth was beautifully rendered aloud in script form. The playlet had the flavor of A. R. Gurney‘s Love Letters. I would love to see it stretch beyond the one-shot situation. Like Love Letters it could enlist two compatible players and travel the hinterlands with no scenery and two sets of scripts.. Coincidentally Burton is currently appearing as Katherine Cornell in Pete Gurney’s latest play The Grand Manner at Lincoln Center
Collected Stories.
Manhattan Theater Club
Both playwright Donald Margulies’ breakthrough play, Sight Unseen, about the cost of success for a painter, and Time Stands Still which explores the chasm between a war photographer and a journalist, starred the remarkable Laura Linney. Do be sure to see Time Stands Stills when it re-emerges at the Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater this fall. Margulies wrote this 1996 parable about an eminent writer Ruth Steiner – played irascibly by Linda Lavin in this revival. Steiner’s short stories earned her instant recognition in literary circles, while in her early 20s. After the bloom came off the rose, Ruth became a member of the establishment, teaching writing to the young and the ambitious in New York City such as Lisa Morrison (Sarah Paulson) She is made uncomfortable by the schmeichleringof a fawning student Lisa Morrison (Sarah Paulson) – ( shades of Anne Baxter’s Eve) whose own first book of stories is received with the same huzzahs Ruth’s once occasioned.
Open-Ended
Come Fly Away
Marquis Theater
46th Btwn. B’way and 8th Ave.
877-250-2929
The great promise choreographer Twyla Tharp held out for us with her unforgettable Movin’ Out has been diminished by a dance piece that is boring to the extreme. Come Fly With Me simply never flies. Set in a night club the canned music is crammed with all the familiar Sinatra music you can hear any Saturday or Sunday on the Jonathan Schwartz radio show, with Old Blue Eyes backed by a live 17-piece orchestra.
Promises, Promises
Broadway Theater
B’way @ 53rd St.
212-239-6200
Don’t give up on Promises, Promises. I promise you that you are in for a pick-me-up in the second act that will have you as giddy as bathtub champagne. It’s mostly the doings of Tony Winner Katie Finneran who does a 10-minute turn as a slightly lush bar siren on the make for young exec Sean Hayes. As I understand it much of the bits of business were Finneran’s, including an authentic owl hoot. Until she came along, I was comparing the musical unfavorably to the 1968 original which starred Jerry Orbach, which in turn was based on Billy Wilder’s movie , The Apartment. The Hal David/ Burt Bacharach score is appealing, notably the title song, I’ll Say a Little Prayer for you. She Likes Basketball and I’ll Never Fall in Love again.
Race
Ethel Barrymore
243 W. 47th St.
212-239-6200
Not one of Mamet’s best or better. The notion that two law partners, played by new cast members Dennis Haysbert and Eddie Izzard, could be compelled to defend a possible bigot Charles Strickland (Richard Thomas), because Susan, the firm’s African-American associate lawyer (Afton C. Williamson), claims he patronized her during preliminary examination, suspends belief. The premise that Susan would connive to torpedo the case is beyond the pale. With each succeeding role Thomas scales his mounting virtuosity as a stage performer.
Reviewed by Drama Desk colleague, Bob Feinberg (Fela! and Rock of Ages)
Fela!
Eugene O’Neill Theatre
230 West 49th Street
(212) 239-6200
The theater throbs to the Afrobeat music (a blend of jazz, funk and African rhythm and harmonies) performed by a striking African man accompanied by a full band and an ensemble of some 30 dancers, some dressed in traditional, tribal costume, others in 1970s disco garb. The man, a Nigerian born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, but known simple as “Fela,” studied music as a 20-something in London and formed his first band – the Koola Lobitos – there. He returned to Nigeria in the early ‘60s, toured the world with his band, renamed “Afrika ’70,” and opened a nightclub called “The Shrine” in Lagos’ Empire Hotel. During the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, he married 27 women simultaneously – most of them, dancers and singers in his band – released 50 albums, performed at the Berlin Jass Festival and Giants Stadium, and contracted AIDS. More than a musician and performer, he pioneered Afrobeat. He was also a human rights activist and political maverick whose music – indeed, whose life – challenged the militaristic dictatorships of Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s. He criticized upper class Africans for turning their backs on traditional African culture and thwarted government censorship by buying ad space in Nigerian newspapers to run political attacks on the Nigerian government. His music became more and more political, resulting in attacks by the army on his commune – named the Kalakuta Republic – which was burned to the ground in a 1,000 soldier raid in 1977. Soldiers severely beat Fela and threw his elderly from a window, killing her. In retaliation, Fela delivered her coffin to the army barracks in Lagos where the military leadership was housed. He formed his own political party – Movement of the People – and attempted to run for President, but was not allowed to put his candidacy forward. He died in 1997 and his funeral, held at the site of the burned ruins of The Shrine, attracted more than a million attendees. Fela’s story is true and Fela! is true-to-life. Choreographed and directed by Bill T. Jones (2007 Tony winner for choreography in Spring Awakening) - its producers are Jay-Z and Will & Jada Pinkett-Smith, who showcase Fela’s actual musical compositions, the show is a combination of dance performance, musical, political rally, and marathon for its star – Sahr Njaujah – who is onstage, dancing, singing, extemporizing, for almost the entire show. Fela! Is unlike anything this reviewer has seen on Broadway. Go see it, but don’t expect to be humming show tunes as you leave the theater. A raised fist is more likely.
Rock of Ages
Brooks Atkinson
256 W. 47th St.
212-719-4099
When you’re driving (alone) and REO Speedwagon’s classic Keep on Lovin’ You comes on the radio, do you turn the volume up and sing along? When you hear Starship’s We Built This City, do you publicly lament the demise of The Jefferson Airplane (but privately play “air drums” to the infectious beat)? Did you recently enjoy the Sixties anthems from the revival of Hair; The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical but secretly long for the power chords of Journey’s Any Way You Want It? THEN STOP FIGHTING YOUR ‘80s DEMONS AND GO SEE ROCK OF AGES! It’s the story (book by Chris D’Arienzo) of Sherrie (Kerry Butler, fresh from her star turn in Xanadu), a small town girl hoping to make it as an actress in Hollywood, who meets Drew (Idol’s Constantine Maroulis) a lad from Michigan who sweeps the floors in a club on the Sunset Strip but longs to make rock and roll – only as Survivor, Asia and White Snake can. Narrated by Mitchell Jarvis’s show-stealing Lonny, the zany right-hand man to club owner Dennis (Adam Dannheisser), the show lets the music drive the sweetly comic plot, to charming effect. There’s lots and lots of hair (hat’s off to hair/wig designer Tom Watson), acid washed denim, and too-tight-tee shirts, jeans and jump suits. The music (supervised and arranged by Ethan Popp) is loud and infectious. The cast and onstage band have a great time…as does the audience. Finally, you can belt out Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel The Noize” at the top of your lungs – in public!
They’re Altogether Ooky.
The Addams Family isn’t as bad as they say.
By James Feinberg
I have a tendency to give good reviews of everything. The lowest rating I’ve ever given was Two Bows, and that was for an exhibit, not a show. Because with shows; musicals; plays- there is not a better experience, not one, than seeing them. Saying this, you will not be disappointed if you see The Addams Family between now and next March 2011.
I am not lying, nor am I exaggerating. The Addams Family is the best-written, the funniest, the most impressive, the best-directed, the best-acted, the most intelligent musical I have ever seen. I’m talking about this show making Billy Elliot look like Super Mario Brothers - The Movie. Nathan Lane brings down the house as a Happy/Sad Gomez, who he plays with a smooth Spanish accent and a hatred for the right. Bebe Neuwirth plays a suicidal-ish, dancing Morticia. A passionate Wednesday, an explosive Pugsley, a mental Grandma, an electric Fester, and a… well… Lurch completes the family.
The musical revolves around modern times, in which Wednesday is 18 (even though, according to the TV show, she would be 52 in the modern day) and in love with a “normal” boy. Hilarity ensues when she invites him over for dinner and the family realizes that the Beinikes aren’t so normal after all- at least in their perspective ... Cousin Itt, the Thing, and a dancing curtain pull, all make cameos, as well as the squid Bernice and Morticia’s extremely hungry plant. The music is bouncy and cheerful, a perfect syncopation for the evil (granted, lovable evil) of the Family. Look out for When You’re An Addams, the opening number and the Addams’s welcome to their dead ancestors rising from their graves, Full Disclosure, the Addams’s game they play with visitors in which everyone must tell something they’ve never told anyone, and Let’s Not Talk About Anything Else But Love, in which Gomez, Fester, and Grandma warble about the good and the bad of love life. Do not miss it, because Nathan Lane leaves in March 2011, and the original Family is something everyone should see.
A Little Night Music
Walter Kerr
219 W. 48th St.
212-239-6200
Still another revival of a classic musical, this one an ultra- minimalist mounting of Sondheim’s adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night. Whereas Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Company succeeded admirably by being scaled down, this production directed by Trevor Nunn is threadbare. The background of triangular panels is disconcertingly stark, vis-a-vis the pageantry manifest in the 1973 original with Len Cariou and Glynis Johns, and the 2003 City Opera version with Claire Bloom and Jeremy Irons. In the original, Glynis Johns as Desirée treated Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns as an elusively understated, speak-sing, as did Bloom in the City Opera version. Here, owing to its popularity (breathes there a cabaret artist who hasn’t included it in his or her repertoire) Send in the Clowns is reprised in the finale. Catherine Zeta-Jones, did a serviceable job as Desirée, whereas Johns, though she could not sing a lick, enchanted the audience. Alexander Hanson is fine as Fredric in the role originally sung by Cariou. Angela Lansbury, perhaps unwittingly, did a spot-on imitation of Hermione Gingold as the grandmother. Zeta-Jones and Lansbury have been replaced by Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch.
Memphis
Shubert Theater
225 W. 44th St.
212-239-6200
Now if only Charles Strouse and Lee Adams' Bye Bye Birdie score could be injected into Memphis, you might have a musical for the ages. This homage to 1950s rock ’n’ roll has a ton of fine performers, dancers and singers who light up the stage, albeit with mostly forgettable songs. The singular exception is The Music of My Soul, sung by two exciting singer/actors, Chad Kimball as Huey, a high school dropout and white man with a love of the black vernacular of rock and roll and Montego Glover as Felicia, a black soul mate to Huey.
Jim Brochu as Zero Mostel in
Zero Hour
My Pick as Best One-Person
Performance of the Season.
Actor’s Temple Theater
339 W. 47th St. (betw. 8th and 9th Aves).
212-239-6200
Sundays at 2 p.m., Wednesdays at 3 p.m., Saturdays at 2 p.m.
When an increasing number of my friends told me in no uncertain terms to see this one-man comic/tragic homage to Zero Mostel, I said to them, who would have the chutzpah to turn into a Rhinoceros? Or become Leopold Bloom or Tevye or perform in the liberal Café Society with the likes of Jack Gilford, Professor Irwin Corey and Jimmy Savo? No one but the Genuine Z-Man. No one, until a reasonable facsimile performed admirably before one’s eyes at the Actor’s Temple Theater in the person of Jim Brochu. The first time I saw Mostel anywhere was on the old Channel 13 Play of the Week in which he performed live on TV with E. G. Marshall in Waiting for Godot, followed by his incomparable Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and as Psuedolus in A Funny Thing Happened, a role turned down in successive order by Milton Berle and Phil Silvers, until Zero’s wife threatened to remove his genitals unless he took the part. The premise of Brochu’s brilliant script is Zero being interviewed by a young, albeit not visible reporter for The New York Times in Mostel’s West 28th St. apartment. In between guffaws from we onlookers were words spoken of the black list that kept him from performing for years, thanks in no small part to Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen who pilloried him from the Hearst press. Brochu as Zero reminisces about such victims as his dear friend Jacob Loeb who played Gertrude Berg’s husband on The Goldbergs. As an adman at the time, I was conscious of blacklisting by the notorious Red Channels which victimized Loeb who took his own life, and scores of actors such as Jean Muir who played Henry Aldrich’s mother on the TV version of that famed serial. Muir was the victim of a one-person hate campaign by Loblaw an upstate NY supermarket chain whose president threatened to pull all General Food products from his shelves, unless Muir was fired. The irony of Brochu’s condemnation of Jerome Robbins for naming names to HUAC, is that Robbins later hired Zero for both A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Fiddler on the Roof. Not in the drama was the paradox of Elia Kazan who ratted Zero out, giving him an important role in the movie Panic in the Streets. Vindication was almost complete when Zero appeared in Woody Allen’s The Front in 1975.
LIMITED ENGAGEMENT.
   
Legally Blonde; The Musical
(4 gavels out of 5)
By Bob Feinberg
Prudential Hall at The NJ Performing Arts Center in Newark, New Jersey was called to rollicking order during the first week in June as the venue for Legally Blonde; The Musical (as its name suggests, the musical version of the hit 2001 MGM motion picture, “Legally Blonde,” starring Reese Witherspoon and Luke Wilson).
An energetic cast; smart and sassy music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin; and fun and fast-paced book by Heather Hach led the audience to an obvious verdict: Legally Blonde is a guilty pleasure for all in attendance.
Becky Gulsvig (who understudied the lead on Broadway) is winning as Elle Woods, the seemingly dim-witted, pampered Valley Girl who follows her privileged, preppy boyfriend, Warner Huntington III (Jeff McLean) east from the Delta Nu sorority at UCLA to Harvard Law, in search of marriage and happily ever after. To do so, she studies for the LSATs with the help of her “Greek Chorus” of sorority sisters (the fabulous, high-stepping Tiffany Engen, Rhiannon Hansen, and Candice Marie Woods); produces an unusual video essay for her law school application; and all the while wears her signature pink and frills for all to see.
Once at Harvard, Elle is befriended by the meek but attentive T.A. Emmett Forrest (D.B. Bonds); threatened by the ice princess fellow 1-L Vivienne Kensington (Megan Lewis); and intimidated by the Kingsfield-ian Professor Callahan (Michael Rupert). Of course, in the end, Elle bests them all: getting the grades, the job, the right man and the admiration of her peers she so justly deserves.
In addition to Gulsvig, star “witnesses” in the cast include Natalie Joy Johnson, who steals her scenes as the befuddled manicurist (and Elle’s first client) Paulette; Ven Daniel as the ceili dancing UPS man; and, of course, a number of “oooohhhh” inducing pups who scamper across the stage on cue.
RETURNING THIS FALL
Laura Linney, Brian d'Arcy James and Eric Bogosian in “Time Stands Still.”
Photo: Joan Marcus.
Time Stands Still
Manhattan Theater Club at the
Samuel J. Friedman Theater
261 W. 47th St.
212-239-6200
Beginning Oct. 7
Before Time Stands Still, playwright Donald Margulies gave us two theatrical gems in the past decade, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dinner with Friends and Sight Unseen with the glorious Laura Linney. The one show on which Margulies stubbed his toe, was Brooklyn Boy, a yawner, due to a laconic performance by Adam Arkin. Let us rejoice then for Time Stands Still, not solely for a beautifully constructed script that is powerful, sensitive, biting, and comedic, nor an astonishing piece of staging which comes with the revered territory of Daniel Sullivan, but also for four perfectly synched players. No surprise here from the ultra-versatile Linney as Sarah, a photojournalist who was almost done in by a car bomb in Iraq or from her guilt-ridden partner Brian d'Arcy James as James Dodd, himself a sufferer of a breakdown who left Iraq before her accident, then brings her back from a hospital in Germany to their Williamsburg, Brooklyn flat . Linney and d'Arcy James have the chops to bring excitement to any theatrical enterprise. What knocked me for a loop was Eric Bogosian, the master monologist with the penchant for employing the f-word in the pluperfect subjunctive. As Richard Ehrlich, photo editor of a newsmagazine, Sarah’s mentor and one-time squeeze, he is warm, wry and cuddly as a teddy bear. In the role of Mandy, Ehrlich’s trophy girl friend, Christina Ricci has taken over for Alica Silverstone. Mandy emerges from bimbo-ism to make perhaps the most salient point in the play. Does a recorder of a life-threatening event have an obligation to save a victim’s life rather than document it for his or her viewers?
FINAL WEEKS
Everyday Rapture.
American Airlines Theater
227 W. 42nd St.
212-719-1300
“I can’t think of another production in recent years that captures and explains so affectingly the essence and allure of musicals.” So says The New York Times Ben Brantley. To which I say, God help us for not bringing us another such production to the Great White Way. I use the God word, only because Sherie Rene Scott has the temerity to sing “You Made Me Love You” to images of Jesus Christ. That is an affront, not solely to Jesus, but to Judy Garland and Clark Gable.
CD’S
With a Song in His Heart,
Renowned Cardiologist
Sings of Love and Life in
An Affectionate Tribute to
Rogers, Hart, Hammerstein, Lerner, Loewe
And Kern.
My cardiologist and good friend Arthur Weisenseel, with whom I’ve been privileged to duet while taking my annual treadmill stress test, has put together an imposing oeuvre of songs in a rich baritone that regularly invades my living room. Here are favorites of mine:
- With a Song in My Heart
- It’s a Grand Night for Singing
- Some Enchanted Evening
- If Ever I would Leave You
$20 plus s&h.
To order, Click: http://www.healheartharmony.com/HealHeartHarmony/Music.html |
