Ben Peltz - Page 14

The old showbiz adage about always leavin' 'em wanting more isn't always the best advice, as exemplified Adam Bock's fascinating, understated and, in the end, frustratingly incomplete, A Small Fire.  In his usual fashion, especially when teamed up, as he is here, with director Tripp Cullman, Bock takes us on an engrossing journey just beyond the outer edges of reality.  There is some extraordinary scene work, both in his writing and in the collaborative efforts of the director and his two superlative leads, Michele Pawk and Reed Birney.  But while the 80-minute production satisfies in so many ways, the text also leaves out too many delicious details.

I'll resist the temptation to call director Paul Alexander's Off-Broadway mounting of Dracula anemic or toothless, but will note his remarkable achievement of assembling a production that manages to be aggressively bad in so many ways and yet never achieves the 'you gotta see how bad this is' status.  Though plagued by inept acting, questionable character choices, cheap-looking (and sounding) effects and a glacial pace, the evening is too dull to be enjoyed on any level.

No, that nice young man offering to pour you a glass of wine as you enter the New York Theatre Workshop's auditorium is not an intern or an Equity membership candidate earning weeks; it's one of the three madcap musicians who will be spending the next two hours trading punch lines, wheeling a trio of pianos around the stage and, somehow through it all, taking the inspiration for their antics from Franz Schubert's 1827 song cycle, Winterreise.

The First Amendment, that noble invention of our founding fathers that grants all Americans the right of free speech, must frequently be defended under less than noble circumstances; the right of a neo-Nazi group to hold a march in the heavily Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois, the right of Lenny Bruce to use a certain euphemism for someone who performs oral sex on a man as part of his comedy act and now... perhaps... the right of Michael Riedel to get a good seat at Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.

Last Tuesday night I went out for some pre-holiday coffee with my good friend, BroadwayWorld Senior Editor Jessica Lewis (Actually we were so engrossed in conversation that we forgot to order coffee.  Sorry, Starbucks.), and naturally the topic of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark came up.  Jessica had seen the show already and I mentioned how comical it was becoming that, with what right now stands as an eight-week preview period, the reviewing press will be attending long after the Internet has helped establish a firm word-of-mouth opinion.

People usually think I'm joking when I tell them that one of my favorite original Broadway cast albums is the one for the Swiss mime troupe, Mummenschanz.  But yes, they did record an album; one of audience reactions during a live performance at the sadly-gone Bijou Theatre during their 1977 three-year run.  The vinyl LP is even divided into bands and the liner notes tell you exactly which routines the crowd is laughing at and applauding for.

Before anyone removes a lick of clothing in EndTimes' decidedly secular song and sketch revue, Naked Holidays, an unlikely matchup of a perky and cultured Brit (Ruthie Stephens) and a snarling Mexican heavy metaler (Alessandro Colla) leads the cast of nineteen young and attractive performers, most of whom you will see naked by the evening's end, in a brief orientation of the history of the holidays that grace our December calendars.  The sketchy reasons for the celebration of the birth of Christ occurring on December 25th, they conclude, originates from the already present pagan solstice festivals, which were loaded with drunkenness, orgies and crude comedies and spectacles.

New Yorkers looking to make the yuletide a little decadent this year would be well-advised to drop the kiddies off at Mr. Balanchine's ballet over at Lincoln Center and hop a train to Brooklyn for the always-enticing theatre/dance troupe Company XIV's elegantly erotic Nutcracker Rouge.

'We found all the people who didn't see Donny and Marie tonight,' Suzanne Carrico chirps with a big smile as she surveys her Metropolitan Room audience.  In her new show, featuring material from her CD, What Christmas Time Means To Me, the MAC Award winner might be called a little bit American songbook, a little bit holiday traditional as she celebrates 'the only time of the year with a built-in soundtrack' with cleverness, sincerity and a heck of a lot of joy.

Listening to the popular theatre critic/journalist Peter Filichia talk about musicals can be twice as entertaining as half the shows on Broadway.  Ever hear his story about the audience reaction at the first preview of Bring Back Birdie?  Or the way he one-upped David Merrick after being tossed out of a preview of 42nd Street?  Or the exact moment he could tell, while watching an out-of-town tryout of Company, that Dean Jones would not be playing Bobby for long?

Perhaps the Broadway musical would enjoy a complete and total renaissance of quality if only Thomas Meehan would agree to co-author the book of every new show that hits town.  The writer whose main stem debut was the perfectly crafted Annie has gone on to spend the bulk of his career co-authoring with the likes of Mel Brooks, Mark O'Donnell and Lee Adams.  And while I'm certainly not dismissing the contributions of his collaborators, the Thomas Meehan name in a Playbill seems to guarantee that no matter how the dialogue and the score turn out, the elements will be housed in a sturdy structure that firmly establishes its story arc, gives us reasons to care about the characters and steadily glides along to a satisfying conclusion.

Back in the days of Henry Miller, it was one of the great Broadway traditions for him and other men of the theatre to name playhouses for themselves.  I won't discount that perhaps some ego-stroking was involved, but it was also a shrewd business move.  The popular actor/producer was telling the public that even if he wasn't appearing in the house's current offering, the production arrived with his seal of approval.  This wasn't just some play paying money to rent his space; Henry Miller believed this to be quality theatre.

Cameron Mackintosh's 25th Anniversary production of Les Misérables, presented by The Paper Mill Playhouse, has finally hit the friendly American shores after touring Britain, and perhaps symbolic of its Atlantic crossing is the new opening picture devised by co-directors Laurence Conner and James Powell.  Sure, 24601 (a/k/a Jean Valjean) is still a prisoner in chains for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread for his starving sister and her family, but he and his fellow inmates are now rowing oars on a galley ship.  The music (Claude-Michel Schonberg) and words (Herbert Kretzmer, based on the original French text by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel) of this world-famous adaptation of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel, set against the backdrop of Paris' 1832 student revolution, are unchanged, but the new locale not only starts the evening off with a visually striking image, but signals to the musical's two-and-a-half decades worth of fans that this will not be just another variation of the original Trevor Nunn/John Caird production they are accustomed to.  (A production that can still be enjoyed on the West End.)

While there's certainly plenty to enjoy in the new musical version of Pedro Almodóvar's 1988 film, Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown - David Yazbek's jaunty Latin-based score, the winning performances of a star-studded cast (three Tony winners and four other nominees) and the kinetic flashiness of Bartlett Sher's kicky production - the show is also a prime example of how the sum of the pieces can add up to more than the whole when the missing ingredient is a strong book.  Not that the talented Jeffrey Lane doesn't make a game try at it.  Sticking closely to the source, his work is frequently clever and he and Yazbek concoct some quirkily fun musical scenes, but the odds are working against him in this one.

Although Broadway has a history of great artistic success from adapting existing sources for the musical stage (My Fair Lady, Show Boat, Gypsy...) the past decade's ever-increasing trend of turning popular films, novels that inspired popular films and songwriter's catalogues into musicals has, in many minds, elevated the status of the completely original musical; particularly original musicals by American authors.

Creating new opportunities for beautiful blondes with enchanting soprano voices is a topic generally not included in discussions of non-traditional casting in the theatre, but when it was announced that Kelli O'Hara would be starring in the Encores! concert production of Bells Are Ringing instead of one of Broadway's many talented comedic actresses who might regard this weekend's performances as a public audition for the planned upcoming revival of Funny Girl, it was not, to say the least, an expected choice.

While football and baseball have been slugging it out for decades for the title of America's Most Popular Sport, there's no doubt that the latter is Broadway's baby, boasting Tony-winners Damn Yankees and Take Me Out.  Aside from inspiring amusing songs for Wonderful Town and High Button Shoes, football's longest Broadway run was the short-lived musical All-American, which featured the unlikely combination of Ray Bolger acting in scenes written by Mel Brooks.  Heck, even basketball (That Championship Season) and rugby (The Changing Room) have fared better on Broadway than football.

While the campy antics of Devil Boys From Beyond may suggest an unlikely blend of screwball classics like His Girl Friday with infamous sci-fi fare such as Plan 9 From Outer Space, the movie title that kept popping into my mind was Clash of The Titans.  Not because of the mythical physiques of beefy boys Jeff Riberdy and Jacques Mitchell, but because this honey of a laff-riot matches esteemed associates from the schools of Off-Broadway's two most significant drag theatre artists.

Sure, in America the guilty have just as much a right to a fair trial as the innocent.  But when someone you believe is guilty doesn't get one, is that a wrong you can be all that enthused about righting?  That's one of the discussion points that might be mulled over by leftist radicals downing shots of vodka after taking in Amy Herzog's After The Revolution.  Unfortunately, this tantalizing moral dilemma is regulated to a throwaway point in a play that teases us with its political content while contenting itself with being a rather formulaic family drama.  It's a good one, for sure; well-written (despite an unsatisfying ending) with absorbing conflicts and director Carolyn Cantor's excellent cast is always engaging, but every so often the play reminds us of an interesting direction the author decided not to take.

While Ira Levin will forever be remembered as the novelist who made the phrases 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Stepford Wives' indelible entries into American pop culture, devotees of musical theatre fondly regard him as the bookwriter/lyricist for one of Broadway's more intriguing flops, 1965's Drat! The Cat!