Cirque du Soleil's Totem & The Broadway Musicals of 1961

A human ball of silver glitter hanging from a cord is lowered above what looks like a bungalow-sized muffin top.  (It’s supposed to represent a turtle shell.)  Before the glitter ball makes its landing the cover is removed to reveal what looks like a tribe of humanish amphibians bouncing on trampolines and twirling on the muffin/turtle’s frame.  Shortly after, a sleazy-looking clown in a tropical shirt tosses a condom to a woman in the front row and says, “Call me!”  Yes, dear readers, Cirque du Soleil is back in town.

This time around the Canadian troupe of world class circus artists is playing the parking lot of Citi Field for a stint scheduled to end on May 12th, but if the Mets do as well as expected this season, the space should be available to them for many more months to come.

Written and directed by Robert Lepage, Totem is described by Cirque as ”a fascinating journey of the human species from its original amphibian state to its ultimate desire to fly,” but as is usually the case with their shows, the artistic theme is not the reason for going.  Still, as long as the acrobats, jugglers, leapers and flyers are center stage, Totem is a wild and fun adventure.

Unfortunately, Cirque doesn’t provide free programs with the identities of the artists and the proper names of the skills they display.  More familiar routines include a troupe of beefy guys holding long poles parallel to the ground while lither fellows bounce from one to another in spectacular leaps.  A muscular male dancer twirls his female partner at breathtaking – and one would think neck breaking – speeds.  Another male and female couple in continuous motion maneuver around a high trapeze.

Five female unicyclists ride in formations while flinging bowls to each other that they catch atop their heads.  A pair of ladies juggle flat, pizza-like objects with their feet and a fellow placed inside a clear cone keeps colored balls spinning around like electrons orbiting a nucleus.

Some of Cirque's more eye-popping acts, like the wheel of death and the balancing contortionists, are left out of this one, but the crazy assortment of costume and lighting effects are sufficiently opulent, and the intimacy of the circular tent gives most of the crowd a great up-close view.

Photos: OSA Images.

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Broadway musicals were certainly not lacking for star power during that hectic year of 1961, as big-name performers, writers and directors all fought for box office attention.

The legendary Alfred Drake starred as the legendary Edmund Kean in a musical scored by Robert Wright and George Forrest.  Elaine Stritch headlined Noel Coward’s Sail Away as Barbara Cook did for Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz’s The Gay Life.  The Happiest Girl In The World boasted Cyril Ritchard in no less than eight roles with Yip Harburg’s lyrics set to Jacques Offenbach melodies.  That kid from Off-Broadway, Jerry Herman, penned his first Broadway score for Milk and Honey, which brought 2^nd Avenue favorite Molly Picon uptown.  Composer/lyricist Richard Adler made his return to Broadway after the death of his partner, Jerry Ross, with the most controversial musical of the season, Kwamina, concerning an interracial love story in an emerging African nation, played out by Sally Ann Howes and Terry Carter.

The two biggest hits of the year were Anna Maria Alberghetti and, in his Broadway debut, Jerry Orbach in Bob Merrill, Michael Stewart and Gower Champion’s Carnival! and Robert Morse and Rudy Vallee in Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows’ How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, but if you were reading the early edition of the New York Herald Tribune on December 28^th, you might have been tricked into thinking that the new Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne show, Subways Are For Sleeping, had just opened to unanimous raves because producer David Merrick, knowing he wouldn’t get any money reviews, got permission from seven people with the same names as New York’s seven opening night newspaper critics to attribute glowing quotes to them in a print ad.  (Word of the scam spread quickly and the Trib was the only paper that printed it.)

And yet with all that musical theatre muscle being flexed, only a handful of songs from that year became popular standards.  Even members of the knowledgeable audiences that frequent Town Hall’s Broadway By The Year series might have been hearing more than half of these tunes for the first time.  Fortunately, creator/writer/host Scott Siegel always recruits a top-shelf lineup of performers, accompanied by music director Ross Patterson helming his Little Big Band, to provide the most artistically satisfying of introductions.

Jeffrey Denman, one of contemporary musical theatre’s top song and dance men, directed and choreographed the event, teaming up twice for charming duets of Coward’s “When You Want Me” and Johnny Burke’s “I Wouldn’t Bet One Penny” (from Donnybrook!, a musical based on The Quiet Man) with his wife, accomplished Broadway gypsy Erin Denman.  The former also relived a couple of moments from the days when he understudied Matthew Broderick in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, backed by a male ensemble for the classic “I Believe In You” and leading the company in a rousing “Brotherhood of Man.”

Christine Andreas’ entrancing vocals and intelligent dramatic phrasing sublimely brought out the mixture of melancholy and hopefulness in Sail Away’s title song and graced Carnival!’s “Mira” and Happiest Girl’s “Adrift on a Star” with warmth and charm.

Another fine musical theatre actress, Kerry O’Malley, brought some needed depth to two tepid ballads from Kwamina (“What’s Wrong With Me?” and “Another Time, Another Place”) but was far better showcased in How To Succeed’s tongue-in-cheek homage to suburban conformity, “Happy To Keep His Dinner Warm” and Kean’s richly romantic “Sweet Danger.”

Two Carnival! ballads originated with Jerry Orbach’s dark baritone (“She’s My Love” and “Her Face”) were given a new sound via Scott Coulter’s sweet, airy tenor.

Fans of Emily Skinner may have been surprised to hear her singing in a legit soprano voice for The Gay Life’s “Magic Moments” but her Broadway belt was back for a daffy, neurotic spin on Coward’s comic gem, “Why Do The Wrong People Travel?”

Ensemble highlights included O’Malley, Skinner, Coulter and Denman in a jazzy four-part harmonizing of Subways’ “Comes Once In A Lifetime” and an unamplified mixing of two ballads of romantic longing; Let It Ride’s “His Own Little Island,” (Coulter, Denman and Felipe Tavolaro) and Donnybrook!’s “For My Own” (Andreas, O’Malley and Skinner).

Tavolaro, who made a one-night trip to New York from his native Brazil to be in the concert, is a member of the Broadway By The Year Chorus, a group of young professionals directed by Coulter, that opened the show accompanying Andreas in Carnival!’s “Love Makes The World Go Round” and commenced the second act with a spirited, unamplified rendition of Milk and Honey’s title song and its most popular melody, “Shalom.”

Photos by Stephen Sorokoff:  Top:  Jeffry Denman and Erin Denman; Bottom: Emily Skinner.

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Posted on: Friday, March 22, 2013 @ 12:33 PM Posted by: Michael Dale

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Where's My Pet Palliated Gown?

New York is getting a 96 story condo tower. I'm just hoping that whoever lives on the 90th floor has a loud voice, gets depressed frequently and loves singing Cole Porter.

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Posted on: Thursday, March 21, 2013 @ 12:58 PM Posted by: Michael Dale | Leave Feedback

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Broadway Grosses: Week Ending 3/17/13 & Theatre Quote of the Week

"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool."
-- Jane Wagner

 

The grosses are out for the week ending 3/17/2013 and we've got them all right here in BroadwayWorld.com's grosses section.

Up for the week was: SPIDER-MAN TURN OFF THE DARK (15.8%), JERSEY BOYS (13.4%), THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (11.7%), NEWSIES (9.8%), NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT (8.4%), CHICAGO (8.0%), VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE (8.0%), MAMMA MIA! (4.6%), CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (4.2%), MATILDA (3.5%), ONCE (2.7%), ROCK OF AGES (1.6%), LUCKY GUY (1.1%), WICKED (0.6%), THE LION KING(0.3%),

Down for the week was: CINDERELLA (-14.3%), ANN (-6.9%), HANDS ON A HARDBODY (-4.4%), BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S (-4.3%), ANNIE (-1.0%), KINKY BOOTS (-0.2%),

Posted on: Monday, March 18, 2013 @ 08:11 PM Posted by: Michael Dale | Leave Feedback

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Detroit '67

Nearly 40 years ago, producer Norman Lear brought a television program about a black family’s life in a Chicago housing project into millions of American homes.  And while the show never ignored the dangers and hardships of living in an underserved, crime-ridden community, Good Times focused on the safe haven provided by family and friends that nurtured artistry and activism while providing the expected abundance of sitcom laughter.

That same atmosphere of love and laughter – and especially music – is the safe haven of Detroit ’67, Dominique Morisseau’s drama with comedy that begins on the weekend before July 23rd, 1967, when mounting tensions between the police vice squad and black citizens feeling harassed exploded into deadly riots that only subsided when the National Guard and U.S. Army troops were called in.

Siblings Chelle and Lank (Michelle Wilson and Francois Battiste) live in the house where they grew up, their parents having both passed away, and earn money hosting after-hours parties in their basement.  It’s an illegal business, but its secrecy allows customers the opportunity to dance to the latest Motown hits relatively safe from police raids.  When the play begins, Chelle is prepping for the weekend’s fun, patiently resetting the needle whenever one of her scratchy 45rpm records starts skipping.  Though she sent Lank into town to buy some of the latest hit singles, he and his buddy Sly (Brandon J. Dirden) return with an 8-track player and tapes, excited for how this new technology will produce a smoother sound with no skips.  Chelle is suspicious of his enthusiasm, especially when it becomes apparent that Lank and Sly want to use the new audio system in the legit neighborhood bar they plan to buy; an idea she thinks is too risky in the current street climate.

That evening Lank and Sly bring home a white woman, Caroline (Samantha Soule), who they found passed out and apparently beaten up on the street.  Knowing that taking her to the hospital would raise suspicion against them, they tuck the unconscious women under blankets on the couch, assuring her that she’s safe when she wakes up the next morning.  Though she won’t reveal exactly what conditions led to her current state, Chelle reluctantly allows her to stay and work for her until she can afford to go someplace safe.  That night the riots ignite and eventually its consequences are tragically felt.

As directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, Detroit ’67 does, in the most positive way, resemble a warm, urban sitcom where the comedy nicely leads us into serious issues.  The characters are familiar types, played with empathy by a strong ensemble.  Chelle is the pragmatic, grounded woman who doesn’t like taking unnecessary risks while Lank is the wheeler-dealer with big dreams and Sly as his trusting sidekick.  Caroline is the white woman with a surprising knowledge of black culture and lifestyles, up on all the latest Motown artists and able to mix up a mean Bali Hai.  There’s also De'Adre Aziza as Bunny, Chelle’s sexy and streetwise friend who spends most of her time on stage tossing out sassy comments.

A drama set more in the center of the action might offer a better historical look at those five brutal days, but Detroit ’67 more of a sentimental look at what was lost; both of the city’s past and of its potential future.  And in that way it succeeds as a loving and satisfying visit.

Photos by Joan Marcus:  Top: Michelle Wilson and Brandon J. Dirden; Bottom: De'Adre Aziza and Francois Battiste.

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Posted on: Monday, March 18, 2013 @ 01:51 AM Posted by: Michael Dale | Leave Feedback

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The Flick

On paper, Annie Baker’s The Flick is 122 pages long.  For a typical play this would mean a running time somewhere between two hours and fifteen minutes and two and a half hours at the most.  On stage at Playwrights Horizons, the performance I attended of director Sam Gold’s production of The Flick ran a bit over three hours and fifteen minutes.

This is by design.  In promoting her new piece, the playwright has expressed a preference for dialogue and pacing that more accurately reflects real life over the elevated reality generally associated with live theatre.  As in her past plays, all of which have had their premiere productions mounted by Gold, The Flick includes conversations that skirt around points instead of making them.  There are also many scripted pauses and silent moments where the audience can’t clearly see what is going on.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  There’s a lot to be said for finely presented subtext, but Baker’s tale of the purity of art form giving way to modern, money-making technology as seen through the eyes of three awkward employees of a single-screen Massachusetts movie theatre doesn’t carry the necessary weight to justify the lengthy attention span requested.

The play is set in designer David Zinn’s realistic auditorium, complete with rows of red chairs and holes in the upstage wall where the projector is set.  The theatre audience sits where the screen would be.  As described in Baker’s script, the play opens in darkness, the only light coming from the projector hitting above the theatre audience’s heads.  We hear Bernard Herrmann’s introductory film scoring for The Naked And The Dead, though all we see of the film is the bright white light flashing for, as specified by the playwright, two minutes.

Finally, actors appear.  The tragic center of the piece is 35-year-old Sam (terrifically empathetic Matthew Maher), a thickly-accented, not especially bright, regular guy who is the senior member of the three-person crew.  The first scene has him training Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), a college student taking a semester off, in the ritual of sweeping the floors in between screenings; a simple task that the new guy gets down far quicker than his supervisor.  While Avery, an introvert except when it comes to expressing his passion for movies, may have a better future ahead of him, Sam is pretty much stuck where he is.  Though he has a crush on the punkish Rose (Louisa Krause), he also resents the fact that she was promoted to projectionist despite his seniority.

After letting these characters simmer for a while, revealing bits of their backgrounds and developing an attraction between Avery and Rose, Baker introduces the news that the art house is being sold to a chain that plans to replace the projector and go digital.  While Sam and Rose are concerned for their jobs, Avery is infuriated with the switch to modern, less-artistic technology.

Although there is enough in The Flick to keep an audience satisfied for a more standard two-hour length, Baker and Gold’s commitment to their interpretation of realism – including repetitious scenes and long silences that do not speak volumes – alienates attention from the sweet, humorous story of the day-to-day lives of three troubled people.  This love letter to the movies could afford to incorporate a bit of theatre's elevated reality.

Photos by Joan Marcus:  Top: Matthew Maher; Bottom:  Louisa Krause and Aaron Clifton Moten.

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Posted on: Saturday, March 16, 2013 @ 02:01 PM Posted by: Michael Dale | Leave Feedback

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Neva & Mary Foster Conklin

Guillermo Calderón’s comic drama, Neva, begins with a monologue that any actress over 35 with a decent knack for self-effacing humor will want to grab.

It’s spoken by Olga Knipper, the widow of Anton Chekhov, as she contemplates how unprepared she feels to soon be starring in a production of her beloved late husband’s The Cherry Orchard. (“Rasputin is more truthful than I am.”)  In her anxiety she imagines audience members praising her to her face, but scorning her publically for not being worthy of the roles written for her.  (“Because for me this is a punishment.  It humiliates me when people look at me. That said, I like it when they call me and they say, “We’d like you to play this role.”)

Those two pages, played by Bianca Amato with the type of tragic self-centeredness that made the Russian dramatist’s plays subtly funny, is by far the highlight of the Public Theater’s production, as translated by Andrea Thome.

The play is set in Saint Petersburg, through which the Neva River flows, on a Sunday morning in 1905 that has Olga nervously waiting in the theatre for rehearsal to begin.  However, it’s not only unlikely that the director and much of the cast will arrive, it’s also very likely that they are all dead, as this is the 22^nd of January  -- later to be known as Bloody Sunday – when the Tsar’s soldiers fired upon thousands of unarmed protestors and uninvolved passers-by.

The only two who come to join her are the charismatic Aleko (Luke Robertson) and the introverted Masha (Quincy Tyler Bernstine).  The trio spends the bulk of the play improvising a scene based on Chekhov’s death from tuberculosis (trying to get the cough just right), criticizing Masha’s artistic inadequacies (““Do you think I would be a better actress if I enjoyed sex?”) and rejecting the value of theatre when there’s blood on the streets.  The play climaxes with Masha emotionlessly shouting a long speech summarizing the issues addressed in the previous 75 minutes.  (“I hate the audience, those simpletons who come to entertain themselves while the world ends. They come to seek culture, to sigh. They should be ashamed. They should give that money to the poor.”)

It’s to the credit of the three actors involved that Neva can hold attention for even its brief running time.  Calderón, who also directs, has costume designer Susan Hilferty dress them all in dark tones.  There is no designer credited for the small elevated platform, not nearly large enough for any substantial movement, where the entire play is performed, nor for the one moveable footlight that allows anything to be seen.  By the time the evening’s clichéd pretentiousness has covered all its artsy bases, the light is forcefully directed into the faces of the audience, symbolizing… Oh, whatever the hell that’s supposed to symbolize.

Photo of Bianca Amato, Luke Robertson and Quincy Tyler Bernstine by Carol Rosegg.

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I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of being conceived back when Fran Landesman began writing the lyrics and poetry that would earn her the title of the beat generation’s “poet laureate of lovers and losers.”  And I’m quite certain the same can be said for Mary Foster Conklin, but in her tribute to the scribe best known for “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” and “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” the sly and smoky jazz vocalist creates a mood that one can imagine replicates the feel of low-key cool and coffee house worldliness that accompanied the material when it was a young woman’s reaction to the masculine sensitivity of 1950s Greenwich Village and the hipster side of St. Louis.

Titled Life Is A Bitch after a comically fatalistic poem that was a favorite of Bette Davis, Conklin is joined by music director/pianist John di Martino and bassist Greg Ryan for 90 minutes of wisdom, anecdotes and some ravishing words and music presented with knowing dramatics and warm intelligence.

The trickily rhythmic "Nothing Like You" (music by Bob Dorough) opens the program, followed by the creamy “Never Had The Blues” (also Dorough), setting us up for an evening of flippantness and emotional colors.  “In A New York Minute” (Simon Wallace) highlights the jumpy, unexpected rhythms of the city, “Scars” (also Wallace) has Conklin at her most beautifully intimate, assuring a new lover that they can freely expose each other to the evidence of their past wounds (“Don’t be ashamed, everybody’s got scars. / That’s the way we keep score on this planet of ours.) and in “Small Day Tomorrow,” her “anthem of the unemployed,” the singer lounges in a relaxed playfulness.

That last selection, as Conklin explains, was inspired by an evening where Landesman was left alone in a favorite watering hole because all of her friends had a “big day tomorrow.”  She quips, “Out came a bar napkin and the rest is history.”  And “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” (Tommy Wolf), best known as a gay anthem, she explains was actually inspired from the lyricist’s learning that one of her obsessive artist friends was about to marry a 16-year-old girl and she was thinking how someone so young couldn’t possibly be prepared for what she had in store.

The charming between-song patter not only expresses Conklin’s personal appreciation of the songs, but gives a rather thorough history lesson of her subject’s life and career; her open marriage of 61 years to Jay Landesman (founder of the beat lit magazine Neurotica), their years in St. Louis, mingling with the likes of Lenny Bruce and Barbra Streisand at the Crystal Palace, and writing The Nervous Set with Tommy Wolf, the musical about New York’s beatnik culture that was a smash in St. Louis but failed to win over Broadway audiences.

The brief Metropolitan Room run of Life Is A Bitch has sadly concluded, but any future opportunities to hear the perfect match of Landesman’s hip observations and Conklin’s stylish interpretations is certainly worth a listen.

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Posted on: Thursday, March 14, 2013 @ 03:33 PM Posted by: Michael Dale | Leave Feedback

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Cinderella Occupies Broadway

“This is like children’s theatre for 40-year-old gay people!”

So wisecracked a character in Douglas Carter Beane’s Broadway adaptation of the film, Xanadu.  As Al Jolson might have observed, we had ain’t seen nothing yet.

While there’s certainly enough of the traditional story, at least as we know it here in America, to keep the kiddies occupied, Beane’s adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Cinderella, significantly inspired by the movement started by Zuccotti Park’s 99-percenters, is a rollickingly fresh and funny new take on the tale mounted with spirited zest by Mark Brokaw; a little bit campy, a little bit sharp musical satire and a whole lot romantic, but from a different angle.

And it is, in fact, a new musical comedy.  Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella premiered as a live television special starring Julie Andrews in 1957 and was presented again in a 1965 revised version as another TV event starring Leslie Ann Warren.  There have been previous stage adaptations that used these two broadcasts as their source (plus a Disney-produced revised TV adaptation starring Brandy) but while they all share the same core of songs, Beane’s new script takes nothing from them.  Unlike last season’s rewritten revival of Porgy and Bess, that just softened the impact of material that already existed as a theatre piece, this production uses the television score (plus lifting some unknowns from the Rodgers and Hammerstein trunk) and only the most basic necessities of the teleplay’s story to invent something new for the stage.

Prince Topher, played with a genuine nice-guy appeal by Santino Fontana, doesn’t slay the dragon or the angry tree-like creature that challenges his soldiers in the opening scene, but rather humanely incapacitates them; perhaps thinking they can be rehabilitated.  He’s an orphan who has been naively spending his short reign controlled by a Lord Protector (Peter Bartlett, delightfully droll and dry as always) who has been passing laws to protect the wealth of the upper class at the expense of the poor.  A brief chance encounter with Cinderella convinces her that he’s a compassionate person who may not be aware of what is being done in his name.

The title character’s relationship with her step-family is fleshed out a bit more.  In fact, her actual name is Ella.  The “Cinder” part is a derogatory nickname, though she eventually “takes back the word.”  Her step-mother (Harriet Harris, grandly resembling a combo of Bette Davis and Dorothy Loudon) married her first husband for love, but when she was widowed with two daughters to raise, she married Cinderella’s now deceased father for money.  (“He died.  I got a house!”)  Though Ann Harada’s Charlotte is a self-centered little dynamo, Marla Mindelle’s Gabrielle is shy, bookish and has a crush on Jean-Michel (Greg Hildreth), a local activist who organizes soup kitchens and makes speeches on behalf of those who have lost their homes due to unfair financial practices.

The Lord Protector decides to hold the ball that will find a bride for Topher as a way of distracting the public from the lad’s accusations and in a very clever scene, Jean-Michel’s attempt to rally the public with “Now Is The Time” (an unused anthem written for South Pacific) is drowned out by the merry song and dance, “The Prince Is Giving A Ball.”  And while Ella is as excited as any other young lady in town to attend, her main motivation for wanting to go is not to snag a royal husband, but to warn Topher to open his eyes to the way his people are being treated.  It’s her selfless qualities and her generosity that earn her a visit from the fairy godmother (charmingly ethereal Victoria Clark) and once she arrives at the palace, she wins over both the prince and his subjects simply by being a nice, friendly person.  (Costume designer William Ivey Long’s gorgeous and often comic creations include a stunner of a quick transformation into Cinderella’s ball gown, which seems to be assisted by lighting designer Kenneth Posner.)  There’s still the pesky matter of the midnight deadline, but when happily ever after eventually arrives it comes with a message of valuing kindness, forgiveness and charity over physical beauty and to work for what you wish to achieve instead of depending on magical solutions to just appear.

In the six years since Laura Osnes won Broadway stardom as a TV game show prize, she’s gradually developed into quite the skilled and endearing ingénue lead, primarily though fine performances in Rodgers and Hammerstein vehicles.  (She was Kelli O’Hara’s replacement in South Pacific and headed concert productions of Pipe Dream and The Sound of Music.)  In Cinderella she more than fills the expected requirements of sweet, pretty looks and a soft lovely soprano, but adds to them admirable assertiveness, maturity and a sly sense of humor.  Adults wishing to expose young girls to a positive fictional role model should be pleased.

At its best, the contrast between Rodgers and Hammerstein’s traditionally romantic, operetta-like score and the satirical jabs of Beane’s book balance well, much like the similar contrast found in Finian’s Rainbow, but there remain a few awkward moments.  The love-at-first-sight waltz “Ten Minutes Ago” and the lush “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful (Or Are You Beautiful Because I Love You?)” don’t quite fit the kind of attraction for each other that the bookwriter establishes and the comical “Stepsister’s Lament” (changed from “Stepsisters’ Lament” because Gabrielle is too involved with her romantic subplot to feel jealousy) would be better off as a solo for Harada’s Charlotte instead of having her funny antics backed up by a chorus of ladies who, ten minutes ago, were admiring Cinderella’s kindness and sincerity.

Still, having music director David Chase visibly conducting twenty musicians in Danny Troob’s rich orchestrations for these beloved compositions from a real orchestra pit helps teach kiddies whose minds may have been corrupted by Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark another important lesson; Broadway orchestras belong in the same room as the actors.

Photos by Carol Rosegg:  Top: Laura Osnes, Santino Fontana and Company; Center:  Marla Mindelle and Greg Hildreth; Bottom:  Victoria Clark.

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Posted on: Thursday, March 14, 2013 @ 01:14 AM Posted by: Michael Dale | Leave Feedback

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Broadway Grosses: Week Ending 3/10/13 & Theatre Quote of the Week

"It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross."
-- Tom Stoppard

The grosses are out for the week ending 3/10/2013 and we've got them all right here in BroadwayWorld.com's grosses section.

Up for the week was: ANN (10.1%), CHICAGO (6.9%), THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (5.3%), ONCE (4.5%), THE LION KING (3.4%), CINDERELLA (3.1%), THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD (1.3%), MAMMA MIA! (1.0%), NEWSIES (0.7%), ROCK OF AGES (0.6%), JERSEY BOYS(0.5%),

Down for the week was: ANNIE (-14.6%), HANDS ON A HARDBODY (-9.9%), CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (-5.6%), KINKY BOOTS (-3.2%), NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT (-2.0%), LUCKY GUY (-1.9%), SPIDER-MAN TURN OFF THE DARK (-1.7%), WICKED (-1.0%),

Posted on: Monday, March 11, 2013 @ 05:24 PM Posted by: Michael Dale | Leave Feedback

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The North Pool

The North Pool is certainly the most conventional piece to hit New York from imaginative playwright Rajiv Joseph.  There are no philosophical tigers, no imaginary Holden Caulfield’s giving advice and no relationships built on mutual physical injuries.  But the traditional two-hander is a neatly crafted, tense and juicy theatrical ride.

Set in 90 minutes of real time, the play takes place in 2007 (April 13^th, to be exact), in the office of high school vice-principal, Dr. Danielson (Stephen Barker Turner).  It’s the last few minutes before spring break begins but first the VP needs to meet with 18-year-old Syrian transfer student Khadim Asmaan (Babak Tafti) over what seems to be a trivial offense.  Danielson asks a lot of questions he already knows the answer to and when Asmaan is caught lying he’s assigned to serve detention.

The student accepts the administrator’s offer to make it a quick detention right then and there, most likely making them the only two people left in the building.  But while Asmaan would rather serve his time quietly, Danielson has more questions for him regarding his family, his participation in school activities and items found in his locker which may or may not be related to threats made against the school.

The anxious student counters by bringing up some well-known rumors about the vice-principal.  To go further would reveal too much but it all leads up to each one’s relationship with another student.

The upper hand keeps bouncing back and forth and under director Giovanna Sardelli neither character can claim the audience’s sympathy for very long.  Turner’s Danielson is a pompous authority figure grounded in traditional (white) American values, unconvincingly trying to let the teenager know that he’s his friend.  Tafti’s Asmaan first appears as a polite and timid fish out of water until his arrogance and ruthlessness surface.

There are a couple of points that defy logic a bit, and a slight hint of a sadistic act involving the title location that never develops, but despite those stumbles, The North Pool proves a well-acted and entertaining cat and mouse game.

Photo of Stephen Barker Turner and Babak Tafti by Carol Rosegg.

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Posted on: Friday, March 08, 2013 @ 05:27 PM Posted by: Michael Dale | Leave Feedback

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Candy Tastes Nice

The woman who went by the pseudonym Natalie Dylan, a self-described feminist with a B.A. in women’s studies, hasn’t been the only one to attempt to put her virginity up for auction, but being attractive, American and willing to appear on national television to explain how she wished to use the money to pay for her further education most likely helped her become the best-known in this country.

In these days where government legislation of morality and a woman’s right to control her own body stirs up controversy, Dylan’s story is still extraordinarily relevant.  Playwright/performer Miranda Huba took from it her inspiration to create Candy Tastes Nice, a fictional solo piece about a woman wishing to pay off her student loans by holding such an auction.

Directed by Shannon Sindelar, the play was previously performed in New York in a traditional theatre setting, but this new production is placed in the upstairs lounge of the bordello-themed bar, Madame X, with customers welcome to bring their drinks into the playing space (no minimum) where they sit on cozy couches and can sample from small bowls full of sugary treats.  There are elevated areas on both ends of the room but for the most part Huba struts across the floor up close to her listeners as she tells her tale, which turns out to be an awkward mix of sexual politics overwhelmed by outlandish fantasy.

Huba’s writing style frequently echoes the crass titillation of a letter to Penthouse  (“The series of boyfriends that I had selfishly blue balled had never done anything other than some heavy petting.”) performed with an off-putting sense of arrogance.  The play works best when she’s seriously critical of the media’s insistence of shaping her story to suit its needs, regardless of the truth, such as in a scene inspired by Dylan’s appearance on the Tyra Banks show.  Huba has her unnamed narrator repeatedly asked by a model/talk show host why she’s doing it and she repeatedly answers that she wants to pay off her student loans.  It isn’t until she changes her answer to express a yearning for celebrity love and attention that the model/host is satisfied that she’s come to the heart of the matter.

Huba does touch on significant topics such as the theory that women have been auctioning off their virginity to the highest bidder since the beginning of time and the moral culture that automatically sees prostitutes as a victims (She doesn’t go into the high cost of education, though.) but only lightly.  Instead of exploring issues thoroughly, she ventures off into fuzzy symbolism with a scene involving a young boy and her internal organs and cartoonish satire which has world leaders bidding on her as part of complicated deals involving oil, hostages and nuclear weapons.  Despite her effort to make a statement, the subject of auctioning off one's virginity and the issues surrounding it are so unusual that what comes out of the playwright’s inventiveness never seems like it would be as interesting as a realistic approach. 

Also, the title is confusing.  There’s a character in the narrative named Candy, which can lead one to wrongly believe the title might be referring to her.  And frankly, the words Candy Tastes Nice suggests a sex act that has nothing to do with the play.

Photo of Miranda Huba by Michael Weintrob.

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Posted on: Thursday, March 07, 2013 @ 06:01 PM Posted by: Michael Dale | Leave Feedback

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Belleville & The Revisionist

As a public service for playgoers who do not understand French, nothing of any importance takes place in the final scene of Amy Herzog’s Belleville.

Don’t worry, it’s not a spoiler to say that the actions that end the next to last scene pretty much complete the play and that the final pages, spoken entirely in French, do nothing but leave those of us who only know English wondering what the hell they missed.  (For the record, I cut and pasted the scene from my press script onto one of those web sites that performs translations.)

Perhaps I’ll never be satisfied with the way Ms. Herzog chooses to end her plays, but like her After The Revolution and The Great God Pan, she has a terrific way with dialogue that both entertains and stings and characters and situations that are at least initially grabbing.  Director Anne Kauffman and an excellent cast greatly contribute to keeping attentions fixed, despite a couple of lapses in believability and a dearth of content to sufficiently fill the play’s 95 minutes.

The Belleville section of Paris fills in for Park Slope, Brooklyn (The Seine, the Gowanus… What’s the dif?) as represented by the attic apartment (fine work by Julia C. Lee) rented by twentysomething American couple, Zack and Abby (Greg Keller and Maria Dizzia).  The first thing we learn about their marriage is that Abby has been holding back any physical intimacy since going off her anti-depressants.  It goes downhill from there.

After drawing the audience in with some amusing observations about the irony of an Eiffel Tower onesie and Abby’s failure at her chosen career (“To be an actress you have to love to suffer and I only like to suffer.”) the playwright spends the rest of the evening hinting at, and eventually revealing in tiny morsels, the many issues involving these two arrested adolescents, including addiction, deception, finances and commitment.  Eventually, things start getting seriously dangerous.  Keller and Dizzia do a great job of initially coming off as a cute, if somewhat quirky, couple and slowly blending into the transitions that reveal the darker sides of their marriage.

Serving as a representation of maturity is Phillip James Brannon as their landlord, Alioune, who Abby is shocked to discover – since he’s happily married with two children and a successful business – is only 25.  In the relatively small role of his wife, Amina, Pascale Armand has little more to do than to appear pissed off, which she does nicely.

Photos by Joan Marcus:  Top: Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller; Bottom:  Pascale Armand and Phillip James Brannon.

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If actor/playwright Jesse Eisenberg isn’t going to bother much with projecting his lines loud enough to reach row M of the cozy and acoustically fine Cherry Lane Theatre, then I’m not going to bother much with reviewing them.

To be fair, I checked with others and the hearing problem wasn’t just mine, and to be doubly fair – since his voice projection skills have nothing to do with his playwriting – I did review a copy of the script before concluding that The Revisionist, though given a fine production by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and director Kip Fagan, is far too familiar and unpolished to engage, though the presence of Vanessa Redgrave will undoubtedly fill the 179-seat playhouse.

Eisenberg plays rude, obnoxious bad-boy writer David suffering a block while trying to revise his sophomore effort.  He decides to get some undistracted work time by traveling to Poland to stay with his second cousin, Maria (Redgrave), whom he’s never met.  Why Poland?  Why Maria?  Why do they bond over a vodka-soused recitation of “Who’s On First?”  I don’t know.

The overly patient and generous Maria puts up with David’s spoiled nonsense because she is longing to release to some relation a family secret from her childhood during the German occupation.  (Who’s the revisionist now?)  Providing breaks from their implausible scenes are nice moments between Maria and a gregarious cab driver pal, played by Daniel Oreskes.

Photo of Vanessa Redgrave and Jesse Eisenberg by Sandra Coudert.

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Posted on: Wednesday, March 06, 2013 @ 05:17 PM Posted by: Michael Dale | Leave Feedback

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About Michael: After 20-odd years singing, dancing and acting in dinner theatres, summer stocks and the ever-popular audience participation murder mysteries (try improvising with audiences after they?ve had two hours of open bar), Michael Dale segued his theatrical ambitions into playwriting. The buildings which once housed the 5 Off-Off Broadway plays he penned have all been destroyed or turned into a Starbucks, but his name remains the answer to the trivia question, "Who wrote the official play of Babe Ruth's 100th Birthday?" He served as Artistic Director for The Play's The Thing Theatre Company, helping to bring free live theatre to underserved communities, and dabbled a bit in stage managing and in directing cabaret shows before answering the call (it was an email, actually) to become BroadwayWorld.com's first Chief Theatre Critic. While not attending shows Michael can be seen at Shea Stadium pleading for the Mets to stop imploding. Likes: Strong book musicals and ambitious new works. Dislikes: Unprepared celebrities making their stage acting debuts by starring on Broadway and weak bullpens.