Ben Peltz - Page 13

Stephen Sondheim famously commented that his Sweeney Todd is an opera when performed in an opera house and a musical when performed in a theatre.  A similar comparison might be made for composer/lyricist Joe Iconis' Things To Ruin, which in the past several years has played New York engagements in a legitimate theatre (Second Stage), two quasi-theatre/music spaces (Ars Nova and the much-missed Zipper Factory) and two music venues (Joe's Pub and its current home for two more performances, (Le) Poisson Rouge).

In the roughly five years between November of 1935 and December of 1940, the team of Rodgers and Hart opened nine new musicals on Broadway.  These included revolutionary shows like On Your Toes, which changed the use of dance in musical theatre, and the underappreciated Pal Joey, which brought new sophistication to the characters and themes that could be featured in a musical.  There were also popular hits like Babes In Arms, The Boys From Syracuse, Jumbo and Too Many Girls that introduced classic American songbook entries like 'My Funny Valentine,' 'The Lady Is A Tramp,' 'Falling In Love With Love,' 'My Romance' and 'I Didn't Know What Time It Was.'

Though the sexual revolution was revving into full force in 1965, you'd never know it by America's popular entertainment.  Barbara Eden may have been dressed in a belly dancer outfit while starring in the new hit series, I Dream of Jeannie, but the network censors made sure her belly remained covered.  The next year Marlo Thomas' That Girl would begin a five-year TV relationship with her boyfriend Donald, but at the end of each romantic date they'd end the evening alone in their own separate apartments.

The thought crossed my mind more than once during the intermission of Rick Elice's delightfully funny romp, Peter and the Starcatcher, now playing at the New York Theatre Workshop.  Why was the versatile comic actor, Christian Borle, fresh from an acclaimed dramatic turn as Prior Walter in Signature's Angels in America, now regulated to a perfectly respectable but not exactly choice ensemble role in this prequel to J. M. Barrie's tale of Peter Pan?

With celebrity anti-Semitism once again making headlines very shortly after The Public Theater's production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice ended its Broadway run, it almost seems a well-timed retaliation that Theatre for a New Audience's excellent mounting make a return visit to Gotham.

It isn't just Curtis Moore's action-accenting electric guitar licks that give Richard Thomas a rock star presence in director Barry Edelstein's swift and rowdy production of Timon of Athens, a stinging morality tale attributed as a collaboration of sorts between William Shakespeare and the younger scribe, Thomas Middleton.  Though scholars will call the piece incomplete and problematic, the star gives a charismatic performance that glides through the rough patches.

The most touching, delicately nuanced and beautifully realized work in The Public Theater's premiere production of Compulsion is, quite honestly, a wooden performance.   Rinne Groff's fictionalized tale of the Broadway dramatization of Anne Frank's diary begins with a life-sized marionette depicting the young girl, pencil in hand, innocently writing down thoughts that she most likely never dreamed would be so immortalized.  As a voice quotes how the adolescent feels, 'in spite of everything,' Matt Acheson's creation, manuevered by Emily DeCola, Daniel Fay and Eric Wright, moves with remarkably understated detail, her frozen face and stiff body nevertheless communicating heartbreaking sincerity through Anne Frank's words.  Unfortunately the rest of the evening seems freakishly overplayed by comparison.

The always pleasing Gregg Edelman is an actor with a special knack for revealing the educated, articulate side of America's Average Joe and in Black Tie, A.R. Gurney's latest comedy inspired by his WASPy Buffalo upbringing, that talent is put to exceptional use.

The Red Bull Theater, those specialists in making Jacobean drama hip without going hipster, have assembled an excellent company for Jesse Berger's vividly realized mounting of the 1621 rarity, The Witch of Edmonton.

The biggest Broadway event of 1937 was undoubtedly the gala opening night of I'd Rather Be Right.  Not only did the new musical boast a score by Richard Rodger and Lorenz Hart and a book by George S. Kaufman (who also directed) and Moss Hart (the pair had just won that year's Pulitzer for You Can't Take It With You), but the star was no less than the grand old man of Broadway - who many will argue invented the book song and dance musical comedy as we know it today - George M. Cohan, playing the role of then-President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Never before and never since has a sitting U.S. president been the leading character in a Broadway musical.

Name your musical The Road To Qatar! and in less than five words and an exclamation point you've communicated to your audience what to expect; a zany, lightweight, tuneful fish-out-of-water comedy set in an exotic locale featuring a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby-ish pair with a healthy dose of sex and romance provided by a Dorothy Lamour-ish babe.  And for a good deal of their pocket-sized ninety-minute musical, Stephen Cole (book and lyrics) and David Krane (music) deliver as promised.  At its best, The Road To Qatar! is a funny, breezy musical comedy hoot with some legitimately toe-tapping melodies.  But while enjoyable, the material isn't quite memorable, though the current production at The York has the feel of an early version of something that could be whipped into a pretty terrific show.

In April of 1949, Rodgers and Hammerstein shocked the Theatre World by writing a song for their new musical professing that humans developed racial prejudice by nurture and not by nature.  Later that same year, a scene in the new musical by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill showed two racially different young boys innocently striking up a quick friendship, unaware of why anyone would object.

The New York stage is often a haven for self-destructive couples on display, but rarely is that self-destruction so bluntly in view as in Rajiv Joseph's intriguing Gruesome Playground Injuries.  The work of this imaginative playwright, who'll be making his Broadway debut later this season with his Pulitzer finalist, A Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, grows more interesting with each new piece to hit town and director Scott Ellis' darkly funny Second Stage production is terrifically unsettling.

Though I try to avoid pronouncing century-old plays as being as relevant today they were a hundred years ago, a little tweaking here and there - perhaps the mentioning of a critically acclaimed musical that fails at the box office while another that suffers from horrible pre-opening word of mouth nevertheless enjoys a healthy advance sale - would make Arnold Bennett's 1909 media satire, What The Public Wants, feel as though it were written last night.

Back in the 1930s, when hip New Yorkers got their doses of political satire by taking in the latest Broadway musical comedy, it wasn't uncommon for then-President FDR to pop up in a show; either in person, as played by George M. Cohan in Rodgers and Hart's I'd Rather Be Right or, more frequently, through comical lyrics, such as those penned by Harold Rome in Pins and Needles and Cole Porter in Leave It To Me!

I'm usually not one to sit in judgment of my journalistic colleagues but when one of them is up on stage performing, what's a theatre critic to do?  Fortunately, I can honestly report that Matt Windman, known for his snappy reviews in amNew York and on Theatremania.com, did a fine job in the small role of 'Matt Windman,' on opening night of Paper Mill's funny and heart-tugging production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.  (Actually, the role would have been a little larger if he knew how to spell 'palestra' correctly.)

Actors who bear a substantial resemblance to a legendary celebrity or historical figure are often inspired to turn that stroke of luck into a one-person show.  If Bern Cohen ever had any doubts about his resemblance to political activist Abbie Hoffman, they were certainly dissolved one evening in the 1970s when Ohio police arrested him and put him through a brutal interrogation under the assumption that he was the famous 'Clown Prince of the Revolution' who co-founded the Youth International Party (the Yippies), was a member of the 'Chicago Eight' who were charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot after disruptive demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention and wrote a New York Times bestseller, even though it was titled Steal This Book.

The central figure of Diana Amsterdam's tragedy of manners is a young, terminally ill accountant named Paul (Ted Caine) who spends most of the evening silently lying in a hospital bed surrounded by a carnival of denial.  Unable to communicate, it's unclear how much of his wife, Sheila's (Christine Rowan),  mask of perkiness he must endure as she forces positive energy into the room with plans for their future and uses an annoyingly motherly tone to praise the fact that he ate a whole half a banana today and kept it all down.

First-time playwright Tommy Nohilly seems intent on ramming edgy family dysfunctions in the audience's faces with Blood From A Stone.  Unfortunately there's no play underneath to support it all.  Director Scott Elliott and The New Group do a heck of a good job covering up the flaws of the text most of the time, but the nearly three hours of animosity and head-banging symbolism can't help looking very silly now and then, despite the skilled ensemble.

How remarkably tragic it is that the triumphant opening night of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, perhaps the greatest comedy ever penned in the English language, was also the event that led to the author's personal downfall and eventual public and financial ruin.