Ben Peltz - Page 16

After reading far too many obituaries claiming, while not exactly mourning, the death of the Broadway musical, insisting that the art form can only be revived by injections of the kind of music that appeals to today's young audiences, I decided to take a night off from cabarets and piano bars a couple of Sundays ago to see what kind of songs were going to save the hallowed grounds of Gershwin, Porter and Rodgers.

It's not shaping up to be a very promising season for alumni of The Carol Burnett Show.  Just like the recently closed Viagra Falls, Kenny Solms' It Must Be Him offers a terrific company of comical pros working hard to inject any mirth possible into ninety minutes of tepid material.

Though Teresa Deevy was arguably the world's most famous female playwright in 1942, the year she completed her class-conscious romance Wife To James Whelan, the new management of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, which had already produced six of her plays, turned it down.  The once-prolific career of the dramatist whose love for theatre began after being diagnosed at age 20 as incurably deaf due to Meniere's disease, skidded to a halt, making her name, at least on this shore, all but forgotten now.

'I should have taken the jail time,' moans the solo character in Randy Cohen's The Punishing Blow, not quite under his breath.

Lovers of the hair bands of 70s, 80s and 90s who find Rock of Ages just too intellectually complex shall rejoice at the arrival of Power Balladz, the show that puts the 'z' in 'rock anthem.'  I'm just not certain where exactly it puts it.

I was forty-five years old when a theatre professional I greatly admired first took me out to lunch to discuss his lifetime of experience and my fledgling career as a critic.  If my mother were alive to see it, I'm sure she would find nothing creepy about the scene.  But in his frequently clever coming-of-age-in-the-theatre story, Secrets of The Trade, playwright Jonathan Tolins teases the audience with moments of potential creepiness in drawing out the relationship between an 18-year-old aspiring Broadway Baby and the decades-older Tony-collecting writer/director he idolizes. 

Congratulations to David Burtka and Neil Patrick Harris who are expecting twins this fall by way of a surrogate.  Now there's two kids who are going to have the entire score of Les Misérables memorized by the time they're five.

I just spent the last two days trying to figure out why the bookwriter/lyricist of Spring Awakening was working as a flight attendant.

Family fun is rarely as tantalizingly edgy as when that troupe from of the old days of new vaudeville, The Flying Karamazov Brothers, is in town.  Their return engagement of 4Play, an exploration of the rhythms shared by music, juggling and humor, is performed with the ensemble's trademark inspired lunacy and dazzling skill.  And with founder Paul Magid, the sole member of the original gang still performing, sharing the stage with the youthful trio of Stephen Bent, Mark Ettinger, and Rod Kimball, there is the added charm of seeing an older mentor passing on the traditions of his art to a new generation.

Back in the day, the great ladies of the theatre were known to provide their own dresses and gowns as they toured the provinces in contemporary dramas and comedies.  And while today's Off-Broadway productions generally have costume designers to handle such matters, at least one Obie-winner, Donna Lynne Champlin, is doing her part to keep that tradition alive in Transport Group's enchanting production of See Rock City & Other Destinations.  And as the newlywed actress explains, the gown she wears in the musical's final scene isn't the only item that had previously played a starring role in her wedding ceremony...

Bernadette Peters just had to go and ruin it for everybody, didn't she.  Well, maybe not for everybody, but certainly for the unfortunate soul who will be honored in June with this season's Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical.  Because in all probability the honor will be forever cursed by the unavoidable sidebar, 'Yeah, but was she better than Bernadette Peters in A Little Night Music?'

All that was missing was an ice cold can of beer in my hand as I sat back in my folding beach chair and took in the sights as I imagined the ocean waves of Coney Island crashing in the distance.  No wait... maybe that was really the sound of the crashing waters of Niagara Falls.  Or was I at The Alamo?  And what exactly is this Rock City that all the barn rooftops say I should be seeing?

'So what are you seeing next?' is a question I'm frequently asked and every year around this time when I answer, 'Broadway's Rising Stars.  It's a concert at Town Hall with recent college and theatre school graduates singing showtunes,' I often get that look of pity that presumes that sitting through stuff like this is the price I pay for getting comps to see Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch in A Little Night Music.

There's something very endearing about watching a couple of old pros like Bernie Kopell and Lou Cutell exercise their finely tuned comedic chops as a pair of elderly widowers looking for a night of excitement; especially when that excitement comes in the form of Teresa Ganzel, who displays ample comic skills herself as the shapely blonde goodtime girl with a heart of gold.  Add another actor and this trio could deliver a very enjoyable production of The Sunshine Boys.  But alas, the vehicle they ride into the Little Shubert, Viagara Falls, is an anaemic sex comedy that wastes their talents and the audience's patience.

In Ten Reasons I Won't Go Home With You, now playing as part of the Midtown InterNational Theatre Festival, actress/stand-up comic Kelly Nichols plays Katie, a smart, funny and single New Yorker looking to find her one true love.  But as bookwriter of the show, which is inspired by her own dating highs and lows, Nichols is happy playing the field; seeking out and supervising the work of seven composer/lyricist combinations to create the score.  I asked her about this unusual process for creating a new musical.

I'll be blunt.  I'm not going to go into much detail about the problems with composer/bookwriter Rob Broadhurst and lyricist/bookwriter Brent Black's teenage Faustian musical, I'll Be Damned, since it's a fledgling effort and the Jaradoa Theater Company offers seats for a comparatively low price.  The production will certainly be perking up the interest of Broadway fans with its casting of the broad and belty Mary Testa and popular up-and-comer Kenita R. Miller playing featured roles, but the piece is not ready to be reviewed.

So the big theatre buzz on Sunday morning was generated from a New York Times op-ed piece by violinist Paul Woodiel, currently employed by the Broadway production of West Side Story.  As the long-time friend of that show's composer, Leonard Bernstein, put it, '(A)fter 500 performances, our producers have told us and our union that in order to cut costs they will chop our string section in half, releasing five musicians and 'replacing' them with a synthesizer piped in from another room. I don't think Lenny would have approved.'

When it was hip to be hep I was hep but since it's no longer hip to be hep I sometimes get confused by today's pop stars. Every time I see Lady Gaga I keep thinking Leigh Bowery has lost a lot of weight and for the longest time I thought Beyoncé was the name of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's last musical before it was changed to Road Show.

What a difference sixteen years can make.  A toddler can become a voter, an innovation can become a cliché and, in the case of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, a tense drama can turn into fluff romantic comedy.

It would certainly be an interesting experience for modern playgoers to travel back in time and see how The Merchant of Venice was first received by Shakespeare's audiences.  Those only familiar with the play's famous, 'Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions...' speech, spoken by the moneylender Shylock, might just assume the author meant it to be a drama attacking anti-Semitic tendencies of the day.