Ben Peltz - Page 5

Sophie's choice was a casual coin flip compared with decision forced upon a young mother in Alexander Dinelaris' drama recalling the Ottoman Empire's Armenian genocide, Red Dog Howls.  As a 91-year-old grandmother enduring life with the memory of a horrific confrontation with three sadistic Turks, Kathleen Chalfant gives an extraordinarily convincing performance balancing pain and dark humor, climaxing with an agonizing scene where she reveals a sickening secret.  But Chalfant's performance, certainly worth remembering when award season comes along, is all the production has to recommend.

While nobody ever said musical theatre was easy – at least, nobody with any real knowledge of the art – you would think that in writing a musical about the first worldwide beloved figure of the 20th Century there wouldn't be too much trouble establishing empathy.  But the surprisingly dry and emotionless Chaplin, presented in a respectably strong Broadway production, tries to cram so many facts into its two acts that there's Little Room left for feeling.

It's not unusual for theatergoers at 45 Bleecker Street to see cheery 8x10 photos of the actors they're about to see displayed in the lobby, but those attending Culture Project's 10th Anniversary production of The Exonerated are greeted by more somber headshots.  Mounted before them are thirteen portraits by painter Daniel Bolick.  Titled The Innocence Portraits, they are the faces of people who spent 10… 18… as much as 27-and-a-half years in prison – a combined 71 years on death row – for crimes that DNA and other evidence eventually proved they did not commit.

In the life they had planned for themselves, upscale suburbanites Mary and Ben probably never thought they'd be trading hosting duties at weekend barbeques with people like Kenny and Sharon.  In the life they had planned for themselves Mary and Ben surely never imagined they'd be neighbors with people like Kenny and Sharon.  But with their dreams of a secure and prosperous life temporarily – at least they hope temporarily – put on hold because of a precarious American economy, the couple next door just might be a mirror image of what is only a few missed payments away.

Subtle British comedies of sex, morality and class like Mary Broome rarely wash up on these shores without the name George Bernard Shaw attached to them.  But thankfully the beachcombers of the Mint Theatre Company, specialists in providing sturdy mountings of the once popular/now obscure, came across this 1911 Allan Monkhouse curiosity that hasn't been seen in New York since 1919.

When it comes to the subject of transracial adoption, it would be nice to think that any child is better off with two loving and supportive parents of a different race than with nothing permanent at all, but in Bennett Windheim's challenging play, Normalcy, which deals specifically with the issue of white parents adopting black children, there is a passionate argument presented that claims such an act will inevitably cause serious damage for the child.

Before a grade-school backdrop depicting heathery hills, a pair of confused theatre-goers struggle with an outdated map of Broadway while an offstage chorus sings, “Brink of doom, Brink of do-om,” and before you can say “Come ye to the spoof,” the cast of Forbidden Broadway: Alive and Kicking is promising that, “Just like Jesus and Judy Garland, we're resurrected again.”

Reviewing mindless fun can be dangerous terrain.  In the first half of the last century magnificent wits like P.G. Wodehouse and George S. Kaufman wrote the books for mindlessly fun musical comedies showcasing scores by the likes of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and the Gershwins that invented a new sophistication in American music and lyrics.  The plots may have been silly, but the mindless fun of 1920s and 30s (Of Thee I Sing, Anything Goes, The Boys From Syracuse for starters) was often literate and inventive.

The latest addition to the growing genre of stage adaptations of plays by the great masters that scale their sources down to a collection of indecipherable scenes that are just trying their darndest to be erotic is Playing With Fire, The Private Theatre's environmental/multi-media combo that is rumored to have something to do with August Strindberg.

So it was just announced that top shelf musical comedy performer Leslie Kritzer will be joining the cast of NEWSical on the same night Perez Hilton joins the cast.  I wonder…  Will this nationally known entertainment blogger be so impressed by the audaciously funny girl with the thrilling belt that he starts mentioning to his countless readers how sublime she'd be starring in a certain Fanny Brice bio-musical?  (With him as Nick, of course!)

Has there ever been a father/daughter theatrical combo that sets off sparks like when HAllie Foote acts in the plays of her father, the great Horton Foote?  For Primary Stages, she's been heartbreaking as the emotionally repressed title character in The Day Emily Married and downright hilariously self-centered in Dividing The Estate.  Now, in the company's package of three Foote one-acts titled Harrison, TX, she and Andrea Lynn Green open the evening with crackling comic chemistry that's firmly grounded in reality.

Before a frustrated New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses grumbled, 'Well, let's build the bastard a theater,' and designated city funds to build the Delacorte, Joseph Papp's dream of bringing free Shakespeare to everyone was being achieved by mobile units of actors that toured the city in small scale productions.  Now in its second year, The Public Theater's Mobile Shakespeare Unit has been recreating that experience for audiences that free Shakespeare In The Park cannot reach.

Once upon a summer of '83, a young aspiring actor named Woody Harrelson became close pals with a Harlem-raised fellow named Frankie Hyman while they both worked a construction job in Houston.  Eventually, they went their separate ways; one becoming famous for doing something other than playwriting and the other pursuing a career in writing, although these many years later he apparently hasn't written anything he would care to mention in a Playbill bio.

Two days after the death of its author, I had the pleasure of taking in director Michael Wilson's outstanding revival of The Best Man – one of the best evenings Broadway had to offer last season – for the third time.  Gore Vidal most certainly went out with a landslide victory.

...we'll still be playin' his songs.

Barely looking, and certainly not sounding, much older than she was over thirty years ago, when her clarion vocals and chipper charm earned her a Tony nomination for playing an unexpectedly pregnant college student in Baby, you might be surprised to know that the weekend before her Monday night concert at Town Hall, Liz Callaway was in Pittsburgh playing the final four performances of a stint as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

The last time the 1933 West End musical Nymph Errant was revived in New York, the Medicine Show Theatre Company advertised their production with the selling point that they haven't removed any of the show's racism.  Now, while going to see a racist musical is not exactly my idea of a fun night out, there is a certain historic value to watching older musicals performed with the texts the authors wrote, opposed to the frequent occurrence of slapping their books with labels like “creaky” or “dated” and having contemporary authors make wholesale revisions to transform them into suitable entertainments for modern audiences.

America may have abruptly lost its Camelot on the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, but in the extraordinarily rich and tender new musical Dogfight, it was the night before that a pair of drops in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea began to sparkle.

When the original Broadway production of Fela! closed in January of 2011, Zuccotti Park was little more than a block-long plaza where Wall Streeters would enjoy a bit of lunchtime sun.  For now, at least, the park has pretty much returned to that status, aside from the tourists taking photos of themselves at the spot now famous for birthing the Occupy Wall Street movement.

When Phil Geoffrey Bond was named Programming Director at 54 Below, it became a given that the theatre district's spanking new nightlife venue would include on its schedule Broadway-centric evenings geared for the knowledgeable musical theatre fan who appreciates both past glories and upcoming works in progress.  The producer/host of the Laurie Beechman Theatre's popular Sondheim Unplugged series now makes a significant debut in the same capacities with New Mondays, dedicated to giving audiences a sampling of fresh material from accomplished theatre composers and lyricists.