Ben Peltz - Page 7

“Are you the great white hope?” a Boston sports reporter asks the Indiana-grown college star newly acquired by the home team; a player expected to help his suspiciously pale-hued group of teammates win basketball championships.

In October of 1971, three days after the original Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar began its week and a half of previews, the title song of what is considered to be the world's first rock opera was heard on American television's highest-rated show.  No, it wasn't The Ed Sullivan Show, which had ended its run earlier in the year, but the controversial new sitcom, All In The Family.

If energy and physical commitment equaled craft and technique, Tracie Bennett's performance as Judy Garland in End Of The Rainbow might be considered one of the great triumphs of the season. But Peter Quilter's flimsy play offers her little in the way of support and director Terry Johnson has her playing more highly strung caricature than character, reducing the enterprise to little more than an endurance test for those at both sides of the footlights.

Before the audience members began to take their seats for the Off-Broadway premiere of Once this past December, members of the press were already sent an email announcing that the production would be moving to Broadway following its limited run at the New York Theatre Workshop.  Thus, the fact that the critical response to the show supported such a move seemed superfluous.

Despite the loveable antics of those hard-working ladies from Texas, Broadway musicals have always been a little awkward around prostitutes.  The book of New Girl In Town (based on Anna Christie) gets tongue-tied when trying to be honest about its title character's former profession and the creators of Sweet Charity turned Nights of Cabiria's prostitute protagonist into New York's most chaste taxi dancer.  To this day I'm certain there are little boys performing in Oliver! who believe Nancy is some kind of den mother and Bet is her helpful assistant.

In the years between the fall of vaudeville and the rise of Comedy Clubs, Americans looking to enjoy some live stand-up would frequently gather at their local jazz venue, where rising stars like Lenny Bruce and Mort Saul would offer their observations in a rhythmic style that many would say mimicked the licks themselves.  In his musical tale of losing his job, No Place To Go, playwright/composer/lyricist/performer Ethan Lipton tells the story of mounting disappointments in wry growls of spoken comical riffs that glide into an after-hours score heavily infused with jazz and blues.

With its funny, sexy and sentimental book by master craftsman George Abbott and a catchy and clever score by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Damn Yankees is a textbook example of the kind of big and brassy musicals that made Broadway's Golden Age glitter.  Paper Mill's terrific new production is packed with boisterous comic performances and, as the song says, miles and miles and miles of heart.

About ten years ago, Tommy Tune was starring in an Off-Broadway revue; a nightclub-style act he had been performing in Las Vegas.  I hadn't seen the show yet, but one night I was browsing through a theatre chat board and read a comment by someone who had just seen a preview.  The writer was very excited to report about one of those special moments the audience witnessed that night that could only happen in live theatre.

Sidney Goldfarb's Hot Lunch Apostles might have been quite the shocker when The Talking Band's original production, with its run-down carnival setting that has strippers trying to spice up business by presenting religious tableaus, premiered at La MaMa in 1983.  But if director Paul Zimet's spirited revival offers more of a nostalgic look at the type of avant-garde that had congress debating the value of arts funding three decades ago, the material is wrapped in a fun, participatory production.

Somewhere around the middle of Denis O'Hare and Lisa Peterson's solo play adaptation of Homer titled An Iliad, the storyteller, known simply as The Poet, halts his detailing of the Trojan War because something he just mentioned reminds him of an event that occurred in... And then he takes several minutes to sequentially list every major conflict in recorded history from ancient days to the present.

In its opening moments, it would be completely understandable to assume that Assistance, Leslye Headland's viciously fun satire of the cutthroat dealings among entry-level twenty-somethings, might be mimicking David Mamet's dark comedy of film executives, Speed-the-Plow. 

It's not your garden variety playwright who can draw you into a two-person drama with an extended dialogue comparing the healing effectiveness and fragrance of competing brands of foot salts.  But the comfortable comic exchanges that sweeten the early moments of Athol Fugard's Blood Knot cleverly turn horrific by the final blackout, thanks to an excellent pair of performances created under the playwright's own direction.

Though Eugene O'Neill was a grownup thirty-one years of age when Beyond The Horizon, his first full length play, opened on Broadway in 1920, the landmark domestic drama is boiling over with so much youthful angst you might expect its trio of lovers to start whipping out microphones to belt out emo rock numbers.

Shortly into Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, the 17th Century Italian scientist shows his young companion a model of the Ptolemaic system of the universe, a gyroscope-looking creation depicting the sun and planets and other celestial bodies revolving on golden bands of orbits around the earth.  And if you choose that moment to take a look around you at Classic Stage Company's inviting new production, you'll notice how cleverly the environment created by set designer Adrianne Lobel replicates the look of the model, with large celestial globes suspended above the Earthlike playing area and hints of their golden orbits.

The controversy remains fresh as a Daisey down at The Public Theater, where extemporaneous monologist Mike Daisy returns for a new engagement of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

Oddly enough, the most interesting personal observation to be pondered in Shatner's World: We Just Live In It is spoken, not by the titular William Shatner, but by Patrick Stewart.  In a television clip, a conversation between the two captains of the Starship Enterprise, Stewart explains how, despite his acclaim as a classical actor of the stage, he's quite certain that his role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, is what he will ultimately be remembered for.  And he's fine with that.

Given its pedigree as a Pulitzer winner that swept every playwriting award an Off-Broadway entry could win during its premiere run in 1997, you would think that Paula Vogel's How I Learned To Drive would follow the lead of other Off-Broadway successes like Driving Miss Daisy, Steel Magnolias and, most recently, Wit, and return to New York in a Broadway production.

The original Broadway cast album of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along is one of those handful of recordings - like Mack and Mabel and Candide - that a musical theatre lover can listen to hundreds of times without hearing a clue as to why the show flopped.  The quick answer, and usually the most unfair one, is 'the book.'  More often, though, the more complete answer is ambition.

When The Public Theater premiered Adam Guettel's Myths and Hymns in 1998 - under the title Saturn Returns - it was presented as a simple song cycle using chamber arrangements of pop, gospel and classical styles in a loose theme of exploring the human relationship to faith, utilizing traditional hymns and ancient myths.  In the new production presented by Prospect Theater Company, director Elizabeth Lucas, through snippets of connecting dialogue and short, silent scenes, gives the evening a bit of a narrative.  The result is too thin to add any dramatic heft, but not so intrusive as to distract from the poetry of the material and the tender and touching performances of her beautifully singing cast.