Kristin Salaky - Page 10

Aren't you tired of presidential candidates choosing rock songs like 'Barracuda' and 'Our Country' for their campaign themes? Who listens to that kind of music? (I mean, besides 99.9% of the country.) If these guys really want to snare the valuable showtune voter block, maybe they should try being introduced by a selection from the Stephen Sondheim oeuvre.

Some actors are known not only for their stage work but for their political or personal beliefs or for events in their off-stage life. Would you ever avoid seeing a play you might normally be interested in because you find something about an actor's personal life objectionable? Let us know in our new poll.

Lee Blessing's plays have always shown a wonderful knack for vivid story-telling (A Walk In The Woods, Cobb), but in his new Off-Broadway offering, A Body Of Water, the author is intentionally not telling us the story. Likewise, I won't be completely telling you the story of why I found the piece, on the whole, a letdown, because to do so would reveal too many details best explained on the playwright's timeline. But if I found fault with the play itself, director Maria Mileaf's Primary Stages production is a fine mounting.

While it's exceedingly doubtful that Kristin Scott Thomas' Madame Arkadina could play a 15-year-old, as she famously claims in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, a 25-year-old may not exactly be out of her range. With a whimsical eccentricity, sprightly manner and a knockout figure, this centerpiece of Ian Rickson's Royal Court production - visiting the Walter Kerr with a mixed cast of Brits and Yanks - is the most youthful presence on stage. And unlike many fine actresses who have played the role looking much older than the character's stated 43 years, her Arkadina is not a faded stage star looking foolish as she clings to a long-lost youth, but the hot mom of a 25-year-old who has little intention of aging into an adult.

They say you can get a lot of things on Craig's List; a date… a job… arrested… But actor and stand-up comic Bob Greenberg got the title of Best Alfred Hitchcock Look-A-Like of 2008. BroadwayWorld was on hand for photo coverage of that prestigious competition when it was held a couple of weeks ago on the Cort Theatre stage after a performance of The 39 Steps, but let's hear the story from the winner himself.

Thanks to Wayman Wong for bringing this New York Post article to my attention. It's not bad enough that we've seen the demise of so many New York theatres in recent years, now five of the buildings on West 28th Street that made up historic Tin Pan Alley are up for sale and likely to be demolished in order to put up a high rise.

It's easy to forget how ravishingly absorbing an evening at Equus can be if you only consider it as Peter Shaffer's scripted words. Though certainly not deficient in providing a neat little psychological morality drama, what makes the text succeed so well is that, like a great ballet composer, the author knows how to hand over to other artists the opportunity to use his work as a springboard for the creation of emblazing visuals that illuminate with lofty creativity. Equus may not read like great theatre, but director Thea Sharrock's elegant cerebral nightmare of a production shows it can sure play like it.

Ah, there's nothing like watching the marriage of a pair of tortured intellectuals crumble before our eyes from the safe distance of an auditorium seat to happily send audience members to the nearest nightcap retreat with that special glow that comes from a satisfying night at the theatre. And actors Elizabeth Marvel and Norbert Leo Butz, along with director Austin Pendleton, do their darndest to whip up a frenzied evening of dangerous, verbally (and a bit physically) violent theatre. If playwright Michael Weller's Fifty Words were a complete enough piece to match its stellar production we might be close to having one of the must-see events of the season, but for now the two-character evening plays more like watching a pair of skilled actors doing exceptional scene work.

Although I hadn't read any of the first wave of reviews, by the time I was seated for my post-opening night press performance at the Hirschfeld it was pretty much common knowledge to the entire Broadway community that the new (and from the looks of her Playbill bio, the only) creation from bookwriter/composer/lyricist Jill Santoriello brought out gobs of that legendary New York theatre critic acid wit among the great majority of my colleagues.

Okay, so New York City Opera has commissioned Philip Glass to write a new opera about Walt Disney. Let's start taking bets. How many clueless parents are going to be taking their toddlers because they assume the Disney name means it's for kids?

How exactly does Curly know the height of an elephant's eye? I don't mean to doubt the intelligence or inquisitiveness of the guy, but if I asked a pre-statehood Oklahoma cowboy how high the corn has grown, the first response I'd expect wouldn't be a comparison to the height of a proboscidea native to Africa and Asia. Perhaps he found a picture book in some public library, or maybe that famous Thomas Edison film of the electrocution of Topsy, the Coney Island elephant, had made its way to a local picture house.

As I was leaving the Mint Theatre after their simply marvelous production of J.B. Priestly's 1957 drama, The Glass Cage, I overheard a woman saying to her companion, 'That play had everything! Greed… love… revenge… sex… everything!'

In today's New York Post, Michael Riedel is critical of the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust for granting a $200,000 prize for the purpose of nurturing American Playwrights to Tony Kushner instead of to a deserving unknown. Earlier this year the Ed Kleban Award for most promising musical theatre lyricist ($100,000) went to David Lindsay-Abaire for his work in the upcoming Shrek

At the beginning of Dan Gordon's engrossing and uplifting drama, Irena's Vow, Tovah Feldshuh, as real life heroin Irena Gut Opdyke, is introduced to a high school auditorium filled with students to tell them about her experiences as a 19-year-old trying to hide 12 Jews in Nazi occupied Poland. At the end of the play she is reminding her young listeners that they are the last generation that will hear first hand accounts of the Holocaust's atrocities from those who survived it, and that it is their responsibility to never back away from confronting hatred.

[title of show] will be the first Broadway production to win a Tony Award while playing Off-Broadway. Just a hunch.

'Only the great deserve the darts of satire,' proclaimed an advertisement for the New York leg of the Bolshoi Ballet Company's 1936 American tour, a classy reply to the spoofing they were receiving from George Balanchine's dance piece La Princesse Zenobia, a highlight of George Abbott and Rodgers and Hart's Broadway hit On Your Toes.

While the phrase 'Shakespeare in the Park' brings to most New Yorker's minds thoughts of getting up early and waiting in line for hours to see one of the Public Theater's Delecorte productions, savvy Gothamites know that the warmer weather annually brings dozens of free outdoor Shakespeare performances to many of our public parks and community gardens that can be enjoyed by just showing up (usually with your own blanket or chair) at showtime.

There's an interesting point buried beneath the innocuous entertainment of writer/director Roger Bean's The Marvelous Wonderettes, a somewhat cute little show utilizing girl group and female soloist pop hits from the 1950s and 60s. Unfortunately, that interesting point could have easily been made with out the tedium of his vapid, unfunny book and standard story. But if you can disregard everything that happens between the songs and just enjoy the singing talents of Farah Alvin (the shy, geeky one), Beth Malone (the trouble-maker), Bets Malone (the air-headed, helium voiced blonde) and Victoria Matlock (Most Likely To Become Ann-Margret) you're apt to have an enjoyable time.

What's that? You've seen Spring Awakening 87 times and you were wondering if there were any other musicals about sex-crazed teenagers who rebel against their parents and express their innermost thoughts when time stands still and songs act as internal monologues? Well it just so happens the show for you played on Broadway, albeit briefly, over thirty years ago and is now receiving an absolutely hilarious revival at the York.

It's my firm belief that if composer Leroy Anderson, lyricist Joan Ford and bookwriter/lyricists Walter & Jean Kerr had named their brash and funny 1958 musical comedy about the love/hate relationship between a silent movie director and his reluctant star anything other than Goldilocks, it might not only have had a longer run than its five months on Broadway, but would have been a popular choice among regional and amateur theatres as well. With a good collection of snazzy tunes and well-crafted lyrics (most notably the semi-standard torcher, 'I Never Know When To Say When') and a book loaded with guffaws and wise-cracks (originally quipped by stars Elaine Stritch and Don Ameche), Goldilocks is a solid example of a show that, if not exactly a musical theatre triumph, provided a fun night out for audiences in an era when affordable ticket prices meant that not every Broadway production had to be a huge event.