Kristin Salaky - Page 11

The vocal miracle that is Marilyn Maye is once again working magic in the cozy confines of The Metropolitan Room, where, in the past two years, she's opened a wondrous quartet of engagements to break a 16-year exile from Manhattan.

Dan Wackerman, Artistic Director and frequent stage director for the Peccadillo Theatre Company, has regularly displayed a golden touch for mounting crackling revivals of long-forgotten Broadway plays like Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law, Dorothy Parker and Arnaud d'Usseau's The Ladies of the Corridor and, in an absolutely hilarious mounting, John Murray and Alan Boretz's Room Service. But with Charles MacArthur's 1942 political screwball farce, Johnny On A Spot, he and his Peccadillo cohorts attempt their toughest feat of alchemy yet in belief that this 4-performance Broadway flop was an unfortunate victim of the public's squelched taste for satire a mere month after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Congratulations to BroadwayWorld theatre critic Duncan Pflaster, whose latest playwrighting effort, Prince Trevor Amongst The Elephants, took home three awards at this year's Midtown InterNational Theatre Festival, including Outstanding Overall Production of a New Comedy Play and Outstanding Playwriting for a New Script, Play or Book of a Musical. We can't review Duncan's plays here on BroadwayWorld (ethics, ya know), though they're being produced more and more frequently around New York, but we can raise a proverbial glass when his talent is honored.

The only negative thing I'll say about Fela!, the Off-Broadway docu-musical inspired by the life of Nigerian political activist and musical revolutionary Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, is that it never engaged this martini-swilling Manhattanite who entered the theatre unschooled in the culture and politics of the protagonist's homeland. The professionalism, exuberance and entertainment value of the piece is undeniable and I imagine many of my dear readers would have a terrific time visiting 37 Arts these days. But unless you're going in with a full knowledge of and an emotional attachment to its controversial subject, you may find, save for a well done moment late in the game, there is little dramatic pull to the proceedings to sustain interest for its two and a half hours. An audience full of fans of this internationally known artist who died in 1997 might understandably be thrilled by Fela! but while its potent message of the power of music to combat oppression is certainly universal, it took a review of the text's stage directions and a bit of Googling for this neophyte to get a fuller picture of the life and culture on display.

In the latest edition of Opera News, Michael Portantiere asks Stephen Schwartz, Adam Guettel, Jason Robert Brown, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael John LaChiusa, Stephen Flaherty and Stew for their opinions on the difference between opera and musical theatre.

Though it took She Loves Me's Ilona Ritter just one trip to the library to discover the magic of books, musical theatre's bookwriters have traditionally been underappreciated for their vital contributions and dramatic artistry. This morning I actually blurted out at my computer screen, 'Damn, why didn't I think of this!!??,' while reading Matthew Murray's terrific feature on BroadwayStars about what he considers to be the best spoken scenes in musical theatre.

Marty Geiger is one of those colorful theatre junkies I often run into during intermissions or on chat boards. A robust gentleman of 60 and a lawyer by trade, he decided two years ago to venture into the world of cabaret performing. When I took my seat for his new show at Don't Tell Mama, Summer Baby, I wasn't really intending to review it; I was just supporting a nice guy who always has something interesting to say about the new musicals in town. But hey, it turns out Marty, with the

Attractive people saying bitchy things while wearing sexy outfits and drinking too much. No it's not another BroadwayWorld staff meeting, but New York Daily News entertainment writer Patrick Huguenin's Paper Dolls, a funny and promising new play about the world of celebrity gossip that just closed its run at the New York International Fringe Festival.

Noel Coward once asked in song, 'Why Must The Show Go On?' That thought might have been on the minds of Neil Diamond fans that, according to this article, walked out on his concert Monday night when the singer, who was diagnosed the next day with acute laryngitis, performed a complete concert in a raspy voice. Diamond has offered refunds for anyone making a request.

Though earlier in the primaries he admitted to being bored by showtunes like 'Oklahoma' in grade school, this Comedy Central article proves that Barack Obama has since developed quite the savvy taste for musical theatre. Unfortunately, the article fails to mention that John McCain was the original Mortimer in The Fantasticks.

Thanks to the gang at [title of show] the new parlor game sweeping the nation (or at least Chelsea) is to come up with unusual names for drag queens. The best one I could think of was 'Belle Jar' but Mike Ceceri of North Shore Music Theatre came up with what I humbly consider to be the best one evah….

Imagine Hamlet infused with a shot or two of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and you'll get an idea of the atmosphere of Moonwork's very clever and entertaining Bound In A Nutshell. Adaptors Gregory Sherman and Gregory Wolfe (who also directs) craft a new script exclusively out of lines from Shakespeare's text, resetting famous scenes and reassigning classic quotations into new contexts and creating a modern day setting where the Prince of Denmark is imprisoned in a mental institution, a surveillance camera fixed on him 24/7, for the murder of Polonius.

I'm all for creative non-traditional casting, but is Katie Holmes now playing Joe Keller, the successful businessman accused of selling faulty airplane parts to the U.S. government during World War II, in the upcoming Broadway revival of All My Sons? I only ask because this MSNBC blurb is about how she's starring in the production. I would think she'd be better suited for the supporting role of Ann Deever, the daughter of Keller's business partner who has been romantically involved with both of his two sons

While the creators of Desir may have had La Ronde in mind while dreaming up their sensual fantasia of backstage trysts, the sight of so many buff fellas in period undergarments, which, with all due respect to the sensational athletic skills on display, are certainly a selling point of the evening, reminded me more of an entry from playwright Robert Coles' legendary series of Cute Boys In Their Underpants adventures, namely Cute Boys In Their Underpants Go To France. (Yes, it's a real play!) Certainly if Olympic gymnastics offered points for eroticism (something I think they should seriously consider for London 2012), Desir would undoubtedly qualify as an evening of gold medal champions.

In this amusing and somewhat bittersweet interview with the BBC, Ruthie Henshall tells of being smuggled into Buckingham Palace regularly after performances of Cats in order to visit her secret boyfriend, Prince Edward. Though she was in love with the British royal, the relationship ended because she knew she could not continue her theatre career if they wed.

Yes, she sings it. And if you've never heard her sing it as a full-fledged, poised, articulate, sexy and self-effacingly humorous adult then you haven't really heard her sing it yet.

I never thought of myself as especially gossipy. Surely there are at least two other Michaels in this burg who set the gold standard at reporting that sort of stuff. But when ace press agent Richard Kornberg, the man who convinced half the city that Ben Brantley loved In My Life, says, 'Come here, Michael. You're gossipy,' I pay attention. So after handing me tickets for Friday night's performance of Absinthe, Kornberg wanted to make sure I knew that Daniel Bedingfield would be in the audience that night.

I generally refer to songs from musical theatre as showtunes but every so often I run into someone who thinks it's an inappropriate term. Tell us what you think in our new poll…

Sometime after Betty and Adolph and long before Hunter and Jeff, another pair of New York actors wrote a musical with juicy roles for themselves and achieved their dream of taking it to Broadway. Not exactly hippies, but inspired by the dramatic possibilities of the flower power movement, bookwriter/lyricists Gerome Ragni'>Gerome Ragni and James Rado'>James Rado devised a story where the former played Berger, a high school student and de facto leader of a tribe of Manhattan hippies, and the latter was his newly-drafted buddy Claude, who can't decide if he should join his friends in burning their draft cards and, if necessary, fleeing to Canada, or comply with his parents' wishes that he go fight in Vietnam for his country.

Please forgive my delay, dear readers, in jotting down a few thoughts on the latest Scott Siegel enterprise, the second annual All Singin', All Dancin', which scorched the Town Hall stage last Monday night. What with a bundle of new shows to take in since then (and a biggie opening up tonight) sometimes the task of summarizing a one-night-only revue has to be set aside briefly to write about new, longer-running productions.