Kristin Salaky - Page 9

'Why do I feel like a fucking tourist in my own neighborhood!?!' That is the angry, anguished cry of Robert, a Polish-Puerto Rican native of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who has seen the crime and neglect of his lifelong neighborhood remedied by a gentrifying influx of high-end restaurants, art galleries and expensive building complexes that have priced long-time residents out of their communities.

Penned by a pair of downtown revue writers (Betty Comden and Adolph Green), composed by a wunderkind New York Philharmonic conductor (Leonard Bernstein), choreographed by a Ballet Theatre soloist (Jerome Robbins) and originally directed by musical comedy master George Abbott, there's never been a musical on Broadway that mixes highbrow and lowbrow with such a wondrous cacophonous clash as On The Town.

For the benefit of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Equus star Daniel Radcliffe will be auctioning off the pair of Lucky Brand Jeans he wears in the show after matinee performances on November 22, 29 and December 6. What do you think? Tell us in our new poll…

'Sooner or later we're bound to get it right.' That's the final line of Road Show, the new Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical, directed by John Doyle, that's opened at The Public. It was also the final line of Bounce, the Harold Prince directed previous version of Road Show, which for a time was to be known as Gold!, that that did not make its presumed arrival to Broadway after tepidly received engagements in Chicago and Washington, back in ought three.

Early in the second act of My Vaudeville Man!, the captivating new musical at The York Theatre, Shonn Wiley, portraying eccentric dancer Jack Donahue, challenges four fellow vaudevillians to what's known as a tap drunk. Eventually, Buchanan will be a star on Broadway and a popular favorite at the Palace, but now he's a struggling 19-year-old kid who has taken to the bottle and is in need of quick cash. Each man throws five dollars into the pot, starts taking swigs from a bottle of rye and, most importantly, keeps dancing until only one is left standing. Wiley is the only one on stage, but he vividly paints the contest before our eyes, as Jack battles the endurance of his colleagues and his own inebriation until the competition turns violent. The piece is an extraordinary bit of dance drama, mixing humor, danger, grit and desperation, with Wiley's performance containing some of the best acting through dance we're apt to see this season.

Though last Sunday night was my first exposure to anything associated with the Disney triptych of made for television movies carrying the banner, High School Musical, it's my guess, judging from the enthusiastic reception the production received from an opening night audience loaded with young theatergoers, that fans of the series will not be disappointed. Paper Mill does their usual highly professional job, with a talented, energetic cast delivering Mark S. Hoebee's buoyant, quick-paced direction with gusto and singing attractively under music director Bruce W. Coyle. Denis Jones' choreography nicely fits the athletic and cheery requirements of the show's atmosphere and the design elements are sharply delivered via Kenneth Foy's kinetic set, Wade Laboissonniere's colorful, clique defining costumes and Tom Sturge's celebratory lights.

Yes, I know… Bury The Dead is not exactly the kind of title that's going to send box office sales into a tizzy. And sure, the Connelly Theatre, located on 4th Street between Avenues A & B, may be a perfectly lovely and intimate venue but it's a bit of an unpleasant hike from the nearest subway stop on a damp and chilly evening. But the seven-year-old Drama Desk and OBIE winning Transport Group has been regularly making the pilgrimage well worthwhile for playgoers seeking adventurous new material, inventive revivals and crackerjack acting. Their new spin on Irwin Shaw's 1936 anti-war drama is worth braving a hurricane from the Astor Place 6 line stop to get to. Hyperbole? Yes. So let me put it in more realistic terms. It would require one spectacular theatre season for this stirring and captivating re-imagination of Shaw's fascinating absurdist piece to not be considered one of its highlights. And if Donna Lynne Chaplin's performance is not considered one of the finest of the season it will mean we've been blessed with a year of staggering excellence in stage acting.

I try not to get involved with partisan politics on this blog, unless it's theatre related and can serve as a source for humor, but when one of our great contemporary playwrights has something to say about an important issue, I'm honored to spread the word.

I believe it was Chekhov who said that if a hammer appears on stage in the first act, somebody better use it to build a shelf in the second act. Well, Adam Rapp's Kindness contains no carpentry but there is quite a bit of suspense involving the appearance of a hammer. And while the play, directed by the author, is a bit of a cruise to nowhere, it's still an interesting excursion with an odd mixture of tragic realism and broad comedy (at one point someone actually walks into a wall as a gag) gamely played by an engaging cast.

After the Broadway opening of Billy Elliot, the Tony Awards with have to consider how to handle the nomination eligibility of David Alvarez, Trent Kowalik and Kiril Kulish, who share the title role and alternate performances equally. What do you think is the best solution? Let us know in our new poll.

If you're feeling nostalgic for those sweet innocent days when guys could continually act like self-centered jerks and intelligent, attractive women would sleep with them anyway, a trip to Second Stage's funny and energetic revival of Howard Korder's Boy's Life is certainly in order.

Thanks to my BroadwayWorld colleague Adrienne Onofri for sending me this video of a showtune singin' hockey mom making her political preference known.

Opening night isn't exactly going smoothly for the Off-Off Broadway production of Love Child, a modern adaptation of the infrequently performed Euripides drama Ion, presented at the Sausage King Space in Red Hook. A noisy audience member in the front row can't silence her cell phone and hearing aid, an actor has passed out on stage, an upstaging diva is trying to steal the show and a large grease stain on the floor makes each entrance and exit a death-defying experience. But on opening night of Love Child, Daniel Jenkins and Robert Stanton's two-man comedy presented by Primary Stages, everything was crackling with hilarious split-second precision.

Although Mike Daisey's exploration of national defense, past and present, If You See Something Say Something, arrives at Joe's Pub just in time to serve as a companion piece to the Metropolitan Opera's production of Dr. Atomic, there is nothing minimalist about this monologist. He may spend the entire 100 minute presentation sitting behind a desk with nothing but a glass of water and his notes but, as directed by Jean-Michele Gregory, Daisey himself is a fully orchestrated production. A large man who embellishes his frank observations ('The founding fathers could have been considered by the British to be terrorists.') and grim warnings ('If you raise an army and leave it standing, it will find something to do.') with artfully placed profanity, large, sweeping gestures and a face of fully animated Silly Putty, his voice is that of a genial, but angered everyman, bouncing with varied tempos, tones, full out comic crescendos and meaningful sotto voces. If Lenny Bruce was embodied by Zero Mostel and played by Louis Armstrong, the result would closely resemble Mike Daisey.

Three years ago I named D'Jamin Bartlett's performance of 'The Miller's Son' at BroadwayWorld's Standing Ovations IV concert, thirty-two years after she introduced the song in A Little Night Music, as one of my most memorable theatre moments of 2005. I may have to put her back on the list for 2008. At Sunday afternoon's Broadway Originals concert, the final entry of Town Hall's 4th Annual Broadway Cabaret Festival, Bartlett once again - in the original key - completely floored a New York audience with her rapid-fire deliver of Stephen Sondheim's patter combined with sterling vocals conveying an intensely cerebral sexuality. Called out to take a bow, she seemed sincerely surprised and overwhelmed at the cheers of the crowd.

Inspired by the sudden political fame of 'Joe the Plumber,' John McCain's web site now has a special page where you can get your own personalized rally sign by filling out a form that says…

Yes, there are many severely unrepresented groups in New York theatre and that situation needs to be improved. But to focus on one for a moment, here's a link to an interesting New York Times article about the difficulty for women playwrights to have their work produced.

It's perfectly understandable if years from now, or maybe fifteen minutes after leaving the theatre, the only thing you clearly remember about the Roundabout's new production of A Man For All Seasons is Frank Langella's extraordinary performance as the highly-principled Chancellor of England, Sir Thomas More, who refused to support Henry VIII's wish to separate from the Vatican and form the Church of England in order for him to divorce the aging Catherine of Aragon and wed Anne Boleyn in hopes of their union producing a son and heir. Not that director Doug Hughes' sturdy mounting of Robert Bolt's 1960 historical drama doesn't contain fine work from the rest of the ensemble, but in a play where the central figure so dominates the proceedings - especially with this production's removal of the narrator/commenter character known as The Common Man - Langella linguistically feasts on the dense, wordy text and gracefully conveys the complexities of a family man w

In today's Michael Riedel column, Harold Prince very nicely sums up his view on the state of the Broadway musical:

Start with a wonderful dark comedy from 1942, director Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be, which starred Jack Benny and Carol Lombard as the married, spotlight-hogging stars of a theatre troupe in Nazi occupied Warsaw who wind up using their acting skills to play a part in the Polish resistance,…