Michael Dale - Page 140

After his Broadway debut shut down after four performances, All My Sons was the play that put Arthur Miller on map; running for a good nine months, winning the 1947 Tony Award for Best Play and bringing the author to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

First things first; there is no hot air ballooning in Mark Brown's stage adaptation of Jules Verne's Around The World In 80 Days, just in case your only familiarity with the plot comes from Michael Todd's not exactly faithful 1956 movie version. (For that matter, there aren't any martial arts fight scenes either, in case you only saw the Jackie Chan remake.) But if Verne's hero did dabble in a bit of ballooning, I'm sure Brown and director Michael Evan Haney would have found some clever way to depict it in this lively and entertaining little production that's landed at the Irish Repertory Theatre in association with Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

While the rest of the country celebrates Independence Day with barbeques and fireworks, musical theatre lovers like me will gather around their television sets for the traditional viewing of what I and many others call the finest film ever made from a Broadway musical, 1776.

There's a moment in Show Boat where a woman sings that her true love, 'just plain Bill,' is 'an ordinary man' who 'isn't half as handsome as dozens of men' and is, on the whole, kinda stupid.  This is considered by many to be one of the most romantic love songs of the 20th Century.  In Neil LaBute's new reasons to be pretty the main character, reacting to his buddy's ravings about how hot another woman is, says that his girlfriend of four years may be 'regular' looking, but he wouldn't trade her for a million bucks. This will not be considered one of the most romantic sentiments of the 21st Century.

Though Ervin Drake's 'The Friendliest Thing (Two People Can Do),' from his 1964 hit What Makes Sammy Run?, has been called the first song from a Broadway musical to be directly about having sex, Suzanne Carrico employs no vampy winks or purring vocals as she observes with heightened intellectual interest the unnecessity of foreplaying drinks and dances when a couple in lust could simply get right to it.  (Yes, I just made up two words in that sentence.  Deal with it.)  Her new show at The Metropolitan Room, opening less than three weeks afters winning the MAC Award for Outstanding Debut, is named for this suggestive showtune but the self-described geek cleverly treats the song as a subtext to Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields' 'Welcome To Holiday Inn,' sandwiching the cerebral sexuality between slices of broader, comical pass-making.  This is either the smartest show about sex or the sexiest show about smarts in town.In outstanding company both offstage (Mary Cleere Haran is her director) and on (she's got music director/arranger Tedd Firth on piano and Steve Doyle on bass), Carrico has the kind of sunny, uncomplicated voice that can fill Harold Arlen and Leo Brown's 'Hooray For Love' with perky glee, matched with the kind of acting skill that can explore the dark dramatic longings of Arlen and Johnny Mercer's 'I Had Myself a True Love,' climaxing in an anguished belt that is far more about the woman she portrays than her ability to vocally shine.She calls this her hanky-panky show and most every number has something to do with sex.  There's the sweet simplicity with which she approaches Jimmy Roberts and Joe DiPietro's 'I Will Be Loved Tonight,' where a woman who has gone too long without a lover's touch anticipates how the evening's date will end, and the wry exasperation of 'Toothbrush Time,' William Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein's tense contemplation on why last night's lover is taking so long to get out of the apartment.  She savors the snazzy jazz jauntiness of Michael John La Chiusa's 'The Thief' and turns George Gershwin and B.G. DeSylva's 'Do It Again!' into a lopsided debate between the mind and the libido (guess who wins).The very funny sexpot character song, 'Femininity' (Jay Livingston/Ray Evans), is given an interesting personal twist as she introduces it with some of her own feelings as an adolescent girl surprised by the different way boys would look at her once she started developing.  Her admiration for the romantic passion expressed by Alan and Marilyn Bergman fuels her detailed story-telling in 'Like a Lover' and 'The Island.And for those who believe that hanky-panky is never complete without a bit of cuddling after, she finishes the evening with a very satisfied and satisfying 'Embraceable You' by the Gershwins.

Set designer Derek McLane exercises no subtlety in immediately establishing the mood for Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's drama Good Boys and True.  On entering Second Stage's theatre the audience is greeted by three walls full of dozens and dozens of sports trophies neatly displayed in wooden shelves that stretch from the floor to upper reaches of the playing space.  Though the characters never recognize these trophies as a realistic part of their environment, they serve as a continual backdrop reinforcing a culture that believes those who achieve victory – in athletics, in career or in solving conflicts – are the only ones who matter.

Maybe I've been watching too many Sex & The City re-runs but once or twice during Manhattan Theatre Club's terrifically acted revival of Caryl Churchill's 1982 drama of gender politics, Top Girls, I couldn't help wondering how its famous first act might work if the cast included Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon. Because if you don't know the play itself, it may strike a familiar chord if I said, 'It's that one where a group of interesting women get together in a restaurant having revealing conversations while drinking lots of alcohol.'

Spotted at Cafe Edison:  Hillary Clinton and Cubby Bernstein in serious conversation huddled over bowls of motzah ball soup.  As Leo Frank sang, this is not over yet.

I mean it with the most sincere amount of respect and admiration for both gentlemen when I write that Peter Gallagher seems to have morphed into Jerry Orbach.  At least in his portrayal of Bernie Dodd, the hard-driving Broadway director convinced that when the star of his new play suddenly leaves for a Hollywood gig he can get a great turn out of the washed-up alcoholic actor whose performances twIce Thrilled him many years ago.  He's the best part of Mike Nichols' new production of Clifford Odets' The Country Girl (which has undergone some text tweaking by Jon Robin Baitz).  His tough, but passionate mannerisms and gruff speaking voice bring out a sense of urgency to the proceedings as he convinces a skeptical producer (Chip Zien), a reluctant actor and his long-suffering wife that his high-stakes risk can pay off big.  By the end of the evening I was half expecting the man to send his star on stage with an exhilarated, 'Think of musical comedy!'

Check your good taste at the door and have a blast at Cry-Baby, the deliriously warped new musical comedy based on the John Waters flick spoofing the culture clash between squares and juvies in 1950s Baltimore. While jokes about polio and sexually abusive priests and songs about tongue kissing may not be for everyone, this hilarious and spirited tuner serves up its crudeness and with extra helpings of whipped cream and sprinkles from the first notes of its revved-up overture to the final chord of the play-out music. I laughed for over two hours and when I looked down I saw my toes involuntarily tapping. It's a fun night out.

Though Julie Wilson was certainly not the first and by all means not the last great singer to have her heart stomped upon by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's 'Surabaya Johnny,' there is no one I can name more deserving to claim it as their signature song.  (Okay, maybe Lotte Lenya, but you know that's a special case.)  Though for many years now the 83-year-old beloved cabaret star has been singing songs less and less and speaking them more and more, there are few who can match her for painting vivid word pictures and bringing complex dramatic subtext to a lyric.  With pianist Christopher Denny doing a marvelous job of softly supporting her many pauses and tempo changes, Wilson's crushing performance of Marc Blitzstein's translation, played to a pin-drop silent crowd on opening night of her new show at The Metropolitan Room, is an emotionally striking portrayal of a woman who can explode with anger at the mistreatment she endures from her faithless lover while moments later barely control a sob at the admission that she still loves him.  Through the years I've seen Julie Wilson sing 'Surabaya Johnny' many times but her performance that night was the best I've ever seen or heard from anyone.  (And as is typical of her modesty, she actually introduced the song by complimenting Donna Murphy's performance of it on Broadway in LoveMusik.)  She follows it with a devilishly humored 'Mack the Knife' (also Blitzstein's translation) that builds so slowly and precisely that she goes through the entire song twice in order to hit the climax.  I heard no complaints.

There were actually those who thought Cole Porter, Broadway's fountain of divine wit and sophistication, had run dry by that winter of 1948.  Though his recent offerings like Something For The Boys and Mexican Hayride were far from flops, his kind of thin-plotted musical comedy where the book and the songs often had little more than a passing acquaintance with each other was being overshadowed by the enormous success of Rodgers and Hammerstein's integrated musical dramas.  Even in the lightest of entertainments, the public was becoming more and more enthralled by musicals with strong plots and well-developed characters.

With all due respect to Kelli O'Hara, Paulo Szot, director Bartlett Sher and even Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan, the real star of the Lincoln Center revival of South Pacific is orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett, whose sublime work from the original 1949 production is now enchanting contemporary audiences.

Oh sure, it's still the most breathtaking, emotionally packed evening of damn near perfect musical theatre in town (No, make that of theatre in town.) and Ms. LuPone's Rose is now an even more complex and finely detailed portrayal, but while she hasn't exactly turned demure on us for Gypsy's transfer to Broadway, she has seriously toned it down.

You'll please forgive me if I've run out of superlative adjectives with which to describe the work of Marilyn Maye, who, after a 15-year absence from New York's cabaret scene, just opened her 4th Metropolitan Room show in a baker's dozen months.

Several years before Urinetown's Mark Hollmann began writing satirical songs about the public's right to pee he teamed up with playwright Jennifer Fell Hayes to pen a delightful musical for young audiences about one of New York's lesser known cultural landmarks.  Fare For All at The Mount Vernon Hotel takes us back to 1830, a time when the city stretched only as far north as 14th Street and taking a trip to the country meant heading up to the wilds of what is now 61st Street between 1st and York to breath the fresh air, swim in the East River and enjoy a bowl of the world famous turtle soup served at The Mount Vernon Hotel.

I suppose the main difference between a violent protest and an act of terrorism is whether you're on the side of the person who set off the bomb or the person who was killed by it.  In Primary Stages' premiere production of Willy Holtzman's drama, Something You Did, the person responsible for the bomb going off is played by the charismatic and understatedly graceful and eloquent Joanna Gleason, making the evening's morality conflict hardly a fair fight.

That happy gentleman on the left is the legendary American playwright Robert Patrick, and what he has in his hands is a long-time dream of his; a plaque to commemorate the life of Joe Cino.  Fifty years ago Joe Cino opened the doors to his Caffe Cino, now regarded as the birthplace of both the Off-Off Broadway movement and the American Gay Theatre movement, to playwrights willing to mount productions on his tiny 8' x 8' stage.  Among those who walked in were Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen, Doric Wilson, Sam Shepard, William Hoffman, John Guare, and, of course, Robert Patrick.  Cino didn't even read the scripts.  Most of the time he would ask the playwright his astrological sign and if he liked the answer an opening night was set.  Musical theatre fans know the Cino as the place where Bernadette Peters starred in the original one-act version of Dames At Sea. 

When last we left The Mint Theater, that extraordinary collective of theatre archivists that specialize in mounting first-class Off-Broadway productions of time-obscured plays by still-famous names, they were teaching many New Yorkers that Leo Tolstoy took a crack at playwrighting once with his grim drama, The Power of Darkness.  Now they're surprising those who didn't know that even Ernest Hemingway was represented on Broadway once with The Fifth Column, which premiered at the Alvin in March of 1940 and logged in 87 performances.

With three different directors placing their marks on the material during its pre-Broadway tryouts and two actors who were not quite up to the vocal demands of the dramatic score playing the leads (Shirley Booth and Melvyn Douglas), Marc Blitzstein (music and lyrics) and Joseph Stein's (book) Juno, based on Sean O'Casey's Juno And The Paycock, limped into the Winter Garden in March of 1959 following high expectations (West Side Story had been ousted from the theatre to make room for it) and quickly closed up shop two weeks later.