| 27 April 2010
Thomas Jay Ryan, Arnie Burton and Michael Urie in The Temperamentals.
More rain Monday and still way too cold for the end of April.
Since it was a Monday, most Broadway theaters were dark, but there is a complex of converted discount movie houses at West 50th Street that has a handful of auditoriums -- an off-Broadway multiplex, if you will -- and an engrossing new play by Jon Marans (Old Wicked Songs) called The Temperamentals, which turns out to be a code word for “gays” in the 1950s.
It is a somewhat fictionalized history of the Mattachine Society, an early sociopolitical activism group for gay rights in a very closeted period in America, long before the breakthrough of the Stonewall riot in 1969.
Most of this history was new to me, which made differentiating fact from fiction difficult, but the story was involving and Marans focused on the personal dramas within the movement, which gave the play some emotional hooks. In the foreground are Harry Hay (Thomas Jay Ryan), a pioneer Mattachine leader and Communist Party member, and his lover, Rudi Gernreich (Ugly Betty’s Michael Urie), who would go on to fame and fortune as the designer of the topless bathing suit.
Expect The Temperamentals to get numerous productions across the country after its New York run, thanks in part to its small cast and non-existent production requirements.
***
During the afternoon, I schlepped downtown to interview choreographer Joey McKneeley, a former dancer in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway who was anointed by the legendary, difficult director to be the keeper of the flame, to re-create the dances of West Side Story for major productions such as the current Broadway revival, the national tour coming to the Kravis Center next season and an international tour that McKneeley also directed.
Already recognized for his own choreography on Smokey Joe’s Café, The Life and The Boy from Oz, he spoke of several projects about to surface in which he also moves into the director’s chair. If the musical theater survives -- sorry, this season seems to put that matter in doubt -- McKneeley could be an influential figure in its future.
Next: The Addams Family (snap-snap) and The Easter Bonnet Competition
| 26 April 2010
A scene from Enron.
Well, so much for the nice weather. I had another great day Sunday in all respects except meteorologically. It rained most of this gray, dreary day and even when the rains halted briefly, it was cold and raw. Fortunately, I had excuses to stay inside for most the time.
I went to a matinee of Enron, Lucy Prebble’s epically theatricalized chronicle of the Houston energy company whose collapse became the largest corporate bankruptcy in United States history, leaving virtually penniless its employees, who were encouraged to invest their 401(k)s in company stock while upper management was quietly selling off its holdings.
It is a wild story of hubris and greed, but it could have easily bogged down in explanations of technical financial concepts like mark-to-market accounting, were it not for the dazzling window dressing of director Rupert Goold’s production, which features musical production numbers, Star Wars light saber duels, a pack of currency-eating raptors and lots of flashy video and electronic stock quote tickers.
Plus a stellar central performance by Norbert Leo Butz, who is usually seen in musicals, as the architect of Enron’s meteoric rise and almost-as-fast disintegration, Jeff Skilling.
I still prefer Red as a play, but the pyrotechnics, by actual fireworks and the actors, in Enron will make the Best Play Production Tony Award a true neck-and-neck race, I suspect. Reviews will be out Wednesday morning.
* * *
I have a longtime friend, composer-lyricist Barry Kleinbort, who is also renowned as a director of cabaret acts. Coincidentally, this week he oversaw a series of one-night performances at a great playing space called 59E59, which not coincidentally is its address.
And Sunday night, the only night I had free, it kicked off with a non-musical evening of reminiscences and readings by playwright-actor-frequent cross-dresser Charles Busch (Psycho Beach Party, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife) and one of his informal repertory company members, wacky actress Julie Halston.
Back when I was reviewing in my hometown of Washington, D.C., over 30 years ago, I first met Charles, who was just starting out, doing a one-man show called Alone with a Cast of Thousands, a piece of performance art that gave a suggestion of the talent and ability to take on female roles that was to come. Anyway, last night’s cabaret was an amusing, informal, unpolished show and it was fun being in the throng of friends and fans afterwards saying “hi” to Charles, who has become a Tony-nominated playwright and star of numerous of his own works, some of which have been filmed.
* * *
Barry Kleinbort and Penny Fuller.
Still, the cabaret serendipity paled next to going out afterwards with Barry and one of his friends and teaching colleague at Rutgers and Columbia, Tony nominee Penny Fuller (Applause, Rex, The Elephant Man and, most recently, Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate). He has directed her in six cabaret acts over the years and on Wednesday she is featured in the 59E59 series with an evening of songs by Charles Strouse.
We went for drinks at the impossibly chic La Caprice bar nearby and sat around bemoaning the state of the musical theater, arguing over whether Durrenmatt’s The Visit is suitable for musicalization (as Kander and Ebb have done), plotting how to get Penny booked into the Colony Hotel’s Royal Room and generally solving the problems of the world.
As columnist Cindy Adams would say, “Only in New York. Only in New York.”
Next: The off-Broadway play The Tempermentals and a Starbucks rendezvous with West Side Story's Joey McKneeley.
| 25 April 2010
Alfred Molina in Red.
Oh, the sacrifices I make for you, my readers.
I am currently in New York City, enduring a week of theater, to fill you in on the season here, either as a guide for your future visits to Broadway or to whet your appetites for potential touring editions to South Florida. Or, OK, just because I craved an immersion into good theater for my own sake.
So I will be seeing 10 shows in seven days and, if the WiFi holds out, posting daily dispatches from Manhattan, with more detailed reviews to come after my trip.
I arrived Saturday, a great sunny day with a crispness in the air that is so rare in Florida. My theatergoing began on a high note with a matinee of the play Red, a portrait of the work process and artistic esthetic of obsessive, angry abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko. The production is a transfer from London’s Donmar Warehouse, but is written by American John Logan, best known for such screenplays as Gladiator, The Aviator and Sweeney Todd.
The play looks at Rothko in the late 1950s, as he is readying a set of huge canvases commissioned by New York’s Seagram’s Building for its then-new Four Seasons restaurant. He mentors, instructs and verbally abuses his new assistant, spewing out his artistic philosophy along with his contempt for some of his fellow artists and his unappreciative clients.
Rothko is played with a fury by Alfred Molina, paired with Eddie Redmayne, who won the Olivier Award for his performance. The production is compact, full of heady ideas and a passion about the art of making art. Expect it to receive several Tony Award nominations.
I attended with Charles Passy, my former colleague on The Palm Beach Post, the restaurant critic who has just begun a new job covering the world of wealth management for The Wall Street Journal. Fortunately, he has kept his eye open for good places to eat and he introduced me to John’s Shanghai, a terrific Chinese place in the theater district. Try the soup-filled buns.
Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth in Promises, Promises. (Photo by Joan Marcus)
In the evening, I saw the final press preview of Promises, Promises, a musical from 1968 based on Billy Wilder’s sardonic comedy, The Apartment. It is a show I have always liked and I have held a grudge for the past 42 years that it lost the Best Musical Tony to 1776. It has a very enjoyable score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, their only foray into the musical theater, reportedly because Bacharach felt unable to control the sound in the theater like he could in a recording studio. He was disgruntled that performances of his songs would change night to night, which is exactly the essence of live theater.
I suppose you could complain that the score sounds dated, having that ‘60s sound that typified what Bacharach churned out for his pop songs of the era, but it was a pleasure to hear it again in this first-ever Broadway revival.
Not everything in the production works, including the casting of Kristin Chenoweth as the female lead, stuck in an affair with a married executive at the life insurance company where she toils. The character needs to be vulnerable and a quart low in the self-esteem department, where Chenoweth comes on like her usual force-of-nature self. To bolster her role, two pop songs -- I Say a Little Prayer and A House Is Not a Home -- have been added for her. Both are terrific songs, but neither one fits her character or the dramatic situation snugly.
Making his Broadway debut is Will and Grace’s Sean Hayes as Chuck Baxter, the likeable, ambitious schnook who lends his apartment out to libidinous executives for extramarital quickies. He suffers by comparison to Jerry Orbach, who originated the role, but I suspect most of today’s theater critics -- or audience members -- do not go back that far. Hayes has a pleasantly musical singing voice and an amusing way with physical comedy. He is the best thing about the production.
Also looming over the show are memories of the great Michael Bennett’s original choreography, including an explosive dance number at the company’s Christmas party, set to some of David’s dumber lyrics, Turkey Lurkey Time. The original number, danced by a trio that included a young, agile Donna McKechnie, is classic. The new version, with steps by Rob Ashford, barely raises the ambient temperature.
Next: Another acclaimed play from London about a U.S. subject: Enron
| 24 April 2010
Erin Joy Schmidt and Ricky Waugh in Dying City. (Photo by George Schiavone)
Talk about switching gears. After planning to produce the entertaining, but empty British farce Boeing-Boeing, Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre abruptly changed course to present instead Christopher Shinn’s shifting, shifty contemporary drama, Dying City.
It was a smart move for artistic director Richard Jay Simon, who traded up to a powerful play by an important emerging writer. Shinn understands the art of withholding information -- from his characters, as well as his audience -- and releasing it slowly and deliberately for maximum effect. Never doubt that he is in control of his storytelling, which seems not to add up. Until it does.
Like Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll, which began the season at Mosaic, Dying City contains more characters than actors. In this case, there is a pair of identical twins, who could not be more different in every way but looks, played deftly by Ricky Waugh.
When we first see him, he is Peter, a gay movie star biding his time between film projects in a Broadway production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He arrives at the New York loft apartment of Kelly (an apprehensive Erin Joy Schmidt), the therapist widow of his Harvard-educated twin brother, Craig, who felt compelled to join the army and go to Iraq, where he died in an armament mishap. Or was it suicide? And why is Kelly acting so uncomfortably around Peter, whom she has avoided seeing since her husband’s death?
There are enough unanswered by questions in Dying City to keep us leaning in, straining to crack its code, to solve its enigmas. And at Mosaic, it is performed so ably that watching the two actors is often satisfying enough. Schmidt is the anchor of the production, the character through whose eyes we experience events unfolding, in its back-and-forth chronology -- from Peter’s arrival and then back a year earlier to the eve of Craig’s going off to war.
Schmidt only plays one character, but the divergent moods she conveys on those two fateful days offer her the opportunity to show quite an emotional range. As for Waugh, his delineation of the two brothers is quite crafty. He draws differences with subtlety, as well as sibling connections and similarities. Shinn can be a bit clunky with his structure, so that we soon know that when Peter ducks into a side room, it will be Craig who reemerges, and the play will have taken a time shift. Waugh’s performance goes a long way towards making it work.
The same could be said for Simon’s well-modulated direction and the lighting transitions by Dan Gelbmann. Shinn is only in his early 30s, so he may be providing us with edgy dramas for a long time to come. If they can be as affecting as Dying City, he may bring some new life to the theater.
DYING CITY, Mosaic Theatre, American Heritage School, 12200 W. Broward Blvd., Plantation. Continuing through May 9. Tickets: $37. Call: (954) 577-8243.
| 21 April 2010
Michael McKeever and Laura Turnbull in Distracted.
With two parts wisecracks and one part wisdom, Lisa Loomer has aimed her word processor at some of contemporary life’s intriguing social issues.
She has illuminated our views on employing Third World nannies (Living Out), body modification rituals (The Waiting Room) and efforts to become parents (Expecting Isabel) with highly theatrical humor.
Belonging unmistakably to that same family of plays is Distracted, a look through the comic microscope at the perplexing epidemic of the childhood condition, attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder. Now receiving its area premiere at Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre, the play is certainly informative, supplies laughs at regular intervals, and is directed capably by Clive Cholerton in a expertly performed production with first-rate video visuals culled by Sean Lawson.
But eventually Loomer feels compelling to provide a solution to this medical stumper, or at least some solace for parents driven to distraction by their overly rambunctious offspring. And when she does, it is with a tidy, simplistic homily that all but destroys the goodwill she had amassed up to that point.
Helping considerably to finesse the script’s eventual letdown is Laura Turnbull as the mother of a 9-year-old suburban hellion named Jesse. Audience members with a world view like W.C. Fields’ will be pleased and relieved to hear that the tot is heard, but not seen, for most of the evening.
Still, he is on everyone’s mind as Mama -- yes, that’s the only label Loomer gives her -- begins her journey of discovery, visiting clueless, contradictory doctors, impatient, disinterested teachers and meddlesome neighboring moms, trying to find a way to restore some normalcy -- whatever that is -- to Jesse and her family.
She finds that there is no magic pill solution, but there is Ritalin, which is unlikely to cure the boy, but it can help keep him focused or at least quieter in class. Jesse’s dad (understandably perplexed Stephen G. Anthony) is staunchly against medicating the boy, feeling that ADD is something one simply grows out of in time, but Mama succumbs to the pharmaceutical exit strategy.
Loomer jumps her characters around in time and space, as if the play had come down with a bit of ADD itself. And while she is not suggesting that 21st-century media overload is a cause of ADD, it’s not helping matters, either. The production design is dominated by two oversized video screens that bombard us with information and images, suggesting the electronic assault we have learned to live with and assimilate.
One of Turnbull’s most striking features are her deeply affecting, mournful eyes, which certainly come in handy here, but she is also a deft comedienne, and she earns all of the laughs that Loomer tosses her way, amid the anguish. Michael McKeever is all about comedy as a succession of physicians or, rather, as an ADD-addled actor turned functional by Ritalin, allowing him to play a succession of physicians.
And while her subplot is a tangent from the main story, motor-mouthed Nikki Bromberg is a genuine find as Jesse’s babysitter, a teen in pain whose cry-for-help habit of cutting herself has led to her own medication.
Toss in entertaining support from the long-absent Kim Cozort, Lela Elam and Kim Ostrenko, and you have a brisk evening of theater. It could have been a far better one, though, if Loomer had accepted that it is enough to ask questions rather than provide a facile answer.
DISTRACTED, Caldwell Theatre, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through May 16. Tickets: $34-$55. Call: (561) 241-7432 0r (877) 245-7432.
