"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
-- Robert Benchley
The grosses are out for the week ending 11/30/2008 and we've got them all
right here in BroadwayWorld.com's grosses section.
Up for the week was: SHREK THE MUSICAL (30.0%), THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (27.8%), THE 39 STEPS (26.0%), SPAMALOT (25.2%), GREASE (22.0%), THE LITTLE MERMAID (21.6%), MARY POPPINS (18.9%), THE LION KING (14.8%), 13 (13.8%), CHICAGO (12.7%), DIVIDING THE ESTATE (10.6%), SPRING AWAKENING (10.1%), EQUUS (9.9%), HAIRSPRAY (8.5%), IN THE HEIGHTS (7.6%), BILLY ELLIOT: THE MUSICAL (5.8%), AVENUE Q (4.9%), BOEING-BOEING (4.8%), GYPSY (4.4%), THE SEAGULL (4.3%), WICKED (2.5%), AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY (2.0%), MAMMA MIA! (1.6%), JERSEY BOYS (1.3%), PAL JOEY (0.5%), SOUTH PACIFIC (0.1%),
Down for the week was: IRVING BERLIN'S WHITE CHRISTMAS (-7.9%), ALL MY SONS (-3.8%), A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (-3.2%), SPEED THE PLOW (-0.4%),
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Monday, December 01, 2008 @ 3:15 PM
Dividing The Estate: Gimme Gimme
That cultish assemblage that likes to recite my reviews from memory on open mic nights at the Nuyorican Poets Café (it's weird being an icon for the culturally disenfranchised) may notice many similarities between my following scribblings on Lincoln Center Theater's Broadway production of Horton Foote's Dividing The Estate and my review of this mounting's original Off-Broadway run last season at Primary Stages. But if director Michael Wilson can do a cut and paste job, with minor adjustments here and there, there's no reason I can't do the same.
It's taken 19 years for this terrific Reaganomics era comedy to trickle down to Broadway since its 1989 premiere at New Jersey's McCarter Theatre (I suppose "trickle across" would be more accurate) but though the transfer from Off-Broadway just happened to come in at a time when the economic climate makes its story relevant again, this very funny and very human production would even be welcome in more prosperous times.
1987 was a disastrous year for the U.S. economy, particularly in Texas after the price of oil plummeted following a major stock market drop. Foote sets the piece shortly after "Black Monday" in the home of family matriarch Stella Gordon (Elizabeth Ashley). None of 85-year-old Stella's children, all over 50, have ever held a regular job, with all receiving a monthly allowance from the family estate. The two oldest, widow Lucille (Penny Fuller) and Lewis (Gerald McRaney), live at home while their sister Mary Jo (Hallie Foote) lives in Houston with her real estate selling husband Bob (James DeMarse) and party girl daughters Sissie (Nicole Lowrence) and Emily (Jenny Dare Paulin).
Lucille's son, named Son (Devon Abner), draws a salary for managing the family's estate and is often at odds with Lewis, who can't keep a job because of his gambling and drinking and is frequently in need to borrow from the family money. As the play begins, Son is hoping to get a raise so he can afford to marry the politically-minded schoolteacher Pauline (Maggie Lacey) while Lewis is in need of fast cash because he's being blackmailed by the father of the 19-year-old he's been dating (Virginia Kull).
Typical of Foote, Dividing The Estate seems deceptively light on plot until the pieces start fitting together and, in this case, the comic fireworks begin. The match is lit by a visit from Mary Jo and her family, who are in a financial crisis and want to discontinue the allowance system and just divide the estate among the three children. But with most of the estate's worth tied up in land, that quick fix could seriously decrease the value of their inheritance with the poor market and high taxes. Their decision will also affect the lives of family servants Mildred (Pat Bowie, the only new cast member), her daughter Cathleen (Kelana Richard) and the 92-year-old Doug (Arthur French).
With fine performances from an exceptional ensemble, Foote's play and Wilson's production combine to draw realistic laughs from family politics. There is lovely pathos in the relationship between Ashley's commanding matriarch and French, as the man who has worked for her family all his life and has turned into a cranky senior citizen who fears not being useful. Fuller and McRaney stand out as the gracious Lucille and emotional Lewis while Hallie Foote once again proves herself a supreme interpreter of her playwright father's material. Her desperate and manipulative Mary Jo is hilarious without ever seeming a character.
Contrasting with the less attractive antics of its inhabitants, Jeff Cowie's set is comfy, distinguished and tasteful, though the larger dimensions for the Booth Theatre stage take away that cramped feeling that so effectively emphasized the large family's discomfort with each other.
It's been over 10 years since Horton Foote was last represented on Broadway with his Pulitzer-winning, The Young Man From Atlanta. In the past several years we've seen outstanding Off-Broadway mountings of his The Trip to Bountiful (Signature Theatre) and The Day Emily Married (Primary Stages) but, at 92 years of age, it's good to see the grand old man on the big stage once again.
Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Hallie Foote and Elizabeth Ashley; Bottom: Elizabeth Ashley, Penny Fuller, Arthur French, Hallie Foote and Gerald McRaney
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Sunday, November 30, 2008 @ 2:42 AM
Billy Elliot: I Just Wanna F***in' Dance
If I were a betting man I'd wager Billy Elliot to be the last show standing should the economy remain steadfast in its current quest to entirely obliterate Broadway. (Any truth to the rumor that the next thing moving into the St. James is a Starbucks?) Throngs who were enchanted by the musical's source film and even more who have been undertowed by the waves of publicity surrounding the three adolescents who alternate performing the title role (presumably until puberty brings out the hook) will no doubt enter the Imperial Theatre for many months or even years to come, as eager to see the kid dance as audiences at Miss Saigon were to see Royal Academy of Dramatic Art graduate Jonathan Pryce hump a Cadillac. And Billy Elliot never disappoints in that respect. My Billy of the evening was the very game Trent Kowalik, but even if you catch a performance starring David Alvarez or Kiril Kulish (or understudy Tommy Batchelor) you can take your seat assured you'll be witnessing the work of a specially trained specimen carefully schooled in the arts of ballet, tap, street dance, jazz and gymnastics at the exclusive Billy Elliot House, which I'm told is only a short drive from Grease Academy.
But if I seem less than completely enthused about what is undoubted the best anti-Margaret Thatcher musical to hit Broadway since Blood Brothers, it's because, despite an interesting story told through exceptionally vivid, dramatic visuals delivered by director Stephen Daldry and choreographer Peter Darling via a mostly excellent cast, the music of Elton John and the book and lyrics of Lee Hall, while never awful, rarely achieve a quality that surpasses reasonably competent.
Now, reasonably competent is nothing to be sneered at these days. I can name a few recent productions that might have welcomed the opportunity to display the quote "Reasonably Competent!" outside their theatres. And while good direction, impressive production values and fine casting can sometimes make an evening of lesser material somewhat bearable, Messrs. Daldry and Darling skillfully dangle so many pretty, shiny things in front of the audience that if you block out the shoddy jokes, serviceable songs and plethora of moments that screech the evening to a halt you might find yourself convinced you were witnessing high art.
Not having seen the flick, which was also directed by Daldry, choreographed by Darling and penned by Hall, I was seated with only slight knowledge of its story of an 11-year-old son of a British coal miner who, during a brutal year-long 1984 strike, winds up taking a fancy to the ballet and secretly starts using the money he's supposed to spend on boxing lessons for dance classes. The show starts with a directorial flourish as documentary film footage explaining labor politics of the day dissolves into a scene where, with their children running around in carefree play, workers sing a unity anthem with orchestrations by Martin Koch that make them sound like the student rebels of Les Miserables.
And that's when Billy Elliot's main flaw starts becoming apparent. The show's best writing and most impressive staging comes in the scenes involving the coal miners, climaxing before the first act has hit its halfway point in a musical scene where the strikers are confronted by riot police, sent by Prime Minister Thatcher to help bust the union, outside a community center where their daughters are cheerfully going about their dance routines. The innocent joy on the inside contrasting with the volatile tension on the outside, eventually blending together in a comedic clash, is a great example of the best kind of character-and-plot driven musical theatre dramatics. Unfortunately the lightweight song that accompanies the scene ("SOlidarity, soliDARity, SOlidarity forEVer") can best be described as "protest disco."
Blossoming out of this conflict is the most interesting character of the night, Billy's dad; a widower dutifully taking on both traditional parental roles while fearful that the boy's interest in dance will turn him into a, as they say in County Durham, poof. Of course one of the reasons the role is so interesting is that Gregory Jbara is giving the best performance of his admirable Broadway career, revealing the character's slow and beautiful growth from a man who sternly loves his son in the only way he knows how to someone so open to trying to understand his boy's passion for a world he finds strange and suspiciously foreign that he's willing to make an unthinkable sacrifice to help Billy achieve his dream. The heart of the show pumps mightily when the slightly inebriated elder Elliot sings a pro-labor folk song at a Christmas gathering and, at the finish, sees his lad timidly singing along with him. The expression in Jbara's face and the quiver in his voice suggest relief that, finally, he can connect with his son over something gravely important. When Billy has the opportunity to audition for the Royal Ballet School and performs an extraordinarily athletic routine as a way of expressing how dancing makes him feel, it's Jbara, sitting quietly in a chair, watching with expressions of shock, bewilderment and pride in finally understanding what his son can do and how important it is to him, who is giving the emotionally uplifting performance.
While Hall must be credited for inventing the situations that are well acted and staged, he also must take at least partial blame for the lack of empathy established for the title character, filling his dialogue instead with frequent witless moments that attempt to derive humor from having little kids and kooky grown-ups spewing out curse words and sexual innuendo for punch lines, a routine that gets pretty tiresome by the time a lovesick tyke is offering to show Billy her "hoo-hoo."
He may carry far more stage time than anyone else in the show and be spotlighted in three major dance moments (and quite a few lesser ones), but the lad is quite underwritten when it comes to dialogue and song, and is continually upstaged by the supporting cast's flashier moments. He sits quietly during his dotty grandmother's (Carole Shelly with her usual panache) musical remembrance of how she'd forget what a lousy drunken sod her husband was every time he took her dancing and feeds straight lines to his young cross-dressing pal Michael (Frank Dolce at my performance) before they launch into glitzed up tap-dancing vaudevillian turn that is so jarringly different from the rest of the production you can feel the creators screaming, "Be entertained, dammit!" That same desire to entertain at the expense of good storytelling may be the reason Billy's first private ballet lesson from the chain-smoking, disillusioned but always caring Mrs. Wilkinson (Haydn Gwynne) is set to a song called, "Born to Boogie."
The ten wonderful young ladies who make up Wilkinson's class (Juliette Allen Angelo, Heather Ann Burns, Eboni Edwards, Meg Guzulescu, Izzy Hanson-Johnston, Caroline London, Marina Micalizzi, Tessa Netting, Corrieanne Stein and Casey Whyland), an endearing collection of shapes, sizes, ages and abilities, steal every moment they're on by dancing as a realistic ensemble of enthused but unpolished individuals.
Having Billy's deceased mother (Leah Hocking) appear to him in memory is too much of a cliché to be effective but the major misstep of the night comes from the decision to strap the boy to a harness so that he can perform impossible feats of flight during a pas de deux from Swan Lake with his imagined older self (Stephen Hanna). And while I'm sure the intention is to show the freedom the boy feels as he dances, the sight of it reduces the character's dream to a special effect, no different than a falling chandelier or an on stage helicopter, instead of demonstrating the true beauty of obtainable human grace.
And that reminds me of a lesson Mrs. Wilkinson sings to her students in the first act:
Try to keep your arm in line.
Come on, at least pretend you're doing fine.
You can wow 'em every time;
All you have to do is shine.
Forget about content,
Focus on style.
Steal an inch on them
And they'll give you a mile.
And smile, smile, smile, smile.
Despite some truly fine work, the heartbreaking part of Billy Elliot is that all too often the creators offer little more than shine.
Photos by David Scheinmann: Top: Gregory Jbara and David Alvarez, Center: The Company; Bottom: The Ballet Girls
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Thursday, November 27, 2008 @ 6:15 AM
Broadway Grosses: Week Ending 11/23 & Algonquin Round Table Quote of the Week
"Everybody favors free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground."
-- Heywood Broun
The grosses are out for the week ending 11/23/2008 and we've got them allright here in BroadwayWorld.com's grosses section.
Up for the week was: BILLY ELLIOT: THE MUSICAL (13.4%), THE LION KING (7.2%), GREASE (6.7%), IN THE HEIGHTS (5.7%), MARY POPPINS (5.4%), WICKED (3.7%), 13 (3.0%), MAMMA MIA! (1.1%), SOUTH PACIFIC (0.4%),
Down for the week was: GYPSY (-15.5%), THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (-11.9%), AVENUE Q (-8.2%), THE SEAGULL (-8.1%), THE 39 STEPS (-7.7%), ALL MY SONS (-7.3%), EQUUS (-6.9%), DIVIDING THE ESTATE (-4.5%), AMERICAN BUFFALO (-4.0%), AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY (-3.7%), SHREK THE MUSICAL (-3.7%), SPAMALOT (-3.6%), SPEED THE PLOW (-3.5%), BOEING-BOEING (-3.2%), THE LITTLE MERMAID (-1.9%), SPRING AWAKENING (-1.3%), CHICAGO (-1.2%), A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (-1.1%), HAIRSPRAY (-0.5%), JERSEY BOYS (-0.2%),
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Monday, November 24, 2008 @ 4:50 PM
Taking Over & Wintuk
"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.
Encouraged by a few bottles of Brooklyn Lager, Robert has grabbed the microphone at a Community Day event in order to say a few words to all his new hipster and yuppie neighbors who have migrated to Williamsburg in recent years; "Did it ever occur to you to ask who lives here? If we wanted 37 new bars in our neighborhood in one year? Did you think to ask?"
Robert is one of eight creations solo performer/playwright Danny Hoch portrays in Taking Over, an exciting and discomforting piece of political theatre that, while certainly one-sided in its stance on gentrification issues, pulls you in with its intriguing and skillfully performed characters that see the changing neighborhood from different angles.
Some of people we meet have their own ways of adapting to change. Marion, an elderly black woman, sits on her stoop chatting with a friend about all the "resident tourists" enjoying expensive brunches at one of the four French cafes at one intersection ("I been in this neighborhood fifty years. Wasn't no brunch happenin' here. People were smoking crack! People were eatin' Ding Dongs for dinner.") and what happened when she gave in to temptation and entered one of them to buy a $4 almond croissant. In another scene a Dominican taxi dispatcher barks orders to his drivers in harsh, rapid-fire Spanish while speaking to white customers in friendly English tones.
In a brashly comical scene, a rapper named Launch Missiles Critical advises his fellow revolutionaries at the Galapagos Art Space to join him to moving to Canada, where health care is free, gay marriage is legal and, "property values is ridiculous now!" The most pitiable moments come in a scene where a volatile fellow named Kiko ties to get in good with an AD on a film shooting on his block, trying to charm his way to get any kind of work.
Newcomers to Williamsburg - a hip French real estate agent, a middle-aged Jewish developer and an NYU dropout selling her art work on the street - are given their say, but they come of primarily as objects of ridicule.
Under director Tony Taccone, Hoch's transformations from character to character are exacting, complete and done with minimal costume pieces, as supplied by Annie Smart. Smart also provides the set design that can cleverly switch from the exterior of a run-down brick building to the inside of a costly exposed brick apartment. Composer Asa Taccone, sound designer Walter Trarbach and lighting and projection designer Alexander V. Nichols bring vibrant energy to scene transitions.
Toward the end of the 100 minute piece, Hoch speaks to the audience as himself and explains his own personal conflicts regarding the changes in his neighborhood. Aside from actually liking the assorted cheese plate at the Sardinian Wine Bar, Hoch earns most of his living performing on the road and rents out his Williamsburg apartment to tourists for $1,700 a week. He reads what seem to be actual letters from past audience members, criticizing his show for being negative, divisive and alienating. ("Why can't you be more like Anna Deavere Smith?") But perhaps those are the qualities that make Taking Over so effective. It's good to feel uncomfortable at the theatre when the reason isn't because your seat is hard and there's no leg room.
Photo of Danny Hoch by Joan Marcus
******************************************
"Less is More," might be an appropriate advertising slogan for this year's edition of Cirque du Soleil's Wintuk, now making its second annual visit to Madison Square Garden's WaMu Theatre. Last year's premiere edition, created and directed by Richard Blackburn was an ambitious but muddy spectacle bogged down by an indecipherable, ritualistic story. This year's director, Fernand Rainville, reshapes the evening thusly: a kid named Jamie is sad because there's no snow in his town. That's the plot, now bring on the leapers, contortionists, flyers, balancers and other assorted arty athletic types.
And they do come on in a flurry. Patricial Ruel's town square set is soon loaded with skateboarders, bicyclists, an odd assortment of green-clad robbers who look like Irish variations of the MacDonald's Hamburgler and a slack-roped clothes line made for walking. Last year's huge, lumbering shaggy dog puppets have been reimagined as an acrobatic team in human-sized costumes, but one of them still can't resist relieving himself on one of the singing streetlamps, causing a short circuit that necessitates a visit from an electrician who happens to be an expert at balancing on a towering assortment of cylinder pipes.
Returning favorites include a mistress of muscle isolation twirling assorted hoops in varying directions on every available body part, aerial strap artists gracefully flying with balletic beauty and a troupe of acrobatic daredevils bouncing high in the sky off of long flexible poles. But the new featured highlight is a wild chase scene taking place on a stage-length trampoline hidden in the floor. Supposedly, the green guys are trying to escape the pursuit of a group of bicycle-riding cops, but that's just an excuse for an exhilarating sequence of flying leaps, comical bounces and a few lengthy jumps worthy of Evel Kenevel.
I suppose I'm not giving anything unexpected away by letting you know that, yes, it does snow at the finale; though it's not quite the blinding blizzard I recall from last year. I guess it's the economy, you know.
Photo courtesy of Cirque du Soleil
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Monday, November 24, 2008 @ 8:36 AM
WHITE CHRISTMAS Review Roundup
Press notes describe Irving Berlin's White Christmas as "the story of Second World War veterans Bob Wallace and Phil Davis who become partners in a song-and-dance act after the war. Looking for love, the two follow a duo of beautiful singing sisters who have a Christmas gig at a Vermont lodge, which just happens to be owned by their former army commander, General Waverley. Full of dancing, laughter and some of the greatest songs ever written, Irving Berlin's White Christmas promises to be a merry and bright theatrical experience for the entire family."
Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press, "Who diluted the holiday cheer? The festivities are muted and mild in "Irving Berlin's White Christmas," a lavish, yet surprisingly bland stage adaptation of the popular 1954 movie.
This version, which opened Sunday at Broadway's Marquis Theatre, raids Berlin's considerable catalog of songs to augment the film score, which was centered around "White Christmas," the most iconic of the composer's melodies."
David Rooney, Variety: "There hasn't been this much tap-dancing on a Broadway stage since "42nd Street." Yet despite its relentless effervescence, "Irving Berlin's White Christmas" is most alive in its gentler, more melancholy moments -- few as there are. Arriving in New York after multiple regional stops in the past four seasons, and aiming to establish itself as an annual holiday engagement, this somewhat mechanical show feels like a road production staffed with mostly second-tier talent. More seasonal confection than full-bodied musical theater, it coasts along on the strength of its melodious numbers and sparkling visuals, which should suffice to keep the tourist trade happy."
Elysa Gardner, USA Today: "Irving Berlin's White Christmas (* * 1/2 out of four) is as conscientiously G-rated a musical as you'll find on Broadway. Still, it ought to have an audience advisory — for diabetics.
In fact, anyone susceptible to sugar shock should think twice before digging into this bowl of holiday treacle, which opened a limited engagement (through Jan. 4) Sunday at the Marquis Theatre."
Charles Isherwood, New York Times: "This efficient but bland theatrical version of the Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye movie from 1954, directed by Walter Bobbie and choreographed by Randy Skinner, has been spreading cheer to kitsch-friendly audiences in various cities since its premiere in San Francisco in 2004.
It comes trimmed in extra numbers from the Irving Berlin songbook, as has been the custom for newfangled old-fashioned musicals for years, at least since “My One and Only” remixed the Gershwin songbook back in 1983. "
Joe Dziemianowicz, NY Daily News: "After playing in other U.S. cities for the past four years, "Irving Berlin's White Christmas" has finally made its way to New York.
As Broadway musicals go, it's a little creaky. But as a holiday entertainment, it's light and bright and boasts some great production numbers.
"
Linda Winer, Newsday: "The good cast handles the old-fashioned snappy talk without overselling it. Carrie Robbins' handsome costumes appear to have been made with a budget intended for a long run - or, more accurately, a return engagement as an annual alternative to the Rockettes and "The Nutcracker."
In other words, "White Christmas" is a reasonable facsimile of what it's meant to be - a manipulation of the sentimental holiday marketplace that does not disturb the seasonal equilibrium with a bubble of original thought."
Frank Scheck, NY Post: "So it's more than a little disappointing that the Broadway production of "Irving Berlin's White Christmas" is so lacking in genuine Yuletide spirit. Looking to this would-be seasonal perennial for holiday cheer is like trying to get warm while watching the "Yule Log" on TV."
Posted by Robert Diamond
on Monday, November 24, 2008 @ 8:56 AM
On The Town: Subways Are For Seeking
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.
Its lineage can even be traced to the visual arts; Paul Cadmus' controversial 1934 painting The Fleet's In!, that so outraged viewers with its erotic depiction of sailors carousing with loose women and one very well-groomed gentleman that it was removed from a WPA exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery. But Robbins saw how the painting could dance if the sailors were depicted more as "healthy, vital boys" and, with Bernstein composing, he created and starred in the ballet Fancy Free, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House in January of 1944. By December of that same year, by the suggestion of the ballet's set designer, Oliver Smith, the piece was transformed into the Broadway musical comedy smash that enjoys a terrific concert mounting from Encores! this weekend.
While its story of three sailors plopped in New York for a 24 hour leave who each meet a gal more than willing to show her appreciation for our boys in uniform can seem like little more than frisky frolics on the surface, that big pink elephant in the room nobody's talking about is that there's still a war going on and this might be the last day of freedom these boys have to squeeze every possible bit of fun out of life before being sent out somewhere to meet with a tragically early end. (A point that was sadly ignored in the misguided film version, released and set in 1949.) Just try not getting choked up when the time for parting comes near and the newly matched couples try and be casual about it by tossing off the lyric, "Oh well, we'll catch up some other time," when they all know that there's just no way to be sure.
From its opening hymn for early-risers, "I Feel Like I'm Not Out Of Bed Yet," (sung with ear-perking bellows by Geno Segers) to its closing confirmation that New York, New York will ever remain a hell of a town - sandwiching such first-rank theatre songs as the soul-pulling "Lonely Town," the madcap "Carried Away," and the raucously swinging "I Can Cook, Too" - On The Town's shining score glitters even brighter thanks to the symphonic orchestrations by Bernstein, Hershey Kay, Don Walker, Elliot Jacoby and Ted Royal. Conductor Todd Ellison, who always seems so deceptively laid-back in performance, has the 30-piece orchestra practically conversing with each other as they exchange musical phrases with the contrasting voices of a non-stop urban landscape.
The gag-infested scenes (the book has been condensed by David Ives for this production) blend into emotion-revealing interpretive ballets that are a vital part of the story-telling. While notations for Robbins' original choreography are not known to exist, Warren Carlyle has remounted three numbers from what the master devised for the 1989 production of Jerome Robbins' Broadway, and has faithfully worked in his style to complete the evening's dance requirements in visually striking fashion.
Given the short amount of rehearsal time contractually allowed for staged concert readings and the physical limitations provided by the on-stage orchestra, it's understandable if director John Rando's staging didn't quite provide the comically frenetic frenzy my own personal taste would have desired by the opening night performance. But the muscular charm bouncing off the stage for nearly three hours nevertheless gloriously glides with the refreshing breeze of knockout entertainment.
Tony Yazbeck exudes attractive tough-guy sentimentality as Gabey, the sailor who falls for a photograph of "Miss Turnstiles for June" displayed in a subway car and sets out on a city-wide quest to find her. His singing of " Lonely Town" is a beautifully touching moment of open-hearted longing. The show's lead dancer, Jessica Lee Goldyn is sunny and athletic as the elusive girl of his dreams, turning darkly sensual in a ballet where he actually is dreaming of her.
Playing oversexed cab driver Hildy, Leslie Kritzer burns up the stage as a top-shelf musical comedy comedienne who can let loose with jazzy, show-stopping vocals as she pursues the initially reluctant Chip (a fine Justin Bohon). Jennifer Laura Thompson, as the man-hungry anthropologist Claire de Loone and Christian Borle as Ozzie, the gob whose primitive-looking mug drives her batty, score their share of funny moments, as do Michael Cumpsty as Claire's cuckolded fiancé, Julyana Soelistyo as her perpetually sneezing roommate and Rachel Coloff as a pair of positively awful nightclub torchers, but the biggest laughs of the night are in appreciation of Andrea Martin, who milks so many hilarious bits from her small role as a boozy ballet instructor I was afraid the dancers would slip on the puddles left on the floor.
On The Town has not been especially lucky when it comes to Broadway revivals with two significantly revised mountings lasting only two months each. While the Encores! production can use a bit of a spit-polish, not to mention a return to the full Comden and Green book, it's nevertheless an exuberant example of musical comedy at its best.
Top image: Paul Cadmus' The Fleet's In!; Photos by Joan Marcus: Center: Tony Yazbeck; Bottom: Justin Bohon and Leslie Kritzer
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Sunday, November 23, 2008 @ 2:51 AM
Getting Lucky With Daniel Radcliffe?
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…
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Friday, November 21, 2008 @ 2:21 AM
Dividing the Estate Review Roundup
Dividing the Estate opened last night at Broadway's Booth Theater. The show's a human comedy about a family that must confront its past as it prepares for its future. Did the critics find it funny?
For USA Today, Elyse Gardner writes that "But the 92-year-old who gave us the The Trip to Bountiful and The Young Man From Atlanta, not to mention the Oscar-winning screenplays for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies, is too gentle a soul to summon anything resembling real venom. The folks we meet in Estate, which opened Thursday at the Booth Theatre, can be immensely irritating, but they're not, well, bad people — or, truth be told, terribly interesting ones."
For the NY Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz gives the show 3.5 stars out of 5 and writes that "With a lone exception, the cast of the Lincoln Center presentation at the Booth Theatre is the same as the one that made the play's Off-Broadway run at Primary Stages 14 months ago so tasty.".
David Rooney writes in Variety that ""Evidence that history repeats itself is everywhere in "Dividing the Estate." Once-valuable farmland has made way for strip malls, local businesses are being supplanted by foreign-owned factories, the real estate market has sunk, financial institutions are hurting and more and more folks are facing bankruptcy and home foreclosures. This sweetly satirical comedy about a Texas family squaring off over their inheritance could almost be unfolding in 2008, but Horton Foote wrote the play 20 years ago and set it against the economic turmoil of the late '80s."
Michael Kuchwara writes for the Associated Press that "In one respect, "Dividing the Estate" is even more timely today than it was in October 2007. The play, under Michael Wilson's leisurely, low-key direction, is set in recession-plagued 1987. Prices are falling. Real estate is a mess. Jobs are being lost. And the members of a once well-off clan must confront their dwindling financial future. You can't get more up-to-date."
Ben Brantley writes in the New York Times that "This production — which arrives with most of its original cast, directed with hair-trigger timing by Michael Wilson — has ripened into an ideally balanced ensemble piece, with acting that matches and magnifies Mr. Foote’s slyly and acutely observant writing. A year ago “Dividing the Estate” was good, but a tad shaky in tone. This latest incarnation reveals it to be one of the masterworks of the 92-year-old Mr. Foote, the author of “The Trip to Bountiful,” “The Young Man From Atlanta” and the Oscar-winning screenplays for “Tender Mercies” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”"
Frank Scheck of the NY Post gives the show 3.5 out of 4 stars, and he says that "Opening last night after an earlier run at Primary Stages, this deeply humanistic and funny play is old-fashioned in the best sense.
Director Michael Wilson's assured production features a wonderful ensemble cast whose seamless work feels even more lived-in than it did earlier. It's easy to believe that this loving but endlessly bickering clan would drive themselves crazy if they failed to live up to the task of the play's title."
Posted by Robert Diamond
on Friday, November 21, 2008 @ 8:46 AM
Road Show: We've Learned How To Bounce
"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.
I have no idea if was the final line in 1999, when the show was known as Wise Guys and Sam Mendes directed a workshop production that, according to a Sondheim-penned article published in the in the New York Times before their first performance, was set to, "open on Broadway on April 27 at a theater to be announced."
I won't venture a guess as to what the final line was back in 1952, when Sondheim first got the idea to musicalize the lives of turn-of-the-century architect Addison Mizner and his bon vivant brother, Wilson, only to find that producer David Merrick had bought the rights to one of their biographies and assigned Irving Berlin and S. N. Behrman to work on the (eventually abandoned) project.
But the point, dear readers, is that after ten years of development, performances, revisions and even an original cast album, I do believe Messrs. Sondheim and Weidman have gotten it right.
Not that Road Show will be loved by everybody. Its dark, sardonic commentary on what happens when the land of opportunity falls into the clutches of the opportunistic can make Assassins seem a crowd-pleaser by comparison. And truth be told I rather enjoyed Bounce, the lighter and funnier musical comedy variation of the material that played Chicago. (I was only slightly less enthused about the revised edition that played in DC shortly after) But Road Show is a better musical drama than Bounce was a musical comedy, if only for the fact that, streamlined to an intermission-less 100 minutes and stricken of a leading lady character that, though played with scene stealing aplomb by Michele Pawk, far overstayed her usefulness on stage, there is simply less that doesn't work. And what remains is enticing, intriguing, intelligent and stylishly presented.
Spurned on by the deathbed advice of their father (William Parry) to take advantage of America's road to opportunity in the new century, the cautious, conservative Addison Mizner (Alexander Gemignani) and his irresponsible and irrepressible brother, Wilson (Michael Cerveris) embark on an uneasy partnership that begins with the Alaska gold rush and ends with the Florida land boom. In between, Addie uses his talent for architecture to build a potentially stabile life taking care of their mother (an adorable Alma Cuervo) while Willie marries well and uses his talent for charm and promotion to earn and lose a bundle fixing horse races and boxing matches while putting his name on a Broadway play of dubious authorship.
While a good deal of Bounce's dialogue and score has been retained for Road Show, most of the songs have experienced at least minimal lyric changes to suit altered plot points and a new thematic focus. There are also some complete cuts and fresh additions to the score but the most significant change is not so much in the material but in John Doyle's staging that favors commentary over empathy. The entire company of 15 is continually on stage, positioned among a wall of crates, filing cabinets and boxes (designed by Doyle) reacting with derision or detached amusement when not directly involved in a scene. They're not required to play musical instruments, as in his Broadway revivals of Sweeney Todd and Company, but, as has become an identifiable style of his, they often say lines facing front, disconnected from the characters they are speaking to. While Ann Hould-Ward's costumes and Jane Cox's lights inspire sepia-toned nostalgia, as does the Sondheim music which, while not exactly period, is often traditionally attractive and catchy, Doyle twists the American dream into a ghoulish nightmare where a kid can grow up to be anything he wants so long as there are a sufficient number of suckers handy.
Sure, like in any Doyle production there are one or two what-the-hell-am-I-looking-at moments (Having the cast change into costumes covered with blueprint designs is this show's equivalent of Sweeney Todd's little white coffin.) but there are also inspired moves like having characters regularly toss money in the air like confetti; a staging conceit bound to make Gerard Alessandrini drool.
The two leads work splendidly together, with Cerveris' reckless, coke-snorting Willie transforming from a well-meaning gambler to the devil sitting on his brother's shoulder and whispering temptations in his ear. The sweet-voiced Gemignani plays Addie with a quiet dignity as he adjusts to adversity and his brother's antics. He also sings the lovely "The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened," with Claybourne Elder, who plays his romantic interest; a wealthy young lad who wishes to rebel against his father by founding an artist colony. In Bounce the cynical lyric was sung by Willie as an expression of love for what another person can do for him. Here, it borders on cerebral sappiness.
Fans of the famous Sondheim lyrical density won't be disappointed by rhymes like, "We'll never make our fortune / Just by sitting on the porch 'n' / Looking wistful / When there are nuggets by the fistful," but, as this is not a show about intellectuals, the flashiness is appropriately kept to a minimum.
The mere fact that it has a (sorta) new Stephen Sondheim score justifies calling Road Show a must-see. It being a fascinating piece of grown-up musical theatre given a darkly entertaining production and featuring a strong cast is just a happy bonus.
Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Michael Cerveris and company; Center: Michael Cerveris and Alma Cuervo; Bottom: Alexander Gemignani
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Wednesday, November 19, 2008 @ 9:26 AM
The Producers - ON ICE? How About WORD UP?
Ok - no - Mel Brooks isn't taking his multi Tony award-winning musical to the ice rinks (yet..) But after watching this great video circulating the web - well who knows what the future might hold for Max and Leo! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6HZ9q7RX0c
and since we're talking The Producers and videos - you might also check out this clever video (and marketing tactic) the cast of Westchester Broadway Theater's production created: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL7YlborJ0c&fmt=18
Posted by Craig Brockman
on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 @ 11:35 PM
American Buffalo Review Roundup
John Leguizamo and Cedric the Entertainer star in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's American Buffalo, which opened on Broadway last night. Here's the critics takes!
Ben Brantley writes in the NY Times that "Ssssssssst. That whooshing noise coming from the Belasco Theater is the sound of the air being let out of David Mamet’s dialogue. Robert Falls’s deflated revival of Mr. Mamet’s “American Buffalo” — which opened on Monday night with the mixed-nut ensemble of John Leguizamo, Cedric the Entertainer and Haley Joel Osment — evokes the woeful image of a souped-up sports car’s flat tire, built for speed but going nowhere."
Joe Dziemianowicz for the NY Daily News gives the show 2 stars out of 5, and writes that "Despite a starry cast of John Leguizamo, Haley Joel Osment and Cedric the Entertainer, who's miscast, the tepid two-hour two-act, directed by Robert Falls, makes the story seem very slight, with all the danger and combustibility of a book of soggy matches."
Elysa Gardner in USA Today gives the show 3 stars out of 4 and writes that ". Approaching Mamet's celebrated account of three losers bound by complementary failings, Falls and his cast ease the pace and intensity of the distinctly jazzy dialogue rhythms and emphasize the underlying pathos that truly — more than the four-letter words or the sudden bursts of violence — makes this play disturbing. This isn't the most titillating American Buffalo you'll ever see, but I doubt that many productions have made the thwarted humanity of these men more accessible or moving."
In Newsday, Linda Winer writes that "So there is less hot news here. On the other hand, this one has an exhilarating performance by John Leguizamo, who careens off Mamet's essence with a joy I missed in the oddly constricted "Plow.""
David Rooney writes for Variety that "When "American Buffalo" is done right, the profane poetry of David Mamet's dialogue can be bracing and the sad desperation of its three minor-league crooks -- playing at being players -- has a poignant sting. But in the three decades since the play was first seen, the influence of its speech patterns has become increasingly pervasive in films, cable TV and imitative theater, while humanized hoodlums have turned up everywhere. Maybe that's why this starry revival sits so flatly on its impressive set. Or maybe it's the lack of a connective thread among its performers. Either way, something isn't working."
Lastly for this roundup, Michael Kuchwara writes for the AP that "The four-letter words are intact but just about everything else is amiss in the slack, unsatisfying Broadway revival of David Mamet's "American Buffalo.""
Posted by Robert Diamond
on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 @ 8:51 AM
My Vaudeville Man! & American Buffalo
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.
And while that scene is the high point of Jeff Hochhauser (book and lyrics) and Bob Johnson's (music and lyrics) two-person tuner, there is a heck of a lot more to savor. Based on Buchanan's collection of correspondence published as Letters of a Hoofer to His Ma, the story begins in 1910 with the lad writing his "Mud" that he's left their Charleston, Massachusetts home (and the security of a steady job in the ship yard) for his first gig as a professional dancer, touring the small vaudeville houses of New England. Though convinced his "Fifteen minutes of dynamite" will make him famous, his old world Irish mother is fearful of having her son exposed to immoral show people. ("When St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland they all swam across the ocean and went into vaudeville.")
With the two characters conversing from afar through their letters, the book is admittedly a bit short on plot, spending much of the first act describing Jack's life on the road in pursuit of girls and a better spot on the bill, along with his unsuccessful attempts to save up enough money to send home. It's not until shortly before intermission, when we start realizing the amount of abuse Mud has been taking from her alcoholic husband as she expresses her concern that Jack has been drinking himself, that the dramatic potential of My Vaudeville Man! starts to take hold.
Even so, the material is still highly entertaining, as is director/choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett's warm and nostalgic production. Jack's descriptions of the types of acts he would perform with, including humorous references to some legendary names to be, are engaging history lessons while Mud's good natured ethnic humor ("(The Jews) may have murdered our savior but they're good to their mothers.") is perfectly in period.
But it's when Wiley and Karen Murphy (as Mud) sink their chops into the rich period score that My Vaudeville Man! really flies. Wiley, who co-choreographed, sings with showmanship and taps with crisp clarity and firm technique (the great Broadway hoofer Bob Fitch is credited as "Eccentric Dance Consultant") through routines like a charming shadow dance number and a comic French Apache dance. Murphy's Mud is full of sweet old world charm, showed best during a running routine where she sings to a priest her confessions that she's been lying to her friends about what her son does for a living. But her toughness comes through with invigorating power in a song where she tells her husband she's no longer taking his abuse.
My Vaudeville Man! may have its rough edges, but its terrific entertainment featuring two knock-out performances.
Photos of Shonn Wiley and Karen Murphy by Carol Rosegg
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That profanely sweet music blaring out of the Belasco Theatre these days is the sound of David Mamet at his ear-tickling best ricocheting off the walls in director Robert Falls' high octane revival of American Buffalo. The trio of John Leguizamo, Cedric the Entertainer and Haley Joel Osment deliver some of the finest ensemble acting in town in a production that sizzles from start to finish.
Mamet's 1977 Broadway debut, an Off-Broadway transfer, is the play that popularized his reputation for taut, explicative-drenched dialogue that sings poetically when properly played. Taking place in a dingy Chicago second hand store, it's a bit of a back-alley opera (emphasized by Santo Loquasto's stage-filling, brick-a-brack saturated set which would be eye-popping from even the back rows of The Met) mixed with satirical commentary about the low-down corruption of free enterprise.
Shop owner Donny (Entertainer) suspects he got ripped off by a customer who purchased a buffalo nickel from him for far less than its worth so he plots a break-in of the man's home to steal what he assumes to be a valuable coin collection. Joining him is the dangerously high-strung Walter, a/k/a Teach (Leguizamo) and an unseen accomplice named Fletcher. The young, slow-witted, drug addicted Bobby (Osment), who hangs around the shop and runs errands for Donny is also involved, but Teach questions his loyalty and dependability. While they play isn't exactly a comedy, there is a lot of laughter generated by Mamet's heightened reality as these two-bit crooks see themselves as simply carrying out a business transaction as good American capitalists. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht might have called it, The Nickel Opera.
Though Leguizamo is a Tony-nominated actor known to Broadway audiences for his self-written solo pieces, Freak and Sexaholix… a Love Story, this is his first stage appearance playing a character in another author's play. His cast mates are both making their professional stage acting debuts. And yet Falls has them bubbling with combustible chemistry. Leguizamo's hyper-kinetic performance spits out Mamet's more colorful vulgarities with the tone and rhythm of a seasoned jazzman. Cedric the Entertainer is the sturdy rock of the evening and generates genuine pathos with his strict concern for the well being of Osment's fragile and pitiable Bobby; a concern that is severely tested when it comes to money.
And to top it off, they've got the best "turn off your cell phone" announcement in town.
Photo of Cedric the Entertainer, Haley Joel Osment and John Leguizamo by Joan Marcus
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 @ 12:00 AM
Broadway Grosses: Week Ending 11/16 & Algonquin Round Table Quote of the Week
"A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn't go."
-- Alexander Woollcott
The grosses are out for the week ending 11/16/2008 and we've got them all right here in BroadwayWorld.com's grosses section.
Up for the week was: SHREK THE MUSICAL (57.6%), THE SEAGULL (4.0%), SPEED THE PLOW (3.2%), A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (2.2%), JERSEY BOYS (2.0%), AMERICAN BUFFALO (1.0%), TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1.0%), AVENUE Q (0.8%),
Down for the week was: GREASE (-19.1%), 13 (-17.3%), MARY POPPINS (-12.5%), CHICAGO (-11.9%), BILLY ELLIOT: THE MUSICAL (-11.5%), SPAMALOT (-9.9%), THE LION KING (-8.5%), HAIRSPRAY (-7.9%), IN THE HEIGHTS (-7.1%), THE LITTLE MERMAID (-6.9%), SPRING AWAKENING (-4.4%), EQUUS (-4.3%), THE 39 STEPS (-4.0%), MAMMA MIA! (-3.7%), THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (-2.4%), ALL MY SONS (-1.9%), AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY (-1.4%), BOEING-BOEING (-0.8%), DIVIDING THE ESTATE (-0.7%), WICKED (-0.6%), GYPSY (-0.3%), SOUTH PACIFIC (-0.2%),
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Monday, November 17, 2008 @ 3:59 PM
High School Musical & Speed-the-Plow
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.
And if you are one of the eighty bajillion teenage and tweenge fan of High School Musical, you should stop reading this review right now. Really. The rest is just a lot of blah, blah, blah that wouldn't interest you.
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Okay, here we go.
How do I begin to describe what bland, lifeless material this is? Yes, the Paper Mill crew does what it can and there are even one or two miraculous moments when they squeeze something out of this undercooked, unseasoned oatmeal of a musical that kinda, sorta resembles entertainment. But really, the gap between this show's popularity and its accomplishment is so wide they may as well call it The Reagan Administration: The Musical.
The story has potential, even though the happy ending is achieved by our heroes committing acts of vandalism. Basketball star Troy (Chase Peacock) and math whiz Gabriella (Sydney Morton) fall seriously in like with each other while singing a karaoke duet at a ski lodge during winter break. But when it turns out she's been transferred to his school Gabriella learns that the social structure of the clique hierarchy forbids jocks from hanging out with brains.
Neither group hangs out with the thespians either, perhaps because they're headed by the annoying pair of self-centered Sharpay (Bailey Hanks) and her twink twin brother, Ryan (Logan Hart). Oddly, nobody seems bothered by the fact that these biological siblings have been playing the leads opposite each other in every school production since grade school and are now auditioning to play the young lovers in the new student-written neo-feminist revisionist Shakespeare musical, Juliet and Romeo.
Gabriella also wants to try out but for some unexplained reason kids must audition for the leads as a couple and will only be cast along with their partner, so Troy agrees to join her in auditioning. When word gets out that the captain of the basketball team has crossed accepted social lines it encourages the rest of the student body to be more open about having diverse interests outside of their cliquish boundaries and we soon find out that, among other things, a jock has a secret desire to be a baker and a brain enjoys dancing hip-hop.
And while the important theme of celebrating our personal differences as we bond into a community is great one to pass along through musical theatre, David Simpatico's book, based on Peter Barsocchini's screenplay, is at best innocuous and at worst horribly unfunny. If lines like, "I'd rather suck mucus from a dog's nostrils until his nose caves in," and "We need to save our show from people who think Eugene O'Neill is Shaquille O'Neal's older brother," are examples of what passes for wit nowadays I weep for the future of musical comedy bookwriting.
Thirteen people are credited with having written the evening's songs and none of them were able to come up with a memorable melody or a clever lyric. The score is made up almost entirely of sound-alike light rock ensemble numbers expressing obvious sentiments ("Get'cha Head In The Game," "We're All In This Together") while chances to explore the inner workings of individual characters through song are, save for one duet by the leads, completely ignored.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of High School Musical is its mocking attitude toward musical theatre. While the school athletes and smart students are respectfully depicted, the ones in the drama club are shown as being delusionally talentless and their bad auditions are treated as punch lines. The fine actress Donna English is reduced to playing the eccentric drama teacher as a vindictive ninny who leads the kids in ridiculous theatre games and goes out of her way to favor the students she wants to cast. The introverted Kelsi (Stephanie Pam Roberts), who wrote Juliet and Romeo would like to have Troy and Gabriella star in her show because they sing her big song like an American Idol-ish riff-heavy power ballad while Sharpay and Ryan sing it like, you know, a showtune.
Now there are those who will say that I shouldn't be so hard on a show that's aimed toward kids and may get them to be regular theatergoers. I say that if you teach kids at a young age that musical theatre is dumb material dressed up with high-energy performances they'll have no reason to expect it to be any more.
Photos by Gerry Goodstein: Top: Joline Mujica, Zach Frank, Joseph Morales, Adrian Arrieta, Stephanie Pam Roberts, Becca Tobin, Charity Sharday De Loera, Sean Ewing, Krystal Joy Brown, Sean Samuels, Beth Crandall, Justin Keyes, Marissa Joy Ganz, Brittany Conigatti, Sam Kiernan, Dennis Necsary, Taylor Frey, Deanna Aguinaga and Kristy Cavanaugh; Bottom: Becca Tobin, Justin Keyes, Zach Frank, Deanna Aguinaga, Bailey Hanks, Logan Hart, Dennis Necsary, Joline Mujica, Krista Pioppi, Sean Samuels, Beth Crandall and Victoria Meade
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You'll please pardon me if the following paragraphs do little more than perpetuate Raul Esparza's reputation as a critics' darling, but aside from enjoying the rhythmic blasts of misguided testosteronic swagger in David Mamet's toothy 1988 satire of Hollywood muscle, there is little to recommend in director Neil Pepe's mounting of Speed-the-Plow except a look at the 21st Century's most versatile New York stage actor (Who else can go from starring in The Normal Heart to dancing "The Old Bamboo" in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?) in a showcase role that takes delicious advantage of his exceptional skills.
It's the old art versus commerce battle played in three taut scenes as movie producer Charlie Fox (Esparza) lucks into a chance to sign a big name action star in a prison picture if he can have the deal done by the next morning. He takes the news to newly promoted executive Bobby Gould (Jeremy Piven) who has the option to green-light one project a year without approval from the higher-ups. In between discussions of exactly how much money they can make from this sure-fire blockbuster, Charlie bets his partner-to-be that he can't bed the timid temp secretary (Elisabeth Moss), so Bobby assigns her to read a new novel by some "Eastern sissy writer" called The Bridge or Radiation and the Half-Life of Society, which he's been asked to give a courtesy read, and has her come to his place that night to get her opinion on its potential as a film.
Admittedly, Charlie is the role with the most potential to dazzle (Ron Silver won his Best Actor Tony playing him in the original production) and Esparza shapes him into a hyper-caffeinated left coast variation of Tom Wolfe's "Master of the Universe." His musically-savvy performance jostles the listener with intriguing tones and rhythms that dig up unexpected laughs and chills from Mamet's text, such as the moment when Charlie's well-guarded desperation churning inside leaks through by way of a simple half-laugh. And he can somehow coldly deadpan with ferocious energy.
Jeremy Piven is never believable as someone who has achieved even mid-level pull in this lion's den, seeming more like a lost mail-room boy who has mistakenly wandered into the wrong office. In their lengthy scenes where Mamet's electric give and take should be bouncing off the walls, Esparza pings and Piven never pongs. Elisabeth Moss is a barely noticeable presence. I'm not sure she even picked up a paddle.
Photo of Raul Esparza and Jeremy Piven by Brigitte Lacomb
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Monday, November 17, 2008 @ 12:04 AM
BILLY ELLIOT Review Roundup
Based on the film about a working-class British boy with dreams that run contrary to family expectations, the London smash-hit musical arrived on Broadway last night. So, what did the critics think?
David Rooney in Variety writes that "Three-and-a-half years may seem a long time for an instantaneous London smash like "Billy Elliot: The Musical" to cross the Atlantic, but the delay looks to have played serendipitously into the producers' hands. With unemployment figures soaring and the economy in the dumps, the zeitgeist could hardly be more attuned to the stirring story of a Northern England miner's son liberated from bleak reality by his passion for ballet. But even without that happy accident of timing, American audiences would have no trouble connecting with the universal sentiment of this bittersweet dual celebration of community and individuality."
Michael Kuchwara writes for the Associated Press and says "It's not often that a musical comes along that is as ambitious as it is emotional — and then succeeds on both counts.
But "Billy Elliot," which opened Thursday at Broadway's Imperial Theatre, is an exceptional work that exemplifies what the best musicals are all about: collaboration. Everything comes together in this impressive, warmhearted adaptation of the 2000 British film about a North Country coal miner's young son who yearns to dance and join the Royal Ballet School in London."
Ben Brantley RAVES in the New York Times that "Your inner dancer is calling. Its voice, sweet but tough and insistent, pulses in every molecule of the new Broadway musical “Billy Elliot,” demanding that you wake up sleeping fantasies of slipping on tap or ballet shoes and soaring across a stage. Few people may have the gift of this show’s title character, a coal miner’s son in northern England who discovers he was born to pirouette. But the seductive, smashingly realized premise of “Billy Elliot,” which opened Thursday night at the Imperial Theater, is that everybody has the urge. "
Barbara Hoffman in the NY Post gives the show 4 out of 4 stars and writes that "AFTER some rocky previews, marred by a sluggish hydraulic set and overly thick accents, "Billy Elliot" opened last night, proving itself the best gift from Britain since Harry Potter.
This tale of a motherless coal miner's son who was born to dance (ballet, no less) was written, directed and choreographed by the same team behind the 2000 film. But unlike so many shows that plod from screen to stage, "Billy Elliot: The Musical" makes the leap from reheated adaptation to reimagined creation."
Elyse Gardner gives the show 3 out of 4 stars in USA Today and she says that "But the show arrives on Broadway at a time when Americans are just as primed for its feel-good populism. In a period of economic turmoil, after a presidential campaign marked on both sides by a defiant hopefulness, Billy Elliot feels very much in sync with the mood in the nation today."
Posted by Robert Diamond
on Friday, November 14, 2008 @ 8:54 AM
Bury The Dead: Risky and Brilliant
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.
Premiering at the Barrymore Theatre and employing a cast of 32 actors, Irwin Shaw's first play takes place during, "the second year of the war that is to begin tomorrow night," and concerns a sextet of dead soldiers who refuse the services of those trying to bury them and insist on going back home so they can live out the lives they haven't even started. The military and the press agree that the episode must be kept hush-hush, fearing their protests will lead to a decline in the public's support of the war, so they call on one significant woman from each soldier's life to try and convince her man to take it lying down.
Not quite a full evening's length, when Bury The Dead ran its 97 Broadway performances it was preceded by a short curtain-raiser. For Transport Group's production, which only employs 7 actors, director Joe Calarco has written a prelude, A Town Hall Meeting, that cleverly blends itself into Shaw's play and eases a modern audience into the world of 1930's protest drama.
When we first enter the theatre, set designer Sandra Goldmark's stage shows leftover evidence of several spirited events in a middle school auditorium, including a class election debate where, according the posters, Eddie was touting his experience while the word "choice" was prominent in Mary Jane's campaign. Giddily greeting us at the start is Donna Lynne Champlin as the music teacher known only as Our Host, wasting no time in passing out cookies to those in attendance. ("They're store bought I know, but I didn't have the time, it's mortifying I know, but I just didn't have the time.") With daffy enthusiasm Our Host explains that we all wouldn't be here tonight if not for one man… George Stephanopoulos. An avid viewer of This Week With George Stephanopoulos, his practice of scrolling the names and ages of the most recent American losses in Iraq and Afghanistan inspired her to take a trip to see the war memorials of Washington D.C. Taking note of how long after each war's conclusion it took to build its memorial, Our Host, figuring it's never too early to start remembering, has called this meeting to honor the war heroes and heroines of the current conflict.
Though the program was planned to be, "a hodgepodge - a little this'n'that - read some poems and letters written by soldiers - so beautiful - and sing some war songs," at the last minute her star pupil suggested they do an impromptu reading of Irwin Shaw's Bury The Dead.
After drafting her reluctant husband (Jake Hart) into the cast, volunteers from the audience (Jeremy Beck, Fred Berman, Mandell Butler, Jeff Pucillo and Matt Sincell) cold read from the script while Our Host reads the stage directions. At first they simply read the words while seated at table in their amateur attempts at performing but gradually, in bits and pieces at first, they abandon their scripts and actually inhabit their characters. It's not as though they've suddenly become better actors, but more like the forgotten play has refused to be buried among faded Broadway memories and has taken on a renewed life. At times this terrifies Our Host, who apparently has never read the script before, especially when she is called on to play all six women in separate scenes with each soldier.
Up until this point Champlin's innocent eccentric has served as a safety net to lighten the evening, but in the play's seamlessly presented final scenes she completely shifts into a series of contrasting and skillfully committed portrayals. She and Jeremy Beck are touching in their simple bewilderment as a rural farming couple. She's a hard-nosed dame in love with Fred Berman's slick, cheating party-boy. As the mother of Mandell Butler, who is so heartbreaking as the boy who mourns for the adult life he never had, she longs to once again see her son's baby face, unprepared for the sight of how it's been disfigured. There's an amusing romantic abrasiveness to the give and take between Champlin and Jake Hart, as her lug of a mechanic husband as they try and rehash their marriage.
R. Lee Kennedy's lights do an extremely effective job of taking us from the bright and safe world of the town hall meeting to the emotional complexity of the Shaw's play and its many locales. Michael Rasbury's sound design also greatly adds to the texture of the piece.
It's a bit of a cliché to say an old play is just as meaningful today as it was back then, but within his insightful concept Calarco, without altering the playwright's original work, effectively shows us contemporary people being overwhelmed by the relevance of a 72-year-old work of drama. Given the subject matter it may seem trivial to call this dangerous theatre, but it is at the very least a risk-taking project and it succeeds brilliantly.
Photos by Carol Rosegg: Top: Mandell Butler, Donna Lynne Champlin and Fred Berman; Bottom: Jake Hart and Donna Lynne Champlin
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 @ 8:17 AM
Broadway Grosses: Week Ending 11/9 & Algonquin Round Table Quote of the Week
"Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common."
-- Dorothy Parker
The grosses are out for the week ending 11/9/2008 and we've got them all
right here in BroadwayWorld.com's grosses section.
Up for the week was: SPAMALOT (17.3%), THE LITTLE MERMAID (15.7%), SPRING AWAKENING (15.4%), MARY POPPINS (15.2%), 13 (14.6%), AVENUE Q (13.9%), A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (10.9%), IN THE HEIGHTS (9.4%), GREASE (7.5%), BOEING-BOEING (6.9%), BILLY ELLIOT: THE MUSICAL (6.8%), AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY (6.1%), HAIRSPRAY (5.7%), DIVIDING THE ESTATE (3.9%), GYPSY (3.4%), CHICAGO (3.2%), A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1.9%), EQUUS (0.7%), THE 39 STEPS (0.6%), TO BE OR NOT TO BE (0.2%),
Down for the week was: SPEED THE PLOW (-9.0%), THE SEAGULL (-5.9%), ALL MY SONS (-5.7%), WICKED (-4.1%), THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (-3.8%), MAMMA MIA! (-1.8%), JERSEY BOYS (-1.5%), THE LION KING (-0.4%),
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Monday, November 10, 2008 @ 3:39 PM
Harvey Fierstein Weighs In On Civil Rights and Last Week's Election
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.
Thanks to my friend and BroadwayWorld colleague Duncan Pflaster for bringing this column by Harvey Fierstein to my attention.
Posted by
Michael Dale
on Monday, November 10, 2008 @ 10:55 AM
