Intermission Talk

“Porgy & Bess” needed

“Wit” to travel

“The Road to Mecca”

by TONY VELLELA

Back in 1995, when she was appearing with Jude Law and Kathleen Turner in “Indiscretions” on Broadway, I had a wonderfully candid conversation with Cynthia Nixon.  The topic under discussion was acting styles.  We’d just been sharing our experiences with Uta Hagen.  “I’d always been a very emotional actor,” she confided.  “I would go right into the emotions of the character, rather than the circumstances.  I would ‘pump’ the emotions.  Now I see that it’s kind of a dead-end way to work.”  She had just completed a series of sessions with the HB co-founder, and noted that “Miss Hagen expects you to think on stage as the character . . . to have many circumstances in your head, and so many maps of where you might go, that you can explore any territory the character might lead to.”

The “Indiscretions” cast:  Jude Law, Cynthia Nixon, Roger Rees and Eileen Atkins.

Today, Nixon is starring in the revival, and Broadway premiere of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Wit,” portraying a cancer victim confronting her mortality.  And were she alive, I believe Miss Hagen would be proud of her former student.  And while some of the specifics of cancer treatment have evolved since the play opened in 1998, off-Broadway, the core of its compelling story involves how any of us faces our impending demise.  Dr.Vivian Bearing, [Nixon], with her PhD. in 19th century metaphysical poetry, would seem to be a good candidate for growing thick armor as her situation becomes more and more compromised.  The brilliance of Edson’s writing becomes apparent as Bearing’s personal, closely-guarded fears bump up against her fierce intelligence and scalding sense of humor.  Previous high-profile Bearings [Kathleen Chalfant off-B’way and Emma Thompson in an HBO film], projected an obvious toughness of spirit, which suggested that, whatever the details of the story’s conclusion, it would be one chosen by the central character.  Nixon’s ‘persona,’ though, reflects a less galvanized spirit, even at times fragile.  Her ‘victimhood’ is apparent from the get-go, not diminished because of her railing against all manner of institutional ineptitude, against the approach often taken by medical professionals who seem impervious to human feelings, or by the comfort she may have expected from the poetry of John Donne she holds so dear, in and out of the classroom.  Like all of us, she cannot dictate or direct the details of our final moments of life.

At rise, with her bald head, she resembles an alien refugee from “Close Encounters…”.  She first-person narrates the story, employing the sharp wit her IQ and usually rarified company would suggest.  But here, in the world of diagnoses and observations and X-rays and meds and hospital dressing ‘gowns,’ her IQ doesn’t come into it at all.  And                     whenever she does locate an opportunity to roll out a smart-as-a-whip caustic comment, it does not find a place to land.  This professor, so comfortable in her role as celebrated teacher, must now try to do her own learning – which is, learning to suffer.  Because director Lynn Meadow surrounds Nixon with a first-rate ensemble [including the always spot-on Michael Countryman, the happily understated Carra Paterson, and Suzanne Berish so effective in the pivotal role of Bearing’s early-career mentor], the sense of ‘reality,’ such as it may be in a narrated play, registers as strongly as a death sentence.

The current revival of “Porgy & Bess,” [not comfortable, despite how many others are, with calling it ‘The Gershwins’ …] features scenic design by Riccardo Hernandez.  Having seen some of his other work, it should not have been a surprise that this time out, he would also forge an overpowering abstract element in which the musical takes place.  As in “The People in the Picture,” [a mile-high picture frame] and “Parade,” [a mile-high dead tree], to name a few, this effort also puts experimental concept above the needs of the story.  Catfish Row, Charleston, South Carolina, in the late 1930s, an enclosed courtyard of ramshackle tenements, clotheslines, cobblestones and a well, here has been transformed into a vertical lumberyard.  For comparison, take Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” which also requires a feel for the Italian-immigrant neighborhood where the apartment hours is located, in Brooklyn.   When we first meet Eddie, he strides home through small knots of friends, a member of a community.  So, too, when his betrayal is revealed, do we see how that same community shuns him.  Catfish Row should also be seen as that kind of enclave, heads popping out of windows, doorways open, broken stairways leading to broken lives.  But Hernandez’s  barren design robs us of that vital component, the interrelationships among the hard-scrapple folk who collectively suffer indignities large and small.  Other faults have been found with this production, including the weakening of the score and the tinkering with the book, which also deserve mentioning.  Another example of this re-imagining has turned the almost mournful solo “Summertime” into a kind of young-couple romantic duet, draining it of its ability, at the very top of the show, from depicting the enervated quality of life now, and the wrenching aspirations a young mother has for her child.  The set design places this at once delicate and brutal story inside a wooden diorama, robbing it of a critical element in creating the vitality and spark it is capable of.

Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis as Bess and Porgy.

And then there’s Audra.  Ms. McDonald again demonstrates that her greatest gift is the ability to generate, in almost any situation, a breathtaking fearlessness.  Notice that quality in her duet with Porgy [the solid Norm Lewis], “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.”  It mirrors her eye-popping outcry as Ruth in “A Raisin in the Sun,” when she decries her boundless joy at the prospect of leaving behind “these Goddamned cracking walls – and these marching roaches! . . . Hallelujah! and good-bye misery.”  When Sportin’ Life [David Allan Grier, whose sly cunning is balanced with his powerful vocals] teases his way into her latent weakness for ‘happy dust,’ we can see past and present Bess doing battle, the expressions of doubt and commitment and fear and hope crossing her face like lines on a map.  Her wrenching calls for help as Crown reclaims her go unheeded, but they are undercut by the lack of a true, real-looking ‘place’ where the action goes down.

Opera?  Musical theatre work?  A definitions distinction I’m not qualified to parse.   If you don’t expect to have an opportunity to hear this score and experience this tale live, it’s a rich, rewarding event.  Like so much of what comes back labeled as revival, this one also suffers from the commercial expectations a more manageable production might lead to, as well as the ever-growing mania for imprinting a classic work with the distortions visited upon it by willful directors, book re-writers or designers.  Must that be the case?  Ain’t necessarily so.

Bucking this pernicious trend, the respectful revival of Athol Fugard’s 1985 chamber-piece drama “The Road to Mecca” gives us what one could imagine the playwright had in mind.  In this instance, he brings us to a remote hut along a back road in the small Karoo village of New Bethesda, South Africa, circa 1974.  A spirited widow, Miss Helen descends from the original Dutch settlers, and embodies their flinty independence.  Her pastor, Marius, is also an Afrikaner.  The third character, a schoolteacher named Elsa, from English stock, came into Helen’s life when her car broke down a few years back.

Last things first.  Thanks to the sensitive, careful and caring set design by Michael Yeargan, Helen’s circumscribed world within that hut tells us so much about its inhabitant, a sculptor, lover of literature and of nature, and a woman of great resourcefulness.  Notice the books that have replaced one of the legs on her well-worn chaise.  Miss Helen has painted her walls the colors of a blazing sunset.  Artwork, found pieces, carvings, masks and other items of interest bedeck her walls.  And the absence of electric lights accounts for more than two dozen candles of varying sizes and thicknesses that reside on almost every flat surface.

As Miss Helen, Rosemary Harris knows her way around a feisty persona, but tempers her with the self-doubt that has frozen her in place and time.  When Marius and his congregants threaten to take her home and her land, she writes to Elsa to come to her aid.  After her eight-hour drive, Elsa finds Helen’s reticence to spilling out the facts nearly exasperating.  As Marius, who was portrayed in the original New York production by the playwright, Jim Dale creates a folksy charm about him that seems to hint at some underlying deception.  And Carla Gugino’s Elsa provides another opportunity for this insightful and perceptive young woman to shine.  Twists are twisted and turns are turned.  A seemingly little, personal tale of crisis becomes a solid foundation to examine what independence means, what responsibility to ourselves and others entails, how age does not always bestow total wisdom and when to negotiate, as Prof. Bearing does in “Wit,” the consequences of coming to the end of one’s journey.

In  The  Wings

Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts continues its Solo Sessions series with a presentation of Steve Solomon’s “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish, I’m in Therapy!”  If you missed its two-year off-Broadway run, you can book tickets for this April 1 at BrooklynCenterOnline.org.

The Judy Garland world of tributes and recreations continues, this time via a property titled “End of the Rainbow.”  Hopping the Atlantic from an acclaimed London run, it will star Tracie Bennett, recreating her role as Judy, as the show traces the singer’s last two years, from the iconic Palace Theatre concert to her death in 1969.

Another entertainment giant, Charlie Chaplin, has inspired a new musical about the silent film star’s life and career.  “Becoming Chaplin” may look more viable now that a motion picture, “The Artist,” has successfully recreated and celebrated the mute world of those early pictures.  Originating at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, the musical is expected to have its voices heard next season.

The 1991 indie fave “Dogfight,” which starred Lili Taylor and River Phoenix, has spawned an eponymous musical set to heat up Second Stage this summer.  The ’60s-era story follows a young, and shy waitress and a Marine on the verge of being shipped out to Vietnam.   The romantic tale features music & lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, a book by Peter Duchan, and the show was awarded the 2011 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theatre.  Joe Mantello directs.

Finally, for readers from out-of-town, here are two resources to seek out which will help you navigate your Broadway getaway:  [1] Created by veteran Broadway producer, The Broadway Hotline was launched the first of this month, as a one-stop phone service to answer all questions to make it easier [and possibly cheaper!] to make tracks to the Theatre District.  This toll-free hotline = 1-855-SEE-BWAY = operates seven days a week, from 10 AM until showtime, and offers advice and answers about ticket prices and bargains, parking, geography of the streets and avenues, the consequences of there’s a snowfall closing streets and businesses, and more.  It’s like having a hotel concierge you can summon at the touch of your phone pad.  For more info: www.The BroadwayHotline.com.  And [2], when you check in, ask the desk clerk for a copy of the Winter 2012 edition of Playbill that features information on current shows, including discount coupons for many of them.  For more info: www.playbill.com.

On   Book

To enrich your understanding of the context of two of the shows reviewed above, here are three books that do just that.  The discussions about the origins and original intentions of the creators of “Porgy and Bess,” check out “Geniuses of the American Musical Theatre,” by Herbert Keyser.  This handsome overview includes a substantive, well-written chapter on George Gershwin, and others on the creators who shaped the world the Gershwins flourished in.  For the libretto, pick up Stanley Richards’ “Ten Great Musicals of the American Theatre.”  You can see for yourself what the original book and lyrics were, and compare them to the revisal now on display.

Athol Fugard has become of the more heralded playwrights of the last century.  After you take in “The Road to Mecca,” and also “The Blood Knot,” now at the stunning new Signature Theatre center, familiarize yourself with some of his other works.  Four of his plays are collected in an Oxford University Press, but any other collection will do.

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TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the theatre series ‘Character Studies’ for PBS.  His award-winning play “Admissions” is published by Playscripts, and “Maisie and Grover Go to the Theatre” by Art Age Publications.    His feature stories about the performing arts have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Dramatics Magazine, Theatre Week, Parade, Rolling Stone and dozens of other publications.  He is currently teaching very small, private sessions on plays, musicals, characters in them and for actors, directors, designers and dramaturgs, an examination of the creators’ intentions when preparing to work on a production, along with one-to-one coaching.  He can be reached at tvellela@nyc.rr.com.

Looking Back: How the Fall

Season Fared, Good & Bad

by Tony Vellela

“It’s a wrap!” — not the tissue paper and ribbon Christmas bundles coverings still piled in the corner, or fake fur shoulders-coverings, or updated, raunch-spiced songs covering old standards.  This wrap is what they shout when a camera work project has shot its last frame.  This is theatre.  Shows wrap eight times a week.  And at the dawn of the new year, it’s time to see how the previous several months fared, now that the fall season has wrapped.

Instead of tossing titles onto an all-or-nothing ‘best’ or ‘worst’ list, this column prefers to look at individual aspects, starting with the ‘bests.’  And the first category always seems to be ACTING!!

No surprise to anyone who’s been sitting in audiences for the last few years, watching her performances get better and better,  that my pick for the most enriched performance came from Lily Rabe, in Theresa Rebeck’s “Seminar.”  In my view, this remarkable young woman has taken inherited gifts from her parents, playwright David Rabe and actor Jill Clayburgh, and enhanced them with her own nuanced choices, reminiscent of the quiet subtleties that made Julie Harris create such memorable roles.  Close behind is Nina Arianda’s vexing vixen in David Ives’ “Venus in Fur,” who makes her hair-trigger unpredictability a veritable virtue.  Entirely different in content and style, the underappreciated Marcia Jean Kurtz bristled with comic timing gold in Charles Busch’s “Olive and the Bitter Herbs.” 

And in a pairing as organic as Kander & Ebb, Frank Langella’s unctuous, amoral financier in Terrence Rattigan’s “Man and Boy” gave new meaning to ‘wolf in sheep’s Armani.’  Talking of Kander & Ebb, the musical performance stand-outs belong to five relative newcomers to Broadway ears.  When Jessie Mueller belts and croons in Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner’s “On a Clear Day…” she resurrects the joys of listening to old recordings of Anita O’Day, Jo Stafford and Helen Forrest.  [If you don’t know their sounds, treat yourself.]

In the revival of Stephen Schwartz’s “Godspell,” Lindsay Mendez delivers “Oh, Bless the Lord My Soul” with the kind of fearlessness that its original interpreter, the great Lynne Thigpen, would have admired.  And then there’s the peerless Jayne Houdyshell, whose “Broadway Baby” in Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” knocks you out!  The revival sparkles with great singing from established stars, but it’s Houdyshell who delivers the jolt, bringing fresh colors to this anthem to grit and greasepaint.

Representing the guys, Jeremy Jordan’s Clyde in the wearisome “Bonnie & Clyde” is destined to join the [very thin] ranks of musical theatre leading men who can charm as well as they can menace – he’s a great new discovery.  And Drew Gehling, portraying the underwritten plot device Warren in “On A Clear Day…” shows great promise, and deserves to move into larger and better-imagined roles.

Actors can only be as good as the material they have to work from, and in the category of outstanding writing, Ives’ comedy/drama “Venus in Fur,” is joined by David Henry Hwang’s “Chinglish,” a delightful premise of miscommunication, culture clash and hidden agendas, fleshed out with heart and humor.  It was a real pleasure finally to find a new, clever WORD comedy.   Jordan Harrison’s spot-on “Maple & Vine,” where Ozzie and Harriet meet 1984, showed how a remarkable playwright can start with almost conventional humorous moments, pepper them with real-life trauma [the loss of a child], then segue smoothly into scathing satire.    All three plays demonstrate that it takes a heightened sense of imagination to create a fresh premise, and then have it come to life when it goes transfers page to stage.  In terms of sheer ambition and audacity, “Lysistrata Jones,” from Lewis Finn and Douglas Carter Beane, applied a high-voltage taser gun to the musical theatre world.

Greatly overlooked and undervalued is the contribution of the set designer to the success or failure of any production.  At opposite ends of the spectrum, in terms of designer choices, were two whose designs exploded into the audience’s consciousness, to the benefit of the plays they housed.

Lydia R. Diamond owes a good deal to David Gallo, scenic designer for her new play “Stick Fly.”

Her Martha’s Vineyard setting, which requires three distinct areas to unfold, did so in a meticulously-appointed naturalistic interior/exterior complex that hasn’t been seen since Todd Rosenthal’s masterpiece set for Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County.”   Evoking the hectic, frantic dynamic of today’s career-driven Manhattan and the tranquil, superficial ethos of Middle America in 1955, designer Alexander Dodge proved to be a wizard, cleverly employing modular units and a color palette that spoke the language of both eras.

And pulling all the elements together is the director, whose contribution succeeds only in relation to how invisible it is.  In that regard, both Walter Bobbie [“Venus in Fur”] and Anne Kaufman [“Maple & Vine”] demonstrated how powerful the invisible hand can be.

Finally, a catch-all collection of memorable misfires.  In Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop,” Angela Bassett embodies the opposite of that old dictum ‘less is more,’ and in her case, much less would have been very welcome.  The season’s most unnecessary revival was the blowsy production of “Private Lives,” Noel Coward’s wry little gem, with “Stick Fly” and “Seminar” sharing the negative honors for most predictable story lines.  “Stick Fly,” in particular, recycled at its core yet another Bad Dad premise.  Lighting designer Beverly Emmons recycled the fade-to-black-but-leave-a-spot device that became a fave film choice half a century ago [see director Morton daCosta’s “Auntie Mame” and the Roz Russell “Gypsy” directed by Mervyn LeRoy].    And here’s one of the great unanswered questions: how could a design team, in this case those responsible for the “Clear Day” set design and costuming, come up with such hideous choices?  Actors were trapped in front of an Escher-like series of blocks and circles and checkerboard patterns, and also trapped in the worst interpretations of how young adults dressed themselves in the early seventies – Hollywood’s mock hippie styles in clashing, bold colors, with one unfortunate young woman got up like a refugee from Sherwood Forest.  One of the casualties of these irritating designs seems to have been Harry Connick, Jr.’s energy level.  And we thought the “Promises, Promises” revival missed its mark.

Wrapping it up, here’s my shout-out to the ReGroup Theatre, which I’ve personally championed since their inception two years ago.  To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the launching of the legendary Group Theatre, this ambitious and respectful company presented an evening of excerpts from all 23 plays presented by the Group Theatre, a monumental undertaking which was truly remarkable.  Along with “Follies,” their 80th Anniversary Tribute to the Group Theatre deserves renewed kudos for attempting to present something with scope and substance, and succeeding.

On Book

You say there are few new offerings during January?  Why not enrich your knowledge of historical and cultural facts and relish a potpourri of delicious anecdotes, by putting on a cast album of your choice, on a low volume, and snuggle into a few of these fantastic tomes.  Then your intermission talk next season will be all the more scintillating.

To track various periods and patterns, these selections will keep you entertained, and surprise you in the bargain.  Start with the biographical journeys of two of the theatre’s most esteemed critics, George Jean Nathan and H.L.Mencken.  In his book “The Smart Set,” named in tribute to the magazine that chronicled the trials, triumphs and trickery of the late teens through the Depression years, Thomas Quinn Curtiss brings us into the intersecting worlds of the Algonquin Hotel, the Hipppdrome, Greenwich Village and the Trial of the Century.  ReGroup’s first publishing outing, “The ‘Lost’ Group Theatre Plays, Vol. 1” [soon to be followed by #2], rediscovers works by Claire & Paul Sifton and John Howard Lawson.  Estelle Parsons penned the introduction.  Ethan Mordden’s “All That Glittered” dissects the golden age of drama on Broadway, 1919-1959.  “Black Theatre USA,” the revised and expanded edition, edited by James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, reaches back to 1935, and pulls you through the outstanding output from African-American playwrights.  An impressive collection of contemporary gay & lesbian plays have been compiled by Don Shewey in his “Out Front.”  And a grand sweep covering 200 years of plays, players and productions fills Mary C. Henderson’s imposing, well-illustrated “Theater in America.”

Looking for something that will let you hum along?  Pick up Stanley Richards’ two-volume set, “Ten Great Musicals of the American Theatre,” and the follow-up, “Great Musicals of the American Theatre.”  Match them up with the “Rodgers & Hammerstein Illustrated Songbook,” with a foreword by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and you’ll sing yourself to sleep.

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TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the PBS series about theatre, “Character Studies.”  A playwright, he has written more than a dozen plays and musical works, including two that have been published, “Admissions” and “Maizie and Grover Go to the Theatre.”  He has served as a theatre feature reporter and critic for several publications, including The Christian Science Monitor, Dramatics, Parade, Crawdaddy and Theatre Week.  He conducts small-group theatre studies classes on characters, plays and musicals, as well as private coaching sessions.  To learn about them, contact him at tvellela@nyc.rr.com.

“Follies,” “Man and Boy,” &

An icon on “The Mountaintop”

Usher in the Theatre Season

by  Tony  Vellela

Two big men, in two little plays.  One younger man, with a unique personal story.  And lotsa big-talented gals in one capacious musical.

Since the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King must have been familiar with the saying “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions,” he surely would have recognized how applicable it is at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.  Katori Hall’s earnest but un-reconciled “The Mountaintop” seems set up to create a humanizing myth about the civil rights icon, setting the wisely intermission-less tale in Room 306 of Memphis’ Lorraine Motel.  [Side note: Did the pre-show projection say ‘hotel’ instead of . . .?]  David Gallo’s meticulous set design also teases us into anticipating a realistic fictionalization of King’s last night, before his tragic assassination the next morning.

Hall’s writing is far less meticulous.  She relies on an overheard [by the maid and by us] phone conversation to sketch in a picture of King’s home life and current state-of-mind.  For the first half or so of the 85 minutes, King finds himself entertaining, charming and indulging a sassy black motel maid, who delivers his coffee, shares her Pall Malls and trades jocular observations about life, society and the state of civil rights.  A nakedly obvious suggestion that this encounter will shift from casual to carnal, [it does not], plays like an early Fox sitcom.  A few serious, even sobering commentaries tantalize with false hope that this story is going somewhere insightful.

Then, the game changes.  The maid can finish so many of King’s sentences because she was a maid, when she was alive, but she very recently passed over, her current status is angel, and her first assignment is to escort King to paradise.  In an impressive bit of stagecraft reminiscent of 1994’s “An Inspector Calls,” the set disassembles, leaving MLK and then the heavenly-garbed angel on the cusp of the celestial plane, delivering the best lines of the play, calling future generations to “pick up the baton” and carry on the struggle for complete equality for all humankind.

So – sitcom, melodrama, fictionalized mini theatrical biopic, sermon?  How, you may be asking, did this jumbled text make it to the boards?  Like the last moments of the play, the answer is in the stars – movie stars, that is.  As MLK, the imposing, and quite convincing Samuel L. Jackson holds his own against the always daunting task of portraying a real person, and in this case, one known to be larger than life.  On the distaff side, God’s messenger in maid’s clothing stars Angela Bassett, whose performances frequently suffer from a marked practice of emoting rather than connoting.  Hall’s script is a playfield for Bassett’s weakness.

You may also be asking how this second-rate play was recipient of London’s Olivier Award, in a year when it was in competition with Jez Butterworth’s remarkable, stunning Tony-winning “Jerusalem.”  For that answer, you will have to consult your own stars.

Another big star talent can also be seen, in a revival of Terence Rattigan’s 1963 anti-capitalist stage screed, “Man and Boy.”   Frank Langella, who is almost peerless as any character with a confident volubility, a very high disdain quotient and a permanently arched eyebrow, here becomes international financier Gregor Antonescu, two small steps ahead of being indicted in a monumental scandal in Depression-era 1934.  Gregor’s got nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide . . . except his estranged son’s Greenwich Village basement apartment, possibly the future home of Ruth and her sister Eileen.

A production would never have been considered for revival without the assurance of a blazing icy-hot performance at its center, and with Langella on board, the play gets probably the best presentation it will ever receive.  The masterful Derek McLane again creates a rich, textured environment for the story to unfold.  Maria Aiken directs with a hand nuanced enough to keep down the claptrap possibilities, and the supporting cast, especially Adam Driver as Gregor’s conflicted son Basil.

My companion at this performance, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s, assured me during intermission that the ‘facts’ in the case against Gregor seem to have been drawn by Rattigan with great care, and could easily translate into some of the fast-shuffle paper-only assets-juggling that created the epidemic of housing defaults that led to our current Great Recession.  Gregor’s personal story line falters and wobbles all over the place, including one snarky set-up where he appears to be pimping his son to one of his biggest male accusers, the source of the title’s sexual innuendo double meaning.  But this unpolished sequence of events suggesting the imminent destruction of the man and the world financial condition he has insinuated himself into the center of, mostly holds together.  It’s about twenty minutes too long [a decision maybe, to honor the entire original text, since it hasn’t been seen since its premiere in 1963].  However, it’s still great acting in a pretty good play.

Younger talent emerges regularly, and in one instance, it came from a secret, dangerous personal saga.  When teen-aged Carlo Alban was cast as Carlo on the PBS children’s series “Sesame Street,’ he was an All-American, amiable, smiling sweetheart of a teen, who could sing and act beautifully with the kids.  Other roles, on television and at the Public, followed, including regular, recurring or guest spots on ‘Law & Order,” “Oz,” ‘Touched by an Angel,” and “House of Buggin'”.  [full disclosure: I cast Carlo as one of the leads in my musical “Mister” in 2001.]  What we did not know – my production team for that musical, the producers at PBS, the staff at the Public, or anyone else – was that he was an illegal immigrant, functioning with all manner of false and forged paperwork documenting a fictional life that he and his family invented after receiving temporary visitors’ visas.

Now that he is legal, Alban can share all these trials, challenges, lies and deceptions, in a solo show he has written, titled “Intringulis,” [hidden motive, a mystery, a complex web].  And what he’s done so well, with craft and a lack of a harsh, doctrinaire tone, is to stitch together the patches of all these elements, professional, familial and personal, into a true quilt of experiences that provides entertaining musical segments, humorous recollections and re-creations, and serious, even intensely thought-provoking questions as relevant today as when they took place.

The project began as a workshop at the LAByrinth Theatre Company, which Carlo helped launch.  This off-Broadway production is a presentation of INTAR at its space at 500 west 52nd street [www.intartheatre.org].  This one is definitely worth your time, because it will only be there another two weeks.

The double meaning in the title of this fall’s hot ticket revival – the Stephen Sondheim /  James Goldman musical saga “Follies” – has never been shown clearer.

Yes, it’s about a faux Ziegfeld Follies beauties and beaus reunion, and symbolizes the passing of a lavish, opulent, glamorous and entirely shallow entertainment.  But the women and men who come together to commemorate their once-glorious, now long-gone hey-day have each lived, then as now, in a world of fantasy, and yes, folly [which means conduct or belief that is not grounded in logic].

Lavish revues, generically called ‘follies,’ staged with grand over-the-top costuming, and parades of skin-baring young beauties, ruled the Broadway stage during the post Great War period.  Ziegfeld and George White, and later Billy Rose, were household names, impresarios who spared no expense in giving audiences plentiful glitz, faux glamour, music and fantasy.  In this 1971 story about the reunion of performers in the fictional Weismann Follies, the personal lives of several of the troupers, some going back to the earliest days of the twentieth century, the life choices of many are revealed to be perfectly defined as folly [i.e. a foolish action, a pointless but expensive undertaking].

The score has always been considered one of Sondheim’s best, with song after song [“Broadway Baby,” “In Buddy’s Eyes,” “Too Many Mornings,” “Who’s That Woman,” “Could I Leave You,” “Losing My Mind,” and most notably “I’m Still Here”] each a chronicle of misspent moments and confrontations with regret.  The assembled cast also features performer after performer [Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, Danny Burstein, Jayne Houdyshell,  Rosalind Elias and Elaine Paige, among others] who can inhabit a role so totally that you forget who they really are. Like the revue format the show pays homage to, “Follies” takes its shape as a collection of almost free-standing tales, which are loosely intertwined, often with heartbreaking consequences.  What fails the premise is its fairly weak book, which keeps the proceedings from moving at its rightful, spirited pace.  However, director Eric Schaeffer’s decisiveness and the entire design team’s stunning creations support and combine to create the best production this classic will ever get, thanks to its origins as part of a Kennedy Center season.

Stand-outs?  Burstein’s energetic song-n-dance turn matches the depth he brings to the dramatic side of Buddy, whose original good luck in landing Sally [Peters] for his wife has turned to an object of pathos.  Peters reflects the other side of their weary union, with her heartfelt “In Buddy’s Eyes.”  Houdyshell’s career accomplishments continue to tote up, her “Broadway Baby” pulling out all the proverbial stops.  Maxwell dazzles with both her numbers, using her supreme confidence to stir together just enough acid and smirkiness.  The inner child of Elaine Paige’s fading Hollywood star Carlotta enriches the usually one-note defiance of “I’m Still Here.”  And keep an eye out in future for Kiira Schmidt, whose work pops in smaller, ensemble parts – she’s got the vitality of Ann Miller, and the quirkiness of Virginia O’Brien – can’t beat that!

On   Book

Swept away as you will be by the dazzle of “Follies,” it would benefit your enjoyment if you familiarize yourself with the lyrics prior to attending.  Sondheim’s legendary, deserved reputation as one of the English language’s best-ever practitioners should prompt you to pick up either the TCG publication of the playscript, or Knopf’s “Stephen Sondheim: Finishing the Hat,” as comprehensive as possible a compilation, of the man, his work, and his commentary on his work   You will get repeated enjoyment savoring lyrics such as this verse from “I’m Still Here:”  I’ve been through Ghandi,/Windsor and Wally’s affair,/And I’m here./Amos ‘n’ Andy,/Mah-jongg and platinum hair,/And I’m here./I got through Abie’s/Irish Rose,/Five Dionne babies,/Major Bowes,/Had heebie-jeebies/For Beebe’s/Bathysphere./I lived through Shirley Temple/And I’m here.  Or from “Broadway Baby:” I’m just a Broadway baby,/Slaving at the five-and-ten,/Dreaming of the great day when/I’ll be in a show./Broadway baby,/Making rounds all afternoon,/Eating at a greasy spoon/To save on my dough.

While “Man and Boy” is a lesser-known Terence Rattigan play, others with more recognizable titles will demonstrate why this writer keeps showing up, decade after decade, such as “Separate Tables” and “The Winslow Boy.”  Get acquainted with them in “The Collected Plays of Terence Rattigan, and don’t overlook some of his screenplays, such as “The Yellow Rolls-Royce,” “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” and “The Prince and the Showgirl,” – yup! – the one with Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe.

Any list of perennially riveting and relevant plays about the Depression and its consequences always begins with those by Clifford Odets.  Start off with “Six Plays of Clifford Odets” from Grove Press.  Then, keep going.

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TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the PBS series about theatre “Character Studies.”  His play “Admissions” won Best Play Award at the N.Y. International Fringe Festival, and is published by Playscripts.  His play “Maisie and Grover Go to the Theatre” is published by ArtAge Publications.  His writings have appeared in dozens of publications, including Dramatics, The Christian Science Monitor, Parade, Rolling Stone and Reader’s Digest.  He has taught theatre-themed classes at Columbia University-Teacher’s College, HB Studio, Lehman College and several other educational and cultural institutionsaround the country, and currently teaches private and small group sessions for actors, playwrights, directors and dramaturgs – information available at tvellela@nyc.rr.com.

“Ghetto Klown” knows

“How to Succeed”

in Brit’s “Jerusalem”

where “Anything Goes”

by TONY VELLELA

‘Tis the season of over-achievers.  And because cellphones, no-zone, sugary donuts and ten-minute plays have combined to reduce the average theatre-lover’s attention span, this edition will only look at four of them.  Whew!

Attaining success with limited expenditure of energies is the foundation of “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” the peppy musical blueprint for making it in the world of multi-everything corporations.  Created by Frank Loesser [music & lyrics], with a book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert, half a century ago, it captured the 1962 Pulitzer Prize.  This revival shows us why.

The Hartman Group, Ari Mintz, Associated Press

At the dawn of the sixties [not THE sixties, which began around 1966], bright, eager young men invaded big business as big business was getting way bigger.  One of these corporate acolytes, a rather boyishly charming J. Pierrepont Finch, reads a book with the same title as this piece, and snakes his way to the top of the top.  And sparking this firecracker to life at the Hirschfeld Theatre is the indomitable Daniel Radcliffe, late of Harry Potter-ville, and his 2008 Broadway debut in “Equus.”   As he descends from the ceiling as a window-washer, reading the book, we hear the text narrated for our benefit by Anderson Cooper [no acting threat to anyone anywhere].  That’s the last time Ponty is seen heading downward.

There’s a lot to like here, but you need to park your tendency to compare this one with the original stage version or its film adaptation, both of which spotlighted the Cheshire-grinning Bobby Morse [now, ironically, Robert Morse, in the cast of television’s “Mad Men,” about that era and that world].  This production really sees its world through Ponty’s eyes alone.  And a good thing, too.  His husband-hungry love interest, Rosemary, is handled by Rose Hemingway with a kind of clumsy girly-ness crossed with a barracuda’s instincts, not a good fit.  As World Wide Wicket’s head man, Biggley, John Larroquette’s sitcom chops help him convey the boss’s quirks and percs, with unexpected, and very welcome restraint.  What does remain almost casting-proof, if the cast can sing well, is the show’s peerless score, which includes standards such as “I Believe in You,” “Been a Long Day,” “How to Succeed” and “Brotherhood of Man.”  That last entry is usually a showpiece for the boss’s uptight secretary to let loose, but here, she’s swallowed up by the entire cast.  Another change, this one for the better, comes courtesy of Tammy Blanchard’s take on the boss’s personal ‘project,’ a Miss Hedy LaRue, who doesn’t know a steno pad from a Brillo pad.  Blanchard’s Hedy has more than just a knockout figure; she’s got a head for figures, and uses it to match Ponty in the ladder-climbing department.

The Hartman Group, Ari Mintz, Associated Press

Daniel Radcliffe, left and Tammy Blanchard

Radcliffe, age-appropriate for the role, projects into Ponty what we project onto the actor – a zeal to conquer this challenge, which for Ponty is succeeding in business, and for Radcliffe, it’s carrying a Broadway musical.  Ponty pulls it off with less effort, but Radcliffe earns our admiration for sheer, as they used to say, moxie.

If there’s a Spanish word for ‘moxie,’ in that dictionary, next to the word, you’d find a picture of John Leguizamo, our second over-achiever.  When his ahead-of-its-time Fox variety show “House of Buggin'” was running in the mid-’90s, I spent a week covering it, and saw him whirlwind his way from sketch rehearsal to writers’ room to costume quick-changes to shooting the sketch, without seeming to breathe.  In his newest one-man Broadway show “Ghetto Klown,” he insinuates himself around the stage of the Lyceum Theater with enough energy to make you forget he’s nearly fifty.  Those familiar with his past one-mans, “Mambo Mouth,” “Sexaholic – A Love Story” and “Spic-O-Rama” will be pleased that the format here is roughly the same – true and almost true events from his life, peppered with projections, music snippets, dance moves and impersonations, all tidily strung together by director Fisher Stevens.   Like Lily Tomlin and Billy Crystal, Leguizamo blends a unique delivery with an endearing self-deprecating charm, wrapped around more than two hours of razor-sharp, hilarious comedy material.  He once told me, over lunch, that he was an avid student of the classic comics of the last century, including George & Gracie, Benny, and Fred Allen.  I rest my case.

On the distaff side, Sutton Foster has been carving out a Broadway career that almost, to quote that green witch eight blocks north of the Sondheim Theatre, defies gravity.  This new revival of “Anything Goes” sports music & lyrics by Cole Porter and an amalgamated book by P.G.Wodehouse & Guy Bolton, Howard Lindsay & Russel Crouse, plus Timothy Crouse & John Weidman.  It’s a 1930s shipboard romance / zany screwball comedy, wherein a former evangelist Reno Sweeney [Foster], tries to woo and win lost love Billy [the spot-on Colin Donnell] away from his reluctant love interest Hope [Laura Osnes, who hits every mark with perfection], with an on-the-lam gambler Moonface Martin popping in and out, gumming up the works [a rather artificially chipper Joel Grey].  The plot rivals “Hellzapoppin'” and “Night at the Opera” for literary coherence, which adds to the fun.  And the living treasure John McMartin once again shares his brilliant comedy timing to keep things giddy.

No shortage of happy tappy numbers here, with director/choreographer Kathleen Marshall combining both assignments in ways that enhance the production.  Now, not to quibble, but while powerhouse Foster and theatre icon Grey, with dazzling support from the company and the designers, keep the ocean liner afloat as though it’s in a sea of bubbly champagne, one wonders what this revival would look like with different leads. Imagine, for instance, Christine Ebersol and Craig Bierko as Reno and Moonface, roles that deserve acting informed by an instinctive wise-cracking, slippery scam-artistry and a delicious deviousness that Sutton/Grey adequately mimics.  Before you get all up and crazy, the show’s a hot’n’sassy respite from some of the darker fare or pandering star vehicles in the neighborhood, so if you see it, you’ll enjoy it.

“Jerusalem” leads the pack in terms of darker fare, despite playwright Jez Butterworth’s uncanny skill for peppering this lurid, near mythological tale with true comedy, developed from within the characters and story lines during a 24-hour period.  And #4 on our over-achiever list goes to the spell-binding Mark Rylance.  During the past three seasons, he took flight in “Boeing Boeing,” commandeering the stage in “La Bete.” and now embodies the outcast Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, living in a rundown beached trailer in a forest bordering the English hamlet of Flintock, Wiltshire.

But the ‘when’ is more important to this ragged, rugged tale than the ‘where.’  St. George is revered as the patron saint of England, for his legendary supposed role as a dragon-slayer who rescued a maiden held hostage in a deep dark cave. And his patron’s day is April 23, the date of the play, and of its opening on Broadway [clever producers, eh?].  The title comes from the song of the same name, based on a William Blake poem that heralds a promise-land of peace and love and the natural world unpolluted.  Rooster laments the lost, or never found, paradise, and like St. George, lashes out at every representation or demonstration of corruption, evil and hypocrisy.

Instead of Peter Pan, or the Pied Piper, Rooster more closely resembles the older male titular father figure Bob, overseeing a band of hustler street urchins in Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho.”  Rooster is also a refuge-provider to the kids he peddles drugs and drinks to, kids who are the rural Brit version of the hang-out gang in “Suburbia.”  Rooster achieved notoriety as a documented daredevil figure, who is also reputed [by his own reporting] to have been conceived when a bullet passed through his dad’s member, out the window, and into his mom’s egg basket, making him the product of a virgin birth, born with a full set of teeth.  Other stories abound, involving him walking away after being declared dead, and later found in a nearby pub downing libations, and having an active acquaintance with giant Druids.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Mark Rylance, center, in a scene from “Jerusalem,” on Broadway at the Music Box Theater.

On this day, his wife has come back to the village for the annual festival, which is much less lively now that Rooster no longer jumps large numbers of buses with his motorcycle.  Their son is with them.  And it is also the day that the town council has issued its final decree, ordering him off the forested public land where he has been parked for many years, to allow for the construction of a housing development.  A runaway teen-aged girl has been hiding out in his tin parked ‘submarine,’ which sports St. George’s flag on its roof.

So Rooster has his pick of dragons to slay: the council and their eviction notice; his wife’s interference with the chance to get to know his young son; the region’s band of thugs, who drop in to rough up Rooster and his followers, and dealing with his own personal demons.  Butterworth has set his saga on the very day that this dissipated druggie/drunk must rid his world of every kind of evil, negative influence, to put his own world in order, for himself and for the cast-off young people in his orbit.

If this sounds like a comic book invention, or a Richard Foreman event with an actual book, those observations only reflect surface elements.  Butterworth, with the help of director Ian Rickson, has chiseled a masterwork of invention, a creative volcano of a play, erupting with every kind of pathos, with every chance to inject humor skillfully realized, with characters that are both three-dimensional and mythic, and with a multi-layered interlocking set of plot lines that resemble a rapidly unraveling hooked rug in the foyer of one of Flintock’s shabby little cottages.

None of this could be realized – none of it, mind you – without the anchor performance of that theatrical over-achiever, Mark Rylance.  Johnny the ‘Rooster’ always mutates before our eyes, as his motives shift, and his moods [often chemically altered] create a kind of behavioral chaos that he barely keeps in cheque.  This is a performance that folks decades from now will recount as a towering, thundering, magical evocation of how a written character can possess the stage like a vivid nightmare can possess one’s waking moments, despite attempts to block it out.  Rylance has insinuated himself into a guaranteed place in theatre history with this unequalled performance.

On  Book

If you’d like to fill yourself in on what John Leguizamo was talking about when he gave credit to the master laffmeisters from the middle of the last century, check out two biographies.  The first is “Gracie: A Love Story,” that George Burns wrote about his beloved wife and comedy partner Gracie Allen [Penguin Books, 1988].  Their career went from vaudeville to radio to pictures to television, and if their television series “The Burns & Allen Show” ever cycles back into syndication, watch it, and if you are an actor looking to do comedy, tape it for intensive study.  The other Allen from that same era was Fred Allen, and Robert Taylor’s biography “Fred Allen: His Life and Wit” [Little Brown – 1989] takes you through the same journey from one entertainment medium to the next.  Fred never had the television success that George & Gracie enjoyed, but then again, George once told me that they tried not to be too proud of being in the Top Ten “because there were only eight shows on at that time!”

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TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the PBS series ‘Character Studies’ about theatre.  His award-winning play “Admissions” is published by Playscripts.  He has reported on the performing arts for dozens of publications, including The Christian Science Monitor, Dramatics, Parade Magazine, Rolling Stone and Theatre Week.  Information about his small-group intensive classes about theatre, as well as his private coaching, can be obtained from tvellela@nyc.rr.com.

“Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,”

abandons “Good People,”

to find her “Arcadia,”

with her “Book of Mormon”

by Tony Vellela

There’s a great old Astaire/Rogers picture ‘The Gay Divorcee’ [not that kind of ‘gay’], where Ginger’s rented an alibi guy, who keeps mangling the sentence “Chance favors the prepared mind.”  In David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Good People,” and Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” that guy could wander in and out saying his line and fit right in.  When it premiered in 1995 at Lincoln Center, the Stoppard play fascinated those who understood it, and bewildered those who didn’t, with many switching back and forth during any given performance.  This time around, it seems a little easier to follow, but some of the ‘fascination’ elements have been rendered less mesmerizing.  Here are the basics:  We’re in the nearly-empty room of an English 1809 manor house [Derbyshire] in spring, with only a few odd chairs and a dining table of unlikely length at its center, holding books, a candelabra and a tortoise.  At the start, a twenty-ish young male tutor and a puberty-realized young girl are doing lessons.  She’s smart, clever and curious.  He’s bored.  Her mother fancies the tutor; a guest couple has had tryst-connected events peppering their stay; a landscape gardener has been hired to convert the grounds from proper formal British style to the in-vogue Continental free-range look, shorn to be wild, as it were.

Next scene, we’re in the late twentieth century – same room, same spare appointments, including the enervated reptile.  A professor who specializes in literary history and criticism is there to research the place’s place in lit. hist., using the estate records as her source.  One of her severest critics is also in town, and plans to challenge her work while proving on his own that Lord Byron was a house guest at the time she is looking into.

Of course, you can’t get the whole picture beyond the fact that these two story lines are woven throughout with sexual escapades, status and class questions, enough name-dropping to sink the Bismark and most crucially, a quest for knowledge [real or not].  For a play that  relies on some need to demonstrate how life’s mysteries and realities always find their connectedness, the set design alone works against establishing that milieu.  Intimate it is not.  As the stories unspool, migrating proper nouns pop up in both centuries.  The ‘engine’ that drives this remarkable vehicle is the playful, fifteen-year-old Thomasina, whose boundless curiosity is matched by her keen mathematical acumen.  She stumbles upon the key to the solution to figuring the proof for Fermat’s last theorem, which has stumped the collective learned for centuries.  [It’s a math thing.]  And when, nearly two hundred years hence, her papers are discovered, the researchers are in disbelief that a mere female child could have calculated this arcane formula.  And in her more mischievous mode, she examines the sketches of how the estate will look after it has been reconfigured, and draws in the figure of a man, referred to in the 20th century as The Hermit, because she’s placed him next to the drawing of a small outbuilding known as the Hermitage.  Can’t have one without the other, she jokes.  And it is this ‘by chance’ impulsive adolescent act that launches hundreds of researcher-hours, reams of analysis, wildly divergent kinds of speculation and a small cottage [hermitage?] industry devoted to marketing all of it.

Making it through this epic requires talents all round.  Director David Leveaux handles his responsibilities of moving people in, out and about, as a choreographer would, but falls short of the ‘acting guide’ component.   And inattentiveness to line delivery in regard to comedy timing causes vital bits to be lost when drowned out by laughter.  Happily, young Bel Powley comes off much better than the somewhat frenetic, gesticulating Jennifer Dundas did in the original 1995 production.  Powley skillfully meshes adolescent and prodigy – we can see how hormones and brain cells can believably do battle in an energetic, yet thoughtful young girl.  Tom Riley [the tutor] and David Turner [the visiting husband of the couple] turn in flawless incarnations of their characters.  But a few surprising let-downs mar the overall undertaking, including Billy Crudup [he starred as the tutor a generation ago], as a high voltage critic who acts like he’s an ancestor to Ari from ‘Entourage;’ Margaret Colin and Lia Williams, both of whom, for different reasons, do not generate enough heat to be women who would inspire even an agenda-free tryst, and Raul Esperza, marking time as another of the academic researchers.

There are three ways to enjoy this ambitious venture: [1] just watch it for the fun of piecing together the story lines and judging the full range of acting styles and choices for yourself; [2] read the play first, so you can tell the players without a program, and [3] study up on Fermet, Lord Byron, the natural gardener pioneer Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, chaos theory, the tension between the Classical and Romantic eras in all areas of European life, and the other works by Tom Stoppard.  You choose – then take your own chance.

The chance that Margy [Frances McDormand] takes in “Good People” leads her onto a high-wire of recriminations during a high voltage windstorm that she can’t quite control.  Her better self eventually whispers into her ear with a loud South Boston accent.  She is mother to an adult mentally-challenged daughter, struggling to hold on to blue collar jobs that are often sabotaged by her need to care for that daughter, and loosely befriended by old high school chum Jean [the flawless Becky Ann Baker, deserving of a long-overdue Tony Award] and a humorously cantankerous landlady Dottie [the  equally flawless Estelle Parsons, ditto the Tony Award thing],  Margy [hard ‘g’] must now try to recover from losing yet another job when her daughter’s condition creates scheduling problems – read ‘excessive tardiness.’

When Jean proposes that Margy pay a ‘friendly visit’ to their former high school friend Mike [a credibly conflicted Tate Donovan], now a successful Chestnut Hill endocrinologist who never looked back to his old neighborhood mean streets of South Boston, Margy at first bristles.  She decides to drop in sans appointment to his office, where he manages to generate some degree of bonhomie.  She would like a job; all he can offer is a handout.  He gets maneuvered into inviting her to his son’s birthday party, but when she arrives, there’s no party because the son is sick.  She suspects otherwise – that he lied to her to prevent her from hitting up his friends for a job, which was in fact her agenda.  What wounds Mike is Margy’s skillful deployment of the charge that he’s become one of the ‘lace curtain Irish,’ traitors to their roots, and no longer ‘good people.’  It takes his lovely young, smart wife [a captivating Renee Elise Goldsberry] to untangle the web Margy’s enmeshed Mike in, and Margy leaves without real satisfaction, sadder but no wiser.  All this is territory that could’ve been kicked around quite convincingly in a two-parter on “Roseanne,” where, you may recall, Estelle Parsons played Roseanne’s mother Bev.

Daniel Sullivan generates true organic relationships here, as he did in the playwright’s “Rabbit Hole.”  What Margy quite eloquently relates to Mike is how one small incident, a chance encounter, a delay of two minutes when an event unfolds, even a broken tooth, can wind up shaping a person’s entire life.  She both accepts the inevitable occurrence of random events, and curses their power to alter in bad ways the trajectory of her life.  In “Good People,” Lindsay-Abaire almost pulls it off, deflating the play’s power and sting with a throw-away line just at the end that serves to trade rare clarity for pointless ambiguity.  Maybe leaving before the final scene would be the best bet.

What you can bet on is the powerhouse entertainment quotient of two new musicals, one imported from Australia, the other from South Park Land. With both of these twisted versions of the musical theatre form, it helps to have an acquaintance with the effects of hallucinogenics – a kind of belated tribute to my old friend Owsley.  This is not to say, lest creators are dialing attorneys to draft slander suits, that said creators were under any influence at all of any illegal kind.  It just sort of looks that way.  And as it happens, they are both trippy musicals about a trip.

“The Book of Mormon” unites South Park originators Trey Parker and Matt Stone with ‘Avenue Q’s’ Robert Lopez.  Their intention is to shock and provoke.  And depending on who you are, they may succeed.  If references to female circumcision, scrotum infestation and child rape seem out of place in a musical, no amount of formula chorus lines,  conventional staging or redeeming follow-ups will win you over.  If not, this is a good book.  Profanity is in the ear of the be-hearer.

The trip happens when an eager, magnetic young Mormon evangelist, [the door-to-door guys – white shirt, black tie, smile] and the over-eager, social misfit, both ending their training and about to start their two-year stint as Elders in the field, get paired up and sent to AF – rica !!!   Not St. Petersburg, San Diego or even Denver, but the End of the Earth.  It’s a coming-of-conscience tale as stolid Ken [Andrew Rannells]  and bumbling Arnold [Josh Gad – character names do give it away] mature into who God wants them to be, I think.  As they try to convert even one native, stuff happens, always set to catchy tunes and snappy dance routines.  The filching the creators do is good-natured satire, and includes mimicking the ‘Small House of Uncle Thomas’ set piece from “The King & I,” and a hefty amount from “The Lion King.”

While the formula draws [lovingly, I might add], from the solid book R&H book musicals of mid-century last, the result, surprisingly, is even more reminiscent of ’60s musicals such as “Promises, Promises” and “How to Succeed…,” but with a lot of verbal assaults on every type of convention.  Rannells and Gad at first represent their stereotypes with vigor and a kind of sweetness, and as their belief systems unravel, and they see the damage their religious peddling does to people who need more than slogans and leather-bound Bibles, they blossom into truly enjoyable guys to watch.  Casting kudos to Carrie Gardner, for filling the show with a splendid array of talented newcomers and vets.  Due to the skillful direction by Mr. Parker and Casey Nicholaw, the pace is rambunctious, aided no doubt by Mr. Nicholaw’s experience with “Spamalot” and “Drowsy Chaperone.”  There’s a genuine peppiness to the proceedings that all but mitigates the material, and whatever your take on its irreverence elements, The World Did Not End because “The Book of Mormon” has begun to corrupt Broadway audiences. Is that even possible?  In fact, it has rejuvenated a form that is still one of America’s proudest creations, the stage book musical.

Priscilla, in “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” is a bus.  Three guys, a second-string drag queen, a more accomplished DQ, and a transsexual now retired from the business, are all living in Sydney.  The second-stringer has a son from a hapless encounter in the Aussie boonies, and the mother/wife contacts him because the boy wants to meet Dad.  In a stunning coincidence, Mom owns a club in the town called Alice Springs, and suggests that Dad and friends can play there, while the reunion takes place.

So, it’s a road picture musical, the basics coming from the film of roughly the same name.  But the stage version resembles a Las Vegas nightclub revue, with one ‘act’ after another presented to dazzle the paying customers, while the storylines get inserted as little more than afterthoughts.  It has echoes of the “Gypsy” segment when Rose motors cross-country, picking up newsboys along the way.  It’s what would happen if “Mamma Mia” slept with “La Cage Aux Folles” and they had a hyperactive child.

The true stars of “Priscilla” are the designers.  Jonathan Deans and Peter Fitzgerald [sound], Brian Thomson [bus concept & production design], Nick Schlieper [lighting], Cassie Hanlon [make-up] and Oscar-winners Tim Chappel & Lizzy Gardiner [for the costumes in the picture, repeated here in giddy, witty excess] keep the pace fast.   The show’s structure almost mirrors nineteenth-century melodramas in reverse, where book scene changes were masked by the presentation of short musical numbers, called ‘olios.’  Here, the musical numbers are the main attraction, with the story popping in and out, while the chorus changes into and out of their innumerable behemoth headdresses, and more outfits soaked in sequins, feathers, beads, bangles and spangles than any sober person can count.  Also popping in and out are tributes to performance icons such as Tina Turner, Eartha Kitt, Marilyn and Madonna.

As one [older] person said to another during intermission, “This type of show goes back to the twenties.  It’s a revue, except that it’s vulgar.”  Younger eaves-droppers nearby couldn’t hold in their snickers.  And the jukebox that this happily tawdry musical draws from must have been fathered by a time machine, because the songs range from ‘Material Girl’ and ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ to ‘Thank God I’m a Country Boy’ and ‘A Fine Romance,’ the latter demonstrating how the skill of lyric-writing has degenerated soooo much.  It’s by Jerome Kern, from a picture called “Swing Time,” starring Fred and Ginger, which, you could say, brings us full circle.

Afterpieces

Because I grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania, I know very well the setting for Jason Miller’s “That Championship Season.”   The playwright is said to have modeled the character of the aging high school basketball coach after Scranton Prep’s legendary winning coach Jack Gallagher.  In the play, four of the five members of a former team that has become the stuff of mythology once again reunite, more than two decades later, in the coach’s living room, to commemorate that winning final, last-second victory.  But the structure, seen today, reveals its outlines, in which each character must come clean and deal with a development that threatens their personal or professional lives, and the truth of the legend – think “Boys in the Band” in satiny shorts, bouncing basketballs and drinking beer.  Kiefer Sutherland comports himself remarkably well, given the somewhat musty feel of the exposition-heavy writing, with red flag names such as Father Coglin, Joe McCarthy and Pope Pius providing touchstones for the coach’s mentality.  Written in 1972, the fear-mongers were crying ‘communist’ as a code word for ‘hippies,’ and Coach is the perfect dupe for those who dealt in painting with a broad, Red brush.   He’s a ‘there’s no place for second place’ type of bulldog guy.  If you feel at home in that rah-rah, dominate-at-all-cost, ‘America – love it or leave it’ environment, you’d do much better dropping in on Vince and Marie Lombardi, at Circle-in-the-Square.

Two acting legends, and a third in the making, populate the revival of “Driving Miss Daisy.”  Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones portray the ‘best friends’ Daisy and her driver Hoke, and Boyd Gaines handles Daisy’s diligent son, but it still comes off as a very very good university production.  If you’ve never seen any of these truly fine actors, you might want to enjoy their work in [sort of slow] action.  If it’s the story you want to revisit, watch the picture again.   And, the play doesn’t have that marvelous theme song.

In other news, as they say on network television, Neil LaBute’s “Fat Pig” has been postponed until next season, because a key investor has pulled out.  And the New York Philharmonic will treat us all to a concert version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” from April 7 to 9 at Avery Fisher Hall.  The cast includes Neil Patrick Harris as Bobby, with his circle of friends to include Anika Noni Rose, Martha Plimpton, Stephen Colbert, Jim Walton and Patti LuPone.

On Book

Miss LuPone can also be seen on bookshelves.  Her autobiography “Patti LuPone: A Memoir,” co-written with Digby Diehl, is a breezy read, funny, lively and candid.  It was interesting to learn that her first name is not the result of the ’50s craze of changing the ‘y’ to an ‘i’ at the end of girls’ names, such as Joni James and Patti Page.  Our Patti gets her moniker from the surname of her mother’s family.  Her great-grandaunt, Adelina Patti, was a famous nineteenth-century coloratura from Sicily!

Another show business tome that can seduce you into immersing yourself for many hours is David Leopold’s lovingly compiled “Irving Berlin’s Show Business.”  The photo collection alone will pull you in for quite a while, and the book tells how the Russian immigrant, born Irving Beilin, filled nearly all of his 100+ years crafting songs, including three of the most revered and recorded in the last century, “Easter Parade,” “White Christmas” and “God Bless America.”

Now if you do choose to read “Arcadia,” you can expand your Stoppard IQ by picking up Faber & Faber’s Contemporary Classics edition “Tom Stoppard: Plays – # 5,” which includes the aforementioned, along with “Night & Day,” “Indian Ink,” “Hapgood,” and one of my favorites, “The Real Thing.”  And a word to the easily confused – if you want to give yourself an edge before seeing two other pond-jumpers, “War Horse” and ‘Jerusalem,” pick up the playscripts first.

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TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the PBS series “Character Studies,” about theatre.  His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Dramatics, Parade, Rolling Stone, Theatre Week and The Robb Report, among other publications.  His award-winning play “Admissions” is published by Playscripts, his play “Maisie & Grover Go To The Theatre” is published by Art Age, and his new play “Labor Days” will be produced in August.

“The Three Sisters”

Can’t Take “Blood from

A Stone,” because “The

Milk Train Doesn’t Stop

Here Anymore” or at

“Other Desert Cities”

by Tony Vellela

Blame the father.  When General Prozorov, a widower, moved his four children from Moscow to the small garrison town where he was put in charge of a brigade of soldiers, the kids got cut off from the world they were educated and socialized to thrive in.  Eleven years have gone by, and for ten of them, they at least enjoyed the glow of being in the area’s most vibrant household, where gatherings overflowed with music and games, discussions and the free exchange of ideas.  Dad died a year ago.  Since that time, while the only brother settled into a lovingly looked-after only male role, the three sisters have gradually grown more and more weary of this life without father.  The glow is almost gone.

When we meet the adult Prozorov siblings in Anton Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters,” it’s the dawn of the twentieth century in rural Russia.  Any optimism that might accompany a new century is not matched by the principals’ inability to act on their collective goal – to high-tail it out of there and get back to the intellectual, vibrant, society-driven and romanticized Moscow they remember as children.

The Classic Stage Company’s revival, aided by outstanding set design concepts, envelops its audience in this masterwork.  As the story progresses, each sister fails to realize her dream.  Olga, the eldest, is fulfilled in her post as a schoolteacher, but dreads the prospect of being headmaster.  The surrogate mother, she remains suitor-less.  Masha, the middle sister, has trapped herself in an ill-conceived marriage to Olga’s high school teacher colleague, whom she initially thought of as smart and stimulating because he was educated.  Now, he’s just boring.  And Irina, the youngest, settles for marriage to a baron, which ties her to the vagaries of her husband’s military assignments.  All three, during the four and a half years that pass, must confront the realization that they will not journey somewhere over the rainbow, that even their modest diversions of birthday parties and holiday celebrations  cannot fill the vacuum in their emotional lives.  It may be worst for Masha.  She is tortured by her barely-consummated affair with Vershinin, a married-with-children lieutenant colonel with a psychotic wife, a romantic man who shares her passions intellectual and carnal, but not her will to abandon their stagnant station for a new life together.

The lone brother Andrey garners loving attention from the sisters, who project onto him their vision of a young man taking Moscow by storm, with a university post and a reputation as a musician and sought-after bachelor.  Instead, he sets lower sights, marries Natasha, a local farm girl who adores him, and contentedly secures a position on the county council.   Once we meet his wife, it suggests that Chekhov might have considered titling this work “Three Sisters and a Sister-in-Law.”

In Natasha, Chekhov gives us the embodiment of someone whose strivings are not encumbered by idealistic assessments of false modesty, who does not indulge superiority complexes shaped by education rather than accomplishments, who compartmentalizes her roles of wife, mother and mistress [both manager of the household and adulteress with the town’s most influential man].  And in this production, Marin Ireland powerfully creates a woman who has all these compartments fully stocked, and draws from them unabashedly, as befits someone untrained in nuanced behavior.

So much stands out in this sterling production, as this dream cast makes joyful use of Austin Pendleton’s vaunted ability to permit actors to grow into their roles.  [full disclosure:  Pendleton directed my award-winning play “Admissions.”]  His casting choices reflect a keen understanding of the need to show how all these characters slide in and out of primary moments, how they tamp down high emotions to keep within their societal expectations, how their views of time evolve and how artifice and integrity can become corrosively fused, held together by fear and weakness.

Every performance supports the others.  The sisters – Jessica Hecht’s Olga, Juliet Rylance’s Irina and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Masha – show individual talents and personal scars, while effortlessly becoming intimately close sisters who can soothe feelings, push buttons and pull no punches.  Peter Sarsgaard wisely chooses to make Vershinin an officer whose wounded life makes him an easy recipient for Masha’s fantasies of escape, a man less dashing than his Moscow counterparts, and would not have commanded Masha’s attentions if she had met him after successfully getting back to town.  Josh Hamilton’s Andrey shows us what happens when a person with no strong drives becomes the object of others’ projections, and whose lack of interest in his sisters’ societal aspirations makes him, at least for a few years, a perfect match for the unpretentious Natasha.  And stage veterans Roberta Maxwell, George Morfogen and Louis Zorich are added delights in smaller roles.

But if there is a first among equals in this cast, it is surely Ireland.  By choosing not to hide the impulses she feels as she feels them, and not deny the immediacy of her judgments, her Natasha, the only one of the four woman who winds up ‘having it all,’ shows the contrast between the real and the ideal, between imagining and acting, between romantic love and mutual needs.  Her Natasha does storm into a room, because that is what she feels the moment calls for.  Because when one steps back and looks at the landscape of the play, one thing becomes clear — no Natasha, no play.

One of the characteristics that make for a great actor is fearlessness.  Add to that a high intelligence level employed skillfully to honor the intentions of a great script, and finally, in some instances, a willingness to risk looking foolish, all of which Ireland possesses.  And currently, at the Laura Pels Theatre, such a combination also comes to life eight times a week in Tennessee Williams’ controversial “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” directed with care by Michael Wilson.  And the actor responsible for sparking this real event is Olympia Dukakis.

Written by Williams in 1961-62, and victimized by ill-conceived productions and by a critical press that had almost collectively decided that he was no longer a playwright worth serious consideration, “Milk Train” belongs at or near the end of the line of his great ‘needy older woman- purchasable younger man’ yarns.  Here, Flora ‘Sissy’ Goforth, former chorus girl and widow of four husbands, three of whom have turned her into one of the world’s richest women, has holed herself up in her indulgently-outfitted mountaintop villa on Italy’s Divina Costiera.  She’s writing her memoirs while she’s still got time, and there’s not much left.

With only an always punctilious, often unctuous young Vassar grad, recently widowed, as her dictation transcriber cum personal assistant Blackie [the estimable Maggie Lacey], and a minimum of put-upon staff, Sissy has fashioned a regimen fueled by liquors, black coffee and various pharmaceuticals, legal and illegal.  She’s had her entire security-fortified collection of villas and surrounding land wired to pick up and broadcast her recollections, wherever she is, recorded for Blackie to take down.  This fussy routine gets torpedoed when Christopher Flanders,  a young-ish, semi-louche poet type [a somewhat subdued Darren Pettie] scales the cliffs, outruns the attack dogs with only a few minor scrapes and wounds, and inserts himself into Flora’s cloistered, tightly-controlled universe.

The author’s notes indicate that the setting should suggest a ‘semi-abstract’ style, and the designers [Jeff Cowie: set; Rui Rita: lights] have delivered on that instruction.  Director Michael Wilson exerts good judgment in not messing around with what the playwright wanted the style and sensibility to be.  As the last sweet days/hours of Flora unfold in August, 1962, the random bits of her memories, abetted by a frienemy, lovingly named the Witch of Capri [Edward Hibbert outdoing himself in campy, staccato movements and line deliveries], reveal a defiant octogenarian, determined to guarantee that future generations have access to her life story, with all its riches as a reflection of American and world societal and cultural significances.  She was there, and she wants you to damn well know it.

Flanders, known in recent years among gilt-edged society folk as the Angel of Death, due to his propensity for turning up near the end of the lives of rich, lonely women, eagerly readies his role as sympathizer and source of comfort, and not until she can hear the Grim Reaper whispering in her ear does Flora shed her scales, deactivate her personal emotional alarm systems and seek out his talents, but not before one last performance as a Geisha seductress, complete with embroidered kimono, lacquered black wig and two fans deftly slung open with the sharp wrist movements of a karate chopper.  She has done this before, a lot.

And here is where Olympia Dukakis excels.  Her Flora comes forth with the very best of Mae West, Totie Fields, Leona Helmsley, Elaine Stritch, Phyllis Diller, Gwen Verdon and Sophie Tucker – bawdy, merciless, sensual, witty, charming, calculating, vulgar, sly and cold-blooded, with the proportions constantly shifting to suit the moment and the audience, of many or one.

This piece, rewritten often until he got it to his satisfaction, has been labeled one of Tenn’s lesser works.  Unfortunately for many new pieces also running now, it stands out by comparison as superior to pretty much all of them, including Lincoln Center’s production of “Other Desert Cities,” by Jon Robin Baitz.  This attempt at balancing the liberal view that the Reagan-era die-hards masked their deepest feelings of sympathy for the welfare of America’s most unfortunate takes a little from this play [“A Delicate Balance”] and a little from that one [“After the Revolution”], gaudies it up with elements from a sensational tabloid news story [the rich-boy Alex Kelly Connecticut fugitive rapist case], and dresses it up with a giddily A-list cast, each of whom knows how to gut a cliche.  Because, for instance, Linda Lavin has never met a zinger she can’t deliver, and Thomas Sadoski won’t let a two-dimensional role keep him from finding a little bit of complexity to chew on, there are moments of acting virtuosity.  Baitz owes them big-time.

And, a curious aside: both Ireland and Sadoski performed the same generous feat for Neil LaBute in “reasons to be pretty.”  Don’t let anyone tell you actors are not creative artists.

Afterpieces

‘Less is more,’ the familiar adage goes.  Playwright Tommy Nohilly not only ignores it, he has decided that much, much, much more is not enough.  Presented by the New Group, his “Blood from a Stone” unspools in the living room of a nondescript frame house in a lower middle class, blue collar Connecticut neighborhood.  Vagrant son Travis [a tempered Ethan Hawke] has decided to spend a few days with his disagreeable family before heading west to carve out a new life in California, aided as much as possible by pain-killers in very frequent ingestions.

By the time this Yule-week saga ends, its plot points assault us with drug abuse, battered spouse(s) syndrome, a couple of casual adultery hook-ups, grand larceny, chronic addictive gambling, collapsing ceilings, and just about everything else except the kitchen sink.  Oh, wait.  At one point, the sink does develop a leak.  Unfortunately, it would take more than a plumber to fix all the plot leaks in this rambling, wearying downer.

So how about treating yourself to a real ‘upper?’  On Sunday, February 20, at 2 PM, the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College continues its Theater Series with “American Big Band.” Featuring a cast of 20 singers, dancers and musicians, this welcome joyride strings together music by Big Band icons such as Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington, using the premise of a series of radio broadcasts from those great ’30s and ’40s star-filled sites – Harlem’s Cotton Club, Hollywood’s Palomar Ballroom and Billy Rose’s Music Hall.

Now, if you are old enough to have your parents talk about Saturday night dance hall dates, or if you’ve seen Betty Hutton, Jane Powell or early Frank Sinatra pictures on AMC-TV, OR if you’re caught on to the swing dance resurgence, this will be like a stress-free vacation.  And on March 20, they follow it up with another show, this one built around the Gershwin musical ” ‘S Wonderful.”  Indeed!

On Book

For some insight into how Olympia Dukakis turned into ‘Olympia Dukakis,’ her autobiography chronicles the journey from her challenge to become accepted coming from her first-generation Greek-American status, to Oscar-winner for “Moonstruck.”  Her zeal and intensity flares up through so many milestone moments in her life, with her marriage to actor Louis Zorich providing an anchor to creating a successful professional and personal life.  And Louis, [“The Three Sisters”] makes his own contribution to reading pleasure with his hilarious compilation “What Have You Done Lately?’  He’s collected horrendous and hilarious audition stories from six generations of actors, and provides not just entertainment but inspiration to those new to the profession who think that once you’ve made it, you’ve made it.

The personal life of Anton Chekhov comes alive in a rare biography written by his brother Mikhail.  Titled “Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir,” the close-in recollections and comments about the masterful playwright offer true insights into where many of the aspects of his masterworks came from.  When plays such as “The Three Sisters” are endlessly scrutinized, they often overlook the influences that made the writer the writer.  Fortunately, Mikhail’s book has been translated by Eugene Alper, to give us some of that rich backstory.

To immerse yourself into the writer’s works, pick up [carefully – it’s kinda heavy], “The Complete Plays: Anton Chekhov,” translated by Laurence Senelick.  This is a lovingly- compiled anthology that offers, along with the familiar canon, some early plays, even untitled or unfinished ones, so you can track his remarkable development, and make your own connections between his brother’s observations, and Anton’s output.

And if you’re serious about seeking out substantial material that offers insight into Tennessee Williams, you can thank Margaret Bradham Thornton for compiling and editing “Tennessee Williams: Notebooks.”  Throughout his life, Tennessee diligently filled journals and notebooks almost daily/nightly with short histories of each day’s events, usually accompanied by a sharp remark or candid personal judgment that make the notebooks far more than a ship’s log of the life and career of a genius.  It is not about the genius; it is by him.  And now, it’s for all of us to share.

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TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the PBS series about theatre, “Character Studies.”  His award-winning play “Admissions” is published by Playscripts.  He has taught at HB Studio, the New School, Columbia University and regional arts centers.  He has written for dozens of publications about the performing arts, from The Christian Science Monitor and Dramatics Magazine, to Rolling Stone, Parade and the Robb Report.  Information on private coaching, and his small-group sessions [max. size = seven] for actors, directors and playwrights can be obtained by writing to tvellela@nyc.rr.com.

“The Importance of Being

Earnest,” “Long Story Short”

and Other Observations

by Tony Vellela

What do “Hairspray,” the film “Birdcage” and the current revival of “The Importance of Being Earnest” have in common?  Actually, what TWO things?

One, they are all built around well-written and cleverly directed material.  And, they all benefit from consummate male actors using their exquisite comedy timing to inhabit larger-than-life female characters – in the case of ‘Hairspray,” the reference is literal.  What Harvey Fierstein did for Edna Turnblatt, and Nathan Lane did for Albin, the commanding Brian Bedford now delivers in Oscar Wilde’s epigram-stuffed 1895 classic, as he stalks the stage as Lady Augusta Bracknell.  Plus, he directs.

This Roundabout Theatre Company production comes to Broadway from its acclaimed run at Ontario’s 2009 Stratford Shakespeare Festival, a kind of Disneyland for theatre-lovers. The American Airlines theatre stage line is bound by clamshell faux footlights, to evoke theatres of the Victorian era in London and the countryside.  And all the excellent design work [Desmond Heeley’s set & costumes, Paul Huntley’s wigs and hair design and even Duane Schuler’s lighting] cheerily take us into that world like the White Rabbit pulling Alice down the rabbit hole.  Curtain up, and we’re all the way in.

The un-earnest duo at the center of this love tangle, Algernon [Santino Fontana] and Jack [David Furr] have each created a fictitious, woes-laden fellow – a brother for Algernon, a neighbor for Jack – whose “troubles” always seem to take their creators away from where they are, to get them to where they would rather be.  Deceit being the currency of this social set, the lads are comfortably manipulating social situations until each of them gets flattened instantly by Cupid’s pointy slender shaft.  For Algernon, it’s Cecily [Charlotte Parry], and Jack’s heart throb is Gwendolen [Sara Topham].  Unfortunately for everyone under thirty, the fair maidens each have a connection to Lady Bracknell.  She is Gwendolen’s mother.  And, since the elderly Lady in question reigns supreme as matriarch of her clan, it is her self-anointed role to approve of Algernon’s love interest.  The Lady doth protest as much, or more, as anyone can.

Bedford knows just how to protest – he does it undiminished confidence, a slight lowering of eyelids, an adjective’s attenuated pronunciation, a slow sweep of the head to harpoon all in the room with a menacing gaze, always prompting waves of laughter and broad, happy smiles.  She owns contempt, and we love her for it.  Festooned in upholstery-strength brocade, feathers on birds of prey perched forward on hats clinging to their patron, and bodice-distracting ruffles, Bedford resembles [for boomers who know the reference] the actress Doris Packer, seen in the 1950s as Beaver’s often unflinching grade school principal, Mrs. Rayburn.  His Lady Bracknell pilots her floor-length ship of state from one revelation to the next, in her to-the-manor-born mission to keep up appearances, shield her daughter and nephew from ill-advised matches, restrict the guests to those worthy of her presence and squelch any possible impropriety that might stain her immaculate white gloves.

All this plotlines muddle of feigned emergencies and instant amour registers more comprehensively on the stage than on the page, because director Bedford has kept his staging crisp and linear.  Even the basic set pieces in each act [I = Algernon’s morning room in his London flat; II = the garden at the Manor House, Woolton; III = the Manor House Drawing Room] occupy the same relative areas, act to act.  This proves all the better for permitting us to absorb the doubles tennis match Wilde has served up – one set of volleys conveys the workings of the plot, while the other set delivers the striking serves and dazzling backhands of Wilde’s breath-taking bons mots – a virtual Wimbledon of witticisms.  Wilde’s style influenced comedy-writing for decades to come, even when whimsy substituted for wit, as in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”

Of the four youngsters, Ms. Parry and Mr. Furr are most engaging due to their well-paced restraint, while Mr. Fontana’s smug mugging seems lifted from the English Music Hall realm.  Rounding out the cast of characters are Dana Ivey as Miss Prism, Cecily’s tutor, and Paxton Whitehead, as the clueless Rev. Chasuble.  When Jack’s real provenance is improbably and hilariously unearthed, until Act Three thought to be the undeclared presumed orphan famously cradled in an abandoned handbag railway station coat room, it shatters Prism’s staunchly conservative reputation.  Ivey’s performance, tagged ‘redoubtable’ by many, is in fact far more – it matches Bedford’s diamond-sharp moment-to-moment savvy, a triumph of tiny choices and self-control.

Since both young women have predetermined that their destined spouses must be named Earnest, it should be noted how Wilde named some of his comedy’s inhabitants.   As I tell my students, everything is a choice.  Jack is meant to denote a common fellow.  Algernon translates as someone with moustaches [plural], and therefore possibly a man with an overbearing prissiness.  Anyone christened Cecily loves music.  Gwendolen derives from Guinevere, of the Roundtable gang.  Prism seems to be sarcastically named after something that is dazzling.  The good reverend’s surname comes from a vicar’s outer, sleeveless garment – someone who doesn’t have arms and can’t grasp things, perhaps?   An old-fashioned aside: in “The Odd Couple,” Neil Simon named his Pigeon sisters after Wilde’s vacuous heroines.

The most apt Christian moniker of all surely is that of Lady Bracknell – Augusta.  This ‘august’ personage indeed commands our laser-like attention and blind obedience.  Failure to give her both, in full measure, guarantees swift and unimaginable consequences.

Consequences of historic proportions rattle around the make-believe stone steps on the set of “Colin Quinn Long Story Short,” a 75-minute humorous, and sometimes laugh-packed monologue that traces the history of civilization.  Yup!  Directed by Jerry Seinfeld, Quinn’s rather intelligent riff on how man screwed up big time boils it all down to ethnic idiosyncrasies, quirky behavior and the occasional buffoon in the right place at the wrong time.  With a serious debt to Mort Sahl, the comic mines a couple hundred centuries of mankind’s back story through the lens of today’s social norms, or ab-norms, as the case may be.  The material does seem rushed, and often, a clever quip comes off as the seed of a potentially riotous premise, only to be left on the floor instead of being nurtured into a full-grown bit.

Quinn’s act makes only fair-to-middling use of full screen projections and amusing animation, but any time comedy requires the audience to know the difference between the Middle East and the Midwest, it deserves acclaim.  Broadway’s smallest house, the Helen Hayes, helps to keep the atmosphere casual.  The performance ends with a stand-up routine that pretty well ties it all together, but given the fact that it’s had the entire planet’s real and mythological events to draw from, “Long Story Short” should not have taken its title so literally.

A few weeks back, word circulated that Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim have met with Barbra S. to conjure up a new screen version of “Gypsy.”  Conventional wisdom among theatre folk who rate movie musicals is that the 1959 Rosalind Russell starrer, directed with Hollywood adjustments by Mervyn LeRoy, failed to capture the great show’s magic.

It’s curious that Arthur’s golden girl choice for what many called the definitive revival recently, Patti LuPone, does not seem to be in the running, despite being closer in age to Madame Rose – she’s about 50, and Miss S is coming up on 69.  And it’s still a mystery why the two surviving creators of this classic musical don’t comment on the 1993 TV-movie version starring Bette Midler.  One wonders how Sondheim’s score will fare when sung by the independent-minded musical genius who makes every composition her own.  Ready or not, here comes Momma!

On   Book

Oscar Wilde (ne Fingal O’Flahertie Wills, from Dublin) ingested the 19th-century Aesthetic movement, which advocated art for art’s sake, and rose to become its leading spokesman.  He sharpened his pencils and his wits, and turned out some of the English-speaking world’s most memorable wordplay masterpieces, such as the biting satire “An Ideal Husband” for the stage, the wrenching poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” and the haunting novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”  Check out two collections that will give you hours of pleasure: Harper Perennial’s “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems and Essays,” and “Wilde: The Complete Plays,” from Metheun Publishing.

TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the PBS documentary series about theatre, “Character Studies.”  He has written about theatre and the arts for The Christian Science Monitor, Dramatics Magazine, Parade, Rolling Stone, and dozens of other publications.  His award-winning play “Admissions” is published by Playscripts.  He has taught theatre subjects at Columbia University Teacher’s College, HB Studio, the New School and other institutions, and now conducts small classes and private tutoring sessions.  Information is available through tvellela@nyc.rr.com.

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“Pitmen Painters,” “Middletown,”

“After the Revolution,” “Elf,”

“The Pee-wee Herman Show”

and some new Afterpieces

by Tony Vellela

Back when I was a kid [phones were always connected to a wall with

a length of cord], parents either sent their pre-teen offspring to the movies,

or they brought them, depending on the percentage of adult material the older folks might enjoy.  Same is true with two current Broadway offerings, “Elf” and “The Pee-wee Herman Show.”  But if you don’t fall into that parent category, we’ll come back to those shows in a minute.

Let’s look instead at three decidedly grown-up, even dare I say mature dramas New York has to choose from [feel free to attend all three].  “Pitmen Papers,” “Middletown” and “After the Revolution” can help you believe that American culture is not, in fact, going to Hell in a foreign-made hand-basket.

“Pitmen” is by Lee Hall [inspired by William Feaver’s book].  Hall’s creds include “Billy Elliot” x 2 [screenplay, as well as book and lyrics for the musical], and this drama arrived by way of London’s West End [the easiest way to make it to Broadway, it seems].  This remarkably inspirational tale follows the journey taken in the mid nineteen-thirties, by several coal miners in Newcastle [as in “coals to …”] and a dental technician friend, who take advantage of a government-sponsored program to bring adult ed classes to the underclass.  Thinking they were going to learn about economics, and therefore the reasons behind their meager subsistence wages, they enroll, only to find out that the last-minute substitute course will be in art appreciation [!].  Their original intent, they tell the multi-syllablicly inclined professor, was “to know the secret behind what’s going on.”  They begrudgingly stay on, get lulled into expressing themselves through their own art, and reveal a stunning talent, one and all, for doing just that.  Known as the Ashington Group, their work was exhibited, showcased, sold and studied.

As their understanding of and appreciation for art grows, criticism follows from some, who lament the lack of political commentary in most art of the day, when the world is in such a perilous state.  One miner/artist brings in a print of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ to demonstrate how a work of art can visualize the horrors of war.  Others feel that art should provide a respite from the real world.  Whatever their subjects, they become beneficiaries of patronage from a wealthy art collector, and soon discover the tightrope of having financial support impinge on free expression.  Whatever you think of that balancing act, the messages provide plenty to reflect on, class divisions between poor artists and rich patrons being just one of them.

Class inequality is front and center in Amy Herzog’s gripping new play “After the Revolution,” at Playwrights Horizons.  It’s 1999, and in true progressive-liberal fashion, lefties are bemoaning the shortcomings of the Clinton era, unaware of what’s ahead.  This family, however, has much much higher standards for what a political regime should accomplish – they want a workers’ revolt.  The life of their recently-deceased patriarch, a hero from the McCarthy Blacklist years, has inspired his granddaughter Emma [named for Goldman?], a star law student, to create a foundation in his name, to advance the causes he championed.  Her father, uncle and grandmother applaud this choice.  When the dead hero turns out to have a very live skeleton in his closet, all bets are off.

In a novel twist on a classic coming-of-age tale, the granddaughter finds herself at odds with her conscience, with her family and with the young man whom she employs at her foundation, and whom she has planned to partner with in life. The storyline shreds many liberal-nurtured myths about themselves, such as their belief that they oppose all forms of racism, and applies a scalpel to the analysis of the folks who questioned the body politic of the post WWII era.  Like that ringing slogan from the Sixties, ‘politics is personal.’

Complementing the communal themes mouthed by the family, this ensemble cast hangs together nearly perfectly, a great opportunity to see sterling performances in service of a thoughtful, well-crafted piece.  Peter Friedman’s shattered dad bristles with the pangs of thwarted expectations.  Mark Blum’s peacemaker uncle strains to find hard-won common ground.  And above all, Lois Smith, as the patriarch’s indignant widow clinging to the principles that bonded them to each other and to their Marxist fellow travelers, generously gives us another memorable characterization that again demonstrates why she has come to hold a place of honor among theatre-lovers.

Like any revolution, there are aspects that don’t bear out as one would hope.  A secondary story line, about the other sister’s drug problems, rehab time and then her coming out, feels oh-so gratuitous.  And as Emma, Katharine Powell relies on too much ‘actor-y’ behavior that tends to make her character needlessly unsympathetic and not smart enough to believe as being at the top of her law school class, a real weak point that occasionally throws off the balance between plot and performances.

Political commentary of the symbolic variety gets a pretty good showing in “Middletown,” by Will Enos, at the Vineyard Theater.  [an aside: back in 1949, Robert Wise directed a film noir picture called ‘The Set-Up,’ with Robert Ryan as a washed-up boxer limping from second-rate town to second-rate town, and one of those burgs is called Middletown.]  The like-named town in this Enos saga shelters inhabitants whose life stories and daily routines slowly unfold in a dispassionate style uncharacteristic for any piece trying to break new ground in the realm of the dysfunctional.  They’re usually so frenetic.

Everyday folks make outrageous, hilarious pronouncements with the deadpan delivery of Stephen Wright.  When newcomer John, played with engaging ordinariness by Linus Roache, encounters a couple in a park near a war memorial, their explanation for their interest is that “there’s a long history of death in both our families.”  Town librarian Georgia Engel, playing the truth-teller – in – chief, sincerity personified, nods approvingly when John applies for a library card, and comments “Good for you, dear.  Most people figure, why bother?  I’m just going to die anyway.”

But this is not simply a clever humor-piece trading on life’s misfortunes and missed cues.  Enos has a rare sense of craft, as he reshapes familiar ‘types’:  the zealous small town cop, whose urge to maintain order who choke-holds a young nonconformist mechanic for failure to “be a good human”, or ‘Mary,’ a despairing, timid young wife whose neglectful husband is not helping her become pregnant.  They all float through the ‘town,’ aided by David Zinn’s well-conceived set design, that includes two side-view frame houses with picture windows affording views of John and Mary as they aren’t living their fulfilling lives.

Others trying to pigeon-hole the play have used the facile tag of post-modern “Our Town.”  This misses the point.  Thornton Wilder wrote about a time and place that grew out of his half-century’s removal of time, colored by a nostalgia that described what might have been.  Enos’ “Middletown” may have started in Grover’s Corners, but it arrived there by way of James Thurber.  Enos allows us to discover these lives in a tale that revolves around the role of names, nouns, places and the stories they reify. Yes, these inhabitants break the fourth wall and the stage line.  “Middletown” deserves a good long run somewhere, to give it a chance to become one of those little gem pieces that people return to from time to time, and recommend to friends, neighbors, co-workers and visiting relatives from out-of-town.

And if those out-of-towners have humans in tow who only learned to speak during the 21st century, they may seek your advice on where to spend their holiday bankroll, since most people are not rolling in it these days.  So – back to the opening paragraph.

In short, you can take the kids to see Pee-wee.  You can cut the cards to see which adult shepherds all the kids to see the Elf.

Fortunately for me, my friend John Eng, who works with pre-schoolers [he is a very patient person], accompanied me to the Pee-wee party.  I knew why I liked the show.  It’s funny.  But John gave me the insight into why kids do, and it’s not just because it has bright colors, goofy clothes and furniture that talks.  Kids like the comfort that comes from the familiar and the structured, and this show has them in the same way that a kindergarten class does – it’s PuppetLAND, there’s snack TIME, and in fact, calling anything XXXX – TIME makes it sound like a treat to kids.  There’s even a word of the DAY, which happens to be ‘fun,’ and everyone is encouraged to yell and clap whenever it’s mentioned [remember Groucho’s ‘secret word?’].

No need to chronicle here all the bits that Paul Reubens quick-steps through.  At nearly sixty, he has entered the same universe as Dick Clark, Robert Cummings, Ann-Margret and others who basically still look like they did when they were twenty-somethings.  Let’s just say that many of the short sequences are built like vaudeville routines, with solid pay-offs.  Comedy writing has basic rules that don’t change, as evidenced by a bit about teaching English pronunciation – it echoes the hilarious routine early Second City’s Andrea Martin perfected as an immigrant trying to speak English, with riotous results.  And there are plenty of double entendres to cause a smile or a chuckle, at least.  Pee-wee tells the postman, there with a delivery, that he has a cute … package.  The Handyman, Pee-wee notices, is wearing new, big boots.  And he notes that a guy with big boots must have … big feet.  Adults who grew up with Reubens’ popular children’s show in decades past give him a tumultuous entrance applause, and do the same every time any character from that era appears.  They seem like theatre queens [and kings] who would attend any performance of Carol Channing’s “Hello, Dolly!” and applaud for every single event in the show.  So, in a word – it’s fun!  [Yeah!  Clap, clap!]

“Elf,” brought to cartoon-y life by tall, lithe, sunshine-y Sebastian Arcelus, is fun for anyone who comes up to his belly button.  It starts off in the North Pole, where elf Buddy, surrounded by fellow elf helpers, done by actors who take to their knees a la “Shrek – the Musical,” learns that he is not a real elf at all.  Seems he was a human baby who happened to crawl into Santa’s bag almost twenty years ago, and was brought home and raised by Mr. and Mrs. Claus.  Buddy decides to head South to the place where his careless Dad lives, big bad New York City.  He has adventures.  He falls in love.  He converts his Dad, a Scrooge-y type with a neglected wife and neglected son, into a caring guy with a liberated family.  And it all happens set to a pleasant score, punctuated by TV variety show choreography.  Most memorable moment – the reveal that shows Santa town.  It looks like the center piece in a giant pop-up book.

Afterpieces

This new column feature, for those non-theatre geeks, is named for the short pieces that were performed after the main play of the evening in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on English stages.

Like the other “La [Cage]” on the Big Apple Boards, “La Bete” stars a very talented actor whose box office creds skyrocketed when “Frasier” hit the NBC airwaves.  David Hyde Pierce has returned to the city that gave him his valuable stage experience at the start of his impressive career, taking on one of contempo theatre’s most daunting works.  Written by David Hirson in verse, and co-starring the versatile Mark Rylance, it’s getting the best production it likely ever will.  Performed without an intermission, possibly for fear of losing half the audience during a break, huge laughs alternate with labored sections often enough to make it important that you choose to attend as much for the theatrical experience as it would be for the amusement of it.  Rylance’s by-now heralded stunning thirty-minute monologue is matched by Hyde Pierce’s remarkable ability, through fluid, sensitive delivery, to make the verse disappear.  And if your Rylance ‘Jones’ needs more juice, he’ll be back in the spring, starring in Jez Butterworth’s play “Jerusalem,” being imported from Blighty.  Natch.

What does not disappear in “Lombardi,” the play about legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, at Circle in the Square, is the disappointment in its lax story-telling.  A volatile, success-obsessed man with a volcanic temper and a really loving wife, the title character is impersonated well enough by Dan Lauria.  The play occurs during the events that surround the career-changing 1965 game when his beloved Green Bay Packers vied for the NFL championship.  If you love, really love football and its cast of characters, know their stats, speak their language, and can interpret their actions based on your own knowledge, this is one you can cheer for.  Anyone can cheer Judith Light’s empathetic portrayal of Lombardi’s emotionally short-changed wife.  Anyone else?  Well, have you seen “Time Stands Still” yet?

Since David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre” is shuttering early, no need to ponder over its highs and lows.  This one is a kinda curious string of more than 25 short and shorter scenes that are best thought of as sources for acting class scene study exercises.

Speaking of Kelsey Grammer, when he leaves the Cage in early February, co-star Douglas Hodge also leaves, and book writer for the show Harvey Fierstein will don the drag as Albin.  And speaking of Christmas shows, a new work by Duane Poole [book], Larry Grossman [music] and Carol Hall [lyrics] celebrates Truman Capote’s heart-warming tale “A Christmas Memory,” which was once adapted for television, with a shatteringly-real performance from Geraldine Page.  The musical stars Penny Fuller, and runs December 1 – 16 at TheatreWorks at the Lucie Stern Theatre, in Palo Alto.

And finally, if it’s good news closer to home you’d like to hear, Donna Murphy will get one of those rare chances Broadway A-listers have these days to create a new role, rather than step into a revival, competing with a ghost or a memory.  Roundabout Theatre Company will mount “The People in the Picture,” by Iris Rainer Dart, about a one-time Yiddish theatre actress in Poland before WWII, in the spring.

On  Book

If you’re looking for a true Yuletide experience to share with the family, try rekindling the tradition of grouping around the piano, mugs of hot chocolate in hand, singing your way through some American musical theatre classics.  One great source is “Rodgers & Hammerstein: The Illustrated Handbook.”  Along with sheet music and lyrics, each musical’s story line and back story are presented, along with great pictures from the eras when they premiered.

The era hashed over in “After the Revolution,” when Senator Joe McCarthy unleashed his political reign of terror, followed the social upheavals of the 1930s.  The theatre’s response at that time came from actors, directors and writers who chose to address what was going on in the street, and Harold Clurman’s vivid chronicle “The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre & the 30s” brings it all to life.

And the side-splitting life of the early days of Second City, where Andrea Martin honed that foreigner speech flubber and so many other laugh gems, is captured in “The Second City Unscripted,” by Mike Thomas.  From Gilda to Tina, so many comedy giants of the last four decades all started there.

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TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the PBS documentary series about theatre “Character Studies.”  His award-winning play “Admissions” is published by Playscripts.  He has written several other plays, musicals and the Cable ACE award-winning documentary “The Test of Time.”  He has taught theatre-related classes at Columbia University, HB Studio and arts centers across the country, and continues to teach small intensives and acting coach sessions privately.

‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,’

‘Brief Encounter’ & ‘Time Stands Still’

by Tony Vellela

What time IS it?  It’s time for war, the people who cause it, report on it, and have their lives trampled on when it’s just around the corner.  In other words, time stands still for a bloody bloody brief encounter.

What do ‘Brief Encounter’ and ‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson’ happen to have in common?  Each one has chosen a hyper-presentational, entertainment-first style, lathered onto elements of their eras, a cheery haze of giddiness filtering the dark parts.  Regrettably, over-indulgence on the flourishes and flounces that can please a crowd moment to moment, can cumulatively grow wearisome.  And, it would seem, that in both instances, this proclivity is the result of an unnecessary lack of confidence in the overall production.

Like the local news, if it bleeds, it leads, so . . . ‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,’ at the Jacobs, blasted its way uptown from last spring’s almost bombastic showing at the Public, a kind of Rite of Spring.  One part ‘Fela,’ one part ‘Passing Strange’ and one part ‘Fiorello,’ it melds the music and lyrics of Michael Friedman, the choreography of Danny Mefford and the book and direction of Alex Timbers into a high-intensity telling of the life and times of our controversial seventh president.  He is known for such disparate plot points as marrying a married woman, nearly doubling the land mass of the United States, exiling Indian tribes through forced marches in which the refugees were swaddled in pox-infested blankets, winning the presidency using a populist strategy instead of relying on power politics, fathering what became the country’s first true political party [the Democratic], and in rare moments of self-doubt, indulging in cutting – a backwoods, Oval Office, rock star kind of guy.

The Jacobs Theatre interior, bathed in a zillion kilowatts of red lights,  looks like a 3-D diorama created by a middle school American history class on acid [this is not a criticism].  The anachronisms, if/when you spot them, will make you smile instead of wince [i.e. an ‘oil painting’ of Hugh Hefner, plastic orange pill bottles, a pack of Parliaments].  Probably the most relevant stage piece is a reproduction of the 1872 John Gast painting titled ‘Manifest Destiny.’  The concept of European settlers doing God’s will by claiming the North American continent, rescuing it from its native savages, was beautifully depicted in that classic work of art, and this concept forms the cornerstone of both the historical era Jackson dominated, and the musical’s story line.  That story line, however, is not a line, but a series of dots and dashes, which connect by way of emo-musical theatre numbers, peppy jittery dance moves, book scenes that play like sketch comedy and a very impressive output of zealous performers pumping out zealous performances.  The theme song, so to speak, called ‘Yea Yea Populism,’ ricochets off the walls, thanks to this exuberant cast, and along with its other virtues, ‘Bloody Bloody’ provides another Main Stem platform for super-sized downtown talent.

Chief among them, despite his good showings in ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ and ”Inherit the Wind,’  is Benjamin Walker in this Broadway break-out title role.  In appearance, he looks like he could depict a Neil LaBute misogynist with ease, all shoulders and hips, scowl and sneer.  Facially, he owes a debt to Bill Murray’s comic ego-inflated macho-obsessed men.  When Walker opens his throat, though, a big big and mighty solid voice booms out.  This part should do for him what the lead in ‘The Who’s Tommy’ did for Michael Cerveris.

A majority of the sight gags, physical comedy, vaudeville mannerisms and general padding could use a frontiersman’s axe.  Audience members more comfortable with two-dollar words rather than four-letter ones were observed politely fleeing.  Serious-minded folk hoping that the potential political messages promised in the bally-hoo about this show’s renegade approach to the American condition will be disappointed in much the same way that ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ did.  But like ‘Urinetown,’ ‘Spring Awakening,’ ‘Rent,’ ‘Passing Strange’ and ‘American Idiot’ among others, ‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson’ jolts Broadway with new energy, fresh ideas and a whole lotta slap-in-the-face bravura.

Like the blood show, ‘Brief Encounter’ mixes styles, forms, media, music, movements and intentions, to riff on the iconic 1945 British film of the same name.  That classic romance weeper was adapted by Noel Coward from his 1936 one-act play ‘Still Life,’ and starred Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, directed by David Lean.  The Roundabout Theatre’s Studio 54 entry, imported from London’s Kneehigh Theatre [must everything that runs for more than a week in London take up residence in a Broadway house?  I’m just sayin’…], uh – Kneehigh Theatre, keeps the original material all too brief, which means we encounter a hefty helping of director-itis, since the helmer and the adaptor are one and the same, Emma Rice.  Theatrical gimmicks abound, and many impress, such as having the principals step into the screen projections of their destinations, a ‘Purple Rose of Cairo’ in reverse.

Bored, reasonably well-heeled housewife Laura [an appealing Hannah Yelland] and a conscientious doctor Alec [the solid Tristan Sturrock] “meet commute” in a train station, internally rhapsodize about each other, and finally give in to their emotions, but not their carnal longing.  The film honored the genuine conflicts that burden any ill-fated pair, and that relationship ends with each one returning to their respective and respectable spouses.

With genuine emotions and heartfelt romance confined these days to Hallmark movies and the occasional foreign film, Kneehigh’s Rice has slathered her ‘Brief Encounter’ with enough Music Hall grease to feed bubble and squeak to the entire East End.  Nine Coward songs are cut into the already slight story, with the majority of these giggly romps allotted to the secondary characters who populate the train station.  Like ‘Bloody Bloody,’ it’s entertainment first, but this time, the stage seems like it’s being powered by hot air balloons.  One stand-out, Gabriel Ebert as a goony snacks peddler, channels the long-forgotten but charmingly talented Carleton Carpenter, who appeared alongside the likes of Debbie Reynolds and Judy Garland in a few early 1950s M-G-M Arthur Freed vehicles.  Would that this creative team had the confidence to keep the proceedings centered on the original story – with music, fine; with some sophisticated wink-wink, fine – rather than feeling the need to manufacture their own stage version of ‘Mystery Science Theatre 3000.’

After you’ve seen the current production of ‘Time Stands Still,’ write letters, send e-mails, scroll off texts, tweet tweets and slip notes under the door to the American Theatre Wing asking them to include it as a candidate for best play revival.  Originally presented last spring with almost the same cast, and the same director, it presents a deepening level of skill on the part of playwright David Margulies.  [The play was skunked out of winning the Best Play Tony Award by the British import ‘Red.’]  This twenty-first century nod to the mid twentieth-century kitchen sink drama shows us three people in mid-life, grappling with the reality that time, in fact, does not take a time-out, so you can catch up with your perpetual unfinished business, rework your life plan, read more books or replay those liaisons and make them come out right.

World-class photojournalist Laura Linney has returned from chronicling the Iraq war, following her partial recovery from a roadside bomb that killed her translator/guide.  Free-lance reporter and writer Brian d’Arcy James, her frequent partner in the war zones and live-in partner between excursions, has escorted her back from Germany, and at rise, she shows her independent spirit by curtly shrugging off his attempts to assist her into the room and onto a chair.  Her leg and arm are bound up, her face is pocked with shrapnel scars, and her eyes have the dull expression of someone whose mind is somewhere else.  And, of course, it is.

The details of their professional lives, interwoven with best friend and magazine photo editor Eric Bogosian, soon mirror their personal lives in several unsettling parallels.  Linney’s reputation for the unflinching starkness of the horrors she sees and captures is her strength.  And d’Arcy James chases after the dual dream of producing Pulitzer-level reporting on the world’s atrocities, while escaping into less demanding pseudo-psychological features that could be called the Easy Listening version of journalism.  She is willing, almost driven, to challenge conventions and confront realities.  He is eager, almost obsessed with crafting a domestic harmony that would require both of them to sacrifice the recognition that she has and he seeks.

Their long-standing, live-in relationship has been damaged by Linney’s acknowledgment that she had a romantic affair with the translator who died in her arms next to their burned-out jeep.  And when Bogosian brings along his new love, a perky much younger event-planner who at first seems to be a refugee from a sixties Neil Simon comedy, that couple’s easy displays of affection elicit squirms when they visit the older couple’s small, basics-only Brooklyn loft.

Margulies has chosen to create a couple whose lives and choices seem obviously compatible, but upon closer examination, rely on opposite means of expression.  Photographers only need to succeed once to fulfill their assignment, one perfectly composed and content-rich image that tells its story.  Writers need to assemble just the right strings and batches and pairings and constructs of adjectives, commas, proper and common nouns, lengths of sentences, quotes, references, adverbs and metaphors to tell theirs.  His approach to his work, and now to the most critical decision about their shared lives – to reshape them or separate – begs for compromises, negotiations, justifications and settling.  Her approach has no room for any of these.  The fissures have been exposed.  Their paths crossed, their time together so far has been fulfilling, but ultimately, they cannot proceed in the same direction.  In her professional life, she freezes time, preserves a moment, however representative or not it is of its context.  In their real lives, time, for them, and all of us, does not stand still.

And if ever there was a production that speaks to the need for a Tony Award category for Best Ensemble Acting in a drama, like other organizations bestow, this is it.  Daniel Sullivan’s direction is clean and insightful, Donald Margulies’ choices are strong, and all the performances are crisp when required, and when necessary, brutally frank.

On Book

Speaking of time [or as the Brits say, ‘talking of time’], it has been exceptionally good to Eli Wallach.  The veteran actor will mark his 95th birthday on December 7th, and a few weeks from now, the Motion Picture Academy will award him with a special lifetime achievement Oscar.  Sixty years ago, he was appearing in the Tennessee Williams classic ‘The Rose Tattoo,’ with Maureen Stapleton – they both won Tony Awards.  And his autobiography chuckles its way through most of his seventy-five year career, and is titled ‘The Good, the Bad, and Me.’  Get it?  He was the ‘Ugly,’ in the Clint Eastwood picture, the ‘Good, the …’

Time has also been civil to the plays of Noel Coward, even though the basics of the plots may seem a tad dusty.  One of the more interesting collections is ‘Noel Coward – Collected Plays: Three,’ because it includes three of the one-acts that made up his ‘Tonight at 8:30’ outings, including ‘Still Life,’  along with an amusing intro by Sheridan Morley.

And if you’re wondering where some of the precedent for ‘Bloody Bloody’ may have come from, look no further than backward in time, to the master of raucous, provocative, symbolic, iconic and sense-assaulting theatre, Berthold Brecht.  ‘Mother Courage,’ anyone?  Check out his ‘Brecht on Theatre – The Development of an Aesthetic,’ edited and translated by John Willett.

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TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the PBS series about theatre, ‘Character Studies.’  Among his plays is the award-winning ‘Admissions,’ directed by Austin Pendleton, published by Playscripts.  He has taught at HB Studio, Columbia University and cultural arts centers around the country.  His theatre articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including Dramatics Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, Theatre Week, Parade and The Robb Report.  He also conducts limited-size intensive workshops, private coaching sessions and classes from home.

Autumn in

NYC Theaters

by Tony Vellela

So you’re planning to take in a few shows this fall.  So you’ll be getting to your theatres by subway, bus, train, car, taxi, bicycle, unicycle or shank’s mare [for anyone not on the AARP mailing list, that means ‘walking’].

So here’s an overview of what to look forward to, and possibly order tickets for now.

Any musical that features the creative talents of John Kander and the late Fred Ebb, and boasts direction and choreography by Susan Stroman, earns a place on the ‘must-see’ list.  “The Scottsboro Boys,” which also has a book by David Thompson, chronicles the fates of nine young black men accused of raping two white women in 1931.  The alleged crimes took place aboard a freight train headed for Memphis.  The piece began its life last season at off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre, and sold-out performances prompted its move Uptown.  The final work of one of musical theatre’s few truly great writing teams, it promises to become another Kander & Ebb classic.

A different kind of classic could help bridge the gap when two people are looking for a night out, and one of them favors spending it in a theatre, while the other is more at home in a stadium.  In the football world, NFL Hall of Fame coach Vince Lombardi ranks as a classic example of how one man can inspire young men to give their all on the gridiron.  The winning team at the Super Bowl is awarded the Lombardi Trophy.   Based on the David Maraniss biography ‘When Pride Still Mattered,’ the new play “Lombardi” provides Dan Lauria with the role of a lifetime, as he growls, snarls, cajoles, shames and cheers on his guys, driving them on to victory after victory.

Hoke returns to the boards to drive Miss Daisy once again, when Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones retell the Pulitzer Prize-winning saga of a fiercely independent Jewish retired schoolteacher and the fiercely understanding chauffeur her caring son hires, to carry her in that shiny new 1948 Packard, to errands around Atlanta.  Having seen this touching tale told off Broadway [with Dana Ivey in the tiny Playwrights Horizons black box, on the night Katharine Hepburn was there to scope out the role], and all the way up to its Oscar-winning incarnation with Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman, it will take real star power to make it fresh.  It’s safe to say that this team, aided by the inimitable Boyd Gaines as Daisy’s son Boolie, qualify.

Also making a return engagement is last season’s “Time Stands Still,” by Donald Margulies.  This is a gripping and moving examination of how a committed battlefield photojournalist struggles with her own personal battles, when she takes a local Iraqi translator into her bed as well as her assignments.  The revelation sets off an emotional IUD back at home, when she returns injured and scarred, and does not know how to handle the offers of assistance from her longtime boyfriend.  Laura Linney’s multi-dimensional performance will again by supported by holdover cast members Eric Bogosian and Brian d’Arcy James, with Christina Ricci replacing the focus-grabbing Alicia Silverstone.

A new entry imported from London that has not grabbed much buzz focus to date, “The Pitmen Painters” unveils the moving, true story of Northumberland miners from early in the last century who learned to channel their pent-up frustrations and feelings on canvas.  And lest you think this could be a dicey story to deliver a real theatrical punch, look no further than the resume of its author, Lee Hall.  You remember Hall – he wrote the book for “Billy Elliott.”

Of course, there’s also the re-revival of “A Little Night Music,” wherein Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch have taken over the roles of that naughty, gaudy, bawdy, sporty mother-daughter team.  The production, which opened last season with Catherine Zeta-Jones [a questionable Tony winner] and Angela Lansbury [a notable Tony icon] at the top of the cast list, was listless, almost fading before your eyes.  This new duo sparks up the proceedings enough to warrant a possible second look.  Both of these dames have the wry sense of humor, and the vinegar in their bloodstreams that these roles require.  And when Bernadette sings ‘Send In the Clowns,’ you’ll think to yourself, somebody damn well better send IN those G-D CLOWNS!  This lady MEANS it!

This column doesn’t normally mention one-night-only events.  But a 25th anniversary staged reading of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” merits an exception.  With a cast that includes John Benjamin Hickey, Victor Garber and Patrick Wilson, and Joel Grey in the director’s chair, the October 18 production, at the Walter Kerr Theatre, benefits the Actors Fund and Friends in Deed, both devoted to HIV/AIDS care for those who cannot afford it.  Information is available at www.oandmco.com.

And finally, a tribute film from Martin Scorsese titled “A Letter to Elia” reviews Kazan’s almost peerless stage and film career, which shaped the talents, fortunes and lives of some of the last century’s greatest playwrights and actors.  PBS will show the documentary as part of its ‘American Masters’ series, slated in most markets for October 4, with a theatrical release also in the planning stage.

ON BOOK

With “Scottsboro Boys” and “Driving Miss Daisy” headed to Broadway from their original O-B launching pads, and all of David Margulies’ previous work seen there only, it’s definitely worth a look at the life of the woman who gave off-Broadway its juice, Lucille Lortel.  Alexis Greene’s loving yet comprehensive biography “Lucille Lortel: The Queen of Off Broadway” will keep you turning the pages, as Lortel grows through her early career as a dancer, into the producer of the now-famous White Barn summer theatre, to her landmark productions, including the stunning presentation of Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” in the Theatre de Lys in the Village, which in her bold fashion, she purchased and named after herself.

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TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the PBS series ‘Character Studies.’  His award-winning play “Admissions” is published by Playscripts.  Vellela teaches at HB Studio, does private coaching sessions, and has served as a theatre journalist and critic for dozens of publications, including The Christian Science Monitor, Dramatics, Theatre Week and Parade Magazine.