Ben Peltz - Page 10

Has there ever been a father/daughter theatrical combo that sets off sparks like when HAllie Foote acts in the plays of her father, the great Horton Foote?  For Primary Stages, she's been heartbreaking as the emotionally repressed title character in The Day Emily Married and downright hilariously self-centered in Dividing The Estate.  Now, in the company's package of three Foote one-acts titled Harrison, TX, she and Andrea Lynn Green open the evening with crackling comic chemistry that's firmly grounded in reality.

Before a frustrated New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses grumbled, 'Well, let's build the bastard a theater,' and designated city funds to build the Delacorte, Joseph Papp's dream of bringing free Shakespeare to everyone was being achieved by mobile units of actors that toured the city in small scale productions.  Now in its second year, The Public Theater's Mobile Shakespeare Unit has been recreating that experience for audiences that free Shakespeare In The Park cannot reach.

Once upon a summer of '83, a young aspiring actor named Woody Harrelson became close pals with a Harlem-raised fellow named Frankie Hyman while they both worked a construction job in Houston.  Eventually, they went their separate ways; one becoming famous for doing something other than playwriting and the other pursuing a career in writing, although these many years later he apparently hasn't written anything he would care to mention in a Playbill bio.

Two days after the death of its author, I had the pleasure of taking in director Michael Wilson's outstanding revival of The Best Man – one of the best evenings Broadway had to offer last season – for the third time.  Gore Vidal most certainly went out with a landslide victory.

...we'll still be playin' his songs.

Barely looking, and certainly not sounding, much older than she was over thirty years ago, when her clarion vocals and chipper charm earned her a Tony nomination for playing an unexpectedly pregnant college student in Baby, you might be surprised to know that the weekend before her Monday night concert at Town Hall, Liz Callaway was in Pittsburgh playing the final four performances of a stint as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

The last time the 1933 West End musical Nymph Errant was revived in New York, the Medicine Show Theatre Company advertised their production with the selling point that they haven't removed any of the show's racism.  Now, while going to see a racist musical is not exactly my idea of a fun night out, there is a certain historic value to watching older musicals performed with the texts the authors wrote, opposed to the frequent occurrence of slapping their books with labels like “creaky” or “dated” and having contemporary authors make wholesale revisions to transform them into suitable entertainments for modern audiences.

America may have abruptly lost its Camelot on the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, but in the extraordinarily rich and tender new musical Dogfight, it was the night before that a pair of drops in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea began to sparkle.

When the original Broadway production of Fela! closed in January of 2011, Zuccotti Park was little more than a block-long plaza where Wall Streeters would enjoy a bit of lunchtime sun.  For now, at least, the park has pretty much returned to that status, aside from the tourists taking photos of themselves at the spot now famous for birthing the Occupy Wall Street movement.

When Phil Geoffrey Bond was named Programming Director at 54 Below, it became a given that the theatre district's spanking new nightlife venue would include on its schedule Broadway-centric evenings geared for the knowledgeable musical theatre fan who appreciates both past glories and upcoming works in progress.  The producer/host of the Laurie Beechman Theatre's popular Sondheim Unplugged series now makes a significant debut in the same capacities with New Mondays, dedicated to giving audiences a sampling of fresh material from accomplished theatre composers and lyricists.

So now that Patrick Page will be ending his stint as The Green Goblin in Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark and begin rehearsals for a piece just a tad worthier of his talents, Cyrano De Bergerac, his replacement Robert Cuccioli, a sensitive lyric interpreter with a beautifully masculine voice, will be taking on the honor of singing “A Freak Like Me Needs Company” eight times a week.

When the houselights went up for intermission at Gina Gionfriddo's  provocative comedy of gender issues, Rapture, Blister, Burn, my immediate impulse was to ask my guest – a 1980s Columbia University Women's Studies graduate who, like myself, remembers the days when an Upper West Side liberal's coffee table was considered incomplete if not graced by a heavily earmarked volume of Susan Faludi's latest and simply saying the name “Phyllis Schlafly” at certain cocktail parties would trigger the same venomous reaction the name “Haman” would receive from the most Manischewitz-soused participants at a Lower East Side Purim spiel – if it all seemed realistic to her.

Though the team of Richard Maltby, Jr. (lyrics) and David Shire (music) hasn't had much luck when it comes to book musicals (Baby and Big, despite their admirers, struggled through disappointing Broadway runs.) when it comes to Off-Broadway musical revues, the boys are two-time champs.  Their 1970s hit, Starting Here, Starting Now, was topped in 1989 by a 300+ performance run of Closer Than Ever, which is now getting a sparkling revival at the York.

Backwoods 1800s America proves an unlikely, but ideal setting for Shakespeare's As You Like It in director Daniel Sullivan's enormously entertaining Delacorte production that mixes dexterous wordplay with rowdy comedy.

By the third act of Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles' 1946 romantic comedy, Love Goes To Press, one of the play's leading characters, a female war correspondent considered tops in her field, begins discussing marriage with the handsome soldier who has captured her heart.  When the stuffy British Major speaks romantically of how his love will, naturally, give up her career and go to Yorkshire to stay with his mother until they get married, the 2012 audience members around me, naturally, smirked and guffawed at the absurdity of his antiquated assumptions.

The words, “Once upon a time…,” were followed by that familiar Sondheim vamp, and Danielle Ferland skipped onto the stage just as she had 25 years ago as the original Little Red Riding Hood in Into The Woods.  Sure enough, there was a wolf there to greet her, but instead of encountering Granny, The Baker's Wife and The Witch, Little Red found herself in a forest inhabited by a young French revolutionary, an elderly Holocaust survivor, a roller-skating duo and a former President of The United States.

Fadwa Faranesh, a bright, engaging Palestinian woman living in Bethlehem, hosts a cooking program from her home kitchen, where she prepares delectable dishes like tabouli and baba ghanoush in the traditional manner the women of her culture have been preparing them for centuries.  To her, food is an important connection between the past and the present.

When I first heard the title Potted Potter – The Unauthorized Harry Experience – A Parody by Dan and Jeff, my American mind immediately thought of the slang term we use for inebriated and figured Jefferson Turner and Daniel Clarkson's two-person, 70-minute presentation would be some kind of irreverent adult spoof of J.K. Rowling's septet of Harry Potter novels.  But no, “potted,” to our Brit friends, merely means abridged, and the show, which actually doesn't involve much parody, is really more of a wholesome family entertainment; not that there's anything wrong with that, as we say on the Upper West Side.

“Mensch” is not a word you might immediately think of to describe Frank Sinatra, but the label seems to fit Cary Hoffman quite snugly.  And though his solo musical, My Sinatra, has the nice Jewish guy from Long Island singing fifteen Sinatra hits (“One For My Baby,” “”Summer Wind,” “Luck Be A Lady,” “The Lady Is A Tramp”… you know the rest.), it is not a celebrity impersonation show.  It's actually a very warm, enjoyable presentation of his lifelong obsession with the man who many would consider to be definitive male interpreter of American popular music.

Snooty Manhattanites such as I generally have a short list of offerings that would lure us all the way out to Brooklyn.  For some it's a steak at Peter Lugar.  For others, it's the Rodins at the Brooklyn Museum.  But the quickest way to get me aboard a Gowanus-bound F train is to say that director/choreographer Austin McCormick has got a new theatre/dance piece for his Company XIV.