Ben Peltz - Page 10

Though he did have a brief - very brief - stint on Broadway before Lemon Sky premiered in 1970 at midtown's Off-Broadway Playhouse Theatre, Lanford Wilson was still at that point regarded as a downtown playwright.  One of the leading scribes of the crew consisting predominantly of gay men who created Off-Off Broadway at Caffe Cino, his career would seriously take off shortly after Lemon Sky's run with The Hot l Baltimore, Fifth of July, Talley's Folly (Pulitzer winner) and Burn This.

Whether you view first-time playwright Jeff Talbot's The Submission as satire, a cautionary tale, a commentary on American race relations, an offensively naïve creation of some crazy white guy or a reaction to the recent controversy regarding Porgy and Bess might depend on how willing you are to accept its basic premise:

If the squeals and cheers of Paper Mill's opening night audience is any indication, the brand new stage version of the 1992 Disney musical film Newsies (a financial flop that has gained a cult following through the years) should prove to be a popular hit among playgoers who enjoy hearing attractive young men belting pop anthems and watching them leap across the stage performing athletic spins and flips.  But underneath the flashy performances of its title ensemble, Newsies is a slow-moving, workmanlike musical that takes an interesting, historic episode in the American labor movement and presents it as the kind of spunky entertainment that takes formulaic aim at the heart without earning any emotional payback through well-crafted storytelling.

Tabloid theatre might be the best way of describing Dan Klores' The Wood, a drama that attempts hard-hitting, journalistic toughness in painting a somewhat nonobjective portrait of New York newspaper columnist Mike McAlary.  The author delivers a lot of ink-stained passion in his tale of a local kid who grew up worshipping the likes of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill before becoming one of Gotham's most prized newshounds - jumping between Newsday, The Post and The Daily News whenever one offered more money - but weak storytelling leaves too many holes in the narrative and broad-stroke writing gives most of the actors little more than clichés to portray.

This week I had my first experience with the joyful adult visual fantasia known as Arias With A Twist; a madcap collaboration between puppeteer/designer/director Basil Twist and cross-dressing chanteuse Joey Arias that first hit town three years ago. It's an eye-popping blast.

While the 182 previews, numerous postponements and drastic changes in the creative team experienced by the current tenant of the Foxwoods Theatre might serve as some indication that musical theatre ain't easy, the real proof of the art form's difficulty can now be observed in its rapturously imperfect glory at the Marquis.

I've heard of some directors who, as soon as they've taken on a new play, grab a black marker and scratch out every stage direction the playwright wrote into the script, as though the author's only business was to write dialogue and allow each individual stager to create the rest.

Last year around this time, Elevator Repair Service had Gotham playgoers abuzz with their cover-to-cover, word-for-word staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, re-titled Gatz. Director John Collins' off-beat adaptation, which had Computer Age office workers assuming the roles of Fitzgerald's Jazz Agers, intrigued many, but also terrified quite a few with its six hour and twenty minute length. (Intermissions and a dinner break stretched the production to over eight hours.)

Brooke Shields was looking for something a little out of the ordinary when she wanted to treat her cast-mates from The Addams Family to a fun time out this past Wednesday night, so she turned to one of Gotham's favorite burlesque queens, Calamity Chang.

There would be far fewer complaints about having too many revivals on Broadway if they were all done the way the Mint Theater Company does them.  Under artistic director Jonathan Banks, each piece mounted in their intimate space has an interesting story behind it, usually that of a forgotten playwright or a rarely-produced piece by someone few associate with writing plays.  Their productions define the most positive aspects of museum-quality theatre, with visuals and interpretations that take you back to the time when the play was contemporary, rather than dressing the play in a manner that forces it to relate to contemporary times.

Though Hero: The Musical, is being pushed as, 'the first Korean Broadway-style musical to be shown overseas,' it's really of a theatrical style firmly rooted in the West End. Commissioned to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the death of Korean freedom fighter, An Chunggun, Hero comes off at best as a well-intentioned imitation of the power-ballad heavy pop operas of Broadway's British invasion, frequently reminiscent of the revolutionary sexiness of Les Miserables and the military pageantry scenes of Miss Saigon.

It's inevitable that The Woodshed Collective's The Tenant, a site-specific theatrical interpretation of Roland Topor's novella via Roman Polanski's film adaptation, will be compared with the downtown hit, Sleep No More. Both require audience members to freely walk through several floors of rooms, exploring the contents and running into actors playing out scenes. But despite its less elaborate production values, I found The Tenant to be a far superior and much more entertaining experience.

The obligatory Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark spoof that everyone figured would be a part of the 2011 New York International Fringe Festival obviously did not benefit from a series of workshops and readings before making its debut at the Bleecker Theatre. This one had to be a rush job.

Back in June of 2007, I reviewed a very enjoyable production at the Paper Mill Playhouse titled, Pirates! (or Gilbert and Sullivan plunder'd).  It was, as I wrote then, 'a fast and rowdy adaptation of the English duo's irreplaceable The Pirates Of Penzance conceived by Nell Benjamin (additional book and lyrics), Gordon Greenberg (director) and John McDaniel (music supervision, new arrangements and orchestrations).

There isn't much to say about playwright/director Tony Georges' muddy drama of a dysfunctional East Texas marriage, Tricks The Devil Taught Me, except that what seems like a perfectly capable company of actors and designers have found themselves employed in the service of a play that is simply nowhere near ready to be seen.

The best known works of playwright/cross-dressing actor Charles Busch fall into two distinct categories. There are the plays he stars in and there are the plays populated by characters that probably regularly attend the plays he stars in.

The unfortunate case of laryngitis inflicting Death Takes A Holiday's leading man, Julian Ovenden, divided press reservations for the new musical into 'before' and 'after.'  I was originally scheduled to see the show the week of its opening, but when understudy Kevin Earley began filling in, many of us were, understandably, put on hold to wait for his return.

In a week where we've been reminded how even the classics of the American musical stage are rarely revived in Broadway or Broadway-bound productions without their deceased authors' work being anything from tweaked to drastically rewritten, it's very refreshing to see a major revival where the material has been kept as it was and the show has simply been creatively refreshed. Director Michael Greif, who staged the original New York Theatre Workshop production of Rent that quickly moved to Broadway, gives us a new Off-Broadway mounting at New World Stages that looks at the material from a wholly different angle without any noticeable changes to the late Jonathan Larson's text. While still a life-affirming celebration of youthful passions and the need to create, this presentation is grittier and more realistic than the original, performed by an excellent ensemble placing their own interesting stamps on what, after 12 years on Broadway, many would consider iconic roles.

If Diane Paulus' new version of Porgy and Bess does make it to Broadway, I know one theatre that ain't gonna house it.

If Mike Nichols and Elaine May ever had a routine about two theatre geeks discussing their favorite unsuccessful musicals, it probably would have resembled the kind of banter that goes on between Jennifer Tepper and Kevin Michael Murphy as creators/producers/hosts of the concert series, If It Only Even Runs A Minute.  Monday night's edition, their seventh, was my third visit to their collection of one-nighters where musical theatre well-knowns and not so well-knowns join music director/pianist Caleb Hoyer to sing selections from underappreciated and/or forgotten musicals between quick histories of each production by Tepper and Murphy.  Frequently, original cast members will be on hand to give first-person accounts of the bumpy roads to opening night.