Kristin Salaky - Page 10

Okay, so New York City Opera has commissioned Philip Glass to write a new opera about Walt Disney. Let's start taking bets. How many clueless parents are going to be taking their toddlers because they assume the Disney name means it's for kids?

How exactly does Curly know the height of an elephant's eye? I don't mean to doubt the intelligence or inquisitiveness of the guy, but if I asked a pre-statehood Oklahoma cowboy how high the corn has grown, the first response I'd expect wouldn't be a comparison to the height of a proboscidea native to Africa and Asia. Perhaps he found a picture book in some public library, or maybe that famous Thomas Edison film of the electrocution of Topsy, the Coney Island elephant, had made its way to a local picture house.

As I was leaving the Mint Theatre after their simply marvelous production of J.B. Priestly's 1957 drama, The Glass Cage, I overheard a woman saying to her companion, 'That play had everything! Greed… love… revenge… sex… everything!'

In today's New York Post, Michael Riedel is critical of the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust for granting a $200,000 prize for the purpose of nurturing American Playwrights to Tony Kushner instead of to a deserving unknown. Earlier this year the Ed Kleban Award for most promising musical theatre lyricist ($100,000) went to David Lindsay-Abaire for his work in the upcoming Shrek

At the beginning of Dan Gordon's engrossing and uplifting drama, Irena's Vow, Tovah Feldshuh, as real life heroin Irena Gut Opdyke, is introduced to a high school auditorium filled with students to tell them about her experiences as a 19-year-old trying to hide 12 Jews in Nazi occupied Poland. At the end of the play she is reminding her young listeners that they are the last generation that will hear first hand accounts of the Holocaust's atrocities from those who survived it, and that it is their responsibility to never back away from confronting hatred.

[title of show] will be the first Broadway production to win a Tony Award while playing Off-Broadway. Just a hunch.

'Only the great deserve the darts of satire,' proclaimed an advertisement for the New York leg of the Bolshoi Ballet Company's 1936 American tour, a classy reply to the spoofing they were receiving from George Balanchine's dance piece La Princesse Zenobia, a highlight of George Abbott and Rodgers and Hart's Broadway hit On Your Toes.

While the phrase 'Shakespeare in the Park' brings to most New Yorker's minds thoughts of getting up early and waiting in line for hours to see one of the Public Theater's Delecorte productions, savvy Gothamites know that the warmer weather annually brings dozens of free outdoor Shakespeare performances to many of our public parks and community gardens that can be enjoyed by just showing up (usually with your own blanket or chair) at showtime.

There's an interesting point buried beneath the innocuous entertainment of writer/director Roger Bean's The Marvelous Wonderettes, a somewhat cute little show utilizing girl group and female soloist pop hits from the 1950s and 60s. Unfortunately, that interesting point could have easily been made with out the tedium of his vapid, unfunny book and standard story. But if you can disregard everything that happens between the songs and just enjoy the singing talents of Farah Alvin (the shy, geeky one), Beth Malone (the trouble-maker), Bets Malone (the air-headed, helium voiced blonde) and Victoria Matlock (Most Likely To Become Ann-Margret) you're apt to have an enjoyable time.

What's that? You've seen Spring Awakening 87 times and you were wondering if there were any other musicals about sex-crazed teenagers who rebel against their parents and express their innermost thoughts when time stands still and songs act as internal monologues? Well it just so happens the show for you played on Broadway, albeit briefly, over thirty years ago and is now receiving an absolutely hilarious revival at the York.

It's my firm belief that if composer Leroy Anderson, lyricist Joan Ford and bookwriter/lyricists Walter & Jean Kerr had named their brash and funny 1958 musical comedy about the love/hate relationship between a silent movie director and his reluctant star anything other than Goldilocks, it might not only have had a longer run than its five months on Broadway, but would have been a popular choice among regional and amateur theatres as well. With a good collection of snazzy tunes and well-crafted lyrics (most notably the semi-standard torcher, 'I Never Know When To Say When') and a book loaded with guffaws and wise-cracks (originally quipped by stars Elaine Stritch and Don Ameche), Goldilocks is a solid example of a show that, if not exactly a musical theatre triumph, provided a fun night out for audiences in an era when affordable ticket prices meant that not every Broadway production had to be a huge event.

The vocal miracle that is Marilyn Maye is once again working magic in the cozy confines of The Metropolitan Room, where, in the past two years, she's opened a wondrous quartet of engagements to break a 16-year exile from Manhattan.

Dan Wackerman, Artistic Director and frequent stage director for the Peccadillo Theatre Company, has regularly displayed a golden touch for mounting crackling revivals of long-forgotten Broadway plays like Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law, Dorothy Parker and Arnaud d'Usseau's The Ladies of the Corridor and, in an absolutely hilarious mounting, John Murray and Alan Boretz's Room Service. But with Charles MacArthur's 1942 political screwball farce, Johnny On A Spot, he and his Peccadillo cohorts attempt their toughest feat of alchemy yet in belief that this 4-performance Broadway flop was an unfortunate victim of the public's squelched taste for satire a mere month after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Congratulations to BroadwayWorld theatre critic Duncan Pflaster, whose latest playwrighting effort, Prince Trevor Amongst The Elephants, took home three awards at this year's Midtown InterNational Theatre Festival, including Outstanding Overall Production of a New Comedy Play and Outstanding Playwriting for a New Script, Play or Book of a Musical. We can't review Duncan's plays here on BroadwayWorld (ethics, ya know), though they're being produced more and more frequently around New York, but we can raise a proverbial glass when his talent is honored.

The only negative thing I'll say about Fela!, the Off-Broadway docu-musical inspired by the life of Nigerian political activist and musical revolutionary Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, is that it never engaged this martini-swilling Manhattanite who entered the theatre unschooled in the culture and politics of the protagonist's homeland. The professionalism, exuberance and entertainment value of the piece is undeniable and I imagine many of my dear readers would have a terrific time visiting 37 Arts these days. But unless you're going in with a full knowledge of and an emotional attachment to its controversial subject, you may find, save for a well done moment late in the game, there is little dramatic pull to the proceedings to sustain interest for its two and a half hours. An audience full of fans of this internationally known artist who died in 1997 might understandably be thrilled by Fela! but while its potent message of the power of music to combat oppression is certainly universal, it took a review of the text's stage directions and a bit of Googling for this neophyte to get a fuller picture of the life and culture on display.

In the latest edition of Opera News, Michael Portantiere asks Stephen Schwartz, Adam Guettel, Jason Robert Brown, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael John LaChiusa, Stephen Flaherty and Stew for their opinions on the difference between opera and musical theatre.

Though it took She Loves Me's Ilona Ritter just one trip to the library to discover the magic of books, musical theatre's bookwriters have traditionally been underappreciated for their vital contributions and dramatic artistry. This morning I actually blurted out at my computer screen, 'Damn, why didn't I think of this!!??,' while reading Matthew Murray's terrific feature on BroadwayStars about what he considers to be the best spoken scenes in musical theatre.

Marty Geiger is one of those colorful theatre junkies I often run into during intermissions or on chat boards. A robust gentleman of 60 and a lawyer by trade, he decided two years ago to venture into the world of cabaret performing. When I took my seat for his new show at Don't Tell Mama, Summer Baby, I wasn't really intending to review it; I was just supporting a nice guy who always has something interesting to say about the new musicals in town. But hey, it turns out Marty, with the

Attractive people saying bitchy things while wearing sexy outfits and drinking too much. No it's not another BroadwayWorld staff meeting, but New York Daily News entertainment writer Patrick Huguenin's Paper Dolls, a funny and promising new play about the world of celebrity gossip that just closed its run at the New York International Fringe Festival.

Noel Coward once asked in song, 'Why Must The Show Go On?' That thought might have been on the minds of Neil Diamond fans that, according to this article, walked out on his concert Monday night when the singer, who was diagnosed the next day with acute laryngitis, performed a complete concert in a raspy voice. Diamond has offered refunds for anyone making a request.