Kristin Salaky - Page 9

After the Broadway opening of Billy Elliot, the Tony Awards with have to consider how to handle the nomination eligibility of David Alvarez, Trent Kowalik and Kiril Kulish, who share the title role and alternate performances equally. What do you think is the best solution? Let us know in our new poll.

If you're feeling nostalgic for those sweet innocent days when guys could continually act like self-centered jerks and intelligent, attractive women would sleep with them anyway, a trip to Second Stage's funny and energetic revival of Howard Korder's Boy's Life is certainly in order.

Thanks to my BroadwayWorld colleague Adrienne Onofri for sending me this video of a showtune singin' hockey mom making her political preference known.

Opening night isn't exactly going smoothly for the Off-Off Broadway production of Love Child, a modern adaptation of the infrequently performed Euripides drama Ion, presented at the Sausage King Space in Red Hook. A noisy audience member in the front row can't silence her cell phone and hearing aid, an actor has passed out on stage, an upstaging diva is trying to steal the show and a large grease stain on the floor makes each entrance and exit a death-defying experience. But on opening night of Love Child, Daniel Jenkins and Robert Stanton's two-man comedy presented by Primary Stages, everything was crackling with hilarious split-second precision.

Although Mike Daisey's exploration of national defense, past and present, If You See Something Say Something, arrives at Joe's Pub just in time to serve as a companion piece to the Metropolitan Opera's production of Dr. Atomic, there is nothing minimalist about this monologist. He may spend the entire 100 minute presentation sitting behind a desk with nothing but a glass of water and his notes but, as directed by Jean-Michele Gregory, Daisey himself is a fully orchestrated production. A large man who embellishes his frank observations ('The founding fathers could have been considered by the British to be terrorists.') and grim warnings ('If you raise an army and leave it standing, it will find something to do.') with artfully placed profanity, large, sweeping gestures and a face of fully animated Silly Putty, his voice is that of a genial, but angered everyman, bouncing with varied tempos, tones, full out comic crescendos and meaningful sotto voces. If Lenny Bruce was embodied by Zero Mostel and played by Louis Armstrong, the result would closely resemble Mike Daisey.

Three years ago I named D'Jamin Bartlett's performance of 'The Miller's Son' at BroadwayWorld's Standing Ovations IV concert, thirty-two years after she introduced the song in A Little Night Music, as one of my most memorable theatre moments of 2005. I may have to put her back on the list for 2008. At Sunday afternoon's Broadway Originals concert, the final entry of Town Hall's 4th Annual Broadway Cabaret Festival, Bartlett once again - in the original key - completely floored a New York audience with her rapid-fire deliver of Stephen Sondheim's patter combined with sterling vocals conveying an intensely cerebral sexuality. Called out to take a bow, she seemed sincerely surprised and overwhelmed at the cheers of the crowd.

Inspired by the sudden political fame of 'Joe the Plumber,' John McCain's web site now has a special page where you can get your own personalized rally sign by filling out a form that says…

Yes, there are many severely unrepresented groups in New York theatre and that situation needs to be improved. But to focus on one for a moment, here's a link to an interesting New York Times article about the difficulty for women playwrights to have their work produced.

It's perfectly understandable if years from now, or maybe fifteen minutes after leaving the theatre, the only thing you clearly remember about the Roundabout's new production of A Man For All Seasons is Frank Langella's extraordinary performance as the highly-principled Chancellor of England, Sir Thomas More, who refused to support Henry VIII's wish to separate from the Vatican and form the Church of England in order for him to divorce the aging Catherine of Aragon and wed Anne Boleyn in hopes of their union producing a son and heir. Not that director Doug Hughes' sturdy mounting of Robert Bolt's 1960 historical drama doesn't contain fine work from the rest of the ensemble, but in a play where the central figure so dominates the proceedings - especially with this production's removal of the narrator/commenter character known as The Common Man - Langella linguistically feasts on the dense, wordy text and gracefully conveys the complexities of a family man w

In today's Michael Riedel column, Harold Prince very nicely sums up his view on the state of the Broadway musical:

Start with a wonderful dark comedy from 1942, director Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be, which starred Jack Benny and Carol Lombard as the married, spotlight-hogging stars of a theatre troupe in Nazi occupied Warsaw who wind up using their acting skills to play a part in the Polish resistance,…

Aren't you tired of presidential candidates choosing rock songs like 'Barracuda' and 'Our Country' for their campaign themes? Who listens to that kind of music? (I mean, besides 99.9% of the country.) If these guys really want to snare the valuable showtune voter block, maybe they should try being introduced by a selection from the Stephen Sondheim oeuvre.

Some actors are known not only for their stage work but for their political or personal beliefs or for events in their off-stage life. Would you ever avoid seeing a play you might normally be interested in because you find something about an actor's personal life objectionable? Let us know in our new poll.

Lee Blessing's plays have always shown a wonderful knack for vivid story-telling (A Walk In The Woods, Cobb), but in his new Off-Broadway offering, A Body Of Water, the author is intentionally not telling us the story. Likewise, I won't be completely telling you the story of why I found the piece, on the whole, a letdown, because to do so would reveal too many details best explained on the playwright's timeline. But if I found fault with the play itself, director Maria Mileaf's Primary Stages production is a fine mounting.

While it's exceedingly doubtful that Kristin Scott Thomas' Madame Arkadina could play a 15-year-old, as she famously claims in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, a 25-year-old may not exactly be out of her range. With a whimsical eccentricity, sprightly manner and a knockout figure, this centerpiece of Ian Rickson's Royal Court production - visiting the Walter Kerr with a mixed cast of Brits and Yanks - is the most youthful presence on stage. And unlike many fine actresses who have played the role looking much older than the character's stated 43 years, her Arkadina is not a faded stage star looking foolish as she clings to a long-lost youth, but the hot mom of a 25-year-old who has little intention of aging into an adult.

They say you can get a lot of things on Craig's List; a date… a job… arrested… But actor and stand-up comic Bob Greenberg got the title of Best Alfred Hitchcock Look-A-Like of 2008. BroadwayWorld was on hand for photo coverage of that prestigious competition when it was held a couple of weeks ago on the Cort Theatre stage after a performance of The 39 Steps, but let's hear the story from the winner himself.

Thanks to Wayman Wong for bringing this New York Post article to my attention. It's not bad enough that we've seen the demise of so many New York theatres in recent years, now five of the buildings on West 28th Street that made up historic Tin Pan Alley are up for sale and likely to be demolished in order to put up a high rise.

It's easy to forget how ravishingly absorbing an evening at Equus can be if you only consider it as Peter Shaffer's scripted words. Though certainly not deficient in providing a neat little psychological morality drama, what makes the text succeed so well is that, like a great ballet composer, the author knows how to hand over to other artists the opportunity to use his work as a springboard for the creation of emblazing visuals that illuminate with lofty creativity. Equus may not read like great theatre, but director Thea Sharrock's elegant cerebral nightmare of a production shows it can sure play like it.

Ah, there's nothing like watching the marriage of a pair of tortured intellectuals crumble before our eyes from the safe distance of an auditorium seat to happily send audience members to the nearest nightcap retreat with that special glow that comes from a satisfying night at the theatre. And actors Elizabeth Marvel and Norbert Leo Butz, along with director Austin Pendleton, do their darndest to whip up a frenzied evening of dangerous, verbally (and a bit physically) violent theatre. If playwright Michael Weller's Fifty Words were a complete enough piece to match its stellar production we might be close to having one of the must-see events of the season, but for now the two-character evening plays more like watching a pair of skilled actors doing exceptional scene work.

Although I hadn't read any of the first wave of reviews, by the time I was seated for my post-opening night press performance at the Hirschfeld it was pretty much common knowledge to the entire Broadway community that the new (and from the looks of her Playbill bio, the only) creation from bookwriter/composer/lyricist Jill Santoriello brought out gobs of that legendary New York theatre critic acid wit among the great majority of my colleagues.