Michael Dale - Page 136

Nearly 40 years ago, producer Norman Lear brought a television program about a black family's life in a Chicago housing project into millions of American homes.  And while the show never ignored the dangers and hardships of living in an underserved, crime-ridden community, Good Times focused on the safe haven provided by family and friends that nurtured artistry and activism while providing the expected abundance of sitcom laughter.

On paper, Annie Baker's The Flick is 122 pages long.  For a typical play this would mean a running time somewhere between two hours and fifteen minutes and two and a half hours at the most.  On stage at Playwrights Horizons, the performance I attended of director Sam Gold's production of The Flick ran a bit over three hours and fifteen minutes.

'This is like children's theatre for 40-year-old gay people!'

The woman who went by the pseudonym Natalie Dylan, a self-described feminist with a B.A. in women's studies, hasn't been the only one to attempt to put her virginity up for auction, but being attractive, American and willing to appear on national television to explain how she wished to use the money to pay for her further education most likely helped her become the best-known in this country.

As a public service for playgoers who do not understand French, nothing of any importance takes place in the final scene of Amy Herzog's Belleville.

Out of necessity, people tend to fall in love rather quickly in musical theatre.  Trying to jam a relationship into a two and a half hour entertainment often means a good thirty-two bars of lush music and romantic lyrics is all it takes to establish a lasting emotional bond.

While several of New York's non-profit theatre companies have been pursuing the noble cause of creating more exposure for contemporary women playwrights, the Mint Theatre Company has been cornering the market on the dead ones.  Fourteen of the company's forty productions were scripted by women, a statistic that gains stature when you consider that they're reviving from a pool of material with a percentage of work by women far below that rate.  A prime case in point is the nearly forgotten Irish playwright Theresa Deevy, arguably the most famous female playwright of the first half of the 20th Century.

If the Broadway revival of a few years back demonstrated the deadly results that can occur when overthinking and underplaying a quality farce, the new Paper Mill mounting is a fast a furious example of Ken Ludwig's madcap Lend Me A Tenor done right.  Director Don Stephenson doesn't throw any fancy curveballs with the material, but he and his perfectly cast company of Broadway vets nail every door slam and verbal ping-pong volley with hilarious aplomb.

Near the end of 'Sure Thing,' one of the sextet of David Ives one-act comedies that make up All In The Timing, a pair of strangers meeting in a café bond over their mutual love for the early films of Woody Allen.  Perhaps the current offering from Primary Stages will inspire couples to meet at the 59E59 Theaters' bar and bond over the early works of Mr. Ives, before he became known for less-quirky full-length plays and concert adaptations of old musicals.

Bertolt Brecht's Baal is pretty much the type of play you'd expect to be written by a 20-year-old student who would eventually become known for using dramatic techniques meant to alienate the audience from any emotional connection to the characters.  Now his social commentary about a hard-drinking outcast poet womanizer and murderer has been given a 1990s spin from The New Group in playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman's Clive.

I'm writing these words fully aware that there is no opinion I can express in the ensuing paragraphs that will ever have any effect on anyone's decision whether or not to buy tickets for Manilow On Broadway.  I don't mean that in a self-effacing manner.  I'm also sure that no one ever looked at an ad for Barry Manilow's current concert engagement at the St. James and thought, 'Hmm, this looks interesting but I want to see what Ben Brantley says about it before buying tickets.'

Reading about the new Lanford Wilson revival makes me wonder if the weekly grosses for the last Stephen Sondheim Broadway revival were known as Follies' Tally.

In musicals like Fiddler On The Roof, She Loves Me and The Apple Tree, the team Jerry Bock (music) and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) once graced Broadway with scores that found poetry and elegance in the lives of everyday people.  But nowhere is that more apparent than in the boisterously fun and heavily New York accented, Fiorello!, a celebration of the early career of Fiorello LaGuardia, the city's enormously popular 99th mayor.

The women who took over the American workforce during World War II were abruptly expected to quit once the boys started coming home.  And while many looked forward to settling down with a traditional Mr. Right and staying home to raise 2.7 babies, there were others who were torn between the safety of normalcy and their yearning for something more dangerous and adventurous when William Inge's Pulitzer-winning Picnic premiered on Broadway in 1953.

There is no truth to the rumor that at tonight's closing performance of Evita, Ann Harada played Peron's Mistress and sang 'Why Would A Fellow Want A Girl Like Her?'

Tracy Morgan was on The View today and said he'd like to play the title role in a Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly!, but when asked to sing a bit of the song he said he didn't know it. Remarkably, though, he had the entire oak leaf monologue memorized. #OneOfTheseSentencesIsALie

A legendary flop gets a second chance, a fabled night spot closes as a new one opens and a mysterious investor supposedly dies of malaria. These were just a few of the stories and issues theatre lovers talked about in 2012.

With serious issues at stake in Tuesday's upcoming election, let's take a break with some of Broadway's sillier looks at the commander-in-chief.

Playwright/actors like Noel Coward, George M. Cohan and Charles Ludlum were all well known for appearing in their own works, but it's not as frequent to see a well-known playwright appear in a piece by someone else.

With a new production of Annie now previewing on Broadway, it looks like Gwen Verdon may have to relinquish her title as the most famous redhead to have played the Palace.