Michael Dale - Page 32

Perhaps if Clifford Odets' landmark pro-union drama, WAITING FOR LEFTY, hadn't opened the year before, Lillian Hellman's 1936 labor drama, DAYS TO COME, the sophomore Broadway effort of the playwright who made a huge name for herself two years earlier with THE CHILDREN'S HOUR, might have been better received.

With an innocuous book more focused on moving to plot points than creating interesting leading characters and a platitude-heavy score that tends to linger on moments instead of expanding on them, PRETTY WOMAN, based on the hit 1990 film, is the blandest musical to hit Broadway in recent memory.

The past several Broadway seasons have seen extraordinary developments in musical theatre, with a steady stream of new shows, usually transferring from non-profit Off-Broadway, offering smart writing, inventive storytelling and expanded notions of the subject matter and musical styles that can be welcomed into the art form.

The stage is quite empty, save for a makeshift throne in a corner and a couple of rows of ordinary looking chairs in the back, where actors not involved with scenes sit. The costumes are contemporary clothes, mostly black, with the occasional embellishment to suggest the 15th Century setting. When a character is in need of a dagger, he'll grab one of the two hanging from ropes on either side of the stage.

It may not have the romantic sweep of 'Some Enchanted Evening' or the driving intensity of 'Don't Rain On My Parade,' but so far, the best new theatre song of this young season is a finely-crafted emotional shut-down carrying the unlikely title 'Michael In The Bathroom.'

Back in the days, really not very long ago, when self-effacing gags about failed diets were one of the few topics of discussion deemed acceptable for women in comedy, the punchline Renee Taylor uses after telling about the time when she ate nothing but meatballs every day because it was the diet that helped Lou Costello shed twenty pounds before filming 'Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy,' would have been regarded as gold.

The last time an actor appeared in a Broadway musical playing a role he had previously essayed on film, it was 1983, when Anthony Quinn opened in the revival of ZORBA. Sharing that unusual distinction with him now is Israeli actor Sasson Gabay who has taken over as leading man of this past season's 10-time Tony winning musical, THE BAND'S VISIT.

One of the most exciting and important voices to emerge from the 1980s-90s American performance art movement, Karen Finley might be regarded as one of the country's most noted censored artists.

The late afternoon and early evening rain that had been steadily falling last Friday didn't stop the faithful from arriving at Central Park's Delacorte Theater for Shakespeare In The Park's return of the Public Works' 2016 musical version of TWELFTH NIGHT.

'I sound like Borat and I look like Seinfeld,' jokes the Russian-accented illusionist Vitaly Beckman, who indeed sports a resemblance to 9th Avenue's most famous diner patron.

Coming in at the heels of landmark musicals like AIN'T SUPPOSED TO DIE A NATURAL DEATH and INNER CITY, composer/lyricist Micki Grant's DON'T BOTHER ME, I CAN'T COPE was an important part of the early 1970s surge of Broadway musicals that were not only about African-American experiences but were written and directed by African-Americans as well.

Fans of late 16th Century pastoral poetic narrative tragicomedy have been all abuzz anticipating the Broadway arrival of the new song and dance adaptation of a Sir Philip Sidney classic. But rather than go the obviously commercial route and title their creation 'The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, the Musical,' the creators have opted to call their peppy merriment HEAD OVER HEELS.

There was plenty to admire when playwright/director Young Jean Lee's STRAIGHT WHITE MEN opened at The Public Theater in November of 2014.  Those familiar with the exceedingly non-traditional work of the Obie-honoree, whose past dramatic choices have included inserting a scene from 'Sesame Street' about Mr. Hooper's death into a play about King Lear and having silent nude performers interact with audience members to explore the boundaries of comfort zones may have chuckled a bit at the thought of her stepping into theatrical territory more or less defined in this country by the naturalistic classics of dramatists like Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill.

When the smash hit revue SMOKEY JOE'S CAFE, celebrating the pop classics of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, opened on Broadway in 1995, director Jerry Zaks staged each beloved number with snazzy show-biz slickness and glitz, suggesting the ways they might have been performed by the artists who introduced them when in concert or on television variety shows.

'If life were only moments, then you'd never know you had one,' sings a character from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's INTO THE WOODS while pondering whether the intimate encounter she just experienced would turn out to be of lifelong meaning or just a barely significant distraction.

It's a classically-styled cinematic pose. The kind that tends to define a certain era of film noir. A woman stands alone on the Coney Island boardwalk on a chilly day. Covered in a tan trench coat, belt tied at the waist, she stares out at the ocean. After a few moments, emotions sweep over her and she begins to cry.

The person seated in the back of the orchestra section on opening night of the Encores! Off-Center concert mounting of GONE MISSING, who was loudly sobbing during the closing song, was by no means causing a disturbance. In fact, the choked-up moans of heartbreak being emitted throughout New York City Center's auditorium many times during the performance were simply bringing to the surface the sadness that served as the evening's subtext, even for those who did not know the clever and touching revue's late composer/lyricist personally.

'Now that the winter formal gives way to glorious spring fling,' recites our antihero at the outset of Mike Lew's enormously clever contemporary riff on Shakespeare's RICHARD III, titled Teenage Dick, 'we find our rocks for brains hero Eddie - the quarterback - sleeping through his job as junior class president.'

This is not shaping up to be a good year for Oscar Hammerstein II, American musical theatre's most important writer, who spent the first half of the 20th Century not only making significant strides to convert the genre from loosely assembled entertainments into respected and influential pieces of dramatic art, but was also a leading voice in promoting progressive values through his books and lyrics for such musicals as SHOW BOAT, SOUTH PACIFIC and THE KING AND I.

'We're all fully interested in navigating this brave new world with them,' says an exasperated character in Jordan Harrison's comedy of social politics, Log Cabin, 'but it sometimes seems like they want us to get it wrong... Like they're filling a quota of perceived transgressions.'