Michael Dale - Page 38

The best news coming out of 44th Street these days is that the refurbishing of the Helen Hayes Theater has been completed and that Second Stage, while retaining its longtime Off-Broadway home one block down, has set up residency, making the intimate playhouse Broadway's only venue exclusively dedicated to works by living American authors.

It wasn't exactly a stellar weekend for Donald Trump. Nationwide protest rallies condemned his party's relationship with the NRA, a woman revealed on national television that her life was threatened if she went public with details of their affair, and as for the cherry on top, ANGELS IN AMERICA: A GAY FANTASIA ON NATIONAL THEMES, has returned to Broadway.

Though the songwriting team of Robert Wright and George Forrest is best remembered by Broadway enthusiasts for adapting the music of Edvard Grieg into SONG OF NORWAY and similarly using the melodies of Alexander Borodin to create their score for KISMET, their greatest success came when director/choreographer Tommy Tune took interest in a musical of theirs that fizzled into obscurity on its way to Broadway, then known as AT THE GRAND.

It was less than five years ago when little girls around the globe were presented with a computer-animated rebellious role model who was fed up with hiding her true self to conform to other people's ideas of what it meant to be a 'good girl' and, quite literally, dropped her gloves in defiant celebration of what makes her unique.

Typically, the immediate attraction between Cinderella and the handsome prince is presented as simply a matter of physical chemistry, but in Company XIV's newest variation of Charles Perrault's classic, the true bonding between the two occurs because they're both captivating aerialists.

The smiling, bobbing head and swaying shoulders of the self-proclaimed Parrothead who accompanied this Jimmy Buffett neophyte to the breezy fun new jukebox musical comedy, ESCAPE TO MARGARITAVILLE, seemed proof enough that fans of the Mississippi-born singer/songwriter known for carefree Caribbean-inspired melodies should have a swell time.

Innovative genius Norman Lear will forever be remembered for expanding the limits of what television comedy could do by bringing Archie Bunker, and his everyday brand of casual and not-so-casual bigotry, into American homes every week and hold him up to public ridicule.

Teaser:  There is a knockout of a surprise moment, cleverly devised and wonderfully played, contained within Pulitzer-winner Bruce Norris' mini-epic THE LOW ROAD, now getting a rollicking production at The Public, with a terrific ensemble of players guided by the talented hand of director Michael Grief.

'We take care homes,' a Polish immigrant living in New York's Borough of Queens bluntly explains to a young newcomer from Ukraine who has yet to get settled. 'Us kinds people, we take care house. Men, they build them and women, they clean them. Take care children. Rest this country handles rest this country. But us, we do homes.'

Historically, it hasn't been unusual for writers like Amantine Lucile Dupin (better known as George Sand) and Nelle Harper Lee (published as Harper Lee) to take on traditionally male or androgynous names to help advance their careers in a patriarchal world by allowing publishers and readers to make their own assumptions regarding the author's gender.

'One of the few great musical comedies of the last thirty years.' - Howard Taubman' 'What a show! What a hit! What a solid hit!' - Walter Kerr' 'The best musical of the century.' - John Chapman'

One of the great characteristics of live theatre is that, as opposed to film and television, no matter how iconic a performance is, no matter how indelibly attached an actor may seem to a role, there will be other actors playing it.

'Dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians,' sings a young lady feeling the bright television lights on her face as cameras capture her every move for a national audience in Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee's outrageous, endearing and perceptive social commentary, JERRY SPRINGER -- THE OPERA.

'I have a friend - She's a liberal. I don't know if there are any liberals here...'

Introverts weren't exactly regarded as sexy, at least not as a norm, when Edward Albee's one-act classic 'The Zoo Story' premiered in 1958, launching the career of a playwright whose name became synonymous with the psychoanalyzation of privileged white American dysfunctionality.

Intended for Ethel Merman, created by Carol Channing, reinvented by Pearl Bailey and based on a character made famous by Ruth Gordon, the title character of Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly! is perhaps the most flexible starring role to ever grace the Broadway musical stage.

It was nearly two years ago when The Public Theater opened the first major New York production penned by the relatively unknown Sarah Burgess. Her tersely scripted and aridly humored DRY POWER delved into the cutthroat world of corporate takeovers, and director Thomas Kail's bracing production matched the playwright's vicious verbal chess match with the same abundance of pop and vibrancy.

There are no live actors involved in with the Scottish theatre company Vox Motus' new storytelling attraction, FLIGHT, and though New York's theatre critics were invited to sample showings at the McKittrick Hotel, their creation can be more accurately described as an art installation.

With a name like BAR MITZVAH BOY, it should be no surprise that the current musical at the York is a coming of age story. What is surprising is that the composer of this intimate piece is Jule Styne, better known for brassy star vehicles like GYPSY and FUNNY GIRL.

"Do you have any idea who I am?," Eve Ensler asks the doctor who suggests radiation treatment of her vagina to prevent the resurgence of her cancer. "Do you have any fucking sense of irony?"