How remarkably tragic it is that the triumphant opening night of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, perhaps the greatest comedy ever penned in the English language, was also the event that led to the author's personal downfall and eventual public and financial ruin.
I imagine Richard Skipper must approach his embodiment of Carol Channing a bit differently than most successful female celebrity impersonators. When doing Barbra or Eartha or Ethel there are certain idiosyncrasies one can latch onto and exaggerate as punch lines. Channing, however, has always presented herself on stage as a sort of self-satire. To broaden up what is already such an extreme can easily slip into vulgar mockery.
The old showbiz adage about always leavin' 'em wanting more isn't always the best advice, as exemplified Adam Bock's fascinating, understated and, in the end, frustratingly incomplete, A Small Fire. In his usual fashion, especially when teamed up, as he is here, with director Tripp Cullman, Bock takes us on an engrossing journey just beyond the outer edges of reality. There is some extraordinary scene work, both in his writing and in the collaborative efforts of the director and his two superlative leads, Michele Pawk and Reed Birney. But while the 80-minute production satisfies in so many ways, the text also leaves out too many delicious details.
I'll resist the temptation to call director Paul Alexander's Off-Broadway mounting of Dracula anemic or toothless, but will note his remarkable achievement of assembling a production that manages to be aggressively bad in so many ways and yet never achieves the 'you gotta see how bad this is' status. Though plagued by inept acting, questionable character choices, cheap-looking (and sounding) effects and a glacial pace, the evening is too dull to be enjoyed on any level.
No, that nice young man offering to pour you a glass of wine as you enter the New York Theatre Workshop's auditorium is not an intern or an Equity membership candidate earning weeks; it's one of the three madcap musicians who will be spending the next two hours trading punch lines, wheeling a trio of pianos around the stage and, somehow through it all, taking the inspiration for their antics from Franz Schubert's 1827 song cycle, Winterreise.
The Drama Desk Award-winning singer-songwriter Michael Garin and the singer-comedienne Mardie Millit, continue to toss and turn as their well-received cabaret two-hander, "Sleepless in September," resumes its run of Tuesdays at the Metropolitan Room on January 4.
The First Amendment, that noble invention of our founding fathers that grants all Americans the right of free speech, must frequently be defended under less than noble circumstances; the right of a neo-Nazi group to hold a march in the heavily Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois, the right of Lenny Bruce to use a certain euphemism for someone who performs oral sex on a man as part of his comedy act and now... perhaps... the right of Michael Riedel to get a good seat at Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.
Michael Dale names ten memorable theatre moments from some of New York's lesser known 2010 productions.
Last Tuesday night I went out for some pre-holiday coffee with my good friend, BroadwayWorld Senior Editor Jessica Lewis (Actually we were so engrossed in conversation that we forgot to order coffee. Sorry, Starbucks.), and naturally the topic of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark came up. Jessica had seen the show already and I mentioned how comical it was becoming that, with what right now stands as an eight-week preview period, the reviewing press will be attending long after the Internet has helped establish a firm word-of-mouth opinion.
People usually think I'm joking when I tell them that one of my favorite original Broadway cast albums is the one for the Swiss mime troupe, Mummenschanz. But yes, they did record an album; one of audience reactions during a live performance at the sadly-gone Bijou Theatre during their 1977 three-year run. The vinyl LP is even divided into bands and the liner notes tell you exactly which routines the crowd is laughing at and applauding for.
Before anyone removes a lick of clothing in EndTimes' decidedly secular song and sketch revue, Naked Holidays, an unlikely matchup of a perky and cultured Brit (Ruthie Stephens) and a snarling Mexican heavy metaler (Alessandro Colla) leads the cast of nineteen young and attractive performers, most of whom you will see naked by the evening's end, in a brief orientation of the history of the holidays that grace our December calendars. The sketchy reasons for the celebration of the birth of Christ occurring on December 25th, they conclude, originates from the already present pagan solstice festivals, which were loaded with drunkenness, orgies and crude comedies and spectacles.
The Drama Desk Award-winning singer-songwriter Michael Garin and the singer-comedienne Mardie Millit, continue to toss and turn as their well-received cabaret two-hander, "Sleepless in September," resumes its run of Tuesdays at the Metropolitan Room on January 4.
New Yorkers looking to make the yuletide a little decadent this year would be well-advised to drop the kiddies off at Mr. Balanchine's ballet over at Lincoln Center and hop a train to Brooklyn for the always-enticing theatre/dance troupe Company XIV's elegantly erotic Nutcracker Rouge.
'We found all the people who didn't see Donny and Marie tonight,' Suzanne Carrico chirps with a big smile as she surveys her Metropolitan Room audience. In her new show, featuring material from her CD, What Christmas Time Means To Me, the MAC Award winner might be called a little bit American songbook, a little bit holiday traditional as she celebrates 'the only time of the year with a built-in soundtrack' with cleverness, sincerity and a heck of a lot of joy.
Listening to the popular theatre critic/journalist Peter Filichia talk about musicals can be twice as entertaining as half the shows on Broadway. Ever hear his story about the audience reaction at the first preview of Bring Back Birdie? Or the way he one-upped David Merrick after being tossed out of a preview of 42nd Street? Or the exact moment he could tell, while watching an out-of-town tryout of Company, that Dean Jones would not be playing Bobby for long?
Perhaps the Broadway musical would enjoy a complete and total renaissance of quality if only Thomas Meehan would agree to co-author the book of every new show that hits town. The writer whose main stem debut was the perfectly crafted Annie has gone on to spend the bulk of his career co-authoring with the likes of Mel Brooks, Mark O'Donnell and Lee Adams. And while I'm certainly not dismissing the contributions of his collaborators, the Thomas Meehan name in a Playbill seems to guarantee that no matter how the dialogue and the score turn out, the elements will be housed in a sturdy structure that firmly establishes its story arc, gives us reasons to care about the characters and steadily glides along to a satisfying conclusion.
Back in the days of Henry Miller, it was one of the great Broadway traditions for him and other men of the theatre to name playhouses for themselves. I won't discount that perhaps some ego-stroking was involved, but it was also a shrewd business move. The popular actor/producer was telling the public that even if he wasn't appearing in the house's current offering, the production arrived with his seal of approval. This wasn't just some play paying money to rent his space; Henry Miller believed this to be quality theatre.
The Metropolitan Room, 34 West 22nd Street, is bringing back -- for three nights only -- the super hot Marilyn Maye in her rapturously reviewed "Her Own Kind of Broadway".
The Metropolitan Room, 34 West 22nd Street, is bringing back -- for three nights only -- the super hot Marilyn Maye in her rapturously reviewed "Her Own Kind of Broadway".
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