Michael Dale News

Cameron Mackintosh's 25th Anniversary production of Les Misérables, presented by The Paper Mill Playhouse, has finally hit the friendly American shores after touring Britain, and perhaps symbolic of its Atlantic crossing is the new opening picture devised by co-directors Laurence Conner and James Powell.  Sure, 24601 (a/k/a Jean Valjean) is still a prisoner in chains for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread for his starving sister and her family, but he and his fellow inmates are now rowing oars on a galley ship.  The music (Claude-Michel Schonberg) and words (Herbert Kretzmer, based on the original French text by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel) of this world-famous adaptation of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel, set against the backdrop of Paris' 1832 student revolution, are unchanged, but the new locale not only starts the evening off with a visually striking image, but signals to the musical's two-and-a-half decades worth of fans that this will not be just another variation of the original Trevor Nunn/John Caird production they are accustomed to.  (A production that can still be enjoyed on the West End.)

While there's certainly plenty to enjoy in the new musical version of Pedro Almodóvar's 1988 film, Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown - David Yazbek's jaunty Latin-based score, the winning performances of a star-studded cast (three Tony winners and four other nominees) and the kinetic flashiness of Bartlett Sher's kicky production - the show is also a prime example of how the sum of the pieces can add up to more than the whole when the missing ingredient is a strong book.  Not that the talented Jeffrey Lane doesn't make a game try at it.  Sticking closely to the source, his work is frequently clever and he and Yazbek concoct some quirkily fun musical scenes, but the odds are working against him in this one.

Although Broadway has a history of great artistic success from adapting existing sources for the musical stage (My Fair Lady, Show Boat, Gypsy...) the past decade's ever-increasing trend of turning popular films, novels that inspired popular films and songwriter's catalogues into musicals has, in many minds, elevated the status of the completely original musical; particularly original musicals by American authors.

The Drama Desk Award-winning singer-songwriter Michael Garin and the singer-comedienne Mardie Millit, reprise their well-received cabaret two-hander, "Sleepless in September," for six assorted Tuesdays at the Metropolitan Room, beginning November 23.

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".

Creating new opportunities for beautiful blondes with enchanting soprano voices is a topic generally not included in discussions of non-traditional casting in the theatre, but when it was announced that Kelli O'Hara would be starring in the Encores! concert production of Bells Are Ringing instead of one of Broadway's many talented comedic actresses who might regard this weekend's performances as a public audition for the planned upcoming revival of Funny Girl, it was not, to say the least, an expected choice.

While football and baseball have been slugging it out for decades for the title of America's Most Popular Sport, there's no doubt that the latter is Broadway's baby, boasting Tony-winners Damn Yankees and Take Me Out.  Aside from inspiring amusing songs for Wonderful Town and High Button Shoes, football's longest Broadway run was the short-lived musical All-American, which featured the unlikely combination of Ray Bolger acting in scenes written by Mel Brooks.  Heck, even basketball (That Championship Season) and rugby (The Changing Room) have fared better on Broadway than football.

While the campy antics of Devil Boys From Beyond may suggest an unlikely blend of screwball classics like His Girl Friday with infamous sci-fi fare such as Plan 9 From Outer Space, the movie title that kept popping into my mind was Clash of The Titans.  Not because of the mythical physiques of beefy boys Jeff Riberdy and Jacques Mitchell, but because this honey of a laff-riot matches esteemed associates from the schools of Off-Broadway's two most significant drag theatre artists.

Sure, in America the guilty have just as much a right to a fair trial as the innocent.  But when someone you believe is guilty doesn't get one, is that a wrong you can be all that enthused about righting?  That's one of the discussion points that might be mulled over by leftist radicals downing shots of vodka after taking in Amy Herzog's After The Revolution.  Unfortunately, this tantalizing moral dilemma is regulated to a throwaway point in a play that teases us with its political content while contenting itself with being a rather formulaic family drama.  It's a good one, for sure; well-written (despite an unsatisfying ending) with absorbing conflicts and director Carolyn Cantor's excellent cast is always engaging, but every so often the play reminds us of an interesting direction the author decided not to take.

The Costa Mesa Playhouse is pleased to announce its 2010-2011 season-a season filled with classic and contemporary comedies, award-winning musicals, and a humor-laced drama.

While Ira Levin will forever be remembered as the novelist who made the phrases 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Stepford Wives' indelible entries into American pop culture, devotees of musical theatre fondly regard him as the bookwriter/lyricist for one of Broadway's more intriguing flops, 1965's Drat! The Cat!

Our Postmodern Town might be a more descriptive title for Will Eno's Middletown, a play that coats the Thornton Wilder standard of normal American life as it pertains to the cycle of life and death with a whitewash of Samuel Beckett absurdity.  And if even half of the play's two hours contained the vivacity of the first few minutes, where David Garrison rhythmically recites an all-inclusive list describing any possible type of audience member who might be in attendance - concluding with his pointing out the fire exits - a trip to Middletown might prove a worthy excursion.

The only press night offered for the Public LAB's premiere production of playwright/director Richard Nelson's That Hopey Changey Thing was this past Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at 7pm.  Given that the play actually takes place on Tuesday. November 2nd, 2010 at 7pm (America's Election Night, for my plethora of foreign readers) I was rather hopey that the text might, in fact, wind up being changey, depending on the news of returns coming in during the play's 90 minutes.  No such luck.  But even in its frozen state, the piece is sharp, engrossing and superbly acted.

The Drama Desk Award-winning singer-songwriter Michael Garin and the singer-comedienne Mardie Millit, reprise their well-received cabaret two-hander, "Sleepless in September," for six assorted Tuesdays at the Metropolitan Room, beginning November 23.

Early on in Lisa Kron's politically-charged romantic comedy/drama, In The Wake, audiences are reminded of a scene that traditionally takes place in many American households every fourth Thursday of November.  While the rest of the family is ready to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, there's one person pleading to keep the television on for just a little longer, obsessed with the score and loudly complaining about the officiating.  Only this time it's Thanksgiving Day, 2000 and Kron's central character, Ellen (Marin Ireland), isn't concerned with a football game, but is jumping up and down in front of the MSNBC broadcast, wildly cheering for a come-from-behind Al Gore victory in the contested presidential election.

Three quarters of a century before a Frank Rich review had the power to close a Broadway show on opening night, New York City Police Commissioner William McAdoo accomplished the same feat with his pan of the 1905 American premiere of George Bernard Shaw's, Mrs. Warren's Profession.

Abigail Grotke... a real-life person named Abigail Grotke... has been collecting vintage books on relationship advice for 25 years, amassing over a thousand volumes published from 1822 to 1978, with titles such as The Unfair Sex, She Cooks to Conquer, How to Get a Teen-Age Boy and What To Do With Him When You Get Him and A Virtuous Woman: Sex Life in Relation to the Christian Life.   In her archival website, Miss Abigail's Time Warp Advice, questions like, 'Is a man abnormal if he likes art and dislikes sports,' are answered by quoting the wisdom of experts like Fred Brown and Rudolf T. Kempton, authors of 1950's Sex Questions and Answers: A Guide to Happy Marriage ('Every normal man has a bit of woman in him and every woman contains some of the male in her personality.').

Perhaps not content with merely being the best comic actress on the New York stage, Jan Maxwell follows her hilarious turns in last season's revivals of The Royal Family and Lend Me A Tenor by refreshing her dramatic chops a with a riveting, edge of your seat performance in John Doyle's senses-tingling production of Arthur Kopit's 1978 drama, Wings.

'Let's see if we can do this without a microphone,' peeped Jo Sullivan Loesser, as she prepared to fill the 1,495-seat Town Hall with 'Somebody, Somewhere,' which she introduced in the 1956 original Broadway production of The Most Happy Fella.  While the age of the widow of the great Frank Loesser is a fact you'll not find via Google, let's just say she's a few decades beyond the point where audiences would expect to hear such lovely, expressive and, yes, loud soprano tones from an unamplified voice.  The house, still and silent for those few minutes of bliss, finally erupted with appreciative cheers for the brief reminder of a time when all Broadway musicals were sung that way.

Actor Zero Mostel was larger than life. And he was a man of contradictions.