Michael Dale News

As Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters, inspired by the true story of a collection of miners who art history books now refer to as The Ashington Group, commences, the title characters are quite figuratively blank canvases.  Raised to spend nine hours a day working the northern English coal mines from the time they're still boys, the small gathering of fellows who decided they wanted to learn a bit about culture through weekly visits from a university art professor have never set foot in a gallery and know nothing of the great works most of their countrymen would recognize as part of common knowledge.  Their understanding is that there is some 'secret' behind art that only the elite know about, giving them the ability to determine what's good and what isn't.

For decades, the great and not-so-great vocal artists of cabarets and nightclubs have put their own personal spins on the songs of the sumptuous Noel Coward catalogue; changing a tempo here, adjusting a rhythm there.  Similarly, adaptor/director Emma Rice makes a marvelous party out of her theatrical riff on Coward's bitter sweet one-act romance, Still Life, by way of the play's 1945 film version, Brief Encounter.  The happy result is a stage play where characters occasionally dissolve into glorious black and white screen images or evolve into musicAl Hall entertainers singing commentary on the tense and understated love story.

They say we've become a society anesthetized from violent images since the days when graphic television news footage from Vietnam helped spark the largest anti-war movement this country had seen up until that time.  But the video clips from Gaza shown in Pulitzer-winning journalist Lawrence Wright's solo piece, The Human Scale, are enough to test any playgoer's stomach.

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

This past Friday afternoon I read that this person has been meeting with producers to consider the possibility of appearing on Broadway, in order to, 'expand her brand by taking to the stage.'  That evening I heard the 82-year-old Marilyn Maye, after nearly ninety minutes of superlative interpretations of musical theatre classics from the likes of Jerry Herman, Frank Loesser and Kander and Ebb, tell her completely enthralled audience that it's still her ambition to one day be on Broadway, before emoting a beautifully vulnerable 'Losing My Mind' that segued into a classy and celebratory 'I'm Still Here' that brought just about the entire packed Metropolitan Room house to its feet in one of the most adoring ovations I've ever seen.

When asked how she kept her voice strong and healthy week after week while starring on Broadway, Ethel Merman famously quipped, 'You have to live like a f***ing nun!'  If that's the case then I suppose Scott Shepherd should be up for sainthood any day now.  In Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service's cover-to-cover, word-for-word staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Shepherd reads the narrating role of Nick Carraway, which I'm guessing is roughly 75% of the text in this theatre piece which, at the performance I attended, began at 3pm and let out around 11:20, allowing for two fifteen minute intermissions and an hour and fifteen minute dinner break.

Though set designer Anna Louizos supplies a realistically grimy subway platform for Primary Stages' mounting of the new a cappella musical In Transit, the characters scurrying underground are disappointingly squeaky clean.

It's always a good sign when you walk into a theatre for a comedy and right away the set is making you laugh.  Such was the case for me with the playful space Jo Winiarski created for the Pearl Theatre Company's uproariously funny mounting of The Sneeze, Michael Frayn's vaudevillian octet of comedies adapted from early Chekhov one-acts and short stories.

Castro's invading, integration is the new frontier and you have to be much larger than a size 6 to be considered plus-size.  Welcome to the '60s and welcome to Paper Mill's big, bubbly and thoroughly loveable production of Hairspray.

Michael Frayn's 1975 comedy, Alphabetical Order, is the type of play that, either as a compliment or as a dismissal, American audiences are likely to label as 'very British.'  Its humor is subtle, its themes are sub-textual and the characters all talk in these funny accents.  But even those who appreciate the delicacy of that type of play may find this early work by the versatile writer who went on to pen the riotous Noises Off and the heady Copenhagen a little padded and lacking in both humor and bite.  Still, director Carl Forsman and the Keen Theatre Company serve up a lively production that boasts its charms, particularly in the performances of the engaging ensemble.

While Sarah Ruhl and director Rebecca Taichman haven't exactly made children's theatre out of Virginia Woolf's transgendering 1928 novel, Orlando (unless you approve of full adult nudity in your kiddie matinees), there are generous doses of playful whimsy in this well-mounted CSC production; though the playwright's approach seems to dilute the material's effectiveness a bit.

Applause Video will be selling a special 4-DVD set of 'The Leading Men' concerts on Sunday, Sept. 26, at the Broadway Flea Market in Shubert Alley.

Perhaps it's a sign of economic hardship continuing to plague Off-Broadway that not one drop of V-8 Vegetable Juice Cocktail is poured over the leading lady's head, nor is even one slice of watermelon smacked onto an actor's skull in Ivo van Hove's deliciously stark and chilly interpretation of Lillian Hellman's classic 1939 melodrama, The Little Foxes.  The director whose proclivity for covering characters in chocolate sauce and ketchup must have done a number on the dry-cleaning budgets for New York Theatre Workshop's productions of Hedda Gabler and The Misanthrope, comes clean in this one, but don't be foolhardy enough to expect anything near a traditional mounting of this tale of greed and gender politics among the siblings of an aristocratic Southern family.

Applause Video will be selling a special 4-DVD set of 'The Leading Men' concerts on Sunday, Sept. 26, at the Broadway Flea Market in Shubert Alley.

I suppose it's about time someone came up with a name for that genre of plays where a handful of actors each impersonate a varied assortment of characters to tell a sprawling story, i.e., The 39 Steps, The Complete Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged).  When that jolly day arrives certainly Chris Weikel's hilarious Charles Dickens send-up, Penny Penniworth: A Story of Great Good Fortune, should be regarded as one of its more sparkling examples.

There's a strong essence of familiarity to be whiffed at Edward Albee's latest, Me, Myself & I, especially if you have fond memories of his far superior absurdist effort, The Play About The Baby.  Once again there's a bickering couple bearing a strong resemblance to an older version of ...Virginia Woolf?'s George and Martha, especially in their dominating relationship to a younger couple and the matter of a child who may or may not exist.  This isn't necessarily a flaw in the piece, but when farce isn't funny, when wordplay lacks crackle and when a play about identity can't seem to claim its own, the mind tends to wander to sunnier days.

After reading far too many obituaries claiming, while not exactly mourning, the death of the Broadway musical, insisting that the art form can only be revived by injections of the kind of music that appeals to today's young audiences, I decided to take a night off from cabarets and piano bars a couple of Sundays ago to see what kind of songs were going to save the hallowed grounds of Gershwin, Porter and Rodgers.

It's not shaping up to be a very promising season for alumni of The Carol Burnett Show.  Just like the recently closed Viagra Falls, Kenny Solms' It Must Be Him offers a terrific company of comical pros working hard to inject any mirth possible into ninety minutes of tepid material.

Though Teresa Deevy was arguably the world's most famous female playwright in 1942, the year she completed her class-conscious romance Wife To James Whelan, the new management of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, which had already produced six of her plays, turned it down.  The once-prolific career of the dramatist whose love for theatre began after being diagnosed at age 20 as incurably deaf due to Meniere's disease, skidded to a halt, making her name, at least on this shore, all but forgotten now.

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.