Ya gotta love those 60s bands with their matching outfits. The Beatles had their buttoned up suits and ties and Paul Revere and The Raiders wore mod colonial getups, but perhaps the craziest rocker look ever broadcast into American homes was the schoolboy ensemble worn by a band then known as The Young Rascals.
After numerous miscarriages, unsuccessful tries with fertility medications and an arrangement with a pregnant American woman that falls through, white metropolitan couple Annie and Peter (Kerry Butler and Kelly AuCoin) decide to adopt a child from Africa.
In a time when discussions of rape culture and the possibility of the media slanting rape coverage against accusers are controversial subjects in our national conscious, its rather fortunate timing that the highest profile play of the Broadway season involves a New York tabloid reporter whose career was defined by two headline-making rape cases.
'Don't make any judgments. / Let The Players play,' sing the characters of Hands On A Hardbody out to an audience sitting in seats priced at what might be the same amount as the weekly unemployment checks some of them are struggling to survive on.
Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton is set to make her Broadway debut in her solo performance piece, 'The Maybe'.
Even if Richard Greenberg's stage adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast At Tiffany's doesn't completely seduce Broadway, I have a hunch that shortly after the amateur and regional rights eventually become available, this will be one of the most produced plays in the country. Why? Because sandwiched between the years where they envision themselves as Cinderella and those where they envision themselves as Blanche DuBois, I'd estimate a large chunk of America's artistically inclined female population loves envisioning themselves as Holly Golightly and they are going to want to do this play.
The shorthand response for why the original production of It's a Bird… It's a Plane… It's Superman only managed to eke out a three and a half month run on Broadway has traditionally been that the show opened during a newspaper strike.
A human ball of silver glitter hanging from a cord is lowered above what looks like a bungalow-sized muffin top. (It's supposed to represent a turtle shell.) Before the glitter ball makes its landing the cover is removed to reveal what looks like a tribe of humanish amphibians bouncing on trampolines and twirling on the muffin/turtle's frame. Shortly after, a sleazy-looking clown in a tropical shirt tosses a condom to a woman in the front row and says, 'Call me!' Yes, dear readers, Cirque du Soleil is back in town.
Nearly 40 years ago, producer Norman Lear brought a television program about a black family's life in a Chicago housing project into millions of American homes. And while the show never ignored the dangers and hardships of living in an underserved, crime-ridden community, Good Times focused on the safe haven provided by family and friends that nurtured artistry and activism while providing the expected abundance of sitcom laughter.
On paper, Annie Baker's The Flick is 122 pages long. For a typical play this would mean a running time somewhere between two hours and fifteen minutes and two and a half hours at the most. On stage at Playwrights Horizons, the performance I attended of director Sam Gold's production of The Flick ran a bit over three hours and fifteen minutes.
The woman who went by the pseudonym Natalie Dylan, a self-described feminist with a B.A. in women's studies, hasn't been the only one to attempt to put her virginity up for auction, but being attractive, American and willing to appear on national television to explain how she wished to use the money to pay for her further education most likely helped her become the best-known in this country.
As a public service for playgoers who do not understand French, nothing of any importance takes place in the final scene of Amy Herzog's Belleville.
Out of necessity, people tend to fall in love rather quickly in musical theatre. Trying to jam a relationship into a two and a half hour entertainment often means a good thirty-two bars of lush music and romantic lyrics is all it takes to establish a lasting emotional bond.
While several of New York's non-profit theatre companies have been pursuing the noble cause of creating more exposure for contemporary women playwrights, the Mint Theatre Company has been cornering the market on the dead ones. Fourteen of the company's forty productions were scripted by women, a statistic that gains stature when you consider that they're reviving from a pool of material with a percentage of work by women far below that rate. A prime case in point is the nearly forgotten Irish playwright Theresa Deevy, arguably the most famous female playwright of the first half of the 20th Century.
If the Broadway revival of a few years back demonstrated the deadly results that can occur when overthinking and underplaying a quality farce, the new Paper Mill mounting is a fast a furious example of Ken Ludwig's madcap Lend Me A Tenor done right. Director Don Stephenson doesn't throw any fancy curveballs with the material, but he and his perfectly cast company of Broadway vets nail every door slam and verbal ping-pong volley with hilarious aplomb.
Near the end of 'Sure Thing,' one of the sextet of David Ives one-act comedies that make up All In The Timing, a pair of strangers meeting in a café bond over their mutual love for the early films of Woody Allen. Perhaps the current offering from Primary Stages will inspire couples to meet at the 59E59 Theaters' bar and bond over the early works of Mr. Ives, before he became known for less-quirky full-length plays and concert adaptations of old musicals.
All these interesting rumors going around about how the new Broadway production of Cinderella is trying to make the title character more of a role model for young girls. I hear today they're changing the lyric of the big ballad to 'Do I Love You Because You're Feminist?'
Bertolt Brecht's Baal is pretty much the type of play you'd expect to be written by a 20-year-old student who would eventually become known for using dramatic techniques meant to alienate the audience from any emotional connection to the characters. Now his social commentary about a hard-drinking outcast poet womanizer and murderer has been given a 1990s spin from The New Group in playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman's Clive.
From Kristin Chenoweth to Deborah Cox to Idina Menzel to Barbra Streisand to Michael Crawford to the Ladies of THE VIEW to Adam Pascal, Patti LuPone, Raul Esparza, Alan Menken, Lea Salonga, Bernadette Peters, Laura Osnes, Victoria Clark, GLEE and Everything in Between - It's the BroadwayWorld.com 2013 Valentine's Day Special - It's the Biggest Ever!
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