I'm writing these words fully aware that there is no opinion I can express in the ensuing paragraphs that will ever have any effect on anyone's decision whether or not to buy tickets for Manilow On Broadway. I don't mean that in a self-effacing manner. I'm also sure that no one ever looked at an ad for Barry Manilow's current concert engagement at the St. James and thought, 'Hmm, this looks interesting but I want to see what Ben Brantley says about it before buying tickets.'
In musicals like Fiddler On The Roof, She Loves Me and The Apple Tree, the team Jerry Bock (music) and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) once graced Broadway with scores that found poetry and elegance in the lives of everyday people. But nowhere is that more apparent than in the boisterously fun and heavily New York accented, Fiorello!, a celebration of the early career of Fiorello LaGuardia, the city's enormously popular 99th mayor.
The women who took over the American workforce during World War II were abruptly expected to quit once the boys started coming home. And while many looked forward to settling down with a traditional Mr. Right and staying home to raise 2.7 babies, there were others who were torn between the safety of normalcy and their yearning for something more dangerous and adventurous when William Inge's Pulitzer-winning Picnic premiered on Broadway in 1953.
There is no truth to the rumor that at tonight's closing performance of Evita, Ann Harada played Peron's Mistress and sang 'Why Would A Fellow Want A Girl Like Her?'
Laurie Metcalf is already seated center stage as patrons enter the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre for Manhattan Theatre Club's production of The Other Place, tempting less-sophisticated playgoers to yell out, “We loved you in Roseanne!”
It doesn't happen often, but, fair or not, there's always a little extra pressure put on a play when it comes to New York after having already won the Pulitzer Prize. Quiara Alegría Hudes, a Pulitzer finalist for both Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue and her co-authorship of In The Heights, was awarded top honors last year for Water By The Spoonful, which was commissioned by Hartford Stage, where it premiered in 2011. Shortly after, the recently-opened Off-Broadway mounting was placed on Second Stage's schedule.
If you have a hankering to see a room full of grown-ups acting like those teenagers watching The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, then get thee to The Metropolitan Room, where Marilyn Maye is doing her traditional job of knocking 'em dead.
A legendary flop gets a second chance, a fabled night spot closes as a new one opens and a mysterious investor supposedly dies of malaria. These were just a few of the stories and issues theatre lovers talked about in 2012.
Even if the names Marc Kudisch and Jeffrey Denman are as foreign to you as the middle monikers of the three wise men, there's a wonderful familiarity to their on-stage personas as The Holiday Guys. It's the kind of relaxed, off-the-cuff give and take that's been enjoyed for generations, whether packaged as Hope and Crosby, Allen and Rossi or Brooks and Reiner.
The subjectivity of the truth appears to be a running theme in the intriguing work of young playwright, Amy Herzog, who follows the recent success of After The Revolution and 4,000 Miles with a moving drama, The Great God Pan.
It's a rare performer that can generate so much affection from an audience by regarding them with unrestrained contempt, but Jackie Hoffman has cultivated a unique niche for herself in New York's lengthy history of comic actors who partner with their Jewish heritage acting as straight man.
It feels like familiar territory as soon as the lights go up on two people, mid-conversation, speaking in that jaunty rhythm of clipped communication; those overlapping thoughts and unfinished sentences where you can sense every dot of each ellipsis.
Set during one of the most tumultuous periods in our country's history, Paula Vogel weaves several intimate stories of soldiers, escaped slaves, would-be kidnappers and the country's first couple into a comforting evening of holiday storytelling, A Civil War Christmas. Director Tina Landau, music director Andrew Resnick and a talented ensemble of eleven tread through episodes of tragedy, racism, frivolity and hopefulness in a display that hints at, while not exactly drawing parallels to, a traditional nativity pageant.
From The Jazz Singer to Fiddler On The Roof to Yentl and beyond, Jewish drama on the American stage has regularly explored the topic of youthful straying from traditional ways. The newest example to hit Off-Broadway, based on Chaim Potok's 1972 novel, is Aaron Posner's My Name Is Asher Lev, a warm and humorous addition to the genre.
Yes, I'll say it. The 1959 Broadway stage version of The Sound of Music is far superior to 1965 film adaptation. Yeah, yeah, I know… The Oscar-winning best picture has all that lovely Austrian and Bavarian scenery and those cute kids and, oh yeah, Julie Andrews as the young postulant, Maria, sent to serve as governess to the seven children of Naval Captain Georg Ludwig von Trapp. But it also has a watered-down screenplay by Ernest Lehman that cuts two of the best songs in Rodgers and Hammerstein's score and eliminates one of the most interesting aspects of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse's original book; the depiction of nice, likeable Austrians who, unaware of the full extent of Hitler's atrocities, argue against resistance of the German overthrow of their country. The stage musical even includes an important scene, altered in the film, where a Nazi in uniform commits a selfless act of compassion that helps rescue the von Trapps.
If the world were a little more just and the general public's taste for musical theatre a lot more cerebral, news of a new Michael John LaChiusa musical would cause the same kind of box office frenzy that in the 1940s and 50s greeted announcements of Rodgers and Hammerstein's latest. Or at least match the high expectations these days whenever another Stephen Sondheim revival is mounted.
Did somebody decide when I wasn't listening that this would be the season where all translations of classic plays must contain occasional forays into anachronistic contemporary language? First came An Enemy of the People and Cyrano de Bergerac, and now Carol Rocamora's adaptation of Chekhov's Ivanov, being used in CSC's schizophrenically handsome/punkish production, would have us believing the playwright had his characters uttering the 19th Century Russian equivalents of “harangue,” “He's a real operator” and “Hope you choke.”
When it comes to television, the 37th President of the United States is best remembered for an unfortunate debate against John F. Kennedy and later for those infamous words, “I am not a crook.” But it was a younger, more idealistic Richard Milhous Nixon who used television to warm American hearts and save his political skin by telling the story of a little cocker spaniel namEd Checkers and bringing new respectability to the words “Republican cloth coat.”
Playwright Richard Nelson first introduced audiences to the family of Apple siblings with That Hopey Changey Thing, which took place on election night 2010 and, by design, opened on that same night. He pulled the same trick last year with Sweet and Sad, which opened and was set on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks.
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