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Having a Wonderful Life in The Life
Lillias White and Chuck Cooper's excitement on seeing posters for The Life boasting of their Tony Awards for Best Featured Performance comes as a surprise. When Cooper bursts into White's dressing room with the news, she exclaims "Let's take a picture!"
Their roads leading to the Cy Coleman/Ira Gasman musical about life in the environs of Times Square back "then" (the 70s) were diverse. "And winding, too," quips Cooper, who adds they have "toured all over kingdom come."
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Margaret Meets Mercer
No, I didn't get nominated for a Tony Award as Leading Actress in a Musical, laughed Miss Margaret Whiting, the legendary hitmaker and saloon singer. In fact, I didn't get nominated for a damn thing from any of the awards. Nor did I expect to. And it's not that she doesn't deserve a few nominations. Here's a broad, and she doesn't mind being called one!, who has done it all and done it all memorably. Yes, I have, she says with a howl of laughter, and lived to tell about it.
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Philadelphia Theater in Black And White
Author's Note: This is a report of one city's reaction to an intense debate about Black Theater that absorbed the theater community in June 1997. It ran originally as a cover story in The Philadelphia Forum.
There's a breach between blacks and whites on the subject of theater that's as wide as the gap on the recent OJ verdicts. The public debate between playwright August Wilson and critic Robert Brustein -- and the reaction to their debate -- makes that clear.
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Mary Louise Wilson Riding Full Gallop
Mary Louise Wilson, after years of playing showy featured roles in musicals and plays, finally has a starring role: fashion doyen Diana Vreeland in Full Gallop. "And," she quips, "I had to write it myself!" Her one-woman show was six years in the works -- originating in Sag Harbor, NY, followed by a successful Manhattan Theater Club run before moving to the Westside Theater (43rd Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues). "The hardest thing was to write and then perform it," said Wilson. "I'd often said to friends, 'Let's write a show.' Mark Hampton took me seriously.
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Wit: The Little Engine That Could
Right from the start it was easy to predict that with its critical acclaim and box-office success, Margaret Edson's first play, the Off-Broadway hit Wit, would be a contender for "Best Of" awards this season and even the Pulitzer Prize. This week, Edson, a 37-year-old kindergarten teacher, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Also, in the first awards announcements of season, Wit won Outer Critics Circle nominations for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play and Best Actress. It's not too much of a gamble to predict that Drama Desk and Obie Awards will be next.
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The Wright Stuff: Doug Wright
When I was planning a trip to New York to visit playwright Doug Wright, I asked him for some restaurant recommendations. The places he recommended turned out to be not at all where you'd expect an Off-Broadway playwright to eat. My wife and I checked out several of them and none of them were cheap.
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Maury Yeston On The Titanic
Titanic opened to some mixed and negative reviews. Maury Yeston is reminded of this in the heady days after the show's Tony-win as Best Musical and a now-booming box office. "But let's not forget," reminds Yeston, "we got some very good ones!" Immediately after the opening, which was preceded by rumor-plagued previews, there was the perception among the cast that the mega-musical might close. Some sources close to the production said cast reaction bordered on panic. "We did get mixed reviews," said Yeston. "We took our knocks. But the cast didn't think we were going to close.
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Jerry Zaks: A Master on Both Sides of the Lights
Is Jerry Zaks the most beloved director in the history of modern theater? Well, he is if the accolades heaped upon him by such stars as Nathan Lane, Richard Dreyfuss, Kristin Chenoweth and Lewis J. Stadlen at the Jewish National Fund Tree of Life gala (held December 2003), which also honored Tovah Feldshuh, the award-winning and acclaimed star of Golda's Balcony] are any indication. It was a love fest for the three-time Tony Award winner, who obviously has as much of a devilish sense of humor as those who were "roasting" him.
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Karen Ziemba: Always Gonna Dance?
Karen Ziemba is known on Broadway for her versatility in tripping the light fantastic. A sort of quintuple threat, she's adept at singing (what pipes!) acting, slapstick comedy, drama and dance. Then, there's that infectious smile. Ziemba's been doing "the showbiz thing -- live theater, musical theater, dancing, singing," as she puts it, a long time. So "never gonna dance" are the least likely words you expect to be associated with her. And yet, here she is co-starring in Never Gonna Dance.
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Epic Visions: The Odyssey Of Mary Zimmerman
Written 2,700 years ago, Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey" remains arguably the greatest most fantastical tale of all time for the armchair adventurer. Adapter-director Mary Zimmerman agrees. And that is why she has taken the 12,000 lines of verse, which would take 12 to 13 hours to read in one sitting, and put the romance, sea voyage, ship-wreck, seduction, and supernatural doings into one theatrical package lasting a little more than three hours.
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The Answer Is...David Zippel
Christina Aguilera, Stevie Wonder, Ricky Martin and Michael Bolton have sold millions of records with his songs, making him one of the most prosperous of all theatrical lyric writers. But David Zippel says that his name is still just an answer to a trivia question. He modestly recalls that, when a revue of his songs, "It's Better With a Band," opened, he couldn't even afford a band, and the show used only a piano.
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Without Wendy
Wendy Wasserstein, an uncommon woman among others, left us much too early. She was only 55. As one of our best-loved, best-liked and best-known women playwrights, her unique voice will be missed; and onstage, too. She was literally at the top of her game from the time she left the Yale School for Drama and began her New York career in 1977 with Glenn Close, Jill Eikenberry and Swoosie Kurtz starring in her play about the aspirations of college women, Uncommon Women Among Others.
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Behind the Scenes at Voysey Inheritance
The Atlantic Theater Company, which recently moved their earlier mainstage production (and their first musical), Spring Awakening, to Broadway, has been thrilled with the success of Harley Barker-Granville's The Voysey Inheritance. Artistic director Neil Pepe noted that the demand for tickets prompted, for the first time in Atlantic's history, a third extension.
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Texas Trilogy Goes Contemporary
It is almost impossible to think of Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander without recalling the world premiere of The Texas Trilogy by the late Preston Jones on November 19, 1974, directed by the legendary Paul Baker, founding artistic director of Dallas Theater Center.
The Texas Trilogy began with its first play, The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, performed at DTCs Down Center Stage on December 4, 1973. Lu Ann followed two months later.
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It's All Onstage in Stoppard's Utopia
Approaching Salvage, part three of Lincoln Center Theater's production of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia trilogy, which begins previews on Tuesday and officially opens February 18, it might be wise to keep in mind some comments the author made at the recent SRO Drama Desk panel, A Conversation with Tom Stoppard. He was very amused by the list of background books The New York Times published not long ago in their Arts and Leisure Section as recommended reading to get a full grasp of the events and time depicted in Utopia.
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Orfeh and Andy Karl
In Legally Blonde, Orfeh, who's stunningly, legally blonde, and the tall, handsome Andy Karl play the irresistible "trailer trash," hopelessly-in-love manicurist, Paulette Bonafonte and the object of her manicured, pedicured lust, Kyle, the UPS guy. Their onstage chemistry is as strong as their offstage chemistry.
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A Winter New York Overview
With Christmas and New Year's Eve both embraced in the final week of 2006 -- an embrace warmed by El Niño -- Broadway producers jubilantly rang in 2007 with the highest grossing week in history, raking in $29.1 million at the box office. Attendance for the week ending Dec. 31 also set a new mark at 314,310. Yes, that's an average ticket price of more than $92.50.
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The Return of Brian Murray
The ever-dependable Brian Murray, one of the hardest and always-working actor/directors in the business, is back onstage after a two-year absence. He's playing Scotland Yard Inspector Rough in the Irish Repertory Theater's revival of Angel Street, now known as "Gaslight.
The play is a dark drama about a husband with a mysterious past, who, believing his new wife is being unfaithful, submits her to psychological abuse and manipulative dominance that brings her to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
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Donna Murphy: Singing in a Different Key
Donna Murphy, the award-winning actress who is one of theater's brightest talents, lights up the stage in the LoveMusik as Lotte Lenya in the semi-biographical musical about the rocky and open marriage of Lenya to composer wunderkind Kurt Weill, played by Tony winner and multiple Tony and Drama Desk nominee, Michael Cerveris.
The show is nominated for twelve 2007 Drama Desk nominations, including Outstanding Musical, Director, Book, Actress, Actor, Featured Actor and Choreography. Will there be more to come? We'll know when the Tony nominations are announced May 15th.
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Couples Who Met in the Theater
We're forever hearing about the many loves and marriages among Hollywood stars, but Dallas has its share of stage romances, and three of them have played out over the years on the stages of Theater Three.
It all started in 1960 when a young off-Broadway actress/stage-manager, Norma Young, returned to her home in Dallas in 1960 to care for her ailing mother. I recall Norma telling me the story at intermission one night at Theater Three many years ago. She said there was no place for her to act in Dallas, so
she decided to start her own theater.
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How Everything Came Up Rosie
Rosetta LeNoire, "Rosie" to everyone who loved her (and that list was a very, very long one), at 5' 2" was tiny in statue but was quite the dynamo. After years of acting in starring roles and seguing into major and memorable character portrayals, she had a dream to form a theater company that wasn't black or white but a company for everyone.
Ms. LeNoire's family emigrated from the Caribbean island of Dominica. She suffered from rickets and wore leg braces for 13 years.
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Actors' Equity's Little-Known Stand
Actors' Equity was one of the first unions to stand up against "Jm Crow."
In 1944, the union created a committee to assist minority actors turned away on the road from segregated hotels. Jose Ferrer, who co-starred with Paul Robeson in Othello on Broadway, was outraged by segregation and announced he'd never perform in front of a segregated audience.
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Bert Williams
Camille Forbes introduces us to a long-ago world of intense racism in America, but a world where the color barrier was broken on Broadway and a medicine-show performer became a star in "Introducing Bert Williams" [Basic/Civitas Books, 404 pages; Photos, index, extensive bibliography; SRP $27.50].
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Puffy Reaches for The Sun
ABC is promoting the heck out of next Monday's much-anticipated telecast of Kenny Leon's production of the three-hour presentation of the new movie adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It stars Sean Combs and the leads of the Tony and Drama Desk-nominated 2004 Broadway revival that not only brought in a new breed of theatergoers, as Oprah's The Color Purple has these last two seasons, but also broke box office records.
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Where are Those People Who Did Hair?
The 40th Anniversary of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musicalwill be celebrated with concert performances at Joe's Pub in the Park, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Performances are free and begin at 7 P.M.
The year is 1967, and the Vietnam War is at its height. In New York, a hippie tribe rails against the establishment, intolerance and brutality. When one of their own gets drafted, he must make a decision about what values are worth fighting for.
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Crossing Over to the West Side
The Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim/Jerome Robbins landmark production of West Side Story opened on Broadway in September 1957. The stars were Larry Kert, Carol Lawrence, Chita Rivera and Mickey Calin. Among the supporting cast were Martin Charnin, Marilyn Cooper, Grover Dale and Tony Mordente.
To celebrate the Tony-winning musical's 50th Anniversary, Decca Broadway assembled a roster of classical crossover artists for West Side Story, a new, state-of-the-art recording of the score.
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Humana Festival Plays Get Booked
What happens to Humana Festival plays after they're made stageworthy and spotlighted in the annual celebration of new works at Actors Theater of Louisville? They don't just fade away. "On any given day, somewhere in the world," as ATL notes, "a play is performed or read that had its origin at the Humana Festival."
That's quite an achievement for an event that has kept Louisville on the international theatrical map for 32 years.
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Keep Your Mouth off the Merm!
You may have noticed that some people who have a stake in revivals of classic musicals feel it necessary to trash the stars and other aspects of the original productions. Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? I'd be a fool to give you a reason, but I can tell you that some theater pros are very upset by this practice.
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Gunn Control
Baritone Nathan Gunn has a firm hold on his career as he moves from triumphs in such operas as Billy Budd, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Die Zauberflöte, and An American Tragedy to his upcoming appearances in high-profile concert performances of two great American musicals, Camelot and Show Boat.
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ASF Comes Loaded For Bear, with Furniture
No sooner had the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's Southern Writers' Project's Festival of New Plays (May 16-18, 2000) ended than two entered the 2008-2009 ASF season line-up: Bear Country and The Furniture of Home. Both were commissioned by ASF and received staged readings, along with three other dramas, one with music. All SWP plays concern Southern topics as well as African-American issues in general, presented by Southern and Black writers.
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The 2008 Phony Awards
Most people seem to agree that the Tony Awards already have enough categories, so don't expect any major additions in the future. (Remember "Best Replacement Actor," or whatever the hell it was called? That one was announced but never happened.) But I do sometimes wish that the award categories were tailored more specifically to the shows and artists of each season.
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Welcome Home, Randy!
I like to tell people that I went to school with Randy Graff and it's true, although we only overlapped for one year at Wagner College on Staten Island, and we never actually had a class together.
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Berger Deluxe
To be approached in Central Park by someone begging for change isn't always a pleasant experience. But it was fun when it happened to me early last fall because it was during a Public Theater performance of the "American tribal love-rock musical," Hair, at the Delacorte, and the guy who hit me up for a quarter or two was the mega-talented singing actor Will Swenson in the guise of proto-hippie George Berger.
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Sam Harris Breaks Free
Some alumni of TV talent contests and "reality" shows have done very well on Broadway, others not so much. Sam Harris, who first came to fame on "Star Search," has a proud place in the first category: He sang the hell out of "Magic Changes" as Doody in the 1994 revisal of Grease, gave an excellent performance as hustler Jojo in the Cy Coleman musical The Life, and did a hilarious stint as Carmen Ghia in The Producers. Since then, he's done a lot of concertizing and recording, and he had a recurring role on the 2006 CBS-TV sitcom "The Class."
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Sampling Metro DC Stages at ATCA 2008
The American Theater Critics Association, which moves around the country for its annual convention, this year spent a recent week in the nation's capital and environs. The area houses 75 theatres 43 in the District of Columbia, 17 in nearby Maryland, and 15 in the contiguous portion of Virginia. From the many current offerings, the attendees, thanks to two large buses, were able to sample ten presentations.
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Jack Zink Dead at Age 61
Jack Zink, 61, a South Florida theater critic and arts writer for almost 40 years, died August 18, 2008. He had been diagnosed with cancer in the fall but remained at work at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale into July.
South Florida theater critics routinely review productions from Miami to West Palm Beach, and Zink covered the July opening of Palm Beach Dramaworks' staging of Souvenir, the 2005 comedy with music based, as Zink noted, "on the true life of a woman who murdered music every time she sang, and did it often."
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Lincoln Center Does White House-keeping
If you missed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during its Broadway run, you are forgiven. The show lasted only 13 previews and seven regular performances at the Mark Hellinger Theater (now a church!) in 1976, although it boasted music by Leonard Bernstein, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, and a cast that included Ken Howard, Patricia Routledge, Emily Yancy, Beth Fowler, and Reid Shelton. Even Michael Lichtefeld was in it!
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Euan Morton
Any number of powerhouse performers are currently or very soon to be found doing their stuff in Manhattan's cabaret venues, from Tovah Feldshuh, Rita Moreno, and Spring Awakening's Lea Michele at Feinstein's at the Regency to Amanda McBroom, Annie Ross, Karen Mason, and Marilyn Maye at the Metropolitan Room. But I'd like to call particular attention to Euan Morton's engagement in the historic Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, which continues through March 29, 2008.
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Five Enchanted Evenings (And Three Matinees) with William Michals
When the features editor of Opera News praises an opera singer in his monthly column, that's great; but when he goes out of his way to single out someone whose "fach" is musical theater, that's a very special compliment.
In the October 2007 issue of the magazine, Brian Kellow wrote of William Michals' performance in a Town Hall concert titled, "A Night at the Operetta," that the baritone was "nothing short of splendid in 'Indian Love Call' (solidly partnered by Rebecca Eichenberger) and in his solo, Song of Norway's 'Strange Music.'"