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Yvonne Korshak reviews Off-Broadway, Broadway, Film and Art

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Review | Intimate Apparel | By Lynn Nottage | Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, Long Island

By

On July 9, 2017

In Off-Broadway Theater

… spinning a play from a photograph …

Intimate Apparel is a good play, worth seeing, though it’s not a you-must-see-it play like Lynn Nottage’s Ruined (2008) or her more recent Sweat, both of which won the Pulitzer Prize. Nottage is a fine, intelligent playwright and to spend the evening with her through the medium of this play, written early in her career (2003), is satisfying and thought-provoking.

For Intimate Apparel, the playwright’s imagination spins off from a vintage photograph of an African American seamstress in New York City in 1905, and other photos of African American women of the time.  The central character, Esther (Kelly McCreary), a quiet, hard-working African American who lives in Mrs. Dickson’s (Portia) boarding house in New York City and sews fine lingerie for wealthy white women.

Though inward and retiring, Esther has friends, including the motherly Mrs. Dickson, and the prostitute and would-be serious pianist, Mayme (Shayna Small).  And Esther’s open to conversation, as with Mr. Marks (Blake DeLong), the orthodox Jewish fabric seller on the lower East Side from whom she buys her silks.

But Esther feels alone.  And at thirty-five, she feels the passage of time and slipping away of opportunities.

In the charming and endearing irony of the play, this quiet, modest-dressing, no frills woman who makes fancy lingerie for other women is longing for love.

Until a dark-skinned Hispanic man, George (Edward O’Bienis) a laborer working on the Panama Canal, starts writing to her from Panama.  As in Athol Fugard’s play Blood Knot, the correspondence between a lonely man and woman who don’t otherwise know each other becomes increasingly romantic and sexually tinged. And like Zachariah in Blood Knot, Esther is illiterate, so she has to turn to someone else to hold up her side of the correspondence: her letters are written by her customer, the wealthy white woman, Mrs. Van Buren (Julia Motyka) for whom Esther sews beribboned bustiers with waist-cinching drawstrings.  In some fine staging, George, spot lit, proclaims his side of this correspondence in a rough Anthony Quinn-like voice from various points in the aisles of the theater.

“I love you,” he finally says, and — we sense his opportunism — makes his way from Panama to New York.

Once they meet, how will they live up to each others’ expectations?

Act I has many touching and illuminating moments – for awhile I thought we were on board for a great play.  The second act, however, is overloaded with coincidence and some unconvincing characterizations.  It provides some pleasant and original surprises among the sad inevitabilities, but doesn’t always ring true.

The actors for the most part do justice to the complexities of Nottage’s richly written characters.  Kelly McCreary reveals the passionate determination of modest Esther although at times her inwardness becomes a mask-like lack of expression. Edward O’Biennis brings out George’s mix of awareness of decency and brutal self-centeredness.  Julia Motyka as Mrs. Van Buren shows us the unsettled tension in this woman who seems to have it all, though the playwright throws in a red herring about the nature of her conflicts.  Blake DeLong conveys well Mr. Marks’ tender and remarkable inner conflicts.  Portia’s Mrs. Dickson is a woman of welcome humor who will never let you down.  Shayna Small, though she speaks too softly for the size of the theater, is a sweet Mayme.

The plays by Lynn Nottage that I know, Ruined (2008) and the more recent Sweat, both — with some staging detours — unroll fundamentally in the single space of a bar where the characters come and go and the story unfurls.  In Intimate Apparel, we move around and I missed the effective unity of place of the other plays.  On the other hand, in this play, a central bed is a visual unifying focus: it’s slept in, argued on, made, unmade and remade according to dramatic locale.  The focus on the central bed underlines the issues of love and sex in Esther’s life, and by implication, the traditional centrality of “the bed” in women’s life in general.

Intimate Apparel is set in an historical context, with the photograph of the Black seamstress in 1905 a projected image, but the play seems more interested in Esther’s emotional odyssey than in her time and place.  The effects of Esther’s race on her life, and on her relationship to the White Mrs. Van Buren, are certainly made clear.  The historical note in the program lets us know that in the period there were considerably more African American women than African American men in New York City, providing a context for Esther’s romance through correspondence.  But issues of gender and private life, even more than the larger vistas of cruelty, injustice and race of Nottage’ better known plays, are the focus of Intimate Apparel.  It is indeed an intimate play.

Intimate Apparel is directed by Scott Shwartz, the Artistic Director of Bay Street Theater.  It plays at the Bay Street Theater, on the wharf in Sag Harbor, Long Island, NY, through July 30, 2017.  For more information and tickets, click here.

Jules Feiffer's "The Man in the Ceiling" at Bay Street Theater, Sag Harbor, L.I., NY

Review | The Man in the Ceiling | Book by Jules Feiffer | Music and Lyrics by Andrew Lippa | Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, Long Island

By

On June 24, 2017

In Musical Theater, Off-Broadway Theater

… segregation … 

The idea of this new musical show is that the world can be rough on for a little boy with a big imagination. Unfortunately this show can be rough on the audience.

“Inca Binca,” Jimmy’s imagined character inspired by Father.  Outside Bay Street Theater, Sag Harbor

Young Jimmy has a talent for drawing comics, creating fantastic characters like Inca Binca and Lightning Lady.  A boy busily making up characters and drawing comics — this show, based on Feiffer’s book The Man in the Ceiling is autobiographically inspired

Jimmy’s conventionally-minded father is impatient with this childish and artistic pursuit and pushes Jimmy to become a regular guy who plays baseball and studies for his school tests.  Jimmy’s mother is a busy professional woman who offers weak protection– when she has time, and his older sister Lisi, though she has moments of sympathy mainly dwells in a teen-age manic state.  Charley Beemer, a loose-limbed teenager who’s good at baseball, is a threat as he tries to exploit Jimmy’s talent for his own benefit.  Only Uncle Lester, with a history of writing unsuccessful songs, understands Jimmy, artist-to-artist style.

“Horror Head” — Jimmy’s imagined character inspired by his sister Lisi

The show has some positive aspects.  Jimmy’s imagined comic characters, drawn from his family and his (false) friend Charley, are Jules Feiffer’s witty exaggerations of the types each of the characters represents.  The way Father, Mother, and the other characters alternate between donning their cartoon selves they carry like a shield when Jimmy’s imagining, and their real selves, is effective.  The drawings are charming and sophisticated– well, you’d expect that.  After all, they’re the drawings of a mature artist who has a career based on the allure of his drawings — Jules Feiffer – and not those of a little boy, a talented child, whether Feiffer or otherwise.

Also on the plus side, there’s a funny skit in the second act based on taking the words of a love song Uncle Lester has written to their literal, humorously absurd conclusion.

The set by David Korins, with clever projections by Daniel Brodie and Feiffer, is witty – I enjoyed the effect of torn-out-of-the-book pages from a spiral notebook, magnified.

Jimmy’s imagined character “Lightning Lady,” inspired by Mother.

The performers do their professional best with the material.  Young Jonah Broscow is impressive as Jimmy, going well beyond being “cute” in his believable emotional responses to the highs and lows of his quest to create. Danny Binstock as Father has a beautiful singing voice. Nicole Parker is believable as frantic Mother.  Brett Gray as charismatic the sly teen-aged neighbor Jimmy looks up to and has a fine singing voice.  Erin Kommor is vivacious as Jimmy’s sister Lisi – I’d guess the eye-popping hysteria of her performance was the director’s idea.  Andrew Lippa is amusing as Uncle Lester.

Jimmy’s imagined character ” Toledo Jackson” inspired by Uncle Lester

The show’s book as a whole, however, is disjointed and there’s a loud and garish tone throughout that’s tiresome.  Except for Jimmy, the characters seem there just to make a point about what Jimmy’s up against to protect his talent, and don’t give any sense of having lives of their own.  This is probably intended, as suggested by the fact that Jimmy’s parents are unnamed, just called Father and Mother – which leads to Jimmy addressing his father as “Father” where we expect “Dad.”

When the “man in the ceiling” finally appears as a visualization of Jimmy’s imagination, he’s rendered as a puppet high up maneuvered with sticks by the actors on stage, dynamically less complex than many other puppets used in theater.  Above all, what what the man in the ceiling says doesn’t amount to anything.  The music is sing-song repetitive, with banal lyrics and rhymes are of the “moon/June variety.”  The choreography – such as some ancient Egyptian art stylization to represent imagined Maya gods – is flat.

Jimmy’s imagined character “Winman,” inspired by his neighbor Charley Beemer.

And I found it troublesome the tricky neighbor Charley, the one really bad guy (Father gains redemption but not Charley), is cast as a “cool cat” Black.  Even at the curtain call, most of the cast was posed together stage right as in a family photo, and Charley was isolated stage left, far off on his own. That seemed pretty gratuitous.

The Man in the Ceiling is directed by Jeffrey Seller.  It plays at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, Long Island, through June 25th, 2017.  For more information and tickets, click here.

Review | My Fair Lady | Book and Lyrics by Alan Jay Leerner | Music by Frederick Loewe | Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, Long Island

By

On August 7, 2016

In Off-Broadway Theater

… the story of a story …

For most of the time, this My Fair Lady is so good it made me feel that this wonderful show was even more marvelous than I thought.  I saw new things in it!  It was thrilling!  The production, however, does something really disappointing in changing the ending.  It’s easy to see why they did it – but, they shouldn’t have!

According to the ancient myth, Pygmalion was a sculptor who could never find the right woman until he carved in ivory a sculpture of a beautiful woman and having created her form, was so filled with passionate desire for her that he kissed her.  With his kiss – and thanks to intervention from the goddess Aphrodite — he felt the lips of the ivory image grow warm, the cheeks became rosy, the image took on the hues and feel of human flesh – she became alive and, yes, they lived happily ever after.

With some transformations of his own, George Bernard Shaw took up the myth in his delightful play, Pygmalion, moving the story to early 20th century London, turning the sculptor into persnickety Henry Higgins, an expert on the English language, and turning the sculptor’s created beloved into Eliza Doolittle, a low-class girl with cockney speech eking out a living selling flowers who Higgins’ transforms through his teaching into an elegant woman with upper class speech and elegance, whereupon he falls in love with her.

My Fair Lady, by Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics) and Frederick Loewe (composer) is based on Shaw’s Pygmalion.  The authors draw upon Shaw’s characters and dialog, create brilliant transpositions of scenes, new wit, and songs that capture the characters, their situations and their emotions with breathtaking aptness, humor and beauty.

For most of the time, this My Fair Lady is so good it made me feel that this wonderful show was even more marvelous than I thought.  I saw new things in it!  It was thrilling!  The production, however, does something really disappointing in changing the ending.  It’s easy to see why they did it – but, they shouldn’t have!  The ending is a victim of good intentions, and takes much of the show with it.

Selling flowers around Covent Garden Theater, Eliza Doolittle lets out a howl when her flowers are toppled by the careless rich, bringing her – and her “dreadful” cockney vowels, to the notice of Professor Henry Higgins, the expert on English language.  Higgins (Paul Alexander Noland), disdainful at how most of the English speak (that song:  “Why Can’t The English learn to speak.  These verbal class distinctions by now should be extinct”), remarks to Colonel Pickering (Howard McGillin) that with training, he could transform even this wretched girl’s speech into upper class English.  No fool Eliza:  she arrives at his house the next day wanting lessons so she can own a flower shop. Higgins bets with Pickering that with his training he’ll be able to pass her off as a princess.  Thus begins Eliza’s training in “proper English”.

The wonderful scene couldn’t be done better.  Kelli Barrett is an enchanting Eliza with a beautiful singing voice (“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”) and piquant acting.  Nolan is an appealing stuffed shirt with a fine voice as Higgins.   Pickering (McGllin) is the perfect straight-backed tweedy Englishman.   And it’s our good luck that John O’Creagh as Eliza’s boozing “amoral” father (“With A Little Bit Of Luck”) couldn’t be better. Pickering is the perfect tall straight perfect Englishman.

The show continues pitch-perfect, delicious, all one wants.  True, the set, a sort of amphitheater embracing the stage built in dark wood, is oddly abstract and dark but there’s so much wonderful, one can hardly take time to think about that.  Higgins pushes Eliza to the extremes of endurance and Eliza has the gumption and determination to keep trying, to keep working.  Pickering, and Higgins housekeeper Mrs. Pearce (Karen Murphy) attempt to moderate the strain on her but Higgins isn’t about to soften his regime.   Anyhow, they’re two of a pair, aren’t they? – both unstoppable, working through the night.   Until that marvelous moment comes when Eliza gets it!

It’s all about vowels.  She finally in a sort of flash (hard won flash) gets them right (“The Rain In Spain”), they are thrilled and so are we by the celebratory explosion of joy, they are in love – he may not know it but she does (“I Could Have Danced All Night”) and they try her new speech and ladylike poise at the tony horse races at Ascot in one of the funniest and most moving scenes in all musical theater.

Is the elegant, beautifully speaking Eliza taken for a princess at the ball?  Guess.  But the course of true love never runs smooth (in contrast with the myth), and Shaw introduced a clever and telling bump in the road.  It has to do with how when success finally arrives, the self-centered Higgins and Pickering, congratulate themselves (You Did It”) and it never occurs to them to congratulate the hard-working, hard-studying Liza.  And Liza is no sculptor’s passive ideal – she’s furious.

Now here’s where the trouble with this production comes in.  The ending is forced, through some mumbo-jumbo of a kind of dance abstraction, into a feminist interpretation that disappointingly out of tune with the rest   Michael Arden, the talented director who engaged so many of the scenes with genuine emotion, is quoted in the program notes as speaking of the sexist character of My Fair Lady and that he felt the need to “bring something new to it, to make it feel like a production for today.”  But this something new looks doesn’t seem to grow organically from all we’ve seen before but feels tacked on. And what downer.  Speaking of myths, the last lines of dialog are squeezed into a Procrustean  feminist bed, and it hurts.

The ending is a victim of good intentions.  The aura of joy dissipates.  One doesn’t leave humming.  As one who enjoys realism as well as romance in theater, tragedy as well as comedy, I don’t think you have to leave theater humming and smiling.  But I think one should leave My Fair Lady humming.

This production has a wonderful cast, with great directing of a stupendous show … and an ending that makes My Fair Lady a victim of good intentions.

My Fair Lady playing at Bay Street in Sag Harbor, L. I.

Review | My Fair Lady | Book and Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner | Music by Frederick Loewe | Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, Long Island

By

On August 5, 2016

In Adaptations From Great Authors, Musical Theater, Off-Broadway Theater

… great ….

This My Fair Lady is so good it made me feel that this wonderful show was even more marvelous than I thought.  I saw new things in it!  It’s thrilling!

Pygmalion and Galatea - Jean-Leon Gerome

Jean-Leon Gerome, French, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1890, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum, NYC,  photo commons.wikimedia.org {{PD-1923}}

My Fair Lady originates in the ancient myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who could never find the right woman to love. Finally he carved a sculpture of a woman so beautiful that, having created her form, he was filled with passionate desire and kissed her.  With his kiss – and thanks to intervention from the goddess Aphrodite — he felt the lips of the ivory image grow warm as the cheeks become rosy and the image took on the hues and feel of human flesh (I love the way this happens from top to bottom in the painting by Gerome  at left).  His ideal was transformed into a living woman. In terms of sexism, this lovely story is on a par with that one about Adam’s rib, though, unlike Adam and Eve, Pygmalion and his bride lived happily ever after.

With some transformations of his own, George Bernard Shaw took up the myth in his delightful play, Pygmalion, moving the story to early 20th century London, turning the sculptor into persnickety Henry Higgins, an expert on the English language, and turning the sculptor’s created beloved into Eliza Doolittle, a low-class girl with cockney speech eking out a living selling flowers whom Higgins’ transforms through his teaching into an elegant woman with upper class speech and elegance, whereupon he falls in love with her.

My Fair Lady, by Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics) and Frederick Loewe (composer) is based on Shaw’s Pygmalion.  The authors draw upon Shaw’s characters and dialog, and create brilliant transpositions of scenes, new wit, and songs that capture the characters, their situations and their emotions with breathtaking aptness, humor and beauty.  The whole is directed with refreshing vivacity and dramatic truth by Michael Ardens.

Selling flowers around Covent Garden Theater, Eliza Doolittle lets out a howl when her flowers are toppled by the careless rich, bringing her – and her “dreadful” cockney vowels, to the notice of Professor Henry Higgins, the expert on English language.  Higgins (Paul Alexander Noland), disdainful at how most of the English speak (that song:  “Why Can’t The English learn to speak.  These verbal class distinctions by now should be extinct”), remarks to Colonel Pickering (Howard McGillin) that with training, he could transform even this wretched girl’s speech into upper class English.  No fool Eliza:  she arrives at his house the next day wanting lessons so she can sell flowers in a shop instead of on the street. Higgins bets with Pickering that with his training he’ll be able to pass her off as a duchess.  Thus begins Eliza’s training in “proper English.”

My Fair Lady playing at Bay Street in Sag Harbor, L. I.

My Fair Lady playing at Bay Street in Sag Harbor, L. I.

The enjoyable scene couldn’t be done better.  Kelli Barrett is an enchanting Eliza with a beautiful singing voice (“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”) and piquant acting.  Nolan is an appealing stuffed shirt with a fine voice as Higgins.   Pickering (McGillin) is the perfect straight-backed tweedy Englishman.   And it’s our good luck that John O’Creagh as Eliza’s boozing “amoral” father (“With A Little Bit Of Luck”) couldn’t be better.  Farther along in the show, his rendition of “Get Me To The Church On Time” is so ebullient, so charmingly reprobate, so set off by an alluring large man’s shuffle-dance, that one cannot ask for more delight in this world.

The show continues pitch-perfect, delicious, all one wants. Higgins pushes Eliza to the extremes of endurance and Eliza has the gumption and determination to keep trying, to keep working.  Pickering, and Higgins’ housekeeper Mrs. Pearce (Karen Murphy) attempt to moderate the strain on her but Higgins isn’t about to soften his regime.   Anyhow, they’re two of a pair, aren’t they? – both unstoppable, working through the night.   Until that marvelous moment comes when Eliza gets it!

It’s all about vowels.  She finally in a sort of flash (hard-won flash) gets them right (“The Rain In Spain”), they are thrilled and so are we by the celebratory explosion of joy, they are in love – he may not know it but she pretty well does (“I Could Have Danced All Night”) and they try her new speech and ladylike poise at the tony horse races at Ascot in one of the funniest and most moving scenes in all musical theater.

Is the elegant, beautifully speaking Eliza taken for royalty at the ball?  Guess.  But the course of true love never runs smooth (in contrast with the myth), and Shaw introduced a clever and telling bump in the road.  It has to do with how when success finally arrives, the self-centered Higgins and Pickering congratulate themselves (“You Did It”) without it occurring  to them for a minute to congratulate the hard-working, hard-studying Eliza.  And Eliza is no sculptor’s passive ideal – she’s furious.

The cast, including the entire ensemble of singer-dancer-actors, is superlative.  Kelli Barrett is an even more wonderful Eliza Doolittle than Julie Andrews, I thought listening to the original cast recording a couple of days ago.   Barrett is lovelier and more sympathetic.  She adds to her beautiful voice, and dramatic strength an outstanding comic talent — what an expressive face!  She makes the brilliantly humorous scenes, such as that at the Ascot races, exquisitely funny.  As in, You’ve just gotta see this!

Paul Alexander Nolan as Henry Higgins also has his own hard act to follow since Rex Harrison, with his star power and unbeatable male maturity, created an iconic performance that’s hard to leave go.  Nolan succeeds in creating a more youthful, and energetic — if every bit as amusingly obtuse — Henry Higgins.  Not only that, Nolan’s strong singing voice brings out the full emotion dwelling in the great songs that chart the remarkable romance of Henry and Eliza — a huge bonus since Harrison wasn’t a singer.

As the love-lorn Freddy, Eynsford-Hill fills the theater with his beautiful voice singing “On The Street Where You Live.”  Carol Shelley as Henry Higgins mother  —  aristocrat through and through, and wise realist — has an arresting and charming stage presence.

The versatile, multi-level set enables some very effect interplay between what’s taking place front and center and what’s imagined.  When Henry Higgins, back  in his own sitting room, describes Hungarian rival in the science of phonetics, Zoltan Karpathy,  horning in on Eliza at the ball, Ryan Fitzgerald, zooming in from above as Karpathy does a gymnastic histrionic rendition of how he did it that’s as funny as anything in the show –and that’s saying a lot!

The only false note in this production comes at the very end, where the play has been revised to fit a contemporary feminist mode.  It’s a real let-down, as I felt, and heard on all sides as I left the theater.  A revision of this sort was totally unnecessary —  My Fair Lady is already feminist! And it has an ending that emerges organically from the vivid characters and the development of their relationship.  The show is much about making fun of the obtuse chauvinism of Higgins and Pickering and, when all is said and done, feisty and accomplished Eliza is the hero of My Fair Lady.

For the rest, this production of My Fair Lady is a gift of wit, joy, and great art.  Pure and simple, don’t miss it!

My Fair Lady plays at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, Long Island, NY through September 4, 2016.  For more information and tickets, click here.

Bay Street Theater, Sag Harbor, Long Island, and The Last Night of Ballyhoo

Review | The Last Night Of Ballyhoo | By Alfred Uhry | Directed by Will Pomerantz | Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, Long Island

By

On July 3, 2016

In Off-Broadway Theater

… how do you fit in? …

December 1939, Atlanta Georgia, Hitler has just invaded Poland and Gone With The Wind is premiering in Atlanta, but in the Freitag family,  the big stir is that the end-of-year Ballyhoo party at Atlanta’s German Jewish social club is about to take place.  In keeping with the way human concerns flow from near to far, the global significance of Hitler’s invasion is barely comprehended while the question of who will escort daughter Lala to the Ballyhoo Ball is the concern prime center.

We’re in a wealthy Jewish Atlanta family’s home, richly and tastefully decorated all the way to a shining ornaments and tinsel on the Christmas tree with its star on top (a subject of mild controversy).  Adolf Freitag runs a successful bedding business, and serves as the man of the family among four women:  his widowed pushy sister Boo, her star-struck and impractical daughter Lala, their vague but canny sister-in-law Reba, also widowed, and Reba’s bright daughter Sunny, a junior at Wellesley College.

Into the mix comes Joe Farkas, a young man from Brooklyn, who is an Eastern European Jew (in contrast to the German Jewish Freitags).  Everybody looks down on somebody:  the Christian Atlantans look down on the Freitags because they’re Jewish, and the German Jews, Boo Freitag in particular, look down on Eastern European Jews.

But Adolf has seen outstanding promise in Joe Farkas and has hired him as his business assistant.   Lala takes one look at handsome Joe and is lining him up in her mind as a date for the Ballyhoo ball – though she already has a boyfriend who’s supposed to escort her, Peachy Weil, but he’s from out of town and a bird in the hand …     Joe, though, is more drawn to the brainy elegance of Sunny, down for the holidays.

The play has the look of a romantic comedy, as the deep attraction between Joe and Sunny and the on-again-off-again relationship between the more lightweight characters, Lala and Peachy, play out, with Lala flouncing around adorably in her Scarlett O’Hara dress.  But through it all run the important tensions created by snobbery, in-group versus out-group prejudice, and the painful process of finding a way to fit in.

The position of the Freitags is equivocal:  they are Americans, and Atlantans from many generations back, and a respected and successful business family.  Still, as Jews, they never quite belong.  How they handle the uncertainties of their status is fascinating.  For instance, not being allowed in Christian social clubs, the Freitags are among those who established their own German Jewish social club.

The celebration of Christmas highlights the ambiguities:  as assimilated Jews, they decorate a tall Christmas tree for what Lala asserts is a “national holiday” but even within the family there are disagreements about whether a star at the top is or is not “OK” for them.

As the play progresses, and the romantic relationships develop, Joe’s more forthright relationship to Judaism, as well as his clearer view of the threat of Hitler, begin to shape that of the Freitags.  If you see the play – and it’s well worth seeing! — watch what happens to the tree during the course of the scenes, all the way to the final dream-like episode.

Erin Neufer is quite adorable as the skittish and flamboyant Lala, and Daniel Abeles is a good foil as her boyfriend, a mediocre guy with a fancy pedigree who takes refuges in his amusing ironic good humor.  Ellen Harvey, as Boo, is wonderfully certain of the right way to do everything, and Dori Legg is charming as Reba, a slightly daffy character who gets the point by seeming to miss it.  John Hickok is bemused but self-confident as Adolf, and Amanda Kristin Nichols is believable as the college girl with an interest in politically progressive writers that sits well with Joe Farkas.

The Last Night of Ballyhoo was commissioned for the 1996 Summer Olympics and played in Atlanta, moving on to Broadway where it won the Tony award for Best Play in 1997 among other awards.   Although it doesn’t have quite the emotional naturalness of the author’s earlier play, Driving Miss Daisy, like that one,  it recognizes the power of love to help overcome destructive bigotry, and takes a moving stand on the side of celebrating our common humanity.

It’s a play you’re happy to spend time with and glad to sink your teeth into.  Thanks to Bay Street Theater for giving us a fine production.

The Last Night of Ballyhoo plays at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, Long Island, through July 24, 2016.  For more information and tickets, click here.

Review | The Forgotten Woman | By Jonathan Tolins | Directed by Noah Himmelstein | Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, Long Island

By

On June 12, 2016

In Off-Broadway Theater, Opera

… opera with no music …

If you think you’re too fat or hate opera, maybe you’ll like this play about a fat but successful opera singer who isn’t so sure she likes opera either.  Otherwise …

Margaret is a woman with “issues” – she’s guilty about the demands of her career as an opera singer on her child, and suffers from stage fright, and above all she’s fat. But after a successful climb to the operatic top, the one thing she is not is “forgotten.” Instead, the title – and the play – pander to women who feel “forgotten” because they’re fat.  It also panders to people who find opera a terrible bore, and the emotional ins-and-outs are on the level of another kind of opera – soap.

On the bright side, Ashlie Atkinson in the role of Margaret is a vibrant performer and it’s fun to watch her cavort through this otherwise annoying play.

In preparation for her debut in the starring role at a major opera house, Margaret and her husband, Rudolph (Robert Stanton) are at a fancy hotel with obliging room service and an eager-to-please bell boy (Justin Mark).  She’s being courted by an eager PR rep Erik (Mark Junek), when an entertainment reporter, Steve (Darren Goldstein), comes to interview her for a big spread in his major newspaper.  Well, OK, I suppose “forgotten” could be about ”how you feel inside” but Margaret sure is getting a lot of attention.

It turns out she knows Steve – in fact he was her high school crush who co-starred with her in Hello, Dolly senior year, and the flame is not quite extinguished for her and, she assumes with not a lot to go on, for Steve.

It wouldn’t be right to reveal the resolution of the romantic conflict between (allegedly) handsome Steve, a “Philistine” who knows nothing about opera and could care less, and Rudolph, Margaret’s sensitive, music conductor husband with romantic issues of his own – not because that would spoil the suspense because there isn’t much.  By the same token, I won’t reveal whether Margaret is an absolutely fabulous success on her opening night and gets reviews of transcendent praise, or is a flop – take a guess.

Ashlie Atkinson is a comic talent and brings a terrific delivery to Margaret’s self-amused and ironic cracks about being fat.  Atkinson also conveys dramatic depth, rising above the clichés of the emotional events.  Her performance as a bouncy, down-to-earth, homey diva with a heavy body and dazzling red hair will stay with me.

Most of the laughs, though, are at the expense of opera.  Well, sure, opera – like books, movies, dance, etc.– is a matter of taste and if you happen to be caught in a lengthy one that’s not your type you can feel the enormous suffering Erick (Mark Junek) expresses in an energetically delivered verbal rush of hate-opera.  But the play’s ironic celebration of know-nothing – Steve-who-hates-opera becomes the big newspaper’s next opera critic – is unpleasant.

This is all in line with the play’s take that opera-goers don’t really like opera – they just take a cue from The New Yorker magazine that it’s “the thing to do.”   More of the snide nonsense that passes itself off as arch humor in The Forgotten Woman.

According to the program, author Tolins has written for Opera News and is a panelist on the Metropolitan Opera Radio Quiz so I guess he really likes opera – that is really likes opera as opposed to the cultural pseudos he describes, i.e. everyone else at the opera, who buy pricey tickets to suffer in the service of their supposed pretensions.

And of course it’s not believable that the newspaper, whose publisher Steve can’t name, makes Steve its opera critic at the death of its genuinely knowledgeable critic. Nor is it believable that on the eve of her great debut Margaret’s ready to quit it all to have a “normal life.  And – irony of ironies — while many women opera singers are slim, it’s a truism that many are really large in size, so fat,” though it’s central to the play, is a non-issue

We never encounter the enormous discipline, hours and hours of practice and learning and sustained ambition that it takes to become a great singer.   Margaret’s operatic success as almost accidental.

And what about the music?  It’s puzzling and disappointing that, except for a few background notes, and in an age of great recording effects, no music is incorporated into this play about an opera singer.  A play about an opera singer with no music … I don’t know — maybe the play isn’t snide, maybe Tollins really doesn’t like opera.

The world premier of The Forgotten Woman plays at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, Long Island, through June 19, 2016.   For more information and tickets, click here.

Review | Five Presidents by Rick Cleveland | Directed by Mark Clements | Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, Long Island

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On July 1, 2015

In Off-Broadway Theater

… The World’s Most Exclusive Club …

Republicans and Democrats, winners and losers — how would the conversation go among five Presidents, former and current, if they were thrown together for an hour or so awaiting a formal event?  This fast talking play answers that question with zest and wit.

It’s the day of Richard Nixon’s funeral, April 27, 1994, and the living Ex-Presidents – Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush  – and Bill Clinton, recently elected — gather in the magnificent Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, preliminary to attending the Nixon’s funeral.  Nixon is on hand in a way, represented by a large, idealized photo portrait.  Todd Edward Ivins’ handsome set design is particularly well designed for theater partly in the round,  and the directing moves the actors with complementary flexibility.

At the last minute, Gerald Ford has decided not to deliver his eulogy, though he’s on the printed program.  He’s “done enough for Nixon,” he says, which indeed he did, pardoning Nixon after the Watergate scandal: the burden Ford has carried as a result of granting that pardon is a central theme of the play.  From the start, Ford said he granted the pardon to heal the nation, but the play, which presents Ford in an extremely appealing light, offers yet another way of looking at it, also favorable to Ford.

And who will pinch hit for Ford in eulogizing Nixon?  Among the presidents, only Ronald Reagan ( “Nancy says I never saw a podium I didn’t like”) is ready to volunteer but the other presidents, aware of his signs of early Alzheimer’s disease, gently divert him from the task.

So there they all are and what a lot of fun it is to see them:  athletic, solid Gerald Ford, soft southern talking and compassionate Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan with his slicked back hair, engaging over-ready smile and readiness to tell a joke, George H. W. Bush, the amused and elegant Yale man with a Skull and Bones handshake, and the talky new member in the “club,” Bill Clinton.  The converse of “these are all Presidents” is “none of them is a wimp.”  It’s clear they’re used to being in charge.

The conversation flows naturally while hitting the edges, from lofty presidential concerns to the bad jokes, from the ideal to the crass, from congenial to near violent, from the polite and self-serving evasions to the naked truth.  They embrace in one moment and in the next are nearly at each others’ throats.  Nearing the extremes, though, they draw back.  These are, after all, politic men.

For all their differences, they all share personal pride in being members of “the most exclusive club in the world.” (Ronald Reagan sees it as “an Academy Award!”)

And they all remember the exact number of Americans killed in war during his watch. It’s a moving interlude as each recites the precise number of those who died in war during his term as President:  I wondered if that would be true.  The numbers are noticeably much larger now.

The best of the impersonations is Martin L’Herault:  he simply is Jimmy Carter.  John Bolger gives a pleasing impression of tall, strong Gerald Ford’s Midwestern directness.  Mark Jacoby is smooth as George H. W. Bush, and conveys the intelligence and balanced judgment that led the author to make Bush highly admirable, though the elder Bush’s touch of the folksy could come across more fully.  Steve Sheridan is charismatic as Reagan and dominates his scenes in an exciting way;  still,  the part is played so much for laughs, we lose the sense of the genuine personality.  Brit Whittle doesn’t convey Bill Clinton’s self-assured and polished image — he’s too rumpled — but he does get the voice.  Reese Madigan is on guard as Special Agent Michael Kirby.  A small costume point but we’re dealing with Presidents:  most of the actors could use better tailored suits.

As these affable but tough Presidents duck and parry, they illuminate the historical and political achievements and failures of each of them, and different ways of looking at these, as there are different ways of looking at Ford’s pardon of Nixon.  This hour and a half play manages to be a wonderful and thought provoking – and totally entertaining — crash course in late 20th century American history, from Vietnam to beyond … there’s even speculation on which will we see first, a woman or an African-American as President?  These Presidents, back in 1994, expect one or the other will come soon.

This is the east coast premier of Five Presidents, originally produced by Milwaukee Repertory Theater and Arizona Theatre Company.  It plays at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York through July 26, 2015.  For more information and tickets:  www.baystreet.org/calendar/five-presidents

 

Review | My Life Is A Musical by Adam Overett | World Premiere | Directed and Choreographed by Marlo Hunter | Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, Long Island

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On August 1, 2014

In Musical Theater, Off-Broadway Theater

It feels exciting and even uplifting to attend the first performance of a new show.  This one, My Life Is A Musical, has a cute idea, some amusing moments, and some fine performances from its principals and excellent ensemble players.  On the other hand, the characters are thin, the story loose with predictable outcomes, and the music uninventive.

What’s the cute idea?  Parker, who’s otherwise an uptight accountant, has a peculiar and lyrical trait:  he hears ordinary conversation as singing as in musicals, a quirk he hides because it makes him feel weird.  Like Jim Carrey in Liar Liar who can’t help telling the truth, Parker is mechanically locked in to a quirk he can’t help, leading to unavoidable — and potentially amusing — misunderstandings in his dealings with others.

Roped in to being the accountant for a touring rock group, Parker encounters JT, the bouncy girl who’s group manager and Zach, its main singer. Since Parker is introverted and inexperienced with girls, and is used to hiding the truth about himself, he doesn’t confess his love to JT.  Meanwhile, with his special gift for hearing songs everywhere, he’s feeding Zach songs based on everything from fragments of overheard conversations to the words in his own heart about his growing love for JT.  Sure, Zach’s great at putting a song across but he has no soul within to write one himself (an unkind satire of rock musicians that I take in with skepticism).  Anyhow, Cyrano de Bergerac–like, JT falls in love with Zach who’s singing Parker’s love songs

And Zach, played by Justin Matthew Sargent, is great at putting a song across and some of the most enjoyable moments of the show are when he’s playing and singing.  The songs and styles are spoofs on famous singers:  “I’m just an ordinary dog,” sings the gyrating Zach.

As Zach and the group rise to success because of Parker’s terrific songs (if only they were terrific, but they’re not), Randy, a music blogger who senses there’s something funny about the group’s sudden improvement, comes sneaking around in the guise of a suspicious detective to find out “the truth” about Parker and the group.  Randy, a spoof on “detectives you have known” from Sherlock Holmes to The Pink Panther and others in between, sings the song “What Have You Got To Hide” in the “Hernando’s Hideaway” style of covert excitement that’s enlivened many shows before.  Robert Cuccioli is theatrically commanding and archly funny as Randy, and the character lends itself to some engaging second act farce.

That’s a big improvement over what goes for humor in the first act:  I wish someone would explain to me why the phrase “It sucks” (variants he sucks, she…they…) used about eight times early in the show, gets a laugh out of the audience every time.  Why?

Howie Michael Smith as Parker who comes out of his shell in the course of the show has a couple of introspective songs that come near to poignant but since he’s the only even partly genuine character, the others being amusing but campy caricatures (Randy, Zach) or cliché (JT), the songs spin off into nowhere.  Generally the songs, though energetically performed, tend to blend in to one another.  Put another way, “one doesn’t leave humming.”  The singers are miked, which should be unnecessary for professionals, all the more in a small theater.

Early on Parker confesses his quirk of hearing conversation as music — too bad because, he says, “I don’t like musicals.”  In spite of a laugh or two, I don’t think this one would have changed his mind.

My Life Is A Musical plays at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, Long Island, NY through August 31.

Review | Travesties by Tom Stoppard | Directed by Gregory Boyd | Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, Long Island

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On June 29, 2014

In Off-Broadway Theater

A new production of Travesties:
“Travesties comes to London’s West End in an all-new, five-star production directed by Patrick Marber. Starring multi award-winning actor Tom Hollander, the show opens at the Apollo Theatre in February 2017. For further information and tickets, please visit: http://www.officialtheatre.com/“

This is a wild, zany, Dada like, and very serious play.  It’s set mainly in Zurich in 1917 where swarms of intensely creative people migrated to the neutral Swiss city seeking refuge from World War I.  The place bubbled with the ferment and excitement of their new and revolutionary ideas.  What fun it seems to have been there — here’s your chance.

James Joyce was there working on Ulysses, Tristan Tzara was spearheading the “anti-art” Dada movement, and Lenin was on his way to leading the Russian Revolution.  Henry Carr, a British consular official of the time, was in the middle of all of it — or was he?  In Travesties, Carr, now a pretentious, forgetful old man, looks back and remembers himself as the British Consul General — though he held a lower rank — and recalls through his fragmented memory Joyce, Tzara and Lenin with whom he interacted — or thinks he did.  Through his memories and mis-memories, they spring into vibrant on-stage life.

As far as interactions, this much is fact:  at the time the real Henry Carr played the part of Algernon in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest produced by James Joyce and, in a dispute over the price of tickets and a pair of trousers, sued Joyce in court.  Stoppard conceives this tricky play, Travesties, as a kind of satire — i.e. a travesty — of Wilde’s Earnest, and like Wilde in Earnest, he engages the characters — and hopefully the audience — in hot if meandering debate over the nature and purpose of art, and the relation of art to life.

How wonderful that the brilliant and charismatic actor, Richard Kind, is at the center of this production in the role of Henry Carr.  Kind is hilarious, focused and profound.  If, as can happen, you find the anti-rational, anti-formal, anti-traditional exuberance of Dada, embodied in Michael Benz as Tristan Tzara, leaping on tables and cutting up Shakespeare’s sonnets, irksome, or if you find just too much theory at play, Kind will keep you smiling, laughing, glowing — and listening intently.

Although commentators like to say that Travesties is “not a history lesson,” it spends time verging on one — one feels one’s being briefed — but the great wit and dazzling word play — and exciting literary and cultural allusions for those who can catch them — are delicious sugar coatings.

In contrast to the first act, the second act has something resembling a driving narrative focused on Vladimir Lenin’s struggle to get to Russia at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and his arrival there.  Andrew Weems’ impersonation of the passionately speechifying Lenin is so persuasive, those Russians who would visit Lenin’s glass-entombed mummy yearning to set eyes on the Revolutionary leader would do better to see this play:  seriously, Weems brings the posters of the period to life, and humorously.

By the end, the playwright has had his way:  through the deconstructions and dissonances, the great issues of the relation of art and life, and of the role of memory, perception and imagination in art, emerge with clarity that is both new and intact.  And Stoppard is fair in balancing the scales of articulate expression.  Tzara has demolished the forms and disciplines of art of the past, Joyce has reconstructed them in progressive ways never before envisioned, and Lenin has demonstrated the uselessness and immorality of hyper-individualistic “bourgeois art.”  Everybody’s right, everybody’s incomplete:  the philosophers are busy with the elephant again.  Somehow, though, through it all, Oscar Wilde’s belief in the autonomy of art and “art for art’s sake” seems to win out — or does it?

The play is produced with tone perfect style:  the set is witty and evocative, the pace brisk, the roles perfectly cast and the whole exceptionally well rehearsed.  In addition to Kind as Carr, Weems as Lenin and Benz as Tzara, Carson Elrod plays James Joyce, Aloysius Gigi plays Bennett, Julia Motyka is Gwendolen, Emily Trask is Cecily, and Isabel Keating is Nadya.

And by the way, Joyce got back at Carr for that legal action in his own novelist’s way — parodying him in Ulysses as a drunk, obscene soldier (in the Circe segment).  Between Joyce and Stoppard, Carr lives forever — though surely not in the way one wants to be immortalized by literature!

Travesties plays at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, Long Island, NY through July 20, 2014.

Review | Men’s Lives by Joe Pintauro | Adapted from the Book by Peter Matthiessen | Directed by Harris Yulin | Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, Long Island

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On July 4, 2012

In Adaptations From Great Authors, Off-Broadway Theater

… endangered species …

Men’s Lives tells the story of what happens to fishermen on the East End of Long Island when the forces of change and politics put an end to the only way they know to make a living.  No more skeining with big nets, comes the law from Albany.  And with that, their way of life, based on a tradition of 300 years, is sucked out from under them the way, when you’re standing near the surf, the waves pull the sand out from under your feet.

In order to dramatize Matthiessen’s epic book, Pintauro makes the sensible dramatic choice of focusing on a single iconic fisherman’s family, a father who knew the good times and huge hauls, his three sons who all love the fisherman’s life, and a tough, loving, mother who owns the old house set in sand dunes facing the sea.  Nevertheless, so much is said rather than shown, one feels one’s being informed rather than engaged.

As the story unfolds on a set evoking the sand dunes and the cries of sea birds, we learn that times have been hard — Alice, the mother, recently and in secret, took out a mortgage on the house to keep food on the table but still, the men are seeing the sparsity of the great game fish, the striped bass, as cyclical, sure they’ll come back.

When William, the youngest boy, is washed overboard and drowns, the family draws upon a stoic fatalism, part of their fisherman’s inherited way of life, and holds together.  But they can’t overcome the second blow: the NY State government in Albany bans their way of fishing for stripers, seining with big nets.  This legislation is favored by environmentalists and based on environmental and fish stock benefits but, it’s indicated, the real force behind the legislation is self-serving political pressure brought to bear by wealthy sports fisherman, ‘the rod and reelers.”

The play fails to sort out the significance of the environmental issue.  Is Walt, the father, really correct in thinking that because in the past there have been swarms of fish, they’ll be there in the future?  Experience and common sense indicate that sweeping the seas with large nets leads to endangered fish populations.  (Sometime the loaded, heavy fishermen’s nets needed to be dragged in with the use of tractors, a point not made in the play.)

But whatever the truths of the issues, the fact is that these men’s admirable qualities of stamina, muscle, intimate knowledge of the fish and the waters, and courage against the elements are now useless, and so they feel irrelevant, helpless and without purpose.  They drink, they flounder at other jobs, they die prematurely.  Their fishing dory — open boat — breaks up, their house collapses, becoming no more than an odd-shaped lump among the dunes.  Only Peter, representing the author Matthiessen, who has wandered as a character throughout the play, sympathetic to the fishermen’s plight but unable to help, survives and comes in to his own purpose, to bear witness.

Men’s Lives tells an important story of what happens when a way to earn an honest living becomes obsolete.  It is a tragic story and highly topical, particularly in a world of fast technological change.  Here and there the play comes to dramatic life, particularly when Deborah Hedwall as a gritty, determined Alice is pushing her men — unfortunately to do the impossible.  In a memorable episode, Scott Thomas Hinson as Popeye, the friend, dances his own drowning.  Generally, though, I didn’t believe these actors had the wind in their hair and the waves at their back — especially Peter McRobbie, a fine actor but who here as the father, Walt, who would seem more at home with a pipe and a good book in his study than on that small open boat.

Joe Pintauro’s play Raft of the Medusa, also about a group of men struggling to survive against great odds, with the sea as metaphor, and recently presented off-Broadway in NYC, has far more intrinsic drama.  But what Men’s Lives lacks in drama, it partially makes up for in history.  I read the book awhile back but I’m glad to have seen the play as a refresher, all the more because I know how nowadays you can fish a full day east of Gardiner’s Bay, where these men took their boats, without catching a single striped bass “keeper” — even the once incredibly abundant blue fish, described in the play, are hard to find.

This is the 20 year revival of the play that inaugurated the Bay Street Theatre in 1992.  Men’s Lives has special meaning for being played in Sag Harbor, on Long Island’s East End, and the play itself, first presented during a Baymen’s protest, and with several Baymen attending the first performance, has its own dramatic history.  For more on its background, and for other information and tickets, click here: Men’s Lives.

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