Tag: Richard Kind

Review | Steinbrenner! by Ira Berkow and Bill Madden | Starring Richard Kind | Guild Hall, Southampton, Long Island

On August 6, 2015

… Lucky to be George Steinbrenner …

This was a tremendously enjoyable evening: with his vitality, charisma, and theatrical intelligence, along with his comic timing, acting depth, and all-round performer’s talent, Richard Kind, supported by a fine cast, took us in hand through Berkow and Madden’s take on how George Steinbrenner owned and ran the NY Yankees.

By the end of this staged reading, a work in progress based on Bill Madden’s best-selling book, I wasn’t sure we got to know the real Steinbrenner, but we saw once again that that Richard Kind is one of the funniest men alive.

The play has a biographical arc, from Steinbrenner’s childhood through to old age as his son (Bradford Cover) takes over the Yankees, closing the circle. The focus, though, is all on Steinbrenner’s years of owning – and micromanaging — the team, and restoring it to its earlier, temporarily diminished, hard-to-beat the Yankees glory. In the main, he comes across as brash, unsentimental, and tough on everyone around him: lose a game, get fired. He hires Billy Martin (Danny Fischer) as Manager, fires him, re-hires him, fires him, re-hires. Complacency, Steinbrenner says, doesn’t win games.

In his winning-is-all dominance of subordinates, Steinbrenner brings to mind Donald Trump “You’re fired”. Berkow and Madden, while making much of the swagger, go beyond it to show us a more complex and kinder side to the man. We learn early about Steinbrenner’s generous and not overly publicized philanthropies. He shows a tender if equivocal loyalty for a favored few: he had a special place in his heart for the great Yankee catcher Thurman Munson (played by R. J. Gruber), and when Munson dies in a crash of his (Munson’s) private plane, the winner-takes-all Steinbrenner, moved by grief and respect, is willing to forfeit games to honor him.

And it’s worth noting that while many players and staff came and went revolving door style, his right hand man, Gabe Paul (Zach Grenier), never quit and Stick (Danny Fischer again), a top talent coach and sometime General Manager stayed by him – though to hang in there, and collect their big salaries, they, like everyone in the Yankee organization, it seems, had to take a lot of flack.

Steinbrenner’s combination of confidence and unease is traced to his demanding, perfectionist father whom he never could fully please. His relationship with his wife is referred to lightly, but enough to let us know that he was an ardent and determined suitor – just like when he was courting a star baseball player like Reggie Jackson (Duane McGlaughlin). His relationship with his long-time pal, Elaine Kaufman (Judy Kaye) of Elaine’s, Manhattan famously “in” restaurant, provides a female note. Judy Kaye as Elaine, along with Zach Grenier as Gabe Paul, are cool, smart foils for the rambunctious humor that emanates from Steinbrenner’s single-minded determination, and literal takes on whatever comes along.

Although the play was read by fourteen actors playing even more parts, Richard Kind as Steinbrenner is dominant. You never lose sight of him – nor do you want to! It’s hard to separate how funny and touching he is as an actor from the play’s essential qualities. The story’s told with insight but the we learn too much of what happens by being told. Since Steinbrenner is presented as a work in progress, the authors may move it more from spoken narrative to dramatization.

And about that big question: how did Steinbrenner’s Yankees become so great? The big bucks are mentioned but the focus leaves you thinking their success spun out of his outsize personality. Wasn’t it his outsize pocketbook, and his willingness to spend huge amounts of money?

Steinbrenner was a delightful evening of theater. I look forward to see more of it.

Steinbrenner, directed by Randal Myler, played at Guild Hall in Southampton, Long Island, NY August 2, 2015.

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

By Yvonne Korshak

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.