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Tupac Shakur At The Palace. Harry Potter Star Broadway-Bound. Sondheim Censored. Week in New York Theater

June 21, 2014 Leave a comment

“The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for 4,000 years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.”-John Steinbeck,

Another theater season is dead.

But a new one has already begun, with the opening of “Holler When Ya Hear Me,” a new musical using the songs of Tupac Shakur. (Review below.)

The Week in New York Theater

June 15, 2014

Broadway acting debut -check. Next: James Franco will be making his theatrical directorial debut for Rattlestick Playwright’s Theater’s, The Long Shrift July 7-Aug. 23 .  Written by Robert Boswell, the play tells the story of a dorky teenager thrown in jail for rape, who meets his accuser nine years later.

Nine Thoughts on Theater Awards, clever/informative by Robert Kaplowitz, Tony winner in sound design (Fela) http://bit.ly/1sgMZ5T

Who and what are the new avant-garde? Kate Kreme begins an answer http://bit.ly/1p7Te6f

Closing today:

Tony Shalhoub as quirky George S. Kauffman, mentor and collaborator to Moss Hart, portrayed by Santino Fontana

Tony Shalhoub as quirky George S. Kauffman, mentor and collaborator to Moss Hart, portrayed by Santino Fontana

Act One (Santino Fontana, the Unluckiest Lucky Actor in New York)

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A Raisin in the Sun

17 Amazing Theater Cities That Aren’t London or New York – http://bit.ly/1y5ygLi

 

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An evening of lost Cole Porter songs, The Ambassador Revue, will be performed June 27 only, at Town Hall.

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The World Cup Translated for Theater People

Best Plays by Women That Aren’t Being Produced (and Should Be)

Using improv comedy theater to prevent rape: Sex Signals

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Rupert Grint

Rupert Grint to debut on Broadway

Harry Potter star  joins Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick etc in the revival of Terrence McNally’s It’s Only A Play, making his Broadway debut. It opens October 9th.

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A Tony bounce? All The Way way up in attendance (13.6%), and in grosses. A Gentlemans Guide slightly DOWN in attendance, but also substantially up in grosses.  Aladdin, Raisin, All The Way, Beautiful, Hedwig all got positive airtime at Tonys, all this week grossed $million+.

Playwrights David Henry Hwang and Lynn Nottage will join the faculty of @ColumbiaSchArts, which offers a 3-year playwriting MFA.

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l’m really enjoying having a connection with a live audience, said James Franco to 100s of whooping teens. My article for Broadway Direct, Young Audiences Connect with Of Mice and Men.

James Franco on the difference between movies and theater, and what happens now:

“I went into this project with the object of wanting to learn,”  and that’s what happened. “You have to project your voice in a different way. There are different kinds of rhythms. On stage, the whole play depends on everybody’s rhythm. If an actor is taking too long, the whole play is affected.

“I really like being able to step on stage, and you’re in that world, and it’s all around you. A camera is just a moment. It’s not the same kind of immersion.

“The energy you get from a live audience is really great as a performer. I’m loving that. I’m gobbling it up. It’s a new chapter in my life that I hope to visit some more.

“I’m having one of the best times of my life doing this. But I’m not going to give up movies. I don’t get trapped into any one thing.”

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It’s official: Honeymoon in Vegas by Jason R Brown opens at Brooks Atkinson Theater January 15, starring Tony Danza,Rob McClure and Brynn O’Malley.

Sondheim On Changing ‘Into The Woods’ for Disney, and Living With Censorship

Meryl Streep will reportedly play Maria Callas in film of Terrence McNally’s play Master Class. Mike Nichols will direct.

Are artists born or made? Two studies suggest that artistic talent begins in the womb, shaped by

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The Escape by William Wells Brown, oldest surviving play by African-American (1858). Sunday New Brooklyn Theater

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Holler If Ya Hear Me Review

Eighteen years after his murder at the age of 25, Tupac Shakur has made it to Broadway, in a show that has taken on the awesome challenge of weaving 21 songs and poems by the charismatic rapper and actor into a newly created story about the struggling community on a block in a Midwestern industrial city…Despite a conscientious effort, the story is what is most disappointing about “Holler.”  The multi-character plot that replaces the expected bio-drama is at times muddled or poorly paced…There are enough arresting moments, the music is often exciting enough, and the large cast is talented enough, to have made me wonder whether  it would have worked better without a plot…

Full review, photo essay, and three of the songs.

 

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Puppet Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s worst play done like Avenue Q by @PuppetShakes July 24 – August 17 Theater Row.

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James Earl Jones reads from Othello, Adam Baldwin Macbeth etc in Shakespeare in America. FREE June 30 Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

Recap of panels at the annual TCG conference: 1. Taylor Mac and  Craig Lucas 2.  talks about gaming. 3. diversity. Theaters foster diversity by supporting artists:”We need many things,because we’ve made a terrible career choice”~Kristoffer Diaz

Mamet shuts down a production of sexual harassment drama Oleanna because female part cast w/male actor

We employ camaraderie to kill, Stefan Wolfert learned in combat… and from Henry V. (Latest in series.) The third in his series about a combat veteran discovers Shakespeare

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Mothers and Sons Review: Tyne Daly as Andre’s Mother, Still Angry, Grieving

March 24, 2014 Leave a comment

Tyne Daly

Tyne Daly

In “Mothers and Sons,” Terrence McNally’s well-acted, sometimes touching new play, Tyne Daly as Katharine Gerard pays an unexpected visit to Cal (Frederick Weller) the lover of her son Andre, who died long ago from AIDS.  To understand why McNally wrote “Mothers and Sons,” it is necessary to go back 25 years. To understand why it doesn’t quite work as a play on Broadway, one must linger at the curtain call.

In 1988, McNally wrote a brief monologue that he expanded two years later into “Andre’s Mother,” an episode of American Playhouse on TV starring Sada Thompson and Richard Thomas that showed a memorial service where Katharine Gerard, the dead man’s grieving mother, would not speak to Cal, Andre’s grieving lover.

McNally has decided to write something of a sequel for the stage.  Cal is now a money manager living in a beautiful apartment on Central Park West with his husband Will (Bobby Steggert) and their seven-year-old son Bud (Grayson Taylor.) Katharine is now a recent widow, and she has traveled from her home in Dallas on her way to a European vacation, and dropped by unannounced, having not seen nor communicated with Cal for decades, although she has kept in touch with Cal’s sister.

Over the 95 minutes of “Mothers and Sons,” McNally uses the four characters to explore a range of issues and updates.

There is much talk of the novelty and marvel of two men now being able to be wed. (In real life, it has been three years since New York State legally allowed same-sex marriage.)

“Andre and I were what people called boyfriends then,” Cal says. “Or partners. Lovers was another word people used. We didn’t like any of them. Boyfriends sounded like teenagers, partners sounded like a law firm and lovers sounded illicit. They all seemed insubstantial, inadequate. Then along came the new- but-old-and-obvious name for it. It’d been there all along: husband.”

There is talk of gay fatherhood. ‘The sight of two men hand in hand with a child waiting for the light to change in Central Park West rattles an occasional cage,” Will tells Katharine. “Gay dads still merit more than passing interest even in the metropolis known as Manhattan.”

There is an exploration of the guilt, grief, rage and resentment that comes with loss.

“It will never be ‘our’ loss,” Katharine snaps at Cal. “You lost a man and quickly found other men. I lost a son.”

There is also a consideration of homophobia — “After all these years, it still sickens me,” Katherine says about gay love – and whether there is any possibility of change and reconciliation.

All four performers are first-rate, and do what they can to make their words more than positions. But my trouble with this play seemed to come into focus at the curtain call for the performance I saw. Bobby Steggert made a plea to the audience to support Broadway Cares/ Equity Fights AIDS. This was not because the play was centered on a character who died of AIDS. Such solicitations from Broadway stages to fight AIDS are routine, and have been for more than two decades. Yet “Mothers and Sons,” despite its interludes of eloquence and feeling, too often seems written for a different audience – an audience in great need of enlightenment about AIDS and issues affecting gay people. The script is not so much preachy as obvious.

The character of Katharine offers some intriguing possibilities. Credit McNally for making her something more than just a bigoted yokel; she has a subscription to the New Yorker magazine, and in the infrequent times she is in New York, she stays at the Algonquin. She says “I don’t understand how my life turned out like this,” but what little we know about her life makes clear she has always been unhappy.

Would that McNally had explored Katharine or his other characters in “Mothers and Sons” with the same depth as the characters in some of the other plays in his 50-year career as a playwright – “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” “Master Class,” and his trio of pioneering plays about gay life, “The Lisbon Traviata”, “Lips Together, Teeth Apart”  and “Love! Valour! Compassion!”

Bobby Steggert, Frederick Weller, Grayson Taylor and Tyne Daly in Mothers and Sons

Bobby Steggert, Frederick Weller, Grayson Taylor and Tyne Daly in Mothers and Sons

 

Mothers and Sons

At the John Golden Theater

By Terrence McNally; directed by Sheryl Kaller; sets by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Jess Goldstein; lighting by Jeff Croiter; sound by Nevin Steinberg

Cast: Tyne Daly (Katharine Gerard), Frederick Weller (Cal Porter), Bobby Steggert (Will Ogden) and Grayson Taylor (Bud Ogden-Porter).

Running time: 95 minutes with no intermission

Tickets: $59 to $137

 

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Sound of Music Snark. The Laugh Police. Off-Off Broadway Groundbreaking. The Week in New York Theater

December 8, 2013 1 Comment

LauraBenantionTVSoundofMusic2Let’s face it, the live TV broadcast of The Sound of Music overshadowed whatever exciting news about Broadway itself this week–  new leads for Bullets Over Broadway and Act One; the Grammy nominees for Best Musical Theater Album; firmed up dates for several shows — and even some literally groundbreaking news about Off-Off Broadway.

Below: recap (review) and some of the snarky Tweets during the show. Also: a spirited debate about theater etiquette.

Week in New York Theater Dec 2 to 8, 2013

Monday, December 2

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Tyne Daly returns to Broadway in Terrence McNally’s Mothers and Sons, at John Golden Theater. Previews begin Feb 23; opens March 24. Daly plays a mother who, 20 years after her son’s death from AIDS, travels from Texas to New York to see her son’s former lover.

Are you bored by whole passages of Shakespeare plays? Don’t feel guilty. That might be part of what makes them great.

Is this a Golden Age of Shakespeare? Or is the Bard a bully, crowding out others?

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Opened today: The New Amsterdam Theatre box office, for tickets to Aladdin, which arrives on Broadway Feb. 26

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Pippin recoups its  $8.5 million investment

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Postscript to Kinky Boots attack: It had its best week ever, with more than 100% attendance & record-breaking $1.9 million at the box office.

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In the documentary Six by Sondheim: James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim, Jackie Hoffman, America Ferrera, Darren Criss, Laura Osnes, and Jeremy Jordan

In the documentary Six by Sondheim: James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim, Jackie Hoffman, America Ferrera, Darren Criss, Laura Osnes, and Jeremy Jordan

Six By Sondheim debuts on HBO Monday. Watch video excerpt: Darren Criss, Jeremy Jordan and America Ferrera sing “Opening Doors” from Merrily We Roll Along.

Mark Rylance as Olivia in Twelfth Night on Broadway

Mark Rylance as Olivia in Twelfth Night on Broadway

Producers, please note: Twelfth Night and Richard III did great at the box office even though they sell 2,000 seats per week at just $25.

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Most of the stars of Kinky Boots will be departing the show early next year but Billy Porter will remain at least through July 2014.

The Supremes

The Supremes

All evening performances of Motown the Musical will now be at 7:30.

Alexandra Silber, so terrific in Caramoor’s She Loves Me, will play a GI’s wife in new musical Arlington at the Vineyard Theater, opening in March.

Feel shut out of 700 Sundays on Broadway by its high prices? HBO is planning to film it.

MarySchmidtCampbellArts education makes a difference, says NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts departing dean Mary Schmidt Campbell: If you put well-designed arts programs into the schools… you can raise the performance in reading, math & science.

Good news: Twelfth Night and Richard III extended to Feb 16.

More great news: Fun Home, top of my top 10 list, extends once again at the Public Theater, to Jan 12.

The Rockettes in the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" in the Radi

Christmas Theater

Christmas cheer is a cut-throat business, something I learned from the composer of Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer, Johnny Marks, who pointed out to me that the success of his little ditty and others such as Jingle Bells filled the airwaves every December, making it nearly impossible to get airtime for new Christmas songs, including his own.

Does this work the same for Christmas theater?

Full article, listing the shows

Do the theater etiquette police ever make you wish you had stayed home?


Joy Meads ‏@capnjoy4  I regularly get glared at because I have a loud laugh. (Never disrespectful, in the wrong place, just loud.) I hate it.
I had one woman tell me I didn’t know how to attend theater. I said “ma’am, I’m the literary manager of Steppenwolf Theatre”
For the record, I’m a very respectful audience member. I think it’s about perceived class
 Jonathan Mandell: How did she react?
Joy Meads: just huffed and walked away. What could she say? Drove me crazy because she and her husband talked during the play. Come on.
Zena ‏@scarletseas4 no bc I’m usually one of them!
Jonathan Mandell: I hope you’re at least polite police. Rudeness is its own violation of theater etiquette
Zena: agreed – remember in cinema man shushed me when I was telling MD sis what happened as she had gone out to answer her pager!
Iana Brownstein ‏@bostonturgy Surly British woman waited til quiet moment of ART in West End, turned & yelled at me: “You have the MOST annoying laugh!”
Raymond McNeel ‏@RaymondMcNeel  The second most important reason the under 30 crowd stays home.
Danielle Pashun ‏@DanielleP3214  I think we need more of them! Ppl think when a scene ends that means “commercial break” which means “lets have a convo” :/
KatieGonzo ‏@KatieGonzo Depends. Are they quietly raising a hand to still the water-torture of someone unwrapping a candy?
On the other hand, some old biddy subscribers once chastised my students for “laughing too much”- *at the jokes*.
Joy Meads: Down with the laugh police!

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Marin Mazzie cast in Bullets Over Broadway’s much-sought role of drunk leading lady Helen Sinclair (played by Dianne Wiest in the film)

The arts and culture contribute $500 billion to GDP, more than travel & tourism, in first-ever (!) measure of their economic value. The new index meets longtime challenge… of determining the arts’ value, says National Endowment for the Art research director.

The problem with putting a dollar figure on the arts and culture is that no matter how high, dollars don’t get at the arts’ full value.

Details on Big Fish’s album: released digitally Feb. 7, 2014, in stores, Feb. 11 from Broadway Records.

Why Spider-man move to Vegas isn’t sign of failure: Defensive rant about NY snobs from Las Vegas Weekly. “Vegas can do NY theater successfully, but NY still hasn’t figured out how to do much that’s Vegas-worthy.”
Nella Vera ‏@spinstripes And thank god for that!
Terry Teachout ‏ Is that a good thing or a bad thing
Kate O’Phalen ‏@KateOPhalen Man, does that article miss the mark *and* reek of the same snideness it accuses NY of. Just because you can import watered down bway show, doesn’t mean you can do NY theatre.
Sierra Rein ‏@SierraRein Author writes “I don’t know if Spider-Man is crap. It might be” = ignorance. It was a mess.
Kate O’Phalen: Also agreed on that. I’ve seen Vegas-style shows, and Spider-Man was not up to par.

“When is it censorship, and when is it simply saying no thanks?”Clayton Lord writes about Mormon love of art and the Trumbull high school principal’s banning of the musical Rent in order to conclude: Some works of art “might just not fit into the values, mores, and beliefs of a particular group of people” Interesting to read the comments at the bottom.

The Sound of Music


SoundofMusicMariaandkidsI wrote what I called a recap of The Sound of Music (really a review) but there was a whole different entertainment going on during the show – “live-Tweeting it.” One person’s sample:

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Julie Harris RIP. Tyne Daly Back on Broadway. Macbeths vs Peter Pans. Week in New York Theater

August 26, 2013 Leave a comment

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“God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other…”~Julie Harris (1925-2013), often called the first lady of the American theater, who died on Saturday at the age of 87.

A sad and busy week. News about Tyne Daly’s return to Broadway, Cuba Gooding Jr.’s odd exit from it, and Kenneth Branagh’s debut on a New York stage;  yet more Peter Pans and Macbeths!  Weird and wonderful conversations with the cast of The Glass Menagerie, who all told me they didn’t like the play; Lin-Manuel Miranda, who tried to give me the time of day; Diana DeGarmo, who replied to a snarky comment with elegance; Mark Ruffalo, who told me his favorite lines from Awake and Sing, which he performed on Broadway in 2006.

I reviewed the new revival of Clifford Odets’ Jewish family drama with an Asian-American cast, as well as an overstuffed children’s musical called Timmy The Great, and a comedy about the life on stage, Waiting for Waiting for Godot, one of the 185 shows at the Fringe.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music mailed me something lewd. I videotaped the best male dancer on Broadway. And more, below. If this is the dog days of August, they’re barking.

Week in New York Theater

Monday, August 19, 2013

DalyandMcNallyTerrence McNally’s 20th Broadway play, Mothers and Sons, about a mother confronting the lover of her long-dead son, is slated for Spring. Tyne Daly is set to star, as she did when the play had its debut at Bucks County Playhouse in June

David Leopold ‏@Pknot:  Saw Mother & Sons this summer and liked it. She gave a good performance in good production. Worth seeing.

Let It Be 3Let It Be will close Sept 1, four months earlier, having played 46 performances and nine previews.

Best Theater Casting Directors: 2013 Artios Award Nominees 

ShakespeareDid Shakespeare really invent all those words? A PhD candidate in English says probably not.

A new book argues Hamlet is about love, and “helped Freud understand, perhaps even invent,psychoanalysis”

If “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” married “Vanya, Sonia, Masha and Spike,” what would you call their kids?

Isaac Butler ‏@parabasis:  Expensive.

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Can a show offer too much entertainment? Yes. My review of Timmy The Great

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BridgesofMadisonCountylogoThe Bridges of Madison County with Kelli Ohara and Steve Pasquale opens at Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld on February 27.

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Kenneth Branagh will make his New York stage debut in Macbeth at  the Park Avenue Armory June, 2014. #AnotherMacbeth
PatB ‏@patbky: Have heard raves about this production from people that have seen it. Will be booking tix for sure!

Will Kenneth Branagh say ‘the Scottish play” in The Park Avenue Armory. The armory is not technically a theater,so is superstition waived?

Lillian Bikset :  The world’s a stage. So I keep wondering if it’s safe to say the title of the Scottish play in social media.

Park Avenue Armory ‏@ParkAveArmory We’re tempted to yell it from the rooftops, so we admire your restraint.

Crime novelist Elmore Leonard, whose books fed Hollywood insatiably, has died at 87

SallyStruthersasDollyandGloriaGOLDENGLOBES/Sally Struthers (All in the Family), now 66, will star in a 70+-city tour of Hello, Dolly!, launching in Somerville, NJ, in Oct.

Melanie Griffith, 56, on being too old in Hollywood. “You just have to keep biting and pushing your way through, doing theater.”

(Theater as rehab for aging Hollywood actresses?)

CeliaKeenanBolgerasLauraThe Glass Menagerie
The cast didn’t like the play

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Zachary Quinto on Stage Acting vs. Screen Acting

 

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New Work Now, FREE reading series by the Public Theater, of new plays (plu one old AIDS play) in September Schedule:

In TODAY’s New York Times (not from 1920s): Cops raided House of Yes, Brooklyn space for clowns & comics, as a speakeasy

(Perfecting the art of stunt casting): LaToya Jackson  joins the Off-Broadway cast of Newsical in Sept

FREE  CherryLane Theater Master Class:
David Henry Hwang  9/9
Playwright Kia Corthron, 9/16′
“Roseanne producer” Matt Williams 11/18

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Phantom of the Opera

Once

Once

Most Romantic Theater:

Many pick “Once” or “Phantom of the Opera” as their most romantic theatrical experience, but Lourdes Pagan picks Pippin and, after hearing her story, most would surely agree.

Lovely, heartwarming stories about romance on the stage, and in the seats.

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My review of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing

The National Asian American Theater Company’s solid if unexceptional production of Awake and Sing, Clifford Odets 1935 drama of a struggling immigrant Jewish family in The Bronx, is opening just a few days after the 50th anniversary of the death of Odets, whose heyday as a playwright was almost 80 years ago. He has been experiencing something of a renaissance in New York…. Awake and Sing is often considered his best play…For those of us who saw Awake and Sing at Lincoln Center in 2006, the new production in the more intimate Walker Space  is unlikely to set off any great sparks.

Full review of Awake and Sing

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Rebecca Luker (veteran of eight Broadway shows, including Phantom) is taking over temporarily for Victoria Clark as Fairy Godmother Marie in Cinderella Sep 6 – Jan 19.

Laura Benanti, Cheyenne Jackson, Shuler Hensley to play love triangle in Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, City Center Encores April, 2014

Peter Pan (vs. Macbeth)

PeterPanfrom Belvoir St TheaterNew adaptation of Peter Pan, by Belvoir St Theatre, , set entirely in a kid’s bedroom in 1980s suburban Australia, is coming to  New Victory Theater October 4 to 13

There may be FOUR Peter Pans in NYC this coming season. Maybe Peter Pan can duke it out with Macbeth for dominance of NY theater

Speaking of Macbeth, Pia Catton asks professors and directors WWHY there are so many Macbeths (coming up: Ken Branagh and Ethan Hawke) http://on.wsj.com/12sy3mI

All the explanations for Macbeth mania — a time of terrorism, obsession w/fame, Weiner-like inapt behavior — seem lame to me.)

Theaters are given tax-exempt status, Linda Essig,  points out, because of their role as educators.

Richard Dreyfus tried to retire from movies 10 years ago and pursue theater, but, the way he tells it, theater didn’t want him.

 How is the Internet affecting your career and work as a theater artist?

(my contribution to Weekly Howlround online chat)

The Internet has

1. made research easier for theater artists, especially dramaturgs

2. Social media, especially @Twitter, has strengthened the theater community, and enlarged it (eg to include critics.)

3. Theater news and views are more quickly and more widely available. “Word of mouth” has become world-wide.

4 Internet gives artists terrific excuse to procrastinate yet feel productive:”I’m marketing/networking/whatever”

But how much has the ubiquity of social media and the Internet in real life become incorporated on stage/in plays

Monica Byrne ‏@monicabyrne  I saw a supposedly contemporary realist play recently that made no mention of any of it… .which felt all the more strange because Internet access would have solved a lot of plot points :/

Several plays r explicitly about effect of social media — eg Facebook Me. Not sure it’s fully incorporated on stage yet.

Waiting For Waiting For Godot

My review of Waiting for Waiting for Godot, funny comic riff on the life of an actor, part of the Fringe Festival

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Cuba Gooding Jr. gets his face on Sardi’s — and then leaves BroadwayJ

Broadway Idiot, a documentary following Greenday’s Billie Joe Armstrong as he created American Idiot, will be in New York movie theaters in October.

Class war theater from the 1930s is getting revived, says Michael Feingold, because class war has been revived.

Clockwise from top left: Fantasia Barrino (in After Midnight), Diana deGarmo, Clay Aiken, Justin Guarini (in Romeo and Juliet), Constantine Maroulis, Frenchie Davis

Clockwise from top left: Fantasia Barrino (in After Midnight), Diana deGarmo, Clay Aiken, Justin Guarini (in Romeo and Juliet), Constantine Maroulis, Frenchie Davis

Elizabeth Vincentelli’s blunt take on six American Idol-ers on Broadway

Clay Aiken: likely to return “but few will care”

Fantasia Barrino (in “After Midnight” this season): ” Has the charisma and chops to date a little dude named Tony.”

Justin Guarini (in “Romeo and Juliet” this season): “Can look forward to a solid career as a character actor. Who would have thought?”

Diana De Garmo: “Let’s hope she likes bus travel — road tours are in her future.”

future holds so let’s just take it a day at a time shall we?

“I’m a better actor now than when I was an actor”playwright Mona Mansour tells American Theatre Magazine.”I like writing moments I can feel”

LinManuelatDramatistsGuildconference
Videos from the Dramatists Guild of America National Conference. Includes:

New Media: Dramatists in the Age of Twitter, Facebook

Writing Wicked

A Conversation with Doug Wright

A conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda: At 5!

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MandyPatinkin1Mandy Patinkin on portraying a character: “It helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.” Profile of Mandy Patinkin, star of stage and Homeland  (reads like a therapy session) There are two Mandy Patinkins, says author — the “Do Less Mandy” (when he underplays, he’s terrific) and the “Too Much Mandy” (“oy”)

McKellen Stewart Feature

How do Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart make sense of enigmatic “Waiting for Godot” and “No Man’s Land.”?  By focusing on the concrete.

Acting career in a nutshell via IanMcKellen:

Start in Hamlet as Bernardo–>Rosencrantz–>Horatio->

Hamlet–>Claudius→Polonius–>the skull

EricLaJuanSummers2

Eric LaJuan Summers, the best dancer on Broadway

Julie Grega ‏@j_grega1920h Brings the house down every time!

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Both the Fringe and Vanya, Sonia, Masha and Spike come to an end.

Brochure in the mail from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, promoting Anna Nicole the Opera. (The inside flap says "...a kiss.' -- but still)

Brochure in the mail from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, promoting Anna Nicole the Opera. (The inside flap says “…a kiss.’ — but still)

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