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Thanks for reading, until next time!
3 Ocak 2013 Perşembe
Claire's - Night Sky
To contact us Click HERE
Today's post is a dark holo glitter that I bought on a whim at Claire's and I'm sooo glad I did!
Night Sky is a gorgeous deep blue microglitter in a clear base with chunky holo glitter throughout. 3 coats. 2 of the pictures above are blurred to show the holo. The holo glitter on this is really strong. The only issue I have with this is that its really goopey and think. I will probably thin it next time I wear it. Other than that, this color is fantastic! I love dark holos!
Thanks for reading, until next time!
Thanks for reading, until next time!
I'm back....ish
To contact us Click HERE
Hey guys. I just wanted to let you know that I'm back-ish and plan on posting some stuff soon. I've been MIA because I totaled my car and have been dealing with all that stuff and insurance, etc, and I was working on a musical and a play which left me zero social life. I'm on summer break right now and should have time to do stuff.
Also, updated my blog sale so I can at least pay for gas... got a new used car, but that left me BROKE so if you like anything, please don't hesitate!
Thanks for reading and I'm SO sorry I've been gone.
Also, updated my blog sale so I can at least pay for gas... got a new used car, but that left me BROKE so if you like anything, please don't hesitate!
Thanks for reading and I'm SO sorry I've been gone.
"Ten Chimneys" Doesn't Give Off Enough Heat
To contact us Click HERE
In some ways, the Theatre at St. Clement’s, a haven for so
many theatrical endeavors over the years, is the perfect place for Ten
Chimneys, a play about the legendary actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne that The
Peccadillo Theater Company is presenting there through Oct. 27.
But in other ways, the old church, which opened its doors in 1920 and has no elevators, isn’t a good place for this show at all. Because judging by all the people leaning on canes at the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended, the audience most likely to be drawn to this show is barely younger than the building itself.
Somehow, however, everyone seemed to make it up the staircase to the theater and I suspect that most of them had a good time once they got seated. For playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has put together an amusing, if slight, tribute to a storied era in the theater. Dan Wackerman has directed it with obvious affection. And the real-life husband-and-wife actors Bryon Jennings and Carolyn McCormick are delightful as the Lunts.
The problem is that I’m not sure who besides my aged audience mates and a few slightly younger theater fanatics like me will want to see this show. In their heyday, the Lunts were among the most famous stage actors in the country. But despite having a theater named for them, they’re far less familiar to today’s theatergoers.
Even the Playbill acknowledges that. After the standard bios of the cast and production team, it includes little cheat-sheet biographies of Lunt and Fontanne and of Sydney Greenstreet and Uta Hagen, who also turn up as characters in Ten Chimneys.
The title is taken from the name of the home in Wisconsin where the Lunts spent their summer vacations. It’s also the setting of the play, which begins in 1937 when the actors were preparing a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Hagen, just 18, was cast to play the ingénue Nina.
The story has often been told of how Hagen, who went on to many great roles including Paul Robeson’s Desdemona in Othello and the original Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, missed an entrance during the run. Lunt, left onstage waiting, was so infuriated that when Hagen did appear he took revenge during a stage kiss by biting her lip until it bled.
Afterward, Fontanne added insult to the injury by calling Hagen an amateur in front of the entire company. In later years when she became a legendary acting teacher, Hagen would tell the story herself, using it as a cautionary tale for her students, one of whom was my buddy Bill.
Ironically the notorious incident never makes it onstage in Ten Chimneys. Instead, Hatcher focuses on the less-fascinating, at least as he presents it, domestic lives of his characters: Fontanne’s squabbles with her overbearing mother-in-law, Greenstreet’s guilt towards his manic-depressive wife, Lunt’s uneasiness with his bisexuality and Hagen’s feelings of obligation towards her émigré parents.
I’m a sucker for backstage stories, no matter how dated or inconsequential, and Hatcher peppers his play with enough tidbits about theatrical life, plus a few good bon mots, that I was satisfyingly amused. I even got a kick out of watching the stagehands shove around the elaborate but endearingly old-fashioned set during the intermission.
Still, Ten Chimneys has too much in common with The Grand Manner, A.R. Gurney’s memory play about the Lunts’ contemporary Katharine Cornell (click here to read my review of that). Neither tells a compelling enough story. If you don’t already care about these stars of yesteryear when you walk into the theater, you’re unlikely to care about them by the time you walk out.
In some ways, the Theatre at St. Clement’s, a haven for so
many theatrical endeavors over the years, is the perfect place for Ten
Chimneys, a play about the legendary actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne that The
Peccadillo Theater Company is presenting there through Oct. 27.
But in other ways, the old church, which opened its doors in 1920 and has no elevators, isn’t a good place for this show at all. Because judging by all the people leaning on canes at the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended, the audience most likely to be drawn to this show is barely younger than the building itself.
Somehow, however, everyone seemed to make it up the staircase to the theater and I suspect that most of them had a good time once they got seated. For playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has put together an amusing, if slight, tribute to a storied era in the theater. Dan Wackerman has directed it with obvious affection. And the real-life husband-and-wife actors Bryon Jennings and Carolyn McCormick are delightful as the Lunts.
The problem is that I’m not sure who besides my aged audience mates and a few slightly younger theater fanatics like me will want to see this show. In their heyday, the Lunts were among the most famous stage actors in the country. But despite having a theater named for them, they’re far less familiar to today’s theatergoers.
Even the Playbill acknowledges that. After the standard bios of the cast and production team, it includes little cheat-sheet biographies of Lunt and Fontanne and of Sydney Greenstreet and Uta Hagen, who also turn up as characters in Ten Chimneys.
The title is taken from the name of the home in Wisconsin where the Lunts spent their summer vacations. It’s also the setting of the play, which begins in 1937 when the actors were preparing a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Hagen, just 18, was cast to play the ingénue Nina.
The story has often been told of how Hagen, who went on to many great roles including Paul Robeson’s Desdemona in Othello and the original Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, missed an entrance during the run. Lunt, left onstage waiting, was so infuriated that when Hagen did appear he took revenge during a stage kiss by biting her lip until it bled.
Afterward, Fontanne added insult to the injury by calling Hagen an amateur in front of the entire company. In later years when she became a legendary acting teacher, Hagen would tell the story herself, using it as a cautionary tale for her students, one of whom was my buddy Bill.
Ironically the notorious incident never makes it onstage in Ten Chimneys. Instead, Hatcher focuses on the less-fascinating, at least as he presents it, domestic lives of his characters: Fontanne’s squabbles with her overbearing mother-in-law, Greenstreet’s guilt towards his manic-depressive wife, Lunt’s uneasiness with his bisexuality and Hagen’s feelings of obligation towards her émigré parents.
I’m a sucker for backstage stories, no matter how dated or inconsequential, and Hatcher peppers his play with enough tidbits about theatrical life, plus a few good bon mots, that I was satisfyingly amused. I even got a kick out of watching the stagehands shove around the elaborate but endearingly old-fashioned set during the intermission.
Still, Ten Chimneys has too much in common with The Grand Manner, A.R. Gurney’s memory play about the Lunts’ contemporary Katharine Cornell (click here to read my review of that). Neither tells a compelling enough story. If you don’t already care about these stars of yesteryear when you walk into the theater, you’re unlikely to care about them by the time you walk out.
This "Cyrano de Bergerac" Doesn't Cut It
To contact us Click HERE
Nerds—even the homeliest ones—rule in today’s pop culture. They’re
the stars of hit movies and TV shows. In real life, many are rich and envied. And
the prettiest girls don’t even blink at hooking up with them. So maybe an
old-fashioned romance like Cyrano de Bergerac in which the funny-looking guy
ends up the loser has just outlived its time.
At least that’s what I found myself thinking as I watched the Roundabout Theatre Company’s pleasant but pallid revival of the play that is running at the American Airlines Theatre through Nov. 25.
The French poet and playwright Edmond Rostand wrote this paean to unrequited love in 1897. It played Broadway the very next year and there have been at least 15 major productions in the city since then—and that number doesn’t take into account the musical adaptations, including one composed by Victor Herbert.
But Cyrano's popularity has been waning in recent years. The last time I saw it was back in 2007 when Kevin Kline played the title character who loves the beautiful Roxane but, believing that his big nose makes him too ugly to win her heart, helps a handsomer man woo her.
Jennifer Garner, best known as the butt-kicking spy on the old ABC series "Alias", brought her fame and a contemporary approach to Roxane, playing her as a sword-wielding feminist.
That production lasted just 56 performances. (Click here to read my review).
Now the British actor Douglas Hodge, who won a Tony for his portrayal of the cross-dressing Albin in the 2010 revival of La Cage Aux Folles, has climbed into the britches of a 17th century grenadier and donned Cyrano’s trademark feather-plumed hat. His Roxane is the French actress Clémence Poésy who is making her Broadway debut.
Call me heartless but I didn’t care what happened to either of them.
Cyrano is supposed to have a swashbuckling swagger, which Hodge simply doesn’t have. Hodge is a solid actor and he handles the play’s rhyming couplets and its low-humor moments well but his Cyrano is too meek and often gets lost in the crowd of soldiers onstage instead of commanding attention from them and from us theatergoers.
The only thing that really sets him apart is the ridiculously huge and fake-looking nose that’s been concocted for Hodge to wear. Cyrano’s nose is obviously supposed to stand out but this snout is so outsized that seeing over it almost forces Hodge to cross his eyes.
Poésy’s Roxane seemed wimpy too. And I’ve so totally forgotten Kyle Soller, who plays Christian, the dumb but good-looking guy who gets to get it on with Roxane, that I don’t even remember what he looks like.
Meanwhile, Jamie Lloyd’s direction is far too busy and messy (click here to read an interview with the director and his star). Sure, it’s good for the members of the ensemble to play individual characters but Lloyd, a young Brit who spent the past three years as associate director at London’s Donmar Warehouse, should have found a way to rein in all the mugging.
But there is one saving grace: the performance by Patrick Page as Comte de Guiche, the vain nobleman who is also in love with Roxane (click here to read an interview in which the actor talks about his thoughts on love).
The count is supposed to be the villain of the piece but Page has a plummy baritone voice and a winning stage presence. He’s not exactly a nerd but in the real world, Roxane would just ride off with him. Or at least that’s what I wanted to do.
Nerds—even the homeliest ones—rule in today’s pop culture. They’re
the stars of hit movies and TV shows. In real life, many are rich and envied. And
the prettiest girls don’t even blink at hooking up with them. So maybe an
old-fashioned romance like Cyrano de Bergerac in which the funny-looking guy
ends up the loser has just outlived its time.
At least that’s what I found myself thinking as I watched the Roundabout Theatre Company’s pleasant but pallid revival of the play that is running at the American Airlines Theatre through Nov. 25.
The French poet and playwright Edmond Rostand wrote this paean to unrequited love in 1897. It played Broadway the very next year and there have been at least 15 major productions in the city since then—and that number doesn’t take into account the musical adaptations, including one composed by Victor Herbert.
But Cyrano's popularity has been waning in recent years. The last time I saw it was back in 2007 when Kevin Kline played the title character who loves the beautiful Roxane but, believing that his big nose makes him too ugly to win her heart, helps a handsomer man woo her.
Jennifer Garner, best known as the butt-kicking spy on the old ABC series "Alias", brought her fame and a contemporary approach to Roxane, playing her as a sword-wielding feminist.
That production lasted just 56 performances. (Click here to read my review).
Now the British actor Douglas Hodge, who won a Tony for his portrayal of the cross-dressing Albin in the 2010 revival of La Cage Aux Folles, has climbed into the britches of a 17th century grenadier and donned Cyrano’s trademark feather-plumed hat. His Roxane is the French actress Clémence Poésy who is making her Broadway debut.
Call me heartless but I didn’t care what happened to either of them.
Cyrano is supposed to have a swashbuckling swagger, which Hodge simply doesn’t have. Hodge is a solid actor and he handles the play’s rhyming couplets and its low-humor moments well but his Cyrano is too meek and often gets lost in the crowd of soldiers onstage instead of commanding attention from them and from us theatergoers.
The only thing that really sets him apart is the ridiculously huge and fake-looking nose that’s been concocted for Hodge to wear. Cyrano’s nose is obviously supposed to stand out but this snout is so outsized that seeing over it almost forces Hodge to cross his eyes.
Poésy’s Roxane seemed wimpy too. And I’ve so totally forgotten Kyle Soller, who plays Christian, the dumb but good-looking guy who gets to get it on with Roxane, that I don’t even remember what he looks like.
Meanwhile, Jamie Lloyd’s direction is far too busy and messy (click here to read an interview with the director and his star). Sure, it’s good for the members of the ensemble to play individual characters but Lloyd, a young Brit who spent the past three years as associate director at London’s Donmar Warehouse, should have found a way to rein in all the mugging.
But there is one saving grace: the performance by Patrick Page as Comte de Guiche, the vain nobleman who is also in love with Roxane (click here to read an interview in which the actor talks about his thoughts on love).
The count is supposed to be the villain of the piece but Page has a plummy baritone voice and a winning stage presence. He’s not exactly a nerd but in the real world, Roxane would just ride off with him. Or at least that’s what I wanted to do.
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is Still Great
To contact us Click HERE
Just about everyone who has seen it is saying that the new revival
of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not to be missed. And they’re right.
This latest version of Edward Albee’s masterwork opened at the Booth Theatre on Oct. 13, 50 years to the day that the original opened at the old Billy Rose Theater (now the Nederlander and home to Newsies). But there is nothing dated about Albee’s gimlet-eyed look at the desperate games unhappy people can play to keep themselves going.
Albee had been a success in the downtown theater scene but Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was his Broadway debut. His chronicle of a night in which two college professors and their wives drink oceans of alcohol, flirt with adultery and reveal the secrets that have kept their unhappy marriages together gob smacked the uptown crowd.
The New York Times declared that it “towers over the common run of contemporary plays.” But there were dissenters too. “If Edward Albee is the white hope of the American theater, then our nation is in need of a strong detergent,” huffed one letter to the paper’s editor.
The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama but the board was apparently as prudish as the letter writer and awarded no prize that year. But the theater community knew what it had been given. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? took home four big Tonys for direction, best actor and best actress for Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen as the battling older couple George and Martha, and, of course, best play.
Four years later, Mike Nichols directed a movie version that starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who won her second Oscar for her performance as the bitterly frustrated Martha. I was in my teens then but my mother took me to see it and while I won’t pretend that I understood everything I was seeing, I do remember being transfixed.
Director Pam McKinnon’s crackerjack production is the third Broadway revival. The last, in 2005, which starred Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin was so good that my husband K decided not to see this one because he didn’t want to taint the memory of such a great evening in the theater.
But this new production drew raves when it opened at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2010 and later when it moved to Washington. So I decided to risk it and I had little trouble persuading my theatergoing buddy Bill to see it with me.
And we were so glad we went. The play runs 3 hours and 15 minutes with two intermissions but the time flew by.
That’s in part because Albee’s play is often throw-you-head-back-and- laugh funny. But it’s also because McKinnon and her outstanding cast found new ways to unleash its devastating pain as well.
Amy Morton, best known as the oldest daughter in August: Osage County, makes Martha less of a gorgon than others have. Bill said he missed that harpyish streak in the character but Morton’s human-sized Martha seemed more like the college president’s daughter that Martha is—and more vulnerable. This Martha touched me in a way that others—even very good ones like Turner’s—didn’t. (Click here to read an interview with Morton.)
Tracy Letts, who wrote August: Osage Country confirms how theatrically ambidextrous he is because, while, just as you'd expect one playwright to treat the work of another, he is totally faithful to the text, he's also managed to subtlety reimagine George.
The wounds that Letts' George has suffered over the years throb right beneath the surface but over them he has grown a blister that numbs the pain just enough so that he's able to push ruthlessly ahead. (Click here to read an interview with Letts.)
I also have to give a shout-out to Carrie Coon, who plays Honey, the puerile wife in the younger couple, and who may be the best onstage drunk I’ve ever seen. But everything about this production—Todd Rosenthal’s set, Nan Dibula-Jenkins’ costumes, Aileen Lee Hughes’ lighting and, of course, McKinnon's deft direction—works, the pieces adding up to a magnificent whole.
There was silence for the first few seconds after the performance that Bill and I saw ended as those of us in the audience (dotted with celebrities including Stephen Sondheim and the movie actor Bradley Cooper, as I said, everyone who loves theater is trying to see this) pulled ourselves together and then erupted into applause, including opera-house bravos.
After the show, Bill and I walked through Shubert Alley for a late dinner at Sardi’s. As we were leaving the restaurant, I spotted my old friend the veteran publicist Irene Gandy having dinner with McKinnon. I went over and when Irene introduced me, I put my palms together in a gesture of thanks and bowed. “I’ve been hungry for a nourishing evening in the theater,” I told McKinnon. “Thank you so much for giving it to me.”
And now here's what I want to tell you: go see it and be fulfilled too.
Just about everyone who has seen it is saying that the new revival
of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not to be missed. And they’re right.
This latest version of Edward Albee’s masterwork opened at the Booth Theatre on Oct. 13, 50 years to the day that the original opened at the old Billy Rose Theater (now the Nederlander and home to Newsies). But there is nothing dated about Albee’s gimlet-eyed look at the desperate games unhappy people can play to keep themselves going.
Albee had been a success in the downtown theater scene but Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was his Broadway debut. His chronicle of a night in which two college professors and their wives drink oceans of alcohol, flirt with adultery and reveal the secrets that have kept their unhappy marriages together gob smacked the uptown crowd.
The New York Times declared that it “towers over the common run of contemporary plays.” But there were dissenters too. “If Edward Albee is the white hope of the American theater, then our nation is in need of a strong detergent,” huffed one letter to the paper’s editor.
The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama but the board was apparently as prudish as the letter writer and awarded no prize that year. But the theater community knew what it had been given. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? took home four big Tonys for direction, best actor and best actress for Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen as the battling older couple George and Martha, and, of course, best play.
Four years later, Mike Nichols directed a movie version that starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who won her second Oscar for her performance as the bitterly frustrated Martha. I was in my teens then but my mother took me to see it and while I won’t pretend that I understood everything I was seeing, I do remember being transfixed.
Director Pam McKinnon’s crackerjack production is the third Broadway revival. The last, in 2005, which starred Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin was so good that my husband K decided not to see this one because he didn’t want to taint the memory of such a great evening in the theater.
But this new production drew raves when it opened at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2010 and later when it moved to Washington. So I decided to risk it and I had little trouble persuading my theatergoing buddy Bill to see it with me.
And we were so glad we went. The play runs 3 hours and 15 minutes with two intermissions but the time flew by.
That’s in part because Albee’s play is often throw-you-head-back-and- laugh funny. But it’s also because McKinnon and her outstanding cast found new ways to unleash its devastating pain as well.
Amy Morton, best known as the oldest daughter in August: Osage County, makes Martha less of a gorgon than others have. Bill said he missed that harpyish streak in the character but Morton’s human-sized Martha seemed more like the college president’s daughter that Martha is—and more vulnerable. This Martha touched me in a way that others—even very good ones like Turner’s—didn’t. (Click here to read an interview with Morton.)
Tracy Letts, who wrote August: Osage Country confirms how theatrically ambidextrous he is because, while, just as you'd expect one playwright to treat the work of another, he is totally faithful to the text, he's also managed to subtlety reimagine George.
The wounds that Letts' George has suffered over the years throb right beneath the surface but over them he has grown a blister that numbs the pain just enough so that he's able to push ruthlessly ahead. (Click here to read an interview with Letts.)
I also have to give a shout-out to Carrie Coon, who plays Honey, the puerile wife in the younger couple, and who may be the best onstage drunk I’ve ever seen. But everything about this production—Todd Rosenthal’s set, Nan Dibula-Jenkins’ costumes, Aileen Lee Hughes’ lighting and, of course, McKinnon's deft direction—works, the pieces adding up to a magnificent whole.
There was silence for the first few seconds after the performance that Bill and I saw ended as those of us in the audience (dotted with celebrities including Stephen Sondheim and the movie actor Bradley Cooper, as I said, everyone who loves theater is trying to see this) pulled ourselves together and then erupted into applause, including opera-house bravos.
After the show, Bill and I walked through Shubert Alley for a late dinner at Sardi’s. As we were leaving the restaurant, I spotted my old friend the veteran publicist Irene Gandy having dinner with McKinnon. I went over and when Irene introduced me, I put my palms together in a gesture of thanks and bowed. “I’ve been hungry for a nourishing evening in the theater,” I told McKinnon. “Thank you so much for giving it to me.”
And now here's what I want to tell you: go see it and be fulfilled too.
2 Ocak 2013 Çarşamba
"Ten Chimneys" Doesn't Give Off Enough Heat
To contact us Click HERE
In some ways, the Theatre at St. Clement’s, a haven for so
many theatrical endeavors over the years, is the perfect place for Ten
Chimneys, a play about the legendary actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne that The
Peccadillo Theater Company is presenting there through Oct. 27.
But in other ways, the old church, which opened its doors in 1920 and has no elevators, isn’t a good place for this show at all. Because judging by all the people leaning on canes at the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended, the audience most likely to be drawn to this show is barely younger than the building itself.
Somehow, however, everyone seemed to make it up the staircase to the theater and I suspect that most of them had a good time once they got seated. For playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has put together an amusing, if slight, tribute to a storied era in the theater. Dan Wackerman has directed it with obvious affection. And the real-life husband-and-wife actors Bryon Jennings and Carolyn McCormick are delightful as the Lunts.
The problem is that I’m not sure who besides my aged audience mates and a few slightly younger theater fanatics like me will want to see this show. In their heyday, the Lunts were among the most famous stage actors in the country. But despite having a theater named for them, they’re far less familiar to today’s theatergoers.
Even the Playbill acknowledges that. After the standard bios of the cast and production team, it includes little cheat-sheet biographies of Lunt and Fontanne and of Sydney Greenstreet and Uta Hagen, who also turn up as characters in Ten Chimneys.
The title is taken from the name of the home in Wisconsin where the Lunts spent their summer vacations. It’s also the setting of the play, which begins in 1937 when the actors were preparing a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Hagen, just 18, was cast to play the ingénue Nina.
The story has often been told of how Hagen, who went on to many great roles including Paul Robeson’s Desdemona in Othello and the original Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, missed an entrance during the run. Lunt, left onstage waiting, was so infuriated that when Hagen did appear he took revenge during a stage kiss by biting her lip until it bled.
Afterward, Fontanne added insult to the injury by calling Hagen an amateur in front of the entire company. In later years when she became a legendary acting teacher, Hagen would tell the story herself, using it as a cautionary tale for her students, one of whom was my buddy Bill.
Ironically the notorious incident never makes it onstage in Ten Chimneys. Instead, Hatcher focuses on the less-fascinating, at least as he presents it, domestic lives of his characters: Fontanne’s squabbles with her overbearing mother-in-law, Greenstreet’s guilt towards his manic-depressive wife, Lunt’s uneasiness with his bisexuality and Hagen’s feelings of obligation towards her émigré parents.
I’m a sucker for backstage stories, no matter how dated or inconsequential, and Hatcher peppers his play with enough tidbits about theatrical life, plus a few good bon mots, that I was satisfyingly amused. I even got a kick out of watching the stagehands shove around the elaborate but endearingly old-fashioned set during the intermission.
Still, Ten Chimneys has too much in common with The Grand Manner, A.R. Gurney’s memory play about the Lunts’ contemporary Katharine Cornell (click here to read my review of that). Neither tells a compelling enough story. If you don’t already care about these stars of yesteryear when you walk into the theater, you’re unlikely to care about them by the time you walk out.
In some ways, the Theatre at St. Clement’s, a haven for so
many theatrical endeavors over the years, is the perfect place for Ten
Chimneys, a play about the legendary actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne that The
Peccadillo Theater Company is presenting there through Oct. 27.
But in other ways, the old church, which opened its doors in 1920 and has no elevators, isn’t a good place for this show at all. Because judging by all the people leaning on canes at the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended, the audience most likely to be drawn to this show is barely younger than the building itself.
Somehow, however, everyone seemed to make it up the staircase to the theater and I suspect that most of them had a good time once they got seated. For playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has put together an amusing, if slight, tribute to a storied era in the theater. Dan Wackerman has directed it with obvious affection. And the real-life husband-and-wife actors Bryon Jennings and Carolyn McCormick are delightful as the Lunts.
The problem is that I’m not sure who besides my aged audience mates and a few slightly younger theater fanatics like me will want to see this show. In their heyday, the Lunts were among the most famous stage actors in the country. But despite having a theater named for them, they’re far less familiar to today’s theatergoers.
Even the Playbill acknowledges that. After the standard bios of the cast and production team, it includes little cheat-sheet biographies of Lunt and Fontanne and of Sydney Greenstreet and Uta Hagen, who also turn up as characters in Ten Chimneys.
The title is taken from the name of the home in Wisconsin where the Lunts spent their summer vacations. It’s also the setting of the play, which begins in 1937 when the actors were preparing a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Hagen, just 18, was cast to play the ingénue Nina.
The story has often been told of how Hagen, who went on to many great roles including Paul Robeson’s Desdemona in Othello and the original Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, missed an entrance during the run. Lunt, left onstage waiting, was so infuriated that when Hagen did appear he took revenge during a stage kiss by biting her lip until it bled.
Afterward, Fontanne added insult to the injury by calling Hagen an amateur in front of the entire company. In later years when she became a legendary acting teacher, Hagen would tell the story herself, using it as a cautionary tale for her students, one of whom was my buddy Bill.
Ironically the notorious incident never makes it onstage in Ten Chimneys. Instead, Hatcher focuses on the less-fascinating, at least as he presents it, domestic lives of his characters: Fontanne’s squabbles with her overbearing mother-in-law, Greenstreet’s guilt towards his manic-depressive wife, Lunt’s uneasiness with his bisexuality and Hagen’s feelings of obligation towards her émigré parents.
I’m a sucker for backstage stories, no matter how dated or inconsequential, and Hatcher peppers his play with enough tidbits about theatrical life, plus a few good bon mots, that I was satisfyingly amused. I even got a kick out of watching the stagehands shove around the elaborate but endearingly old-fashioned set during the intermission.
Still, Ten Chimneys has too much in common with The Grand Manner, A.R. Gurney’s memory play about the Lunts’ contemporary Katharine Cornell (click here to read my review of that). Neither tells a compelling enough story. If you don’t already care about these stars of yesteryear when you walk into the theater, you’re unlikely to care about them by the time you walk out.
This "Cyrano de Bergerac" Doesn't Cut It
To contact us Click HERE
Nerds—even the homeliest ones—rule in today’s pop culture. They’re
the stars of hit movies and TV shows. In real life, many are rich and envied. And
the prettiest girls don’t even blink at hooking up with them. So maybe an
old-fashioned romance like Cyrano de Bergerac in which the funny-looking guy
ends up the loser has just outlived its time.
At least that’s what I found myself thinking as I watched the Roundabout Theatre Company’s pleasant but pallid revival of the play that is running at the American Airlines Theatre through Nov. 25.
The French poet and playwright Edmond Rostand wrote this paean to unrequited love in 1897. It played Broadway the very next year and there have been at least 15 major productions in the city since then—and that number doesn’t take into account the musical adaptations, including one composed by Victor Herbert.
But Cyrano's popularity has been waning in recent years. The last time I saw it was back in 2007 when Kevin Kline played the title character who loves the beautiful Roxane but, believing that his big nose makes him too ugly to win her heart, helps a handsomer man woo her.
Jennifer Garner, best known as the butt-kicking spy on the old ABC series "Alias", brought her fame and a contemporary approach to Roxane, playing her as a sword-wielding feminist.
That production lasted just 56 performances. (Click here to read my review).
Now the British actor Douglas Hodge, who won a Tony for his portrayal of the cross-dressing Albin in the 2010 revival of La Cage Aux Folles, has climbed into the britches of a 17th century grenadier and donned Cyrano’s trademark feather-plumed hat. His Roxane is the French actress Clémence Poésy who is making her Broadway debut.
Call me heartless but I didn’t care what happened to either of them.
Cyrano is supposed to have a swashbuckling swagger, which Hodge simply doesn’t have. Hodge is a solid actor and he handles the play’s rhyming couplets and its low-humor moments well but his Cyrano is too meek and often gets lost in the crowd of soldiers onstage instead of commanding attention from them and from us theatergoers.
The only thing that really sets him apart is the ridiculously huge and fake-looking nose that’s been concocted for Hodge to wear. Cyrano’s nose is obviously supposed to stand out but this snout is so outsized that seeing over it almost forces Hodge to cross his eyes.
Poésy’s Roxane seemed wimpy too. And I’ve so totally forgotten Kyle Soller, who plays Christian, the dumb but good-looking guy who gets to get it on with Roxane, that I don’t even remember what he looks like.
Meanwhile, Jamie Lloyd’s direction is far too busy and messy (click here to read an interview with the director and his star). Sure, it’s good for the members of the ensemble to play individual characters but Lloyd, a young Brit who spent the past three years as associate director at London’s Donmar Warehouse, should have found a way to rein in all the mugging.
But there is one saving grace: the performance by Patrick Page as Comte de Guiche, the vain nobleman who is also in love with Roxane (click here to read an interview in which the actor talks about his thoughts on love).
The count is supposed to be the villain of the piece but Page has a plummy baritone voice and a winning stage presence. He’s not exactly a nerd but in the real world, Roxane would just ride off with him. Or at least that’s what I wanted to do.
Nerds—even the homeliest ones—rule in today’s pop culture. They’re
the stars of hit movies and TV shows. In real life, many are rich and envied. And
the prettiest girls don’t even blink at hooking up with them. So maybe an
old-fashioned romance like Cyrano de Bergerac in which the funny-looking guy
ends up the loser has just outlived its time.
At least that’s what I found myself thinking as I watched the Roundabout Theatre Company’s pleasant but pallid revival of the play that is running at the American Airlines Theatre through Nov. 25.
The French poet and playwright Edmond Rostand wrote this paean to unrequited love in 1897. It played Broadway the very next year and there have been at least 15 major productions in the city since then—and that number doesn’t take into account the musical adaptations, including one composed by Victor Herbert.
But Cyrano's popularity has been waning in recent years. The last time I saw it was back in 2007 when Kevin Kline played the title character who loves the beautiful Roxane but, believing that his big nose makes him too ugly to win her heart, helps a handsomer man woo her.
Jennifer Garner, best known as the butt-kicking spy on the old ABC series "Alias", brought her fame and a contemporary approach to Roxane, playing her as a sword-wielding feminist.
That production lasted just 56 performances. (Click here to read my review).
Now the British actor Douglas Hodge, who won a Tony for his portrayal of the cross-dressing Albin in the 2010 revival of La Cage Aux Folles, has climbed into the britches of a 17th century grenadier and donned Cyrano’s trademark feather-plumed hat. His Roxane is the French actress Clémence Poésy who is making her Broadway debut.
Call me heartless but I didn’t care what happened to either of them.
Cyrano is supposed to have a swashbuckling swagger, which Hodge simply doesn’t have. Hodge is a solid actor and he handles the play’s rhyming couplets and its low-humor moments well but his Cyrano is too meek and often gets lost in the crowd of soldiers onstage instead of commanding attention from them and from us theatergoers.
The only thing that really sets him apart is the ridiculously huge and fake-looking nose that’s been concocted for Hodge to wear. Cyrano’s nose is obviously supposed to stand out but this snout is so outsized that seeing over it almost forces Hodge to cross his eyes.
Poésy’s Roxane seemed wimpy too. And I’ve so totally forgotten Kyle Soller, who plays Christian, the dumb but good-looking guy who gets to get it on with Roxane, that I don’t even remember what he looks like.
Meanwhile, Jamie Lloyd’s direction is far too busy and messy (click here to read an interview with the director and his star). Sure, it’s good for the members of the ensemble to play individual characters but Lloyd, a young Brit who spent the past three years as associate director at London’s Donmar Warehouse, should have found a way to rein in all the mugging.
But there is one saving grace: the performance by Patrick Page as Comte de Guiche, the vain nobleman who is also in love with Roxane (click here to read an interview in which the actor talks about his thoughts on love).
The count is supposed to be the villain of the piece but Page has a plummy baritone voice and a winning stage presence. He’s not exactly a nerd but in the real world, Roxane would just ride off with him. Or at least that’s what I wanted to do.
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is Still Great
To contact us Click HERE
Just about everyone who has seen it is saying that the new revival
of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not to be missed. And they’re right.
This latest version of Edward Albee’s masterwork opened at the Booth Theatre on Oct. 13, 50 years to the day that the original opened at the old Billy Rose Theater (now the Nederlander and home to Newsies). But there is nothing dated about Albee’s gimlet-eyed look at the desperate games unhappy people can play to keep themselves going.
Albee had been a success in the downtown theater scene but Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was his Broadway debut. His chronicle of a night in which two college professors and their wives drink oceans of alcohol, flirt with adultery and reveal the secrets that have kept their unhappy marriages together gob smacked the uptown crowd.
The New York Times declared that it “towers over the common run of contemporary plays.” But there were dissenters too. “If Edward Albee is the white hope of the American theater, then our nation is in need of a strong detergent,” huffed one letter to the paper’s editor.
The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama but the board was apparently as prudish as the letter writer and awarded no prize that year. But the theater community knew what it had been given. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? took home four big Tonys for direction, best actor and best actress for Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen as the battling older couple George and Martha, and, of course, best play.
Four years later, Mike Nichols directed a movie version that starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who won her second Oscar for her performance as the bitterly frustrated Martha. I was in my teens then but my mother took me to see it and while I won’t pretend that I understood everything I was seeing, I do remember being transfixed.
Director Pam McKinnon’s crackerjack production is the third Broadway revival. The last, in 2005, which starred Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin was so good that my husband K decided not to see this one because he didn’t want to taint the memory of such a great evening in the theater.
But this new production drew raves when it opened at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2010 and later when it moved to Washington. So I decided to risk it and I had little trouble persuading my theatergoing buddy Bill to see it with me.
And we were so glad we went. The play runs 3 hours and 15 minutes with two intermissions but the time flew by.
That’s in part because Albee’s play is often throw-you-head-back-and- laugh funny. But it’s also because McKinnon and her outstanding cast found new ways to unleash its devastating pain as well.
Amy Morton, best known as the oldest daughter in August: Osage County, makes Martha less of a gorgon than others have. Bill said he missed that harpyish streak in the character but Morton’s human-sized Martha seemed more like the college president’s daughter that Martha is—and more vulnerable. This Martha touched me in a way that others—even very good ones like Turner’s—didn’t. (Click here to read an interview with Morton.)
Tracy Letts, who wrote August: Osage Country confirms how theatrically ambidextrous he is because, while, just as you'd expect one playwright to treat the work of another, he is totally faithful to the text, he's also managed to subtlety reimagine George.
The wounds that Letts' George has suffered over the years throb right beneath the surface but over them he has grown a blister that numbs the pain just enough so that he's able to push ruthlessly ahead. (Click here to read an interview with Letts.)
I also have to give a shout-out to Carrie Coon, who plays Honey, the puerile wife in the younger couple, and who may be the best onstage drunk I’ve ever seen. But everything about this production—Todd Rosenthal’s set, Nan Dibula-Jenkins’ costumes, Aileen Lee Hughes’ lighting and, of course, McKinnon's deft direction—works, the pieces adding up to a magnificent whole.
There was silence for the first few seconds after the performance that Bill and I saw ended as those of us in the audience (dotted with celebrities including Stephen Sondheim and the movie actor Bradley Cooper, as I said, everyone who loves theater is trying to see this) pulled ourselves together and then erupted into applause, including opera-house bravos.
After the show, Bill and I walked through Shubert Alley for a late dinner at Sardi’s. As we were leaving the restaurant, I spotted my old friend the veteran publicist Irene Gandy having dinner with McKinnon. I went over and when Irene introduced me, I put my palms together in a gesture of thanks and bowed. “I’ve been hungry for a nourishing evening in the theater,” I told McKinnon. “Thank you so much for giving it to me.”
And now here's what I want to tell you: go see it and be fulfilled too.
Just about everyone who has seen it is saying that the new revival
of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not to be missed. And they’re right.
This latest version of Edward Albee’s masterwork opened at the Booth Theatre on Oct. 13, 50 years to the day that the original opened at the old Billy Rose Theater (now the Nederlander and home to Newsies). But there is nothing dated about Albee’s gimlet-eyed look at the desperate games unhappy people can play to keep themselves going.
Albee had been a success in the downtown theater scene but Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was his Broadway debut. His chronicle of a night in which two college professors and their wives drink oceans of alcohol, flirt with adultery and reveal the secrets that have kept their unhappy marriages together gob smacked the uptown crowd.
The New York Times declared that it “towers over the common run of contemporary plays.” But there were dissenters too. “If Edward Albee is the white hope of the American theater, then our nation is in need of a strong detergent,” huffed one letter to the paper’s editor.
The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama but the board was apparently as prudish as the letter writer and awarded no prize that year. But the theater community knew what it had been given. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? took home four big Tonys for direction, best actor and best actress for Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen as the battling older couple George and Martha, and, of course, best play.
Four years later, Mike Nichols directed a movie version that starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who won her second Oscar for her performance as the bitterly frustrated Martha. I was in my teens then but my mother took me to see it and while I won’t pretend that I understood everything I was seeing, I do remember being transfixed.
Director Pam McKinnon’s crackerjack production is the third Broadway revival. The last, in 2005, which starred Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin was so good that my husband K decided not to see this one because he didn’t want to taint the memory of such a great evening in the theater.
But this new production drew raves when it opened at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2010 and later when it moved to Washington. So I decided to risk it and I had little trouble persuading my theatergoing buddy Bill to see it with me.
And we were so glad we went. The play runs 3 hours and 15 minutes with two intermissions but the time flew by.
That’s in part because Albee’s play is often throw-you-head-back-and- laugh funny. But it’s also because McKinnon and her outstanding cast found new ways to unleash its devastating pain as well.
Amy Morton, best known as the oldest daughter in August: Osage County, makes Martha less of a gorgon than others have. Bill said he missed that harpyish streak in the character but Morton’s human-sized Martha seemed more like the college president’s daughter that Martha is—and more vulnerable. This Martha touched me in a way that others—even very good ones like Turner’s—didn’t. (Click here to read an interview with Morton.)
Tracy Letts, who wrote August: Osage Country confirms how theatrically ambidextrous he is because, while, just as you'd expect one playwright to treat the work of another, he is totally faithful to the text, he's also managed to subtlety reimagine George.
The wounds that Letts' George has suffered over the years throb right beneath the surface but over them he has grown a blister that numbs the pain just enough so that he's able to push ruthlessly ahead. (Click here to read an interview with Letts.)
I also have to give a shout-out to Carrie Coon, who plays Honey, the puerile wife in the younger couple, and who may be the best onstage drunk I’ve ever seen. But everything about this production—Todd Rosenthal’s set, Nan Dibula-Jenkins’ costumes, Aileen Lee Hughes’ lighting and, of course, McKinnon's deft direction—works, the pieces adding up to a magnificent whole.
There was silence for the first few seconds after the performance that Bill and I saw ended as those of us in the audience (dotted with celebrities including Stephen Sondheim and the movie actor Bradley Cooper, as I said, everyone who loves theater is trying to see this) pulled ourselves together and then erupted into applause, including opera-house bravos.
After the show, Bill and I walked through Shubert Alley for a late dinner at Sardi’s. As we were leaving the restaurant, I spotted my old friend the veteran publicist Irene Gandy having dinner with McKinnon. I went over and when Irene introduced me, I put my palms together in a gesture of thanks and bowed. “I’ve been hungry for a nourishing evening in the theater,” I told McKinnon. “Thank you so much for giving it to me.”
And now here's what I want to tell you: go see it and be fulfilled too.
A Few of My Favorite Theater Things in 2012
To contact us Click HERE
People began posting 10 best lists so early that I
don’t know how they even managed to see—let alone rate—all the shows that
opened in November and December (click here for a handy round-up of some of the lists collected by my friend Howard Sherman). But I didn’t get the early bird memo and so I’m starting this new year off with my top 10.
Of course, the best thing about any of these lists—including this one—isn’t that they tell you what was worth seeing and worth skipping last year but that they help you figure out how much you want to rely on the recommendations of the person who made the list when you’re deciding what to see in this new year.
Because what these lists—we should call them 10 favorites rather than 10 bests—really reflect are the current interests and tastes of the person making them. As regular readers know, I'm usually interested in shows that deal with big political issues and I have a soft spot for ones that use highly theatrical stagecraft but, as you’ll see, what got to me in 2012 were intimate dramas, simply staged, that made me really think about the ways in which we struggle to connect with one another. Here, in alphabetical order, are the 10 shows that most connected with me:
AdA The acronym stands for Author directing
Author and playwrights Marco Calvani and Neil LaBute collaborated on two poignant and exquisitely acted
ruminations on the lengths to which people will go to avoid loneliness. As I
said in my review, “the memory of these engagingly enigmatic plays will linger
with me for a longtime to come.” And so they have.
THE BIG MEAL Using a series of landmark meals, from first dates to funeral receptions, playwright Dan LeFranc and director Sam Gold chronicled a couple’s life over six decades. To quote from my review of that one, “it’s packed with lots of laughs and some tear-inducing moments as well. I dare anyone to see it without identifying with the joys and disappointments of at least one of those meals.”
COCK British playwright Mike Bartlett used the metaphor of a sporting event for his drama about a gay man torn between his male lover and a woman for whom he unexpectedly falls. He and director James Macdonald also stripped away the usual theatrical conventions—sets, props, even comfortable seating—leaving only the text, four sensational actors and, as that review said, “the essence of theater in its most elemental form.”
DISGRACED Many
plays that deal with race dance around the subject but Ayad Akhtar went straight at
it in this bracing look at an assimilated Muslim attorney and his white wife in
post-9/11 America. As I said in my review, the play, under Kimberley
Senior’s acute direction, sidesteps the usual stereotypes and instead shows
people who “are like most human beings, sometimes arrogant when they're right,
defensive when they're not but most often stumbling through the murkiness in
between those certainties.”
HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE This was the first New York revival of Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the complex relationship between a pedophile and the niece he abuses since its original 1997 production. Kate Whoriskey’s rendering of it showed how truly powerful a work it is and, as I said in my review, confirms its status as a masterpiece that deserves a place on the Mount Rushmore of great American plays.
THE LADY FROM DUBUQUE
Director David Esbjornson’s elegant production didn’t just revive Edward Albee’s 1980
meditation on dying, it revised the general consensus about the play. As I
wrote after seeing it, “It took me days to sort out my
thoughts and feelings about The Lady From Dubuque but I think I can now sum it
up in a word: gratitude.”
SLOWGIRL The mismatched pair in Greg Pierce’s two-hander are an
uncle and a niece, both harboring secrets. The performances were nuanced, Anne Kauffman's
direction masterly, the set lovely, the lighting and sound almost poetically apt. As I said in June, “Slowgirl may
not be a great work but it is a deeply satisfying one and as welcomed as the
first breeze of summer.”
TRIBES On the surface, British playwright Nina Raine’s drama is about a young deaf man, torn between the family that loves but patronizes him and the deaf community which embraces but isolates him from the wider world. But under David Cromer’s inventive direction, it was also a sensitive look at the ways in which we all define ourselves, align ourselves and choose our own tribes. Nearly everyone who saw this production loved it and appropriately so because it was, as I wrote back then, “a tribe to which anyone who loves smart theater should want to belong.”
UNCLE VANYA Two productions of Chekhov’s tragic comedy about unrequited love played in the city last summer. One came from the Sydney Theatre Company and starred Cate Blanchett. But I actually preferred the Soho Rep’s version, which was adapted by playwright Annie Baker, directed by the ubiquitous Sam Gold and starred a trove of terrific stage actors lead by Reed Birney in the title role. Like Cock, Soho’s Vanya opted for a no-frills approach (including the uncomfortable seating) but it cut to the bone for me. As I said in my review, “I was not only riveted by it, but moved as well.”
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? There may be no greater thrill for a theater lover than to
see an old classic given a fresh, and yet, still apt interpretation. Director
Pam McKinnon and a brilliant cast have shifted the power balance in
Edward Albee’s masterwork about unhappy marriages from the wife Martha to the
husband George and, as I wrote after seeing it, “found new ways to
unleash its devastating pain” while still making it clearer than ever what binds the couple together.
But wait there’s more. Click the orange button below to hear my theatergoing buddy Bill and me discuss some of our favorite performances from last year:
People began posting 10 best lists so early that I
don’t know how they even managed to see—let alone rate—all the shows that
opened in November and December (click here for a handy round-up of some of the lists collected by my friend Howard Sherman). But I didn’t get the early bird memo and so I’m starting this new year off with my top 10.
Of course, the best thing about any of these lists—including this one—isn’t that they tell you what was worth seeing and worth skipping last year but that they help you figure out how much you want to rely on the recommendations of the person who made the list when you’re deciding what to see in this new year.
Because what these lists—we should call them 10 favorites rather than 10 bests—really reflect are the current interests and tastes of the person making them. As regular readers know, I'm usually interested in shows that deal with big political issues and I have a soft spot for ones that use highly theatrical stagecraft but, as you’ll see, what got to me in 2012 were intimate dramas, simply staged, that made me really think about the ways in which we struggle to connect with one another. Here, in alphabetical order, are the 10 shows that most connected with me:
AdA The acronym stands for Author directing
Author and playwrights Marco Calvani and Neil LaBute collaborated on two poignant and exquisitely acted
ruminations on the lengths to which people will go to avoid loneliness. As I
said in my review, “the memory of these engagingly enigmatic plays will linger
with me for a longtime to come.” And so they have.
THE BIG MEAL Using a series of landmark meals, from first dates to funeral receptions, playwright Dan LeFranc and director Sam Gold chronicled a couple’s life over six decades. To quote from my review of that one, “it’s packed with lots of laughs and some tear-inducing moments as well. I dare anyone to see it without identifying with the joys and disappointments of at least one of those meals.”
COCK British playwright Mike Bartlett used the metaphor of a sporting event for his drama about a gay man torn between his male lover and a woman for whom he unexpectedly falls. He and director James Macdonald also stripped away the usual theatrical conventions—sets, props, even comfortable seating—leaving only the text, four sensational actors and, as that review said, “the essence of theater in its most elemental form.”
DISGRACED Many
plays that deal with race dance around the subject but Ayad Akhtar went straight at
it in this bracing look at an assimilated Muslim attorney and his white wife in
post-9/11 America. As I said in my review, the play, under Kimberley
Senior’s acute direction, sidesteps the usual stereotypes and instead shows
people who “are like most human beings, sometimes arrogant when they're right,
defensive when they're not but most often stumbling through the murkiness in
between those certainties.”
HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE This was the first New York revival of Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the complex relationship between a pedophile and the niece he abuses since its original 1997 production. Kate Whoriskey’s rendering of it showed how truly powerful a work it is and, as I said in my review, confirms its status as a masterpiece that deserves a place on the Mount Rushmore of great American plays.
THE LADY FROM DUBUQUE
Director David Esbjornson’s elegant production didn’t just revive Edward Albee’s 1980
meditation on dying, it revised the general consensus about the play. As I
wrote after seeing it, “It took me days to sort out my
thoughts and feelings about The Lady From Dubuque but I think I can now sum it
up in a word: gratitude.”
SLOWGIRL The mismatched pair in Greg Pierce’s two-hander are an
uncle and a niece, both harboring secrets. The performances were nuanced, Anne Kauffman's
direction masterly, the set lovely, the lighting and sound almost poetically apt. As I said in June, “Slowgirl may
not be a great work but it is a deeply satisfying one and as welcomed as the
first breeze of summer.”
TRIBES On the surface, British playwright Nina Raine’s drama is about a young deaf man, torn between the family that loves but patronizes him and the deaf community which embraces but isolates him from the wider world. But under David Cromer’s inventive direction, it was also a sensitive look at the ways in which we all define ourselves, align ourselves and choose our own tribes. Nearly everyone who saw this production loved it and appropriately so because it was, as I wrote back then, “a tribe to which anyone who loves smart theater should want to belong.”
UNCLE VANYA Two productions of Chekhov’s tragic comedy about unrequited love played in the city last summer. One came from the Sydney Theatre Company and starred Cate Blanchett. But I actually preferred the Soho Rep’s version, which was adapted by playwright Annie Baker, directed by the ubiquitous Sam Gold and starred a trove of terrific stage actors lead by Reed Birney in the title role. Like Cock, Soho’s Vanya opted for a no-frills approach (including the uncomfortable seating) but it cut to the bone for me. As I said in my review, “I was not only riveted by it, but moved as well.”
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? There may be no greater thrill for a theater lover than to
see an old classic given a fresh, and yet, still apt interpretation. Director
Pam McKinnon and a brilliant cast have shifted the power balance in
Edward Albee’s masterwork about unhappy marriages from the wife Martha to the
husband George and, as I wrote after seeing it, “found new ways to
unleash its devastating pain” while still making it clearer than ever what binds the couple together.
But wait there’s more. Click the orange button below to hear my theatergoing buddy Bill and me discuss some of our favorite performances from last year:
There's A New Spider In Town
To contact us Click HERE
T.V. Carpio’s first official performance as “Arachne” in SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Dark is one she will likely remember for the rest of her life. She emerged from the stage door a star, with a giant bouquet of roses in hand, to meet a crush of news crews and photographers. Everyone wanted to know what it felt like to land the role and if she had any trepidation in taking it on. The bouquet was from co-star Reeve Carney. It turns out T.V. goes way back with Reeve and his super-guitarist brother Zane Carney.
Onstage her character uses her powers of illusion to wreak global havoc, but off stage she is humble and demure. Earlier in the day, she told George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America,” “I have a great want to step into some big shoes and do the best I can do to service this piece.”
Onstage her character uses her powers of illusion to wreak global havoc, but off stage she is humble and demure. Earlier in the day, she told George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America,” “I have a great want to step into some big shoes and do the best I can do to service this piece.”
1 Ocak 2013 Salı
Why the "Les Miz" Movie Makes Me Happy
To contact us Click HERE
It’s no surprise that film critics are pooh-poohing the new movie version of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s pop opera Les Misérables. Just as it’s no surprise that people are flocking to see it (the movie took in $18 million when it opened on Christmas Day, beating out Tom Cruise, Quentin Tarantino and the elves and wizards of “The Hobbit”). And perhaps it’s no surprise to regular readers to hear that I’m with the people on this one.
But the latter is a bit of a surprise to me. Although it ran for 16 years on Broadway, has been performed in 43 countries and seen by some 60 million people, Les Miz, as it’s come to be known, is not my favorite musical. Just between you and me, I fell asleep when I saw the original production back in the ‘80s.
I did do better when my theatergoing buddy Bill persuaded me to see the 2006 revival. But the storyline still confused me—which revolution is the show about? Which pining soprano is the female lead? Which cute kid was featured in the iconic poster?
Still, I was a fan of the Victor Hugo novel, which I read in 8th grade and soul locked with in the way that you can only do with a book when you are 13 years old. Hugo’s story, whose central characters are a man imprisoned for stealing bread to feed his family and a woman forced into prostitution to support her child, is a combination of agitprop and melodrama that aims directly at middlebrows like me.
Some highbrow critics called the book sentimental when it first came out in 1862 but it was an instant bestseller across the European continent and in America too. And its popularity with the masses has never waned. Wikipedia lists some 60 movie versions, including one in 1897 by the film pioneering Lumière bothers. And the more reliable IMDB lists at least two dozen adaptations.
The Hugo novel is nearly 1,500 pages long in the Signet paperback edition and so something has always been lost in its stage and screen translations but the tale has never been clearer to me than in this new film version, directed by Tom Hooper, who gobbled up nearly all the Oscars two years ago for "The King’s Speech" and is clearly unafraid of earnest sentiment (click here to read a story on the making of the movie).
Hooper lets the viewer know from the very first scene that this movie is a musical. Indeed, most of it is sung threw, just as the stage version was.
Much is being made of his decision to film the singing live on the set and add the full orchestrations later in the mixing (the sound guys are probably shoo-ins for Oscars). But guess what? It works. Singing has become the language of the film, as natural and emotional as spoken dialog (click here for a piece on how they got the actors up to vocal speed).
The songs—“I Dreamed A Dream,” “Who Am I,” “Do You Hear the People Sing,” “One Day More,” “On My Own,” “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables,” “Bring Him Home”—are, of course, familiar and they’re still stirring. Loud sniffles and muffled sobs could be heard throughout the movie theater.
Hooper’s also cast the film with the kind of big names who draw big audiences. Hugh Jackman, plays Jean Valjean, the righteous thief who redeems himself but is pursued over two decades by the relentless Inspector Javert, played by a somewhat shaky Russell Crowe. Although he occasionally moonlights as the lead singer in his own rock band, Crowe seems ill at ease in his numbers and lacks the chops to deliver them.
On the other hand, Jackman, who’s done award-winning work in musicals in both London and New York, sounds great and looks great too. I’m not the fan girl that my friends over at the Craptacular are but, OMG, he’s a gorgeous man.
The rest of the something-for-everyone cast includes the ever-versatile Anne Hathaway, affecting (and already an Oscar frontrunner) as the prostitute Fantine; TV’s Amanda Seyfried, spot-on as Valjean’s ward Cosette; Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter bringing comic relief as the ludicrously larcenous inkeepers the Thénardiers; and the dreamy matinee idols Eddie Redmayne and Aaron Tveit as leaders of the student revolutionaries who set off the story’s climax (click here to read the Craptacular interview with Tveit).
Plus, there’s even a cameo by Colm Wilkinson, the original stage musical's Jean Valjean, now playing the priest who puts the thief on the right path to redemption.
They’re all good.
The movie itself is still more a series of tableaux than a continuous narrative. And the background scenery is awful. It’s muddy in that way that bad CGI is when it’s trying to mask its mistakes.
But none of this matters.
The audience at my Upper West Side movie house was largely rapt, although a few people did sneak out before the 2 hour and 43 minutes film ended. Among them was one mother who hurried her tiny daughter up the aisle as a desperate Fantine was about to give up her final bit of honor.
So, let the critics carp. There is a resonant connection between the poor and oppressed in 19th century France and those of us in the 21st century who are about to be poorer and more oppressed as our financial and political leaders keep leading us over fiscal cliffs.
And if we in the 99% want to shed a few tears and grab hold of a little uplift (both of which "Les Misérables" unabashedly provides) that’s absolutely fine with me.
It’s no surprise that film critics are pooh-poohing the new movie version of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s pop opera Les Misérables. Just as it’s no surprise that people are flocking to see it (the movie took in $18 million when it opened on Christmas Day, beating out Tom Cruise, Quentin Tarantino and the elves and wizards of “The Hobbit”). And perhaps it’s no surprise to regular readers to hear that I’m with the people on this one.
But the latter is a bit of a surprise to me. Although it ran for 16 years on Broadway, has been performed in 43 countries and seen by some 60 million people, Les Miz, as it’s come to be known, is not my favorite musical. Just between you and me, I fell asleep when I saw the original production back in the ‘80s.
I did do better when my theatergoing buddy Bill persuaded me to see the 2006 revival. But the storyline still confused me—which revolution is the show about? Which pining soprano is the female lead? Which cute kid was featured in the iconic poster?
Still, I was a fan of the Victor Hugo novel, which I read in 8th grade and soul locked with in the way that you can only do with a book when you are 13 years old. Hugo’s story, whose central characters are a man imprisoned for stealing bread to feed his family and a woman forced into prostitution to support her child, is a combination of agitprop and melodrama that aims directly at middlebrows like me.
Some highbrow critics called the book sentimental when it first came out in 1862 but it was an instant bestseller across the European continent and in America too. And its popularity with the masses has never waned. Wikipedia lists some 60 movie versions, including one in 1897 by the film pioneering Lumière bothers. And the more reliable IMDB lists at least two dozen adaptations.
The Hugo novel is nearly 1,500 pages long in the Signet paperback edition and so something has always been lost in its stage and screen translations but the tale has never been clearer to me than in this new film version, directed by Tom Hooper, who gobbled up nearly all the Oscars two years ago for "The King’s Speech" and is clearly unafraid of earnest sentiment (click here to read a story on the making of the movie).
Hooper lets the viewer know from the very first scene that this movie is a musical. Indeed, most of it is sung threw, just as the stage version was.
Much is being made of his decision to film the singing live on the set and add the full orchestrations later in the mixing (the sound guys are probably shoo-ins for Oscars). But guess what? It works. Singing has become the language of the film, as natural and emotional as spoken dialog (click here for a piece on how they got the actors up to vocal speed).
The songs—“I Dreamed A Dream,” “Who Am I,” “Do You Hear the People Sing,” “One Day More,” “On My Own,” “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables,” “Bring Him Home”—are, of course, familiar and they’re still stirring. Loud sniffles and muffled sobs could be heard throughout the movie theater.
Hooper’s also cast the film with the kind of big names who draw big audiences. Hugh Jackman, plays Jean Valjean, the righteous thief who redeems himself but is pursued over two decades by the relentless Inspector Javert, played by a somewhat shaky Russell Crowe. Although he occasionally moonlights as the lead singer in his own rock band, Crowe seems ill at ease in his numbers and lacks the chops to deliver them.
On the other hand, Jackman, who’s done award-winning work in musicals in both London and New York, sounds great and looks great too. I’m not the fan girl that my friends over at the Craptacular are but, OMG, he’s a gorgeous man.
The rest of the something-for-everyone cast includes the ever-versatile Anne Hathaway, affecting (and already an Oscar frontrunner) as the prostitute Fantine; TV’s Amanda Seyfried, spot-on as Valjean’s ward Cosette; Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter bringing comic relief as the ludicrously larcenous inkeepers the Thénardiers; and the dreamy matinee idols Eddie Redmayne and Aaron Tveit as leaders of the student revolutionaries who set off the story’s climax (click here to read the Craptacular interview with Tveit).
Plus, there’s even a cameo by Colm Wilkinson, the original stage musical's Jean Valjean, now playing the priest who puts the thief on the right path to redemption.
They’re all good.
The movie itself is still more a series of tableaux than a continuous narrative. And the background scenery is awful. It’s muddy in that way that bad CGI is when it’s trying to mask its mistakes.
But none of this matters.
The audience at my Upper West Side movie house was largely rapt, although a few people did sneak out before the 2 hour and 43 minutes film ended. Among them was one mother who hurried her tiny daughter up the aisle as a desperate Fantine was about to give up her final bit of honor.
So, let the critics carp. There is a resonant connection between the poor and oppressed in 19th century France and those of us in the 21st century who are about to be poorer and more oppressed as our financial and political leaders keep leading us over fiscal cliffs.
And if we in the 99% want to shed a few tears and grab hold of a little uplift (both of which "Les Misérables" unabashedly provides) that’s absolutely fine with me.
There's A New Spider In Town
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T.V. Carpio’s first official performance as “Arachne” in SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Dark is one she will likely remember for the rest of her life. She emerged from the stage door a star, with a giant bouquet of roses in hand, to meet a crush of news crews and photographers. Everyone wanted to know what it felt like to land the role and if she had any trepidation in taking it on. The bouquet was from co-star Reeve Carney. It turns out T.V. goes way back with Reeve and his super-guitarist brother Zane Carney.
Onstage her character uses her powers of illusion to wreak global havoc, but off stage she is humble and demure. Earlier in the day, she told George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America,” “I have a great want to step into some big shoes and do the best I can do to service this piece.”
Onstage her character uses her powers of illusion to wreak global havoc, but off stage she is humble and demure. Earlier in the day, she told George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America,” “I have a great want to step into some big shoes and do the best I can do to service this piece.”
Iowa Court stikes a blow to gender equality by ruling that employers can fire employees for being hot
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A dentist acted legally when he fired an assistant that he found attractive simply because he and his wife viewed the woman as a threat to their marriage, the all-male Iowa Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The court ruled 7-0 that bosses can fire employees they see as an "irresistible attraction," even if the employees have not engaged in flirtatious behavior or otherwise done anything wrong. Such firings may be unfair, but they are not unlawful discrimination under the Iowa Civil Rights Act because they are motivated by feelings and emotions, not gender, Justice Edward Mansfield wrote.
An attorney for Fort Dodge dentist James Knight said the decision, the first of its kind in Iowa, is a victory for family values because Knight fired Melissa Nelson in the interest of saving his marriage, not because she was a woman. But Nelson's attorney said Iowa's all-male high court, one of only a handful in the nation, failed to recognize the discrimination that women see routinely in the workplace.
Nelson, 32, worked for Knight for 10 years, and he considered her a stellar worker. But in the final months of her employment, he complained that her tight clothing was distracting, once telling her that if his pants were bulging that was a sign her clothes were too revealing, according to the opinion.
He also once allegedly remarked about her infrequent sex life by saying, "that's like having a Lamborghini in the garage and never driving it."
Knight and Nelson — both married with children — started exchanging text messages, mostly about personal matters, such as their families. Knight's wife, who also worked in the dental office, found out about the messages and demanded Nelson be fired. The Knights consulted with their pastor, who agreed that terminating Nelson was appropriate.
Knight fired Nelson and gave her one month's severance. He later told Nelson's husband that he worried he was getting too personally attached and feared he would eventually try to start an affair with her.
Nelson filed a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination, arguing she would not have been terminated if she was male. She did not allege sexual harassment because Knight's conduct may not have risen to that level and didn't particularly offend her, Fiedler said.
Knight argued Nelson was fired not because of her gender, but because her continued employment threatened his marriage. A district judge agreed, dismissing the case before trial, and the high court upheld that ruling.
source
A dentist acted legally when he fired an assistant that he found attractive simply because he and his wife viewed the woman as a threat to their marriage, the all-male Iowa Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The court ruled 7-0 that bosses can fire employees they see as an "irresistible attraction," even if the employees have not engaged in flirtatious behavior or otherwise done anything wrong. Such firings may be unfair, but they are not unlawful discrimination under the Iowa Civil Rights Act because they are motivated by feelings and emotions, not gender, Justice Edward Mansfield wrote.
An attorney for Fort Dodge dentist James Knight said the decision, the first of its kind in Iowa, is a victory for family values because Knight fired Melissa Nelson in the interest of saving his marriage, not because she was a woman. But Nelson's attorney said Iowa's all-male high court, one of only a handful in the nation, failed to recognize the discrimination that women see routinely in the workplace.
Nelson, 32, worked for Knight for 10 years, and he considered her a stellar worker. But in the final months of her employment, he complained that her tight clothing was distracting, once telling her that if his pants were bulging that was a sign her clothes were too revealing, according to the opinion.
He also once allegedly remarked about her infrequent sex life by saying, "that's like having a Lamborghini in the garage and never driving it."
Knight and Nelson — both married with children — started exchanging text messages, mostly about personal matters, such as their families. Knight's wife, who also worked in the dental office, found out about the messages and demanded Nelson be fired. The Knights consulted with their pastor, who agreed that terminating Nelson was appropriate.
Knight fired Nelson and gave her one month's severance. He later told Nelson's husband that he worried he was getting too personally attached and feared he would eventually try to start an affair with her.
Nelson filed a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination, arguing she would not have been terminated if she was male. She did not allege sexual harassment because Knight's conduct may not have risen to that level and didn't particularly offend her, Fiedler said.
Knight argued Nelson was fired not because of her gender, but because her continued employment threatened his marriage. A district judge agreed, dismissing the case before trial, and the high court upheld that ruling.
source
Worker formally reprimanded for excessive farting
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A US federal employee was formally reprimanded this month for excessive workplace flatulence, a sanction that was delivered to him in a five-page letter that actually included a log of representative dates and times when he was recorded “releasing the awful and unpleasant odour” in his Baltimore office. In a letter sent on Decenber 1oth accusing him of “conduct unbecoming a federal officer,” the Social Security Administration employee was informed that his “uncontrollable flatulence” had created an “intolerable” and “hostile” environment for coworkers, several of whom have lodged complaints with supervisors.The worker, a 38-year-old Maryland resident, reportedly submitted evidence that he suffered from “some medical conditions” that, at times, caused him to be unable to work full days. But a SSA manager noted in the reprimand letter that, “nothing that you have submitted has indicated that you would have uncontrollable flatulence. It is my belief that you can control this condition.”
According to the letter of reprimand which is the least severe administrative sanction that can be levied against a federal worker the man was first spoken to about his flatulence during a May 18 “performance discussion” with his supervisor. He was informed that fellow employees had complained about his flatulence, and that it was “the reason none of them were willing to assist you with your work.” Two months later, on July 17, a second SSA manager spoke with the man “in regards of your releasing of bodily gas in the module during work hours.” On August 14, a third administrator - a SSA “Deputy Division Director” - spoke with the worker about his “continuous releasing of your bodily gas and the terrible smell that comes with the gas.”
I'm sorry but this is totally understandable. If I had a co-worker who couldn't control his farting I would demand he be fired. I've told my wife that if she couldn't control it that would be grounds for divorce. I need a stink-free environment.
source
According to the letter of reprimand which is the least severe administrative sanction that can be levied against a federal worker the man was first spoken to about his flatulence during a May 18 “performance discussion” with his supervisor. He was informed that fellow employees had complained about his flatulence, and that it was “the reason none of them were willing to assist you with your work.” Two months later, on July 17, a second SSA manager spoke with the man “in regards of your releasing of bodily gas in the module during work hours.” On August 14, a third administrator - a SSA “Deputy Division Director” - spoke with the worker about his “continuous releasing of your bodily gas and the terrible smell that comes with the gas.”I'm sorry but this is totally understandable. If I had a co-worker who couldn't control his farting I would demand he be fired. I've told my wife that if she couldn't control it that would be grounds for divorce. I need a stink-free environment.
source
Lindsay Lohan does NOT do bar mitzvahs
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Bar Mitzvah boys, settle down– Lindsay Lohan will not be coming to your Jewish coming-of-age celebration, no matter how good at Torah reading yiu are.
Recently, a North Carolina booking company called 123 Talent sent out a mass email, telling clients the “Mean Girls” star would be available for bookings at small private parties, like weddings and bar mitzvahs.
Lindsay’s team of reps claim she never signed with the booking company, according to TMZ, and the actress is fuming people think her career has hit such rock bottom, she’d have to appear at a bar mitzvah (is that such a bad thing?)
Meanwhile, the CEO of 123 Talent insists they were in the works of signing with Lindsay, but her team ”decided to go in another direction” last minute.
Whatever, Lindsay. If you ever decide to change your mind, just letting you know that bar mitzvah receptions have open bars and lots of horny boys (oday they are only 13).
Bar Mitzvah boys, settle down– Lindsay Lohan will not be coming to your Jewish coming-of-age celebration, no matter how good at Torah reading yiu are.
Recently, a North Carolina booking company called 123 Talent sent out a mass email, telling clients the “Mean Girls” star would be available for bookings at small private parties, like weddings and bar mitzvahs.
Lindsay’s team of reps claim she never signed with the booking company, according to TMZ, and the actress is fuming people think her career has hit such rock bottom, she’d have to appear at a bar mitzvah (is that such a bad thing?)
Meanwhile, the CEO of 123 Talent insists they were in the works of signing with Lindsay, but her team ”decided to go in another direction” last minute.
Whatever, Lindsay. If you ever decide to change your mind, just letting you know that bar mitzvah receptions have open bars and lots of horny boys (oday they are only 13).
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