For those of us of a certain age, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella is a nostalgia trip. The memory of this musical, a television landmark in the ‘50’s lingers as a singular pleasure. My fear in bringing young people, Noah (8) and Hannah (6), to a recent matinee was my losing composure and singing loudly along to “Impossible,” “In My Own Little Corner,” “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?” Another concern: would it be as good for them as it was for me? To date, critics and awarders seem in thrall. Even though this is a Broadway debut, the musical has 9 Tony nominations as well as nods for other major awards, as a musical revival.
If this were Dutch Masters instead of American Masters, I’d have a box of cigars, gripes Mel Brooks about the enterprise of including a documentary about him in the prestigious PBS series. On Wednesday night, an audience at the 92 Street Y got a sneak preview of the show, Mel Brooks: Make a Noise, that will air Monday night. The evening also included a conversation with director Robert Trachtenberg, The View co-host and comedian Joy Behar, and director Susan Stroman. The image of Mel Brooks hovered above them, a huge presence on Skype, echoing a moment in the film when Gene Wilder is asked whether it registered as important when he met Mel Brooks: Does Moses think it’s important when God speaks to him?
The sight of two men in giant clown shoes and oversized pants shuffling on a commuter platform lingers in the mind. From the Signature Theater’s production of Old Hats, winner of this year’s “Outstanding Alternative Theatrical Experience” Award at last week’s Lucille Lortel Awards, the skit, featuring Bill Irwin and David Shiner evokes Chaplin’s little tramp and a history of slapstick. Unlike the Tony Awards, which are presented interspersed with acts from Broadway shows too, the Lucille Lortel Awards, a night of honors and entertainment from over 100 plays off-Broadway, takes much of its fun from the fact that the show would not be televised.
The news that The Testament of Mary would close on Sunday hung in the air for Friday evening’s performance, more prominently than any of the play’s props, including a dead tree. At the prologue, the audience comes to the stage circling Mary as blessed icon, robed in blue. How she became that exalted figure is what this play’s about. To be sure, sharing the stage with a vulture may be genius, but not a good sign for a long life.
One of super agent Sue Mengers’ many rules for dealing with divas is never remind them of the beginning when you are walking them down the red carpet on the way to the Oscars. For example, do not say to Diana Ross, we are a far cry from when you were giving Berry Gordy blowjobs in the back seat of a limo. Taking that cue, it would be just wrong to remind the Divine Miss M of her work at the Continental Baths backed by the Harlettes before her Broadway revue, Clams on the Halfshell. Then again, she was so fabulous back in the day, and incarnating Sue Mengers, in I'll Eat You Last, a show that does not even touch her mega singing chops, she’s fabulous now.
In North Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, two young men live in a rundown house, Phillip, an agile shut-in, and Treat, a menacing low level thief, in Lyle Kessler’sOrphans at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. The play’s first time on Broadway, it will be interesting to see how the Tony Award committee will categorize this testosterone-ridden three-hander, as this fine production is sure to contend for top prizes. The third character, a Chicago businessman, Harold, enters the ménage: at first a willing caller wanting another drink, he becomes a kidnap victim when Treat smells the opportunity for quick cash. Soon a power shift: The rope bound Harold, with a nod to Houdini, frees himself and takes on a parental role.
Here is a musical on Broadway with a philosophy a girl can love: Kinky Boots starts with a rousing tribute “The Most Beautiful Thing,” to shoes. On a pedestal sit a pair of red patent leather pumps to die for. Fetish, to be sure—“Sex is in the Heel”, Kinky Boots, at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, is comprised of music by rocker Cyndi Lauper with book by Harvey Fierstein based on a charming and memorable British film of the same title, Kinky Boots is also a feel good extravaganza of leggy drag queens and divas including two major talents, Stark Sands and Billy Porter, who as Charlie Price and be-sequined performer Lola, dare to ask the quintessential Fierstein question: what is a man? (This may not be simply a matter of footwear.)
Tom Hanks sporting ‘80’s-ish facial hair was explaining the difference between his naturally grown mustache and that of the character he portrays in his Broadway debut Lucky Guy, the play by the late Nora Ephron based on the life of Mike McAlary. His went out in tough bristles, Hanks gesticulated madly bringing his hands under his nose where a tight, well clipped fringe sat by contrast. A gaggle of interviewers laughed.
The mood at the Broadhurst Theater and at Gotham Hall for Lucky Guy’s opening night on Monday was bittersweet exuberance: with the tearful final moment of the play, when Hanks, as McAlary after a near death accident and sick with the cancer that killed him, delivers a weighty speech and a portrait of Nora Ephron hangs over the stage. Hanks was not the only one crying.
Truman Capote’s glory days as a celebrated writer were revisited at the opening of Richard Greenberg’s, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, on Wednesday night at the Cort Theater, and a black & white ball—eh bash at the Edison Ballroom. The play starts with a narrator called Fred reminiscing about a New York brownstone where he once lived, and a particularly spectacular neighbor, Holly Golightly with whom he partied and took baths. The tall and lanky, handsome “Fred” (Cory Michael Smith) may be the epitome of everything that the “bulldog” Capote was not, but the self-invented Holly (Emilia Clarke), one of his greatest creations, hews close to the author’s bone.
Whenever I am blue, I can snap out of it conjuring Sigourney Weaver’s image as Snow White. That was the take away when I saw Christopher Durang’s Chekhovian mash up, Masha, Sonia, Vanya and Spike at Lincoln Center in December. Now the enterprise has moved to Broadway, its Sturm und Drang at a Bucks County country house on a pond successfully transported to The Golden Theater. Act I is a sendup of Chekhovian tropes with prescient views on real estate and familiar philosophical exclamations like “I’m in mourning for my life!” In Durang’s whimsical mix master, as directed by Nicholas Martin, the tragic—and neurotic-- circumstance of everyday life turns to high hilarity.
