New York Theater News: Last of the year

The first half of the 2011-2012 Broadway season has ended, and it's been blah. Adding a little zing: the family melodrama Stick Fly and the intriguing revisal of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, with Jessie Mueller and Harry Connick, Jr.

Tonys time

My Twitter feed (look to the right) shows what I was feeling in the moment, but doesn't tell the whole story. Trying to avoid the chatters, who tend to trend catty, I thought the show made what it could from a fairly dry season; the star power came in handy, and winners Catherine Zeta-Jones and Scarlett Johansson threw off some heat. Alas, the evening's best moment, Marian Seldes' delightful "speechless" reaction to winning her lifetime achievement award, was relegated to the first hour; if you don't have NY1, which telecast it, you didn't see it, nor much of the design winners, which always irritates me. The musical numbers always come off as somewhat canned, particularly when the sound system is faltering, and solo performers like Zeta-Jones are better off performing their songs rather than acting them in a vacuum. (On the other hand, non-nominee Kristin Chenoweth was much sunnier and more relaxed here than onstage in Promises, Promises.) No one has ever solved what to do with the plays, twas ever thus. So, a New York "whatever," not bad, some nice moments (Douglas Hodge's La Cage vamp of a game Matthew Morrison and a Will Smith)--and hopes for a jazzier 09-10 season that gives the show more to work with. The Tony-winning Memphis is pictured.

Drama Desk winners announced

Two ties highlighted this year's awards, as Outstanding Play Revival and Outstanding Actress (Musical) deadlocked. Me? I was most happy to see Alex Timbers' book for Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson win, to see the Tony-ineligible Brighton Beach Memoirs get a bit of recognition, and that the ensemble cast of The Temperamentals had something to celebrate as the show closed. Can't argue with the rest, not doing cartwheels, either; it was that kind of season. The award-winning import Red, which struck gold, is pictured.

Shows: Frank, Tony, and the Boys

Come Fly Away with Sinatra, Lend Me a Tenor, and The Scottsboro Boys as I pick it up again after spring break. Tenor stars Justin Bartha and Tony Shalhoub approximate how I feel to be back after a week on the Florida coast.

Plays: I'm Walken here

The ghoulish comedian (which is pretty much what he is these days) returns to Broadway in Martin McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane, while other good ensemble casts lose their cool in the drama When the Rain Stops Falling and The Pride. (Praise, too, for the New Group revival of Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, which closed on Saturday. Shepard himself found the piece "rickety" but its fine cast, ably directed by Ethan Hawke, found some life in it. Interestingly, for a piece that deals with some painful themes, there was no "adult language" in it at all. The absence of profanity is more startling than its presence.)

New York Theater News: The Miracle Worker

The story of Annie Sullivan (played by Tony nominee Alison Pill) and Helen Keller (Little Miss Sunshine Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin) returns in a 50th anniversary season production, reviewed here.

Enemy returns

I'm always griping that the only Ibsen play revived in New York with any constancy is Hedda Gabler, with an occasional visit to A Doll's House. So I was happy to trek over to the West 30's to attend a Barrow Group Theatre Company production of Enemy of the People, which I only know from reading (I wrote a well-received paper about the playwright in high school) and an out-of-it Steve McQueen's curious 1978 film version, which I saw on cable and has resurfaced on DVD-R in the Warner Archive.

Very superficially, the play anticipates, of all things, Jaws. Except that here the menace isn't an outsized shark but the potential of slow death from chromium poisoning, which has been found in the hot baths that are a tourism moneymaker in the town where the production is set. Leading the crusade to shut down the baths for an overhaul is the town's physician--but the support he receives from his family and a socialist newspaper and other individuals erodes in the face of reasoned opposition from local business interests, not least his cagey father-in-law. Dr. Stockmann (Larry Mitchell) is shunned, and faces the scandal of being branded "an enemy of the people" as his damaging report is swept under the rug.

Seth Barrish and K. Lorrell Manning have freely adapted the play, beefing up the female roles and adding some sore-thumb colloquialisms ("ballistic!") to Ibsen's original. To a degree the overhauling, making the piece "meaningful" for our craven-to-business times, works, not that that aspect of it needed a push. The modest staging is however somewhat logy, and the acting uneven. (The "bad guys" have the edge, performance-wise, over the good.) But my desire to see this play staged has been satisfied, and anyone needing an Ibsen fix is encouraged to seek it out, through March 8.

Live Design: Beginning of 10

Regrouping from my "End of 09" entry a whole month after the year and decade began...in the company of set designer John Lee Beatty and LD Peter Kaczorowski as they collaborate on two new plays, Time Stands Still with Laura Linney and Venus in Fur at Classic Stage Company, plus the revival of A View from the Bridge with Liev Schreiber and Broadway debutante Scarlett Johansson (pictured).

Top 10 Theater in 09

In alphabetical order:

The Cherry Orchard (Bridge Project/BAM)
The Cripple of Inishmaan
The Emperor Jones (at the Soho Playhouse through Jan. 31)
Finian's Rainbow (closing Jan. 17 at the St. James)
God of Carnage
The Late Christopher Bean
Mary Stuart
Next Fall (reopens on Broadway March 11)
Ruined
A Streetcar Named Desire (BAM, pictured)

Of note: The American Plan, Blithe Spirit, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Distracted, In the Next Room or the vibrator play (closing Jan.10 at the Lyceum), The Royal Family, Superior Donuts (closing Sunday at the Music Box), and the one-third of The Norman Conquests I was able to see.

Welcome mat: A Broadway hello to Catherine Zeta-Jones (A Little Night Music) and Daniel Craig (A Steady Rain). Good to see you again, Jude Law (Hamlet).

Flop house: Three of the worst shows I saw last year were at the American Airlines, which is enduring heavy turbulence: After Miss Julie, Hedda Gabler, and The Philanthropist. Further dishonorable mention to Killers and Other Family and Race.

The month in theater

From Live Design: Finian's Rainbow and Superior Donuts on Broadway, and The Age of Iron and Wolves at the Window Off. Pictured are Finian's stars Kate Baldwin and Cheyenne Jackson.

Bean Off Broadway

Unseen in New York since 1932, Sidney Howard's The Late Christopher Bean has been resurrected by TACT. A review for New York Theater News.

Live Design: Next Fall

Patrick Breen and Maddie Corman co-star in Geoffrey Naufft's Off Broadway hit, at Playwrights Horizons through Aug. 8.

Live Design: Twelfth Night in Central Park

Some enchanted evening, Shakespeare-style, as a feisty Anne Hathaway makes merry in the Delacorte production of Twelfth Night.

Phedre live

Emulating the Met and its popular operacasts, the UK's National Theatre has started NT Live, which kicks off here in the New York City area with live telecasts of Jean Racine's Phedre, as adapted by Ted Hughes and directed by Nicholas Hytner. Helen Mirren and Dominic Cooper (one of Hytner's History Boys, recently seen in Mamma Mia!) star. Sounds like something worth getting off the couch for.

From the PR:

"In the New York City area, screenings can be seen at Film Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Director’s Guild Theatre, Cinema Arts Centre, Fairfield University (CT), Monmouth University (NJ) & the Shakespeare Theatre Company (DC).

The broadcast will also be shown on screens across the United States including the Mann Theatre in Hollywood, the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and many more.

WHEN:
The launch of NT Live is Thursday, June 25.

Broadcasts in the New York City area include:
●The Director’s Guild Theatre – Thursday, June 25 at 7:30pm
●Monmouth University, NJ – Thursday, June 25 at 7pm
●Brooklyn Academy of Music – Thursday, July 9 at 7pm
●Film Society of Lincoln Center Walter Reade Theater – Monday, July 6 at 4pm and 8pm
●Fairfield University, CT – Saturday, July 11 at 2pm
●Shakespeare Theatre Company (DC) – Monday, June 29 & Monday, July 13 at 7:30pm
●Cinema Arts Centre (Long Island) – Friday, July 24 at 7:30pm

The press release says about Phedre (co-starring Margaret Tyzack): "Consumed by an uncontrollable passion for her young stepson and believing Theseus, her absent husband, to be dead, Phedre (Mirren) confesses her darkest desires and enters the world of nightmare. When Theseus returns, alive and well, Phedre, fearing exposure, accuses her stepson of rape. The result is carnage."

Coincidentally, I just saw Jules Dassin's 1962 take on the tale, a contemporized version featuring the toothsome Melina Mercouri and a miscast Anthony Perkins. An interesting try, prettily filmed in Greece, but this well-reviewed production should be more the thing.

Tonys for Billy(s)

By this time of the year theater watchers are prostrate with award-itis, but the Tonys get us to rally. Despite the best efforts of the sound and cameramen to sabotage the evening on TV the show looked pretty good from my sofa, which this year I was on and off running various errands during the show. (Life with children.) It had to be OK, given the utter predictability of the winners. Except maybe for the Next to Normal writers beating the Billy Elliot juggernaut (which included the showbizzy win for all three performers playing Billy, one of whom is pictured), everything was pretty much in lockstep with expectations. It was fun seeing Elton and Liza rock out with the cast of the Hair revival at the top of the show, and host Neil Patrick Harris cap it with a delightful 11 o'clock number. The one bit of excitement, a Normal/Billy tie for orchestrations, happened in the phantom zone where the design awards and best book of a musical were exiled.

The memories of Broadway 2008-2009 will have to last a little longer than usual this year; there are no summer openings for the first time in some time, so the 2009-2010 season doesn't kick off until October. The acclaimed West End revival of La Cage Aux Folles, from newly minted Tony Lifetime Achievement winner Jerry Herman, caused the only real stir of the evening (backstage) when Harvey Fierstein mentioned the possibility of a Broadway transfer, so (relatively) soon after the show's Tony- and Drama Desk-winning revival in the 2004-2005 season. If it's the best of times, look for it to be making the awards rounds next spring.

The annual Tonys torment

In a column that could have been written in the Clinton era, the New York Post's Michael Riedel gets exercised over a Tonys telecast (this Sunday) brimming with music but low on drama, with Best Play Revival and other categories booted. Twas ever thus; it used to be that the exiled designers at least got some exposure on PBS, but that hasn't been the case for at least a couple of seasons now. I'm not happy about it, but Blanche, you are in that chair. Perhaps the Obamas, who enjoyed the revival of Joe Turner's Come and Gone (pictured) last Saturday, could intervene--or maybe that part could be webcast?

The other part of this annual scourging is happening at All That Chat, where the sanctimony with which the nominations are treated gives way to bitterness over the unfairness of the telecast. Folks, that's showbiz: in exchange for a network berth, you get aging musical numbers stuffed down your throat, like the after-effects of gypsy curses from Drag Me to Hell. Maybe Ovation or a cable network could take it on, but that wouldn't please anyone without access--or, more to the point, the show producers looking to get some national exposure. Ratings-wise the Tonys don't do too bad for summer programming, but they aren't the Oscars, either. If the numbers were up maybe everyone could get the turn they deserve in the winner's circle. But, to quote from another movie, deserve's got nothing to do with it.

Rain of stars

I have no particular beef with movie and TV stars taking the Broadway stage. Julia Roberts, in Three Days of Rain, and Katie Holmes, in All My Sons, weren't exactly revelatory but they didn't disgrace themselves; there were far worse things about the Miller revival than Holmes' earnest but undistinguished acting. I'm used to big stars treading the boards to give "EBU" performances (they get that a lot in reviews, along with a certain amount of cred for trying it) and don't usually comment on the latest news of someone braving the stage. But when I read that Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig are teaming for a play this fall, color me impressed.

The drama in question, a two-hander by Keith Huff called A Steady Rain, has gotten good reviews on its home turf and has a clever website to boot. Jackman and Craig are an unlikely pair of Chicago cops but I didn't really see the former as Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz, and the latter as James Bond, and they have the chops to pull this off, too. I can only hope that new producer Barbara Broccoli, of the Bonds, won't mess it up, as she did with the ghastly musical of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (clips of which elicited groans from fellow viewers at my viewing last night of the excellent Sherman Brothers documentary, The Boys.) And if Jackman and Craig hit it off maybe Jackman, a Bond candidate, could be enticed to play a villain in an upcoming entry. That would be cool, too.

Drama Desk winners announced

A short and snappy ceremony resulted in big wins for Lynn Nottage's Ruined (pictured) and Billy Elliot the Musical at the 54th Drama Desk Awards, held last night. I've just come from the after party, held at the large and lovely Rouge Tomate bistro, where I met winners Geoffrey Rush (Exit the King), Pablo Schreiber (the off-Broadway reasons to be pretty), and Janet McTeer (Mary Stuart). The understandable absence of overseas-based winners like Shrek the Musical designer Tim Hatley was more than made up for by the present-and-accounted-for star wattage of winners Liza Minnelli and Angela Lansbury, whose award was presented by Jane Fonda. Besides Nottage's win for the gripping Ruined--one of seven Off or Off Off Broadway winners this year--I was especially gratified to see set designer David Korins take home a statuette. It couldn't happen to a better designer, or a nicer guy.

Live Design: End-of-season wrap-up

The most production-heavy Broadway season since 1984 has come to an end, and I look at no less than eight revivals herein, including John Glover, Bill Irwin, Nathan Lane and John Goodman in Waiting for Godot at Studio 54 (pictured). Lots of awards nominees are among them; I'll be at the Drama Desks on Sunday night, mingling with the bold and the beautiful.

Drama Desk nominations announced

Looks as if this year's nominators were working 9 to 5 (pictured) this awards season--the soon-to-open musical garnered 15 nominations, the most of any show in the 2008-2009 season, and a record haul. (Having been on the committee, I can assure you that they were working 9 to 5, and then some, to place the best of Broadway, Off Broadway, and Off Off Broadway into contention.)