The Happiest Medium » Tribes

Hurry! Hurry! Step Right Up to the Box Offices! Last Chance! A Lot of Shows Are About to Disappear; PBS Specials; On the Record – New Releases

Ellis Nassour — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 22:47:31 +0000

It’s that time of year loyal lovers of theater dread. Shows that have been struggling to make it, will be closing. The light at the end of the tunnel, as is always the case with Broadway, is that new, and some are quite exciting, shows will be taking their place.

The musical Ghost, based on the 1990 smash film, gave up the ghost Saturday [August 17]. The End of the Rainbow, with [whether you believe the arc of the play to be factual or fiction] a commanding performance by Tracie Bennett, heads out to tour soon [and will be adapted for the screen] and, as of Sunday, there’s no Judy, Judy, Judy on Broadway. On August 29, the curtain rings down on glitzy Sister Act.

Closing it’s limited engagement on September 1 is the New York Shakespeare Festival’s revival of Sondheim’s Into the Woods, playing Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre [free admission], and starring Oscar winner Amy Adams and Tony winner Donna Murphy.

September 2 we must say cheerio to one of this season best entertainments, One Man, Two Guvnors, starring 2012 Best Actor, the incomparable James Corden. It’s a laugh riot and should be at the top of your Must See list. Also closing the same day is this year’s Best Play, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, also a Pulitzer Prize honoree and Olivier Award winner.
The acclaimed 2012 Tony-winning revival of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess,starring Audra McDonald

Porgy and Bess (Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis | Photo by Michael J. Lutch)

[except August 21-23], Norm Lewis, and David Alan Grier, has posted September 23 for its final performance. Rumor has it heading to the big screen, directed by Spike Lee.

Off Broadway, you can catch the last performances of the popular farce, Potted Potter, which presents all seven Harry Potter books in 70 minutes.

Still holding strong Off Broadway is Nina Raine’s must-see family drama Tribes, one of the best plays of this or any recent season.

In previews or soon to open are the play Grace, co-starring Paul Rudd and Ed Asner; the musical Chaplin, based on the life of filmdom’s silent era king, the Tramp; one of Broadway’s biggest blockbusters, the Tony-winning Annie; Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Rupert Holmes’ Tony-winning The Mystery of Edwin Drood, based on Dickens’ incomplete last novel and co-starring legendary Broadway favorite Chita Rivera; and Chicago’s Steppenwolf’s revival of Edward Albee’s landmark play, the scorching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?

Also in the good news department, a brand new edition of Gerard Alessandrini’s wickedly funny send-up Forbidden Broadway, Alive and Kicking! has arrived.

PBS Specials

PBS regularly airs performances of the Metropolitan Opera and a variety of the best in classical and pop concerts. Coming up is a superb example of the former.

Verdi’s La Traviata gets a contemporary design that’s both off-putting and provocative on August 23 at 9 P.M. and August 26 at Noon in Willy Decker’s production that might not satisfy loyalists but breathes new breath into a classic. Celebrated French soprano Natalie Dessay delivers a staggering portrayal of Violetta. Matthew Polenzani is Alfredo, with acclaimed Russian bass Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s magnificent portrayal of Giorgio. The Met’s Fabio Luisi conducts.

Upcoming: Vienna Philharmonic Summer Night Concert, Great Performances, August 31, 9 P.M.; Paul McCartney, Live Kisses, September 7, 9 P.M.

On the Record

Tony winner and two-time Grammy nominee Betty Buckley’s new solo album, Ah, Men! The Boys of Broadway [Palmetto Records] features tunes from her acclaimed 2011 concert, “songs,” she says, “we gals never got to sing. It’s my take on some of the soaring melodies the men got to sing.” The 14 tracks include Irving Berlin’s “My Defenses Are Down,” Annie Get Your Gun; Bernstein/Sondheim’s “Maria,” West Side Story; Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady,” Guys and Dolls; and a suite from Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.

Raissa Katon Bennett, cabaret award winner and a later Christine in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Charles Hart’s Phantom of the Opera, has released Another Kind of Light [LML Records]. The 15 tracks include Broadway, pop, and jazz. Among the highlights is “Ordinary Miracles” by Marvin Hamlisch and Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Cole Porter’s “I Concentrate on You,” and the rarely-recorded “How Could I Not?” by Alan Menken and David Spencer from the musical adaptation of The
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Bennett performs songs from the album August 21-25 at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency. To book, click here.

Onstage Broadway And Off Broadway And Behind The Scenes At Clybourne Park

Ellis Nassour — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 01:23:37 +0000

There’s no shortage of star power on Broadway, but there are several shows/stars this season that really stand out: the amazing Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis in the Porgy and Bess revival, which also features stunning portrayals by David Alan Grier as Sporting Life and Phillip Boykin as Crown — all Tony-nominated; young English comic James Corden, giving a Tony-nominated performance that will have you falling out of your seat and rolling on the floors in One Man, Two Guvnors, is a welcome presence to the season. He works hard for his money but gets a lot of competition from his cast — especially the Tony-nominated and very nimble dodderer Tom Edden [as Alfie], a master of physical comedy.

Other superlative Tony-nominated performances have arrived via stage, film, and TV veteran John Lithgow as ’60s controversial political writer and powerbroker Joseph Alsop in The Columnist; stage, film, and TV veteran James Earl Jones as a former President of the United States in the revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.

There’s also Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, and Judith Light in Other Desert Cities; and newcomer, direct from her West End Olivier-winning performance, Tracie Bennett offering her amazing transformation into Judy Garland, drunken and pill-addled escapades, warts, and all, in End of the Rainbow [frankly, the play would be better if we saw more of Garland’s humor and heart instead of all her desperate foibles in her sad last days].

Not enough can be said of Matthew Broderick’s incredible performance in Nice Work If You Can Get It, which was shamefully not nominated [you have to wonder if the Tony nominators were asleep!]. Co-stars Tony-winners Michael McGrath and swinging Judy Kaye (a Tony winner for The Phantom of the Opera) are no slouches in the do-anything-for-laughs category and they do it so effortlessly and flawlessly.

Then, Off Broadway, in Tribes, there are memorable portrayals by Jeff Perry and Russell Harvard. Nina Raine’s Drama Desk winning Outstanding Play, gives dysfunctional families new definition. It’s directed by Drama Desk nominee David Cromer in a setting that surrounds audiences, presented by Barrow Street Theatre at Greenwich House, at 27 Barrow Street [at the corner of Seventh Avenue South, one block South of Christopher Street].

Tribes’s marvelous cast is comprised of Will Brill, Russell Harvard, Jeff Perry, Susan Pourfar, Gayle Rankin, and Mare Winningham. It focuses on Billy, a young deaf man raised in the confines of a idiosyncratic and politically incorrect family. Though he’s adapted to his hearing family’s unconventional ways, they’ve never returned the favor. It’s not until he meets Sylvia [Pourfar], who’s on the brink of deafness, that he finally stages a rebellion that tears the family further apart.

A 2012 Theatre World Award honoree for Outstanding Off-Broadway Debut Performance, Harvard is a real-life deaf actor. Pourfar receives the TWA 2012 Dorothy Loudon Award for Excellence in the Theater.

Behind-the-Scenes at Clybourne Park

Discovery Communications’ HowStuffWorks is presenting a special behind-the-scenes perk for theater lovers, especially those curious about “How’d they do that?” in stage productions. The all-new Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast entitled A Visit to Clybourne Park, can be viewed on www.HowStuffWorks.com and downloaded from iTunes.

Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-nominated Best Play, Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris world premiered Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2010 followed by a critically-acclaimed pre-Broadway engagement at Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum in L.A. The play also won an Olivier Best Play Award for its London production. It opened to ecstatic praise at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway with its original 2010 cast: Crystal A. Dickinson, Brendan Griffin, Damon Gupton, Christina Kirk, Annie Parisse, Jeremy Shamos and Frank Wood. Shamos is Tony nominated for Best Featured Performance (Play).

The podcast offers a rare glimpse into how Tony-nominated scenic designer Dan Ostling’s 1959 suburb living room transitions 50 years to 2009 during the 15 minute intermission. Act 1 introduces nervous community leaders who try to stop the sale of a home to a African-American family; Act 2 is set in the same house in 2009 as the now-predominantly African-American neighborhood battles to hold its ground in the face of gentrification.

www.HowStuffWorks.com features themed blog posts inspired by the play: This Old House, in which Tony-nominated director Pam MacKinnon discusses America’s history of racial bias as countless neighborhoods transitioned from white to black; The Hansberry Connection, which examines A Raisin in the Sun playwright Lorraine Hansberry and how the events of her personal life [as presented in that classic and landmark play] parallel those facing the characters in Clybourne Park; and Pure Drama, which delves into A Raisin in the Sun and its connection to the play.