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by Antonio Miniño on February 24, 2010
The Ohio Theatre, a pillar of New York’s downtown theatre scene for 29 years, will close on August 31, 2010. The new landlord has issued official notice and no further negotiations are scheduled.
Located at 66 Wooster Street, The Ohio Theatre was one of Soho’s pioneering performance spaces and is now one of the last remaining. The not-for-profit theatre company Soho Think Tank runs the space under the direction of Artistic Director Robert Lyons. Lyons says, “It’s where Tony Kushner produced his first play out of college, where Philip Seymour Hoffman made his professional acting debut, where Eve Ensler performed Dicks in the Desert, a decade before writing The Vagina Monologues. The Ohio Theatre has been an incubator and platform for New York’s most exciting and innovative theatre artists for almost 30 years. Its closing emphatically punctuates the end of an era in Soho, and stands as a high profile casualty in the relentless decimation of the lower Manhattan theatre landscape.”
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by Diánna Martin on February 12, 2010
Kristen Vaughan as Zelda and Montgomery Sutton as Edouard
When Clothes for a Summer Hotel premiered in New York City in 1980, the world wasn’t quite able to wrap their mind around the play. It closed after 15 performances and was Tennessee Williams’ last Broadway production. With a myriad of plays that changed the face of modern theatre across the world, winning everything from a Pulitzer Prize (twice) to a Tony Award, one would think the man would have been given a little artistic license. Alas, no. People were not ready for this “Ghost Play”; and the fact that it’s been re-mounted in New York City only one other time since its original opening is a testament to the stigma surrounding it. It’s a play that is very tricky to pull off properly, and I’m still not sure if White Horse Theatre Company was able to do that.
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by Diánna Martin on October 30, 2009
Next Year In Jerusalem - Elyse Mirto and Jake Robards
Halloween is a fun time to dress up and party, but this year I am doing something WAY cooler: I’m doing what I adore, which is seeing theatre. And what makes this so special is that I am catching the final performance of Next Year In Jersusalem by award-winning playwright Dana Leslie Goldstein.
One of the things that makes me super happy about it? It’s starring Elyse Mirto, who won the award for 2009 Outstanding Actress in a Lead Role at the New York Innovative Theatre Awards this year for her role in Any Day Now (and it was one of my favorite shows of the year – I loved her performance), and deals with how a family’s heritage and one man’s life’s struggles for a better future for his daughters can sometimes be so difficult emotionally for everyone.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on June 15, 2009
In Memorium
This was supposed to be a review for reasons to be pretty (written by Neil LaBute, directed by Terry Kinney, starring Thomas Sadoski, Marin Ireland, Steven Pasquale and Piper Perabo). A very late review, no doubt, but not every reviewer has the luxury of seeing a Broadway show while it’s still in previews. Sometimes a reviewer needs to wait until someone wins an extra pair of tickets and graciously passes them along to her … which is how I came by my tickets. So, if you’re looking for a review I’m going to direct you to a terrific review of reasons to be pretty by David Stallings of The Fab Marquee. If you’re looking for my reasons why good shows can’t survive on The Great White Way these days, then please keep reading …
It all started last week when I got this call:
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on May 27, 2009
The other day a friend of mine went to see Sessions. I asked her how she liked it and she said, “I didn’t expect it to be so heavy. I guess when I saw “musical” I expected “light”. Huh.
Comedy Tonight!
As a life long devotee to Sondheim, who’s every musical (even the deceptively named Follies) is filled with some combination of longing, regret, despair, confusion, anger, revenge, lethargy, emptiness, callousness, greed, murder, mental illness, and scorn, the last thing I tend to expect from a musical is “light”. Even the first song from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (“Comedy Tonight”) takes the time to tell you what you will NOT see: NO ROYAL CURSE, // NO TROJAN HORSE, // AND A HAPPY ENDING, OF COURSE! // GOODNESS AND BADNESS, // MAN IN HIS MADNESS, // THIS TIME IT ALL TURNS OUT ALL RIGHT! // TRAGEDY TOMORROW! // COMEDY TONIGHT! as if to caution “If you’ve come here for the typical Sondheim fare you’ll be disappointed by all the jubilation!” Of course Sondheim is brilliant in any mood, so there’ no fear of disappointment, it’s just rarely does a musical start off with the disclaimer WARNING … HAPPY ENDING AHEAD!
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on May 7, 2009
Bea Arthur as Vera Charles (with Lucille Ball as Mame)
My first encounter with Bea Arthur wasn’t in her role as Dorothy Zbornak on Golden Girls, or even as Maude Findlay in Maude. I was first introduced to Bea Arthur’s disembodied baritone as it came seeping through my bedroom floor boards.
Picture it – Brooklyn, early seventies. A young six year old is trying to get her beauty sleep, but in vain. A lot is going on when you’re six years old; you’re in first grade, making new friends, learning how to raise your hand before speaking, and getting the rules of Red Light Green Light One Two Three down pat so as to not end up shunned by the kids who had older siblings and already knew all the tricks of winning. It’s a very impressionable time. It’s also the time in my life when my father decided to renovate the basement and spent many a late night hammering, spackling and painting till well after my bedtime. He’d cleverly housed the stereo speakers in the ceiling and one speaker happened to be directly under my bed.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on April 8, 2009
I can not, as a proud adult woman, BEAR to pick up the phone and say to ANYONE “Hello, may I purchase 2 tickets to Kooza, please?” It’s just so … undignified.
But say Stephen got them for me, because he has no trouble saying any word in any language, be it real, made up, or an amalgam of the two (which Cirque would have us believe is how they get all their names of their shows). But then one night Sally calls and asks me if I’ve got any plans this week …
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on August 25, 2008
Years ago I got the Gregory McGuire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and it immediately became one of my top favorites of all time. I’m a big fan of stories that tell the other side of the story (see: Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead). Moral of Wicked: Don’t always believe the first story you hear, even if that story is coming from a poor little Kansas farm girl who got picked up off her fence post by a tornado and was deposited, worlds away, into a strange place where 1) citizens are diminutive and members of something called the Lollipop Guild, 2) the welcome committee is comprised of one women who arrives onto the scene via Floating Giant Bubble, 3) there’s only one road you can follow to get out of the place, and 4) everything that’s gone wrong is the fault of some wicked green witch who likes to transform people into tin and straw for kicks when she’s not commanding a fleet of flying monkeys.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on August 3, 2008
When I was a little girl I was shocked to discover that you could check records out of the library just like you checked out books. It almost seemed like stealing … stealing with your EARS.
Since my dad’s collection of records was extensive but sadly lacking a few staples I immediately headed over to the Broadway section to see what they had. And there I found a treasure of shows I’d never even HEARD of before, all for the temporary taking. I was like a kid in a candy store. But more like just a kid. You know … in a library.
The first record I ever checked out was Damn Yankees. I renewed it over and over again, sure that I was begrudging some other fan of their dose of Lola and Shoeless Joe but to hell with that! Of course, looking back, I bet I was probably the last person to check the record out, but if not, I can safely say I was probably the last 12 year old.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on January 27, 2008
Seriously? Where the hell is she?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking as a fan. I’m not saying “The world needs more Sarah Brightman so, DAMN IT! I want to see her represented more in mainstream pop culture!”
I’m also not asking where she’s gone on her travels as of late.
And I’m not asking where she’s gone spiritually.
No, I’m asking where pie-faced, mooney eyed, matronly little chunk of a Brit, Sarah Brightman has gone. This Sheryl Crowbot in her place that writhes in come-hither fashion and even manages to sex up the Ave Maria is NOT the Sarah Brightman I’ve known and (not) loved for the past 20 years.
See for yourself.
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