by Karen Tortora-Lee on June 23, 2009
"The Office"--Cast of Richard Hymes-Esposito's THIS ISN'T PARADISE (Photo Credit: NuansArt.com)
This Isn’t Paradise is so much like Glengarry Glen Ross that it could have been written by David Mamet himself. That is … if David Mamet had fallen down a well and lost his memory. And his ability to write a play. And when he crawled out of the well all he found in his pocket was a wad of cocktail napkins with scribbles on them which said Follow up on that real estate story … Don’t forget all that trademark cursing … and the trademark misogyny. Then Mamet took all the cocktail napkins and gave them to the guy who wrote Gigli and said Here, finish this up for me.
Related Posts:
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:
Related Posts:
by Karen Tortora-Lee on June 13, 2009
… my mom grounded me for getting a speeding ticket … so I peed in her shampoo …
… I only make friends with ugly people …
… I am sleeping with 2 married men … I am a married man myself …
… I will die NEVER having been loved …
… I dread coming home to my daughter and husband every day …
Wow. Heavy stuff. Stuff I did not make up. Stuff that can be found on a confessional website where people unloaded their deepest secrets anonymously. Secrets that were then gather up, assembled, and made into Bigger than I, written collectively by Counting Squares Theatre, directed by Nick Sprysenski and currently playing at UNDER St. Marks.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Karen Tortora-Lee on June 3, 2009
I’m here to set the record straight. I’ve spent years thinking that Phylicia Rashad‘s career was based on giving life to characters that sprung forth from Bill Cosby‘s head, the straight (wo)man standing patiently by as William Henry Cosby, Jr. Ed.D. gave in to one of his patented Cosby-eque tirades. After all, she played his wife, lawyer Claire Huxtable, for eight seasons on The Cosby Show, then signed on for the gig again, playing Ruth Lucas on Cosby. She took Claire Huxtable on the road and over to A Different World to visit her “daughter” when ratings required her to do so, and she had no issue with voicing the mother of Little Bill, Cosby’s saccharine animation for the 3-and-under set. She’d even appeared in an episode of The Cosby Mysteries. (Ever hear of it? Me neither). Almost more stereotyped than Henry (who?) “The Fonz” (oh …) Winkler, she even Claire Huxtable’d her way through those Jenny Craig commercials. I know she’s had other roles, but her main body of work remained so uninteresting to me that I never bothered to catch her in A Raisin In The Sun or anything else, quite frankly. So it wasn’t really on my radar that she won a Tony … or even that she was up for one.
And then I spent a night at August:Osage County. Never, and I mean EVER, have I ever done anyone a greater disservice. Phylicia, if you’re out there, I apologize. I more than apologize, I owe you a steak dinner. I owe all the Huxtables (even you, Grown Up Rudy) a steak dinner. Because Phylicia Rashad, you left me ashamed at my small-mindedness, humbled by your skill and in awe of your complete transformation. You really ARE a great actress.
Related Posts:
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!
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Karen Tortora-Lee on May 18, 2009
Tommy ... Can You Hear Me?
I don’t think I took a breath for a full five minutes as I watched the first scene of The Gallery Player’s production of The Who’s Tommy (original book, music and lyrics by Pete Townshend). I’m not kidding, I literally sat there, stunned … amazed really, at what I was seeing, hearing … feeling. Between the orchestra booming out the amazing score, the lighting (designed by Chris Walsh) which convincingly transformed Michael Kramer’s set into a hatch through which men parachuted down to uncertainty, and the wonderful projection screens that held images of war, destruction, and carnage … well it was all I could do to blink. No doubt about it, Tommy starts with the velocity of a pinball released from the chute … and is the definition of breathtaking.
Thankfully, after an opening that large, the musical soon gently lands you back down in your seat where you’re able to breathe again, and take in the surroundings. For those who don’t know the story, it’s easy enough for me to quote one of Tommy’s most famous songs … That deaf, dumb, blind kid sure plays a mean pinball. But of course … there’s more.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Karen Tortora-Lee on May 12, 2009
They're Lying
So off I go to UNDER St. Marks to see No Tea Production’s new show, LIARS directed by Lindsey Moore, when on my way there I’m handed a lottery ticket by a man who’s slumped over a mail box. ”It’s … the winning … ticket ….,” he gasps to me, his arm outstretched, “… take it. I’m … I’m …” and with that he falls to the ground. ”What? He’s what?” I kick him a bit. ”What are you? Dying? Are you dying? Is that what you’re saying?” I turn to my husband, annoyed, with a WTF? look on my face, but he just shrugs. So I take the lottery ticket, cash it in, and find it’s worth a million bucks. Then I hire some scrub to write this review for me while I pack for my cruise around the world. Bon Voyage!
Of course, I’m lying. But you already knew that … just like the audience of LIARS … the laughs are built in when you know that everything that comes out of anyone’s mouth is NOT the truth.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
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.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Karen Tortora-Lee on April 28, 2009
Take The Oath
Take a preacher looking for a flock, a flock looking for a preacher, one “Good” sister, one “Bad” sister, a snooty churchwoman trying to bring down a house of cards and a housekeeper who’d give Alice a run for her money, set it all in the dry, hot Dust Bowl of Depression-Era Florida and you’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of Jacqueline Goldfinger’s magnificent The Oath, directed by Cristina Alicea and currently running at The Arclight Theater till May 10th.
Before the play even starts, sound designer Martha Goode and scenic designer Blair Mielnik do an amazing job of settling you into the time period as well as the underlying good ole Christian spirit by playing songs like I’ll Fly Away while you get to study the beautifully detailed and marvelously evocative set design which gets it perfect, right down to the old icebox and wooden framed forced perspective hallway.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Karen Tortora-Lee on April 22, 2009
Strange Bedfellows (photo by Moira Stone)
After interviewing Dorothy Fortenberry and Josh Conkel last week about Caitlin and the Swan I was ready for anything. A shocking comedy, a satirical poke at the female-friendship meme, a sly wink that came with a taboo nod, or perhaps even a mish-mash of Animal Farm, The Seagull, and Babe, Pig in the City. What I wasn’t ready for was characters presented as a smart group of women, who were more Mary, Rhoda and Phyllis than Miranda, Carry and Samantha. Gosh, can we all just admit that women have been gathering around bottles of wine and comparing things long before Sex and The City made bitching about men over cosmo/apple/flirt/tinis fashionable? Since the dawn of the cork screw chicks have been meeting to compare their lives against each others, their own lives against what they’d envision, and most of all … to compare how far each gal is willing to go in the quest to have the perfect relationship.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
