Olivia Newton-John Visits Off-Broadway's Manipulation

from: TheaterMania.com

Grammy Award-winner Olivia Newton-John attended a preview performance of the Off-Broadway production of Victoria E. Calderon's Manipulation at the Cherry Lane Theater on Friday, June 24. The show officially opens on June 28.

The production is helmed by Will Pomerantz, with the cast including Brendan McMahon, Saundra Santiago, Marina Squerciati, Jeremy Stiles Holm, Robert Bogue, Rafi Silver, Gabriel Furman and John-Patrick Driscoll.

The play centers on a woman coping with her husband's flagrant infidelities, her mother's suggestions that she have an affair herself, and her psychoanalyst's self-serving advice.

The production features scenic design by Bill Stabile, lighting design by Kirk Bookman, costume design by Alejo Vietti, sound design by Jeremy Lee, technical supervision by Jay Janicki, and fight direction by Rick Sordelet.

For tickets and more information, Click Here

"4000 Miles" by Amy Herzog

from: TheaterMania

In her heartfelt if not always involving new work, 4000 Miles, now being presented by LCT3 at the Duke on 42nd Street, playwright Amy Herzog once again amply demonstrates her gift for creating the sort of acutely detailed conversations and finely crafted characters that immediately ring true for audiences.

Indeed, 4000 Miles proves to be something of a companion piece to her superior drama, After the Revolution, as we once again meet Vera Joseph (Mary Louise Wilson), now 91 and still feisty, still opinionated, and still dealing -- not always elegantly -- with bouts of memory loss and vocabulary confusion. Not surprisingly, the role proves to be an ideal fit for the superb Wilson, who imbues the part with plenty of sharp-tongued flintiness melded with a soupcon of human compassion and a dollop of leftist idealism.

As the play begins, the widowed Vera is awakened in the middle of the night by her 21-year-old grandson Leo (Gabriel Ebert), who has arrived unexpectedly in her pre-war West Village apartment after a cross-country bicycle trip. He's slightly disheveled and slightly defiant -- and apparently willing to walk out the second Vera begins asking too many questions.

As we soon come to learn, Leo is in crisis: his best friend, Micah, died during the journey; he is estranged from his mother and sister for a variety of reasons; and his brief reunion earlier that evening with his girlfriend Bec (the excellent Zoe Winters) has not gone as planned. Vera offers Leo some grandmotherly comfort -- as well as the occasional put-down -- and the two soon settle into a reasonably comfortable if likely temporary living arrangement.

As their weeks together pass, Herzog comes close at times to entering sitcom land, as in a well-played scene where the two smoke marijuana together. And she teases out the story of what actually happened to Micah a bit longer than necessary, for no discernible reason. (Nonetheless, the monologue in which the details are revealed is beautifully written.)

Still, Herzog's strength is her ability to deftly capture the truth of the characters' relationships, even Vera's love-hate friendship with her (unseen) neighbor, Ginny. The show's strongest scene is Leo's delayed reunion with Bec, which is full of confessions, recriminations, and genuine love. Conversely, a scene where Leo brings home Amanda, a kooky Asian girl (overplayed by Greta Lee), works far less well -- in part due to Daniel Aukin's unnecessarily frantic direction.

As might be expected, Leo learns to take responsibility for his life and his actions during his stay with Vera. But to both Herzog's credit and detriment, the reasons for this transformation aren't particularly spelled out. It doesn't appear to have anything to do with Vera's influence or any noticeable outside force; it merely happens.

While Ebert is a likeable and sometimes moving presence onstage -- and he exhibits strong chemistry with all three of his scene partners -- he seemingly lacks the ability to truly show us how or why Leo changes. Ultimately, the journey's end feels a bit too abrupt, even as the play seems to have taken a bit too long to get there.

Still Swinging ...

from: TheaterNews Online

Tennessee Williams wrote plenty of plays in the later stages of his career that are rarely performed. But even theater junkies can be forgiven for being unfamiliar with One Arm, which is now being presented off-Broadway in a co-production between the Tectonic Theater Project and the New Group.

One Arm is based on a 1948 short story by Williams that he later turned into a screenplay that was never filmed. Moises Kaufman's production is presented in an unashamedly presentational format. A narrator even sits downstage and reads off descriptions of camera shots that were intended for the film.

Ollie, the handsome central character, is a former boxing champ who lost his arm in a gruesome auto accident. But actor Cladbourne Elder makes no attempt to hide Ollie’s missing arm, which remains in plain sight. It’s merely immobilized and attached to his torso.

The narrative is broken into flashbacks that are presented out of chronology. It begins with Ollie rotting away in jail just before receiving the death sentence for murder, and immediately jumps to him on the street as a hustler, the only work he could find after his accident.

At first, Ollie appears to have become emotionally dead. But at the last minute he finds redemption from the hundreds of letters sent to him from his former male customers.

Besides the fact that Kaufman (Laramie Project, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo) is known primarily for documentary theater, the only justification for the overtly theatrical style of One Arm would be the difficulty of realistically showing Ollie both before and after the loss of his arm.

But besides the irritating use of narration, this makes for an atmospheric and undeniably intense piece of theater based on long-lost writing from one of the 20th century’s premier playwrights.

You can find Tickets Now

June 8th in Theater history

From Paybill

1925 Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart make their lyric and songwriting debut in The Garrick Gaieties at Broadway's Garrick Theatre. In the cast are Sterling Holloway, Sanford Meisner, Philip Loeb and Romney Brent.

1934 Gordon Daviot's historical play Queen of Scots plays at London's New Theatre. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies is Mary and Laurence Olivier is Lord Bothwell. It earns 106 performances.

1980 Chinese traditions vs. Americanization is the focus of FOB which opens at the Public Theatre today. David Henry Hwang's drama, set in a small restaurant in California will, win OBIEs for Best Play and for star John Lone.

1997 Michael Mayer directs a production of Peter Hedges' Baby Anger which opens at Playwrights Horizons tonight. The play stars Kristen Johnston and John Pankow as the stressed parents of a boy who gets cast in an award-winning commercial as a girl.

Today's Birthdays: Robert Preston 1918. Alexis Smith 1921. Jerry Stiller 1929. Joan Rivers 1933. Julianna Margulies 1966.

Spider-Man, Broadway's Favorite Money-Pit

from NPR:

Taking a page from the comics, producers of Broadway's "Spider-Man" musical are hoping their battered hero can somehow return from the dead.

"Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," Broadway's most expensive and audacious show, emerges from a three-week hiatus Thursday night with what the creative team and producers say is a cleaner story, tighter music and more love story.

The $70 million musical with music by U2's Bono and The Edge reopens with most of the cast intact but without the visionary Julie Taymor as director. Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker, said the changes have been reinvigorating.

"There's an energy in the company because of having a clear direction, knowing where we're headed and knowing that it's going to be to a greater place," said Carney. The new script, he says, "jumps off the page at you."

Playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, director Philip William McKinley and choreographer Chase Brock cleaned up a story that had wandered into darker and mythological themes, while Bono and The Edge reworked the songs. More flying stunts were added and the romance between Peter Parker and Mary Jane returned to center stage.

The original show began previews in November and soon went bad. Performances were canceled and stunts went awry, leaving actors trapped hanging over the audience. There were five major accidents to cast members, including one to lead actress Natalie Mendoza, who left the show after suffering a concussion.

The worst accident happened to actor Christopher Tierney, who suffered a fractured skull, a fractured shoulder blade, four broken ribs and three broken vertebrae on Dec. 20 when he tumbled in front of a shocked preview audience after a safety harness failed. In April, only four months after the fall, he returned to the show and is expected to again execute the main Spider-Man aerial stunts on Thursday.

I'm glad they decided to go from "trying too hard to be meaningful" to "trying too hard to sell tickets."

Oprah Demands More Attention

Oprah in the title role of "King Kong," holding a small blonde woman in her right hand

from Huffington Post:

Brace yourselves, New York: Oprah is coming to Broadway.

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Oprah said that she has every intention of acting in a Boradway play once her talk show ends.

"I have a stack of plays in my bag right now that I am reading," she said. "And just this past weekend, I was in New York meeting with producers. We were just talking about what would be the best route to take. But yes, this is really going to happen." She said that an ensemble show would be the best route for her to take.

Of course, Oprah will have to fit a Broadway play into her already busy schedule. On Monday, she admitted that OWN, the network she created, "is not where I want it to be," and said she would be devoting much more of her time to ensuring its success.

Oprah is also not a Broadway—or acting—novice. She was intimately involved in bringing the musical adaptation of "The Color Purple" to the stage, and has acted in movies for nearly 30 years. She is also set to star in an HBO movie, "Ruined."

In her interview with the Tribune, Oprah seemed dead set on making sure she got to Broadway. (And really, what producer would turn her down?)

"This next phase of my life should be pure delight," she said.

For you, perhaps.  For us, it'll be like, AAAAAAAAH, AAAAAAH, SAVE US, SAVE US, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES, and then Jack Black goes "Twas beauty killed the beast" aaaaaand curtain

Spider-Man Different, But The Same

from NYT:

Bathed in green light, Patrick Page took center stage at the Foxwoods Theater on Broadway and hissed his lines with the sinister glee of a villain back from the dead.

Which he is. Playing the Green Goblin in the musical extravaganza “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” Mr. Page saw his character killed off in Act I during all 145 preview performances of Julie Taymor’s version of the show this winter. Yet there was the Goblin alive and well in Act II at Friday’s rehearsal of “Spider-Man,” cracking wise in a new scene lampooning telephone voice mail.

Resurrected at the urging of focus groups that the producers convened, the Goblin and his patter are among the signs that “Spider-Man” has largely abandoned Ms. Taymor’s Wagnerian ambitions and high-concept artistry, going for a comic-book sensibility instead. The musical is aiming to capture “the 8-to-88-year-old market,” in the words of Philip William McKinley, who is now overseeing the show’s direction, as the producers seek a strategy to make good on their record-setting investment of $70 million.

After a three-week performance hiatus to accommodate a creative overhaul, at a cost of $5 million, “Spider-Man” is set to resume previews on Thursday with what its producers said they hoped would be a lighter, circuslike spirit. Five flying sequences have been added to the previous two dozen. The roles of Aunt May, Uncle Ben and Mary Jane Watson — cherished characters from Spider-Man lore — have been expanded. The musical’s composers, Bono and the Edge of U2, have added a few new songs and rewritten several others.

Bono and Edge, in their first news media interview about “Spider-Man” since performances began in November, said on Monday that they loved much about Ms. Taymor’s version but felt it relied on spectacle rather than on story. Theater critics savaged that show in February, and Bono and Edge said that all of the original collaborators — not simply Ms. Taymor, who was fired in March — shared responsibility. But for “Spider-Man” to succeed, they said, it needed to stir people emotionally.

If all you need is to stir people emotionally, you can make it the story of a man getting dropped from the cable system and breaking his arm, and his ambition to continue being Spider-Man.  Meta, but effective.