26 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(01/29/03 4:52am)
NEW YORK -- That golden haze on the meadow is a bit brighter the second time around.\nThe current Broadway revival of "Oklahoma!" received a muted welcome from many of the critics when it opened at the Gershwin Theatre last March. Tasteful, a tad sedate and a little reverential, the production was intimidated perhaps by the show's standing as a landmark of the American musical theater.\nNow, a second viewing finds this Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, with several important cast changes, more relaxed and more open, making the frisky sweetness of Susan Stroman's choreography all that more apparent and enjoyable.\nIt's Stroman's choreography that propels this Trevor Nunn-directed production, which he originally staged at England's National Theatre. If anything, she is the one who should have been intimidated, since Agnes DeMille's dances for the original were extraordinary and always considered an integral part of any major revival.\nStroman's achievement is impressive, especially in the musical's first-act finale, the "Out of My Dreams" ballet. It's here that the slender story -- will cowboy Curly or menacing hired hand Jud Fry take the indecisive Laurey to the box social? -- gets its fullest expression.\nStephen R. Buntrock's Curly is more sunny and less complicated than his predecessor's. Buntrock is thoroughly engaging -- brash but not overbearing -- and he possesses a glorious voice that does full justice to such standards as "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" and "The Surrey With the Fringe on Top."\nAmy Bodnar -- the alternate and understudy for the original Laurey Josefina Gabrielle -- is less feisty and more predictable, although she dances and sings the role well. Bodnar takes over the role permanently Feb. 18.\nPatty Duke, returning to Broadway for the first time in more than 40 years, has replaced Andrea Martin as the matriarchal Aunt Eller. Duke is not a natural musical-comedy performer, but there is something endearing about her gawkiness when it comes to song and dance. She's got gumption, which is a quality this flinty, pioneer woman should abundantly possess.\nMerwin Foard's performance as Jud Fry is as physically threatening if not as psychologically complex as that of Shuler Hensley, the actor who won a Tony Award for his portrayal of the show's troubled villain.\nSeveral of the holdovers have gotten better, particularly Jessica Boevers as the flirtatious Ado Annie. The actress has found the laughs in a character who, in the wrong hands, is more likely to be annoying than comic. And Justin Bohon as the rope-twirlin,' high-steppin' Will Parker remains one of the best dancers on Broadway.\nThe production, which perversely lost the Tony last June for best musical revival, still looks spiffy, too. Those barren plains, populated by a lonely farmhouse or two and the occasional windmill, are lovingly captured in all their Spartan beauty by designer Anthony Ward.\nBy today's rapid-fire, show-biz standards, "Oklahoma!" doesn't spin very quickly, which may be part of its problem with modern audiences. The show turns 60 March 31, but if its story feels a little thin, its glorious songs wear their six decades very well.
(12/11/02 3:49am)
NEW YORK -- To paraphrase (sort of) from Charles Dickens: It was the best of shows, it was the worst of shows. \nTwo big, expensive musicals arrived this week on Broadway within a day of one another, and their receptions couldn't have been more different. \n"La Boheme," Australian director Baz Luhrmann's takes on the beloved Puccini opera, received the best reviews since "Hairspray" opened last August. But "Dance of the Vampires," starring Michael Crawford, had most critics out for blood and tossing around such adjectives as "mindless," "vapid," "amateurish" and "mortifying." \nFor "La Boheme," the rapturous notices have paid off at the box office. Monday's take, the day after the opening, was close to a million dollars, "in the high six figures" according to producer Jeffrey Seller, and sales continued to be strong Tuesday. \n"It could easily have been a very different story," Luhrmann said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "In the end, it's Italian opera on Broadway. We could have been sitting here going, "What idiot let him do that?" We always get good and bad reviews — very passionate for and against. I think it helped that many of the critics went three times and really had time to think about the piece."\nLa Boheme" opened Sunday with a $3 million advance, good but not great for a lavish musical. Its producers already are unspooling a lush 30-second television commercial that will remind viewers of "Moulin Rouge," Luhrmann's recent film musical. \n"That TV commercial is on in a very heavy rotation this week in the New York area, and Baz is already changing it to reflect the fact that we are now an open New York show," Seller said Tuesday. "We are working really hard to get out the message that this is a popular entertainment, that this is fun." \nFun is not what the critics had at "Vampires," and even Crawford, one of the theater's most popular performers because of his appearances in "The Phantom of Opera" in London, New York and Los Angeles, came in for some catty sniping. \n"Vampires" originally was scheduled to open last month but was postponed for two weeks after director John Rando left to visit his mother, who underwent emergency open heart surgery in Texas. \nThanks to Crawford, "Vampires" has a hefty advance and has done surprisingly well at the box office. Last week, it grossed more than $734,000 and played to 90 percent capacity at the Minskoff Theatre, which has more than 1,700 seats. \nThe Broadway Theatre, which houses "La Boheme," is even bigger, so the show, with tickets now on sale through March, has plenty of seats left to sell. The $6.5 million musical also has three rotating sets of leads because of the show's heavy vocal demands. It started posting at the box office who will sing at each performance. \n"If we don't post, people won't know so that they can come back a second and third time," Seller said. \n"The opera audiences were the first people to come and say, 'Oh, this is for me.' We have won them over," the producer added. "Now we want to win over people who never go to the opera but who do go to musicals -- the pop audience." \nLuhrmann leaves next Friday for Jordan to begin work on a film about Alexander the Great, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. And his next stage project? \n"We have been developing 'Strictly Ballroom' over the last several years," the director said. By the end of next year, Luhrmann may have some idea where he stands with the project, which is based on "t look for it on stage before 2005 -- at the earliest, he said.
(12/02/02 3:57am)
NEW YORK -- Murderous passion in ancient Greece with the ultimate high-strung wife and mother. Singing vampires in exotic Lower Belabartokovich. A fierce feud between two literary lionesses. Don Quixote tilting again at windmills. \nAll this, and Paul Newman, too. \nBroadway will be blooming in December, with seven major productions scheduled to open before Christmas, making the month feel more like spring, when the Tony Award deadline usually produces a spate of shows trying to nab nominations. \nAnd the December rush doesn't include the prominent off-Broadway attractions -- featuring such stars as Danny Aiello, Sigourney Weaver and Tommy Tune -- that also will arrive during the next three weeks. \n"I think it would be a little too soon to declare a trend," says Jed Bernstein, head of the League of American Theatres and Producers. "Shows open when they are ready to open. That said, it is certainly true this year that there are more shows than normal opening in early December." \nUsually by Thanksgiving, Broadway openings are pretty well over until after the first of the year, with newly arrived shows aggressively selling for the potent holiday week between Christmas and New Year's and bracing for the downturn in business in January and February. \nNot so this year. The logjam began after "Dance of the Vampires" canceled its Nov. 21 opening because of an illness in director John Rando's family and pushed the musical into December. By then, "Our Town" had moved into the mix, followed by "Medea." \nThe $12 million "Vampires," which marks Michael Crawford's first visit to Broadway since "The Phantom of the Opera" nearly 15 years ago, now opens Dec. 9. The show, based on Roman Polanski's campy film, "The Fearless Vampire Killers," has been doing hefty business during its extended seven weeks of previews. \nThe revival of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," starring Paul Newman as the Stage Manager, has been an even more potent attraction. The limited engagement, running through Jan. 26, still has a few seats available, but already has recouped its $1.5 million production costs. Now in previews, it opens Dec. 4. \nThe next night finds Brian Stokes Mitchell opening in a revival of "Man of La Mancha." Mitchell portrays the idealistic Don Quixote and Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio is his beloved Dulcinea. \n"We always had to open in December because of our commitment to an out-of-town engagement," said David Stone, one of the producers of "Man of La Mancha." \nSeveral other shows did the same, including "La Boheme," trying out in San Francisco, and "Imaginary Friends" in San Diego. \nNo one is certain how the heavy influx of shows will play out. \n"Some people say that fighting for media space with the movies, which always open a lot of films between Thanksgiving and Christmas, is a mistake," Bernstein said. "Others think you have the excitement of the holiday season when people are focused on going out and consuming entertainment. So maybe it's the perfect time to be in front of the public." \nEach of the seven newcomers could be distinct enough to draw audiences. \n"What's interesting about this December is that even though there are seven openings, they are all over the place in terms of subject matter," said Stone. \nBaz Luhrmann's "La Boheme" opens Dec. 8. The $6.5 million version of Puccini's opera already has generated buzz, particularly among fans of Luhrmann's movie, "Moulin Rouge." \n"Medea" grabbed great reviews in a brief engagement last month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was promptly snapped up for Broadway. The Greek revenge tragedy, with Fiona Shaw in the title role, begins a limited engagement Dec. 10, closing Feb. 22. \nSwoosie Kurtz and Cherry Jones, playing Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, open in "Imaginary Friends," Nora Ephron's account of their feud and subsequent lawsuit. The curtain goes up Dec. 12. \nFinally, "Dinner at Eight," a 1932 play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, arrives only six days before Christmas.
(11/26/02 4:34am)
NEW YORK -- Physician, heal thyself. \nIt would help a lot if the two doctors in "Blue/Orange,'' Joe Penhall's frenetic, agitated drama about mental illness and its relationship to racism, did just that: took two tranquilizers and calmed down. \nThey are the excitable ones in Penhall's aggressively talky three-character play, which the Atlantic Theater Company opened Sunday off-Broadway. "Blue/Orange,'' a hit two years ago at England's Royal National Theater, is set in a London psychiatric hospital where a young schizophrenic black man could be released after treatment. "Could be'' are the operative words, since the man's freedom depends on what two white, middle-class doctors -- a young, inexperienced physician and his older supervisor -- agree to do. \nTheir debate pretty much takes up the whole play, filling designer Robert Brill's chic, antiseptic consultation room, a blindingly white square floor with gray walls and a glass table containing a bowl of oranges. \nThe inmate man, played with likable looniness by Harold Perrineau Jr., believes the oranges are blue. And that's the least of his problems. He also says Ugandan dictator Idi Amin is his father or maybe Dad is Muhammad Ali. There doesn't seem to be any doubt about his mental problems, but the older doctor, a creepy, compelling Zeljko Ivanek, is determined to release him. \nThe accomplished Ivanek oozes a smarmy sympathy as he questions the patient and challenges his junior colleague, whose nervousness and overwhelming desire to do the right thing is perfectly captured by the boyish Glenn Fitzgerald. \nThe older man attempts to blame society for the inmate's illness and wants him, armed, of course, with the appropriate medication, back on the street. Fitzgerald's character thinks otherwise. \nTheir discussions, staged by director Neil Pepe as if they were verbal fencing matches, gradually grow in intensity, finally erupting in a big second-act outburst by the younger doctor. It's a diatribe that his mentor and the patient then turn against him. \nPenhall takes a soapbox approach to these fiery dramatics, and it's easy to see which side he favors. Unfortunately, despite all the speechifying, he neglects the story, settling for a series of arguments that stunt the plot and any character development. \nNot much is revealed about these three men, except the opinions they mouth. They are statements rather than people, giving "Blue/Orange'' the feel of a medical paper that has been theatrically, if impersonally, delivered.
(09/12/02 5:20am)
NEW YORK -- Many theaters were dark and strangely quiet, but the show went on for eight of 23 Broadway productions, including such big musicals as "The Producers," "Hairspray" and "Thoroughly Modern Millie." \n"In a way, we have to treat it as any other day, as far as going out there and performing," said Brad Oscar, star of "The Producers," the laugh-filled Mel Brooks musical. "We can't bring on stage the gravity and the weight and the enormity of what Sept. 11 means, especially with this show. And it's that contrast which makes performing on Wednesday so hard." \nAll shows acknowledged the terrorist attacks in some way Wednesday during matinee \nperformances. \n"On this day of remembrance, let us pledge our hands, our hearts and lives to building and not destroying. Let us remember, let us mourn, let us renew, let freedom ring," said Harvey Fierstein at an emotional matinee curtain call of "Hairspray." \nBefore Fierstein spoke, designer David Rockwell's back wall setting of lights had been reconfigured into a giant American flag. After the actor finished speaking, four chorus members led the audience and cast in an a cappella, soul-tinged rendition of "God Bless America." Many theatergoers and several of the performers on stage, including star Marissa Jaret Winokur, brushed away tears as the song reached its climax. \nAt "The Producers," the cast sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the end of the matinee and planned to do it again following the evening performance. "Metamorphoses" donated half the box-office proceeds from Wednesday's two performances to the New York Firefighters 9-11 Relief Fund. Jonathan Dokuchitz and Jackee Harry, stars of the Rodgers and Hart revival "The Boys From Syracuse," spoke briefly to the audience before the show. \nAt "Millie," Dick Scanlan, the musical's lyricist and book writer, and its composer, Jeanine Tesori, welcomed theatergoers in brief remarks before the curtain rose. \n"There's something mighty life-affirming about voices raised in song and laughter. So this is what I propose," Scanlan told the audience at the Marquis Theatre. "I am going to make sure they (the cast) sing a lot and you have to make sure you laugh a lot, and maybe together, somehow, we can help each other continue to heal." \nBut it was like any other theater day for Lorraine Holt, who came in from the Bronx to see "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife." \n"I love the theater and try to go to matinees every chance I get," Holt said. \nAlthough a few shows, such as "Hairspray," were sold out, business was down -- drastically -- for others. "Millie" filled 900 of its 1,600 seats at the matinee, much of it sold at the half-price ticket booth. Some shows, such as "Proof" and "Allergist's Wife" offered steep discounts and even gave away tickets. \n"It's a no-win situation this week," said Jed Bernstein, head of the League of American Theatres and Producers. "Sept. 11 is right between the Jewish holidays and September is a soft month to begin with. \n"Yet, no matter how bad it is this year, it will be better than last year's September"
(03/19/02 4:06am)
NEW YORK -- Goodbye to Broadway's original Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom.\nAfter nearly a year's run, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick left "The Producers" on Sunday, turning over the starring roles in Broadway's biggest hit in years to English actor Henry Goodman and television star Steven Weber.\nThe Mel Brooks musical, based on his 1968 film about two rapscallion Broadway producers who bilk investors out of their money by putting on a musical about Adolf Hitler, won't have to worry about sagging ticket sales. The show, which won a record 12 Tony Awards last June, is pretty much sold out for months to come.\nThe enthusiastic crowd at Sunday's matinee began standing and cheering even before the final curtain came down. After a teary Lane and Broderick took their bows, Brooks and director-choreographer Susan Stroman came on stage and presented their stars with bouquets of red roses.\n"We wanted to thank you for making us laugh for an entire year," Stroman said, as she wished them well "on your new adventures."\n"But when you are done with those film and TV folks," she added, "you need to come back."\nBrooks yelled out, "Ditto." The two actors didn't speak.\nLane collected a Tony for his portrayal of Bialystock, the role originated in the movie by Zero Mostel. Broderick was Bloom, the hapless accountant, played by Gene Wilder in the film.\nBoth roles are difficult, demanding parts, particularly Lane's, which, in the second act, required him to recapitulate the entire plot in one five-minute musical number that usually stopped the show.