2009-2010 Broadway Season

[Okri]

Both Enron and Red were nominated for Olivier Awards (along with Jerusalem, which was a great read, and The Mountaintop, which I haven't read)

[Big Magilla]

On the musical side the only new musical that seems even remotely interesting is Sondheim on Sondheim and that's just another compilation of Sondheim standards, albeit one with an outstanding cast that includes Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat. It could pit 82 year-old Cook, who won her only Tony for The Music Man 52 years ago, against 84 year-old Anglea Lansbury who'll be going for her sixth (fifth in a musical) for the revival of A Little Night Music.

Speaking of revivals, the cast recording of the recently closed Finian's Rainbow was has been released.

I listened to it yesterday and I have to say that this is the best yet recording of one of my all-time favorites.

It has a perfect score, twelve songs, thirteen including an instrumental, and there isn't a dud among them. Burton Lane's soaring melodies and Yip Harburg's trenchant lyrics remain fresh even if the scenario long ago started to grow moss.

The most amazing thing about this recording, though, is that it corrects a problem the show has always had and that is that the leading man (Woody) has always seemed somewhat blah compared to the more interesting manifestations of Sharon and Og (the leprechaun), the other two principal singing characters.

Ella Logan and David Wayne left Donald Richards in the dust in the original 1947 production as did Jeannie Carson and Howard Morris with Biff Maguire in the 1960 revival. Petula Clark and Tommy Steele all but buried Don Francks in the 1968 film version and Melissa Errico and Malcolm Gets did the same to Jonathan Freeman in the acclaimed 2004 Irish Repertory Theatre production. Not here though.

Kate Baldwin is the best sung Sharon yet and Christopher Fitzgerald does wonders with Og, but it's Cheyenne Jackson as Woody who is truly amazing here. His lilting tenor voices brings out nuances in "Look to the Rainbow", "If This Isn't Love" and "Old Devil Moon" that we never knew were there before.

The CD booklet includes the lyrics to all the songs, but you don't need it. The words have never been sung more clearly. Still, it's nice to have especially when the words fly by so quickly in several of the songs,especially the hialrious and still pungent "The Begat"...

"The lord made Adam, the Lord made Eve, he made them both a little bit naive.

They lived as free as the summer breeze, without pajamas and without chemise, until they stumbled on the apple trees.

Then she looked at him, and he looked at her, and they knew immediately what the world was fer.

He said give me my cane, give me my hat, the time has come to begin the begat.

So they begat Cain and they begat Abel, who begat the rabble at the Tow'r of Babel.

They begat the Cohens and they begat O'Rourkes. They begat the people who believed in storks.

Lordy, lordy, how they did begat. How they be-be-be begat, and even more than that, when the begat got to be gettin' under par, they begat the daughters of the DAR.

They begat the Babbits and the bourgeoisie, who begat the misbegotten GOP.

It was pleasin' to Jezebel, it was pleasin' to Ruth, it pleased the League of Women Shoppers in Duluth.

Though the movie censors tried the facts to hide, the movie-goers up and multiplied.

Lordy, lordy, how they multiplied. Soon it swept the world, every land and lingo. It became the rage, it was bigger than bingo!

The whites begat, the reds begat, the folks who shoulda stood in bed begat.

The Greeks begat, the Swedes begat, why even Britishers in tweeds begat. And lord, lordy, what their seeds begat!

The Lapps and Lituanians. Scranton, Pennsylvanians. Strict vegetarians. Honorary Aryans.

Starting from Genesis, they begat. Heroes and menaces begat! Fat fillibusterers begat. Income tax adjusterers begat.

'Twas natchaler and natachaler to begat. And sometimes a bachelor, he begat. It didn't matter which a-ways they begat. Sons of habitues begat.

So bless them all who go to bat and heed the call of the begat!"



Edited By Big Magilla on 1265212477

[Okri]

I just goy tickets for Next Fall, a gay marriage play which was a big hit at Playwriights Horizons last summer. Mark Rothko is one of my favorite artists so I can't wait for Red, and Enron, a smash in London already has its marquee up at the Broadhurst.

I've read Enron, and I'll say it right now - it's winning. I've also read Red, and it'll be nominated. Haven't read the new Marguilies. They haven't published Next Fall yet, and I've already harassed Naked Angels about it twice.

[Mister Tee]

Let's not pass over Time Stands Still, the new Donald Margulies play that opened last week to solid reviews (starring Laura Linney), and the revival of a View from the Bridge -- an historic Tony acting favorite -- for which Liev Schreiber and, unexpectedly, Scarlett Johansson were highly praised.

[Damien]

I just got tickets for Next Fall, a gay marriage play which was a big hit at Playwriights Horizons last summer. Mark Rothko is one of my favorite artists so I can't wait for Red, and Enron, a smash in London already has its marquee up at the Broadhurst.



Edited By Damien on 1265077763

[Okri]

This season on Broadway is turning out to be quite awesome. The play about Mark Rothko (Red, by John Logan, starring Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne) is transfering to Broadway in April. Adjust your tony predictions accordingly.

[flipp525]

I caught "August: Osage County" at The Kennedy Center last Friday (stage-right box seats and a bottle champagne with my best friend, perfect placement for that explosive Act II dinner scene). I saw Tracy Letts' play in September '08 at the Music Box Theater in NYC and had written extensively about the experience on this board, but I thought I'd drop a note here to say that Estelle Parsons' performance has somehow risen in my estimation since the last time I saw it. It's bordering on brilliant. Parsons, who is 82 years old, commands the stage like a woman in her 40's. She doesn't miss a beat, infusing Violet Weston with a darkly comic sensibility tinged with an almost scarily-focused mania during Violet near-catatonic bouts of drug-addled stupor. Her final moment of the play is quietly devastating.

Laurence Lau, who I grew up watching on "Another World" played the role of the youngest daughter's sleazy fiance. What a treat that was!



Edited By flipp525 on 1260889031

[FilmFan720]

I've been hearing great things about the Ragtime revival. But I hear rumors that it's closing January 3rd. I've listened to the score of the original. I so want to see it now. I won't be able to if the rumor is true.

I have a couple of friends in the show, and while they haven't said anything about closing yet, they do keep mentioning buying tickets and that sales aren't what they should be...I think a date is set, but I wouldn't be surprised if it closes in January...I won't get out to see it either.

[anonymous1980]

I've been hearing great things about the Ragtime revival. But I hear rumors that it's closing January 3rd. I've listened to the score of the original. I so want to see it now. I won't be able to if the rumor is true.

[Okri]

Oh, I'm hoping that BAM somehow transfers this to Broadway (a la Medea with Fiona Shaw)

[Damien]

My Beloved is a judge for the Obie (Off-Broadway) Awards this year, so he'll be seeing Cate in Streetcar. He's trying to get a second ticket so I can go, too. Ben Brantley of the NY Times was ecstatic.

[flipp525]

After seeing Cate Blanchett perform this past weekend in the Eisenhower Theater of The Kennedy Center in the Sydney Theater Company's touring production of "A Streetcar Named Desire", it's hard to write a capsule review that doesn't become *all about her*. But, truly, her performance towers over this entire production and Tennessee Williams' play IS Blanche DuBois, so let's not try and pretend there's that much else to talk about. Blanchett was perhaps one of the most buzzed-about people this past month in D.C. Washington has a vibrant theater scene, but when it gets a major star tackling such an iconic role, the whole thing becomes an "event", in this case, of almost mythical proportions.

Perfectly opening with The Ink Spots' "If I Didn't Care", Blanche sat on her suitcase at stage-left, bathed in white light. Blanchett immediately radiated a nervousness in her too-fine white suit and hat, that necessary brittleness "the Southern female Hamlet" requires to begin the play. Her sonorous voice, dipping into the lower registers for the biggest moments of reproach (Blanche castigating Stella for leaving her alone to deal with Belle Rêve, for example) was a wonderful addition to the character. Blanche's tenuous grip on reality has never been more honestly captured in those opening moments.

Blanchett handled extremely well the precarious balance between a woman caught in the trap of her own delusion and the steely determination to pull off the impossible and leave her past behind (a goal she, of course, ultimately fails to reach). The performance, even as the character consciously dips into sentimentality, never wavered from a sheer focus; it had a through-line and Blanchett was taking us on a very specific journey.

And as the play progressed, the rich vision of desperation she created became more and more vivid. At the end of the play, Blanche, a broken, ravaged, shadow of a human being, with bedraggled hair, a starkly pale and sallow visage, wearing just a slip, scrambles under the bed to escape the bullying nurse, like a frightened feral cat, then struggles to find composure in the arms of a Southern gentleman once again as she limps off the stage. It was, quite simply, a devastating, astonishing performance. It knocked me out of my seat, it left me speechless, breathless and emotionally drained. Hers' is, without a doubt, the new definitive version of Blanche DuBois.

Liv Ullman's assured direction included some rather exquisite, original touches throughout the show. The infamous rape scene was less violent than I've seen in past productions. Yet, after it was over and the lights came down, thus ending Blanche's physical assault, the lights then came back up for about ten more seconds to reveal Blanche perched on the edge of the bed, tilted to the side like a flamingo with a broken neck, her hair disheveled as she stares out the window, while Stanley, completely nude and bare-assed, lies face down asleep beside her. And then the lights go down again ending the scene. It was an evocative, haunting directorial choice. The rape comes off as more of an acquiescence of the inevitable rather than the more overt act of violence that is more traditionally portrayed.

The set design offered some original touches: a screen door that seemed to open up onto a back-porch was perfect for varying the entrances. Windows and mirrors reflected the on-stage action. The Hubbells, who live in the apartment above the Kowalskis, are seen almost throughout the entire show through their window, often in silhouette through a drawn shade. The entire set was realistically shabby and drab, like one of those life-sized dioramas of a squalid living room in the 1940's in the Smithsonian's American History museum.

The all-Austrailian cast retained their Southern accents throughout, except for Tim Richards' Mitch in his penultimate scene when his anger toward Blanche reached its highest pitch. Joel Edgarton's Stanley is a gorgeously-sculpted specimen (right down to his previously mentioned bare ass) and he finds the ferocity (and even humor) in his character. Blanchett is tall, yet the fragility she embodies made her an interesting contender for Edgarton's compact brutishness.

"Streetcar" is headed for an already sold-out month-long engagement at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn and then will end its tour. If you have a chance to see it, I implore you to go. This is a once-in-a-lifetime, legendary performance for the ages.



Edited By flipp525 on 1260645651

[flipp525]

I know it's not Broadway, but The Kennedy Center is DC's "Broadway" venue. I cannot WAIT to see this. What an absolute rave.

By the way, this production is heading to Brooklyn at the BAM Harvey Theater after its DC-run, however it is already sold-out: http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=1272

Blanchett fires 'Streetcar's' eternal combustion engine
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 2, 2009

If Cate Blanchett's nerve-shattering turn as Blanche DuBois doesn't knock the wind out of you, then there is nothing on a stage that can blow you away. What Blanchett achieves in the Sydney Theatre Company's revelatory revival of "A Streetcar Named Desire" amounts to a truly great portrayal -- certainly the most heartbreaking Blanche I've ever experienced.

It's a shame that the 24-performance run in the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater, its U.S. premiere, is completely sold out. This is the kind of evening you want to urge people to see, to remind them of theater's illuminating range, its ability to force you out of your resistant natural skepticism, to assess, reflect and feel.

I confess that in the final scene of the 3-hour 15-minute production -- when Blanchett's spectral Blanche is stripped so entirely of the sustaining illusions of life that she looks as if all her blood's been drained away -- I lost it. In the harrowing moment before the asylum doctors lead Blanche away, she makes a frantic last break for it, running and hiding under the bed in Stella and Stanley's room. Watching as Blanchett at last limply submits (over the wrenching sobs of erstwhile beau Mitch), you grasp fully the inevitability of Blanche's demise: She has been lost since a day long ago in her native Mississippi, where the horrific end to an intense, impossible love spurred her to a self-induced doom.

The Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, renowned for her collaborations with the director (and father of her child) Ingmar Bergman on some of his most important films, was recruited to direct Tennessee Williams's seminal tragedy for its debut in Sydney in September. As she finds in the piece both poetry and unexpected humor, Ullmann proves a formidable hire. Her stark approach -- Stella's dingy apartment, with its bare light bulbs and chipped tiles, has rarely appeared so cramped and shabby -- departs from some other productions of "Streetcar" in their attempts to embroider the play with the intoxicating colors of New Orleans in the 1940s.

Apart from the city

Ullmann and set designer Ralph Myers see the tarnished glamour as window dressing. They draw the curtains on the vibrant city outside the apartment: The only exterior is the fire escape to the flat of the hot-blooded couple above, who are often shown only through the window shade, in silhouette. Even with the muffled notes of the blues that waft in from the wings, this could be a kitchen-sink drama in a tattered neighborhood not unlike Ralph Kramden's.

But by no means is it a gray slice of domestic life. The production turns us into bomb-sniffers, waiting as it meticulously builds to the explosion of Stanley's attack on Blanche, which is rendered here smartly as a clumsy, drunken ravishment, one in which Blanche is drunker than Stanley. Granted, an audience is not entirely sure after the initial encounters of Blanche and Joel Edgerton's strapping Stanley Kowalski that the evening will satisfyingly combust; it takes time for Edgerton's portrayal to develop a rhythm to compete with the always watchable Blanchett's. But it does eventually assert itself grandly, in the vengeful power of a conscience-less Stanley, incensed at Blanche's audacious self-dramatizing and utterly indifferent to her pain.

The telegraphing of those wounds so transparently from the get-go might in a less skillful performance feel like overkill. Here, it adds to the sense of a woman whose self-destructive path is already laid out. When we meet Blanche, washed up on the doorstep of her younger sister Stella (the appealing Robin McLeavy), her hands quiver with anxiety -- or it the d.t.'s? She doesn't merely reach for a bottle of the Kowalskis' booze with those shaky hands, she lunges for it with her eyes.

That she's schooled in the art of deception is also made abundantly clear: After sneaking a drink, she thinks to wipe down the glass, as if a tiny indiscretion would loose an unraveling of the stories of the far more devastating skeletons in her closet.

Some of the production's obsessive attention to Blanche does push other performances to the sidelines; McLeavy's Stella is consigned resolutely -- and aptly -- to Blanche's shadow. (Stella's crack about how catering to Blanche makes her feel like she did at home rings particularly true.) Fortunately, Blanche DuBois is meant to exist in an eternal follow spot, and you get to see here how well that idea serves the plot. For Blanche's effort to muscle Stanley out of the way itself proves to be a fatal gambit.

Overcoming a towering shadow

It's a measure of the sensual lock Marlon Brando still has on the role of Stanley that 50-plus years after the film version, his image is still the one fixed in the mind. Every actor chosen for a revival has to contend with him, and Edgerton manages far better than most. He's broad and muscular, but Blanchett is tall, and so it's not a performance of sheer physical dominance. He is not the most primitive Stanley, either, not quite the animal whom Blanche describes; Edgerton's frequent, high-pitched laugh hints at a mischievous, nervous energy. And he finds a solid center to the character in Stanley's boiling resentment of Blanche's superior attitude, and her challenge to his control over Stella.

Aggression, more than desire, seems to inform their relationship. Early on, a nifty moment of sexual tension arises, as Blanchett, astride a bedroom night table, challengingly blocks Edgerton's way to a radio. As if to underline his rage at being unable to get around Blanche, Stanley later throws the radio out the window. And when at last he overpowers her in the famous rape scene, you acutely feel the impact of this Stanley's hatred.

Technically, the Australian company fares pretty well with the cadences of the Deep South, even if a few of the accents fade in and out a bit. Tess Schofield's costumes, however, are consistently redolent of faded elegance. In particular, the outlandish floor-length white dress Blanche wears for the birthday party that fizzles after Tim Richards's Mitch fails to show, helps to accentuate the world of unreal expectations to which Blanche still clings.

It is in the pitiable final scene, when Blanche cannot muster the strength to put on a dress at all, that Blanchett is at her most astonishing peak. Unmasked, her Blanche stumbles across the stage, exhausted, vanquished, finished.

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Lighting, Nick Schlieper; composer and sound design, Paul Charlier; vocal coach, Charmian Gradwell. With Michael Denkha, Mandy McElhinney, Jason Klarwein, Sara Zwangobani, Morgan David Jones.



Edited By flipp525 on 1257645351

[OscarGuy]

Thanks for the advice. It would have to be after January for me so that I can get my tax return in. Do you think it will stay open that long? I always fear for Sondheim musicals b/c they aren't huge mass-audience affairs that most people want to re-see (like Show Boat or Oklahoma or such). Is it likely that A) it will stay open that long and that B) Lansbury will still be part of the show?

And I guess I'm not really that worried about getting a refund as if she's not there, then I don't have much choice because I don't live in the area...I can't exactly come back later.

[Damien]

In addition to playbill.com, which Flipp mentioned, you can get discount tickets at theatermania.com and broadwaybox.com. They have almost every show except for Wicked, Jersey Boys and Billy Elliot. It's much better to get tickets through them than at the TKTS booth because 1) you can buy them in advance 2)which means you get better seats (I've had great seats for any number of shows through these discounts) and 3) you don't have to waste a couple hours standing on line.

As for understudies, the general rule is that if a performer is billed above the title (as Lansbury surely will be), you can turn in your ticket if he or she misses a show.

Wes, when you have an idea of when you might be coming to New York, let me know. I live in Hell's Kitchen two blocks from Times Square, so I can give you advice on where to stay and eat, what to do, and steer you away from tourist traps.

By the way, generally speaking, January is the best time to get theatre tickets -- after the holiday rush, things are pretty dead.