Theater

It has been almost three months since The Wire's series finale, and we're all itching to hear about what our favorite actors on the show will be up to. We'll soon see Jimmy McNulty, or Dominic West, on the big screen playing the villain in the sequel to The Punisher movie. Michael, er...Tristan Wilds, is switching zipcodes, to the new 90210. Remember Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski? He was the woefully mousy police officer who resigned in shame after shooting a fellow undercover cop to become a pretty good teacher in the local Balitmore public school. Well he, or actually the actor who plays him, Jim True-Frost, will be coming to our zipcode to play another kinda pathetic character in Tracy Lett's Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County.

Mr. True-Frost will play "Little Charles," the gentle, misguided 37-year-old who is called a loser by his mother and is having an affair with his first cousin. He'll start performing on the Music Box Theatre stage starting June 17.  read more »

Stew's soulful rock musical Passing Strange and race satire Yellow Face were two big winners at last night's 53rd annual Village Voice Obie Awards, presented at Webster Hall. Established in 1955, the awards are the "freewheeling wild child of New York theater's awards world," and are chosen by a committee of critics and working theater artists. Yellow Face's lead Francis Jue won an Obie, along with playwright David Henry Hwang. The Observer's John Heilpern wrote in his review of Yellow Face: "The play is a powerful departure—a bitterly honest attempt by the dramatist to come to terms with himself and who he is in the tumult of racially divided America." Passing Strange won for ensemble and best new theater piece. You can watch a video of the presentation here. More winners after the jump.  read more »

Prepare yourselves: Katie Holmes is coming to Broadway. Variety is reporting that Mrs. Cruise has officially signed on for a production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons this fall at a theater to be announced. Conveniently, the Church of Scientology New York is located just a few blocks away from the theater district at their 46th Street outpost...  read more »

Roger and Hammerstein's Broadway classic South Pacific was the big winner last night at the Drama Desk Awards at the F.H. LaGuardia Concert Hall in Lincoln Center. Associated Press reports that the revival picked up five prizes including best musical revival, best actor and director for a musical, best musical set and sound design. August: Osage County, Tracy Letts' tale of a dysfunctional Oklahoma family, was chosen best play of the New York theater season, and Passing Strange was named best musical in awards given by the organization of theater journalists. Full list of last night's winners after the jump.

The complete list of 53rd Annual Drama Desk Awards winners, courtesy of Playbill, follows (winners names are in bold with an asterisk).  read more »

As American Idol finalists face the Battle of the Davids—Archuleta vs. Cook—producers of the revival of Grease have announced that last year's winner, Taylor Hicks, will make his Broadway debut in that summer-lovin' musical next month.

Playbill reports:  read more »

When we think of the British playwrights we’re most familiar with, one is a political conservative for the thinking classes (Sir Tom Stoppard), another a safe middlebrow socialist for the carriage trade (Sir David Hare), and another a working-class sentimentalist for Off Broadway (the un-knighted Mike Leigh).

Where does that leave Caryl Churchill—the unrepentant Marxist-feminist poet who’s for nothing less than social, political and theatrical revolution? In my view, she’s England’s greatest living playwright.

Ms. Churchill is, firstly, the shaman of theater who transforms our sense of reality. She’s the radical contemporary dramatist who’s experimented the most, on either side of the Atlantic, with theatrical form—and made it new and irresistible. In that sense, it doesn’t matter whether you share her politics, or—heaven forbid!—“approve” of them.

In play after intelligent play—the staggering, time-bending Top Girls (1982), currently at the Biltmore; its model in role-playing, Cloud Nine (1979); or the famous Restoration Comedy about Wall Street greed that proved wildly popular with Wall Street traders, Serious Money (1987)—Ms. Churchill has proved herself a dazzlingly inventive playwright with an original mind.

Her recent, unrelenting 50-minute reflexive rant against the U.S. and Tony Blair at the Public, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You was an uncharacteristic lapse—a cartoon, a wanky indulgence. It certainly lacked the finesse of other recent work such as the apocalyptic and lyrical Far Away, the hypnotic magic realism of The Skriker, and the delightful nuttiness of Blue Heart—the one-acter in which children suddenly run out of kitchen cabinets like mice and a giant ostrich lopes into the action.

LOOK AT THE imaginative daring of the legendary first act of the all-female Top Girls: A dinner party in an Italian restaurant is being hosted by pushy Marlene, the new female boss of the Top Girls Employment Agency, and celebrating with her are five other “top girls”—Pope Joan, the mythic female ninth-century Pontiff, who was stoned to death; Isabella Bird, the Victorian traveler and writer; Lady Nijo, the 13th-century concubine to the emperor of Japan and Buddhist nun; Patient Griselda, the peasant girl who married a prince and sacrificed her children (Griselda was celebrated by Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer); and Dull Gret who was painted by Brueghel and led a revolutionary assault on hell.

It’s a fantastic gathering and Shavian conversation piece across the centuries about the fate of ultimately powerless women. And how weirdly, utterly natural those mythic figures seem, mingling in the present! “We’ve come a long way,” 20th-century Marlene announces in her toast to one and all. “To our courage and the way we’ve changed our lives and our extraordinary achievements.”

It’s Ms. Churchill’s point, of course, that women haven’t come a long way at all, and that nothing has changed in spite of their achievements. Beneath the dinner party’s exotic, overlapping banter, there’s misery and sexual abuse, feminine acquiescence and nightmares that the playwright proceeds to link to the 1980s.

Ms. Churchill takes us from the surreal timelessness of the opening, to a London comedy about the rise of Marlene amid the Thatcherite callousness of her agency, to the bruising social realism of her sister’s wretched existence in Suffolk living with a dim, frightened young daughter, Angie.

Ms. Churchill writes consistently good roles for children. Angie is given the last word in the play—“Frightening”—and the play itself is saturated in fear. Angie sure frightened me. Brilliantly played by Martha Plimpton (who doubles very amusingly as Pope Joan), I kept thinking the poor girl is a distant relative of Dull Gret and that what frightened her so much was a nightmare of her nonexistent future, and that she was on the verge of beating her mother’s brains out.

Ms. Churchill does this to you. Menace is one of her insinuating notes. In the Top Girls Employment Agency, the ball-breaking women are like callous men in disguise. This middle section of the play doesn’t live up to the magic of the first. (What could?) The office scenes are sketchy, and the sexual politics of the workplace have grown familiar in the 25 years since the play premiered.

But one scene riveted me. Mary Beth Hurt, in a measured, beautiful cameo as Louise, is the living embodiment of defeated middle-aged anonymity in a man’s world. She appears to be an uninteresting woman stuck in middle management; she wants a new job in pathetic revenge for not being noticed after a lifetime’s dedication. “I don’t care greatly for working with women. I think I pass as a man at work. …” Louise is the drab descendant of the fake Pope Joan. Yet beyond Ms. Churchill’s sexual politics, I saw this short, terribly human scene as a portrait of a secular saint.

The playwright’s socialist credo verges on the reductive in the last scene’s slow-burning confrontation between Marlene and her estranged working-class sister, Joyce. Visiting home in rural Suffolk for the first time in years, the capitalist Marlene is revealed as a woman who’s lost her soul, while her socialist sister has held onto hers.

Joyce is the exhausted, furious idealist who works as a maid slogging in three jobs to put food on the table. Her guy fell for another woman. She raised the cursed, slow-witted Angie. She’s someone who deserves much, much better in life.

They all do.

“I don’t mean anything personal,” Marlene offers her sister apologetically after a vitriolic row between them about that other top girl, Maggie Thatcher. “I don’t believe in class. Anyone can do anything if they’ve got what it takes.”

“And if they haven’t?” Joyce asks.

“If they’re stupid or lazy or frightened,” she replies indignantly, “I’m not going to help get them a job. Why should I?”

Marlene’s big self-deception is that she says she doesn’t believe in class. England has never stopped believing in class. It remains the country’s dirty little secret. But for me that final scene is less a political treatise than an exceptionally moving family drama. Ms. Churchill is saying that people are suffering. They can’t just be treated like rubbish. She’s suggesting that there are catastrophic consequences to neglect, as Dull Gret does at the close of the remarkable first scene in her gutter description of her brutal battle with hell.

“We’d all had family killed,” says Gret. “My big son die on a wheel. Birds eat him. My baby, a soldier run her through with a sword. I’d had enough, I was mad, I hate the bastards. I come out of my front door that morning and shout till my neighbors come out and I said, ‘Come on, we’re going where the evil come from and pay the bastards out’ … and the ground opens up and we go through a big mouth into a street just like ours but in hell.”

In Top Girls, the winners and losers are all women. Kudos to the entire cast, the best ensemble on Broadway—Ms. Plimpton; Ms. Hurt; the excellent Marisa Tomei as Isabella Bird and Joyce; Elizabeth Marvel as Marlene; and Ann Reeder, Jennifer Ikeda and Mary Catherine Garrison, all terrific actresses.

The scenic designs of exemplary emblematic simplicity are by Tom Pye; Laura Bauer created the perfect costumes; and James Macdonald has directed the finest production of the year.

It's a lucky number 13 nominations for In the Heights, the smash-hit musical about Washington Heights, including two nods for Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s 28-year-old creator and star, according to the New York Times. The 2007-2008 Tony Award nominations were announced today by Tony Award winners Sara Ramirez and David Hyde Pierce at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Other musicals competing for the top prize include Cry-Baby, Passing Strange and Xanadu. The 62nd Annual Tony Awards — hosted by Tony and Academy Award winner Whoopi Goldberg — will be presented on June 15 at Radio City Music Hall.  read more »

South Pacific performers heard some "Happy Talk" this morning. The revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's classic musical at the Lincoln Center won four awards for the 58th annual Outer Critics Circle Awards, announced today. The Outer Critics Circle Awards are decided upon by a group of writers "covering New York theatre for out-of town newspapers, national publications and other media beyond Broadway," according to Playbill. While South Pacific nabbed the Outstanding Revival of a Musical, Director of a Musical, Actor in a Musical and Featured Actor in a Musical awards, Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning drama August: Osage County picked up three awards: Outstanding New Broadway Play, Director of a Play and Actress in a Play. Raul Esparza and Eve Best got rewarded for their acting in The Homecoming, although we're bummed our main Deadwood Dad Ian McShane was snubbed for his terrifying performance.  read more »

It's a filthy world out there and John Waters has never been afraid to show it to us on film (see: sex scene involving chickens in Pink Flamingos). But Mr. Waters will be bringing us all the crime, fashion lunacy and extremes of the contemporary art world live, on stage, at his one-night-only, one-man show "The Filthy World" on June 26. The "Pope of Trash" will perform his vaudeville act at the Concert Hall at the New York Society of Ethical Culture. Tickets are $37.50 and $100 for FilthyVIP (which includes a meet and greet with Mr. Waters, and an autographed DVD). Get tickets here.

I disagree with the critics who feel that Laura Linney has been miscast as the infamous sexual predator the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Ms. Linney’s controversial performance in the erratic Roundabout revival is living very dangerously indeed. Its unyielding ice coldness is overstylized, riveting in both its originality and waywardness, and ultimately a self-negating mistake, like an experiment in the wrong venue. But which other actress on Broadway, I wonder, is as daring as Ms. Linney?

It’s glib to think that this fine actress who’s known for her unshowy emotional honesty is unsuitable for the role of Merteuil, the “virtuoso in deceit.” Ms. Linney’s scrubbed sanctimony in The Crucible is untypical of the more intriguing range of her work in the theater (Sight Unseen) and on film (Mystic River, You Can Count on Me). There’s no reason I can imagine why she can’t be emotionally honest playing a cow.

Cow is the polite c-word for the Marquise de Merteuil. The problem is that practically all emotion has been drained out of Ms. Linney’s performance.

She hasn’t been miscast, she’s been misdirected.

Rufus Norris’ revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses lurches from the ostentatiously starchy to the stylishly good to the heavy-handed and coarse. The British director’s overintellectualized idea of Merteuil has neutralized Ms. Linney’s emotional power to such an extent that she scarcely connects with the other actors onstage. There are long stretches when she doesn’t even look at anyone.

We’re meant to perceive her Merteuil as though she were a figure frozen in a painting.

ALL VERY WELL (and arty). Scott Pask’s elegant, unsurprising set with drapes and mirrors encourages such painterly narcissism. (The less refined emblem of the original 1986 staging was an unruly defiled bed.) But portraiture isn’t theater. It’s a director’s concept, and it’s out of sync with the rest of the production.

Given the courtly artifice and manners of the ancien régime in 18th-century France, doubtless Ms. Linney’s flawlessly mechanized stylization is historically correct. So, too, her studied, glacially slow walk or the unwaveringly precise manner in which she holds the fingers of her hands over her silk panier. But this is a Merteuil who has no fun with the games she plays.

In proto-feminist self-justification, she tells the Vicomte de Valmont—her sometime lover and unscrupulous partner in sexual conquest—“I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.” Merteuil is a woman who can say that her favorite word isn’t betrayal, but cruelty. She’s undeniably heartless.

And mercilessly so in Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel. But Christopher Hampton’s renowned stage adaptation makes Merteuil more emotionally ambiguous, while his screen version for the Stephen Frears movie starring John Malkovich and Glenn Close had her crack up when Valmont betrays their libertine pact and falls in love with his biggest conquest—the pious, married Madame de Tourvel. The opportunity is there for Ms. Linney’s bloodless Merteuil to be human!

Ben Daniels’ Valmont, on the other hand, is having far too much fun. The British actor does a lot of Fragonard-ing about the joint, too. That perfect aristocratic posture—the stockinged, shapely leg slightly bent in front of the other, the insolently arched back to the manner born (and so on). Mr. Daniels’ cheerfully depraved Valmont—a man “who never opens his mouth without calculating the harm he can do”—is looser and warmer than his co-conspirator. His shade-too-likable performance lacks insinuating danger. Next Page >