Time to reread the collected works of Hallie Flanagan, Maxine Klein and Bertolt Brecht.

… while listening to the soundtracks of Pins and Needles and The Pajama Game.

Other titles with which to “up the workers”:

The Gut Girls by Sarah Daniels

Singing Jailbirds by Upton Sinclair

Beggar on Horseback by Kaufman & Connelly

Does The Miracle Worker count?

Sturm und Drang by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger. It’s the work that coined that phrase, in 1776. The play’s actually about the American Revolution.

Dynamo by Eugene O’Neill. Big splashy thunderstorm finale. One of O’Neill’s most underrated works. It underwhelmed the critics at its premiere, and the playwright blamed himself for not having gotten as involved in the production as he had been with previous ones.

Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon. “I’m going to be shoveling snow in my own living room!”

Three Days of Rain by Richard Greenberg. We all know what that means.

The Tempest by William Shakespeare. “Here’s neither bush nor shrub, to bear off
any weather at all, and another storm brewing. I hear it sing i’ the wind: yond’ same black cloud, yond huge one, looks like a foul bombard that would shed his liquor.”

Porgy and Bess by Ira Gershwin, Dubose Heyward and George Gershwin. The hurricane that bombards Catfish Row at the end of Act 2 has just been bested by the furor arising from Porgy purists upset at some of the changes Diane Paulus and Suzan-Lori Parks have made for their revised version at the ART.

To Gleam It Around, To Show My Shine by Bonnie Lee Moss Rattner. A 1983 play based on Zora Neale Hurston’s Okeechobee Hurrican-struck story Their Eyes Were Watching God. It’s had productions at several college and regional theaters.

Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. The 1921 movie version of this 1910 George M. Cohan play (based on short stories by George Randolph Chester) was showing at the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington DC in January of 1922 when the building’s roof collapsed due to snowfall from a blizzard that had raged for over two days. Ninety-eight people died and over a hundred others were injured in the crash. The storm ended up being named after the theater: The Knickerbocker Storm.

The Storm by Ostrovsky. Turned into an opera by Janacek. It’s mostly metaphorical, about tempestuous relationships and personal revelations which resound like thunderbolts, but there is a weather-type storm in there somewhere too.

Irene. The musical comedy based on the James Montgomery play Irene O’Dare was, in its time, the longest running show in Broadway history. Songs from two decades-apart versions of this show—“You Made Me Love You” and “Alice Blue Gown” can be heard this November in the new musical Hello! My Baby at Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre in Chester.
Another hit song from the show, which you could well be humming Sunday: “There’s Something in the Air.”

Today is national Museum Day. For theater fans, allow me to strongly recommend a stroll around the Thomas Lawrence exhibit on the second floor of the Yale Center for British Art.

The show is extravagantly labeled Regency Power and Brilliance, but the hype is warranted because Lawrence was the coolest celebrity portrait artist of his day. This was a time before paparazzi—“Excuse me, sir, could you climb this hill and stay there the rest of the afternoon so that I might paint you in an indecorous posture?”—but Lawrence brings some of that vitality to his work. His paintings also became the late 18^th century equivalent of pin-up posters. The Yale show demonstrates how his works were turned into stipple engravings and mass-produced.

There’s no doubt that Lawrence was besotted with the rich and famous.

The painting which greets you at the start of the exhibition—first major American retrospective of ol’ T.L. in nearly 20 years—exemplifies the sort of subject matter that attracted him. It’s of Elizabeth Farren. She was destined to become the Countess of Derby. But when this painting was done in 1790, she was known as a leading actress of the London stage. She’d played Miss Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer in 1777 (when that Goldsmith comedy was already a few years old), Lady Teazle in Sheridan’s A School for Scandal and Lydia Languish in the same playwright’s The Rivals, Betty Modish in Colley Cibber’s The Careless Husband, every Shakespeare heroine from Juliet to Portia to Twelfth Night’s Olivia and dozens of other major roles at major Drury Lane theaters.

Lawrence paints Farren not onstage but outdoors, in a climate which may be hard to clarify—it seems cloudy, sunny, windchilled and warm all at once. Whatever weather it is, she seems inappropriately dressed for it. She’s pulling a wrap up around her neck, is a little hunched as if warding off the elements, and her gown drags along the dirt.

In short, she’s acting, creating a character who may be in the wrong place in a questionable costume but is nonetheless captivating. Thomas Lawrence gets her innate drama queenliness. His painting of her caused a sensation. And it still does.

While Lawrence naturally gravitated to commissions from the high-born and titled, he had a natural affinity for famous performers. The Yale exhibit has you craning your neck to read the descriptive cards posted by each grand portrait, so you can figure out who these impressive-looking folks were. The YCBA has arranged many wonderful displays of 18^th and early 19^th century portraits, but their previous exhibit which this Thomas Lawrence one most reminds me of is the Lord Snowdon photo show the museum hosted in 2001. There’s that same sense of the artist enhancing an already rich personality, rather than vainly trying to make somebody look better than they are.

Elizabeth Farren isn’t the only actor on view. She’s not even the only one to become a countess after Lawrence painted her. Among the other theater types:

• Emilia, Lady Cahir (“Later Countess of Glengall”), who apparently indulged in amateur “country-house theatricals.” In this unfinished portrait, Lawrence is attempted to throw her as three distinct characters.” A pencil note on the canvas says he’s done it “in a fit of folly.”

• British theater superstar Sarah Siddons (shown in a print by William Say fashioned after a Thomas Lawence painting), posing with her hand on a copy of a book of plays by Thomas Otney.

• Siddons’ brother John Philip Kemble, in the role of Cato the Younger for the hit play about the Roman statesman by Joseph Addison. The play had been around for about a century when Kemble helped build his reputation as a heroic leading man with it. Lawrence’s portrait is huge and glowing, like a close-up in a Technicolor movie.

I’ve visited the YCBA’s Thomas Lawrence exhibit over a dozen times since it opened in February. When it closes on June 5, it will feel like the theater season is really over.