Christie in Love

Through Oct. 29 at the Yale Cabaret. Written by Howard Brenton. Directed by Katie McGerr. Sound Design: Matt Otto. Fight Choreography: Fisher Neal. Dramaturg: Mary Laws. Stage Manager: Hannah Sullivan. Producer: Shane D. Hudson. “Visual Design by the Company.” Performed by Lucas Dixon (Constable), Rob Grant (Inspector) and Max Roll (Christie).

Dark chilly nights have miraculously appeared this week to underscore the themes of a slew of depression-season Yale productions.

It’s intense enough that the Yale Cabaret would choose to stage Howard Brenton’s 20^th century social nightmare Christie in Love (its very title a perversion) on the same week that the Yale Rep world-premieres Amy Herzog’s neo-noir youth angst explosion Belleville and the Yale School of Drama traffics in soul-selling and spark-extinguishing with Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. Now the weather is complying with the already ubiquitous creepiness.

The first time I saw Christie in love, at Tufts university in the early ’80s,  it featured Hank Azaria, who already, as a college undergrad, had an uncanny knack for extreme accents (in this case British cockney slowing foul limericks). It was hard to restrain Hank Azaria even then, but there was no need. This Yale Cab production doesn’t hold back the Monty Pythonesque excesses either. The accents rise and fall, the Britishish eccentricities are blustered and bolstered.

Howard Brenton’s play is so  amazing because it can suck in large dollops of the absurdist comedy that was so popular in England at the time (iot was written in 1970, when Monty Python and The Goodies were in full flower), yet chill you to the bone with sober realism. The play, after all, is based on a real-life crime that was  the mid-‘50s British equivalent of John Wayne Gacy—a killer who’d washed bodies in and around his home. The particular horror of Christie’s case was that his testimony had helped police convict and execute another man for a couple of killings Christie probably did himself.

Brenton’s author’s note in the script opens by insisting that “Christie’s first appearance is in the Dracula tradition. Happy horror, creeps and treats.”

The play not only still makes sense as an overall condemnation of the lurid media (the set is a pile of crumpled up newspapers posing as Christie’s backyard), desensitized urban society (those coarse limericks get increasingly distasteful), and the competitive and power-grubbing nature of modern life in general (a constable has to go home to the wife and assume normalcy after digging up human bones; an inspector plays interrogation-room psychological games with the murderer), it’s still funny and it’s still crazy-scary. The purposefully all-male cast has to internalize and awkwardly socialize, and the three actors here do so with an air of archness and exasperation that’s exhilirating.

I’m surprised productions of this play, which made Brenton’s reputation overnight when David Hare’s Portable Theater production of it moved swiftly to the Royal Court Theatre in 1970)  don’t come around more often. It should be a rite of passage for young dramatic actors the way Zoo Story has become. It’s not the sort of play where you can compliment the cast and creative team for maintaining a consistent tone. It’s the kind where you praise them for juggling so many knives in the air.

Belleville
Through Nov. 12 at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Written by Amy Herzog. Directed by Anne Kauffman. Scenic Designer: Julia C. Lee. Costume Designer: Mark Nagle. Lighting Designer: Nina Hyun Seung Lee. Sound Designer and Composer: Robert Kaplowitz. Production Dramaturgs: Amy Boratko and Alex Ripp. Vocal and Dialect Coach: Beth McGuire. Fight Directors: Rick Sordelet and Jeff Barry. Stage Manager: Gina Noele Odierno.

Belleville opens like Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, with newlyweds indulging the glories of their own cool apartment. Except there’s stuff about masturbation. Belleville closes like an Ionesco play, with an awful lot of attention being paid to the furniture. Except a very disturbing human tragedy has happened. In the middle, Belleville plays like an early 20th century melodrama, in which everyone has dark ulterior motives and everytime a knife is brandished—to cut bread, mostly—someone comments on how menacing it seems.
Except that Belleville’s chills and thrills come from everyday, present-day anxieties like establishing yourself in a career and a relationship when you’re in your 20s, or losing a parent at a sensitive time, or wondering where the rent’s going to come from.
The main characters in Belleville reek with that all-American air of entitlement and superiority. They’re smug, self-centered, oblivious to the problems they’re causing others and grotesquely wrapped up in themselves. This is a play of constant conflicts: internal, external, cultural, psychological and epidermal.

The Yale Repertory has offered more than its share of bleak relationship dramas in the last few years. That’s because it premieres more new works by young playwrights than any other theater in New England. Belleville offers a new fashion of bleakness (bleak is the new black), and I won’t say it’s unwelcome. Like everyone from Dostoevsky to Edward Albee to David Adjmi to Lucinda Coxon (all of whom have been produced at the Rep in recent years), Herzog explores the disintegration of a relationship, showing how the “lovers” have been living a lie.

But Belleville is much more dramatic, or rather melodramatic, than a simple unraveling of a relationship. Herzog wants to show you the hopelessness and rage that can spiral out of the stresses of everyday living, but she really cares about raising the entertainment value of the experience. Belleville is funny. It’s suspenseful. It’s mock-shocking, then genuinely horrifying. It’s weird yet real. It’s old-fashioned yet current and immediate. It’s ironic yet earnest. You can read multiple metaphors into it—America’s attitude about the rest of the world, maturity and regression in Millenial Generation, the need for romance—geographically or personally—and the desire to micro-manage that romance until it’s just another consumer commodity.

You might wonder how on earth any actor can play such scattered material. The Rep’s cast shows just about every option. As Abby, a frank and frustrated young woman trying to kick the anti-depressants she’s been taking since her mother died, Maria Dizzia strips herself emotionally bare, erupting regularly into hysteria which somehow stops short of histrionics. As her husband Zack, Greg Keller takes a different tack, starting with a stoner-dude stereotype then adding humanity gradually. As their mature-beyond-their years landlords, Gilbert Owuor and Pascale Armand watch silently and react in a variety of ways. Yet everyone is hiding true feelings, or feels powerful or controlled by others.
Happy Halloween. That yuppie couple living in seemingly idyllic bliss is haunted beyond your worst nightmares. Not everybody will have the stomach for Belleville, but at least it scaring up some new styles for the Theater of Codependent Despondency.

In honor of the Yale School of Drama production of Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights—and Halloween!—here are some other colorful Fausts, drawn from the vast Christopher Arnott Collection of Mephistopholean lit.

Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights
Presented by the Yale School of Drama through Oct. 29 at the Iseman Theater. Written by Gertrude Stein. Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Scenic Designer: Adam Rigg. Costume Designer: Jayoung Yoon. Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring. Sound Designer: Elizabeth Atkinson. Projection Designer: Hannah Wasileski. Composer: Adrian Knight. Dramaturg: Sunder Ganglani. Stage Manager: Kirstin Hodges. Performed by William DeMerritt (Doctor Faustus), Lupita Nyong’O & Chris Henry (Mephisto/Doctor Faustus), Adina Verson (Marguerite Ida and Helena Anabel/Doctor Faustus), Alexandra Trow (Marguerite Ida and Helena Anabel/Little Boy and Girl/Doctor Faustus), Fisher Neal (The Dog/Doctor Faustus), Jillian Taylor (The Boy/Doctor Faustus), Hallie Cooper-Novack (Country Woman with the Sickle/Little Boys and Girl/Doctor Faustus), Seamus Mulcahy (Man from Overseas/Doctor Faustus),

Is he is he Doctor Faustus?

There is a cur with the countenance of an old man.
Two or seven speak for one.
A sickle sticks in a spiral staircase.

There could never be a “right way” of doing Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. For starters, Gertrude Stein’s play is really a libretto for which the music was never written. Stein is also too attuned to the eye of the beholder—audience, director, reader—to deliver a piece that is not open to constant reinterpretation.

While Stein is clearly taking much of her Faust from Goethe’s—the prominence of Marguerite, the philosophical undertones, the religious rhetoric—I’ve always appreciated her grasp of Christopher Marlowe’s version of the ancient legend, with its gallows humor and comic wonderment and bold theatricality. Stein of course is also spinning a Faustus on her own terms. She seems to be warning of the dangers of blindly following. Her Faustus is the creator of an electric light bulb. This puts me in mind of the media critic Marshall McLuhan, who saw the light bulb as pure information, sort of a forbidden fruit of the electrical age.

I should add that McLuhan was not a fan of Stein, and once wrote “Jazz provides for the lazy and illiterate precisely what Stein and Joyce offer to more earnest folk: a carefully arranged reduction of consciousness to a moment by moment inconsequentiality. The latest name for this elaborate game of evading and abolishing reason and the rational content of experience is called Existenz (existentialism).”

It’s hard not to talk like that when confronted with Stein, even though her own style is famously sparse and direct. She emphasizes through repetition, not multisyllablism.

Lileana Blain-Cruz, who has staked out a reputation at the Yale School of Drama for deftly devising shows through collaborative ensemble work, translates Stein’s sense of echoing and repeating phrases into stagecraft by having two or more people voice one role at the same time. The actors all seem to have learned the play wholly, which adds to the depth of their performances in even the smallest voices. They also invest themselves in make-up, costumes and movements—some Fosse-esque choreography for the devil(s)—that add flash and glamour. When the characters must bare their souls, it helps that they have trappings to cast off.

Blain-Cruz is ambitious in her choice of material, but she has a sense of grace and balance that draws you in to Stein’s sometimes stultifying text. There is ample humor, starting with a Stein-like decree to “Turn off you cell phones. Turn off your cell phones.” You can feel the audience loosen up, laugh and smile, buying in to the literariness and the theatricality. There’s a spatial evenness to the spaced-out proceedings, which take place along a wide, floor-level stage divided into three parts with a slanty platform that looks like a public restroom floor in the middle.
Elements from ‘20s jazz and silent movies are well chosen, though Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights was written later than that, in 1938, the same year that Stein’s great friend Thornton Wilder premiered his Our Town.
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights remains, dark, remote and operatic. But Lileana Blain-Cruz and her ensemble make it easy, even fun, to follow into the light.

Up close and scary is what Amy Herzog is going for with Belleville, which has its world premiere opening tonight at the Yale Rep. As it did for seven years of her higher education, Yale’s got her back.
When Herzog became concerned that the Rep space wasn’t quite intimate for the Belleville of her fitful dreams, the theater arranged to put up temporary walls around some of the sections of the auditorium. “It’s an example of how seriously they take the needs of a play,” Herzog says. “When I was writing, I was thinking about the apartment, not about the Rep.” The set presents that apartment in great detail.

As for the fright potential, “I wanted it to be scary,” Herzog says, but it’s scary in a modern fast-paced world sort of way. “I’m interested in horror onstage, I like psychological thrillers.” To prep for the show, the cast watched old films such as Gaslight and Suspicion.

Amy Herzog went to Yale both as an undergrad and as a playwriting student at the Yale School of Drama. She found a career straight out of school, with New York productions of After the Revolution and 4000 Miles. The latter was produced by LCT3, the new-works lab for the Lincoln Center this past spring, and will be reborn next spring with a bigger-deal production at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater.
She’s still well remembered in New Haven for her audacious The Wendy Play, which featured a cast of nearly two dozen, half of them high school students borrowed from the Educational Center for the Arts magnet school.
The Wendy Play was a credit to the then-new Carlotta Festival, which presents full productions of works by the School of Drama’s third-year playwrights. The Wendy Play seemed like one of those plays that took such full advantage of available resources and risk-taking opportunities that you couldn’t imagine it ever being staged anywhere again, however good it was.
Yet The Wendy Play did get done again, in California, and her two New York plays seem assured of many regional productions.
Where does Belleville, a dark relationship drama, fit into Herzog’s career trajectory?
“The Rep commissioned it before I graduated. This was my first professional gig,” Herzog explained over coffee at Book Trader last Friday.
The Wendy Play was quasi-autobiographical. Does Belleville’s adventure of a young American couple in France mirror anything in Herzog’s life?
“No. I did spend a summer in Paris once, but nothing like what’s in the play. I just think it’s very interesting, the place Paris holds in our imagination.
“I had a hard time arriving at the first draft. I started writing it in 2007-08, so it either took four years or a month to write.
Herzog’s been attending rehearsals and was adding new touches to the script even once the show was in previews. She also had an active role in casting the play, which stars Maria Dizzia, Greg Keller, recent Yale School of Drama grad Gilbert Owuor and Pascale Armand (who was in the Rep production of Danai Gurira’s The Eclipsed two seasons ago). “I care a lot about actors and acting,” says Herzog, who studied acting and performed in student productions as a Yale undergrad (though her major was English). “But when there’s a question, I defer to the casting director. A lot of writers write for specific actors; casting is a whole separate step.”
She credits Yale—both the undergrad Theater Studies Department and the graduate School of Drama—with giving her a great grounding in the field. “I TAed for Donald Margulies, a tremendous teacher. I got to know Paula Vogel. And Richard Nelson has been a great mentor to me.” She’s teaching at Yale Theater Studies herself now, and also has taught at Bryn Mawr. “Teaching and being in productions and writing can take a lot of time, but I have a tremendous batch of students.”
Somewhere in the past busy year she also found time to get married, to the director Sam Gold, the prolific Off Broadway director who’s making his Broadway debut with the new Theresa Rebeck play Seminar this week.
As for Herzog, besides 4000 Miles’ transfer to the Mitzi Newhouse, she’s got another commission from Yale to work on. “After I turned in Belleville, they called and commissioned another play. I thought that meant they didn’t want to do Belleville. But they did.”
As ever, Yale’s got her back.

Check the name on this ubiquitous Halloween costume.

The brand name Hibrow looks and sounds a lot like the word Hebrew.

I came to this realization entirely on my own, and while researching the item online I find I’m not the first to note the pun. Which only affirms the theory that there might be  a subliminal anti-Semiticism at work here.

Evidence quickly mounts. Are the brows really all that high on these glasses? No, they’re relatively low. The prominent characteristic of the eyebrows is that they’re bushy, not that they’re high. Wouldn’t Bushy Brow be just as good a name as Hibrow?

Regardless, however you want to describe them, the brows are the least important element of this simple disguise, undoubtedly less prominent than the nose, glasses and mustache. Only four parts to the disguise, and the brow comes in fourth, yet gets top billing.

Besides, the humor the disguise conveys is not highbrow, it’s lowbrow. Top hats and ascots are highbrow. Plastic toy faceware is lowbrow.

A long-ago theater memory rushes back to me: a production of The Merchant of Venice directed by Laurence Senelick at my alma mater Tufts University’s old Arena Theatre in the early 1980s. One of the students in the cast was Hank Azaria, even then known for his funny voices and limber limbs. For a scene where the boorish Venetian boys mercilessly mock Shylock, I remember Hank Azaria nimbly placing one of these “Hibrow disguises” on his face. It was memorable because he did it so deftly, as quickly and effectively as if he’d just said the word “Jew,” except it was a more visually arresting slur. It was also the first time I’d ever considered that glasses-and-mustache arrangement to have any ethnic bearing whatsoever. I’d known them all my life but never known them, if you see what I mean.

When I google phrases such as “Jewish nose and glasses,” I do get the occasional entries that admit a connection, such as “Purim Eye Glasses and Nose Shtik” (a catalogue item at jewishsoftware.com). A lot of sites (including Benny’s Educational Toys—The Jewish School Supply Company”) refer to them as “Groucho Nose Glasses.” Which is common, but when you think about it is just as odd as “HIbrow.” Groucho Marx didn’t always wear glasses, and when he did they were wire-framed and not black ovals like Hibrow has. As for his mustache, Groucho painted his on, until his YOu Bet Your Life days, when he grew a real one that was short and gray. So in Groucho’s case this disguise would mostly relate to the eyebrows. Plus he was Jewish. Which brings us right back to Hibrow. Except it doesn’t, because it only does if you know as Groucho glasses, so why would you want to call them Hibrow?

I might be overthinking this. Can you see my furrowed brow?

“This Joint is Jumpin’”
Arthur Faria has lost count of how many times he’s directed Ain’t Misbehavin’, the landmark 1970s Broadway hit which celebrates the life and work of Harlem Renaissance icon Thomas “Fats” Waller and which inspired dozens of similar (mostly inferior) historical song revues and jukebox shows on the Great White Way.
Faria reckons the tally of his previous misbehaviors is in the dozens. But one never knows, do one?
While the total may elude him, Faria remembers the finest nuances of each specific production—from the musical’s first appearance as a one-act revue of Fats Waller songs at Manhattan Theatre Club to its latest revival which has its first preview performance tonight (Wednesday, Oct. 26) on the Long Wharf Theatre mainstage. (Critics get to go Nov. 2; expect a review here next Thursday or Friday. Tix and details at the Long Wharf site here.)

Richard Maltby Jr. co-conceived and directed the original cabaret and Broadway productions of Ain’t Misbehavin’. Faria did the musical staging and choreography. Both men signed on for the Long Wharf revival. Murray Horwitz, who co-wrote the show’s book with Maltby and has been involved in a few other revivals, isn’t along for the ride this time. “Murray takes a back seat to it these dayus,” Faria explained in a phone interview last week. “This production, he did not attend rehearsals. But he’s always invited.”

“Spreading Rhythm Around”
Ain’t Misbehavin’ is not one of those cases where a show’s creators are so protective of their work that the piece is never allowed to be altered. Nor is it one of those situations where an underling with no original ideas of their own recreates the staging or choreography by rote.

Ain’t Misbehavin’ ran for over 1600 performances on Broadway, with performers that ranged from blues shouters to more refined torch song seductresses. Whern Irene Cara from the original Manhattan Theatre Club revue couldn’t be part of the transfer to Broadway, she was replaced by Charlene Woodard, a much different sort of performer.

Ain’t Misbehavin’ was retooled for a national tour starring the Pointer Sisters in 1995 and again in 2008 for American Idol veterans Ruben Stoddard, Frenchie Davis and Trenyce Cobbins.

Doesn’t sound like the producers are all that single-minded in their aesthetic, eh?

The Long Wharf cast includes Eugene Barry-Hill, Doug Eskew, Kecia Lewis-Evans, Cynthia Thomas and Deb Walton.

“T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness”
Above all, consider that this is a show that decided from the get-go that they weren’t even going to insist that there be an exact impersonation of its prevailing force, jazz musician and composer Fats Waller. Everything’s open to reinterpretation. “My job,” Faria says, “is to give the show a vernacular, a style of movement.”

The closest character to Fats Waller in Ain’t Misbehavin’—smiling, sly, overweight, wears a bowler hat, plays the piano—is named Ken, after Ken Page, the actor who originated the role. All the characters, for that matter, are named for their original players: Nell (Carter), Andre (DeShields), Armelia (McQueen) and Charlayne (Woodard).

“At first, I wasn’t sure where we would find Fats Waller. Then, in the rehearsals, it occurred to all of us that all of these people are elements of Fats Waller. You get the feeling that these are Fats’ five closest friends. Ken Page was 22 when he started. It would have been easy to say, OK, you’re Fats Waller. That would be too easy. We didn’t want to do that. We started by staging the numbers in a period style. No dialogue. No book to rely on. You’re loaded with impression.

“That Ain’t Right”
So even while allowing for new ideas, respect for the formative voices is upheld, because they were so integral to what the show became. “We bring a lot of tradition when we come into rehearsals,” Faria says.

He talks about rehearsals a lot. He’s proud of the fact that Ain’t Misbehavin’ looks improvised and loose. Yet each gesture has been extensively worked out, and the show is as “set” as if it had much more rigorous technical needs.

While he welcomes innovation, Arthur Faria is insistent that the secret to Ain’t Misbehavin’ is intense rehearsal. He’s intentionally lost the chance to work major stars into various productions of the show because he knew they wouldn’t be up to the workload. He calls Nell Carter, who made her name in the original cast of the show and made it seem so effortless, “one of the hardest working women I’d ever met in my whole life.”

He despairs of some of the productions that he hasn’t directed and has been invited to. “Most people don’t get it. They think it’s a cheap show—throw a few boas on the women and just do it. They don’t get it. They don’t see the beauty.”

“Squeeze Me”
Speaking of beauty, Faria credits Ain’t Misbehavin’ with introducing mainstream white Broadway audiences to the concept of a large black woman being beautiful.” While acknowledging that “There are heavy-set women in the show because those are who auditioned for us,” the physical and vocal diversity of the performers was crucial to Ain’t Misbehavin’’s widespread appeal.

“I was very young when I first did the show. I wanted to load it up,” Faria says. He still does. During the Long Wharf rehearsals he decided to add a mirror ball—“not a disco ball; an old-fashioned ballroom mirror ball.” It’s for the scene where “How Ya Baby” glides into “Jitterbug Waltz.” The numbers demonstrate how subtle and dramatic Ain’t Misbehavin’ can be, amid all its blowsy grandiosity. Faria fashioned this dance into sharply different pairings—one couple tentative and shy, another antic and ass-grabbing.

“Lookin’ Good But Feelin’ Bad”
In other areas, Faria says “I wanted this show to have a bottom, not just the lightness. Fats Waller had a wonderful life, but he also had a darker side.” Some of that comes out in song choices such as the potsmoker’s lament “The Viper’s Drag.” Faria admits his staging of that number was inspired by the over-the-top anti-pot B-movie Reefer Madness. The hysteria fit with his candid belief that “we knew our audience would be primarily white. I wanted this to be a white person’s take on what a black experience might be, from the insult songs like “Your Feet’s Too Big” to the beautiful songs and the dark side.” The show seeks to turn caricatures and cultural stereotypes on their head, just as Waller did, slyly ingratiating itself while making audiences challenge some of their cultural biases.

“I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”
Faria’s reverence for Waller has not subsided over the years. He describes his glee at being gifted with a hat which belonged to Waller. When working with the singer Patti Austin, he got to know her mother Edna, who gave Faria the greatest compliment he’s ever gotten: “Fats would have loved this. He’d love all the details.” Faria was astonished to learn that Edna Austin had been one of the Waller Girls on the records and film shorts Waller made in the 1930s.

The intention of the Long Wharf production was to restore some of the intimacy which Ain’t Misbehavin’ had in its earliest incarnation at Manhattan Theatre Club. It would be a stretch to say that’s really doable. The show was much shorter then, and had a different shape. “The show was only 30 minutes long. We might have said, ‘OK, that’s Act One, and just created a second act, but instead we took the entire show apart and reconfigured it.”

Another intimacy obstacle: the actors at Long Wharf will outfitted with Lavalier microphones. “You can’t see them—it ruins the illusion of the production for me,” Faria says, but microphones nonetheless.

“Find Out What They Like”
On the other hand, Faria declares the Long Wharf version “doesn’t resemble a version done anywhere else. We’ve done it at Cincinnatti Playhouse in the Park which has a long thrust stage”—a Long Wharf mainstage distinction—“but that theater is huge. I’m taking advantage of the thrust here. It brings the show closer to the audience. So Long Wharf will definitely have the same sense of intimacy that the original show did. You can not escape this cast!”
Nor should you want to. “The cast have all done the show before, and maybe four of them have worked together at different times, but they have never all performed together. You put these five together, and the mix is something we’ve never had before.
“The cast has to be willing to reinvest itself totally. We reinvent this show regularly.”

I do these quirky lists every month or so, trawling the new Netflix on-demand offerings for shows which are either about the theater or feature familiar theater types.

Actresses. Real Korean film stars play themselves in this comedy about animosity and one-upmanship at a Vogue photo shoot.

Almost Love. South Korean romance between childhood friends who become an actress and a martial artist.

Baby Jane? Drag stage stars remake the iconic Bette Davis classic.

Bikini Girls on Ice. Not actually an ice show. A horror show.

Card Subject to Change. We all know that championship wrestling is scripted, but it’s much messier and looser in the small-town circuit. Kind of like the community theater of the sports world. A documentary.

The Captains: Documentary survey, produced and narrated by William Shatner of those who’ve played captains on various Star Trek series. May remind you of the the astonishment and excitement which arose when RSC member Patrick Stewart got plucked to star in Next Generation. Of similar interest, with theater-friendly title: William Shatner’s Gonzo ballet.

Circus Rosaire. Documentary concerning the struggles of a Florida circus family.

Copyright Criminals. A documentary about sound-sampling, particularly in the hip-hop world but applicable to a lot of the sort of idea-lifting and intellectual property disputes common in theater dramaturgy and design.

Dance Fu. Directed by Cedric the entertainer, a martial arts parody in which the hero’s talents are terpsichorean rather than Tae Kwan Do.

Do Not Disturb. Short films with theater dynamics: they’re all small-cast relationship dramas, albeit with horror elements, and all take place in the same room.

Eating Out: Drama Camp. Fourth in Q. Allan Brocka series of gay romantic comedies, this one set at a theater camp with more than the usual number of drama queens.

5 Sides of a Coin. Multi-faceted in-depth look at the hip-hop movement.

Flip the Script. Like Tyler Perry, Terrah Bennett Smith came to movies having done over a dozen stage productions. Like Tyler Perry, she specializes in modern African-American romantic melodramas.

F/X. One Brian Dennehy’s biggest screen successes. In recent years Dennehy’s done almost nothing but stage work, and is coming here to New Haven next month to do his rendition of Krapp’s Last Tape.

Gordon Glass. Omar Benson Miller directs and stars as a security guard longing to be a professional actor.

Harmony (Hamoni). Drama of female inmates in a Korean prison starting a choir.

Lisa Picard is Famous. Griffin Dunne’s 2000 film about an aspiring TV actress jealous of the success of her playwright friend.

Paul Simon & Friends. A Library of Congress concert from when the Capeman composer was awarded the first Gershwin Prize for Popular Music.

Perfect Host. David Hyde Pierce, who began his acting career in the regional theater and has spent much of the last decade on Broadway, stars in this dinner party thriller.

The Reinactors: Documentary about the celebrity impersonators along Hollywood Boulevard.

Screen at Komchanod. An audience of ghosts gather to watch a movie in this horror tale. I know you’re out there; I can hear you not breathing.

Stage Fright. Horror film about an acting ensemble trapped in an old theater where a mass murder once occurred.

The Storytellers. A Hollywood screenwriter frustrated by ageist producers uses her grandson as a front to sell her work.

Super Troopers: Before they got a movie deal, Broken Lizard was a live comedy troupe.

You Got Served. Dance competition musical.

That Championship Season. The 1999 remake, directed by Paul Sorvino and starring Vincent D’Onofrio and Terry Kinney.

200 Pound Beauty. A singer undergoes plastic surgery to fit show biz ideals in this Korean drama.

Welcome to Nollywood. Documentary about the developing Nigerian film industry, which has roots in community theater.

World Intergender Wrestling Champion. Not the first documentary to examine comedian Andy Kaufman’s foray into the sports arena.

Stand-up stuff includes Kevin Hart I’m a Grown Little Man, Michael Winslow Live, Adam Ferrara Funny as Hell, Earthquake Presents From the Outhouse to the White House (political humor from black stand-ups), Tom Wilson: Bigger Than You, Certifiably Jonathan. Winters (do you remember Winters as the corpse in the film version of Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad Poor Dad?), Run On (with three so-called Christian comedians: Tommy Blaze, Brad Stine, David A.R. White), Paul Rodriguez—Comedy Rehab (any Rodriguez special is a master class in working a room and keeping it fresh) and Brazilian stand-up Rafinha Bastos’ A Arte do Insulto. Jeffrey Ross: No Offense is of special interest, since Ross has mined a special strain of live comedy as roastmaster of the Friars Club specials.

StarzPlay, which operates somewhat differently from the main Netflix library in that the offerings can be short-term (and which will reportedly end its relationship with Netflix next February due to licensing issues) currently has several theatry things on its menu: The Blues Brothers, Step Up 3, Fantastic Flesh—The Art of Make-Up EFX, Cannibal! The Musical, Marvin’s Room, Prelude to a Kiss, Topsy-Turvy, Roger Guenver Smith’s A Huey Newton Story, Frank Langella’s Dracula flick and—wow!—the 1975 Zero Mostel/Estelle Parsons sex-romp anthology Foreplay.

Broadway Music MVPs 1960-2010: The Most Valuable Players of the Past 50 Seasons

By Peter Filichia (2011 Applause Theatre & Cinema Books)

I can’t say I’m fond of made-up competitions that pit creative artists against each other as if they were playing sports. But with his earlier The Biggest Hit and the Biggest Flop of the Season, 1959-2009 and now this new volume which takes its cues from the more nuanced hit-and-flop determinations of major-league baseball, Peter Filichia has found fun, frisky formats through which to structure his vast knowledge of Broadway history.

This book is charming right off the bat, so to speak, with a preface that defends the baseball/theater metaphor and works it imaginatively for three pages.

Filicia’s as good with behind-the-scenes anecdotes as he is with the glamorous footlight stuff and showtune passion-sharing, so this is wide-ranging and enlightening book, its data and personal opinions bolstered by dozens of firsthand interviews with an array of Broadway talents, from Kaye Ballard to Larry Gelbart to Anthony Rapp. If you find the manner in which the info is arranged to be unwieldy, don’t worry; Filicia’s indexed it.

Best of all, Filichia doesn’t take his premise all that serious. In treating theater seasons as if they were baseball seasons, he duly each year’s top rookies, “managers” (producers), comebacks, “relievers” and of MVPs, all that seriously. But he’s happy to explain how strong other contenders were, and he openly questions some of his own choices. He’s not interested in using a new way of marking greatness in the theater industry as a chance to redress wrongs done by the Tonys or other awards. Sondheim, for instance, is treated as erratically here as he is in the non-Filichia  leagues: Reliever of the Year for the Candide revival, Comeback Player of the Year for Company, MVP for Follies and complicit in a host of awards won by his stars and collaborators.

Mostly, Filichia tells the stories he wants to tell, aiing to provide variety and insight within an entertaining framework. The MVP for 1986 is Betty L. Corwin, who developed the Theater on Film and Tape Archive in the Billy Rose Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Some rookies are obvious: Barbra Streisand’s breakthrough in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, for instance. But some equally obvious rookies, such as Kristin Chenoweth in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, are overlooked, perhaps because they received appropriate recognition from the Tonys or other award-givers. Or just because Filichia has more interesting showbiz legends to spin. The Comeback king of 1985-86 is Michael Rupert in a Sweet Charity revival; he’d been on Broadway as a teenager in The Happy Time a quarter-century earlier.

So the Comeback winners aren’t all old, and the Rookies aren’t all young; Tyne Daly (Gypsy) and Mickey Rooney (Sugar Babies) are excellent choices. Nice to see Jerry Lewis acknowledged as a Reliever for how he brought new life to the ‘90s revival of Damn Yankees. David Merrick’s cited as Best Manager of 1961-62 for his audacious and unethical ads for Subways Are for Sleeping in which he quoted people who’d loved the show and just happened to have the same names as the major New York theater critics.

Filichia knows in advance that as much as they want to respect the views of theater critics and historians, they want to argue and bitch about them even more. He does a great play-by-play in Broadway Musical MVPs, and wisely offers lots of chances for readers to scream “Throw the bum out.”