Westport Country Playhouse Knows What It’ll Be Doing For Over a (Magical) Year from Now

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


The Westport Country Playhouse hasn’t yet opened the final two shows in its current season (Suddenly Last Summer Aug. 23-Sept. 10 and Twelfth Night Oct. 11-Nov. 5), and they’re already announced their full slate for 2012.

How quaint, to follow a calendar-year season schedule rather than the school-year model preferred by most regional theaters. But Westport’s legacy is as a summer theater, so making that season the center makes perfect sense.

When some theaters list a lot of familiar classics, it’s fair to chide them for playing it safe—as long as those theaters have some legacy of new works or other risk-tasking that they’re forsaking. Westport’s history is as a cool summer stock house known for attracting big movie and theater stars to do regional renditions of the popular dramas and comedies of their time. You marvel at the old posters on display in the lobby not because the shows are so exotic but because the casts are. Who wouldn’t have wanted to see Lilian Gish in The Trip to Bountiful in 1953? Or Thornton Wilder appearing in his own Our Town and Sking of Our Teeth? Imogene Coca in Anita Loos’ Happy Birthday, offering what would have to have been a very different take on a role originated by Helen Hayes? Art Carney, who originated the role of Felix Ungar in the Odd Couple, instead starring in a different Neil Simon comedy, Prisoner of Second Avenue? Jack Gilford and Lou Jacobi in Simon’s The Sunshine Boys?

So that’s the attitude I take to Westport: shows you’ve heard of, but with an added ingredient that makes them seem fresh. Sometimes that ingredient is just the theater itself, neatly renovated a few years ago in a manner which added comfort and high-tech accoutrements while respecting the classic dimentions of the stage (very high, rather deep) and the auditorium (dark and wooden, the seats built into meeting-house pews). The WCP audience is unlike any in the state: eager to indulge in a night out at the theater, but more worried about wasting their precious time than their money. They don’t suffer bad plays gladly. Mark Lamos understands this crowd as few ever have, and handles the role of artistic director rather differently than he did his last big Connecticut regional theater gig, running Hartford Stage for 17 years (from the late ‘70s into the early ‘90s). The WCP, after all, is a place where Shakespeare has rarely been done. (And we have yet to see how next month 2011-season-concluding Twelfth Night goes.)

So, the season:
May 1-19, 2012: The previously announced 25th anniversary revival of Sondheim & Lapine’s Into the Woods, directed by Lamos. It’s a co-production with Baltimore CenterStage.
June 12-30, 2012: The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion adapted her own bestselling memoir (about her state of mind following the the deaths of her husband John Gregory Dunne and their daughter Quintana Roo Donne) for the stage. The New York production was directed by playwright David Hare, who had one of his own plays at Westport last year. The Westport production of The Year of Magical Thinking stars Maureen Anderman, who took over for Vanessa Redgrave in the New York run. Anderman has a long list of Broadway and TV credits, but I would rather note that she is equally acclaimed in the regional theater, especially in Connecticut, where she has starred at Long Wharf, Yale Rep and Hartford Stage. She certainly has the gravitas to do Didion—Anderman’s resume runs from O’Neill to Pinter to soap operas. But any one-woman play about mortality, be it Wit or Year of Magical Thinking or God Said Ha!, needs to balance the darkness with lightness—so take comfort in the fact that Anderman’s killed in comedies from the likes of Moliere, Kaufman and Gurney. I fondly recall her First Lady at Yale Rep. She’s got the range to do whatever she wants.

Maureen Anderman,thinking.


Aug. 28-Sept. 15: Speak of the devil: Moliere’s Tartuffe, which Maureen Anderman appeared in under the direction of Mark Lamos years ago at Hartford Stage, is being done anew, with different cast and director, in the Westport Country Playhouse’s late summer slot. Associate Artistic Director David Kennedy helms this one. It’s a play I love. (My father wrote a novel about Moliere, and I grew up appreciating the playwright’s comic gifts as deeply as I did those of Bugs Bunny.) I hope this production takes the bad taste out of my mouth put there by Daniel Fish’s misguided, arch and counterintuitive Tartuffe at Yale Rep a few years ago.
Aug. 28-Sept. 15, 2012: A new play! Harbor by Chad Beguelin, directed by Lamos. Good for them. A new play. A comedy about social, class and family expectations yet, set in Sag Harbor. Good. Laugh at people like you for a bit, Westport.
Oct. 9-Nov. 3, 2012: A Raisin in the Sun. Just remember. This is the theater that takes classics and reminds you why regional theater audiences still need to see them. I held my tongue when I saw Diary of Anne Frank on the schedule last year, and I’m certainly reserving judgement of this choice, even though it was roundly lampooned by George C. Wolfe in his The Colored Museum as “The Last Mama on the Couch Play” a quarter-century ago.

Categories: Connecticut Theaters, Previews, Westport Country Playhouse | 6 Comments

England’s Riots: We’ll Rumble Them Right?

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


The scene felt like it was in a movie. The mayor, white blond hair flopping in its Dulux dog way, bumbled down a cordoned-off Lavender Hill, past firefighters dousing what used to be a party shop.
His smallish media mob—featuring fuzzy microphones, aides, camera and hangers-on—headed towards the much bigger broom mob, waiting to start cleaning the street. It wasn’t exactly West Side Story but it was, well, pretty strange actually.
—“Cheers and Jeers for Boris from the Bristling Crowd” by Ann Treneman, London Times front page, 10 August 2011

“It wasn’t exactly West Side Story”?! No kidding. But you know that some writers and editors agonized over that metaphor. Couldn’t be too specific. Couldn’t romanticize the wrongdoers. OK to make authority figures bumbling but not thoroughly incompetent or corrupt. Nothing can suggest an agenda. Has to be straight-out hooliganism. No “Les Misearables” comparisons, then. You’d think you’d be history if you quoted Shakespeare either: his passionate agendas and charismatic rulers would eviscerate the extremely simple point that you’re trying to make.

Pity for the London Times, then, that West Side Story—several of whose characters admittedly live and die by street violence—is based on Romeo and Juliet. Other than angry young people throwing things, there’s no useful connection between West Side Story and the riots and looting that have swept through England in the last few days.

If you want to connect a news story about sweeping up the trash in a crumbling class-clashing society, why not go for Mary Poppins, or Stomp? Makes more sense than West Side Story.

West Side Story’s violence is contained, a feud among families and gangs, a neighborhood civil war of vulnerable immigrant communities. The London riots? Not much of a plot there at all.

Reducing unbelievable disaster to the phrase “”like a movie” is a common sort of post-crisis journalistic denial, as if finding order and meaning in chaos must suggest that someone scripted it. The impulse to reduce the inconceivable to images from pop-culture fictions quickly gives way to genuine human survival tales. Today’s heroine is the young woman who was photographed leaping from a burning building. Tomorrow’s stories will be about the cost of rebuilding, and all arts references will be forgotten.

The real shame is that England nurtured a whole generation of playwrights—Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, David Edgar—who’ve eloquently articulated the roots of street violence, social injustice and class warfare. We should looking up those guys rather than finding the most mindless and non-threatening theatrical metaphors for things getting out of hand.

Why analyze, when you can just blame the very last buggin’ gang on the whole buggin’ street? On the whole ever-mother-lovin’ streeeeeeet…

Categories: Politics, Rock Theater | Leave a comment

Half a Dozen Great Animated Broadway (or Broadway-style) Musicals

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


Oh, Streetcar—The Springfield Community Players. I’m one of those Simpsons fans who’s only conversant in the show’s first six or seven seasons. If they’ve ever done a better multi-part Broadway musical parody than this stellar takedown of A Streetcar Named Desire, I need to know about it. Runners-up (also from early seasons): The Planet of the Apes musical starring Troy McClure, and the abrupt Music Man tribute in “A Streetcar Named Marge” (not to be confused with “Oh, Streetcar!”)

Snoopy! The Musical. There’s an animated version of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, but it pales next to the Off Broadway original, having cut half the songs so as to fit a one-hour TV broadcast slot and keeping with the Peanuts TV cartoon tradition of having the characters sound like real kids reading their lines off the page. (A few of the cast members here also appeared in the weekly Charlie Brown & Snoopy Show, during the most prolific period of Peanuts cartoons.) The singing is weak, the performances not as lively as in the classic Clark Gesner-scored stage version with its brilliantly modular set design.
Snoopy! The Musical, on the other hand, only benefits from trims and a consistent style. This long-gestating mutt of a sequel (the Annie Warbucks of its time) had its world premiere in San Francisco in 1975 but didn’t make it to Off Broadway until 1982, with a completely different cast. I saw a Boston try-out of that Off Broadway version, starring David Garrison as Snoopy and Vicki Lewis as Peppermint Patty—both far better than the material they were given to work with. (Lewis, years away from NewsRadio and other glories, was replaced by Lorna Luft shortly after the show went to New York. Some indignity, if that the biggest “name star” they could swing.) The TV rendition succeeds as a brisk, harmless installment in the long, uneven annals of animated Peanuts—more unwieldy than It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown, perhaps, but not nearly as far-gone as the Spike-starring It’s the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown.

Mayhem of the Music Meister! The final episode of the first season of Batman: The Brave and the Bold rated festival rated festival screenings and the release of its eight-song soundtrack, and was nominated for an Emmy. Neil Patrick Harris, still jut entering his mainstream acceptance as a Broadway belter (he’d done Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but had only just begun hosting all those awards shows). NPH accesses his old Cabaret and Assassins characterizations for a supervillain who mesmerizes the members of the Justice Leagure of America into doing kicklines against their will. The songs are super-catchy, from the style-parody “He Drives Us Bats” (sung by inmates of Arkham Asylum) to “Death Trap,” a suspense song which would work in just about any actual Frank Wildhorn musical.

Cats! It never actually got made (Really Useful Productions ultimately took the easy straight-to-video filmed-stage-show route instead), but the concept of turning Andrew Lloyd Webber’s leg-warmer into a ful-length animated feature was so appealing that it worked its way into the dialogue of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. Which almost made it real.

Shinbone Alley. This is the cat cartoon musical which did get made, against all odds, nearly 15 years after the stage musical on which it’s based had a short run on Broadway, and some 65 years after its lead characters had first been introduced as part of humorist Don Marquis’ daily column in the New York Sun. The film cleverly updates the urban squalor of the original archy & mehitabel newspaper adventures and the 1957 nusical to include the civil unrest and war-consciousness of the early 1970s, which connected it squarely to the Ralph Bakshi adult cartoon features Heavy Traffic and Coonskin released in that same enlightened era. (Bakshi referenced archy & mehitabel as slumdwelling urbanites in one of his films.)

South Park The Movie. Structured just like a real musical. The Book of Mormon’s success was inevitable.

Categories: Lists, Rock Theater, Television | 8 Comments

Playing the Market

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


Everybody has decided that everybody is panicking. So everybody is screaming and getting up and running out of the theater.
—BU Economics prof Laurence J. Kotlikoff, quoted in the Aug. 9 Boston Globe story “An Avalanche of Worry—World Markets Plunge on Fears Over US, European Economies

A dizzying array of disaster metaphors in today’s news. Avalanche, plunge, teetering on the brink… the only ones left to use in tomorrow’s papers will be locusts and paper cuts. But that theater panic riff really stuck out for us. What shows should those jittery crowds be seeing with their fast-dwindling disposable income?

The American Clock by Arthur Miller. A chronicle of the 1929 Wall Street crash and its aftermath, by a playwright who lived through it and whose writing career began with a New Deal WPA gig. It only lasted 12 performances on Broadway, but college and community theaters have kept the fires burning. Boasting one of the largest casts of any Miller play, it was made into a TV movie in 1993, adapted by Frank Galati and directed by none other than Bob Clark, of Porky’s and A Christmas Story fame. The TV cast is astounding—everyone from Mary McDonnell to Joanna Miles, Kelly Preston to Estelle Parsons, Jim Dale to Eddie Bracken, Yaphet Kotto to Tony Roberts. David Straithairn and Darren McGavin play the same character at different ages!

Grapes of Wrath by Frank Galati again. The great adaptor explored the upper classes losing their cash in his American Clock screenplay. His take on Steinbeck’s book covers the lost dreams of those who never had money in the first place.

Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets. Its original 1935 Group Theatre production in New York didn’t last long, but today’s recession-conscious regional theater scene has found a new audience for this financial mishap melodrama. It’s had stagings at Oregon Shakes, ART and The Intiman in recent seasons.

Flora, The Red Menace by George Abbott, Robert Russell, John Kander and Fred Ebb. A 1965 musical presented as if it were produced by the Federal Theatre Project.

Annie, Rainmaker, half a dozen other Odets, more variations on Grapes of Wrath… We could keep going on Great Depression shows forever. Let’s move on to other eras:

The Admirable Crichton by J.M. Barrie. An epic of financial reversal, in which a servant is better equipped for survival and powermongering when money is removed from the social equation. Not just economically but environmentally aware, the play chickens out in its final act before it can make a strong statement about societal class shake-ups.

Other People’s Money by Jerry Sterner. The seriocomic consequences of corporate takeovers.

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. Arrogance, racism and cultural one-upmanship all based on whether or not one’s ship comes in.

An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen. A defense of whistleblowers and rational planners in communities blinded by the promise of easy short-term riches at the expense of long-term health.

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Moliere. Nipping social-climibing in the bud, not because of national financial concerns and austerity trends, but due to commonsense exasperation at unchecked vanity and ludicrous luxuries. Rewritten for the 1980s by the great Charles Ludlam and ridiculously retitled Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde.

Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard. A play so full of stuff that it has resonated with every political or cultural upheaval in America since it was written in 1978. Corresponds neatly with today’s turmoil by referencing zombies.

Categories: Politics | Leave a comment

Artistic Viz-ion

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


I’ve been reading VIz for over 20 years, shortly after it debuted and when I was still in its target audience of horny, irrespressibly young adults who think they’re smarter than everyone else. I never “outgrew” the magazine partly because I never “outgrew” the British comic books and tabloid newspapers which it satirizes. Also because reliably, at least once an issue, the admittedly low-class, foulmouthed, anything-for-a-laugh Viz does a bit which, by any standard, is clever, funny on several levels and even (a word which would appall these self-styled vulgarians) witty.
The piece shown here, “Bard Language,” isn’t any of that. But it is about theater and it is typical of Viz. The mag is part MAD, part The Onion, part old National Lampoon and Spy, part nasty scrawlings on bathroom walls. Puncturing pretension is the foundation of what Viz duz. To that end, theater manifests itself in a few regular features, including The Critics (in which a married pair of writers loudly proclaim the virtues of rubbish) and Luvvy Darling (a worthless actor who’s all style and no work).
None of those features appear in Viz #207. Perhaps a page of News of the World-style manufactured comical indignation over Shakespeare is enough.

Categories: Books & Magazines, Shakespeare, Stand-Up Comedy | Leave a comment

Travelin’ Light

Posted on August 6, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


A Guys and Dolls matchbook bought at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. This is a hip independent bookshop, and the other matchbooks for sale were all lit-based rather than theatrical. The image on the matchbook cover is from the first edition of Damon Runyon’s short story collection Guys and Dolls (with an intro by Heywood Broun), published in 1931. The show is very loosely based on a couple of these tales and more accurately simply based on the book’s title and Runyon’s patois.
In any case, it was nice to find a matchbook with a play on it; remember when fancier matchbooks were a popular souvenir item at Broadway theater merch counters?
I just ran across a copy of Eric Bentley’s anthology From the American Drama. Bentley considered the book of Guys and Dolls impressive enough to rub shoulders in the volume with Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (a 1902 pop culture phenomenon by Clyde Fitch, later adapted for the Federal Theatre Project), The New York Idea (1906, Langdon Mitchell; this is the script recently updated by David Auburn), Wilder’s Pullman Car Hiawatha and Saroyan’s The Man With the Heart in the Highlands (originally a short story).
The musical’s book, of course, is by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, with uncredited augmentations by the show’s original director, George S. Kaufman.
Well matched!

Categories: Theater Toys | 2 Comments

Sides

Posted on August 6, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


I put together this facsimile paper theater (from Pollock’s Toy Theatres, published in 1972) with scissors and a gluestick. The only remaining thing is to figure out what to present in it.
For a paper theater, something flat, black & white and two-dimensional seems appropriate. But if I did a Wendy Wasserstein play, I’d have to pay royalties!
So many plays, from the Federal Theatre Project to Odets to Miller, used to be “ripped from today’s papers,” including the comics sections—L’il Abner, Annie… and whatever happened to that long-gestating Mickey Rooney musical of Bringing Up Father? Well, there’s a Betty Boop musical slated for 2012 on Broadway.

Categories: Children's Theater, Theater Toys | Leave a comment

Come, poor remains of friends, rest on this rock

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

It wasn’t really a musical event. It was a theatrical production of a musical event.
—Barry Tashian in the October 2010 issue of Shindig! magazine, quoting bandmate Bill Briggs about what it was like for their band The Remains to tour with The Beatles in 1966.

Categories: Rock Theater | Leave a comment

I saw a smith stand with his hammer thus

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

At this point in our careers, we checked into hotels under pseudonyms. If you used real name, you’d have a tribute band delivering your room service or a girl larger than your whole family trying to climb through your window. Mentioning the name Aerosmith brought nothing but pain and penicillin . But then what else do you give a band that’s got everything?

So we checked in under names like the Shakespearean Players, Upchuck and the Hurlers, or, my favorite, Six Legs and Four Balls (I stole that one from Peter, Paul and Mary). We’d arrive at the Holiday Inn and they’d say “Welcome, Shakespearean Players!” We would say stuff like ‘Thank thee, sire” and “Will thou showest us-eth to our roometh?” (Try saying that with crackers in your mouth.) It was out there, but you know, at four in the morning, anything goes.

—Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?—A Rock ‘n’ Roll Memoir (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2011)

Categories: Books & Magazines, Rock Theater, Shakespeare | 10 Comments

More Lou Harry Trivia Games

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


The first three rounds are here
and the answers to those first three rounds are here

For the uninitiated, these questions emanate from a pub quiz which the wonderful Lou Harry of the Indianapolis Business News put together one night for a bunch of theater journalists who were in L.A. as part of an NEA/Annenberg fellowship in June. Good fun!

Round Four: Theater Math
1. The number of Angry Men plus the musical based on Fellini’s 8 ½.
2. The number of Men in a Boat divided by a song from A Chorus Line.
3. The number used twice in the title of a musical which starred Danny Kaye, times the number of girls used twice in a Kander & Ebb title.
4. A Jason Robert Brown musical, minus the number in the title of a musical which starred Tommy Tune.
5. Number of Frenchmen in the Cole Porter musical plus the number of Hoods with Robin in the upcoming Rat Pack-related musical.

Round Five: Roots
Name the book, play or opera on which each of these shows was based. (Some may have more than one source.)
1. Crazy for You
2. Timbuktu!
3. Play On
4. Mame
5. Rent
6. Angel
7. South Pacific
8. Cabaret
9. Sugar
10. Lestat

Round Six: Who Wrote…
1. The play You Never Can Tell
2. The book The Season
3. The play Crimes of the Heart
4. The book for Fiddler on the Roof
5. The lyrics for City of Angels
6. The music for The Goodbye Girl
7. The theme song for The Nanny
8. The play The Mercy Seat
9. The play Uncommon Women and Others
10. The music for The Capeman

Round Seven: Lyrics
Name the show from which these quotes come.
1. “Oh, it’s time to start livin’”
2. “It was the music of something beginning.”
3. “Joey, Joey, Joey. You’ve been too long in one place.”
4. “I’m quick on the trigger with targets not much bigger.”
5. “Don’t you carry nothin’ that might be a load.”
6. “I’m gonna be a mighty being, so enemies beware”
7. “Prepare ye the way of the lord.”
8. “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.”
9. “Where is love?”
10. “Everyone’s a little bit…”

Categories: Trivia Quiz, Uncategorized | Leave a comment