Monkees as Actors: A Quiz

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


What do you know about the stage (and quasi-stage) work of The Pre-Fab Four?

1. Davy Jones was in the original Broadway cast of this Dickens-based musical. (The cast appeared on the same Feb. 9, 1964 telecast of the Ed Sullivan show as the Beatles.)
2. David Jones and Micky Dolenz co-starred in the London premier of this stage musical adapted from a Harry Nilsson TV special.
3. Davy Jones was Vince Fontaine in the first national tour of the 1994 Broadway revival of this 1970s Off Broadway sensation.
4. Micky Dolenz co-starred in a regional revival of Stephen Schwartz’s regal anti- war musical at the Goodspeed opera house.
5. As the first major project of his Pacific Arts production company, Michael Nesmith released this “book with a soundtrack”—not quite a musical, but more than a concept album.
6. Micky Dolenz played. the same role as Davy Jones once had in a national tour of this Broadway musical.
7. Michael Nesmith taped stand-up performances by L.A.-based comics for this NBC series based on his earlier clip anthology Elephant Parts.
8. Peter Tork was one of the first celebrities to take part in comedy sketches on this long-running New Jersey-based vaudevillian variety show, ostensibly for children, hosted by Floyd Vivino.
9. Micky Dolenz had a solo 45 based on the works of William Shakespeare.
10. Among Micky Dolenz’s stage directing credits is the London premiere of the live adaptation of this Alan Parker gangster film.
11. Davy Jones returned to the musical in which he’d first achieved stardom, in a different, much older and even more villainous role.
12. Michael Nesmith’s current project involves real-time live performances streamed online under this title.
13. Micky Dolenz did an entire album of Broadway showtunes.

Answers in a future post.

Categories: Rock Theater, Trivia Quiz | Leave a comment

Lax on Lux

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


I plowed through Scott Eyman’s massive Empire of Dream: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (Simon & Schuster 2010) not because I’m a fan of color-saturated epic biblical photoplays—that Technicolor overkill leaves me cold—or even because of DeMille’s appearance in Sunset Boulevard. (Buster Keaton’s cameo is so much cooler.)
No, I’m just a fan of Lux Radio Theatre, an atypically underproduced project to which DeMille’s name was attached. Underproduced because these were audio-only restagings of popular Broadway plays and Hollywood movies. The Lux recreations often featured the same stars as their New York or California originals, yet can be even more interesting when they don’t.

The show ran on three different radio networks (primarily CBS) for 20 years, and DeMille hosted it for nine. You can hear it broadcast on a number of different internet-based Old Time Radio channels, including the fine one hosted by Antioch http://radio.macinmind.com/ and can download episodes from archive.org, http://www.archive.org/details/Lux17
iTunes, audible.com and elsewhere.

I think historians often underestimate how important a widely disseminated public image can be for a biographical subject whose talents ostensibly lay behind the scenes. The fact that Hitchcock had his own TV series, that John Huston was an actor, and that Cecil B. DeMille had Lux Radio Theater unquestionably had lots to do with them being the best-known and most-written-about directors of their respective times.

Scott Eyman, then, is remiss is doing so little reporting on DeMille’s Lux period. He does give over about seven of Empire of Dream’s 580 pages to the radio program, but nearly all of that concerns a political battle DeMille waged when the American Federation of Radio Artists proposed assessing a dollar fee from all its members to fight a state measure which would open the radio industry to non-union workers. It’s a fascinating tale in itself, one which finds the DeMille admirably sticking to his personal principles, refusing to pay, then ultimately sacrificing his cushy radio gig as a result.

But that story is well chronicled in DeMille’s own memoirs. I really want to know more about Lux Radio Theatre itself—how it was cast, how much time it took to produce. It’s clear that the hands-on DeMille didn’t just show up to read the intro scripts; his wind-up banter with the stars following the dramas seems both loose and authoritative. I remain curious about how seriously he took this decade-long gig, and how much a hand he had in it. Lux Radio Theatre is as crucial an archive of theater in its time as those golden age TV productions which ended up in the Broadway Theatre Archive box set, or the PBS series American Playhouse were in theirs.

Categories: Books & Magazines, Radio | 1 Comment

The As You Like It Review

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

As You Like It
Part of the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival, playing in repertory with The Tempest and Rose Mark’d Queen through August 13. Directed by Louis Proske. Scenic designer: Kristen Robinson. Costume designer: Kristin Fiebig. Lighting designer: Alan C. Edwards. Sound designer/composer: Nathan A. Roberts. Dramaturg/Associate Artistic Director: Elliot B. Quick. Artistic Director: Devin Brain. At the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1567.

Somebody at Yale should write a thesis on how the Yale summer theater’s production of the Tempest features a Prospero so diffuse that his lines (arguably the second greatest powerful-old-man role in Shakespeare, behind King Lear) are divvied up amongst all the members of the ensemble, while each young character in As You Like It is carefully and thoughtfully brought to life as a passionate individual.

The two plays are currently playing in repertory at the Cabaret’s underground (and in the case of As You Like It, also outdoor) space at 217 Park St., New Haven. They’re joined later this week by the Margaret amalgamation Rose-Mark’d Queen. The shows all have different sets, directors and concepts. Most members of the acting ensemble appear in two of the three plays; of the six performers in The Tempest four are also among the ten-person cast of As You Like It.

Last time I saw a production of As You Like It done by Yale students, at the school’s Iseman black-box space in 2003, it had a swinging ‘60s theme and the entire play had been renamed “Can You Dig It?”

The previous time I liked As You Like It at Yale was in 1994, when the School of Drama’s then-Dean Stan Wojowodski directed an all-student production featuring Paul Giamatti as Jacques and Lance Reddick as one of the Dukes. That one was done as a vivid, pastel-colored cartoon which had the characters luxuriating and meditating on rolling green lawns.

I’ve seen the play done successfully several times by young casts at other colleges and community theaters. I even saw the 1974 American tour of the National Theatre’s fabulous all-young-male production, and it was every bit as legendary as you may have heard it was.

On the other hand, nearly every “adult” production I’ve ever seen of the show (including some star-studded endeavors at major Shakes festivals) has sucked. The required crossdressing was played for superficial laughs, the wrestling and foraging lacked credible determination. An As You Like It directed by John
I think As You Like It has special appeal for smart youth just beginning to make their way into careers and creative fulfillments, wanting to proclaim and define their gender identities, wanting to explore possibilities. If the muse of the memorable “Can You Dig It?” (directed by Brendan Hughes) was free love, the undercurrent of this one (directed by Louisa Proske) is free thought. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is recited (and surreptitiously quoted in the program—“And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels”—on the back of a poster touting

There are plenty of commendable staging and design concepts here: a full-audience trip outside to the Cabaret courtyard, where you see cast members loitering, in character, on the pathways and where a wrestling ring is constructed before your very eyes. When the crowd is summoned back indoors, the forest of Arden has magically appeared. The tree’s leaves are crumbled bits of paper, a shady foreshadowing of Orlando’s plastering of the trunks with love poems about Rosalind.

Yet the greatest pleasures in this full-bodied production are to be had from its human transformations, not the scenic ones. Seeing Adina Verson return to the male drag—virtually the same outfit!—she donned as Yitzak in last year’s summer cabaret production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch—is heaven for the many fans of that gender-bent rock show. Currently stuffing her crotch as a hermaphroditic Ariel in the SumCab’s Tempest, Verson does a much fuller masculine impersonation as Ganymede, aka Rosalind in disguise. In fact, since his Ganymede is more deeply played than the Rosalind which begets him, Verson goes well beyond playful disguises; she makes us ask basic questions about sexual attraction and male bonding.

Again, as a special treat for those of us aware of Cabaret shows BSF (Before Shakespeare Festival), seeing Tara Kayton—Managing Director of the 2010-11 school-year Yale Cabaret season, and producer of this summer season—as a deadpan gun-toting guardsman is a ripe jest: who better than a theater manager to order patrons around and get them back into their seats? When Kayton returns as the smitten shepherdess Phebe, we see a warmer, whimsical side—and again, who better to herd sheep than a theatrical producer?

As with The Tempest, the Cabaret ensemble has to change hats and jackets so often to effect the smaller roles that an overall sense of pace and tone is lost. Disbelief is not suspended. But what’s lost in consistency is gained in focused scenework performed by the best available actors. Ensemble players like Matt Biagini and Paul Lieber look ideal for the authoritarian cads they play in the opening scenes of this city-to-country traverse. In most productions, that’s all they’d get to do. Yet Lieber’s singing and guitar-playing (essentially the role of Amiens in Shakespeare’s script, but generalized here as “Forest Lord”) anchors the forest scenes, and Biagini as Jacques does the most natural, extemporaneous-sounding “All the world’s a stage” oration I’ve ever heard.

Brenda Meaney (who plays both of the battling Dukes, making Duke Senior a gladhanding politician and Duke Frederick a trippy bearded Falstaff type) go for improv-comedy gusto, while others delicately underplay. Babak Tafti does both, going for the obvious old-man voice and cane as Adam in the play’s early scene, then boldly underplaying the court jester Touchstone.

Here, Rosalind and Celia—the young women whose journey from safe high-born upbringings into the dark forest beyond the duchy provides the play with its central sexual-awakening metaphor—seem more amused at Touchstone’s openness and charm than they are at his creaky jokes. This fey, finetuned take on Touchstone (even when wooing Jillian Taylor’s sexually overcharged Audrey) adds volumes to the production’s air of longing, desire, experimentation, social awareness and class (in all its definitions). What’s not to like?

Categories: Connecticut Theaters, Reviews of Shows, Shakespeare, Yale Summer Cabaret | Leave a comment

“Come hither, crack-hemp!”

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


Given the spacy nature and streetclothes aesthetic of the Yale summer cabaret’s production of The Tempest, I was well disposed toward this alternative fabric shop in Burlington, Vermont which bears a bad Shakespeare pun for a name. Not enough to jump out of the car, however, hence this sucky photo. The store’s called The Hempest, in case this vision seems, ahem, too hazy and bleary.

Categories: Shakespeare | 2 Comments

Ain’t Broadway Grand?

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

Today’s installment of the gag strip Grand Avenue by Steve Breen and Mike Thompson, found on that exemplary aggregator of sequential art GoComics.com.
Interesting iconography. What’s the last Broadway show to involve a toga? The Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum revival of 15 years ago? Nathan Lane’s The Frogs seven years ago? Has there been a period production of a Greek drama—or a Shakespeare play set in Greece or Rome not directorially transmuted to another era—since, say, the 1930s?
We quibble. Always nice to see theater jokes in the daily comics. We despair of finding them anywhere outside of Apartment 3-G.

Categories: Comic Strips & Comic Books | Leave a comment

“Some delightful ostentation, or show, or pageant or antic or firework”

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


An Elizabethan theatrical manifestation of American Independence day.
(This explosive device doesn’t need to fully title itself A Midsummer Night’s Dream; you wouldn’t set off fireworks except at night. If Eugene O’Neill plays were fireworks, they’d be called just Long Journey, or Becomes Electra).

Here’s what Midsummer’s Dream looks like exploding. The frolicking figure at left is not Puck. It is a dog named Jorge.

Categories: Holidays, Shakespeare | 2 Comments

The Big Shakespeare Set Switcheroo

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


TIM BROWN IN THE YALE SUMMER CABARET SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL PRODUCTION OF THE TEMPEST. PHOTO BY ETHAN HEARD.
This is where it starts getting interesting.
The Yale Summer Cabaret production of The Tempest kicked off what, with the subsequent openings of As You Like It and YSC artistic director Devin Brain’s original aggregation of several “Henry” and “Richard” plays, Rose-Mark’d Queen, a logistically complex three-show repertory season of Shakespeare in the small student-run basement theater space. There’s a rotating sched of performances through mid-August.
Veteran summer stock performers may sniff at this exertion—a few decades ago, rep seasons were the very definition of summer theater. Most of the young talents at the Summer Cabaret even have recent experience in multi-show machinations, having just survived the latest Carlotta Festival of New Plays at the Yale School of Drama. But the Yale Cabaret, with its small ceilings and confined quarters (allowing not much more than 60 seats for the audience) is a special case.
The Tempest features an abtract set of metal poles and branches on which the actors (particularly Ariel) spin and clamber. It would not be out of line to suppose that the set jungle gym would suffice for the other two Shakespeare shows.
This is not, however, the case, due to a switch in designers during the production process and the needs of the three disparate directors.
One constant—not just for this singular three-pronged “Shakespeare Festival” season but for the past four Yale Summer Cabaret seasons in general—is music director Nathan Roberts. The composer/performer anchored the onstage bands behind the Cabaret productions of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Who’s Tommy and the original musical Fly-By-Night. He once wandered through a contemporary play at the Cabaret as a wandering minstrel singing ‘80s pop songs.
Nathan Roberts had his work cut out for him on The Tempest, having to prepare immortal melodies which are roundly praised by the characters in the show. Not that comedy scores or marching songs are any easier.
Doing The Tempest first might have psychologically eased the anxiety over the impending set-and-script transitions for the acting company: In the SumCab’s production, everybody gets to do pieces of Prospero’s role.

Categories: Connecticut Theaters, Previews, Shakespeare, Yale Summer Cabaret | Leave a comment

Lou Harry’s Theater Trivia Pub Quiz: The Answers!

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


The questions are here. These are the answers.
At least two more rounds of questions coming later this week.

ROUND ONE: WARM-UPS
1. Puckering musicals: Anyone Can Whistle and Whistle Down the Wind.
2. In the order in which they were produced: Oklahoma, Carousel, The King & I, Me & Juliet, The Sound of Music
3. Mama Roses: Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone.
4. Short runs on the jukebox: Good Vibrations: 94 performances, 50 previews. Ring of Fire (The Johnny Cash Musical Show): 57 performances, 38 previews. The Times They Are A-Changin’: 28 performances, 35 previews.
5. The Amish musical: Plain and Fancy by Joseph Stein, Will Glickman, Arnold B. Horwitt and Albert Hague.
6. The other Broadway superhero: It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman.

ROUND TWO: Hot Shows
1. The Water Engine
2. Smoke on the Mountain
3. Pretty Fire
4. The Hot L Baltimore
5. Burn This
6. The Matchmaker
7. Blazing Saddles
8. Red Hot & Blue

ROUND THREE: Replacements
(Note for purists: In some cases, the “replacements” did not immediately follow the original stars in the same roles.)
1. Verdon leads to Minnelli: Chicago
2. Merman leads to Bailey: Hello Dolly
3. Parker follows McArdle: Annie
4. Julia in for Langella: Dracula (the Edward Gorey one).
5. Stritch follows Lansbury: A Little Night Music
6. Kaczmarek for Ruhl: Lost in Yonkers.
7. Hopkins from Perkins: Equus.
8. Lane to Goldberg: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
9. Williams after Rivera: Kiss of the Spider Woman.
10. Stamos does Banderas: Nine.

Categories: Trivia Quiz | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

15 Theater-related “New Arrivals” on Netflix

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

A random survey. All these “New” or “Recent” titles at www.netflix.com are in the “Watch Instantly” mode, so you don’t have to wait for days by the mailbox to find out that I’ve recommended sheer crap.

Almighty Thor: A Norse-god-in-the-modern-world superhero epic released in 2011, yet it’s NOT the Kenneth Branagh Thor. This one is from the director of Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus.

American: The Bill Hicks Story. Documentary about the late outspoken revolutionary stand-up comic, who is often compared to the late outspoken revolutionary stand-up comic Lenny Bruce.

At the Sinatra Club: Mobster saga set in and around a nightclub.

Circus: Documentary following the Big Apple Circus for an entire season.

Criss Angel Mindfreak: All six seasons are now online, bringing stage magic to the masses.

Joan Rivers—A Piece of Work: I always regret that I never got to see her play Lenny Bruce’s mother in that Lonny Price play.

The Kevin Dunham Show: The erstwhile Sugar Babies attraction, whose theater tours still pack ‘em in, is the most popular broadcast ventriloquist since Edgar Bergen.

Mr Bean—The Whole Bean: As Rowan Atkinson’s long-ago HBO special proved, the Mr. Bean didn’t just revive classic silent movie comedy, it revived the stage vaudeville styles that inspired silent movie comedy.


Ridicule: French indie which would make a fantastic play. It’s about wit used as a weapon in late 18th century French royal courts.

Rock-a-Doodle: Over 20 years before All Shook Up, there was this animated rockabilly-scored musical about a cocksure, foolhardy country singer.

Role/Play: Gay romance concerning an outed, and fired, soap actor.

South Park—A Very Buttery Collection: Anthology of 13 episodes featuring Butters, from the masterminds of the Book of Mormon musical. One of the eps involves tap dancing.

Sumo of the Opera: A Veggie Tales adventure starring Larry the Cucumber in a simultaneous tribute to theater-haunting and pro wrestling.

Vanishing on 7th Street: John Leguizamo gets so much material for his one-man shows from his experiences in Hollywood that you owe to yourself to see him in cheesy horror flicks like this one.

Why Did I Get Married Too?: Tyler Perry’s being making movies for a decade now, but those films still had the patina of the popular stage shows which inspired them. This is one of the first which announces itself as a film rather than a film-based-on-a-play or a play-like film. Because it’s a sequel, and its big name star, Janet Jackson, is not stage-trained (unless you count her pop tours).

Yo Gabba Gabba!: The stage tour of this hipster kids’ show aimed for the same spontaneity and contemporaneity, getting stage-savvy live bands with attitude to jump aboard as special guests. The full-bodied maskwork by the show’s stars is pretty impressive too.

Categories: Film, Lists | Tags: , , | 13 Comments

The Tempest Review

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Christopher Arnott


The Tempest
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Jack Tamburri. Scenic designer: Kristen Robinson. Costume designer: Mark Nagle. Lighting designer: Alan C. Edwards. Sound Designer/Composer: Nathan A. Roberts. Performed by Brenda Meaney, Adina Verson, Tim Brown, A.Z. Kelsey, Paul Lieber.

Through August 12 at the Yale Summer Cabaret. Performed in repertory with As You Like (which begins previews July 1) and Rose-Mark’d Queen (begins previews July 7).

It’s not always clear who’s wearing the pants in Yale Summer Cabaret’s season-opening traipse through The Tempest. But everybody gets to wears Prospero’s robe, and read his books.

Knocking Shakespeare’s island-bound romantic revenge drama down to eleven characters, essayed by six actors, is both fraught and freeing. What you lose in fluidity you gain in transparency. Character work is not as strong, but the construction of the play gets a fresh clarity. With each of the actors covering two roles each, plus a part of Prospero, Jack Tamburri’s production becomes one quick style experiment after another. Which works just fine with a script which, just to mention its film versions, has inspired such radically diverse visions as Paul Mazursky’s, Julie Taymor’s and Forbidden Planet.

In trying to explain the plot of The Tempest to my daughter the other day, I found myself saying “he’s angry at his family, so he goes off and discovers his own island and does whatever he wants there—the way a lot of people might want to.” I’d never considered Prospero as having an urge that could be called common until I expressed it that way. This Tempest, however, is all about Prospero’s impulses being understandable and universal. He’s not the imperious individual we usually see him as. He represents emotional choices, often extreme ones, that a lot of us might dream about: removing ourselves far from our problems, magically forcing people to fall in love (or fall asleep), curling up with a good book for eternity. His slave and lightside-personality-extension Ariel comes off as more practical than whimsical here.
In a land where actors change character simply by donning a different hat—or casually acknowledge the audience, despite being stranded on a remote island—the supernatural, mood-changing mood of Shakespeare’s script is diffused. Everything here is potentially transformative. A sorceress is just a trickster with some personal hang-ups.

This is not one of those slimmed down Shakespeares which builds itself around a single strong concept. It plays freely with a lot of different ideas. Romantic scenes are played for laughs. The servant scenes are played for laughs upon laughs upon laughs. Class conflicts get downplayed when the servants are such endless buffoons, but gender roles here are openly explored: Adina Verson plays Ariel just as gender-bendy as Verson was when being Yitzhak in Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Yale Summer Cabaret last year. Caliban is played by a woman (Brenda Meaney, the girliest of The Tall Girls at the Carlotta Festival of New Plays this past May); to some is a departure, though when I look back at all the Tempests I’ve seen at Yale over the years, I think I’ve seen more female mooncalves than male.

With actors switching parts with such alacrity, scenes of imminent death don’t come off as all that dangerous. Suspense is lacking. The acting styles clash constantly. Some roles are believably portrayed while others are shallow wallows of surface and artifice. In the very first scene of the show, I worried that the cast’s initial air of good-natured goofiness—The Tempest done as Godspell—would pervade the whole production. But the forced buoyancy soon breaks up.

This Tempest is best approached as a scenework exercise, where key exchanges exist in the moment and don’t necessarily propel later scenes. In a land ruled by an amorphous presence with a passion for books and storytelling, such roleplaying is appropriate. When the actress playing Miranda takes a turn in the golden robe that denotes that she’s now playing Prospero, she rips pages and pages out of one of the self-exiled intellectual’s favorite tomes. The volume turns out to be a Collected Works of William Shakespeare.

Categories: Connecticut Theaters, Shakespeare, Yale Summer Cabaret | Tags: , | 2 Comments