Edges and Ideats

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas tried in vain for years to create an Edinburgh-esque “fringe” festival to surround it. Turns out you can’t just manufacture these things. But two fests which were in a sense inspired by A&I have endured.

One is the Audubon Arts on the Edge festival, as old as Arts & Ideas itself. The 2011 edition is Saturday June 4 from noon to 5 p.m. on Audubon Street, between Orange and Whitney in downtown New Haven.

The fest’s title overreaches all over the place, since neither the arts nor the location are in any way “on the edge.” Many of the performers come from local schools or mainstream arts organizations, the fest is overwhelming kid-friendly, and Audubon street is only a couple of blocks from New Haven Green, in the city’s designated arts district.

What it may lack in edginess, however, it delivers in comfort and cheeriness. Art on the Edge is a free and easy way to check up on some of the area’s reigning school-based performing arts groups, including ensembles from New Haven Ballet, the Educational Center for the Arts and Neighborhood Music School. There are interactive exhibits and demonstrations from local museums and other community organizations throughout the day. Most of the live performances are musical, but there are some dance and spoken word acts:

At noon and again at 1:40 p.m. on the Leeney stage: The Peruvian Folk Dance Group doing Tusuykusin Peru

At 1 p.m. and again at 2 p.m. on the Park of the Arts stage: Storytellers sponsored by New Haven Free Public Library

At 1:30 p.m.: Stiltwalker Lady Blaze.

At 2:10 p.m. on the Leeney stage: New Haven Ballet.

At 3 p.m.: Don Wunderlee doing a Punch & Judy show.

At 3:55 p.m. on the Leeney stage: Neighborhood in Motion—An Interactive Dance Experience.

A complete sched is here (in PDF form).

The other A&I-adjacent New Haven arts festival is of course Ideat Village, which began as openly antagonistic towards A&I but has long since settled into its own independent groove. This is Ideat Village’s tenth anniversary, a landmark it reached despite some organizational waffling a few years ago (the founders almost stopped doing it, then happily changed their minds) and despite some serious obstacles placed in its way by certain downtown civic and business interests.

Ideat Village is entirely dependent on a volunteer staff, community donations and city park permits. This year I’m told they’ve been stymied by sudden alterations in the hours when outdoor events can be held in downtown park areas. We trust the nonsense will be overcome and the Ideats can take over the asylum once again. Meantime, there’s an Ideat Village fundraiser June 4 at 9 p.m. at café nine with seven bands for a mere six-buck cover.

Categories: Arts & Ideas, Children's Theater, Connecticut Theaters | Leave a comment

Avail yourself of our calendar page

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

I’ve just updated the New Haven Theater Jerk Calendar section, right through August, with links and everything. Details on the more expansive events—O’Neill conferences, Arts & Ideas, etc.—will be covered in the blog posts. But if you think more info would be useful on the calendar page, let me know. You’re the boss.

Categories: NHTJ Business | Leave a comment

Where’d the Header Photo Come From?

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

This is me with Roddy McDowall. As if you need to be told, I’m the dumpy guy on the right. McDowall was effortlessly dapper and charming, despite having just caught a scoundrel onstage in the national tour of Dial M for Murder which played New Haven’s Shubert in 1994. McDowall played Inspector Hubbard in the Frederick Knott thriller.

What are we talking about? Noel Coward and Planet of the Apes, naturally. Oh, and Night Gallery. This is just four years before Roddy McDowall’s death from lung cancer. He’s 66 here—really, doesn’t he look great?

This photo (taken by former Shubert press flack Morton Langbord) is also notable for showing the back of the blonde head of the ever-stylish Elizabeth Curren, the famed New Haven Register society reporter who passed away last month. I’ve eulogized Ms. Curren in the June 2 issue of the New Haven Advocate (here) and at my site www.scribblers.us (here).

Categories: Header Photos | 1 Comment

Get Oppressed: A chat with Katy Rubin, facilitator of this Weekend’s Theater of the Oppressed/Forum Theater workshop

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

KATY RUBIN SHOWN WORKING ON LET ME IN! DEJAME ENTRAR!, A BI-LINGUAL SHOW BASED ON IMMIGRATION AND RACISM ISSUES PRESENTED BY THE PEOPLE’S THEATRE PROJECT IN NEW YORK EARLIER THIS YEAR. THIS WEEKEND KATY IS LEADING A THEATER OF THE OPPRESSED WORKSHOP IN NEW HAVEN.

“Anyone doing Theatre of the Oppressed in New York can come together here,” says Katy Rubin, founding director of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC.

Anyone in Connecticut as well, apparently. Rubin grew up in New Haven, where she was exposed to such diverse theater arts as circus skills, Bread and Puppet pageantry and summer outdoor Shakespeare. She attended the arts magnet high school Educational Center for the Arts, where one of the school productions she was in was the multi-compendium The Greeks. She’s studied theater in England, Wales and Brazil, is a core member (or “Rogue Artist”) of the “investigative, socially relevant” New York troupe The Anthropologists. She taught in public school in New York and juvenile detention centers in Brazil, run bilingual theater workshops and staged projects with homeless artists.

All these experiences feed into Theater of the Oppressed New York, the company Katy Rubin founded a couple of years ago. The company uses concepts and techniques popularized by Brazilian theater theorist Augusto Boal by empowering those who’ve been denied basic human to take action and articulate their struggles through theater performance.

“It’s really political. It’s based on the idea that everyone’s an actor. We present these issues and we have a creative, imaginative time doing it.”

Rubin was in Brazil in 2008 working with a variety of organizations and studying Theater of the Oppressed techniques with some of the form’s pioneers, including Boal himself. She’s been spreading TotP techniques through her New York teaching and directing gigs. This year she’ll be traveling to Nicaragua with a Connecticut project involving another socially motivated New Haven-raised theater artist and teacher: Aaron Jafferis, who’s working with the Bregamos Community Theater on a local production of A Peasant of El Salvador by the politically conscious Vermont clowning duo of Stephen Stearns and Peter Gould.

“Aaron Jafferis I know from art, and New Haven, and life, and ECA…,” Katy Rubin gushes. “They had this idea to do Theater of the Oppressed. They called me, and we decided to do it together.”

The multi-part project begins with the workshop this weekend. Friday’s session is a general workshop on Forum Theater, the foundation of the Theater of the Oppressed discipline.  Those who can’t take part in the entire workshop can still get something out of this intro, and are also invited to the closing session on Sunday afternoon—a performance worked up by the 20 man full-weekend participants.The full-scale workshop—Friday from 6-9 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.—has its tuition fee set on a sliding scale from $50-$150. If you’re only attending the Friday and Sunday sessions, admission is ten dollars for each.

“The first night,” Katy Rubin explains, “is an introduction to Theater of the Oppressed—accessible for everyone, teaching the essential theater games. The last night is a Forum Theater performance which the people who’ve been there all weekend will joke.”

“Joker” is Augusto Boal’s term for those who adapt and implement Theater of the Oppressed shows. The process has been adopted worldwide as a way to adapt classic works, and create new ones, so they are freshly relevant to their immediate performers and audiences.

Not all the participants in this weekend’s Theater of the Oppressed workshop—a varied lot of artists, activists, and teachers—will be heading to Nicaragua. Some will apply what they learn at the workshop to projects in Connecticut and elsewhere.

Those who be part of this weekend’s activities will have other opportunities to see or otherwise involve themselves in future aspects of this multi-faceted New Haven/Leon Sister City Theater Project. There will be performances of A Peasant of El Salvador Aug. 4-6 and 12-13 through the Bregamos Community Theater in New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood, after which the delegation presenting the play will travel to the Nicaraguan city of Leon, a longtime “sister city” of New Haven’s. Both the New Haven Sister Cities Project and the Bregamos Community Theater are active sponsors of the theater project, which has also gained support from the International Association of New Haven and the Yale-based Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies with some funding from the U.S. Department of Education. For details, check the New Haven Leon Sister City site.

 

PHOTO BY LAURA TURLEY OF THE JAN HUS THEATRE TROUPE PERFORMING IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU LAST FALL. KATY RUBIN HAS DEVELOPED A NEW PIECE WITH THE TROUPE (WHICH CREATES WORK BASED ON THEIR EXPERIENCES AS HOMELESS NEW YORKERS), HELLTER SHELTER, WHICH WILL PREMIERE THIS MONTH.

While training New Havenites for a Sister City collaboration, Rubin has also been readying a New York tour of Hellter Shelter, the original theater piece she’s developed with the Jan Hus Homeless Outreach and Advocacy organization. The show, described as “a story of corruption, discrimination and dehumanization in the NYC shelter system, told through original documentary footage, interactive theatre, break-dancing and laughter,” has five Pay-What-You-Can performances at a variety of venues between June 9 and 22.

She’s also got Theater of the Oppressed workshops planned in New York in June. In Brazil, Boal’s teaching and techniques are more commonly used and accessed. Adapting them for cities in the United States has been an interesting experience, Rubin says: “You’re going into a community that’s different from one you might have been part of yourself, and it can be a delicate situation”—even if that community’s in the same town where she grew up.

In her work on both the homeless-issue show Hellter Shelter and on Theater of the Oppressed in general, Rubin takes an admirably humble, non-presumptuous and open-minded approach. “We’re not trying to solve the problems, and we’re not trying to pretend we know what people in these situations are going through. It’s an offering. We can make a play about something that isn’t working.”

Articulating and sharing the concerns is the goal. That’s what this two-city, multi-leader, international performance project is all about.

KATY RUBIN LETTING US IN AGAIN, THIS TIME IN COLOR.

Categories: Bregamos Community Theater | 1 Comment

Pop Culture: How They Got Those Balloons to Burst in Italian-American Reconciliation at the Long Wharf

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY’S ITALIAN-AMERICAN RECONCILIATION AT THE LONG WHARF, DIRECTED BY ERIC TING, IN THE AFTERMATH OF A BALLOON BLOODBATH WHICH POPPED SEVERAL OF THE VULNERABLE ORNAMENTS. THE ACTORS BLOCKING THE VIEW OF SOME BALLOONS ON THE FLOOR ARE MICHAEL CRANE AND UNREPENTANT BALLOON TERRORIST LISA BIRNBAUM. PHOTO BY T. CHARLES ERICKSON.

The Long Wharf Theatre’s production of John Patrick Shanley’s Italian-American Reconciliation closed last weekend, but there’s a point about it still worth pondering. It’s the sharp point which pricked balloons on cue, so they popped just when actress Lisa Birnbaum started firing a staple gun in their direction. The staple gun was a stand-in for a real gun in Eric Ting’s elaborately rethought interpretation of Shanley’s script. Ting’s version turned the drama into a fantastical flashback, enacted by workers at a VFW banquet hall in the wake of a big Italian wedding.

There were actually several balloon effects, Long Wharf Technical Director Mike Wyant explained to me in a ‘phone chat on Wednesday morning. “Eric asked us to figure out a way so that when the actress [Birnbaum] shoots a staple, it gives the actor near her [John Proccacino] a motivation to move back quickly, as if he’s being shot at. Eric really liked the idea of seeing half-floating balloons—the party’s over, and they’ve lost their helium. So we decided to pop some balloons.”

The duty fell to Wyant partly because, as Technical Director, he’s in charge of how the set is built and maintained, but also because “we don’t have an Effects department. The Props department helped a lot.”

Wyant says he researched the effect for a week and half online, and discovered a variety of reliable techniques for popping balloons remotely. “There are ways of using lasers, but that wasn’t right for us. You can use old Christmas lights.” He finally settled on solenoid, a thin metal coil of wire which conducts electricity and forms an electromagnetic field. (Solenoid switches are used for starting cars.) The wire was strategically placed on the balloon so that when electricity shot through it, the charge would instantly melt the thin balloon casing. Lisa Birnbaum and Stage Manager Megan Schwarz Dickert worked out a visual cue for just before the balloon needed to burst, then Dickert relayed a command to a Long Wharf stage carpenter who did the honors.

Pop!

The trick worked splendidly, Wyant says, except for a shaky preview performance or two while the crew was still getting used to the apparatus. “The funniest way it worked was when a balloon melted but didn’t pop. It just slowly deflated. The effect still worked, but it was pretty funny.”

That was how the character Janice, brandishing a staple gun atop a stepladder (a scene originally written with a zipgun and balcony in mind) punctuated her anger at an intrusion by Aldo, the best friend of her ex-husband in Italian-American Reconciliation’s second act.

Elsewhere in the play, it was thought that the bedraggled Aldo could use a balloon effect of his own. So a low-flying balloon, attached to a chair in the banquet hall set, was rigged using a whole different wiring method. This time Wyant used Nichrome wire, made of an alloy with a lot of nickel in it. Nichrome wire can get very hot very fast, so it’s used in ingnition systems to launch model rockets and fireworks. A long wire was laid under the stage carpet—and an extensive carpet it was, covering the stage floor all the way out to under the first row of auditorium seats, really nailing the inclusive feel of Scott Bradley’s set design. The wire wound up into the stage furniture, where it was disguised as a bit of ribbon and tied to a balloon. When a 12 volt battery was switched on, it sent a charge straight to the doomed latex balloon.

And Pop! goes the Italian-American Reconciliation.

Categories: Connecticut Theaters, Long Wharf Theatre, Technical Theater | Leave a comment

West Side DeRosa: Glad Handing the National Tour of Arthur Laurents’ West Side Story Revival

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

STEVEN DEROSA CENTER STAGE IN THE NATIONAL TOUR OF WEST SIDE STORY—FOR ABOUT ONE MINUTE, UNTIL ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE. THE NATIONAL TOUR OF THE ARTHUR LAURENTS-DIRECTED REVIVAL IS AT THE BUSHNELL IN HARTFORD THROUGH SUNDAY MAY 29.

I’ve been a Stephen DeRosa fan for over 15 years, and rejoice whenever I see his name come up in something cool. I first glommed on to his endearing eyebrow waggles and jittery voice when he was at the Yale School of Drama in the mid-1990s. I must have seen him in over a dozen things: opposite Paul Giamatti in a Yale Cabaret production of Chekhov’s The Bear directed by the then-head of the YSD directing program Earle Gister; as the Troll King in Jean Randich’s expansive production of Peer Gynt. He did a recitation of a then-newly discovered poem thought to be Shakespeare’s (“Shall I Die? Shall I Fly?”) which was tacked on to the beginning of Mark Rucker’s awesome Yale Rep production of Twelfth Night.

“Ahh, Yale! My salad days! A highlight of my quarter century in this business we call show! I did more Cabaret shows than anyone else in my class,” DeRosa recalled with thespianic aplomb in a phone interview a few weeks ago from  West Side Story tour stop in Cleveland, Ohio. The tour hit Hartford’s Bushnell on Tuesday for eight performances, ending Sunday May 29.

DeRosa’s classmates at Yale included not just Giamatti but Sanaa Lathan, Suzanne Cryer, Tom McCarthy and Mercedes Herrero, but DeRosa could upstage them all if he felt like it. After graduating, he co-starred in a revival of Charles Ludlams’ The Mystery of Irma Vep with Ludlam’s late partner Everett Quinton. The production went to Broadway and turned the script into a standard that has since been done by regional and community theaters nationwide. DeRosa’s since been a Broadway regular, from the Nathan Lane-starring The Man Who Came to Dinner, the 2002 revival of Into the Woods and Hairspray.

He’s also done dozens of readings of new works, “with more famous people than you can believe, in things nobody ever saw.” One of them was a new musical made out of Gershwin tunes, with a script by Wendy Wasserstein. Another was a Harry Connick Jr. project. It was in a reading that New Haven last got to see Stephen DeRosa, at the Long Wharf Theatre in the Stephen Drukman comedy Going Native. The Long Wharf later did a full Stage II production of the play, but DeRosa was unable to do it.

His career has had a lot of twists and turns, enough that he’s given up on predictions, let alone listing “dream roles.” “You get less attached after a while. You become kind of a fatalist. Like, I really wanted to be Louis in Angels in America on tour. I didn’t get that, but because of dear, wonderful James Bundy”—who was in the Yale School of Drama directing program while DeRosa was in the acting program, and who now is Dean of the whole school—“I got to do a one-act play of Tony Kushner’s instead, creating a role.

“And I never dreamed I’d be playing Eddie Cantor.” Last year DeRosa got to impersonate the whoopee-making Follies superstar in Martin Scorsese’s HBO series Boardwalk Empire, set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City.

“I’ve been blessed to work with people who are really artists—Kushner, Scorsese… geniuses, who are gifted in a spiritual way.” Which brings us to West Side Story. Two of the show’s original creators—lyricist Stephen Sondheim and librettist Arthur Laurents—were deeply involved with this revival. Laurents, who died earlier this month at the age of 93, directed this revival, and was the main motivator behind having some of the Puerto Rican characters’ songs and dialogue done in Spanish.

When DeRosa worked with Sondheim previously for the 2002 Broadway revival of Into the Woods, the role of the Baker was reshaped for the actor. He’s been granted that sort of attention again for West Side Story, even though he wasn’t with the show in New York and joined up for the tour. “There are two or three new lines for Tony,” he says, but his character is the only one that’s been actually enhanced.

“It was the same with Into the Woods—the original creators there to revisit what they’d created. It was not necessarily tailored to [the actors], but changes were made, and I was there to see that happening. Sondheim was still putting changes into Into the Woods three months after we opened.

“That’s the reason why I took the job. I knew Arthur Laurents was creating a new version.” DeRosa was specifically brought into the tour by Associate Director David Saint, who offered him the role and, as DeRosa puts it, “tailored it to my work on the character.”

It’s a bit funny to hear all this fuss being made over that poor shlub Glad Hand.

In weaker hands, he’s one of those roles which could be could be reduced to a mere plot point: as one of very few adults in this saga of teen gangs, he is required to announce and clumsily referee the sexually charged “Dance at the Gym” sequence where Tony (of the Jets gang) and Maria (whose brother and boyfriend are both Sharks) first fall in love. Laurents had high standards, however (his autobiography Original Story By is full of quarrels related to him defending the integrity of his work), and didn’t consider any of the roles he wrote minor. “He told me he wanted the character always to be funny,” DeRosa says. West Side Story’s choreographer/director Harold Robbins —whose original dances are preserved in this production, and are in fact legally required to be maintained in all revivals of the show—worked so intently on his choreography that he had a tendency to overlook issues with the book. When he had a chance to revisit Glad Hand’s character a half century after he first invented it, “Arthur rewrote it,” DeRosa continues. “To get all those testosterone-fueled adolescents at a party.

“Glad Hand is a fool, essentially, and I love fools. His heart is in the right place. He’s all about “Abstinence! Abstinence!” He’s trying to get the kids not be sexual, and of course it doesn’t work. But he’s trying. This is from a time when there weren’t guidance counselors yet in schools.

“It’s this tiny little moment to get us to the dance at the gym—which, of course, becomes one of the most thrilling things you’ll ever experience on the American stage.”

DeRosa really pushes the glories of seeing West Side Story live. “Most people only know the movie. When you hear the score, it’s just fabulous. One thing that’s true—and certainly has been bitched about by Arthur, and echoed by those from the original production—is that, back then, the triple-threat actor/singer/dancer was very rare. Someone like Chita Rivera, or Rita Moreno, who could do it all, was unusual. Nowadays, with the training programs and the American Idol, performance challenges have risen in the American musical theater and the performers are rising to the occasion. It’s exciting for this show to be done again with people who are all acting and singing and dancing at this level.

“It’s a younger cast. Not jaded. They want to do the job. It’s not their fifth tour, or their fifth West Side Story. It’s so thrilling to see it live. I’ve been doing it for seven months, and I’m not tired of it. I’m very grateful. I have have this brief contact with the audience, and just enjoy the benefits of aging.”

Besides playing Glad Hand, DeRosa’s billed as the understudy for the other adult males in the show—Officer Krupke, Detective Shrank and the pharmacist Doc—but he hasn’t yet had to go on in any of those other roles. “These are great old character men, who would probably go on in an iron lung if they had to. There’s no understudy envy, not an Eve Harrington in the wings.”

The current cast of West Side Story tour will be with the show at least through September. The tour itself is booked well into 2012.

“Shakespeare and Sondheim,” Stephen DeRosa confesses giddily, “are probably the reasons I went into theater—to be an idiot, and not got to Georgetown for law. Sondheim is too hard on himself about it, but I think West Side Story is a milestone for the four of them—Laurents, Sondheim, Robbins and Bernstein. Four of the greatest American theater artists, challenging each other to do their best work.”

Categories: Bushnell, Connecticut Theaters, Previews, Tours | Leave a comment

The My One and Only review

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

TONY YAZBEK AND ALDE LEWIS JR. TAP THE TITLE TUNE IN MY ONE AND ONLY AT THE GOODSPEED OPERA HOUSE. PHOTO BY DIANE SOBOLEWSKI.

 

My One and Only

Through June 25 at the Goodspeed Opera House.

Music & lyrics by George & Ira Gershwin. Book by Peter Stone and Timothy S. Mayer. Original staging and choreography by Thommie Walsh and Tommy Tune. Directed by Ray Roderick. Choreographed by Kelli Barclay. Produced by Michael Price. Associate Producer: Bob Allwine. Set Design by James Youmans. Costume Design by Robin McGee. Lighting Design by Paul Miller. Projection Design by Michael Clark. Sound by Jay Hilton. Hair & Wig Design by Robert-Charles Vallance. Orchestrations by Dan DeLange. Assistant Music Director: William J. Thomas. Production Manager: R. Glen Grusmark. Stage Manager: Bradley Spachman. Performed by Tony Yazbek (Billy), Gabrielle Ruiz (Edythe), Trent Armand Kendall (Rev. Montgomery), Khris Lewin (Prince Nikki/Achmed) Kirsten Wyatt (Mickey), Alde Lewis Jr. (Mr. Magix), Vasthy E. Mompoint & Victor J. Wisehart & Richard Riaz Yoder (New Rhythms) and the Ensemble of Nancy Rnee Braun, Brian Davis, Deanna Glover, Joe Grandy, Trent Armand Kendall, Matthew J. Kilgore, Drew King, Lea Kohl, Vasthy E. Mompoint, Jarran Muse, Kristyn Pope, Allison Kaye Rihn, Kristen J. Smith, Victor J. Wisehart and Richard Riaz Yoder.

 

“This boy is going to make me get out of my chair.”

It’s not often that an old-school musical gives you the same tingle up your spine as a suspense thriller. But even with all those familiar Gershwin melodies, a glorious sense of feverish anticipation is what My One and Only delivers.

The plot is ostensibly about a young aviator attempting to make the first solo flight across the Atlantic. There are nasty spies whacking good Americans on their noggins with wrenches, and an aquatic entertainer who’s gone missing—perhaps she’s in Persia?

But no, that’s not where the suspense lies. It comes with the announcement that “I’m dancing and I can’t be bothered now,” or the news that “we’re in the swim,” or that after that there’ll be some kickin’ away of clouds. It comes with a melody you know well, slowed to a rhythm you’ve never heard it at, and the realization that “Strike Up the Band” could be an emotional ballad.

Not to mention—wow!—that bit where the boy (high-flyer Billy) gets Mr. Magix (Alde Lewis Jr., a protege of the tap genius who first danced this part a quarter-century ago, Charles “Honi” Coles) out of his chair, for as flashy and assured a bit of male tapdance bonding as you may see in your lifetime. This number, which earns the right to illustrate and punctuate the musical’s title song, encompasses as much drama as it does dance. It hands down traditions. It puts insouciant youth in its place. It respects grumpy old men. It spreads joy to the rest of the cast and knocks the audience flat out.

This is the sort of musical you only attempt if you’re certain you can startle with the production numbers. They have to be sensational. At Goodspeed they are, and the dancers know it. They’re beaming. They’re showing off. They’re striking up the band and kickin’ the clouds away. They’re dancing and they can’t be bothered now. Not that we would think for a moment of bothering them.

The reason My One and Only doesn’t get revived all that often isn’t due to any weakness in script or score. It’s because, as it says in the subtitle the Goodspeed plasters on its programs and posters, this is a “tap dance spectacular.” The original production won two Tonys—for its star Tommy Tune, one of the greatest (and gangliest) tap dancers of his time, and for choreography. However funny and frisky and the action gets, it all has to be grounded by spectacular dances.

This was clearly the Goodspeed’s priority. I have great memories of the original My One and Only from over 30 years ago, and those memories are largely about specific star turns by well-known performers. Not having big names like Tommy Tune or Twiggy (for whom the lead roles were originally fashioned) to exploit, the Goodspeed has spread around the spectacle more democratically. For every sensational solo routine, there’s an equally showstopping ensemble number.

My One and Only uses tap shoes and Gershwin tunes as its foundation, but the show is as much a product of the 1970s as it is of the 1920s. It has a sense of adventure and discovery and amorous aggression that’s as applicable to the disco age as to the flapper one—and translates very neatly into our own times. The show’s moral is shared with a zillion Gershwin standards: It’s easy to get yourself down about something, but you don’t have to. Why not kick up your heels?

Half a dozen of the songs in My One and Only (“Funny Face,” “”High Hat,” “S’Wonderful,” “”In the Swim,” “He Loves and She Loves,” and the title tune) derive from a single Gershwin show, Funny Face. That show, and other Gershwin songs brought into the My One and Only score such as “Soon,” come from the same year in which My One and Only is set, 1927. For Funny Face, the Gershwins replaced “How Long Has This Been Going On?” with “He Loves and She Loves”; My One and Only uses both. The rest are a mixed bag, from 1921’s “Boy Wanted” to 1937’s Nice Work If You Can Get It—both songs which describe love in terms of gainful employment—with “Kicking the Clouds Away” (1925), “Blah, Blah, Blah” (1931) in between.

Placing old-fashioned positivistic anthems in a historical context which acknowledges real-life heroes gives My One and Only a kinship to one of the biggest hits in the Goodspeed’s history, Annie. The shows were created only about five years apart. Annie is set in 1933 and features an appearance by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. My One and Only is set in 1927 and makes frequent mention of Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh.

The show’s also blissfully self-aware, as only an anachronistically sunnily dispositioned, nostalgia-driven show can be: A plot progression is dismissed with “Ah, that’s first act business.” There are fart jokes to offset all those starched dress shirts, and gospel wails to integrate the Tin Pan alley atmosphere. When the recurring vocal trio known as The New Rhythms (Vasthy E. Mompoint, Victor Wisehart and Richard Riaz Yoder) emerge at one point with a hilariously cheesy prop to illustrate a sky voyage, they acknowledge it deliriously: “It’s a plane! On a stick!” There’s some serious intelligence at work in the complicated choreography, multi-obstacled romantic plotline and rapid-change set design of this show, but it would be half as impressive without such inspired silliness.

There are slight similarities between My One and Only and The Boyfriend (which the Goodspeed revived in 2005). Both use seaside frolics for big production numbers, and the lovers in each meet at upscale parties. But My One and Only is jazzier and hipper and saucier, less overtly parodic. It’s less interested in capturing a lost era than it is in amplifying what was cool about it.

Tap dancing is surprisingly still spryly cool, even in this age of shoegazing and raves. In the fleet-footed lead role of Captain Billy Buck Chandler, Tony Yazbeck wisely doesn’t even try to ape the role’s originator Tommy Tune. He’s more of a sweaty, athletic, Gene Kelly-esque tapper, and he leaps into each dance as if prepared to tap ‘til he drops. The object of Billy’s affections, swimming ace Edythe Herbert (Gabrielle Ruiz), is required to sing more than she dances, and does so in a confident, personable cabaret style that really invigorates otherwise familiar love songs. Vaudeville yocks are provided courtesy Billy’s tomboy flight mechanic Mickey (Kirsten Wyatt, invoking the great Betty Garrett, not to mention Deborah Walley in Beach Blanket Bingo) and villainous Prince NikolaiErraclyovitch Tchatchavadve (Khris Lewin), whose thick accents transforms “romance” into “ruh-myenz” and “piece de resistance” into “piss of resistents.”

KHRIS LEWIN AND KIRSTEN WYATT TIE UP LOOSE ENDS AS COMIC RELIEF IN MY ONE AND ONLY. DIANE SOBOLEWSKI PHOTO.

The Goodspeed literally frames this succession of dance, crooning and comedy routines with a purposely boxy set design and quickchanging photo and film images to set the scenes. There are more projections in this production than in a Yale School of Drama thesis project. It all makes for a snappy presentations that goes beyond exhilarating into exhausting. The Goodspeed currently has Cutman, a new musical about championship boxing, playing down the road from the Opera House at the Norma Terris Theater, but it’d have to hit hard to be any punchier than My One and Only.

This show is a welcome reminder that a Gershwin tune stands for more than a pleasant melody. The Gershwins fueled a revolution, one that still spins 85 years or so later.

My One and Only will make you get out of your chair.

 

Categories: Connecticut Theaters, Goodspeed Musicals, Reviews of Shows | 2 Comments

The International Festival of Apps & IPhones

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

Had fun last night fooling around with the brand new app fashioned for New Haven’s impending 2011 International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Like the fest itself, it’s classy and community-oriented at the same time.

The app (available as a free download for both iPhone and Droid) offers frequent friendly postings counting down the days to the festival and alerting fans to preview events, discount opportunities. Besides those updates, there’s a slightly more verbose blog to pore over. There’s also a slew of videos, though unfortunately most of them are touting previous festivals. That should change as more material about this year’s featured performers—Yo Yo Ma, Druid Theatre Company, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, Susan Marshall  & Co. et al.—gets disseminated.

For the here and now (and the soon-enough), there’s a calendar and a venue map which will come in handy when you’re downtown rushing from show to show once the festival’s actually happening (and not just virtually here), June 11-25.

At which this invaluable Arts & Ideas app is doubtless going to loudly interrupt an Arts & Ideas concert because some patron forgot to turn off their ‘phone.

Categories: Arts & Ideas, Connecticut Theaters | 2 Comments

Farren at Her Height: Painted by Thomas Lawrence at the Yale Center for British Art

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

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 18th 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 18th and early 19th 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.

Categories: European Theater, Holidays | Leave a comment

Five Rock Records Which Share Titles With 20th Century Plays

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Christopher Arnott

1. Madhouse on Castle Street, Chopper. While, to my knowledge, no specific song on the album builds upon these references, the Connecticut-based power pop band Chopper’s 1995 album Madhouse on Castle Street not only uses the name of a play as the album’s title but has a photograph of a playwright’s home on its back cover. Madhouse on Castle Street was a TV drama written by Evan Jones, directed by Philip Saville and broadcast by the BBC in 1963. It featured Bob Dylan singing and acting, back when his folksinger fame was largely a New York City cult thing.

The photo on the back of the Chopper CD (an image also emblazoned on the disc itself) is of the High Street, London apartment of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell—the flat where both men died in a murder-suicide.

2. The Odd Couple, Gnarls Barkley. Neil Simon’s fourth play, Gnarls Barkley’s second album.

3. Long Day’s Journey Into the Night, Bolland & Bolland. You might know Bolland as Bolland & Bolland, the Dutch pop producers behind Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus.” “Long Day’s Journey” is a track from their 1981 album The Domino Theory, which also features “You’re in the Army Now” (a hit for the Status Quo)… and an overture.

4. Skin of Our Teeth, Hunters & Collectors. The song by the 1980s Australian pop band has nothing directly to do with Thornton Wilder’s 1942 play, except for the central themes of survival and (to quote the H&C lyrics) “God-fearing good living” and “scrabbling under the bed.”

5. They Might Be Giants—it’s a play (by James Goldman of The Lion in Winter and Follies fame), the movie based on that play (starring Joanne Woodward and George C. Scott), the rock band arbitrarily named after that movie (sometimes known as the two Johns and their band of Dans) and that band’s debut album (aka The Pink Album). That’s one resilient title.

Categories: Lists, Rock Theater | Leave a comment