Tony noms are often an occasion for gloating at the  Yale Rep, Long Wharf Theatre, Goodspeed Musicals and Hartford Stage—the regional theaters that often develop new works which evolve into Broadway hits, or encourage artists that later make it big in New York, or share in the same talent pool of actors and designers that Broadway draws from.

Around here, a Tony isn’t seen as the culmination of a career; it’s validation in one theater realm of fine work that’s been acknowledged in other theater realms already.

This year, it’s the undergrad Yale Theater Studies department which has reason to crow. Alex Timbers, a 2001 graduate of the university, is nominated for Best Book of a Musical for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which he also directed. Timbers had a fanatical following as a student director, which he built upon with his New York based Les Freres Corbusiers company and now much-hyped shows like Bloody Bloody and the recent Pee Wee Herman Show revival (which Timbers directed).

There are plenty of opportunities for Connecticut theatergoers to say “I saw that person once in…” For instance;

Vanessa Redgrave (nominated for Driving Miss Daisy) did a politically charged playreading at Long Wharf this year.

Brian Bedford (director of The Importance of Being Earnest, but nominated for playing Lady Bracknell in it) brought his one-man Shakespeare show to the Long Wharf many years ago.

John Benjamin Hickey was a regional theater stalwart who did Valued Friends at Long Wharf in 1990 and also apparently worked at Yale Rep in something sometime.

John Kander & Fred Ebb had a regional workshop of their musical version of The Skin of Our Teeth at Westport Country Playhouse three years ago, when their The Scottsboro Boys (nominated for Best Musical and 11 other awards) was already being developed.

David Yazbek (nominated for Best Original Score of a Musical for doing both the music & lyrics for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) once had a rock band that sounded a lot like XTC (high praise) which played at Toad’s Place in New Haven.

Al Pacino has done stage work at the Long Wharf several times, most recently in Hughie in the mid-‘90s.

Larry Kramer nearly killed himself at Yale because he felt unloved and misunderstood as a gay men in the 1950s; his The Normal Heart, nominated for Best Revival of a Play, and his million-dollar gift to Yale to found a center for gay studies in 2001, helped demystify and celebrate gay culture for everybody.

Mark Rylance spent seven years of his childhood in Connecticut, from the ages of 2 to 9.

Scratch a Broadway show, and somebody in Connecticut has a tangential thread to pull.

I’ll keep adding to this list as things occur to me. Feel free to email me your own “I remember them in…”s to chris@scribblers.us, or just comment below.

It’s kind of a pity that Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson had to go up against The Book of Mormon, The Scottsboro Boys, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown for Tony Award nominations this year.

On the other hand, who’s complaining? Those of us who perpetually worry that Broadway “doesn’t get it” have to give credit where due: The fact that such once-culty or controversial projects are in contention for the top commercially minded award in American theater means alternative audiences are being actively courted, not just being paid lip service to.

The Best Play nominees—David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Motherfucker With the Hat, Nick Stafford’s War Horse—all could be considered the sort of thing you’d be more used to finding Off or Off-Off Broadway or on regional stages. That might well have been the case for The Motherfucker With the Hat if Chris Rock hadn’t decided to star in it, or even for Jerusalem if it hadn’t arrived loaded down with so many British Awards, not to mention it’s already-got-a-Tony star, Mark Rylance. Yet, again—the corrosive Chris Rock in a Broadway play!

The shake-out for who actually got nominated for Best Musical resulted in two fairly conventional (if relatively modern) shows based on recent-vintage movies, Sister Act and Catch Me If You Can, going up against the sensation of the season, The Book of Mormon (14 nominations altogether) and The Scottsboro Boys (which adds a little gravity to the category; it got 11 other noms despite having already closed).

Likewise, New York theater royalty sewed up  nearly all the top non-musical performance nominations: Rylance for Jerusalem, Brian Bedford for The Importance of Being Earnest, Vanessa Redrave (Driving Miss Daisy),  Joe Mantello (who has two Tonys as a director, none yet as an actor) for The Normal Heart , Nina Arianda (hard not to get nominated when it’s the female lead in Born Yesterday), Frances McDormand (Good People), Lily Rabe (in Al Pacino’s Merchant of Venice; counts as royalty because of her lineage: David Rabe and Jilly Clayburgh) and of course Pacino, who’s glorified (and rightly so) every time he returns to the stage. Bobby Canavale (for The Motherfucker…) are Hannah Yelland are the odd man and woman out here, and even they are known quantities.

I could go on (and will, in other posts.)

But still, don’t you think this was a pretty diverse, progressive season, and that the Tony nominators noticed that?

Complete list of nominees at the Tony Awards website.

Stratford Ct.’s Square One theater, whose offerings are usually anything but square, is ending its 2011-12 season with Art. Like the off white canvas its plot draws from, Art has never gone out of style. The Elm Shakespeare company did Art (in an actual gallery setting) around a year ago, and the play’s still a staple on college campuses.

Yazmina Reza’ s comical three- character aesthetic argument will never again have the ubiquity it enjoyed when it first trickled down to regional and small theaters in the late ’90s—I recall reviewing three productions in the same month. Art’s resurgence now owes as much to the playwright’s staying power as it does to the play’s. Reza’s kept writing lively literate and intellectual shows that are embraced by upper middle class audiences. The most recent is God of Carnage—watch out when rights to that one become more commonly available.

The glory of Art is that small companies can produce it cheaply, market it easily, and use it to reward some of their regular players. The surefire roles can be carried off by old actors as easily as young, by the dumpy as deftly as by the handsome, by the wacky as readily by the intense. I have yet to see a production where a woman was cast in one of the roles, though I understand that’s been done successfully a few times. I have seen an extraordinary range of talent kill in this show.

Square One artistic director Tom Holehan’s got a trio of company veterans on hand: Alexander Kulcsar (who’s done comedy, melodrama and murder mystery for the company in the past, and also designed Art’s set), Pat Leo (who has a dozen Square One shows on his reseume) and Dan Arenovski (three previous Square One credits and counting). That kind of stage cameraderie should really help a show that’s about longheld (if rapidly fraying) friendships.

Art runs May 13-28 at the Stratford Theatre, 2422 Main St., Stratford. Tix and info here.

Varla Jean Merman is known hereabouts for her fundraising concert for Hartford’s Mark Twain House last June, her appearance in Charles Ludlam’s quickchange farce The Mystery of Irma Vep at both Hartford Stage and the Long Wharf Theatre in 2004, her multiple collaborations with playwright/Connecticut theater-marketing guy Jacques Lamarre, and for purporting to be the love child of Ethel Merman and Hamden native Ernest Borgnine.

Varla Jean Merman (sometime known as Jeffery Roberson) is taking time off from her whirlwind one-woman shows to be part of the original cast of Lucky Guy, The Musical. Willard Beckham’s multi-styled Nashville-set singing-cowboy musical began previews last week at the Little Shubert Theatre in New York. Opening night is May 19, and the Off Broadway run ends July 24. Besides Varla, the cast includes Kyle Dean Massey, Leslie Jordan, Jenn Colella, Jim Newman and Savannah Wise.

Lucky Guy was developed at Goodspeed Musical’s Norma Terris Theatre in Chester, Connecticut, back in 2009, with a completely different cast: Josh Grisetti, Gary Beach, Katie Adams, Autumn Hurlbert, John Bolton and Stacia Fernandez.

Mad Magazine has added a “Theatres of the Absurd” department to its table of contents for June. The feature is “Similarities & Differences Between the Spider-Man Musical and the War in Afghanistan.” Among the ten shared traits on the Mad checklist: “Millions of dollars blindly poured into it”; “Largely performed by disillusioned twentysomethings”; “A textbook case of American hubris”; and “Entire production very poorly choreographed.”

The two categories where Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and the Afghanistan war differ: “Will still be going strong in 2013” (no checkmark in that column for Spider-Man) and “Americans paying close attention to the endless debacle” (where Spidey is checked but Afghanistan ain’t).

The Spider-Man show also gets the honor (better than a T0ny!) of being featured in Al Jaffee’s Mad Fold-In.

And that’s not the only stage culture comedy in issue 509. There’s also “Mad’s 11 Little-Known, Practical, Real Life Uses for Ballet” and the terpsichorean TV parody Dancing With the Star Wars.

PHOTO BY T. CHARLES ERICKSON OF BEYOND THERAPY AT THE WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE

Beyond Therapy

By Christopher Durang. Directed by David Kennedy. Scenic design by Lee Savage. Costume design by Jennifer Caprio. Lighting design by Jeff Croiter. Sound design by John Gromada. Stage manager: Matthew Melchoirre. Performed by Jeremy Peter Johnson (Bruce), Nicole Lowrance (Prudence), Trent Dawson (Stuart), Kathleen McNenny (Charlotte), Stephen Wallem (Bob) and Nick Gehlfuss (Andrew).

Through May 14 at the Westport Country Playhouse.

I reviewed this show for The Fairfield County Weekly, here.

Rather than duplicate myself, here’s a web-friendly list of references and punchlines which may help you decide if this decidedly ‘70s-vintage comedy is for you. The onslaught of pop-culture iconography in the play will have you reaching for the Trivial Pursuit board.

Most of the items listed  below come directly from Durang’s script. A few, such as the Warhol portrait and the tune “76 Trombones” (in a lounge-music rendition) are unique to this production.

Auntie Mame

David Berkowitz

Shaun Cassidy

Chips Ahoy! cookies

Constantine (in Chekhov’s The Seagull)

Joyce DeWitt (Three’s Company)

Equus

Betty Friedan

“Just One of Those Things”

Kierkegaard, Mahler, Joan Didion

Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot

Margaret Mead

Marie of Romania

Kate Millett

Million Dollar Movie

Mondrian

Notes from the Underground

Orca

People Magazine

Poland water

“Reach Out and Touch Someone”

Rice-a-Roni

“Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy

The Second Mrs. Tanqueray

The Sensuous Woman

“76 Trombones”

Skylab

Snoopy doll

“Someday My Prince Will Come”

“Someone to Watch Over Me”

Sunday Bloody Sunday (Murray Head, Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson)

Tree of Wooden Clogs

Tylenol

An Unmarried Woman

Warhol, silkscreen of Elizabeth Taylor

“Welcome to Kanagawa” from Pacific Overtures

Just came back from the New Haven Green, where some Bread-and-Puppet-esque pageantry figures towered over the marchers in a pro-immigrant parade. Lots of music performances and speechifying too.

International Workers’ Day. Good time to reread:

1. The Admirable Crichton by J.M. Barrie

2. The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni

3. Mr. Puntilla and His Man Matti by Bertolt Brecht

… whilst listening to the soundtracks of:

4. Working, the Musical

5. Pins and Needles

6. The Pajama Game

The Adventures of Little Red Riding Hood

Presented by the Yale Children’s Theater through May 1 at Dwight Hall, 67 High Street, on the Yale campus. Produced by Ethan Jefferson and Kyle vanLeer. Written and directed by Deborah Garcia and Cassandra Kildow. Performed by Bianca Rodriguez (Little Red), Cooper Wilhelm (Wolf, Emily Howell (Hansel), Jessica Norton (Gretel), Joie Chen (Pigglesworth), Katelynn Clement (Piggy Sue), Dylan Morris (Pork Chop) and Deborah Garcia (Witch).

More genuinely troupe-like than a lot of the clicquey Yale undergrad theater groups, the Yale Children’s Theater has always had a finely calibrated anti-indulgence meter, which is what really sets them apart from a lot of their thespian classmates.

The YCT’s mission is to entertain children. They do this cleverly, with a careful guise of casualness, inspiring their young audiences to find the joy in theater. Their openness and friendliness is their hallmark. Each actor has a page of their own in the program, where they can put a game or puzzle. The cast sticks around after the curtain call to sign autographs and engage with the audience. These are wonderful traditions, and I’ve seen how well my own children respond to them.

I’ve seen at least half a dozen YCT shows in recent years. The Adventures of Little Red Riding Hood is one of the goofier ones, and they can get pretty goofy.

An appearance by Hansel & Gretel in the show’s first scene had me checking my program for the show’s title, but “Little Red” (who is off to grandma’s alone because “Mom is really busy writing legal briefs”) shows up soon after, pursued by a “wolf” in a lounge jacket and fur-eared fedora. In his anguished flight, Little Red finds herself aiding the three little pigs: Pigglesworth (the clever one), Piggy Sue (the vain girly one: “Don’t forget to moisturize!”) and Pork Chop (a calculator-punching geek who, when the wolf fails to huff and puff a brick house to smithereens, deems it “a victory for science!”). The wolf’s desire to devour Little Red turns out to be a misunderstand, and other acts of violence are similarly understated or lessened—fitting, considering that the show is performed in Dwight Hall, a venue associated with peace and social justice activities for over a century. Instead, there’s a dance-off between the good guys (“Dancing in the Streets”) and baddies (“The Monster Mash).

The staging is frantic, but clear. I once saw a Yale Children’s Theater show where Sherlock Holmes was conjecturing how a villain whom he had yet to catch pulled off a crime; while the detective spoke, the crime was reenacted in flashback. When Holmes wondered aloud how he might apprehend the fiend, a small child (sitting on the floor just a few feet from the actors, in the groundlings-type area that forms at all small-theater kids’ shows) started screaming, over and over “He’s right there! He’s over there!” Some staging techniques which are very effective in other genres of theater don’t fly at all in kids’ shows. Chaotic romps like this, however, are surefire.

Cosmic touches of Sondheim’s Into the Woods notwithstanding, this is definitely for very young audiences—my eight-year-old told me “Daddy, I think I’m getting too old for this” while my six-year-old hung on every word.

The final performances of Little Red Riding Hood (as the program calls it; on the website it’s just Little Red) are today, May 1 at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. A nice follow-up activity might be the May Day celebration on New Haven Green, where local children’s theater impresario Roger Uilhlein will be tossing kids around on a mattress, certified clown/magician The Amazing Andy will perform, and there will be a May Pole ritual.

Sinatra in Hollywood

By Tom Santopietro. Thomas Dunne Books (St. Martin’s Press), New York, 2008. 530 pages.

He’s been the subject of several, but Frank Sinatra never acted in an actual Broadway musical. His status as a musical theater legend came from the other coast: he starred in the films of On the Town (parts of which were filmed in New York) and Guys and Dolls and the Cole Porter-scored High Society (based on Philip Barry’s play The Philadelphia Story). He would’ve starred in the movie of Carousel instead of Gordon McRae if the studio hadn’t insisted on separate takes of every scene, so it could release both regular and Technicolor versions. Studio head Jack Warner wanted Sinatra to do the Music Man movie instead of the show’s Broadway star Robert Preston.

Even in his waning years, when he hardly acted at all, Sinatra turned a Kander and Ebb theme song from a not-well-received movie into a pop standard, and stuck “Good Thing Going” from Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along onto one of his albums.

I tore through this 530-page tome to get to the bits about the theater-related Sinatra flicks, particularly Tender Trap and The Joker is Wild. Both yielded hit songs but are non-musicals, and there’s not a while lot of scholarship available on either.

The Tender Trap is a much better play than it is a movie (though if it weren’t for the movie we wouldn’t have its great Sammy Cahn theme song). I think it can be seen as an iconic theater piece of the 1950s, when the live theater was struggling against the onslaught of television and Technicolor and survived by creating hipper, younger fare. Max Shulman, famous for his college-based humor (he created Dobie Gillis) co-wrote Tender Trap, and it originally starred Ronny Graham, a major force in the cabaret revue movement of the ‘50s.

The Joker is Wild is a solid adaptation of Art Cohn’s biography of Joe E. Lewis, a showbiz bio that was usually gritty for its time. Lewis was a singer who became a comedian, and who needed to because some gangsters slashed his throat when he tried to take his career beyond mob-owned clubs in Chicago.

Both these Sinatra faves of mine get better-than-expected treatment is Santopietro’s book, even if the author personally finds The Tender Trap “tiresome” and The Joker is Wild “markedly uneven.”

There’s great context provided, for starters:

The Tender Trap represented Sinatra’s first return to MGM in five years, and opened on November 17, 1955, a mere three days after the premiere of Guys and Dolls. The first-ever film to present Frank Sinatra as the leading man in a comedy, it even garnered some critical approval, with The Hollywood Reporter declaring the film “Colorful as a bright new lipstick and as merry as sixth martini.”

Santiopietro also brings up some TV productions Sinatra did that don’t get much attention in other books, including the NBC adaptation of Anything Goes alongside Bert Lahr and Ethel Merman. He did this live telecast in the midst of his major movie comeback period of the mid-1950s—it aired between the releases of From Here to Eternity and Suddenly. But despite its popularity it doesn’t usually get figured into Sinatra’s career-renewal equation. The Anything Goes TV show (just an hour long) was released just last month on DVD.

Sinatra in Hollywood is well researched, but mostly depends on the most popular Sinatra biographies. It leans very heavily on Nancy and Tina Sinatra’s memoirs. But rehashing behind-the-scenes tales isn’t really the point of the book. Santopietro diligently screens and comments upon just about every recorded screen acting job Sinatra ever did. He can overreach for adjectives—there’s lot of over-the-top qualifying phrases like “would be putting it mildly” or “the exact opposite of…”—but the mere fact that one man has examined all these documents is useful. When Santopietro boils his opinions down to simple letter grades, it proves to be quite the balanced career appraisal: 10 As, 24 Bs, 25 Cs,, 10 Ds and one F (for Cannonball Run 2; no argument there).

Santopietro is pretty hard on Double Dynamite, an admittedly formulaic yet otherwise inoffensive feature with a couple of good songs made on the cheap and co-starring Groucho Marx. Santopietro blames it as the nail in the coffin which nearly shut down Sinatra’s film stardom altogether.

Santopietro opens his book with an impassioned defense of Sinatra as an accomplished actor—not just good but great, he argues—and counters the common wisdom that Sinatra was like Elvis, sloughing through film projects that fell outside his recording-studio or concert-stage comfort zones. He finds validation for this thesis in the words of Sinatra himself, who when asked by Johnny Carson what he thought were major highlights of his career, mentioned his straight acting roles in From Here to Eternity and The Man With a Golden Arm. The fact that such an opinion-packed and well-rounded 530-page book could be devoted to just this one facet of Sinatra’s life and work is a fine summation of that argument.

This is a guy who could hold his own in musicals against Gene Kelly, Betty Garrett, Brando, Sammy Davis Jr… All the more pity that he never trod the stage as an actor.

As the British ska band The Specials proclaimed in 1980:

Are you ready for this? I told you he was coming.

Who? J.B., and he’s ready to sock it to you one time.

The Long Wharf Theatre could break into a similar chant. Of course, The Specials were singing about James Bond (“Unh! Spy Who Loved Me! You Only Live Twice!”), and Long Wharf is welcoming back Joshua Borenstein. But in both cases it’s all about security and intelligence.

Long Wharf announced today that Joshua Borenstein would be the interim managing director at the theater. It’s a canny and fortunate circumstance, since few arts administrators know the place better or could step in so confidently at such short notice.

Borenstein was Associate Managing Director at the Long Wharf from 2003-2008, spanning the periods when Michael Stotts, then Joan Channick were the Managing Directors. Borenstein was even an interim managing director for a few months between Stotts and Channick. This time the theater got him by contracting him through his current employer, AMS Planning and Resarch Corp., which tracks the sustainability and marketability of arts organizations. The company just released a major national study, Culture Track 2011, which according to the AMS website examined “the attitudes and behaviors of cultural audiences, trends in attendance at visual and performing arts events, and the motivators and barriers that affect participation.” Borenstein was the lead researcher on that study.

Even before he was at Long Wharf, Borenstein was knowledgeable about theatergoing trends in the area as a theater management student at the Yale School of Drama. He’s worked at the Yale Rep, Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company and Providence’s Trinity Rep. He’s been a guest lecturer at Yale and served on the board (as both president and treasurer) of the Yale Summer Cabaret. Can you ask for a better background?

At Long Wharf, Borenstein will replace Ray Cullom, who lasted a mere two seasons at Long Wharf and left in March to become the executive director of the Queens Theater in Park in Flushing Meadows, New York.

When Cullom left, there were statements from the Long Wharf to the effect that this was an appropriate time for such transitions; administrators often leave theaters in spring, when one season is over and the next has already been pretty much booked and budgeted. Cullom’s leaving was amicable, and he was able to give notice and wrap up a few loose ends. Other than putting together a search committee, the Long Wharf board wasn’t behaving particularly anxious.

But with leaner theater staffs (Cullom’s first task at Long Wharf was to downsize the place), things are planned out longer in advance and there’s no real downtime at regional theaters anymore. The Long Wharf is about to officially announce its 2011-12 season on May 9, and is also putting together a summer season and planning its annual gala. It needs a Managing Director on hand.

A Long Wharf spokesman says it’s too early to talk about any permanent candidates for the permanent Managing Director position. The Long Wharf board is currently searching for a search firm which will search for candidates. In the meantime, Josh Borenstein works for AMS Planning and Research Corp. and has been contracted to help out the Long Wharf in the short term. We’re sure he’ll manage.