Dael Orlandersmith’s two-character drama Yellowman is playing at Trinity Rep through April 3. It played at Long Wharf’s Stage II nine years ago this month. I recall that production well. I liked it quite a bit, but could only praise Orlandersmith’s own performance through backhanded compliments, since I’d felt she’d improved so much as a performer since her earlier one-woman show The Gimmick (also seen at Long Wharf, in 1998). This led to a volatile phone call from Ms. Orlandersmith and some awkward diplomatic maneuvers between the theater she was performing at and the newspaper I was writing for. The next time I interviewed her, for the Long Wharf’s world premiere of The Blue Album (a collaboration with David Cale), she barely spoke to me, and I don’t altogether blame her.
In any case, Dael Orlandersmith is not performing the female role in Yellowman in Rhode Island. The cast consists of Joe Wilson Jr. and Rachel Christopher. Regardless of who’s doing it, the play is a cleverly constructed relationship drama where separate monologues gradually gravitate closer and closer until it miraculously merges into a deep dialogue.
Hello Yellow
Fast and Lewis
The Off Broadway run of Mark St. Germain’s drama Freud’s Last Session has been extended, and not for the first time. The dual analysis of Freud and C.S. Lewis now is not slated to leave the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater on West 64th St. until July 3, with the current cast of Martin Rayner and Mark H. Dold.
Though he hasn’t traveled all that far from this area, working a lot in NYC and at the Barrington Stage Co. in the Berkshires, I haven’t thought about Dold in years. Still, I recall him vividly as Sullen in Everett Quinton’s production of The Beaux Stratagem at the Yale Rep in the mid-1990s and especially for his Kurt Cobain impression in the Yale Cabaret’s brilliant grungification of Chekhov’s Ivanov, renamed Nirvanov.
Dold was also at the Long Wharf Theater here in New Haven opposite another mid-‘90s Yale School of Drama grad, Reg Rogers, in Dealer’s Choice by Patrick Marber; Dold’s most recent Long Wharf show was the East Coast premiere of Craig Lucas‘s The Singing Forest. In all that time, he doesn’t appear to have put on any weight. Unlike C.S. Lewis himself.
Where Did Death Sting First?
Death Takes a Holiday is becoming a musical, opening June 10 at the Roundabout in NYC. The NY Post shorthands the Albert Casella play on which it’s based as the basis for the Brad Pitt film Meet Joe Black, but theater junkies know it as a legendary, too-seldom-revived romantic drama from the 1930s. Connecticut theater junkies know it in particular because the American version of the play had its world premiere at the Stony Creek Puppet House in Branford. The Puppet House, which also boasts that Orson Welles made his first film there (as part of a summer-theater Mercury Players workshop), has been best known in the past half-century for housing—and actually using, in full-length battle spectaculars—a rare corps of colorful Sicilian marionettes collected by Grace Weil.
The Puppet House fell into disrepair a few years ago and was closed by Branford city officials due to code violations. There have been numerous plans (including this one) to reopen the place as a performing arts center, ending the dilapidated barnlike building’s own death-like holiday.
One other immediate Connecticut connection to the impending Death Takes a Holiday musical: its composer, Maury Yeston, of Nine fame, both studied and taught at Yale. One of his first shows, a musical based on Alice in Wonderland for the Footlights Club at Cambridge University which he composed as a graduate student between his Yale stints, had its American premiere at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in 1971.
He’s Made His Bedford
Brian Bedford’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest has been extended through July 3. Haven’t seen it, and sniff every time I read a review which suggests that Bedford’s casting of himself as Lady Bracknell is somehow novel or groundbreaking. For me, Quentin Crisp will always be the quintessential male New York Bracknell (from a 1982 production directed by Evan Thompson, whose family used to run inspired summer-stock seasons at the Ivoryton Playhouse here in Connecticut). By now, that drag-Bracknell concept is beyond tired. I remember thinking it was old hat when Doug Hughes enlisted Edward Hibbert to be Lady Bracknell at the Long Wharf Theater in 1999, and I remember my relief when I heard a national tour of a new Peter Hall production in 2006 would feature a woman, Lynn Redgrave in the role.
There are better reasons to see The Importance of Being Earnest. Such as Brian Murray, who blew the top off the Long Wharf just last month with his blustery take on art dealer Joseph Luveen in Michael Rudman’s revival of Simon Gray’s The Old Masters. Murray has joined the Earnest cast as Canon Chasuble. Oh, and regardless of casting (it’s one of those shows any trained actor knows how to do), this is simply one of the sturdiest British comedies ever written, a model of well-heeled silliness. As surefire as mainstream entertainment can get, no matter who’s wearing the dress.
Won Before
The indie film Win Win is opening wide this week. Its director, Tom McCarthy, and its star, Paul Giamatti, both studied acting at the Yale School of Drama in the mid-90s, and I have indelible memories of each of them.
As Duke Orsino, McCarthy provided exquisite framing moments for one of the best Twelfth Nights I’ve ever seen, directed for the Yale Rep with an all-YSD cast in 1995. In the very first second of the show, McCarthy burst up gasping from an deep tank of water at the front of the stage. At the very end, he had a charming small moment which still makes me chuckle; after Sebastian and Viola were revealed to be twins, McCarthy’s Duke started to converse with Sebastian, then made a shocked face suggesting that he’d mistaken the young man for Viola. That the actors playing the siblings were about as un-identical as they could be (a pit of incredulity which gapes in all productions of Twelfth Night ever) only added to the hilarity of this perfect little routine, which was mingled into a full-cast party scene. I saw the production several times, and those McCarthy moments still dazzled even once they felt familiar.
I saw Paul Giamatti in over a dozen shows during his time at the Yale School of Drama. (He’d also been undergrad at Yale. I can’t recall seeing any of his work then, but he used to browse for hours at a small bookshop I managed near campus.) I recall lamenting that he’d be forever stuck in character actor parts once he started making movies; his earliest roles were as the guy snogging his girlfriend in a diner in Cameron Crowe’s singles, the blustery radio exec Pig Vomit in the Howard Stern bio Private Parts. Despite having made inroads into indie films and a few blockbusters, he was still doing the blustering businessman idiot routine in Big Fat Liar in 2002. Any typecasting would be a tragedy, I felt, having seen him nail the starring roles in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Carlo Gozzi’s Love of Three Oranges, not to mention Jacques (the “All the world is a stage” utterer) in As You Like It plus a scad of Chekhovs (The Bear at the Yale Cabaret, The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull at the School of Drama). Ultimately, talent did out, and Giamatti got to be Harvey Pekar and John Adams and the Sideways guy and dozens of other roles he didn’t win on just his looks. The only struggle remaining now is to get the Motion Picture Academy to recognize his achievements.
I am not generally a fan of wrestling, or of films in which flawed adults mentor troubled teens, but Win Win seems to have a winning formula: McCarthy matched with Giamatti for the first time in 15 years.
Crock
Isn’t putting Tom Cruise and Alec Baldwin in the film of Rock of Ages a little like putting Oliver Reed and Jack Nicholson in the movie of Tommy, or Steve Martin and Frankie Howerd in the Bee Gees’ Sergeant Pepper, or Eddie Izzard in Across the Universe? It seems to be one of those bragging points for A-listers—”I’m so great, they cast me in a musical even though I can’t sing.”
Gnomeo and Juliet sequels planned
King Sprinkleer
MacBirdbath
Titus Watering-candronicus