Archives for April 2011

Zero Mostel sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Comedy Tonight” (from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) at the 1971 Tony Awards:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Teachers tend to form opinions about music, and these are always getting in the way of creation. The teacher, like the parent, must always have an answer for everything. If he doesn’t he loses prestige. He must make up a story about music and stick to it. Nothing is more sterilizing.”
Virgil Thomson, The State of Music

Broadway is jumping, and for the rest of the month I’ll be filing two or three drama columns each week for The Wall Street Journal. In today’s paper I review The Motherf**ker With the Hat and Catch Me if You Can. The first–very much to my surprise, by the way–is a knockout, the second a dud. Here’s an excerpt.
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Theatergoers familiar with the work of Stephen Adly Guirgis know that the gigawatt expletive embedded in the title of his latest play is one of his favorite words–on stage, anyway. Whether the public at large will feel comfortable seeing it on a marquee is an open question. Broadway is a scary place to open a straight play, especially one whose name can’t be said out loud on network TV. It stands to reason that “The Motherf**ker With the Hat” (to give the play its official, double-asterisked title) should have done poorly in previews, the buzz-inducing presence of Chris Rock notwithstanding. But even though the title is too clever by half, Mr. Guirgis’ play is buzzworthy in its own right. It’s tight, smart and splendidly well-made, a tough-minded, unromantically romantic comedy that keeps you laughing, then sends you home thinking.
“Hat” (let’s leave it at that) is about two working-class couples who are too close for comfort. Jackie (Bobby Cannavale), a violent hothead who just got out of jail and is now trying to get clean and sober, is crazy about Veronica (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who has an equally short fuse but has yet to discover the joys of sobriety. Ralph D. (Mr. Rock), Jackie’s sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous, is a fast-talking scamster whose long-suffering wife (Annabella Sciorra) knows what he’s up to and has had it up to here. When Jackie finds a strange man’s hat in the grungy apartment that he shares with Veronica, all hell breaks loose. To say more would be to give the game away, but rest assured that you won’t get even a half-step ahead of Mr. Guirgis, who deals a steady stream of surprising cards all evening long….
Time was when musicals got made into movies. Now it’s the other way around. A successful Hollywood film is now seen as one of the safest possible sources for a big-budget Broadway musical, since it brings to the stage–at least in theory–its own built-in audience of fans. Not that that stopped the producers of “9 to 5” from losing their shirts, but generally speaking, the theory is sound. Would that it made for better shows. “Catch Me if You Can” is a case in point, a glossy stage version of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 movie that is musically unmemorable and emotionally dead….
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Read the whole thing here.

Exposé of Sleight of Hand, a rare short film featuring card-trick expert John Scarne:

“If you have to worry about originality or think about it, you’re not original.”
William Schuman, unpublished autobiographical manuscript

What with the steady stream of Broadway and off-Broadway openings and the fast-approaching world premiere of Danse Russe in Philadelphia on April 28, I’m too distracted to do any blogging beyond the usual almanac entries and theater-related posts. So in lieu of holding forth at endless length on whatever, I’m posting a link to a transcript of a recent interview about Danse Russe. (In case you’re wondering, this really is the way that Paul Moravec and I talk when we’re in the same room.)
To read the interview, go here.

“Americans are generous but not magnanimous, because the grand gesture is too aristocratic for comfort.”
Florence King, “Florence King Opens Her Diary” (The Spectator, Mar. 12, 2011)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I have pretty good things to say about the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Anything Goes and great things to say about Sutton Foster, its star. Here’s an excerpt.
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Sutton Foster is a star without a sky. Like Kristin Chenoweth, she is a natural-born performer of good old-fashioned musical comedy who lives in an age when good old-fashioned musical comedies are no longer being written. A wholesome beauty with a voice as warm as summer sunshine, Ms. Foster has to date starred in only one first-rate show, “The Drowsy Chaperone,” and until now she’d never appeared in a Broadway revival of a classic musical. The Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes,” directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, isn’t exactly that, nor is the show quite right for Ms. Foster, but her performance is so full of zowie as to overcome all possible objections. If she weren’t already a star, this “Anything Goes” would make her one with room to spare.
“Anything Goes” is a fluffy-headed farce about amorous shenanigans on a cruise ship in which Ms. Foster plays a hardboiled nightclub singer named Reno Sweeney who falls for the wrong guy (Colin Donnell) before finding the right one (Adam Godley). The role was written in 1934 for Ethel Merman, and Patti LuPone, a performer of like inclination, took it over in the 1987 Broadway revival. Unlike those famously tough gals, Ms. Foster isn’t a naturally brassy dame, and there are times when it feels as though she’s playing dress-up. Yet her singing is so lustrous and vibrant that you’ll be glad to go along with the gag. She nails every syllable of Porter’s tricky lyrics to the back wall of the theater–in “You’re the Top” she even gives the uncanny impression that she’s making them up on the spot–and when she uncoils her mile-long legs and flicks a forward pass at Mr. Donnell in the first scene, you’ll whoop with delight….
The original “Anything Goes” featured three of Porter’s best-known songs, “You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick out of You” and the title number, and a book that was written by P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, then rewritten by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (Wodehouse claimed that only two of his lines made it to Broadway). It is now, like most pre-“Oklahoma!” musicals, a bit on the quaint side, and so it’s no surprise that the Roundabout is performing the much-altered version created for Lincoln Center Theater in 1987, an updated, commoditized “Anything Goes” into which three more Porter hits, “Easy to Love,” “Friendship” and “It’s De-Lovely,” were shoehorned. Though its period feel was synthetic, the Lincoln Center version was still a huge success (it ran for 784 performances) and has since become the “standard” version of “Anything Goes.” Alas, it’s crammed full of rusty wisecracks that lost their crackle long ago, and since nobody seems inclined to dust off the original, one wonders why the Roundabout didn’t call in David Ives to give the script a good going-over.
Ms. Marshall, who did so well by “The Pajama Game” and “Wonderful Town,” takes a while to get going this time around, perhaps because the book is stale. Not until the title song, which wraps up the first act, do her dances catch fire. From that moment on, “Anything Goes” flies through the air with absolute assurance….
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Read the whole thing here.
Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr sing “Friendship,” originally telecast on a 1954 Colgate Comedy Hour production of Anything Goes: