Archives for November 6, 2015

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Boston premiere of Katori Hall’s Saturday Night/Sunday Morning and two New York premieres, On Your Feet! and King Charles III. Here’s an excerpt.

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After seeing “Our Lady of Kibeho” off Broadway last November and “The Blood Quilt” in Washington, D.C., this past May, I knew that Katori Hall was a potentially major talent. That’s why I drove up to Boston to check out the Lyric Stage Company’s revival of one of her earlier plays, “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning,” and I’m thrilled to report that the 34-year-old Ms. Hall is now three for three in a row.

Written in 2008, “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning” is a Chekhov-style mood piece set in a Memphis beauty parlor at the end of World War II. Imagine a cross between “Steel Magnolias” and “Barbershop” and you’ll start to get a sense of what Ms. Hall is up to—but “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning,” even though it’s full of raucous laughs, is no light comedy. Each scene trembles with tenderness and pain, and each character will lodge in your memory long after the lights go up at evening’s end.

Miss Mary’s Press ’n Curl isn’t just a beauty parlor: It’s also a ramshackle boarding house for young black women who have stopped in Memphis on their way to parts unknown, run by a disillusioned war widow (Jasmine Rush) who knows too well how hard the world can be. The absence of a strong plot doesn’t matter in the slightest: No sooner do you meet these women than you want to know all about them…

Broadway’s latest greatest-hits album, “On Your Feet!: The Story of Emilio and Gloria Estefan,” is what the subtitle promises, a bioshow about the co-leaders of the Miami Sound Machine, the Cuban-American dance-floor pop group that torched the charts in the ’80s with such catchy singles as “Conga” and “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You.” Alexander Dinelaris’ book is heavy on the Hollywoodian clichés, but it has its charming moments, too, and every other aspect of the production, directed by Jerry Mitchell, is slick and satisfying…

If you saw “The Audience” at least twice, you’ll probably already have bought a ticket for Mike Bartlett’s “King Charles III,” a what-if fantasy in which Queen Elizabeth II finally kicks the bucket, followed by the ascension of her long-suffering son to the throne. But wait, there’s a catch! The former Prince Charles (Tim Pigott-Smith, who is sensationally good) proceeds to defy Parliament by refusing to sign a bill abridging freedom of speech, thus triggering a 10-alarm constitutional crisis. So what, you ask? So this: “King Charles III” is a Shakespearean pastiche written in blank verse—and that, alas, is where the gas runs out. If you’re going to write a two-and-a-half-hour-long Shakespearean pastiche, you’d better be a damned good poet, and Mr. Bartlett is a mere versifier…

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To read my review of Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, go here.

To read my review of On Your Feet!, go here.

To read my review of King Charles III, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about a historically important home-video release. Here’s an excerpt.

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Peter Pan is everywhere these days, and I, for one, am getting good and sick of him. Not only does the dreadful “Finding Neverland” seem likely to run on Broadway for several more decades, but “Peter and the Starcatcher,” which is only marginally less bad, has become a regional-theater staple. Now that “Pan” has gone belly-up in movie houses, though, I’m starting to wonder whether my growing exasperation with the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up might be more widely shared. Hence it’s valuable to be reminded of the powerful and permanent appeal of the play on which all these tedious prequels are based.

That reminder comes in the form of VAI’s home-video release of the original TV versions of Jerome Robbins’ celebrated musical-comedy adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” the show for which Mary Martin (who played Peter in drag) is still best remembered. These programs, originally telecast live and in color on NBC in 1955 and 1956, were landmarks in the history of television: Never before had so large a TV audience seen a Broadway show. The 1955 version was viewed by more than 65 million people, one out of every three Americans, and it made so deep an impression on those who saw it that NBC did the whole thing over again 10 months later.

In those days you couldn’t repeat a live telecast any other way—videotape had yet to be invented—but both performances were filmed in black-and-white for archival purposes. These “kinescopes,” as such films are known, have never before been issued on home video other than in blurry pirate versions. (The out-of-print color version of “Peter Pan” released 17 years ago was the 1960 telecast, which was videotaped.) VAI has remastered both kinescopes with scrupulous care, and the results, if not up to modern-day broadcast quality, are surprisingly sharp and perfectly watchable….

It’s not hard to understand the colossal fuss that was made at the time over the 1955 telecast. Then as now, the only way to see a new hit Broadway musical was to go to New York and pay for a ticket, and “Peter Pan,” which ran for 152 performances, closing just nine days before the TV version aired, was performed at the Winter Garden Theatre, which has 1,526 seats. You can do the math: The number of people who got to see the show onstage was a tiny sliver of the far greater number who saw it on TV for free. If you want to know how the common culture of postwar America helped to bring its citizens together, you can’t do much better than to consider “Peter Pan.”…

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Read the whole thing here.

From the 1956 telecast of Peter Pan, Mary Martin sings “I’m Flying,” by Moose Charlap and Carolyn Leigh:

Birgit Nilsson sings “In questa reggia” (from Puccini’s Turandot on a 1967 episode of The Bell Telephone Hour. The conductor is Donald Voorhees:

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

“There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.”

Laura Lippman, I’d Know You Anywhere