Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Jason Alexander Will Direct a Comedy on Broadway This Summer

      by

      “The Cottage,” written by Sandy Rustin, will star Eric McCormack, Laura Bell Bundy and Lilli Cooper.“The Cottage,” a farce inspired by and also sending up the work of Noël Coward, will come to Broadway this summer in a new production directed by the “Seinfeld” alum Jason Alexander.The play, which has had several productions in small theaters over the last decade, will star Eric McCormack (“Will & Grace”), Laura Bell Bundy (“Legally Blonde”) and Lilli Cooper (“Tootsie”).“The Cottage” is a British farce by an American writer, Sandy Rustin, whose murder mystery drama, “Clue” (adapted from the board-game-based film), is now among the most-produced plays in the United States.Set in England in 1923, the comedy is set off by the revelation of an extramarital affair that brings a group of interconnected people together at a country house.It was first staged in 2013 at the Astoria Performing Arts Center in Queens, and has since had productions in Massachusetts, Arizona, Colorado, Virginia, and Florida, as well as on Long Island, and it has been optioned for television.Alexander directed a reading of the play in 2016 and led a developmental workshop in 2017. This production will be his Broadway directing debut, but he has appeared on Broadway in six shows and won a Tony Award for starring in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.”“The Cottage” is scheduled to begin performances July 7 at the Hayes Theater, with the opening scheduled for July 24. It is a commercial production, renting space from a nonprofit; the lead producers are Victoria Lang and Ryan Bogner, who last collaborated on the stage adaptation of “The Kite Runner” that ran on Broadway last year.This summer is shaping up to be an unusually busy one for Broadway: “The Cottage” is the fifth show to announce a summer opening thus far, joining the musicals “Back to the Future,” “Here Lies Love” and “Once Upon a One More Time” and the play “Purlie Victorious.” More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      Hari Nef and Parker Posey: Two ‘It’ Girls Whose ‘Humanity Peeks Through’

      by

      In a pairing that seems almost predestined, the actresses are sharing a stage in “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” a contemporary riff on Chekhov.In a show-business world full of square pegs and round holes, Parker Posey and Hari Nef are 12-sided dice.Posey, 54, has forged an unclassifiable career since her days as the “it” girl of 1990s independent cinema — mirrored in her oddball 2018 book, “You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir.” She has created a series of indelible characters in Christopher Guest comedies, including “Best in Show,” but has also memorably brought her off-kilter rhythms to high-profile gigs like the flamboyant assistant district attorney Freda Black in the HBO Max mini-series “The Staircase” and the scheming Dr. Smith on the Netflix reboot of “Lost in Space.”As for Nef, 30, she landed the recurring role of Gittel in the Amazon series “Transparent” days after graduating from Columbia University, in 2015. The first openly transgender woman to receive a worldwide modeling contract, Nef also writes for various magazines, appeared in the Off Broadway play “Des Moines” in December, and has a couple of big projects arriving later this year: Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie and the HBO series “The Idol” in which she’ll appear alongside the Weeknd and Lily-Rose Depp.From left, Daniel Oreskes, Posey, Amy Stiller and Nef in the New Group’s production of “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” which follows a group of theater friends who retreat to a house in the Catskills.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a meeting that seems almost predestined, the pair are now sharing a stage in Thomas Bradshaw’s “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” a New Group production in previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center. (It is scheduled to open Feb. 28 and run through March 26.) A contemporary riff on Chekhov set in the Catskills, the play renames the charismatic, brittle actress Irina Arkadina as Irene (Posey), while the moody, romantic Masha has become Sasha (Nef).“They’re iconic in who they are and what they bring to their work,” the play’s director, Scott Elliott, said of Nef and Posey during a phone call. “They’re able to bring themselves to the parts so there’s very little separation between the actor and the role. Their humanity peeks through.”This quality helps explain why both New York-based actresses have a similar ability to connect with a character’s pathos, while also deploying unerring comic timing: Posey’s turns in those Guest films are pitch-perfect, while Nef was praised by Ben Brantley, in his review of Jeremy O. Harris’s play “‘Daddy,’” for delivering “the production’s sharpest satirical performance.”On Being Transgender in AmericaG.O.P.’s Anti-Transgender Push: Republican state lawmakers are pushing more sweeping anti-transgender bills than ever before, including bans on transition care for young adults up to 26.At School: Educators are facing new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students change their name, pronouns or gender expression at school.Feeling Unsafe: Intimidation and violence against gay and transgender Americans has spread this year — driven heavily, extremism experts say, by increasingly inflammatory political messaging.Puberty Blockers: These drugs can ease anguish among young transgender people and buy time to weigh options. But concerns are growing about their long-term effects.Naturally, there are generational differences. In a chat following a rehearsal, in January, Nef mused about taking Posey to a rave while Posey reminisced about visiting classic ballroom dance halls in Berlin. And yet they connect. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“I want to be known for what I do as an actor,” said Nef, who also appeared this winter in the Off Broadway play “Des Moines.” Josefina Santos for The New York TimesWhat did you know of each other before “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY”?PARKER POSEY Hari Nef — oh, she was in “Transparent.” I remembered exactly what a performance that was and how much she lit up a scene. She changed the temperature of the room. I don’t keep up with a lot of things. I don’t have a lot of social media — I forgot my Instagram password a while ago and I tried to sign on a few times with the password I thought I remembered. But of course it was the wrong password.HARI NEF I knew so much about your work. “Party Girl” is a favorite, but I’d also seen you on “Search Party,” the whole gamut. A friend of mine said that you in “The House of Yes” is probably one of the greatest screen performances he’s ever seen. And he doesn’t play.POSEY When we met for the first read-through, Thomas said, “I’ve just got to tell you, ‘The House of Yes’ was a big inspiration for me and my writing.” That [script] was Wendy MacLeod’s Yale thesis. I didn’t know that playwriting can be so subversive.NEF I was always so attracted to you and your work because you were glamorous and you were dramatic and you were cool and you were distinctive and uncompromising, but not in a way that was obvious or traditional. You are beautiful and talented, that is obvious and traditional, but you always did things your way. I knew that if I was going to make a career as an actor, much less as an actress, I would have to do things non-traditionally. I didn’t have anyone quite exactly like me to look to so I looked at your work and I looked at Tilda [Swinton] and Chloë [Sevigny].POSEY I got lucky because at a time in the culture, you could do Off Broadway and afford your $700 a month apartment. And you could do independent movies: “It’s only 22 days, yeah, I’ll do that one.” It was kind of punk rock or like being in a band. Everyone was hanging out together and it was very organic. It was a little pocket of time that didn’t last that long.NEF I’ve been able to spend my entire fall and winter doing Off Broadway shows because I did Fashion Week before this and that visibility brings other opportunities. You can get paid three, four, five times what I’m going to make for both these plays combined by going to one dinner and being photographed there in an outfit. I post images of the films I like on Instagram not just because I find them inspiring and beautiful — I do — but it’s me going, “I want to be in movies like this.”POSEY You’re having the best of both worlds because to be online and have a social media presence is kind of to be your own magazine. I need to learn. But that time is a different time; it is your generation’s time right now.NEF You’re literally from the last moment where it was possible to be cool. Looking at that capital-C definition of cool all the way back to Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, there’s talent, there’s glamour, there’s drive, there’s darkness. But there’s also a mystery and a specificity, and you lose that mystery and specificity by existing online. Because of the money thing and the rent thing, it has become essentially untenable to be cool, to be mysterious, to have that allure being an indie legend.Do you think it’s one thing to be perceived as cool and another to be taken seriously as an actor?NEF So much of my entry into this industry and this practice was around “Transparent.” I was riding on this flotilla of discourse about things that had nothing to do with what I could do as an actor. I thought I had to sing for my supper just for a seat at the table. Maybe I was right, to a certain extent, but it became like, “Do I really want people to know me by what I say or what I am or what my private medical history is?” No, I want to be known for what I do as an actor.POSEY Cool is when there’s something original or unexpected, or seems to have some kind of luck around it. Which your appearing on that show was: the unexpected, something new, something fresh. And that is not orchestrated — that’s luck. I see that now. I look at life and the path of an actor as having that luck. And I think that’s very enviable.NEF I’ve been very lucky. I remain lucky. The play I did before “Daddy” was my senior thesis in college: I played Arkadina in “The Seagull.” I had gone through what I had gone through in college and I never thought that I would get to go onstage to do Chekhov, much less play her. I knew that I probably wouldn’t be able to play a role like that again for many, many years — not because of age but because of the size and the heft of the role. I haven’t played a role like Arkadina since then, but I’m back doing “The Seagull” and that is more than was promised to me at that moment in history.“It’s interesting to observe how quick people are to villainize strong women,” Posey said of her character, Irene, a showbiz mom in “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY.” “The misogyny is on fire, still.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesParker, what drew you to Arkadina/Irene?POSEY What attracted me the most to this part was the narcissistic mother, and the power that a mother has over her son. And she’s a showbiz mom, someone with a lot of heart and theatricality and all that. I’m so lucky as a middle-aged woman to be playing this part. It’s interesting to observe how quick people are to villainize strong women, how fun it is to see the worst. People love to call someone a bitch. I mean, the misogyny is on fire, still.NEF I play a lot of bitches.Why do you think that is?NEF Well, I’m no ingénue. I write, and a lot of the bitches I’ve played are also writers, thinkers. Smart. “Bitch” is often a fill-in for intelligent, for articulate, for opinionated, queer, not conventionally feminine or not conventionally beautiful. I think the “Barbie” stuff happened because I didn’t play bitchy and I didn’t play dumb and I didn’t play plastic in the audition.POSEY Having been cast as a female Dr. Smith, that was such a coup, I was so grateful for that gig. If you can live in Hollywood, it’s a lot easier to get cast and be a part of that world. But I wanted to walk around and see other people.NEF What is your relationship to the word “scene-stealer”? It’s the word that really follows me. It’s not a bad thing: It means I’m doing good work in small roles.POSEY That is a character actor making strong choices. When you have a small role in something big, you have to fill it in a certain way, and that’s its own thing.NEF If you’re a bold flavor — which I know I am — it’s more intuitive for people to see you as seasoning to the steak. I’d like to be the steak someday, but I know I have to earn it. So many of your iconic roles have been supporting and I’m wondering if you ever felt minimized by it.POSEY [long pause] Your 20s are really intense and then the culture changes and you’re, like, “Where am I going to fit in? I’m going to be in ‘Blade: Trinity’ playing a vampire? Never thought I’d see the day but yeah, I want to work and that’ll be interesting.” And then it’s the 40s. It’s heartbreaking when you become aware of just how intensely male-dominated our stories are, especially when you mature as a person and as a woman.NEF The shifts in the culture are by and large cosmetic when it comes to power and who gets the green light and who gets the sign-off for studio things. I can’t control the way I’m cast or how people see me.POSEY But you can see and acknowledge where you are. You’re in the mix. We’re so lucky to do what we love to do. A lot of people don’t.NEF That’s the bottom line of gratitude right now. This sounds corny but every day I’m so grateful to be here with you, to be here with everyone, to work through this winter onstage. It’s not guaranteed for anyone, much less someone like me or you. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Cornelia Street’ Review: A Musical With Local Ambitions

      by

      An affectionate elegy to a Greenwich Village restaurant, Neil Pepe’s production at Atlantic Theater orders everything on the menu.The midcentury novelist Dawn Powell, Greenwich Village’s great chronicler, wrote that there are three stages a person goes through when negotiating its twisty streets — first enthusiasm (“Bohemia — oh thrills!”), then cynicism (“Bah! Village theatricals!”), then resigned acceptance (“After all the Village is the Village when all’s said and done”).“Cornelia Street,” a fidgety, aimless new musical, is set on one of the Village’s quainter lanes. It goes through every stage, all at once. Written by Simon Stephens with music and lyrics by Mark Eitzel and directed by Neil Pepe for the Atlantic Theater’s subterranean space, the show is simultaneously celebration, deflation and a neighborhood elegy in a minor key. It plays out amid and atop the rickety tables and sturdier bar of Marty’s Café, a struggling Village restaurant. The show has deep affection for this (mostly) invented place and for the majority of its habitués. But like a lot of tourists who have walked these winding streets, it loses its way.At the play’s diffuse center is Jacob (Norbert Leo Butz), a onetime punk who has spent 28 years as the cafe’s chef. Jacob lives above the storefront with his teenage daughter, Patti (Lena Pepe, the director’s own daughter), and has recently developed higher culinary ambitions, trying to sneak orders for Iberico ham and venison under the crotchety nose of the cafe’s owner, Marty (Kevyn Morrow). How the empty restaurant has remained solvent long enough for Jacob to turn gourmet is one of the play’s many mysteries. Scott Pask’s set and Stacey Derosier’s lighting suggest a snug, homey, stay-all-day space of tin ceilings and mismatched wood. But no one frequents it, save for Mary Beth Peil’s former opera singer, Ben Rosenfield’s puppyish tech bro and George Abud’s preening cabdriver.The first act finds Marty’s suddenly threatened: The landlord wants to sell. Meanwhile, Patti has trouble at school. Philip (Esteban Andres Cruz), the sole waiter, has an audition. Misty (Gizel Jiménez), a woman from Jacob’s past, fleeing her own demons, turns up, too. Jacob embroils himself in a drug-dealing scheme that also demands embezzlement. If landlord disputes, lost souls and white-collar crime seem like too much story to stir into a chamber musical, well, yes. This is before the complications of the second act: a death, a disappearance, a musical number devoted to the glory days of Studio 54. (For some of us, this will conjure unhappy memories of the Atlantic’s last musical flop, “This Ain’t No Disco.”)Stephens doesn’t seem to believe in all this action, often stopping it cold so that characters can offer some blue-plate philosophizing.Here is Jacob’s: “You ever get one of those days when you really thought you knew where you were and what you were doing with your life and then you realize you had no [expletive] idea?”And here is Misty’s: “Life, huh?”This is the third collaboration between Stephens and the singer-songwriter Eitzel, the founder of the mordant alternative rock band American Music Club, following 2010’s “Marine Parade” and 2015’s “Song From Far Away.” Neither show has played New York, but reviews suggest that these previous partnerships have been successful ones. Which makes sense. Stephens’s enduring concern, in plays from “Punk Rock” to last year’s “Morning Sun,” is with people who don’t feel at home in the world or who must learn that any home they thought they had was made of straw and sticks. And the characters in Eitzel’s songs are very rarely anything like satisfied or secure.Scott Pask’s set and Stacey Derosier’s lighting suggest a snug, homey, stay-all-day space, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut here, under Pepe’s makeshift direction, the songs and the book scenes feel at odds. (Pepe is another frequent collaborator of Stephens, though only his straight plays.) Whatever its contrivances, “Cornelia Street” is ultimately a work of naturalism, whereas the dreamy, gloomy musical interludes suggest something more abstract and symbolic. Instead of swelling during the musical numbers, the show seems to shrink, embarrassed. The arrangements and orchestrations are expansive and surprising, but the staging feels apologetic. Butz, with his rocker voice and dad vibes, and Jiménez, an ingénue with edge, are supple performers, singing as casually as they might speak. They manage these tonal shifts with ease. The rest of the cast, moving to Hope Boykin’s swishing, slashing choreography, seem to struggle. That their characters feel less like people and more like types can’t help.The Atlantic has a productive history of investing in small, off-center musicals — “The Bedwetter,” “Kimberly Akimbo,” “The Secret Life of Bees,” and most significantly “The Band’s Visit” and “Spring Awakening.” This wants to be one more. (In its more creditable moments, it also gestures toward another intimate, single-set musical, “Once.”) Here, the approach feels tentative. Sometimes offstage voices are used, sometimes not. Lighting transforms the space during a song or remains constant. Pepe seems like a man who is not enjoying what he has ordered, but can’t bring himself to send it back.“Cornelia Street” owes an obvious debt to the Cornelia Street Cafe, a Village institution that shuttered in 2019 because of rent hikes. (This homage had apparently upset Robin Hirsch, one of the cafe’s founders. But Hirsch, invited to lead a storytelling event alongside Stephens and Eitzel on one of the show’s dark nights, has since been brought into the fold.) Friendly and unpretentious, the place made you feel like a local, even if you could never afford an apartment nearby. If only “Cornelia Street” could offer some of that same welcome and sense of purpose. If ever a musical needed to stop and ask for directions, it is this one.Cornelia StreetThrough March 5 at Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Broadway and West End Theater Owners Agree to Join Forces

      by

      A major British theater company, Ambassador Theater Group, says it is “combining operations” with Jujamcyn, the smallest of Broadway’s three big landlords.Jujamcyn Theaters, the smallest of the three big Broadway landlords, is combining its operations with a large British company, the Ambassador Theater Group, or A.T.G.The transaction, confirmed Tuesday by Jujamcyn and International Entertainment Holdings Limited, which is A.T.G.’s parent company, would give A.T.G., which already operates two of the 41 Broadway houses, a more sizable foothold in the heart of America’s theater industry, and would give Jordan Roth, the Jujamcyn president, more resources for showcasing his creative ambitions. Jujamcyn operates five Broadway houses; A.T.G. has 58 venues in Britain, Germany, and the United States.The companies said that the transaction is subject to regulatory approval, but did not say by what entity and in which country. No financial terms were specified.Roth, one of the most colorful characters on Broadway’s business side, will become the creative director of the combined company and its largest individual shareholder, with a seat on the board. There are also significant institutional shareholders: A large Rhode Island-based private equity firm, Providence Equity Partners, has for the last decade been A.T.G.’s majority shareholder, and at the height of the pandemic, when theaters were being financially squeezed by a lengthy shutdown, an Australian company, T.E.G., acquired a minority share of the company.Roth, the 47-year-old son of the real estate titan Steven Roth and the Broadway producer Daryl Roth, has been a singular force in a staid industry, with a disruptive emphasis on customer service in his theaters, a fondness for couture, an exuberant presence on social media, and left-leaning politics sharply at odds with those of his Trump-supporting father.The transaction portends a potential shift from the quirky to the corporate: A.T.G. is a large company, run by a former wine industry executive, Mark Cornell, who will remain as chief executive of the combined company. A.T.G. is fundamentally British, which could be a cause for concern on Broadway, where there is occasional worry about too many London shows — often developed with British government support — swamping work by American theater artists. (After Second Stage Theater, a nonprofit that focuses on work by living American writers, finally acquired a Broadway house in 2015, its artistic director, Carole Rothman, proudly proclaimed that her organization’s Broadway programming would feature “No Brits.”)The companies, which would not make anyone available for comment, did not describe the transaction as either an acquisition or a merger, and it is not immediately clear what “combining operations” will mean for the employees or operations at the five Jujamcyn houses or the two A.T.G. Broadway houses.The Jujamcyn theaters include the Eugene O’Neill, which is the long-term home of “The Book of Mormon,” as well as the Al Hirschfeld (“Moulin Rouge!”), the Walter Kerr (“Hadestown”), the August Wilson (“Funny Girl”) and the St. James (awaiting a new musical called “New York, New York”). Roth is expected to continue to decide what shows run in those five theaters, and he has previously shown a strong interest in work by American writers: Four of the five current Jujamcyn musicals have American origins; “Moulin Rouge!” has Australian roots, but the stage musical was developed in the United States.A.T.G. has an ambitious Broadway track record thus far. The company has for a decade operated one of the biggest Broadway houses, the Lyric, which, lavishly reconfigured for 1,622 seats, has for the last five years been home to “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” A.T.G. has since 2017 also operated one of Broadway’s smaller houses, the Hudson, which with just under 1,000 seats often presents plays; the latest, a revival of “A Doll’s House” starring Jessica Chastain, began previews Monday night. Among the hallmarks of the company’s Broadway presence: fancier food and drink than at most of the American-operated houses.Notably, both “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “A Doll’s House” are produced by companies financed by A.T.G. A lead producer of “Cursed Child” is Sonia Friedman, a prolific and powerful London-based producer whose production company is an A.T.G. affiliate; the director of “A Doll’s House” is Jamie Lloyd, a British director whose production company is also affiliated with the group. (Friedman is also a lead producer of “Funny Girl” and “New York, New York,” both running at Jujamcyn theaters.)The combination of A.T.G. and Jujamcyn — it is not clear what the amalgamated venture will be called — will still be the smallest of the three big Broadway landlords, but now with seven of the 41 theaters. The Shubert Organization has 17 theaters and the Nederlander Organization has nine. Six theaters are operated by nonprofits, one by Disney, and one (Circle in the Square) is independently owned.Jujamcyn, founded in the late 1950s, was named for Judy, James and Cynthia Binger, the grandchildren of the company’s founder. The Binger family sold the company to Rocco Landesman in 2005; Jordan Roth bought a stake in the company in 2009.Roth has been an activist theater owner. In the buildings, he has overseen everything from a redesign of the ice cubes (to reduce the clinking noise) to bringing in a new ticket seller, SeatGeek, to manage ticket sales.He has presented multiple hit shows, among the biggest of which has been “The Book of Mormon,” which has been running since 2011. He also landed “Springsteen on Broadway,” an enormously successful Bruce Springsteen concert show that had runs both before and after the pandemic shutdown.Roth has also been active as a producer, most recently transferring a concert-style production of “Into the Woods” from City Center to the St. James; he was also a producer of the Tony-winning 2018 revival of “Angels in America.”A.T.G. has been expanding its presence in the United States, where it now owns, operates or manages 16 theaters, including not only the two Broadway houses, but also the King’s Theater in Brooklyn, the Colonial Theater in Boston, and theaters in Detroit, New Orleans, San Antonio, San Francisco and Sugar Land, Texas. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      New Ohio Theater Announces It Will Close After Three Decades

      by

      Robert Lyons, the founding artistic director, said it was time for a new generation to take over the West Village stage.At a time when theaters are struggling to reach prepandemic audience levels, the New Ohio Theater, a staple for artists and independent theater companies for 30 years, announced it would present its final Manhattan performance in August.The shifting theater landscape and increased financial pressures led to the decision, said the founding artistic director, Robert Lyons, who is also a playwright and director. “It’s just a good time to step aside and pass the baton,” he added, explaining that he envisioned a new generation taking on the space.The closing will end programs like the Ice Factory, Now in Process, Theater for Young Minds, New Ohio Presents and New Ohio Hosts. The Archive Residency program will conclude in the spring of 2024.The theater, originally known as the Ohio Theater and located off Wooster Street in SoHo, was founded as a nonprofit in 1993, and before that provided a shared space for independent companies and artists to brainstorm and perform. In 2011, the company moved to 154 Christopher Street in the West Village as the New Ohio Theater, and continued to operate as a hub for independent theater. Over time, New Ohio oversaw a renovation project at the theater that included the installation of a new sprung stage, new risers, an HVAC system and a bathroom in the dressing room.For 16 years, Edward Einhorn, the artistic director of the Untitled Theater Company No. 61, has collaborated with the theater; he plans to present his absurdist dark comedy “The Shylock and the Shakespeareans” there in June. Einhorn said theaters like the New Ohio have been essential to the development of indie performance works since the late ’90s.“I’m slowly losing my homes,” Einhorn said. “There are a few left, but it’s a hard time still, hard to get audiences, hard to know what to do next.”The “Moulin Rouge!” director Alex Timbers and the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin are among those who worked at the theater early in their careers.Kristin Marting, the founding artistic director of HERE Arts Center, who was part of a company that booked a season at the theater when she was 21, said it was the first theater she worked in. Marting said it greenlighted less conventional works, like an immersive “Alice in Wonderland” she directed in the late ’80s, and served as a sanctuary for generations of emerging theater makers.The plan is to reserve the 74-seat space for use by nonprofit companies. The building’s landlord, Rockrose Development, will accept proposals from theater companies looking for a home beginning Wednesday.Marting said the New Ohio would be sorely missed.“I hope that the new entity that comes in embraces the same level of experimentation and inclusion and invites a broad spectrum of the community to make work,” she said. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” by Craig Seligman

      by

      WHO DOES THAT BITCH THINK SHE IS? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag, by Craig SeligmanFrom wee-hours cabaret to prime-time reality TV to fiercely contended children’s story hour at the local library, the American drag queen’s journey has been a long and bumpy one.For Doris Fish, alter ego of Philip Clargo Mills, it began not in America but Manly Vale, an apt-sounding suburb of Sydney, Australia,and ended in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco, 1991 — with resurrection, one source maintains, as a ghost composed variously of golden sparks and Evian water.I had not known of Fish before reading the journalist Craig Seligman’s minutely observed new biography of him (though some friends used the female pronoun, “he never wanted to be a woman — he never even wanted to seem like a woman,” the author writes). I finished it persuaded this was a life well worth examining, if only because his peers are so often celebrated, or excoriated, in aggregate.Most of Fish’s performances are unrecoverable, but those that can be scratched up are indelible. Best known, in a limited way, is probably “Vegas in Space,” a posthumously released and deeply weird 1991 sci-fi comedy about male earthlings who undergo sex-change operations so they can travel to a female-only planet (something about recovering stolen jewels…).Promoting the movie during its production period on a Pittsburgh morning show in 1986, Fish gamely endures being treated like a talking zoo animal by the gawking hosts and awkwardly grinning housewives. There’s also a choppy video out there of his swan song, “This Is My Life,” fervidly performed in a caftan and satin gloves at the benefit from which the book takes its name. He was months from death.Born in 1952, Philip was the middle child of six in a tolerant Catholic family that permitted a marijuana plant on the premises. He played a high-kicking chorus girl under a priest’s tutelage at his all-boy school’s year-end musical with more enthusiasm than most of his classmates. Remarkably indifferent to the prospect of arrest or social censure, he joined a local troupe called Sylvia and the Synthetics whose outré antics had me scrawling exclamation points in the margins.One female impersonator’s considerable male member was tucked through his legs to simulate a tail. Another pinned back her hair with swastikas. Another bit into a dripping sheep’s heart to punctuate a lovelorn ballad, blood dripping onto her ball gown like one of the less tasteful Valentine’s Day bitmojis. There were flash mobs of Marilyn Monroe impersonators and teetering pyramids of performers on quaaludes. “Everything was permitted,” Seligman writes dryly, “including ineptitude.”After working for the Florence Broadhurst wallpaper factory, from which he filched metallic powders for his cosmetics, Philip/Doris moved to San Francisco, money sewn into his pockets by his loving mother, Mildred, and found his true calling. Mostly this was what was then called prostitution, though in Fish’s hands it seems more like a kind of sexual nursing. He specialized in relations with those society often rejected, the obese or infirm. (There was a green-card marriage to a lesbian, one of the few survivors of his circle who declined to be interviewed here.)He acted as “comedy model” for a greeting-card company called West Graphic, portraits that Seligman compares to the work of Cindy Sherman. He wrote a popular column for The San Francisco Sentinel, then an essential gay weekly. And he performed in a group called Sluts a-Go-Go, emulating faded stars of the ’30s and ’40s while occasionally brushing up against rising ones of the period (Robin Williams, Lynda Carter). The Sluts and their associates were equal-opportunity offenders, doing racial as well as gender impressions, spewing double entendre and sometimes seeming to positively assault their audiences with sensory overload, exaggerated glamour and flagrant disregard for safety codes.Though revolutionary in his in-your-faceness, Fish was not particularly political; the sincerity such activity requires was anathema. One of the more intriguing aspects of his foreshortened life was an attitude described here as Romantic Cruelism: a pose of complete indifference or dark humor even in the face of tragedy.Fish displays it when his parents divorce; when a younger sister dies after a mysterious illness; and when one Synthetic, who had been a childhood friend, perishes in a fire: “Burnt to a cinder in a room full of exotic drag. All they found was a tooth,” as Spurt!, a local punk zine, callously memorialized. “The young don’t know what to do with endings,” Seligman writes, and there were so many more to come.“Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” revisits and draws from a 1986 profile of Fish that Seligman wrote for skittish editors at Image magazine, a weekend section of The San Francisco Examiner. Aside from overuse of the words “notoriety” and “notorious,” it is confidently written, wistful and quite personal; Seligman’s now-husband, Silvana Nova, was part of Fish’s scene.The author of a previous book comparing Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag, Seligman diverts here and there to Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,’” but spends most of his time simply retracing Fish’s footsteps. At times these seem akin to the old Hans Christian Andersen version of “The Little Mermaid,” whose heroine is granted the power to walk out of the water, but only with the pain of swords going through her. (In one parade, Fish’s elaborate costume included fiberglass “legs” that drew blood from his own, covering the stains with black tights.)Seligman’s own stance is mostly one of wary wonderment, that drag queens have gone from “totally beyond the pale” to mainstream acknowledgment, “from feared freak into object of fascination,” from the shaky spotlight to — however contentiously — the kindergarten rug. He piles a lot of historical weight on Fish’s shoulders, but his subject carries it like Joan Crawford in a padded Adrian frock.WHO DOES THAT BITCH THINK SHE IS? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag | By Craig Seligman | Illustrated | 352 pp. | PublicAffairs | $29 More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      For Burt Bacharach, ‘Promises, Promises’ Was One Broadway Hit Too Many

      by

      The perfectionist composer was content with being a one-hit musical-theater wonder, calling the experience the hardest thing he had ever done.In the late 1960s, when Broadway show tunes and popular music were veering in opposite directions, the producer David Merrick, one of the most hidebound curmudgeons on Broadway, reached out to one of the most successful American pop composers of the time: Burt Bacharach.Bacharach (who died on Feb. 8 at age 94) already had more than a dozen international hits with his lyricist partner, Hal David, including “Walk on By,” “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “The Look of Love.” That last song was introduced in the spy parody “Casino Royale,” and, in fact, Bacharach had met Merrick at that movie’s London premiere in 1967. They agreed to work together if the right project came along.Bacharach wasn’t exactly bedazzled by the bright lights of Broadway. “When I was getting successful with pop songs, and having hits, there wasn’t something burning inside me that said, “Boy, I need to write a Broadway show,’” he said in an interview for the 1985 book “Notes on Broadway.” “I was quite content being in the studio and making my records.”It just so happens that when Merrick eventually wrangled the playwright Neil Simon to adapt Billy Wilder’s 1960 Academy Award-winning film “The Apartment” as a musical, it was Simon who pushed for Bacharach and David, as he wanted to update the material and incorporate a sound that might reach contemporary audiences. “Promises, Promises,” as the show would be called, centered on a well-meaning milquetoast accountant in a New York insurance firm who essentially pimps out his apartment to his superiors in exchange — so he is promised — for a series of promotions. Merrick, a master of the Show for Tired Businessmen (“Do Re Mi,” “Hello, Dolly!,” “How Now, Dow Jones”), assembled the perfect team for a show about tired businessmen.The material was beautifully tailored for Bacharach and David’s sensibilities — urban, witty, rueful, alienated but passionate — and the songwriters were faithful to the tone of Simon’s book: a savvy mix of wisecracks, romantic heartbreak and contemporary satire.But one early aspect of this collaboration was telling: While Simon and David crafted the text together in New York, Bacharach remained deeply involved with other studio projects in Hollywood, setting his music to David’s lyrics from afar. He would not arrive in New York until September 1968, with the first Broadway preview just two months away.Orbach, background center, in one of the “Promises, Promises” production numbers. He won a Tony Award for playing the nebbish accountant, Chuck.Getty ImagesDespite the distance, Bacharach was already demonstrating how his command of the pop charts could pay dividends — even before the show went into rehearsals. “I thought it would be great if the music came out a couple of months before, so [theater audiences] would have some familiarity with the work,” he recounted in the liner notes to a 1989 three-CD set of his music. His eternal muse, Dionne Warwick, recorded two songs from the incipient score, while Bacharach worked his usual meticulous magic in the protected confines of the recording studio, getting his complicated rhythms just right. Warwick’s single of the “Promises, Promises” title number hit No. 19 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.“As musicals go, it couldn’t have been easier,” Bacharach recalled in “Notes on Broadway.” “The financing, getting it done, getting it in the theater — it just went with lightning speed.”Then came the November tryout in Boston, where Merrick’s usual boorish behavior was on display. He apparently demanded a hit song for the second act, so that the nebbish hero, Chuck, could connect romantically (however tenuously) with Fran, the elevator operator for whom he pines.Bacharach would have gladly obliged, but he was sent to Massachusetts General with pneumonia. Merrick stomped around and cursed the songwriters and supposedly threatened to hire Leonard Bernstein to replace them, but David beavered away and came up with wistful lyrics to a duet called “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” He even incorporated Bacharach’s malady: “What do you get when you kiss a guy?/You get enough germs to catch pneumonia./After you do/he’ll never phone ya.”When he was released from the hospital, Bacharach found the melody to match the malady: “Maybe because I was still not feeling all that well, I wrote the melody faster than I had ever written any song before in my life,” Bacharach wrote in his 2013 memoir, “Anyone Who Had a Heart.”Ahead of the New York opening, Bacharach wanted a sound more like what he was used to in a recording studio, so he brought in his frequent recording engineer Phil Ramone and had the Shubert Theater’s sound system redesigned. The orchestra was divided into small groupings (separated by fiberglass panels), each surrounding a microphone that would relay the sound to be mixed live at the back of the theater. And the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick (in one of his first Broadway jobs) added two guitars — one acoustic, one electric — and a quartet of female singers, billed as Orchestra Voices. The technical virtuosity of these innovations unnerved Merrick so much that, according to a New York Times article about the arrangements, he admonished Ramone and Bacharach: “I don’t want the audience walking out of the theater saying, ‘It’s a recording.’”But even Merrick fell in love again after “Promises, Promises” opened on Dec. 1, 1968, to rapturous reviews. On opening night, he told a reporter that Bacharach was “the first original American composer since Gershwin.” In an article in The Times, John S. Wilson wrote, “The tight Bacharachian rhythmic patterns keep bouncing around in your head as you walk into the night, songless but pulsing with a busy little beat.”Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises” at the Broadway Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut the experience didn’t make Broadway burn any brighter inside Bacharach. “Somehow I lived through it, and I’m still alive,” he told Rex Reed in a Times interview before the show opened. “But this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m wiped out by this show, man. I’ll be in Palm Springs on Wednesday.” And he was as good as his word — joining his wife, the actress Angie Dickinson, in a newly-rented desert home with a tennis court and a swimming pool.A week or so later, a phone call to Palm Springs from Merrick confirmed that there were limits to what Bacharach could control in a live production, eight times a week. “He called me and said ‘Eight subs [substitute players] in the orchestra last night, including the drummer’ and guess who was in the audience? Richard Rodgers! This great, great composer. Richard Rodgers!,” he recounted in “Notes on Broadway.” “It made me feel just terrible, because my music is not that easy to play. A song like ‘Promises, Promises’ changes time signature in almost every bar. And I’ve got … a drummer who’s sight-reading, who’s never played it before.”“Promises, Promises” was hardly an irreparable disappointment for Bacharach: The original Broadway production ran for 1,281 performances (and Jerry Orbach, who played the accountant, won a Tony Award for the role); there was a robust West End run; and a Broadway revival (sized and trimmed for contemporary tastes) in 2010 starred Kristin Chenoweth and Sean Hayes. And “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” would become a smash single for Warwick in 1970, hitting No. 1 on Billboard’s adult contemporary chart; it would also be the last time a song originating on Broadway reached the top spot on any of the Billboard charts.That was probably cold comfort to Bacharach. Looking back on his Broadway experience for the CD liner notes decades later, he was definitive: “If you’re doing a musical, it’s going to change every night,” he wrote. “If you’re doing something on record, it doesn’t get changed every night. So that’s what I prefer to do.”David, also quoted in the liner notes, said about his collaborator and the reality of Broadway: “If you’re a perfectionist, it can drive you crazy.”Sixteen months after “Promises” opened, Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” arrived on Broadway and the modernity of its sound would have been unthinkable without Bacharach’s innovations. Indeed, many of them were reintroduced by Tunick, the “Promises” orchestrator, when he took on the orchestrations for “Company.”“If I were hearing ‘Another Hundred People’ for the first time,” the music critic Will Friedwald said in an interview for this article, “I would have guessed it was Bacharach and not Sondheim.”Chenoweth with Bacharach, far right, and Simon, center, at the curtain call for the revival’s opening night performance in April 2010.Charles Sykes/Associated PressBacharach was initially philosophical about “Promises, Promises” — “If we knocked down a few doors with my rhythms or the new sound in the show, great,” he told Reed — but the theatrical magic he created for his only Broadway score is so apposite and hip and melancholy and sweet that it makes one ache for what might have been.Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at New York University. His latest book, “I’ll Drink to That! Broadway’s Legendary Stars, Classic Shows, and the Cocktails They Inspired,” will be published in May. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Sandra Seacat, Much Admired Acting Coach, Dies at 86

      by

      She helped Laura Dern, Marlo Thomas, Mickey Rourke and many others overcome fears, find their characters and discover “the joy of acting.”Sandra Seacat, who had a modest career as an actress and a formidable one as an acting coach, putting her own spin on techniques she had learned under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio to help Laura Dern, Marlo Thomas, Mickey Rourke and numerous other stars achieve some of their best performances, died on Jan. 17 in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.Her husband, Thurn Hoffman, said the cause was primary biliary cholangitis, an autoimmune disease.Ms. Seacat joined the Actors Studio in the early 1960s, when Mr. Strasberg was the artistic director and imparting the rehearsal and acting techniques often called simply the Method. Before long she began leading classes, and her reputation as an acting coach started to grow.By the early 1980s she was applying the psychiatrist Carl Jung’s theories about dreams and the unconscious to her coaching, helping students use their dreams to illuminate their own feelings and the characters they were developing, a technique called “dream work.”“The artist is a shaman, a wounded healer,” Ms. Seacat said in a 2015 video interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “We have wounds that we want to bring forth through the material. It’s joyful, it’s painful, but not painful in a bad way. And when you do that you also heal people in the audience.”Actors who worked with her echoed that sense.“The work was our bond,” Marlo Thomas, for whom Ms. Seacat was a coach, teacher and mentor for more than 40 years, said by email. “She taught me to seek the truth in myself, to heal my wounds and those of the audience. She changed me as a human being, teaching me to cast off my protective armor and see the world as a baby might see it, feeling and experiencing it for the first time.”Ms. Thomas’s career had for years been defined by her role in the 1960s sitcom “That Girl,” but Ms. Seacat helped her branch out, leading to more substantial parts and an Emmy Award for outstanding lead actress for her role as a woman who had spent years in a mental institution in the television movie “Nobody’s Child” (1986).Peggy Lipton had also achieved some 1960s TV fame, as one of the stars of the crime show “The Mod Squad,” but she then stepped away from acting for years to raise her children. By the late 1980s she was thinking about returning, but, she told The Los Angeles Times in 1993, “it was very scary.”She joined one of Ms. Seacat’s classes, nervous at first. “I used to sit under the table near the door,” she said, “so if she ever called on me I could get out.”But, she said, Ms. Seacat eventually helped her break through the fear. Ms. Lipton, who died in 2019, went on to accumulate dozens more TV and film credits, most memorably as the diner owner Norma Jennings on the trendy series “Twin Peaks” and its sequels.Mickey Rourke had done little acting — he had been an amateur boxer — before he arrived in New York in the 1970s and eventually began working with Ms. Seacat. He has often credited her with helping him to get serious about the craft of acting, leading to attention-getting roles in the 1980s in “Body Heat,” “Rumble Fish,” “Angel Heart” and other movies. She was responsible for “channeling all it was that was messing me up into something creative and challenging,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1984.Younger stars also benefited from her coaching, among them Andrew Garfield, who played the title character in “The Amazing Spider-Man” (2012) and its sequel and earned an Emmy nomination for his lead role in the mini-series “Under the Banner of Heaven” last year (in which Ms. Seacat played his character’s mother).“She was a revolutionary, a culture-changing teacher of acting and storytelling,” Mr. Garfield said in a statement. “She is a beacon for all of us of what a life of deep meaning and beauty can look like.”Ms. Seacat and the actress Laura Dern in an undated photo. “Sandra gave me the greatest gift an actor could ever ask for,” Ms. Dern said. “Sandra gave me the joy of acting.”Katie Jones/Variety, via Penske Media, via Getty ImagesSandra Diane Seacat was born on Oct. 2, 1936, in Greensburg, Kan., in the midst of the Dust Bowl, to Russell and Lois (Cronic) Seacat.After graduating from Northwestern University, Ms. Seacat moved to New York and began her acting career. In 1959 she married Arthur Kaufman, and some of her early credits are under the name Sandra Kaufman.Once she was admitted to the Actors Studio — she said she auditioned while pregnant — she appeared in various productions, including “Three Sisters” on Broadway in 1964, in which she had a small role. She had small roles in two other Broadway productions as well, “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1973 and “Sly Fox” in 1976.Ms. Seacat also took occasional roles on television and in films throughout her career. She directed one feature film, the 1990 comedy “In the Spirit,” which had a star-studded cast that included Ms. Thomas, Olympia Dukakis, Elaine May, Melanie Griffith and Peter Falk.“‘In the Spirit’ is a flat-out New York comedy, with all of the pluses and minuses that go with that territory,” Bob Strauss wrote in his review in The Los Angeles Daily News. “Director Sandra Seacat, one of the industry’s most respected acting coaches, lets her cast get away with Method murder. But the performers’ mannered joy is also infectious; even when the jokes don’t work, you smile along just to feel part of the party.”Ms. Seacat’s marriage to Mr. Kaufman ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Michael Ebert. She married Mr. Hoffman in 1982. In addition to him, she is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Greta, and a sister, Serena Seacat.The long list of other stars Ms. Seacat worked with includes Jessica Lange, Rachel Ward, Ryan Gosling and Laura Dern.“Sandra gave me the greatest gift an actor could ever ask for, which was beyond a method or a craft or anything anybody talks about,” Ms. Dern said in the 2015 Hollywood Reporter video. “Sandra gave me the joy of acting.” More