Entries Tagged 'Theatre' ↓

New York City is always a cultural oasis and the summer time seems to be when arts and entertainment events, or the announcement of future happenings, are in abundance. With gas prices being what they are, and “staycations” the new, less expensive way to enjoy time off, venturing around town seems the best bet.

Here’s a peak at some upcoming entertainment options:

The Tony Award-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones will direct and choreograph a new musical about Fela Kuti, slated to open in September.

“Fela!” was written by Jim Lewis along with Jones, who won a Tony last year for his choreography of “Spring Awakening” and who is also artistic director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. The play is based on the life of the legendary Human Rights activist and Nigerian Afrobeat musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, who died in 1997 of AIDS-related illness. Fela spent years as a political prisoner after founding the political party Movement of the People, and is known for bringing huge bands to the stage, including many singers, dancers, percussionists, brass musicians, and guitarists. His music, which blends jazz with African beats and lyrics that demanded change and equality in his country, will be performed in the show by the Brooklyn group Antibalas.

The show will run at the 37 Arts theater in Manhattan from September 4 to September 21.

Joe’s Pub, the intimate nightclub performance space at The Public Theater, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary with an unprecedented 300 shows from September through December. During that time, Joe’s Pub will welcome back many of the artists who have had their US debuts at Joe’s Pub, recorded live albums there, or got their break in the music industry through showcases at Joe’s Pub.

Among the returning stars is one of our favorites, Billy Porter, who will do two shows there, December 7 and 8. Porter calls his show The Contemporary American Standard, and will do songs made famous by Stevie Wonder, Anita Baker, Donnie Hathaway, Oleta Adams, John Legend, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, India.Arie and others.

10th Anniversary tickets go on sale Thursday, July 17, 2008.

Ntozake Shange’s powerful mid-’70s “choreo-poem,” for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, is getting a Broadway revival at the Circle in the Square Theatre. Previews start August 19, with a scheduled opening on September 8. India.Arie is set to star and three time Tony Award winner Hinton Battle will choreograph this play which dramatizes the struggles and journey toward self respect experienced by black women in America.

Another 1970’s black theater revival, The First Breeze of Summer, by playwright Leslie Lee, is being staged by the Signature Theatre Company, August 5 to September 28.

Signature Theatre is celebrating the historic Negro Ensemble Company, which originally staged this play in 1975 on Broadway. The show takes place over the course of one sweltering weekend in June, as the struggles of three generations of the Edwards family collide. Gremmar, the Edwards family matriarch, recalls her past and considers its legacy for her children and grandchildren as they confront the choices that will define their futures. Leslie Lee’s Obie-Award winning play is a timeless portrait of family bonds and coming of age. Ruben Santiago-Hudson will direct.

Although a long way off, another revival of another classic theatre piece was announced this week, to some considerable interest. A new Broadway production of the landmark musical West Side Story, directed by librettist Arthur Laurents, will begin previews Feb. 23, 2009. This production will introduce the unprecedented element of selectively weaving Spanish throughout both the book and songs.

Laurents, who earned solid reviews (and a 2008 Tony nomination) for staging the current Broadway run of Gypsy, stated, “This show will be radically different from any other production of West Side Story ever done. The musical theatre and cultural conventions of 1957 made it next to impossible for the characters to have authenticity. Every member of both gangs was always a potential killer even then. Now they actually will be. Only Tony and Maria try to live in a different world…”

West Side Story has music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Laurents. The staging will retain the original choreography of late director Jerome Robbins, who conceived the project by transposing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to the turbulent streets of the Upper West Side in 1950’s New York City.

Casting information and on sale date for tickets will be announced later.

If eating out is more your style, New York City Restaurant Week—which is actually two weeks–runs July 21 through August 1. Over 200 restaurants will offer three-course prix-fixe dinners for $35.00 and lunch at $24.07.

Finally, jazz trumpeter Jeremy Pelt has released a new CD, November on the MAXJAZZ label. Possibly the most cost effective staycation you can have. Just stay at home and listen to music.

Anyone who has had a blog for any length of time will identify with Emily Gould’s essay Exposed, in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Gould is a blogger, former Gawker.com staffer and writer, who shares some of the pitfalls of a life lived publicly on the internet. While it is her story, it is far from unique.

We live in really interesting times. The internet has shortened the time it takes for news and information to circulate. I typically learn about things first via email or someone’s blog and sometimes hours later via mainstream media. We’ve got at our disposal email, listservs, websites, blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, viewer produced content sites like YouTube and even XTube, to communicate with others, form networks of friends and associates or create our online persona.

The downside, as Gould’s story illustrates, is that many of us put too much personal information online and everything we put online is permanent. People you don’t even know are now privy to your innermost thoughts or your home movies. Almost all of us can be Googled. A year ago, when I was actively job hunting, I checked my blog stat tracker and noticed a visitor from one of the places where I had applied. We just never know who’s out there reading

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My favorite television series, The Wire, may have concluded its five season run here in the U.S., but season five hasn’t aired yet across the pond in the U.K. (British visitors to this site are advised not to read my old posts on the subject or you’ll find out how it ends.)

English fans of the series are just now getting introduced to some of the actors. The Guardian newspaper has a print and audio interview with actors Felicia “Snoop” Pearson and Jamie Hector, the characters “Snoop Pearson” and “Marlo Stanfield.” It must be strange to still do interviews about characters they stopped playing months ago but also disheartening to know they may never see roles that juicey again.

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Last Wednesday I attended a staged reading for a new play still in development, by an exciting young playwright I first told you about months ago. Katori Hall, who wrote Hoodoo Love, is working on a project now titled, The Mountaintop. The story is set on April 3, 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee and involves a conversation between Dr. Martin Luther King and a motel housekeeper with special insight into the future.

Hall has an excellent gift for the English language and an engaging and insightful way with her storytelling. This particular story is unusually daring, for her use of real people in fictionalized events and her connection of King’s dream to present-day reality. The staged reading was done through the Lark Theatre Playwright’s Workshop. No word on when or if a full production will be staged.

Barack Obama’s national address on the state of race relations in America was a shrewd move to undercut the backlash stemming from comments made by his minister Jeremiah Wright, but also seems to have taken the wind out of the sails of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which has repeatedly injected racial (if not downright racist) undertones to their criticism of him. The question I have is, when will Hillary give her address on race issues? Why was it necessary for Obama to repudiate Rev. Wright when Hillary has so reluctantly distanced herself from racist statements coming from her camp? Why is it Black people always have to take on the responsibility of educating the rest of society on race?

And if we’re going to have a real discussion about race relations in this country, why don’t we begin with the arrival of Europeans in North America. The White man killed off Indians by the thousands, stole their land, put whomever was left on reservations, and created a system of laws and governments to justify it all. If we aren’t capable of talking about the basic injustices relevant to the formation of this country, then any other conversation on race is just an academic exercise.

New York’s state government seems to be settling down after a week and a half of sex-tinged controversy. First, former Governor Eliot Spitzer resigns in shame after his involvement in a high-end prostitution came to light. Now this week, his replacement, the new Governor David Paterson and his wife Michelle Paige Paterson both admit to having had extramarital affairs during a rocky period in their marriage. While some people want to get their noses out of joint over the mere suggestion of sexual impropriety, let me say first the latter scenario is nothing like the former.

Eliot Spitzer’s greatest offense was hypocrisy and infidelity. The self-proclaimed corruption fighter who was going to clean up Albany, forgot to start with his own closet. But the Patersons had a difficult phase in their relationship, which they’ve both acknowledged to one another. Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce and one of the top reasons is sexual incompatibility. Someone isn’t satisfied and starts looking outside the marriage. To their credit, David and Michelle Paterson are working to address the problems in their relationship. To our knowledge, Spitzer never told his wife Silda he was paying for callgirls.

In theatre news, a revival of August Wilson’s Fences is headed for Broadway. The play won four Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize during its original 1987 run. While it is great to see Wilson’s work get more exposure, is he destined to be, even in death, the only Black playwright able to get produced on Broadway? Producers need to know there are other Black writers out there.

As life imitates art, so does art draw inspiration from reality. In a perfect world great events would lead to equally great art. If only it was that easy.

Katrina, the costliest and most deadly hurricane to ever hit the United States, devastated the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi in August 2005, left more than $81 billion in damages, and displaced millions of residents, some of the hardest hit in New Orleans. A combination of indifference and incompetence on the part of the Bush Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and state and local governments has turned mostly poor and Black residents of that city into homeless refugees, some still in trailers now approaching three years later.

Lower Ninth is a new Off Broadway play in production at The Flea Theater in Lower Manhattan set among the wreckage in that section of New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward, that borders the Mississippi River to the South and Saint Bernard Parish to the east. Mostly Black and working class, the neighborhood was left under water by the storm. People there lost lives and homes. Many have yet to return or rebuild.

The play tells the story of two men who have been stranded on a rooftop for three days. Malcolm (James McDaniel from ABC’s NYPD Blue), is an itinerant worker, now devout Bible-reader and stepfather to E-Z (Gaius Charles of NBC’s Friday Night Lights), a directionless young man seemingly angry with life and his present circumstances. A third man, Lowboy (Gbenga Akinnagbe from HBO’s The Wire) begins the play as a lifeless corpse wrapped in plastic, a former friend of E-Z who he rescued but couldn’t save from the rising waters.

In the small black box space at The Flea, set designer Donyale Werle has taken over the entire stage with a large, realistic rooftop set that creates a believable sense of abandonment. It is easy to imagine the water around them offering no hope for escape. Heather Dunbar’s costumes are appropriate for a hot, steamy New Orleans August and days spent without a bath.

Now, if only the actors and designers had a good play to work with.

Playwright Beau Willimon offers a one-act that understandably shifts the dialogue from subject to subject (what would you talk about all day if you were on a roof for three days) but quickly it just becomes blather. From last rites to games of twenty questions to how Malcolm met E-Z’s mother and more, he doesn’t spend enough time allowing us to know these men or care anything about them. Instead of mining the natural dramatic tension that might be drawn from an understanding of the circumstances that got them on the roof instead of away to safety, the playwright pursues middling attempts at sentimentality. In brief explorations of the relationship between Malcolm and E-Z, and E-Z and Lowboy, the story is neither compelling nor interesting, a mere collection of scenes, barely rising above the level of a bad made-for-tv movie.

Director Daniel Goldstein, like his actors, does a capable job with inferior material. In an inspired choice, to illustrate how these men are surviving both day and night, he plunges the theater in total darkness, the actors voices the only clue that anyone is still out there. If only they’d had more interesting things to say.

As Spike Lee has proven with his Emmy winning documentary on Katrina, that tragic episode is rife with artistic possibilities. Hopefully others will find a way to explore them for the stage.

Broadway has rarely been known for risk-taking. A commercial institution focused on the bottom line, theater producers like to give the audience what they think they want, over and over again, until the cash registers ring.

But with the opening (in preview) this week of a revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Broadway is both playing it safe in restaging a classic, and taking chances–in the choice of performers–in a way that should leave producers and audiences most satisfied.

Williams’ 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play is getting a unique and innovative all-Black recasting, which while staying faithful to the original story of a wealthy, yet dysfunctional family in the Mississippi Delta, now has added nuance because of it.

The theater community has never completely embraced the concept of what it calls “alternative casting.” While White actors have always felt it their right to don blackface to do Othello, heaven help the Black actor who dares to perform a role previously conceived with a White person in mind. Drowning Crow, the 2004 all-Black adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, received compliments for performance but rankled the nerves of critics seemingly for the shear audacity of touching the classics.

This revival works largely because of its strong cast. It is remarkable how Williams’ words seem just as authentic, just as believable, coming out of the mouth of James Earl Jones as Big Daddy, as they did from Burl Ives in the original production (and later the film) more than fifty years ago. Jones uses his massive voice and presence to portray the most ornery and irascible old man you ever saw, on the evening of his 65th birthday celebration.

Joining him is one of the best actors working in theater today, Tony Award winner Phylicia Rashad as Big Mama. (If you only know her work from The Cosby Show, you don’t know her work at all. Get your butt to the theater!) Rashad is simply delightful to watch as Big Daddy’s doting wife, mistrusted by him but perhaps the only real loving person in the family.

Movie actor Terrence Howard (Academy Award nominated for Hustle & Flow) makes not only his Broadway but his stage debut as their son Brick, the ex-star athlete who is descending rapidly into alcoholism following the death of his very close friend Skipper and the pressure to produce offspring. Calling Howard a movie actor is not a knock, merely a statement of his past credentials. Though less experienced than others on this stage, he more than holds his own in balancing the emotions of a man in a loveless marriage, still mourning the loss of a friend he deeply cared about. Had Howard not been up to the task, he might have withered like a raisin in the sun or some other less skilled celebrities who have attempted to work in the theater.

His wife Maggie is played by yet another Tony winner, Anika Noni Rose. A beautiful, young, social climber who has married into the family, she is skilled at using her abundant feminine charms to get what she wants, but not skilled enough to get Brick to love her. She understands all too well that the price of inheriting Big Daddy’s estate and thus securing her future, is a baby. Rose’s Maggie is a bundle of energy, mixed with raw sex appeal, laced with cunning and guile and just a smidge of spite.

This half-century-old play seems timeless under Debbie Allen’s direction. In light of contemporary discussions of “the DL,” the show’s insinuation of a homosexual underpinning to Brick’s mourning and marital indifference, is perhaps more easily accepted by today’s audience than when it originally opened. It also allows us to better understand the machinations one goes through to keep up appearances for family and society’s sake.

Giancarlo Esposito and Lisa Arrindell Anderson are eldest son Gooper and his wife Mae, a successful corporate attorney and a fertile wife, who have done all the right things to provide heirs to the empire, but who still can’t seem to ingratiate themselves. Both performers amuse us with their calculated missteps before Big Daddy and well-aimed backstabs at Maggie and Brick.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens officially on March 6 for a limited run at the Broadhurst Theatre. I give it my “run, don’t walk” recommendation.