Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for March, 2010

Sony launches new Broadway site

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

Sony Masterworks is officially launching a new Website devoted to its large catalog of Broadway music tomorrow — MasterworksBroadway.com — and it’s not just a treasure trove of information on cast albums for sale, it’s a major new archive of theater history.

The site traces the history of the cast album from the original production of “Finian’s Rainbow” in 1947 through the current hit revival of “South Pacific” at Lincoln Center (below).

Sony’s predecessor, Columbia Records, was one of the top Broadway cast album labels because the president of the company in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s was the theater lover and great producer Goddard Lieberson.

Lieberson’s label scored one of the biggest recording hits of the 1950s with the cast album of “My Fair Lady” which was on the charts for several years.

Those were the days when show music was part of the bedrock of the pop music industry so there were good financial reasons for recording Broadway shows, as well as aesthetic reasons. All of the pop singers of that period scored hits with Broadway songs (even The Beatles recorded a tune from “The Music Man” on one of their early albums).

The cast album is the only tangible record we have of great Broadway shows of the past, so Lieberson and his peers did us all a service by having the casts and orchestras of so many shows go into the studio (usually a few days after the opening) to preserve their performances (and the score).

In the case of the early Stephen Sondheim flop, “Anyone Can Whistle,” Lieberson was so certain of the importance of the score that he went ahead with an album even though he knew the show was closing after a few performances (Angela Lansbury — above — went into the studio the day after she lost her first job in a Broadway musical). Without that cast album — which went on to become a cult favorite — it would be highly unlikely that the City Center Encores! series would be doing a staged reading of the show next week with Donna Murphy, Sutton Foster and Raul Esparza.

The Masterworks Website is packed with never-before-seen photographs from the recording sessions as well as production shots from many of the shows (that’s James Naughton, above right, in the terrific 1990 musical, “City of Angels”). The site will also feature a weekly blog by the excellent theater journalist and historian Peter Filichia; an enormous streaming library of cast recordings; and podcasts with Broadway notables including Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury, Bernadette Peters and others.

On tomorrow’s official launch date, the site will begin the “You Gotta Get A Gimmick” sweepstakes during which daily prizes will be awarded, including a trip for two to NYC to see a Broadway show, and the entire Masterworks Broadway catalog.

Every Tuesday and Friday, the site will feature a prize related to the work of Jerry Herman and Stephen Sondheim respectively, including an autographed CD collection of their works. New prizes will continue to be announced throughout the month.

Check it out at www.masterworksbroadway.com

‘The Temperamentals’: sexual politics in the 1950s

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

It’s not easy to mix a good personal story with history and sweeping cultural changes, but that’s exactly what Jon Marans has done with great skill in his off-Broadway play, “The Temperamentals.”

The piece started in a tiny developmental space, moved to a slightly larger off-off Broadway venue last year and is now installed in a mid-size off-Broadway house at the New World Stages complex on West 50th St.

The title derives from one of the code words for gay men back in the day when homosexuality was still considered a crime in most parts of the country.

Marans follows an unlikely couple — Communist Party firebrand Harry Hay (Thomas Jay Ryan, above left) and Austrian fashion designer Rudi Gernreich (Michael Urie, above right) — who inspire each other as they try to get the first organized gay group, The Mattachine Society, off the ground during the McCarthy era.

Hay is a card-carrying Communist who believes that homosexuality should be the equivalent of heterosexuality in the U.S. and he is willing to fight for that cause. Rudi likes the exotic gay underground of the 1950s, but Harry inspires him to be more politically active.

The terrible irony in this relationship is that Rudi gets Harry to drop his cover marriage to a woman so that they can be true romantic partners, but then finds out that he can’t be a success in 1950s Hollywood without a wife by his side. In one memorable scene, Rudi has this formula for success spelled out for him by the closeted director Vincente Minnelli, who was famously married to gay icon Judy Garland after they made several MGM musicals together.

Director Jonathan Silverstein creates a historical pageant on a bare-bones set, with three extremely gifted supporting actors (Arnie Burton, Matthew Schneck and Sam Breslin Wright) playing a multitude of characters who enter the lives of Harry and Rudi.

Thomas Jay Ryan has never scored in a big Broadway hit, but over the past decade or so he has become one of the kings of off-Broadway and regional theater in everything from “The Misanthrope” to “Juno and the Paycock.” He is simply one of our finest stage actors and his Harry Hay is a major performance you should not miss.

Internet stalking, prostitution collide in thrilling ‘212’

Monday, March 29, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

The new Alafair Burke novel, “212” (Harper), is a humdinger, set in Manhattan, that takes us on a wild ride through the dark new 21st century worlds opened up by the Internet.

The book is the third in a series Burke has been writing about New York Police Department detective Ellie Hatcher, but you don’t need to have the read the first two novels to jump right into “212” (as this first-time Burke reader can testify).

With so many of us on social networking sites, and buying and selling all sorts of things on Craigslist, it’s no wonder that crime writers are finding the Internet to be very fertile ground for their work.

The new Harlan Coben novel, “Caught,” delves into the way that reputations can be ruined with a few blog postings — and a carefully crafted false social network identity.

“212” is a terrific read because the author combines well-drawn characters with a plot that most of us can identify with.

What starts fairly casually as the story of a New York University student finding weird postings about herself on a campus gossip site quickly escalates into a tale of multiple murder that brings together seemingly unrelated people — a super-powerful New York real estate man (in the Donald Trump vein); an attractive real estate woman with a sick mother who starts earning what she sees as easy money through an Internet escort service; and that increasingly anxious NYU coed Megan Gunther.

Burke takes us through a very realistically detailed New York City — with all of the local color of a Linda Fairstein novel. Another strong element is Ellie’s determination to make it in what is still a male-dominated profession and yet hang on to a satisfying social and family life.

As the book opens, Hatcher is involved in a relationship with assistant DA Max Donovan and a tad worried about her brother/temporary roommate Jess, who has never held down a job for more than three months until he started working for one of those big “gentleman’s clubs” on Manhattan’s far West Side.

Few workplace novels I’ve read have delved into the complexities of office relationships with the sensitivity of Burke — Ellie wonders if she should be sleeping with someone in the D.A.’s office and her superior (a female lieutenant) is involved with a cop-turned-bodyguard who could be connected to one of the murders her officers are investigating.

Between the rise of the Internet, and the surprising small-town-like connections one finds between strangers in New York City, those famous “six degrees of separation” have probably been reduced to two or three, at least when it comes to Manhattan.

A $2.5 million secret — what happens in the next ‘SATC’

Sunday, March 28, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

People in the world of movie publicity are debating the top-secret status Warner Bros. is trying to maintain over its forthcoming “Sex and the City 2” — the sequel to the 2008 spin-off of the HBO series.

The studio made everybody who worked on the film sign NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) that could levy $2.5 million damages on anyone divulging any plot elements in advance of the picture’s late May opening.

Two months ago, the model Noah Mills (below) gave an interview during one of his runway shows where he talked a little bit about his work on “SATC2” — he plays one of the new men in Samantha’s life (the hot to trot Kim Cattrall character).

Bloggers Ted Casablanca and Jezebel reported last week that Warner Bros. had come down on Mills like a ton of bricks (scaring him with that pesky NDA he signed). The model is in what the bloggers called “serious trouble.”

Up until this week, John Corbett was not allowed to disclose the fact that he reprises his role as Carrie’s old beau Aidan in the sequel.

Corbett was freed to mention this tidbit at a taping of a talk show last week only because the studio decided to include a shot of the Aidan character in the new trailer.

Some publicists believe the absence of well-sourced leaks over the past few months have thrown a wet-blanket over the “buzz” for “SATC2” — the chatter that you want to surround a movie long before it opens.

It is weird that Warner Bros. is treating the film as if it is a James Cameron science-fiction extravaganza with all sorts of plot twists. Fans of the HBO series and the first movie assume the newly married Carrie and Mr. Big will have their union tested (as it was again and again on the TV show) and that Samantha will get the steamiest sex scenes in the film.

Jessica Coen wrote amusingly about the NDA fracas on the Jezebel blog:

“Honestly, does anyone who’s going to see this movie actually give a rat’s ass about the plot of what is essentially a well-styled lady-orgy? For all we knew about the original’s storylines in advance, audiences still came out in record-breaking droves to see their beloved characters totter about a fantasy city while wearing impossible shoes and outfits raging from enviable to perplexing. Perhaps, for some folks, the question of what would happen in the film’s final 15 minutes kept their brains a little more engaged.”

“Sex and the City is not — and never will be — about entertaining audiences with a plot. The people who will see this movie — both the cultish devotees and those casually indulging their chick-flick needs — will see it no matter what they know beforehand. It seems silly, if not downright stupid, on the studio’s part to squelch any spoilers: The less people know, the less people are talking. Silly Warner Bros. — you should know that if you feed it enough, the Internet is the best hype machine money needn’t buy.”

Here’s a witty comment posted by “Maharani” in response to what Coen wrote:

“I already know the plot.
1] Everyone seems happy.
2] Maybe not so.
3] Something to look forward to!
4] Conflict
5] Vacation, everybody! Let’s go to some place where Charlotte won’t touch the food, and Samantha’s dress would feed a family for 10 months.
6] Montage/Sex scene/Everybody wears a dead reptile or a furry creature.
7] 2 hours are up, just in time for everything to magically come together.
8] Roll credits, thanks for your money, suckers.”

Another commenter – ‘BlueMorpho” – suggested that she had already seen the movie:

“Spoiler alert- Carrie finds The One Ring at Sotheby’s. She goes mad with power, and turns all of the one-shot episode boyfriends into flying monkeys. Miranda then leads an expedition to destroy Carrie, taking her through the vast wastelands of the flyover states. Just as Miranda is about the throw the magic shoe into the fires of Las Vegas, a magician flies down and resets everything. Then they all go to Dubai and find Curly’s gold.”

Another responder to Coen – “Massita” – proposed that “SATC” could be turned into a high-art indie film:

“If the studio decided to recreate ‘Invisible Cities’ with an SATC theme, that I would see.
Scene: The quartet wander past tall buildings, food stands and crowds. The whirligig of urban life swirls about them.
Carrie: This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember.
They enter a shoe store, staring motionless at the wares.
Charlotte: Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think.
Samantha: The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.
The four walk down fifth avenue in the soft glow of the setting sun.
Miranda: What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?”

‘Repeat Until Rich’: down the casino rabbit hole

Saturday, March 27, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

As a major non-fan of Las Vegas (and gambling) I wasn’t sure that Josh Axelrad’s “Repeat Until Rich” (The Penguin Press) was a book for me.

On the surface, the true-life adventures of a professional card counter seemed like another trip to the “21” well.

Boy, was I wrong.

With wit and more than a dash of psychological horror, Axelrad puts us inside his head during the years he spent as part of a team of professional gamblers who decided to ditch their square jobs — on Wall Street and other straight business spheres — for some easy casino money.

Axelrad reminds us near the start of the book that card counting when you play blackjack is a legal activity, but the casinos frown on organized crews like “Mossad,” the unit our narrator/guide signed up with.

By forming a team and coming up with a sizeable cash stake, the Mossad group was able to absorb losses while rolling up huge wins — in the days (or hours) before a casino would catch on and ask the counters to exit their facility. Axelrad tells us of his own high anxiety at being spotted, but he is assured by everyone in the know that casinos are too straight these days to break the arm or leg of a counter before showing him (or her) the door.

The book starts as an adrenaline-fueled travelogue of Axelrad’s immediate success as a counter, rolling up shares in the high six-figures. “Repeat Until Rich” becomes a crazy trip through America’s casino culture as the team is spotted — and banned — from one gambling den after another. Now that so many states have legalized casino gambling, however, there is almost no end to the opportunities for winning and losing.

Axelrad is shocked to see people his own age — in their 20s — who gamble without a Mossad-like system for winning: “It hadn’t really occurred to me that members of my own demographic would want to hang out in casinos, in a context that didn’t involve counting. Who were these people with whom I was meant to blend in? Fraternity and jock types. Lost souls. Investment banking scum. Money sluts…I couldn’t understand them or their motives.”

Axelrad and Mossad act deranged and self-destructive in order to look like the fish the casinos are used to exploiting: “I (became) fully aware that the rare hard-core degenerate gambling addicts must constitute a crucial part of the industry’s revenue stream…They were a minority, yes, but a minority willing to mortgage their houses, to embezzle from the companies they worked for — ordinary middle-class people with losses running into seven figures.”

The author’s life turns inside out after 9/11 — the airport security crackdown made transporting large amounts of money in planes almost impossible — when he returned to Brooklyn to write about his experiences. Ironically, and horribly, Axelrad learned that he had become a gambling addict after he quickly blew all of his winnings in online gambling.

Axelrad shares with us the added anxiety he was under after he was contracted to write “Repeat Until Rich” but found the story he had sold — of his card counting “success” — slipping away as he became just like any other gambling addict loser.

The writer clearly went through hell in the final stages of fulfilling his publishing contract, but the sudden switch from up to down is what makes “Repeat Until Rich” one of the best tales of addiction — and the gambling world — that I’ve ever read.

Another Connecticut stage hit rolling into New York

Friday, March 26, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

Yesterday, The Public Theater in downtown Manhattan announced that the line-up for its 50th anniversary season — beginning in September — will include director Oskar Eustis’ terrific production of “Compulsion” which played New Haven’s Yale Rep earlier this year.

The play by Rinne Groff (below), about the wrangling over the stage rights to Anne Frank’s diary, was a critical and audience hit in New Haven.

Mandy Patinkin (top) gave an awesome performance as New York writer Meyer Levin, who helped shepherd the diary’s U.S. publication with the understanding that he would dramatize the material for Broadway (only to see his dreams denied).

The play will be produced at the Public Theater next Feb. 1 to March 6. The season announcement did not include the casting for that production.

“Compulsion” will be the second recent Connecticut stage production to move into New York City. The Long Wharf version of “The Glass Menagerie” reopened to ecstatic reviews in New York Wednesday night (see blog post below).

The Public season also will include the New York premiere of a new play by Tony Kushner, “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures,” which will open at the Public next March. The play debuted at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis earlier this year with a cast that included Stephen Spinella (below right, with Michael Esper) who won a Tony Award in Kushner’s landmark drama, “Angels in America.”

(The Public is already offering various membership plans for next season, starting at $55. For more information, visit www.publictheater.org.)

Long Wharf’s definitive ‘Glass Menagerie’ re-opens in New York

Thursday, March 25, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

For many years, “The Glass Menagerie” was one of my least favorite Tennessee Williams plays simply because I saw so many bad or mediocre productions of the writer’s most autobiographical work.

Moviemakers haven’t done any better with the piece — none of the three film versions are satisfactory. The 1974 TV movie contains one of the very few flat-out awful performances ever given by Katharine Hepburn (maybe that’s why the film seems to have vanished).

The mother character in the play, Amanda Wingfield, is too often unbearably nostalgic about her prosperous Southern upbringing and too self-pitying about the state we find her in at the start of the play — a middle-aged single mother with a helpless grown daughter and a son who clearly won’t be hanging around their cramped Depression era St. Louis apartment much longer.

Amanda is too often played as a maudlin solo act — an older Blanche DuBois stuck in memories of the fallen South of her youth (but without the sexual electricity of Blanche) and never really connecting with her sad children.

At most stagings of the play I’ve attended, it was all too easy to identify with Tom’s eagerness to scram for parts unknown (this was especially true at the last Broadway revival in which Jessica Lange was a horrifyingly self-involved Amanda).

Leave it to director Gordon Edelstein and the brilliant Judith Ivey to blow the cobwebs off this “classic” and to give us something new and fresh.

The dynamic duo first joined forces last spring at Long Wharf Theatre — Edelstein’s home base as artistic director — where “The Glass Menagerie” was simply spectacular.

Fortunately, a visiting New York Times critic agreed and the wheels were set in motion for the transfer of that staging to New York City by the Roundabout Theatre (and then on to Los Angeles in the fall).

The show officially opened at the Laura Pels Theatre last night and I am very happy to report that it has lost none of its power in the move from the Long Wharf thrust stage — with the audience on three sides of the playing area — to a traditional proscenium theater.

Keira Kelley has returned as Laura and Patch Darragh is once again playing Tom.

The second act role of Laura’s “gentleman caller” is played by the one newcomer to the production, Michael Mosley, who is excellent.

Judith Ivey is the real power behind the show, however, playing Amanda in a way that (finally) makes sense — allowing the woman to be much more than the wilting steel magnolia of most productions.

Who knew there were so many laughs in the character of the faded Southern belle?

And that those laughs could be produced without sacrificing the Williams poetry and the poignance of Keira Kelley’s presentation of poor “crippled” Laura’s fixation on her glass animals?

Who would have thought that a contemporary actress could find a universal essence of motherhood in such a specifically Southern play, written more than a half century ago?

Ivey makes you believe Amanda has spent decades joking and arguing with her grown son Tom — the Williams stand-in played so well by Patch Darragh — and that with a fierce combination of love and steamroller guilt she almost always gets her way (something the woman has expected ever since she was a beautiful, teasing girl juggling dozens of suitors back home in Mississippi).

We can see that Tom gets his mordant sense of humor and much of his world view from his mother — despite their prickly relationship.

Ivey makes the financial dimensions of the story come through loud and clear, too. We can understand Amanda’s fear of “dependency” in the middle of a global financial catastrophe, with only her son’s paycheck and a pitiful job selling magazine subscriptions over the phone standing between her and the poorhouse.

We sense that Amanda wants the best for her kids, but we also feel her terror of not having enough money to live on.

Edelstein makes the links between Tom and Tennessee explicit — the production opens with Tom starting work on the play we are about to see, rather than with the character looking out at us and delivering narration.

The old way of starting and ending the play too often turns into gooey nostalgia — the Edelstein approach drains off the pre-emptive sentimentality of the other stagings I’ve seen.

How lucky New York City is to have this superb revival move into town and how nice for us that we have another chance to see a definitive production of an American classic.

(“The Glass Menagerie” will run through May 30 at the Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46th Street. Tickets are priced at $70-$80 and can be ordered online at www.roundabouttheatre.org.)

Happy birthday, Mr. McQueen, wherever you are

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

The one-of-a-kind movie star and icon of cool Steve McQueen would have been celebrating his 80th birthday today if cancer had not claimed him 30 years ago.

McQueen’s reign at the top of the box-office charts was relatively brief — his first big hit was “The Great Escape” in 1963 and his last major film was “The Towering Inferno” 11 years later.

But in between those two milestones, McQueen developed a screen persona that has never dated. Pop “Bullitt” or “The Thomas Crown Affair” into your DVD player — both films are from his peak year of 1968 — and you will see the essence of movie stardom.

LIFE.com released a cache of never-before-published pictures of the star earlier this week — including the shot above — taken by photographer John Dominis just before “The Great Escape” opened.

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