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Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year

Sat, 10 May 2008 18:28:24 +0100

Chairman of the jury, Edward Seckerson looks forward to this year's Stephen Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year prize.

50 students, 50 Sondheim songs - all in the space of 8 hours. That's testing for even the most hardened Sondheim enthusiast. For this Sondheim enthusiast, whose brief was to choose just 12 finalists from amongst them, "testing" doesn't even begin to describe it. Excitement? Apprehension? Dread? How much stand-out talent was waiting just beyond the audition room door? Had it been a good year for our national drama schools and universities? Which songs would prove the most popular choices? Would they choose wisely? Should we be quoting odds on "Not While I'm Around", "Being Alive", or "Send in the Clowns" topping the most-often-performed charts? Just as well we didn't. I'm a sore loser. And the heats for the Stephen Sondheim Student Performer of the Year 2008 were nothing if not unpredictable. When the first four people through the door could all make the final and none of them sing "Send in the Clowns" you begin to wonder if an hour or two is all it will take for you to turn into John Barrowman: "Outstanding! Outstanding! Outstanding!"

And a high percentage of the work was. Students went for less familiar songs: hell, we even had a song from Bounce. Some performances were work in progress, some were fully fledged, some would stop a West End show right now. But most had sincerity and most had heart and most sounded like they loved the man's work.

So 12 finalists - 8 girls, 4 guys - are I know going to put on a cracking show on the afternoon of 1st June. My fellow judges - Gareth Valentine, Barry Burnett, Kim Criswell, and George Stiles - can blame me for the choices but they won't blame me for including a few risk-takers. I am always so encouraged to see and hear not just pretty voices and word-perfect delivery but youngsters prepared to go the extra distance, to inhabit a character and fill a lyric and dare with a vocal line. Several of these contestants have the potential to blow an audience away. It could be anybody's final.

And, of course, there are the all-important "new" songs. Steve made that a condition of this annual competition going ahead in his name. New writing had to be a part of it. So which of the 12 new songs (courtesy of that invaluable organisation - the Mercury Music Development) will grab our attention and walk off with the Stiles & Drewe new song award? We'll know it when we hear it. And we'll probably hear a grunt, too, which will be Sondheim in spirit offering some discreet vocal encouragement.

Contrary in New York

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:41:56 +0100

By Jeffrey Sweet

At the moment there are two fire escape musicals on Broadway. One is a hit, one is struggling. Neither matches up to the great fire escape musical, of course -- West Side Story. But, though I understand why the hit is a hit, it's the struggling show that's won a piece of my heart.

The hit is In the Heights. Many years ago, I remember having a conversation with the writing team of Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford (authors of the off-Broadway hit, I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road) during which they theorized that a substantial percentage of the reason a musical succeeds is that it depicts a romanticized version of a world the audience wants to be immersed in. I don't know if their theory is different after some decades of working, but I have to come to believe there is some sense in it.

What is Grease, for instance, but a theme park of the American 1950s? Or Guys and Dolls but an engaging cartoon of Times Square a few minutes after they swept up the confetti after V-J Day? And it is the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows with the most vivid portraits of ways-of-life unfamiliar to New York theatergoers -- the royal court of Siam, tropical islands in the south seas, the flat plains of the west, the fishing villages of New England and a mansion in Austria -- that proved to be their most enduring hits.

In the Heights is about life in Washington Heights. The George Washington Bridge is in the background. In the foreground are a handful of buildings on a neighborhood street. The show concentrates on the characters associated with three businesses -- a taxi service, a fast food stand and a hair salon. By the end of the evening, two of these businesses will be closed and the third will have avoided closing only by the providential hand of a winning lottery ticket. The show was conceived by, features a score by and stars Lin-Manuel Miranda with a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes, and it clearly means to document an endangered way-of-life.

There is energy to burn here, largely due to the choreography of Andy Blankenbuehler which embraces the sensuality of the Latin-influenced score. I suspect that this one of the shows that will be popular with Japanese tourists because you don't need to understand the dialogue in order to get the essence of what is going on.

Understanding the dialogue and the lyrics didn't enhance my experience much. The characters are pushed around by coincidence and the needs of the writers rather than being driven by their individual personalities. In the lyrics of song after song, Miranda has characters exhaustively explain their pasts. The repetitiousness of this tack wearied me swiftly.

And I am very much in the minority. The audience around me reacted as if the show were one big street party to which they were pleased to have access. In the Heights was successful off-Broadway last season and that success has apparently accompanied it to its Broadway incarnation. And I don't much mind being one of the few grinches who didn't enjoy it.

Much of the New York press was similarly grinchy about A Catered Affair, a musical based on a TV play dating from the Fifties by Paddy Chayefsky and the film adaptation written by Gore Vidal.  A few of the press (including the Times's first-string critic, Ben Brantley) thought that at 90 minutes the show was too long and drab. Though I have some quibbles, I was pretty much enthralled throughout.

Largely set in and around a cramped New York apartment, the story concerns a middle-aged couple whose daughter Janey decides to marry.  Janey and her intended want a simple and cheap civil ceremony, but Aggie, the girl's mother, is intent on throwing a big splashy event, largely as a way to compensate for the constrained life she's led since pregnancy forced her to marry cabdriver Tom. Tom watches the plans get ,more ostentatious and more expensive and realizes that every dime he has saved will disappear in feeding a ton of strangers at the reception. Also in the mix is Aggie's aging gay brother, Winston, who triggers the tension when he's told that there would be no room for him at the smaller civil service since he's not "immediate family" (though he's slept on the sofa for years).

These are buttoned-up people who have mostly had to choke back their disappointments and compromises. What John Bucchino's songs frequently offer is an escape valve for these pent-up feelings, none lovelier than Aggie's quiet rhapsody about all things apricot while helping her daughter shop. It helps that the orchestrations are by the masterful Jonathan Tunick and suggest the warmth of Elmer Bernstein's underscoring for films like Love with the Proper Stranger and The World of Henry Orient, both of which were love letters to New York.

Harvey Fierstein does double duty here, as the author of the book and playing Uncle Winston. He is an audience-pleaser as a performer, but his work on the book is a little less successful. Fierstein sets up Winston as the catalyst for the show's central dilemma, but he misses the audience's need to see Winston evolve to the point at which he can contribute to resolving the situation. Many of the other scenes play with understated power, though.

The performances, under the direction of John Doyle, are among the best on Broadway. Faith Prince has left her Adelaide of Guys and Dolls far behind and skillfully depicts the inner turmoil of the mother. Even when we disagree with her actions, we can't help but understand the years of frustration that fuel them. When the sound of grief comes pouring out of her, the moment is almost shockingly private. Tom Wopat finds an original take on husband Tom, managing to sustain a quiet strength even as he is bullied for much of the evening.  His aria "I Stayed" is an explosion of pent-up feelings, simultaneously a defense, an indictment and a plea for justice.  Leslie Kritzer avoids the trap of generic sweetness as the daughter.

Yes, as I say, aspects of Fierstein's plotting seem to me to be lacking, but I felt the evening achieved a good 80% of what it was shooting for, and so far it's the musical of the season a CD of which I most eagerly anticipate.

Incidentally, notwithstanding its mixed reception in the press, It is nominated for more Drama Desk Awards than any production this season. I hope it wins its share and that it has a chance to run long enough to reach a wider audience.

Jeffrey Sweet is a playwright, journalist and teacher, probably best known for his play THE VALUE OF NAMES, the musical WHAT ABOUT LUV? (which played the Orange Tree many years ago), and a history of Chicago's Second City comedy troupe called SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY. A resident artist at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre, nine of his plays will soon appear in anthology published by Northwestern University Press.

Surprise Hit in New York

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:13:37 +0000

By Jeffrey Sweet

Not only has the play that won the 2007 Joseph Jefferson Award for best play in Chicago, August: Osage County, received the best reviews of the season for a new play in New York, but the winner of the Jeff for best musical, Adding Machine, has just opened off-Broadway to the best reviews of the season for a new musical. At the moment, at least, the best new work in Manhattan is not from Manhattan but a city where the weather is notorious nearly a thousand miles to the west.

By an odd coincidence, the play this musical is based on, Elmer Rice’s 1923 expressionistic drama The Adding Machine (and no, I have no idea why “The” was dropped for the musical’s title) will be broadcast on BBC Radio Three’s series Drama on Three on March 3 and will be available online for the following week. For years it has existed in the States mostly as an anthology-stuffer – one of those plays of sufficient significance that a case could be made for assigning drama students to read it but rarely receives a professional production of consequence. Its leading character, subtly named Mr. Zero, is a drudge who makes his living adding up numbers in some nameless and dimly-lit office. With the invention of the adding machine, his job is obliterated. The bad news hits him when, in fact, he is expecting a promotion. Unhinged, he murders his boss, spends time on death row, is executed, wakes up in Elysian Fields, finds an adding machine in the afterlife that excites his passion for crunching numbers, and is re-born to become a wage slave yet again.

Tempted to sing yet?

What struck me on the page as earnest, somewhat heavy-handed satire is transformed in this musicalization into a thing of oddly moving beauty. Major credit must go to the score by Joshua Schmidt and Jason Loewith which mostly eschews traditional song forms in favor of arias and musical scenes that would be at home specializing in chamber operas. Angular melodic lines are supported by accompaniment of surprising lyricism. The richness of the score is in contrast to the nearly monochromatic set designs depicting a world of punishing drabness lit to a level that barely achieves gloom.

Add to this what must be the lumpiest company of players currently onstage in New York. Joel Hatch’s Mr. Zero is a zombie, benumbed by routine, his voice strangled to a faintly-protesting nasality. His wife is played by Cyrilla Baer, similarly doughy of figure; she manages to make a big impression playing small-mindedness. Amy Warren finds a touching delicacy in Mr. Zero’s sentimental co-worker, the most sympathetic (if slightly dim) figure in the piece. They perform the Schmidt-Loewith score with passion and precision.

After being impressed by director David Cromer’s work with some of Chicago’s most dynamic smaller theatres (most notably co-directing an award-winning production of Peter Parnell’s two-evening adaptation of John Irving’s Cider House Rules), it is a pleasure to see him make such an impressive splash in New York, following in the footsteps of such other Chicago directors as Mary Zimmerman, Robert Falls, Frank Galati and Gary Griffin.

If you’re thinking of coming to the States to indulge in a week or two of theatre, might I gently suggest that you skip New York this time and head straight to Chicago to see the stuff that will probably be impressing the pants off of Manhattan next season. August and Adding Machine originated by Steppenwolf and the Next respectively, but this is just a sample of the work that the nearly two hundred functioning companies there produce each season. Obviously, not all of this stuff is going to be first rate, but I can’t think of another city in the States regularly producing more new material of consequence or introducing more important talent. By the way, the tickets and hotels in Chicago cost about half what they would cost in New York.

Jeffrey Sweet is a playwright, journalist and teacher, probably best known for his play THE VALUE OF NAMES, the musical WHAT ABOUT LUV? (which played the Orange Tree many years ago), and a history of Chicago's Second City comedy troupe called SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY. A resident artist at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre, nine of his plays will soon appear in anthology published by Northwestern University Press.

Ray Bennett : Stars turn out for new National season

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:59:40 +0000

By Ray Bennett

Oscar winners Jeremy Irons, Vanessa Redgrave and Juliette Binoche plus Ralph Fiennes, Claire Higgins and Simon Russell Beale are among the stars to perform and the fabulous “War Horse” will return in the new season at London’s National Theater announced this morning.

Irons will play British conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in a new play by Howard Brenton titled “Never So Good” to be directed by Howard Davies on the Lyttleton stage in March. Redgrave will star in “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion, based on her bestselling memoir. Directed by David Hare, the production transfers to the Lyttleton from New York at the end of April.

Binoche and Akram Jhan will co-direct and perform in the Lyttleton a new work designed by Anish Kapoor and co-produced by the National in September. Fiennes will take the title role in “Oedipus” by Sophocles in a new version by Frank McGuinness directed by Jonathan Kent on the Olivier stage in October.

Beale and Higgins star with Hayley Atwell (right) and Paul Ready in George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara.” Nicholas Hytner’s production opens March 4 as part of the Travelex £10 Tickets program.

Other productions in the Travelex program, presented on the Olivier stage, are “Fram,” a new play by Tony Harrison about the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, directed by Harrison and Bob Crowley and featuring Jasper Britton and Sian Thomas; Thomas Middleton’s Elizabethan play “The Revenger’s Tragedy,” directed by Melly Still with Rory Kinnear as Vindice; “Her Naked Skin,” a new play by Rebecca Lenkiewicz set during the suffragette era to be directed by Howard Davies; and a revival of “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour” by Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn.

“War Horse” which was sold out this winter in its opening run, will return to the Olivier in November. Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris direct Nick Stafford’s adaptation of the Michael Morpurgo novel.

Other highlights at the National this year will include a new play by Michael Frayn titled “Afterlife,” which examines the life of Max Reinhardt, Austrian impresario and founder of the Salzburg Festival; Simon Russell Beale (above) in Harold Pinter’s “A Slight Ache”; “The Pitmen Painters,” a new play by Lee Hall, writer of “Billy Elliot,” and a new production based on Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” starring Ben Whishaw, who is soon to be seen with Hayley Atwell in a new feature film based on Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.”

Ray Bennett writes from London on movies, TV, theatre, music, media and more for, amongst others, The Hollywood Reporter and Cue Entertainment.

Visit Ray's website for access to all his thoughts and reviews : The Cliff Edge

Jeff Sweet : Musical Cities

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:04:34 +0000

By Jeffrey Sweet

Lately, Timothy Spall seems to have cornered the market on evil henchmen. He transformed from a rat to a rat-like ally of Voldemort in a Harry Potter movie, and he’s Fagin, abetting the murderous Bill Sykes in a new TV miniseries of Oliver Twist. Within the last couple of months, he’s refined his specialty to henching in musicals, colluding with Susan Sarandon’s evil queen in Enchanted and plotting with Alan Rickman’s corrupt judge as Beadle Bamford in Sweeney Todd.

At first, Enchanted and Sweeney Todd would seem to have little other in common. Enchanted is a nimble and light-hearted riff on the conventions of Walt Disney cartoons, given a little extra zetz by the fact that it was created by the Disney studio itself. And Sweeney Todd is ... well, it’s Sweeney Todd. Frequently nimble, hardly light-hearted.

But both films are not just the stories of their leading characters, they are about the possibilities and terrors of cities.

The Enchanted city is present-day New York, which is presented as a world of endless delight. You know New Yorkers’ reputation as hostile and aggressive goons? None of those cretins made it out of the casting call. Everybody in the film is delighted to rush to the aid of the princess Giselle who has been tossed out of the two-dimensional heaven of Andalasia and finds herself entering 3D through a manhole cover in Times Square. The film makes the case that Manhattan has it all over home. Home may have had castles and quaint cottages in the wood; they are no match for skyscrapers, trendy restaurants, upscale shops and ballrooms in the sky.

Part of Enchanted’s brief is to make peace between the images of princesses’ passivity in the Disney catalogue and contemporary feminist values, so in this film it is Giselle who saves her prince’s butt from a dragon. But she gets to wear the pretty clothes, too. In a clever twist on Cinderella and other cartoons in which the heroine enlists the help of birds and cute mice in doing housework chores, Giselle does her cleaning up singing “Happy Working Song” (one of several adroit collaborations between Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz) with the choreographed assistance of Manhattan’s wildlife – cockroaches and rats.

Vermin also make a memorable appearance to music in Sweeney Todd. During “The Worst Pies in London,” Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett alternates between serving her inedibles and splatting crawlies on the beat.

If Enchanted’s city is a playland, from the first looming images seen from a ship on the Thames as Sweeney returns from exile, the city is a hell. At several points in the Stephen Sondheim score, the murderous hero sings of London as “a great black pit,” and production designer Dante Ferretti responds with a nightmare vision of vividly detailed grime. In such an environment, is it any wonder that violence and corruption are promises in every alley and shadow? Indeed, the opening title sequence is of the progress of a flood of gelatinous blood through the city’s pavement, machinery and sewers.

I have my quibbles about this Sweeney (“A Little Priest” used to be a perversely joyous number, filled with bad puns; this version doesn’t quite earn its climax), but director Tim Burton makes London one of the major characters in a way no previous version has, contributing as much to this film as his brooding Gotham City did to Batman.

I can’t help but wonder what would have become of Giselle if, instead of Manhattan, she had emerged into one of Tim Burton’s cities. Timothy Spall would probably be there, too.

Jeffrey Sweet is a playwright, journalist and teacher, probably best known for his play THE VALUE OF NAMES, the musical WHAT ABOUT LUV? (which played the Orange Tree many years ago), and a history of Chicago's Second City comedy troupe called SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY. A resident artist at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre, nine of his plays will soon appear in anthology published by Northwestern University Press.

Jeff Sweet : After the Strike

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:50:26 +0000

By Jeffrey Sweet

A collective sigh of relief greeted the news that, after nineteen days, the stagehands’ strike that had closed down most of Broadway ended with both management and the union declaring they had made a good deal. Management got a reform of work rules, and the union got a significant boost in rates for their hire. And the lights on a lot of stages went on again.

One of the weeks during the strike was the one that Broadway Cares: Equity Fights AIDS had scheduled for its annual curtain-speech appeal to the audiences for support. The shows that for contractual reasons performed during the strike appealed as planned (I left money at performances of Pygmalion and The Ritz). The returning shows attempted to make up for lost time. At the performance of Cyrano I attended, there was some fiercely competitive bidding in the auction for Kevin Kline’s autographed nose. The winning bid – $1400 (one of Jennifer Garner’s eyelashes was thrown in for a bonus; she’d lost the other in performance).

A flurry of plays, the openings of which had been delayed, premiered to mostly warm response. The biggest splash was made by August: Osage County, Tracy Letts’s three-and-a-half hour drama about a warring family produced by Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theatre. None of the actors is a star by New York terms (though Sally Murphy was the Julie Jordan in the well-received Lincoln Center revival of Carousel some years back and was featured in Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s musical version of The Wild Party), but, given the extravagant notices, this will certainly change. The play itself was greeted by the New York Times critic as the best new American drama to play Broadway in years, and there was an immediate stampede at the box office.

As I write this, composer Alan Menken is working with book writer Doug Wright and director Francesca Zambello on the stage version of The Little Mermaid. The score will include songs from the original animated film Menken wrote with his late partner, Howard Ashman, as well as new songs with lyricist Glen Slater. As you’ll recall, The Little Mermaid is about a mermaid who falls in love with a human and becomes human herself. As it happens, Menken is currently basking in the success of a substantial film hit called Enchanted (with lyrics by Stephen Schwartz), which is about a princess in an animated cartoon who falls in love with a real, live human and, yes, becomes human herself. And let’s not forget the recently-arrived Broadway hit, Xanadu, about a goddess who falls in love with a human and becomes ... (Maybe now is the time for me to revive a project I worked on with Susan Birkenhead some years back, a musical version of Bell, Book and Candle. As you may remember, it’s about a witch who falls in love with a human.)

In the meantime, the Writers Guild strike against the movie and TV industry drags along. The most recent round of negotiations ended with management breaking off talks and calling the writers stubborn and intransigent. The studio bosses don’t seem to be convincing many people. Opinion polls show almost 70% of the American public on the side of the writers, with only 4% being firmly on the side of management. By that measure, they’re even less popular than George Bush. Most observers are predicting a long strike that may extend well into the new year.

Critic Charles Isherwood of the New York Times stirred up some comment by writing a column suggesting that striking writers with backgrounds in the theatre should take advantage of their lack of employment by returning to the ennobling activity of writing plays. The immediate response by some of these writers was, “Why, so you can pan us again?” Isherwood is admired for his intelligence, but a number of writers think he is too eager to indulge in withering sarcasm. There is a rumor that Isherwood was genuinely disturbed by an article to that effect written by Jon Robin Baitz and that he called Baitz to discuss the matter. And, as I say, it’s a rumor ...

Jeffrey Sweet is a playwright, journalist and teacher, probably best known for his play THE VALUE OF NAMES, the musical WHAT ABOUT LUV? (which played the Orange Tree many years ago), and a history of Chicago's Second City comedy troupe called SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY. A resident artist at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre, nine of his plays will soon appear in anthology published by Northwestern University Press.

Jeff Sweet : Strike City

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:51:07 +0000

By Jeffrey Sweet

Tuesday morning, I was handing out leaflets on Wall Street. Tuesday night, I was being offered leaflets on Broadway.

So it goes currently in New York City where much of the theatre and film world is involved in a pair of strikes.

The leaflets I handed out were in support of the strike of the Writers Guild of America (of which I am a member). The issue? Serious participation in the income derived from – and anticipated to be derived from – DVD sales and new distribution schemes through the Internet. Management has been telling writers that Internet technology is too new and ill-defined to be able to promise there will be any money to divide. A new video [which can be seen as part of Jon Robin Baitz’s article HERE] establishes that at the same time management reps have been saying this to writers, they’ve been saying pretty much the opposite to investors they’re trying to hold and attract.

I’m fairly lucky in that little of my income these days comes from film and TV, so I attend the rallies and actions without the sense of urgency that some of my colleagues feel. Frankly, I’m enjoying catching up with old friends and meeting people whose work I admire.

I run into Tony Kushner on the subway heading down to one of the picketing sites and he tells me he’s working on the libretto of an opera to be composed with Jeanine Tesori for the Metropolitan Opera as a follow-up to their Caroline, or Change. I suggest he might get something out of chatting with William M. Hoffman, who wrote the libretto for the Met’s very successful Ghosts at Versailles with John Corigliano. Tony comments that Bill has also written some not terribly pleasant things about him recently. One would think that two gay Jewish playwrights who both write opera would find common ground, but Bill’s political views have gotten increasingly conservative, and he and Tony disagree strongly over policies regarding Israel. I incline toward Tony’s political perspective, but Bill is an old friend. Bill offers his perspective, I politely disagree, and then we talk about theatre.

Wednesday, I run into David Picker, who was a producer for United Artists and had a hand in the films of West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof. One of the screenwriters says, “Hey, aren’t you management?” Turns out David’s writing now himself and is in sympathy with WGA goals. He talks about his attempt to get Jerome Robbins to direct the film version of Fiddler, but Robbins had an unhappy time working on the film of West Side Story so he declined. Picker is a dance fan, and he tried to put together a project on dance for Robbins to direct. The subject was going to be Nijinsky, but somehow Robbins dropped out and Herb Ross (another former choreographer) ended up directing the picture. David is filled with stories about Robert Altman, John Frankenheimer, Otto Preminger, Blake Edwards, John Sturges, Harry Belafonte and a lot of the other people he worked with during his days in the studio system. I tell him he should write a book. “Funny you should mention that ...” he says.

Marshall Brickman is also on the line Wednesday, remarking to friends that he is caught up in both strikes. Brickman, who co-wrote Annie Hall and Manhattan with Woody Allen (arguably Allen’s two best movies), also co-wrote Jersey Boys, the huge Broadway hit based on the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. At the moment, though, it and most other Broadway shows aren’t playing.

The stagehands for most of the houses are on strike, and the result has been the shutting down of all but a handful of shows for the first time since a short musicians union strike a few years back. Shows that had been previewing and were supposed to open this week are stalled in limbo, and shows that were flourishing are having to refund tickets. Many of the actors have joined the picket lines in support of the stagehands. And it was from picketers in front of The Color Purple that I was offered the leaflet I mentioned in my lede.

Because the stagehands have different contracts with different houses, there are a handful of houses in which performances are going on as usual, and those shows are reaping the benefit. My neighbor Kerry Butler is starring in Xanadu, the tongue-in-cheek, small-scale staging of a notoriously bad movie musical from the disco era. I saw her husband, writer Joey Mazzarino, on the picket line on Wednesday, and he said they’ve been playing to full houses at the Helen Hayes Theatre this week. As well they should anyway – it’s goofy fun, and Kerry manages to be simultaneously ironic and charming playing a goddess who swooshes around on roller skates and talks with an Australian accent (in tribute to Olivia Newton-John, who played the part in the film).

I am reminded that, before she took on Xanadu, Kerry was in a workshop of The Little Mermaid, the Broadway-bound stage version of the Disney movie featuring an expanded Alan Menken score. It, too, is held up during the stagehands strike. Our Wednesday WGA picketing took place in front of the Disney store on Fifth Avenue, and Ariel is one of the characters that was obscured from the rest of the street by our signs.

(c) Jeffrey Sweet 2007

Jeffrey Sweet is a playwright, journalist and teacher, probably best known for his play THE VALUE OF NAMES, the musical WHAT ABOUT LUV? (which played the Orange Tree many years ago), and a history of Chicago's Second City comedy troupe called SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY. A resident artist at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre, nine of his plays will soon appear in anthology published by Northwestern University Press.

Edward Seckerson: Hot foot from NY and suddenly it's Big Hair Day!

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:48:26 +0000

By Edward Seckerson

It says something for the London incarnation of Shaiman & Wittman's Hairspray that it maintained energy levels which normally would tend to dissipate between JFK and Heathrow. After a voracious week in the Big Apple I returned to discover that Michael Ball really had changed sex, married Mel Smith, and spawned a daughter called Tracy. Newcomer Leanne Jones, with hair higher than Everest and a smile as wide as her hips was like the sun coming out at midnight. She and the rest of this terrific London company lit up the Shaftesbury Theatre like a beacon. Perhaps for the first time since Hair opened there in the 60s this unlucky theatre will see some serious traffic. Advance bookings are healthy. Perhaps the great British public have already seen the light.

I'll stick my neck out here and say that this is probably the finest performance that Michael Ball have given us to date. The range of what he does with his voice (and his 'enhanced' body) is extraordinary but most of all it's what he does with his heart that is so totally winning. You'll go a long way to see a more truthful and generous and unselfish performance. He's made a human being of a caricature and left Harvey Fierstein growling all the way to his next torch song. Ball's Edna is so giving, so lovable that you want Tracy to succeed for him - sorry, her - alone. Smashing. And genuinely truthful.

My hysterical week in NY began down at Joes Pub with Judy Kuhn singing Laura Nyro. Talk about taking you back. Nyro would have been 60 this month and Kuhn sang her gritty, unexpected, achingly beautiful songs like they could change the world all over again. Backed by a ferociously feisty band squeezed optimistically on to the tiny stage, this wasn't so much a gig as a shameless album promotion. Did we care? Not a bit. That album - "Serious Playground" - is just out from the enterprising Ghostlight label and reminds us that the Kuhn voice is every bit as individual as the songs. When will Metropolis be forgotten? When will she return to the UK?

Well, not for a while because having created the role of Cosette in the Original Broadway Cast of Les Miz she's back in the show as Fantine, the role I always thought she was much more natural casting for. And she dreams the dream like no time has gone by. Who knows, in a few years the voice may have marinated sufficiently for her to have a crack at her first Jean Valjean. He, at the moment, is our very own John Owen-Jones and he's surely the best yet. He even out-breathes Colm Wilkinson spinning the eternal reaches of his head voice to wonderful effect in the gorgeous "Bring Him Home". The indestructibility of the show is still in part a testament to Trevor Nunn whose stunningly on-the-money production still delivers in spades. Not since the original production of Oliver has a director made more of a revolve. The image of the mortally wounded student revolutionary Enjolras slowly revealed hanging from the barricades draped in the red flag of socialism is one of the most iconic of modern musical theatre. That the show is so well maintained (and packed at a Wednesday matinee) is a tribute, too, to Cameron Mackintosh.

Off then to the Eugene O'Neill Theatre to see what all the fuss surrounding Spring Awakening is all about. A musical of Frank Wedekind's once-banned play of pubescent sexual awakening? You'd better believe it - and a highly original one at that. Imagine a group of impressionable teens in 19th century Germany. The place, a boarding school. Period clothes, period manners. Frigid atmosphere. But the hormones are raging and before you can say 'cold shower' hand-mikes are whipped out of inner pockets and the message is - arousal rocks. Great cast, quirky, original score from Steven Sater (book and lyrics) and Duncan Sheik (music). And the first masturbation song since Hair - but this time with visuals.

Curtains - a backstage murder mystery (and why not?) - was one of the shows the late lamented Fred Ebb was working on when he died. His wit is all over it - and so, too, that of Rupert Holmes (he of The Mystery of Edwin Drood - a favourite show of mine) who wrote the book. It's froth, but it's smart froth with one liners strewn about as readily as red herrings. Not a great Kander and Ebb score (and we came to expect great from them) but unmistakably theirs and not nearly as forgettable as some commentators have made out. Fun, too, to have Tony winner David Hyde Pierce deftly throwing material away as surely as the indomitable Debra Monk (the living reincarnation of Ethel Merman) was whacking it out to the back of the gallery.

Elements of Curtains' slapstick finds its way into the new Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens musical The Glorious Ones now playing at the Lincoln Center. Check out my online interview for further insights into this talented duo's work on this and other shows. The Glorious Ones traces the humble origins, the high and mainly low comedy of commedia dell'arte whose legacy of laughter has resounded from the 16th century to the present day. We see the beginnings of familiar characters, real and imagined; we share their dreams, their personal intrigues, their highs and lows and hopes for immortality. Ahrens' book (like all her work) is elegant, Flaherty's music among his most lyrical with an acoustic sounding band beguiling the narrative forward. You know when you leave a new show eager to hear the album? This is one such score. And one song - which Flaherty reckons could be his best yet - "I Was Here" - wholeheartedly delivered by Marc Kurdisch - tugs gloriously at all our aspirations in whatever field we have chosen.

So here I am, back in Blighty, shaken and stirred and wondering why we in London can't maintain such a healthy diet of new musical theatre work. A few years ago Broadway had become merely a repository for British blockbusters like Les Miz and Phantom. Now it's alive with the sound of new music, new talent, new shows. Why? Because I reckon Broadway and Off Broadway realised that if they didn't encourage the burgeoning talent of the here and now that one day there would be no legacy to keep the great Broadway tradition alive. Admittedly the catchment area is larger in New York and its surrounding areas, but people's appetite for theatre is simply greedier than it is in London. It's inconceivable to come into midtown Manhattan and not go to the theatre. How do we get that to happen in London?

(c) Edward Seckerson 2007

Jeff Sweet : On a new book about Gershwin

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 20:05:46 +0100

By Jeffrey Sweet

Wilfrid Sheed argues the primacy of George Gershwin and Irving Berlin in his book, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty. His subject is the group of songwriters who wrote the bulk of the great American song catalogue, most of them doing their magic within the framework of musicals for Broadway and Hollywood.

Though every now and then Sheed lapses into stylistic flourishes that makes me wish an editor had weighed in a little more aggressively, I’m relishing House. What particularly impresses me is the amount of space he gives to Gershwin’s generosity to and enthusiasm for other writers.

This is something of which I’d heard little before. His ego and confidence were legendary, as were his appetites for sports, painting and women. But what Sheed makes a particular point of is how excited Gershwin would get about the writing of others. He reportedly put a lot of energy into promoting and supporting the writing of newcomers and complimenting the work of those he would have had a right to view as competitors.

Gershwin seemed to see the creation of new American songs as a joint mission of which he had the good fortune to be a point man. He would grab writers new to him and pull them into cabs to personally introduce them to publishers. He surprised one struggling writer with the gift of a piano. And time and again he is quoted praising the work of others, not just complimenting but viewing a great new song as a challenge to him to try to match or build on. One rarely hears the word “sportsmanship” in reference to songwriters, but that’s a recurring image in Sheed’s portrait of Gershwin. He’s the guy who appreciated another person’s best game, even if he (rarely) was outplayed.

I’m glad to say that this spirit is alive and well today. I know one top-rank theatre composer who has dipped his hand into his pocket more than once to pay the rent of a lesser-known composer whose music he admires. Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, through their work with the Dramatists Guild’s education program, have mentored a small army of younger musical theatre writers. I once was surprised to see Stephen Sondheim show up at a one-act musical I had written that was produced off-off-Broadway. After the performance, he took me to lunch and gently but with great firmness disabused me of some of the rhymes I thought I’d gotten away with.

Lehman Engel, who created the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop that trained many of the composers, lyricists and book writers who went on to write several of the major musicals of the last forty years, once referred to those of us who were lucky enough to study with him as his children. Most of us were flattered to be thought of in this light. But it leads me to speculate that a lot of established musical theatre writers – more than a few gay – might indeed view the younger talents whom they encourage, mentor, lend money to and occasionally reprimand as filling the place that those with other more traditional family lives fill with biological children.

Are there some mean, competitive SOB’s out there? Sure. But most of the writers I know are fans of each other and get particular satisfaction out of doing what they can to make sure that when the time comes for them to leave the stage, they will have done their part to see that the good work goes on.

Edward Seckerson : An Audience with Edna

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:52:00 +0100

A wet Tuesday lunchtime. London traffic at a standstill. You'd think we'd be used to the rain by now. I am seated, microphone at the ready, my colleagues Tommy Pearson and Thomas O'Connor in attendance, in the palatial (only joking) reception area of the No.1 dressing room (actually it's No.12) at the Shaftesbury Theatre. A rack full of tasteless glamour frocks tell you that this Edna is no Dame - not in any sense. Actually, she's a he and "he" (as if you haven't guessed already) is Michael Ball. He's never late, but he is today and it's stressing him out. A series of phone calls from his car relay to his assistant Andrew when he's moving and when he's not. Right now he's gridlocked outside the Connaught Hotel. It's going to be at least 15 minutes. Andrew is entertaining: we swop Betty Buckley stories. Now there's a dame. Isn't Sunset Boulevard Lloyd Webber's best score? Damn right it is.

Michael is at Goodge St. now. And fretting. 'It's alright sweetie', says Andrew, 'They don't need you on stage until 2 for sound checks. So no make-up. We just need to pop a wig on you and we're set.' So reassuring. 'Doesn't Michael look pretty in the photos', asks Andrew. Er, gorgeous, I reply.

Whereupon he's through the back entrance of the dressing room, a little damp but otherwise his usual engaging self. Hugs all round. We've done this before, we'll do it again.... The microphone's live now and it's just like it always is - like old times. Hairspray, Sondheim, Sweeney, English National and New York City Opera, the unspeakable (but we still do) Kismet, the new Bacharach album, Dusty Springfield, farewell juvenile leads, hello drag. And I get to know his bra size...

Hear Ed's interview with Michael Ball HERE.

Jeff Sweet : Songs for Cartoons

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 21:53:12 +0100

By Jeffrey Sweet

A friend has engaged me to write a nightclub act for a young singer he admires. Rather than do the usual autobiographic stuff – “I was born in a small town but always wanted to conquer Broadway, etc.” – we’ve decided to organize her act around songs that were introduced in cartoons. And just to make it a little tough on ourselves, we’re going to allow only a couple from Disney films.

Some major songwriters composed for animated features and shorts. Hoagy Carmeichal and Frank Loesser wrote the beguiling, “Couple in the Castle” for Hoppity Goes to Town. Before they wrote Funny Girl together, Jule Styne and Bob Merrill collaborated on a TV special called Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol which featured one of Styne’s most elegant melodies, “Winter Was Warm.” (Victoria Clark sings it on the CD, Jule Styne in Hollywood.) Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, years after The Wizard of Oz, came to the aid of Judy Garland by supplying the score for Gay Purr-ee, a story about cats in Paris. We’re planning on pairing their “Paris is a Lonely Town” with Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens’s “Paris Holds the Key to Your Heart” from the score for Anastasia.

One of the happiest discoveries has been of the work a composer named Sammy Timberg did for the brothers Fleisher, Max and Dave, who were Walt Disney’s principle competitors from the early Thirties into the Forties. In addition to providing the muscular underscoring for the stunning early Superman cartoons, Timberg wrote for Popeye and Betty Boop and their animated pals. Olive Oyl singing, “I Want a Clean-Shaven Man” and Betty singing, “Don’t Take Away My Boop-boop-de-doop” offer the sly pleasure of ironic innocence. At the moment, I’m thinking of opening the act with a Timberg that begins, “What can I do for you?/I’d do most anything you asked me to.” It was originally sung as a jaunty two-beat as Popeye drove a car into town. The attractive young lady I’m working with would slow it down a bit and invest it with implications clean-living Popeye never imagined.

Much of Timberg’s stuff is wonderfully catchy. If you’re looking for jaunty, toe-tapping melodies, filled with the sound of American optimism in the face of the Depression and war, I recommend a CD called "Boop-Oop-A-Dooin'," a collection of Timberg’s work for the Fleishers. It’s the musical equivalent of ginger ale, minus the burp.

Jeffrey Sweet is a playwright, journalist and teacher, probably best known for his play THE VALUE OF NAMES, the musical WHAT ABOUT LUV? (which played the Orange Tree many years ago), and a history of Chicago's Second City comedy troupe called SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY. A resident artist at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre, nine of his plays will soon appear in anthology published by Northwestern University Press.

Jeff Sweet : On Sid Caesar

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 08:40:55 +0100

By Jeffrey Sweet

Here’s why musical fans the world over should be grateful to Sid Caesar:

In the 1950s, beginning with Your Show of Shows, Sid Caesar starred in a series of TV programs. To write them, he hired the following people (among others) – Mel Brooks, Michael Stewart, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner and Joe Stein. Not that it was his intention, but Caesar recruited and, by the nature of the comedy he asked them to write, helped train this gang to dominate the writing of books for musicals for decades.

Between them, alumni of Caesar’s writing stable helped write The Producers, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Hello, Dolly!, Sweet Charity, Little Me, Bye, Bye Birdie, Mack and Mabel, Take Me Along, and Fiddler on the Roof. (Woody Allen only wrote one musical, and it was for the movies, but do you think I was going to leave him off the list?)

I have a theory. Much of Caesar’s shows involved parodying the theatre, films, opera, ballet and TV of the time. In order to parody with real acuity, you have to know how the original works are built. So while these guys were taking apart From Here to Eternity, Pagliacci and This is Your Life, they were learning valuable lessons about why these things work that they later drew on when they started creating their own projects.

This thought comes to mind because the author of the books of Take Me Along and Fiddler, the afore-mentioned Joe Stein, is being celebrated at the York Theatre [http://www.yorktheatre.org/] in a month-long series of staged readings of four of his other shows – Zorba, Enter Laughing, The Body Beautiful and The Baker’s Wife. Sunday, I saw Enter Laughing, which is based on his play of the same name, which in turn was based on the novel of the same name by fellow Caesar alumnus, Carl Reiner.

Enter Laughing belongs to the subset of projects created by Caesar’s writers about Jewish boys and show business. Whereas Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor, the Mel Brooks-produced film, My Favorite Year (which also became a musical) and the sitcom Carl Reiner created and co-starred in, The Dick Van Dyke Show, were all openly fictionalized versions of being on Caesar’s staff, Enter Laughing dramatizes an earlier stage. Its young hero, David, yearns to break free from the bonds of cautious family life, resist his destiny as a pharmacist and try his luck as (horrors) an actor.

Josh Grisetti was young David, his parents were played by the married lawyers from L.A. Law (and real-life married couple), Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry, Kaitlin Hopkins was a man-hungry actress and George S. Irving was her weary actor-manager father. Irving, in fact, had played this part on Broadway when the show was a flop under the title, Farewell 174th Street. One of the reasons it was a flop was that the young David was played by 45-year-old Robert Morse. To justify Morse playing a teenager, the producers persuaded Stein to frame it as a flashback. The critics at the time weren’t buying it, and sadly the show didn’t last long.

Director Stuart Ross proved it deserves better. Is it a missing masterpiece? Well, no, but it is funny and tuneful and it contains a pricelessly vulgar song in which David imagines he’s a movie star with a butler (played with great hauteur by Mr. Irving) who fears the master can’t respond to a call from Greta Garbo because he’s busy providing carnal entertainment to a long list of Thirties movie stars. (In a talk with the audience after the performance, young Grisetti confessed he hadn’t heard of most of them. Happily, enough of the audience were familiar with the references to stop the show. But then how can any song that invokes Anna Mae Wong not have a laugh or two?)

The proceedings were introduced, as ever, by the York’s artistic director, Jim Morgan. A few days earlier, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed in a talk at Columbia University that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Jim suggested that might be why there are no great Iranian musical comedies.

There’s also no evidence that Sid Caesar ever visited Iran.

(c) Jeffrey Sweet 2007
Jeffrey Sweet is a playwright, journalist and teacher, probably best known for his play THE VALUE OF NAMES, the musical WHAT ABOUT LUV? (which played the Orange Tree many years ago), and a history of Chicago's Second City comedy troupe called SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY. A resident artist at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre, nine of his plays will soon appear in anthology published by Northwestern University Press.

Jeff Sweet : Betty Comden & Adolph Green

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 14:54:12 +0100

By Jeffrey Sweet

When I was a high school kid living in Evanston, Illinois and dreaming of a life in New York, it was a New York that Betty Comden and Adolph Green helped invent. A New York filled with witty, literate people who wrote books and plays and songs and sang those songs with brio and lost their hearts in parks and penthouses and especially on neighborhood streets (where passing strangers were always available to be enlisted into an encouraging chorus). It was a New York accompanied by music by Leonard Bernstein or Jule Styne – jaunty, wistful and optimistic. It was a New York I imagined as I fell asleep listening to my portable Zenith record changer play stacks of LPs, among them recordings of Comden and Green shows – On the Town, Wonderful Town and Bells Are Ringing.
When I arrived in Manhattan for college, the real city didn’t quite match Comden and Green’s New York. (For one thing, strangers on the street resist forming spontaneous choruses, unless yelling something unprintable at a cab driver.) But there were always corners here that did live up to those images, and those were whatever corners Betty and Adolph happened to inhabit at the moment. I served on the Dramatists Guild Council with them for several years. The Guild is an organization dedicated to the interests of playwrights, composers and lyricists, and the Council and the officers meet once a month during the season to take up issues of copyright, contracts, censorship and education. Contrary to what some believe, Betty and Adolph weren’t married to each other (Adolph was married to Broadway star Phyllis Newman, who often appeared in Comden and Green shows), but one rarely saw one of them in public without the other, and they always sat together at Council meetings.
I got the impression that they loved being Comden and Green. Some writers are shy, reclusive or just (to be honest) downright rude. One approaches these warily or not at all. They don’t want to be complimented or to be told how much their work means to you. They like your applause in the theatre and appreciate nice words in the press, but actual contact with the public taxes their ability to maintain courtesy.
That wasn’t the case with Betty and Adolph. They loved to meet people who loved them. I remember a book fair held on Fifth Avenue. Applause Books had just issued an anthology called The New York Musicals of Comden and Green featuring three of their shows, and they sat happily in a booth, chatting with anyone and everyone who came by, signing title pages, telling anecdotes and looking a bit like honorary co-mayors of the street. And yes, they were delighted to hear about your high school’s production of Bells Are Ringing.
The robustness of their spirits couldn’t quite hide the frailty that age ultimately inflicted on them. I once set up a seminar on writing musicals for a convention of theatre journalists. Betty and Adolph were scheduled to appear along with John Weidman and Joseph Stein (writers respectively of Assassins and Fiddler on the Roof. The program was scheduled for the Circle in the Square Theatre on Broadway. What we had all forgotten was that one reaches that stage through a long series of steps down. The color drained from Betty’s face as she looked at those dozens of steps. She was of course given the option of demurring. But no, she insisted on slowly making her way down to the stage. She had the assistance of a friendly arm (now that I think of it, it may have been mine), but it was far from easy. She and Adolph found their chairs on the stage and caught their breath, the journalists took their places in the audience, and the two of them gave their usual spirited and delightful performance. The face that had been pinched with anxiety now glowed because she was where she was supposed to be – on a stage.
Here’s a story they told that day: At one point during the composition of the lyrics for On the Town they were worrying through the structure of a particular number. It occurred to one of them (they didn’t remember who) that the lyric they wanted to write should have the same pattern as “You Mustn’t Kick It Around,” a Rodgers and Hart song from Pal Joey which begins, “If my heart gets in your way/You musn’t kick it around.”
Betty (or maybe Adolph) said, “Why don’t we start writing this lyric as if it were to go to that tune?” And so they began writing, “Carried Away” like this: “I try hard to keep control/But I get carried away.” (Try singing that line on top of the Rodgers tune and you’ll see it fits.)
When they were finished, they gave the lyric to Leonard Bernstein to set to music. I asked her, “Did you tell him what tune you wrote it to?” “Oh no,” she said. They didn’t tell him the lyric was based on a pre-existent tune at all. They just gave him the lyric, and he set it. Needless to say, except for the structure, the music Bernstein wrote bore no relationship to the Rodgers tune. And a classic Bernstein-Comden-Green song was born.
After the program was over, the journalists didn’t see the difficulty of the climb back up those stairs. Reporters around the country posted stories about the session. The word “legendary” was in all of them that I read.
Another anecdote: Sometime in the Nineties, I arrive at an off-off-Broadway theatre to see a new musical and find Adolph in the lobby. We start talking about Marc Blitzstein. (Blitzstein was the composer-lyricist who wrote The Cradle Will Rock and the American adaptation of the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera that was an early off-Broadway hit.) I mention how much I love Blitzstein’s Regina, an opera based on Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. “Wonderful score,” says Adolph. “Too bad they never recorded it.” “Adolph,” I say, “they recorded it. I have a copy.” “No, Jeff,” he says, “if they had recorded it, I would have it.” I decide not to challenge him on this. As it happens, a few days later I’m in Princeton, New Jersey, and I stop by the Princeton Record Exchange, a store stocked thousands of old LPs. Looking through a bargain bin, I come across a mint-condition box set of Regina on three discs. Three bucks. At moments like this, you have to feel there’s a Higher Power, and that it has a sense of timing. Next day, I’m back in New York, and I phone Adolph. I tell him what I’ve located and that I’d like to find a time to get it to him. “Ooo,” he says, “what are you doing now?” And so I walk to the apartment overlooking Central Park West. His assistant meets me at the door and escorts me to a room filled from floor to ceiling with books and records. I present him with the recording. He presses his face to the cover (he’s nearly blind) to see the photo of Blitzstein sitting among the cast, holding the score of the opera. “What shall we start with?” he says. I suggest a number from the beginning of the third act called “Listen to the Rain.” He puts the record on. It is a song in which the handful of decent characters from Hellman’s tale sit on the front porch during a spring shower and sing of the cleansing power of rain. At one point, a bass begins a soaring, thrilling melody line to the words, “Consider the rain/The falling of gentle rain ...” And then I’m not hearing one voice but two. Adolph has begun to sing along. His voice isn’t as rich as the one on the record, but it is full of feeling. And I realize he is singing note-perfect from memory something he probably hasn’t heard in more than thirty years. Yipes.
The number ends. He shuts off the phonograph and turns to me.
“Marc was a friend,” he says. And he begins to talk of his early days when he and Betty and a radiant performer named Judy Holliday had a nightclub act that played in Greenwich Village under the name The Revuers. (Comden and Green later wrote Bells Are Ringing for Holliday.) Their frequent accompanist was a young man who used the name Lenny Amber who, under his real name, Leonard Bernstein, was responsible for bringing Comden and Green to Broadway as his collaborators on On the Town.
“We had terrific fans,” says Adolph. And he tells of the night when, after one of their performances, one of their fans – composer Aaron Copland – showed up at the club where they were appearing. Blitzstein was there, too. “Aaron says he has something he wants us to hear. A piece he’s just finished,” remembers Adolph. So the gang heads over to the nearby apartment of one of them (probably Copland’s, though Adolph wasn’t clear on this), Copland hands Blitzstein a sheef of music, and then the two of them take their places at two pianos and play the piano sketches of Copland’s newest ballet score, Billy the Kid.
“You know it?” Adolph asks me.
Know it? Bernstein’s recording of the score is one of the other records that was rarely far from my phonograph during my high school days. And I thought, not a bad deal – for three bucks I got a mental snapshot of New York culture at the height of its golden age.

The last time I saw Betty and Adolph together was their last public appearance as a team. Every year, the Dramatists Guild hosts a dinner to raise funds for programs and fellowships it sponsors. As part of this, they give out awards for career achievement. Naturally, Betty and Adolph won one. Rather than content themselves with giving acceptance speeches, they performed a piece of material they had written for the occasion. The number shows what would have happened if Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams hadn’t been protected by Guild contracts from having changes forced upon them by producers afraid of unhappy endings. The result? Willie is saved and Blanche goes on a swell cruise. At that point, Betty and Adolph probably couldn’t even see the audience, but they could certainly feel it. It was like watching plants bloom under grow lights. The audience cheered not just the material but the gallantry of the performance.

Adolph died first. A few days later, for the first time anybody could remember, Betty came to a Council meeting alone. She stood up to share one of her favorite memories. She and Adolph were playing some horrible nightclub in the early days of their career. The show was a disaster. No laughs, no applause, nothing. They finished the performance to dead silence. As they were heading backstage after this debacle, somebody out in the loathsome audience, probably out of a sense of irony, clapped two isolated claps. “Ah!” said Adolph brightly, “they want more!” And it was all Betty could do to keep him from returning to the stage.
Another story is well known, but worth repeating. Betty, Adolph, Phyllis and friends went to the movies to see something that turned out to be pompous and dreadful. At one point, the overwrought leading lady had this line: “Have you ever tasted death?” Adolph immediately shouted out, “I have. It tastes like chicken.”
That was the last time I saw Betty. I heard that occasionally friends came to visit her and sing her songs or discuss theatre, but I wasn’t part of that circle. She died November 23, 2006.

On Tuesday, September 18, the Majestic Theatre was the site of a special performance featuring a host of Broadway’s leading ladies singing songs by the team. Quite a line-up – Christine Ebersole, Karen Ziemba, Lucie Arnaz, Stephanie J. Block, Leslie Uggams, Liz and Ann Hampton Calloway, Beth Leavel, Lilias White, and Elaine Stritch, among others. (I won’t try to count how many Tony Awards they had between them.) Phyllis Newman performed a number from Subways Are For Sleeping about a Southern girl trying to manage the politics of an Atlantic City beauty contest. As the enthusiastic applause receded, she casually mentioned she had first done that piece 46 years ago. (She won the Tony Award, too.) Then she said that Betty wasn’t the only person who collaborated with Adolph, and she introduced her collaboration, daughter Amanda Green (a talented lyricist herself) who made a case for genes carrying along talent by knocking out “If,” a furious catalogue of romantic outrages committed by her now-dead lover. A clip of Betty and Adolph singing, “Carried Away” occupied the penultimate spot in the line-up. It was from a TV variety show of the Fifties. I had only known them in their later years, when Adolph had snowy white hair. Here he had long, dark hair that flopped back and forth as he threw himself into this song celebrating excess.
Finally, Barbara Cook came out and sang, without amplification, a song that the pair had introduced when World War II was still raging –

“Where has the time all gone to?
Haven’t done half the things we want to.
Oh well, we’ll catch up
Some other time.”

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR THE THEATRICAL PERIODICAL, DRAMATICS MAGAZINE. THANKS TO THEM FOR ALLOWING US TO REPRODUCE IT HERE.

(c) Jeffrey Sweet 2007

Jeffrey Sweet is a playwright, journalist and teacher, probably best known for his play THE VALUE OF NAMES, the musical WHAT ABOUT LUV? (which played the Orange Tree many years ago), and a history of Chicago's Second City comedy troupe called SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY. A resident artist at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre, nine of his plays will soon appear in anthology published by Northwestern University Press.

Sophie Mayer : ENOpen House for Sally Potter's Carmen

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 14:32:05 +0100

By Sophie Mayer

Carmen (Alice Coote) lost her voice. Escamillo (David Kempster) missed the dress rehearsal. First-time opera director Sally Potter thinks the art form is “a world of pointless epics played out for the rich. A big space for narrow minds. A dusty antique of a form. A dinosaur.” (Guardian, Sept 2007

Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?

Not only that, but this backstage gossip isn’t being whispered at the Ivy (or its operatic equivalent): it’s out in public, as part of the ENO’s experiment with new media and online community.

Created especially for Potter’s production of Carmen, the startlingly honest backstage access provided by the mini-site reflects the qualities and themes of the director’s work in and around film. In the 1970s, she was active as a performance artist, engaging audiences in public spaces such as Green Dragon Court and creating a number of shows that satirically explored opera, such as Death and the Maiden and Aida, moving through her celebrated, witty interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, to charting the progress of her most recent film YES around the world as the only established director to write a personal blog and answer forum posts. Potter’s work has emphatically demystified the processes of making art, creating points of access where you least expect them.

And backstage drama has been a subject of her work since the films she created for Richard Alston’s dance piece Combines (1972?), which showed dancers rehearsing and audiences arriving. There will be projections in Carmen as well, exposing the prevalence of video surveillance in contemporary Britain.

The connection between the gossipy, intensely surveillant world of opera and the political significance of surveillance is at the centre of Potter’s film The Man Who Cried (2000), in which Christina Ricci plays Suzie, a Jewish refugee in Paris at the outbreak of WWII. Suzie is engaged to sing in the chorus of an opera company whose attention-loving tenor, Dante Dominio (John Turturro), is a fascist. Everyone is watching everyone, and we get to see Potter’s parodic take on some of the classic operas – especially a ridiculous and chilling scene, after the invasion of Paris scares off both performers and audience, in which Dante is accompanied by a chorus of one: Suzie.

But as Potter told me in an interview, working in the medium and with the singers has given her a new respect for what opera can be. “What you have is you have a highly specialised area of skill that's highlighted in opera, and which the whole thing is a framework for, which is the powerful human voice – the power of the human voice. Opera singers work without amplification, in enormous spaces, and the technical demands, the musculature and the training is quite extraordinary.” Interview here.

Potter – who trained as a dancer in her twenties, and toured as a singer with jazz improvising groups – is no stranger to the discipline of performance. In The Tango Lesson (1997), she plays Sally, a film director feeling estranged by the movie business who takes up learning tango with celebrated tanguilero Pablo Veron; she even performs with him in a tango showcase in Paris, and conceives the idea for a film about a director learning tango from Veron…

Pablo, who “has God’s feet,” according to the Guardian, returns to his collaboration with Potter in Carmen, where he leads a shadow-chorus of dancers. Potter’s work is full of cross-linkages of this kind, whether it’s the opportunity to collaborate again with Veron, or the echo of her collaboration with Taraf de Haïdouks on The Man Who Cried in Carmen’s ‘gypsy’ themes. Part of the excitement of Carmen is wondering how the director who gave us Tilda Swinton gender-blending as Orlando will style the opera’s famously difficult sexual politics…

But part of what excites me is also Potter’s radical determination to engage with new media, with blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, as well as Facebook groups forming part of her embrace of the online community. Engaging with what’s possibly the stuffiest form of high art, Potter has made it determinedly inclusive – not least because you can jump on the Carmen talkboards and tell her what you think.

More information and tickets are available at HERE including information about Access All Arias, the discounted ticket scheme for under-30s.

Sophie Mayer is a postdoctoral fellow in the Screen Media and Cultures programmeat the University of Cambridge. She is currently completing a book on Sally Potter for Wallflower Press (autumn 2008) and a play for Playbox Theatre