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When the CLO's "Peter Pan" opened last week, I was also away (see yesterday's journal entry), so Kate Luce Angell did the review honors.
But having interviewed Cathy Rigby for the preview and been subjected to her feisty, pint-pot practicality and charm -- not to mention that she's still a cutie at 50-something -- I wanted to watch her work. After all, as my preview noted, she's been playing Peter off and on for 35 years -- this is one of those famous life-time roles, like Yul's King of Siam and Carol's Dolly Levi.
She was worth the visit. I came late, thanks to the Pirates-Yankees crowd and a lightening-and-thunder downpour of Biblical intensity, but I was there in time to see her truculent Little Rascal appeal as she persuades Wendy to fly away to Neverland. Rigby makes a great boy, and there were several times when I felt just exactly the surge of parental concern that the show is designed to elicit,
Rigby also clearly enjoys the flying, which is, after all, what we come for. She does it with zest and an abundance of heedless derring-do, plus an aw-shucks self-assurance. The book of the musical doesn't have any of the deep melancholy that pervades several versions of the original James Barrie story (or certainly the James Barrie life), but whatever moments of regret or parental tenderness the show does express, Rigby zeroed in and harvested them all.
Last night I finally caught up with "The Odd Couple" at the Public Theater. Although I wrote the preview -- tellingly, an interview with artistic director Ted Pappas on why he had chosen such a familiar old warhorse to end the Public's season -- I was out of town when it opened, so the review was handled by Anna Rosenstein.
I was glad to see it, especially because of the acting, which is capable all around, especially by XX in the juicy little parts of the Pigeon Sisters. Several Pittsburgh actors did good work as the poker playing pals, and it was fun to see CMU grad John Scherer back at the Public where he once shined as Bertie in "By Jeeves," this time very funny as fussy Felix -- much funnier than Matthew Broderick was in the recent Broadway revival.
As Pappas said in the preview, it's amazing that this is the first time the Pubic has ever done Neil Simon, writer of some 30 Broadway shows and arguably the most popular American playwright of the past 50 years. It's long overdue.
On the other hand, there's a reason other Public artistic directors haven't done Simon: although undisputed commercial successes, many of his plays have little of the substance of art. Even when well-produced, as here, "Odd Couple" pretty well fits that description.
If Pappas had wanted mainly to redress the Public's neglect of Simon, there are a half-dozen other Simon plays that would better repay the efforts of a subsidized theater interested as much in art as entertainment. The BB trilogy ("Brighton Beach Memoirs," "Biloxi Blues" and "Broadway Bound"). "Lost in Yonkers," "Rumors" and maybe "Jake's Women" come immediately to mind. "Odd Couple" is a dependable laugh machine, and that's nothing to sneer at, but even this very capable production doesn't reveal any Chekhovian depths of character.
Or maybe it's just that it's been staged to death. A young theater friend who had never seen it before was astonished to hear how many of the jokes were familiar from TV sitcoms -- Simon influenced all the commercial comedy writers of a generation.
I hope it doesn't sound condescending to say that the Public's audience deserves something better. It's too good a company to put all this energy into something with so little payoff.
The Pittsburgh CLO has announced the casting of Michele Lee in the title role of its production of "Mame," running July 8-13 at the Benedum Center.
The Tony- and Emmy-nominated actress is probably best know for her role as Karen Mackenzie in the CBS series "Knots Landing" and star turns in the Broadway and film version of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," as well as the Disney classic "The Love Bug." Lee has starred in and produced numerous films for television.
Tickets for "Mame" start at $18.50 and are available online at pittsburghCLO.org, by calling 412-456-6666 or at the Box Office at Theater Square.
"My whole life flashed before my eyes," said Rob Marshall Saturday, May 10, at the William Penn in his remarks on accepting the Richard Rodgers Award for Excellence in Musical Theater.
Ditto, sort of. When I arrived in Pittsburgh in 1968 to teach in the Pitt English Dept., fresh out of grad school, one of the first people I met was a fellow fugitive from New England, Bob Marshall, and then Anne and their kids, Maura, Rob and Kathleen (to list them in order of age, Maura being older than her twin brother by a few minutes).
We hit it off, and not just because we shared the Red Sox. (But Bob and I did found the two-man Rico Petrocelli Fan Club of Western Pa., which got us on Myron Cope's talk show in 1975 when the Red Sox played that great World Series with the Reds.)
Although the Marshall kids are a couple of years older than ours, they all grew up together as we and a couple of other English Dept. families shared family weekends and holidays.
Pink Frolic: CMU's Barbara Anderson (left) and Judy Conte and Marta Habermann, bracket former CLO head Bill Thunhurst.
So there's a personal as well as Pittsburgh pleasure in seeing their success. Along, doubtless, with others at the William Penn, we felt pride in how gracious they were, how affirmative about growing up amid the academics and performing artists of Pittsburgh.
Of course the 53rd Pink Frolic Ball would have been fun even without the Marshalls as its centerpiece, what with getting dressed up, good food and drink, and then dancing. But with them, it was a trip down memory lane.
It started off with a small cocktail reception, which included lots of theater people -- CMU's Barbara Anderson, Judy Conte and Greg Lehane and Laurie Klatscher, former CLO heads Bill Thunhurst and Charlie Gray, the Playhouse's Jodi Welch and Ron Tassone, comedienne Barbara Russell, and many more.
Rob Marshall (right) with, from left, Barbara Russell, Jodi Welch and Ron Tassone.
After that, I had a brief window in which to interview Rob and Kathleen for PG Video. (You can watch that video here.)
Then into the maelstrom of the larger cocktail party, with the fun of the grab-bag pink boxes that are a Guild tradition.
Finally we all crammed into our seats in the William Penn ballroom for a 20-minute revue by a 10-performer ensemble of numbers associated with the many Marshall shows on Broadway and elsewhere.
Point Park grad and Playhouse and Public Theater veteran Daina Griffith was charismatic in "Maybe This Time." There were also three current Point Park students: Ahmad Simmons ("Too Darn Hot"), Brittany Carricato ("Wrong Note Rag") and Justin Peebles ("Le Jazz Hot").
From Carnegie Mellon came Zachary Berger ("Hey There") and Steffi Garrard ("Whatever Lola Wants"). The University of Michigan contributed Stephanie Maloney ("Unusual Way"), and Penn State, grad JD Daw ("Kiss of the Spider Woman").
And representing the CLO Academy were Kristin Serafini and Ted Stevenson ("Favorite Things" and "I Can Do That").
The whole was arranged and directed by Jason Coll and choreographed by Kiesha Lalama-White, with orchestrator JC Carter conducting the band in the balcony.
Larry Richert was the evening's emcee. I think it was either he or the CLO's Van Kaplan (I was too surprised to take note) who introduced the evening's surprise guest, Harry Connick Jr.
As Kathleen said later, it really was a surprise: hearing it was someone who'd worked with her on "The Pajama Game," she ran through some possibilities in her mind without ever expecting it would be the star.
"Rob, I'm still waiting for the call for 'Nine'" (the movie musical Rob's about to direct), Connick joked from the podium.
He thanked Kathleen for taking on "Pajama Game" because it "saved us a lot of money," the implication being that she took less than a full director's salary. And he joked that she'd actually gotten him to dance, so that "sometimes I feel I don't even have to speak, I just move."
In the video tribute the CLO produced and showed, there were pictures of Rob and Kathleen as teenagers (I admit I provided those to CLO) and one of the two of them with sister Maura as Von Trapp children in the CLO's 1973 "Sound of Music."
Accepting her Rodgers Award, a handsome, engraved crystal bowl, Kathleen called the evening "a combination of 'This Is Your Life,' 'Queen for a Day' and, with Harry Connick Jr. here, a Friars' roast."
Kathleen said she and Rob were "so happy to be the home-town kids," and recognized some former teachers and other early mentors present.
She recalled that both of them received their Equity cards at CLO, but she traced her and Rob's love of musical theater back to doing Gilbert & Sullivan at Falk School in the fifth or sixth grade.
And "most of us who love musical theater probably fell in love with it at a Rodgers and Hammerstein show," she said, in tribute to the namesake of the award, which was presented to them (as is traditional) by Rodgers' daughter, Mary Rodgers Guettel.
Rob remembered having been a performer at a Richard Rodgers Award gala in the 1980s, wearing a tux "with a pink tie and cummerbund."
He mentioned the inspiration provided by their childhood idol, Lenora Nemetz, who, in the following summer at the CLO, when they were in "The King and I," would "slip us into dance rehearsals to watch."
But "it's time to retire those pictures of the 'Sound of Music' with the chubby boy in the knee-highs," he said.
An oddity about Connick's appearance is that I'd just written about him in connection with the Rodgers Award, in last Thursday's In the Wings column. That was only because it was just announced Kathleen is doing a newly devised Gershwin musical with him in the fall, but the CLO naturally feared for a moment that the news he was coming had slipped out.
Surprise guest Harry Connick Jr. (left) with Lauren Elson Bartholomae, Meghan Rawson LeBeau, Rob Marshall and (sitting) Kathleen Marshall.
Their care to keep it quiet even had him skulking unobserved around the hotel that afternoon and then sitting way off to one side before he was announced./p>
So much for the ceremonial part of the evening.
For me, the rest of it is a happy blur of dancing, laughing and a sip of wine or two.
It ended up with a group of us -- the awardees, Maura, Bob, Anne, Connick and several of us old (in either sense) friends -- sitting around laughing.
As the song says, it's "nice work if you can get it."
Sunday, May 4, last day
The PG group left in the morning, and it may not shock you to hear I slept in and missed saying goodbye -- forgivable, perhaps, because I knew they were in good hands with Paul and Jackie. I think most would agree it was a good trip, with variety in the shows we saw and some appealing extras. As a bonus, we pretty much dodged the rain that irregularly threatened daily, throughout the trip.
Country Laine Mazza, Broadway gypsy and swing in "Cry-Baby," takes care of the autograph hounds.
Then I dove into more writing -- on this journal, mainly, but also the upcoming Weekend cover on Anthony Chisholm, featured actor of four of August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle plays in New York and now about to do "Two Trains Running" in Pittsburgh.
Just in time I cleared out of my room, checked my bags and sprinted down the block to the Marriott Marquis Theatre to see "Cry-Baby." Like "Hairspray" (with which it shares key creators), it's a musical comedy stage adaptation of a John Waters film about rebellious youth in mid-century Baltimore. The reviews were pretty dismissive -- not that I read the reviews when I'm soon going to review that show myself, but you hear about them anyway -- which as usual predisposed me to find the reviews wrong, as I did for a while.
In plot, "Cry-Baby" is really more like "Grease," with its good-girl-attracted-to-renegade (and of course renegade-attracted-to-good-girl -- ain't Nature grand?). Enough off the off-the-wall, subversive Waters spirit seeps through to keep it surprising for a while, but gradually it turns predictable, and along the way you realize that most of the characters are pretty cardboard and aren't going to deepen or develop.
Courtney Mazza, lovely as ever.
It has sprightly early rock 'n' roll music, however. I'm a sucker for that sweet, bouncy sound from my youth.
There, that's a thumbnail review. I wonder if I'll find more to say when I come to write a review proper?
It's pretty rare to go to a Broadway musical without finding Pittsburghers in the cast, and "Cry-Baby" is no exception. To start, the bouncy, parodic choreography is by Point Park's Tony-winning Rob Ashford. In the featured quartet of straight, white-bread guys who are the villains of the piece, there's Peter Matthew Smith, a Quaker Valley and Point Park grad, also familiar from Pittsburgh Musical Theater. And cast as an invaluable swing is one of my favorite Pittsburgh talents, Courtney Laine Mazza, whom I recall seeing win a Kelly Award as a CAPA freshman (I think it was).
(Click here for a 2000 interview with Courtney and Sarrah Strimel, when both were 18-year-olds in the CLO ensemble.)
She performed that day, so I waited patiently at the stage door amid the autograph hounds with their armloads of posters and programs, to chat for a while. She said it was the fourth "track" she's done already -- a reminder that understudying is on the whole harder work than starring, since you need to know so many different parts and you find yourself dancing with yourself, as it were, playing a role that interacts with a role you just played. Talk about your out-of-body-experiences!
"Nobdy knows how hard it is to swing," she said. But she's also assistant dance captain, so although she has many more years of prime performing time ahead of her, maybe she'll also move into a creative role, as such Pittsburghers as Rob and Kathleen Marshall, Jeff Calhoun and Rob Ashford have done before her.
And now back to Pittsburgh to digest all this and continue writing reviews.
If you're interested in the Post-Gazette theater trips, whether to Broadway, London or the Canadian festivals, check out the advance schedule you can find by scrolling down the right column at www.post-gazette.com/theater. You can also call Gulliver's Travels, 412-441-3131, and ask to be put on the mailing list for those trip announcements that interest you.
Finally caught up on some sleep, woke to do some online research on what had taken me to the NYPL, then dashed back there to arrange for some images to be sent. (Not to make a mystery of this: it's about the history of my small town in R.I.)
Outside the 21 Club, with its jockey motif.
Then I raced up to 48th St. with about a minute to spare to see "Boeing Boeing" -- yes, again. It opens on Monday, and they just started letting critics see it Thursday. So when the PG group went Wednesday, it wasn't yet open for review. I went anyway, but they told me I had to come back and review it later, so I did. Obviously I wouldn't have gone again if I hadn't liked what I saw, but I did, so I did, and I laughed just as much. I have no idea what the New York critics will say -- I rather fear they may condescend to it, since it is, after all, "just" a farce -- but there's no question it's an audience-pleaser. It sure pleased me.
The really distinctive performance is Mark Rylance's, but the others do good, strenuous work. Christine Baranski is an audience favorite from the start, and she and Bradley Whitford get entrance applause. Rylance gets only a smattering, since he's not known on Broadway, but by the end of the show, everyone knows he's been the heart of the comedy.
In the wine cellar at 21 (actually under No. 19), some bottles are reserved for favorite clients or the faous: spot the Liz Taylor vintage.
Seeing it for a second time in just four days, the main difference was Whitford, who was doing much more: he'd really settled in and started to expand. He's a fine stage actor. Well, maybe I just watched him more this time. I'll think about it.
The ShowPlane's farewell dinner was at 21, a restaurant with a comfortable present but also a sparkling past. I remember my parents' talk of having eaten there in the '40s, and I'm sure my father had been drinking there before that. On this visit Paul and Jackie arranged an extra treat, a visit to the Prohibition wine cellar, built underneath the adjacent No. 19 and hidden behind a giant, 5,000 pound steel and concrete door disguised as part of the cellar wall, so no crusading enforcement cops would bust through it.
The legend is that then-mayor Jimmy Walker liked to drink at 21, so once during a raid he hid out in the cellar under No. 19 and called to have the federal agents' cars ticketed.
Oenophile Paul Busang considers slipping a few bottles under his jacket.
Now, they say the cellar holds about 27,000 bottles. Amid them, there's a cozy dining room that seats up to 21 (of course). You can book it for a multi-course, five-wine dinner for just $495 per -- or you can settle for a 3-course, 2-wine luncheon that'll set everyone back only $120.
While we were eating upstairs, the Kentucky Derby was run amid some intense rooting. With all the racing decor, it felt appropriate, but what a sad end result it proved to have.
And then on to one of the main attractions of the week, the fine "South Pacific" at Lincoln Center, which is all cluttered up outside with construction work. But there was nothing wrong inside the Beaumont, where the delicious Kelli O'Hara is partnered with the matinee-idol looks and sumptuous baritone of Brazlian/Polish opera star Paulo Szot.
This one will be fun to write about, not the least because, amid all the pleasures of melody and romance, "South Pacific" also has a serious story -- surprisingly so for a popular art form in 1949.
Laughter all afternoon and laughter plus sumptuous melody, romance and a feeling heart at night. Not bad.
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