The Morning Line
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THE MORNING LINE DATE: Monday, April 20, 2015 FROM: Michelle Farabaugh, Jennie Mamary Katelyn Fuentes, Cameron Draper PAGES: 24, including this page. April 19, 2015 Kenneth Branagh Starting London Theater Company By Roslyn Sulcas LONDON — Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. Kenneth Branagh, whose movie “Cinderella” opened last month, has formed his own theater company, and will put on a season of plays at the Garrick Theater in the West End here, starting in October. The Kenneth Branagh Theater Company, which will be resident at the Garrick for a year, will include Judi Dench, Rob Brydon and the “Cinderella” stars Richard Madden and Lily James, who will play the title roles in “Romeo and Juliet.” The season will open with Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” in October, featuring Ms. Dench as Paulina and Mr. Branagh as Leontes. Subsequent productions include Terence Rattigan’s rarely seen “Harlequinade,” a comedy about a theater company trying to perform “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Winter’s Tale.” Sean Foley, who will direct Francis Veber’s “The Painkiller,” and Rob Ashford, who will direct John Osborne’s “The Entertainer,” featuring Mr. Branagh, are part of the company’s creative team, as is Christopher Oram. Mr. Branagh told the BBC that “the idea of a theatrical home is very appealing to me,” but that he wanted to avoid “getting tied in or tied up for a very long period of time in a single place.” Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000 April 17, 2015 Cast of ‘Hamilton’ Pays Tribute to ‘A Chorus Line’ By Michael Paulson The hit Off Broadway musical “Hamilton” closed its Thursday night performance with an unusual number: “What I Did For Love” from “A Chorus Line.” The young actors of “Hamilton” celebrated the 40th anniversary of that earlier show by inviting the members of its original cast to watch “Hamilton” from the audience at the Public Theater, and then to join them onstage after a curtain call in which the “Hamilton” cast held up head shots, in a nod to a well-known “Chorus Line” image. And then, acknowledging the way “A Chorus Line” called attention to the struggles of aspiring musical theater singers and dancers, the “Hamilton” cast chose its ensemble members, rather than its stars, to sing the tribute number on the Newman Theater stage at the Public, where both shows had their premieres. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the writer and star of “Hamilton,” said in an interview that he has been a fan of “A Chorus Line” since assistant directing a production during his junior year at Hunter College High School. “I know every note of that show, because the shows you work on in high school stay in your DNA forever — I could do ‘Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love’ right now, because it’s just in there,” he said. “We wore out that original cast recording. So it means the world to me that we get to honor them — I can’t tell you what goes through your head when you’re a performer onstage and you know that some of the people who inspired you to be onstage are watching you. That’s a very heady feeling.” Priscilla Lopez, who was nominated for a Tony for her work in “A Chorus Line” said the reunion brought back many memories. “Whenever I hear ‘What I Did for Love,’ whether I’m singing it or anybody else is singing it, I just break down and cry,” she said, “because it just represents such a time in my life, a time that I would gladly live over and over and over again.” Ms. Lopez went on to win a Tony for “A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine,” and later costarred with Mr. Miranda in his musical “In the Heights.” “A Chorus Line” transferred from the Public to Broadway in 1975; “Hamilton” is scheduled to transfer from the Public to Broadway this summer. Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000 April 19, 2015 Review: ‘Fun Home’ at Circle in the Square Theater By Ben Brantley “Fun Home” knows where you live. Granted, it’s unlikely that many details of your childhood exactly resemble those of the narrator of this extraordinary musical, which pumps oxygenating fresh air into the cultural recycling center that is Broadway. Yet this impeccably shaded portrait of a girl and her father, which opened on Sunday night at the Circle in the Square Theater, occupies the place where we all grew up, and will never be able to leave. That’s the shifting landscape where our parents, whether living or dead, will always reign as the most familiar and elusive people we will ever encounter. Adapted from Alison Bechdel’s fine graphic novel of a memoir, with an incisive book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and heart-gripping music by Jeanine Tesori, “Fun Home” might be described as a universal detective story. Set in three ages of one woman’s life (embodied by three perfectly matched, first-rate actresses), it tries to solve the sort of classic mystery that keeps grown-ups in analysis for decades: Who are these strange people who made me? The focus of that question here is an especially knotty case. Meet Bruce (Michael Cerveris), who teaches high school English, restores old houses and runs a funeral home in a small Pennsylvania town. As the husband of Helen (Judy Kuhn) and a father of three, Bruce is as divided personally as he is professionally, a fastidious upholder of the perfect-family facade who picks up young men (all played by Joel Perez) on the down low. Sounds like the stuff of a pulpy Lifetime movie, doesn’t it, or of a choked-up, closure-seeking best seller? But while “Fun Home” is likely to keep you wet-eyed for much of its intermission-free 100 minutes, it is also wryly and compellingly cleareyed — or as cleareyed as hindsight allows, when it’s your own family you’re scrutinizing. The focus keeps changing in “Fun Home,” directed with vivid precision and haunting emotional ambiguity by Sam Gold, as do the time-stopping frames of the woman whose memory we inhabit. That’s Alison (Beth Malone), a 43-year-old graphic artist who is using her pen to draw her past into perspective. Or trying to. The objects she sees in the rearview mirror are both closer and farther away than they appear. She has two vital accomplices in this task: the child (Sydney Lucas) and the college student (Emily Skeggs) she once was. These earlier versions of Alison kept journals, trying to make sense of a world that felt slightly off- kilter for many reasons, including her own nascent attraction to other women. The adult Alison is seen peering over the shoulders (literally) of her former selves, wincing at what she was. She also conjures up the carefully restored, museumlike old house where she lived with her brothers (Zell Steele Morrow and Oscar Williams); the Oberlin College campus, where she fell in love with a fellow student named Joan (a spot-on Roberta Colindrez), and the lonely drawing desk where Alison works to give shape and substance to her ghosts. Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000 I can’t think of a recent musical — or play, for that matter — that has done a better job at finding theatrical expression for the wayward dynamics of remembering. That includes the now-you-see-now-you-don’t-aspect of David Zinn’s inspired in-the-round set, in which furniture materializes through trapdoors, as well as the ruthless clarity and sudden, obscuring dimness of Ben Stanton’s lighting. But most important is the music, a career high for Ms. Tesori (“Violet,” “Caroline, or Change”), which captures both the nagging persistence of memory and its frustrating insubstantiality, with leitmotifs that tease and shimmer. (John Clancy did the nuanced orchestrations.) The music is woven so intricately into Ms. Kron’s time-juggling script that you’ll find yourself hard pressed to recall what exactly was said and what was sung. Every member of the cast is fluent in this musical language, blessedly never pushing for effect. Not that there isn’t room for the occasional show-off number. How could it be otherwise when there are children on the stage? Mr. Morrow, Mr. Williams and Ms. Lucas present a showstopping, casket-riding commercial for Bruce’s funeral home that the Bechdel children whip up while hanging out in the mortuary. They are also invaluable participants in a later sequence that transforms Alison’s clan into a perfectly in-sync, finger-snapping musical group along the lines of the Partridge Family, that most wholesome of 1970s pop bands. These are the show’s only pastiche numbers, with Ms. Tesori using slick, prepackaged forms to suggest a child’s wistful longings for a tidy, happy existence that real life can never match. Otherwise, the score stays close to the fragile hearts and minds of its characters as they are. As befits a work that is both a coming out (on several levels) and a coming-of-age story, “Fun Home” features two exultant hymns of sexual awakening. They are performed with spirit and style by Ms. Skeggs (on Alison’s first night with Joan) and the incomparable Ms. Lucas (in a fabulous ode to a handsome delivery woman glimpsed in a coffee shop). And the always excellent Ms.