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. Kuhn, whose Helen is shaped by a resentment she can barely afford to express, gives full life to a lacerating 11 o’clock ballad of repressed emotions set free.

Much of the music, though, has the interrogative restlessness of thought in pursuit of certainty, and the ambivalent mix of anger and affection that pervades our relationships with our nearest and dearest. There’s a delicate dissonance in the multiple-part songs, which are all the more affecting for their implicit yearning for harmony.

Mr. Cerveris, an unforgettably fierce Sweeney Todd in John Doyle’s 2005 revival, rises to the challenge of the show’s toughest role. Bruce isn’t just a man with a double life, but a character shaped with love and exasperation, recrimination and guilt by Alison’s recollection of him. As played by Mr. Cerveris, he is both irresistible and forbidding, warmly accessible and icily opaque.

“A family tragicomic” is the subtitle of the book by Ms. Bechdel on which this show is based. And it’s hard to strike the right balance in bringing that oxymoronic quality to the stage. I fell hard for “Fun Home” when I first saw it at the Public Theater, and had worried that this rare beauty might be damaged in its relocation.

But this production has only improved, not least because of its having to be reimagined for a theater-in-the- round space. (The Public production was on a proscenium stage.) The audience becomes, more than ever, part of the Bechdel family circle. For better or worse — and for me shows this cathartic are only for the better — we’re home.

FUN HOME

Music by Jeanine Tesori; book and lyrics by Lisa Kron; based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel; directed by Sam Gold; choreography by Danny Mefford; sets and costumes by David Zinn; lighting by Ben Stanton; sound by Kai Harada; orchestrations by John Clancy; music director, Chris Fenwick; music coordinator, Antoine Silverman; hair and wig design by Paul Huntley; production stage manager, Lisa Dawn Cave; production manager, Juniper Street Productions; company manager, Tracy Geltman; general manager, 321 Theatrical Management. A Public Theater production; Oskar Eustis, artistic director; Patrick Willingham, executive director; presented by Fox Theatricals, Barbara Whitman, Carole Shorenstein Hays, Tom Casserly, Paula Marie Black, Latitude Link, Terry Schnuck/Jack Lane, the Forstalls, Nathan Vernon, Mint Theatrical, Elizabeth Armstrong, Jam Theatricals, Delman Whitney and Kristin Caskey and Mike Isaacson. Continues at the Circle in the Square Theater, 235 West 50th Street, 212-239-6200, funhomebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

WITH: Michael Cerveris (Bruce), Judy Kuhn (Helen), Beth Malone (Alison), Sydney Lucas (Small Alison), Emily Skeggs (Middle Alison), Roberta Colindrez (Joan), Zell Steele Morrow (John), Joel Perez (Roy/Mark/Pete/Bobby Jeremy) and Oscar Williams (Christian).

April 19, 2015

Review: ‘The Tailor of Inverness,’ a Father-Son Tale at Brits Off Broadway

By Alexis Soloski

The writer and performer Matthew Zajac has a ghost story for you. And an adventure story and a detective story. It’s all the same story, which is apparently a true story and conveniently his own story — well, his and that of his father, Mateusz Zajac, who eventually settled in Inverness, Scotland, supporting his family with his sewing machine. What happens before that and also long after, as Matthew returns to Poland to spool back the lost threads of his father’s life, are the subjects of his impassioned but unfocused solo show, “The Tailor of Inverness,” the first entry in this season’s Brits Off Broadway festival.

The younger Mr. Zajac stands on a mostly bare set in a tiny theater at 59E59. He has a thin face and a thin body, his hair recedes in a widow’s peak and square-framed glasses sit on his slightly hawklike nose. When he wears those glasses and speaks in an accent that’s part Eastern European and part Scottish, he’s playing his father. When he takes them off and adopts quieter, more English tones, he’s playing himself. There’s also a violinist, Aidan O’Rourke, always onstage, who supplies sound effects and accompanies Mr. Zajac when he sings Polish folk songs.

What happened to his father during the Second World War is something of a mystery. According to various records and his own untrustworthy accounts, Mateusz fought for the Poles, he fought for the British, he fought for the Nazis, he fought for the Soviets. He was a German prisoner of war or maybe a Russian one. Perhaps he went to the Middle East. Perhaps not. Somehow he became a good Scot and a good father, but almost certainly by sacrificing a part of his past and possibly a part of himself.

Mr. Zajac never quite manages to sort through the tangled skeins of his father’s life, and for a long time, neither he nor the director, Ben Harrison, quite manages to sort out the skeins of his own play. It takes him a strangely long time to introduce and frame the story. And while he’s a fine actor, he’s more compelling when he relaxes into his mellower self than when he stirs himself up to play his excitable dad. (I say this advisedly. It’s dangerous to malign the man holding the needles.)

It’s never clear why exactly Mr. Zajac embarked on his quest or what he hoped to find. Near the end of the show, his father asks, “Does it matter what I am?” To us in the audience, maybe not. But to the son who has stitched together an ardent, deeply personal play around the question, it seems to matter enormously.

“The Tailor of Inverness” continues through May 3 at 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street; 212-279-4200, 59e59.org.

Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000

April 17, 2015

Review: ‘Revenge of the Popinjay’ at Dixon Place

By Alexis Soloski

The curtain speech at “Revenge of the Popinjay,” by Animal Parts at Dixon Place, sounds a bit different than usual. There’s little about cellphones or flash photography or exit routes. Instead, Anthony (Anthony Johnston), with his plaid shirt and ripped jeans and uniquely Canadian friendliness, shares the latest safety guidelines issued by the New York Police Department: “Try to be off the streets by nightfall. Do not go out alone. If you must leave your homes after dark, always travel with a same-sex buddy.”

It seems that a slayer known as Gaylord the Ripper, the Hetero Killer has been hacking the arms off straight people, then dumping their bodies into the East River. (I guess if the dismemberment doesn’t kill them, the pollution will.) Happily, Anthony acknowledges that Dixon Place, long a beacon of queer performance, “is probably one of the safest places we could be right now.”

But I’m not sure Dixon Place has ever seen a solo show quite like the queasy, creepy, chaotic “Revenge of the Popinjay,” which combines Theater of the Ridiculous comedy with confessional monologues, a slasher film aesthetic, an allegory of queer experience, a Beyoncé tribute and some rowdily pornographic rap music.

Assisted by the director and co-creator Nathan Schwartz, who sits onstage at a sound table, Mr. Johnston plays a version of himself, as well as several other characters. This Anthony is also an actor, also Canadian, also troubled by the recent death of an older sister. It all begins innocently enough, with Anthony offering some amusing speeches on self-help and the multiverse while gradually introducing the serial killer narrative.

But soon Mr. Johnston had shed his jeans. Then his shirt. Then his undershirt. I worried that he was cold. Then he covered himself in vomit and blood, and I had other things to worry about.

You can — and should — applaud the wildness of “Revenge of the Popinjay,” but the unrulier it grows, the more incoherent it gets. While watching a scene of sex and strangulation, I realized I had no idea who was murdering whom. Or why I ought to care. The play seems to conclude at least three times before it sputters to a woozy, nonsensical halt, the stage covered in blood, a small octopus dead on the floor.

“What?” the killer asks in the penultimate scene. “Too much?”

Definitely.

“Revenge of the Popinjay” continues through next Saturday at Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie Street, Lower East Side; 866-811-4111, dixonplace.org.

Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000

April 18, 2015

Jonathan Crombie, Actor Known as Romantic Lead in ‘Anne of Green Gables,’ Dies at 48

By Liam Stack

Jonathan Crombie, a Canadian actor who was known to a generation of fans as Gilbert Blythe in the mini-series “Anne of Green Gables,” died on Wednesday in New York City. He was 48.

The cause was a brain hemorrhage, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said.

Mr. Crombie rose to fame as a teenager when he was cast as the handsome and confident love interest in the 1985 Canadian television adaptation of “Anne of Green Gables,” Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 novel about an orphan (played by Megan Follows) growing up on Prince Edward Island. It was shown in the United States on PBS the next year.

The role made him a household name in Canada, and he reprised it in two sequels: “Anne of Avonlea” in 1987 and “Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story” in 2000.

“I think he was really proud of being Gilbert Blythe and was happy to answer any questions,” Mr. Crombie’s sister, Carrie Crombie, told the CBC. “He really enjoyed that series and was happy, very proud of it. We all were.”

Mr. Crombie appeared on numerous TV shows and in stage productions in both the United States and Canada. He made his Broadway debut in 2007 in the hit musical comedy “The Drowsy Chaperone.”

He was also well known in his home country as the son of David Crombie, who was mayor of Toronto from 1972 to 1978. After leaving the mayor’s office, his father represented the city in the Canadian Parliament and later held several cabinet positions.

“On behalf of the people of Toronto, I extend to the entire Crombie family my deepest sympathies on sudden death of actor Jonathan Crombie,” John Tory, the current mayor of Toronto, wrote in an update posted to Twitter.

Mr. Crombie was born in Toronto on Oct. 12, 1966. Survivors include his sister and his father.

Kevin Sullivan, the producer of “Anne of Green Gables,” told the CBC that Mr. Crombie was chosen as Gilbert at the age of 17 after the casting director saw him perform in a school play.

“I think for legions of young women around the world who fell in love with the ‘Anne of Green Gables’ films, Jonathan literally represented the quintessential boy next door, and there were literally thousands of women who wrote to him over the years who saw him as a perfect mate,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000