THE MORNING LINE
DATE: Monday, June 20, 2016
FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Clare Lockhart
PAGES: 16, including this page
8
June 19, 2016
C1
June 20, 2016
Review: In ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes,’ Mourning a Departed Lothario By Charles Isherwood
A more appropriate title for “Out of the Mouths of Babes,” a new play by Israel Horovitz that opened on Sunday at the Cherry Lane Theater, might be “Dead Man’s Harem.” In this improbable and eventually even fantastical comedy, enlivened by an excellent cast including Judith Ivey and Estelle Parsons, four women who have all been involved with the same man gather to mourn him in his Paris apartment.
First on the scene are Evelyn (Ms. Parsons) and Evvie (Ms. Ivey), who exchange polite conversation that becomes somewhat less polite when Evelyn learns that Evvie used to be called Snookie — a nickname bestowed by the man they both loved (whose name is never mentioned). It was Snookie who broke up Evelyn’s marriage to the man.
The portrait that emerges of this lifelong womanizer is not a very appealing one. He met all the women in his life, it appears — and there were many, including his first wife, the original Snookie, who killed herself after Evelyn came along — when they were students attending his literature classes at the Sorbonne. Serial predator, one might call him today. Plus: He refused to do dishes.
But apparently, and we must take it on faith, he was irresistible, at least to the young women dazzled by his intellect and sophistication. While Evelyn and Evvie are discussing their past, the name Janice crops up. It’s confusing, but apparently Janice slipped in when Evvie was over, but then Evvie came back.
Enter Janice (Angelina Fiordellisi), a decade younger than Evvie (who’s 68 to Evelyn’s 88). She is startled to learn that both Evelyn and Evvie received email invitations to the funeral from an unknown woman, and were even given plane tickets so they could fly from the United States. Janice had to read about her former husband’s death online, and invited herself.
She’s so upset by this information that she heads straight to a window and tries to jump out — echoing an act of years before, when she discovered her man was back with Evvie and tried to kill herself. Fortunately, this time, too, she fails, when Evelyn and Evvie pull her back from the brink. (The frequent jokes about suicide strike a rather sour note for a comedy.)
The mystery of Janice’s non-invitation is solved when a fourth woman enters the apartment the next day: Marie-Belle (Francesca Choy-Kee), bubbly and younger than Janice by two decades, who reveals that she was the last to marry the dead man. Warmly apologetic, she explains that she hadn’t realized Janice was still, er, available. (The implication is she thought Janice was dead.) More peculiarly, Marie-Belle matter-of-factly says that she and her husband remain in communication, causing three pairs of eyebrows to rise — not counting those in the audience.
Mr. Horovitz has written more than 70 plays, including “Park Your Car in Harvard Yard” (for which Ms. Ivey earned a Tony nomination in 1992) and “My Old Lady” (in which Ms. Parsons has appeared, and which Mr. Horovitz recently turned into a movie starring Maggie Smith). “Out of the Mouths of Babes” is not among the most substantial, though it offers roles that snugly fit all four actors.
Evelyn has the sharpest tongue, and Ms. Parsons, with her tart acerbity, makes the most of it. When Janice solemnly reflects that she has “never chosen men who make me happy,” Evelyn replies, “There’s possibly no such thing as men who make women happy.”
Earthy and funny, tilting between sympathy and smiling antagonism, Evelyn has moved far beyond the emotional tumult of her relationship with the dead man. So has Evvie, whom Ms. Ivey imbues with a wry warmth. (Rather bizarrely, Evvie, Evelyn and Janice all came from Boston; apparently the departed Lothario had a thing for New England women.) Evvie never married, preferring to sleep with married men, and eventually established a career writing for television.
Janice, on the other hand, still seems susceptible to the tug of old associations. As played with an amusing air of self-seriousness by Ms. Fiordellisi (who is also the artistic director of the Cherry Lane), Janice, who apparently has made several suicide attempts over the years, keeps sliding toward sadness. Evelyn and Evvie are never quite sure she won’t make another dash for the window.
And Ms. Choy-Kee brings an easy radiance to her performance as Marie-Belle, making her giggling suggestions of continued sexual relations with her dead husband more amusing than distasteful. She also imbues the character with a sweet, wide-eyed naïveté, so that when Marie-Belle reveals she invited the others not just for the funeral but also to stay and live with her in the apartment, you accept this odd idea as being sincere — as opposed to insane.
Although the acting, under Barnet Kellman’s direction, keeps things lively, and the growing camaraderie of the women suffuses the stage with a mild congeniality, “Out of the Mouths of Babes” lacks dramatic drive and has only an intermittent comic bite. To distract yourself from unhappy reflections on the actors’ superiority to their merely serviceable material, however, you can bask in (or sigh in envy at) the lovely set by Neil Patel, an airy loft whose high walls are covered from top to bottom in artwork.
A program insert identifies all of the artists, and they are oddly assorted, with an emphasis on paintings and photos by boldface names. I happened to know that Joel Grey was a gifted photographer and artist, but was surprised to learn that Rosie O’Donnell, Eve Plumb, Billy Dee Williams and Tina Louise also moonlighted as painters. “Out of the Mouths of Babes” may not be a major play, but it doubles as an unusual gallery show.
C5
June 20, 2016
Review: ‘I’ll Say She Is’ Revives a Marx Brothers Revue
By Neil Genzlinger
Some impersonations don’t need to be very precise. What comedian doesn’t have a lazy Mae West or Arnold Schwarzenegger in the kit bag that’s good for a quick, cheap laugh? But if you’re going to presume to resurrect the Marx Brothers in a full-length stage musical, your Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo had better be spot on.
The delightful “I’ll Say She Is” at the Connelly Theater clears that bar easily, transporting its audiences back to the days of bad puns and zany incongruities as only the Marx Brothers could deliver them. The show is a theatrical labor of love for Noah Diamond, who has spent years researching and trying to recreate “I’ll Say She Is,” the Marx Brothers’ first Broadway show.
That production, a revue with a smattering of plot, ran for more than 300 performances in 1924 and 1925 but was not preserved or later made into a movie. Mr. Diamond, working from a rehearsal outline, news accounts and other sources, has assembled an approximation of the original that is utterly convincing, and darned entertaining as well. (The original book and lyrics are credited to Will B. Johnstone; the music to Tom Johnstone.)
Mr. Diamond showed off a rough version of his efforts at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2014. Here, the resurrected show gets a full production by a cast of more than 20, directed by Amanda Sisk, who is married to Mr. Diamond and does a fine job of complementing his historical scholarship with a very Marx-like romp.
Mr. Diamond himself plays Groucho, and he might as well be Groucho. Matt Roper’s Chico and Seth Shelden’s Harpo are also meticulous, and Matt Walters completes the quartet with the less well-known Zeppo, the male romantic lead in the story but certainly not the center of attention.
What plot there is involves a society ingénue (Melody Jane) who finds her privileged life boring. The four Marxes come to her aid, leading her on a ludicrous tour of New York that includes scenes in Central Park, on Wall Street, in an opium den and, after things go awry, in a courtroom.
But never mind the story; this is a vaudeville hodgepodge at heart, with a little bit of everything thrown in: chorus line numbers, ballets, love songs, a harp solo for you-know-who. It’s all light as a feather, underscoring just how much tastes in humor have changed, even as it reminds us how brightly the Marx Brothers’ brand of lunacy once blazed.
22
June 19, 2016
Desmond Heeley, an ‘Alchemist’ of Theater Design, Dies at 85
By Bruce Weber
Desmond Heeley, a celebrated designer for the theater, the opera and the ballet, whose costumes dressed the likes of Laurence Olivier, Beverly Sills and Margot Fonteyn, and whose sets were used in major productions throughout the world, died on June 10 in Manhattan. He was 85.
The cause was cancer, said Philip Caggiano, a friend.
With a painterly eye for beauty and the resourcefulness to create the impression of elegance from the most mundane materials — a glittering chandelier for a 1993 production of “La Traviata” at the Lyric Opera of Chicago was made from plastic spoons — Mr. Heeley was a designer of both grandeur and witty panache.
His long career — on Broadway alone it covered more than half a century and three Tony Awards — began when he was a teenager in England, and early on he worked with the innovative director Peter Brook.
Mr. Heeley was a skilled painter and a hands-on designer who concerned himself with every detail of a production’s visual presentation, tinkering to the very end. Those who worked with him said he had a preternatural sense of what an audience sees; he was frequently described as an alchemist or magician because his constructions — seemingly unrefined on close examination — dazzled from a spectator’s perspective.
Santo Loquasto, the Tony Award-winning designer, said that a Heeley design “often had a beautiful lushness to it” and revealed “a sculptural way of viewing things.”
Duane Schuler, a lighting designer who was his frequent collaborator, recalled a twinkling tree that Mr. Heeley made from shards of old CDs, and a whole shimmering ocean suggested by clear plastic and clear tape.
“He had a great sense of color and proportion and a sense of how to find light,” Mr. Schuler said. “He’d build sets out of masking tape and water putty, and the texture would be rough, and up close they wouldn’t look like much; they were a mess. You’d take 20 steps back and it was magical.”
Mr. Heeley designed for Glyndebourne, the opera house in East Sussex, England, and La Scala in Milan. His work at the Metropolitan Opera included Bellini’s “Norma” (1970), which starred Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne; Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” (1978), with Ms. Sills; and Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” (1980), directed by Gian Carlo Menotti and starring Renata Scotto. He designed a “Brigadoon” and a “South Pacific” for New York City Opera and a “Camelot” for Broadway.
His ballet work included “The Merry Widow,” a dance adaptation of the operetta by Franz Lehar, for the Australian Ballet (which featured Margot Fonteyn in the title role when it appeared in New York City in 1976),
and a Tchaikovsky buffet: a “Sleeping Beauty” for the Stuttgart Ballet, a “Nutcracker” for the Houston Ballet, a “Theme and Variations” for American Ballet Theater.
Of Mr. Heeley’s three Tonys the first two were in 1968, for both costume and set design, for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” Tom Stoppard’s existential twist on “Hamlet.” It was the first time anyone won both those design awards for the same show.
His third Tony was for costume design in his last work on Broadway, the 2011 production of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” directed by and starring, as Lady Bracknell, Brian Bedford, whom Mr. Heeley dressed in spectacular Victorian splendor.
The two men had worked together many times at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, where their “Earnest” was first produced, and which was a longtime artistic home for both of them. Mr. Bedford died in January.
At Stratford, Mr. Heeley designed nearly 40 productions, beginning in 1957 with “Hamlet,” starring Christopher Plummer, and concluding with “Earnest” in 2009. His other shows there included “Cyrano de Bergerac” (1962), John Webster’s Jacobean drama “The Duchess of Malfi” (1971) — “The costumes by Desmond Heeley are both gorgeous and fantastic,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times — Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” (1995 and 1996), and Dion Boucicault’s 19th-century comedy “London Assurance” (2006).
Mr. Heeley was born in London on June 1, 1931, but details about his early life remain obscure.
He grew up near Stratford-upon-Avon and went to school on a small scholarship. A headmaster suggested he go to work at the nearby Shakespeare Memorial Theater (now the Royal Shakespeare Company). He aspired for a time to be a milliner; Mr. Brook recognized his aptitude and hired him to design costumes for a London production of Jean Anouilh’s “The Lark.”
“My formative years were at Royal Shakespeare Company,” Mr. Heeley said in 2011 in an interview with Light & Sound America, an entertainment technology magazine. “I was a handyman in the theater, because I could make things — the odd sculpture, the odd prop. I don’t think I was very good, but I was quick.”
In 1955 Mr. Heeley created the costumes for Mr. Brook’s landmark production of “Titus Andronicus,” at the time the most rarely performed of Shakespeare’s tragedies because of its explicit violence. Mr. Brook’s production — with Olivier as the title character, a Roman general, and Vivien Leigh as his daughter Lavinia, who is raped and mutilated — “reclaimed the play for the modern theater,” the critic Michael Billington wrote.
Its highly stylized design muted the gore — Lavinia’s wounds were depicted as red ribbons flowing from her mouth and her sleeves — and helped shift the play’s emphasis from the horrors of vengeance and bloodshed to the agony of fathomless? grief.
Mr. Heeley’s subsequent theater work in England included the original productions of Joe Orton’s “Loot” and Graham Greene’s “Carving a Statue,” which starred Ralph Richardson. His connections at the Shakespeare Theater — among them the designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch and the directors Tyrone Guthrie and Michael Langham, all of whom became significant figures in the early years of the Stratford festival — led to his work in Canada.
Mr. Heeley has no immediate survivors. His partner, Lance Mulcahy, a composer, died in 1998.
In an interview with Playbill.com in 2011, Mr. Heeley recalled his first brush with the theater, and perhaps the seeds of his life’s work.
“At the age of 5, I was taken to see a pantomime, which I think was called ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears,’” he said. “And for some reason, in it, there was a spooky toy shop, which I thought was rather good at 5, but out of this ceiling came this cardboard skeleton dancing about, and I can remember it plainly, and thinking, ‘That’s not very good. It’s just an old cardboard thing.’
“But at the same time, in the toy shop, there were these life-sized dolls in boxes, and do you know what? They came alive. I was amazed. These dolls were alive!”
B5 B5
June 20, 2016
22
June 16 – 29, 2016
E3
June 19, 2016
C15
June 19, 2016
BL-2
June 18, 2016