Jean Stapleton, Who Played Archie Bunker's
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THE MORNING LINE DATE: Monday, June 3, 2013 FROM: Michael Strassheim, Emily Meagher, Michelle Farabaugh Katelyn Levy, Lindsey Sullivan PAGES: 19, including this page Emma Stone Is Out of 'Cabaret' Revival - NYTimes.com MAY 30, 2013, 5:52 PM Emma Stone Is Out of ‘Cabaret’ Revival By PATRICK HEALY The movie actress Emma Stone (“The Amazing Spider-Man,” “The Help”) has pulled out of the planned Broadway revival of “Cabaret,” in which she was expected to make her Broadway debut in early 2014 as Sally Bowles opposite the Tony Award-winner Alan Cumming as the M.C. Ms. Stone’s publicist said on Thursday that the actress now has scheduling conflicts with a feature film that prevent her from joining the musical, which Roundabout Theater Company is planning to mount at one of its Broadway theaters, Studio 54. Ms. Stone’s withdrawal is fairly sudden: She was still attached to “Cabaret” as recently as last week, according to two theater producers who were not working on the revival but are familiar with plans for the show. A spokesman for Roundabout, meanwhile, confirmed for the first time on Thursday that the “Cabaret” revival was indeed in the works – it had yet to be officially announced – and that the Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes would stage the revival, with Rob Marshall as co-director and choreographer. The two men collaborated similarly on an earlier Roundabout revival of “Cabaret” that ran from 1998 to 2004. Mr. Cumming and Natasha Richardson won Tonys for their performances as the M.C. and Sally in that production. The theater spokesman, asked about Ms. Stone, said in a statement, “Roundabout is in the casting phase and exploring if the production can come together with the most ideal cast.” “Cabaret” originally opened on Broadway in 1966 and won the Tony for best musical and best score for the composer John Kander and the lyricist Fred Ebb, among several other awards. The show has a book by Joe Masteroff, based on writings by Christopher Isherwood. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/emma-stone-is-out-of-cabaret-revival/?pagewanted=print[6/3/2013 9:01:32 AM] A Paradise and a Prison - The New York Times June 2, 2013 THEATER REVIEW A Paradise and a Prison By BEN BRANTLEY When Kelli O’Hara sings the word “garden,” an arid landscape blossoms into lushness. This poetic note is sounded halfway through the first act of the generally prosy new musical “Far From Heaven,” which opened on Sunday night at Playwrights Horizons. And all your senses come to attention, the way they do on one of those days when an early, full-blown spring seems to have broken through winter without warning. Up to that point in this earnest musical adaptation of Todd Haynes’s 2002 film about Eisenhower-era repression, Ms. O’Hara has been giving a polished, efficient performance as Cathy Whitaker, a polished, efficient housewife in the Hartford of 1957. Cathy has interrupted her daily regimen of domestic duties to have a word with her new gardener, Raymond Deagan (Isaiah Johnson), who has returned a scarf she had lost. Cathy is polite and self-conscious, in the way white women of her time and class often were with the black people who worked for them. But as Raymond explains the care and feeding of plants in a song called “Sun and Shade,” Cathy joins in with a hesitant confession: “You see, one day, I too would like to garden.” And on that one word, “garden,” her hitherto clipped soprano expands into a voice that stretches and shimmers. The sense of hope, of the possibilities of a world with a wider view, that pulses in this voice breaks your heart. It’s one of those lovely moments that happens only in musicals or operas, when a single note lets you peek into the heart of a previously concealed self. Since “Far From Heaven” stars Ms. O’Hara, whose radiant interpretations have rejuvenated the heroines of Broadway classics like “The Pajama Game“ and “South Pacific,” there will be other such moments in this production. But there’s the nagging sense throughout that Ms. O’Hara, like the character she plays, is not being allowed to express her vast potential. Too often she seems confined to two dimensions; so do the imperfectly cast actors portraying the men in her life, Mr. Johnson as Raymond and Steven Pasquale as Cathy’s husband, Frank, a closeted homosexual. So, for that matter, does the show as a whole. “Far From Heaven” reunites three of the creators of the 2006 musical “Grey Gardens”: the songwriters Scott Frankel (music) and Michael Korie (lyrics) and the director Michael Greif. Though it suffered from some imbalances of tone, that show did wonders in finding the wounded humanity within two seemingly monstrous women, the flamboyantly eccentric real-life Edith Bouvier Beale and her rebellious daughter, known as Little Edie. The actresses playing them, Mary Louise Wilson and Christine Ebersole, both walked off with Tonys that season. Featuring a tight and serviceable book by the industrious Richard Greenberg (whose “Assembled Parties” is up for a Tony this year), “Far From Heaven” reverses the portrait-painting process that made much of “Grey Gardens” so moving. Instead of finding the quiet center of a bizarre and exhibitionistic heroine, Little Edie (Ms. Ebersole, in the second act), “Far From Heaven” seeks to elucidate the big and disturbing emotions http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/theater/reviews/far-from-heaven-at-playwrights-horizons.html?hpw&pagewanted=print[6/3/2013 9:04:37 AM] A Paradise and a Prison - The New York Times beneath Cathy’s shiny, conformist surface. The superb film that inspired this musical accomplished this through principally cinematic means. As conceived by Mr. Haynes, “Far From Heaven“ is an hommage to Douglas Sirk’s intense movie soap operas of the 1950s, works in which people seemed to think, breathe and talk in Technicolor. Mr. Haynes’s approach brought out the subtext in that style, while adhering to, and even enhancing, Sirk’s ruling aesthetic. When the camera moved in on the face of its Cathy, a wonderful Julianne Moore, the slightest flicker of that actress’s eyelid told you everything you needed to know about her interior life, especially with Elmer Bernstein’s dark purple soundtrack swelling in counterpoint. The film’s visual lavishness turned a picket-fence, compartmentalized, racially segregated America into something like a sinister fairy-tale forest; you could feel Cathy being smothered by its excesses. If the film gave the impression of swirling in enclosing circles, Mr. Greif’s production mostly follows a straight line. This geometry is echoed in Allen Moyer’s skeletal modular set, which relies on Peter Nigrini’s projections of mid-20th-century Better Homes and Gardens-style imagery to create atmosphere. Flatness is the dominant effect. Such a look may be appropriate to an analysis of lives ironed by rules and ritual into crisp uniformity. But as a visual concept, it comes across as too-obvious satire. So does the portrayal of gossiping stay-at-home wives and their hard-drinking executive husbands. These were clichés when Mr. Haynes made his movie 10 years ago, but his skewed angle made us see them freshly. In more recent years, the television series “Mad Men“ could be said to have achieved the same thing, if by different means. In contrast, the musical “Far From Heaven” is at its least interesting as a picture of a society. The songs here that dissect such sour 1950s caricatures as secretary-pinching bosses and cocktail-tippling matrons (which are given the tired punctuation of one drinker’s hiccups) are especially stale. (I did like Nancy Anderson, as Cathy’s sly best friend, for whom Mr. Frankel has written songs that give gorgeously insinuating form to the rhythms of everyday hypocrisy.) The eroding marriage of Cathy and Frank somehow never unsettles us as it needs to, even when he drunkenly humiliates her in public. Mr. Frankel has scored Frank’s parallel life as a gay man with jazzy film-noir dissonance, and Mr. Pasquale hits the jagged notes of self-loathing required. But even in anger, he projects an attenuated, almost ghostly presence, and when he finally walks out on Cathy, it doesn’t leave much of a vacuum. As the gardener for whom Cathy feels a forbidden affinity, Mr. Johnson also registers as slighter than he needs to. His Raymond is as neutrally genteel and well-spoken as a docent in a museum. (In one scene, set at an art exhibition, he opens Cathy’s eyes to the wonders of Miró.) The wistful, quietly absorbing duets of longing for Cathy and Raymond are lovely. That they don’t stay with you has to do with the lack of chemistry between them. Playing layers has never been Ms. O’Hara’s strength. What makes her one of the best performers in musicals today is her direct, unconditionally sincere way with a song. Here, when she’s doing Cathy in superficial housewife mode, she’s convincing, but not compelling. It’s only when Cathy discovers how she’s really feeling, and surprises herself as she expresses those feelings in http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/theater/reviews/far-from-heaven-at-playwrights-horizons.html?hpw&pagewanted=print[6/3/2013 9:04:37 AM] A Paradise and a Prison - The New York Times song, that we perceive the glories of which her character and Ms.