The Morning Line

THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Tuesday, January 22, 2013

FROM: Michael Strassheim, Emily Meagher, Michelle Farabaugh, Kelly Guiod

PAGES: 26, including this page

'Avenue Q' Puppets Help With Ad Campaign About H.I.V. - NYTimes.com

JANUARY 21, 2013, 3:00 PM ‘Avenue Q’ Puppets Help With Ad Campaign About H.I.V.

By PATRICK HEALY Three of the puppet characters from the saucy musical "Avenue Q," the Tony Award winner about the challenges of early adulthood, will star in a series of public service announcements on the Logo cable channel about H.I.V. and sexual behavior, the show's producers and the network announced Monday.

The spots, which will begin running Jan. 28 during the season premiere of "RuPaul's Drag Race," will cover topics like erasing the stigma of H.I.V., talking frankly about sex with partners and seeking treatment if diagnosed as H.I.V. positive. The six announcements will be rolled out through 2013 and feature the puppets Lucy the Slut, the closeted Rod and his hunky boyfriend, Ricky.

The scripts were written by Jeff Whitty, who received a Tony for the libretto for "Avenue Q," which also won the Tony for best musical in 2004. The show closed on Broadway in 2009 and is now running Off Broadway at New World Stages.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/avenue-q-puppets-help-with-ad-campaign-about-hiv/?pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:22:42 AM] Paula Vogel and Betty Buckley Lead List of Theater Hall of Fame Inductees - NYTimes.com

JANUARY 21, 2013, 2:13 PM Paula Vogel and Betty Buckley Lead List of Theater Hall of Fame Inductees

By PATRICK HEALY The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel ("How I Learned to Drive") and the Tony-winning actress Betty Buckley ("Cats") will be among the annual inductees to the Theater Hall of Fame at a ceremony on Jan. 28.

The organization, which recognizes lifetime achievement in American theater, is also honoring Trevor Nunn, the Tony-winning director of "Cats," "Les Misérables" and several other musicals; as well as the actor Sam Waterston ("Law & Order"); the playwright Christopher Durang ("Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike"); the Lincoln Center Theater artistic director Andre Bishop; the director Michael Kahn, who also leads the Shakespeare Theater Company of Washington, D.C.; and, posthumously, the costume designer Martin Pakledinaz.

The Tony-winning actress Tyne Daly will be the emcee of the 42nd annual ceremony, which will be held at Broadway's Gershwin Theater, where the plaques with the names of each year's honorees are hung.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/paula-vogel-and-betty-buckley-lead-list-of-theater-hall-of-fame-inductees/?pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:23:37 AM] Musical to Feature Stephen Schwartz Songs - NYTimes.com

January 20, 2013 Musical to Feature Stephen Schwartz Songs Compiled by ADAM W. KEPLER

A new compilation musical showcasing the catalog of the composer Stephen Schwartz, “Snapshots: A Musical Scrapbook,” is scheduled to have its premiere in the fall at the Norma Terris Theater in Chester, Conn., Goodspeed Musicals has announced. With a book by David Stern, the musical will feature over 20 songs by Mr. Schwartz, including compositions from “Wicked,” “Godspell” and “Pippin.” Some of the lyrics and orchestrations will be revised to match a new story that focuses on a married couple reliving memories captured in a box of photographs in their attic. No casting information was announced.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/theater/musical-to-feature-stephen-schwartz-songs.html?pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:28:07 AM] Revenge Comes in a Tight Embrace in a South African Tale of Infidelity - The New York Times

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January 21, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Revenge Comes in a Tight Embrace in a South African Tale of Infidelity

By BEN BRANTLEY

Sometimes a weighty tale is never more affecting than when it’s told lightly. “The Suit,” the wonderful touring production from the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, brims with a gentle effervescence and musicality that you associate with entertainments usually described, a bit dismissively, as charming.

Yet even as it draws you in like the gregarious host of an intimate party, this story of adultery in apartheid South Africa is quietly preparing to break your heart. By the time you leave the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where “The Suit” runs through Feb. 2, you may feel you’ve experienced devastation by enchantment. The sadness will linger, but so will an elating sense of this show’s enfolding magic.

Such complicated sorcery is all the more potent for its seeming simplicity, a paradox long associated with the great director Peter Brook, who created “The Suit” with his longtime collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne and the composer Frank Krawczyk. An ever-more-pared-down plainness has marked the path of Mr. Brook’s career, which stretches over more than six decades, embracing pinnacles like his acrobatic “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and his marathon “Mahabharata.”

Sometimes the results are austere to the point of starvation, as in his bare-bones 50-minute version of Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” several years ago. “The Suit” — which is based on a story by the South African writer Can Themba, and its stage adaptation by Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon — is unlikely to leave anyone feeling hungry. It arranges similarly basic theatrical elements — a cast of four performers and three musicians, some chairs and some clothing racks — into a world that brims with juicy, appetizing life.

It’s our awareness of the possibilities for sweetness within that life that lends “The Suit” much of its sting. Its fablelike story unfolds in Sophiatown, a poor but vital suburb of Johannesburg that flourished in the 1940s and ’50s as a center of black culture (especially music) and has since acquired mythic status in South African memory. “The home of truth, our place,” is how the show’s narrator (Jared McNeill) describes it. Within that world live a couple who, when we first see them, wrapped in each other’s arms in bed one rainy morning, would appear to be the very image of marital contentment: Philomen (William Nadylam) and Matilda (Nonhlanhla Kheswa). Both husband and wife deliver separate encomiums, Matilda in soaring song, to the beauty within their existence, despite its privation.

Their Eden collapses that same day. Philomen, having been tipped off by a friend, rushes home from work to find his wife in the arms of a lover (Rikki Henry, in one of many roles), who escapes through the bedroom

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/theater/reviews/the-suit-at-brooklyn-academy-of-music.html?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:24:36 AM] Revenge Comes in a Tight Embrace in a South African Tale of Infidelity - The New York Times

window in his underwear. His suit is left behind, to become the instrument of Philomen’s whimsical and cruel revenge upon his wife.

I won’t describe the forms that this revenge takes, except to say that the suit becomes an active participant in an unhappy ménage à trois. As Mr. Nadylam executes Philomen’s retribution, with a mix of sorrow and tight- lidded rage, you understand exactly why the narrator has told us earlier that this story could take place only in a land of repression. Like the apartheid-spawned violence and humiliation that the play’s characters trade frightened stories about, the suit casts an inescapable and blighting shadow on Philomen and Matilda’s private world.

This makes “The Suit” sound grim. It isn’t. This is partly a matter of the witty inventiveness of the production, lighted by Philippe Vialatte and designed by Oria Puppo, which creates an entire township from its small cast. (The fine, chameleon musicians — Arthur Astier, Raphael Chambouvet and David Dupuis — help fill out the roster of citizens.)

More important, time and again we feel the exultation that caged birds find in song. It is the great wish of Matilda (whom Ms. Kheswa presents as a ravishing blend of self-possession and perplexity) to become a singer. And when she performs at a women’s club, with the three male actors doing a jaunty backup, you may find tears in your eyes, because the sense of relief is so ecstatic. And because you know it can only be fleeting.

Conversely, when Mr. McNeill performs “Strange Fruit,” the song about lynching in the American South made famous by Billie Holiday, the purity of his voice and directness of his manner transform a ballad of destruction into an enduring victory for art. It’s a promise that though the music may end for Matilda and for Sophiatown — which would be razed soon after “The Suit” takes place — it never truly stops.

Everyone onstage is pretty close to perfect. Well, perhaps not the three additional cast members who are conscripted from the audience to join the show’s climactic party chez Philomen. I can say this because I was one on the night I saw “The Suit.” Normally such participation makes me cringe.

But it’s a testament to the seductive hold of this production that even onstage, amid performers I’d been watching from a comfortable distance, I could forget my embarrassment and focus on them. Up close the illusion remained so utterly intact that when I returned to my seat, I was grateful that I had managed, just barely, to keep myself from shedding tears in a spotlight.

The Suit

Based on “The Suit” by Can Themba, Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon; directed, adapted and music by Peter Brook, Marie-Hélène Estienne and Franck Krawczyk; lighting by Philippe Vialatte; sets and costumes by Oria Puppo; assistant director, Rikki Henry; stage managers, R. Michael Blanco and Thomas Becelewski. A Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord production, presented by Brooklyn Academy of Music, Alan H. Fishman, chairman; Karen Brooks Hopkins, president. At the Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn; (718) 636-4100, bam.org. Through Feb. 2. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.

WITH: Nonhlanhla Kheswa, Jared McNeill, William Nadylam and Rikki Henry.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/theater/reviews/the-suit-at-brooklyn-academy-of-music.html?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:24:36 AM] Just One Sale Away From Redemption - The New York Times

January 20, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Just One Sale Away From Redemption

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

A bright, encouraging smile almost never leaves the face of Crystal, the embattled heroine of the fine new drama “Bethany,” by Laura Marks, which opened on Sunday night at City Center. Portrayed by America Ferrera (“Ugly Betty”) with a warm poise that smoothly masks profound anxiety, Crystal cannot really afford to let doubt or vulnerability cloud her features. She’s a saleswoman, after all, and the key to selling is keeping up a shiny veneer of confidence, even when there’s a silent screech of desperation threatening to leap into your throat.

Ms. Marks’s trenchant, economical drama is surprisingly (dismayingly) rare among new American plays in the clear, compassionate attention it pays to the corrosive effects of the economic downturn on the battered middle class. In this expertly turned Women’s Project production, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, the focus is on the rough waters being negotiated by a single mother living in an unnamed exurb of a small American city.

As the play opens Crystal arrives with a small carry-on bag and a few essentials in her new home: a rather beaten-up-looking, recently foreclosed house that still at least has water and electricity. Crystal has no legal right to be there, so she turns on that welcoming smile when she discovers she’s not the only squatter. Gary (Tobias Segal), scruffy and possibly emotionally disturbed, has already moved into the bedroom upstairs.

Gary’s tendency to rant about the toxins of the “military-industrial complex” and about how the downfall of capitalism will lead to a new, nomadic culture would normally have a sensible young woman like Crystal sprinting for the nearest Comfort Inn. But Crystal has no money and nowhere to go, and more important a pressing need to establish some sort of convincingly stable domicile. A job loss led to Crystal’s becoming homeless, which in turn led to the placement of her daughter, Bethany, in foster care.

As played with twitchy, molelike menace by Mr. Segal, Gary definitely reeks of potential danger, but he seems friendly enough. He mostly sticks to himself and is perfectly willing to help out by posing as a plumber when Crystal receives a visit from the social worker (the fine Myra Lucretia Taylor) she hopes will help her get Bethany back. Aside from the false nature of her domestic situation, Crystal must also hide the dispiriting news she has just received: that her new job selling Saturns will soon be going away when the dealership closes. (Emily Ackerman brings some welcome, mordant humor to the play as Crystal’s dryly dour boss, Shannon.)

Ms. Marks, a recent graduate from the Juilliard playwriting program, draws a stark, increasingly disturbing picture of the vulnerability of single women (and single mothers) in an economy in which the threads of the safety net have frayed to the point of invisibility. Crystal’s enforced cohabitation with the unbalanced Gary is not the only way she finds herself uncomfortably dependent on, well, the kindness of strangers.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/theater/reviews/bethany-with-america-ferrera-at-city-center.html?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:26:14 AM] Just One Sale Away From Redemption - The New York Times

At work she is desperate to make one last sale, and she thinks she has found a solid buyer in Charlie (the excellent Ken Marks, the playwright’s husband), a motivational speaker who’s eyeing one of the higher-end models but can’t quite bring himself to sign on the dotted line. In monologues that make for grimly funny listening, Charlie gives us a taste of two of his spiels about achieving financial prosperity, offering comforting, specious platitudes like “the hardest part of making your dreams come true is simply believing that you deserve it.”

The smarmy pep talk, with its generous doses of magical thinking, isn’t the only dubious line of goods Charlie is peddling. Mr. Marks’s genial every-guy exterior hides something far more sinister. In perhaps the play’s most chilling scene, Charlie drives Crystal home after taking her to dinner ostensibly to discuss buying the car. Without quite making the terms of the transaction explicit, Charlie suggests that one of “the secret laws of prosperity,” as he puts it in his inspirational-speak, is the “law of compensation”: the quid pro quo.

As Crystal finds herself under increasing pressure from all sides, “Bethany” takes a turn toward the gothic in its depiction of the lengths to which this intelligent, well-meaning and morally centered woman will go to secure a chance at getting her daughter back. But there’s a sad, dark logic to even the most outlandish turns the story takes.

And Ms. Ferrera’s performance is beautifully modulated. Pushed to the edge but still determined to keep the pilot light of hope flickering in her increasingly darkened life, Crystal knows she must keep a firm grip on her emotional responses at every moment. This means burying her humane impulses when she feels her future is at stake, and even, at one point, keeping her wits about her — where’s that Formula 409? — after a brutal (and literal) fight for her life.

Without stepping over the line into moralizing — or editorializing — Ms. Marks’s disturbing, incisive drama suggests that the bruising exigencies of our depressed economy are scraping away at the surface civilities of American life, making it harder for people to heed their moral compasses. Self-reliance may be a celebrated American virtue, but “Bethany” reminds us that the distance between self-preservation and pure ruthlessness can be collapsed with alarming ease.

Bethany

By Laura Marks; directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch; sets by Lauren Helpern; costumes by Sarah J. Holden; lighting by Mark Barton; sound by Leon Rothenberg; dramaturgy by Megan E. Carter; fight direction by J. David Brimmer; production manager, Aduro Productions; production stage manager, Jess Johnston; associate producer, Lanie Zipoy; assistant director, Lydia Fort. Presented by Women’s Project Theater, under the direction of Julie Crosby and Lisa Fane. At the New York City Center Stage II, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan; (212) 581-1212, nycitycenter.org. Through Feb. 17. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Emily Ackerman (Shannon), America Ferrera (Crystal), Kristin Griffith (Patricia), Ken Marks (Charlie), Tobias Segal (Gary) and Myra Lucretia Taylor (Toni).

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/theater/reviews/bethany-with-america-ferrera-at-city-center.html?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:26:14 AM] Nourished by Language That Is Based on Touching - The New York Times

January 18, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Nourished by Language That Is Based on Touching

By BEN BRANTLEY

Take the opportunity to play with your food before you see “Not by Bread Alone,” a performance piece by the Nalagaat Theater of Israel. An optional preshow dinner is being offered in connection with this singular touring production, which runs in New York through Feb. 3. And the experience of that meal may come closer to admitting you to the world of this play’s performers than anything you will subsequently see onstage.

That’s because you can’t see at all in the blacked-out restaurant that has been set up in the basement of the Skirball Center at New York University, where this Tel Aviv-based troupe is in residence. Your waiters, who are blind, have the advantage here.

They lead you on a labyrinthine path to your seat, and gently help you find your place setting, your wine and water glasses, and your food, which is delicious. Because you will probably need to use your fingers, you become newly aware of the textures as well as the tastes of what you are eating. And the darkness that surrounds you acquires its own pulsing life.

The performers who appear in the show that follows — which is conducted upstairs on a lighted stage — all possess memorable and distinctively expressive faces. But it’s their hands you’re likely to focus on as they knead bread (to be baked in ovens onstage) and communicate with one another by touch. Their fingers are as assured as yours were faltering when you dined in the dark. Nalagaat, you should know, is a Hebrew word that means “please touch.”

All of the cast members in “Not By Bread Alone,” conceived and directed by Adina Tal, are both deaf and blind to varying degrees, some from birth. And the show is never stronger than when they depict, through language signed and spoken (there are English supertitles), the sensory content of their lives, in which touching and being touched assume paramount importance.

So do the senses of smell and taste. A wonderful monologue by Itzik Hanuna, who speaks with commanding intensity and novelistic detail, describes a lonely holiday in which smoking a cigarette becomes a transporting act of independence.

Performers recount their dreams of an existence with light and color. And their individual fantasies are acted out in vignettes, which often assume the style of the classic silent comedies of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, and sometimes descend into sticky mawkishness. (Fortunately, several of the actors are expert physical comedians.) Cloying accordion music is played; stilts, funny hats and other vaudevillian props are deployed; brightly patterned parasols are twirled.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/theater/reviews/not-by-bread-alone-at-the-nyu-skirball-center.html?pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:29:00 AM] Nourished by Language That Is Based on Touching - The New York Times

Much of this of course is designed to appeal to a seeing and hearing audience. The mise-en-scène sometimes feels like an ornately festooned bridge that never quite stretches to the interior shores of the lives lived by those onstage. It’s when you watch their hands at work to signal, prompt, applaud and translate for one another that you think that, just maybe, you’re starting to hear what they hear.

Not By Bread Alone

Conceived and directed by Adina Tal; music by Amnon Baaham; sets by Eithan Ronel; costumes by Dafna Grossman; lighting by Ori Rubinstein; translated by Elita Abayev, Talal Alziadna, Kyla Chaya Blumenfeld, Yoav Chorev and Neomi Avgail Elkayam; operations manager, Hagay Hashi Gilad Jakont; tour manager, Adva Oren; theater manager, Hofit Rachel Rauchberger; associate producers, Alexandra Rosenberg, Laura Bennegadi and David F. Schwartz. A Nalagaat Deaf-Blind Theater Ensemble production, Ms. Tal, artistic director; presented by N.Y.U. Skirball Center, L. Jay Oliva, executive producer; Michael Harrington, senior director; in association with Orin Wolf, Arktype/Thomas O. Kriegsmann, Howard and Janet Kagan, David Milch and Martin Karlinsky. At the N.Y.U. Skirball Center, 566 La Guardia Place, at Washington Square South, Greenwich Village; (212) 352-3101, nyuskirball.org. Through Feb. 3. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Genia Shatsky, Shoshana Segal, Igor Oshorov, Tzipora Malka, Bat Sheva Ravenseri, Yuri Oshorov, Marc Yarosky, Itzik Hanuna, Yuri Tevordovsky, Rafi Akua and Nurani Levy.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/theater/reviews/not-by-bread-alone-at-the-nyu-skirball-center.html?pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:29:00 AM] One Actor Chronicles His Peculiar Career, From School to Boat to Stage - The New York Times

January 21, 2013 THEATER REVIEW One Actor Chronicles His Peculiar Career, From School to Boat to Stage

By ERIC GRODE

Right from the start of his career James DeVita could perform Shakespeare with his hands tied behind his back.

Correction: At the start of his career Mr. DeVita was permitted to rehearse Shakespeare only with his hands tied behind his back. That’s how much trouble he had restraining his movements. The Long Island accent was another matter entirely.

“In Acting Shakespeare,” Mr. DeVita’s audience-friendly solo show, charts this good-natured actor as he lurches from college dropout to fishing-boat worker to inept auditioner to fixture of the Wisconsin theater scene, thanks in part to an inspiring 1984 trip to see Ian McKellen perform “Acting Shakespeare.” (The new play is described as “freely adapted” from the McKellen play.) Along the way he learns to downshift from Acting Shakespeare to simply acting Shakespeare, thanks in part to a “Henry IV, Part 1” director with some rope and some strong preferences.

This evolution is on display through the excerpts performed by Mr. DeVita, whose lantern-jawed, sunken-eyed charm would make him ideal as the sort of crime-show suspect — a doting uncle or maybe a soccer coach — whose last-minute confession would surprise exactly nobody. Emphatic but unfussy, his Shakespeare vignettes make up for in clarity what they lack in creativity. For every cannily chosen excerpt, particularly a “King John” soliloquy that Mr. DeVita connects with the death of Shakespeare’s young son, there’s an “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I,” and even a “To be or not to be.”

Mr. DeVita’s early goal was to become “the Gene Kelly of Shakespeare,” and he displays an analogous everyguy brio throughout “In Acting Shakespeare.” His frequent detours into biography, both Shakespeare’s and his own, are agreeable if more than a little glib. (Only once, when he describes the fear of shedding his accent and “letting go of what you thought was you,” does he touch upon the less chipper aspects of an actor’s life.)

Like his role model — and like Mr. McKellen, for that matter — Mr. DeVita has a keen sense of what his audience wants and is happy to deliver. A little too happy in fact. The program lists the play, which has been performed in more than a dozen cities, as being “originally directed by” John Langs. A director on the scene might have come in handy during some of Mr. DeVita’s more boisterous anecdotes. Old habits die hard apparently.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/theater/reviews/in-acting-shakespeare-at-the-pearl-theater.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:21:39 AM] Choosing Love or Honor, and Losing Either Way - The New York Times

January 21, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Choosing Love or Honor, and Losing Either Way

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

In the 17th-century French tragicomedy “Le Cid,” honor — not life, happiness or even love — reigns supreme.

So when Rodrigue’s aging father has been insulted, Rodrigue must seek vengeance. Inconveniently, the target of that vengeance happens to be his fiancée’s father. Rodrigue faces a lose-lose situation — or, more academically, a Cornelian dilemma, an ethical choice named for this very play by Pierre Corneille — in which he must choose between honor and love.

Either he kills his nemesis and betrays his betrothed, Chimène, or he stands down for her sake, in which case the shame would make him unfit to marry her. As Rodrigue bewails: “One deed would cause the one I love to mourn,/The other she would scorn.” (The former poet laureate Richard Wilbur has translated Corneille’s verse into English.)

Rodrigue (the cleft-chinned, Disney-princelike Jeff Kline) chooses honor, killing Chimène’s father and flipping the Cornelian hot potato to Chimène herself. Honor requires her to continue the blood feud by beseeching the king to hang her lover.

Interpreted a different way, these face-saving tragic turns could well be performed as farce: so ridiculous are the extremes the characters turn to in the name of propriety that they cease to be proper. But then life is, after all, a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel, to borrow from Horace Walpole.

This production, directed by Peter Dobbins and produced by Storm Theater and Blackfriars Repertory Theater, succeeds more on the thinking than on the feeling side. That is partly thanks to a strong comic performance from Jessica Zinder as the high-strung Infanta of Castile, who also struggles with the dueling demands of desire and duty; and the thoughtful presence of George Taylor as the frail, vicariously pugnacious father to Rodrigue, a sort of stage mother to this budding knight.

But in the role of the tragic heroine Chimène, Meaghan Bloom Fluitt is stiffer than her Renaissance wardrobe. Her doleful dress belies her inability to express any of the mournfulness and anguish she supposedly possesses. This rarely produced play is still worth seeing, but she does it no favors by giving the George Foreman treatment to the juiciness of one of the meatier female roles of classical theater.

http://theater.nytimes.com/...13/01/22/theater/reviews/le-cid-at-the-theater-of-the-church-of-notre-dame.html?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:25:22 AM]