Grisham's 'Time to Kill' Coming to Broadway - NYTimes.com JUNE 25, 2013, 3:46 PM Grisham’s ‘Time to Kill’ Coming to Broadway By PATRICK HEALY A stage adaptation of “A Time to Kill,” John Grisham’s legal thriller about a young white lawyer defending a black man for a revenge murder in Mississippi, will open on Broadway in the fall, the producers said on Tuesday. The play is the first adaptation of a novel by the best-selling Mr. Grisham for the theater; the writer is Rupert Holmes, a Tony Award winner for best book and best score for “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” The novel was made into a 1996 film starring Matthew McConaughey and Samuel L. Jackson. The play’s producers, Daryl Roth and Eva Price, have indicated in investment documents that the show will cost $3.6 million on Broadway. Casting will be announced soon; in the premiere of the play in 2011 at Arena Stage in Washington, Sebastian Arcelus (“Elf”) played the lawyer. That production received mixed reviews. The play is to begin preview performances on Sept. 28 at the Golden Theater and open on Oct. 20. The director will be Ethan McSweeny (the 2000 Broadway revival of “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man”), who staged the play at Arena. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/grishams-time-to-kill-coming-to-broadway/?pagewanted=print[6/26/2013 9:51:02 AM] Escaping a Broken Marriage in a Ruined Town - The New York Times June 25, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Escaping a Broken Marriage in a Ruined Town By CATHERINE RAMPELL If you describe the plot of “Rantoul and Die” to a friend, as I did, you will probably find yourself muttering, “but it’s still really funny, I swear.” And really, I swear, this tale of a sour, violent marriage is funny — darkly, darkly funny. The setting is Rantoul, a broken town in central Illinois where the factories have closed and the residents have given up or left. The best jobs around are at the Dairy Queen, where Debbie (a combustible and astonishingly gifted Sarah Lemp) has the good fortune to be employed full-time. Debbie has worked hard to make it to assistant manager, and is now trying to clean up her personal life. That means getting rid of her husband, Rallis (Derek Ahonen), a whimpering, truckling, tenderhearted, unstable man-child whom she cows merely by blinking. But Rallis cannot bear the thought of living without her, and discharges several suicidal cries for help. Alas, such cries are answered unsympathetically by Debbie and by Rallis’s supposed friend, Gary (the ominous, fast-talking Matthew Pilieci), who is mostly excited about inheriting Rallis’s knife collection if and when Rallis bites it. The best that Gary’s pep talk can elicit is the following admission from Rallis, “Trying to kill myself ain’t no way to live.” Only Debbie’s boss, Callie (a preternaturally cheerful Vanessa Vaché), the cat lady spewing deceptively wise Hallmark twaddle, provides some true comfort to any of the other long-suffering characters. “Rantoul and Die” is by Mark Roberts, better known for producing and writing lighter fare for the sitcoms “Mike & Molly” and “Two and a Half Men.” Here he writes with the expletive-laden catharsis of someone who has been cramped by CBS’s standards and practices department for far too long. His dialogue is vivid and coarse, riddled with saw-toothed similes and sinister non sequiturs, most of which cannot be quoted here. Some of the more G-rated references include descriptions of characters “wearing bitterness like a rain poncho,” or falling apart “like a puzzle on a paint shaker.” Mr. Roberts’s bizarre, Quentin Tarantino-esque twists will leave you unnerved and squirming; thankfully for those of us who are squeamish, much of the gristle and gore is described or heard offstage, rather than presented in celluloid close-up. The production, the latest by the acclaimed Amoralists troupe, is nothing if not unpredictable, but it earns its every unlikely plot turn through committed, hard-nosed performances. To break up the bleakness Jay Stull’s fertile direction likewise offers nuggets of physical comedy throughout, including a character scooping out the remnants of a peanut-butter jar using a stray pair of chopsticks. http://theater.nytimes.com/...-rantoul-and-die-a-woman-seeks-a-new-personal-life.html?ref=theater&_r=0&pagewanted=print[6/26/2013 9:40:26 AM] Escaping a Broken Marriage in a Ruined Town - The New York Times This peanut butter bit is messy, but no matter; Alfred Schatz’s inspired set is already almost meticulously dirty, a sty of old food, dirty clothes, crumbling walls, dusty video games, faded takeout menus and maybe even a stray “Oklahoma!” DVD. In short, everything about this production is both chaotic and controlled, cartoonish but still uncomfortably authentic. http://theater.nytimes.com/...-rantoul-and-die-a-woman-seeks-a-new-personal-life.html?ref=theater&_r=0&pagewanted=print[6/26/2013 9:40:26 AM] One Dublin Day in June, Consumed by Errands and Eros - The New York Times June 25, 2013 THEATER REVIEW One Dublin Day in June, Consumed by Errands and Eros By ANDY WEBSTER It takes audacity to adapt James Joyce’s “Ulysses” for the stage. No wonder Patrick Fitzgerald’s “Gibraltar” — starring himself and Cara Seymour, now at the Irish Repertory Theater — is subtitled “An Adaptation After James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses.’ ” Any stage version can only graze the book’s infinite layers. But there are plenty of those layers here. “Gibraltar” jettisons Stephen Dedalus, the young academic character whose story threads through the novel, to focus on the advertising salesman Leopold Bloom and his younger wife, Molly. (One early domestic scene — Bloom’s trip to the outhouse for some reading and blithe defecation — demonstrates the play’s fidelity to the book’s candor.) The couple’s sex life has suffered since the death of an infant son years before, and Bloom hopes that by tolerating Molly’s affair with the macho hothead Blazes Boylan, he will appear more sensitive by comparison. Molly and her lover are to have a 4 p.m. assignation while Bloom does errands around Dublin, whose 1904 atmosphere is skillfully evoked by Alma Kelliher’s unobtrusive sound design and Sarah Bacon’s costumes. Ms. Seymour plays many of the citizens Bloom briefly encounters: a newsboy, a pharmacist, a bookseller. As Bloom’s day unfolds, the density of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness prose — staccato bursts of thought brimming with historical references, aphorisms and wordplay — grows in Mr. Fitzgerald’s delivery. Even when its meaning is elusive, the language sings. (Credit Mr. Fitzgerald and the director, Terry Kinney, for hewing to Joyce’s tone.) Bloom attends a funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery; dines at the Davy Byrnes tavern, where he encounters an Irish republican; and enjoys a reverie at Sandymount Strand. Act II presents the closing aria: Molly’s soliloquy, a sparkling river of observations, reminiscences and graphic sexual imagery recited at night upon Bloom’s return. (Paul Hudson’s gentle lighting, a field of stars behind a scrim, exquisitely sets the mood.) As Mr. Fitzgerald, playing the Narrator, sits by her bedside, Molly evolves from a dreamy state into a serene rapture. Ms. Seymour, recessive so far, glows. As Bloom, Mr. Fitzgerald resembles Joyce, though more muscular, while Ms. Seymour is a fair visual approximation of Nora, Joyce’s uneducated wife, indispensable muse and model for Molly. When Mr. Fitzgerald departs from the book, with his Narrator interrupting Molly’s monologue with biblical phrases, he alternates the sacred with the sensual (and to some ears, the obscene). In his bond with Nora, Joyce reveled in such a juxtaposition. In “Gibraltar,” we do as well. http://theater.nytimes.com/...r/reviews/gibraltar-adapted-from-ulysses-plays-at-irish-rep.html?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[6/26/2013 9:55:43 AM] Elliott Reid, Sleuth in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,’ Dies at 93 - NYTimes.com June 25, 2013 Elliott Reid, Sleuth in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,’ Dies at 93 By ANITA GATES Elliott Reid, a character actor familiar to television and movie audiences and probably best remembered as Jane Russell’s love interest in the 1953 film “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” died on Friday in Studio City, Calif. He was 93. The Inn on the Boulevard, the assisted-living facility where he lived, confirmed the death. Mr. Reid began his career in radio. Working in his teens on the “The March of Time,” he met Orson Welles, who invited him to join his new company, Mercury Theater. He made his Broadway debut, as the poet Cinna, in Mercury’s 1937 production of “Julius Caesar” and his film debut in 1940 in “The Ramparts We Watch,” a patriotic docudrama. In “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” he played Ernie Malone, a private detective hired to investigate Lorelei Lee, played by Marilyn Monroe. He winds up falling in love with her best friend, played by Russell. In other films Mr. Reid was Fred MacMurray’s self-important rival in the Disney comedy “The Absent-Minded Professor” (1961) and a small-town prosecutor in “Inherit the Wind” (1960). His last feature film was the 1988 comedy “Young Einstein,” in which he played a guard at a mental hospital. He worked most often in television, appearing on series like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” in the 1950s; the satire “That Was the Week That Was” in the ’60s; “All in the Family” in the ’70s and “Designing Women” in the ’80s. He also tried his hand behind the scenes, writing episodes of “Lou Grant,” “The Love Boat,“ “After MASH” and “Love, Sidney” in the 1980s.