'True Blood' Star Will Play Stanley in 'Streetcar' - NYTimes.com

JUNE 14, 2013, 1:16 PM ‘True Blood’ Star Will Play Stanley in ‘Streetcar’

By ALLAN KOZINN Joe Manganiello, whose buff physique has been amply displayed as a werewolf on HBO’s “True Blood” and as a stripper in the film “Magic Mike,” will wear (and take off?) the most famous T-shirt in American theater when he plays Stanley Kowalski in Yale Repertory Theater’s production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Portraying Blanche DuBois will be René Augesen, who has appeared at the Public and Lincoln Center Theaters. Mark Rucker is directing the production, which opens Yale Rep’s season on Sept. 20 and is scheduled to run through Oct. 12.

The season, which had already been announced, also includes “These Paper Bullets,” an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” with music by Billie Joe Armstrong of the band Green Day and plays by Caryl Churchill, Dario Fo, Marcus Gardley and Meg Miroshnik.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/.../06/14/true-blood-star-will-play-stanley-in-streetcar/?ref=allankozinn&pagewanted=print[6/17/2013 11:03:39 AM]

Of Shakespeare and Superheroes - The New York Times

June 13, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Of Shakespeare and Superheroes

By BEN BRANTLEY

There’s enough plot in Eric Rosen and Matt Sax’s “Venice,” the action-flooded new musical at the Public Theater, to fill a whole year in a Marvel comics series. Though it borrows some of its story from Shakespeare’s “Othello” and much of its tone from apocalyptic movie blockbusters like “The Dark Knight Rises,” this tale of a once-and-future civil war still seems to translate into two-dimensional panels as you watch it.

You can imagine thought bubbles rising from the characters’ heads, as they brood in ways idealistic and dastardly in a devastated city of tomorrow still steeped in a suffocating past. This is true even when they’re wailing like Bruno Mars or rapping like Nicki Minaj. They also often speak in urgent, public-bulletin-style declarations that help fill us in on recent events, like: “Willow Turner is missing ... We have reason to believe she is headed for the city.”

The news is most entertaining when it’s broadcast by a serious joker identified as Clown MC, who delivers the dish rap-style in “Venice,” which was previously staged in Kansas City and Los Angeles and opened on Thursday night as part of the Public’s valuable Lab series. First seen with a laptop composing this show’s opening lines (which are projected on the walls around him), Clown MC would also seem to be the guy pulling the strings in the story. This is fitting, since he is played by Mr. Sax, who wrote the show’s score and, with Mr. Rosen, its lyrics. (Mr. Rosen, the show’s director, did the book.)

A man of improbably elastic face and form, Mr. Sax, who in 2008 starred in the one-man show “Clay” (created with Mr. Rosen), is an original voice and presence, a rapper from the suburbs who regularly morphs from self- conscious square to wriggling, blissed-out Slinky. You can feel the joy he takes in summoning the characters into being as “Venice” begins, assessing the actors with sly and shy glances as they appear onstage.

When he shows up toward the end of the first act as the host of a spectacularly doomed wedding party, he’s so electrified that you expect him to short-circuit. He brings to mind a kid who has created an elaborate fantasy universe out of objects in his bedroom, and has come to believe this world is a hundred times more real, not to mention exciting, than the daily routine at home and school.

Unfortunately, the creatures that spring from this teeming imagination are, to outsiders, about as lifelike as toy soldiers. Though the cast includes a bevy of attractive and seasoned young performers — including Jennifer Damiano (“Next to Normal,” “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”) and Leslie Odom Jr. (late of “Smash") — their skills don’t always mesh with Mr. Sax’s sensibility. Chanting in propulsive rhyme, for instance, comes naturally to very few of them.

They are also burdened with an unwieldy tale to tell, unassisted by the special effects that Hollywood can be relied on to provide as plot-hole-concealing camouflage. “Venice” is both the show’s title city — a town shattered by terrorism 20 years earlier and now controlled by a military-industrial complex — and the title

http://theater.nytimes.com/...er/reviews/venice-by-eric-rosen-and-matt-sax-teems-with-action.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print[6/17/2013 11:02:37 AM] Of Shakespeare and Superheroes - The New York Times

character, a clean-cut Che Guevara type portrayed by a subdued Haaz Sleiman.

Venice Monroe is a child of rape, born to a freedom-fighting mother (who appears as a sorrowful but inspiring ghost, played by the charismatic Uzo Aduba) who would surely have won the Nobel Peace Prize if it existed in this unspecified future. She, like most of her generation, was wiped out in the terrorist attack. (No, I don’t know who the terrorists were. Will you let me get on with this, please?)

The survivors include the lovely Willow Turner (Ms. Damiano), the daughter of Venice’s dead president, who has grown up away from the city in the Safe Zone and is betrothed to Theodore Westbrook (Jonathan-David), the inheritor of the aforementioned military-industrial complex. But she really loves Venice (the man), whom she remembers from their shared childhood, and intends to marry him in a ceremony that would reunite a divided nation (or city-state, or whatever).

Not everybody wants this to happen, though, including Venice the man’s half-brother, Markos Monroe (Mr. Odom), a conniving military malcontent who is married to a love-starved woman named Emilia (Victoria Platt). Though Markos occasionally erupts into Iago-like utterances that suggest that he, too, is a creature of motiveless evil, we know why he’s bad. Mom liked Venice (the boy) best, and it still rankles.

The cast also includes Claybourne Elder as Michael Victor, the straight-arrow aide and friend to Venice (the man and the city), whose story arc looks as if it might parallel that of Cassio in “Othello,” until ... well, it’s deflected by the arrival of a seductive pop diva named Hailey Daisy, zealously played by Angela Polk, who doesn’t really have much reason to be here, except that she’s the only performer who matches Mr. Sax in verve. I was very sorry when she walked into that bomb, or gunfire, or whatever it was.

The production has been designed with a “Mad Max”-meets- “Max Headroom” sensibility by a formidable team that includes Beowulf Boritt (set), Clint Ramos (costumes), Jason Lyons (lighting) and Jason H. Thompson (projections). The music, overseen by Curtis Moore and played by an onstage band, isn’t very different from what you’d hear on most mainstream radio stations. Chase Brock’s funky, “Riverdance”-style choreography is kind of fun, especially as executed by Mr. Sax.

Though Mr. Odom doesn’t have the strength of malice that a first-rate villain requires, he makes sweetly insinuating music in his falsetto range, and has one of the show’s best songs, the revenge-survival anthem “Last Man.” Ms. Damiano’s clarion voice is always a pleasure to listen to, though her Willow, partly inspired by Shakespeare’s Desdemona, is otherwise short on defining characteristics.

Still, what’s a leading lady to do when she has to sing lines like “I’m still, the calm ahead of the storm/I feel the dark ahead of the dawn”? At such moments we need Mr. Sax’s Clown MC, who is missing in action for far too much of the second act, to swoop in and rescue us from banality. It’s remarkable how many clichés you’re willing to forgive when they’re tumbled together in a nonstop rap rant, delivered by a performer like Mr. Sax, who gets high on his own delirious rhymes.

Venice

Book by Eric Rosen; music by Matt Sax; lyrics by Mr. Sax and Mr. Rosen; additional music by Curtis Moore; choreography by Chase Brock; directed by Mr. Rosen; sets by Beowulf Boritt; costumes by Clint Ramos; lighting by Jason Lyons; sound by Acme Sound Partners; projections by Jason H. Thompson; music supervisor, orchestrator and vocal arranger, Mr. Moore; dramaturge, Doug Wright; music director, Jim Abbott; music

http://theater.nytimes.com/...er/reviews/venice-by-eric-rosen-and-matt-sax-teems-with-action.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print[6/17/2013 11:02:37 AM] Of Shakespeare and Superheroes - The New York Times

production by Mr. Sax, Mr. Moore and Joshua Horvath; production stage manager, Kelly Glasow; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Maria Goyanes; general manager, Steven Showalter; production executive, Ruth E. Sternberg. A PublicLab production, presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director; Patrick Willingham, executive director, by special arrangement with Kansas City Repertory Theater and Center Theater Group. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, (212) 967-7555, publictheater.org. Through June 30. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

WITH: Uzo Aduba (Anna Monroe), Jennifer Damiano (Willow Turner), Claybourne Elder (Michael Victor), Jonathan-David (Theodore Westbrook), Leslie Odom Jr. (Markos Monroe), Victoria Platt (Emilia Monroe), Angela Polk (Hailey Daisy), Matt Sax (Clown MC), Haaz Sleiman (Venice Monroe) and Emilee Dupré, Semhar Ghebremichael, Devin L. Roberts and Manuel Stark (Ensemble).

http://theater.nytimes.com/...er/reviews/venice-by-eric-rosen-and-matt-sax-teems-with-action.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print[6/17/2013 11:02:37 AM] Sexual Trafficking, Up Close and Personal - The New York Times

June 16, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Sexual Trafficking, Up Close and Personal

By BEN BRANTLEY

The girl on the bus had been promised summer and sunshine, she says, and it is cool and clammy on this wet evening in June. But Mary, 14 years old and fresh from Nigeria, is willing to forgive this new, exciting city its disappointing weather. If she has any suspicion that what awaits at the end of her journey will be beyond forgiveness, she does not betray it.

Thus began the performance I attended of “Roadkill,” the unsettling site-specific theater piece about sex trafficking created by Cora Bissett, first seen three years ago at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and brought to New York by St. Ann’s Warehouse in . The audience members, who numbered about 20, had boarded the same bus as Mary outside the Warehouse’s theater.

She proved to be a delightful traveling companion, infectiously alert to the changing landscape as we rode toward Clinton Hill, and full of artless questions for her bus mates. Were we rich? Did we have cars? Did we live in houses?

Though portrayed by the adult actress Mercy Ojelade, Mary seemed far more childlike, less guarded and more exuberantly hopeful than most American teenagers. How could you not answer her questions? How could you not want to protect her? How could you not feel an urge to yell at her to get off that bus right now? Needless to say, nobody yelled anything like that; we were watching a play.

Ms. Bissett fully intends to exacerbate the sense of helplessness that is always to some extent part of being a passive spectator. In forcing us into instant intimacy with its guileless heroine, “Roadkill” makes us feel personally responsible for what happens to Mary once she steps off the bus and into a town house in Clinton Hill.

Within minutes of her arrival she will be raped by a pimp. Shortly after, she will be sexually servicing man after man; they will later describe her performance in consumer satisfaction reports, as if she were a new model of car. As we are ushered from room to room, we share the claustrophobic prison that is now Mary’s home (designed by Jessica Brettle and lighted by Paul Sorley).

Conceived and directed by Ms. Bissett, with a text by Stef Smith, “Roadkill” was inspired by first-person accounts from girls and young women who have been sold into prostitution. This is by design a consciousness- raising show, meant to bring a sobering immediacy to a topic that has become a regular subject of television crime shows like “Law and Order: SVU.” (The program includes a list of ways to help stop human trafficking.)

Ms. Bissett successfully avoids tabloid prurience in telling Mary’s story. The girl’s initial rape and subsequent sexual encounters are mostly rendered impressionistically, in animation (by Marta Mackova) and video projections (by Kim Beveridge) on the walls. The sequences are artfully made, but there’s a didactic quality to their inclusion, making you feel a bit like a visitor at a sexual trafficking information center. http://theater.nytimes.com/...views/roadkill-bears-witness-to-human-trafficking.html?ref=theater&_r=1&&pagewanted=print[6/17/2013 11:03:11 AM] Sexual Trafficking, Up Close and Personal - The New York Times

In other scenes the audience is put in the position of uncomfortable eavesdropper on Mary’s conversations with Martha (Adura Onashile), the older woman who accompanied her on her bus trip as a seemingly benevolent aunt. As played with alternating warmth and brusqueness by Ms. Onashile, Martha is no bluntly drawn villain but a survivor of an experience similar to Mary’s, who has now pragmatically accepted the rules of her trade as grim but unavoidable facts of life.

Viewed coldly as a work of theater, “Roadkill” is variable. It can seem clumsy, in hindsight, as it switches between live and video sequences. And the use of a single actor (the credible but overworked John Kazek) as the different men in Mary’s life, from her evil pimp to her loving father, goes against the grain of you-are-there experiential theater. (Michael Bradley Cohen completes the cast as a police officer who arrives during a noisy party.)

But “Roadkill” is not meant to be viewed coldly. And it is unlikely that anyone who sees it will be able to sustain an objective distance. That’s largely because of the performance of Ms. Ojelade, whose Mary seems to age, harden and wither before our eyes.

She is not on the bus that takes the audience back to St. Ann’s Warehouse after the show. And something like a scream fills the silence left by the girl who 90 minutes earlier had been so full of ingenuous chatter.

Roadkill

Conceived and directed by Cora Bissett; text by Stef Smith; sets and costumes by Jessica Brettle; lighting by Paul Sorley; video art by Kim Beveridge; animation art by Marta Mackova; dramaturge, Pamela McQueen; assistant director/sound design by Harry Wilson; movement by Natasha Gilmore; associate producer, Colin Baird. Produced by Pachamama Productions and Richard Jordan Productions, in association with Traverse Theater, Edinburgh; presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse, Susan Feldman, artistic director; Andrew D. Hamingson, executive director. Bus departs from St. Ann’s Warehouse, 29 Jay Street, at Plymouth Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn, (718) 254-8779, stannswarehouse.org. Through June 30. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Mercy Ojelade (Mary), Adura Onashile (Aunt Martha), John Kazek (Various Male Roles) and Michael Bradley Cohen (Police Officer).

http://theater.nytimes.com/...views/roadkill-bears-witness-to-human-trafficking.html?ref=theater&_r=1&&pagewanted=print[6/17/2013 11:03:11 AM] Harold J. Cromer, Vaudeville Duo’s Stumpy, Is Dead - NYTimes.com

June 13, 2013 Harold J. Cromer, Vaudeville Duo’s Stumpy, Is Dead By BRUCE WEBER Harold J. Cromer, a hoofer and comedian who as Stumpy, half of the vaudevillian duo Stump and Stumpy, performed antic dance routines in clubs around the country after World War II and later on television, died on June 8 at his home in . He was in his early 90s.

His death was confirmed by his great-granddaughter Chelsea Phillips.

Stump and Stumpy were among the top comedy teams to play the black theater and nightclub circuit — including the in Harlem and the Moulin Rouge in Las Vegas — from the 1930s into the 1950s. They also appeared at the Paramount Theater and the Copacabana.

James Cross was Stump, who towered over his partner, Stumpy (initially played by Eddie Hartman), and their act played off their differences in height — Mr. Cromer was 5-foot-2 — and their contrasting levels of sophistication. (Stumpy was the sharper-witted.)

They sang and danced, and they clowned with great precision, often to the music of jazz orchestras, frequently performing on the same bill with the likes of , , , , Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. Mr. Cromer took over the Stumpy role in the late 1940s or early ’50s.

With the emergence of television in the 1950s, the pair appeared on the and variety shows and occasionally in dramatic series, including “Dragnet” and “Gunsmoke.” Their slickly choreographed high jinks are said to have inspired those of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.

Mr. Cromer was a self-taught dancer who was known early on for tapping on roller skates. As a teenager he appeared on Broadway in the musical “” (1939), which starred and Bert Lahr, and in which Mr. Cromer had two dance numbers with a leggy young ingénue, .

He stayed with the show after it went on the road (with Gypsy Rose Lee in the Merman role), and, in 1943, he appeared in another Broadway musical, “Early to Bed,” with music by Fats Waller. But his mainstream stage career was stalled by a lack of opportunities for black performers. He didn’t return to Broadway until 1978 in “The American Dance Machine,” a show named for a touring dance company that specialized in reviving dance numbers from musicals of the past.

“There was no advancement,” he recalled about his early theater days in a 2001 interview with the Web site Talkin’ Broadway. “I did that and that was it. I went out on the road and continued to do ‘Du Barry Was a Lady.’ After that, what’s next, little man, when your show closes in Columbus, Ohio? I came back to New York and nothing was going on. That’s when I started to get into vaudeville.”

Mr. Cromer was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of the West Side, and in Harlem. His father, William, a railroad worker, and his mother, the former Hattie Bell DeWalt, were transplants from South Carolina.

Always coy about his age, Mr. Cromer would acknowledge only that his birthday was on June 21. Public records report the year to be anywhere from 1921 to 1923, and Ms. Phillips, his great-granddaughter, said it might have been 1920. He was one of nine children, including a twin sister.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/theater/harold-j-cromer-the-stumpy-of-vaudevilles-duo-stump-and-stumpy-dies.html?pagewanted=print[6/17/2013 11:01:50 AM] Harold J. Cromer, Vaudeville Duo’s Stumpy, Is Dead - NYTimes.com

Mr. Cromer said he was inspired to dance when he saw a movie in which Bill Bojangles Robinson tapped down a flight of stairs. Through his early teens he helped support his family by dancing on the street (sometimes on skates) for change and winning groceries in dance competitions. During high school — he never finished — he danced at a night spot called the Kit Kat Club. He sang and danced in the 1938 film “Swing!,” directed by Oscar Micheaux.

Mr. Cromer appeared in other films over the years, including “The Cotton Club” in 1984. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, he was the M.C. for touring rock ’n’ roll shows produced by Irvin Feld, introducing performers like Paul Anka, Bobby Darin, Bill Haley and His Comets, Aretha Franklin and a young Stevie Wonder — to whom, according to Ms. Phillips, he gave a harmonica. (Mr. Wonder returned it decades later, she said.)

Mr. Cromer outlived two wives: Gloria Freeman, whom he married in 1939 or 1940 and who died in 1971, and Carol Carter, whom he married in 1980 and who died in 2000. In addition to Ms. Phillips, his survivors include a daughter, Dierdre Graham; a son, Harold Jr., known as Poppy; a brother, Raymond; five grandchildren, eight other great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

In later years Mr. Cromer performed in Off Broadway revues and traveled widely as a teacher, often using his own choreographed piece “Opus One,” as a textbook. “Aside from ‘Opus One,’ danced to the Tommy Dorsey tune, there’s not a huge body of choreography that Harold left behind, but that one work, with its swinging rhythms and classic vernacular moves, was a classic primer in rhythm tap,” Constance Valis Hill, a tap historian and professor of dance at Hampshire College, wrote in an e-mail. “He kept the tradition alive for younger dancers. His life in entertainment — as a busker tapping for pennies, a vaudevillian, song-and-dance man, comedy tap dancer bringing that black vernacular style to Broadway — is iconic, representative of his time. If you saw him singing and dancing ‘Mr. Bojangles,’ you’d know his story.”

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/theater/harold-j-cromer-the-stumpy-of-vaudevilles-duo-stump-and-stumpy-dies.html?pagewanted=print[6/17/2013 11:01:50 AM]