Cate Blanchett in ‘The Present’
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THE MORNING LINE DATE: Monday, January 9, 2017 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh PAGES: 23, including this page C3 January 9, 2017 Hillary Clinton Receives Ovation at ‘The Color Purple’ By Michael Paulson and Michael Barbaro Hillary Clinton, who has kept a relatively low public profile since losing the presidential election two months ago, on Sunday showed up at the final performance of the Broadway revival of “The Color Purple,” reveling in the story of a beleaguered woman who triumphs over the oppressive men in her life (and, along the way, discovers a love for colorful pants). Mrs. Clinton, accompanied by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea, received several ovations from the sold-out audience as she arrived, and then another round of applause when she was acknowledged by the cast after the show. “There’s a lot of really awesome famous and notable people here today,” the actress Patrice Covington, who gave the farewell speech on behalf of the cast after the show, said to the audience. “I’m not going to call all of them out — I know you already know them,” she said, before pausing, looking in Mrs. Clinton’s direction, and waving at her mischievously. At that, the audience erupted into a new, loud round of applause. The reaction was substantially warmer than the scattered booing and clapping that greeted the arrival of Vice President-elect Mike Pence when he attended “Hamilton,” just one block north, on Nov. 18. “We love you Hillary,” some audience members shouted. Several thanked Mrs. Clinton and told her, “God bless you.” “God bless you,” Mrs. Clinton replied. Mrs. Clinton was besieged by photo-seekers before the show, at intermission and as she was ushered out a side door after the musical ended (“Whoa!” said her husband as they left.) Jordan Serpone, 33, an audience member from Boston, said that spotting Mrs. Clinton was a surprisingly moving experience for him. “I was having every emotion I’ve tried to get rid of over the past few weeks,” he said during intermission. He shook her hand, but said he is still filled with frustration over her loss. “She shouldn’t be here. She should be planning her cabinet,” he said. Because the Sunday matinee was the last performance for the acclaimed production, which won last year’s Tony award for best musical revival, the crowd was starry: Among those in the audience were Jonathan Groff, Mariska Hargitay, Gayle King, Debra Messing, Leslie Odom Jr., Billy Porter, Phylicia Rashad and Anna Wintour. Public sightings of Mrs. Clinton in the weeks since the election have been sufficiently rare that they create a stir on social media. Strangers have sought photographs with her at stores and in the woods near her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. But Mrs. Clinton has indicated that she and her husband plan to attend the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as president on Jan. 20. “The Color Purple” tells the searing story of a young black woman abused by her stepfather and her husband in rural Georgia in the early 20th century. The musical is an adaptation of a best-selling 1982 novel, by Alice Walker, which was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Steven Spielberg adapted the novel into a film in 1985, and Oprah Winfrey, who was featured in the film, went on to become an important champion, and co-producer, of the musical. The musical has been one of the most successful at attracting black audiences to Broadway. It first opened on Broadway in 2005, and features a book by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Stephen Bray, Brenda Russell and Allee Willis. The revival, which opened in 2015 and was directed by John Doyle, featured a star- making performance by the British actress Cynthia Erivo. She won a Tony award for best actress in a leading role in a musical. The last show took place on Ms. Erivo’s 30th birthday. C3 January 6, 2017 Jimmy Buffett’s ‘Margaritaville’ Musical Is Broadway Bound By Joshua Barone Jimmy Buffett’s tropical paradise is coming to Broadway — but not before going on tour. “Escape to Margaritaville,” Mr. Buffett’s musical featuring new songs and past hits, is scheduled to open on Broadway in spring 2018, its producers announced on Friday. The play will come to New York after its previously announced premiere in May at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, followed by engagements in New Orleans, Houston and Chicago. “We’ll set sail from California on a pre-Broadway national tour stopping first in the city that gave me my start — New Orleans,” Mr. Buffett said in a statement. “Then to some of my other favorites,” he added, “before arriving at that port of all ports, Broadway and New York City.” The musical — about a part-time bartender and singer named Tully who thinks he has life figured out until a tourist steals his heart — is being written by two veterans of the TV series “My Name Is Earl”: its creator, Greg Garcia, and the comic actor Mike O’Malley. Christopher Ashley, who is directing the new Broadway musical “Come From Away,” will direct. He was a Tony nominee for his direction of “Memphis” and “The Rocky Horror Show.” Mr. Buffett’s previous foray into musical theater, a collaboration in the 1990s with the writer Herman Wouk called “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” was critically and commercially unsuccessful and never arrived on Broadway. C8 January 9, 2017 Review: ‘Gardens Speak,’ a Graveside Encounter With Lives Lost in Syria By Charles Isherwood It’s a sad truism, or maybe a sad truth, that even the most appalling statistics about the victims of war can over time have a numbing effect. The conflict ripping apart Syria has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, but it has been making headlines for so long that even the most empathetic among us may be growing inured to the horror. “Gardens Speak,” a stark, moving theater piece by Tania El Khoury, brings us into painful intimacy with the human cost of the war by acquainting us with the life — and the death — of just one of those victims. Presented as part of the Under the Radar festival, this work is as much an art installation as it is theater. Just 10 people participate at a time, and the work lasts about 40 minutes. After being led into a dark antechamber and asked to remove shoes and socks (I pitied the woman wearing long laceup boots), we don raincoats and then move into another room, in the middle of which is a simulacrum of a cemetery. Each audience member chooses a card on which a name is written in Arabic. We then match the name to one of the names written on the tombstones, and, as instructed on the card, dig into the dirt to reveal the English name of the person being memorialized (they were all opposing the Assad government), and then lie down on top of the “grave” to hear the man or woman’s story, which seemed to be whispered from under the earth. I heard the story of Ahmad, a university student who participated in the protests in Aleppo against government forces and was shot dead during one of them. In lightly accented English, he told of his youthful aspirations, his studies and his death and burial in the garden of a stranger. (There are, apparently, thousands of Syrians laid to rest in the gardens of sympathetic strangers, and in communal parks.) The story was a simple one, simply told, but the experience was nonetheless extraordinary, and emotionally wrenching. After the voice is stilled we return to benches upon which small notebooks have been placed, and we have the option of writing a letter to the “martyr” whose story we have heard, and burying it in the earth above the grave for other participants to read if they choose. I was too shaken to think of anything to put down. I’m a writer by profession, obviously, but in the moment the words just wouldn’t come. Gardens Speak Through Monday. New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Abe Burrows Theater, Manhattan, 212-967- 7555, undertheradarfestival.com. Running time: 40 minutes. C8 January 7, 2017 ‘Lula del Ray,’ a Spectral Parade of Fantastical Images By Ben Brantley So if you add up the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional to create a new spatial entity, does that mean you’re in the fifth dimension? Whatever you choose to call it, such a perspective-melting world is the realm in which the enchanting “Lula del Ray” takes place. This latest offering from the Chicago-based arts collective Manual Cinema, which runs through next Saturday in the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, is dreamy in all senses of the word. It tells its story — in many ways, a familiar one of a restless girl’s small rebellion against her lonely provincial life — in the twilight zone between shadow and substance. As you sink into the spectral parade of images of the 1950s American Southwest, you may wonder at times if you haven’t, in fact, fallen asleep. Should you require a reality check, you can always shift your focus from what’s happening on the large upper screen — where a polished narrative unfolds in a series of animated silhouettes — to the industrious group of sorcerers gathered directly below it. They’re the show’s own Wizards of Oz, the illusion-makers who ply transparencies, shadow puppets, video, scrims and their own shadows to create an alternate universe.