'Kinky Boots' Sets April 4 Broadway Opening - NYTimes.com

AUGUST 15, 2012, 3:13 PM ‘Kinky Boots’ Sets April 4 Broadway Opening

By PATRICK HEALY "Kinky Boots," one of the most anticipated musicals of the new Broadway season, with Cyndi Laupermaking her debut as a songwriter for the stage, will begin performances on March 5, 2013, at the Al Hirschfeld Theater and open on April 4, the producers announced on Wednesday.

Based on a 2005 British filmabout a shoe factory heir who enlists a drag queen to help save the family business, "Kinky Boots" will star the Tony Award nominee Stark Sands ("Journey's End," "American Idiot") as the scion Charlie and Billy Porter (Belize in the Off Broadway revival of "Angels in America") as the resourceful Lola. The show's book writer is Harvey Fierstein, who won a Tony for his book for "La Cage aux Folles" and was nominated in the category last season for the Broadway musical "Newsies."

Ms. Lauper, a Grammy-winning pop icon of the 1980s, has written the music and lyrics for the production, which will have an out-of-town run in Chicago this fall. Jerry Mitchell will direct, and the lead producers are Daryl Roth and Hal Luftig.

Like "Kinky Boots," most of the new Broadway musicals expected this season are inspired by movies or books; the others include "Bring It On," "Rebecca," "A Christmas Story," "Matilda," "Diner," and "Hands on a Hardbody."

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/kinky-boots-sets-april-4-broadway-opening/?pagewanted=print[8/16/2012 9:52:02 AM] Religious Roots Tangle With the Groovy ’60s - The New York Times

August 15, 2012 THEATER REVIEW Religious Roots Tangle With the Groovy ’60s

By JASON ZINOMAN

Wearing a bushy beard and the absent-minded expression of a father preoccupied with work at the dinner table, Eric Anderson, who plays the Jewish singer Shlomo Carlebach in the bio-musical “Soul Doctor,” appears smaller than life. That changes, however, when he starts to sing.

Transforming from a mild-mannered rabbi into a kinetic dynamo, he imbues his numbers with their own arc, often starting in a meditative mood before slowly building to a joyous, leaping roar. Mr. Anderson’s understated acting style pays off here, and his onstage performances are the best part of this otherwise safe, mechanical portrait of a fascinating cultural figure.

Carlebach, whose family escaped Nazi Germany and ended up in New York, where his father ran a small synagogue, was the rare Orthodox pop star. Gifted musically, he gravitated toward the New York folk club scene in the 1960s. He mixed gospel and soul influences with traditional Jewish music. In the process he developed a following throughout the world for his sunny, spirited songs, particularly among the tie-dyed countercultural set. After a prolific career he died in 1994.

Written and directed by Daniel S. Wise, the show tracks this evolution during an overlong 2 hours 45 minutes, focusing on Carlebach’s struggle between the conservative religious world and the progressive music scene. In the first act he tries to persuade crowds to separate into male and female groups and does his best to avoid touching women, as is religious custom. But as he gains success, he embraces a new lifestyle.

And yet Carlebach continues preaching the virtues of the Torah; his flock includes a collective of hippies in San Francisco that he calls the House of Love and Prayer. In this telling, Nina Simone, played with lovely delicacy and strong voice by Erica Ash, proves to be a key inspiration at various points in his life; songs she made famous fill out the score, which is dominated by Carlebach’s own music. There’s even some romantic spark between them that goes insufficiently explored.

Mr. Wise creates the framework for a potentially fascinating show but doesn’t fill it in with the necessary psychology or personality to make his protagonist vivid. Carlebach remains a cipher. A subplot about his marriage, which is shaken by his constant touring, is shoehorned into the story, but its thinness only underlines how little we learn about what motivates Carlebach. His critics, generally dogmatic religious types, are merely one-dimensional villains.

Even putting aside the show’s failure to explore some of the more controversial criticisms of Carlebach, like the report in Lilith Magazine, released after his death, that accused him of sexual harassment and abuse, this remains a gentle, sanitized portrait. It comes alive, however, when Mr. Anderson bursts into song. That’s when “Soul Doctor” stops treading carefully and begins to stomp.

http://theater.nytimes.com/...eater/reviews/soul-doctor-shlomo-carlebach-new-york-theater-workshop.html?pagewanted=print[8/16/2012 9:51:21 AM]

August 15, 2012 Joan Roberts Dies at 95; Original ‘Oklahoma!’ Star

By MARGALIT FOX

Joan Roberts, who created the role of the winsome “yeller”-haired heroine, Laurey, in the original Broadway production of “Oklahoma!,” died on Monday in Stamford, Conn. She was 95.

Her death was announced by the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization. One of the last living members of the musical’s original cast, Ms. Roberts had lived for many years in Rockville Centre, N.Y.

“Oklahoma!,” which opened in 1943, was only Ms. Roberts’s second Broadway show. She had previously appeared in the short-lived musical “Sunny River” (1941), with music by Sigmund Romberg and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.

Asked by Mr. Hammerstein to audition for “Oklahoma!,” Ms. Roberts first tried out for the part of Ado Annie, the feisty young woman incapable of demurral.

But Mr. Hammerstein soon realized that her lyric soprano was better suited for the demure Laurey, a role for which Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin were reported to have been considered. Celeste Holm, who died last month at 95, was cast as Ado Annie. “Oklahoma!” ran for 2,212 performances and became a benchmark by which later musicals would be judged.

Ms. Roberts was born Josephine Rose Seagrist in New York City on July 15, 1917, and reared in the Astoria section of Queens.

Paramount Pictures had a studio in Astoria. When Josephine was 5 or 6, she marched in, announced she wanted to be in pictures, and was cast as an extra in several films.

As a girl, Josephine studied with the singing teacher Estelle Liebling, who also taught Beverly Sills. As a teenager, she toured the country in Shubert brothers musicals, taking the stage name Joan Roberts early on.

“Oklahoma!,” the first collaboration between Mr. Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers, was an adaptation of Lynn Riggs’s 1931 Broadway play, “Green Grow the Lilacs.” At one of Ms. Roberts’s many auditions for the musical, she was asked to read from Mr. Riggs’s script.

“It was filled with vulgar language, and during the reading I just dropped the words because no 18-year-old farm girl would use those words,” Ms. Roberts told The New York Times in 2001. “I never thought I’d get the part but I did, and, you know, none of that language was in it when we opened.” Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, “Oklahoma!” opened on March 31, 1943, at the St. James Theater to glowing notices; critics commended Ms. Roberts and the male lead, Alfred Drake, for their freshness and fine voices. (In the show’s ballet sequences, choreographed by Agnes de Mille, their characters were danced by Katharine Sergava and Marc Platt.)

Ms. Roberts’s best-known musical numbers included “Many a New Day,” “Out of My Dreams” and, with Mr. Drake, “People Will Say We’re in Love.” Her performance as Laurey led to a contract with the Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, but the roles he promised never materialized. The 1955 film version of “Oklahoma!,” produced by Arthur Hornblow Jr., starred Shirley Jones as Laurey.

Ms. Roberts appeared in several more Broadway musicals of the ’40s, including “Marinka” and “High Button Shoes,” before settling into a life of marriage, motherhood, summer stock and regional theater. In 2001, she returned to Broadway after more than 50 years to play the operetta star Heidi Schiller in a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies.”

Ms. Roberts’s first husband, John Donlon, died in 1965; her second, Alexander Peter, died in 1993. Survivors include a son, John Donlon; two stepsons, Robert and James Peter; and a number of step-grandchildren and step-great- grandchildren.

Though “Oklahoma!” made Ms. Roberts a star, it did leave her, she said, with one abiding regret. During backers’ auditions to raise money for the show, she and other cast members were asked to buy $500 shares of their own.

Actors being impecunious, they declined. By the time it closed in 1948, The Times reported that year, “Oklahoma!” had netted its investors a return of 2,500 percent.

August 15, 2012 Al Freeman Jr., Actor Prominent in Civil Rights Era, Dies at 78

By PAUL VITELLO

Al Freeman Jr., a star among a generation of black actors that emerged during the civil rights era, who made his mark in both drama and race relations with his portraits of some of the movement’s most forbidding personalities — angry young men in the 1960s plays of James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones, Malcolm X in a television drama, and the black separatist Elijah Muhammad in Spike Lee’s 1992 movie “Malcolm X” — died on Aug. 9 in Washington. He was 78.

His death was announced by Howard University, where he had been chairman of the theater arts department since 2005. No cause was disclosed.

Mr. Freeman’s lucid fury and psychological insight made him a favorite of literary black playwrights in the 1960s. He made his Broadway debut in 1960 in “The Long Dream,” a stage adaptation of a novel by Richard Wright, playing a black undertaker’s son who discovers his father’s complicity in the racial oppression at the heart of small-town life.

He starred on Broadway again in 1962 with Cicely Tyson, Roscoe Lee Browne and Alvin Ailey in “Tiger Tiger Burning Bright,” a pessimistic depiction of a black family’s life in New Orleans at the end of World War II. And he returned to Broadway in 1964 to play the ill-fated pastor’s son Richard Henry in Mr. Baldwin’s play “Blues for Mister Charlie,” loosely based on the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black youth murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after supposedly flirting with a white woman.

The same year, at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in the East Village, Mr. Freeman played a poet-revolutionary leading a race war in a production of “The Slave,” by Mr. Jones, now known as Amiri Baraka, which concludes with the sound of gunshots and a simulated bombing, the stage left covered in rubble. “Al Freeman Jr. is brilliant,” the critic Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times, praising his performance for its “taut intelligence.”

Mr. Freeman viewed his role as a black actor during that time as part of a larger, unfolding drama, he told interviewers. “I wasn’t down there on the front lines with Martin Luther King, or preparing myself with the Black

Panthers,” he told Ebony magazine in 1993. But bringing life to characters in plays like “Blues for Mister Charlie” and “The Slave,” he added, “That was my activism.”

By the end of the 1960s Mr. Freeman was being cast in television dramas and feature films like “Finian’s Rainbow,” starring Fred Astaire, and “The Detective,” with Frank Sinatra, both released in 1968. He said he liked the mainstream success, but lost some of the sense of purpose he had felt in dramas about race. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve always tried to find a good reason for doing it,” he told The Times in 1970, referring to television projects. “But lately I’ve begun to think that maybe it’s my own kind of cop-out rationale.”

In the 1970s Mr. Freeman began appearing on the ABC soap opera “One Life to Live” in the recurring role of a police captain. In 1979 he received a Daytime Emmy for that role — the first ever given to an African-American in a soap opera — as well as critical acclaim for his portrayal of Malcolm X in the mini-series “Roots: The Next Generations.”

Teaching at Howard University beginning in 1988, Mr. Freeman had withdrawn somewhat from acting when Mr. Lee, preparing to direct “’Malcolm X,” asked him in 1991 to audition for the role of Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam leader who inspired Malcolm X and then disappointed him with his marital infidelities.

Mr. Freeman later told interviewers that he felt he could bring to the part a feel for the times and a sense of the promise people saw in the young Malcolm, a part that went to Denzel Washington. “Certainly Spike didn’t pay me that much,” he told Ebony. “The point was that it had to do with my life.”

Reviews seemed to confirm his initial instincts. The critic Gene Siskel said watching Mr. Freeman’s Elijah Muhammad on screen was like watching documentary footage of the man himself.

Albert Cornelius Freeman Jr. was born on March 21, 1934, in San Antonio. After his parents, Albert and Lottie, divorced, he recalled, he spent much of his childhood shuttling between San Antonio, where his mother stayed, and Columbus, Ohio, where his father, a jazz pianist, resettled. In 1960 he married Sevara Clemon, a dancer; the couple divorced in the mid-1980s. No immediate family members are known to survive.

Mr. Freeman said his life as an artist was inextricable from the spirit of the times in which he lived, and that Malcolm X had articulated that spirit more powerfully than anyone. In the 1993 Ebony interview, he recalled once seeing Malcolm X speak in Harlem. “I remember him saying, ‘If a dog attacks you, whether it’s a four-legged dog or a two- legged dog, you kill that dog,’ ” he said. “That’s what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear ‘stand up!’ Not ‘go out and kill anybody,’ but ‘stand up and be a man.’ ”