THE MORNING LINE
DATE: Wednesday, October 14, 2015
FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Megan Ching
PAGES: 22, including this page.
Obituary for Robert DiMichiell, Jr.
October 13, 2015
Robert Lawrence DeMichiell Jr. passed away last night (Monday, October 12) in Manhattan after a three year battle with cancer. He died peacefully at home with his husband Jeffrey M. Wilson at his side.
DeMichiell was born on May 2, 1958 in Portland, Maine, to Robert Lawrence DeMichiell Sr. and Nan (McEvoy) DeMichiell. At the age of 2, his family moved to Kodiak, Alaska, where his father was the Commanding Officer of the LORAN station. In 1962, Robert Sr. was transferred to the faculty of the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT, and the family moved to Waterford, Connecticut where they still reside. Bob Sr. passed away in 2014.
As a young boy, Robert loved art and would copy any illustration he saw. With his father as his chaperone and biggest champion, he attended hundreds of art fairs with a sign, “You name it, I’ll draw it. One dollar. No dogs”. In 1980, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and moved to New York, which remained his home.
DeMichiell was one of the most prolific commercial illustrators of his time, with a distinctive style that was synonymous with sophisticated New York City-based entertainment and culture. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker (including the cover in 1993, and hundreds of theatrical illustrations for them, including the magazine’s first ever color illustration of the Blue Man Group), Entertainment Weekly (where he was a regular for many years) and Premiere Magazine's “If You Ask Me” column for 12 years. Additionally, he created the signature art for many Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, including Oliver (1984), The Wind and the Willows (1985), Arsenic and Old Lace (1986), The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (1998), La Cage aux Folles (the 2004 revival), as well as numerous posters for the charity Broadway Cares including the organization’s annual Easter Bonnet, Gypsy of the Year, Nothing Like a Dame, Broadway Flea Market and Broadway Barks events. His illustrations have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Readers Digest, TV Guide, Hartford Courant and literally hundreds of newspapers and magazines around the country. His corporate work includes images for American Express, Absolut Vodka, and many others.
He married Jeffrey M. Wilson on March 25, 2012 and their wedding was profiled in the NY Times. A year later, their photo appeared in a story about same-sex marriage .
He is survived by his mother Nan, sisters Lynn (husband Brian) Lynch and Gail DeMichiell, nephews Matthew and David Lynch, and niece Jessica Harran.
A long-planned celebration of his art work will be held, as originally planned, this evening (Tuesday, October 13, 2015). Entitled “Robert de Michiell: On Fire Island,” the exhibition will be from 1:00-5:00 PM today with a closing reception from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at ClampArt Gallery, 531 West 25th in Manhattan.
Tributes are coming in from all over. Here is a beautiful one from Paul Rudnick: Robert de Michiell.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in his name to The Actors Fund, 729 Seventh Ave., New York, NY, 10019 or to Calvary Fund (Calvary Hospital Hospice), 1740 Eastchester Road, Bronx, NY 10461
Here is a sample of some of Robert’s artwork:
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October 14, 2015
C3
October 14, 2015 Suzan-Lori Parks Is Awarded the Gish Prize
By Erik Pipenburg
Suzan-Lori Parks is the recipient of the 22nd Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, awarded annually to artists who have had an extraordinary impact in their disciplines. Established through the will of the actress Lillian Gish, the prize comes with a large cash award, currently about $300,000.
Ms. Parks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-nominated playwright whose works include the epic “Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3),” which was staged in 2014 at the Public Theater to mostly positive reviews, and an adaptation of the book for the controversial revamp of the musical “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” which opened on Broadway in 2012.
In a news release announcing the award, the Gish Prize Trust said that Ms. Parks’s work “challenges contemporary conceptions of race, sexuality, family and society, and is distinguished by its striking wordplay, vibrant wit and uninhibited style.” “Brilliantly trippy” is how Ms. Parks described joining the roster of past winners, which includes Bob Dylan, Maya Lin and Arthur Miller.
Ms. Parks is to receive the award in a ceremony on Nov. 30 at the Public Theater. The evening will include a performance of an excerpt from her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Topdog/Underdog,” with the actors Brandon J. Dirden and Jason Dirden, and a musical performance by Ms. Parks and the musician Steven Bargonetti. C1
October 14, 2015
Review: ‘Ugly Lies the Bone,’ With Mamie Gummer as a Combat Veteran
By Charles Isherwood
It takes a brave playwright to saddle her work with the less than enticing title “Ugly Lies the Bone.” The play itself, about a severely wounded war veteran attempting to put together a new life, confirms that Lindsey Ferrentino is a writer of dauntless conviction. This bracing drama from the Roundabout Underground program, starring a superb Mamie Gummer as that damaged vet, confronts an achingly topical issue with hardheaded honesty and admirable compassion.
Jess (Ms. Gummer) has returned to her Florida home from a third tour in Afghanistan, enduring intense pain from injuries and the many surgeries that followed. We can read how much she suffers, moment by moment, from the grimaces and winces that flicker across Ms. Gummer’s face.
One leg almost permanently cramped, Jess uses a complicated walker to move around. The skin on the right side of her face has the mottled look of some kind of exotic fish, and she conceals her thin hair with a scarf; grafts cover large areas of her body as well, so she wears a bodysuit that extends down one arm.
Jess’s psyche is under severe stress, too, although her inherent strong will comes through clearly in her sardonic responses to her sister Kacie (Karron Graves), whose relentless attempts to cheer and distract only provoke irritation. Kacie’s bubbly chatter about her new boyfriend, Kelvin (played with lumbering, sweet cluelessness by Haynes Thigpen), meets with sarcasm and raised eyebrows, although Jess has but one eyebrow to raise.
Ms. Ferrentino alternates scenes depicting Jess’s uneasy transition to her “old” life with those set at a facility where she receives a kind of virtual reality therapy. Putting on goggles that cause her pain (“It took three surgeries to give me back my eyelid”), Jess is encouraged to move her limbs while watching an avatar move through a snowy wilderness. The choice of clime is hers; she finds it soothing.
Despite the forthright depictions of Jess’s suffering and frustration, “Ugly Lies the Bone,” directed by Patricia McGregor with careful attention to subtle changes in texture, retains a certain buoyancy. Ms. Gummer deftly draws out all the wryness in Jess’s personality, even as she makes clear that it’s often gallows humor born of her traumatic experience. Commenting on how Kacie, too, no longer resembles the glowing beauty of her high school years, she cracks, “At least I have an excuse.”
As Kacie and Kelvin tiptoe around Jess and her sensitivities, Jess renews a friendship with her former boyfriend when she stops in at a gas station convenience store and finds him behind the counter.
After the embarrassment of failing to recognize her has washed away, Stevie, played with goofball warmth by Chris Stack, offers his sympathy with an offhand grace. After a few more visits to the convenience store — Jess’s luck seems to extend only to minor wins in scratch-off lottery tickets — she and Stevie have established a familiar rapport.
“If you won more than five, I’d have to take your picture,” Stevie says.
“Then I’d have to get my gun,” Jess cracks.
Although Stevie has married, he suggests that he and Jess get together to once again watch a space shuttle launch — the last one — from the beach. “I can’t be around sand anymore,” Jess says flatly. “It’s a trigger.” They settle instead on watching it from her rooftop, but just as suggestions of a closer intimacy are hinted at, Jess has a psychic relapse and must be rushed to the hospital.
Ms. Ferrentino makes movingly clear how Jess’s experience has scarred her family, too. We learn from Kelvin that Kacie still cries herself to sleep, the kind of detail Kacie, whose anxious care for her sister is evident in Ms. Graves’s excellent chipper-antsy performance, would be too sensitive to share.
Their mother, unhappily, has dementia and no longer lives at home. Jess resists Kacie’s attempts to have her visit. We can guess at the reason: fear that her mother will react with horror or confusion at her daughter’s appearance or, worse, will not know her at all.
Yes, I know, more cheery detail! But unflinching portraits like the ones Ms. Ferrentino draws of the transitions of wounded veterans back to society are hard to come by outside journalism. The play is also notable for its focus on a female combat veteran; as women are increasingly represented in the armed forces, their stories are rightly drawing more attention (as in “Grounded,” recently at the Public Theater with Anne Hathaway) in works that explore how their experiences are both similar to and different from those of their male counterparts
Jess does slowly make progress with her novel therapy, which is based, a note indicates, on stress-reducing techniques actually being used on veterans. As the silken voice (Caitlin O’Connell) urges her to enter the imaginary landscape, her movements gradually become more fluid, and her initial testiness subsides. (We see projections of snowy mountainscapes, by Caite Hevner Kemp, on a screen pulled in front of the stage.)
The play’s title, incidentally, comes from Albert Einstein: “Beauty is but skin deep, ugly lies the bone. Beauty dies and fades away, but ugly holds its own.”
By the end of the play we have long since ceased to see Jess as “ugly” (if we ever did), but we do leave with the confident sense that, despite the setbacks and the uncertain future, this determined, hardheaded young woman will quite probably find a way to hold her own — and then some.
C4
October 14, 2015
Review: ‘Cut Throat,’ Mocking, Yet Embracing, the Clichés
By Neil Genzlinger
If you’ve never heard anyone mock the absurd phenomenon of ultracompetitive preschools, JB Reich’s “Cut Throat” at the Abingdon Theater Company will probably provide some laughs. But you have almost certainly heard such mocking, since it has been fueling plays, television shows, magazine articles, sketch comedy and more for years. “Cut Throat” features game actors expending a lot of energy to put across mostly familiar barbs.
Amy (Sarah Sirota) and Ben (Eric Bryant) are a young Upper West Side couple with a 3-year-old who are desperate to get the kid into a snooty preschool but lack the kind of pedigree that guarantees admission success. As the play begins, they are at an open house for one particularly obnoxious school, listening to the woman who runs it (Susan Cella) spout pretentious nonsense.
“It’s important we understand the philosophy of each school,” Amy tells Ben, who is skeptical of the whole process.
His response: “Since when do preschools have philosophies?”
Her response: “Since they started charging 25 grand a year.”
So this is a couple who understand the preposterousness of the universe they are trying to crack into, which leaves the play on shaky logical ground; they despise the Upper West Side clichés while at the same time trying to become one. In any case, Ben and Amy endure a series of humiliations seeking to please one school after another. The supporting players take on multiple roles, Ms. Cella doing an especially hilarious job as Binky, a high-society lush who Ben and Amy mistakenly think can pull some strings on their behalf.
Mr. Reich stuffs the play (which was directed by Mark Waldrop) with easy targets but then shifts gears near the end by throwing in marital discord, mother-daughter tension and child-rearing insights that aren’t very insightful. The transition doesn’t work; Ben and Amy spend two-thirds of the play in a world of caricatures, then are yanked out of it so that they, and the audience, can be taught weighty real-life lessons. Probably better to just stick with the laughs, shallow as they are. C4
October 14, 2015
Review: ‘Who’s Your Baghdaddy?,’ on the Difference Between Credible and Reliable Intelligence By Anita Gates
It all begins at the Frankfurt airport, when the only political-asylum specialist available who speaks Arabic is a nervous junior detective on the job for less than a week. Sure, sure, he can handle the talkative Iraqi defector.
In “Who’s Your Baghdaddy? Or How I Started the Iraq War,” an important, cunning, rock-solid musical comedy with a terrible title, the mistakes start there. A well-meaning C.I.A. employee confuses credibility and reliability — words that have very different meanings, we learn, among intelligence people — in a translation. Things like that just keep happening.
I don’t know how the Iraq war started, but this is the most plausible explanation so far. If you ever thought about the whole thing and wondered, “How could people be so stupid?,” here’s how: fear of being wrong, fear of admitting being wrong, the temptation of a life-changing promotion and other helpless, thoroughly plausible acts of ego.
The show is set in 2001. Act II begins on Sept. 11, with vows of revenge.
This is an Off Off Broadway production, for better and for worse. The cast works in the round at the Actors Temple Theater, on the theater floor, and almost everybody (the maximum audience is 50 or so) sits in the front row. When you cross your legs, you run the risk of kicking an actor. The orchestra consists of a keyboardist and a drummer. Caite Hevner Kemp’s set is a table and a few cushioned chairs. The cardboard props include a Krispy Kreme box that plays a computer.
Yet the staging (Marshall Pailet is the director) is fast-paced, expert and perfectly proportioned. Mr. Pailet’s music and A. D. Penedo’s lyrics (they wrote the book together, based on an unproduced screenplay by J. T. Allen) are modestly eloquent, as storytelling (like “Second in Command”) and in character-driven numbers (like “I Am Das Man”). Misha Shields’s choreography is inflected with early Bob Fosse, so it’s probably no accident that the two slinky State Department characters wear black fedoras.
The cast of eight is uniformly authentic and sympathetic. The only actor I can’t speak for is Nehal Joshi, who plays the Iraqi source nicknamed Curveball. I saw his understudy, Pomme Koch, who had a lush, resonant singing voice and the right amount of ambiguity. This man could be telling the truth about the mobile chemical- weaponry labs — or he could be a slimeball.
The script contains just enough “Wag the Dog” absurdism to keep things in perspective. One of the most satisfyingly goofy exchanges is between the woman who confesses that she’s a Civil War re-enactor and the man who asks her, “Which side?”
“Franco’s,” she says. C3
October 14, 2015
Review: ‘The Alcoholic Movie Musical!’ Goes Down Easy
By Claudia La Rocco
Attend a lot of performances, and you start to notice this: There are those onstage who are charming when they heckle their audiences, and those who aren’t.
Into the charming category goes Cynthia Hopkins, whose new 75-minute show at the Bushwick Starr, “The Alcoholic Movie Musical!,” opened on Saturday night with some gentle but pointed ribbing of those who had just paid money to see it. It will come as no surprise to those familiar with Ms. Hopkins to learn that her ultimate target was herself — specifically her musical, her ordeal in making her musical, and her life choices, and lack of choices, that contributed to this ordeal.
“It’s a disaster, and it hasn’t even begun,” she laments early on, staring out suspiciously at us from behind a piano. But that’s not quite true; as its name perhaps suggests, “The Alcoholic Movie Musical!” has been building (or is it running out of?) steam for a while. Though the stage is stripped down, featuring only Ms. Hopkins and Jeff Sugg operating within a tangle of wires, projections and equipment, the somewhat narrative plot is complicated; autobiographical elements (whether actual or invented) are combined with meta-theatrical meditations on those elements. For example: Being an alcoholic becomes conflated with struggling to write a screenplay about being an alcoholic, a process made more difficult by, among other things, being an alcoholic.
Along the way, Ms. Hopkins sheds supporters, who are all portrayed by her or Mr. Sugg, both in video and onstage. (The old finger-as-mustache gag is used to rather irresistible effect for the latter sections.) The joke, of course, is that Ms. Hopkins is marvelously good and sympathetic company; artfully plain, her sung and spoken meditations on the agony of creation come as a relief to those who have faced the same difficulties to see something through. Her clumsily aspirational dance routines delight. And her thoughts on how best to utilize her drinking problem (“I want to be the Temple Grandin of alcoholism”) are a compelling stew of funny, manipulative and strange.
So perhaps this is too much of a proscriptive quibble, but I found myself wondering what “The Alcoholic Movie Musical!” might do if it weren’t quite so charming — if its messy edges weren’t, in fact, pretty tidy, and its heroine were more a wreck than a lovable wreck. It’s fun to watch Ms. Hopkins talk about going off the rails, and, if even some of the autobiographical elements are true, she speaks with authority. What would happen if, onstage, she did the same?
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November 2015
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October 14-20, 2015
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October 13, 2015
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October 14-20, 2015
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October 13, 2015