Bill Nunn, Who Played Radio Raheem In
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THE MORNING LINE DATE: Monday, September 26, 2016 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Angela Yamarone PAGES: 17, including this page C3 September 24, 2016 ‘Frozen’ Musical Zeros In on Michael Grandage as Director By Michael Paulson Disney is expected to name Michael Grandage to direct its coming “Frozen” musical as the company seeks to keep the high-stakes project on track after firing the previous director. The expected hiring of Mr. Grandage was first reported by The New York Post. Disney declined to comment, but a person with knowledge of the production’s plans confirmed that Mr. Grandage was the leading candidate. Mr. Grandage, a much-admired former artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, a nonprofit in London, now runs a production company and directs both plays and films. He has directed one big musical on Broadway — a 2012 revival of “Evita,” which opened to mixed reviews — and is currently directing a film version of “Guys and Dolls” for 20th Century Fox. On Broadway, Mr. Grandage is better known for his plays: earlier this year he directed a revival of “Hughie” that failed at the box office; in 2010 he won a Tony Award for his direction of “Red,” and he was nominated for Tony awards in 2007 for directing “Frost/Nixon” and in 2014 for directing “The Cripple of Inishmaan.” Ben Brantley, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, last month described Mr. Grandage as one of the best directors working in London at the moment, writing, “Among the mainstream establishment, I’d single out Michael Grandage and Mr. Hytner (who both now run their own theater companies) for combining original theatrical wit and resourcefulness with commercial instincts.” Mr. Grandage would succeed Alex Timbers, whom Disney initially tapped to direct “Frozen.” The company announced last month that it had “parted ways” with Mr. Timbers, and it then began talks with other possible directors, including Stephen Daldry (“Billy Elliot”). (Mr. Timbers, last represented on Broadway with “Rocky,” is now directing “Oh, Hello on Broadway,” which begins previews Friday, and has also been working on a stage adaptation of “Beetlejuice” for Warner Bros.) Mr. Grandage would bring Christopher Oram, his partner in life and in theater, to the project as set designer, replacing Bob Crowley. Mr. Grandage will have to work on a relatively rapid timeline for a project of this scale. Disney is planning to stage a first production of “Frozen” in Denver next August, and then to open it on Broadway, at an expanded St. James Theater, in the spring of 2018. The musical is to be an adaptation of the hit film, with much of the same creative team, including music and lyrics by the husband-and-wife team Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, and a book by Jennifer Lee. Casting has not been announced. September 25, 2016 C24 September 23, 2016 C4 September 24, 2016 Review: In ‘A Taste of Honey,’ She’s Having the Baby. How Quaint. By Laura Collins-Hughes Shelagh Delaney was still a teenager when she sent her first script off to a London theater in 1958, enclosing a note that fairly bristled with a bold defensiveness. “I am sending this play to you for your opinion,” she wrote. “Would you please return it to me, as whatever sort of theatrical atrocity it is to you it means something to me.” There’s a similarly endearing blend of brisk audacity and unmistakable vulnerability in the young heroine of that play, “A Taste of Honey” — which, far from being received as an atrocity, became a hit in the West End and on Broadway, and then a film. Her name is Jo, and the actresses who have played her to acclaim over the years include Joan Plowright and Amanda Plummer. Add to that list Rebekah Brockman, whose memorable and assured portrayal is one of the chief attractions of Austin Pendleton’s rather patchy revival, at the Pearl Theater Company. Another draw is the terrific jazz trio that takes up residence in Jo’s living room; more on that in a bit. As the play opens, Jo is moving into a shabby flat with her mother, Helen (Rachel Botchan), in Manchester, England. Ms. Delaney’s stage directions describe Helen as “a semi-whore,” but she seems mostly to be a single mother who gets by on her looks and never wanted to be a parent in the first place. Jo is unsurprised when Helen ditches her to marry Peter (Bradford Cover), a cad with cash. Jo’s own love life — briefly promising when she falls for a tender navy man named Jimmy (Ade Otukoya), who quickly proposes — fizzles when he ships out and doesn’t come back. It’s an interracial relationship, and her blasé attitude about what people will think is part of what marks her as socially rebellious. When she discovers that she’s pregnant, she decides to have the baby, a prospect made infinitely easier by the presence of her friend and roommate, Geoffrey (John Evans Reese), who nurtures and looks after her. He is gay, by the way, which Jo initially finds terribly exotic. In its first New York revival since 1981, “A Taste of Honey” feels quaint around the edges; once- unconventional modes of living hardly raise an eyebrow these days. The play’s startle factor now lies in its discomfiting depictions of undisguised racism and homophobia. One thing that hasn’t changed much, but is beginning to: how rare it is for a play to put at its center a big, juicy role for a young woman. So it’s unfortunate that, particularly in Act I, this is a frustrating production. Ms. Botchan gives an erratic performance, while Mr. Cover seems unsuited to his role — and not only because Peter is meant to be significantly younger than Helen, an element unwisely ignored here. The rest of the cast does beautifully, and the jazz trio — a standard, slightly surreal feature of the play — brings a comfortable charm and a lovely sound to the proceedings, which include an overture of sorts at the top of each act. But these fine parts can’t be removed from the whole. There remains a nagging sense of a play only partly revived. “A Taste of Honey” runs through Oct. 30 at the Pearl Theater, 555 West 42nd Street; 212-563-9261, pearltheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. C4 September 24, 2016 Review: ‘Hit the Body Alarm’ Finds Satan in a Jumpsuit By Alexis Soloski Satan, cast down from heaven, tries to make the best of his new home.“Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven,” he says. Hell promises freedom, safety, power. Besides, do the denizens of paradise get to wear cool asymmetrical jumpsuits? That’s how Satan is clad in “Hit the Body Alarm” at the Performing Garage, Winsome Brown’s curious fusion of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”; James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”; and two original monologues, one by her, one by Brad Rouse. Ms. Brown begins the piece in a white robe and auburn wig, rearranging props, telling bad jokes in a German accent, running a finger around the rim of a wine glass. Then the lights change and swathes of plastic sheeting drop away, and there she is in black wings and that terrific jumpsuit, reciting Milton. The show takes imprisonment as its theme, seeming to borrow inspiration from Milton’s conjecture that Satan internalizes his own captivity — “for within him hell/He brings, and round about him.” But the extracts from the classics don’t relate especially well to the monologues, and the monologues don’t relate especially well to each other or to the John Zorn music that underscores them. The one by Mr. Rouse, who also serves as co-director, works better on the page. Ms. Brown’s, about a former actress who commits a terrible wrong, is far more absorbing, though it stops just when the moral questions it provokes become most compelling. The final scene, in which a bare Ms. Brown, resembling a German renaissance nude, recaps Eve’s dream, doesn’t add much. If the textual collage isn’t particularly engrossing, at least Ms. Brown is. She’s a spiky actress and an unaccommodating one, who prefers to needle audience members rather than oblige them. Confronted with forbidden fruit, you know she’d take an audacious bite. “Hit the Body Alarm” continues through Oct. 2 at the Performing Garage, 33 Wooster Street; theperforminggarage.com. Running time: 1 hour. A25 September 26, 2016 Bill Nunn, Who Played Radio Raheem in ‘Do the Right Thing,’ Dies at 63 By Liam Stack Bill Nunn, a versatile actor best known for playing the role of Radio Raheem, the boombox-toting neighborhood philosopher killed by police officers in Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing,” died on Saturday in Pittsburgh. He was 63. His death was announced on social media by Mr. Lee. His wife, Donna, told The Associated Press that Mr. Nunn had cancer. The first major acting role for Mr. Nunn, the son of a well-known professional football scout, was in the 1988 film “School Daze,” also written and directed by Mr. Lee. The next year brought the critically acclaimed “Do the Right Thing,” in which he played Radio Raheem, who carries a boombox blaring Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” through the streets of the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn on the hottest day of summer. Radio Raheem sits at the moral heart of the film, delivering a soliloquy directly to the camera on the ceaseless contest between love and hate, symbolized by the four-finger rings he wears on each hand.