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THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Tuesday, January 3, 2017

FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh

PAGES: 36, including this page

December 26, 2016

‘Hair’ to Have 50th Anniversary Party at La MaMa

By Ryan Burleson

“Hair,” the musical that voiced a generation’s antiwar passions, will celebrate its 50th anniversary at La MaMa on Jan. 21 with a night of storytelling and performances by original and revival cast members. Those confirmed from the 1968 cast include Natalie Mosco; Allan Nicholls; the Rev. Marjorie Lipari; and Dale Soules, who now plays Frieda Berlin on “Orange Is the New Black.” They will be joined by, among others, André De Shields, who counts his appearance in a 1971 Chicago production as the official start of his career. The anniversary event will feature personal stories from the creators Galt MacDermot and James Rado, who will be celebrating his 85th birthday. And a demo of the song “Hair,” performed by Mr. Rado, Mr. MacDermot and their collaborator, Gerome Ragni, who died in 1991, will be played publicly for the first time. Attendees will also hear live performances of “Aquarius,” “Donna,” “Frank Mills” and “The Flesh Failures (Let The Sun Shine In),” and they’ll view rarely seen photos from the private collection of the “Hair” producer Michael Butler. Mr. Butler; an original cast member, Walter Michael Harris; and Antwayn Hopper, who performed in the 2009 Broadway revival of the show, will make appearances via video. “Hair” first appeared in October 1967, at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, before migrating to Broadway. The anniversary event, presented as part of La MaMa’s Coffeehouse Chronicles series, will be moderated by Chris Kapp and directed by Michael Gamily, with educational outreach by Arthur Adair. Admission is free with a suggested donation, and advance reservations are required, at lamama.org.

December 29, 2016 ‘Hester Street’ to Be Adapted for the Stage By Andrew R. Chow The playwright Sharyn Rothstein is writing a stage adaptation of the 1975 film “Hester Street,” which starred Carol Kane in a breakout Oscar-nominated performance and is the latest in a wave of classic films to move to the stage. “Hester Street” was adapted by Joan Micklin Silver from the 1896 novella “Yekl” by Abraham Cahan, and follows a young Jewish immigrant struggling to assimilate on the Lower East Side. Richard Eder’s review in The New York Times made several references to the film’s play-like quality. “The effect of seeing “Hester Street” is that of seeing a familiar play,” he wrote, also noting that the movie’s street scenes looked “like a stage set.” Ms. Rothstein’s most recent play, “By the Water,” appeared at the Manhattan Theater Club in 2014 to positive reviews. She has a personal connection to the story of “Hester Street.” “My great-grandmother came to America alone as a 16-year-old girl and raised her family just north of Delancey Street,” she said in a statement. “It’s a story as old as our nation and just as relevant today.” The producers Michael Rabinowitz and Ira Deutchman plan to stage readings in 2017 with the goal of moving the project to Broadway. Stage versions of “Dead Poets Society” and “Terms of Endearment” recently ran in New York, and an adaptation of “Dog Day Afternoon” is in the works.

December 25, 2016

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December 27, 2016

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December 23, 2016

Review: ‘Kevin!!!!!,’ a Multimedia Sendup of ‘Home Alone’ By Andy Webster

It takes audacity and energy to satirically sabotage a holiday film as revered as the 1990 comedy “Home Alone.” But in “Kevin!!!!!,” a multimedia sendup at the People’s Improvisational Theater, the troupe Recent Cutbacks displays plenty.

The players know the terrain: Previous productions from the group have spoofed the “Lord of the Rings” movies and the “Jurassic Park” franchise. “Home Alone” offers a target even more ripe for mockery, and as directed by Kristin McCarthy Parker, the company does a pretty thorough job in one breathless hour.

“Kevin!!!!!” employs video, puppets and action figures, as well as actors, to tell its familiar story, about a boy abandoned by his vacationing family and left to defend a suburban home from two klutzy burglars. (Here, Natalie Rich plays Marv, the Daniel Stern role, while Sonia Mena portrays Harry, the Joe Pesci part.)

Much of the frenetic action takes place on a small onstage table with video cameras aimed at it. There, cast members, some turned away from the audience, manipulate figurines, homemade puppets and, yes, a nutcracker for scenes projected on a screen. At other times, bigger puppets occupy the larger stage, particularly for Kevin (the Macaulay Culkin role, here Nick Abeel) and the thieves.

Providing bite-size musical chestnuts of the season is a talented choir comprising Sarah Godwin, Evan Maltby, Richard Sears and Michelle Vo, with Ms. Godwin especially impressive.

The affection here for “Home Alone” is palpable — it helps to know the original — and largely devoid of malice. The show doesn’t really have to go there; the movie’s script (by John Hughes) approaches self-parody.

When Kevin brings his mother to heel for having forgotten him (while his father gets off scot-free), “Kevin!!!!!” reveals just how much of a dated artifact “Home Alone” actually is.

December 23, 2016

Review: Peering Behind the Whimsically Ghoulish ‘Gorey’ By Elisabeth Vincentelli

It’s usually wise to avoid assumptions based on an artist’s work. Actors so convincing as violent psychos go home to minivans and soccer lessons. Gilbert & George’s paintings can be provocatively outré, but they live routine lives in their conservative suits. Not so Edward Gorey, who was almost as eccentric as his ghoulishly humorous drawings, with their mysterious black-clad ladies, long-suffering children and ominous menageries. This admirer of “The Golden Girls” and Balanchine had a predilection for fur coats, Converse sneakers and cats. The offbeat illustrator proves a rich subject for a play, and the writer-director Travis Russ’s “Gorey,” from the Life Jacket Theater Company at the Sheen Center, does his archly kooky world justice. Subtitled “The Secret Lives of Edward Gorey,” the show focuses on the man rather than the artist. Mr. Russ’s decisive idea is to have three actors portray him at various stages of his life: Phil Gillen is Gorey in his 20s, fresh from Harvard; Aidan Sank picks him up in his mid-30s, at peak Oscar Wildean flamboyance; and Andrew Dawson gives us a man in his 70s who’s made peace with his regrets. The three constantly interact with one another, a lovely way to suggest Gorey’s inner questioning and the evolution of his sensibility through the decades. The set, by Mr. Russ and John Narun, is inspired by Gorey’s Cape Cod home, which he bought in 1979 and where he lived until his death, in 2000. It is a nostalgic jumble of portfolios, books, old typewriters and record players. (We hear a few of the pop songs he was crazy about.) Billed as a “fantasy memoir,” the play intermingles flights of fancy and such slightly dramatized Gorey quotations as “I am fortunate in that I have always been terribly undersexed.” This “confirmed bachelor” never had a relationship, and while the two younger avatars sometimes express longings for love, however drolly, Mr. Dawson’s elderly Gorey seems philosophical about a life alone, but not lonely. Gorey, as ever, forged his own path.

December 27, 2016 Review: Hey, Eb, 3 Christmas Spirits Would Like to Chill With You By Laura Collins-Hughes

Poor old Ebenezer Scrooge, saddled with that sharp and ungainly first name. Even if he weren’t bitterness and ill will incarnate at the start of “A Christmas Carol,” those four unfriendly syllables would serve as a warning to his fellow human beings, and maybe the occasional spirit: Approach with caution. But when the ghost of Jacob Marley pays an evening visit to Scrooge in Blessed Unrest’s “A Christmas Carol,” a Dickens adaptation by Matt Opatrny, this unusually benevolent Marley calls him Eb, as a good pal might. To Fred, Scrooge’s insistently festive nephew, he is Uncle Neezer. And Belle, the squandered love of Scrooge’s life, refers to him as Ebbie. A humanizing warmth flickers through this stripped-down, six-actor “A Christmas Carol,” at the New Ohio Theater, where J. Stephen Brantley is a delightfully sour, unreformed Scrooge, a man who bares his teeth in place of a smile. On Christmas Day, after the ghosts have persuaded him to change his ways, he is endearingly tentative in his efforts to transform. It’s the in-between that gets tricky in this production, which feels a little saggy in this wide-open and bare playing space. Blessed Unrest specializes in physical theater, and a full-company dance number to Lady Gaga’s “Applause” is an energetic high point. But, too often, the action is strangely far away, and there is a deadening effect to the script’s insistence on emphasizing social injustice even more than Dickens does in his original story. Directed and choreographed by Jessica Burr, the show does include some lovely performances. Joshua Wynter brings an ease to both Marley and the merry Mr. Fezziwig, Scrooge’s long-ago boss, while Nathan Richard Wagner gives a gentleness to Bob Cratchit and a teasing flirtatiousness to Mrs. Fezziwig. Many other roles lack that vividness, though, and there is never a sense of a world firmly created. One thing this show succeeds at cleverly, however, is telling a ghost story in a way that won’t frighten any children in the audience. The spirits who parade through “A Christmas Carol” don’t need to be spooky to us, and they’re not. They just need to scare Scrooge straight, and they do.

December 28, 2016 Carrie Fisher, Child of Hollywood and ‘Star Wars’ Royalty, Dies at 60 By Dave Itzkoff

Carrie Fisher, the actress, author and screenwriter who brought a rare combination of nerve, grit and hopefulness to her most indelible role, as Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” movie franchise, died on Tuesday morning. She was 60. A family spokesman, Simon Halls, said Ms. Fisher died at 8:55 a.m. She had a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles on Friday and had been hospitalized in Los Angeles. After her “Star Wars” success, Ms. Fisher, the daughter of the pop singer Eddie Fisher and the actress Debbie Reynolds, went on to use her perch among Hollywood royalty to offer wry commentary in her books on the paradoxes and absurdities of the entertainment industry. “Star Wars,” released in 1977, turned her overnight into an international movie star. The film, written and directed by George Lucas, traveled around the world, breaking box-office records. It proved to be the first installment of a blockbuster series whose vivid, even preposterous characters — living “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” as the opening sequence announced — became pop culture legends and the progenitors of a merchandising bonanza. Ms. Fisher established Princess Leia as a damsel who could very much deal with her own distress, whether facing down the villainy of the dreaded Darth Vader or the romantic interests of the roguish smuggler Han Solo. Wielding blaster pistols, piloting futuristic vehicles and, to her occasional chagrin, wearing strange hairdos and a revealing metal bikini, she reprised the role in three more films — “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1980, “Return of the Jedi” in 1983 and, 32 years later, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” by which time Leia had become a hard-bitten general. Lucasfilm said on Tuesday that Ms. Fisher had completed her work in an as-yet-untitled eighth episode of the main “Star Wars” saga, which is scheduled to be released in December 2017. Winning the admiration of countless fans, Ms. Fisher never played Leia as helpless. She had the toughness to escape the clutches of the monstrous gangster Jabba the Hutt and the tenderness to tell Han Solo, as he is about to be frozen in carbonite, “I love you.” (Solo, played by Harrison Ford, caddishly replies, “I know.”) Offscreen, Ms. Fisher was open about her diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She gave her dueling dispositions the nicknames Roy (“the wild ride of a mood,” she said) and Pam (“who stands on the shore and sobs”). She channeled her struggles with depression and substance abuse into fiercely comic works, including the semiautobiographical novel “Postcards From the Edge” and the one-woman show “Wishful Drinking,” which she turned into a memoir.

For all the attention she received for playing Princess Leia, Ms. Fisher enjoyed poking wicked fun at the character, as well as at the fantastical “Star Wars” universe. “Who wears that much lip gloss into battle?” she asked in a recent memoir, “The Princess Diarist.” Having seen fame’s light and dark sides, Ms. Fisher did not take it too seriously, or consider it an enduring commodity. As she wrote in “The Princess Diarist”: “Perpetual celebrity — the kind where any mention of you will interest a significant percentage of the public until the day you die, even if that day comes decades after your last real contribution to the culture — is exceedingly rare, reserved for the likes of Muhammad Ali.” Carrie Frances Fisher was born on Oct. 21, 1956, in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was the first child of her highly visible parents (they later had a son, Todd), and said in “Wishful Drinking” that, while her mother was under anesthetic delivering her, her father fainted. “So when I arrived,” Ms. Fisher wrote, “I was virtually unattended! And I have been trying to make up for that fact ever since.” In 1959, Ms. Reynolds divorced Eddie Fisher in the wake of his affair with Elizabeth Taylor, whom he married that same year. (Ms. Taylor later left him to marry Richard Burton.) Any semblance of a normal childhood was impossible for Ms. Fisher. At 15, she played a debutante in the Broadway musical “Irene,” which starred her mother, and appeared in Ms. Reynolds’s Las Vegas nightclub act. At 17, Ms. Fisher made her first movie, “Shampoo” (1975), Hal Ashby’s satire of Nixon-era politics and the libidinous Los Angeles culture of the time, in which she played the precocious daughter of a wealthy woman (Lee Grant) having an affair with a promiscuous hairdresser (Warren Beatty). She was one of roughly two dozen young actresses considered for the role of Princess Leia in Mr. Lucas’s marathon casting sessions for “Star Wars.” (Cindy Williams, Amy Irving, Sissy Spacek and Jodie Foster were among those who also read for the part.) Many of Ms. Fisher’s line readings from that film have since become part of the cinematic canon: her repeated, almost hypnotic exhortation, “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope”; her wryly unimpressed reaction when Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) arrives in disguise to rescue her from a detention cell: “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” “Star Wars” became a financial and cultural phenomenon, launching more movies and a merchandising machine that splashed Ms. Fisher’s likeness on all manner of action figures and products while casting her into an uneasy limelight. She partied with the Rolling Stones during the making of “The Empire Strikes Back,” hosted “Saturday Night Live” and had romantic relationships with Dan Aykroyd (with whom she appeared in “The Blues Brothers”) and Paul Simon. She and Mr. Simon had a marriage that lasted less than a year, and he was inspired to write his song “Hearts and Bones” about their time together. As its lyrics go: Two people were married The act was outrageous The bride was contagious She burned like a bride.

These events may have had some effect On the man with the girl by his side. In “The Princess Diarist,” she admitted what many fans had long suspected: During the filming of the first “Star Wars” movie, she and Harrison Ford (who was married at the time) had an affair. Ms. Fisher acknowledged taking drugs like LSD and Percodan throughout the 1970s and ’80s and later said that she was using cocaine while making “The Empire Strikes Back.” In 1985, after filming a role in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” she had a nearly fatal drug overdose. She had her stomach pumped and checked herself into a 30-day rehab program in Los Angeles. Those experiences later became grist for her caustic, comic novel “Postcards From the Edge,” whose chapters are variously presented as letters, diary entries, monologues and third-person narratives. As the main character, Suzanne, writes of her rehab stay: “Mom brought me some peanut butter cookies and a biography of Judy Garland. She told me she thought my problem was that I was too impatient, my fuse was too short, that I was only interested in instant gratification. I said, ‘Instant gratification takes too long.’” The book was later made into a movie, directed by Mike Nichols from a script by Ms. Fisher. Released in 1990, it starred Meryl Streep as Suzanne and Shirley MacLaine as her movie-star mother. On film, Ms. Fisher also played the scene-stealing best friend of Meg Ryan’s title character in the 1989 romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally…” On television, she played satirical versions of herself on shows like “Sex and the City” and “The Big Bang Theory.” She had a recurring role on the British comedy “Catastrophe” (seen here on Amazon) as the mother of the character played by Rob Delaney, one of the show’s creators. Her survivors include her mother; her brother, Todd; her daughter, Billie Lourd, from a relationship with the talent agent Bryan Lourd; and her half sisters, Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher, the daughters of Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens. Ms. Fisher had a Dorothy Parker-like presence on Twitter, where she ruminated on the inexplicable mania surrounding “Star Wars” and on her French bulldog, Gary, in playful messages filled with emoji. Last year, after the release of “The Force Awakens,” she wrote, in part: “Please stop debating about whether OR not [eye emoji] aged well. unfortunately it hurts all 3 of my feelings. My BODY hasn’t aged as well as I have.”

December 29, 2016 Debbie Reynolds, Wholesome Ingénue in 1950s Films, Dies at 84 By Anita Gates Debbie Reynolds, the wholesome ingénue in 1950s films like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Tammy and the Bachelor,” died on Wednesday, a day after the death of her daughter, the actress Carrie Fisher. She was 84. Her death, following a stroke, was confirmed by her son, Todd Fisher, according to her agent, Tom Markley of the Metropolitan Talent Agency. Ms. Reynolds was taken to a Los Angeles hospital on Wednesday afternoon. According to the celebrity news site TMZ, she had been discussing funeral plans for Ms. Fisher, who died on Tuesday after having a heart attack during a flight to Los Angeles last Friday. On Tuesday, Ms. Reynolds had expressed gratitude to her daughter’s fans on Facebook. “Thank you to everyone who has embraced the gifts and talents of my beloved and amazing daughter,” she wrote. “I am grateful for your thoughts and prayers that are now guiding her to her next stop.” Ms. Reynolds’s career peak may have been her best-actress Academy Award nomination for playing the title role in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” (1964), a rags-to-riches western musical based on a true story. Her best-remembered film is probably “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), the classic MGM musical about 1920s moviemaking, in which she held her own with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor, although she was only 19 when the movie was shot and had never danced professionally before. Her fans may cherish her sentimental good-girl portrayals, like the title role in “Tammy and the Bachelor” (1957), in which she played a Louisiana moonshiner’s wide-eyed granddaughter who spouted folksy wisdom. Her greatest fame, however, may have come not from any movie role but from the Hollywood scandal involving her husband and a glamorous young widow. In 1955, Ms. Reynolds married Eddie Fisher, the boyish music idol whose hits included “Oh! My Pa-Pa” and “I’m Walking Behind You,” and the young couple were embraced by fan magazines as America’s sweethearts. Their best friends were the producer Mike Todd and his new wife, the femme-fatale film star Elizabeth Taylor. When Mr. Todd died in a private-plane crash in 1958, Ms. Reynolds and Mr. Fisher rushed to comfort Ms. Taylor. Mr. Fisher’s comforting, however, turned into a very public extramarital affair. He and Ms. Reynolds were divorced early the next year, and he and Ms. Taylor were married weeks later. That marriage lasted five years. Ms. Taylor left Mr. Fisher for Richard Burton, whom she had met in Rome on the set of “Cleopatra” (1963). Almost 40 years later, in an interview with The Chicago Sun-Times, Ms. Reynolds said of Ms. Taylor, “Probably she did me a great favor.” In her 1988 autobiography, “Debbie: My Life,” she described a marriage that was unhappy from the beginning.

“He didn’t think I was funny,” Ms. Reynolds wrote of Mr. Fisher. “I wasn’t good in bed. I didn’t make good gefilte fish or good chopped liver. So what did he have? A cute little girl next door with a little turned-up nose. That was, in fact, all he actually ever said he wanted from me. The children, he said, better have your nose.” Mary Frances Reynolds was born on April 1, 1932, in El Paso. Her father, Ray, worked for the railroad and struggled financially during the Depression. Her mother, Maxene, took in laundry to help make ends meet. As Nazarene Baptists, they considered movies sinful. With the promise of a better job, Ray moved to California when Mary Frances was 7, and the family soon followed. Her career dream was to go to college and become a gym teacher, she often said, but when she was named Miss Burbank 1948, everything changed. Two of the judges were movie-studio scouts, and she was soon under contract to Warner Bros., which changed her name. In 1950, she had her first screen credit in “The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady,” a musical comedy starring June Haver and Gordon MacRae. (Two years earlier she had a small uncredited part in “June Bride.”) The same year, she played Helen Kane, the 1920s singer known as the boop-boop-a-doop girl, in “Three Little Words” and also appeared in “Two Weeks With Love,” in which she sang “Aba Daba Honeymoon” with Carleton Carpenter. The song became a huge novelty hit. Her roles seemed to mirror 1950s attitudes toward love, marriage and family. In 1955, she played a marriage- minded all-American girl opposite Frank Sinatra in “The Tender Trap.” In 1956, she starred with her new husband, Mr. Fisher, in “Bundle of Joy,” a musical remake of the 1939 comedy “Bachelor Mother.” After the Taylor-Fisher-Reynolds scandal, Ms. Reynolds rode on a crest of good will and was a popular co-star in a long string of films, mostly lighthearted romantic comedies, including “The Gazebo” (1959), “Say One for Me” (1959) and “The Pleasure of His Company” (1961). She also played the title role in “The Singing Nun” (1966), appeared in “Divorce American Style” (1967) and was part of the all-star ensemble cast of “How the West Was Won” (1963), a rare drama among her more than three dozen movie credits. “Drama’s unhappy, and playing someone unhappy would make me unhappy,” she told The Boston Globe in 1990. “Ain’t for me, honey.” She took a stab at series television with a sitcom, “The Debbie Reynolds Show” (1969), in which she played a wacky Lucy Ricardo-like wife who wanted to be a journalist like her husband. It lasted only one season. But she soon achieved a kind of immortality as the voice of Charlotte the selfless spider in the animated film version of E. B. White’s children’s classic “Charlotte’s Web” (1973). She had married Harry Karl, a wealthy shoe retailer, in 1960, but by the time they divorced in 1973, he had gambled away or otherwise misspent his fortune and hers. Ms. Reynolds set out to re-establish herself financially. She headed to New York that year to make her Broadway debut in a revival of the 1920s musical “Irene,” for which she received a Tony Award nomination for best actress in a musical. In 1976, she had a short-lived one- woman Broadway show, “Debbie.” She made her last Broadway appearance in 1983, taking over the role originated by Lauren Bacall in the musical version of “Woman of the Year.” She later toured the country with stage shows including “Annie Get Your Gun” and a new version of “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” She had taken her musical and comedy talents to Las Vegas as early as 1960 and became a fixture there in the ’70s and ’80s. She and her third husband, Richard Hamlett, a Virginia real estate developer, established their own hotel, casino and movie-memorabilia museum there. But there were financial problems, and the property had to be sold in the ’90s.

A decade or so later, it looked as if Ms. Reynolds would finally find a permanent home for her Hollywood memorabilia museum, this time in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., the home of Dolly Parton’s theme park, Dollywood. But that, too, fell through, and in 2011, a large portion of her collection was auctioned at the Paley Center in Beverly Hills. Two sales, the first in June and the second in December, took in a little more than $25 million, including $4.6 million for the dress Marilyn Monroe wore in the famous subway-grate scene in “The Seven Year Itch.” For a while, Ms. Reynolds seemed to be better known as the mother of Ms. Fisher — who shot to stardom as Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” movies and wrote semiautobiographical novels — than as an actress or singer. Ms. Fisher’s 1987 book, “Postcards From the Edge,” made into a film starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine, reflected the sometimes difficult relationship between her and her famous mother. Ms. Reynolds’s career took something of a back seat to her personal life when she married Mr. Hamlett in 1984, but they divorced 12 years later. In 1996, Ms. Reynolds made an attention-getting big-screen comeback when Albert Brooks cast her as his often-clueless yet admirably self-possessed widowed mother in “Mother.” Her uncharacteristically low-key comic performance earned her a Golden Globe nomination, though not the Oscar nomination that many had predicted. The next year, she played Kevin Kline’s mother in the sexual-identity film comedy “In & Out.” And beginning in 1999, she won new fans with a recurring role on the NBC sitcom “Will & Grace” as Bobbi Adler, the Debra Messing character’s gregarious, uninhibited mother, who had a tendency to burst into song (show tunes, of course). Ms. Reynolds continued acting and doing voice work in both films and television into her late 70s. In 2013, she appeared as Liberace’s strong-willed mother in the HBO movie “Behind the Candelabra,” with Michael Douglas as Liberace. She appears in the documentary “Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds,” which was shown at the New York Film Festival in October, and of which her son, Mr. Fisher, is a producer. She is survived by Mr. Fisher and a granddaughter, Billie Lourd.

December 25, 2016 Willa Kim, Designer of Fanciful Costumes, Dies at 99 By Anita Gates

Willa Kim, the petite and unfailingly elegant theatrical costume designer whose exuberant, sometimes over-the- top designs brought her two Tony Awards and a solid reputation for innovation in the dance world, died on Friday on Vashon Island, Wash. She was 99. A friend, Richard Schurkamp, confirmed her death. Ms. Kim, a longtime resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, had been living with a niece on Vashon Island for the last couple of years, he said. Ms. Kim was in her 60s when she won her first Tony for best costume design. It was for her work — glamorous Harlem Renaissance-inspired designs for Gregory Hines, Judith Jamison and others — in “Sophisticated Ladies” (1981), the Duke Ellington musical revue. She received her second Tony exactly a decade later for “The Will Rogers Follies,” a Ziegfeld-style vaudeville extravaganza with a western accent, starring Keith Carradine. In his review for The New York Times, Frank Rich described Ms. Kim’s costume designs as breathtaking, with an opening-number chorus that kept “coming and coming” over the staircase, “each time with new chaps, new colors, new headdresses.” Ms. Kim’s other Broadway musicals included “Dancin’” (1978), “Tommy Tune Tonite!” (1992) and her last, “Victor, Victoria” (1995). She also worked on plays like Tom Stoppard’s “Jumpers” (1974), John Guare’s “Four Baboons Adoring the Sun” (1992) and a revival of “The Front Page” (1986). Dance was an equally important aspect of her career. In that area, she became known for two significant design accomplishments. She was said to be the first to switch from heavy, woolly nylon to lightweight stretch fabrics for dancers’ costumes and to paint designs on those new fabrics, starting with Margo Sappington’s 1971 ballet “Weewis.” As Ms. Kim recalled, a Brooklyn paint dealer agreed to sell her his product only after she promised to get his niece, a dance student, a scholarship at the Joffrey Ballet. She found her dance work liberating, she said, because unlike characters in theater, dancers did not have to look like “people operating in a real world,” no matter how fanciful. But she considered her designs for opera, like the “Turandot” she did for the Santa Fe Opera in 2005, the most interesting in her career. Ms. Kim’s milieu was almost exclusively the stage. But she did win an Emmy Award in 1981 for the costume design of “San Francisco Ballet: The Tempest,” which appeared as part of PBS’s “Great Performances: Dance in America.” She did only a handful of other screen projects: one movie (Francis Ford Coppola’s “Gardens of Stone,” a Vietnam War home front drama) and two television specials, all in 1987. “Maybe astrologically something was going on” that year, she said in an interview in 2009. Ms. Kim received numerous design awards during her six-decade career, but one of the most cherished was the Coronet Culture Medal from the South Korean government, awarded to her in New York in 2008.

Wullah Mei Ok Kim was born on June 30, 1917, near Santa Ana, Calif., one of six children of Shoon Kwan Kim and the former Nora Koh, Korean immigrants who soon moved the family to Los Angeles, where they operated a grocery store. Wullah (she Americanized the spelling of her first name later) showed an early aptitude for art. Because she also loved clothes, she hoped to become both a fashion illustrator and a painter. After graduating from Belmont High School, she took art classes at Los Angeles City College. Then she continued her studies on scholarship at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, which later merged with another school to become CalArts, the California Institute of the Arts. In 1942 she began what should have been her dream job, working as a fashion illustrator at the May Company department store. But within months, she left for Paramount Studios (a teacher had sent her portfolio there), where she became the assistant to the costumer Barbara Karinska. The two worked with Raoul Pène du Bois, who was designing most of the costumes for the Ginger Rogers film “Lady in the Dark” (1944). In 1945, after working with Ms. Karinska and Mr. Pène du Bois on other films, Ms. Kim followed her mentors to New York. Later that year, “Are You With It?” became the first Broadway musical for which she assisted Mr. Pène du Bois.

California beckoned once more, and she went home to study at the Jepson Art Institute with the Italian painter and designer Rico Lebrun. When she returned to New York in 1950, her association with Mr. Pène du Bois continued. They worked together on some of the biggest Broadway hits of the decade, including “Gypsy,” “The Music Man” and “Bells Are Ringing.” As the 1960s began, Ms. Kim struck out on her own. The costume budget for Arnold Weinstein’s “Red Eye of Love” (1961), at the Living Theater, was roughly $250. She began her dance career the next year designing costumes for Glen Tetley’s “Birds of Sorrow,” a modern-dance version of a Japanese Noh play. Her first solo work on Broadway was for “Are You With It” in 1945. Another show, “Have I Got a Girl for You!” (1963), closed on opening night. In fact, her first four Broadway projects ran a total of only 12 days. But by the 1970s, her career was in full swing, bringing her Tony nominations for “Goodtime Charley” (1975), “Dancin’” (1978), “Song and Dance” (1985) and “Legs Diamond” (1988) in addition to her two Tony wins. By the time Ms. Kim reached her 70s, people began to ask when she planned to give it all up. She didn’t. And in her 90s she admitted that while she did not consider herself retired, “everyone else seems to.” One of her last major projects was a new production of “The Sleeping Beauty” for American Ballet Theater in 2007. She married William Pène du Bois, a cousin of Raoul, in 1955. William, a children’s book illustrator and author and a founder of The Paris Review, returned alone to Europe in 1972 but, according to Bobbi Owen’s book “Designs of Willa Kim” (2005), they remained in touch and he continued to attend many of her openings. Mr. Pène du Bois died in 1993. Her survivors include her niece, Celeste Rosas. Her three brothers, Jack, Henry and Young O. Kim, a highly decorated World War II veteran, died before her. Ms. Kim voiced only one regret. Given the chance to do it all over again, she said in 2009,“You know, I would be kinder.”

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December 30, 2016 George S. Irving, Tony Winner and Voice of Heat Miser, Dies at 94 By Richard Sandomir

George S. Irving, a Tony Award-winning actor who was in the original Broadway casts of “Oklahoma!” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and amused a wide audience pitching White Owl cigars on television, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 94. His daughter, Katherine Irving, said the cause was heart failure. With his jutting jaw, wavy hair, commanding size and operatic baritone voice, Mr. Irving was a formidable stage presence. “He didn’t need a microphone,” said James Morgan, the producing artistic director of the York Theater, an Off Broadway company where Mr. Irving reprised some of his roles in decades-old, short-lived Broadway musicals. “He had this incredibly resonant voice, and total precision of diction. You can hear him on recordings — his voice just pops out from everybody else.” In one of those shows, “Enter Laughing,” in 2008, Mr. Irving revived the ridiculous, ribald number “The Butler’s Song” from “So Long, 174th Street,” as the musical was known when it closed after 16 performances in 1976. He showed anew the crispness of his enunciation — in this case stretched to farcical parody — and his talent for broad comedy. George Irving Shelasky was born on Nov. 1, 1922, in Springfield, Mass., to Abraham Shelasky, a haberdasher, and the former Rebecca Sack, a homemaker. “When I was 13 or 14, I sang in synagogues and churches when I was a boy soprano,” Mr. Irving told the theater website Broadway World. “We had a very good dramatics teacher in high school. We did ‘Julius Caesar’ and Chekhov.” After graduating from Classical High School in Springfield, he was awarded a scholarship to study drama at the Leland Powers School in Boston. After a year, he said, he found chorus work at the Municipal Theater Association of St. Louis, an outdoor theater better known as the Muny. When Mr. Irving replaced an actor in “Show Boat” at the Muny, Oscar Hammerstein II, the musical’s lyricist, happened to be there; their meeting eventually led to a job for Mr. Irving in the chorus of “Oklahoma!” and a front-row seat for the production’s first reading. “We all gathered upstairs at the Guild Theater, and Dick Rodgers played the score for us for the first time,” he told Broadway World. “Oscar was there and sort of mumbled the lyrics a little.” He left after a few weeks when he was drafted into the Army in World War II. He served in Special Services, the military’s entertainment branch, in the Philippines and Korea.

After his discharge, Mr. Irving went back to Broadway and was cast in “Call Me Mister,” a revue about soldiers returning from war. He met his future wife, Maria Karnilova, a ballet dancer and actress, in the cast. Her portrayal of Golde, Tevye the dairyman’s wife, in “Fiddler on the Roof” earned her the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical in 1965. Mr. Irving won his Tony, for best featured actor in a musical, eight years later for “Irene,” a hit revival of a 1920s show that also starred Debbie Reynolds, in which he played a flamboyant male fashion designer named Madame Lucy. (Ms. Reynolds died on Wednesday.) In an otherwise tepid review, Clive Barnes of The New York Times called Mr. Irving’s performance “by far the most professional and polished,” and said his Madame Lucy “stole a show that was never guarded as closely as it might have been.” Mr. Irving was a regular on Broadway, in the musicals “Can-Can,” “Bells Are Ringing” and “Irma La Douce,” among others, and in plays like Gore Vidal’s political satire “An Evening With Richard Nixon and...,” in which he played the title role. By the early 1970s, Mr. Irving’s expressive face had grown increasingly familiar to theater and television audiences. One of his long-running roles was as the spokesman for the American-made White Owl cigars. Once you try a White Owl, he said with a cocky smile, “We’re gonna getcha. You know we’re gonna getcha.” After exhaling some smoke, he added, “Oh yeah.” But he lost the job, he said, when he told Esquire magazine that he was most like his character in the ad campaign “when I get my hands on a big, fat Cuban cigar.” In 1974 he provided the voice for Heat Miser, the character who regulates warm weather, in the animated television movie “The Year Without a Santa Claus.” He returned to the role 34 years later in a sequel, “A Miser Brothers’ Christmas.” He also narrated episodes of the “Underdog” cartoon series. In addition to his daughter, Mr. Irving is survived by a son, Alexander; three grandchildren; and three great- grandchildren. Ms. Karnilova died in 2001. Mr. Irving was known for holding cast members at the York Theater rapt with his decades’ worth of backstage stories. “Ninety-nine percent of them aren’t printable,” Josh Grisetti, who worked with him in “Enter Laughing,” said in an interview. “He was so classy and dignified, so when he came out with those ridiculous stories or jokes, they always caught you off guard.”

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December 23, 2016

David Berry, Playwright and Screenwriter, Dies at 73 By Medea Giordano

David Berry, a playwright and screenwriter best known for the play and film “The Whales of August,” died on Dec. 16 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 73.

The cause was a heart attack, his ex-wife, Robin Schmidt, said.

“The Whales of August,” about two elderly sisters summering off the coast of Maine, was inspired by Mr. Berry’s childhood memories of aunts who had a cottage there. It was presented at the WPA Theater in Lower Manhattan, starring Bettie Indrizzi and Elizabeth Council.

Mr. Berry wrote the screenplay for the 1987 movie version, directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Vincent Price and Ann Sothern. It was Ms. Gish’s last film.

Both the stage and movie versions were popular in Japan, with a national tour in 2013 and a movie- themed bar in Shibuya bearing the name. Ms. Schmidt recalled that even though Mr. Berry did not speak Japanese, he wept while watching the Japanese version of the play, saying it was the best production he had ever seen.

Though always interested in the theater, Mr. Berry did not set out to write plays. He was writing a novel inspired by his Army service in the Vietnam War when Ms. Schmidt urged him to turn it into a play. It became “G. R. Point,” which ran Off Broadway before moving to Broadway in 1979, starring Michael Moriarty, Michael Jeter and Howard Rollins Jr.

“What I’m trying to do,” Mr. Berry said in a 1979 interview, “is let people know what it was like. I really wanted people to understand that the men who got sent over there were people that we all knew well, and weren’t the monsters that they’ve been depicted as.”

The play earned Mr. Berry an Obie Award for distinguished playwriting.

David Adams Berry was born on July 8, 1943, in Denver and spent most of his childhood in Maine. A childhood friend, Betsy Huston, recalled, “We all leapt on the rugged rocks and ran through the pines by the sea enacting dramas while our parents drank rum and cokes in the cottage that was the setting for ‘The Whales of August.’”

Mr. Berry enlisted in the Army in 1968, shortly after graduating from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., where he had studied theater and European history. He was discharged in Vietnam when he had to return home to become guardian to his two siblings after his mother died.

After the success of his two plays, Mr. Berry continued writing while teaching at several institutions, including the National Theatre Institute in Waterford, Conn., and most recently, the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.

He is survived by his sister, Barbara Hasson-Brown; his brother, Richard Hasson; and a stepdaughter, Julia Lee Barclay-Morton.

January 2, 2017

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December 27, 2016

Entertainment Ex-Spice Girl Melanie Brown not daunted by Broadway By Mark Kennedy December 27, 2016 https://apnews.com/60b6948afc67411bb48f5e3544d32db2

NEW YORK (AP) — Most women in their 40s facing the prospect of singing and dancing on Broadway eight times a week might ask to shorten their high heels just a smidge. Melanie Brown wants hers taller. No wonder they call her Scary Spice.

"If you're into high heels, you want them the higher the better," Brown said as she prepares to join the cast of "Chicago" playing the murderous Roxie Hart.

Doesn't it matter that it's a very physical role and that she'll appear for her first song on a ladder 15 feet in the air? Not to Brown.

"Why not?" she asks with a throaty laugh. "Why not?"

Brown, who since the Spice Girls' chart-topping exploits has become a sought-after TV judge, said she's relishing the chance to play a jail inmate who kills her boyfriend and sings about her newfound celebrity.

After years of criticizing others, she finds herself on stage. She seems unfazed, saying made frequent visits to the recording studio in her Los Angeles home to prepare.

"I'm always going to be the one to go, 'Yes, I just want to get back into singing,'" she said. "I'm constantly singing and vocalizing so it's nice to be able to get the chance to do it all at once."

Brown has been on Broadway before, playing Mimi in "Rent" in 2005. But this time her task has Bob Fosse-inspired choreography, skimpy outfits and killer songs such as "Me and My Baby."

"My 9-year-old said, 'Why did you choose that part? It's such a big part,'" she said. "And I'm like, "Cause it's good to challenge yourself.' And then I'm thinking, 'Why did I choose that one?'"

Brown shot to fame as part of the five-piece Spice Girls, known for its girl-power attitude thanks to songs like "Wannabe" and "Spice Up Your Life."

The group marked its 20th anniversary this year, which also happens to be the 20th anniversary of "Chicago." But Brown said none of the members managed to pull off a tour or an event to celebrate.

"I still hope something is going to happen, but nothing's been set in stone at all," she said. "We're all talking about it, but nothing's actually been said like, 'OK, on this day, on the time, this is what we're doing so let's get rehearsing!'"

Brown has been a contestant on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" and was a judge on the Australian and UK editions of "The X Factor." She's a current judge on "America's Got Talent."

Fellow critic Simon Cowell got her involved in judging and she said she tries to concentrate simply on whoever is performing in front of her. The rest comes naturally.

"Doesn't everybody do that at home — yell at the TV and go, 'Oh my God, are you kidding me?'" she asked. "I think we all have that inside of us." 17

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