THE MORNING LINE
DATE: Friday, July 31, 2015
FROM: Melissa Cohen Zoe Edelman, Sarah Hodgson, Raychel Shipley
PAGES: 8, including this page.
Please note that BBB closes at 2:00pm on Fridays through September 4.
July 30, 2015 Lupita Nyong’o to Star in ‘Eclipsed’ at the Public Theater
By Erik Piepenburg
The Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”) will make her New York stage debut this fall in the Public Theater’s production of the war drama “Eclipsed,” written by the Obie Award- winning playwright Danai Gurira (“In the Continuum”), the theater announced on Thursday.
Set in 2003 near the end of the civil war in Liberia, the play is about a group of women who are captives of rebels fighting the government. In a statement the Public Theater’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, called the work a “feminist reading” of the African conflict that is “both heart-breaking and profoundly life-affirming.”
“Eclipsed” will be directed by Liesl Tommy, who staged the play’s premiere at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington in 2009.In his review of a production at Yale Repertory Theater that same year, Charles Isherwood wrote that the play “depicts the harsh realities of women’s lives in a strife-torn African country with both a clear eye and a palpable empathy.”
Additional casting is to be announced. The show is to begin previews at the Public on Sept. 29 and continue through Nov. 8, with opening night scheduled for Oct. 14.
The production will open in New York as both Ms. Nyong’o and Ms. Gurira prepare for the premieres of two high-profile screen projects.
Ms. Nyong’o is to appear in the highly- anticipated film “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” directed by J. J. Abrams and set to hit theaters in December.
Ms. Gurira, in addition to her work as a playwright, stars as the zombie-killing Michonne on the popular AMC series “The Walking Dead,” which is to return for a sixth season on Oct. 11.
A more recent play by Ms. Gurira, “Familiar,” will be presented by Playwrights Horizons in February 2016.
July 29, 2015 “Hamilton,” Based on a Book, is Becoming One Again
By Alexandra Alter
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s raucous hip-hop musical, “Hamilton,” sprang from an unlikely source: a dense, 818- page biography of Alexander Hamilton by the historian Ron Chernow. Mr. Miranda picked up the book as vacation reading before a trip to Mexico, and soon after tearing through the first chapter, he had the idea to adapt Hamilton’s life story into a musical.
Now, the play, which just opened on Broadway in previews after acritically lauded, sold-out, Off-Broadway run, will get its own life in print. Grand Central Publishing has acquired Mr. Miranda’s book “Hamilton,” which blends the history of Hamilton’s life with Mr. Miranda’s lyrics and annotations and behind-the scenes content from the show. The book will include photographs, interviews, essays and sidebars that explore how Mr. Miranda translated Hamilton’s life — from his tough childhood as an orphan to his military career and his role as the nation’s first Treasury secretary – into musical theater. Grand Central plans to publish the book in April 2016.
Other Broadway musicals, including “Wicked,” “Phantom of the Opera” and “Rent,” have been published as books of lyrics and musical arrangements. But with its rich biographic and historical material, “Hamilton” may be especially well suited to the treatment. The show, which has been praised by critics as ground breaking and formally innovative, has drawn in a string of celebrities, authors and politicians, including Salman Rushdie, Madonna, Gloria Steinem and President Barack Obama.
Mr. Miranda, a Tony and Grammy Award-winning composer, lyricist and actor, said that as a teenager, he had been enamored with a book based on the musical “Rent,” and that as an adult, he studied Stephen Sondheim’s books of lyrics.
“Our goal here is to take you inside ‘Hamilton': not just the timeline of its creation, but the thought process, historical considerations and artistic decisions that went into my lyrics, from beginning to end,” Mr. Miranda said in a statement released by Grand Central. “I want you to know everything about it.”
July 31, 2015
Review: ‘Ramona,’ a Puppet Tale About Trains in Love
By Alexis Soloski
“Ramona,” a play from Georgia’s Gabriadze Theater at the Lincoln Center Festival, stars two star-crossed steam locomotives. You could say it’s about the romance of travel, though here that romance ends in an unusually tearful scene of smelting. In just over an hour, this puppet show, set in the postwar Soviet Union, tackles freedom and duty, love and death, and metallurgy.
The winsome Ramona is a shunting engine, relegated to tootling up and down a small railroad station in the Rioni region. Her lover is Ermon, a strapping hunk of horsepower. When he is sent to help rebuild infrastructure in Siberia, Ramona pines away for months and then years. But she regains a sense of purpose when a couple of dodgy circus impresarios persuade her to carry their troupe over the mountain pass to the spa town of Tskaltubo to rescue their circus tent and their livelihood.
Then their star tightrope walker is injured, and these mountebanks demand from Ramona a further, aerodynamically unlikely sacrifice.
Borrowing from Russian theater heavyweights like Gogol, Mayakovsky and Andreyev, “Ramona” has its stalls and sputters — some repeated scenes, some indifferent clowning. The six black-clad puppeteers are skillful, but it’s a shame that the puppets’ voices are recorded rather than live. Rezo Gabriadze, the play’s writer, director and designer, could toy further with perspective and form.
Yet marvels abound. The first image is an utter wonder: a half-dozen trains sliding past one another with sinuous grace, their lit windows glinting against the darkness. Later scenes involve a philosophical pig, a circus parade, a perilous high-wire act.
What’s even more extraordinary is the handicraft with which Mr. Gabriadze shapes each scenic element. You see it in the noses of the marionettes, the wit of the prop mountains, the folk elegance of the hand-sewn curtains, the slashing colors of the painted panorama that roll past as Ramona chugs along toward her fate.
All aboard!
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