Pressed for Time and Looking for Love - the New York Times

THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Thursday, June 20, 2013

FROM: Michael Strassheim, Emily Meagher Tess Zaretsky

PAGES: 16, including this page

A sad farewell to JAMES GANDOLFINI. A consummate professional, a true talent and incredible man. He will be missed.

James Gandolfini Is Dead at 51 - a Complex Mob Boss in ‘Sopranos’ - NYTimes.com

June 19, 2013 James Gandolfini Is Dead at 51; a Complex Mob Boss in ‘Sopranos’ By DAVE ITZKOFF James Gandolfini, the Emmy Award-winning actor who shot to fame on the HBO drama “The Sopranos” as Tony Soprano, a tough-talking, hard-living crime boss with a stolid exterior but a rich interior life, died on Wednesday. He was 51.

Mr. Gandolfini’s death was confirmed by HBO. He was traveling in Rome, where he was on vacation and was scheduled to attend the Taormina Film Fest. The cause was not immediately announced; an HBO press representative said that Mr. Gandolfini may have had a heart attack.

Mr. Gandolfini, who grew up in Park Ridge, in Bergen County, N.J., came to embody the resilience of the Garden State on “The Sopranos,” which made its debut in 1999 and ran for six seasons on HBO.

In its pilot episode viewers were introduced to the complicated life of Tony Soprano, a New Jersey mob kingpin who suffers panic attacks and begins seeing a psychiatrist. Over 86 episodes, audiences followed Mr. Gandolfini in the role as he was tormented by his mother (played by Nancy Marchand), his wife (Edie Falco), rival mobsters, the occasional surreal dream sequence and, in 2007, an ambiguous series finale that left millions of viewers wondering whether Tony Soprano had met his fate at a restaurant table.

The success of “The Sopranos” helped make HBO a dominant player in the competitive field of scripted television programming and transformed Mr. Gandolfini from a character actor into a star. The series, created by David Chase, won two Emmys for outstanding drama series, and Mr. Gandolfini won three Emmys for outstanding lead actor in a drama. He was nominated six times for the award.

HBO said of Mr. Gandolfini in a statement on Wednesday, “He was a special man, a great talent, but more importantly, a gentle and loving person who treated everyone no matter their title or position with equal respect.”

Mr. Chase, in a statement, called Mr. Gandolfini “one of the greatest actors of this or any time,” and said, “A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes.” He added: “I remember telling him many times: ‘You don’t get it. You’re like Mozart.’ There would be silence at the other end of the phone.”

James Joseph Gandolfini Jr. was born in Westwood, N.J., on Sept. 18, 1961. His father was an Italian immigrant who held a number of jobs, including janitor, bricklayer and mason. His mother, Santa, was a high school cafeteria chef.

He attended Park Ridge High School and Rutgers University, graduating in 1983 with a degree in

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communications. He drove a delivery truck, managed nightclubs and tended bar in Manhattan before becoming interested in acting at age 25, when a friend took him to an acting class.

He began his movie career in 1987 in the low-budget horror comedy “Shock! Shock! Shock!” In 1992 he had a small part in the Broadway revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” starring Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange.

By the mid-1990s Mr. Gandolfini had made gangster roles a specialty, playing burly but strangely charming tough guys in films like “True Romance” (1993) and “The Juror” (1996). He had an impressive list of character-acting credits, but was largely unknown when Mr. Chase cast him in “The Sopranos” in 1999.

“I thought it was a wonderful script,” Mr. Gandolfini told Newsweek in 2001, recalling his audition. “I thought, ‘I can do this.’ But I thought they would hire someone a little more debonair, shall we say. A little more appealing to the eye.”

“The Sopranos,” which also became a springboard for television writers like Matthew Weiner (who would later create the AMC drama “Mad Men”) and Terence Winter (who later created the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire”), drew widespread acclaim for its detailed studies of the lives of its characters, and, at its center, Mr. Gandolfini’s portrayal of Tony Soprano, who was tightly wound and prone to acts of furious violence. (He beat and choked another mobster to death for insulting the memory of his beloved deceased racehorse, to name but one example.)

Mr. Gandolfini, who had studied the Meisner technique of acting for two years, said that he used it to focus his anger and incorporate it into his performances. In an interview for the television series “Inside the Actors Studio,” Mr. Gandolfini said he would deliberately hit himself on the head or stay up all night to evoke the desired reaction.

If you are tired, every single thing that somebody does makes you mad, Mr. Gandolfini said in the interview. “Drink six cups of coffee. Or just walk around with a rock in your shoe. It’s silly, but it works.”

Tony Soprano — and the 2007 finale of “The Sopranos,” which cut to black before viewers could learn what plans a mysterious restaurant patron had for Tony as he enjoyed a relaxing meal with his wife and children — would continue to follow Mr. Gandolfini throughout his career.

He went on to play a series of tough guys and heavies, including an angry Brooklyn parent in the Broadway drama “God of Carnage,” for which he was nominated for a Tony Award in 2009; the director of the C.I.A. in “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow’s dramatization of the hunt for Osama bin Laden; and a hit man in the 2012 crime thriller “Killing Them Softly.”

Mr. Gandolfini also produced the documentaries “Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq” and “Wartorn: 1861-2010,” about the history of post-traumatic stress in the military.

Survivors include his wife, Deborah Lin Gandolfini; a daughter, Liliana, born last year; a teenage son, Michael, from his marriage to Marcella Wudarski, which ended in divorce; and his sisters Leta Gandolfini http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/arts/television/james-gandolfini-sopranos-star-dies-at-51.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print[6/20/2013 10:29:02 AM] James Gandolfini Is Dead at 51 - a Complex Mob Boss in ‘Sopranos’ - NYTimes.com

and Johanna Antonacci.

In a 2010 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Gandolfini said that he was not worried about being typecast as Tony Soprano and that he was being offered different kinds of roles as he aged.

“Mostly it’s not a lot of that stuff anymore with shooting and killing and dying and blood,” he said. “I’m getting a little older, you know. The running and the jumping and killing, it’s a little past me.”

Asked why he did not appear in more comedies, he answered, “Nobody’s asked.”

Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/arts/television/james-gandolfini-sopranos-star-dies-at-51.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print[6/20/2013 10:29:02 AM] New Group's New Season Includes Beth Henley, Thomas Bradshaw Plays - NYTimes.com

JUNE 19, 2013, 8:14 AM New Group’s New Season Includes Beth Henley, Thomas Bradshaw Plays

By ERIK PIEPENBURG The New Group on Wednesday announced two new productions as part of its 2013-14 Off Broadway season at the Acorn Theater. Beginning in October the company will present “The Jacksonian,” a dark comedy by the Pulitzer Prize winner Beth Henley (“Crimes of the Heart”), set in 1964 in her hometown, Jackson, Miss. Directed by Robert Falls, the production will feature Ed Harris, Glenne Headly, Amy Madigan and Bill Pullman, who will reprise their roles from the play’s premiere last year at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Additional casting is to be announced.

In January the company will mount “Intimacy,” a new work by Thomas Bradshaw, whose play “Burning” the New Group produced in 2011. Scott Elliott, the company’s artistic director, will direct the dark comedy, about three American families whose lives intersect over issues of race and sex. Casting for the production is to be announced, as is the company’s third production of the season.

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June 19, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Pressed for Time and Looking for Love

By BEN BRANTLEY

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The mating season has arrived at the Barrington Stage Company. This theatrical outpost in the Berkshires has recreated the habitat of creatures whose ruling imperative is to find sexual partners fast. You will be happy to know that, nature being generous by and large, most of them get — how shall we put it? — lucky. You, in turn, will surely feel lucky to be in their company for a couple of hours.

John Rando’s production of “On the Town,” the 1944 musical about three sailors on shore leave in New York City, is one of those rare revivals that remind us what a hit show from long ago was originally all about. In this case, it’s the sex, stupid. That should be a no-brainer given that the plot concerns servicemen, long deprived of female company, bent on finding dream dates (or any dates) under a 24-hour deadline.

Yet in recent years, despite an often ravishing score by Leonard Bernstein, “On the Town” has seemed too quaint to be sensuous. The celebrated 1949 film, which starred Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, still exudes such peppy wholesomeness, you can’t imagine any of its would-be lovers progressing beyond an Andy Hardy kind of kiss. The last Broadway revival, directed by George C. Wolfe in 1998, struggled to find a contemporary urban pulse, and wound up feeling unnaturally cramped.

The joy of Mr. Rando’s production is in its air of erotic effortlessness. By that I don’t mean that getting a gal comes easy for its leading men in uniform, played by Clyde Alves, Jay Armstrong Johnson and Tony Yazbeck. But even at their most desperate and clumsy, these lovelorn sailors seem borne on a current of pheromones, which makes them unfailingly nimble of foot, supple of hip and light of carriage. They’re just doing what comes naturally, and such naturalness has a grace all its own.

Mr. Rando has staged “On the Town” before, in a 2008 concert production for Encores! at City Center in New York. Though I didn’t see that production, Mr. Rando certainly seems to have mastered the airy, rejuvenating touch this show requires. “On the Town” had its roots in the short Jerome Robbins ballet “Fancy Free,” which was expanded into a Broadway musical by four fast-rising young talents: Robbins, Bernstein and the writers (and comic sketch artists) Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

Mr. Rando has held on to the zephyr-like spirit that informed Robbins’s original ballet, a sensibility that makes the human sex drive seem as airy as it is earthy. And he has enlisted the choreographer Joshua Bergasse to summon the mood of Robbins’s style without literal imitation. Best known for his work on television (“Smash,” “So You Think You Can Dance”), Mr. Bergasse takes to the stage with a relaxed confidence and, most important, a feel for dance as a medium for defining individual character.

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Though the 20-strong ensemble (the largest cast ever assembled by the Barrington Stage Company) shares an attitude and a rhythm, its strength comes from our awareness of its separate parts. The three pals at the show’s center do their jubilant pas de trois (“New York, New York,” the best-known number) in perfect synchronicity. But they have distinctive quirks in how they move, especially when they’re putting the moves on.

Take Mr. Alves as Ozzie, the brashest of the lot, who discovers his kinetic kinship with the Neanderthals while visiting the Museum of Natural History, then translates that low lumbering walk into much of what he does from then on. Chip is the small-town greenhorn (who thought it was a good idea to cast Sinatra in this role for the movie?), and Mr. Johnson gives him a surprised spontaneity when he dances, as if he can’t believe he’s so triumphantly on his feet.

As Gabey, the wistful one, Mr. Yazbeck (who played the same part at City Center) probably looks the most like a sailor you’d see during Fleet Week. But when he sings and dances in a number like the heartbroken “Lonely Town,” his athletic frame and average-Joe face become the stuff of elegant, yearning poetry. There’s a quixotic purity about this not-too-bright fantasist, as he searches for the young woman he saw in a picture on a subway, the winner of this month’s Miss Turnstiles contest.

When Gabey tracks down this Miss Turnstiles, an aspiring actress named Ivy, it makes sense that she should be just as unsophisticated and dreamy as he is. Played by the lovely and lithe Deanna Doyle, Ivy is an eternal naïf (even though she’s secretly working as a cooch dancer in Coney Island). And when she and Mr. Yazbek pair off in fantasy ballets, they are surfing the clouds.

Ozzie and Chip also find their ideal matches in this production, in the persons of the anthropologist Claire De Loone, whom Elizabeth Stanley turns into a winningly lowdown highbrow, and Hildy Esterhazy, the randy cabby played with charmingly measured gusto by Alysha Umphress. They are both take-charge types, a reminder of the new independence American women discovered during World War II.

When Hildy sings “Come Up to My Place,” you know it’s not just to show Chip her etchings, any more than we doubt what Claire, in her first song, gets “Carried Away” by. Their intentions are made unusually clear in this “On the Town,” which includes postcoital scenes that find the boys dazed and happy in their underwear. And when Hildy belts and scats her way through the double-entendre-laden “I Can Cook Too,” Chip is left holding an unmistakably phallic baguette.

Yet this is somehow all delivered without a smirk. Enhanced by Beowulf Boritt’s simple storybook set and Darren R. Cohen’s glimmering musical direction (the evocative period costumes are by Jennifer Caprio), this New York is enfolded in a hazy, fairy-tale innocence. It’s a place where carnal dreams come true without the threat of STDs or pregnancies. And even broadly drawn punch lines of eccentric characters — played deliciously here by Nancy Opel, Michael Rupert and Allison Guinn — come across as buoyant and unbruised.

The production runs only through July 13, giving it the mayfly-like life span of the romances it portrays. Normally, I wouldn’t tell citizens of the five boroughs to drive three hours to be told that New York is a helluva town. But this enchanted vision of a city that was — and of course never was — is worth catching before it evaporates.

On the Town

Music by Leonard Bernstein; book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, based on an idea by Jerome

Robbins; directed by John Rando; choreography by Joshua Bergasse; musical direction by Darren R. Cohen; sets by Beowulf Boritt; costumes by Jennifer Caprio; lighting by Jason Lyons; sound by Ed Chapman; wigs by Rob Greene and J. Jared Janas; director of production, Jeff Roudabush; production stage manager, Renee Lutz. Presented by the Barrington Stage Company, Julianne Boyd, artistic director; Tristan Wilson, managing director. At the Barrington Boyd-Quinson Mainstage, 30 Union Street, Pittsfield, Mass., (413) 236-8888; barringtonstageco.org. Through July 13. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

WITH: Clyde Alves (Ozzie), Deanna Doyle (Ivy Smith), Jay Armstrong Johnson (Chip Offenblock), Elizabeth Stanley (Claire De Loone), Alysha Umphress (Hildy Esterhazy), Tony Yazbeck (Gabey), Nancy Opel (Madame Maude P. Dilly/Diane Dream/Dolores Dolores) and Michael Rupert (Judge Pitkin W. Bridgework).

http://theater.nytimes.com/.../06/20/theater/reviews/a-revival-of-on-the-town-at-barrington-stage.html?ref=theater&_r=0&pagewanted=print[6/20/2013 10:25:52 AM] Now Playing: Wall Street, Villains and Money - The New York Times

June 18, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Now Playing: Wall Street, Villains and Money

By KEN JAWOROWSKI

Seemingly every convention of late-19th-century theater is used in “The Henrietta”: Stock market fortunes are won and lost in minutes. Telegrams and letters arrive and are read aloud. Exposition-heavy asides are delivered directly to the audience.

None of that is surprising — the play had its premiere in 1887. What is remarkable, though, is that those creaky setups seem so fresh. In this production by the Metropolitan Playhouse, outdated devices often feel endearing, and corny comedy leads to several loud laughs.

“The plaintive wail that goes up from Wall Street, whenever I corner it, is a touching tribute” to me, Nicholas van Alstyne announces in the opening minutes. He’s a master of the market, and that alternately helps and hinders his search for love and his attempts to control his madcap family.

At the same time, one of van Alstyne’s sons is a villain bent on destroying his father. Of that son, an 1887 review in The New York Times said: “Such men as he exist, and may be found in Wall Street today. They are creatures of our own raw civilization and selfish society.” (That otherwise glowing review bemoaned that several actresses “were dressed in very bad taste.”)

Bronson Howard, the playwright, wasn’t as witty as Oscar Wilde — then again, who was? — but his script shares a kinship with “The Importance of Being Earnest,” from 1895: buried secrets come to light, and much of the humor is driven by confusion over a name. By today’s standards, the jokes are hokey, and sarcasm is refreshingly scarce.

The cast of 12, directed by Alex Roe, is splendid. Michael Durkin brings an infectious bluster as van Alstyne. Blaine Smith and Michael Hardart, as his sons, are sharp. Alexandra O’Daly and David Lavine stand out in smaller roles. Strobelike blackouts inventively end the scenes; Sidney Fortner’s costumes are exceptional (and in perfectly good taste).

There are slow spots in this two-and-a-half-hour play, some attributable to the script’s age, some to imperfect pacing. Those are forgivable. What’s sad is that Howard, once widely known as “the dean of American playwrights,” could be so forgotten. What’s happy is that this production remembers him so well.

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June 29, 2013

Cast Albums

Two Last This Title, Artist Peak Weeks on Weeks Week Week Imprint | label Pos. Chart #1 2 wksKinky Boots Original Broadway Cast Recording 1 3 1 1 3 Masterworks Broadway | Sony Masterworks Motown: The Musical – 2 2 Original Broadway Cast Recording 2 2 Motown | UMe Pippin – 1 3 The New Broadway Cast Recording 1 2 Ghostlight/Sh-K-Boom | Razor & Tie Wicked 2 5 4 Original Broadway Cast Recording 1 390 Decca Broadway | Decca Rodgers + Hammerstein's Cinderella 8 4 5 Original Broadway Cast Recording 2 6 Ghostlight/Sh-K-Boom | Razor & Tie Roald Dahl's Matilda: The Musical Original Cast Recording 5 6 6 4 14 Royal Shakespeare Company | Royal Shakespeare Company The Book Of Mormon 3 7 7 Original Broadway Cast Recording 1 109 Ghostlight | Sh-K-Boom Once: A New Musical Original Broadway Cast Recording 4 8 8 1 66 Masterworks Broadway | Sony Masterworks Jersey Boys 7 9 9 Original Broadway Cast Recording 1 388 Rhino The Phantom Of The Opera 13 14 10 Original London Cast Recording 4 261 Really Useful | Decca Classics