Schimmel Center to Host Shakespeare's Globe's 'Hamlet' - NYTimes.com
JULY 24, 2012, 3:15 PM Schimmel Center to Host Shakespeare’s Globe’s ‘Hamlet’
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER A staging of "Hamlet" by Shakespeare's Globe theater will be among the attractions in the 2012-13 season at Pace University's Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, which announced its line-up on Tuesday. "Hamlet," which is directed by Dominic Dromgoole and will run Oct. 2-7, will be the Shakespeare's Globe's third appearance at the center in lower Manhattan, following "Love's Labour's Lost" in 2009 and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" in 2010.
The more than 30-event season, which begins on Sept. 22, will also include an appearance by the Romanian gypsy brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia; a banjo summit featuring Béla Fleck; and a tribute to Woody Guthrie by Justin Townes Earle and guests.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/schimmel-center-to-host-shakespeares-globes-hamlet/?pagewanted=print[7/25/2012 9:41:17 AM] New York Musical Theater Festival Report: 'Swing State' - NYTimes.com
JULY 23, 2012, 2:42 PM New York Musical Theater Festival Report: ‘Swing State’
By CATHERINE RAMPELL For many reasons, "Swing State" is an odd little show.
It's a two-person, boy-meets-girl musical, except the boy is gay. It has a flip, political-sounding title, but the story is not a farce about elections but instead a drama about personal loss and childhood trauma. It's a musical about tolerance, but chiefly emphasizes tolerance of those who are openly intolerant.
Bonnie is a born-again kindergarten teacher in Ohio hoping to save her students' souls as recompense for a great sin she committed before finding Jesus. She believes that sin (can you guess what it is yet?) is the cause of both her infertility and her chronic back problems.
Enter Neil - an effeminate, New-Agey chiropractor fresh from Brooklyn - who manages to cure her spine as if he were the messiah himself.
Neil meanwhile has baggage of his own. He grew up in Ohio, where he was bullied mercilessly for being a "sissy-boy." He has returned to the area because his mentor advised him that he could "heal" himself only by "healing" the enemy, or at least their back pain.
As Bonnie, Morgan Weed accomplishes the impressive feat of helping a not-obviously empathetic Hell's Kitchen audience empathize with a "Christian nut job," as she is occasionally called. But then Dana Yeaton's book and lyrics grant Bonnie a much more nuanced and developed character arc than those offered to Neil (Jed Resnick). (Music by Andy Mitton is generally pretty, if sometimes generic.)
Indeed, the show seems much more Bonnie's than Neil's, to a fault. In its painstaking efforts not to judge the Christian right, somehow the show places the onus to embrace "the other" disproportionately on Neil, and Bonnie mostly gets a free pass for her bigotry. Both leads, however, are psychically rewarded for perhaps an even graver sin: exploiting people in vulnerable positions - kindergarten students and patients - as a means to exorcise their own demons.
"Swing State" continues through July 29 at the 45th Street Theatre, 354 W 45th St; (212) 352-3101, nymf.org.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/new-york-musical-theater-festival-report-swing-state/?pagewanted=print[7/25/2012 9:37:53 AM] New York Musical Theater Festival Report: 'Central Avenue Breakdown' - NYTimes.com
JULY 24, 2012, 5:56 PM New York Musical Theater Festival Report: ‘Central Avenue Breakdown’
By ANITA GATES It is 1943, and the Los Angeles jazz scene is on fire. A lovely family of four arrives from small-town Mississippi, ready to start new lives far from Southern racism and, in the case of the men, pursue careers as saxophone players.
It is easy to see why the festival invited "Central Avenue Breakdown," which was part of the 2011 lineup, to return. The show, which ended its run on Sunday at the Pershing Square Signature Center, is rich with lively, moving and often truly original music by Kevin Ray.
Lyrics like "Woke up dead this morning," "I was born on Black Monday" and, in a gentler mood, "Martha, bring your love back to the light" create a haunting and convincing sense of place and time. That includes World War II, a stretch of thriving music clubs and a growing sense of outrage when white policemen visit with racist assumptions and billy clubs in hand.
But the book, by Mr. Ray and Andrea Lepcio (with additional story contributions by Suellen Vance), needs major work. I did not see the 2011 production, but Ms. Lepcio joined the team only this spring, so it seems safe to infer that some revisions are already in place.
There is a clear-cut plot; that's not the problem. William (Albert Christmas), the father, turns out not to be good enough for the big time. In case we have trouble understanding his audition scene, his son Jim (Rod Lawrence) announces, "Pop's not good enough."
So Jim and his brother set out to make their names and do the family proud. Jim, the more innovative, has his own sound (we know this because he says, "I've got my own sound"), but Bill (Joshua Boone), the more traditional, gets ahead faster. Heroin addiction, rivalry over a beautiful and talented white singer (Rebecca LaChance) and two untimely deaths are added to build drama, but the dialogue just lies there, more like chapter titles than resonant action.
Still, "Central Avenue Breakdown" manages a touching finale. The cast does a fine job. Juson Williams is particularly engaging as a powerful club owner. And the choreography - by Christopher Windom, who also directed - has its moments. At times it looks like an Isadora Duncan parody, but at others it is thrillingly exuberant. The strong parts of this show deserve to go on.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/.../new-york-musical-theater-festival-report-central-avenue-breakdown/?pagewanted=print[7/25/2012 9:38:44 AM] Immigrant Led Astray in His New Home - The New York Times
July 24, 2012 THEATER REVIEW Immigrant Led Astray in His New Home
By ANDY WEBSTER
The playwright and director Yoshvani Medina was born in Cuba, and judging from “Probation,” his engaging work presented by Repertorio Español at the Gramercy Arts Theater, he is consumed with ambivalence about that country. Throughout the play, essentially a dialectic between pro-Cuban and pro-American sentiments, Mr. Medina resists taking sides, wisely preferring to explore gray areas in each perspective.
A prologue presents an unspecified but recent military skirmish in Cuba: A dying Fredo (Sandor Juan) extracts a promise from Pancho (Alfonso Rey) that he will take care of Fredo’s son, Freddy. A year later Pancho is in Miami, and Freddy (also Mr. Juan) and his pregnant wife, Yenny (Hannia Guillén), arrive to start a new life. Pancho sets up Freddy at a shady clinic engaged in Medicaid fraud; the wry, skeptical Yenny seeks employment as a standup comic.
Freddy knows Pancho’s offer is suspect, but the money proves too tempting, and before long he has a house, two cars and the feds on his trail. When the authorities close in, he eyes a return to Cuba, but Pancho, the godfather to his son, tries to dissuade him. (“In Cuba, people have nothing,” he says. “Everything belongs to the government,” which prompts Freddy to retort, “And everything here belongs to the banks.”) Yenny, now a journalist and blogger, has ideas of her own.
The production is in Spanish, which a new, unobtrusive captioning system translates, leaving non-Spanish speakers to savor Mr. Medina’s assured direction and the appealing cast. (Jorge Noa and Pedro Balmaseda’s stark, malleable set keeps the focus squarely on the actors.)
Freddy, who is earnest but seducible, is eclipsed by the cynical Pancho, whose gruff observations can be hilarious, though their more heated exchanges verge on the didactic. Ms. Guillén’s character offers vital leavening, with monologues about sex and the lessons she’s learned in America; her blog is called I Live in Miami (and I Know Its Entrails). Unseen is Freddy and Yenny’s baby, Fred, part of a future generation fated to inherit the impasse between countries so close and yet so very far apart.
http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/theater/reviews/probation-by-yoshvani-medina-in-spanish.html?pagewanted=print[7/25/2012 9:40:36 AM] Sherman Hemsley, Star of ‘The Jeffersons’ Dies at 74 - NYTimes.com
July 24, 2012 Sherman Hemsley, ‘Jeffersons’ Star, Is Dead at 74 By MEL WATKINS Sherman Hemsley, the bantamweight comic actor who portrayed the scrappy, nouveau riche George Jefferson on the hit CBS sitcom “The Jeffersons,” died on Tuesday at his home in El Paso. He was 74.
His death was confirmed by his agent, Todd Frank. He did not specify a cause.
The Jeffersons were introduced as Archie Bunker’s Queens neighbors on “All in the Family” in 1971. George was conceived as a black version of Archie, as distrustful of white people as Archie was of black people (and almost everyone else). Although George’s wife, Louise, was frequently seen, George himself was mentioned but did not appear on camera until 1973: he was said to be unwilling to set foot in a white family’s house. (In reality, Mr. Hemsley was unavailable until then. Mel Stewart was seen as George’s brother, Henry, until Mr. Hemsley joined the cast.)
The character of George Jefferson proved so popular that a spinoff series was developed. “The Jeffersons” made its debut in January 1975; in the opening episode, George, the owner of a successful cleaning business; his wife, whom he called Weezy (played by Isabel Sanford, who was 20 years Mr. Hemsley’s senior); and their son, Lionel (Mike Evans), leave Queens and, in the words of the show’s memorable theme song, are “movin’ on up” to Manhattan’s fashionable Upper East Side — to “a deluxe apartment in the sky.” The show was an immediate success, finishing fourth in the 1975 Nielsen ratings.
High-strung and irrepressible, George Jefferson quickly became one of America’s most popular television characters, a high-energy, combative black man who backed down to no one — something that had rarely been seen on television. At the same time, however, he was vain, snobbish and bigoted (“honky” was one of his favorite epithets directed at whites), and flaunted his self-regard like a badge. Each week, his wife or their irreverent maid, Florence (played by Marla Gibbs), would step up to scuttle his wrongheaded schemes or deflate his delusions of grandeur.
Florence: It just occurred to me why your hair keeps falling out.
George: Why?
Florence: You ain’t got nothing up there for it to root in!
“The Jeffersons” was a hit until it left the air in 1985. And the reclusive Mr. Hemsley, who tended to avoid the Hollywood spotlight, established himself as one of television’s most popular stars, if also one of the least accessible.
Sherman Alexander Hemsley was born in Philadelphia on Feb. 1, 1938. He dropped out of Edward W. Bok Technical High School in the 10th grade to join the Air Force and was stationed in Asia after the Korean War. He returned to Philadelphia after his discharge and, while working at the post office, attended Philadelphia’s Academy of Dramatic Arts in the evening.
In 1967, encouraged by the actor and director Robert Hooks, Mr. Hemsley moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He joined the Negro Ensemble Company, studied with the renowned actor and director Lloyd Richards (later dean of the Yale School of Drama) and performed with Vinette Carroll’s Urban Arts Corps. He also appeared in Off Broadway productions. In one — a double bill of “Old Judge Mose Is Dead” and “Moon on a Rainbow http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/arts/television/sherman-hemsley-star-of-the-jeffersons-dies-at-74.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print[7/25/2012 9:42:53 AM] Sherman Hemsley, Star of ‘The Jeffersons’ Dies at 74 - NYTimes.com
Shawl” (1969) — he drew praise from The New York Times, which called him “an actor whose instinct for the comic line and the comic gesture, even the comic lift of an eyelash, is wholly natural and just about perfect.”
Mr. Hemsley’s big break came a year later when he was cast in the Broadway musical “Purlie.” When Norman Lear was looking for an actor to play Archie Bunker’s neighbor, he remembered seeing Mr. Hemsley in that show.
“The cocky energy of the guy was totally in sync with the offstage image we had created of George,” Mr. Lear later said.
Mr. Lear traced Mr. Hemsley to San Francisco, where he was appearing onstage in the musical “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” and offered him the role of George Jefferson.
A year after “The Jeffersons” left the air, Mr. Hemsley returned to television in “Amen,” a sitcom set in a black Baptist church in Philadelphia. He starred as Deacon Ernest Frye, a character every bit as caustic and blustery as George Jefferson. In the opening episode, he tells an overweight pastor: “God gave each of us a temple. You have torn yours down and put up a Pizza Hut.” The show ran on NBC from 1986 to 1991.
The popularity of reruns of “The Jeffersons” on Nick at Nite and TV Land in the 1990s spurred a renewed interest in the show’s stars. In the ’90s and early 2000s Mr. Hemsley, Ms. Sanford (who died in 2004) and Ms. Gibbs were frequent guests on prime-time shows. Mr. Hemsley in particular seemed to show up on almost every sitcom with a primarily black cast, among them “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” “The Wayans Brothers” and “The Hughleys,” on which he and Ms. Gibbs both had recurring roles. He also starred as a con man in the short-lived UPN comedy “Goode Behavior” in the 1996-97 season. His most recent appearance was on the Tyler Perry sitcom “House of Payne” in 2011 — as George Jefferson.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
At the height of his popularity on “The Jeffersons,” rumors surfaced that Mr. Hemsley was a temperamental loner, as arrogant and difficult as the character he played. The actors he worked with tended to disagree. “I’m here to tell you it’s a lie,” Clifton Davis, his co-star on “Amen,” said of the rumors. “He’s very shy, and he’s not on an ego trip.”
Mr. Hemsley laughed at the suggestion that his personality was in any way similar to George Jefferson’s. “I’m nothing like him,” he said in 1996. “I don’t slam doors in people’s faces, and I’m not a bigot. I’m just an old hippie. You know — peace and love.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/arts/television/sherman-hemsley-star-of-the-jeffersons-dies-at-74.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print[7/25/2012 9:42:53 AM]