THE MORNING LINE DATE: Tuesday, January 22, 2013 FROM: Michael Strassheim, Emily Meagher, Michelle Farabaugh, Kelly Guiod PAGES: 26, including this page 'Avenue Q' Puppets Help With Ad Campaign About H.I.V. - NYTimes.com JANUARY 21, 2013, 3:00 PM ‘Avenue Q’ Puppets Help With Ad Campaign About H.I.V. By PATRICK HEALY Three of the puppet characters from the saucy musical "Avenue Q," the Tony Award winner about the challenges of early adulthood, will star in a series of public service announcements on the Logo cable channel about H.I.V. and sexual behavior, the show's producers and the network announced Monday. The spots, which will begin running Jan. 28 during the season premiere of "RuPaul's Drag Race," will cover topics like erasing the stigma of H.I.V., talking frankly about sex with partners and seeking treatment if diagnosed as H.I.V. positive. The six announcements will be rolled out through 2013 and feature the puppets Lucy the Slut, the closeted Rod and his hunky boyfriend, Ricky. The scripts were written by Jeff Whitty, who received a Tony for the libretto for "Avenue Q," which also won the Tony for best musical in 2004. The show closed on Broadway in 2009 and is now running Off Broadway at New World Stages. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/avenue-q-puppets-help-with-ad-campaign-about-hiv/?pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:22:42 AM] Paula Vogel and Betty Buckley Lead List of Theater Hall of Fame Inductees - NYTimes.com JANUARY 21, 2013, 2:13 PM Paula Vogel and Betty Buckley Lead List of Theater Hall of Fame Inductees By PATRICK HEALY The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel ("How I Learned to Drive") and the Tony-winning actress Betty Buckley ("Cats") will be among the annual inductees to the Theater Hall of Fame at a ceremony on Jan. 28. The organization, which recognizes lifetime achievement in American theater, is also honoring Trevor Nunn, the Tony-winning director of "Cats," "Les Misérables" and several other musicals; as well as the actor Sam Waterston ("Law & Order"); the playwright Christopher Durang ("Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike"); the Lincoln Center Theater artistic director Andre Bishop; the director Michael Kahn, who also leads the Shakespeare Theater Company of Washington, D.C.; and, posthumously, the costume designer Martin Pakledinaz. The Tony-winning actress Tyne Daly will be the emcee of the 42nd annual ceremony, which will be held at Broadway's Gershwin Theater, where the plaques with the names of each year's honorees are hung. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/paula-vogel-and-betty-buckley-lead-list-of-theater-hall-of-fame-inductees/?pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:23:37 AM] Musical to Feature Stephen Schwartz Songs - NYTimes.com January 20, 2013 Musical to Feature Stephen Schwartz Songs Compiled by ADAM W. KEPLER A new compilation musical showcasing the catalog of the composer Stephen Schwartz, “Snapshots: A Musical Scrapbook,” is scheduled to have its premiere in the fall at the Norma Terris Theater in Chester, Conn., Goodspeed Musicals has announced. With a book by David Stern, the musical will feature over 20 songs by Mr. Schwartz, including compositions from “Wicked,” “Godspell” and “Pippin.” Some of the lyrics and orchestrations will be revised to match a new story that focuses on a married couple reliving memories captured in a box of photographs in their attic. No casting information was announced. http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/theater/musical-to-feature-stephen-schwartz-songs.html?pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:28:07 AM] Revenge Comes in a Tight Embrace in a South African Tale of Infidelity - The New York Times This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, please click here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now. » January 21, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Revenge Comes in a Tight Embrace in a South African Tale of Infidelity By BEN BRANTLEY Sometimes a weighty tale is never more affecting than when it’s told lightly. “The Suit,” the wonderful touring production from the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, brims with a gentle effervescence and musicality that you associate with entertainments usually described, a bit dismissively, as charming. Yet even as it draws you in like the gregarious host of an intimate party, this story of adultery in apartheid South Africa is quietly preparing to break your heart. By the time you leave the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where “The Suit” runs through Feb. 2, you may feel you’ve experienced devastation by enchantment. The sadness will linger, but so will an elating sense of this show’s enfolding magic. Such complicated sorcery is all the more potent for its seeming simplicity, a paradox long associated with the great director Peter Brook, who created “The Suit” with his longtime collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne and the composer Frank Krawczyk. An ever-more-pared-down plainness has marked the path of Mr. Brook’s career, which stretches over more than six decades, embracing pinnacles like his acrobatic “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and his marathon “Mahabharata.” Sometimes the results are austere to the point of starvation, as in his bare-bones 50-minute version of Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” several years ago. “The Suit” — which is based on a story by the South African writer Can Themba, and its stage adaptation by Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon — is unlikely to leave anyone feeling hungry. It arranges similarly basic theatrical elements — a cast of four performers and three musicians, some chairs and some clothing racks — into a world that brims with juicy, appetizing life. It’s our awareness of the possibilities for sweetness within that life that lends “The Suit” much of its sting. Its fablelike story unfolds in Sophiatown, a poor but vital suburb of Johannesburg that flourished in the 1940s and ’50s as a center of black culture (especially music) and has since acquired mythic status in South African memory. “The home of truth, our place,” is how the show’s narrator (Jared McNeill) describes it. Within that world live a couple who, when we first see them, wrapped in each other’s arms in bed one rainy morning, would appear to be the very image of marital contentment: Philomen (William Nadylam) and Matilda (Nonhlanhla Kheswa). Both husband and wife deliver separate encomiums, Matilda in soaring song, to the beauty within their existence, despite its privation. Their Eden collapses that same day. Philomen, having been tipped off by a friend, rushes home from work to find his wife in the arms of a lover (Rikki Henry, in one of many roles), who escapes through the bedroom http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/theater/reviews/the-suit-at-brooklyn-academy-of-music.html?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[1/22/2013 10:24:36 AM] Revenge Comes in a Tight Embrace in a South African Tale of Infidelity - The New York Times window in his underwear. His suit is left behind, to become the instrument of Philomen’s whimsical and cruel revenge upon his wife. I won’t describe the forms that this revenge takes, except to say that the suit becomes an active participant in an unhappy ménage à trois. As Mr. Nadylam executes Philomen’s retribution, with a mix of sorrow and tight- lidded rage, you understand exactly why the narrator has told us earlier that this story could take place only in a land of repression. Like the apartheid-spawned violence and humiliation that the play’s characters trade frightened stories about, the suit casts an inescapable and blighting shadow on Philomen and Matilda’s private world. This makes “The Suit” sound grim. It isn’t. This is partly a matter of the witty inventiveness of the production, lighted by Philippe Vialatte and designed by Oria Puppo, which creates an entire township from its small cast. (The fine, chameleon musicians — Arthur Astier, Raphael Chambouvet and David Dupuis — help fill out the roster of citizens.) More important, time and again we feel the exultation that caged birds find in song. It is the great wish of Matilda (whom Ms. Kheswa presents as a ravishing blend of self-possession and perplexity) to become a singer. And when she performs at a women’s club, with the three male actors doing a jaunty backup, you may find tears in your eyes, because the sense of relief is so ecstatic. And because you know it can only be fleeting. Conversely, when Mr. McNeill performs “Strange Fruit,” the song about lynching in the American South made famous by Billie Holiday, the purity of his voice and directness of his manner transform a ballad of destruction into an enduring victory for art. It’s a promise that though the music may end for Matilda and for Sophiatown — which would be razed soon after “The Suit” takes place — it never truly stops. Everyone onstage is pretty close to perfect. Well, perhaps not the three additional cast members who are conscripted from the audience to join the show’s climactic party chez Philomen. I can say this because I was one on the night I saw “The Suit.” Normally such participation makes me cringe.