“All About Me,” which has now opened at the Henry Miller Theater, would seem to have all that it takes to be a Broadway show, including nine new songs and an attention-getting publicity campaign. But the stage manager’s comment comes an hour after the curtain rises, and I was still, in a way, waiting for one. As winning as some of “All About Me” may be, the 90 minutes of shtick and song are likely to disappoint all but the most devoted members of each performer’s cult – and perhaps even some of them.

The two entertainers have certainly demonstrated in the past that they know what a show is. Dame Edna, the dotty persona in blinding couture played by 76-year-old Australian comedian Barry Humphries, has been the star of her own Broadway show twice before, to great applause. A kind of cross between Barbara Cartland and Don Rickles, Dame Edna can inspire waves of laughter with nothing more than a look. But she rarely just looks. “You’ve aged, you’ve aged tragically,” she tells the audience in “All About Me,” before selecting individuals in the orchestra to make fun of. Her satire can be breathtakingly barbed. She tells us she has adopted a baby from the African Republic of Chlamydia; “I got it from the same village where Madonna shops for her loved ones.”

Michael Feinstein, a Grammy nominated singer and piano player, has been on Broadway three times before with well-received concerts of selections from what is usually called the Great American Songbook. Here he plays a white piano and sings from Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, et al. backed with a 12-piece orchestra that appears in an elaborate all-white set as if performing in a 1930’s Busby Berkeley movie musical. In addition, he has composed five of the nine original songs in “All About Me” (Humphries has contributed lyrics to five).

As always, Humphries has moments of hilarity; Feinstein is mellifluous and charming.

So what’s the problem? Although playwright Christopher Durang is listed as the co-writer, “All About Me” doesn’t seem so much scripted as jerry-rigged -– the tethering together of two successful acts by the thin strand of a single joke.

That joke started months ago when separate press releases by different theater publicists announced that 1, a Michael Feinstein concert of American Songbook standards would open on Broadway on March 6th with the title “All About Me,” and 2. A comic romp with Dame Edna would arrive on Broadway a week earlier, on March 6, 2010, with the title “It’s All About Me.”

Dueling press releases followed to give the impression of a feud over the similar titles. Michael Feinstein was quoted in his: “Titles are not copyrightable. I wish Ms. Edna well. I’ve heard of her.”
Dame Edna was quoted in hers: “Someone purchased a CD of Mr. Feinstein’s at a flea market in Australia and re-gifted it to me recently. I’m impressed at how often he sings on key.”

The feud was soon resolved; their publicists announced they would be combining both shows into one. It was all a publicity stunt – the intention was to do a show together from the outset — but the joke continues. First, there are the Playbills that the ushers distribute, half of which show only Michael Feinstein on the cover and credit him as the co-writer with Durang, the other half Dame Edna and credit only Barry Humphries as Durang’s co-writer. Then there is the music before the curtain opens, an overture that cleverly juxtaposes a few bars of over-the-top strip tease with a Gershwin tinkle, and offers tiny snippets of every grand Broadway show you can think of.

When the curtain rises, Feinstein makes a splashy entrance atop a staircase and underneath a flashy “All About Me” sign, and offers song and patter for about 15 minutes. It is only after Feinstein is finishing his third song, “The Lady Is A Tramp,” that Dame Edna appears with an even splashier entrance, awash in sequins and reclining atop one of the pianos in a sensuous pose. “I’m sorry I’m a little late,” she says to Feinstein, “but thanks for doing the warm-up.” She calls for two black-shirted muscle men to carry Feinstein off. Then the he-men return, don pink sequin vests and do a song-and-dance routine with Dame Edna, the beginning of about 15 minutes of her routine — until Feinstein, his tuxedo torn, escapes back onto the stage.

Feuding and dueling and duets follow, at one point the stage manager dividing the stage in half with yellow police tape and limiting each performer to a minute at a time, punctuated by a foghorn.

In theory, all this should be great fun, the latest incarnation of the bickering duo that has a long tradition in American entertainment: Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Sonny and Cher. But these were comedy acts that worked for years to harmonize their disharmony. Feinstein and Dame Edna have not had as much practice together, and they seem not so much to complement as to interrupt one another. Just because they joke about how little chemistry they have together doesn’t mean they actually have any. The result is a sense that neither gets enough time, or, depending on your taste, one gets too much time — or both get too much.

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All About Me
Written by Christopher Durang, Michael Feinstein and Barry Humphries
Directed by Casey Nicholaw
Scenic and costume design by Anna Louizos, lighting by Howell Binkley, sound design by Peter Fitzgerald, Dame Edna’s gowns by Sephen Adnitt
Cast:
Michael Feinstein, Barry Humphries, Jodi Capeless (stage manager), Bruno (Gregory Butler), Benito (Jon-Paul Mateo)
Running time: Ninety minutes with no intermission
Ticket prices: $49.50 to $121.50; Student rush: $26.50; Premium as high as $251.50.

[advertisement: Buy tickets to the best shows on Broadway]

Monday, March 8, 2010
Broadway Impact co-founders including Gavin Creel (star of “Hair”) will be at the “TalkOut” Monday, March 15 of The Temperamentals

Variety lays off the theater critic David Rooney and both staff film critics, saying the trade paper will rely on freelance reviewers from now on. Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) reacts: Variety fires Todd McCarthy and I cancel my subscription…RIP, schmucks

A View From The Bridge has recouped its investment, the producers announced. Four more weeks to make a profit. (The show closes April 4th).

Know of an Off-Off Broadway theater person deserving an award? The New York Innovative Theatre Foundation is accepting applications for its three “Honorary Awards” until May 1.

Patti Lupone to make her NYC Ballet debut in “The Seven Deadly Sins” in 2011 as singer, a part originated by Lotte Lenya

BAM and Donmar Warehouse present the U.S. premiere of new version of August Strindberg’s Creditors, directed by Alan Rickman April 16-May 16

New Yorker magazine theater critic Hilton Als LIGHTS into Martin McDonagh’s “A Behanding in Spokane,” calling it “vile” and the Anthony Mackie character a Stepin Fetchit
I should point out that I too had problems with the racism in A Behanding in Spokane and what I called the “pitch-poor” black character.

Eddie Redmayne, mostly a film actor (the naive son of Matt Damon in “The Good Shepherd”; “That Other Boleyn Girl”), is playing opposite Alfred Molina in “Red,” a play about the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko, which played in London and begins performances this week at the Golden Theater on Broadway, with a scheduled opening on April 1.
Asked about the play, and whether it will be made into a film, Redmayne said: “It’s a two-hander, a very intimate tale about apprenticeship and this sort of father/son relationship. It’s everything I’m kind of interested in. I don’t know if there’s a film life for it, but certainly I’m thrilled that since it’s this New York play by an American writer, that New York will get to see it.”

Tuesday, March 9, 2010
@GoToOffBroadway: It hasn’t officially opened yet, but it’s already a hit: Kander & Ebb’s “The Scottsboro Boys” extends to April 18!

Broadway’s Fela! records cast album, available in stores June 8

“The Miracle Worker” will continue, producer says, even though business has not (yet) picked up.

Nixon vs. Journalism vs. Drama. My review of “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers” at the New York Theater Workshop.
There are plenty of old plays about even older issue-laded historical events that stand up: “Inherit the Wind” (a 1955 play about the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial) may be the most noteworthy one. The Nixon era has inspired fresh dramas such as Peter Morgan’s “Frost/Nixon.” But “Top Secret” feels like something resurrected past its time, and presented in a way that keeps us at an even greater distance. full review

Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Roundup of reviews for “Love Never Dies,” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to “Phantom of the Opera” which has opened at the Adelphi Theater in London, with plans to open on Broadway in the fall. In his review, New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley called it “a poor sap of a show,” But British critics were more mixed. Meanwhile, “The Phantom of the Opera” lives on, with a new U.S. tour

Lincoln Center has announced its summer festival, which will include will include a 12-hour version of Dostoevsky’s “The Demons”- in Italian, on Governors Island. “The Demons” will have English subtitles…but still!

The New York Post’s Michael Riedel says there is talk that the next cast for “God of Carnage” might be all-black (Eddie Murphy? Mo’nique?) It worked with Hello, Dolly; “Cat on A Hot Tin Roof” etc

David Rooney, fired Variety theater critic, talks of the “erosion of arts coverage” and how the “critical voice is being undervalued.”

“Banana Spheel,” the Cirque de Soleil show that was going to being in Feb, has been delayed again; Previews are now set for April 29

Thursday, March 11, 2010
Despite mixed reviews, “Love Never Dies”, Phantom sequel, is still planned for Broadway in fall, but with some changes likely.

The Public Theater’s artistic director Oskar Eustis will direct New Yorker magazine writer Lawrence Wright’s one-man show about the crisis in Gaza, “The Human Scale”, at Joe’s Pub March 17-21.

Dame Judi Dench to publish her memoir “And Furthermore” in October, her life as an actress (and not just as M in the James Bond flicks)

“The God of Carnage” will not go on national tour,at least not yet. The producers couldn’t line up enough theaters to make it profitable.

My review of Next Fall: Religious Faith, Gay Love, and One-Liners On Broadway:
The easiest thing to say about “Next Fall,” a play by Geoffrey Nauffts that debuted last year at Playwrights Horizon and is now being “presented” on Broadway by Elton John and his life partner David Furnish, is that it is a moving, amusing and thoughtful evening at the theater. It is more difficult to label the play, to call it a comedy or a melodrama or a love story or a gay play or a drama about religious faith. It is all these things and not precisely any of them, a modest play on its surface with degrees of depth hinted at by the several possible meanings of its title.
Full review

Friday, March 12, 2010
“Unchain My Heart, the Ray Charles Musical” with book by Pulitzer winner Suzan-Lori Parks, is set to open on Broadway in November.

Kelsey Grammer will play both Georges & Albin, the gay couple of “La Cage Aux Folles,” opening on Broadway April 18, but not at the same time.

“Promises Promises” star Sean Hayes (who came out as gay earlier in the week) talked about his co-star Kristen Chenoweth: “People [will say] ‘Holy crap! I didn’t know she had that in her.…’ By that, I mean me.”

World Theatre Day 2010 is on March 27th — and it has a Twitter account @WTD10
@WTD10: We also have a blog, which acts as a hub for sharing.

From Playwrights Horizon (@phnyc) We’re kicking off new student and 30&Under memberships next season… starting 4/1!

The Orphan’s Home Cycle plays its 200th performance tonight. My favorite play(s) this season.

Baseball plays are at bat — certainly in Hoboken, the supposed birthplace of baseball, where the Mile Square Theater company has commissioned close to 50 baseball plays over the past eight years.

I’m at the Drama Book Shop.To my left, a woman reading August Osage County. To my right a man reading a directory of casting agents
Anthony Smith (@ashtonhminty, student) sounds dreadful. get yourself some wine.

Saturday, March 13, 2010
Everyone from Lily Tomlin to Buzz Aldrin pushing for Carol Channing to receive 2010 Kennedy Center Honors. (She hasn’t already?)

Lisa Waldrop (@lisawaldrop, Alabama, “always wishing I was in New York City”): Neither has Dick van Dyke! Crazy!

Downsized Backstage theater editor Leonard Jacobs (@clydefitch) on Variety’s firing theater critic David Rooney — ‘critics’ may vanish; cultural arbiters will not.

Broadway Time Machine
The Broadway League (@thebwayleague) asked: If you had a time machine and comp tickets, what show would you see and why?
Elyssa Gross (@slick144×2): I don’t need a time machine! @rockofages takes me back to the 80’s and that’s all I need!!
@thecraptacular: Easy. Opening night of Pal Joey, Gene Kelly starring.
Laura K. Jacobs (@laurak23): So many! But one I would definitely see is the original Pajama Game cast.
@conssrtfan: I would see Camelot c.1960 the music of all my younger life, & Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well c. 2007
Tony Lance (@tonylance): Either opening night for original production of West Side Story or original production of Ragtime.
Kiaosha (@blckbettyboop): Original cast of Dreamgirls with Jennifer Holiday.
@BwaySalsera: RENT- Would’ve loved to feel the energy & see it in person
Richard Sobel (@shonufflives): Opening night of My Fair Lady…Dame Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison and The Magnificent Score
Mike Lancaster (@lancmike): My pick- Funny Girl at the Winter Garden starring Barbra Streisand’
Arvin Mendoza (@Wildcard2500): I’d go see Sunset Blvd. because we’ll probably never see sets like that again on Broadway

When The Rain Doesn’t Stop
Jonathan Mandell (@newyorktheater, that’s me): I’m supposed to see The Scottsboro Boys tonight, but it’s so wet. (not the show, the weather)

Linda Buchwald (@PataphysicalSci): Rainy days are great for last minute tickets. Saw matinee of @nextfall & really moved by it

Alex Jensen (@jensen11us): I also have tickets for that in April let me know what you think

Jonathan Mandell (@newyorktheater): I talk about it being wet & suddenly I get all these London theater followers! You’re an inspiration. I’m going. Never too wet to see a show!

@angelstoughbark: So true so true i would never miss a show for a little wetness

Sunday, March 14, 2010
GLAAD Media Awards in theater last night went to “A Boy and His Soul” by Colman Domingo and “She Like Girls” by Chisa Hutchinson

Dennis Baker: Does your schedule allow you to create art or are you about to implode? How are you as an artist creating a work/life/art balance?

The still-anonymous @BroadwayGirlNYC , who has been on Twitter exactly a year today (her Twitterversary), has just announced she will have a weekly column Thursdays on BroadwayWorld.com.

My review of A Miracle Worker — Accessible, Engaging, Endangered
To judge whether there is an audience for “The Miracle Worker” the first-ever Broadway revival of the 1959 play about the awakening of Helen Keller, let’s look at the numbers: as many as a million adults in the United States who are both deaf and blind; 20 million or so who are hearing-impaired; more than 25 million who are vision-impaired (people who have trouble seeing even with glasses); more than 300 million who experience frustration, yearn for connection, feel inspired by a true story of triumph over challenges. Full review

My review of “Looped” – Tallulah Ends Up Oprah
Tallulah Bankhead, the quotable and oft-caricatured sultry-voiced star whom Valerie Harper is playing in “Looped,” was the inspiration for both Cruella de Vil in “101 Dalmatians” and Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire”; indeed, Tennessee Williams is said to have asked her to play Blanche on Broadway, but she turned him down because, according to Harper’s Tallulah, “How would it look for an aging promiscuous Southern woman who drank too much to play an aging promiscuous Southern woman who drank too much?”
She is, in short, made to be played full review

–
The Week in New York Theater Tweets appears every Monday in The New York Theater section of The Faster Times, a selection (and enhancement) of the past week’s 140-character Twitter messages by Jonathan Mandell. To sign up to the New York Theater Twitter account, click on this link.

Past issues:

Sondheim Daily, Shakespeare Twitterized, Hand Loss, Hand Loss. 03/08/10
American Idol on Broadway. Bad Theater. Political Theater. Internet Theater. 03/01/10
Best Plays Ever, Gay Plays Now, Spring 2010 Theater Preview, 02/22/10

Broadway Love, Cell Phone Hate, Absolutely Fabulous Debuts. 02/15/10

Jackie O, Jersey Boys/Jersey Shore, Picking (On) Playwrights. 02/08/10

Avenue Q/South Park 2? Time Stands Still. American Idiot Doesn’t. 02/01/10

Scarlett Johansson’s First Time; Victor Garber’s 15th; A Nasty Bye Bye. 1/25/10

Antonio Banderas Back On Broadway? Angels Back In America. 1/18/10

Sinatra, Elvis, Green Day, Bono Coming To Broadway 1/11/10

Ragtime and Rainbow Shockers; The 2010 Season; What’s Wrong With Waltre Krre (Theater vs. Theatre)1/04/10,

From Arthur Miller to Catherine Zeta-Jones 12/28,

12/21, 12/14, 12/07

She is, in short, made to be played, and although she has nowhere near the name recognition she had while alive, she has been reincarnated on the stage many times, by actresses like Kathleen Turner and female impersonators like Craig Russell, in plays with titles like “Tallulah Hallelujah!” and “Dahling,” named after her signature greeting: She called everybody “darling” because “all my life I’ve been terrible at remembering people’s names. Once I introduced a friend of mine as ‘Martini’. Her name was actually ‘Olive’.”

That line and many of Tallulah’s far more notorious remarks are packed — one could say overstuffed — into “Looped,” which has now opened at the Lyceum. After Harper makes her dramatic entrance, stumbling hours late into an L.A. sound studio wearing dark glasses, a full-length mink coat, lacquered-red fingernails and blush-red lips – and soon holding a cigarette in one hand and booze in the other — she delivers one foul-mouthed crack after another non-stop for a solid 10 minutes.

How entertaining you find these and the rest of the play’s Tallulah-isms depends on your tolerance of everything that surrounds them. “Looped” has an annoyingly amateurish script by playwright Matthew Lombardo, who could have done better, judging by “Tea at Five,” his more adroit vehicle at the Promenade a few years back about the life of Katherine Hepburn.

The premise for “Looped” is based on an actual if insignificant event that occurred during the making of Tallulah’s last film, which had the unpromising title of “Die, Die, My Darling.” By the time she died in 1968 at the age of 66, Tallulah long had been better known for her outrageousness than her acting; as one obituary put it, her “personal life had such flair that, in recent years, when she did so little stage work, there was a tendency to underestimate her talent…” Few of her films matched her achievements in the theater, most famously as Sabina in Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” and Regina in Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes,” but her best-known performance was in a movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat.” That was all many years in the past when, three years before her death, she appeared in a horror movie inspired by the success of “Whatever Happened To Baby Jane,” which had starred the aging actresses Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, launching a genre that Charles Busch has since labeled Grande Dame Guignol. Tallulah was called to a sound studio to redub a single line in “Die, Die My Darling.” What should have taken five minutes took …forever, the entire length of this play.

The playwright places Tallulah in that studio and pairs her with a (presumably) imagined character named Danny, who as the film’s editor is elected by default to handle the dubbing, or looping, with the impossible and inebriated actress.

There is virtually nothing about Danny that rings true, no line he utters that doesn’t grate. He scolds the actress for her shortcomings in a barking manner that is entirely unbelievable and then opens up about his own problems (homosexuality, estranged daughter) in such a theatrically weepy way that it would be laughed off an afternoon soap. It is possible that Brian Hutchison is a good actor – his credits include stints on Broadway in such high-quality works as “Exit the King” and “Proof.” If so, then casting him as Danny has done him dirt.

A theatergoer with great Zen strength might be able to tune out every one of Danny’s lines in Act I, hearing only Tallulah and her zingers. That maneuver would fail, however, in Act II, when his story starts to crowd out hers, and Tallulah abruptly becomes Oprah – or, for that matter, Rhoda (Mary’s Jewish neighbor in the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” the character for which Valerie Harper is still best known) — dispensing hard-earned buck-em-up advice from the heart.

Maybe Tallulah really reached out to people like this; Tennessee Williams said she exhibited “an instinctive kindness to a person in whom she senses a vulnerability that is kin to her own.” Her vulnerability came from a lifetime of tragedies, including the death of her mother shortly after giving birth to her, and her own near-death and hysterectomy in her early thirties that the play attributes to venereal disease she contracted from movie star Gary Cooper. But there was surely a better way of dramatizing this lesser-known aspect of her personality than filling up precious time with…Danny. It is especially a shame since there is so much about Tallulah that remains fascinating. Left out from “Looped,” for example, is the political activism of this outspoken liberal off-spring of a prominent Alabama political family: Both her uncle and her grandfather were U.S. Senators; her father was the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The moments in “Looped” that attempt to show Tallulah’s tender and tortured sides, even the brief ones, are so treacly as to gum up the whole enterprise. Ironically, it was only during the piling on of witticisms, many of them self-deprecating or self-destructive, that I was struck with a sense of how unfunny much of her life probably was.

Still, to the extent that “Looped” is worth seeing, it is to watch Harper’s impressive comic impersonation of a Tallulah whose utterances can still shock even while they amuse:

“Cocaine isn’t habit forming. I should know – I’ve been using it for years.”

“I’m bisexual. Buy me something and I’ll be sexual.”

“There are two kinds of men, the men who want to fuck me, and the men who want to be me.”

“If I had to live my life again I’d make all the same mistakes - only sooner.”

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Looped
at Lyceum Theater (149 West 45th Street)
Written by Matthew Lombardo
Directed by Rob Ruggiero
Sets by Adrian Jones, costumes b William Ivey Long, lighting by Ken Billington, sound by Michael Hooker and Peter Fitzgerald
Cast:
Valerie Harper as Tallulah Bankhead
Brian Hutchison as Danny
Michael Mulheren as Steve
Running time: about two hours with one intermission
Ticket prices: Normal: $25 (for balcony) to $111.50. Student Rush: $25.00. Premium: Up to $226.50

Those challenges belonged both to Helen Keller, who at 19 months old was felled by a disease that made her both deaf and blind, and to Anne Sullivan, a young woman who had herself been blind until her sight was partially restored after nine surgeries, and had grown up in an orphanage. Anne Sullivan was hired to be Helen Keller’s teacher.

“Here’s a houseful of grownups can’t cope with the child,” exclaims Helen’s father, when 20-year-old Anne Sullivan first arrives at the Keller’s Alabama home. “How can an inexperienced half-blind Yankee schoolgirl manage her?”

The answer to that question is the focus of William Gibson’s play. The original Broadway production won four Tony Awards, including best play and best actress (Anne Bancroft; she and Patty Duke won Academy Awards for a reprisal of their roles in the 1962 movie adaptation). The play ran for nearly two years.

A few days after the opening of this second production, the producer announced that he was thinking of closing the show unless ticket sales picked up.

That would be a shock, and a shame. As directed by Kate Whoriskey, who was universally praised for her direction of “Ruined,” Lynn Nottage’s play examining the way civilians adjust to the terror of war in the Congo, “The Miracle Worker” presents its own kind of war, literal physical combat between two extraordinary young actresses, embodying characters who are very much fighting their personal terrors. Abigail Breslin, nominated for an Academy Award for her role as an unlikely beauty contestant in “Little Miss Sunshine” at the age of 10, is a wordless Helen — staring into space, disheveled, defiant, ever-eager to reach beyond her grasp — who uses her face and body with compelling clarity to reveal the world of a trapped intelligence. Alison Pill plays the young, stubborn working-class Anne determined to connect Helen to the rest of humanity, through language. Theatergoers may not recognize Pill as the same 23-year-old actress who was the lesbian activist campaign manager in the movie “Milk,” the cancer patient in denial in the HBO TV series “In Treatment,” the put-upon stamp collector’s daughter in “Mauritius” and the infatuated teenage terrorist in “The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” To remember her in those roles is to understand how completely she has transformed herself here into a young woman who feels in her own way as much a misfit from the world as her pupil.

The main objection to “The Miracle Worker” (besides just the fact that it’s a play rather than a musical) seems to be its staging in the round at Circle in The Square, which requires pieces of furniture attached by cords that rise and fall from the ceiling when needed, and which occasionally obstructs the viewing, depending on where in the theater you are sitting.

None of this bothered me. Maybe I had a good seat, or maybe what mattered most were the accumulation of moments in Anne’s battle to teach Helen, first the manners of civilized society, then (through finger-spelling) its language:

I liked this sense of scenes floating in space, the large empty stage seeming almost ethereal, a stand-in for the larger unknown world as it is experienced both by Helen because of her physical limitations and Anne because of her isolated upbringing.

The unorthodox staging would not bother the blind members of the audience either. They can take advantage of D-Scriptive audio description system available for free. For the hearing-impaired, there is both the Assistive Listening System available in other Broadway theaters, and something called I-Caption, a hand-held captioning system. There is also ShowTrans, which translates the proceedings (not just the dialogue) into Spanish, Portuguese or Japanese. Certain performances are interpreted in sign language or presented with open captions (the theater equivalent of film’s subtitles).

The next open-captioned performance, according to the Miracle Worker Web site, is Tuesday, March 23 at 7pm. The next sign-interpreted performance is Tuesday, March 30 at 7pm.

There is no other show on Broadway that is so accessible, to both the disabled and the young, and that speaks to them so directly.

Helen Keller, born in the 19th century, went on to become an internationally renowned figure of the 20th, author of 12 books, inspiring public speaker, political activist. After graduating from Radcliffe College – the first blind-deaf student to graduate from any college – this daughter of a former officer of the Confederate Army became a leading suffragette, anti-war activist, a socialist, advocate of birth control, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a disability rights activist. She was even credited with having introduced the Akita breed of dog to the United States. Maybe the time is right for a new drama about the adult Helen Keller? For the moment, there is, for the first time on Broadway in 50 years, “The Miracle Worker.”

Twitterers: Follow Jonathan Mandell on New York Theater

The Miracle Worker
At Circle in the Square Theater (235 West 50th Street)
By William Gibson; directed by Kate Whoriskey; sets by Derek McLane; costumes by Paul Tazewell; lighting by Kenneth Posner; music and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen; hair design by Charles LaPointe; physical coaching and movement by Lee Sher;
Cast:
Abigail Breslin (Helen Keller), Alison Pill (Annie Sullivan), Jennifer Morrison (Kate Keller), Elizabeth Franz (Aunt Ev), Matthew Modine (Captain Keller), Tobias Segal (James), Daniel Oreskes (Doctor/Anagnos), Michael Cummings (Percy), Simone Joy Jones (Martha), Yvette Ganier (Viney) and Lance Chantiles-Wertz (Jimmie).
Running time: 2 hours with one intermission.
Ticket prices: Normal: $80 to $117. Day of performance ticket lottery: $26.00. Premium seats: up to $202.

“Next Fall” begins in a New York City hospital where friends and family gather after Luke, an actor in his thirties (Patrick Heusinger, best known from TV’s “Gossip Girl”), was injured in a taxi accident and has fallen into a coma. We meet his divorced parents, who have travelled from Florida, and eventually his lover Adam, a man in his forties (Patrick Breen of Off-Broadway’s “Fuddy Meers” and Broadway’s “Big River”). It is clear right away that Luke’s parents and his lover don’t know each other; Luke never told his (bigoted) parents about Adam.

The fluorescent ceiling lights of the hospital retract, some walls move, and it is five years earlier, on a rooftop with a nighttime view of the skyline, where Adam and Luke have just met: They have escaped a party where Luke executed the Heimlich maneuver on a choking Adam. (“You looked so cute all doubled over like that,” Luke tells Adam, joshing banter that becomes the norm.) Luke is working as a cater waiter, but has just been cast in a production of “Our Town.” Adam wants to be a writer but has worked for the past six years in the candle shop owned by his friend Holly.

The rest of the play alternates between scenes in the hospital and scenes moving forward through the years of the two men’s unlikely relationship – unlikely not primarily because of the difference in their ages or types (Luke is an openly friendly hunk, Adam a sardonic intellectual nerd) but because Adam is an atheist and Luke is a committed, and apparently fundamentalist, Christian. From the beginning, Adam is relentless in attacking Luke for subscribing to a theology that dismisses gay relationships as sinful. Luke argues that all human beings sin, that having sex with men “just happens to be mine,” but that his sin, as all sins, will be forgiven because he has accepted Christ as his savior.

Adam: So then, if Matthew Shepard hadn’t accepted Christ before he died, he’s in hell, and his killers who, say, have, are going to heaven? Is that what you’re saying?”
Luke: Can we change the subject?

It is a credit to the script, though, that Adam doesn’t score all the points, that Luke’s faith is shown to have value. Indeed, each of the characters in his or her own way has some kind of spiritual life, whether on a journey or confidently arrived. These are not just pat mouthpieces for their positions. At a vulnerable moment, Adam confesses “you don’t have to believe in hell to walk around feeling like you’re going to burn in it.”

It seems largely on the strength of its positive Off-Broadway reviews last summer that “Next Fall” first extended its limited run several times and now has transferred with no discernible changes (other than a larger set) to the Helen Hayes. But there were critical dissenters then, and on theater chat rooms now, who find the characters sketchy or stereotypical, or question the credibility of some of the play’s details, for example how two people who work in a candle shop could afford an apartment in Manhattan that Luke’s father on a visit describes as “swanky” (Maybe their parents are helping them with the rent?); more significantly, how two people with such sharply conflicting core beliefs could stay together so long (Love finds a way?) One can also detect a certain coyness in the play about Judaism. The hospital is a Jewish hospital (there is a scene in the hospital chapel that makes this clear), Luke’s mother Arlene makes some silly (but not really anti-Semitic) comments about Jews. Yet, while Adam might as well have “Made by Woody Allen” printed on his chin — aspiring writer; hypochondriac; politically-minded, CNN-watching, wise-cracking Upper West Sider – we are apparently supposed to believe (based on one throwaway line) that he grew up in a non-religious but Christian-heritage household. Not impossible, but not typical. (Maybe playwright Nauffts didn’t want his play overwhelmed by Bridget-Loves-Bernie issues.)

What makes any such gaps trivial is the acting. Nauffts, the artistic director of Naked Angels, the theater company where “Next Fall” originated, is also an actor who has appeared in dozens of films and TV shows. He and director Sheryl Kaller have assembled a cast of six first-rate actors (brought intact from the Off-Broadway production) and given them a chance not just to express emotions fully and believably, but to bring out those feelings in the audience as well – and that includes both tears and laughter.

Of special note are Patrick Breen as Adam, who seems to have been destined to play this role, and Connie Ray as the overly talkative pill-popping Arlene, Luke’s post-responsible mother, who makes a potential sitcom joke into a believable woman through her expertly modulated performance. Singling out these two is not intended as a disparagement of the other four, all of whom have stand-out moments that are touching or tickling, and feel true. The playfully affectionate scenes between Luke and Adam, as performed by the two Patricks, go a long way to establishing a reality in their relationship, and making it appealing.

Producers need to be brave to bring almost any play to Broadway these days. What the producers needed for “Next Fall,” a play without music or stars but one that contemplates the heavens, was something close to faith. Faith is largely what “Next Fall” is about.

Twitterers: Follow Jonathan Mandell at New York Theater

Next Fall by Geoffrey Nauffts
At the Helen Hayes Theater (240 West 44th Street)
Directed by Sheryl Kaller
Sets by Wilson Chin, lighting by Jeff Croiter, sound by John Gromada, costumes by Jess Goldstein
Cast:
Patrick Breen as Adam
Maddie Corman as Holly
Sean Dugan as Brandon
Patrick Heusinger as Luke
Connie Ray as Arlene
Cotter Smith as Butch
Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes, including one 15 minute intermission
Ticket prices: Normal range: $81.50 - $116.50. Student rush: $26.50. Premium top price: $226.50

excerpts from other reviews

The scenes, like much of “Top Secret,” are based on actual transcripts, and are outrageous in their implications. Here first-hand we hear how government officials lie, how they start wars under false pretenses, give vent to personal vendettas, label something “secret” so that it doesn’t embarrass them.

As someone whose interests and sympathies align with those of the authors (and who has peripheral connections to some of the real-life characters and the creative team), I am not sorry I went to “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers.” I am sorry that, despite a stellar cast of solid professionals (especially Larry Pine as Nixon and Kathryn Meisle as Katherine Graham), it was not more engaging.

Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons wrote “Top Secret” as a radio drama 20 years ago, about an incident now four decades old. There are plenty of old plays about even older issue-laded historical events that stand up: “Inherit the Wind” (a 1955 play about the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial) may be the most noteworthy one. The Nixon era has inspired fresh dramas such as Peter Morgan’s “Frost/Nixon.” But “Top Secret” feels like something resurrected past its time, and presented in a way that keeps us at an even greater distance. It is being staged at the New York Theater Workshop as if it were still a radio drama – the actors stand in front of microphones reading from scripts. An old-fashioned radio sound effects person works at a desk behind them. Since the events being depicted occurred way past the radio era, the choice to stage “Top Secret” like this is just baffling.

Then there is the question of focus. The Pentagon papers were commissioned in 1967 by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, 7,000 pages that in effect documented the failure, and in many cases venality, of U.S. policy and practice regarding Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, who had contributed to the study, leaked the bulk of the papers, all classified, to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers. The New York Times started publishing some of the revelations; the Justice Department got a court injunction for them to stop publishing it. The Washington Post then decided to publish.

“Top Secret” focuses almost exclusively on the Post’s decision to publish, and its ensuing court case. The New York Times is not really in the picture. Daniel Ellsberg is mentioned, but is not a character in the drama. There are a few lines of dialogue about the contents of the documents, but this play is not about the quagmire of Vietnam, nor do we hear enough to establish for ourselves the parallels between it and the war in Iraq. “Top Secret” is, more than anything, about the importance of a free press in a democracy.

One could see the timing of its revival as ironic, especially when one of the reporters at the end says:

“It’s easy for the Washington Post and the New York Times to take on the U.S. government. We had the resources. We could pay the lawyers. But we didn’t wage this battle just for the giants of journalism. We waged it for the little guys, the poor guy out there covering some zoning committee for some paper you never heard of.”

The Washington Post and the New York Times still have resources, although not as many; there will always be reasons to take on the government; but how many of those papers you never heard of still exist? The landscape has changed so much that perhaps the point of the play has changed as well — not an argument for the necessity of a free press, but a lament for old media.

Those interested in “Top Secret” for its educational value might be better served by the post-performance panel discussions, about half a dozen of which remain — one, on March 16th, with Daniel Ellsberg himself. There is also “The Most Dangerous Man in America” a film documentary about Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers that was nominated this year for an Academy Award. It is showing right now, at Cinema Village, within walking distance of the New York Theater Workshop.

Twitterers: Follow Jonathan Mandell at New York Theater

Top Secret: The Battle for The Pentagon Papers
at New York Theater Workshop,
79 East 4th Street
By Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons
Directed by John Rubinstein
Scenic and lighting design by David Lander
Costume design by Holly Poe Durbin
Cast: Diane Adair, Lary Bryggman, John Getz, Jack Gilpin, James Gleason, Matt McGrath, Kathryn Meisle, Larry Pine, Russell Soder, Peter Strauss, Peter Van Norden
Running time: two hours with intermission
Ticket prices: $65. Students and SUnday evenings: $20.
Through March 28th

Monday, March 1, 2010
Stephen Sondheim from an interview in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Oh, that feeling of being superannuated. It’s because I don’t write pop music, rock music. I write ‘of my generation,’ and deliberately so. I write, as most people do, the music I grew up with. The generation before me — [Leonard] Bernstein and [Jule] Styne — tried to imitate the sounds of their time. But I think George Gershwin was the only composer so attuned to the music around him that it sounded authentic. He did it with jazz and would probably be able to do it with the music now. Of course, when I was 25 or 30, I was on the cutting edge of my time. But while you can make a rock arrangement of anything — the Pet Shop Boys did one of ‘Losing My Mind’ — it wouldn’t be authentic for me to write in that style.”

Come to Cherry Lane Theater’s Master Class with Amiri Baraka. Mar. 8, 7pm. tix $25 ($10 students)

Harry Belafonte turns 83 today. Best known as a singer, movie actor and civil rights activist, he performed in three Broadway productions, produced two others

No surprise: Broadway grosses dropped by more than $3.5 million last week and attendance by almost 30,000 — due of course to the snow.

I’ve just seen Sam Shepard’s “Lie of the Mind” and for some reason have the urge to see “Modern Family.”

The New Group (@TheNewGroupNYC): Our Lie of the Mind made you want to watch Modern Family? I think that’s because they both have what I like to call “the awesome factor”

Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Donna Murphy will star alongside Sutton Foster in the City Center Encores! production of Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’ Anyone Can Whistle, Apr 8-11

Venus in Fur, hit two-hander now running at Classic Stage Company until March 28, may transfer to Broadway!!

Interview with head the Theater Development Fund’s theater accessibility project, or TAP, about acceptability for Broadway, AND a list of accessible performances, open captioned.

We know that stars sell a show. But will a star as PRODUCER –Elton John, Jay Z, Lily Tomlin - sell tickets on Broadway?

Shutter Island’s Mark Ruffalo: “The theater is my real house…I’d love to be Hamlet or, if I wasn’t too old, Romeo.”

Marin Mazzie, best known for “Kiss Me Kate” and “Ragtime,” will join the cast of “Enron,” opening on Broadway April 27th. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal by former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling of his 2008 conviction

Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Producer Ken Davenport conducted a survey of theatergoers gathered at the Times Square TKTS booth. Only one out of 100 of them, he says, associated “Broadway” with “expensive.”
The top five most frequent word-association responses to “Broadway” were: shows (15 responded this way) plays, musicals, New York, and music.
The top five most frequent word-association responses to “Off-Broadway” were: plays (12), “don’t know” (9), cheap, “not as fun,” and “theater.”

Three Off-Broadway musicals on grim historical subjects: “Scottsboro Boys”, “Signs of Life”, “The Burnt Part Boys.”

Youtube as a road to Broadway: Producer David Shor sees Michelle Citrin’s video then hires her to write ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ a musical based on the 1993 Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movie that (its producers hope) is bound for Broadway. The name of Youtube video that got her hired: 20 Things to Do With Matzah.

On this day in 1887 Anne Sullivan arrived to take care of Helen Keller. Appropriately tonight is the opening of “The Miracle Worker” revival

The Miracle Worker reviews: uneven, poorly staged, still compelling

Thursday, March 4, 2010
My My review of A Behanding in Spokane
Christopher Walken, who kills in “A Behanding in Spokane,” his 15th role on Broadway, is better known for the 100 or so movies in which he has performed, including Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow.” Right before that movie opened, I asked him in an interview how his role in it differed from his previous work.
“Well,” he replied. “I had a head.” In “Sleepy Hollow” he played the Headless Horseman.
In “A Behanding,” a 90-minute dip into silliness that is Martin McDonagh’s fifth play on Broadway and the first to take place in America, Walken is once again missing a body part. He plays Carmichael, a man who lost his left hand 47 years ago and has been searching for it ever since…the rest of the review
Linda Buchwald (@PataphysicalSci, blogger and editor at StageGrade):
Why are critics so concerned about the lack of greater meaning in Behanding? Can’t a play just be entertaining, as Behanding certainly is?
Jonathan Mandell (@newyorktheater, me): I think she means me:
Linda Buchwald: Not just you! Almost all the critics felt that way. I can see where you are all coming from, but I loved the show.
Jonathan Mandell: It’s a contrast with his previous work, and it’s hard to take the racism when it’s just entertainment.
Linda Buchwald: Don’t get me wrong–it’s no Pillowman (didn’t get to see Lieutenant or Beauty Queen)

Yank! has extended its run two weeks, to April 4th, which will come as no surprise if you read my review.

Enron has completed its casting, including Jordan Ballard (Hairspray), Brandon J. Dirden (Prelude to a Kiss)

Disney on Broadway,past, present & future: Billy Elliott’s director Stephen Daldry has been asked to work on stage version of “Dumbo”

Friday, March 5, 2010

Steve Loucks (@steveonbroadway, blogger)
If you were about to meet Stephen Sondheim, what would you ask him?
Jonathan Mandell: Are you about to meet Stephen Sondheim?
Steve Loucks: I’ll be in his presence at a private reception in just about two hours.
Serg Rodriguez(@Splurge24, blogger and Youtuber): SHUT UP!!! ARE YOU GOING TO MEET STEPHEN SONDHEIM?!?! I’d ask him if he needed a full-time sycophant. Then I’d faint.
Actually, I’d ask him if he is planning to or would consider writing an auto-biography/memoir. And if so, when?
Broadway Girl (@BroadwayGirlNYC, anonymous but famous Twitterer): Honestly if I met Stephen Sondheim I would probably just try to avoid peeing myself.
Jonathan Mandell: He mentored Jonathan Larson. Who are the up-and-coming theater composers he admires now?
Joseph Lee Edward (@JLeeEdward, actor, singer, blogger): Does he have advice for actors who are approaching his work for the first time?
Which actors’ interpretations of his lyrics and/or music are most memorable for him?
(@tapeworthy): Well don’t ask Stephen Sondheim for his autograph. I found out AFTER I asked that he’s notorious for not giving it.
Kristy Glass (@kristyglass, actor, model, singer, baby wrangler): He’s a quiet standoffish man, I wouldn’t ask him anything…

Steven Loucks: I just returned from having had the honor and privilege of meeting Stephen Sondheim. Very gracious and as sharp and brilliant as ever.
Jonathan Mandell: Did you get a chance to ask him any of the questions?
Steven Loucks: Actually I ended up introducing him to an up and coming director who has already done SUNDAY IN THE PARK & GYPSY.
Sondheim was not very quiet or standoffish tonight. He was beyond gracious and practically gregarious.

American Theatre Wing’s Jonathan Larson grants will be presented March 9th at American Airlines Theater. Performances will include a rare Larson song.

Hits at non-profit/Off-Broadway theaters like Clybourne Park,Orphans Home Cycle, Circle Mirror Transformation don’t get commercial runs because there are no stars.

Frank Sinatra told Twyla Tharp “You give me class” & he always wanted to be a dancer. Come Fly Away opens March 25.

The producer of “The Miracle Worker,” which opened March 3, issued an announcement threatening to close it unless business picks up this weekend.

Saturday, March 6, 2010
Stephen Sondheim in Minnesota from an account in BroadwayWorld.com: The majority of the innovation, he said, is happening in places like off-Broadway and regional theatre, where production costs are smaller and new composers and lyricists are free to take more chances. He cited Spring Awakening and Next to Normal as examples of the few rare, recent musicals with original scores, and pointed out that they were able to find homes on Broadway because of successful runs off-Broadway first. He also discussed that because most writers of off-Broadway shows often cannot make a living with that kind of work, they’re being lost from the musical Theatre World to jobs in television and the popular music industry. Again, he emphasized the importance learning through failure and experience, and mentioned how few new, young composers have the opportunity to fail multiple times before creating a Broadway-worthy hit.

Seating charts for theaters in London and New York (and Brooklyn) on Playbill.com. Bookmark this page!

Sunday, March 7, 2010
My review of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged):
The Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC), which began in 1981 as a street corner act in California, played in London for nearly a decade, and just won a 2010 Shorty Award for “cultural institution” (2010 was the debut of this award for Twitterers), has now arrived in New York, for a run at the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).” In keeping with their new motto – short and tweet – it’s a short run, only a week, until March 14th. But yes it is sweet….
Yet this is the Age of Twitter…“The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” could be — dare I say this? — shorter. complete review

Reduced Shakespeare Company (@reduced) New York Theater asks in his review if we can be shorter. Fair question! Here’s The Complete Works - Tweeted.
eg.
MACBETH
Lady Macbeth encourages her husband to be more aggressive in pursuing career options.

Zero Hour, funny one-man show about Zero Mostel, reopens tonight at DR2, 103 E 15th St.

Hair Loss
The Al Hirschfeld Theater loses its “Hair” today as the entire hippie cast of the Tony Award-winning Broadway revival moves en masse to London.The 31 new cast members, including Ace Young, Diana DeGarmo, Kyle Riabko, will begin Tuesday March 9th.
Andrew Kober (@andrewkober, original “Hair” cast member) The weather today reminds me of the day we opened. And even the guys at Juice Generation said they’re going to miss us. Nice things.
Gavin Creel (@Gavincreel, original “Hair” cast member) So much kindness. Life is intense right now. In so many ways

Broadway Girl: Happy trails to @HAIRtribe! thanks for being our partners in the equality fight! So excited for you to spread the love across the pond!
Who is going to join me at 3pm as I blast the cast recording of HAIR and pretend I’m there in person sending off the cast?!
My open love-letter to the London-bound Broadway cast of HAIR
Alex Jensen (@jensen11us) @BroadwayGirlNYC don’t you think you should tone it down a tad on this hair nonsense?
BroadwayGirlNYC: Um, NO
(@celticgirl62): Why should she
Alex Jensen: Because its not like they are dying. They will still have jobs and life goes on…

The Oscars

Nine of the 20 Oscar nominees for performance have appeared on Broadway. (See details.) NOT ONE OF THEM WON.
Here’s the Modern Family commercial that everybody raved as being the best thing about the Oscars:


Best Song Oscar and Broadway Broadway composers who’ve won range from Irving Berlin to…Stephen Sondheim.

–
The Week in New York Theater Tweets appears every Monday in The New York Theater section of The Faster Times, a selection (and enhancement) of the past week’s 140-character Twitter messages by Jonathan Mandell. To sign up to the New York Theater Twitter account, click on this link.

Past issues:

American Idol on Broadway. Bad Theater. Political Theater. Internet Theater. 03/01/10
Best Plays Ever, Gay Plays Now, Spring 2010 Theater Preview, 02/22/10

Broadway Love, Cell Phone Hate, Absolutely Fabulous Debuts. 02/15/10

Jackie O, Jersey Boys/Jersey Shore, Picking (On) Playwrights. 02/08/10

Avenue Q/South Park 2? Time Stands Still. American Idiot Doesn’t. 02/01/10

Scarlett Johansson’s First Time; Victor Garber’s 15th; A Nasty Bye Bye. 1/25/10

Antonio Banderas Back On Broadway? Angels Back In America. 1/18/10

Sinatra, Elvis, Green Day, Bono Coming To Broadway 1/11/10

Ragtime and Rainbow Shockers; The 2010 Season; What’s Wrong With Waltre Krre (Theater vs. Theatre)1/04/10,

From Arthur Miller to Catherine Zeta-Jones 12/28,

12/21, 12/14, 12/07

“There are 1,122 roles in Shakespeare’s works,” Reed Martin, the “RSC managing partner” tells us near the beginning of the evening, standing in front of a cartoon-like replica of the Globe Theater. “Way too many.”

In this view, none of Shakespeare’s 37 plays should have more than the number of characters who can be played by three performers, Martin, Austin Tichenor, and Matt Rippy, who are nothing if not energetic. For their finale, the company reprises “Hamlet” (which takes up the entire Act II) in about four minutes, then in one, then in ten seconds, then backwards.

Those who know Shakespeare, and are not aghast at the defilement, will appreciate the clever tweaks and allusions — “Titus Andronicus” recast as a cooking show, “The Gory Gourmet”; a rap version of “Othello”; the condensing of the 16 Shakespeare comedies into one, with the performers offering their reasoning for this reduction that the comedies are all based on the same “five or six funny gimmicks…

“What’s that one with the shipwreck, and the identical twins, and the wedding at the end?”
“Um, all of them?”

Those who don’t know or care about Shakespeare can get by with the slapstick, boob jokes, pop culture references, bawdy sophomoric puns, general silliness and the funniest turn-off-your-cell-phone announcement I’ve ever heard.

Heaven help the vulnerable developing minds — and New Victory is a children’s theater after all — for whom this show would serve as an introduction to the bard. The closest to an actual rendition of Shakespeare’s language is the 16-minute version of “Romeo and Juliet.” (The theater recommends the show for children age 11 and older).

It is pointless to take issue with a show that has been so popular in so many places for so long that it’s practically an industry: The self-declared Bad Boys of Abridgement “have created six (soon to be seven) stage shows, two television specials, several failed TV pilots, and numerous radio pieces – all of which have been performed, seen, and heard the world over.” Yet this is the Age of Twitter (those tweets summarizing “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet” were on Twitter, not in their stage show): “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” could be — dare I say this? — shorter.

Twitterers: Follow Jonathan Mandell at New York Theater

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
at the New Victory Theater (209 West 42nd Street)
Written by Adam Long, Daniel Singer, Jess Winfield
Directed by Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor
Set design by S.W. Wellen
Cast: Reed Martin, Matt Rippy, Austin Tichenor
Running time: about an hour, 45 minutes, including intermission
Ticket prices: $12.50 to $35 (less for New Victory members)
Through March 14th.

“Well,” he replied. “I had a head.” In “Sleepy Hollow” he played the Headless Horseman.

In “A Behanding,” a 90-minute dip into silliness that is Martin McDonagh’s fifth play on Broadway and the first to take place in America, Walken is once again missing a body part. He plays Carmichael, a man who lost his left hand 47 years ago and has been searching for it ever since.

If that seems an odd and skimpy premise for an entire Broadway play, McDonagh milks it to deliver many of the elements we have come to expect of the playwright whose debut work, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” crossed the ocean 12 years ago (when he was 28 years old), after successful productions in Galway, London and Dublin, and won four of the six Tony Awards for which it was nominated. In “A Behanding” as in his previous plays, there is violence or the threat of violence, mordant humor, a series of twists and teases that play with the audience’s expectations. And there are body parts (in this case, severed hands.)

This first play that he has written specifically for the Broadway stage, however, is missing two usual McDonagh ingredients: a setting in Ireland, and the sense that a larger point is being made. These two might be related. By his uprooting of his shenanigans from the Irish soil, he can no longer tap into the rich history and associations of Irish culture, and we can no longer assume that his work is some kind of parable offering insights into it. If the journey from “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” to “A Behanding in Spokane” isn’t quite the one Tracy Letts made between “August: Osage County” and “Superior Donuts,” McDonagh is turning up the laughs and toning down the shock but also the awe. His latest black comedy is an entertaining and empty trifle. You could almost say that it’s the playwright this time who’s missing his head.

Still, from the first moment we see Christopher Walken on the stage, it is clear we are in the hands – or anyway the hand — of a pro. He is sitting blankly on a bed in a flea-bag hotel, staring at the audience for what seems like forever. He ignores the increasingly loud scratching, pounding and muffled screaming in the closet behind him, until he gets up, takes out a gun, opens the closet door, and shoots. In the several minutes it took for all this to happen, the audience laughed, by my count, five times. You needn’t be a fan of or even familiar with his most memorable roles — Diane Keaton’s loon of a brother in “Annie Hall”; the war-damaged Nick in “The Deer Hunter”; or (for a change of pace) John Travolta’s joke-shop-owning song-and-dance hubby in “Hairspray” — to be won over by this actor’s stage mastery of timing, vocal inflections, facial expressions.

As we soon discover, Carmichael did not kill the man in the closet, whose name is Toby (Anthony Mackie); he shot into the wall to frighten Toby into silence. Carmichael is angry because Toby and his girlfriend Marilyn (Zoe Kazan) tried to scam him, by selling him a hand they claimed was his, but that they stole from a museum. To save their skins, they now tell him that they brought him the wrong hand by accident, that his real hand is at home. So Carmichael handcuffs them to the radiator, lights a candle atop a can of gasoline, and goes in search once again of his hand.

In his absence, they try to escape; they encounter the hotel receptionist, who hates being called a receptionist (Sam Rockwell); they discuss whether the story Carmichael told of how he got his hand chopped off made any sense: In Spokane, Washington, he said, a group of strange men grabbed him when he was 17 and stuck his arm on a railroad track until a train ran over it, then waved goodbye to him using his hand.

“Do you believe all that Spokane stuff? How he got his hand cut off and all?” Marilyn asks.
“I kinda had the feeling I saw that in a TV movie one time, that had Lee Majors in it…” Toby says.
“That’d be pretty mean, wouldn’t it,” Marilyn says, “somebody waving goodbye to you with your own hand?”

I hesitate to call this play a four-hander, first because I’m resisting any more hand puns, but also because there is a fifth character, Carmichael’s mother, who is very much present, without actually being there, existing only as an unheard voice on the other side of the telephone line. She is, like her son, a racist.

Toby, who is as far as I know the first black character that McDonagh has created, is subjected to repeated utterances of that nasty epithet for African-Americans. Toby himself curses relentlessly in what is apparently a pitch-poor effort to capture the way black people speak. I wondered whether McDonagh’s willingness to bask in this kind of offensiveness was some effort to comment on American culture – our violence, our racism — or just another random effort to shock for amusement.

Donagh’s two previous plays on Broadway, “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” and before that “The Pillowman,” were far more gruesome, the first with dead cats and blood, the second with its demented tales of child killings. But they were also engaging riddles, and fairly readable as comments on, respectively, terrorism and the power of storytelling. In “A Behanding in Spokane,” the little incidents, twists, revelations, remarks, odd scenes — the hotel employee has a long front-of-the-curtain monologue about monkeys in the zoo — pile up, but they start to seem like disconnected punchlines. I considered whether I was missing something, whether the play was really about the ways people do mean things to one another, or how we obsess over silly things. Then I realized – I was the one who was in danger of obsessing over a silly thing, this play.

Twitterers: Follow Jonathan Mandell at New York Theater

A Behanding In Spokane by Martin McDonagh
at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater
(236 West 45th Street)
Directed by John Crowley
Scenic and costume design by Scott Pask, lighting design by Brian MacDevitt
Cast:
Christopher Walken as Carmichael
Sam Rockwell as Mervyn
Zoe Kazan as Marilyn
Anthony Mackie as Toby
Running time: 90 minutes without intermission
Ticket prices: $61.50 to $116.50
Through June 6, 2010.

Monday, February 22, 2010
Have a script for a musical? Submit it to the New York Musical Theatre Festival. Twelve will be produced! Deadline: March 1

American Idol On Broadway
“American Idol” was not called “Broadway Idol” and it is unlikely the producers hoped their television show would supply stars for the Great White Way.
That, however, is what has happened.
Fantasia Barrino, American Idol winner for season 3, starred on Broadway in “The Color Purple.”
Taylor Hicks, American Idol winner for season 5 , appeared in “Grease.”
American Idol runners-up have been as, or more, successful on Broadway:
Clay Aiken (number 2 in season 2) had a run in “Spamalot” more

Six Points offers up to $20,000 fellowships for New York artists to develop new projects with a Jewish focus.

Critic-o-Meter has changed its name and address to Stage Grade. It still provides a summary of the New York critics’ reviews of plays and musicals, including my reviews. (Each grade is what the Stage Grade editors think is the grade a critic is giving to the show being reviewed. So they said in my reviews I was giving A+ to “Orphans Home Cycle” and D+ to “Race”)

In a new play, Bass for Picasso, on Theater Row from April 17 to May 23, a disabled New York Times food writer throws a dinner party with recipes from Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. It’s written by Kate Moira Ryan, whose previous plays have memorable titles: 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, Cavedweller, and Mommy Queerest

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Mandy Gonzalez, who originated the role of Nina in “In the Heights”, will assume the role of Elphaba in Wicked starting March 23

Cheyenne Jackson (@Cheyguynyc, actor and singer): My dentist apologized for not coming to Finians rainbow while he was cleaning my teeth. No fair…I couldn’t retort, as my mouth was busy.

Twitterplays is one year old, the inspired weekly effort organized by the New York NeoFuturists, a theater company (not to be confused with the Chicago Neofuturists) that presents shows off-line as well. This week’s assignment was to write a one-tweet play that has three speaking and one non-speaking role. A selection:

Jenna Stern (@JennaStern):
7am. Mom (pouring coffee)-Did you do it? Dad (grabbing mug)-Do what? Daughter-Take him for a walk! Dad-No, not yet. Dog-(sad face).

Carl Riehl (@C_Winston, composer):
[Lights up: monkey typing furiously] 1: You won’t ever finish it. 2: You won’t even start it. 3: Stupid monkey. [Monkey keeps typing]

Alexander Cherry( @unwyn, poet, mathematician, etc.):
A: “I’m telling you! He moved!” B: “He couldn’t have. Right, doctor?” C: “He’s comatose, so no.” [D’s hand grabs A’s]

Zabeth Russell (@zabsters):
CASHIER: Medium or large popcorn? DAN:Get off my fucking back for a second. GUY IN LINE: Whoa, buddy. DAN’S DATE:(horrified silence)

Here are the NY Neofuturists own favorite Twitterplays

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Arts Day 2010 in Albany – a lobbying day to try to restore funding
Off-Off Broadway advocacy on Youtube: 40,000 artists in 500 theaters putting on 1,800 productions a year! All that is endangered by the governor’s proposal to cut $6.5 million from the arts budget

After 29 years, Ohio Theater in SoHo (where Tony Kushner,Eve Ensler,Philip Seymour Hoffman got their start), will close August 31

Why couldn’t American theatre produce its own “Enron” (the play)? The Guardian

Is A Bad Play Good To See?
Theatergoer’s dilemma: What do you do when you have a ticket to see a show that every critic has panned? Judge for yourself, or spare yourself?

Indira Satyendra (@hudsonette, NYC lawyer, fan of American theater): I’ve skipped plays with terrible reviews because life is so busy. But if you have the time, you can learn from the bad ones.

Erica McLaughlin (@ezmac99, actress, playwright): You HAVE to watch bad theater to know what makes theater good! “Bad” theater often leaves me more inspired afterwards. And unlike film, theatre can evolve throughout the course of a run. Clarity of acting choices can change a show as it goes

Howard Sherman (@HESherman, executive director of the American Theatre Wing): If I commit to seeing a show, I always go. Always something to be learned; often artists involved I want to support.

James Carter (@jdcarter, “playwright, producer, punk.”): Can you get your $ back? If not, see the carnage. Look at the train wreck and see what you learn.

Kate (@BeeingMissStar, actress): I always want to judge for myself. I don’t always agree with critics, and watching terrible theatre is a great learning experience.

Linda Buchwald (@PataphysicalSci, blogger, StageGrade editor) I went to see Romantic Poetry specifically because it was universally panned. I learned that the critics were right.
But sometimes if you go in expecting a show to be awful, you can be pleasantly surprised.

Nella Vera (@spinstripes, director of marketing, the Public Theater): “Bad” is in eye of beholder. I loved plenty of shows that were panned

Jonathan Mandell (@newyorktheater, that’s me): Name three

Nella Vera: I truly loved The Capeman, Andrew Lippa’s Wild Party and Peter Sellers’ Othello, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, all four plus hours of it.

Esther (@GratuitousV, theater blogger): I don’t think I’d see a show that was panned unless subject or actors really interested me. I just don’t have the time.

My review of “Yank!”.
In less talented hands, such a concoction could have produced a tasteless mix of cliché, camp, and bombast. All three elements certainly exist in “Yank!” (mostly the first two), but here it all works. In the capable hands of the Zellnik brothers and the rest of the creative team, and with a well-chosen cast, “Yank!” is like a gay “South Pacific.” I should say quickly that “Yank!” is not likely to enter the musical theater canon, or be revived in 50 years; the tunes, while pleasing, did not seem especially memorable, and there are some awkward plot devices. But “Yank!” and “South Pacific” share setting, theme and tone (or range of tones, from playful to pointed; soulful to a bit schmaltzy.) And whatever its flaws, “Yank!” is a musical very difficult to dislike. more

@YanktheMusical ooh, this one’s nice. Even if I never heard of the paper

Thursday, February 25, 2010
“Evita” is to be revived on Broadway starring Argentine Elena Rogers and, as Che (the producers hope), Ricky Martin.

Meanwhile, Patti Lupone, who originated the role of “Evita” on Broadway in 1979, one of the 25 Broadway productions in which she has appeared, is holding a contest to name the book she is writing about “my theatrical life.” If your title is selected, she writes on her Web site, “you’ll win an autographed copy of the book, two tickets to my next Broadway show (or major show in a city near you), and I’ll congratulate you personally at the theatre.”

“Political Theater”
Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater, me): It’s interesting that everybody’s referring to the health care summit as “political theater.” Does this mean there’s a plot? A happy ending?
Indira Satyendra (@hudsonette): It’s Theater of Hate.
Carli Entin (@carlient): More like theater of the absurd
Isaiah Tanenbaum (@isaiahlt, actor, photographer, twitterphobe): No, if health care reform is political theater, it’s definitely a Problem Play.

Radio dramas, hot for 40 years until they were killed by TV in 60s, are back on the Internet, as audio dramas…or mind movies.

Are you an art hero? Nominate yourself or someone else for one of the six awards from Americans for the Arts, e.g. advocate

Friday, February 26, 2010
Tony Awards schedule for 2010, released today
Eligibility cut-off, April 29
Nominations announced, May 4
The nominees meet the press, May 5
The nominees lunch together privately, May 20
The Tony Awards, June 13

The biggest local story today is, in a word, SNOW. The storm continues today in New York, more than 12 inches expected, and more tomorrow. All Broadway productions will take place today as regularly scheduled, announces the Broadway League (@TheBwayLeague). There are many snow day deals on Broadway.

TWO Tennessee Williams festivals in March to mark the playwright’s 99th birthday: The Unknown Williams and Tenn99 free marathon reading

@OurTownOffBway: Today the 1 yr anniversary of Our Town’s Opening!!

Learning from A Bomb: my review of “Mr. & Mrs. Fitch”
The show to my surprise struck me initially as not half-bad..But ultimately I agreed with (almost) everybody else that “Mr. & Mrs. Fitch” was far less witty than it was pretending to be, the characters fake and hammy, the enterprise pretentious and pointless. Given my Twitter mandate, I tried to make this a learning experience. So:
How to Turn “not-half-bad” Into A Bomb:
1. Don’t edit
2. Strain to be unoriginal
3. Sound sophisticated without being so.
Details

Another view from Nathan Collins (@nmcollins, playwriting grad student): I thought it was fun. not life changing theater but enjoyable, well-acted and crafted.

Saturday, February 27, 2010
Cate Blanchett gives a speech on why the arts are important:
“The arts operate at the core of human identity and existence…Countries with strong cultural identities demonstrate greater social cohesion…We change people’s lives, at the risk of our own….We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place.”

‘Theater is now viewed as a way of getting a staff writing job on TV’ e.g. Keith Huff (”A Steady Rain”) writing Mad Men. Other examples of playwright–>TV writer: Marsha Norman, Theresa Rebeck, Warren Leight (Side Men), Tracy Letts,
After “Superior Donuts” was staged, CBS began pursuing playwright Tracy Letts to repackage it as a TV sitcom
Remember how I said Superior Donuts seemed like a sitcom (Tracy Letts and the Shock of the Sitcom). Maybe Tracy Letts was auditioning!

Producer Ken Davenport (@kendavenport) explains 5 Broadway box office terms, wrap,advance, gross,net, nagbor, but not why we should care.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given the Soho Rep in Tribeca a $200,000 grant.

The Case Against Abortion — my review of Girls in Trouble at the Flea Theater
To call “Girls in Trouble” provocative is to understate the degree to which the play is sure to antagonize anybody who feels strongly one way or another about the issue of abortion. This is where somebody would typically say: Well, the playwright must be doing something right if he offends both sides. But the two sides will be aghast for different reasons. more

The Mad Fashionista (@madfashionista, blogger, “truly chic New Yorker): Dear Lord, that play sounds ghastly.Thank you for an excellent review. My abortions were so undramatic…Oops…there go half my followers.

My review of “The Temperamentals”
Harry Hay was an ex-actor turned teacher who was married with two children and a member of the American Communist Party. Rudi Gernreich, a Viennese-born Hollywood costume designer whose family had died in Auschwitz, would go on to become one of the most celebrated designers of the 1960’s, the creator of the topless bathing suit. Together they formed the Mattachine Society, at a time when “homosexual marriage” meant men marrying women to disguise their identity, touching hands could result in arrest, and there were code words like “temperamentals” for what is now known as the LGBTQ community.

The key to appreciating this play by John Marans is to think of it as community theater, in a good sense — a look at the origins of a community. On a spare stage with lighting that at times seems to mimic the glare of an interrogation room, a cast of five, three of whom play a large range of characters, bring us back to an era full of fear and the first efforts to do something about it. more

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The Week in New York Theater Tweets appears every Monday in The New York Theater section of The Faster Times, a selection (and enhancement) of the past week’s 140-character Twitter messages by Jonathan Mandell. To sign up to the New York Theater Twitter account, click on this link.

Past issues:

Best Plays Ever, Gay Plays Now, Spring 2010 Theater Preview, 02/22/10

Broadway Love, Cell Phone Hate, Absolutely Fabulous Debuts. 02/15/10

Jackie O, Jersey Boys/Jersey Shore, Picking (On) Playwrights. 02/08/10

Avenue Q/South Park 2? Time Stands Still. American Idiot Doesn’t. 02/01/10

Scarlett Johansson’s First Time; Victor Garber’s 15th; A Nasty Bye Bye. 1/25/10

Antonio Banderas Back On Broadway? Angels Back In America. 1/18/10

Sinatra, Elvis, Green Day, Bono Coming To Broadway 1/11/10

Ragtime and Rainbow Shockers; The 2010 Season; What’s Wrong With Waltre Krre (Theater vs. Theatre)1/04/10,

From Arthur Miller to Catherine Zeta-Jones 12/28,

12/21, 12/14, 12/07