Yeah, Another Giveaway…But A Really Big One

First things first:  it looks like I owe you guys an apology. Because either you all really don’t want to see Disaster! (which I don’t believe) or I made the giveaway question too cumbersome (which is probably the case.) Whatever the reason, no one wrote in for the last giveaway so I’ve got no winner to announce. 
 

But I’m betting that it will be different with this week’s giveaway because up for grabs is a copy of the eagerly anticipated new book “Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History” by Glen Berger.  

As most theater lovers know, Berger was Julie Taymor’s co-writer on Spider-Man: Turn off The Dark, which, as his book title suggests, may be the most notorious musical of all time. Luckily, he kept notes during the show’s long and troubled gestation and now his 384-page tell-all is touted to reveal all the behind-the-scenes dirt about the battles between Taymor and her erstwhile collaborators the big rock musicians—but total musicals novices—Bono and the Edge.

The book is due out Nov. 5 but the New York Post columnist Michael Riedel has already had a sneak peek and you can see some of the advanced dish he been sharing by clicking here. 

Even better, you can get a chance to have your own free copy of the book (plus a bonus prize of the tickets to Disaster!) by emailing me the name of the actor who was originally supposed to play the show’s villainous Green Goblin at jan@broadwayandme.com by midnight this Sunday, Nov. 3.

And speaking of green, let me join the chorus of congratulations to Wicked, the Wizard of Oz prequel that tells the story of the defiantly green witch Elphaba, cause it celebrates its 10th year on Broadway today. 

Is "13" Too Immature for Broadway?

Tweens, that precocious generation between the ages of 8 and 15, have turned “High School Musical” into a cash cow for Disney. They made the Jonas Brothers (ages 17, 16 and 13 when they formed their band in 2005) one of the hottest acts in the music business today. They put 15 year-old Miley Cyrus on the cover of Vanity Fair this year. And they even helped Broadway’s Wicked become the international girl-powerhouse that it is. So as I sat watching the new musical 13 that opened on Sunday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, I found myself wondering “Why didn’t someone think of this before?

This is a musical about 13 year-olds, starring a cast of 13 in which no one is older than 18 and even the onstage band is composed of players who probably just began to shave and wear bras. Unlike most of the shows aimed at this demographic (Wicked, Legally Blonde, The Little Mermaid), 13 has its eye on the boys who feel they’ve outgrown The Lion King. In fact, Broadway seems to be going a bit boy crazy this season because both the upcoming shows Billy Elliot and Shrek are aiming for the same audience.

Thirteen tells the story of Evan Goldman, a New York kid whose mother moves him to Indiana after his parents divorce and just a few months before he’s due to celebrate his bar mitzvah. The plot centers around Evan’s efforts to fit in with the kids at his new school so that they’ll join the festivities marking his entry into manhood. The book is by Dan Elish (who’s written such kid-friendly novels as “Born Too Short: The Confessions of an Eighth-Grade Basket Case”) and TV writer Robert Horn. And the music and lyrics are by Jason Robert Brown, composer of the Tony Award-winning score for Parade and the critically acclaimed The Last Five Years.

The whole idea is so smart and appealing that I really wanted to like 13. But, alas, I didn’t. It’s not the fault of the kids in the cast, who are, for the most part, talented and comfortable onstage, particularly Graham Phillips, who played Evan at the performance my friend Priscilla and I attended (he’s scheduled to take Saturday nights off). Phillips has the kind of bright, easy, and yes seductive, charm that brings to mind a junior version of the “M*A*S*H”-era mensch Alan Alda.

Other standouts include the clarion-voiced Allie Trimm as Patrice, the nice-but-non-cool girl who lives next door to Evan; and Aaron Simon Gross as Archie, a kid who gets around on crutches and a strong sense of humor. And even the young band plays well, although some of the heavy lifting is done by conductor and keyboardist Tom Kitt, whose last spin on Broadway was as the composer of the short-lived High Fidelity.

But aside from Kitt and director Jeremy Sams, who does a good job with such as young cast, I blame the show’s shortcomings on the grown-ups involved in the production. While its tunes are poppy and its lyrics witty (click here to hear a sampling), 13 struck me as the kind of show that adults think kids will find cool rather than a show that kids actually do find cool.

And I was totally turned off by how it fed into stereotypes. Does Indiana really have to be, as one song calls it, “the lamest place in the world” to live? Does the school jock have to be the predictably dumbest kid in the school? Does the blonde girl have to be the one that all the boys want? Does everyone have to be so thoroughly grossed out when two boys accidentally kiss?

Yeah, I know. I’m no where near the demographic 13 is hoping to draw. And I admit the audience the night I attended, heavily sprinkled with kids, seemed to enjoy the show, which runs just over 90 minutes. Even I got a kick out of seeing each young cast member show off in the joyful finale. And Priscilla, whose youngest is 14, said she's going to go back with her daughter and thinks that kids will like it. So what do I know? I don't even own any Jonas Brothers records.

"Pamela's First Musical" is a Final Gift From--and Tribute to--Pamela's Aunt Wendy

By all accounts, there was no one more beloved in the theater world than Wendy Wasserstein, who died from cancer in 2006 when she was just 55. She won almost every honor a playwright can win—the Tony, New York Drama Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle awards and a Pulitzer Prize. But people also just liked Wendy. I refer to her so familiarly because everybody was on a first-name basis with Wendy, including the New York City school kids she introduced to the theater through the Opens Doors Program she founded in typically open-hearted Wendy fashion.

I never had the good fortune to meet her but I was fond of Wendy too. Her plays tracked the lives of women like me—self-consciously smart and ambitious and a little insecure about it all—from the optimistic college girls of her 1977 play Uncommon Women and Others to the more uncertain middle-aged professor in her final 2005 play, Third. And, as it turns out, we both have nieces—mine Jennifer, hers Pamela—with whom we started sharing our passion for the theater when they were just girls. In 1996, Wendy published “Pamela’s First Musical,” a children’s picture-book about introducing her niece to the theater. When I heard that Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS was staging a benefit production of the musical based on that book, I immediately bought a ticket.

“Pamela’s First Musical,” with drawings by the theatrical set designer Andrew Jackness, tells the story of a suburban girl whose eccentric Aunt Louise celebrates her niece's eighth birthday by treating her to a Saturday in Manhattan, complete with lunch at the Russian Tea Room (changed to Sardi’s on stage) and a Broadway matinee. The book is also filled with playful allusions to real-life Broadway celebrities—the musical’s writers are a duo called Betty and Cy Songheim; its producer Bernie S. Gerry (punny jokes for theater insiders and geeks).

It was lyricist David Zippel who suggested turning the book into a musical (click here to find the podcast of an interview he did on the history of the show) and he recruited his frequent collaborator Cy Coleman to do the score. But Coleman died in 2004 and Wendy passed 14 months later. A note in the Playbill for Pamela’s First Musical insists “Before Wendy and Cy died, the music, lyrics and book were done.” The finished product suggests otherwise. But it doesn’t matter. Watching Pamela’s First Musical, Wendy’s last gift to the theater, was truly a one-of-a-kind experience.

And everyone lucky enough to be there knew it was something special. When the house manager spotted a friend in the audience, the woman sitting next to me, he asked her to give him her Playbill. “We’re running out of programs,” he explained, handing the extra copy to the usher, who hid it under her jacket. On the way in, I had seen people taking extras from the stack by the door—either for the keepsake value or maybe for an anticipated eBay sale.

The show was performed in concert style with the 16-member orchestra sitting on stage in front of a starry backdrop and the actors carrying scripts—which they consulted often. The great Donna Murphy played Aunt Louise (ad libbing totally in character the few times she forgot a line) and Lila Coogan, one of the young actors in Mary Poppins, played Pamela. Gregg Edelman doubled as Pamela’s widowed father and the show-within-a-show’s leading man, Nathan Hines-Klines (more fun), while Carolee Carmello played both the dad’s new fiancée and the faux show’s leading lady, Mary Ethel Bernadette (still more).

Other celebrated Broadway troupers—including Sandy Duncan, Kathie Lee Gifford, Joel Grey, Donna McKechnie, Tommy Tune and Lillias White—had cameos as their own come-to-life portraits on the walls of Sardi’s (Christine Ebersole was listed in the Playbill but didn't appear). Musical writers Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens played the Songheims and New York Post theater columnist Michael Riedel got into the act in the silent role of the dread theater critic Simon Crankley. There was actually a very funny song for Crankley to sing but I don’t know if Riedel chose not to perform it or was asked not to but they finessed it so that the producer character sang it for him. At the curtain call the real-life, and now grown-up, Pamela Wasserstein came on stage to thank everyone for coming.

Walking to the subway after the show, I found myself a few paces ahead of the towering Tommy Tune and the diminutive Joel Gey, on their way to the Sardi’s party and looking like the quintessenial Mutt and Jeff. Several passersby stopped Grey, probably recognizing him as the Wizard in Wicked more so than for his true star turns as the emcee in the original production of Cabaret or as the cuckolded husband in the original cast of the long-playing revival of Chicago. Tune, passing largely unnoticed despite his distinctive height and equally glittery CV, slowed his long gait until Grey caught up with him. As they strolled, they talked shop. “I’m not as creative when I don’t have a schedule,” I overheard Tune confessing.

The whole thing was a treat for a theater lover like me but I would gladly have traded it to have Wendy still around and chronicling this phase of our lives.

"The Little Mermaid" Fails to Make A Splash

Disney was not a bad word when I was growing up. It meant "The Mickey Mouse Club," which I loved watching. It meant Disney World, which I longed to see. And it meant entering the magical worlds of feature-length cartoons like "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty." So, I'm not really quite sure how Disney became a four letter word on Broadway. Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and the restoration of the venerable New Amsterdam Theatre helped rescue Broadway and the Times Square area from the drug pushers, pimps and sex shops that dominated the neighborhood in the ‘70s. But sophisticated musical lovers complain that Disney's later shows—Aida, Tarzan, Mary Poppins—have been too bland and too mechanical. Broadway insiders gripe that the Disney corporation refuses to play by the rules, throwing its weight around in contract negotiations and its money around to buy up talent. And now, this week, nearly every major theater critic has joined in, harpooning Disney's latest show, The Little Mermaid. “Loved the shoes. Loathed the show,” wrote the New York Times’ Ben Brantley.

Alas, I have to swim with the tide on this last one. I don't think The Little Mermaid is as terrible as Brantley says but there certainly isn't anything magical about it. And it's magic you want from a fairy tale and from the imagineers of Disney. Raised expectations might be part of the problem. There have been few more magical moments on the stage than the opening of The Lion King. The Disney folks hired the experimental theater director Julie Taymor and she transformed that beloved cartoon into a wondrous theatrical experience that set a high bar for other Disney shows. For Mermaid, Disney hired the internationally acclaimed opera director Francesca Zambello, clearly hoping that she would create a similarly transformative production. I've never seen Zambello's work before but if The Little Mermaid is any indication, I don't get what the fuss is about.

The show still tells the story of the mermaid princess Ariel (the pleasant Sierra Boggess) who falls for a human prince (the equally pleasant Sean Palmer), and then defies her father (the very buff and therefore particularly pleasant-to-look-at Norm Lewis) and almost sacrifices her life for love. But the book by Doug Wright (yes, the same award winning creator of I Am My Own Wife and the book for Grey Gardens) pads the tale so much that what was once a brisk 83-minute movie is now a somewhat bloated 2 ½-hour show. All of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman's songs from the original cartoon are still there and they still delight but the new ones by Menken and Glenn Slater aren't up to the same level. Most of the imagination seems to have gone into creating an underwater world, which set designer George Tsypin and costume designer Tatiana Noginova do primarily with lots of plastic to simulate water and by having actors glide around on sneakers with wheels in their heels to affect the movement of swimming.

I went to the show with my niece Jennifer, who is now 28 but who, like me, grew up on Disney cartoons and still has the DVDs of every show that came out during the company’s second golden era of animation, which began with the release of “The Little Mermaid” in 1989. We tried to get into the mood of the evening by stopping for a quick bite before the show at Blue Fin, the seafood restaurant around the corner from the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre where The Little Mermaid is playing. But the service was spotty and the tab was ridiculously high for the salad and appetizers we ordered. Jennifer wasn't any more pleased with the show, perking up only for familiar songs like "Part of Your World," "Kiss the Girl" and, the always-buoyant "Under the Sea." "Well," she said at the end, damning the show with faint praise, "it was better than Tarzan."

The kids in the audience, and there were oodles of them at the performance we attended, seemed to enjoy the show more than we did. But they didn't display the excitement that I saw in the young theatergoers at Wicked or Legally Blonde. Maybe kids today are too jaded for the PG-attractions of a traditional Disney show. But maybe it’s just time for Disney to move on from adaptations of its old animated hits. The company seems to think so too. It is currently developing musicals based on "The Man in the Ceiling," Jules Feiffer's children's book about a boy who yearns to become a cartoonist; and "Peter and the Starcatchers," a prequel to Peter Pan by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. Maybe they can help restore Disney's good name.

The "Radio City Christmas Spectacular"

See two updates on the stagehands' strike at the end of this entry.

Most kids probably get their first exposure to the theater during the holiday season that runs from the week before Thanksgiving to the week after New Year's. Lots of parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts buy tickets for their little ones to see big Broadway shows like Wicked and The Lion King. But a large part of the seasonal merriment comes from the special limited-run shows that play multiple times a day, offer at least some tickets at family-friendly prices and disappear before all the Christmas tinsel is packed away.

Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, with ticket prices running $25 to $99, was scheduled to do up to seven performances a weekend at the St. James Theatre before the stagehand’s strike shut it down (although settlement talks are underway even as I type this*). A few blocks uptown in a big tent in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center, the Big Apple Circus is celebrating its 30th season with a new show called Celebrate! that, according to its press handout, features "a live, original musical score, a chic British ringmistress, and of course our own lovable Grandma the Clown" and seats starting at $28. This year the Cirque du Soleil folks got into the holiday spirit with Wintuk, a holiday-centered extravaganza at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden with ticket prices of $30 to $110. And then, of course, there's the granddaddy of holiday family shows, the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, where tickets cost $40 to $100 until the end of its run on Dec. 30. Road companies of the Christmas Spectacular are playing across the country this season in places like Fort Lauderdale and Phoenix but, call me provincial if you like, there’s nothing like seeing it in the glorious performance cathedral that Radio City Music Hall is.

I first saw the Christmas Spectacular there when I was about seven and I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. I loved the precision-dancing Rockettes and the pageantry of the show's version of the Nativity story with its parade of live animals, including camels and an elephant. I took my niece Jennifer when she was around the same age back in the mid '80s. But by then the show seemed a little run down and tacky. Jennifer, a veteran theatergoer by the time she was four, wasn't much impressed. And so it's been about 20 years since I've been back to see a Christmas Spectacular but my family is big on traditions and this year Jennifer and I took her four-year old god-brother Max to see it.

The show is celebrating its 75th anniversary and it's undergone a makeover to make it more attractive to kids who even at the earliest ages are more used to being entertained by Jay-Z music videos and CGI-animated cartoons (click here to see a behind-the scenes NYTimes video on the making of the new Spectacular). The result is a mix of the old and the new. The Rockettes, looking great, perform their traditional, and still amazing, "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" routine, which debuted in 1933, but they also do a few numbers that include some hip-hop moves. "The Living Nativity" is still there (albeit with fewer animals than I remember from the old days) but there's also a high-tech, 3-D animated tour of New York (3-D glasses are pasted in the program). They still do an excerpt from "The Nutcracker" with a lovely little girl ballerina but there's also a jazzy number with dancing Santa Clauses. And there's plenty of opportunity for audience participation (or interactive involvement, as we now call it) from carol sing-alongs to, at the finale, the spinning of small pen lights (they came with the programs too at the opening-night performance we attended).

The 90-minute show didn't live up to the memories of the ones I'd seen in my childhood. But I'm going to let four-year Max have the final the word here. "It was," he told his mother when he got home, "a great Christmas show."

[*An update on Nov 19: According to NY1, the local 24-hour news station with good sources in the Broadway community, How the Grinch Stole Christmas has a separate contract with the stagehands' union Local One and its producers, clearly unhappy to see the other kiddie shows thriving while theirs remained dark, made a separate arrangement with the strikers over the weekend so that its shows can go on starting Nov. 20.]

[A later update on Nov 19: the powers that be at the Jujamcyn Theaters are now threatening to lockout the Grinch producers, who, in turn, say they are going to court to fight for the right to put on their show. I got this info from by buddy Steve at Steve on Broadway.com, which has provided the most comprehensive and update coverage of the strike of any media outlet. So, click on to his blog if you want to know the latest on what has become Broadway's most riveting drama.]

"Grease" Isn't Slick Enough

There's a reoccurring dream that I have: I'm back in my old high school and no matter what I do or where I go, I can't get out. That's kind of how I've felt the last couple of weeks after seeing the totally sophomoric off-off Broadway show Idol: The Musical, both versions of the Disney Channel’s High School Musical and now the new revival of Grease that opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Sunday. Broadway seems obsessed with high school too. There are the socially conscious high schoolers in Hairspray, the sexually repressed ones in Spring Awakening, the overachieving bunch in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the slightly older sorority sisters of Legally Blonde and those witchy schoolmates in Wicked. Who says Broadway isn't trying to reach out to the youth market?

As anyone who has been to high school knows, popularity is the prime currency for success. And this production of Grease arrives with a built-in clique. Its stars were chosen by viewers who tuned into the NBC reality show, "You're the One That I Want" and phoned in votes for their favorites. "You're the One.." wasn't a big hit, as TV shows go, but it was big enough that the stage show now has a reported $15 million advance. Audience members at the performance my sister, niece and I attended reveled in being part of the in-crowed, mouthing the words to the songs and mobbing the souvenir shop, where T shirts went for $25 a pop—cash only, no credit cards.

The 21 year-olds who won the talent contest—Max Crumm and Laura Osnes—aren't bad. He has a goofy charm that doesn't really fit the character of the sexy greaser Danny Zuko but is nonetheless winning. She is appropriately sweet as goody girl Sandy Dumbrowski and nails her songs. But neither is ready to anchor a show and even though their castmates are more experienced (Kirsten Wyatt as Frenchy, the ditzy beauty-school dropout, and Jeb Brown as the lecherous radio DJ Vince Fontaine are particularly good) and nearly everyone on the creative team headed by director Kathleen Marshall has won, or at least been nominated for, a Tony Award, this Grease has an amateur feel about it. The best part for me was watching conductor Kimberly [not Karen as originally posted] Grigsby lead the onstage orchestra. Grigsby has a lithe swagger that even Rizzo, the show's bad girl, would envy and she danced and rocked her way through the entire evening. My husband K, the pit musician, has never played with Grigsby but some of our friends have and a few have been put off by what they call her show-off antics but she brought a sizzle to Grease that everyone else on stage lacked.

Truth is, I've always been so-so about Grease. But it was the object of my sister Joanne's first crush on Broadway. She saw the original production the fall she turned 16 and couldn't stop talking about it and or singing the songs in the weeks that followed. Good big sister that I was, I gave her the original cast album for Christmas, which she played and played and played. Her passion didn't fade with time; in fact, it revved up with the 1978 movie version starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. And though Joanne has seen scores of Broadway shows over the years, Grease, like all first loves, continues to hold a special place in her heart. She wasn't thrilled by what she saw at the Brooks Atkinson. But my niece—her daughter—Jennifer was. It won't surprise you to learn that Jennifer was a faithful viewer of "You’re the One That I Want". Of course, at 27, she's also one of the ones that Broadway wants. And so, although critics and traditionalists have decried it, this probably won't be the last time American TV viewers get to play casting director for a Broadway show.

Supporting the Troops with "Beyond Glory"

Souvenir shops have become almost as common as Playbills at Broadway and off-Broadway theaters. So much so that I actually know some people who have skipped the show that's playing and just run into the lobby to pick up a CD, a T-shirt, or a keychain. The Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre doesn't usually host that kind of goodie-bag show. And so as the audience filed out of the performance I attended of Beyond Glory, Stephen Lang's one-man tribute to men who have received the Medal of Honor, we found a young woman standing next to a pile of books simply stacked on the floor. "Buy the book on which the show is based," she called out. "Only $20 and signed by the author." Several men, some of them visibly wiping tears from their eyes, snapped up copies.

Broadway has begun playing the niche market game, targeting different shows to different audiences—Wicked and Legally Blonde for tween and teen girls, Spamalot for their big brothers, The Color Purple for black church ladies and Xanadu for camp-loving show queens—but there's been little aimed at the "Saving Private Ryan" set. In fact, there’s been little entertainment for them period. Even Clint Eastwood is making rueful war movies these days. After four years in Iraq, Americans are fed up with war. But even the most diehard opponents of the war in Iraq, determined not to repeat at least one mistake of the Vietnam War, bookend their harangues with statements of support for the troops. In that, Beyond Glory, which Lang adapted from the oral histories in journalist Larry Smith’s book of the same title, is a play of its time.

I hadn't planned to see it. I've never been a big fan of Lang's (he's always seemed to overpower his roles) and I'm tired of war talk too. But the reviews were so strong that curiosity got the best of me. And I'm glad it did. Director Robert Falls has crafted a production that is elegant in its simplicity. And Lang, in total control of how to best use his natural aggression, is superb. Aided only by assorted pieces of military uniforms that he pulls from an old trunk, he transforms himself into eight very different men, most of them ordinary joes, who showed extraordinary valor under extreme circumstances in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. His co-stars are the show's design team (including lighting designer Dan Covey, sound designer Cecil Averett, projection designer John Boesche, and original music composers Rober Kessler and Ethan Neuberg) each of whom has contributed work that is non-intrusive but powerfully effective.

There was none of the usual coughing and no restless moving in seats at the performance I attended. The only sound was grateful laughter during the 80-minute show's few humorous moments. The New York run, which ends on Aug. 19, is only the latest stop on a tour that has taken the show to American military bases around the world and the floor of the U.S. Congress. Lang has insisted in interviews that the show isn't making a political statement. But it is unabashedly patriotic. Only 3,463 medals have been given the nation's highest award for military service since Abraham Lincoln signed the law establishing the honor in 1861; just two have been granted to soldiers involved in the Iraq War. Beyond Glory honors all of those who are serving.