THE MORNING LINE DATE: Monday, February 8, 2016 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Claire Manning, Amanda Price PAGES: 26, including this page

February 6, 2016

Encores! Off-Center Sets Season, With Jeanine Tesori in Charge One Last Time

By Michael Paulson Jeanine Tesori, the Tony-winning composer of “Fun Home,” has decided that this summer is to be her last overseeing the Encores! Off-Center program at City Center. Ms. Tesori is the first artistic director of the program, which presents rarely revived Off Broadway musicals. The program is a companion to the better-known Encores! series, which offers semi-staged concert performances of rarely revived Broadway shows. For her fourth and final summer, Ms. Tesori will present two shows from the late 1970s, “Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” as well as the previously announced “Runaways.” “Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” from 1979, is about a hard-drinking millionaire with philanthropic impulses. The show was written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, who later collaborated on “Little Shop of Horrors.” The City Center production, from July 27 through July 30, will star Santino Fontana (“Cinderella”) and Skylar Astin (“Pitch Perfect”) and will be directed by Michael Mayer (“American Idiot”). “Runaways,” a 1978 show about troubled teenagers, is somewhat better known because it had a Broadway run; the show was written by Elizabeth Swados, who died last month. The City Center production, from July 6 through July 9, will be directed by Sam Pinkleton and will feature local students in the cast. The Encores! Off-Center summer will also include a July 16 concert featuring Sutton Foster, Jonathan Groff and others, accompanied by Ms. Tesori on piano. City Center will name a new artistic director for the Encores! Off-Center program, and Ms. Tesori will continue to produce events there on a freelance basis, according to a spokesman, Joe Guttridge.

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February 6, 2016

Review: ‘Broadway & the Bard’ Serves Delicious Combos By Charles Isherwood Shakespeare and Broadway have had a relationship quite a bit more intimate than a handshake over the years, but the two have perhaps never met with quite the coziness that they do in “Broadway & the Bard,” an odd but enjoyable solo show, starring the stage veteran Len Cariou, that juxtaposes monologues and sonnets with songs from musicals. Longtime musical-theatergoers know Mr. Cariou best from his appearances in “Applause,” “A Little Night Music” and of course “Sweeney Todd,” in which he created the title role. But as he notes at the top of this 80-minute show at the Lion Theater, six months before appearing in “Applause,” he made his Broadway debut in 1969 in the title role of “Henry V.” His Shakespearean bona fides also include many seasons at the Guthrie Theater and at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. (Mr. Cariou was born in Canada.) This bit of history explains one of the unlikelier transitions in the show, conceived by Mr. Cariou in collaboration with the director, Barry Kleinbort, and the music director, Mark Janas. Henry’s rousing speech at Harfleur (“Once more unto the breach”) is followed immediately by the title tune from “Applause.” There’s more sentiment than logic in this pairing, but most of the other segments are more cleanly aligned. Orsino’s opening soliloquy from “Twelfth Night” (“If music be the food of love, play on”) is followed by two diverse love songs, “Love, I Hear,” from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” and Rodgers and Hart’s “Falling in Love With Love.” The king’s celebrated speech from “Richard II” (you remember: “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground/And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings”) leads into a Broadway rarity, the wistful and lovely “If I Ruled the World,” from the musical “Pickwick.” Mr. Cariou’s singing voice has naturally lost some — well, frankly, much — of its power and agility since his heyday. It has acquired a distinct wobble and can grow thin at both ends of his range. But his phrasing is intelligent and eloquent, and for the most part he has chosen songs with rich lyrics that you don’t mind hearing half-sung. (We only hear a few snatches of music from “Sweeney Todd,” played by Mr. Janas at the piano, who provides sensitive accompaniment throughout — even a bit of Bach — and provides Mr. Cariou with a few introductory cues before some of his monologues.) Mr. Cariou’s delivery of his Shakespearean set pieces is exemplary, across a broad range of emotional territory. His Iago has a nice subtly seething quality; his Petruchio a swagger, humor and a smidgen of sensitivity; his Benedick a bruised braggadocio. The songs that follow the verse are sometimes chosen to illuminate the feeling in the words, sometimes to offer a kind of riposte.

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And so Benedick’s angry avowal of distaste for Beatrice is followed, amusingly if incongruously, by the Gershwin classics “Nice Work if You Can Get It” and “How Long Has This Been Going On?” More straightforward is the move from solemnity to joy that marks the combination of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”) with “Lucky to Be Me,” from “On the Town.” I confess to being a little confounded, on the other hand, by the combo platter of Mark Antony’s subversive eulogy for Julius Caesar with a grab bag of bits from “Something Wonderful,” “Sometimes a Day Goes By” (from Kander and Ebb’s “Woman of the Year”) and “There’s Always One You Can’t Forget” from “Dance a Little Closer.” Sentiment possibly plays a role here, too: Mr. Cariou notes that he sang the last of these briefly on Broadway, since the show opened and closed on the same night. In fact, a significant part of the appeal of “Broadway & the Bard” is hearing Mr. Cariou casually recount the history of his career. Who knew that while he was appearing in “A Little Night Music,” Mr. Cariou was simultaneously the associate artistic director of the Guthrie, then being led by Michael Langham? As he ruefully notes, his great hope of playing Macbeth, scheduled to take place after he finished a yearlong run in the musical, was dashed when Mr. Langham briskly informed him: “No Scottish play for you, dear boy. You’ll play Lear. It’s time you started to do those character parts.” Mr. Cariou was 35 at the time. Mr. Cariou makes for jovial company and draws the audience into a comfortable intimacy with little effort. He notes that several composers — from Cole Porter to Richard Adler to Jeanine Tesori and Mr. Sondheim — have set Shakespearean words to music. So while we do not get a taste of Mr. Cariou’s Sweeney Todd, he does sing Mr. Sondheim’s setting of the song “Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun,” which was written for his adaptation of Aristophanes’ “The Frogs.” This and a beautifully elegiac selection from “September Song” were among the performance’s musical highlights. Of course, a production devoted to making a kaleidoscopic collage of show tunes and Shakespeare would be scandalous if it did not include Porter’s “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” which Mr. Cariou performs with an aptly savory taste for frisky innuendo. It’s a delicious ending for an unusual evening that allows us to brush up not only on our Shakespeare, but also on the expansive range of Broadway musicals.

February 8, 2016

Review: ‘The Grand Parade’ Romps Through the 20th Century By Alexis Soloski MONTCLAIR, N.J. — Hey, it’s Kaiser Wilhelm and the influenza pandemic! Also, the Russian Revolution, the Charleston and Harry Houdini. This cavalcade of figures and emblems constitutes just a few minutes of Double Edge Theater’s “The Grand Parade (of the 20th Century),” a highly imagistic and somewhat cryptic sprint through 100 years of popular and political culture, offered by Peak Performances at Montclair State University here. Paintings by Marc Chagall, including the piece that gives the performance its title, are a stated influence, and so in the opening moments the stage of the Alexander Kasser Theater is littered with brides, roosters, fiddlers and several trapeze artists. With occasional changes of costumes and masks, members of the six-member cast, supported by five live musicians, race through the events of an eventful century. With less than a minute per year, there’s much incorporated, but also much eliminated. The logic of inclusion and exclusion can feel somewhat arbitrary. The suffragists are here, but not the Stonewall uprising. The Vietnam War, but not the Korean one. The AIDS crisis, but not the discovery of penicillin. The focus is largely white, male and Western, though the group clearly has a feeling for revolution and protest. What’s less apparent is what Double Edge Theater wants to achieve with this pageant of incident. The actors, who created the piece with the designer and director Stacy Klein, evidently have a deep and personal commitment to the action, but a particular take on the content is more difficult to discern. There seems to be some suggestion that culture oscillates between decadence and atrocity, between celebration and mourning, yet even this is less than obvious. The pile-on of uninflected reference and event can make the piece seem the theatrical equivalent of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” (David Bowie is included, by the way, while Billy Joel is not, which is probably for the best.) Still, the nearly wordless acting is of a high order and Ms. Klein ensures that each episode flows fluently into the next. There can be a sameness to the visual landscape — all those skirts and trapezes — but individual images are quietly astounding. The music, composed by Alexander Bakshi, undulates between crescendo and quiet in compelling fashion, a soundtrack to an epoch that already feels both immediate and far away.

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February 6, 2016

Review: In ‘Washer/Dryer,’ a Marriage Goes Through the Spin Cycle By Laura Collins-Hughes Sonya and Michael weren’t planning on a wedding when they got that Groupon deal for a trip to Las Vegas. But at the hotel, she asked for the honeymoon suite, and he took it as a hint. Now they’re back in New York, married, and he’s moving into her studio on the Upper East Side. Or is he? The main obstacle to wedded bliss in Nandita Shenoy’s “Washer/Dryer,” a would-be wacky comedy, is a little detail that Sonya (Ms. Shenoy) neglected to mention to Michael (Johnny Wu) before they said, “I do.” Her co-op apartment (the set is by Anshuman Bhatia) is single-occupancy, so he can’t legally live there, but she refuses to give it up because of the washer and dryer that came with the place. “That is the holy grail of New York City real estate,” she tells him. It would be easier to root for their happiness if they weren’t one of those couples with creepy nicknames for each other. She calls him Puppy. He calls her Kitten. Eew. Presented by Ma-Yi Theater Company at the Beckett Theater at Theater Row, “Washer/Dryer” is only partly in keeping with Ma-Yi’s mission of producing “new and innovative” work by Asian-American playwrights. New though it is, the play resembles nothing so much as a stale 1970s sitcom, but with Asian-Americans in the main roles. When the tyrannical co-op board president, Wendee (Annie McNamara), starts sniffing around, Sonya denies being married, saying Michael is her “best gay boyfriend.”Jack Tripper, anyone? This lie will, of course, sow much confusion when it reaches Michael’s imperious mother, Dr. Lee (Jade Wu). Sonya’s actual gay best friend — a stock character of more recent vintage — is Sam, her downstairs neighbor, played with terrific élan by Jamyl Dobson. Wry, skeptical and possessed of a dancer’s grace, Mr. Dobson brings hilarity to a play that badly needs it. In a small miracle, he also makes a fully human being out of a role written as a comic stereotype. The other actors fare less well. Directed by Benjamin Kamine, “Washer/Dryer” never really pops into three dimensions, not even when the smell of sizzling garlic wafts into the audience from a wok in Sonya’s kitchen. If not for that scent, we might as well be watching TV.

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February 7, 2016

13

February 7, 2016

4

February 8-21, 2016

80

February/March 2016

26

February 2016

45

February 2016

10