Life Upon the Sacred Stage

One Thousand Gifts

2012-01-30T12:07:00.003-05:00

Some excerpts from Ann Voskamp’s lovely book, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to LIVE FULLY Right Where You Are, which my dear friend Karen Murphy Jensen (Murph) gave me.

“So then as long as thanks is possible . . . I think this through. As long as thanks is possible, then joy is always possible. Joy is always possible. Whenever, meaning -- now, wherever, meaning -- here. The holy grail of joy is not in some exotic location or some emotional mountain peak experience. The joy wonder could be here! Here, in the messy, piercing ache of now, joy might be -- unbelievably -- possible! The only place we need see before we die is this place of seeing God, here and now.

“Eucharisteo -- thanksgiving -- always precedes the miracle.

“Thanks is what multiples the joy and makes any life large, and I hunger for it.”

Voskamp quotes Erasmus: “A nail driven out by another nail: habit is overcome by habit.” She realizes thankfulness in all things must be learned. “Nails driving out my habit of discontent and driving in my habit of eucharisteo. Because that habit of discontentment can only be driven out by hammering in one iron sharper. The sleek pin of gratitude.”

And learning requires practice. She quotes C.S. Lewis’s advice to a man looking for fullest life: “If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.”

“This is why I had never learned the language of ‘thanks in all things,’” she writes. Though pastors preached it, I still came home and griped on. I had never practiced. Practiced until it became the second nature, the first skin. Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation. Practice, practice, practice. Hammer, hammer, hammer.”

Daniel Radcliffe Started It

2012-01-27T13:54:00.002-05:00

BY SISTER CAROL PERRY, SU

I never cease to be amazed at the remarks people make about their expectations of religion. I wasn't reading a theology tome, just a throwaway insert that came with the Sunday paper. In adding to tidbits about the "stars", two new recipes for pasta and an interview with the chief character of a minor network sitcom, there was a longer profile about Daniel Radcliffe.

Of course, we all know him from Harry Potter. Many of us have been interested as he moved to the stage in an effort to be perceived as more than a boy wizard with a scarred forehead.

In my paper, he sounded fairly level-headed about what his future might be. It was his remarks on religion that set me to thinking once again about the bad press religion gets in our world.

Child of a Protestant father and a Jewish mother, he was raised in a household "with no faith", as he put it. Radcliffe said, "I have a problem with religion or that it says, 'We have all the answers'... Religion leaves no room for human complexity."

Since he can't defend himself, my challenging Radcliffe is one-sided. However, I do think his view is what many others perceive is the function of religion. And so they dismiss it.

Religion does not have all the answers, but it certainly has the questions! True religion challenges us to the core of our being, asking us to look not for easy outs or pat responses, but rather to take hold of those issues that matter most to us and to ask: what lies behind this question?

I have no real gripe with Daniel Radcliffe. He is young, talented, extremely rich and doesn't yet know where life is taking him. I am willing to wait 40 years to see the interview he might give then, if the same questions are posed.

Maybe all I am trying to say is that God is neither an answer man nor a Santa with a bag of goodies to distribute. If more people would seriously ask who is God, we might not be so willing to equate our churches with places where doubters are not welcome.

Meanwhile, we each need to ask ourselves: what do I expect of religion?

This blog posting appears on the web site of Marble Collegiate Church, where Sr. Carol Perry has been the Resident Bible Scholar for more than three decades.

The Road to Mecca

2012-01-26T10:16:00.007-05:00

Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, Sunday in the Park with George, portrays the artist’s overpowering need for self-expression. I was reminded of his song from that show “Children and Art” when I saw the Broadway premiere of Althol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca, which if it were a musical could rename the song “Aging and Art” to sum up its story of a South African woman in a remote village who loses her traditional faith but finds her artistic voice -- and her freedom -- in her declining years.

Gordon Edelstein directs this 1985 work, which is brilliantly acted by Rosemary Harris as Miss Helen, the 70-year-old reclusive sculptor, Carla Gugino (photo, center) as Elsa Barlow, her 31-year-old school teacher friend, Jim Dale as Pastor Marius Byleveld, the elderly country minister who seeks to control Helen’s future. The Roundabout Theatre Company’s production is at the American Air Lines Theatre through March 4.

Set in 1974 in the dusty, remote Karoo of South Africa, the play opens with Elsa’s arrival at Miss Helen’s eclectic cottage, a visual delight with its walls all of different colors and covered in glitter and mirrors that magically reflect the multitude of candles Elsa lights at the end. (Congrats to set designer Michael Yeargan and lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski.) Elsa has driven 12 hours straight from her home in Cape Town, concerned over a recent letter from her friend in which Helen expressed suicidal despair.

As it turns out, she will not be the only one checking in on Helen that day. Marius has been pressuring Helen to give up her home and her “hobby,” as he calls her artwork, to move into a church-run senior citizen residence, the Sunshine Home for the Aged. In the 15 years Helen has been a widow, she has not attended church, although she had sat by her husband’s side in worship for years. This distresses Marius, but a religious vision on the night of her husband’s funeral led Helen to her more personal spiritual path.

Helen’s Mecca, which she calls “the only reason I’ve got for being alive,” is in sharp contrast to the conservative values of the church and the community. It consists of large cement and wire figures of camels, pyramids, owls with old motorcar headlights for eyes, and dozens of Wise Men, all pointed East. These creations disgust the villagers, who regard Helen as a mad woman, and frighten their children, but Helen interacts with none of them, content with her own world, which to her is more alive than the human one that surrounds her cottage. (We never see these figures, which we’re told occupy most of Helen’s property.)

“This is the best of me, Elsa,” she says. “This is what I really am. Forget everything else. Nothing, not even my name or my face, is me as much as those Wise Men and their camels traveling to the East, or the light and glitter in this room.”

And so Elsa confronts Marius with the reason she thinks he has for insisting Helen abandon her home and vocation -- because she had never resigned herself “to being the meek, churchgoing little widow you all expected her to be. Instead she did something which small minds and small souls can never forgive . . . she dared to be different! Which does make you right about one thing, Dominee. Those statues out there are monsters. And they are that for the simple reason that they express Helen’s freedom. Yes, I never thought it was a word you would like. I’m sure it ranks as a cardinal sin in these parts. A free woman! God forgive us!”

What repels Marius and the church and village folk is what attracts Elsa.

“She challenges me, Dominee,” she says. “She challenges me into an awareness of myself and my life, of my responsibilities to both that I never had until I met her.”

She felt this the moment she accidentally first encountered Helen’s Mecca.

“One dusty afternoon five years ago, when I came walking down that road hoping for nothing more than to get away from the flies that were driving me mad, I met the first truly free spirit I have ever known.”

But Marius is unconvinced, and believes the sculptures, which he at first thought were just a harmless result of Helen’s loneliness, had become a form of idolatry that replaced her faith.

“I only began to feel uneasy about it all that first Sunday you weren’t in church,” he says. “The moment I stood up there in front of the congregation, I knew your place was empty. But even then, you see, I thought you were sick. After the service I hurried around here, but instead of being in bed there you were outside in the yard making yet another . . . (At a loss for words) I don’t really know what to call them.”

Helen, who has appeared to shrink between the opposing forces of Marius and Elsa, finds her voice, telling Marius that missing church that first Sunday wasn’t something she did lightly.

“You don’t break the habit of a lifetime without realizing that your life will never be the same again. I was already dressed and ready! I had my Bible and hymnbook, I was on the point of leaving this room as I had done every Sunday for as long as I could remember . . . but I knew that if I did, I would never make that owl. . . I think I also knew that if I didn’t, that if I put aside my Bible and hymnbook, took off my hat and changed my dress and went to work . . . Yes! That was my very first owl!”

She tells Marius she had lost her faith long before, and going “obediently” to church with her husband was a lie.

“Do you know what the word ‘God’ looks like when you’ve lost your faith,” she asks. “It looks like a little stone, a cold, round, little stone. ‘Heaven’ is another one, but it’s got an awkward, useless shape, while ‘Hell’ is flat and smooth. All of them -- damnation, grace, salvation -- a handful of stones.”

As we learn, though, Marius is concerned with more than just Helen’s soul. A number of incidents have occurred that make it questionable whether Helen really should be living alone. What is undetermined is who must make the decision for her future -- Marius, Elsa or Helen herself.

I’m surprised The Road to Mecca is only now making it to Broadway. I saw the Off-Broadway premiere in 1988, with Fugard in the role of Marius (he also directed) and the antiapartheid actress Yvonne Bryceland, who was his muse for 23 year, as Miss Helen. Amy Irving played Elsa. I was moved by that production and was once again by the current one. (Bryceland and Fugard reprised their performances for the film of version in 1991, just a few months before her death.)

Fugard turns 80 this year and is currently resident playwright of Off-Broadway's Signature Theatre Company’s 2012 season. Most of his plays deal with the evils of apartheid in his native South Africa, although that theme is only touched upon in Mecca.

His character of Helen is based on the career of Helen Elizabeth Martins, who lived in the village where Fugard bought a home in 1974. The town folks told him about her sculptures and said she was crazy.

“I obviously couldn’t resist the temptation of strolling in the direction of her house and seeing Miss Helen’s ‘Mecca’ for the first time,” he said in an interview with Theater magazine. “She was still alive at that point but had become virtually a total recluse. So, apart from seeing her in the distance once or twice, and nodding at her when she was among her statues and I happened to be walking past, I never got to know her personally.”

Two years after he moved to the village she committed suicide by drinking lye. Although he had been intrigued by her, he hadn’t felt called to model a character after her until Bryceland pointed out that he had written many marvelous roles for women, but that he had never put two of them together.

“And I suddenly registered for the first time that although I had created an interesting gallery of women’s portraits over the years, I’d never put two women together on a stage as the focus of the whole event.”

While he was considering this, he learned that Miss Helen had developed one close friendship in the last years of her life, with a young woman who was a social worker in Cape Town. That crystalized it for him, although he would take liberties in telling the story; he did not want to create a documentary.

“Because of my respect for Miss Helen the young woman gave me, as a gesture, a little memento of the occasion when we met -- a photograph of herself and Miss Helen,” he said in the magazine interview. “I took one look at the photograph -- it’s a brilliant, beautiful photograph -- and there was the play.”

Raising Money for Theater: How, Whom and When to Ask

2012-01-19T14:31:00.004-05:00

Theater Resources Unlimited (TRU) announces the TRU Producer Boot Camp, an all-day intensive workshop focusing on many crucial aspects of raising money for theater, Sunday, Jan. 29 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at The Players Theatre, 115 MacDougal St. The cost is $175 with a $25 discount for TRU members or individuals who register before Jan. 21. For an application and payment details, please visit http://www.truonline.org/BootCampMoney12.htm.

Faculty this year will include legendary producer Ben Sprecher (Rebecca, Sly Fox, Three Tall Women, Fortune's Fool, Lisbon Traviata, The Shape of Things, Moon for the Misbegotten revival), Cheryl Wiesenfeld (Porgy & Bess, Play Dead, A Steady Rain, Legally Blonde, Elaine Stritch: At Liberty), Patrick Blake (The Exonerated, Play Dead), Van Dean and Kenny Howard co-founders of the producing company the Broadway Consortium (Ch'ing*lish, Bonnie & Clyde, Porgy & Bess, upcoming Evita); plus attorneys LisaRoxanne Walters and Erach Screwvala, international fundraising consultant Laura Fredricks; financial advisor Bailie Slevin; and accountant Dave Spaulding.

SCHEDULE (subject to change)

Sunday, Jan. 29

10 to 10:45 - "Commercial and Not-for-Profit Asks: Defining the Differences" - with attorney LisaRoxanne Walters. We will define terms, then focus on the not-for-profit side: the legal paperwork and structure that is necessary in order to ask for donations, and the responsibilities to your donors, plus the ways in which not-for-profits and commercial companies can work together.

10:45 to 11:30 - "Commercial Financing: Formalizing Your Ask" - with entertainment attorney Erach Screwvala. The required paperwork and structures at every level of development, from front money agreements to private placement to Federal filings. And the limitations placed on asking. NOTE: TRU Accountant Dave Spaulding of Janover LLC will be on hand to discuss and explain any tax or accounting issues that come up during the two legal presentations.

11:45 to 12:30 p.m. - "How To Present Yourself to Investors"- with financial adviser Bailie Slevin. We will take a look at a basic money raising pitch both from your side and the investor's side, learning how to speak the same financial language, exploring how to best communicate your proposal to your target audience.

12:30 to 1:15 - "How to Make Your Best Pitch: Asking Anyone for Any Amount for Any Purpose" - with international fundraising consultant Laura Fredricks. GETTING the money is what it is all about but HOW you go about the process makes all the difference. It takes simplicity, focus, structure, organization, and follow through to make it happen. This section will concentrate on "winning language" and "successful steps" to get the support for your creative projects.

2:00 - 3 - "The Care and Feeding of Investors: Identifying, Cultivating, Maintaining Them" - producer Ben Sprecher

3:00 -3:30 - "Crowdsourcing and Social Media Tools"

3:45-4:30 - "Building Your Portfolio," with producers Van Dean and Kenny Howard of The Broadway Consortium. Presentation includes an interesting new investment model for theater.

4:30-5:30 - "How to Bring Partners to the Table" with producer teams Cheryl Wiesenfeld and Patrick Blake; Van Dean and Kenny Howard; others tba.

5:30-7 p.m. - RECEPTION
Curriculum is subject to change.

ITRU partners with Weist-Barron Studios to offer quarterly Resource Nights and "Speed Dating" as well as free monthly actor workshops. The next Resource Night is Friday Jan. 27. Actors may inquire about this and other actor programs by contacting Jaye Maynard at Jaye@JayeMaynard.com

For more information about TRU membership and programs, visit www.truonline.org or call 212-714-7628.

2012-01-16T12:20:00.002-05:00

MIRAGE - The 30th Stage Anniversary Show

2012-01-13T13:42:00.004-05:00

In his jubilee year, 2012, the mime actor Carlos Mart�nez looks back over 30 intense years on the stage. His premiere performance as a mime took place in 1982 in a youth club in Barcelona; and his repertoire consisted at that time of six mime pieces.

Today, that young theatre buff has become a master of his profession, someone with whom not only advanced mime students and actors study, but who business managers, teachers and theologians consult in order to understand more fully body language and nonverbal communication. From his initial programme of six mime pieces, Carlos Mart�nez has gone on to produce six full-length shows, has performed in over thirty countries in countless theatres, public halls and even convention centres with several thousand participants. His timeless art that relies entirely on the imagination of the viewer, enchants young and old. His humanity and his humour inspire and reach across all levels of society. Some pieces like "The Bus Stop" or "Creation" have become classics.

Carlos Mart�nez is the laureate of the 2002 prize awarded by the German foundation 'Bibel und Kultur? and his shows have been the 'audience choice? in two theatre festivals in Portugal: Almada in 2004 with 'Hand Made? and TeatroAgosto in 2009 with his programme 'Books without Words?.

Throughout all these years Carlos Mart�nez has remained faithful to his own mime identity: the austerity of black clothing, white gloves and white makeup that turns the actor's face into a neutral canvas on which he can project a range of emotions. He loves the woodcut style, this minimalistic form of expression that does not use any props. His measured movements, simple gestures and facial expression allow him to portray characters rich in nuance; all the while revelling in our human inconsistencies and contradictions. Whereas in the past it took a mere 15 minutes for the mime to apply his makeup, nowadays he takes a full hour to complete the process. However it takes just a few seconds to get rid of it at the end of each programme, in front of his audience, in order to say a few words to them.

The process of applying his makeup is both ritual and mental preparation for the stage. The intimacy of the dressing room, where the mime sits alone in front of the mirror, inspired his book 'From the Dressing Room?, which was initially published in 2009 in German ('Ungeschminkte Weisheiten?), and since, in 2011, in English and Spanish ('Desde el camerino?). Asked about getting older the actor says: 'The art does not get older, however, the artist does. What is interesting is that, the older the actor becomes, the closer he grows to his art. And that in return keeps him young.?

For his 30th stage anniversary Carlos Mart�nez has worked on a new show, 'Mirage?, which he performs in combination with all time audience favourites. Inspired by the discussion around climate change and water shortage, which has always been an issue in his home country of Spain, the programme refers to our most precious and most natural resource: water. And as in previous programs, in 'Mirage? the actor leaves both the interpretation of the images he paints in the spectators' minds and the conclusions they reach, up to the imagination of each person.

As the show begins we see how a man loses his way in the desert. His canteen is almost empty. His cell phone battery is running low and anyway there's no coverage. As his growing thirst and tedium lead to delirium, he begins to see illusive images of water: one mirage after another. The water he has taken for granted, appears to him in the desert as the miracle of turning on the tap, the sound of waves at a beach, a well, a public toilet ... Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. How will he survive?

Without props, wardrobe changes or voice, alone on an empty stage with his white-masked face, the mime faces a desert of his own. With only movements to evoke stories in the imagination of an audience, all mime is mirage, creating life from gesture, life which arises from the pure physicality of dramatic (and comic) events.

Carlos Martinez offers us yet another chance to discover the reflection of our humanity in Mirage!

Mirage opens in Switzerland at the Kulturhalle Gl�rnisch, W�denswil on 14th January 2012 and in Germany at the Kabarett der Galgenstricke, Esslingen on 2nd February 2012.

Carlos Mart�nez is offering his audience this very personal contribution to the many actions taking place during the Water for Life Decade (http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/).

The show website: http://www.carlosmartinez.es/#/en/shows/mirage/

Born in Asturias, Spain, Carlos Mart�nez moved to Barcelona and put his passion to work by training at the dramatic arts schools, Taller de Mimo y Teatro Contemporaneo and El Timbal. The positive feedback from his first solo performances, in 1982, confirmed his decision to live from the theatre. And because he is not dependent on any translation, he has found an open stage throughout Europe and around the world.

His show Hand Made was the audience choice at the XXI Almada Theatre Festival in Portugal. Programs such as Human Rights have toured extensively including a month-long tour of Switzerland under the sponsorship of Amnesty International. In 2006, Carlos Mart�nez performed at the AI awards ceremony in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. With Time To Celebrate he celebrated in 2007 his 25th stage anniversary as a mime actor in many European countries.

He teaches master classes for universities and acting schools, such as the Scuola Dimitri (Switzerland), and is a speaker at corporate seminars on the topics of non-verbal communication and body language. Carlos Mart�nez is constantly moving the boundaries of silence in an imaginative world that combines his Mediterranean spirit and humour with precise technique and rhythm.

Winter's chill/God's love

2012-01-07T11:16:00.000-05:00

"The part of this earthen plane in which I live is wrapped in winter as this new day dawns for me. The winter earth leans away from the sun, and I miss its light and warmth. How easily I also lean away from you, Beloved God, and your warmth. How readily I lean toward other things and so find the cold touch of winter upon my words and deeds. How often I forget you, who formed my being and who shaped the cosmos, sending spinning suns by the billions into the winter wasteland of empty space.”
-- from Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim

Carrie Newcomer: Everything Is Everywhere

2012-01-03T15:55:00.005-05:00

By Mary Sheeran

I admit that the title of Carrie Newcomer's CD made me wince. It sounded like something my mother would rant when she came into my bedroom, and on another level, yet another pretentious spiritual statement from some performer. The liner notes brought on more winces: “This album has been a very beautiful journey of music, love and spirituality.” What does that mean? (Everything is everywhere, apparently.) Music is always spiritual, involving breath, body and some mysterious transformable force. It is both mystical and mathematical, of the earth and of the air. So what’s so different about this venture? (I admit to being suspicious of specific music being proclaimed as “spiritual.”)

At first glance, then, the presentation of this CD seems just like so many others purporting to be special. And that’s a shame because there is a lot to admire in this CD once you get past the liner notes and move into the music.

Newcomer shares music with Indian artists Amjad Ali Khan, Amaan Ali Khan, and Ayaan Ali Khan, with whom she collaborated when, in 2009, she went to India, invited by the American Embassy School of New Delhi to perform and work with students to create works of art based on the concepts of peace and justice.

I’ve listened to not a few such “I’ve gone to India” albums; but Newcomer seems to have done more than just the raga scat here. She invited the extraordinary Khans, stellar musicians both together and separately, to join her as vocalists and instrumentalists. Amjad Ali Khan is a sixth generation master of the stringed instrument known as the sarod; his colleagues Amaan Ali Khan and Ayaan Ali Khan are seventh generation sarod players, both with solo careers.

The blend of her easy singing and the interpolations by the Khans point to a common origin of the two forms, folk music and Indian classical, a discovery that may well be the essential point of such a collaboration; although it sounds so easy, such work takes considerable effort. Indeed, the album required time on two continents, in India and Indiana.

The first two selections, “Breathe In, Breathe Out” and “Everything Is Everywhere” are dominated by Newcomer’s folk style, her collaborators being more subtle. With “We Were Sleeping,” we enter new territory. The Khans slip into the music with their haunting vocal backgrounds, the sarod mixing with Newcomer’s twangy guitar. Their presence weaves in and out of Newcomer’s simple texts, adding richness and surprise. It’s just what you want it to be, friends talking to each other in music.

Newcomer’s voice is clear and cool, a combination of Grace Kelly and Karen Carpenter, with pretty much one single vocal color. Her voice is the least interesting part of the CD. Not that it’s unpleasant, but it’s just too … nice. Her accompanying acoustic guitar or dulcimer is sensitive to word and music; her real gift lies in composing and in words, and in jazzing up rhythms that welcome east and west. Her words seem simple, but they go beyond the usual folk idioms. For instance, in “Dreaming”: “…In moments clean and clear, the echo bounces back with a lonesome sound down an endless track. We are born to time and light, clay and stone, a fleeting glance, skin and bone. And the world is wrapped in wind, and the fields are filled with dust that collects in rising rings of perfect loneliness.”

She’s not afraid to sit back and be simple, as in “I Believe”: “I believe that there are some debts that we can never repay and I believe there are words we can never unsay…I believe in socks and gloves made out of soft gray wool and…I know I get some things right but mostly I’m a fool…”I believe in jars of jelly put up by careful hands…” Jars of jelly? But that’s beautiful, and Newcomer understands all about caring hands from the sound of it.

The album’s final offering, “Fountain of Love” is the listener’s real reward. The Khans step forward, Newcomer steps back, and they make the most of the blend in a gentle, rhythmic journey, a raga that seems to emerge full blown from the previous offerings.

All profits from this CD will go to the Interfaith Hunger Initiative, an all volunteer, not-for-profit organization bringing together two dozen faith communities in the Indianapolis area who work together to end child and family hunger. The initiative works to create a system of access to food through pantries in central Indiana and schools in foreign countries, feeding and supporting thousands of children and families. Visit the IHI Web site at www.interfaithhungerinitiative.org.

Carrie Newcomer. Everything is Beautiful. Carrie Newcomer: vocals, acoustic guitars, mountain dulcimer. Featuring Amjad Ali Khan, Amaan Ali Khan, and Ayaan Ali Khan: sarod and vocals. Jim Brock: drums and percussion. Steve Mascari: electric and upright bass. Gary Walters: piano, Wurlitzer piano, field organ. Malcolm Dalglish: hammered dulcimer and vocals. Chris Wagoner: violin and viola. Mary Gaines: cello. Krista Detor: vocal harmony. Kat Domingo: vocal harmony. Produced by Carrie Newcomer and David Weber.

The official Carrie Newcomer web site: www.carrienewcomer.com; the official web site for the Khan family is www.sarod.com.

Writer/singer Mary Sheeran’s novel, Quest of the Sleeping Princess, unfolds during a gala performance of the New York City Ballet and explores George Balanchine’s relationship with music and making dances. Her novel, Who Have the Power, explores cultural conflict, feminism, and Native American history on the American frontier. She has sung through several operas, oratorios, musicals, recitals, and cabaret shows. Her CD, “Through the Years,” is available from CD Baby.

Three Mo' Tenors in Moscow

2012-01-02T11:30:00.001-05:00

Three Mo' Tenors poster in front of the Moscow International House of Music

Blessings for the New Year

2012-01-02T11:20:00.002-05:00

I received this New Year's greeting from Dudley Stone, Triangle Theatre Company's artistic director, and want to share it with you:

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, "give me a hand that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he said "go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God, that will be to you better than light and safer than a known way."

Quoted by King George VI in his Christmas radio address to the nation after the outbreak of war with Germany in 1939.

2012-01-02T11:14:00.001-05:00

"The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul."
-- GK Chesterton

2011-12-22T16:31:00.005-05:00

"The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us, to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ; and in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love to swing the whole world back into the beat of the Music of Eternal Life."
-- Sisters of Baltimore Carmel

Innermost

2011-12-21T11:53:00.000-05:00

On the eve of hope, come, let us be
silent as joy, certain as change,
here before this Christmas tree.

Tassels of wind hang secretly
among berries and fruit and winter sun
that warmed the boughs of this tree.

Ghosts of butterflies delicately
shadow a branch, melt like snow
in the intimate dark of this tree.

A nest where robins were epiphany
clings to the flesh of the trunk
of this music and moon-gilded tree.

With carols and quiet let us be
reawakened to faith, purified,
giving us branches of this tree.

Circled about love’s mystery,
O for a moment fulfilled in light,
we are one in a word, a tree.

--Sr. Maura Eichner, S.S.N.D.

2011-12-20T13:42:00.002-05:00

A Christmas Poem

2011-12-20T13:33:00.000-05:00

LOVE
travels
far
to be
HOME

Carols
e-cho

“Come,
O Come.”

GOD
is
where
He
chose
to be

Living
in
You.

Living
in Me.

-- Sr. Maura Eichner, S.S.N.D.

ALEC BALDWIN ANNOUNCES FELLOWSHIP AT THE SINGERS FORUM

2011-12-18T15:41:00.001-05:00

Alec Baldwin and Singers Forum are pleased to announce their partnership in the Alec Baldwin Fellowship at the Singers Forum, a program that will support playwrights in the development and advancement of original theatrical works. Singers Forum, 49 W. 24th St,, 4th Floor, is a non-profit organization committed to providing the highest quality vocal training in New York City. Baldwin is a New York-based actor who has received two Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and six Screen Actors Guild Awards for his work on “30 Rock.”

“In this age of digitized movie making, it is our duty to find a way to nurture the next generation of great theatrical storytellers, Baldwin says. “I'm excited to lend my support and guidance to the Fellowship at the Singers Forum as it seeks to stimulate the community through unique voices and groundbreaking ideas.”

Singers Forum's mission has always been to create opportunities for artists of every level, artistic director Don Rebic said.

“The Alec Baldwin Fellowship at the Singers Forum will create the opportunity for promising new theatrical projects to get personalized attention, while giving performers the invaluable opportunity to help in the development of an exciting new work,” he said. “It's the perfect marriage of writer and performer and we're thrilled to have Mr. Baldwin's support!"

At a time when the commercial viability of theater has superseded its artistic merit, The Alec Baldwin Fellowship at the Singers Forum will be a year program devoted to the development and advancement of groundbreaking and original theatrical works. With the assistance of Baldwin, Singers Forum will provide professional mentorship, fine-pointed dramaturgy, and a rigorous, individualized workshop process for each chosen project. Culminating in the Fellowship Festival, where each piece is presented in a highly staged backer's auditions, with the goal to create four pieces ready for production by the Summer of 2013.

Important Dates for the Alec Baldwin Fellowship:
Early Applications Due -- Feb. 1
Final Applications Due -- Feb. 29
Finalists Announced -- April 25
Fellows Announced -- May 23
Orientation -- June 6
Fellowship Festival -- June, 2013

About the Singers Forum:

Located in the historic Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan, Singers Forum, which was founded in 1978, is a non-profit musical oasis committed to providing the highest quality vocal training for New York City residents. Our continuing mission is to engage a diverse student body of singers in an situation dedicated to the development and appreciation of the vocal arts. With a strong emphasis on vocal technique, combined with numerous performance opportunities in a safe and supportive environment, Singers Forum strives to offer a full array of private instruction and group classes for both professional and personal growth. Utilizing a roster of dynamic and successful teaching artists who each have their own professional singing and musical backgrounds and successful careers in the arts, we have developed our students? performance skills in a wide variety of vocal styles and genres that range from opera to cabaret, musical theatre to jazz, folk to pop and all genres in between! www.SingersForum.org

James X

2011-12-15T11:28:00.006-05:00

I wrote this feature for the Dec. 23, 2011 issue of National Catholic Reporter

The middle-aged man entering the waiting room with a bulging manila folder looks anxious. In his sage-colored pants and jacket, white shirt with no tie, he appears as bland as the room, which is empty but for a straight chair and a sign with an arrow pointing to the left. It is the words on that sign, though, that indicate any trace of blandness is only superficial. White letters on a blue background foreshadow the fire beneath the surface: Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.

“I have to go into that courtroom soon, into my past,” the man known as James X says as he waits to be a witness before an Irish government tribunal’s inquiry into institutional child abuse. “Tell them what happened back then when I was 11, but I just want to run and run and run.”

In his one-man play, “James X,” Gerard Mannix Flynn reveals one harrowing incident after another of physical and sexual abuse in Ireland’s Catholic and State institutions. A popular and critical success when it premiered in Dublin in 2009, it is playing at Manhattan’s 45 Bleecker Street at least through Dec. 18. Given the subject and its high-profile backers, I can easily see it traveling to other American cities, Boston and Philadelphia to name two.

In the play’s foreword Flynn, who first introduced the character of James in his 1983 novel, Nothing to Say, holds agents of the Church and State accountable -- “a Church that profited from the forced manual labor of 150,000 children, and a State that supplied then with these child workers,” he writes. “This is not James’s story, it is the story of all the children that went through to rooms of hell and horror in institutions run by the congregations of religious Brothers and Nuns, under the license of the State. It is the story of those who suffered in these cruel places and those who were witness to that suffering. We all had a childhood. Let this be our common bond when we read “James X” or Nothing to Say.”

Flynn’s journey through the system began when he was 11 and sent to St. Joseph’s Industrial School in Lettefrack in the 1960s. James X’s travails begin similarly and lead to stints in reform school, prison, a mental institution and 20 years of alcoholism. He was beaten and molested by priests, nuns and most especially Christian Brothers.

Produced in New York by Irish-born actors Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne and Off-Broadway’s Culture Project, and directed by Byrne, “James X” is an intermissionless 80-minute journey into hell, a hell endured by countless Irish children, one of whom was Flynn, who spent 15 years writing this play.

While waiting to give testimony before Ireland’s High Court, James reads aloud the file, which he has just received, the case history that was compiled on him over the years by doctors, psychiatrists, welfare officers and others, reports filled with lies, inaccuracies and indifference, reports that sentenced him to a life of horrendous abuse. Realizing the irony of trying to expect justice from this same prejudicial system, James looks back over his life to find the truth, which Flynn tells and often acts, usually at manic pace, often with dark humor and occasionally in rhyme.

Born in Dublin in 1957, Flynn is a man of about 5’ 7” with balding gray hair who looks a decade older than his 54 years. After too many years of silence, his passion to uncork the memories of cruelty and inhumanity he and others suffered explode in a nonstop monologue that leaves him frequently mopping perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. Nothing stands between him and his character.

His 1983 novel, Nothing to Say, was the story of James O’Neill, later to be James X in the play, a child sent away by the courts to an industrial school in the West of Ireland. “Even at that time, these industrial schools and reform schools were places that sent a shudder of fear through Irish society,” he writes in the foreword to “James X.” “They were situated in the heart of Irish towns and villages and many people must have known what went on there, yet nobody openly talked about it. Nobody really talked about sex, never mind child sex abuse, and to level the accusation of abuse at the State and the Church and their religious congregations was an outrage.

“Twenty years on, Irish society is on the verge of moral bankruptcy. The Catholic Church and its congregation is breaking up upon is own rock, by its own hands and deeds, by its own lack of honesty. It is nothing more than floating debris and all that keeps it from sinking down into the darkness is the tissue of lies and the frightened faithful who cling to these lies. The issues brought up by Nothing to Say are still unfinished business, unhealed wounds.”

The play’s premiere in New York is timely. The Irish Times Times reported Dec. 8 that Dublin’s former archbishop, John Charles McQuaid, who was one of Ireland’s most powerful prelates before his death in 1973, was accused of serial child sexual abuse in a state-sponsored investigative report.

The performance is accompanied by “Impact,” an exhibit of Flynn’s work related to child abuse in Ireland’s institutions that takes viewers through James X's journey from age 6 to the present. ”James X” and this exhibit are part of Imagine Ireland, Culture Ireland's yearlong initiative of Irish art in the United States.

My request for interviews with Flynn and Byrne was denied. Flynn, who besides being a playwright, actor and visual artist is also a former independent councilor for the South East Inner City area in Dublin, did speak with the Irish Examiner in 2010 to discuss the motivation behind his play and exhibition.

“The Irish are a triumphant people,” he said, “who have overcome dreadful events throughout our history and now we need to take ultimate and complete responsibility for what happened, move forward and let the trauma resolve itself.”

Yale Institute for Music Theatre accepting applications for development workshop

2011-12-14T11:29:00.002-05:00

The Yale Institue for Music Theatre (Mark Brokaw, artistic director) will select up to three original music theatre works to be developed in an intensive lab setting in New Haven June 4-17. Submissions will be accepted Dec. 15 through Feb. 1.

Established in 2009, YIMT is a program of the Yale School of Drama (James Bundy, Dean) that endeavors to bridge the gap between training and the professional world for emerging composers, playwrights, lyricists, and librettists. YIMT seeks distinctive and original music theatre works by emerging composers and writers to be developed in an intensive lab setting. During a two-week summer residency in New Haven, the Institute matches the authors of the selected works with collaborators, including professional directors and music directors, as well as a company of actors and singers that includes professionals from NYC and current Yale students. The residency culminates with open rehearsal readings of each project, presented as part of the 2012 International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

ELIGIBILITY

The Yale Institute for Music Theatre accepts applications for projects at various stages of development but focuses on work that is ready to be explored musically and dramatically with performers and directors. Submissions cannot have had a professional production.

Book musicals and other imaginative music theatre projects are welcome. Only composers, playwrights, lyricists, or librettists who are current graduate students; or who have graduated from an accredited degree granting institution (undergraduate or graduate) within the past five years; or who are current Yale students (undergraduate or graduate) are eligible to apply.

Applicants may only submit one work for consideration. Composers and writers may apply as individuals or as part of a team.

Participants must be available for the full duration of the residency. Each member of the writing team will receive an honorarium of $1,000, as well as round-trip transportation and accommodation.

GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION

All submissions must include the following:
1-      three copies of a script with lyrics or a full libretto (no DVDs, videotapes, or photographs);
2-      three copies of a synopsis of no more than one page, with a list of characters and instrumentation;
3-      three copies of a CD (no audio tapes) of at least 20 minutes of music, including a minimum of five songs accompanied by the sheet music for those songs. Piano and vocals are sufficient, and a composer’s demo is acceptable though not preferred. Studio demos are not necessary. No midi recordings will be accepted. Songs must be in sequence on the CD and clearly noted in the script;
4-      three copies of a one-page biography or resume for each creative artist;
5-      three copies of the history of the work’s development and a brief description of what the creative team hopes to achieve at the Institute;
6-      a completed application form signed by all collaborators (book writer, composer, lyricist, librettist). If the proposed project is an adaptation of an existing work that is not in the public domain, proof of fully secured rights must accompany the submission.

Application forms are available at drama.yale.edu/YIMT.

Submissions should be addressed to:

Yale Institute for Music Theatre
c/o Yale School of Drama
P.O. Box 208244
New Haven, CT 06520-8244

For more information about the Yale Institute for Music Theatre or the application process, please email yimt@yale.edu or call (203) 432-1591.

All applicants will be notified of selection by April 1.

For more information, visit www.drama.yale.edu/YIMT

2011-12-12T14:23:00.002-05:00

"Love is the sign through which the world should be convinced that we believe in Jesus."
-- School Sisters of Notre Dame

Godspell's midlife crisis

2011-12-06T17:27:00.002-05:00

I wrote this review for the Dec. 9, 2011 issue of National Catholic Reporter

Godspell is showing its age, at least as represented by director Daniel Goldstein’s production at New York’s Circle in the Square Theatre. This first Broadway revival of the beloved 1971 “rock musical” is like a middle-aged person trying to recapture youth. In people the result is sad to see, here it’s just boring.

What seemed fresh and light 40 years ago -- 20-something actors cavorting around in colorful ragtag costumes singing and acting out Jesus’ parables, with him leading and joining in the fun -- now seems like a church pageant aimed at getting the youth group more interested in religion. Nothing in this revival is of Broadway quality except the songs, which were adapted by composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz from the Episcopal hymnal and biblical passages from the Gospel of Matthew.

Even the songs suffer here because of choreographer Christopher Gattelli’s formulaic dance moves, which in the case of the show’s breakout hit, “Day by Day,” look more like a cardio class warm-up. I also thought of the gym during “We Beseech Thee,” which had cast members bouncing on mini trampolines. This is what we do at my health club in Urban Rebounding, a vigorous hour of working out while jumping on small individual trampolines. The performance was about as involving as watching someone else exercising. The one exception song-wise was “All Good Gifts,” nicely sung by Telly Leung and the company and presented simply.

The fitness center motif continued with Goldstein’s bizarre staging of the Last Supper with Jesus and the disciples gathered around a hot tub. For the life of me I don’t understand the significance of that. Maybe if they had all hopped in it might have made a point, if a bit of a kinky one, of communion and fellowship. As it was, they sat there passing around some pita bread and a chalice while the water bubbled and steamed in front of them.

Another major problem I had was the failure to use inclusive language. I understand that the songs are already set to King James, but the spoken scripture needed someone with a New Revised Standard Version. Attempts were made throughout to update the jokes, such as having the judge in the Good Samaritan parable hurry on by with the excuse of having to get to court for a Lindsay Lohan appearance “again,” but then all the scriptural references featured the “God and men,” “every man who humbles himself” and “nurses a grudge against his brother” viewpoint.

I had this same complaint when I reviewed the 30th anniversary Off-Broadway revival in 2000 for National Catholic Reporter. I mentioned this to Schwartz during a telephone interview then and he told me inclusive language “fails as art” and that he has always felt men represented everyone. I told I had never felt included in the word men. Why would I? I’m not a man. I suggested substitutes like neighbor or brothers and sisters and he said he liked the idea of using neighbor and would speak to the director, Shawn Rozsa. I didn’t revisit that production so I don’t know if the changes were made, but here we are in 2011 for the trumpeted first Broadway revival and the language is as exclusive as ever.

It’s a shame this production is so limp because Godspell meant a great deal to many people. It ran for five years Off-Broadway before transferring to the Great White Way in 1976 where it ran for another year. It has been produced widely throughout the world and its song "Long Live God" was used in Catholic liturgies until at least the late 1980s. “Day by Day,” based on a 13th century Catholic prayer, spent 14 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Godspell even had the distinction of breaking the color barrier in South Africa when, in 1974 at Schwartz’s insistence, it was performed with an integrated cast before an integrated audience.

The audience when I attended this revival was largely middle-aged, probably Boomers with great memories of the show. I had seen the original production Off-Broadway when I was in high school and admit I wasn’t thrilled at the thought of seeing it again, but figured I’d get into it once I was there. I like the songs and still listen occasionally on the original cast album, but the staging here is so bland that the songs would have been better served in concert form.

The revival’s marketers must be hoping to draw in young people rather than just depend on nostalgic Boomers because ads proclaim it as being by the author of Wicked, Schwartz’s 2003 musical still playing to large audiences at the theatre next to Godspell’s. I wonder, though, if today’s generation can be drawn in to this story about the teachings of Jesus after having cut their musical theatre teeth on the current comedy blockbuster The Book of Mormon, which features a song about female genital mutilation, and a hit from several years ago, Spring Awakening, in which the teenage characters were either talking about sex, having sex or masturbating.

Godspell was conceived and originally directed by John-Michael Tebelak who died in 1985 of a heart attack at the age of 35. He left his royalties to my church, the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, where he was an Artist in Residence. Lisa Schubert, vice president for Cathedral events, marketing and communications, said that over the past decade the Cathedral has received royalties of between approximately $50,000. and $75,000 a year, which are applied to the general support of the Cathedral's arts activities. With that in mind, long live Godspell!

Tickets are $125 for all performances except Saturday evenings, which are $135, and are available by calling Telecharge.com at (212) 239-6200 or by visiting www.telecharge.com/godspell. For more information, visit www.godspell.com.

2011-11-16T14:50:00.002-05:00

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee.Isaiah 26:3

"If your mind is filled with defeat thoughts, fear thoughts, resentment thoughts, you are bound to be in a state of mental unrest, even turmoil, and of course there can be no inner peace.
This passage advises you to practice thinking about God, to keep your mind 'stayed' or fixed, not upon your troubles but upon God.
Keep your mind on God for as many minutes during the day as possible. This may be difficult at first for you are unused to spiritual concentration. Practice will make it easier."
-- Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

2011-11-13T15:26:00.001-05:00

"Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees."
-- Victor Hugo

“Je me souviens…I remember…”

2011-11-09T12:33:00.003-05:00

By Mary Sheeran

            Susan Tenny is remembering, and as she is a choreographer, she does it by giving other people dances, and the other people range in age from 9 to 67. That alone is marvelous.

Tenney, on the faculty of Princeton Ballet School, brought her work in progress, "Je me souviens…I remember…” to New York’s Florence Gould Hall about a week ago, and many of what might be called her smaller moments resonate with me still. She showed us a portion of the piece’s first part and most of its final section, hardly something on which to base a review. It must be said, though, that it was a lovely program. Part of its loveliness was that Tenney set the piece to the music by Georges Delerue, the composer of the music for Truffaut’s film, ”Jules and Jim.”

            As the piece begins, a child (Cynthia Yank) romps, stops and pulls a cookie from a paper bag, a Proustian reference to how a small everyday object can bloom forth many memories. A man, adored by the women of his family, collapses. A woman grieves the loss of her baby, or did it spring forth free? The child grows into a young woman, remembering her mother showing her photographs of the romance with the father, the man who died. A grandmother shows her affection and care. The stage is filled with women of all ages remembering and all tell their stories simply and clearly in their dancing. Alexandra Fredas, Alexis Branagan and Anya Kalashnikova act as a chorus and appear to be what ballet dancers “look like,” as they flit through the scenes.

            In typical ballets, people with idealized shapes represent all of us, and we all take that leap of imagination when we sit in ballet audiences. It is not usual to see typical real people on the dance stage, however. When the “typical” ballerinas dance among the “real” people, though, they don’t look real. These dancers seemed uninteresting by comparison, superfluous and unreal. The “real” people were fascinating, charming and rich.

            Tenney’s piece conveys the power of the “small” moments that resonate in our memory – a young woman dancing, a mother smoothing her child’s hair. These only sound trivial on two-dimensional media. And yet, I wonder how such a delicate piece can stretch out to four whole sections, an evening. Yet, I hope I do see it all someday. In the meantime, I will remember.

"Je ne souviens…I remember…" Choreographed and directed by Susan Tenney. Music composed by Georges Duberue. Lighting design by Joe Novak. Costume design by Dominique Daiela Pino-Santiago. Featuring: Alexis Branagan, Naoko Cojerian, Yoshie Driscoll, Gary Echternacht, Alexandra Fredas, Anya Kalashnikova, Samantha Guillace, Pam Fabri Pisani, Cynthia Yank.

Mary Sheeran is the author of Quest of the Sleeping Princess, a novel set during a gala performance at the New York City Ballet, and Who Have the Power, a historical novel set during the Comstock Lode era about a musician discovering that her mother is a healing woman of the Washo tribe. Her CD, Through the Years, is available on CD Baby.

Photo © Julie Lemberger 2011 www.julielemberger.com

2011-11-05T10:19:00.003-05:00

"We now have an opportunity to exchange the wish to control life for a willingness to engage in living."
-- Zen priest Joan Halifax

2011-11-03T12:21:00.002-05:00

"Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible and receives the impossible."
-- Corrie Ten Boom

2011-10-29T12:00:00.000-05:00

"Faith is putting all your eggs in God's basket, then counting your blessings before they hatch."
-Ramona C. Carrol

You Don't Have to Look Like Your Friends

2011-10-21T11:54:00.001-05:00

2011-10-21T11:53:00.002-05:00

2011-10-21T11:53:00.001-05:00

2011-10-21T11:52:00.000-05:00

2011-10-21T11:51:00.000-05:00

The Best of Times -- the Music of Jerry Herman

2011-10-21T10:13:00.005-05:00

Members of The Philhallmonic Society sang more than two dozen songs from the showbiz great at a free concert Sunday at Lincoln Center’s Bruno Walter Auditorium. Founder and artistic director Phil Hall directed the uplifting concert representing seven Jerry Herman classics.

The line to get in ran down Amsterdam Avenue for at least a block and many, many people were turned away. Lucky for me Phil had saved me a seat. The Philhallmonic Society is my favorite non-religious choral group. (Cabaret superstar KT Sullivan described them as “Sex and the City” meets “Glee.”) They radiate with the joy of singing and reminded me once again that even rough times can be the best of times with show music to boost our spirits.

Check their web site for future performances.

2011-10-18T11:14:00.001-05:00

"The ways to God are many. They appear when we are ready for them and when our faithfulness has shown we can live with the consequences of further growth."
-- John Punshon

Still true today

2011-10-14T13:16:00.000-05:00

“One of the great liabilities of history is all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and face the challenge of change.”
-- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Midtown International Theatre Festival Seeks Submissions

2011-10-12T12:42:00.002-05:00

The Midtown International Theatre Festival (MITF) seeks submissions for its 13th season, running from July 8 - Aug.5, 2012. The deadline for submissions is Monday, Jan. 20, 2012.

The Festival accepts submissions in all genres - any sort of stage play, musical or otherwise, new or revived, mainstream or focused on an ethnic or cultural niche. To be eligible, each show must have a producer and production team attached to the project. In addition, the MITF will include a Short Subjects division, with the same deadlines as the rest of the MITF.

"Last year was our best year ever," said John Chatterton, executive producer of the MITF. "Maybe not in size, but in the efficiency with which we got the job done. We're starting a month earlier this year, and in this business a month means a lot! I'm also expecting to add a week to the schedule and have enough plays to fill it."

Applications for the Midtown International Theatre Festival are available online at www.midtownfestival.org. Completed applications, scripts, production materials and a non-refundable reading fee of $30 (no reading fee for Short Subjects) must be mailed to: The Midtown International Theatre Festival, 2578 Broadway #145, New York, NY 10025. (Submissions for the Short Subjects must be sent by E-mail, to john.chatterton@gmail.com.)

Slowing Down, Going Deeper

2011-10-10T13:31:00.002-05:00

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart are the same state of being. . .
and now you want to to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three dimensional space.

-- Lisel Mueller, “Monet Refuses the Operation"

The Way

2011-10-07T11:06:00.002-05:00

I was happy to see that Emilio Estevez’s new film, “The Way,” got such a good review in today’s NYT. I saw it last night at a private, prerelease screening in Kips Bay and thoroughly enjoyed it. The acting, with Martin Sheen in the lead, was strong, the story and characters involving, and the scenery gorgeous. For more details and to see a trailer, click here.

Christine Andreas and Robert Kimball open the new Dutch Treat Club season

2011-10-06T15:06:00.005-05:00

Singing a few lyrics from “Autumn in New York,” cabaret star KT Sullivan opened the 107th season of Dutch Treat Club luncheons Tuesday at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park. The Club, whose members make their living primarily in the arts, meets every Tuesday from October to May, hosted by Sullivan, its president, and offers a performance by a popular singer, wisdom from a noted speaker, good food and great company. I’ve been a member since 1996.

This week’s entertainer was singer/actress Christine Andreas (a member since 1997), who most recently starred as Jacqueline in the Broadway revival of La Cage aux Folles (and who in the 1990s played a schizophrenic, homicidal psychiatrist on my favorite soap, “Another World.”) She sang several songs from her upcoming show “Two for the Road,” which she’ll perform with her husband, composer Martin Silvestri (in photo with Andreas), at 3 p.m. Oct. 9 at the Irvington (NY) Town Hall Theater. All proceeds will go to Ability Beyond Disability, an organization that benefits children with special needs. Andreas has a personal interest in this charity -- her son Mac is 24 “but will always be 4,” she said.

Accompanied by her husband on piano, she opened with her show’s title song, then shared some stories. Six years ago when she was asked to play the mother in a national tour of The Light in the Piazza, she hesitated, not just because she hadn’t toured in ages, but also because it would mean leaving Mac for more than a year.

“There I was playing a special needs mother letting go and that’s just what I was,” she said, adding that she made the decision to do the tour because she had already placed the then 18-year-old Mac in a group home where he was happy.

In remembrance of visiting so many states on tour, she and Silvestri sang “Rhode Island Is Famous for You” -- you know that fun song by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz with its listing of different geographical specialties -- “the camp chair in New Hampshire,” “pencils come from Pennsylvania,” ”vests from West Virginia” and from our neighbor, “New Jersey gives us glue.” A cute song, delightfully done.

She also sang a lovely number called “Is This the Way It Feels to Love?” from a new musical called The Countess of Storyville, which features music by Silvestri and lyrics by Joel Higgins that will have a reading at The Players Theatre later this month. She closed with “Fly Me to the Moon.”

For more information about her benefit show, billed as “a personal scrapbook of musical souvenirs and memories,” visit www.irvingtontheater.com.

Our opening day speaker was musical theatre historian and DTC member since 1976 Robert Kimball who reflected on his recent three-year stint as a Tony Award nominator. Interestingly, Kimball had an indirect connection to the Dutch Treat Club long before he was a member. As an orphan living in a school dorm, he used to listen to newscaster Lowell Thomas on the radio; Thomas was president of the DTC from 1978-81.

Kimball, who is known in part for his comprehensive books on the lyrics of American Songbook writers, joked that Zero Mostel threatened to send him a bill because those weighty books kept breaking Mostel’s coffee tables.

Sounding much like Richard Maltby Jr. did in his theatre talk at last month’s 15th anniversary celebration of Broadway Blessing, Kimball remembered the Great While Way of the 1940s, with its 70-some theatres where more than 200 new shows opened annually. Now, with fewer than 40 theatres left, the Broadway League talks excitedly about creating a record if 40 shows open in a year.

“The only new record being set is for ticket prices,” he said.

When asked if the American musical of today is a reflection of our culture, he replied sadly, “I’m afraid so. There are not a lot of great songs being written for the theatre now.”

Rule, Britannia! -- Ocean’s Kingdom and Union Jack

2011-10-04T16:14:00.005-05:00

By Mary Sheeran

Back when I was growing up in Washington, NJ, my friends and I played that we were The Beatles. We strummed badminton rackets and lip synched to our favorite Fav Four. So, when last February, New York City Ballet announced that it had commissioned a ballet score from Paul McCartney, I was pretty excited. McCartney’s ventures into classical music have not thrilled too many, but they are always interesting, for his music from the mid-1960s and beyond have always leaned on classical and even medieval motifs.

Then, in the next sentence, the company announced that its artistic director, Peter Martins, would do the choreography, and that let any air out of any balloons that might have started up. The company continued to generate excitement with press releases about Paul’s daughter, Stella McCartney, designing the costumes and some stories about how Peter and Paul (sounds almost Biblical) were working together, with Paul doing little step hops to suggest choreography and sketching out the libretto, and Peter waxing about their collaboration. Everyone seemed to be having a lovely time.

Unfortunately, no one outside the walls of the theater expected much except a ballyhooed red carpet, and that is pretty much what we got. Since the mid 1980s, when he succeeded the late George Balanchine, Martins’ dances have refused to catch fire. Some of us keep hoping, alas. Why he chose to create a dance for McCartney’s music is puzzling when there are more talented people around and when real opportunism would be not to lose the opportunity to do something wonderful.

I was flummoxed by Martins’ schizo/cynicism in admitting in advance that the collaboration would produce sold-out houses for Ocean’s Kingdom (that would be the ballet’s title) because of Paul, not because of the ballet, and then following that idea with his expressing the hope that more people would be drawn to the ballet as a result of seeing it.

Well, then, why did he phone in the steps? Did he think no one would notice? (NYCB’s Facebook page ignored the ballet completely with its gushing excitement about laying down the red carpet for the arrival of celebrities at its premiere and preparing for the ball afterwards. Or maybe they think that’s what we really care about.)

Everyone else worked on Ocean’s Kingdom – the McCartneys, the designers, the orchestra, and the dancers. Why couldn’t Martins?

Because he didn’t have to. He was right. The house sold out, and Paul McCartney got a standing ovation because, well, he’s Paul McCartney, but will those “new” people come back to see more? Wasn’t that audience worth working for?

This sloppy, cynical way of doing business irritated me as I watched those hard workers put through their paces. The slickness of the publicity, the opportunism of it all, the “let’s pretend we’re doing something important” as they toss us junk jewelry is disheartening and discouraging in a company that has such a heritage as the repertories of New York City Ballet’s founder George Balanchine and of his co-ballet master Jerome Robbins.

All the reviewers focused their stern gazes on Ocean’s Kingdom, and I’ll get to that eventually, although I guess you have an idea of my opinion. But first things first, and for this performance, Balanchine comes first.

Fortunately, Ocean’s Kingdom was presented on a bill with Union Jack, George Balanchine’s bicentennial tribute to the United Kingdom. It’s one of his crowd pleasers and brings the whole company dressed in colorful kilts stepping out on stage to a steady drumbeat. As the dancers keep processing out from a sort of London Bridge-type gate, they fill the stage with color and life. It’s simple but magnificent stagecraft, and a gasp-inducing sequence.

Once the clans break rank, they dance to various folk songs like the “Keel Row” or “Colonel Bogey’s March.” The audience, already floored, is easily captivated by the variations and then wrought up again with Wendy Whelan and her Amazons in the McDonald of Sleat section. It’s another drum-only sequence, with the women kicking up their legs and stabbing the floor with their toes. It’s a showstopper, the sort of thing that encourages cheers and happy hoots.

Balanchine drew on a mighty library of the history he was part of – Russian ballet, Diaghilev, Hollywood, Broadway, Stravinsky, westerns, a passion for Tchaikovskian melody, and a capacity for both minimalism and DeMille type showmanship. If I once thought that his more popular ballets like Union Jack were distilled through a Russian sensibility, this past Tuesday, I thought how much more “American” the dances looked than I remembered. After almost 30 years, Balanchine ballets have come home to American bodies. They’re us now.

The exception to this in Union Jack is the Costermonger Pas de Deux. Most of us haven’t the foggiest notion of what a costermonger is, and the vaudeville-like style is foreign to everyone in the room, including Tuesday’s cast of Andrew Veyette and Megan Fairchild. These two were just swell, but they weren’t aware of all the jokes they could sell. Balanchine knew costermongers well enough and the humor of the British music hall. I would know that just by remembering the dancers performing this when he was still alive. Back in the day, children, this was Patricia McBride’s role, and she sold the thing to Row K in the Fourth Ring, where I used to sit. She showed me what a costermonger was. And along with her partner Jean Pierre Bonnefous and later Mikhail Baryshnikov, the section was laugh aloud funny and devilishly sly. On Tuesday, Veyette and Fairchild danced the steps and had fun with them, and so did we, but the reason for this segment’s existence, being the slot in the program where the company is changing clothes, was more obvious than it needed to be. The Costermonger Pas de Deux should be more than a utilitarian section.

I could (tactlessly) say the same of Wendy Whelan’s turn in the marvelous McDonald of Sleat segment. Children, when Karin von Aroldingen led her Amazons through the drum roll, it was with noncommitatal expressions that added to the women’s power and sent chills down our backs. They were Balanchine’s female army – the ones you see in Symphony in Three Movements or his Tchaikovsky Suite #3. On Tuesday, I was startled to see some of those Amazons smiling. The steps are there, and the power is still there, but not the understanding behind them.

It’s not just that “they don’t dance the way they used to” – they’re not supposed to. But if you subtract something from the equation, you should add something, and while the actual dance is done brilliantly, the motivation is missing. If they don’t know why they’re there except for steps, why is the audience there? Yes, the dances have become “American,” and we feel at home in them, but they still require the original motivation to make them resonate.

Oh, why am I so picky? It’s Union Jack! What’s wrong with me? It was lovely to see Maria Kowroski saucily leading the WRENS and the RCAF. I got to give a little more applause to the retiring Charles Askegard. And it’s always a breath catching moment when the company signals “God save the Queen” in semaphore code as the orchestra plays “Rule, Brittania!,” the cannon blasts, and the curtain comes down. Union Jack is just so much fun.

As for Ocean’s Kingdom, that was well danced, too, but it was disheartening to watch. There wasn’t any choreography, just steps here and steps there, none of which related to much of the music or story, except for what the music and the talents of the dancers could contribute. Yes, indeed, Peter Martins phoned in the steps after barely skimming through the score. His failure hampers the music, some glorious scenery by Perry Silvey and projections by S. Katy Tucker, and the imaginative, intelligent costumes by Stella McCartney. The piece was helped by the quality of the dancers Martins selected to get his ballet through (for him, apparently) this cynically viewed media event (the dancers being the glorious Sara Mearns, Robert Fairchild, Amar Ramasar, and Georgina Pazcoguin, who created dimensional characters with little to go on. Daniel Ulbricht could have been given more to do.)

McCartney’s music is pretty and, if two-dimensional, enjoyable enough. It certainly told the story. When dancers enter, the music tells you who they are, and if you close your eyes, you can imagine more than you can see in the steps. His libretto admittedly lacked logic, but this is, after all, a medium where swans turn into maidens and nutcrackers battle mice. Even so, the names of the characters alone could make you giggle. Warring families and star crossed lovers wander all over the arts, but this plot was a sad imitation. You see, there were these two kingdoms, one underwater and one of earth. King Terra of the earthly kingdom (I’ll bet you guessed that) arrives in the underwater kingdom (there is no underwater equipment in the ballet and no, I don’t know how people moved from one kingdom to another, but they did). Prince Stone, Terra’s younger brother, falls in love with King Ocean’s daughter, Princess Honorata, but their love is threatened by Terra’s own desire for her. With the help of one of Honorata’s handmaidens, Scala, the princess is abducted by Terra and his henchmen.

Even allowing for the triteness of some ballet and opera stories, this one had many holes were not as easily discerned when NYCB’s excellent dancers took to it. I don’t know what motivated Scala to keep changing her mind, but you could overlook that with Pazcoguin’s strong performance, and what was the point of kidnapping Honorata (the wonderful Sara Mearns)? Why not send her some water lilies? If you secretly desire a princess, why do you put her in prison? But Mearns' performance in the prison (a glorious projection of blue pillars by the way) was breathtaking. The dancers deserved better, though, than a story that resembles a Popeye cartoon with Bluto and Popeye fighting over Olive Oyl. But the dancers found genuine feeling to be danced, and there was genuine feeling in the music, and from the musicians in the orchestra (conducted by the impish Clotilde Otranto).

Martins is an ideal classroom choreographer, creative about steps but not about what to do with them and completely unconcerned about what he shows an audience. Those days he had promise were the days when he was campaigning for Balanchine’s favor and Balanchine’s job. It’s time we all stopped pretending to take him seriously.

Ocean’s Kingdom. Music and libretto by Paul McCartney; Orchestrated by Andrew Cottee; Choreographed by Peter Martins; Costumes by Stella McCartney; Video & projection design by S. Katy Tucker; Lighting by Mark Stanley; Scenery by Perry Silvey. Featuring: Sara Mearns, Robert Fairchild, Amar Ramasar, Georgiina Pazcoguin, Christian Tworzyanski, Daniel Ulbricht. Premiere: Sept. 22, 2011. Union Jack. Music by Hershy Kay, adapted from traditional British music; Choreographed by George Balanchine; Scenery and costumes by Rouben Ter-Arutunian; Original lighting by Ronald Bates; Lighting by Mark Stanley. Featuring: Joaquin de Luz, Charles Askegard, Abi Stafford, Jared Angle, Janie Taylor, Wendy Whelan, Maria Kowroski, Andrew Veyette, Megan Fairchild, Adam Hendrickson, Sean Suozzi. Premiere: May 13, 1976.

New York City Ballet’s fall season runs through Oct. 9 at Lincoln Center. For information and tickets, go to http://www.nycballet.com/index.html.

Mary Sheeran is the author of Quest of the Sleeping Princess, a novel set during a gala performance at the New York City Ballet, and Who Have the Power, a historical novel set during the Comstock Lode era about a musician discovering that her mother is a healing woman of the Washo tribe. Her CD, Through the Years, is available on CD Baby.

2011-10-02T14:35:00.000-05:00

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
-William Faulkner

2011-09-28T09:44:00.000-05:00

May you always find a friend.

2011-09-26T12:39:00.001-05:00

"We shake with joy,
We shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body."
-- Mary Oliver

2011-09-25T12:12:00.004-05:00

"I have a cause. We need those, don't we? Otherwise the darkness and the cold get in and everything starts to ache. My soul has a purpose, it is to love; if I do not fulfill my heart's vocation, I suffer."
-- St. Thomas Aquinas

Dale’s the Name, Jim Dale

2011-09-23T15:30:00.005-05:00

“And should this sunlit world, grow dark one day, the colors of my life, will leave a shining light, to show the way...”*

The son of a foundry worker and shoe factory employee from the tiny English town of Rothwell roamed the stage of the Episcopal Actors’ Guild’s attic-like performance space last night sharing stories, jokes, songs and dances with a standing-room-only crowd. In his new one-man show, “Just Jim Dale,” the Tony-winning star recalled his childhood start in British music halls, his days as a teenaged comic, then pop singer and songwriter turned Academy Award-nominated lyricist (“Georgy Girl”) and his recent gig as audio-book reader of the Harry Potter series. The colors of his life have, indeed, been bountiful and bold.

Young Jimmy Smith was 6 when he was seized by the showbiz call while watching a local variety show. The following year his father took him to London to see Me and My Girl and he declared that’s what he wanted to do. And as we know, he did exactly that, starring in a revival of that show decades later in New York.

But let’s not jump ahead -- back to childhood. His father, with amazing understanding for a laboring man, told him if musical theatre work was what he wanted, “you have to learn how to move.” So Jimmy was enrolled in tap, ballroom and “the dreaded ballet” lessons. “I was the Billy Elliot of our town.”

In the blown-up black and white photos of himself he held up, the lad in black pants and white dress shirt was a dark-haired, chubbier version of the lean, gray-haired 76-year-old man he is today. And he proved he not only learned to move back then, he also developed impeccable timing for story and joke telling and, of course, cultivated that golden voice.

A Jim Dale show would not seem complete without songs from his hit Broadway shows, Me and My Girl and Barnum, and he did not disappoint. His gift to us of the title song from the first show was enchanting, as was his “The Lambeth Walk.”

From Barnum, he not only sang “The Colors of My Life” as a tribute to his wife, Julie Schafler, and “There’s a Sucker Born Ev’ry Minute,” but also gave us a breakdown of all the thrills his carnival-promoting P.T. Barnum had to offer in “Museum Song”. First he had pianist/musical arranger Mark York play the music slowly so we could hear each enticement, a few of which are: “Armadillas, clever caterpillas, reproductions of the Cyclops' ret'na, crystal blowing, automatic sewing, Venus on a shell and other works of art.” Then he let them fly RAPIDLY, just the way they sound on my 1980 cast album. Whew! What a joy.

He is certainly a giving man. This is the second benefit he’s done in two years for the Episcopal Actors’ Guild, an organization that provides same-day relief for actors in need. And he didn’t just do the show, which was directed by Broadway producer, director and lyricist Richard Maltby Jr., with musical direction/arranging by Aaron Gandy, he hung around at the reception to the bitter end, chatting with audience members.

No quiet browns and grays for this performer. He’s taken his days and filled them till they over flow, with rose and cherry reds . . .

*The Colors of My Life
from Barnum
Lyrics by Michael Stewart
Music by Cy Coleman

Kristin Chenoweth -- Some Lessons Learned

2011-09-21T11:07:00.009-05:00

Musical theatre and TV darling Kristin Chenoweth digs deep into her Oklahoma roots for her latest CD, Some Lessons Learned, a lively mix of the usual country fare -- cheating lovers and broken hearts, sung with a swagger worthy of the best Nashville singer.

Kristin proves once again what a multileveled talent she is. Well-known for her comic acting, which has made her one of the biggest draws on Broadway and earned her a Tony and an Emmy, and also as a classically trained coloratura soprano, with this CD Kristin proves she’s a skilled songwriter as well, having penned two of the recording’s 13 selections, "Mine to Love" and the hilarious "What Would Dolly Do?" (or "WW Double D").

Despite her opera training, she sounds right at home in the world of country music, which shouldn’t be surprising given her southern background and a summer of her college years spent singing at Opryland.

In her tribute song to one of her childhood heroes, Dolly Parton, she proclaims she’s “got a lot of Dolly in me” and tells her two-timing man just what he can do: “Take your truck and shove it/ I know how much you love it/ And it’s a good thing ‘cause that’s where you’re moving to./ I’m gonna pull that wig down off the shelf. / Go high heel up with someone else/ ‘Cause I asked myself/ What would Dolly do?”

Another funny song is “I Didn’t” about a couple who seemed to disagree about everything -- he wanted the covers pulled own, but she didn’t; he thought she should gain a few pounds, but she didn’t. What finally drove them apart, though, was a matter of religion: “He thought he was God/ But I didn’t.”

I also like “God and Me”: “If God and me sat down for tea/ I would ask him why he made a heart/ that could break so easily./ If God had time, would it be crime/ If I said I saw one tiny flaw in his grand design?” And I really like "Bitch About," which was released this past summer as a music video. She wants somebody who will love her and bug her and who she can bitch about and not live without. I haven’t seen the video but I would like to because she does a rousing turn on the CD.

My favorite, though, is the inspirational “I Was Here.” “I wanna do somethin’ that matters, say somethin’ different/ Somethin’ that sets the whole world on its ear./ I wanna do somethin’ better with the time I was given/ I wanna try/ to touch a few hearts in this life/ leave nothing less than somethin’ that says/ ‘I was here.’”

All but one of the songs are original compositions, all backed by an excellent group of musicians. Most of the music was recorded in Nashville.

This is Kristin’s fourth CD on the Sony Masterworks label. The first, Let Yourself Go, consists largely of American Songbook and Broadway numbers, reflecting the life she’s been living since moving to New York to pursue a theatre career. As I Am, which I especially love, features mostly Christian music, springing from her Southern Baptist upbringing, and A Lovely Way to Spend Christmas is the favorite of all my holiday music.

Luckily her contract with Sony calls for six more recordings. I’m betting the next will be of opera music. With her master’s in opera performance, that was the career Kristin was headed for before she helped a friend move to New York and while here auditioned for a musical comedy. She got the part and that was the end of her opera career, although she now makes occasional guest appearances with opera companies around the country.

Kristin will be back on TV this season in a new show, “Good Christian Bitches,” (the clip I saw of it doesn’t look too promising) and in the not too distant future back on the Great White Way in a revival of the musical On the Twentieth Century. I have higher hopes for that. And I look forward to those next six CDs!

2011-09-20T09:14:00.000-05:00

May your day be filled with wonder!

Richard Maltby, Jr. Speaks at 15th Broadway Blessing

2011-09-18T13:36:00.012-05:00

Richard Maltby, Jr.

By Lauren Yarger

Those who are in the theater business are blessed, because they have an opportunity to discover what they have been put on the earth to do.

That was the message Monday from Broadway director/lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr. who spoke at the 15th annual Broadway Blessing held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. He encouraged those in the arts to take risks -- "it's the invention that it's all about," he said. "If you are not taking a chance, you're not doing anything worth doing."

The award-winning Broadway veteran of Fosse, Miss Saigon and Ain't Misbehavin' among others, defined theater as "the human spirit reacting to life and creating a story," and urged those who are in the business to realize that they are living in a golden age.

The inter-faith service also featured Natalie Toro, (above, recently of A Tale of Two Cities) singing "Where is it Written?" from Yentl, backed by the Broadway Blessing Choir, which also performed a medley of Broadway songs under the musical direction of Daniel Beckwith, assisting organist at St. John the Divine.

Project Dance performed to "Amazing Grace" by Bel Air Presbyterian Worship Team with choreography by Amanda Brewster and Tony Haris performed "I'll Carry You" by Phil Hall (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Matthew Passion), a song he wrote to commemorate the Blessing's 15th anniversary.
Rabbi Jill Hausman of the Actors' Temple sang "If I Can Stop My Heart from Breaking" (by Richard Hagemen with words by Emily Dickinson). She, the Very Rev. Dr. James A. Kowalski, dean of the cathedral, and The Rev. Canon Thomas Miller, canon for liturgy and the arts at the cathedral, officiated at the service.

Retta Blaney, producer of the event, also received a 2011 The Lights are Bright on Broadway Award, presented by Masterwork Productions., Inc. A reception featuring a variety of mouthwatering refreshments provided by the cathedral's Trustees and Society of Regents Members followed.
Retta Blaney and Lauren Yarger, executive director of Masterwork Productions, Inc.

Enjoying the light

2011-09-16T13:03:00.007-05:00

Monday night was a glorious evening for me not just because it was the 15th anniversary celebration of Broadway Blessing, the interfaith service of song, dance and story I started and have been producing all these years to bring the theatre community together every September to ask God’s blessing on the new season. I also had the honor of receiving one of this year’s two The Lights Are Bright on Broadway Awards given by Masterwork Productions and presented to me by executive director Lauren Yarger (right in photo with me.)

“Masterwork Productions is a non profit Christian Performing arts organization,” Yarger said during the event at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. “Our mission, through a variety of ministries, is to equip, support and serve Christians using the arts as a tool for outreach in their communities. Several years ago we began presenting The Lights Are Bright on Broadway Awards to individuals and organizations making a difference in the Broadway community through their faith. I am thrilled to be here to present one of our 2011 awards to Broadway Blessing producer Retta Blaney because she has been an encourager and mentor to me and has become a close friend. Part of the reason that she is receiving this award is because I suspect that most of you here this evening can say the same thing. It's my pleasure to present The Lights are Bright on Broadway Award to Retta Blaney, for her work exploring the intersection of religion and theater, for being a support and inspiration for artists of faith and for uniting persons of faith through the annual Broadway Blessing.”

I haven’t put the award on a bookshelf in the hall with my other awards yet because I want to look at it frequently. It sits on my coffee table facing my wing back chair and whenever I look up from my book or newspaper, there it is, a joyous reminder of many years of hard work that made my dream of uniting theatre people in pray come true.

Thank you Lauren and thanks to all those who supported my vision -- clergy members, the actors, singers and dancers who have come every year to perform for free, the wonderful volunteer Broadway Blessing Choir and everyone at the Cathedral for their enthusiastic embrace of this unusual little service.

Here’s to the next 15 years!

Tony Award winner Richard Maltby Jr. to speak at Broadway Blessing

2011-09-09T14:32:00.000-05:00

Producer, director and lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr. will deliver a theatre reflection at the 15th anniversary celebration of Broadway Blessing, 7 p.m. Sept. 12 at the Cathedral Church of St. the Divine, Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street.

Currently serving as creative consultant for the Off-Broadway musical play The Magdalene, Maltby holds the distinction of having conceived and directed the only two musical revues to ever win the Tony Award for Best Musical: Ain't Misbehavin' (1978, also Tony Award for Best Director) and Fosse (1999:). He was director/co-lyricist for the American version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Song and Dance, starring Bernadette Peters, and was co-lyricist for Miss Saigon.

In a partnership that began when they were students at Yale, Maltby and composer David Shire have collaborated many times over the years. Their first Broadway credit was in 1968, when their song "The Girl of the Minute" was used in the revue New Faces of 1968. In 1977 the Manhattan Theatre Club produced a review of their earlier songs, written for other works, titled Starting Here, Starting Now.

With Shire as composer, Maltby directed and was lyricist for Baby and the lyricist for Big. Also with Shire, he conceived and wrote the lyrics for Take Flight, which had its world premiere in July 2007 at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London.

He also conceived and directed Ring Of Fire, The Johnny Cash Musical Show and was co-bookwriter/lyricist for The Pirate Queen. He was most recently represented on Broadway as the director of the new, original musical The Story of My Life by composer/lyricist Neil Bartram. That musical had a brief run at the Booth Theatre in February 2009 and received a 2009 Drama Desk Award nomination for outstanding production of a musical.

Maltby will be joined by Broadway singer/actress Natalie Toro who will sing the Michel Legrand/Alan and Marilyn Bergman song “Where Is It Written,” backed by the Broadway Blessing Choir, and Tony Haris will perform a new song by composer/playwright Phil Hall written in honor of the anniversary.

Following a tradition established at the 10th anniversary celebration, Project Dance will perform and Rabbi Jill Hausman of The Actors’ Temple and the Rev. Canon Tom Miller, the Cathedral’s canon for liturgy and the arts, will lead the annual candle lighting ceremony.

As with all announced guests, Maltby’s availability is subject to change. Broadway Blessing is the free interfaith service of song, dance and story that has been bringing the theatre community together every September since 1997 to ask God’s blessing on the new season. Reservations are not necessary.

Broadway Blessing was founded and is produced by journalist and author Retta Blaney.

An autumn blessing

2011-09-07T16:24:00.000-05:00

"May this fall season reconnect us to the ever-changing aspects of our lives: color, complexity, beauty and mortality."
-- Kenny Moore, The C.E.O. and the Monk

2011-09-06T12:53:00.000-05:00

“Put you ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
-- Anne Sexton

Prayer to Achieve Inner Peace

2011-09-01T09:41:00.000-05:00

Slow me down, Lord.
Ease the pounding of my heart
by the quieting of my mind.
Steady my hurried pace
with a vision of the eternal reach of time.
Give me, amid the confusion of the day,
the calmness of the everlasting hills.
Break the tensions of my nerves and muscles
with the soothing music of singing streams
that live in my memory.

Help me to know
the magical, restoring power of sleep.
Teach me the art of taking minute vacations --
of slowing down to look at a flower,
to chat with a friend,
to pat a dog,
to read a few lines from a good book.

Remind me each day of the fable
of the hare and the tortoise,
that I may know
that the race is not always to the swift --
that there is more to life
than increasing its speed.
Let me look upward
into the branches of the towering oak
and know that it grew great and strong
because it grew slowly and well.

Slow me down, Lord,
and inspire me to send my roots deep
into the soil of life’s enduring values
that I may grow toward the stars
of my greater destiny.

-- Cardinal Richard Cushing

Temporal Powers to Ring the NASDAQ Stock Market Closing Bell Today

2011-08-31T08:39:00.004-05:00

The cast of the Mint Theater’s acclaimed Off-Broadway show, Temporal Powers, will visit the NASDAQ MarketSite in New York City’s Times Square to celebrate the play’s Aug. 29 opening. In honor of the occasion, Rosie Benton (in photo with Aidan Redmond) and the rest of the cast will ring today's Closing Bell beginning at 3:45 p.m. at NASDAQ MarketSite – 4 Times Square – 43rd & Broadway in the Broadcast Studio.

Temporal Powers, set in Ireland in the 1920s, is a story of love and loss, where hope and despair are two sides of the same contested coin. Michael and Min are stone-broke and homeless, but the greatest test of their marriage comes when, after taking shelter in a crumbling ruin, they stumble upon hidden treasure. Min sees a chance to start a new life; Michael fears it’s stolen and wants to give it to the priest. As the night grows dark, neither one is left able to see right from wrong. Selected as a Critic's Pick by The New York Times.

2011-08-29T13:47:00.002-05:00

i thank You God for this amazing
day: for leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

-- e.e. cummings

Desiderata

2011-08-24T15:03:00.001-05:00

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

(Author uncertain)

Reviving Teresa Deevy

2011-08-21T14:17:00.008-05:00

I wrote thsi feature for the Aug. 28, 2011 issue of The Living Church Magazine.

She had six plays produced at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in six years in the 1930s. When her seventh met with rejection, she began writing for radio, despite having been deaf since 19, the result of Meniere’s disease developed several years earlier. In 1954 she was elected to the prestigious Irish Academy of Letters. The Irish Times called her one of the most significant Irish playwrights of the 20th century. Yet few people in Ireland today and even fewer in America know the name of Teresa Deevy.

The Mint Theater Company, an award-winning Off-Broadway theatre, is tackling that obscurity with its two-year Teresa Deevy Project, producing three of her plays as well as offering readings, recordings and publications.

“I found her because I asked the question ‘Who were the women writing plays in the first 50 years of the Abbey?’” said Jonathan Bank, the Mint’s artistic director. “I began with the perception that the history of theatre in Ireland was a lot of men and then, oh, yeah, there was Lady Gregory.”

He found that other women’s plays had been produced, but only Deevy’s had been published, and then only a few.

“What gets remembered and produced is a little bit arbitrary,” he said, adding that if people haven’t heard of a work they assume it wasn’t good in the first place. “That’s not a great measure of talent of the playwright and the worth of the play, but once that idea gets set it’s hard to overcome, which is why we’re trying to throw as much muscle as we have behind her.”

Bank began his latest resurrection effort — the Mint’s mission is to find lost or forgotten work and restore it to mint condition — last summer when he directed Wife to James Whelan, the play rejected by the Abbey in 1937. Its critically acclaimed run at the Mint was extended for as long as the space was available.

This summer Bank is directing Temporal Powers, a moving story of Michael and Min Donovan, a couple whose love has been strained by years of poverty. That love is pushed to the limits after they are evicted from their home and take refuge in a crumbling ruin, where they find a large sum of money buried within the walls and end up bitterly divided over the morality of keeping it. Michael says it doesn’t belong to them and that their poverty must be God’s will. Min sees it differently.

“’Tis the hand of God I see in this as clear as me own,” she says. “A wonder but you’d see! What would it be but the Providence of God looking down on his poor children and they destitute.”

Bank thinks the argument is Deevy’s way of “really attacking the question of what should the Church be doing about poverty.”

What Bank finds in all of Deevy’s work is a deep spirituality rooted in her Roman Catholic upbringing. Deevy was born in 1894 in Waterford as one of 13 children. She died in 1963.

“She was a devout, daily Mass-attending Catholic,” Bank said. She also made yearly pilgrimages to Lourdes as a stretcher-bearer for the sick, and on a trip to Rome had an audience with the pope. Her plays, however, offer no moral certitude.

“She posses a question but doesn’t resolve it,” he says.

In Temporal Powers, which plays through Oct. 2, it’s “the eternal question of salvation.”

“She does not come down on one side or the other,” he says. “She makes a really balanced argument and we’re left to make that decision ourselves. That’s true of all her work. You can’t quite find her point of view.”

Wife’s rejection by the Abbey after six straight years of acceptance can be attributed to political factors, Bank said, mentioning the new Irish constitution of 1937 that made it illegal for married women to work. The prevailing atmosphere would have been unfavorable to a woman playwright, even one who wasn’t married.

That her plays are unknown now is because so few of them were published. The Mint will publish her collected works in two volumes. The first will be released in August or September, with the second to follow next year, and will be available through the theatre’s website (www.minttheater.org).

“She had a profound insight into human behavior, human psychology,” Bank said.

In preparing to launch the Teresa Deevy Project, Bank made his first visit to Ireland to meet with her family and study her writings, which were heaped in boxes with no filing system. Wife to James Whelan had disappeared for 40 years because it had been misfiled. Pages from some plays were missing, rendering them useless for production. Her family told him stories of her life and allowed him to copy her work.

“She was a very spiritual Catholic,” Bank says. “She took it to heart. It was not knee-jerk to her. Although her plays are to a certain extent thrashing with this issue, they don’t read as a woman without conflict. As firm as her beliefs would have been, so were her questions.”

Tina Howe's Some Women In Their Thirties Simply Start To Fall

2011-08-18T09:48:00.007-05:00

We all know what it’s like to lose our heads over a love interest, but fortunately the loss is only figurative. Not so for Charlotte in Tina Howe’s wacky new short play Some Women In Their Thirties Simply Start To Fall . Charlotte’s head and body part ways on a busy shopping stretch of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In typical New York fashion, passersby offer their two cents in this absurdist jaunt directed by Billy Hopkins, one of eight one acts in 59E59 Theaters Summer Shorts 5 festival, which opened last night.

Trying to keep her cool under these most unusual circumstances, Charlotte (Crystal Finn, in photo center) sings Broadway songs while trying to will her body (Kate Geller covered head to toe in black), which can’t see or hear without its head and is running amok, back to her. An alarmed shopper, Rene (Kathryn Grody, left) whips out her cell phone to call 911 and report a woman’s head singing show tunes in front of Citarella. Howard (Arthur French, right) joins the commotion, also calling for help on his cell.

The concern of these two Good Samaritans turns to star-struck curiosity when they learn Charlotte is the author of books beloved by their grandchildren. Instantly they reach for their phones again and begin snapping photos, then digress into a conversation about their little ones. The zaniness mounts when Dr. Sudhir Singh (Ryan Shams) arrives and quickly, and accurately, diagnoses the cause of Charlotte’s dismembering -- she’s in love with a married man who won’t leave his wife for her. Rene and Howard have plenty to say about that too, offering advice from their own romantic entanglements.

It’s a nice little slice of Tina Howe, whose breakout 1983 play, Painting Churches, will be revised this season Off-Broadway by the Keen Company. Some Women was my favorite of the four shows I saw. I also liked Keith Reddin’s Clap Your Hands, which lacked Howe’s originality -- two couples on New Year’s Eve who really let insults fly after too much champagne -- but it was fun because of the excellent timing of the four actors -- Meg Gibson, J.J. Kandel, Megan Ketch, Victor Slezak. Hopkins directs this one as well.

The other two in Series B were José Rivera’s Lessons For An Unaccustomed Bride, about a devote young Roman Catholic woman who seeks love advice from a witch doctor, and The Green Book, “an Alchemical Comedy” written and directed by Will Scheffer about dementia, incontinence, gay marriage, sibling rivalry and the Holocaust -- all in one act. I felt I was back in my MFA play-writing workshop in both. After the first my friend Brenda commented that she wondered how work like that got produced. After the second she looked at me and asked, “What was that about?” My reactions to each had been the same.

59E59 Theaters’ fifth annual festival of new American short plays from established and emerging writers offers eight world premiere one-act plays in two separate evenings. The two series will run in rotating repertory through Sept. 3. Series A, which I haven’t seen, features In This, Our Time... by Alexander Dinelaris, Triple Trouble With Love, written and directed by Christopher Durang, The New Testament by Neil Labute and Carrie & Francine by Ruby Rae Spiegel.

George Xenos designed the minimalist sets, Michael Bevins the costumes and Greg MacPherson the lighting for each of the plays.

For more information,visit www.59e59.org or www.throughlineartists.org.

Trust

2011-08-16T11:42:00.000-05:00

"My lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

--Thomas Merton

2011-08-14T12:01:00.000-05:00

Today may you receive all that you desire.

Things are quietly and slowly unfolding as they should

2011-08-10T15:26:00.003-05:00

“The movement to gratitude involves the discovery that God is the God of history and that things are quietly and slowly unfolding as they should. My spiritual task is to learn to listen to all that is going on and trust that God’s hand is guiding me. Then life is no longer a series of interruptions to my schedule and plans, but rather the patient and purposeful way by which God forms and leads me day by day. Gratitude makes the interruption into an invitation, and the occasion of complaint into a moment for contemplation.”
-- Henri Nouwen, Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit

2011-08-06T15:38:00.003-05:00

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces . . .
--May Sarton

The Glass Menagerie-lite

2011-08-04T10:23:00.004-05:00

In a small, barely half-filled theatre Tuesday night, I experienced a tiny theatrical miracle, the New York premiere of a lighthearted romantic comedy by one of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century, or any century as far as I’m concerned.

It’s a story of a domineering southern mother, her painfully shy daughter, her son who works in a factory but dreams of becoming a writer, and the coworker he brings home to dinner, having been nagged by his mother, to meet his sister. Sounds familiar, right? Except for the idea that the thwarted worlds of Amanda, Laura and Tom Wingfield would ever be seen as lighthearted, romantic or comedic.

The Pretty Trap, which opened last night at the Acorn Theatre, is Williams' improbable one-act precursor to The Glass Menagerie. Starring Katharine Houghton as Amanda (left, standing), Nisi Sturgis as Laura, Robert Eli as Tom and Loren Dunn as Jim Delaney, the Gentleman Caller (standing), and directed by Antony Marsellis, the Cause Celebrè production is a pleasant, under-an-hour summer night’s diversion. But more important, it’s a fascinating look into the creative process of a playwright and one of his most exquisite works.

While some funny moments are peppered throughout, mostly relating to the awkwardness of Jimmy’s presence and Amanda’s pushiness, it’s hard to see this play as a comedy because the ghosts of the more well-known characters haunt our minds.

At the time, Williams described The Pretty Trap (which is what Amanda says every young woman should be) as the second act of a longer work to come. I don’t know what could have happened for him to follow such a dramatically different path for Menagerie and, given the two plays I’d certainly choose the later work, but it is nice to see Laura --and the unicorn -- have a happy ending for a change.

It’s also a relief to have an Amanda who isn’t as cruel toward her children. Although she doesn’t utter the famous “the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don’t plan for it” warning, she does still want the best for her children’s future, as she sees it. But here she prods more than belittles.

Another character difference is that this Laura doesn’t have a limp and is better at standing up to her mother.

Houghton seems to enjoy portraying this Amanda-lite. She has played Laura, but says she never had any desire to take on the more formidable matriarch, a role which her aunt, Katharine Hepburn, assumed and won an Emmy nomination for in a 1973 TV adaptation. Although she has numerous stage and film credits and is a produced playwright, Houghton probably will always be best known as the sunny young daughter who brings home a black fiancé (Sidney Poitier) to her liberal parents (Hepburn and Spencer Tracy) in the controversial 1967 film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

The other cast members also seem comfortable in their roles. Ray Klausen has created a shabbily comfy flat in St. Louis, absent the grim alley and fire escape that set the tone in Menagerie. Bernie Dove’s lighting effectively shifts the moods.

Gone too is the expressionism that lends Menagerie its “dream play” quality. The Pretty Trap is a fast-paced, straightforward naturalist play, which runs through Aug. 21 and is well worth journeying over the Theater Row to see.

2011-08-02T13:08:00.001-05:00

“A ‘No’ uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or, what is worse, to avoid trouble.”
-- Ghandi

2011-08-01T12:38:00.000-05:00

2011-07-31T13:47:00.000-05:00

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
-- Joseph Campbell

Off Broadway award established to honor caricaturist Sam Norkin

2011-07-30T16:02:00.001-05:00

I posted this announcement of Sam's award last week and now I am sorry to hear that Sam passed away this morning. God bless you, Sam. I will cherish the caricature you did of me.

To honor his longstanding contributions to the New York Theater—both On and Off Broadway—the Drama Desk Board of Directors has decided to establish a new special annual award in Sam Norkin’s name. Sam has been a superlative caricaturist of theater, opera, ballet and film celebrities for the New York Herald Tribune (from 1940-1956) and for the Daily News (from 1956-1982). His witty, elegant illustrations have also appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe, Back Stage and Variety. During his many years of service to the Drama Desk, he designed the original Drama Desk Awards plaque, served as President of the organization, and has been a longtime member of the Board.

The Sam Norkin Off Broadway Award will be given in any Off Broadway awards category (person or production) which the nominating committee designates as worthy of this special distinction.

I was blessed to have Sam do a caricature of me one evening at at Drama Desk party. It's good to hear he's being honored in this way.

2011-07-27T15:44:00.002-05:00

"We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent to God, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not a fable or a nice story. God manifests everywhere, in every thing, in people, in things and in nature and in events. You cannot be without God. It's impossible! Simply impossible.!"
-- Thomas Merton

2011-07-23T12:32:00.000-05:00

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us."
-- Helen Keller

2011-07-18T11:03:00.001-05:00

"There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living."
-- Nelson Mandela

Happy 93rd birthday, Mr. Mandela!

From the Dressing Room

2011-07-12T16:21:00.005-05:00

In 61 stories, some only a paragraph long, and lovely subtle photographs, Carlos Martinez opens a door into the backstage life of a silent actor in his new book, From the Dressing Room: Reflections on the (Silent) Art of Mime. Having spoken his lines in gestures for more than three decades, this Spanish actor has become one of the most acclaimed mimes in Europe. With the release of this touching 128-page book, he now speaks in words.

Staring with Little Miracle, he shares the awe he feels that people are actually buying tickets to see him perform. I’m sure many artists feel this way.

His anecdotes of his performing life read like meditations. I love the prayerful quality, the respect he has for his art and his audience. The stories are grace-filled, but also often humorous and informative, offering insight into his specific art form.

In Masks, he explains that it takes nearly an hour to paint his mime face alone in his dressing room and “barely 10 seconds and a towel” to take it off, always before his audience.

“Many people have expressed their appreciation for this small gesture at the end of the show,” he writes. “It makes them feel more proximity to me, or perhaps makes me seem more ‘real.’ I suppose a similar thing happens when a priest takes off a cassock, when a doctor removes a lab coat, or when a policeman gets out of uniform. Once the ‘costume’ disappears, it seems like we become nearer and more accessible.”

His contemplation then moves to the kind of masks that all of us put on at times.

“For a mime, the mask isn’t a symbol of hypocrisy but of honesty. In reality, it comes off in a mere 10 seconds. The mask that we must all be concerned about is the one that isn’t painted on with makeup: the one that you can’t see with your eyes, the one that human beings have gotten accustomed to wearing unconsciously. Unlike its makeup counterpart, this one can be put on in 10 seconds, but it takes years of effort to get rid of it. This type of mask penetrates the soul, and all the towels in the world are not enough to get rid of it.”

Many of the narratives are about what takes place in his dressing room -- his preparation, relationships deepened while sharing with fellow artists and the visitors who drop by. For him, the dressing room is “an ally, an intimate space, a waiting room, a decompression chamber, a meeting place and even a small embassy.” Because he learns so much there, he calls one of his dressing room reflections The Professor. And he has had much opportunity to learn, having visited more than 1,000 dressing rooms in more than 30 countries.

In Undress to Dress, he explains that actors need to use their time in the dressing room to strip away all the masks they have worn during the day.

“We have to get rid of all of those other characters that society pushes us to be until we find our true selves, devoid of artifice, clean, vulnerable,” he writes. “The dressing room isn’t a place where the actor puts on a mask, but where he takes it off.”

I’ve never seen Carlos perform, but have been blessed with a couple of his DVDs. I met him and his wife, Jenny Findeis, several years ago when they were in New York, and Jenny and I have stayed in touch through e-mail and Facebook. It is a blessing to reconnect through this book.

To read the first 17 pages of the book, click here.

2011-07-09T12:01:00.001-05:00

"If everything on earth were rational, nothing would happen."
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov

The Joys of Teaching

2011-07-07T13:59:00.005-05:00

Sharing with you Dr. Amit Nagpal's e-interview of me for his blog, The Joys of Teaching. It was a honor to take part. Click here to read.

In "The Magdalene" Mary is Jesus' wife -- not the world's most famous prostitute

2011-07-06T08:53:00.004-05:00

I wrote this feature for the July 17, 2011 issue of The Living Church magazine.

Although he grew up in the United Church of Christ tradition, James Olm had no impression of Mary Magdalene until about a dozen years ago when a minister gave him a copy of The Gnostic Gospels and he began reading about the woman wrongly considered the most famous prostitute of all time. Reading the Gospel of Mary revolutionized his thinking, giving him a missionary zeal to spread the word in the best way he knew how.

“Immediately what went up in my mind was, ‘Boy, did she get screwed and I’ve got to clear her name,’” he said.

That’s just what this 54-year-old musical theatre professor from Casper College in Wyoming hopes to do with The Magdalene, his Off-Broadway musical play about the woman The Gnostic Gospels portray as one of Jesus’ most intimate disciples.

“If she was the enlightened one, the apostle of apostles, we should know this and make it work for our belief systems now,” he said. “What would society be like if we had had an example like Mary? It makes Christ even more of a revolutionary. Our whole society would have been different if the Jesus figure had been a woman. We wouldn’t have had the patriarchal society. It doesn’t take anything away from Christ. This was something I had to do.”

Olm (right in photo) shares his passion for an alternative image of Mary while sprawled on the steps inside the Theatre at St. Clement’s, his lean figure clan in jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers. Up those stairs his play is in rehearsal, five days away from the first preview performance and less than three weeks from the scheduled June 27 opening. He chose this facility after looking at several other Off-Broadway houses, even though he had to wait more than 15 months for it to be available. It was at St. Clement’s Church in Rome that Pope Gregory I declared Mary Magdalene a prostitute, so it seemed appropriate to change that image in this Episcopal church that was gutted in the 1960s to create a theatre and where now both church and theatre reside.

“My thinking is this is where we can clear her name, finally.”

He fully expects opposition to this effort. After the play had a reading in Casper he received hate mail. The Catholic priests he showed it to in town disapproved. It was just too much for some people to see Mary not only lifted to full discipleship, but married to Yeshua (the Hebrew for Jesus) and pregnant with a daughter. (Olm won’t say whether it’s Jesus’ child because that would be giving away his ending.)

“My whole belief system has solidified,” he said. “I don’t see myself as a Christian anymore. I still believe everything he (Jesus) said, but we all have the same potential to do what Christ did, to be enlightened, but we don’t get it.”

The road to this Off-Broadway run began in 1999 when Olm, who has written two other original musicals, Mulberry and Obits, discovered The Gnostic Gospels -- and his calling. He composed the music and co-wrote the book, with J.C. Hanley, who also wrote the lyrics. Richard Maltby Jr. (left in photo), a veteran Broadway producer, director and lyricist, is the creative consultant on the production, which is directed by Richard Burk and is schedule to run through Sept. 4.

Maltby, whose Broadway chops include conceiving and directing the only two musical revues to ever win Tony Awards for best musicals, Fosse and Ain’t Misbehavin’, was attracted to The Magdalene because of his own fascination with The Gnostic Gospels, and he sensed potential in the video he saw of the Wyoming reading, calling Olm a gifted composer.

“It was surprisingly touching and skillfully done,” he said, sitting in the theatre during the rehearsal’s dinner break. “It needed some sort of professional work on it. In musicals you have to follow the action.”

With that in mind, Maltby, a former altar boy who grew up in a nondenominational church, guided the show down to one act, 90 minutes with no intermission, from two acts in two hours with an intermission.

“When we stripped all that talk out, the story really started coming alive and I was surprised at how powerful it was becoming,” he said. “It’s not for nothing that it’s called the greatest story ever told.”

And Maltby knows a thing or two about telling stories for the theatre.

“When you’ve done a lot of shows there are certain things you know to do, usually mistakes you’ve made and learned from,” he said. “There’s nothing in the world more complicated than a new musical.”

Like Olm, Maltby, who studied contemporary religions in college, believes in seeing the historical figures of the Bible differently even if that means a married Jesus.

“The central issue in all Christian religions is that Christ was a man,” he said. “That’s central, and he might have been God. People want to take away the human part of what makes him a man. Sex makes us very uncomfortable.”

He sees this also in the idea of the virgin birth.

“We just want to so purify him of any taint of humanity. I find it troubling. This show returned me to what I believed in.”

For the dozen or so actors, the show may be doing the opposite, taking them from what they believed in. Maltby says cast members have been reading The Gnostic Gospels on their own and their curiosity may be leading them to beliefs that are more relevant to their lives.

One of these who is taking a new look at Mary Magdalene is Linsie VanWinkle, the 28-year-old actress portraying her. VanWinkle (center) grew up Baptist in Oklahoma and never imagined her first starring role in New York would be as Jesus’ wife.

“Not in a million years,” she says with laugh.

The only Magdalene she had been aware of was the prostitute and she’s finding this one much more accessible.

“She’s a strong, feisty woman in touch emotionally but not afraid to get dirty, like me,” she says. “I based it on that. Not to step on faith toes, but it seems more the beliefs I have. He was a human being and she would have been there to support him. It’s such a delicate subject. It’s a wonderful story to tell and I enjoy telling it.”

The pressure she feels is more than just that of a leading actress portraying a character.

“I have a huge sense of responsibility. People only know the stereotype. There’s a huge feminist bone in me to show women who are strong and have a place in society.”

A feminist bone also propelled Olm, a divorced father of three, especially when he learned the Catholic church had rescinded the notion of Mary Magdalene being a prostitute.

“I thought, ‘Why haven’t we heard of this? It’s still being preached. This is not doing justice to women. This is wrong.’”

He hopes people will see his play with an open mind.

“It’s not about preaching at all,” he says. “It’s a story about Jesus and Mary and Mary’s journey in a world that was suppressing her. It’s a story about women’s empowerment and trying to find the answer.

“I’m sure there’s going to be controversy from the ultraconservatives. What I ask for is tolerance. If we could accept everybody’s beliefs we’d have a lot better society.”

Natalie Toro to perform at Broadway Blessing

2011-07-05T09:50:00.013-05:00

Acclaimed singer/actress Natalie Toro will perform for the 15th anniversary celebration of Broadway Blessing, the interfaith service of song, dance and story that has been bringing the theatre community together every September to ask God’s blessing on the new season. Toro will sing “Where Is It Written,” backed by the Broadway Blessing Choir, at the free event, to be held at 7 p.m. Sept. 12 at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street. Reservations are not necessary.

Toro was last seen on Broadway as Madame DeFarge in A Tale of Two Cities, a role that earned her Sarasota Magazine’s Best Supporting Actress Award during the show’s pre-Broadway run. Previously on the Great White Way she played Eponine in Les Miserables and Sally in A Christmas Carol.

In addition to her extensive credits Off-Broadway and in national tours and regional theatre, Toro has performed as a solo artist at Carnegie Hall and at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, Ireland. She sang with a Big Band at The Iridium Jazz club in NYC with Tony Fusco. Her solo show was premiered in February 2009 at The Metropolitan Room to critical acclaim. Her new One Woman Extravaganza, “The Broken Road (Baggage Limit 50 Pounds),” premiered in Hollywood last year. Her CD, entitled Natalie Toro, was released to critical acclaim nationally in 2008, the same week she was honored by the Bronx Borough President, Adolfo Carrion, Jr. as part of Puerto Rican heritage month. “Where Is It Written?” is featured on the CD.

This year’s Broadway Blessing also will premiere a new song by Phil Hall, written in honor of the 15th anniversary that will be sung by Tony Haris. As in years past, Project Dance will perform and Rabbi Jill Hausman of The Actors’ Temple and the Rev. Canon Tom Miller, the Cathedral’s canon for liturgy and the arts, will lead the annual candle lighting ceremony.

More guest artists will be announced in the weeks to come. Retta Blaney is the founding producer of Broadway Blessing.

2011-07-04T11:41:00.002-05:00

"Hope always awake, whispers mercy for a future as sure as a past."
-- St. Elizabeth Ann Seton

Jennifer Muller’s The White Room

2011-06-30T10:38:00.005-05:00

BY MARY SHEERAN

Don’t go to the white room. I’m serious.

The White Room, the latest full-length dance work by Jennifer Muller presented at Cedar Lake Theater last week, started out well, with Hsing-hua Wang, a lovely company apprentice (who got her job the Sutton Foster way, and deservedly so) appearing as the essence of innocence, dancing joyfully about the wide stage. Well, you knew that wasn’t going to last. A second woman entered and they danced happily as friends, with tenderness and joy, until (uh oh) a man entered. (I am tempted to bring in the dialogue from Little Mary Sunshine: “A man! [gasp] Another man!”) He picks a favorite, switches to the other (who was so hurt), and the dynamics seems very high school, but Very Important to Those Involved.

Okay, that sardonic tone came in this early without my really intending it, because I was engrossed during the first part of The White Room. Emotions were clearly defined, even at the turn of a dime, and the dancing was excellent. Dancers hurled legs, arms, and each other, in a way that I knew precisely what their feelings were.

The remarkable energy and stamina of the dancers do not, however, make up for a lack of forward thrust and dramatic competence on the part of the choreographer.

As the cast fills the stage, the relationships become rough, even violent and especially bad for Wang, who takes the brunt of it. Women compete for men, are hurt, betrayed, and go back for more. So, you think, the second part will bring some resolution. Nope. The same emotions and relentless power happy violence from the men against the women was ongoing. It felt like what people used to call angry, militant feminist propaganda of the 1960s, which I always thought was a myth. Dividing the dancers into the all powerful men who hold the winning cards and the powerless women, victims of brutality, whose only defense is seduction is a pretty appalling design and exhausting to watch.

The music helped somewhat, adjusting the mood when the steps were the same aggressive, brutal thrusts over and over. Projections (the latest toy in dance) designed by Kevin Harkens did not provide much guidance or lucid commentary for the audience to understand where we were and why we were there. A question I kept asking myself during the second part.

Every time I thought the end was coming, more dancers would appear on the sides of the stage preparing to enter, and I briefly fantasized that I might die in that uncomfortable seat (second time I felt that, recently; first was at Spiderman last week). When dancers changed clothes and drapes floated down, I wasn’t sure I wanted to take the time to figure out what on earth was going on.

When a technician appeared at the side scaffolding to adjust some lights, he bent over them in a very graceful way, and I thought, “Oh, no, a new character.” But he was just trying, in his own way, to shed some light on the dance.

I stopped caring for people I had cared for in the beginning. My seat grew more uncomfortable, and the sightlines more annoying. I grew less forgiving as audience heads in front of me cut off the feet and lower bodies of the dancers, or as often happened, dancers who flung themselves on the floor. I didn’t care to strain to see what was happening.

The dancers, I must say, were solid. The men in the company, even though playing despicable characters, proved a powerful presence, and I much liked Pascal Rekoert in his hard-to-like role. A character who appeared to be a sort of matron in the madhouse/powerless Mrs. Danforth character (Susanna Bozzetti), Rosie Lani Fiedelman as a more experienced and sexually charged woman, and Elizabeth Disharoon’s poignant depth, proved exceptional in the large cast. Gen Hashimoto was quite creepy. The dancers worked hard and I wish I could speak better about the piece and the time we all spent with it.

My friend Kathryn Buck observed that no one changed in the course of this long piece; the women returned to abusive men, which made it painful to witness. I thought I detected some sort of change in Wang at the end, for she turned away from one of her worst tormentors in the “whiter” ending (after it seemed that she had died), but the gesture was almost a throwaway, and this final section was so short (I shouldn’t complain) that it seemed unimportant compared with what had gone on before. Since the same people were in the room, the whole mess would all start up again and then again and then again. Ah, but someone new did enter – nope, not much hope for her, either.

This work has been in development for a while, and I suspect the creator simply lost track of the forest. It happens. Every so often, the company would release some tidbit about the work, and one such tidbit indicated that the dancers played wives, mistresses, and henchmen. Not that it mattered, but who knew? The company’s press material stated that, “The piece concerns the corruption of innocence, contrasting purity with heartless self-interest and questioning the value systems of our time.” (Dance that, fools!) I would rephrase that as “the corruption of talent with self absorbed, pretentious, and stereotyped choreographic design, both dated and damaging.”

Jennifer Muller/The Works Presents The White Room. Choreographer: Jennifer Muller; Music: Compilation of works by Apocaliptica. Costume design by Anaya Cullen. Set design: Stageworks. Presented at Cedar Lake Theater, New York City June 22 to June 26. For more information, visit http://www.jmtw.org/

Mary Sheeran is the author of Quest of the Sleeping Princess, a novel set during a gala performance at the New York City Ballet, and Who Have the Power, a historical novel set during the Comstock Lode era about a musician discovering that her mother is a healing woman of the Washo tribe.

2011-06-29T10:27:00.000-05:00

"There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less."
— G.K. Chesterton

2011-06-23T13:49:00.000-05:00

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
– Marcel Proust

The Lights Are Bright on Broadway

2011-06-22T10:06:00.006-05:00

Playwright David Davalos, Journalist Retta Blaney Receive Faith-Based Awards
Playwright David Davalos and journalist Retta Blaney have been named recipients of 2011 “The Lights are Bright on Broadway” Awards presented annually by Masterwork Productions, Inc. to individuals and organizations making a difference in the Broadway community through faith.

Davalos is being honored for his play Wittenberg, a witty battle of wills and philosophies between Dr. Faustus and Martin Luther as they attempt to influence star pupil Hamlet at 16th-century Wittenberg University. The play was presented March 11 - April 17 by Off-Broadway’s Pearl Theatre Company. It also received the 2008 Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play and will have its London debut at the Gate Theatre this September. Davalos also is the recipient of the National Theatre Conference’s 2008 Stavis Playwriting Award. He is a graduate of the theatre programs of both the University of Texas and Ohio University. Some of his other plays include Daedalus: A Fantasia of Leonardo da Vinci; The Tragedie of Johnnius Caerson (a comedy in blank verse chronicling the Late Night TV Wars) and Darkfall (a modern sequel to Paradise Lost).

“I'm so gratified (and relieved!) by Wittenberg's receiving The Lights Are Bright on Broadway Award as it offers confirmation that the play's engagement with the question of faith is resonating with audience members who have a real stake in the issue,” Davalos said. “It has always been my hope that the play would speak meaningfully to the ‘Lutherans’ in the audience as much as it does to the ‘Faustians’ one tends to see in abundance in the theatergoing community -- this award helps me to believe that may indeed the case.”

Blaney is a journalist and theater critic and writes Life Upon the Sacred Stage, a popular blog about theater and faith. She is the author of "Working on the Inside: The Spiritual Life through the Eyes of Actors," featuring interviews with Kristin Chenoweth, Edward Herrmann, Liam Neeson, Phylicia Rashad, Vanessa Williams and many other Broadway actors discussing their faith as well as "Stories from the Real World” with a forward by Walter Cronkite. She also directs the annual Broadway Blessing, a free interfaith service at St. John the Divine Cathedral, which brings together the Broadway community each September to ask a blessing on the new season. Her award will be presented at this year’s service 7 pm Monday, Sept. 12. Among the performers who have taken part in the service over the years are Lynn Redgrave, Marian Seldes, Frances Sternhagen, Boyd Gaines and Edward Herrmann.

“I am honored to receive the Lights Are Bright on Broadway Award on behalf of all those who have taken part in this event and helped it to reach its 15th anniversary,” Blaney said. “I started Broadway Blessing in 1997 to bring people together to celebrate theater and also to offer comfort and encouragement to those who make their living in the challenging world of show business.”

Previous recipients of “The Lights are Bright on Broadway” Awards are Kia Corthron for her play A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick (Playwrights Horizons), Max McLean for The Screwtape Letters (Westside Theatre), Dan Gordon for his play Irena's Vow on Broadway and Radio City Rockette Cheryl Cutlip, founder of Project Dance.

Masterwork Productions, Inc. is a faith based, non-profit performing arts organization, which among other services, provides the only resource for professional Broadway and Off-Broadway theater reviews with an added Christian perspective.

The living is easy

2011-06-21T17:15:00.000-05:00

Henry James said the two most beautiful words in the English language are summer afternoon. I think you only need one word -- summer!
Hope yours is great.

Marriage equality

2011-06-21T14:59:00.001-05:00

VICAR BUDDY STALLINGS' WEEKLY MESSAGE/St. Bart's Episcopal Church

It is PRIDE week in New York City, and still we wait. The state legislature did not pass the gay marriage bill yesterday as many of us had hoped. But neither did the lawmakers go home. There is still hope for this week.

A number of our clergy colleagues went to Albany to visibly support one side or the other. Though all who know understand that we are a bit thin on the ground at St. Bart's, I have felt some guilt for not rallying. Honestly, though, it is not our practice to be quite that publically political, arguing that if we preach and teach the gospel of Jesus, good and faithful people will come to the right conclusions. By and large, I believe that and support our quasi-policy in this regard, though in the "what-would-Jesus-do" world, I am pretty sure Jesus would be a little less cautious than I generally am.

Sadly, the most vitriolic discourse around the issue comes from religious quarters. Sometimes when I have heard NYC's most visible religious leader pontificate about this bill, I have marveled that we share the same world religion, much less similar outfits. Once again I am reminded of Anne Lamott's classic line: "It is enough to make Jesus drink gin straight out of the cat dish."

I don't recommend that as a course of action, particularly not out of the cat dish.

But it is time. It is time for this to be a done deal. Legislative changes don't magically change hearts. We need only talk to persons of color in this country to know that. But it is a crucial step. It was fifty years ago this summer (I was eight years old) when the freedom riders poured into Mississippi and other southern states to register voters and stir up all kinds of trouble. Thank God for them. By the time the civil rights legislation was passed a few years later, I was old enough to realize that change really was going to happen. And it did - imperfectly but emphatically. Changing the law matters.

The right to equal marriage under the law will not change every heart, but it is the right step. The table around which we gather each week in the Eucharist is wide and expandable with plenty of room for people on all sides of this issue, but the sacraments of the church, including marriage, can't just belong to one kind of group. These sacraments, these graces for God's sake, convey God to us; and they are God's to give - not ours.

2011-06-21T11:05:00.000-05:00

"To love a person is to learn the song
That is in their heart,
And to sing it to them
When they have forgotten."
-- Anon

Farewell, Ira Kleinman

2011-06-20T14:06:00.001-05:00

I just learned that radio talk show host and longtime Drama Desk member Ira Kleinman passed away yesterday morning. The funeral is 10 a.m. tomorrow at Woodlands Community Temple, 50 Worthington Road in White Plains.

I always enjoyed talking to Ira at Drama Desk gatherings -- he was a great source of news and gossip. I was honored to be interviewed by him for his radio show about my book Working on the Inside: The Spiritual Life Through the Eyes of Actors.

God bless you, Ira.

The Wise Man of Nyokodo

2011-06-20T13:26:00.004-05:00

Hello Friends,

I wanted to share the YouTube link to a video of excerpts from our recent production of The Wise Man of Nyokodo which I wrote, directed, and acted in. (Click here for video)

The Wise Man of Nyokodo is a Japanese style Noh Play in English. It is based on an imagined meeting in the rebuilt Nagasaki Cathedral between the Japanese Catholic peace activist, Dr. Takashi Nagai, and the pilot of the Bockscar, Charles Sweeney, years after the dropping of the Bomb. The performance features professional NYC theater and film actor, Yoshiro Kono; traditional Noh choreography by Sachiyo Ito; Butoh choreography and performance by Fordham Theater Professor, Dawn Saito; and original music composed and performed by the Japanese music ensemble, Wafoo.

If you or folks you know are interested in hosting a performance of The Wise Man of Nyokodo, please contact me at caseydgroves@gmail.com or at (917) 969-8698.

Many Thanks,
Casey Groves

“Through The Wise Man of Nyokodo, I hope many people can deepen general understanding of the brutality of war and the inhumanity of nuclear weapons and work to realize a world free of nuclear weapons.”
-Tomihisa Taue

(Photo, by Lauren Yarger, of Casey Groves and Karen Lehman, executive director of the Episcopal Actors' Guild.)

Jewels at the New York City Ballet

2011-06-17T09:35:00.005-05:00

By Mary Sheeran

         There’s an apocryphal story, repeated so many times it may as well be true and maybe it is, a little, that George Balanchine visited Van Cleef and Arpels and was inspired by the gems on display to create what became the first full-length plotless ballet, Jewels. Don’t try this yourself. Inspiration like this only works if you happen to be George Balanchine. As jewels take years to form and be finished, this ballet represents the enormous range, style, musicality, and resources Balanchine had accumulated in his own jewelbox by 1967.

         For resources, he had the dancers of the New York City Ballet, the company he’d been making dances on since 1948, and the theater he’d designed for dance, the New York State Theatre at Lincoln Center. As for stylistic range, one could divide the ballets of his vast repertory into categories of Emeralds (romanticism), Rubies (brassy, jazz, Stravinsky), and Diamonds (distillation of Russian imperial style – a typical Balanchine approach that looks forward even while looking back. There’s a reason he was born in January.)

         For the record, Balanchine did say of Jewels, “The ballet had nothing to do with jewels. The dancers are just dressed like jewels.” (They are, and beautifully, thanks to the brilliance of costume designer Karinska.)

         Jewels may be considered a three-act ballet, but each section is performed separately, and there is no “mix and match” finale. It begins subtly, with Emeralds. The more you see this piece, the more you grow to love it and the more its music (from Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Shylock) haunts for days after its hearing. Some may feel this section is too slow (company ads refer to the music as being at a “mesmerizing pace,” whatever that means), but it seems to me an essay about time, love and loss, its subject being an aspect of woman that cannot be captured in the other two sections. Some of Emeralds appears to be youthful frolicking, especially that impish pas de trios (Erica Pereira, Anthony Huxley, and Ana Sophia Schiller at Saturday’s matinee performance). There are two delightful solos for women: Rachel Rutherford danced my favorite of the two, delightfully discovering her arms and feet; the applause from her colleagues and her solo curtain call confirmed that this lovely dancer is leaving the company.

         In watching Balanchine’s work, one needs to interact with music and dance more than usual. In Emeralds, the music is slow, but the dancers move fast, capturing the music’s inner pulse. The result is an innocence mixed with longing that permeates the piece, a sense of the fleeting nature of time even when it seems to move slowly. In the final moments, as the women disappear, the three men are left reaching after them into the empty air.

         Bam. That would be Rubies. The piano shoots out Stravinsky’s jazzy “wake ‘em up” chords from his Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, banishing the ethereal green forest (a little too green, I’d say) of Emeralds, and we have eight women, brassily flashing in red. (Susan Walters was the jazzy pianist.) The women’s legs seem to have grown longer, certainly they become powerful weapons; you wonder if they let Teresa Reichlin take hers on airplanes. The music insists on her centrality; and she is central. Whereas we had three men reaching for their ideal in Emeralds, now we have four men who leap forward, each taking a very real leg or arm. They proceed to (take your pick) a) attempt to manipulate her, moving her limbs – a frequently used Balanchine motif; b) be the four partners she has picked to dance with. Whichever you choose, their suggested capture doesn’t last long. This section is a brilliant blend of the Siren from The Prodigal Son and the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty. And by the way, Gonzalo Garcia, while admirably understated here, proved a dynamic gem when he needed to be. Watching him, I was reminded that the role was made on Edward Villella.

         And, speaking of The Sleeping Beauty, the final segment is its sophisticated distillation, Diamonds, an extended pas de deux (interrupted by other dances), whose lead couple are generally considered to be the company’s royalty (here the marvelous Maria Kowroski and Charles Askegard). The man must be strong alone and as a support for his partner, who doesn’t seem to need him much. However romantic this section seems, and however it may appear to be a “wedding” pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty (implied by the diamonds and white costumes), the man here is as longing for the ideal, elusive woman as his earlier companions at the end of Emeralds. The finale here, a lively processional that fills the stage with dancers, followed by a solemn and courtly reverence, pays homage to the land of Petipa and Tchaikovsky, and certainly to the woman who rules over all at the end, but also to the men of Jewels, with their arms outstretched, reaching for her. Taking his place among them is Mr. Balanchine himself.

Jewels. Choreography by George Balanchine; Scenery by Peter Harvey; Costumes by Karinska. Emeralds: Music by Gabriel Fauré (from Pelléas et Mélisande and Shylock); Rubies: Music by Igor Stravinsky (Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra; Diamonds: Music by Peter Ilyitch Tschaikovsky (from Symphony No. 3 in D major). Premiere: April 13, 1967, New York State Theater, with additions to Emeralds in 1976). For information about New York City Ballet, go to www.nycballet.com.

Mary Sheeran is the author of Quest of the Sleeping Princess, a novel set during a gala performance at the New York City Ballet, and Who Have the Power, a historical novel set during the Comstock Lode era about a pianist discovering that her mother was a healing woman of the Washo tribe.

Can You Live Without Labels?

2011-06-15T10:14:00.001-05:00

VICAR BUDDY STALLINGS' WEEKLY MESSAGE/St. Bart's Episcopal Church

"What do you mean when you say you are a progressive?" It is a good question, posed by someone in one of the Transition Forums we had last Sunday. Though I was pleased enough with my answer, maybe too pleased, I have given it some more thought over the last couple of days.

The truth, of course, is that when I say that I am progressive, the real message is that someone else is not. Progressive=good; not progressive=bad. That seems so "last decade". Surely we can do better.

This is what I have decided: I am finished with labeling myself. I can't stop others from doing it to me, but I am not going to make it easy for them by slapping it on myself like a badge. And I am going to attempt not to label them. That will be harder, and I am realistic about my possibilities for succeeding. It is marvelously easy to dismissively say, "well, she is such a 'you fill in the blank.'" Easy and dismissive but also lazy and always somewhat incorrect, certainly partial. It is a shorthand way of interacting with one another that does not benefit us in the long run. Surely we are insightful enough to know that each of us is infinitely more than some primary identification.

So much of what we know about Jesus comes through the lens of narrators with clearly defined group identities and agendas. (The Matthean Jesus, for example, is quite different form the Johannine Jesus.) Despite that, the picture we have of him is of a man who just didn't go there. I don't think he talked to the Samaritan woman because she was a Samaritan or because she was a woman. He talked to her because she was present at a well where he stopped for a little break. Beyond a doubt, his interaction with her is a remarkable and didactic moment, but I don't think he was deliberately crossing boundaries to teach us something. He wasn't being a hip, progressive Rabbi; he was just being Jesus. Maybe that is the real lesson.

Buddy just being Buddy is not nearly as good as Jesus just being Jesus. No doubt about that, but all in all it is the best I have got. Living without labels isn't really going to happen. I do know that. But it is early summer and the living is easy; it is cool enough to pretend it is never going to get really hot again. We can imagine anything we want-and maybe even make some of it come true.

A Little Journey

2011-06-11T09:07:00.009-05:00

When A Little Journey opened on Broadway in 1918, a critic for the New York Herald wrote that audiences were so moved they lingered in their seats afterward “to cling to the men and women of Miss Crothers’ imagination as one would hold onto friends.”

I felt the same way at Monday night’s opening of the Mint Theater Company’s revival of this sacramental play by Rachel Crothers, which is expertly directed by Jackson Gay. As we were standing to leave I said to my friend Brenda, “I want to see this again.” The next morning I started e-mailing my Drama Desk friends to ask them if they were going and had an extra ticket would they please take me. And dear Brian came through -- I went again last night and was so grateful to be back in that world with those special characters.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this play, and don’t want to. It’s a simple story, set in 1914, of people thrown together on a westbound train from New York in what will end up being a life-changing four-day journey for each of them. The first two acts are charming as we get to know the characters -- Julie Rutherford (Samantha Soule, in photo left), a dispirited young woman who is ready to jump from the train because she feels the future holds nothing for her; Jim West (McCaleb Burnett), a young man who has reformed his life by giving up alcohol and opening a ranch to help others get sober; Mrs. Bay (Rosemary Prinz) a hard-of-hearing grandmother traveling with her granddaughter, Lily (Chet Siegel); Annie (Jennifer Blood), an unwed mother with her baby; two college students, Frank (Ben Hollandsworth) and Charles (Ben Roberts); Mrs. Welch (Laurie Birmingham, in photo right), a demanding busybody; Mr. Smith (Douglas Rees), a cantankerous old man who prefers to stay holed up in his cabin and the ordered-about porter (Anthony L. Gaskins). The acting is first-rate across the board.

Martha Hally’s Victorian costumes, Paul Whitaker’s lighting and Jane Shaw’s sound design enhance the mood perfectly, and Roger Hanna’s set is a joy -- train seats on a revolving stage that allows each of the characters some time in the spotlight as their stories unfold.

As delightful as the first two acts are, it was the third that really did it for me. Up until then I had been enjoying the play immensely, which is my typical reaction to a Mint show. That company consistently presents the highest quality productions of any Off-Broadway theatre. In Act Three, however, the tone becomes deeply spiritual as the characters are brought together by an event that strips them of their egos and status (jewelry and expensive clothing gone), their loneliness and even their racial differences. With no private compartments to escape to, they form a primitive gathering around a bonfire, presenting a vision of the Kingdom where everyone is united and “there’s plenty of room.” It is so quietly powerful that my heart fills whenever I think of it. I don’t want to spoil the ending for you by saying more, but in looking back on it and then experiencing it again I can see how skillfully Crothers set the stage for this journey’s end.

A Little Journey, which was a nominee for the first Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is the second Crothers play I’ve seen at the Mint. My friend Peri and I were moved by her Susan and God in 2006, but Journey has affected me more deeply.

This kind of reaction has followed the play from the beginning. Its original production was greeted by the New York Times as “a simple, moving story deftly and very convincingly told.”

Crothers was inspired to write the play while riding on a train. She was struck by how travel “brought together such characters as I required.”

After playing for 252 performances on Broadway, A Little Journey toured the country, making notable stops in Washington and Chicago. In 1927, it was made into a silent film (now lost) starring Harry Carey, Billy Haines, and Claire Windsor. A handful of amateur and stock productions followed in the 1920s and ‘30s, but then it was the end of the line. The train stopped, and A Little Journey hasn’t been seen since.

Finding and resurrecting these lost gems is the mission of the Mint. Plays like this shouldn’t be allowed to be lost to history. Like any well-written work of literature, A Little Journey is perfectly at home in any era.

As for Crothers (1878-1958), she was among America’s most successful and produced playwrights during the first three decades of the 20th century. Nearly 30 of her plays opened on Broadway between 1906 and 1937.

“Although it rare now to find anyone who has heard of her,” wrote the New York Times in 1980, “Miss Crothers at the apex of her career was a symbol of success in the commercial theater.”

Program notes offer interesting insights into the writer and her plays, which often highlighted her interest in strong women characters and social concerns. A Man’s World (1910), heralded by one New York critic as the “first great American play,” followed a young woman’s struggle to establish an artistic career while raising an adopted son. Nice People (1921) examined the flapper phenomenon through the eyes of three young women and provided Katharine Cornell and Tallulah Bankhead with their first important roles. In Susan and God (1937), a socialite discovers the difference between public façade and personal faith while reconciling with her husband and daughter.

According to the notes, Crothers directed her own work. Her consistently high standards helped professionalize the role of director in American theater. She was also a dedicated philanthropist. She helped found many important charities, including the American Theater Wing for War Relief (established 1940), which evolved into today’s American Theater Wing.

By the late 1940s, the program notes continue, Crothers’ comedies fell out of fashion. She continued writing, but she did not produce any new plays, preferring to focus on her charity work. She died in her sleep on July 5, 1958. The Times wrote in her obituary “She was as skillful as she was prolific. Miss Crothers mixed an enormous amount of common sense with smooth craftsmanship and a rare knowledge of and faith in human nature.”

For tickets and further information call (212) 315-0231 or visit MintTheater.org. The Mint Theater Company is located at 311 W. 43rd St., on the third floor.

A Burst of Enthusiasm that Changed the World

2011-06-08T11:20:00.002-05:00

VICAR BUDDY STALLINGS' WEEKLY MESSAGE/St. Bart's Episcopal Church

Creative people make me less tired. Even when I feel as though I have been run over by a truck, in the presence of real creativity I am suddenly back - alive and hopeful, earnest and insightful, and amused and playful. All things once again can be imagined.

Earlier this week I spent some time with a truly creative spirit, one whose life oozes enthusiasm. She is no Pollyanna; life for her has had some hard edges. On more than one occasion, circumstances have required that she recreate herself. From my vantage point, it seems that each newly tweaked incarnation has gotten better and better.

Putting a fine point, or even a dull one, on precisely what set of dynamics, genetic or environmental, create such a composite of personhood is not possible. But the more of these wonderful characters I encounter, the more I am able to identify some things that seem to be common to them. With all due respect to the proverbial moody, miserable, and misanthropic creative genius, the folks I am talking about are the exact opposite, seeming to live from a place of joy that no amount of cynicism lurking about them can extinguish.

In our scripture there are frequent references to the idea that God is up to something new, creating again and again within the people of God a spirit of newness, of hope, of joy. I know that does not mean that we are guaranteed to be happy campers every minute. Heavens, I have been a testy camper a couple of times already today, and it is not yet noon! But it is not too much to hope that our faith will generate in us a sense of joy that lasts even when life is far from peachy. At its best, our faith, our experience of Christ in one another, develops within us a reservoir of joy that allows us to bounce back, to keep on hoping and loving and imagining.

It helps to remember that the Church, this lumbering, perplexing and often maddening entity, began in a burst of enthusiasm that changed the world. Far from the stodgy uptight reputation we have managed to earn and cherish, the church began with some wild and crazy carrying on! On Pentecost, I don't think there was one speck of meanness to be found; people were filled with joy and absolutely nothing could stop them from spreading some really, really Good News. Through all the twists and turns of the church, many of which, old and new, make us cringe, the Good News remains an invitation to a new thing, to a new life, to a life of creativity and joy.

Kelli O'Hara, Always Enchanting

2011-06-05T14:27:00.011-05:00

Three-time Tony nominee Kelli O'Hara launched her new solo CD, Always, Friday night at Manhattan's Town Hall with a 90-minute, intermission-less concert of nearly 20 songs from Broadway and the American Songbook, with a little taste of rock and roll thrown into the mix.

O’Hara has been one of my favorite Broadway performers since I first noticed her onstage, in Sweet Smell of Success in 2002. In the years that followed she continued to charm me in The Light in the Piazza, Pajama Game and South Pacific. I even ventured out in blizzard in January just to see her in Knickerbocker Holiday.

Looking festive in a blue, green and white print sarong dress with strappy high heeled sandals, her blond hair in a shoulder-length bob, she didn’t disappoint, at least not in a major way, in Friday’s concert.

I appreciated her creativity in song selection, choosing several of what she called “man songs,” numbers from shows or recordings that have traditionally been sung my men. Two of these in particular are ones I’ve always loved, “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park with George and “How Glory Goes” from Floyd Collins. It also was nice to hear her sing “This Nearly Was Mine” from South Pacific, which she listened to “hundreds of times” when her costar, Paul Szot, sang it during the critically acclaimed run of the show at Lincoln Center in 2008.

Another highlight of the evening was when she was joined by her father-in-law, singer/actor James Naughton, and husband, singer/songwriter Greg Naughton, for a moving a cappella version of James Taylor’s “Lonesome Road.” Later Kelli and Greg shared the stage with Broadway performers Sherie Rene Scott, Gavin Creel and Julie Foldesi for a spirited “Carry On,” a Crosby, Stills and Nash song that took me back to my youth.

While I was drawn into all of the numbers O’Hara sang and the way she sang them, what I wanted more of was her. Her interaction with the audience consisted mostly of talking a bit about the songs. Even when some technical difficulties with the bass player kept her improvising conversation while a technician worked away onstage, she still steered clear of the intimacy that some personal stories would have given.

I wanted anecdotes about what she called her “schizophrenic musical biography,” more than just the mention in passing that she had grown up on a farm in Oklahoma singing country and gospel while listening to Frank and Ella at her grandparents’ house, before majoring in opera in college. I knew most of that but would have liked to see that life more fully. Did her parents and siblings sing and if so, did they sing together at home or church? What were some of her early singing experiences?

I also was left wondering what it was like to be part of a musical family now. She said Naughton gatherings often include singing and I wanted a window into that world, a story or two of how that happens -- is it spontaneous or do they plan these times together? I craved some snapshots of that talented family singing together.

But other than that, the evening was all I could have hoped for. When she sang she was the same enchanting singer who has always captivated me, and she was well served by her band -- musical director Dan Lipton on piano, Howard Joines on drums/percussion, Antoine Silverman on violin/fiddle, Mark Vanderpoel on upright bass and Matt Beck on acoustic guitar, banjo and mandolin.

She sent us away with a shimmering “I Could Have Danced All Night,” which was appropriate because that’s exactly how I felt.

Little things mean a lot

2011-06-03T10:35:00.003-05:00

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
--Traditional

2011-06-01T11:46:00.001-05:00

"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars and to change the world."
- Harriet Tubman

Nuns, Silly and Serious, Hit Broadway

2011-05-30T11:35:00.004-05:00

I wrote this feature for the May 13, 2011 issue of NCR.

Sr. Jamison Connelly is a counselor in a Catholic drug rehabilitation center. Her garb is standard middle-aged nun fare, black skirt and vest, royal blue shirt, a crucifix pin, a simple wedding band. She depends on prayer to get her through her challenging work. And she swears -- profusely.

Nearby, at the Queen of Angels convent, the sisters have no discernible work. Attired in full black and white habits, with only their faces showing, they giggle and sing their way through the day -- “Praise the Lord, it’s good to be a nun. . . The world’s your oyster when you’re locked inside a cloister.” It’s easy to imagine they’ve never heard a curse word, much less uttered one.

Such are the portrayals of women religious in two shows that opened within 24 hours on Broadway last month, “High” and “Sister Act.” “High” closed on April 24, just five days after opening, due to mixed to negative reviews, but will probably go back out to regional theatres.

“High,” a drama by Matthew Lombardo, is born from his life experience. "Sister Act" is a musicalized version of the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg movie about nuns harboring a second-rate lounge singer who has witnessed a murder. It would have seemed both shows would have attracted audiences -- “High” because it starred an A-list Hollywood and theatre actress, Kathleen Turner, and “Sister Act” because it’s a musical and the film was a hit that spawned a follow-up film. (Goldberg is a producer of the Broadway version.)

While audiences may latch onto these current nun stories, the real vowed women likely felt much more of a kinship at the Booth Theatre with Sr. Jamison, a former drug addict who was homeless for several years at the height of her addiction, than they are to the comic characters up the street at the Broadway Theatre. (As silly as the nuns can be in “Sister Act,” at least they’re women. In his Off-Broadway show “The Divine Sister,” female impersonator Charles Busch offers a spoof of the far-fetched nun portrayals from 1960s movies such as “The Singing Nun” and “The Trouble with Angels.”)

The realistic quality Lombardo brings to Sr. Jamison is natural considering the Catholic playwright based her in part on a high school teacher. But what makes her even more believable is what else he drew upon -- his faith and how that enabled him to recover from a seven-year addiction to crystal meth.

“Sr. Jamison is a nun, but I think she doesn’t buy into a lot of Catholicism,” Lombardo said one afternoon during an interview in the conference room of his show’s publicist. “She has her special relationship with God. She gets him and he gets her. She covers herself in being a nun.”

Her descent into addiction and homelessness was caused largely by guilt she carried from her teenage years, believing she was responsible for her younger sister’s death after the boy she brought home one night murdered the girl while Jamison was passed out downstairs.

After three and a half years on the street, Jamison got sober, returned to her childhood faith and became a nun “to find forgiveness and seek redemption.” She explains that doing all of that was enough. Giving up profanity as well would be “too much for one lifetime.”

“I curse -- a lot,” she says. “It’s one of my character defects.”

She’s also quick with a sarcastic response. Complaining one morning about starting work so early, her superior, Fr. Michael Delpapp (Stephen Kunken), asks if she hadn’t had to get up early in the convent.

“No, and we didn’t make bread and cheese for the townspeople,” she quips.

Lombardo says nuns were his biggest fan base in pre-Broadway productions in Hartford, Cincinnati and St. Louis, responding to Sr. Jamison’s unconventionality.

“She’s a very human, tangible character. They respond to her faith, in some way, and to her flaws.”

The nuns in “Sister Act” lean more toward caricature, in keeping with the genre of musical comedy and the model set by the movie, although one of their creators, playwright Douglas Carter Beane, based them in part on the sisters he encountered growing up in Philadelphia in the 1970s (the same city and decade in which the show is set). A Protestant with “a long line of Methodist ministers in my family,” Beane got to know and admire nuns when he was a student choir member competing with Catholic schools.

“They were always full of life and fun and enthusiasm, and they were great listeners,” said Beane during a telephone interview from his Manhattan home. “I have no horror stories. They were loving, nurturing people. I didn’t have that (Protestant) prejudice. It was very much the opposite.”

For this reason, even though his job is to shoot for comedy rather than realism, he has worked to invest his sisters with as much truth and integrity as possible and make the religious references real enough that “a Catholic person seeing the show would have a good time.”

“I want to treat them as human beings. That allows me to write people as best I can without pushing a viewpoint. I want it to be a Christian review of life within the confines of a Broadway theatre, to not sound preachy and to be uplifting.”

Since this is his “first Catholic piece,” he spent a great deal of time on the web site Fish on Friday, which attempts to explain Catholicism to non-Catholics, “went to St. Patrick’s a lot and did a lot more kneeling” -- including lighting candles to St. Jude when the going got tough -- and read interviews with nuns online. He also sent his script to a nun who was the sister of a theatre friend and she returned it with comments in the margins. When he had immediate questions he took them to two Catholic cast members, Fred Applegate (Monsignor O’Hara) whose wife is a liturgist, and Audrie Neenan (Sr. Mary Lazarus) who had earlier in life considered becoming a nun.

Beane wasn’t the only one searching for credibility. Victoria Clark (Mother Superior) corresponded with the Reverend Mother Dolores Hart, a former actress who is now prioress of the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, CT. Beane had hoped to invite Hart and all the sister consultants to opening night, but because it fell during Holy Week he was planning a night for them at a later time.

As for the authenticity of the habits, when the costume designer asked him what order the sisters were, he said he didn’t care as long as they weren’t too restricted for their dance numbers.

“It’s an imaginary order,” he said. “It’s a Christian viewpoint I felt very comfortable with.” They continue to wear full habits as “the last order still holding out.”

Lombardo didn’t consult any nuns about his script, drawing Sr. Jamison as a composite of three people: a teacher at South Catholic High School in Hartford, CT, Sr. Maureen Reardon; his no-nonsense rehabilitation sponsor and his mother, a compassionate woman “who says the rosary everyday like a good Catholic woman should. She taught me my religion.”

The influences are obvious. Sr. Jamison is never so real as when she prays. Ordered by Fr. Michael to take on the case of a 19-year-old addict she feels inadequate to treat, she beseeches the Trinitarian God for help in formal prayer, but she also talks to God as a companion.

“You have got to meet me halfway or it’s not going to work,” she cries out, echoing the words the playwright uttered himself at his darkest hour. Until he was 36 he had been strongly anti-drugs, but then he fell in love with the wrong guy.

“He was addicted to crystal meth and I was addicted to him,” he says about the start of the seven-year downward spiral during which he lost his home, his career and his family wouldn’t talk to him unless he agreed to go into therapy.

That day finally came on June 2, 2007 when he woke up in a seedy Times Square hotel in a room where the windows were covered with tinfoil, blankets and sheets, an addict’s attempt to keep out all brightness. Lombardo stumbled into the bathroom, turned on the harsh light and looked into the mirror. The wasted man staring back jolted him, as he realized for the first time what he had become, a drug addict.

The revelation drove him to tears, then to raging at God for allowing it to happen. At that moment, the duct tape holding up a sheet peeled off and the tinfoil fell. A spot of afternoon sun bounced off the mirror, filling the room with light and color. He doesn’t know whether it was coincidence, divine intervention or a drug-induced hallucination, but it was the epiphany he needed. He got down on his knees and told God he would get himself into a taxi and to a hospital if God would see him through recovery.

“You have to believe in a power greater than yourself,” he says. “It was faith that gave me the strength to get sober and to write the play.”

It wasn’t only his personal life that changed. Before “High,” he wrote what he describes as “fluffy light comedies.” His harrowing journey changed that.

“I thought, ‘Maybe this came into my life for a reason.’ What I knew was being an addict and Catholicism. Maybe there was something in that challenge of life that I could turn into my art.”

Using his experience, he broadened his play to appeal to a larger audience than just Catholics and former addicts.

“I tried to make it more about faith than religion. It’s set in a Catholic rehabilitation center but it’s about a much bigger discussion.”

Like Sr. Jamison, he relies on faith to carry him through.

“I go to many recovery meetings. That’s where my faith is restored, being in a room full of people who share belief in a higher power restores me and my faith and my sobriety.”

He learned that faith is the only way he can continue.

“Addiction is indeed a disease. The American Medical Association says there is no cure but there is treatment and the best is a 12-step program based on the belief in a power greater than yourself. Isn’t it beautiful that the American Medical Association says if you find faith you will get sober? It’s the only disease treated with faith.”

And he thinks it’s great that two plays about the importance of faith opened back-to-back on the Great White Way this season.

“It’s where we are in our history today. People want to have faith. They’re looking for something greater than themselves.”

Beane agreed.

“Materialism is kind of running its course,” he said. “People are asking, ‘Why are we here? Is there anything more to life?’”

La Sonnambula With Janie Taylor at the New York City Ballet

2011-05-29T14:31:00.005-05:00

By Mary Sheeran

Since I’ve written a novel called Quest of the Sleeping Princess, you would be correct that I would like George Balanchine’s La Sonnambula. Yes, I’ve always loved it (and it figures in my book!). The ballet takes its music from the opera by Bellini (the music is actually written by Vittorio Rieti after themes by Bellini) but the story is different. The ballet tells the story of a poet who falls in love with the Sleepwalker, who is actually the spectre of a Sleepwalker. Admittedly, the story’s always been a little difficult to “get into.” After all, to paraphrase the choreographer himself, how does one dance the role of a poet?

Well, I had no trouble getting into the ballet last Friday, for the superb cast included Robert Fairchild as the Poet, Jennie Somogyi as the Coquette, Justin Peck as the Baron, and Janie Taylor in a “why hasn’t she ever done this before” debut. The whole production seemed richly human and approachable except, of course, for Taylor, who seemed richly spectral. The contrast illuminated the piece dramatically; I felt I was seeing it for the first time.

Taylor is blond, pale, tall, ethereal. When she floats out on toe, the Poet takes her candle and tries to get her attention. This produces a bit of Tom Sawyer/Becky Thatcher humor, which underlines the poet’s frustrations and our sympathy for him. Taylor seems a matter-of-fact spectre as she floats across the stage with nary a toe shoe pounding, but there’s a whimsy to her; we smile because we are both baffled and enthralled. She’s in her own world. Nothing the Poet does can get her attention, and when he even has her fixed for a kiss, their lips never meet. You feel for him and wonder about her. Perhaps she is searching for a lost love. Well, she finds him in her future, as the story’s more operatic turn brings the Poet to her arms. Forever.

Fairchild is a believable young poet, brash, full of feeling, and more human than most. Somogyi is one of the few to bring real life to the Coquette, you can feel along with her. All this, plus the haunting Bellini music, particularly the aria (unsung, of course, but people around me were all humming) “Ah, non credea mirarti,” possibly one of the loveliest melodies ever written, underlined one beautifully haunting ballet.

I also enjoyed, thoroughly, my first look at Christopher Wheeldon’s Polyphonia, a ballet now 10 years old, that started the buzz about this now busy and still wonderful maker of ballets. Wheeldon has a sensitivity to music that translates well into dance. The ballet’s cast included the remarkable Sara Mearns.

The program also included Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15, a nice Mozartean balance to the Bellini, with a quicksilver ending to the folksong Mozart borrowed, “The Farmer’s Wife Has Lost Her Cat.” That Mozart had a sensitive ear for music, too, and his music haunts us with its crystalline purity, no matter how he got into it.

Divertimento No. 15: Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Choreography by George Balanchine; Costumes by Karinska. Premiere: May 31, 1956, American Shakespeare Theater, Stratford, Connecticut. Polyphonia: Music by Gyorgy Ligeti; Choreography by Christopher Wheeldon; Costumes by HollyHynes; Premiere: Jan. 4, 2001, New York State Theater. La Sonnambula: Music by Vittorio Rieti (after themes of Vincenzo Bellini); Choreographed by George Balanchine; Scenery and Costumes by Alain Vaes. Premiere: Feb. 27, 1948, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, City Center of Music and Drama; NYCB Premiere: Jan. 6, 1960, City Center of Music and Drama.

New York City Ballet’s season at Lincoln Center continues through June 12. For information and tickets, visit www.nycballet.com.

Mary Sheeran is a singer and writer whose recent novel, Quest of the Sleeping Princess, takes place during a gala performance at the New York City Ballet (www.questofthesleepingprincess.com). Her CD recording, Through the Years, is available on CD Baby.

Photo: Janie Taylor and Robert Fairchild in La Sonnambula. (Kolnick)

Lucky Guy

2011-05-26T12:40:00.005-05:00

I left the theatre last night sad and disappointed. Not with any aspect of Lucky Guy, every bit of which is a joy, but because I had just heard that it’s closing on Sunday, 10 days after it opened at the Little Shubert Theatre. How unfair that so much junk lingers while this fresh, winning new musical comedy is folding too soon.

All the ingredients seemed right to me -- the story is told with tongue-in-cheek glee, the jokes are funny, the performances excellent, the songs lively, and The New York Times' critic, after some fault finding, said its charms “ultimately prove difficult to resist.” Was there not enough money for marketing, or just not enough time to building an audience through words of mouth, enough to fill that theatre, which as far as Off-Broadway theatres go isn’t as little as its name would imply? (And is also considered by some to be cursed.)

The story, written (book, music and lyrics) and directed by Willard Beckham, is simple and oft-told in various forms, a handsome gosh-by-golly young singer/songwriter, Billy Ray (Kyle Dean Massey) comes to Nashville with dreams of success, falls in love with a pretty local girl, Wanda (Savannah Wise) and almost loses everything because of the greed of the town’s used car dealer, Big Al, campily played by the 4-foot, 11 Leslie Jordan.

“Folks making money on other people’s dreams” is how one song puts it. What makes the plot work so well here is how enthusiastically the cast hams it up to let us know they’re in on the fun.

I was hooked right away with the opening number, “Nashville,” sung and danced with gusto by The Buckaroos -- Callan Bergmann, Xavier Cano, Wes Hart and Joshua Woodie. These amazing dancers appear often and are always a treat, especially as tap dancing Indians in headdresses and beaded loin clothes. Terrific choreography by A.C. Ciulla.

Another hoot of a performance is given by Varla Jean Merman (the drag character of Jeffrey Roberson; in photo with Jordan) as Miss Jeannie Jeannine, the Queen of Country Music who hasn’t had a hit in years (and actually only had one hit ever). To prove her identity with her working class fans she lives in a mobile home -- with 28 rooms that she proudly says was featured in Mobile Homes and Gardens. It’s her “monument to humility,” which Billy Ray admiringly calls “a mansion with four-wheel drive.”

Miss Jeannie Jeannine has a secret past life that is revealed in the second act, just another of the hilarious bits in this quirky little show. Her costumes -- she has 19! -- and all of the rest, by William Ivy Long, are country-looking perfect.

This is a musical an entire family could enjoy together. Rob Bissinger’s sets have a cartoonish quality in keeping with the playfulness of the rest of the show. I truly hope Beckham finds some “one in a million, needle in a haystack,” to quote from another song, producers to believe in this show and bring it back in a smaller space where it can grow and even move on to Broadway.

And I want everyone involved to know that my friend Maureen and I had a great time. We laughed -- and laughed -- and I walked home singing the songs in my head. Thank you for that. Any musical theatre lover in town this weekend should take advantage of this last -- for now only, I hope -- chance to see this good-time show.

Tickets are on sale through TeleCharge.com or at (212) 239-6200 and at The Little Shubert Theatre box office, 422 W. 42nd St., from noon to 6 p.m.

Visit Lucky Guy online at www.luckyguythemusical.com.