Best gay blog. Towleroad Wins Award

Kevin Sessums Hub



04/19/2007


On the Stage: What to See on Broadway Right Now

Hair

GuestbloggerKEVIN SESSUMS

Kevin Sessums recently interviewed Jane Fonda and Moises Kaufman about the new play '33 Variations' for Towleroad, and recently reviewed the plays Our Town, The American Plan, and Ruined. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

I have been remiss lately writing my theatre reviews. I’ve been quite busy with other work as well as planning a five-week trek in northern Spain. Before I leave today for the trek, I thought I’d let you know about some of the great performances I’ve seen lately. I can’t remember a theatre season in which there have been so many stunningly good performances, both individual ones as well as those given by a play’s or musical’s ensemble.

Hair2 First off, ensembles to catch:

There is no more ... well .. blissful time to be had on Broadway than the “happening” going on at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre where the revival of Hair is playing to packed houses. As a kid I listened to the original cast album over and over and over and I realized, while smiling through this revival, that I still know every lyric in the score. Sexy and moving and great fun, it will send you home dancing in the streets. It will bring back your own memories of listening to the score, I’m sure, or create new ones for you by seeing this wonderful revival. My sweetest one involved my grandmother, who raised me, always complaining about how dirty the lyrics were as I blasted them from the stereo in our country home back in Mississippi and asking me to turn off the record every time I played it. But then — quietly, unhurriedly — I’d hear her humming the Hair score to herself when she was shelling peas from our garden or reading her daily Bible passage. Go to the Hirshfeld and — quietly? unhurriedly? — let your own sun shine in. And just for the record: I adore Gavin Creel who plays Claude.

A totally different evening is Neil LaBute’s slightly kinder version of his off-Broadway hit, Reasons to be Pretty. The cast has been reconfigured since its off-Broadway run but it’s even better than before. Marin Ireland and Thomas Sadoski are particularly funny and surprisingly touching as the woman who isn’t pretty enough because the man she loves says so. It been beautifully directed by Terry Kinny.

Carnage God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza’s latest French boulevard comedy (translated by Christopher Hampton) may be the play with the best ensemble on Broadway. Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini, and especially the great Marcia Gay Harden are giving an acting lesson in comic timing in this rather slight play. Indeed, I think Reza is the empress-with-no-clothes. Without these actors and the expert direction of Matthew Warchus, the play would be quite tiresome and a chore to sit through, much like her Art and Life x 3. The cast, however, is sublime. I’ve never laughed out loud so much at such hoary setups. It’s the hit of the season. Ninety intermissionless minutes of urbane savagery.

The emperor who majestically wore the clothes - playwright August Wilson - is receiving a production of his greatest play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, at the Belasco that again is an acting lesson as we watch the play’s ensemble do its work. I might give the God of Carnage crew a bit more credit since they have to deal with overcoming the play. The ensemble at Joe Turner have to rise to their play’s level and are able to ride its greatness which, at first blush, is found in its language. Whereas, the cast of God of Carnage is giving us a jazzlike fugue of marital mayhem, the cast of Joe Turner is a symphonic orchestra of history and religion and some August region past heartbreak that seers the soul.

Elms Another master, Eugene O’Neill, is represented on Broadway in a literally stripped-down version of his Desire Under the Elms. Director Robert Falls has trimmed it to a carnal 100 minutes. The three leads - Brian Dennehy, Carla Gugino, and Pablo Schreiber — are giving volcanic performances. They have to in order to fill the St. James Theatre’s vastness. The set would look at home on the Met’s stage as would those performances. It’s basically a play about greed but in this production the physical desire is amped up. And Pablo Schreiber — for those of you who, like me, find him incredibly sexy — keeps his shirt off most of the time and his nude scene got me in touch with my own greedy desires. It’s the kind of production that takes the time — though it’s set in the 1920s — to pipe in a whole Bob Dylan song as the cast goes about its expert business on stage. As odd as it is, it’s a better use of Dylan than anything Twyla Tharp came up with in her disastrous musical a few seasons back based on his music.

Much more, AFTER THE JUMP...

Continue reading "On the Stage: What to See on Broadway Right Now" »


Larry Kramer Slams Gay Orgs: 'Lazy, Torpid, Unimaginative, Useless'

In a follow-up to his interview with actor Rupert Everett, in which Everett spewed a vitriolic rant about gays who want to be surrogate parents ("It is utterly hideous. I think it’s egocentric and vain.") and get married, Kevin Sessums talks to AIDS activist Peter Staley, comedienne Kate Clinton, and longtime activist and playwright Larry Kramer on those topics.

Here's part of Kramer's reaction on marriage and the state of the LGBT movement:

Kramer “I don’t think we are going to win anything federal—which is really the only important place where it counts—until a few of these Supreme Court justices expire (including that homophobe Anthony Scalia) and Obama replaces them with people sympathetic to our side. This, of course, is by no means a sure thing. I have high hopes for Obama, but I do not feel all warm and fuzzy that he is going to be enough of a friend when push comes to shove. I hope I am wrong. I have never believed in patience, but I do not see that we have either the leaders or the troops enough—a la ACT UP—to go out there and fight. We continue to be a passive population. It drives me nuts. It has always driven me nuts. I do not think the gay population has been all that rabid for gay marriage. Note that I do not use the words ‘gay community.’ Expunge that expression from your vocabulary. We are not a community. There are too many of us to qualify for that word, which connotes something much smaller and more intimate than the huge multipeopled grab bag of our rainbow coalition...

"The work, as it was done for AIDS, has been done by relatively few warriors. And we are losing sight of the HIV/AIDS battle. What is not being done about HIV/AIDS in the United States is shocking. It is more than shocking. It is tragic. Three percent of the entire population of Washington, D.C., is infected. One in ten of its residents between the ages of 40 and 49 is infected. Seven percent of its male African-American population is infected. Gay politics? What gay politics? I don’t see any gay politics. I see a few lazy, torpid, unimaginative—certainly passionless—‘organizations’ that maintain they fight for us when what they do is relatively useless. It has never been otherwise. I am afraid we have never ever had a decent gay organization, outside of ACT UP, that accomplished what we need to accomplish—which is to free ourselves from the tyranny of THEM!”

'Awful Middle-Class Queens' [the daily beast]

(image source)


Rupert Everett Wonders Why He Sits 'Unf*cked' in His Hotel Room

Our theatre critic Kevin Sessums interviews Rupert Everett for The Daily Beast (he's back on Broadway in a revival of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit with Angela Lansbury.

Everett1 Given Everett's recent profile in the NYT and this new one, entitled "Rupert Everett Unleashed", one wonders if Rupert Everett is ever leashed. I don't think so.

Here's what he has to say about gays who want to be parents:

"I think this surrogacy thing is crap. It is utterly hideous. I think it’s egocentric and vain. And these endless IVF treatments people go through. I mean, if you are meant to have babies then great. But this whole idea of two gay guys filling a cocktail shaker with their sperm and impregnating some grim lesbian and then it gets cut out is just really weird. If I did have the impulse to be a parent, I would adopt—or foster. But this whole thing of forcing the idea of parenthood on us gay men is so bogus. Marriage? Babies? Please. I want to be illegal. I want to live outside the mainstream."

Everett believes his wish to be outside of the mainstream puts him "ahead of the curve."

"These awful middle-class queens—which is what the gay movement has become—are so tiresome. It’s all Abercrombie & Fitch and strollers. Everybody has the right to do what they want to do, but still..."

As in his NYT profile, Everett also bemoans the state of being out and gay in Hollywood:

Everett2 "But the reason my career is so up and down is that I get very little opportunity. There is just very little opportunity for a fag. That’s the reality. There isn’t. But I have no regrets for being out. None. It’s not like I’m missing out on that much. Being an actor in Hollywood is not that great a job anymore. It’s become the sluttiest job on the planet. It’s not remotely serious. It’s not like we’re talking about Hollywood in the 1970s that I’m missing out on. If we were talking about ‘70s Hollywood, then I’d be killing myself because the product back then was so astonishing even though it was still thought of as commercial cinema."

And he wonders why he sits in his room "unfucked" while some "buffoon" like Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter gets all the sex:

"I was once staying at a hotel and I was in the room directly under his. He is an amazing fuck. And you can quote me on this. The screams coming from the woman were some of the purest sounds of pleasure I’d ever heard. And there I was sitting alone in my room unfucked. Suddenly it all made sense. That messy hair of his that I always thought was buffoon hair was buffoon hair hiding a monster cock. The next day I went down to breakfast and Graydon came in and I thought to myself, well, now I understand why you are always acting so entitled and walking on air even though you’re rather fat. It’s because grazing the grass between your legs is this appendage of yours. I did rather politely tell him that morning that I thought he was a very good fuck."

Video interviews with the cast of Blithe Spirit, AFTER THE JUMP...

Rupert Everett Unleashed [the daily beast]
(top image robert j saferstein/broadway world)

Continue reading "Rupert Everett Wonders Why He Sits 'Unf*cked' in His Hotel Room" »


On the Stage: Our Town, The American Plan, and Ruined

AmerPlan0566

GuestbloggerKEVIN SESSUMS

Kevin Sessums recently interviewed Jane Fonda and Moises Kaufman about the new play '33 Variations' for Towleroad, and recently reviewed the plays Becky Sharp and The Third Story. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

Before I write about three plays I’ve seen recently, I must sadly pay homage to a couple of theatre greats — first the playwright Horton Foote, who lived a long life and died at 92, and the actress, Natasha Richardson, who lived much too short a life and died this week at age 45.

Foote I didn’t get around to reviewing Foote’s last play on Broadway before it closed — the divine comedy Dividing the Estate — but it was one of the most pleasurable evenings I spent in the theatre this season. When I was a young man trying to find my way in New York City I got a job being a reader of scripts for a big-time movie company and offering my written critiques of them. As a first assignment I was handed a script titled Tender Mercies by someone I, at that point, had never heard of named Horton Foote.

Much more glib than knowledgeable or wise, I wrote a horridly mean critique of the script, which went on to be made anyway and to win a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Foote. I’ve spent all the years since realizing what a boob I was for writing that critique of a man who has been rightly described as the Texas Chekhov. His actress daughter Hallie, who gave one of the season’s funniest and fiercest performances in Dividing the Estate, was her father’s favorite interpreter. My deeply felt condolences go out to her and the entire Foote family.

As they do to Natasha’s family and friends. I met Natasha several times at parties and baby showers because we shared some of those same friends. You always knew what part of the room she was in because of the sound of her throaty laughter. Always kindhearted and concerned about your well-being, she was instrumental in helping one of my best friends finally kick his cigarette habit when none of us could get him to do it. Yet I was often a bit cowed in her presence — and I am not the cowed type — because of my memories of seeing her onstage as the title character in Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie opposite her husband, Liam Neeson; as Anna in Closer (the role Julia Roberts played in the Mike Nichols film of the Patrick Marber play); as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire; and, most thrillingly, as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. I never thought anyone could obliterate the image of Liza Minnelli in the film version of that role, but Natasha certainly did. It was one of the most devastating and heartbreaking performances I’ve ever seen. I never went back to see other actresses in the part during the musical’s long run because I didn’t want to sully the memory of her in the role.

Richn She was, as Alexander Woollcott wrote in 1921 of the original production of Anna Christie, "singularly engrossing." As enthralling as she was on the stage, she was even more so off one. Jane Fonda has a lovely remembrance of her as a small girl on the set of Julia in which Fonda co-starred with her mother, Vanessa Redgrave. You can find it on Fonda’s blog. And she grew up to be more than just an actress. Because her father, the director Tony Richardson, died of complications from AIDS, she also was a tireless activist and fundraiser regarding HIV/AIDS.

Again, as Woollcott wrote of Anna Christie: "It came to the chronic playgoers like a swig of strong, black coffee to one who has been sipping pink lemonade." That was what it was like to be in Natasha’s presence. She was so invigorating and vibrant and full of life that it is hard to fathom that such a woman has so suddenly been taken from us.

My heart breaks for her children and for her husband and for her whole family, especially her mother, who last appeared on Broadway playing the role of Joan Didion. In that role in the one-woman show based on Didion’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking, Redgrave played a grief-stricken woman who has to watch her daughter slip into a coma and then slip away forever. The mind boggles at the Pirandello-like aspect of all of this. But it mustn’t all get too theatrical when discussing this most theatrical of families. This is real life. And it is truly tragic.

 ***OUR TOWN

Ourtown The most truthful and tragic of all American plays is Our Town. In fact, I consider it the greatest American play of the 20th Century and it is appropriate to be writing about it when discussing the fragility of life, which is one of its main themes. There are arguments to be made for O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night or Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire or Tony Kushner’s Angels in America or Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but I think Thornton Wilder’s Our Town trumps them all with its incongruous simplicity as it taps into each chronic playgoers complexity of emotions regarding his or her own life’s experiences. It is the most resonant of American dramas.

An aside: I interviewed Edward Albee recently for the sequel to my memoir, Mississippi Sissy. We got to talking about Wilder, who was a kind of mentor to him. "I started out writing poems when I was about eleven," Edward told me. "I stopped writing poems when I started writing plays when I was 27. I showed some of my poems to Thornton Wilder. I knew him rather well, though he was a very, very closeted and tortured gay man. Very closeted. You could say it was the times. But it was the man too. He read the poems and offered some succint advice: 'Perhaps, Edward, you should write plays.'"

Cromer The emotional succinctness of Our Town is certainly highlighted in the revelatory production it is now receiving at the Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village. It is one of the most stunning productions I have seen in years and if you love the theatre you would be remiss if you skipped it because of memories of being bored by other productions of the play — in high school or college or community theatre. This production, which was originally staged at Chicago’s Hypocrites Theatre, by director David Cromer, will shake away the cobwebs of any bad memories you have of thinking the play is hackneyed or dated. Cromer — who did such a stunningly effective job of directing the musical of The Adding Machine last season — even plays the Stage Manager himself in this production. "This is the way we were," he recites Wilder’s lines but has staged it to remind us that this is the way most decidedly are. Indeed, Cromer’s name is as big as Wilder’s on the front of the program — and rightly so. He has taken the play and mined it for its essential truths. He has also cast it exquisitely. The actors could not be bettered. And, at the end, there is a coup de theatre that is so organic to Wilder’s intentions and yet so surprising it will take your breath away.

I’ll admit I began to cry during the choir rehearsal in the first act and was teary the rest of the play. By the end, I was close to sobs. I don’t want to spoil it for you with too much description or to be too over-blown with my praise. But any reader out there who loves the theatre should get down to Barrow Street promptly. Because of the demand for tickets in the small space, the run has been extended already through September. But be warned — be prepared to experience the play, not just to watch it.

T T T T (out of 4 possible T's)

Our Town, Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***THE AMERICAN PLAN

There are two other productions worth catching — both produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club. At first, I thought that the two plays could not be more different. But then I realized at their roots they are about survival and how, at times, the most beastly of maternal influences can be the very impetus that propels us to survive.

Continued, AFTER THE JUMP...

Continue reading "On the Stage: Our Town, The American Plan, and Ruined" »


Kevin Sessums the Mentor

Many of you likely knew of Kevin Sessums, our theatre critic, from the celebrity profiles he has done for Vanity Fair or Allure or his memoir Mississippi Sissy, but it's likely most of you don't know he's also a regular writer for Parade, the national Sunday paper magazine, which has a fairly conservative readership, and a huge one.

Sessums_brandon This Sunday, Parade is publishing a personal piece in the magazine about the relationship Kevin has had for seven years mentoring Brandon, a straight youngster from Brooklyn born to a teen mother. Kevin has helped Brandon grow into a teen himself. Writes Kevin: "At 14, he is now the same age his mother was when she gave birth to him. My mentioning that to him the other day—he really hadn’t thought about it—prompted our first grown-up conversation about forgiveness and understanding."

Brandon has helped Kevin, who was orphaned at a young age, through some emotional tough spots as well.

Kevin says this article means more to him than almost anything he's written, and hopes it inspires more people to become mentors to kids who need it.

Mentoring Programs Change Lives [parade]


Exclusive: A Conversation on 33 Variations
Kevin Sessums Talks to Jane Fonda and Moises Kaufman

33variations  

GuestbloggerKEVIN SESSUMS

I recently had a conversation with Moises Kaufman and Jane Fonda. Kaufman’s play, 33 Variations, opens on March 9th at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on Broadway with Fonda as its leading lady. She plays a musicologist who is trying to solve the mystery of Beethoven spending so much time writing 33 variations based on a short waltz by Anton Diabelli. She, like the composer, is battling against time. He was going deaf. She has a life-threatening disease. Among her costars are Samantha Mathis, who plays the daughter with whom she’s had difficulties and Colin Hanks — yes, Tom’s son — who plays her nurse.

Fonda_kaufman Kaufman is the writer and director of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project. He directed, among other plays, I Am My Own Wife and Liev Schreiber’s Macbeth at the Public Theatre. He is the artistic director of the Tectonic Theater Project.

We all know Fonda’s credits — or many of them. She’s been at this for fifty years. I ask after a mutual friend, Pat Newcomb, who was the publicist for everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Barbra Streisand to Warren Beatty. “You know I took Pat to the Czech Republic right after the Velvet Revolution and we met Vaclav Havel,” she says, smiling at the memory and petting her small Coton de Tulear dog named Tulea who is curled in her lap.

I recall the first time I ever met her. “It was years ago,” I tell her and mention one of my best friends from college who became one of her closest Hollywood pals for a while. We all had dinner at Joe Allen.

“It couldn’t have been that many years ago,” she said.

“Yeah. It was,” I tell her. “Maybe the early ‘80s. We each had vestiges of a shag and you showed up with your stepmother.”

She laughs.. “I’ve had several. Which one?” she asks.

“I think her name was Susan.”

“Oh, yes, yes. Susan! Yes. Now I remember.”

“I walked you back to your hotel and you told a rather risque joke about arriving at The Pearly Gates and the conversation that ensued with Saint Peter. I remember thinking to myself — shit — Jane Fonda is funny. Who knew she was funny?

JANE FONDA: I’ve gotten funnier. I had to keep up with Ted Turner. He’s hysterical. You’ve got to have a sense of humor to be married to Ted Turner.

KEVIN SESSUMS: That could be a compliment or an insult. He allowed you to get more in touch with your own sense of humor?

JF: Well, he allowed me to ... ah ... well... yeah. That’s all. Yeah.

KS: After your divorce from him, you kept living in Atlanta. Do you consider yourself a Southerner now?

JF: Yes, I do. I’ve lived there for over 18 years.

KS: Moises, we met at the “Mormon March” after Prop 8 passed in California and we New Yorkers took to the streets in solidarity. We were both rendezvousing with some guys at the Barnes and Noble next to the Mormon Visitors Center. I was with my old boyfriend Peter Staley.

MOISES KAUFMAN: Yes, of course. We were meeting Tony Kushner and his husband, Mark Harris. Doug Wright and his husband, David Clement. To be demonstrating with Tony in front of the Mormon Visitors Center — because that’s where half of Angels in America takes place — was very moving.

KS: It had the dramatic contours of a Moises Kaufman play.

MK: Yes, I guess it did, didn’t it. I was very moved that night.

JF: Someone emailed Moises a picture of me with Harvey Milk during a “No on Prop 6” march.

KS: Well, honey, you do have a history of marches. I’d expect you to have a picture with Harvey Milk.

JF: It’s why I loved Sean’s performance so much. I knew Harvey and he totally got him.

Continued, AFTER THE JUMP...

Continue reading "Exclusive: A Conversation on 33 Variations
Kevin Sessums Talks to Jane Fonda and Moises Kaufman" »





Lijit Search





Home | Page 2 | 3 | 4 |