Lambda Literary Award Winners Announced

The winners of the Lambda Literary Awards were announced last night.

I just wanted to send out a congrats to our own Kevin Sessums, who took the award for Mens Memoir/ Biography for Mississippi Sissy. Other winners included Hero by Perry Moore for LGBT Children's/Young Adult, Henri Cole's Blackbird & Wolf for poetry, and Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman for Men's Fiction.

I've posted all the winners, AFTER THE JUMP...

LGBT ANTHOLOGIES

* First Person Queer, Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel (Arsenal Pulp Press)

LGBT ARTS & CULTURE

* The View From Here, Matthew Hays (Arsenal Pulp Press)

LGBT CHILDRENS/YOUNG ADULT

* Hero, Perry Moore (Hyperion)

LGBT DRAMA/THEATER

* Return to the Caffe Cino, edited by Steve Susoyev and
George Birimisa (Moving Finger Press)

LGBT EROTICA

* Homosex: 60 Years of Gay Erotica, Simon Sheppard (Running Press)

LGBT NONFICTION

* Gay Artists in Modern American Culture, Michael S. Sherry (University of North Carolina Press)

LGBT POETRY

* Blackbird and Wolf, Henri Cole (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

LGBT SCI-FI/FANTASY/HORROR

* The Dust of Wonderland, Lee Thomas (Alyson Books)

LGBT STUDIES

* Between Women, Sharon Marcus (Princeton University Press)

BISEXUAL

* Split Screen, Brent Hartinger (Harper Collins Children's Books)

TRANSGENDER

* Transparent, Cris Beam (Harcourt)

LESBIAN DEBUT FICTION

* Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking, Aoibheann Sweeney (The Penguin Press)

GAY DEBUT FICTION

* A Push and a Shove, Christopher Kelly (Alyson Books)

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WOMEN'S FICTION

* The IHOP Papers, Ali Liebegott (Carroll & Graf)

WOMEN'S ROMANCE

* Out of Love, K. G. MacGregor (Bella Books)

WOMEN'S MYSTERY

* Wall of Silence, Gabrielle Goldsby (Bold Strokes Books)

WOMEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

* And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, Nicola Griffith (Payseur & Schmidt)

MEN's FICTION

* Call Me By Your Name, Andre Aciman (Farrar Straus Giroux)

MEN's ROMANCE

* Changing Tides, Michael Thomas Ford (Kensington)

MEN's MYSTERY

* Murder in the Rue Chartres, Greg Herren (Alyson Books)

MEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

* Mississippi Sissy, Kevin Sessums (St. Martin's Press)

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On the Stage: The New Century, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Top Girls, Cry-Baby, A Catered Affair

Kevin Sessums last reviewed South Pacific, Macbeth, and From Up Here for Towleroad. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

I have been remiss in writing my reviews lately because of other assignments. I did a cover story on Sarah Jessica Parker a couple of weeks back for Parade magazine, have a Robert De Niro story in the current issue of Travel+Leisure and an upcoming cover story on Mary-Kate Olsen for Elle. But I’ll try to catch up with this post by focusing on five shows I’ve recently seen.

***THE NEW CENTURY

I went back to see South Pacific last week at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center because I’m doing a story on its leading lady, Kelli O’Hara, for the June 22nd edition of Parade. While picking up my ticket I ran into Kate Clinton, the lesbian comic who combines an acerbic wit with her innate kindheartedness in her stand-up act and packs ’em in all summer up in our shared Shangri-La of Provincetown. I thought maybe Kate was going to ogle O’Hara along with me for the next three hours but she told me she needed some laughs so was about to catch playwright Paul Rudnick’s latest, The New Century, a collection of interrelated one-acts, downstairs from South Pacific at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater. I saw her again at intermission and she was raving about the plays.

Rudnick is an old friend of mine as well so take my own rave with a grain-of-salt if you wish, but you’ll find yourself laughing every 15 or 30 seconds as he riffs on everything from gay cable access shows in Florida to the love of crafts to how the M in S&M might just stand for Maternal Love. A silver-maned Linda Lavin, who won the Drama Desk award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of the mother of the sex slave, is outrageous and heartbreaking. Also heartbreaking, but more sweetly so, is Jayne Houdyshell, the midwesterner who tells us of her love of crafts while, yes, craftily leading us into a story of the AIDS quilt and her son’s death from the disease. Peter Bartlett finds new depths in the stereotype of the effete former New Yorker with the Palm Beach public access show. And Mike Doyle — who splendidly continues this theatre season’s motif of male nudity — is Bartlett’s young charge who channels his own brand of sweetness as expertly as he does his accommodating form of sexuality. Rudnick is in — ahem — top form himself.

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

The New Century, Lincoln Center Theater- Mitzi E. Newhouse, 150 West 65th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES

There are two revivals currently running on Broadway at the moment. I was quite disappointed in one of them. But bowled over by the other. First the bad news. It pains me to give Laura Linney, one of my favorite actresses, a negative review but she seems completely lost as La Marquise de Merteuil in the revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, British playwright Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of the epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos about sexual subterfuge in 18th Century France. I blame Linney less, however, than her director, Rufus Norris, who has directed all the actors and actresses in this lamentable production as if each were in a different play. Ben Daniels — the British stage star who has been nominated for a Tony for Best Actor it would seem for his anachronistic ability to preen like Mick Jagger if the Rolling Stoner’s sexual stage prowess had been rejiggered to fit the personae of Juliet Prowse opening for Liberace in Vegas — gives off no sparks as Le Viscount de Valmont in his scenes with Linney, scenes that are the very heart, cold and cauterized at the same time, of this play that is set in the rarified though randy world of the French aristocracy. Daniels’ lithe dancer’s body sure puts the sinew in sin, but it is a characterization more choreographed than felt. His studied stance of an 18th Century fop attempts to center everything at crotch level yet his Valmont lacks a certain ballsiness. It’s all jazz hands. No jism.

Mamie Gummer as Cecile, the childlike virgin deflowered by Valmont, has been directed to be so off-puttingly ditzy it’s as if she’s appearing up the avenue as one of the stewardesses in the 1960's farce, Boeing Boeing. Sian Phillips, as the resident dowager of the piece, Madame de Rosemonde, seems to have stepped out of an episode of I, Claudius. Benjamin Walker, as Le Chavealier Danceny, would have been better suited in the updated film version of the play called Cruel Intentions — though he and Daniels do doff their period britches to contribute to the season’s motif. Jessica Collins as the upright La Presidente de Tourvel gives the best performance of the production and has some heart-rending moments with Daniels who, come to think of it, would be a great replacement for Peter Bartlett as Mr. Charles, the pampered human poodle from Palm Beach in Rudnick’s plays.

Finally, Kristine Nielsen as Cecile’s mother, Madame de Volanges, reminded me of Vivian Vance if she and Lucille Ball,in the Linney role, had done a take-off of the play in their television heyday. In fact, I kept thinking of those latter-day Viv and Lucy British television stars, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, who did a take-off of the play on their sketch comedy show, French and Saunders, back in 1990 and who better captured the rancid sensuality of the piece than this noisome mess of a revival at the Roundabout.

T (for the costumes and ingeniously draped sets alone)

Les Liaisons Dangereuses, American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42 St., New York. Ticket information here.

AFTER THE JUMP...reviews of Top Girls, Cry-Baby, and A Catered Affair...

***TOP GIRLS

Now for the good news. Caryl Churchill’s feminist cri-de-coeur, Top Girls, is getting a top-notch production from Manhattan Theatre Club at the Biltmore. Beautifully directed by James Macdonald, the play, set in Thatcher’s England of the 1980s, is an impassioned intellectual argument against The Iron Lady’s right-wing politics and yet its leftist heart is left bereft by the play’s devastating end.

Top Girls' first act is one of the most daring any playwright has ever attempted and, in this production, it sets the bar for all that follows. The play’s heroine, Marlene, gives herself a dinner party to celebrate her recent promotion to the managerial level at the employment agency where she works. The guests, however, are not her co-workers but an assortment of women from literary and political history. Pope Joan of the Ninth Century. Victorian traveller Isabella Bird. Lady Nijo, a 13th Century Buddhist nun who was also a concubine of the Japanese emporer. A woman warrior painted by Breugel who goes by the name of Gret. A Chaucerian wife: Griselda. Their overlapping dialogue and true regard for each other is thrilling and comic and cuts to the quick.

The next two acts of the play move back in time from the dinner party and delve into the life of Marlene, who is played by the extraordinary New York actress, the rightly named Elizabeth Marvel, one of the city’s great and yet unsung talents. The play is one of the best acted of the theater season and I want to name all of the women who play multiple parts in the production. They are Mary Catherine Garrison, Mary Beth Hurt, Jennifer Ikeda, Ana Reeder, and especially Martha Plimpton and Marisa Tomei. I don’t want to give away too many plot points. Go for yourself and discover this difficult but dynamic work of art. It is one of the best productions of the theatre season and was woefully overlooked when this year’s Tony nominations were announced — though Plimpton is nominated for her stellar performance as Pope Joan as well as the emotionally stunted Angie, an adolescent who shares a tortured past with Marlene.

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

Top Girls, Manhattan Theatre Club, Biltmore Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***CRY-BABY

Finally, a report of two new musicals this season. The first is the adaptation of John Waters’ film, Cry-Baby. It is a bit homogenized for my tastes. A little more vulgarity would have been welcome. But if you’re a fan of Broadway dancing of the male variety by all means catch it. The three lead male dancers are thankfully kept front and center — especially Spencer Liff. You can’t take your eyes off Liff when he’s onstage and I was not surprised when he won the Fred Astaire Award as the outstanding Broadway dancer of the season last week. The work of choreographer Rob Ashford is the real star of this show.

The two leads, Elizabeth Stanley as Allison and James Snyder as Cry-Baby, seem a bit long-in-the-tooth to be playing teenagers. But Harriet Harris as Allison’s grandmother, Mrs. Vernon-Williams (she doesn’t seem long-enough-in-the-tooth for such a role) is a campy hoot. John Waters is another Ptown buddy of mine and I kept thinking during the show — while my mind often wandered — that the show may not be vulgar enough but John’s bank account sure is becoming so with this show now giving him royalties along with the longrunning Hairspray, a much better show. What’s next, John? A Divine stand-in tap dancing while singing with a mouthful of dog feces in a musicalization of Pink Flamingos? Now that might be just a tad too vulgar even for my tastes.

T T (out of 4 possible T's)

Cry-Baby, Marquis Theatre, 211 West 45th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***A CATERED AFFAIR

On another note completely, the other new musical is A Catered Affair which is a rather staid but classy evening in the theater. The reviews were mixed for this production so I went not expecting much but was deeply moved by the end of the intermissionless 90 minutes. Based on the Gore Vidal screenplay of a Paddy Chayefsky teleplay, the musical is about a cab driver’s daughters wedding after his son has been killed in the Korean conflict in 1953. Harvey Fierstein, who also stars as the uncle of the girl, wrote the book of the musical and shucks much of his yuck-filled sense of humor to give us a touching period piece of kitchen-sink drama for which Chayefsky was so well known. The musical is a bit like ersatz Sondheim but it has its moments of singular beauty. John Doyle has directed it all with an unerring subtleness and grace.

And the cast could not be better. Along with Fierstein, they include, among others, the betrothed youngsters played by Leslie Kritzer and Matt Cavenaugh. But the real stars of the evening are the Tony nominated Faith Prince and Tom Wopat as the bride’s parents. Wopat spends much of the evening underplaying his role until he erupts in his big aria of anguish toward the musical’s end. It is, however, Prince’s show. It is great to have her back on Broadway and she makes the most of the role of an emotionally stunted wife and mother. She delves deeply into the role and is stunningly good. It is a quiet and dignified performance. And a brilliant one. If she wins the Tony over Patti Lupone for Gypsy and Kelli O’Hara for South Pacific, I won’t complain.

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

A Catered Affair, Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 West 48th St, New York. Ticket information here.

Recent Reviews
On the Stage: South Pacific, Macbeth, From Up Here [tr]
On the Stage: Gypsy, The Four of Us, The Drunken City [tr]
On the Stage: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Adding Machine, Parlour Song [tr]
On the Stage: Crimes of the Heart, Sunday in the Park with George, and November [tr]
On the Stage: Come Back, Little Sheba and Next to Normal [tr]

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2008 Tony Award Nominations Announced

Nominations for the 2008 Tony Awards have been announced. Lin Manuel-Miranda's musical In The Heights about the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights led the way with 13 nominations followed by the revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific with 11 nominations.

Check out all the nominees, AFTER THE JUMP...

Click on the linked titles below for reviews on Towleroad by Kevin Sessums, as well as an interview with In the Heights creator Lin Manuel Miranda done by our correspondent Josh Helmin.

Best Play

August: Osage County
Author: Tracy Letts
Producers: Jeffrey Richards, Jean Doumanian, Steve Traxler, Jerry Frankel, Ostar Productions, Jennifer Manocherian, The Weinstein Company, Debra Black/Daryl Roth, Ronald & Marc Frankel/Barbara Freitag, Rick Steiner/Staton Bell Group, The Steppenwolf Theatre Company

Rock 'n' Roll
Author: Tom Stoppard
Producers: Bob Boyett & Sonia Friedman Productions, Ostar Productions, Roger Berlind, Tulchin/Bartner, Douglas G. Smith, Dancap Productions, Jam Theatricals, The Weinstein Company, Lincoln Center Theater, The Royal Court Theatre London

The Seafarer
Author: Conor McPherson
Producers: Ostar Productions, Bob Boyett, Roy Furman, Lawrence Horowitz, Jam Theatricals, Bill Rollnick/Nancy Ellison Rollnick, James D'Orta, Thomas S. Murphy, Ralph Guild/Jon Avnet, Philip Geier/Keough Partners, Eric Falkenstein/Max OnStage, The National Theatre of Great Britain

The 39 Steps
Author: Patrick Barlow
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy, Bob Boyett, Harriet Newman Leve/Ron Nicynski, Stewart F. Lane/Bonnie Comley, Manocherian Golden Prods., Olympus Theatricals/Douglas Denoff, Marek J. Cantor/Pat Addiss, Huntington Theatre Company/Nicholas Martin/Michael Maso, Edward Snape for Fiery Angel Ltd.

Best Musical

Cry-Baby
Producer: Adam Epstein, Allan S. Gordon, �lan V. McAllister, Brian Grazer, James P. MacGilvray, Universal Pictures Stage Productions, Anne Caruso, Adam S. Gordon, Latitude Link, The Pelican Group, Philip Morgaman, Andrew Farber/Richard Mishaan

In The Heights
Producers: Kevin McCollum, Jeffrey Seller, Jill Furman, Sander Jacobs, Goodman/Grossman, Peter Fine, Everett/Skipper

Passing Strange
Producers: The Shubert Organization, Elizabeth Ireland McCann LLC, Bill Kenwright, Chase Mishkin, Barbara & Buddy Freitag, Broadway Across America, Emily Fisher Landau, Peter May, Boyett Ostar, Larry Hirschhorn, Janet Pailet/Steve Klein, Elie Hirschfeld/Jed Bernstein, Spring Sirkin/Ruth Hendel, Vasi Laurence/Pat Flicker Addiss, Wendy Federman/Jackie Barlia Florin, Joey Parnes, The Public Theater, The Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Xanadu
Producers: Robert Ahrens, Dan Vickery, Tara Smith/B. Swibel, Sarah Murchison/Dale Smith

Best Book of a Musical

Cry-Baby
Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan

In The Heights
Quiara Alegra Hudes

Passing Strange
Stew

Xanadu
Douglas Carter Beane

Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre

Cry-Baby
Music & Lyrics: David Javerbaum & Adam Schlesinger

In The Heights
Music & Lyrics: Lin-Manuel Miranda

The Little Mermaid
Music: Alan Menken
Lyrics: Howard Ashman and Glenn Slater

Passing Strange
Music: Stew and Heidi Rodewald
Lyrics: Stew

Best Revival of a Play

Boeing-Boeing
Producers: Sonia Friedman Productions, Bob Boyett, Act Productions, Matthew Byam Shaw, Robert G. Bartner, The Weinstein Company, Susan Gallin/Mary Lu Roffe, Broadway Across America, Tulchin/Jenkins/DSM, The Araca Group

The Homecoming
Producers: Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Jam Theatricals, Ergo Entertainment, Barbara & Buddy Freitag, Michael Gardner, Herbert Goldsmith Productions, Terry E. Schnuck, Harold Thau, Michael Filerman/Lynne Peyser, Ronald Frankel/David Jaroslawicz, Love Bunny Entertainment

Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy

Macbeth
Producers: Duncan C. Weldon & Paul Elliott, Jeffrey Archer, Bill Ballard, Terri & Timothy Childs, Rodger Hess, David Mirvish, Adriana Mnuchin, Emanuel Azenberg, BAM, The Chichester Festival Theatre

Best Revival of a Musical

Grease
Producers: Paul Nicholas and David Ian, Nederlander Presentations Inc., Terry Allen Kramer, Robert Stigwood

Gypsy
Producers: Roger Berlind, The Routh-Frankel-Baruch-Viertel Group, Roy Furman, Debra Black, Ted Hartley, Roger Horchow, David Ian, Scott Rudin, Jack Viertel

Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Producers: Lincoln Center Theater, Andre Bishop, Bernard Gersten, Bob Boyett

Sunday in the Park with George
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy, Bob Boyett, Debra Black, Jam Theatricals, Stephanie P. McClelland, Stewart F. Lane/Bonnie Comley, Barbara Manocherian/Jennifer Manocherian, Ostar Productions, The Menier Chocolate Factory/David Babani

Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play

Ben Daniels, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Laurence Fishburne, Thurgood
Mark Rylance, Boeing-Boeing
Rufus Sewell, Rock 'n' Roll
Patrick Stewart, Macbeth

Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play

Eve Best, The Homecoming
Deanna Dunagan, August: Osage County
Kate Fleetwood, Macbeth
S. Epatha Merkerson, Come Back, Little Sheba
Amy Morton, August: Osage County

Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical

Daniel Evans, Sunday in the Park with George
Lin-Manuel Miranda, In The Heights
Stew, Passing Strange
Paulo Szot, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Tom Wopat, A Catered Affair

Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical

Kerry Butler, Xanadu
Patti LuPone, Gypsy
Kelli O'Hara, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Faith Prince, A Catered Affair
Jenna Russell, Sunday in the Park with George

Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play

Bobby Cannavale, Mauritius
Raul Esparza, The Homecoming
Conleth Hill, The Seafarer
Jim Norton, The Seafarer
David Pittu, Is He Dead?

Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play

Sinead Cusack, Rock 'n' Roll
Mary McCormack, Boeing-Boeing
Laurie Metcalf, November
Martha Plimpton, Top Girls
Rondi Reed, August: Osage County

Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical

Daniel Breaker, Passing Strange
Danny Burstein, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Robin De Jesus, In The Heights
Christopher Fitzgerald, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Boyd Gaines, Gypsy

Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical

de'Adre Aziza, Passing Strange
Laura Benanti, Gypsy
Andrea Martin, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Olga Merediz, In The Heights
Loretta Ables Sayre, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific

Best Scenic Design of a Play

Peter McKintosh, The 39 Steps
Scott Pask, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Todd Rosenthal, August: Osage County
Anthony Ward, Macbeth

Best Scenic Design of a Musical

David Farley and Timothy Bird & The Knifedge Creative Network, Sunday in the Park with George
Anna Louizos, In The Heights
Robin Wagner, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Michael Yeargan, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific

Best Costume Design of a Play

Gregory Gale, Cyrano de Bergerac
Rob Howell, Boeing-Boeing
Katrina Lindsay, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Peter McKintosh, The 39 Steps

Best Costume Design of a Musical

David Farley, Sunday in the Park with George
Martin Pakledinaz, Gypsy
Paul Tazewell, In The Heights
Catherine Zuber, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific

Best Lighting Design of a Play

Kevin Adams, The 39 Steps
Howard Harrison, Macbeth
Donald Holder, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Ann G. Wrightson, August: Osage County

Best Lighting Design of a Musical

Ken Billington, Sunday in the Park with George
Howell Binkley, In The Heights
Donald Holder, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Natasha Katz, The Little Mermaid

Best Sound Design of a Play

Simon Baker, Boeing-Boeing
Adam Cork, Macbeth
Ian Dickinson, Rock 'n' Roll
Mic Pool, The 39 Steps

Best Sound Design of a Musical

Acme Sound Partners, In The Heights
Sebastian Frost, Sunday in the Park with George
Scott Lehrer, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Dan Moses Schreier, Gypsy

Best Direction of a Play

Maria Aitken, The 39 Steps
Conor McPherson, The Seafarer
Anna D. Shapiro, August: Osage County
Matthew Warchus, Boeing-Boeing

Best Direction of a Musical

Sam Buntrock, Sunday in the Park with George
Thomas Kail, In The Heights
Arthur Laurents, Gypsy
Bartlett Sher, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific

Best Choreography

Rob Ashford, Cry-Baby
Andy Blankenbuehler, In The Heights
Christopher Gattelli, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Dan Knechtges, Xanadu

Best Orchestrations

Jason Carr, Sunday in the Park with George
Alex Lacamoire & Bill Sherman, In The Heights
Stew & Heidi Rodewald, Passing Strange
Jonathan Tunick, A Catered Affair

* * *

Regional Theatre Tony Award
Chicago Shakespeare Theater

Special Tony Award
Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981), in recognition of his historic contribution to American musical theatre in the field of orchestrations, as represented on Broadway this season by Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific.

Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre
Stephen Sondheim

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On the Stage: South Pacific, Macbeth, From Up Here

Kevin Sessums last reviewed Gypsy, The Four of Us, and The Drunken City for Towleroad. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

If Patti LuPone is proving her chops as the new Ethel Merman of Broadway in her portrayal of Mama Rose in Gypsy then the newest version of Mary Martin, Merman’s old Rialto rival, that tomboy from Texas who could spark the constricted heart of the most uptight of tenors, is Kelli O’Hara. She is starring in one of Martin’s most reknowned roles as Nellie Forbush in the Lincoln Center Theatre production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. Indeed, at times it seems as if Martin is peeking from beneath O’Hara’s otherwise pitch-perfect portrayal so that it has the eerie quality of watching a kind of double performance, a musical characterization cast in the artistic terms of pentimento when one notices such a thing on a canvas for the first time. There is a richness to the texture. Yet it is a bit dizzying if one keeps focusing on it.

So let’s focus on that first legendary production. It was based on two stories from James Michener’s collection called Tales from the South Pacific, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, an award the musical itself won two years later — along with all nine of the Tony Awards it was nominated for. Since Michener’s two stories — "Fo’Dalla" and "Our Heroine" — were so serious, Rodgers and Hammerstein along with Joshua Logan, the original director, and Leland Hayward, the show’s producer, asked him to write a third story not found in the book and he came up with one about Luther Billis, the show’s womanizing comic relief. Ezio Pinza was cast as the romantic male lead, Emile De Becque, setting up the precedent of casting, when possible, a strapping opera singer in the role.

It has always been rumored that Oscar Hammerstein was so taken by Mary Martin in the last scene of Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus, when she appeared in her tight-fitting gingham dress, that he insisted she be cast as Nelli. (She had been cast in Venus, her starmaking role, when Marlene Dietrich backed out of the lead because she, of all people, found it “too sexy and profane.”) Martin was at the time, however, on the road in a national tour in one of Merman’s great roles, Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, and didn’t think she wanted to commit to what appeared to be yet another long run in her future. But when Rodgers and Hammerstein flew out to meet her on the road and played “A Cockeyed Optimist” and “Some Enchanted Evening”, two of the first songs they’d written for the score, she accepted on the spot.

The show opened in Boston to rave reviews — so much so that playwright George S. Kaufmann joked that Bostonians were slipping money under the door of the Shubert Theatre in Boston not to buy tickets but just because they wanted to slip money under the door of the theatre where South Pacific was playing. Once it arrived in New York its reviews were so rapturous that the state’s Attorney General threatened to shut it down once word got out that scalpers were charging — back in 1949 — two hundred dollars a ticket. He, of course, backed down. And the show ran for over five years.

This production — directed by Bartlett Sher, who directed the last big musical hit at Lincoln Center Theatre, The Light in the Piazza, the score and lyrics for which were written by Rodgers’ grandson, Adam Guettel, and whose two young romantic leads were played by O’Hara and South Pacific’s Lt. Cable, Matthew Morrison — could run just as long as the original one judging by its own critical reaction and the visceral love the audience has for the show from the first sweeping notes of its overture. In fact, it is one of the mosty stirring overtures I have ever heard or — and this is the genius of it — witnessed. As the floor of the stage slowly moves back into the far reaches of the Beaumount’s deep recesses, the orchestra is revealed and the music becomes even more lush. It is a thrilling moment but also a dangerous one. Not because of the stage mechanics of it, but because one wonders how anything after it could be as thrilling.

For me, the overture was, indeed, the highlight of the show though I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of it. But it is a deeply old-fashioned one — especially because of the book by Hammerstein and Logan even with its allusion to pedophilia in its secondary love story between Lt. Cable and Liat. Most of the performances, however, could not be bettered.

O’Hara is proving to be Broadway’s brightest light. There is a wholesomeness about her that does not lessen her sexiness. Paul Szot, the Brazilian opera star, who is her Emile de Becque, is brilliant and, yes, equally sexy. One of the heartbreaking highlights of the show is his second-act solo “This Nearly Was Mine.” Matthew Morrison proves his musical mettle yet again as Cable — though I wonder what his grandpa, John Wayne, would think of his always taking his shirt off in his stage appearances and pleasing all us gay guys so much in the audience. The Hawaiian star Loretta Ables Sayre as Bloody Mary — a role that could be problematic because of its racial stereotyping in a show that preaches against racial stereotypes — finds the anger and bitter beauty that transcend such problems. Yet, sadly, I was disappointed in Danny Burstein. As much as I loved his portrayal of the daffy Latin matinee idol in The Drowsy Chaperone, I found him quite offputting as Luther Billis. He overplays the admittedly hoary comedy of the part and I just didn’t find him believable as a womanizer. His is a grating presence in the show when it should be a welcome and happy one...

All in all, it is a wonderful evening. Even the sailors are all individuals in their varied posturings about the stage. And be advised — right before O’Hara brings the house down with her marvelous-as-Martin version of “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” two of the shower doors open and the cutest sailors scurry about the stage butt-naked adding to the leitmotif this theatre season of male nudity which enlivens even this, the most old-fashioned of musicals.

T T T 1/2 (out of 4 possible T's)

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, Lincoln Center Theater-Vivian Beaumont, 150 West 65th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***MACBETH

Patrick Stewart is packing them in as the title character in Macbeth at the Lyceum Theatre in a production that originated at the Chichester Festival Theatre before moving to the West End then had a sold-out limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Now it’s taken up bloody residence on Broadway. Stewart is the frontrunner to take home the Tony in a couple of months for Best Actor. And although I admired the production for its high concept that takes fascism to a fetishistic level, I could never get out of my mind that I was watching just that: a production. It’s so highly stylized that one is never bored, but one is never moved as well.

Continued, AFTER THE JUMP...

Director Rupert Goold certainly makes his presence felt but his wife, Kate Fleetwood, could have been less of a presence perhaps as I felt she fell into the trap of overacting the part of Lady Macbeth. And when the the three witches began to rap one of their most famous scenes, I wasn’t tapping my toes but rolling my eyes. If a production could be overly interesting, this could be it. Utterly fascinating but flawed. I kept thinking, what’s next? Setting MacBeth on Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise?

T T (out of 4 possible T's)

Macbeth, Lyceum Theatre,
149 West 45th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***FROM UP HERE

Julie White did rightly win the Tony last year for Best Actress for her portrayal of the hyper and hilariously cold-hearted personal manager in The Little Dog Laughed. As her theatrical follow-up she’s chosen The Manhattan Theatre Club production of From Up Here, playwright Liz Flahive’s sensitive cliche-free play about how a family deals with a teenage son who has taken a gun to school in order to threaten his bullying classmates. Instead of a treatise concerning gun control politics and violence in America, Flahive and the director Leigh Silverman have chosen to more delicately approach the issues that such a plot device places in front of all of us. It is not only the son who must deal with the consequences of his actions, but also his extended family.

The production still felt a bit like an out-of-town tryout of a promising work the night I saw it in previews a few weeks back but it is well worth a visit if you’re interested in new plays instead of the spate of revivals that increasingly make up the New York theatre season. White is her expected magnificent self. I kept waiting for the scene that made her choose this play as her follow-up to Little Dog Laughed and it comes toward the end when she and her son have ended up back in the police station once she herself has lost control and gotten in trouble. It is an acting class of nuance and stillness and histrionics all wrapped together as she and the young actor who plays her son, Kenny, Tobias Segal, find depths in the characters that leave them as well as the audience speechless with wonder.

T T 1/2 (out of 4 possible T's)

From Up Here, Manhattan Theatre Club, New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

Recent reviews...
On the Stage: Gypsy, The Four of Us, The Drunken City [tr]
On the Stage: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Adding Machine, Parlour Song [tr]
On the Stage: Crimes of the Heart, Sunday in the Park with George, and November [tr]
On the Stage: Come Back, Little Sheba and Next to Normal [tr]
On the Stage: The 39 Steps and Almost an Evening [tr]

Sphere: Related Content

On the Stage: Gypsy, The Four of Us, The Drunken City

Kevin Sessums last reviewed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Adding Machine, and Parlour Song for Towleroad. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

Okay. Let’s get the adjectives out of the way. Stunning. Amazing. Legendary. Mermanesque.

Yep. I’m describing Patti LuPone’s performance as Mama Rose in Arthur Laurents’ latest production of Gypsy, which is arguably the greatest American musical ever written. Its book is by Laurents. Its score is by Jule Styne, who wrote the music when the show’s lyricist, a 29-year-old Stephen Sondheim, was considered a bit too green to be trusted to take on the duties of composer by the show’s star, Ethel Merman, when its original choreographer and director, Jerome Robbins, had offered him both roles after Cole Porter and Irving Berlin turned Robbins down. Miffed, Sondheim had decided not to do the lyrics alone until his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, convinced him how important his contribution would be to the show. Some even insist the lyrics are the best that Sondheim has ever written. Laurents, who will be 90 in July, directed an earlier version of this production this past summer as part of City Center’s Encore series and, deepening it on many levels (especially LuPone’s performance), has now moved it to the St. James Theatre on Broadway.

I say Gypsy is arguably the greatest American musical because when it first opened in 1959 at the Broadway Theatre it was slighted by audiences and some critics and most awards ceremonies. Indeed, the original production did not win a single Tony award. It lost the Best Musical Tony in 1960 to both The Sound of Music and Fiorello!, which tied for the honor. Other nominees were Take Me Along and Once Upon a Mattress. Mary Martin as Maria in The Sound of Music beat Ethel Merman as Best Actress in a Musical. George Abbott won Best Director in the Musical category for Fiorello!, besting Robbins. Robbins wasn’t even nominated as Best Choreographer; the winner in that category was Michael Kidd for Destry Rides Again. For you trivia buffs: John Kander of Kander and Ebb was the rehearsal pianist for the original production and helped arrange the music for the dance numbers for which Robbins failed to be nominated.

An older downstairs neighbor of mine remembered his high school days in Brooklyn when I told him I’d just seen this latest production of Gypsy and we began to reminisce about all the previous ones we’d each seen. One of the first Broadway productions I ever saw when I first moved to Manhattan in 1974 was a production starring Angela Lansbury, which was also directed by Laurents. I also saw Tyne Daly in the role. (Both Lansbury and Daly did win the Tony for their portrayals.) I saw Linda Lavin. And Bernadette Peters. I even saw Peters' understudy, Maureen Moore, who made her Broadway debut as Dainty June in that 1974 Lansbury production at the Winter Garden. Peters herself played Baby June in a touring production of the show in which Merman starred when the initial Broadway production closed after 704 performances at the Imperial Theatre where it had moved after its opening at the Broadway. I missed Betty Buckley’s acclaimed performance at the Paper Mill Playhouse a couple of years ago. And I wish I had missed Bette Midler’s terribly over-the-top television take on the role. I kept wishing I had a back row balcony seat in my living room the whole time I watched her since that was how she was pitching the part.

"Honey, I saw Merman do it about ten times," my downstairs neighbor said. "All the faggy high school boys around the city like me back then would cut class on Wednesday afternoons and converge on the Imperial Theatre and second act Gypsy so we could watch Merman do ‘Rose’s Turn.’ People in New York back then didn’t like that show. It was too hard and cynical for them. But when you’re a gay-boy-aborning you eat that stuff up. There were a lot of first dates being made up in the balcony of the Imperial during the second act of Wednesday matinees of Gypsy in 1959 and 1960. The place was teeming with teenage gay boys playing hooky."

Gay boys of this generation don’t have to skip school to furtively make dates during Gypsy, but they would still be remiss if they don’t catch LuPone, this generation’s Merman, giving a performance that we’ll all be talking about to our own younger neighbors in years to come. Frank Rich, in his old job as theater critic at the New York Times, has compared Mama Rose to King Lear and LuPone is downright Shakespearean in the dramatic shadings she brings to her rendition of ‘Rose’s Turn,’ the noted, literally so, climactic nervous breakdown of the show’s second act. Laurents has reined in LuPone earlier in the show so she has someplace to go emotionally in the role and it pays off brilliantly. This is the most fully acted Mama Rose I’ve ever seen. LuPone still swoops up on many of her high notes and is the only singer I know who can slur a consonant, but the performance is otherwise so carefully calibrated her vocal idiosyncrasies seem to be created anew for Mama Rose herself.

Boyd Gaines, as Herbie, Rose’s love interest, is the first fully realized Herbie I’ve seen as well. For the first time you believe that the relationship the two are having is as carnal as it is caring and symbiotic. And Laura Benanti, who matures beautifully and hauntingly, into stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, the memoirist on whom the musical is based, measures up to Gaines and LuPone. These are three of the best musical performances I’ve seen in a very long time.

The show’s original title is Gypsy: A Musical Fable. This production — perhaps theatre great Arthur Laurents’s valedictory one — is destined to be a fabled one. Do not miss it.

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

Gypsy, The St. James Theatre, 246 West 44th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***THE FOUR OF US

I recently attended the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival down in New Orleans to appear on a couple of panels. I sat in the audience for several others, including one with playwright Terrence McNally who blamed the expense of real estate in New York for the dearth of young playwrights now in the city. Yet, rents be damned, some still are able to make their way here. Two recent plays are by two rather prolific young writers who haven’t been scooped up by Hollywood.

Continued, AFTER THE JUMP...

In fact, The Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of The Four of Us by Itamar Moses, the more accomplished of the two plays, is about what happens to two close friends when one’s book is bought for two million dollars and made into a movie while the other continues to struggle as a playwright. It is a lovely two-hander beautifully acted by Gideon Banner, as the more financially successful of the two, and Michael Esper. It takes on a rather Pirandello-like quality toward the end of the intermissionless evening that proves Moses is as clever as his characters are. He is certainly as talented as he leads us to believe each of them is. Pam MacKinnon is the play’s ingenious director who has elicited the affectingly naturalistic performances from her two actors to counterbalance the direction’s and the play’s ingeniousness. It’s well worth the visit.

T T 1/2 (out of 4 possible T's)

The Four of Us, Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***THE DRUNKEN CITY

The other play is The Drunken City by Adam Bock at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Sharp Theatre on 42nd Street. It concerns a girls-night-out in order to celebrate an upcoming marriage of one of them and what transpires when Manhattan — a monstrously beguiling place, according to Bock, with the emphasis on the monstrous — sinks its teeth into them. There is real heart in the sitcom body of the play, most of it found in the performance of Cassie Beck as Melissa, the betrothed, and Alfredo Narcisco, who plays Bob, the gay ex-marine baker for whom the young women work. Bob’s interest in Eddie, portrayed by Barrett Foa, who was so good in Avenue Q, is the true romantic spark that flickers on the edges of the play until it ignites in a long kiss between the two at the play’s end that seems to signal the deep need that all the characters have for a true connection. A sweet play sweetly directed by Trip Cullman. But a slight one.

T 1/2 (out of 4 possible T's)

The Drunken City, Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Sharp Theatre, 416 West 42nd Street
New York. Ticket information here.

Recent Reviews
On the Stage: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Adding Machine, Parlour Song [tr]
On the Stage: Crimes of the Heart, Sunday in the Park with George, and November [tr]
On the Stage: Come Back, Little Sheba and Next to Normal [tr]
On the Stage: The 39 Steps and Almost an Evening [tr]
On the Stage: Is He Dead? and The Little Mermaid [tr]

Sphere: Related Content

On the Stage: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Adding Machine, Parlour Song

Kevin Sessums last reviewed Crimes of the Heart,
Sunday in the Park with George, and November for Towleroad. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

Mendacity is the word that Tennessee Williams — probably smiling to himself every time he typed that first syllable into his typewriter — strikes like a discordant bell at the height of his soap-opera-as-masterpiece, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It’s the word that Brick, the closeted alchoholic heart of the play, throws at his father, Big Daddy, when trying to explain to him why he’s turned to the bottle. Indeed, mendacity is at the very heart of three wildly different productions I’ve seen lately.

Let’s start with Cat, director Debbie Allen’s African American production of the play. I went to a recent matinee with an open-mind regarding the rejiggering of Williams 1955 play in order to fit it into the black experience in America. And yet no rejiggering was really needed. Allen did seem to update it to a hazy idea of the 1970s with her costume choices and hair styles and the tacky nouveau-riche interiors. But the play works remarkably well with African American actors — or at least the African American actors she cast. This production is certainly on a higher level than the one that opened a few years ago on Broadway to disastrous reviews which starred Ashley Judd, Jason Patric, Ned Beatty, and Margo Martindale. Judd and Patric seemed lost in their roles but Beatty and Martindale as Big Daddy and Big Mama were magnificent.

I’ve seen my share of Cats. My first year living in New York in 1974 I saw Elizabeth Ashley give her now legendary portrayal of Maggie the Cat opposite the Brick of Keir Dullea. Fred Gwynne (yes, Herman of the TV show The Munsters) played Big Daddy and Kate Reid his wife. In 1990 I saw Kathleen Turner make her Broadway debut with a stunningly sexual Maggie opposite a boring Daniel Hugh Kelly (yes of the TV show Hardcastle and McCormick) as Brick. Charles Durning played Big Daddy and Polly Holiday (yes, kiss-my-grits Flo from the TV show Alice) played Big Mama. In 1976 Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner starred in a television version that, even with Sir Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy and Maureen Stapleton as Big Mama, was painful to watch. A later television version in 1985 with Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones restored my faith in the play. Rip Torn played Big Daddy in that production and the great Kim Stanley tore my heart out as Big Mama.

I’m sure most of you have seen the 1958 film version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman as their most beautiful selves. Dame Judith Anderson was oddly cast as Big Mama and Burl Ives, recreating his portrayal of Big Daddy in the Broadway production, won an Oscar for his portrayal of Big Daddy. The film itself lost out that year to Gigi as Best Picture. Others in the original Broadway production were Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie (yes, Miss Ellie of the TV show Dallas) and Ben Gazarra as Brick. For you trivia buffs, Cliff Roberston was Gazzara’s understudy. Mildred Dunnick played Big Mama.

All of that is to say, I’m a bit of a Cat fanatic so I’m happy to report that Allen’s production at the Broadhurst Theatre is a good introduction if you’ve not been as lucky as I to have ever seen a stage production of the play, which concerns, in real time, the night of Big Daddy’s birthday party when he discovers he’s dying of cancer and all the forms of mendacity that surround him on that night. James Earl Jones as Big Daddy is gruff and touching; his bluster is heartbreakingly rendered in that incongruous way only a great actor can summon when an array of emotions are all put on display at the same time. The second act in which he confronts Brick is the highlight of this production. Terrence Howard, making his stage debut, is not only amazingly sexy in the role — just listen to the women and some of us men in the audience audibly swoon when he makes his entrance — but is able to to convey the real anger and confusion at his core in a role that is maddeningly passive the way that Williams wrote it as if Williams was uncertain himself of what he thought of the character and the character's choices in life because at that time in his own life the issues that Brick was dealing with were so close to to him.

Phylicia Rashad (yes Claire Huxtable of the Bill Cosby Show) overacts a bit in her role as Big Mama but Big Mama herself, let’s face it, is a bit of an over-actor. It’s her way of coping. Anika Noni Rose who was so great in both the stage musical Caroline, or Change and the film version of Dreamgirls, acquits herself admirably as Maggie. She is a consummate actress but not yet a fully mature one so that Maggie’s hunger - sexual and material and emotional - seemed forced at times. But because of her musical background, she handles the first act aria of a soliloquy with remarkable aplomb.

Three quibbles. For some reason Allen has inserted a strolling saxophone player needlessly at the start of the play and between the three acts. Lisa Arrindell Anderson as Mae, Brick's sister-in-law, is giving one of the most archly awful performances I've ever witnessed. And Allen, who has failed to rein in Anderson, has pointed up the comedic moments of the play so that when Williams is at his most touching or his characters are at their most cruel, the audience has already been conditioned to laugh. It felt at times as if I were sitting in the audience of one of those many television shows I’ve mentioned.

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

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Broadhurst Theatre, 235 West 44th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***ADDING MACHINE

There’s nothing television-like about the musical adaptation of Elmer Rice’s expressionistic play, The Adding Machine, now at The Minetta Lane Theatre. Adding Machine (the The, like any semblance of sentimentality, has been jettisoned for this production) has transferred to New York from the Next Theatre Company in Chicago where it won a passel of Joseph Jefferson Awards, that city’s equivalent of the Tony. It’s caused a buzz in theatre circles here as well.

Continued AFTER THE JUMP...

The play served as an inspiration to young Tennessee Williams when he wrote an early work in 1941 which seems quite influenced by Rice’s dramatic treatise on the treachery of capitalism. Titled Stairs to the Roof, it finally had its premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1947. Like The Adding Machine, Williams’ play concerned robotic-like workers stuck as cogs in a larger impressionistic wheel formed by the mendacity of corporate America, depended on a deus ex machina, and had letters as its characters names instead of numbers as Rice labeled his. There is also an overlooked 1969 film of The Adding Machine, Rice’s most famous play — some might say that Street Scene is more famous — which starred Milo O’Shea as Mr. Zero, Phyllis Diller — yes, Phyllis Diller! — as his wife, and the great Samuel Beckett interpreter, English actress Billie Whitelaw as Mr. Zero’s secretary and lover, Daisy. Any film able to contain Diller and Whitelaw in the same frame is worthy of a Beckett play itself.

Adding Machine is beautifully performed by all concerned — yet doesn’t quite seem to reach its aspirations as a modern day Weill opera. (Weill himself chose Street Scene to musicalize.) Composer and co-librettist Josh Schmidt and Jason Loewith, who wrote the libretto with him, have done an amazing job, however, combining many musical styles into a creepy mishmash suitable to the source material. And director David Cromer has cast the show with an art director’s appreciation of faces. Looking at the actors and actresses onstage one feels as if one is seeing photographs from the 1920s come to life. Joel Hatch as Mr. Zero is a blank-eyed wonder as the murderer, Mr. Zero. Cyrilla Baer opens the show with an atonal-like aria that grates and yet grabs the heart. But the true star of the evening is Amy Warren as Daisy. She is as wonderful a singer as she is an actress. She is adamantly present onstage, her odd looks as compelling as they are sexual. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It was as if Miss Piggy were channeling Lotte Lenya.

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

Adding Machine, Minetta Lane Theatre, 18 Minetta Lane, New York. Ticket information here. (photo: carol rosegg)

***PARLOUR SONG

You’ve got one more week to catch the fugue-like Parlour Song by Jez Butterworth at the Atlantic Theatre. Beautifully directed by Neil Pepe, it concerns a married British couple portrayed by Chris Bauer and Emily Mortimer, and their mendacious neighbor played by Jonathan Cake. Butterworth is kind of a resident playwright of the Royal Court, three of his previous plays having been staged there — The Winterling, The Night Heron, and Mojo. The Atlantic staged wonderful and visceral productions of those last two plays here in New York. Yet Parlour Song — maybe its very title is a hint about this — is not visceral at all. There is a quietude about the domestic desperation it puts on display for us. I appreciated it — the staging, the language, the acting — more than I was moved by it. Some of its imagery was stunning yet at other times it seemed as if Butterworth had overplayed his metaphoric hand. Go and judge for yourself if you’re a theatre buff. It is certainly worth catching before it closes. Cake, staking his claim as New York’s newest leading man, once again doffs his clothes for his growing fan base here in New York. Bauer is brilliant in displaying the sharp anguish that keeps surfacing in his pudgy body. And Mortimer is a marvel. She dangerously channels a middle-class housewife’s ennui into a lacerating sensuality. She’d be great as Ruth in the next revival of Pinter’s The Homecoming.

T T 1/2 (out of 4 possible T's)

Parlour Song, Linda Gross Theater, 336 West 20th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

Recent Reviews
On the Stage: Crimes of the Heart, Sunday in the Park with George, and November [tr]
On the Stage: Come Back, Little Sheba and Next to Normal [tr]
On the Stage: The 39 Steps and Almost an Evening [tr]
On the Stage: Is He Dead? and The Little Mermaid [tr]
On the Stage: Holiday Fare — The Drowsy Chaperone, West Side Story, Xanadu and The Color Purple [tr]

Sphere: Related Content

Lambda Literary Award Finalists Announced

Finalists have been announced for the 20th annual Lambda Literary Awards, which will be handed out in West Hollywood at the Pacific Design Center on May 29th.

Among the more than 100 nominees is Towleroad's Kevin Sessums, whose memoir Mississippi Sissy was nominated in the 'Men's Memoir/Biography' category. Kevin has been writing our theater reviews. His award is well-deserved. I'll take this opportunity to toot Kevin's horn a bit more - the book was also named one of the Amercian Library Association's four 'Stonewall Books' for 2007 and was named one of Amazon's Best Books of 2007. It's out in paperback tomorrow!

I interviewed him about the book back in March.

Congrats Kevin!

A full list of the Lambda Literary Award nominations, AFTER THE JUMP...

LGBT ANTHOLOGIES

* Juicy Mother 2, Jennifer Camper (Manic D Press)
* Vital Signs, Richard Canning (Carroll & Graf)
* First Person Queer, Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel (Arsenal Pulp Press)
* Men of Mystery: Homoerotic Tales of Intrigue and Suspense, Sean Meriwether & Greg Wharton, (Haworth)
* Baby Remember My Name, Michelle Tea (Carroll & Graf)

LGBT ARTS & CULTURE

* Media Queered, Kevin Barnhurst (Peter Lang Publishing)
* Art That Dares, Kittredge Cherry (AndroGyne Press)
* The View From Here, Matthew Hays (Arsenal Pulp Press)
* Feeling Backward, Heather Love (Harvard University Press)
* Other Men's Sons, Michael Rowe (Cormorant Books)

LGBT CHILDRENS/YOUNG ADULT

* Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, Peter Cameron (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
* Hero, Perry Moore (Hyperion)
* Saints of Augustine, P.E. Ryan (HarperTeen)
* Freak Show, James St. James (Dutton Children's/Penguin)
* Parrotfish, Ellen Wittlinger (Simon & Schuster)

LGBT DRAMA/THEATER

* Dose: Plays & Monologues, Dan Bernitt (Sawyer House)
* Niagara Falls, Victor Bumbalo (Broadway Play Publishing)
* Return of the Caffe Cino, edited by Steve Susoyev and
George Birimisa (Moving Finger Press)

LGBT EROTICA

* The Golden Age of Lesbian Erotica, Victoria Brownworth & Judith M. Redding (Magic Carpet Books)
* Red Light, J. D. Glass (Bold Strokes Books)
* Ardennian Boy, William Maltese & Wayne Gunn (MLR Press)
* The Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica, Lawrence Schimel (Carrol & Graf)
* Homosex, Simon Sheppard (Running Press)
* Every Dark Desire, Fiona Zedde (Kensington)

LGBT NONFICTION

* Between Women, Sharon Marcus (Princeton University Press)
* Pink Harvest, Toni Mirosevich (Mid-List Press)
* Other Men's Sons, Michael Rowe (Cormorant Books)
* Gay Artists in Mondern American Culture, Michael S. Sherry (University of North Carolina Press)
* Imagining Transgender, David Valentine (Duke University Press)

LGBT POETRY

* Blackbird and Wolf, Henri Cole (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
* A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, Dawn Lundy Martin (University of Georgia Press)
* Otherwise Obedient, Carol Potter (Red Hen Press)
* Fata Morgana, Reginald Shepherd (University of Pittsburgh)
* The Second Person, C. Dale Young (Four Way Books)
* Human Resources, Rachel Zolf (Coach House Books)

LGBT SCI-FI/FANTASY/HORROR

* Wicked Gentlemen, Ginn Hale (Blind Eye Books)
* A Companion to Wolves, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear (Tor Books)
* Spaceman Blues: A Love Song, Brian Francis Slattery (Tor Books)
* The Dust of Wonderland, Lee Thomas (Alyson Books)
* Ha'penny, Jo Walton (Tor Books)

LGBT STUDIES

* Writing Desire, Bertram Cohler (University of Winsconsin Press)
* The First Man-Made Man, Pagan Kennedy (Bloomsbury)
* Between Women, Sharon Marcus (Princeton University Press)
* Caribbean Pleasure Industry, Mark Padilla (University of Chicago Press)
* Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, & the Black American Intellectual, Robert Reid-Pharr (NYU Press)

BISEXUAL

* Look Both Ways, Jennifer Baumgardner (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux)
* Becoming Visible, Beth Firestein, Ed., (Columbia University Press)
* Split Screen, Brett Hartinger (Harper Collins Children's Books)
* The Tourists, Jeff Hobbs (Simon & Schuster)
* Stray, Sheri Joseph (MacAdam/Cage)

TRANSGENDER

* Transparent, Cris Beam (Harcourt)
* Male Bodies, Women's Souls, LeeRay M. Costa, PhD, (Haworth)
* The Marrow's Telling, Eli Clare (Homofactus Press)
* What Becomes You, Aaron Raz Link & Hilda Raz (University of Nebraska Press)
* Nobody Passes, Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore (Seal Press)

LESBIAN DEBUT FICTION

* Lockjaw, Holly Farris (Gival Press)
* Dahlia Season, Myriam Gurba (Manic D Press)
* Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking, Aoibheann Sweeney (The Penguin Press)
* Breathing Underwater, Lu Vickers (Alyson Books)
* O Street, Corrina Wycoff (Other Voices)

GAY DEBUT FICTION

* Tales from the Town of Widows, James Canon (Harpercollins)
* A Push and a Shove, Christopher Kelly (Alyson Books)
* That Was Then, Michael Quadland (Red Hen Press)
* SoMa, Kemble Scott (Kensington)
* Freak Show, James St. James (Dutton Children's/Penguin)

WOMEN'S FICTION

* Biting the Apple, Lucy Jane Bledsoe (Carroll & Graf)
* The IHOP Papers, Ali Liebegott (Carroll & Graf)
* Greetings from Jamaica, Mari San Giovanni (Bywater Books)
* The Child, Sarah Schulman (Carroll & Graf)
* The Kind of Girl I Am, Julia Watts (Spinsters Ink)
* The Mandrake Broom, Jess Wells (Firebrand Books)

WOMEN'S ROMANCE

* Sheridan's Fate, Gun Brooke (Bold Strokes Books)
* The Road Home, Frankie J. Jones (Bella Books)
* Out of Love, K. G. MacGregor (Bella Books)
* For Now, for Always, Marianne K. Martin (Bywater Books)
* When Dreams Tremble, Radclyffe (Bold Strokes Books)

WOMEN'S MYSTERY

* Wall of Silence, 2nd Ed., Gabrielle Goldsby (Bold Strokes Books)
* Mortal Groove, Ellen Hart (St. Martin's Press)
* In the Name of the Father, Gerri Hill (Bella Books)
* Selective Memory, Jennifer L. Jordan (Spinsters Ink)
* Laura's War, Ursula Steck (Bella Books)

WOMEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

* Comfort Food for Breakups, Marusya Bocurkiuw (Arsenal Pulp Press)
* And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, Nicola Griffith (Payseur & Schmidt)
* An Army of Ex-Lovers, Amy Hoffman (University of Massachusetts Press)
* Two Lives: Gertrude & Alice, Janet Malcolm (Yale University Press)
* Waiting for the Call, Jaqueline Taylor (University of Michigan Press)

MEN's FICTION

* Call Me By Your Name, Andre Aciman (Farrar Straus Giroux)
* First Person Plural, Andrew W.M. Beierle (Kensington)
* Dark Reflections, Samuel R. Delany (Carroll & Graf)
* Fellow Travelers, Thomas Mallon (Pantheon)
* The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, Manuel Munoz (Algonquin)

MEN's ROMANCE

* Changing Tides, Michael Thomas Ford (Kensington)
* A Secret Edge, Robin Reardon (Kensington)
* Right Side of the Wrong Bed, Frederick Smith (Kensington)
* Broadway Nights, Seth Rudetsky (Alyson Books)
* A Few Hints and Clews, Robert Taylor (Haworth)

MEN's MYSTERY

* Double Abduction, Chris Beakey (J. Boylston/ ibooks, Inc.)
* Stain of the Berry, Anthony Bidulka (Insomniac Press)
* Pierce, Roberto Ferrari (Haworth)
* Murder in the Rue Chartres, Greg Herren (Alyson Books)
* Mahu Surfer, Neil Plakcy (Alyson Books)
* Drag Queen in the Court of Death, Caro Soles (Haworth)

MEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

* Forgiving Troy, Thom Bierdz (Hudson House)
* Dog Years, Mark Doty (HarperCollins)
* The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, Martin Duberman (Knopf)
* The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, Kenny Fries (Perseus Books)
* What Becomes You, Aaron Raz Link & Hilda Raz (University of Nebraska Press)
* Mississippi Sissy, Kevin Sessums (St. Martin's Press)

Sphere: Related Content

On the Stage: Crimes of the Heart, Sunday in the Park with George, and November

Kevin Sessums last reviewed Come Back, Little Sheba and Next to Normal for Towleroad. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

I recently saw two productions of previous Pulitzer Prize winners in the Pulitzer’s drama category — though neither is a drama. One is a a kind of Chekhovian comedy, that is if Anton Chekhov had read any Fannie Flagg. The other is a musical by Stephen Sondheim who, between perusing his famously dog-eared rhyming dictionary, seemed at the time to have been reading art history essays on neo-impressionism by the two Johns Rewald and Russell.

Beth Henley’s bittersweet Crimes of the Heart, which won the Pulitzer in 1981, has been revived at The Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels Theatre. Actress Kathleen Turner is making her directorial debut with the production and she acquits herself admirably, mining the show’s darker qualities while not skimping on the laughs embedded in the emotional mayhem that ensues when the three grown though not completely grown-up Magrath sisters congregate in their childhood kitchen in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. I’m a Mississippi native myself and one of my old Mississippi buddies, Johnny Epperson (AKA Lypsinka) is from Hazelhurst, proving that we shouldn’t be shocked that this particular small town can be the breeding ground for such sweetly eccentric characters who bravely own their innate diva qualities.

The Magrath sisters were raised by their grandfather after their mother hung herself along with the family cat when they were children and he is now dying up at the town’s hospital. One of the sisters — Meg — has flown in for the deathwatch from Los Angeles where she is a failed singer. The other two sisters still live in Hazelhurst. One — the mousy Lenny — is forlornly single and the other — the sensual yet ditzy Babe — has just shot her husband because she “didn’t like his looks” and is now out on bail. Woven throughout all the play’s woebegone kookiness is the noxious anger that is the residual result of their mother’s suicide.

Henley’s most famous work is a maddening dramatic concoction that, like a souffle, seems so simple to get right yet often falls flat. Turner’s production almost rises to the occasion. She has cast the play with three wonderful actresses. The tiny Jennifer Dundas as Lenny is just the dollop of emotional starch the play needs; there is nothing sentimental about what she achieves with the sentimental inchoate old-maid role. Lily Rabe, who is becoming one of New York’s most reliable young stage actresses, strikes just the right notes of danger and ditz and downhome heartbreak as Babe. Sarah Paulson as Meg manages to be both off-puttingly condescending yet painfully needy at the same time. And I was especially taken by Chandler Williams who plays Babe’s smitten lawyer, Barnette. In the original Broadway production the role was played by Peter MacNicol as a kind of nerdy joke. But Williams is surprisingly sexy, which is a good description of Turner’s take on the play itself.

T T 1/2 (out of 4 possible T's)

Crimes of the Heart, Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, 111 West 46th St, New York. Ticket information here.

***SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE

Another Roundabout production, this one at the Studio 54 Theatre, is a revival of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, which won the Pulitzer in 1985. It is a transfer from the highly acclaimed London production that originated at the tiny Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre before it moved to the West End where it won several Olivier Awards. The two leads from that production have recreated their roles here in New York City and the theatre season is richer for it.

Continued AFTER THE JUMP...

Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters created the roles and I thought they could not be bettered. But their British counterparts now over two decades later, Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell, bring new dimensions to the dual roles that each plays in the musical’s scheme. At their curtain calls at the matinee I saw, they blew the roof off the place as the audience rose in unison to give them a standing ovation and shouts of bravos. Evans in the roles of painter George Seurat in the first act set in 19th Century France and of his grandson George, a sculptor of light, set in the New York art world of the 1980s, is remarkable. He finds in each character the incongruent impetuses that make up an artist’s swagger: an unbounded ego lashed to a lovely insecurity, a sweetness leavened with cynicism, a wanton addiction to the discipline of creativity. Russell is less sexy than Peters was in the role of Seurat’s mistress, Dot, in the first act. But she is earthier and more moving. In the role of the grandmother Marie (the daughter of Seurat and Dot) in the second act, she is feisty and touching. The rest of the American cast is marvelous as well, especially Mary Beth Peil in her roles as the Old Lady in the first act and the art world aficionado, Blair Daniels, in the second, and Santino Fontana as the Soldier in the first act and, in the second, as Alex.

The first act of the musical still works better than the second, but the production’s young British director, Sam Buntrock, who got his start in animation, brings an astonishingly fresh eye to the proceedings and utilizes his animator’s expertise to the show’s advantage. There are some breathtaking touches — visual punctuations that highlight the show’s subject matter which involves the art of creation and how science can either enable it or deaden it, depending on your perspective. Seurat, in a letter stating his thoughts on the process, could have been summing up Sondheim’s take on the making of his own art, when he wrote, "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of the similiar ... considered according to their dominance ... in gay, calm, or sad combinations."

Two of the finest examples, in fact, of Sondheim’s art and philosophy are found in this show, the songs, “Finishing the Hat” and “Move On.” And at the end of each of the acts there is the transcendent, “Sunday,” during which Seurat’s masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, is assembled for our benefit in all its pointillist and, yes, human glory. To paraphrase Mama Rose in Gypsy, a character in another musical for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics to Jule Styne’s score and Arthur Laurents wrote the book, in which perhaps Sondheim’s philosophical take on art was summed up best: the audience can forgive you for a lot if you give ’em a great finish.

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Sunday in the Park with George, Studio 54, 254 W 54th St, New York. Ticket information here.

***NOVEMBER

An Afterthought: If you’re a Nathan Lane fan — and who really isn’t — then perhaps you should catch him in David Mamet’s afterthought of a play, November, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Mamet won the Pulitizer Prize for Drama the year before Sunday in the Park with George did for his Glengarry Glen Ross. November won’t win any prizes. But the audience howls with laughter at the vulgar language and hoary jokes with which Mamet has packed this sitcom of play about a Bush league president of the United States. The plot revolves around selling favors and pardoning turkeys and gay weddings. Lane gets every laugh — and even some that aren’t in the script. Laurie Metcalf, as his lesbian speechwriter, is as expertly deadpan as Lane is in his frantic genius. The only real turkey on stage, however, is the play itself.

T (out of 4 possible T's)

November, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

Previous Reviews
On the Stage: Come Back, Little Sheba and Next to Normal [tr]
On the Stage: The 39 Steps and Almost an Evening [tr]
On the Stage: Is He Dead? and The Little Mermaid [tr]
On the Stage: Holiday Fare — The Drowsy Chaperone, West Side Story, Xanadu and The Color Purple [tr]
On the Stage: Doris and Darlene and The Homecoming [tr]

Sphere: Related Content

On the Stage: Come Back, Little Sheba and Next to Normal

Please welcome Kevin Sessums, who last looked at The 39 Steps and Almost an Evening for Towleroad. You can also catch up with Kevin at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

Two recent productions have opened — one on Broadway, one off-Broadway — that deal with family dysfunction and the disparate ways it can bubble to the surface and emotionally scald those who find themselves wading, as it were, hip-deep in the midst of it.

One concerns alcoholism and 12 Step Programs and is imbued with a kind of elegiac loss. The other delves deeply into pharmacologic dependence and electric convulsive therapy and is saturated as much with a sense of elegiac wonder as it is with its own brand of sadness. One is set in 1950, the other in 2008. And though the narrative impetus of each is the death of an infant and the central character of each is an emotionally disturbed wife, one production is an old warhorse by William Inge and the other a new musical directed by Michael Greif.

The Manhattan Theatre Club’s production at the Biltmore of Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba stars S. Epatha Merkerson as Lola, the wife of the alcoholic chiropractor she calls Doc, who is portrayed by Kevin Anderson. The play deals with their barren marriage, which is enlivened by the purposeful and boy-crazy coed who boards with them. Shirley Booth, before she became known as the maid Hazel in the eponymous television series, won both a Tony and Oscar for the role of Lola and, I admit, it’s hard to shake Booth’s indelible impression as the inappropriately girlish and maddeningly garrulous lady-of-the-house.

It saddens me to say that Merkerson’s oddly stilted and emotionally stunted performance didn’t help erase Booth from my mind since I’ve been a fan of Merkerson’s for years, not only for her portrayal of Lt. Ann Van Buren in television’s Law and Order but also for her performances in, among others, Birdie Blue, The Piano Lesson, F**cking A, and Lackawana Blues. Though her performance in Come Back, Little Sheba has been acclaimed by both the New York Times and The New Yorker by two reviewers I admire — Ben Brantley and Hilton Als — I was left unmoved by it. In fact, I found it grating — though I will grant that it might have been her bravely choosing to highlight the character’s own grating qualities that I found so irksome. At times, however, it seemed the odd staccato coquettishness of her portrayal caused less a sensation of watching a repressed sensualist than a too amply pleasant simpleton. Anderson, giving a beautifully buttoned-down performance, did manage to shake her — and, in turn, me — free of the studied stupor of her portrayal during the play’s climactic drunk scene in which he viciously attacks her.

I am a big proponent of color-blind casting in almost every case. But in this one, I would be remiss if I didn’t confess — okay, let the comments commence — it brought up unanswered dramatic questions for me. The fact that Merkerson, as an African American woman, is married to a preppy white man in the midwest of 1950 would, one presumes, cause some dramatic elements to surface in the play. To ignore the societal and extra emotional issues that such a marriage would entail in 1950s America — in a play that is about a troubled marriage to begin with — did not make dramatic sense. Inge certainly never set out to write a political play in his life. All his work is small-bore in its piling on of domestic details to wring some sort of dramatic payoff in his plays.

The rest of the cast was up to the tasks at hand, which in an Inge play can often mean fleshing out stereotypes. Two standouts are Zoe Kazan, as Marie the boarder, who is still young enough to be slightly confused by her effect on others yet old enough to realize the power of that effect, and Brian J. Smith, as her temporary boyfriend Turk, who literally fleshes out his role when he poses in his gym shorts for Marie to sketch him as he holds a javelin. Inge, who was gay and is said to have been as sexually repressed as many of his characters, was certainly not repressed when it came to sexual imagery.

The production was directed by Michael Pressman with a workmanlike aplomb, which is the incongruous description I would use for Inge’s own aesthetic. The set by James Noone served such an aesthetic. But it was the exquisite lighting design by Jane Cox that added a kind of poetic nuance to the play’s heart-rending dreariness.

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Come Back, Little Sheba, Biltmore Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***
NEXT TO NORMAL

There is nothing dreary about Next to Normal, the new musical at Second Stage on 43rd Street, but it is certainly heart-rending. A musical about mental illness may sound ridiculous — and it does walk a fine line between being rather ridiculous and daringly moving. I come down decidedly on the side of the latter however. Not since Rent and Spring Awakening have I been as surprised and emotionally stirred by a musical. Indeed, Michael Greif, the show’s director, directed Rent as well as last year’s off-Broadway hit, Grey Gardens, that had a move to Broadway. Next to Normal should make the move also. If it does, it should also win the Tony.

Continued AFTER THE JUMP...

When the show first started I was rolling my eyes a bit at the campiness of it all, but the campiness is a way of seducing you into the very difficult subject that begins to unfold and envelope you with a sureness and finesse so seldom witnessed in a musical. Much of this is to the credit of Greif and Sergio Trujillo, who is billed not as the choreographer but the musical stager. Such precision is the cornerstone of this production. The Company-like set is by Mark Wendland and the searing lighting design is by Kevin Adams. Jeff Mahshie has costumed the characters with a chic simplicity. The pitch-perfect musical direction is by Mary-Mitchell Campbell. The songs have been beautifully orchestrated by Michael Starobin and Tom Kit. Music coordination is by Michael Keller. And the sound design is by Brian Ronan. I have made a point of mentioning all of them because their contributions combine so seamlessly to create this sensation of a show, one that left me — I am not embarrassed to admit — drenched in tears by its end.

I am amazed that I left the show so overwhelmed by it because last year I almost walked out of High Fidelity, the ear-piercing mess for which Tom Kitt wrote the music last year on Broadway. It was one of the worst experiences I have ever had sitting through a musical. I only stayed for the second act because I had a teenage nephew with me who seemed to be enjoying it. But Kitt has composed a carefully crafted score that hews closely — dangerously close at times — to the emotions being so expertly explored in Next to Normal. It is a breakthrough work for him and for his librettist and lyricist, Brian Yorkey.

I am hesitant to tell you the story of the show since I think you should go and discover it for yourselves. Secrets are revealed in the narrative. I don’t want to spoil them for you. It is an exploration of the depths of mental illness in one woman’s life — let’s leave it at that — and how that illness affects her family. Alice Ripley as Diana, the woman who is ill, is giving a brilliant performance, the kind of performance those of us who saw her in Side Show have been waiting for her to give for years. At the matinee I saw, Ripley was obviously fighting a cold and yet her difficulty in singing the role added yet another heartbreaking aspect to her performance. She should win every award given for a lead actress in a musical this year. Brian d’Arcy James, as her husband Dan, is both touching and tough and sings his heart out. Jennifer Damiano, the sixteen-year-old who plays their daughter, emotionally limns her role with a much older actress’s acumen. Adam Chanler-Berat, who plays her stoner boyfriend, is able to convey for us his sweetness without seeming treacly. Asa Somers, portraying Diana’s two doctors, is both officious and funny at the same time. And Aaron Tviet, who plays Diana’s and Dan’s son Gabe, not only possesses a gangling sexiness but sings like an angel.

Next to Normal is scheduled to close March 9th. I’m sure it will split critics right down the middle. Some will ridicule its aspirations. Others, like me, will laud them. I loved this show. And, as one person who knows how hard it is to heal when haunted by the presence of lost loved ones, I am grateful for it.

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Next to Normal, Second Stage Theatre, 307 W. 43rd Street, New york. Ticket information here.

Recent Theatre Reviews
On the Stage: The 39 Steps and Almost an Evening [tr]
On the Stage: Is He Dead? and The Little Mermaid [tr]
On the Stage: Holiday Fare — The Drowsy Chaperone, West Side Story, Xanadu and The Color Purple [tr]
On the Stage: Doris and Darlene and The Homecoming [tr]