'Kinky Boots' Opens On Broadway: REVIEW

BY NAVEEN KUMAR

Who better to help boost a stumbling economy than a brazen troupe of fabulous drag queens in high-heels? They’re just the divas for the job in Kinky Boots, the uplifting and heartfelt new musical with book written by Harvey Fierstein and music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper, which opened on Broadway last Thursday at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre.

Loosely based on the 2005 film of the same name, Kinky Boots tells the story of Charlie Price (Stark Sands), whose father dies, leaving him in charge of the family’s floundering shoe factory. Through an unlikely alliance with a wry drag queen named Lola (Billy Porter), Charlie hatches a plan to save the family business by producing stiletto boots sturdy enough to support a man’s weight, and fierce enough to satisfy his outer diva.

Of course, this is not just a tale of economic triumph. Ultimately, it’s a story about courage, pride, and accepting others for who they are—all lessons which drag queens are perfectly suited to teach the world.

Kinky Boots is also a musical very much about family. Charlie and Lola share a bond in overcoming the disappointment of not living up to their fathers’ expectations. Yet for all the characters on stage here, family bonds stretch beyond bloodlines. For Charlie, saving his father’s factory means saving his lifelong friends and neighbors from unemployment. And aside from a fraught relationship with her ailing father, Lola’s band of limber back-up Angels is the only family she knows.

With direction and choreography by Jerry Mitchell, it’s hard to think of a creative team whose talents are more fit for telling a story as campy as it is sincere. Here Fierstein appropriately combines his experience writing musicals about economic underdogs (Newsies) and saucy show queens with a soft side (La Cage Aux Folles). 

Lauper’s music is buoyant, layered with synth, and provides a conducive vehicle for belt-heavy star vocals. Like the pretensionless, unabashed brand of pop she pioneered in the 80’s, Lauper’s songs are scattered with hooks and straightforward in their sentiment. From full cast dance numbers to confessional ballads, and an eleven o’clock number that Porter slays as Lola, every feeling is spelled out with a sugared clarity amplified by repetition.

Both top-notch performers, Sands and Porter bring charisma and talent to their halves of the story’s central odd couple, including voices that soar over the rafters. Annaleigh Ashford is delightfully funny as Charlie’s hapless admirer and dedicated employee, though developing romantic subplots is not the show’s strongest suit. Charlie’s relationship with his fiancée dissolves mostly unseen, and Lola né Simon is actually meant to be straight as well—a holdover from its source material that this production wisely underplays.

If Kinky Boots wears its heart on its sleeve (lyrics in the closing song actually spell out its lessons in a numbered list), it’s a full heart beating with a passionate and important message worth spreading. That changing minds really does change the world is an equation we’re counting on. 

Recent theatre features...
Michael Urie Takes On Barbra Streisand in 'Buyer & Cellar': INTERVIEW
Nora Ephron’s 'Lucky Guy' Starring Tom Hanks Opens on Broadway: REVIEW
'Breakfast At Tiffany's' Opens On Broadway: REVIEW
Annie Baker’s ‘The Flick’ Opens Off Broadway: REVIEW
‘Hit The Wall’ a New Play About the Stonewall Riots, Opens Off-Broadway: REVIEW

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar (photos:matthew murphy)

Nora Ephron’s 'Lucky Guy' Starring Tom Hanks Opens on Broadway: REVIEW

BY NAVEEN KUMAR

The late Nora Ephron’s new play Lucky Guy, which opened on Broadway last night at the Broadhurst Theatre, resembles not so much conventional drama as kinetic, straight-talking journalism. Starring Tom Hanks as renowned tabloid reporter and columnist Mike McAlary, Ephron’s play depicts the newspaperman’s rise and fall in the world of city tabloids as if it were a feature profile. It's an insider story with many contributors.

The stalwart writers and editors in the smoky newsrooms of Ephron's 80's and 90's New York vie for narrative authority as they retell major events in McAlary’s career — though ultimately all the voices on stage add up to Nora’s own. A veteran of Gotham newsrooms, including a stint at the New York Post, Ephron’s sharp personal insights are the play’s unmistakable highlights.

Often told in the same exclamatory tones as headlines splashed across city tabloids, the main events in McAlary’s life are more illustrated than they are dramatized. Players agree (or disagree) about timelines and scenes are assembled accordingly, but Ephron’s characters rarely divert their attention from addressing the audience — storytelling is their business.

George C. Wolfe (Angels In America) directs an ensemble cast of fifteen led by Hanks, whose signature everyman demeanor and accessible charm are put to good use. Hanks takes the audience into his confidence with ease and brings warmth to the surface of a bullish, ambitious character. He transforms smoothly from a pavement-pounding reporter covering the police beat to a weekly columnist blinded at inopportune times by the size of his byline.

Standouts among the cast include Courtney B. Vance (Fences) as Hap Hairston, and Peter Gerety (The Lieutenant of Inishmore) as John Cotter, two of McAlary’s Newsday editors with whom he had strong bonds. Deirdre Lovejoy is refreshing as two of the only apparent women in the newsroom boy’s club, while Maura Tierney’s subdued performance as McAlary’s wife Alice feels like a missed opportunity to lend the story a more solid emotional anchor.

Yet as events turn to McAlary’s struggle with terminal illness, it’s difficult to overlook the parallel to Ephron’s own, which ended last summer while she was continuing work on this play. Between Hanks' heartfelt performance and words that at moments resonate beyond the character on stage, it’s an affecting conclusion with a broader context.

Ultimately, Ephron’s play is an earnest tribute to a particular heyday of sensational print journalism before the age of Perez Hilton and TMZ. If her characters aren't easy to get to know, it's because they're essentially beat reporters spinning stories about their lives rather than living them on stage.

Ephron's Cotter boils it down: "You’re born, you die. Everything in between is subject to interpretation. […] Everything in between is how you tell the story and who’s telling the story and what they think is important and which order to put it in and where they’re coming from." As her characters maintain their distance, the 'who' in Lucky Guy rarely ceases to be Nora herself—though there are worse ways to spend an evening than listening to anecdotes and insights from a revered New York legend.     

Recent theatre features...
'Breakfast At Tiffany's' Opens On Broadway: REVIEW
Annie Baker’s ‘The Flick’ Opens Off Broadway: REVIEW
‘Hit The Wall’ a New Play About the Stonewall Riots, Opens Off-Broadway: REVIEW
Amy Herzog’s ‘Belleville’ Opens Off Broadway: REVIEW
Edie Falco Opens In ‘The Madrid’ Off Broadway: REVIEW

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar (photos: joan marcus)

'Breakfast At Tiffany's' Opens On Broadway: REVIEW

BY NAVEEN KUMAR

Though it ends with a cameo by a cat on a stormy night in New York City, Richard Greenberg’s stage adaptation of Truman Capote’s Breakfast At Tiffany’s, which opened at the Cort Theatre on Broadway last week, isn’t very much like the iconic rom-com made famous by Audrey Hepburn.

Rather than reshaping it into a conventional love story like the 1961 film, this production stays close to Capote’s original novella set during the middle years of World War II. In his stage adaptation, Greenberg (Take Me Out, Three Days of Rain) maintains the original narrative’s first person voice with Fred (an amiable Cory Michael Smith) as the play’s narrator.

The story begins with a missing girl. It’s 1957 and Fred hasn’t seen his friend and neighbor Holly Golightly (Emilia Clarke of HBO’s Game of Thrones) in over ten years. He goes on to recount the story of their fateful and fitful relationship, cluing in the audience on his feelings as seasons pass and their lives become increasingly entangled.

That Fred and Holly don’t live happily ever after is clear from the start—his fascination with her is only momentarily and unrequitedly romantic. Rather, the play is more concerned with steadily revealing the enigmatic nature of both characters.

While Hepburn’s Holly Golightly is all sweetness and light, the Holly on stage here is more brassy and droll—an ingratiating yet calculating city girl making her own way in wartime Manhattan. Clarke lends the character a particular kind of charm, though it seems in line with the story being told here that her Holly is less magnetically sympathetic as the Holly made famous by Hepburn.

Although he spends most of the play baring his soul to the audience, our narrator has secrets of his own—and like most loaded secrets, Fred’s turn out to be sexual. Clues slip from the narrative throughout (some less subtle than others) hinting that Fred may not be exactly on the straight-and-narrow.

Though its story is decidedly different from the film, the production benefits from cinematic design elements. Director Sean Mathias (Bent) makes creative use of lighting, projection and mobile scenery to guide the action from one scene and season to the next, conjuring everything from a night stroll on the Brooklyn Bridge to horseback riding through Central Park.

With its aura of film noir rather than frothy antics, this Breakfast At Tiffany's will likely catch staunch romantics and classic film devotees off-guard. But the combination of two meticulous craftsmen in Capote and Greenberg make for a smart, seductive, well-spoken drama.

Plus, there's the cat. People really do seem to love that cat.

Recent theatre features...
Annie Baker’s ‘The Flick’ Opens Off Broadway: REVIEW
‘Hit The Wall’ a New Play About the Stonewall Riots, Opens Off-Broadway: REVIEW
Amy Herzog’s ‘Belleville’ Opens Off Broadway: REVIEW
Edie Falco Opens In ‘The Madrid’ Off Broadway: REVIEW
Zosia Mamet Opens in ‘Really Really’ Off Broadway:REVIEW

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar (photos: nathan johnson)

Annie Baker’s ‘The Flick’ Opens Off Broadway: REVIEW

BY NAVEEN KUMAR

A lot of stories get told in movie theatres—but none quite like Annie Baker’s subtly artful behind-the-scenes drama about three employees at a run-down single screen movie house. The Flick, which opened Off Broadway Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons, attends to what happens between screenings when the illusion is over, lights come up—and somebody has to clean up the mess.

Directed with an appropriately ambling precision by Baker’s frequent collaborator Sam Gold (Uncle Vanya, The Aliens), the play is staged among about a dozen rows of movie theatre seats (a meticulously detailed set by David Zinn), so that the audience sits in place of the screen. Other than occasionally stumbling upon a particularly gnarly food spill, a majority of the action on stage consists of characters sweeping popcorn off the floor.

A seasoned employee of the Flick, Sam (Matthew Maher) shows young rookie Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten) the ropes on his first day. Sam is what you might call a lifer — 35, living in his parents’ attic, longing to be promoted into the projection room. A reserved, fastidious movie buff home on an extended break from college, Avery’s job at the plex seems temporary by design. Rose (Louisa Krause), a twenty-something with baggy clothes and dyed green hair, works the projector and completes what develops into a clumsy sort of love triangle.

A young, critically acclaimed playwright, Baker has become known for her intricate hand at crafting characters whose idiosyncrasies become one with their charm. Her work is in top form here, as her eloquent characterizations carefully emerge out of scenes of mostly mundane action. Just as the play’s scenes take place between movie screenings, much of Baker’s story lives in the silences between dialogue.

All three actors are exceptional, distilling their performances with equal parts humor and heart. In a play much about perception and people often overlooked, one moment characters may seem easy to peg and the next they surprise us with an unexpected personal insight. All three performers navigate this dynamic with a comfortable ease that’s a pleasure to watch.

Weighting silent moments with unspoken meaning is one of director Sam Gold’s greatest strengths, but it also contributes one of the production’s lone disabilities. Clocking in at just over three hours, it could certainly stand to be tightened. Even slight adjustments in pace would quicken the play’s momentum and bring it down to more reasonable length.

Spending three hours these days in a movie theatre isn’t uncommon — and The Flick is likely more interesting than most of the post-Oscar releases playing at a multiplex near you. And at least it comes with an intermission. 

Recent theatre features...

 ‘Hit The Wall’ a New Play About the Stonewall Riots, Opens Off-Broadway: REVIEW
Amy Herzog’s ‘Belleville’ Opens Off Broadway: REVIEW
Edie Falco Opens In ‘The Madrid’ Off Broadway: REVIEW
Zosia Mamet Opens in ‘Really Really’ Off Broadway:REVIEW
Fault Line Theatre’s ‘From White Plains’ Opens Off-Broadway: REVIEW

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar (photos: joan marcus)

‘Hit The Wall’ a New Play About the Stonewall Riots, Opens Off-Broadway: REVIEW

BY NAVEEN KUMAR

How do you go about staging landmark riots considered the birth of the LGBT civil rights movement? Landing your play a stone’s throw from Stonewall Inn, at an Off-Broadway theatre known for its spare, intimate and emotionally raw productions seems pretty much the perfect place to start. In Hit The Wall, which opened Sunday at the Barrow Street Theatre, playwright Ike Holter also throws in a lot of heart, kinetic rage, and sass talk so fast it spins into poetry.

New York City, June 27^th, 1969—it’s hot as hell, the air is thick with civil unrest, and Judy Garland’s funeral draws thousands of loyal fans to the Upper East Side. Downtown, it’s just another smack-talking morning on the neighborhood stoop, where sharp-tongued young hustlers Mika and Tano (Gregory Hanley and Arturo Soria, imposingly fierce) read every unwelcome queen who steps onto their turf.

There’s Roberta (Carolyn Michelle Smith) the righteous black lesbian, shunned equally by the women’s movement and the Black Panthers, pounding pavement trying to start her own revolution. (“Get your a** back to Sarah Lawrence, girl, MOVE.”) ‘The Newbie’—buttoned-up, naïve, and mostly in the closet. (“This is our stoop, this is our spot, you don’t like the pot then spit out the smoke and cough.”)

Mika and Tano meet their match in Carson (Nathan Lee Graham) a seasoned (and by the end of the night, legendary) cross-dressing black diva, who serves them a read so fast and furious their limp tongues snap to the back of their heads. More than just delicious high-camp, Holter makes clear that these queens' vicious attitudes are part of a carefully honed defense against a harsh world. That they reserve the worst of it for each other shows the contentiousness among a splintered group of outcasts not yet thinking of themselves as a group.

Though they are of course anything but typical, Holter’s cast of characters each stand in for a sort of type—including Cliff (Ben Diskant) a draft-evading drifter, and the unnamed ‘A-Gay’ (Sean Allan Krill), all business suits and discretion. That most of the characters introduced during the day lack fleshed-out backstories seems exactly the point. By the time they’re all dancing in the dark at Stonewall, what matters is we know why they’re there—to drink, get laid, and not worry about hiding themselves.

Under Eric Hoff’s dynamic direction, actions leading from the sweltering day to that fateful night flow one into the next with all the restless momentum and energy of a city street. The historic event is staged with some concern for accuracy, as characters shout out what official reports say happened next.

Holter’s play doesn’t shy away from showing horrifying trials faced by transgendered patrons at the hands of police who raided the bar. In a wrenching and intimate scene, Carson and Peg (Rania Salem Manganero) are both held back as the bar is evacuated and brutally harassed by the play’s lone cop (an intimidating Matthew Greer).

The riot that follows is choreographed like something of a wild dance. If it seems at moments to descend into theatrical chaos—well, it is a riot, after all. Imagination deserves some rein, as reliable accounts of the explosive events are difficult to come by—aside from those able to say, as these bold characters do: “I was there.”

Dragged out of the bar on her way to the back of a cop car, it’s Peg whose indignant cries rouse an initially complacent crowd into action: “No more watching!” It’s a welcome battle cry for any era.

Recent theatre features...
Amy Herzog’s ‘Belleville’ Opens Off Broadway: REVIEW
Edie Falco Opens In ‘The Madrid’ Off Broadway: REVIEW
Zosia Mamet Opens in ‘Really Really’ Off Broadway:REVIEW
Fault Line Theatre’s ‘From White Plains’ Opens Off-Broadway: REVIEW
Tectonic Theatre Project Presents 'The Laramie Project Cycle' At BAM: REVIEW

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar (photos: matthew murphy)

'Why, it's a man!' It's Oz: The Great and Powerful - REVIEW

The ladies love their wizard (James Franco) in Oz: The Great and Powerful

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS 

You're basically asking for a trouble with that title, you know? OZ: THE GREAT AND POWERFUL. It doesn't take a crystal ball to predict how this will turn out. If the movie is neither great nor powerful, tomatoes will be thrown. It feels weird to abbreviate the new picture as simply Oz, since it's a derivation rather than an original, so we'll call it Great and Powerful moving forward despite the misdirection. The filmmakers would approve since the movie begins with a clear and charming admission that James Franco's "Oscar Diggs" is no wizard at all but a travelling con-artist. So I come not to throw tomatoes (too easy), at least not at first, but to marvel at how red they are as they fly through the air.

The trailer brags that the movie comes from the producers of Tim Burton's Eyesore in Wonderland, a gargantuan box office success but one of the worst films of the new century, so there was cause to worry. Could any film be as simultaneously garish and muddy to look at? The happy answer is no.3D technology has come a long way and director Sam Raimi (most famous for the Spider-Man and Evil Dead trilogies) has far more taste and control of his color palette than Burton has had recently. A

fter the movie's old fashioned title sequence and Kansas-set prologue, introducing us to Franco's womanizing wizard before he's whisked off to Oz (you know how), every color of the rainbow does make an appearance. They often share the frame but rather than a muddy color assault, the rainbow here behaves like a joyous community, intermingling peacefully and taking turns in the spotlight. In some small ways it's a worthy tribute to the joys of Golden Age Technicolor. That's especially true when the eye-popping color meets a great visual idea like the Wicked Witch's fiery silhouette (shadow play being a favorite tactic of Raimi's) or a terrific climactic image like the Wizard's pompous arrival in the Emerald City via clouds of colored smoke and cinematic projection. 

So, points for visual prowess but visual prowess ages rapidly in cinema. People don't still watch The Wizard of Oz seventy-four years later because the effects look cutting edge. They watch it for Judy Garland and those adorable Friends of Dorothy.

MORE, AFTER THE JUMP...