Theatre News and Reviews

When Patti LuPone launches into Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive,” you know you’re in for a grand ride.

How many singers can perfect this ecstatic, swooping and soaring ode from the musical “Company” with the authority of Ms. LuPone? And with her ineffable blend of vocal plangency and dramatic force?

In her one-woman show “Matters of the Heart” at the Paramount Theatre, LuPone lets us know (in her first theatrical run here) that she’s still a card-carrying member of that endangered class of bona fide, Broadway-bred showstoppers.

Now in her mid-50s, LuPone is still a petite powerhouse who can glam it up in a black evening dress — and sass it up with bawdy humor. And she retains full command of an elastic mezzo-soprano that can blast a big showtune out of the park, or sweetly murmur a lullaby.

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Hal Holbrook will star in his acclaimed one-man show Mark Twain Tonight! in a limited engagement at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Performances will start on June 6th, and play six performances a week for three weeks.

One of the most popular one-person shows of all time, Mark Twain Tonight! was first conceived in 1966 as a theatrical visit with the incisive writer and humorist born Samuel Clemens; Clemens is listed as the author of the show, in fact. The show ran for 88 performances at the Longacre Theatre, and Holbrook received a Best Actor in a Play Tony. Mark Twain Tonight! played a short return visit in 1977, and Holbrook has toured the show nationally and internationally ever since. Holbrook will soon take the show to Colorado, Ohio and Utah. The show is also familiar to non-theatregoers through a 1967 televised version.

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“Little Women,” the durable Louisa May Alcott title that has inspired countless movie, play and musical versions, emerges once again April 21 with a Manhattan public presentation of Alison Hubbard, Kim Oler and Sean Hartley’s musical take on the property.

The show to be heard in The York Theatre Company’s Spring Developmental Reading Series 3 PM April 21 represents a revised version of the Oler-Hubbard score that won the Richard Rodgers Development Award when it was linked to a libretto by Allan Knee. That earlier show was being developed for Broadway, but its producers chose to keep Knee’s book and bring on another songwriting team, resulting in the current Broadway run of Little Women, the Musical starring Sutton Foster as Jo — a powerhouse performance that is expected to snag a Tony Award nomination.

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It has been written, “Love is wonderful the second time around.” That holds true in this repeat production of “I Love You, You’re Perfect, No Change” now running at Chico Cabaret.

This musical farce, seen here April 7, premiered off-Broadway in 1996 and has played to appreciative audiences wherever performed. With book and lyrics by Joe DePietro and music by Jimmy Roberts, the revue charms with cute sketches and songs about the singles scene, nuptials, parenthood and old age.

Under the masterful direction of Chico Cabaret’s own Sue Ruttenburg, “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” moves the sequences forward using bare-bones staging against black scenery. This allows the audience to concentrate on the talents of the four actors as they move through life’s sequences with facial expressions and body language.

A gleaming black grand piano occupies a pedestal at stage rear. It is an appropriate place to introduce the talents of pianist Jevon Gegg-Mitchell, a newcomer to Chico Cabaret. Gegg-Mitchell becomes one of the actors with enthusiastic vigor, feeling the music as he plays the catchy songs.

Four actors whose voices blend into a rich mixture of song depict the numerous scenes with contagious appeal. They assure the audience that 90 percent of the time men still date women, marry them and make babies.

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Rev up your ThighMaster, Broadway. Suzanne Somers is coming to town.

The star of television’s “Three’s Company” and the fitness guru whose latest book is called “Slim and Sexy Forever” will have her own one-woman show this summer at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.

Entitled “The Blonde in the Thunderbird,” Somers’ entertainment with music will begin performances July 8 with an opening date still to be set. It is scheduled to play a limited engagement through Sept. 3.

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“Someone said in one of the reviews that [the play] was a combination of Stephen King and the Brothers Grimm meets Quentin Tarantino.” — Jeff Goldblum

Like a creepy ghost story with startling twists and turns, Broadway’s “The Pillowman” is hard to explain without spoiling it. But Jeff Goldblum takes a stab.

“It’s so compelling and smart and moment-to-moment and surprising and unexpected and touching and funny and scary and ambiguous and mysterious and rich and worth thinking about,” says the actor, just minutes after stepping off the stage of Broadway’s Booth Theatre from a recent Wednesday matinee preview performance.

Goldblum, speaking by phone, tends to talk in run-on sentences when describing the play. It’s a symptom of his genuine excitement not only to be in it, but to be back on Broadway. It’s where he got his start, long before movies like “The Big Chill,” “The Fly” and “Jurassic Park” made him famous.

“The Pillowman,” which opens tonight, centers on a writer in a totalitarian state who is interrogated about the gruesome events in his eerie short fiction. Billy Crudup plays the writer, whose works mirror real-life child murders occurring in his town. The similarities prompt authorities (Goldblum and Zeljko Ivanek) to detain the writer and his mentally challenged brother (Michael Stuhlbarg) and grill them for information about their possible involvement in the crimes.

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Racism is an ugly word, but it is a far uglier reality.

The state-sanctioned racism of apartheid is the backdrop for Athol Fugard’s ” ‘Master Harold’ . . . and the boys.” The racism that flows between a white teenager and the two black men employed in his parent’s restaurant is the poignant foreground.

Next Act Theatre’s powerful production of the play opened Friday at the Off-Broadway Theatre, under the direction of C. Michael Wright. His long history with the play includes a brief stint on Broadway, a six-month national tour and a production at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.

Wright avoids the melodrama and sanctimony that are often applied to productions of the play. He creates instead an unflinchingly human picture that is as meaningful now as it was in height of apartheid. It is emotionally deafening while quietly understated and unhurried, while beautifully paced.

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Plane Crazy is set during an explosive time in history: The intersection between the dawn of the Jet Age, the introduction of the Pill, the genesis of the modern Feminist Movement, and the Golden Age of Advertising.

Stewardesses represented the first-wave shock troops in a changing world. This was an exclusive sorority of women who had freedom. Freedom to travel wherever they wanted. Freedom to have sex with whomever they wanted. And freedom to have a career without needing the support of a man.

Alas, men were not as quick to adapt. Most guys were interested in a woman who was a cross between Betty Crocker and Betty Page - they didn’t want a Betty Friedan. Society itself, as typified by the advertising industry, was also slow to adapt.

Plane Crazy the Musical, found via boingboing

HERE LIES JENNY, the smash theatrical event starring two-time Tony and Emmy Award winner Bebe Neuwirth and featuring the music of Kurt Weill will play San Francisco’s Post Street Theatre (450 Post Street) for a strictly limited engagement, with previews on Sunday, May 1st and Monday, May 2nd, and a press opening on Tuesday, May 3, 2005. Presented by The Zipper Theatre, Brent Peek and Maria Di Dia, HERE LIES JENNY is conceived and directed by Tony Award winner Roger Rees, features choreography by Tony Award winner Ann Reinking and has music direction and supervision by Leslie Stifelman.

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Directed with an assured sense of style by Lynne Stinchcombe Pollingue, Prattville’s Way Off Broadway Theatre company’s production of Larry Shue’s “adult” comedy “The Nerd” manages to punctuate the play’s surface silliness with social and cultural barbs, which is delivered by a talented cast of seven actors.

The play, which relies on character stereotypes and clever situations and dialogue to entertain, is being performed in the Prattville Performing Arts Center. The small realistic set is designed by Ed Fieder, who uses some newly acquired lighting instruments. The result is a production that is both energetic and visually pleasing

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“Doubt,” which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for drama, is up for another honor, the 20th annual Lucille Lortel Award for outstanding off-Broadway play.

The play by John Patrick Shanley is one of five Lortel best-play nominees, a group that also includes “After Ashley” by Gina Gionfriddo, “Going to St. Ives” by Lee Blessing, “Intimate Apparel” by Lynn Nottage and “Orson’s Shadow” by Austin Pendleton. The nominations were announced Tuesday.

“Doubt,” which tells the story of a nun’s suspicions about a priest and his relationship with a young boy in a Catholic grade school, opened last November at off-Broadway’s Manhattan Theatre Club. It reopened March 31 on Broadway.

Nominated for best off-Broadway musical were “Altar Boyz,” “Junie B. Jones,” “Lone Star Love” and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”

Winners will be announced May 2.