Theatre News and Reviews

Broadway favorite Rebecca Luker will be part of the York Theatre Company’s upcoming presentation of Darling of the Day.

Part of the Off-Broadway theatre’s acclaimed “Musicals in Mufti” spring season, Darling of the Day will be mounted April 15 at 8 PM, April 16 at 2:30 and 8 PM and April 17 at 2:30 and 7:30 PM. Directed by Michael Montel with musical direction by Andrew Gerle, the cast will also include Simon Jones, Charlotte Moore and Stephen Mo Hanan.

Darling of the Day features music by Jule Styne, lyrics by E. Y. Harburg and a book by Nunnally Johnson. The musical is based on the Arnold Bennett novel “Buried Alive” and concerns the story of Priam Farll, “a painter who sees an opportunity to duck out of London’s stifling high society by assuming the identity of his recently deceased valet.” Patricia Routledge won a Tony Award for her performance in the original 1968 Broadway production. The Mufti staging will feature an adaptation by Erik Haagensen. Darling of the Day was first presented by the “Mufti” series in 1998; it is being repeated this season in honor of the Jule Styne Centennial.

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If you asked local audiences to identify the most influential theater artists in Milwaukee over the past 10 years, you would hear names like Hanreddy, Davis, Carsey and West.

It’s symptomatic of C. Michael Wright’s self-effacing personality that he doesn’t have a high public profile, but theater insiders would add his name to the list.

Wright has acted for all of Wisconsin’s major theater companies, from the Milwaukee Repertory Theater to the Skylight Opera Theatre, the American Players Theatre and the Madison Rep. However, performing is probably the least of his contributions to local theater.

Most of the time, Wright is a quiet offstage force, affecting what we see on stage without being seen himself. His knack for networking and dealing with people has made him a catalyst for the dynamic energy that fuels the local theater community.

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There’s been countless films made about Broadway in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s - the thrill of the spotlights, the greasepaint, the roar of the crowds, all of that. But as obvious an idea for a film as it may seem, a documentary has never been made about Broadway. Until now.

US Broadway lover and filmmaker Rick McKay has spent six years interviewing more than 140 Broadway stars, ranging from Carol Channing to Shirley Maclaine, Farley Granger and Uta Hagen. Some of them have since died, making the final product, Broadway: The Golden Age, By The Legends Who Were There, all the more important.

It started as a modestly short program for television, but McKay found it hard to sell the idea. “When I brought it to PBS, they said, ‘No one’s interested in old people; you’ve got to put young people in the cast’,” he explains.

“About two days later, Gwen Verdon, Bob Fosse’s wife, died, and her last interview was in my film. And I thought, ‘It’s becoming a responsibility for me to do these interviews, because these people who are older will never get a chance to tell their story again’. I was in the right place right time.”

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Gina Gionfriddo’s hit After Ashley featuring Anna Paquin, Kieran Culkin, Grant Shaud and Tim Hopper ends its Off-Broadway run at the Vineyard Theatre April 3.

Terry Kinney (Beautiful Child, “Oz”) directed the New York premiere of the black comedy which began performances Feb. 11 and opened Feb. 28 at the downtown venue for a run originally set through March 20. The work was extended “in response to strong audience and critical support,” according to a release.

In After Ashley, a 17-year-old boy deals with his complex and tumultuous relationships with his mother and father when a young girl enters his life. Originally commissioned by Philadelphia Theatre Company, the work then developed further at the 2003 O’Neill Playwrights Conference of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center before becoming a breakout work at the 2004 Humana Festival of New American Plays.

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Roundabout Theatre Company is planning on a Broadway revival of August Strindberg’s classic Miss Julie at Studio 54 this fall, according to the non-profit’s website.

The work has seen a number of productions in recent years since the company had scrapped plans for producing the play in fall of 2002.

Scott Schwartz (Golda’s Balcony, The Foreigner) staged the work Off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre last summer. A Richard Nelson adaptation currently runs at Yale Repertory Theatre. And Marin Hinkle will portray the title character for an upcoming Craig Lucas adaptation at New York’s Rattlestick Theatre. (Closer playwright Patrick Marber even provided London’s Donmar Warehouse with a supposed sequel to the work with After Miss Julie in 2003.)

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Ron Rifkin — who starred in the world premiere of The Paris Letter in Los Angeles — as well as John Glover, Lee Pace and Daniel Eric Gold are expected to star in the upcoming Off-Broadway staging, Playbill.com has learned.

Previews will begin for the New York premiere of the new Jon Robin Baitz drama on May 13 toward a June opening for the limited engagement through Aug. 7.

Director Doug Hughes (Frozen) told Playbill.com’s Harry Haun that the aforementioned male quartet — with one female counterpart — will begin rehearsals April 12 for the work from the playwright of Chinese Friends.

In Paris Letter, a Wall Street hotshot struggles to escape a past that catches up with him and threatens both his personal and professional lives.

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Film star Denzel Washington stars as Marcus Brutus in a new Daniel Sullivan- directed production of Shakespeare’s military tragedy Julius Caesar, opening at the Belasco Theatre on April 3, after previews March 8.

“Et tu, Brute,” will be spoken by William Sadler, who takes on the role of Caesar in Shakespeare’s rendition of the most famous assassination in history, its participants and its fallout. Jessica Hecht will play Brutus’ wife Portia. Colm Feore is Denzel’s conspirator, the “lean and hungry” Cassius, and Eamonn Walker is his nemesis, Marc Antony.

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The Last Days of Judas Iscariot are played out in court one final time when Stephen Adly Guirgis world premiere play directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman closes Off-Broadway, April 3.

The new LAByrinth Theatre Company staging presented in collaboration with The Public Theater began previews Feb. 8 and opened March 2 at The Public Theater’s Martinson Hall. Sam Rockwell and Eric Bogosian star in the debut which had extended prior to its opening due to audience demand.

The Last Days follows the story — set mainly in a near-Purgatory courtroom — of a lawyer who appeals the case of God and the Kingdom of Heaven vs. Judas Iscariot. Saint Monica, Mother Teresa, Mary Magdalene, Caiaphas the Elder, Simon the Zealot and even Sigmund Freud offer their testimony in the seriocomic work which “re-examines the plight and fate” of the infamous Biblical betrayer.

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In musical theatre, the words “fun for the whole family” invariably send alarm bells to purists everywhere: Beware screaming teenagers and their oversized, red-state, mid-American parents who have a knack for unwrapping their candy at the most inopportune moment. Wicked, however, may well be the exception to all the rules of old and new Broadway.

This infinitely pleasing musical recreation of the land of Oz before Dorothy was blown into it — based on the 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire — literally has something for everyone. That’s both what’s good and bad about it.

Teenagers can enjoy its sweet rendering of the rivalry and friendship between the two witches: the “perfect” Glinda (Kendra Kassebaum) and the “unnaturally green” Elphaba (Stephanie J. Block). Winnie Holzman (creator of TV’s My So-Called Life) has crafted a book for Wicked that addresses every emotional need of young women in, or looking for, love, and has dressed it all up in a classic outsider story.

Older folks will appreciate its deconstruction of The Wizard of Oz and, to a less-effective degree, a parable about political power through the suppression of free thought and the creation of enemies to divert attention from the domestic agenda.

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Julia Gibson and Reg Rogers join Marin Hinkle in the cast of the upcoming Craig Lucas adaptation of Miss Julie at Off-Broadway’s Rattlestick Theatre.

The new take on August Strindberg’s classic is set to play May 11-June 9 at the downtown stage with an opening scheduled for May 19. Anders Cato directs.

In Miss Julie, a flirtation between a young aristocratic woman and her father’s servant becomes more than the lady bargained for in the psycho-sexual drama filled with obsession, ambition and manipulation.

Gibson — who recently directed Bliss at the Rattlestick served as standby for the recent Broadway revival of ‘night, Mother. She has appeared in The Exonerated national tour, Stealing Sweets and Punching People (Summer Play Festival) and The Public’s Shakespeare in the Park stagings of Measure for Measure and Henry VIII.

Rogers has performed on Broadway in The Molière Comedies, Holiday, Proposals and Off-Broadway in The Dazzle, Unwrap Your Candy, Lobster Alice, Look Back in Anger, Cellini and Four Dogs and a Bone.

Hinkle — known to television audiences for her turns in “Two and a Half Men” and “Once and Again” — has appeared on Broadway in A Thousand Clowns, Electra and The Tempest. Other credits include Tony Kushner’s adaptation of A Dybbuk (NYSF), The Fourth Sister (Vineyard Theatre), Sabina (Primary Stages), Blue Window and the world premiere of Neil Simon’s Rose and Walsh (Geffen Playhouse).

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John Turturro stars with Max Casella, Didi Conn and Aida Turturro in Theatre for a New Audience’s staging of Eduardo De Filippo’s Souls of Naples, starting Off-Broadway, April 2.

Roman Paska directs the American premiere of a new TFANA-commissioned translation of the work by Village Voice critic Michael Feingold. The show will officially open April 14 at The Duke on 42nd Street for a run currently slated through May 8.

The new translation of Eduardo De Filippo’s Questi Fantasmi! “is what would have resulted if Chekhov and Pirandello had sat down together to write the screenplay for a Bob Hope haunted house movie,” said translator Feingold in a release. The work set in 1946’s Naples, the story follows a down-on-his-luck married man who becomes caretaker of an old palace the is supposedly haunted.

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