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New
York! New York!
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New York Theatre Reviews 1October 1998The Dinah Washington Musical Gramercy Theatre Dinah Was is the story of singer Dinah Washington and it is by turns funny, touching and bitter. With thirteen of her best known songs, including Baby, You Got What It Takes, On the Mellow Side, What a Difference a Day Makes, Come Rain or Come Shine and A Rockin' Good Way, it's also a music feast for Dinah Washington fans. The script is peppered with superb one-liners. Talking to a wistress who tells her she's had six children, Dinah says, "Honey, if you look like that after six kids, I must have given birth to Mexico", and, talking about one of her many men, she says, "After he's kissed you, count your teeth". Lillias White - who has a Tony, an Emmy, and practically every other award the US theatre can offer to her credit - plays Dinah with magnificent conviction and a rapport with the audience which begins almost the second she walks on-stage, and just grows from then. Whether belting out a song in the true Dinah Washington style, teasing one of her men, protesting against being discriminated against, or arguing with her mother, she is totally convincing. Even when mood changes are abrupt, she carries the audience along with her effortlessly. A truly magnificent performance. But this is not a one-woman show. Far from it! She is backed by an excellent ensemble of four and four great musicians. However special mention must be made of Adriane Lenox who plays Maye (Washington's PA), a waitress, Washington's mother and Violet whom Washington invites on-stage to sing with her. Four different roles, but each is played so convincingly that it's hard to believe that it's the same actress. At the end, the audience rose to its feet as one to salute a magnificent evening of theatre. This was my first show in New York, which I saw the day I arrived. I forgot that I had got up at three the previous morning, driven forty miles to the airport, flown to Amsterdam (and sat in that airport for a few hours), then flown to Newark, travelled by bus into NYC, found my hotel, unpacked, explored... Well, you get the picture! I should have been exhausted and unable to keep my eyes open but I came out of that theatre on a real high, feeling totally refreshed and invigorated. What a rockin' good way to start a visit! By Donald Margulies Lucille Lortel Theatre Uta Hagen made her professional debut as Ophelia in 1937: 61 years on she is still going strong. There is little doubt that the audience at the Lucille Lortel was there to see a living theatrical legend - which it did - but it saw much more than that. It saw a consumate actress who can still hold an audience in the palm of her hand It also saw, in Lorca Simons, a young actress who has the ability to become as great in her own way as Miss Hagen. The play is a two-hander. At the beginning Lisa (Simons), a gauche, loud and apparently rather silly creative writing student, arrives for a tutorial with Ruth (Hagen), her professor, who is an established, even famous author. By the end of the play, six years later, Lisa is herself a published and successful author who has used her own experience as the basis for her first book but draws upon the experience of Ruth for her second, "stealing my story" as Ruth puts it. In the time between, we watch the relationship between the two evolve; we see shifts of power, growth and decline. We watch Lisa, albeit with love, admiration and respect, suck Ruth dry. In this whirlpool of emotion there is no resolution at the end, just a deeply miserable and destroyed old woman and a young one who doesn't understand what she has done. The performances are totally convincing, and the chemistry between the two characters, their shifting relationships, the subtle changes in the balance of power, are crystal-clear to the audience, although not to the characters themselves. We are left with a feeling of sorrow, but there is no sense that we can blame one or the other. Each is just being herself: director William Carden and the two actresses avoided the easy way out, the apportioning of blame, which would have provided an easy ending but would have distorted the play and made it into a kind of melodrama. Altogether a fine production. In the UK we, of course, know the greats of the American theatre - Arthur Miller, Tennesse Williams, Eugene O'Neill, and so on - and of the playwrights of today Neil Simon and David Mamet are well known and performed often, but there is a huge body of work which has not crossed the Atlantic. This play shows us what we've missed. And so do the performances. There's a kind of snobbery (shared by us Brits and a lot of Americans) which exalts the British actor above the American (and, to be honest, with some justice if we base that opinion on film rather than theatre), but these two ladies, the old and the young, prove that this is a false perception. I have been fortunate enough to see - live - Olivier and Gielgud, Redgrave and Richardson, and many others, and I have to say that the quality of performance in this play was the equal of anything I've seen on the British stage. Frankly, it was worth the trip to NYC just for this play alone! Created and written by Gerard Alessandrini Stardust Theatre I didn't intend to see Forbidden Broadway, but I'd waited in the queue at the TKTS Booth for a couple of hours only to find that there were no tickets available for the show I wanted to see, so I thought, "What the hell? I might as well see something" and chose this one because it looked the most attractive of those shows for which there were tickets. I'm glad I did! What an hilarious show! For those who don't know it - and it's been running in various incarnations for a number of years now - it's a send-up of Broadway and Broadway shows. It's purely light entertainment in the revue style, but it's funny and fast moving. The four cast members are no mean performers in their own right, and both the writing and the performance are very clever. The send-ups of the various Broadway shows are wicked and the audience never stopped laughing from start to finish. I missed a few jokes which were obviously very US-centric, but most of them hit home - and most do so even if you haven't seen the show they refer to. That said, if you have seen it, the jokes are funnier. Poor old Cats and Phantom come in for quite a hammering, but no show is sacred: even Mandy Patinkin in concert gets it in the neck! OK, it's revue rather than theatre, but so what? It's enjoyable nonetheless! |
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