edjames

I saw this new production last night and I'm happy ti say that I thought it was excellent. I've seen several productions over the years. The last was the Lincoln Center NYPhil version starring Kelli O'Hara and Nathan Gunn in 2013. That was hard to top, but this one certainly tries very hard. Yes, the casting is a bit odd. Black man, white woman but it soon fades away and wears off.
As with many Rodgers/Hammerstein productions there is a dark side to the story. “Carousel” tells the tragic story of carnival barker Billy Bigelow and his ill-fated marriage to New England millworker Julie Jordan, balanced against the comic romance of Julie’s best friend, Carrie Pipperidge, and ambitious fisherman Enoch Snow. Billy is abusive and has a quick temper. The musical was adapted from Ferenc Molnár's 1909 play Liliom, transplanting its Budapest setting to the Maine.
As Jigger Craigin, the rough ex-con who leads Billy astray, NYCB star, Amar Ramasar does not disappoint. His good looks and toned body, not to mention his excellent dancing skills, make you wish he had more to do.
Joshua Henry has a powerful and commanding voice. I'll be the first to admit that I was not familiar with his previous work. Jessie Muller is excellent as Julie.
Brittany Pollack dances the Act 2 beach ballet, detailing the unhappy life of Billy’s 15-year-old daughter, with sensitivity. In a nonsinging role, Margaret Colin is very good as Mrs. Mullin, Billy’s boss and sometime lover. It was good to see her back on stage.
The music is classic Broadway and the score is one of my favorites. The ballad "If I Loved You," is breathtaking. The choreography is very good. The sets are minimal.
All in all, a very fulfilling and entertaining evening of theater.

I saw this new production last night and I'm happy ti say that I thought it was excellent. I've seen several productions over the years. The last was the Lincoln Center NYPhil version starring Kelli O'Hara and Nathan Gunn in 2013. That was hard to top, but this one certainly tries very hard. Yes, the casting is a bit odd. Black man, white woman but it soon fades away and wears off.
As with many Rodgers/Hammerstein productions there is a dark side to the story. “Carousel” tells the tragic story of carnival barker Billy Bigelow and his ill-fated marriage to New England millworker Julie Jordan, balanced against the comic romance of Julie’s best friend, Carrie Pipperidge, and ambitious fisherman Enoch Snow. Billy is abusive and has a quick temper. The musical was adapted from Ferenc Molnár's 1909 play Liliom, transplanting its Budapest setting to the Maine.
As Jigger Craigin, the rough ex-con who leads Billy astray, NYCB star, Amar Ramasar does not disappoint. His good looks and toned body, not to mention his excellent dancing skills, make you wish he had more to do.
Joshua Henry has a powerful and commanding voice. I'll be the first to admit that I was not familiar with his previous work. Jessie Muller is excellent as Julie.
Brittany Pollack dances the Act 2 beach ballet, detailing the unhappy life of Billy’s 15-year-old daughter, with sensitivity. In a nonsinging role, Margaret Colin is very good as Mrs. Mullin, Billy’s boss and sometime lover. It was good to see her back on stage.
The music is classic Broadway and the score is one of my favorites. The ballad "If I Loved You," is breathtaking. The choreography is very good. The sets are minimal.
All in all, a very fulfilling and entertaining evening of theater.

Kudos for TR, however, it's the circumstances behind his announcement that concerns me.
 
According to Hollywood sources, TR was forced out of the closet after an on-set argument between actors Isiah Washington and Patrick Dempsey. Apparently upset that TR, or one of the other cast members was late arriving on the set, Washington's anger got the better of him and he and Patrick Dempsey got into a face to face argument with some saying he put Dempsey in a choke hold while yelling an anti-gay slur about TR.
It all seemed to be downplayed by Dempsey and Washington and although the set was closed down temporarily, everyone apologized afterwards and that seemed the end of it.
However, there are those that are demnading Washington be fired from his job for his angry and physical outburst as well as using the "faggot" word, referring to TR.
One wonders if the "N" word were used at he, or his fellow African-American castmates, would there be more fuss about this situation?
 
Go, discuss amongst yourselves....
 
Ed

Grand Hotel, The Musical

Mar 21 – 25, 2018
 
Tickets start at $35
 
Encores!

A faded ballerina, a Baron who moonlights as a burglar, a dying bookkeeper, a businessman facing certain ruin, and a young secretary all-too-eager to become an American film star are all trapped by history, as the world careens into a great depression, and the revolving door keeps turning.
 
Grand Hotel, The Musical features music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest, a book by Luther Davis, and additional music and lyrics by Maury Yeston. When the show opened on Broadway in 1989 it was a hit—winning five Tony awards and running for 1,017 performances.
 
Book your reservation for the mysterious and luxurious Grand Hotel, The Musical.

Cast & Credits
Book by Luther Davis
Music and Lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest
Based on Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel
By arrangement with Turner Broadcasting Co., owner of the motion picture Grand Hotel
Additional Music and Lyrics by Maury Yeston
Featuring The Encores! Orchestra
Encores! Artistic Director Jack Viertel
Encores! Music Director Rob Berman
Directed and Choreographed by Josh Rhodes
Starring Junior Cervila, John Clay III, Natascia Diaz, John Dossett, Irina Dvorvenko, Guadalupe Garcia, Nehal Joshi, James T. Lane, Jamie LaVerdiere, Eric Leviton, Robert Montano, Kevin Pariseau, William Ryall, James Snyder, Brandon Uranowitz, Daniel Yearwood
With Aaron J. Albano, Matt Bauman, Kate Chapman, Sara Esty, Hannah Florence, Richard Gatta, Emily Kelly, Andrew Kruep, Kelly Methven, Harris Milgrim, Adam Roberts, Christopher Trepinski, Sharrod Williams

And now on Broadway.
I caught an early preview last night, and with the exception that studly handsome Brit actor, Russell Tovey did not transition from the London cast (I had been looking forward to seeing him again on Broadway), this is still an excellent production.
Nathan Lane and Andrew Garfield reprise their lead roles. Nathan as the despicable, evil, ruthless Roy Cohn, and Andrew as Prior, the gay man, dying of AIDS, whom the play revolves around. Intense, brutally honest and relevant in today's world, this play does not disappoint. Interestingly, the "Republican" lines resonated with the audience in today's political climate. The audience loved it. Rousing standing ovation, and well-deserved, I might add, although at 3+ hours, it is a bit of a theatrical marathon.
I miraculously survived the AIDS crisis. The virus still with us, and although there are new and much improved drugs and treatments, I well remember those who literally fell off the face of the earth during the early 80's and died quickly because doctors had no idea how to treat them. The government stood silent against the plague and refused to do anything. Not only was this true of the Reagan administration, but here in NYC, we can blame Mayor Koch and others for their refusals to acknowledge the crisis. Gay men and women organized and found ways to help their brethren cope with devastation.
This play drags up personal painful memories for me, but I did enjoy this production. I've seen a few others over the years. I did not go to the original production as I was so burned out from attending funerals, memorial services and donating my time and monies to AIDS charities in the 80's and early 90's, that I needed a respite from the crisis.
That said, I look forward to next Sunday's performance of part2.
Interestingly, if you caught Nathan Lane on Stephen Colbert a couple of weeks ago, he talked about Roy Cohn's influence on our current "leader" (He Who Shall Nt Be Named) and how Cohn taught him how to deflect criticism and accusation by accusing others, pointing the finger in the other direction, and when everything else fails, deny, deny, deny. Interesting perspective and commentary from Nathan.
Definite Tony noms for Nathan and Andrew.
 
ED

NYTimes review of the updated cast for Hello Dolly:
Review: The ‘Dolly’ Parade Marches On, Now With a New Star

Bernadette Peters, who is taking over the role of Dolly Levi in “Hello, Dolly!” from Bette Midler.
The hit musical revival introduced four fresh principals on Thursday evening. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
A dimply new star has joined the cast of “Hello, Dolly!” and he’s delightful — oh wait.
 
Perhaps you weren’t asking about Charlie Stemp, the replacement Barnaby Tucker in the hit musical revival that introduced four fresh principals on Thursday evening.
 
O.K., then: A dimply new star has joined the cast of “Hello, Dolly!” and she’sdelightful.
 
And something more, too.
 
Bernadette Peters, who turns 70 next week, doesn’t need to step into anyone’s shoes at this point in her 60-year Broadway career. That she would take over the role of Dolly Levi from Bette Midler (and her alternate, Donna Murphy) means she was interested in the challenge, not the provenance. I imagine she understood that there was something she could bring to the part that no one else could.
 
That something is not a stage personality filled with gregarious high spirits. Ms. Peters is neither the hoyden type nor the winking type, at least not since her days as a self-parodying chorine. Where Ms. Midler wrung laughs from a line like “I’m tired, Ephraim, tired of living from hand to mouth” — sometimes even pretending to collapse in decrepitude — Ms. Peters doesn’t even go for a giggle. She makes it clear that Dolly is talking about real hardships: the anxiety of work and the loneliness of a widow.
 
Ms. Peters is in fact a widow. (Her husband died in a helicopter crash in 2005.) So is Ms. Murphy, who nevertheless seemed to revel, like Ms. Midler, in the role’s brightest colors. For all the thoughtfulness she brought to the character, Ms. Murphy was more than comfortable with Dolly’s swanning tours of the passerelle; she giddily partook in the loop of absorption and reflection that eventually whips the audience’s love into a kind of hysteria.
 
Ms. Peters gets all that, and returns it. She sings the Jerry Herman songs thrillingly, of course. But if her performance is more like Ms. Murphy’s than like Ms. Midler’s, it has an even darker underlay. I don’t mean that she isn’t funny; she is — though I’m not sure I really believed, in the famous scene at the Harmonia Gardens, that a woman so disciplined in her diet that she will eat just “three smiles of grapefruit” for breakfast would ever chow down on the giant turkey leg set before her.
 
Photo

 
The darkness is more of an aura or predilection. Ms. Peters seems most truly herself not in charm numbers like “I Put My Hand In” but in spoken or sung soliloquies like “Before the Parade Passes By.” In such moments Dolly, the old meddler, isn’t conning anyone; she’s being honest with herself. The final scenes, even as they bring her financial and marital woes to an end, are heartbreaking in the way all successful campaigns are if looked at closely enough.
 
That’s something you don’t really expect to see in a 1960s musical comedy, especially one as lovingly and successfully reincarnated as “Hello, Dolly!” is in Jerry Zaks’s revival. The explosion-in-a-Necco-factory sets and costumes (by Santo Loquasto) and the eccentric Gower Champion choreography, restaged by Warren Carlyle, continue to astonish; you actually gasp at the hats and postures.
 
But a gap may be opening up between the production’s style and Ms. Peters’s. Mr. Stemp and the other new principals — Victor Garber as Dolly’s intended, Horace Vandergelder; Molly Griggs as the milliner’s assistant, Minnie Fay — match the bright polish of the original cast, which has grown a bit zany with time.
Mr. Garber has a breezier take on Vandergelder than did David Hyde Pierce; the subtext of his bluster is never really in doubt. Ms. Griggs is charming and light as a bubble. And Mr. Stemp, as a 17-year-old clerk looking for adventure, doesn’t seem so much excitable as convulsive. Mr. Carlyle has given him some acrobatic new dance moves to make hay of his hyperkinesis.
 
Ms. Peters goes along with all this, to a point. But sometimes I felt she would rather observe the parade than be in it. (Showbiz was never her idea.) Personally, I’m a sucker for that: I think it gives this “Dolly” a fascinating new valence.
 
And “Dolly” can handle it. After all, it has accommodated actresses as different as Carol Channing (the original) and Tovah Feldshuh over the years. However peppy and farcical it gets, it is built on a strong foundation; Michael Stewart’s book draws heavily on the dramatic and real-world wisdom of its immediate source, Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker.”
 
That play, itself worth reviving, is filled with philosophical asides that the musical borrows almost whole. “The surest way to keep us out of harm is to give us the four or five human pleasures that are our right in the world,” goes the best of these asides, and as spoken passionately by Ms. Peters, herself one of those four or five human pleasures, it has never sounded so true.
 
“And that takes a little money,” she adds.
 
Also true.

Why? One easy answer...I ALREADY HAVE TICKETS for Three Tall Women and Angels In America. I'm still debating Carousel. I've seen several productions over the years.
 
Also, I guess you don't realize that sometimes a new lead can bring a new experience to a show (see NYT review) and I delight in everything that is Bernadette. She is the consummate performer.
 
ED

Why? One easy answer...I ALREADY HAVE TICKETS for Three Tall Women and Angels In America. I'm still debating Carousel. I've seen several productions over the years.
 
Also, I guess you don't realize that sometimes a new lead can bring a new experience to a show (see NYT review) and I delight in everything that is Bernadette. She is the consummate performer.
 
ED

NYTimes review of the updated cast for Hello Dolly:
Review: The ‘Dolly’ Parade Marches On, Now With a New Star

Bernadette Peters, who is taking over the role of Dolly Levi in “Hello, Dolly!” from Bette Midler.
The hit musical revival introduced four fresh principals on Thursday evening. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
A dimply new star has joined the cast of “Hello, Dolly!” and he’s delightful — oh wait.
 
Perhaps you weren’t asking about Charlie Stemp, the replacement Barnaby Tucker in the hit musical revival that introduced four fresh principals on Thursday evening.
 
O.K., then: A dimply new star has joined the cast of “Hello, Dolly!” and she’sdelightful.
 
And something more, too.
 
Bernadette Peters, who turns 70 next week, doesn’t need to step into anyone’s shoes at this point in her 60-year Broadway career. That she would take over the role of Dolly Levi from Bette Midler (and her alternate, Donna Murphy) means she was interested in the challenge, not the provenance. I imagine she understood that there was something she could bring to the part that no one else could.
 
That something is not a stage personality filled with gregarious high spirits. Ms. Peters is neither the hoyden type nor the winking type, at least not since her days as a self-parodying chorine. Where Ms. Midler wrung laughs from a line like “I’m tired, Ephraim, tired of living from hand to mouth” — sometimes even pretending to collapse in decrepitude — Ms. Peters doesn’t even go for a giggle. She makes it clear that Dolly is talking about real hardships: the anxiety of work and the loneliness of a widow.
 
Ms. Peters is in fact a widow. (Her husband died in a helicopter crash in 2005.) So is Ms. Murphy, who nevertheless seemed to revel, like Ms. Midler, in the role’s brightest colors. For all the thoughtfulness she brought to the character, Ms. Murphy was more than comfortable with Dolly’s swanning tours of the passerelle; she giddily partook in the loop of absorption and reflection that eventually whips the audience’s love into a kind of hysteria.
 
Ms. Peters gets all that, and returns it. She sings the Jerry Herman songs thrillingly, of course. But if her performance is more like Ms. Murphy’s than like Ms. Midler’s, it has an even darker underlay. I don’t mean that she isn’t funny; she is — though I’m not sure I really believed, in the famous scene at the Harmonia Gardens, that a woman so disciplined in her diet that she will eat just “three smiles of grapefruit” for breakfast would ever chow down on the giant turkey leg set before her.
 
Photo

 
The darkness is more of an aura or predilection. Ms. Peters seems most truly herself not in charm numbers like “I Put My Hand In” but in spoken or sung soliloquies like “Before the Parade Passes By.” In such moments Dolly, the old meddler, isn’t conning anyone; she’s being honest with herself. The final scenes, even as they bring her financial and marital woes to an end, are heartbreaking in the way all successful campaigns are if looked at closely enough.
 
That’s something you don’t really expect to see in a 1960s musical comedy, especially one as lovingly and successfully reincarnated as “Hello, Dolly!” is in Jerry Zaks’s revival. The explosion-in-a-Necco-factory sets and costumes (by Santo Loquasto) and the eccentric Gower Champion choreography, restaged by Warren Carlyle, continue to astonish; you actually gasp at the hats and postures.
 
But a gap may be opening up between the production’s style and Ms. Peters’s. Mr. Stemp and the other new principals — Victor Garber as Dolly’s intended, Horace Vandergelder; Molly Griggs as the milliner’s assistant, Minnie Fay — match the bright polish of the original cast, which has grown a bit zany with time.
Mr. Garber has a breezier take on Vandergelder than did David Hyde Pierce; the subtext of his bluster is never really in doubt. Ms. Griggs is charming and light as a bubble. And Mr. Stemp, as a 17-year-old clerk looking for adventure, doesn’t seem so much excitable as convulsive. Mr. Carlyle has given him some acrobatic new dance moves to make hay of his hyperkinesis.
 
Ms. Peters goes along with all this, to a point. But sometimes I felt she would rather observe the parade than be in it. (Showbiz was never her idea.) Personally, I’m a sucker for that: I think it gives this “Dolly” a fascinating new valence.
 
And “Dolly” can handle it. After all, it has accommodated actresses as different as Carol Channing (the original) and Tovah Feldshuh over the years. However peppy and farcical it gets, it is built on a strong foundation; Michael Stewart’s book draws heavily on the dramatic and real-world wisdom of its immediate source, Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker.”
 
That play, itself worth reviving, is filled with philosophical asides that the musical borrows almost whole. “The surest way to keep us out of harm is to give us the four or five human pleasures that are our right in the world,” goes the best of these asides, and as spoken passionately by Ms. Peters, herself one of those four or five human pleasures, it has never sounded so true.
 
“And that takes a little money,” she adds.
 
Also true.

Why? One easy answer...I ALREADY HAVE TICKETS for Three Tall Women and Angels In America. I'm still debating Carousel. I've seen several productions over the years.
 
Also, I guess you don't realize that sometimes a new lead can bring a new experience to a show (see NYT review) and I delight in everything that is Bernadette. She is the consummate performer.
 
ED

Either date works for me. 5Napkin is one of my fave places, in fact, I ate at the HK location late last night after theater.

Saw Bernadette last night, she was terrific, as is this production. How do you replace a legend? You get another legend!
This is a great production with a new cast and they all are superb. This is classic Broadway theater and the audience loved it and was on their feet screaming and applauding before the curtain fell. I will try to see this show again.
 
Of note is the adorable actor/dancer Charlie Stems in the role of Barnaby Tucker. This kid was amazing. A relative unknown up until recently, he hails from the UK, where he received glowing notices in the revival of Half A Sixpence. His professional debt, not that long ago, was his role as a monkey in Wicked! Look out for this kid, he's a bundle of talent.
 
http://static.playbill.com/dims4/default/29a9668/2147483647/crop/2021x1138%2B6%2B0/resize/970x546/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.playbill.com%2F36%2F61%2Ff2fe57a6465eb7091de1d296bb34%2Fcharlie-stemp.jpg

Saw Bernadette last night, she was terrific, as is this production. How do you replace a legend? You get another legend!
This is a great production with a new cast and they all are superb. This is classic Broadway theater and the audience loved it and was on their feet screaming and applauding before the curtain fell. I will try to see this show again.
 
Of note is the adorable actor/dancer Charlie Stems in the role of Barnaby Tucker. This kid was amazing. A relative unknown up until recently, he hails from the UK, where he received glowing notices in the revival of Half A Sixpence. His professional debt, not that long ago, was his role as a monkey in Wicked! Look out for this kid, he's a bundle of talent.
 
http://static.playbill.com/dims4/default/29a9668/2147483647/crop/2021x1138%2B6%2B0/resize/970x546/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.playbill.com%2F36%2F61%2Ff2fe57a6465eb7091de1d296bb34%2Fcharlie-stemp.jpg

Today's NYT features Johnny and Tara off the ice at the Olympics...
 
What’s Inside Johnny Weir’s Hotel Room at the Olympics
By KAREN CROUSEFEB. 16, 2018

 
Never mind the athletes they are covering; by virtue of the unadorned honesty of their commentary and the haute-couture majesty of their wardrobes, Weir and Lipinski have become must-see TV.
 
Weir, 33, has his hair swept into a bird nest — two women help him style his hair and do his makeup each day — and wears sequined blazers over layers of leather and lace. Lipinski, 35, wears small dresses and high heels, which she can get in and out of in less time than it took her to complete a short program. On Friday, she strolled into Weir’s room for an interview wearing jeans and a casual top. Upon finding out she and Weir would be videotaped, she slipped out of the room. She returned 1 minute 50 seconds later wearing a fire-engine-red mini dress and heels.“I make fun of how small her dresses are,” Weir said. “That’s why she has less luggage than me, because her dresses are napkin-sized.”


Some globe-trotters collect decorative spoons or native art as keepsakes. Not Weir, who arrived here with suitcases (13!) filled with mementos of his uncharted journey from a self-described country bumpkin to a global personality.
 
“My clothing are my treasures, my Picassos,” Weir said. “I didn’t grow up with much, so when I purchase something or own something, it’s more about the experiences that I had to be able to afford that thing, the memory of where I bought it.”
 
He added: “Everything has meaning. It isn’t just a sparkly jacket.”
 
(Another answer to TV viewers’ questions: Weir wears designer clothes but also shops at discount outlets like TJ Maxx.)
 
It was the second Friday of the Olympics, and Weir and Lipinski had just returned to their spalike Richard Meier-designed hotel after a 10-hour work day that was still a few hours from being a wrap.

Weir’s jewelry — hardly the usual gear for a sports commentator. CreditHilary Swift for The New York Times
They had just called the men’s short program, the same event where at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, Weir emerged as the second-best skater on his way to a fifth-place finish. With a little more than an hour before their presence was required at a production meeting, they huddled to coordinate their next-day’s outfits.
 
Six months before these Games, their second as a broadcasting team, Lipinski and Weir began talking about their Olympic wardrobes. They receive some clothing on loan from designers (one accessory in Weir’s collection was last worn by Pink), but still rely mostly on outfits they pull from their closets.
 
“We’re pretty on point,” Weir said.
 
They trust each other’s tastes and are quick to come to each other’s rescue when a fashion disaster strikes. Earlier in the week, Lipinski experienced an on-air wardrobe malfunction when the lining of her dress sneaked up her leg. During a break, a few people formed a circle around Lipinski, who allowed Weir to stick his hand under her dress and pull the lining down as if it were a window blind. “Only Johnny can fix it,” Lipinski said with a laugh.
 
During broadcasts, a steady stream of spectators sidestep the solicitous ushers and climb the stairs to where Weir, Lipinski and their other broadcasting partner, Terry Gannon, are perched and surreptitiously snap their photographs. On their way in and out of the Gangneung Ice Arena, they are surrounded by selfie seekers.

Lipinski pointing out some of her favorite shoes from Weir’s collection. CreditHilary Swift for The New York Times
They have been in the public eye more than half their lives, and they take the attention in stride.
 
“I grew up lower-middle class in the middle of Pennsylvania,” said Weir, who is from Coatesville and is now based in Philadelphia.
 
“My parents always talked about the importance of being who you are and if you are different, celebrating that and being as special as you can be,” Weir said, adding, “So when choosing the things I wear or the things I say, it really does come from the heart because that’s all I know. I don’t know how to create an image. I don’t know how to be premeditated.”
 
They bring to their presentation and their performance the same meticulousness and drive that fueled their success as athletes. Their workday starts before sunrise and usually doesn’t end until after dark, which leaves them little time to drink in the glorious views from their adjoining rooms at the resort hotel, which overlooks the East Sea, Gyeongpo Lake and the Taebaek Mountains.
 
Weir owns an impressive collection of brooches, and yet neither he nor Lipinski has traded a single Olympic pin. As Weir noted, who are they going to barter with, each other? “We’re more likely to trade earrings,” he said.
 

Weir saying goodbye to Lipinski, whose room is next door. They often work 18-hour days together during the Olympics.CreditHilary Swift for The New York Times
And nine days into these Games, they hadn’t made it to the mountains where many of the events are being held, although they came prepared, packing warm boots and clothing that is ski-lodge chic just in case.
 
“We’ve been to a lodge that looks like a ski area,” Weir said.
 
They see a lot of each other, and that suits them fine. On Friday, they spent several minutes fingering through each other’s wardrobe as they tried to settle on outfits for the men’s long program. Lipinski started with Weir’s shoes. She pointed to the diamond-encrusted pair he wore last year to her wedding to the sports producer Todd Kapostasy, in which he served as brides-man.
 
“Johnny had to stand out,” Lipinski said, “so these are customized shoes that I got for him.”
 
At the end of an 18-hour workday, Weir returns to his room where, surrounded by the blazers he discovered while skating in Paris, the shoes he stumbled on in Japan, the leather pants he was thrilled to find in Italy and all his other beautiful couture comforts, he can put his wardrobe decisions to rest. Weir, whose every waking hour is spent obsessing over form and fashion, always wears the same thing to bed.
 
“I find myself feeling more sexy and comfortable if I’m in the nude for sleeping,” he said.
 
 
 

The short answer is "yes, John was gay," however he was described as "intensely private, therefore he did not wish to discuss it.
 
God bless and keep him at peace. He was a great actor and his portrayal as Frasier and Nile's dad, Martin Crane, was great. He was in the gay film "Lonely Hearts Club."

As expected, their CBS bio does not mention the word "gay," or "dating." Shame!
Well-strung is 4 young talented men who play mend pop/classical tunes together.
I've seen the group perform several times here in NYC and also several times up in Provincetown.
I've met them at their "meet and greets" and they are all friendly and personable.
Trivia fact...all 4 guys live together.
 
 
http://well-strung.com/images/main/splash.jpg

Looks pretty damn fine here, but that was probably a staged photo shoot. In this past weeks episode we had a flash of his buns as he jumped into bed with a cute young guy and had his way with him in from of Gianni. And, yes, it probably is a hairpiece to reflect the '90's. It looks awful.
 

As expected, their CBS bio does not mention the word "gay," or "dating." Shame!
Well-strung is 4 young talented men who play mend pop/classical tunes together.
I've seen the group perform several times here in NYC and also several times up in Provincetown.
I've met them at their "meet and greets" and they are all friendly and personable.
Trivia fact...all 4 guys live together.
 
 
http://well-strung.com/images/main/splash.jpg

As expected, their CBS bio does not mention the word "gay," or "dating." Shame!
Well-strung is 4 young talented men who play mend pop/classical tunes together.
I've seen the group perform several times here in NYC and also several times up in Provincetown.
I've met them at their "meet and greets" and they are all friendly and personable.
Trivia fact...all 4 guys live together.
 
 
http://well-strung.com/images/main/splash.jpg

As expected, their CBS bio does not mention the word "gay," or "dating." Shame!
Well-strung is 4 young talented men who play mend pop/classical tunes together.
I've seen the group perform several times here in NYC and also several times up in Provincetown.
I've met them at their "meet and greets" and they are all friendly and personable.
Trivia fact...all 4 guys live together.
 
 
http://well-strung.com/images/main/splash.jpg

Looks pretty damn fine here, but that was probably a staged photo shoot. In this past weeks episode we had a flash of his buns as he jumped into bed with a cute young guy and had his way with him in from of Gianni. And, yes, it probably is a hairpiece to reflect the '90's. It looks awful.
 

Looks pretty damn fine here, but that was probably a staged photo shoot. In this past weeks episode we had a flash of his buns as he jumped into bed with a cute young guy and had his way with him in from of Gianni. And, yes, it probably is a hairpiece to reflect the '90's. It looks awful.
 

See this show Monday and it was terrific. Loved Jonathan and was unexpectedly wowed by his performance! Bobby was perhaps under rated during his career and he was a prolific songwriter and performer. His life is an interesting tale of a poor boy from East Harlem to Hollywood success. Along the way he had hit tunes and personal struggles. His death at age 37 was tragic. The supporting cast of two guys and gals were good and the small backup orchestra was great. I think the show needs a little fine tuning but the audience loved it.
 
NYPost columnist Michael Reidel raves about Jonathan's performance in today's paper and predicts it is bound for Bway.

Oh God! What a mind numbingly boring production!!!! I left at intermission.
 
On the coldest day in this 13 day arctic blast that has hit much of the United States, I ventured out for what I had hoped to be an entertaining afternoon of theater. All the signs were in its favor. A classic gothic tale of horror, a handsome and talented leading man, Robert Fairchild, who choreographed his role, and a music program including works by Liszt, Schubert, and Bach, I had high hopes that I would enjoy this production.
 
Not so! A boring script and performances that were less than professional, I was bored to death. I can only say that despite terrific effort by the handsome Mr. Fairchild, even he could not say or life this production above the "meh' level.
 
AND, a lady in front of me that whipped out her cell one and began surfing the net 10 minutes into the first act!
 
Here what the NYTimes said:
 
Review: In ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,’ a Monster to Love
MARY SHELLEY�S FRANKENSTEIN
By LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESDEC. 27, 2017


Robert Fairchild, left, and Rocco Sisto in “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” an Ensemble for the Romantic Century production. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” begins in a gothic-horror rainstorm, with flashes of lightning and the kind of organ music that sends a tingle up the spine. The teenage Mary Shelley lies sleeping, and in her dreaming mind, a monster jolts to life, electrified.
 
Hooked up to wires, then writhing on the floor, the creature is a nightmare vision. Yet he has the great fortune to be played by the dancer Robert Fairchild, who possesses a can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him eloquence of movement and facial expression. Mr. Fairchild, who created his own choreography, morphs into a monster of delicate, disarming beauty, an innocent perambulating through a world he flounders to understand.
 
In this “Frankenstein,” the latest multimedia fusion of classical music and theater from Ensemble for the Romantic Century, Victor Frankenstein’s monster is enchanting, endearing, irresistibly alive. He is, startlingly, a monster to love.
 
He is also trapped, unfortunately, inside an ambitious but awkward production whose elements battle one another more often than not. Directed by Donald T. Sanders on the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, the show sounds beautiful. Three musicians perform works by Liszt, Bach and Schubert on oboe (Kemp Jernigan), piano (Steven Lin) and organ and harpsichord (Parker Ramsay), while a glorious mezzo-soprano, Krysty Swann, gentles the anguished monster with song. If this were simply a concert that included dance layered with intricate projection design (by David Bengali) and a moody soundscape (by Bill Toles), it would make quite an atmospheric evening.
 
But “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” is a play of sorts, created by the ensemble’s executive artistic director, Eve Wolf, using excerpts from “Frankenstein” and Shelley’s letters and diaries. It aims to tell a story whose strands refuse to twine smoothly together: the tragic tale of the monster and the grief-scarred life of Shelley, whose mother — the writer Mary Wollstonecraft (“A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”) — died shortly after giving birth to Shelley in 1797. She lost two babies and a toddler of her own and became a young widow when her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned while sailing in a storm.
 
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” begins in a gothic-horror rainstorm, with flashes of lightning and the kind of organ music that sends a tingle up the spine. The teenage Mary Shelley lies sleeping, and in her dreaming mind, a monster jolts to life, electrified.
 
Hooked up to wires, then writhing on the floor, the creature is a nightmare vision.
Yet he has the great fortune to be played by Robert Fairchild
, who possesses a can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him eloquence of movement and facial expression. Mr. Fairchild, who created his own choreography, morphs into a monster of delicate, disarming beauty, an innocent perambulating through a world he flounders to understand.
 
In this “Frankenstein,” the latest multimedia fusion of classical music and theater from Ensemble for the Romantic Century, Victor Frankenstein’s monster is enchanting, endearing, irresistibly alive. He is, startlingly, a monster to love.
 
He is also trapped, unfortunately, inside an ambitious but awkward production whose elements battle one another more often than not. Directed by Donald T. Sanders on the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, the show sounds beautiful. Three musicians perform works by Liszt, Bach and Schubert on oboe (Kemp Jernigan), piano (Steven Lin) and organ and harpsichord (Parker Ramsay), while a glorious mezzo-soprano, Krysty Swann, gentles the anguished monster with song. If this were simply a concert that included dance layered with intricate projection design (by David Bengali) and a moody soundscape (by Bill Toles), it would make quite an atmospheric evening.
 
But “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” is a play of sorts, created by the ensemble’s executive artistic director, Eve Wolf, using excerpts from “Frankenstein” and Shelley’s letters and diaries. It aims to tell a story whose strands refuse to twine smoothly together: the tragic tale of the monster and the grief-scarred life of Shelley, whose mother — the writer Mary Wollstonecraft (“A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”) — died shortly after giving birth to Shelley in 1797. She lost two babies and a toddler of her own and became a young widow when her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned while sailing in a storm.

In a program note, Ms. Wolf writes that she wanted to explore “the connections between the author and her Monster from a woman’s point of view” — links that “may have been unconscious to Mary” but are “glaringly clear” to Ms. Wolf. Beyond the obvious one, the motherlessness of both Shelley and her monster, those connections are not, alas, clear in Ms. Wolf’s text. She puts much emphasis on the deaths of Shelley’s children and on a harrowing miscarriage, but most of that pain was yet to come when Shelley wrote “Frankenstein” in her late teens. So the juxtaposition feels forced and unilluminating.
 
Photo

Mr. Fairchild and Mia Vallet. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
Worse, the play’s dialogue has a way of shattering the mood created by the music, Mr. Fairchild’s movement and those projections — falling rain (the monster opens his mouth to taste it) or a swooping bird (he chases it with canine delight) or the roiling waves that swallow Percy Shelley.
 
The production elements that succeed appear to have received more tender care than those that don’t. The acted scenes are so tonally off that they seem like an afterthought. Mia Vallet’s Mary and Paul Wesley’s Percy are jarringly contemporary in affect and lack a vital spark. Rocco Sisto is more solid as Mary’s father, the philosopher William Godwin, and as a blind man who encounters the monster.
 
Vanessa James’s set, too, is puzzling, given that it needs to work with the projections. Instead it works against them, particularly in Act II, when the hulking gateway that stands upstage center casts a giant shadow on the mountains and sea projected behind it.
 
In the program, Ms. Wolf writes that this “Frankenstein,” like her ensemble’s other shows, is intended to be “more than a concert or a play.” It is more than a concert. It is less than a play.
 
In 1831, nine years after her husband’s death, Mary Shelley wrote the introduction to a revised version of “Frankenstein.” In it, she recalled the challenge that Lord Byron had issued to her and Percy in the rainy summer of 1816. “We will each write a ghost story,” Byron said, and from that prompt came “Frankenstein.”
 
But Mary Shelley noted that Byron and Percy, a pair of poets, had experienced trouble assembling their tales. Her husband, she wrote, was “more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story.”
 
In “Frankenstein,” Ensemble for the Romantic Century is similarly better at poetry than sustained storytelling. For all of the show’s flashes of beauty, it remains a collection of disparate parts, not a whole charged with lightning and brought to animated life.

NYPost reports the musical will open on Broadway in the spring before the Tony's and to avoid competition next fall with the Cher Show...
 
Donna Summer musical producers are scared of Cher
By Michael Riedel
 
December 14, 2017 | 7:45pm | Updated
 
A giant disco ball called “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” is headed to Broadway earlier than expected.
 
The $12 million show, produced by music legend Tommy Mottola, will open at the Lunt-Fontanne in April, just before the Tony Award cutoff date, sources tell The Post.
 
“Summer” opened last month at the La Jolla Playhouse to mixed reviews, including a blistering notice in the Los Angeles Times that would have killed disco.
 
“I don’t need this flimsy bio musical and neither do you,” wrote critic Charles McNulty. “In a musical form not known for literary finesse, ‘Summer’ lowers the bar … The lack of playwriting imagination is startling. If the program didn’t state otherwise, I’d be sure the writing was outsourced to Wikipedia.” “Sweeney Todd” it’s not.
 
But Mottola and his co-producers, Dodgers productions, are confident that those killer tunes, coupled with a slick production by director Des McAnuff and choreographer Sergio Trujillo, will overcome stuffy critics who can’t dance.
 
“The show’s a hoot,” says a theater executive who caught it in La Jolla. “I’m not going to make a case for its artistic merits, but everybody’s going to be dancing at the curtain call.”
 
“Summer” is coming in this season to avoid a showdown with “The Cher Show,” which opens in the fall. Both musicals show their diva at three different stages of her life. In “Summer,” Storm Lever plays Duckling Donna, a gawky kid who grew up in Boston in the 1950s, sang in church and landed a role in a German tour of “Hair.”
 
Ariana DeBose takes over as Disco Donna who, under the guidance of record producer Giorgio Moroder, storms the charts with “Love To Love You, Baby,” “Dim All the Lights,” “MacArthur Park,” “Heaven Knows,” “Hot Stuff,” and that song that clears every wedding reception, “Last Dance.”
 
All those hits plus a few lesser-known gems make up the score.
 
LaChanze is Diva Donna, rebuilding her career after alienating her gay fans by saying “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” (Summer died of lung cancer in 2012.)
 
Not all the reviews were as dismissive as the one in the LA Times.
 
“While this version of her life isn’t quite Broadway ready, it has … potential,” wrote a Hollywood Reporter critic. “I feel love.”
 
The San Diego Reader called it “the most dazzling show ever staged at the La Jolla Playhouse.”
 
That may be overstating the case, but with a Broadway audience made up largely of tourists looking for a good time, “Summer” probably has a shot. Not with critics or Tony voters, perhaps, but with the one place that matters most: the box office.
 
Michael Stewart, who died in 1983, wasn’t a flashy Broadway personality, but he co-wrote some of its best-loved shows: “Bye, Bye Birdie,” “Hello, Dolly!” “42nd Street” and “Barnum.” His work will be celebrated at a benefit Monday at the Urban Stages Theater, 259 W. 30th St.
 
Chita Rivera, Lee Roy Reams, Jim Dale and Charles Strouse are set to perform; tickets at UrbanStages.org.
 
FILED UNDER BROADWAY , BROADWAY MUSICALS , CHER , DONNA SUMMER
 
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