edjames

You realize you don't have to patronize this dentist?. Despite the short walk, I'm sure the neighborhood is full of other dental professionals. I would sit the dentist down and have a little chat about her "overselling". Tell her you want to have specific problems identified and what the corrective alternatives are. Remind her again that you are a "man of a certain age" and that it is imperative for you to follow the 6 month check up rule your dental plan dictates. If she doesn't like it, then its not worth the effort. Health care professionals should be willing to work within your insurance and budgetary restraints, if not find someone else. A few years ago I had a chat with my dentist, also a female practitioner, and I made sure she, and her staff understood my concerns and budget. I too have good dental insurance, but despite my dentist's pleas, I declined having all new veneers.

I cannot confirm this but years ago, speaking to several gay male masseurs, they admitted Lauer was a client who liked more than a rub.
One of the guys was very trustworthy.
 
Rumor has it that David Geffen is next on the list of those who acted inappropriately!

I cannot confirm this but years ago, speaking to several gay male masseurs, they admitted Lauer was a client who liked more than a rub.
One of the guys was very trustworthy.
 
Rumor has it that David Geffen is next on the list of those who acted inappropriately!

I cannot confirm this but years ago, speaking to several gay male masseurs, they admitted Lauer was a client who liked more than a rub.
One of the guys was very trustworthy.
 
Rumor has it that David Geffen is next on the list of those who acted inappropriately!

This news is so very sad. Dementia and, of course, organ failure, is devastating.
David didn't inherit the best of genes. Dementia runs in the family and his father was a notorious alcoholic with a huge ego and temper.
Back in the 70's I briefly dated an exec at Columbia records. He used to tell me tales about his work, especially in Hollywood. He remarked on a number of occasions that David was always getting into trouble in LA's Griffin Park very late at night cruising in the bushes. His father, Jack, was frequently called to the local precinct to bail his son out of trouble.
David, May your journey be peaceful.....
 
http://members.tripod.com/~FACF/RollingStone.jpg

This news is so very sad. Dementia and, of course, organ failure, is devastating.
David didn't inherit the best of genes. Dementia runs in the family and his father was a notorious alcoholic with a huge ego and temper.
Back in the 70's I briefly dated an exec at Columbia records. He used to tell me tales about his work, especially in Hollywood. He remarked on a number of occasions that David was always getting into trouble in LA's Griffin Park very late at night cruising in the bushes. His father, Jack, was frequently called to the local precinct to bail his son out of trouble.
David, May your journey be peaceful.....
 
http://members.tripod.com/~FACF/RollingStone.jpg

Review: A ‘Torch Song’ Burning With Emotion Behind the Laughs
TORCH SONG
 
By BEN BRANTLEY OCT. 19, 2017
 

Two couples figuring things out: Roxanna Hope Radja and Ward Horton, and Michael Urie and Michael Rosen in “Torch Song.”
 
When Michael Urie and Mercedes Ruehl start to cut each other’s hearts out in the second act of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song,” your responses are likely to be deeply divided. “Stop that right now!” you think. Because what they’re doing feels too painful, too private and quite possibly too close to your own home for public consumption.
 
But another part of you is flushed with the thrill that comes from watching two ideally matched performers, at the top of their games, demonstrating the unholy power of flesh and blood to wound its own. Portraying a New York drag queen and his mother visiting from Miami, Mr. Urie and Ms. Ruehl make a strong case for a fiercely tugged umbilical cord as the ultimate weapon of destruction.
 
Not bad for a three-decades-old comedy that would seemed to have passed its sell-by date years ago.
“Torch Song,” which opened at the Tony Kiser Theater on Thursday night in a Second Stage Theater production, is a two-act, trimmed-down version of “Torch Song Trilogy.” That’s the original four-hour portrait of the tribulations of a flamboyantly emotional gay man that captivated mainstream theatergoers when it opened on Broadway in 1982.

It also picked up two Tonys for Mr. Fierstein — hitherto best known for his cross-dressing turns on the margins of Off Broadway — for best play and best actor, and established him as the rare openly gay performer and writer whom even Mom and Dad from the suburbs might enjoy without tsoris. (It was the basis for a less successful .) It could be argued that without Mr. Fierstein there would be no “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” “Will & Grace” or “Modern Family” on television.
 
Still, breakthrough works that make uneasy subjects feel comfortable often seem quaint in retrospect. Certainly, that was my impression when I saw a 2012 staging of “Torch Song” in London, at the Menier Chocolate Factory. With its high sentimentality quotient and wisecracking briskness, it came across as an honorable, gender-tweaking variation on Neil Simon’s classic cash-cow comedies of urban Jewish anxiety.

Yet this latest incarnation of “Torch Song,” directed by Moisés Kaufman, finds an irresistibly compelling gravity beneath the glibness. Best known for staging lyrical but earnest topical dramas (“The Laramie Project,” “Gross Indecency,” “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), Mr. Kaufman turns out to be just the man for eliciting the sting within the soap bubbles of “Torch Song.”
 
Even more important, without overdoing the tremolo, Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Urie make sure we see the vital links between camp comic postures and the genuine fear and pain that lie beneath. Defiantly quipping bravado is a suit of armor for Arnold Beckoff, the show’s leading man (and occasional lady).
 
That carapace has served him well. But sometimes it pinches. And as Arnold, Mr. Urie, who has become one of our most inspired physical comedians, digs deeper here to let us feel exactly where it hurts.
 
When we meet Ms. Ruehl as his mother (call her Ma) in the play’s second act, we experience the shock of recognition that occurs when longtime friends introduce us to their parents. “Oh,” we think, “so that’s where it comes from.” Embodied with carefully harnessed restraint by Ms. Ruehl, whose expert comic timing matches Mr. Urie’s, Ma loves her Arnold as only a mother can.
 
Photo

Fighting words: Michael Urie as Arnold and Mercedes Ruehl as his mother in “Torch Song.”CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
That’s especially true for a mother who sees her own image in her grown child as clearly as this one does. Which makes the differences between them — in this case, the little matter of Arnold’s being gay — take on the openhanded smack of betrayal.
 
The hour or so of entertainment that precedes this encounter is perfectly pleasant. It features one of the funniest simulated sex scenes ever (performed solo by Mr. Urie), not to mention some peerless aperçus. “A drag queen’s like an oil painting,” Arnold tells the audience. “You gotta stand back from it to get the full effect.”
 
Of course, what Mr. Urie does is let us see the brush strokes that went into this frame-worthy creation. And he shows Arnold’s ambivalence about letting others perceive the genuine fragility that he caricatures. This two-sided self-exposure is especially evident in his relationship with Ed (Ward Horton), a self-defined heterosexual with a taste for dalliance in the back rooms of gay bars.
 
It is at just such an establishment, the International Stud (a real place, and notorious in the pre-AIDS era), that Arnold meets Ed in 1974. Their passionate physical affair ends (sort of) when Ed announces he’s going to marry a woman, Laurel (Roxanna Hope Radja). Arnold, in turn, takes up with Alan (Michael Rosen), a streetwise young model and former hustler.
 
The erotic and psychological crosscurrents among this foursome occupy the play’s second part, which is its most contrived and least convincing. It’s in the extended third section that “Torch Song” reveals the tougher mettle of which it is made.
 
We are now in 1980. Arnold and Ed have been (platonically) reunited. And there’s a new guy in the picture: David (Jack DiFalco), a smart-mouthed gay teenager to whom Arnold has become a foster parent. Soon enough, Ma, fresh from Miami, arrives to assess this awkward ménage. And while Ma is as bright a joke maker as her son, there’s no question that it will end in tears.
 
Featuring astute, period-specific sets (by David Zinn) and costumes (by Clint Ramos) that summon the 1970s without winking nostalgia, this “Torch Song” has been impeccably assembled, with acting to match throughout. Mr. Horton, who wears Ed’s conflicts with a forthright air of denial, is the dream straight man (so to speak) to Mr. Urie’s flamboyant Arnold.
 
Mr. DiFalco adroitly avoids the perils of wise-child sassiness and brings a surprising and necessary flash of pain to the recollection of a gay hate crime. And Ms. Radja and Mr. Rosen make the most of what are ultimately throwaway parts.
 
But Mr. Urie and Ms. Ruehl take the show to a level of emotional truthfulness that makes objections to ungainly construction feel beside the point. Ma’s refusal to acknowledge the fact of Arnold’s homosexuality is given full validity in Ms. Ruehl’s uncompromising performance as a woman who avoids the truth by making a joke of it.
 
You know exactly where she’s coming from. And it’s that embracing spirit of understanding, grounded in a bedrock of family feeling, that comes to the surface so startlingly and movingly in this “Torch Song.”
 
Like the 2011 Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” a later play about gay men that once seemed stuck in the past, Mr. Kaufman’s stirring production propels an ostensible period piece into a vibrant present. Emotions as strong as those brought to the surface here, you realize, never go out of date.

Review: A ‘Torch Song’ Burning With Emotion Behind the Laughs
TORCH SONG
 
By BEN BRANTLEY OCT. 19, 2017
 

Two couples figuring things out: Roxanna Hope Radja and Ward Horton, and Michael Urie and Michael Rosen in “Torch Song.”
 
When Michael Urie and Mercedes Ruehl start to cut each other’s hearts out in the second act of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song,” your responses are likely to be deeply divided. “Stop that right now!” you think. Because what they’re doing feels too painful, too private and quite possibly too close to your own home for public consumption.
 
But another part of you is flushed with the thrill that comes from watching two ideally matched performers, at the top of their games, demonstrating the unholy power of flesh and blood to wound its own. Portraying a New York drag queen and his mother visiting from Miami, Mr. Urie and Ms. Ruehl make a strong case for a fiercely tugged umbilical cord as the ultimate weapon of destruction.
 
Not bad for a three-decades-old comedy that would seemed to have passed its sell-by date years ago.
“Torch Song,” which opened at the Tony Kiser Theater on Thursday night in a Second Stage Theater production, is a two-act, trimmed-down version of “Torch Song Trilogy.” That’s the original four-hour portrait of the tribulations of a flamboyantly emotional gay man that captivated mainstream theatergoers when it opened on Broadway in 1982.

It also picked up two Tonys for Mr. Fierstein — hitherto best known for his cross-dressing turns on the margins of Off Broadway — for best play and best actor, and established him as the rare openly gay performer and writer whom even Mom and Dad from the suburbs might enjoy without tsoris. (It was the basis for a less successful .) It could be argued that without Mr. Fierstein there would be no “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” “Will & Grace” or “Modern Family” on television.
 
Still, breakthrough works that make uneasy subjects feel comfortable often seem quaint in retrospect. Certainly, that was my impression when I saw a 2012 staging of “Torch Song” in London, at the Menier Chocolate Factory. With its high sentimentality quotient and wisecracking briskness, it came across as an honorable, gender-tweaking variation on Neil Simon’s classic cash-cow comedies of urban Jewish anxiety.

Yet this latest incarnation of “Torch Song,” directed by Moisés Kaufman, finds an irresistibly compelling gravity beneath the glibness. Best known for staging lyrical but earnest topical dramas (“The Laramie Project,” “Gross Indecency,” “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), Mr. Kaufman turns out to be just the man for eliciting the sting within the soap bubbles of “Torch Song.”
 
Even more important, without overdoing the tremolo, Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Urie make sure we see the vital links between camp comic postures and the genuine fear and pain that lie beneath. Defiantly quipping bravado is a suit of armor for Arnold Beckoff, the show’s leading man (and occasional lady).
 
That carapace has served him well. But sometimes it pinches. And as Arnold, Mr. Urie, who has become one of our most inspired physical comedians, digs deeper here to let us feel exactly where it hurts.
 
When we meet Ms. Ruehl as his mother (call her Ma) in the play’s second act, we experience the shock of recognition that occurs when longtime friends introduce us to their parents. “Oh,” we think, “so that’s where it comes from.” Embodied with carefully harnessed restraint by Ms. Ruehl, whose expert comic timing matches Mr. Urie’s, Ma loves her Arnold as only a mother can.
 
Photo

Fighting words: Michael Urie as Arnold and Mercedes Ruehl as his mother in “Torch Song.”CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
That’s especially true for a mother who sees her own image in her grown child as clearly as this one does. Which makes the differences between them — in this case, the little matter of Arnold’s being gay — take on the openhanded smack of betrayal.
 
The hour or so of entertainment that precedes this encounter is perfectly pleasant. It features one of the funniest simulated sex scenes ever (performed solo by Mr. Urie), not to mention some peerless aperçus. “A drag queen’s like an oil painting,” Arnold tells the audience. “You gotta stand back from it to get the full effect.”
 
Of course, what Mr. Urie does is let us see the brush strokes that went into this frame-worthy creation. And he shows Arnold’s ambivalence about letting others perceive the genuine fragility that he caricatures. This two-sided self-exposure is especially evident in his relationship with Ed (Ward Horton), a self-defined heterosexual with a taste for dalliance in the back rooms of gay bars.
 
It is at just such an establishment, the International Stud (a real place, and notorious in the pre-AIDS era), that Arnold meets Ed in 1974. Their passionate physical affair ends (sort of) when Ed announces he’s going to marry a woman, Laurel (Roxanna Hope Radja). Arnold, in turn, takes up with Alan (Michael Rosen), a streetwise young model and former hustler.
 
The erotic and psychological crosscurrents among this foursome occupy the play’s second part, which is its most contrived and least convincing. It’s in the extended third section that “Torch Song” reveals the tougher mettle of which it is made.
 
We are now in 1980. Arnold and Ed have been (platonically) reunited. And there’s a new guy in the picture: David (Jack DiFalco), a smart-mouthed gay teenager to whom Arnold has become a foster parent. Soon enough, Ma, fresh from Miami, arrives to assess this awkward ménage. And while Ma is as bright a joke maker as her son, there’s no question that it will end in tears.
 
Featuring astute, period-specific sets (by David Zinn) and costumes (by Clint Ramos) that summon the 1970s without winking nostalgia, this “Torch Song” has been impeccably assembled, with acting to match throughout. Mr. Horton, who wears Ed’s conflicts with a forthright air of denial, is the dream straight man (so to speak) to Mr. Urie’s flamboyant Arnold.
 
Mr. DiFalco adroitly avoids the perils of wise-child sassiness and brings a surprising and necessary flash of pain to the recollection of a gay hate crime. And Ms. Radja and Mr. Rosen make the most of what are ultimately throwaway parts.
 
But Mr. Urie and Ms. Ruehl take the show to a level of emotional truthfulness that makes objections to ungainly construction feel beside the point. Ma’s refusal to acknowledge the fact of Arnold’s homosexuality is given full validity in Ms. Ruehl’s uncompromising performance as a woman who avoids the truth by making a joke of it.
 
You know exactly where she’s coming from. And it’s that embracing spirit of understanding, grounded in a bedrock of family feeling, that comes to the surface so startlingly and movingly in this “Torch Song.”
 
Like the 2011 Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” a later play about gay men that once seemed stuck in the past, Mr. Kaufman’s stirring production propels an ostensible period piece into a vibrant present. Emotions as strong as those brought to the surface here, you realize, never go out of date.

Review: A ‘Torch Song’ Burning With Emotion Behind the Laughs
TORCH SONG
 
By BEN BRANTLEY OCT. 19, 2017
 

Two couples figuring things out: Roxanna Hope Radja and Ward Horton, and Michael Urie and Michael Rosen in “Torch Song.”
 
When Michael Urie and Mercedes Ruehl start to cut each other’s hearts out in the second act of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song,” your responses are likely to be deeply divided. “Stop that right now!” you think. Because what they’re doing feels too painful, too private and quite possibly too close to your own home for public consumption.
 
But another part of you is flushed with the thrill that comes from watching two ideally matched performers, at the top of their games, demonstrating the unholy power of flesh and blood to wound its own. Portraying a New York drag queen and his mother visiting from Miami, Mr. Urie and Ms. Ruehl make a strong case for a fiercely tugged umbilical cord as the ultimate weapon of destruction.
 
Not bad for a three-decades-old comedy that would seemed to have passed its sell-by date years ago.
“Torch Song,” which opened at the Tony Kiser Theater on Thursday night in a Second Stage Theater production, is a two-act, trimmed-down version of “Torch Song Trilogy.” That’s the original four-hour portrait of the tribulations of a flamboyantly emotional gay man that captivated mainstream theatergoers when it opened on Broadway in 1982.

It also picked up two Tonys for Mr. Fierstein — hitherto best known for his cross-dressing turns on the margins of Off Broadway — for best play and best actor, and established him as the rare openly gay performer and writer whom even Mom and Dad from the suburbs might enjoy without tsoris. (It was the basis for a less successful .) It could be argued that without Mr. Fierstein there would be no “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” “Will & Grace” or “Modern Family” on television.
 
Still, breakthrough works that make uneasy subjects feel comfortable often seem quaint in retrospect. Certainly, that was my impression when I saw a 2012 staging of “Torch Song” in London, at the Menier Chocolate Factory. With its high sentimentality quotient and wisecracking briskness, it came across as an honorable, gender-tweaking variation on Neil Simon’s classic cash-cow comedies of urban Jewish anxiety.

Yet this latest incarnation of “Torch Song,” directed by Moisés Kaufman, finds an irresistibly compelling gravity beneath the glibness. Best known for staging lyrical but earnest topical dramas (“The Laramie Project,” “Gross Indecency,” “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), Mr. Kaufman turns out to be just the man for eliciting the sting within the soap bubbles of “Torch Song.”
 
Even more important, without overdoing the tremolo, Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Urie make sure we see the vital links between camp comic postures and the genuine fear and pain that lie beneath. Defiantly quipping bravado is a suit of armor for Arnold Beckoff, the show’s leading man (and occasional lady).
 
That carapace has served him well. But sometimes it pinches. And as Arnold, Mr. Urie, who has become one of our most inspired physical comedians, digs deeper here to let us feel exactly where it hurts.
 
When we meet Ms. Ruehl as his mother (call her Ma) in the play’s second act, we experience the shock of recognition that occurs when longtime friends introduce us to their parents. “Oh,” we think, “so that’s where it comes from.” Embodied with carefully harnessed restraint by Ms. Ruehl, whose expert comic timing matches Mr. Urie’s, Ma loves her Arnold as only a mother can.
 
Photo

Fighting words: Michael Urie as Arnold and Mercedes Ruehl as his mother in “Torch Song.”CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
That’s especially true for a mother who sees her own image in her grown child as clearly as this one does. Which makes the differences between them — in this case, the little matter of Arnold’s being gay — take on the openhanded smack of betrayal.
 
The hour or so of entertainment that precedes this encounter is perfectly pleasant. It features one of the funniest simulated sex scenes ever (performed solo by Mr. Urie), not to mention some peerless aperçus. “A drag queen’s like an oil painting,” Arnold tells the audience. “You gotta stand back from it to get the full effect.”
 
Of course, what Mr. Urie does is let us see the brush strokes that went into this frame-worthy creation. And he shows Arnold’s ambivalence about letting others perceive the genuine fragility that he caricatures. This two-sided self-exposure is especially evident in his relationship with Ed (Ward Horton), a self-defined heterosexual with a taste for dalliance in the back rooms of gay bars.
 
It is at just such an establishment, the International Stud (a real place, and notorious in the pre-AIDS era), that Arnold meets Ed in 1974. Their passionate physical affair ends (sort of) when Ed announces he’s going to marry a woman, Laurel (Roxanna Hope Radja). Arnold, in turn, takes up with Alan (Michael Rosen), a streetwise young model and former hustler.
 
The erotic and psychological crosscurrents among this foursome occupy the play’s second part, which is its most contrived and least convincing. It’s in the extended third section that “Torch Song” reveals the tougher mettle of which it is made.
 
We are now in 1980. Arnold and Ed have been (platonically) reunited. And there’s a new guy in the picture: David (Jack DiFalco), a smart-mouthed gay teenager to whom Arnold has become a foster parent. Soon enough, Ma, fresh from Miami, arrives to assess this awkward ménage. And while Ma is as bright a joke maker as her son, there’s no question that it will end in tears.
 
Featuring astute, period-specific sets (by David Zinn) and costumes (by Clint Ramos) that summon the 1970s without winking nostalgia, this “Torch Song” has been impeccably assembled, with acting to match throughout. Mr. Horton, who wears Ed’s conflicts with a forthright air of denial, is the dream straight man (so to speak) to Mr. Urie’s flamboyant Arnold.
 
Mr. DiFalco adroitly avoids the perils of wise-child sassiness and brings a surprising and necessary flash of pain to the recollection of a gay hate crime. And Ms. Radja and Mr. Rosen make the most of what are ultimately throwaway parts.
 
But Mr. Urie and Ms. Ruehl take the show to a level of emotional truthfulness that makes objections to ungainly construction feel beside the point. Ma’s refusal to acknowledge the fact of Arnold’s homosexuality is given full validity in Ms. Ruehl’s uncompromising performance as a woman who avoids the truth by making a joke of it.
 
You know exactly where she’s coming from. And it’s that embracing spirit of understanding, grounded in a bedrock of family feeling, that comes to the surface so startlingly and movingly in this “Torch Song.”
 
Like the 2011 Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” a later play about gay men that once seemed stuck in the past, Mr. Kaufman’s stirring production propels an ostensible period piece into a vibrant present. Emotions as strong as those brought to the surface here, you realize, never go out of date.

Looks like a hit. I saw this wonderful revival starring Michael Urie and Mercedes Ruehl the other evening and loved it! I saw the original downtown at the Actor's Playhouse on 7th Avenue South back in 1982, when author, Harvey Fierstein, Estelle Getty, and Matthew Broderick starred. I thought the play holds up well and still has impact. Michael Urie was fabulous, although his Brooklyn accent still has leftover touches of Barbra Streisand from his role in Buyer & Celler.
Of note is young handsome actor Michael Rosen who plays the role of Alan in the second act Fugue In A Nursery. Alan is a former gay hustler who is now a model and the romantic partner of Arnold. He flaunts his toned body in a pair of bikini briefs/swimsuit. Very, very cute!
The audience, mostly gay men, loved it! Tremendous applause and cheers at the curtain call.
 
Michael Reidel in the NYPost had this to day in a recent column:
 
The buzz around the revival of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song” at Second Stage Theater is so good, there’s talk of a move to Broadway in the spring.
 
But don’t tell Fierstein.
 
“Stop!” he says when I bring up rumors of a transfer. “I’ve got enough trouble with the ‘what nows’ without starting on the ‘what ifs.’ That’s my philosophy on that s–t.”
 
Whatever happens, Fierstein is pleased that a play he began writing in 1978 can still entertain and move theatergoers, including many who weren’t even born when “Torch Song” (then called “Torch Song Trilogy”) won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1983.
 
“I love to hear from the kids,” says Fierstein. “The other night a straight young couple waited for me outside the theater. They were from Australia — I’m not going to attempt their accent — and they said, ‘We don’t want to insult you, but we’ve never heard of you before. But we have to tell you we loved your play.’
 
“Do you know how thrilling it is to for me to hear that about a play I wrote 40 years ago? And from straight Australians?”
 
As the original title indicates, “Torch Song Trilogy” consists of three plays. The first — “The International Stud” — introduces Arnold Beckoff, a professional drag queen and die-hard romantic. Fierstein played Arnold in the original production, winning a Tony Award and launching a career that’s kept him in the spotlight ever since.
 
Michael Urie, from “Ugly Betty,” plays Arnold in the revival, which is being directed by Moisés Kaufman (“I Am My Own Wife”).
 
“Fugue in a Nursery,” the second part, finds Arnold and his new lover, a male model, visiting Arnold’s ex-boyfriend, who left him for a woman.
 
The final (and best-loved) part, “Widows and Children First!,” features a star turn for Arnold’s domineering, hilarious Jewish mother — from Miami, of course — who still hopes her son will settle down with a nice Jewish girl one day.
 
Estelle Getty shot to fame in the role, ending up on TV’s “The Golden Girls” after leaving the show. Mercedes Ruehl gives it her own, very funny spin in this revival. The audience still gasps when Mrs. Berkoff lets Arnold have it for “rubbing my face” in his homosexuality.
 
The character, as Fierstein now admits, was based on his own mother, who loved him dearly but struggled to come to terms with his sexuality.
 
“I’ll tell you a story about my mother,” Fierstein says. “She took my grandmother to see me in the play on Broadway. They came after the first part [which features a graphic sex scene in the backroom of a bar] because my grandmother would not have survived it. At the end of the show, my grandmother says, ‘So Harvey’s a homosexual?’ And my mother says, ‘How should I know? I didn’t sleep with him.’
 
“It took her a little while, but eventually she came around to accepting my sexuality,” he continues. “And at 85 she was delivering meals on wheels to people with AIDS.”
 
“Torch Song Trilogy” originally ran over four hours, but Fierstein has spent the last several months trimming it to fast-paced two hours and 45 minutes.
 
“I’ve noticed a lot of theaters only wanted to do one or two of the plays,” he says. “People are scared of the word ‘trilogy.’ So I’m now calling it ‘Torch Song,’ which is a lovely phrase. If you hear ‘trilogy,’ you think, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not going to get out of here till five in the morning. Marvin, get the car!’
 
“But it’s just ‘Torch Song’ now. So nobody has to be scared anymore.”

A certifiable smash hit....now try to get a ticket, without paying an enormous amount of money! Another Hamilton!
The question is, given the success of the box office will Bette extend her run?
 
Review: ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Is Bright, Brassy and All Bette
HELLO, DOLLY!
By BEN BRANTLEYAPRIL 20, 2017


Bette Midler, center, as Dolly Gallagher Levi in “Hello, Dolly!” at the Shubert Theater.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
 
The pinnacle of fine dining in New York these days can’t be found in a Michelin-starred restaurant, though it will probably cost you just as much. No, you’ll have to get yourself and your wide-open wallet to the Shubert Theater, where the savory spectacle of Bette Midler eating turns out to be the culinary event of the year.
 
Ms. Midler — who opened in the title role of “Hello, Bette!,” I mean “Hello, Dolly!,” on Thursday night — not only knows how to make a meal out of a juicy part; she knows how to make a meal out of a meal. In the second act of this exceedingly bright and brassy revival, Ms. Midler can be found sitting alone at a table, slowly and deliberately polishing off the remnants of an expensive dinner, from a turkey bone dipped in gravy to a multitude of dumplings, while the rest of the cast freezes in open-mouthed amazement.
 
Ms. Midler brings such comic brio — both barn-side broad and needlepoint precise — to the task of playing with her food that I promise you it stops the show. Then again, pretty much everything Ms. Midler does stops the show. As for that much anticipated moment when she puts on fire-engine red plumes and sequins to lead a cakewalk of singing waiters, well, let’s just hope that this show’s producers have earthquake insurance.
 
Back on a Broadway stage in a book musical for the first time (can it be?) since “Fiddler on the Roof” half a century ago, Ms. Midler is generating a succession of seismic responses that make Trump election rallies look like Quaker prayer meetings. Her audiences, of course, are primed for Ms. Midler to give them their money’s worth in Jerry Zaks’s revival of this 1964 portrait of a human steamroller out to land a rich husband in 19th-century New York. The show was a scalper’s delight from the moment tickets went on sale.

But Ms. Midler isn’t coasting on the good will of theatergoers who remember her as the queen of 1980s movie comedies or as the bawdy earth goddess of self-satirizing revues from the ’70s onward. As the center and raison d’être of this show, which also features David Hyde Pierce in a springtime-fresh cartoon of the archetypal grumpy old man, Ms. Midler works hard for her ovations, while making you feel that the pleasure is all hers. In the process she deftly shoves the clamorous memories of Carol Channing (who created the role on Broadway) and Barbra Streisand (in the
) at least temporarily into the wings. 
The show as a whole — which has been designed by Santo Loquasto to resemble a bank of Knickerbocker-themed, department store Christmas windows — could benefit from studying how its star earns her laughs and our love. Playing the pushiest of roles, the endlessly enterprising matchmaker Dolly Levi, Ms. Midler never pushes for effect. Her every bit of shtick has been precisely chosen and honed, and rather than forcing it down our throats, she makes us come to her to admire it.
 
Much of the rest of Mr. Zaks’s production charges at us like a prancing elephant, festooned in shades of pink. This is true of the hot pastels of Mr. Loquasto’s sets and costumes, and of Warren Carlyle’s athletic golden-age-of-musicals choreography, which is both expert and exhausting.
 
 

An antic “Hello, Dolly!” ensemble, from left: Kate Baldwin as Irene Molloy, Bette Midler as Dolly Gallagher Levi, Beanie Feldstein as Minnie Fay and Taylor Trensch as Barnaby Tucker. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
When an onstage laugh is called for, it comes out as a deafening cackle or a guffaw, which is then stretched and repeated. Double takes, grins and grimaces are magnified into crushing largeness, while the chase sequences bring to mind slap-happy Blake Edwards comedies. Even reliably charming performers like Gavin Creel and Kate Baldwin, who play the plot’s supporting lovers (with Taylor Trensch and Beanie Feldstein as their second bananas), seem under the impression they’re in a Mack Sennett farce.
 
My audience couldn’t have been more tickled by these hard-sell tactics, which hew closely to Gower Champion’s original staging. A tone of sunny desperation isn’t out of keeping with what seems to be this production’s escapist mission, which is to deliver nostalgia with an exclamation point.
 
Featuring a book by Michael Stewart and a tenaciously wriggling earworm of a score by Jerry Herman (given gleaming orchestral life here), “Hello, Dolly!” is a natural vehicle for rose-colored remembrance. It was adapted from Thornton Wilder’s play “The Matchmaker,” which grew out of his “The Merchant of Yonkers,” itself adapted from an 1842 Austrian reworking of an 1835 American one-acter.
 
With its folksy wisdom and air of life-affirming wonder, Wilder’s script translated fluently into the hyperbole of a big song-and-dance show, which spoke (loudly) not only of a more innocent age of American history but also of a time when musicals were upbeat spectacles, with outsize stars to match. (Ms. Channing was succeeded by a cavalcade of divas, from Ethel Merman to Pearl Bailey.) Don’t forget that “Hello, Dolly!” opened just two months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when the United States felt anything but united.
 
Photo

Bette Midler, left, as Dolly Gallagher Levi, sets her sights on David Hyde Pierce, as the wealthy widower Horace Vandergelder, in “Hello, Dolly!” CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
The genius of casting Ms. Midler as Dolly, a widow who decides to rejoin life by marrying the rich and curmudgeonly Horace Vandergelder (Mr. Pierce), is that she built her career on making nostalgia hip. Even when she was sassing and strutting for the gay boys at the Continental Baths in her youth (when the original “Hello, Dolly!” was still on the boards), she was channeling entertainers from the days of burlesque.
 
With Ms. Midler, such hommages were never merely camp. She exuded bone-deep affection and respect for vaudeville stylings, in which impeccably controlled artifice became a conduit for sentimentality as well as rowdy humor. That affinity pervades every aspect of her Dolly, which is less a fluid performance than a series of calculated gestures that somehow coalesce into a seamless personality.
 
Consider, for starters, her hydraulic walk, made up of short, chugging steps. (A real train materializes for the big “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” number, but Ms. Midler is the real locomotive wonder.) Or her take-charge New Yawk accent, spiced with the insinuating inflections of
. Or her stylized collapse into exhaustion in the middle of the title song. 
Without stripping gears, she makes fast switches from explosive comedy to a sober emotionalism that never cloys. (Her pop hits, you may remember, include the weepy
) And her final scenes with Mr. Pierce, who delivers a beautifully drawn caricature (and is rewarded with a solo that was cut from the original), may leave you with tears in your eyes without your quite understanding why. 
Ms. Midler’s talents have never included a conventionally pretty voice. Yet when she rasps out the anthem “Before the Parade Passes By,” you hear her voice as that of a nightingale. And when she hikes up her period skirts to shuffle her feet, she gives the impression she’s dancing up a storm.
 
She’s not, of course. (Her kicks in her big numbers are only from the knees.) But a great star performance is at least 50 percent illusion, conjured by irresistible will power and cunning. Ms. Midler arranges her component parts with the seductive insistence with which Dolly Levi arranges other people’s lives.
 
After two acts of fending off Dolly’s charms, Horace finds himself proclaiming, in happy defeat, “Wonderful woman!” Nobody is about to argue with him.

A certifiable smash hit....now try to get a ticket, without paying an enormous amount of money! Another Hamilton!
The question is, given the success of the box office will Bette extend her run?
 
Review: ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Is Bright, Brassy and All Bette
HELLO, DOLLY!
By BEN BRANTLEYAPRIL 20, 2017


Bette Midler, center, as Dolly Gallagher Levi in “Hello, Dolly!” at the Shubert Theater.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
 
The pinnacle of fine dining in New York these days can’t be found in a Michelin-starred restaurant, though it will probably cost you just as much. No, you’ll have to get yourself and your wide-open wallet to the Shubert Theater, where the savory spectacle of Bette Midler eating turns out to be the culinary event of the year.
 
Ms. Midler — who opened in the title role of “Hello, Bette!,” I mean “Hello, Dolly!,” on Thursday night — not only knows how to make a meal out of a juicy part; she knows how to make a meal out of a meal. In the second act of this exceedingly bright and brassy revival, Ms. Midler can be found sitting alone at a table, slowly and deliberately polishing off the remnants of an expensive dinner, from a turkey bone dipped in gravy to a multitude of dumplings, while the rest of the cast freezes in open-mouthed amazement.
 
Ms. Midler brings such comic brio — both barn-side broad and needlepoint precise — to the task of playing with her food that I promise you it stops the show. Then again, pretty much everything Ms. Midler does stops the show. As for that much anticipated moment when she puts on fire-engine red plumes and sequins to lead a cakewalk of singing waiters, well, let’s just hope that this show’s producers have earthquake insurance.
 
Back on a Broadway stage in a book musical for the first time (can it be?) since “Fiddler on the Roof” half a century ago, Ms. Midler is generating a succession of seismic responses that make Trump election rallies look like Quaker prayer meetings. Her audiences, of course, are primed for Ms. Midler to give them their money’s worth in Jerry Zaks’s revival of this 1964 portrait of a human steamroller out to land a rich husband in 19th-century New York. The show was a scalper’s delight from the moment tickets went on sale.

But Ms. Midler isn’t coasting on the good will of theatergoers who remember her as the queen of 1980s movie comedies or as the bawdy earth goddess of self-satirizing revues from the ’70s onward. As the center and raison d’être of this show, which also features David Hyde Pierce in a springtime-fresh cartoon of the archetypal grumpy old man, Ms. Midler works hard for her ovations, while making you feel that the pleasure is all hers. In the process she deftly shoves the clamorous memories of Carol Channing (who created the role on Broadway) and Barbra Streisand (in the
) at least temporarily into the wings. 
The show as a whole — which has been designed by Santo Loquasto to resemble a bank of Knickerbocker-themed, department store Christmas windows — could benefit from studying how its star earns her laughs and our love. Playing the pushiest of roles, the endlessly enterprising matchmaker Dolly Levi, Ms. Midler never pushes for effect. Her every bit of shtick has been precisely chosen and honed, and rather than forcing it down our throats, she makes us come to her to admire it.
 
Much of the rest of Mr. Zaks’s production charges at us like a prancing elephant, festooned in shades of pink. This is true of the hot pastels of Mr. Loquasto’s sets and costumes, and of Warren Carlyle’s athletic golden-age-of-musicals choreography, which is both expert and exhausting.
 
 

An antic “Hello, Dolly!” ensemble, from left: Kate Baldwin as Irene Molloy, Bette Midler as Dolly Gallagher Levi, Beanie Feldstein as Minnie Fay and Taylor Trensch as Barnaby Tucker. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
When an onstage laugh is called for, it comes out as a deafening cackle or a guffaw, which is then stretched and repeated. Double takes, grins and grimaces are magnified into crushing largeness, while the chase sequences bring to mind slap-happy Blake Edwards comedies. Even reliably charming performers like Gavin Creel and Kate Baldwin, who play the plot’s supporting lovers (with Taylor Trensch and Beanie Feldstein as their second bananas), seem under the impression they’re in a Mack Sennett farce.
 
My audience couldn’t have been more tickled by these hard-sell tactics, which hew closely to Gower Champion’s original staging. A tone of sunny desperation isn’t out of keeping with what seems to be this production’s escapist mission, which is to deliver nostalgia with an exclamation point.
 
Featuring a book by Michael Stewart and a tenaciously wriggling earworm of a score by Jerry Herman (given gleaming orchestral life here), “Hello, Dolly!” is a natural vehicle for rose-colored remembrance. It was adapted from Thornton Wilder’s play “The Matchmaker,” which grew out of his “The Merchant of Yonkers,” itself adapted from an 1842 Austrian reworking of an 1835 American one-acter.
 
With its folksy wisdom and air of life-affirming wonder, Wilder’s script translated fluently into the hyperbole of a big song-and-dance show, which spoke (loudly) not only of a more innocent age of American history but also of a time when musicals were upbeat spectacles, with outsize stars to match. (Ms. Channing was succeeded by a cavalcade of divas, from Ethel Merman to Pearl Bailey.) Don’t forget that “Hello, Dolly!” opened just two months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when the United States felt anything but united.
 
Photo

Bette Midler, left, as Dolly Gallagher Levi, sets her sights on David Hyde Pierce, as the wealthy widower Horace Vandergelder, in “Hello, Dolly!” CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
The genius of casting Ms. Midler as Dolly, a widow who decides to rejoin life by marrying the rich and curmudgeonly Horace Vandergelder (Mr. Pierce), is that she built her career on making nostalgia hip. Even when she was sassing and strutting for the gay boys at the Continental Baths in her youth (when the original “Hello, Dolly!” was still on the boards), she was channeling entertainers from the days of burlesque.
 
With Ms. Midler, such hommages were never merely camp. She exuded bone-deep affection and respect for vaudeville stylings, in which impeccably controlled artifice became a conduit for sentimentality as well as rowdy humor. That affinity pervades every aspect of her Dolly, which is less a fluid performance than a series of calculated gestures that somehow coalesce into a seamless personality.
 
Consider, for starters, her hydraulic walk, made up of short, chugging steps. (A real train materializes for the big “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” number, but Ms. Midler is the real locomotive wonder.) Or her take-charge New Yawk accent, spiced with the insinuating inflections of
. Or her stylized collapse into exhaustion in the middle of the title song. 
Without stripping gears, she makes fast switches from explosive comedy to a sober emotionalism that never cloys. (Her pop hits, you may remember, include the weepy
) And her final scenes with Mr. Pierce, who delivers a beautifully drawn caricature (and is rewarded with a solo that was cut from the original), may leave you with tears in your eyes without your quite understanding why. 
Ms. Midler’s talents have never included a conventionally pretty voice. Yet when she rasps out the anthem “Before the Parade Passes By,” you hear her voice as that of a nightingale. And when she hikes up her period skirts to shuffle her feet, she gives the impression she’s dancing up a storm.
 
She’s not, of course. (Her kicks in her big numbers are only from the knees.) But a great star performance is at least 50 percent illusion, conjured by irresistible will power and cunning. Ms. Midler arranges her component parts with the seductive insistence with which Dolly Levi arranges other people’s lives.
 
After two acts of fending off Dolly’s charms, Horace finds himself proclaiming, in happy defeat, “Wonderful woman!” Nobody is about to argue with him.

Sadly gone but not forgotten...THE TWO FAT LADIES RULE!
Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson were great.
 
The Great british Baking Show has moved networks in the UK and will no longer be broadcast on the BBC. The host(essex) Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc have exited the show. news reports say they quit. no world on wether this is contract related or not. they may have exclusive contracts with the BBC. No word on Paul or Mary remaining as judges.
 
MSN reports:
 
It's a sad day in the Great British Baking Show tent. Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, two of the popular baking competition's hosts, announced their departure in light of the show's move from its home on the BBC to Channel 4 for its next season in 2017.
 
After a bidding war -- in which the BBC was said to offer £15 million (nearly $20 million) per year to keep the show on its commercial-free network -- the broadcasting corporation ultimately lost out to Channel 4, when the production company behind the show, Love Productions, rejected any offers below £25 million annually, the BBC reported. With the news of the move, the hosts announced on Monday they had opted to not renew their contracts for GBBS, which is known as the Great British Bake Off in the U.K. And with the help of a pun or two, they explained in a joint statement why they won't follow the show to Channel 4.
 
"We've had the most amazing time on Bake Off, and have loved seeing it rise and rise like a pair of yeasted Latvian baps," said Perkins and Giedroyc in a statement published by the BBC. "We're not going with the dough. We wish all the future bakers every success."

The Crucible ends it's run July 17. Long Days Journey ends June 26. Both are limited run and will not be around in November.

yes, here he is in all his naked butt glory:
 
" A lesser known role Matt played was that of Tucker Max along side Jesse Bradford in “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell”. One good reason you should check out this movie is for the great nude scen Matt Czuchry has in it. We alway love a chance to see come male celebrities naked and this is even more then just a glimps. In it we get a good look at this handsome 34 year old celeb hunks beautiful bubble butt and if you look real close you may even see a bit of full frontal nudity!"
 
http://www.hotcelebritymen.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/matt_czuchry-nude4.jpghttp://www.hotcelebritymen.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/matt_czuchry-nude5.jpg
 
 
http://www.hotcelebritymen.com/?p=817

yes, here he is in all his naked butt glory:
 
" A lesser known role Matt played was that of Tucker Max along side Jesse Bradford in “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell”. One good reason you should check out this movie is for the great nude scen Matt Czuchry has in it. We alway love a chance to see come male celebrities naked and this is even more then just a glimps. In it we get a good look at this handsome 34 year old celeb hunks beautiful bubble butt and if you look real close you may even see a bit of full frontal nudity!"
 
http://www.hotcelebritymen.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/matt_czuchry-nude4.jpghttp://www.hotcelebritymen.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/matt_czuchry-nude5.jpg
 
 
http://www.hotcelebritymen.com/?p=817

Lousy reviews! Compete and utter fiction.
Shame.
 
Review: ‘Stonewall’ Doesn’t Distinguish Between Facts and Fiction
Stonewall
 
 
By STEPHEN HOLDEN SEPT. 24, 2015
 
Photo
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/09/25/arts/25STONEWALL/25STONEWALL-master675.jpg
Jeremy Irvine, right foreground, and Jonny Beauchamp, center, star in “Stonewall.”CreditPhilippe Bosse/Roadside Attractions

“Stonewall,” Roland Emmerich’s would-be epic film about a turning point in the gay liberation movement in 1969, is far from the first historical movie to choke on its own noble intentions. For its two-hour-plus duration, the movie struggles to fuse incompatible concepts.
 
On one level, “Stonewall” is a sweeping social allegory whose central character, Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine of “War Horse”), is an all-American boy from the provinces (Indiana) thrown out of the house by his father (David Cubitt), a high school football coach, for being gay. Arriving in New York with little money and no fixed abode, Danny is radicalized by observing, then experiencing, police brutality.
On another level, the movie wants to be as specific as possible in its reconstruction of chaotic events that took place 46 years ago and have acquired a mythic dimension that demands heroic enlargement. In hindsight, the Stonewall riots are rather like the Woodstock music festival later that summer. More people claim to have been present than could possibly have been there. But except for its identification of actual police officers, “Stonewall” doesn’t bother to distinguish among facts, fiction and urban legend.
Early scenes jump between Danny’s final days in Indiana, before he is observed having sex in a car with a high school quarterback, and his new life in New York. Exiled from his biological family, he bonds with a group of outsiders, homeless drag queens and hustlers who live on the streets or pile, as many as a dozen at time, into a shabby apartment. The neighborhood center of gravity is the seedy mob-owned Stonewall Inn, which is subject to periodic police raids.
 
The movie, filmed in Montreal, does a reasonably good job of evoking the heady mixture of wildness and dread that permeated Greenwich Village street life in those days. In the summer of ’69, homosexual behavior between consenting adults was illegal in New York. At any moment, the police could descend on a gay bar, round up the customers and haul them off.
 
By many accounts, the rebellion was led by drag queens and gay street people who for the first time stood up to the police, and “Stonewall” dutifully acknowledges their participation. But, its invention of a generic white knight who prompted the riots by hurling the first brick into a window is tantamount to stealing history from the people who made it. A trailer that focuses on that moment has led some gay activists to threaten a boycott of the film. No matter how much Mr. Emmerich and Jon Robin Baitz, the estimable playwright who wrote the screenplay, insist that the movie pays tribute to a full multiethnic range of gay and lesbian characters, “Stonewall” falls short. Like it or not, symbolism matters.
 
Had the movie’s central character been Ray, a.k.a. Ramona (Jonny Beauchamp), an androgynous, volatile Puerto Rican who unrequitedly falls in love with Danny, there might be no quarrel. Ray’s saucy “girlfriends” include characters with nicknames like Queen Cong (Vladimir Alexis) and Little Orphan Annie (Caleb Landry Jones), who are treated with respect but remain peripheral.
 
 
AND,
 
What ‘Stonewall’ gets wrong about NYC history
By Lou Lumenick
 
September 24, 2015 | 11:42am
 
 

Jeremy Irvine (right) plays a Kansas farmboy who's new to New York in "Stonewall." Photo: Philippe Bosse
MOVIE REVIEW
Stonewall
 
Running time: 129 minutes. Rated R (sex, profanity, drugs, violence).
 
Did you know that a “straight-acting” Kansas farm boy threw the first brick in the riot that sparked the modern gay-rights movement? News to me, and probably most other New Yorkers.
 
Roland Emmerich’s seriously misjudged “Stonewall” turns the transgender drag queens who helped change America into dress extras in what’s basically a Big Apple retelling of “The Wizard of Oz” revolving around a Caucasian gay man’s coming of age.
 
Already accepted to Columbia University, teenage Danny (Jeremy Irvine) is kicked out of town by his football-coach dad after his high school teammates see him servicing the team’s hunky quarterback.
 
Danny’s sleeping on a park bench in Sheridan Square when Hispanic transgender Ramona (Jonny Beauchamp) invites him to share a crash pad with his flamboyant pals (all played by non-trans actors) on Christopher Street.
 
Modal Trigger
The crowd fights back against the cops in “Stonewall.”Photo: Philippe Bosse
Ramona has a crush on clean-cut Danny, whose own taste in men runs more toward Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a ripped gay-rights activist he meets at the Stonewall Inn. That’s the soon-to-be-infamous mob-owned drag bar managed by Murphy (Ron Perlman), who has half the officers at the Sixth Precinct on his payroll so he can disappear during police raids, where his customers are arrested and/or humiliated for wearing women’s clothing.
 
Danny learns he’s not in Kansas anymore while turning tricks to support himself and getting beaten by leering cops while cruising the Meatpacking District. Nevertheless, Emmerich keeps returning to the Midwest for flashbacks, as well as for a lengthy epilogue.
 
Back at the Stonewall, the NYPD’s public morals squad led by Inspector Pine (Matt Craven) stages an unscheduled raid while the regulars are mourning the death of Judy Garland. They’ve finally had enough, and their battle with the cops is the best-staged part of the film — even if the realistically detailed Sheridan Square set at a Montreal studio looks notably smaller than the real thing.
 
Emmerich — a hugely successful director of disaster movies who happens to be gay — deserves credit for trying to call attention to the plight of gay homeless youth in this self-financed, if seriously flawed, labor of love. But with thinly drawn characters, uneven performances and tin-eared dialogue, “Stonewall’’ plays at best like a musical without the songs.
 
 
 

Successful does not always translate into acting awards or performance accolades, many times "successful" is just quite simply, box office success. Harvey had a "successful" run as Tevye, whether you like his performance or not is another story, and one I do not wish to pursue. Whether we like him or not, Harvey as a big fan base and he brings people to the show. Your criticism is noted and we move along. It is past history. This thread topic was supposed to focus on the current production.
 
 
Here is Ben Brantley opinion of Harvey's performance as Tevye:
 
An Exotic Tevye in Old Anatevka
By BEN BRANTLEY JAN. 21, 2005
 
The placid Broadway revival of "Fiddler on the Roof" at the Minskoff Theater. From the moment it sounds its first word, Harvey Fierstein's voice causes an entire audience to prick up its ears in the manner of a dog startled by a sharp whistle.
 
Heard not so long ago issuing from the plus-size form of Edna Turnblad, the agoraphobic housewife in the musical "Hairspray," Mr. Fierstein's voice is one of the most distinctive in theater, belonging to the legend-making league of those of Carol Channing and Glynis Johns. And though a kazoo is what it most often brings to mind, it also variously evokes a congested saxophone, wind in a bottle and echoes from a crypt. It is, in a way, its own multicolored show. Whether it fits comfortably into the little Russian village of Anatevka, where "Fiddler" is set, is another issue.
 
When David Leveaux's production of this much-loved, much-performed 40-year-old musical of life on a Jewish shtetl first opened last February, it was notable principally for its elegant, autumnal set (by Tom Pye) and its anesthetizing blandness. In the central role of Tevye the milkman, a part created in 1964 by Zero Mostel, the usually excellent Alfred Molina seemed sad, tentative and often absent. The whole show appeared to suffer from a similar lack of engagement with its material.
 
Mr. Leveaux, the fashionable London director behind the Broadway revivals of "Nine" and Tom Stoppard's "Jumpers," may have been aiming for a tone of lyrical lament, of a goodbye to a folkloric way of life about to disappear. But it has always been the robustness as well as the sentimentality of Jerry Bock's and Sheldon Harnick's songs and Joseph Stein's book that has made "Fiddler" such an enduring favorite. Led by the somnambulistic Mr. Molina, and a bizarrely chic Randy Graff as Tevye's wife, Golde, Mr. Leveaux's interpretation sometimes barely had a pulse.
 
That omission has been remedied to some extent by Mr. Molina's new replacement. Even at his quietest, Mr. Fierstein, who won a Tony Award for "Hairspray," has the presence of a waking volcano. And lest anyone think he needs drag to be big, let it be noted that he wears Tevye's tattered trousers with a homey and winning ease. To see the gray-bearded, bright-eyed Mr. Fierstein pulling a horseless milk cart with sardonic resignation is, you may well think, to look upon the image of the Tevye of the Sholem Aleichem stories that inspired the show.
 
It is Mr. Fierstein's greatest asset as a performer, that unmistakable voice, that perversely shatters this illusion. Theatergoers who saw -- or more to the point heard -- this actor in "Hairspray" will require at least 10 minutes to banish echoes of Edna. But even audience members unfamiliar with Mr. Fierstein may find him a slightly jarring presence.
 
Tevye must to some degree be an everyman, albeit in exaggerated, crowd-pleasing form. And Mr. Fierstein, bless him, shakes off any semblance of ordinariness as soon as he opens his mouth. Every phrase he speaks or sings, as he shifts uncannily among registers, becomes an event. And the effect is rather as if Ms. Channing were playing one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's simple, all-American heroines in "Oklahoma!" or "Carousel."
 
A master of droll comic melodramas in fringe theater long before he became a Broadway star with his "Torch Song Trilogy" in 1982, Mr. Fierstein inflects every line with at least a touch of the grandeur of old Hollywood movies, whether he's being husky with sentimentality, smoky with regret or growly with displeasure.
 
This can be quite a bit of fun. Tevye's first solo, "If I Were a Rich Man," takes on a fascinating new life, as Mr. Fierstein slides and rasps through its wordless connecting phrases. But it is sometimes hard to credit this exotic spirit as that of a tradition-bound father who has trouble making the adjustment to changing times.
 
Andrea Martin, who has replaced Ms. Graff as Golde, might do well to borrow a bit of Mr. Fierstein's idiosyncracy. This actress, who first came to attention as a flamboyantly eccentric comedian on "SCTV," is on her best behavior here, as if being in a classic Broadway musical meant being quiet and dignified. (She was livelier in the recent revival of "Oklahoma!")There is nothing jolting or inappropriate in her performance, but there is nothing memorable either.
The same might be said of the rest of the show, though Tricia Paoluccio and Laura Shoop bring a fresh and welcome piquancy as two of Tevye's five daughters. John Cariani, who was nominated for a Tony as the nerdy Motel the tailor, has now pushed his performance to grating comic extremes.
 
The onstage orchestra sounds perfectly pleasant, and the dancing, restaged by Jonathan Butterell from Jerome Robbins's original choreography, is agreeable. Yet somewhere there is a disconnect between Mr. Leveaux's elegiac reimagining of "Fiddler," evident in its poetically somber look, and the dinner-theater-style comic performances of much of the cast. To mourn the passing of the traditional life of Anatevka, you need to have an organic and fluid sense of that life that this production rarely achieves.
 
As for the show's new Tevye, it would seem that this "Fiddler" has gone from having too little of a personality at its center to having too much of one.
 
Still, as Tevye himself might argue, better an overspiced feast than a famine.

Caught an early preview performance of this classic Broadway favorite.
i had seen the show beofe many years ago
Starring Danny Burstein and Jessica Hecht.
From the producers who brought us South Pacific and The King and I, they have created an evening of great song and dance.
Original choreography by Jerome Robbins and music by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, everyone recognizes some of the great classic tunes that have come from this show (Sunrise, Sunset, Tradition, Matchmaker, Matchmaker, If I Were A Rich Man, etc.) Act One is full of great tunes, Act Two, not so much.
Burstein is very good. He has to live up to some great performances from actors past, such as Zero Mostel and Harvey Fierstein. The choreography is terrific and I wish there were more of it. Directed by Bartlett Sher.
The show has its serious moments when it focuses on the expulsion of the townspeople by Russian government.
 
Anyway, it's an good evening of classic theater. A little long though, Act One lasts one hour and forty minutes and the whole show runs very close to three hours with a fifteen minute intermission.
 
Of historical note is that Bea Arthur played the original Yente and Bette Midler played the daughter
Tzeitel.
 
Ed

Honestly, you lump Harvey Fierstein's over-the-top ridiculous portrayal with Zero Mostel who was simply a god? LOL.
 
I lumped no one! LOL
Despite the performance worthiness, Harvey had a very successful run...
 
And, sorry, I should have said Midler played the role later in the run.
 
Jeez!!!!

Lousy reviews! Compete and utter fiction.
Shame.
 
Review: ‘Stonewall’ Doesn’t Distinguish Between Facts and Fiction
Stonewall
 
 
By STEPHEN HOLDEN SEPT. 24, 2015
 
Photo
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/09/25/arts/25STONEWALL/25STONEWALL-master675.jpg
Jeremy Irvine, right foreground, and Jonny Beauchamp, center, star in “Stonewall.”CreditPhilippe Bosse/Roadside Attractions

“Stonewall,” Roland Emmerich’s would-be epic film about a turning point in the gay liberation movement in 1969, is far from the first historical movie to choke on its own noble intentions. For its two-hour-plus duration, the movie struggles to fuse incompatible concepts.
 
On one level, “Stonewall” is a sweeping social allegory whose central character, Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine of “War Horse”), is an all-American boy from the provinces (Indiana) thrown out of the house by his father (David Cubitt), a high school football coach, for being gay. Arriving in New York with little money and no fixed abode, Danny is radicalized by observing, then experiencing, police brutality.
On another level, the movie wants to be as specific as possible in its reconstruction of chaotic events that took place 46 years ago and have acquired a mythic dimension that demands heroic enlargement. In hindsight, the Stonewall riots are rather like the Woodstock music festival later that summer. More people claim to have been present than could possibly have been there. But except for its identification of actual police officers, “Stonewall” doesn’t bother to distinguish among facts, fiction and urban legend.
Early scenes jump between Danny’s final days in Indiana, before he is observed having sex in a car with a high school quarterback, and his new life in New York. Exiled from his biological family, he bonds with a group of outsiders, homeless drag queens and hustlers who live on the streets or pile, as many as a dozen at time, into a shabby apartment. The neighborhood center of gravity is the seedy mob-owned Stonewall Inn, which is subject to periodic police raids.
 
The movie, filmed in Montreal, does a reasonably good job of evoking the heady mixture of wildness and dread that permeated Greenwich Village street life in those days. In the summer of ’69, homosexual behavior between consenting adults was illegal in New York. At any moment, the police could descend on a gay bar, round up the customers and haul them off.
 
By many accounts, the rebellion was led by drag queens and gay street people who for the first time stood up to the police, and “Stonewall” dutifully acknowledges their participation. But, its invention of a generic white knight who prompted the riots by hurling the first brick into a window is tantamount to stealing history from the people who made it. A trailer that focuses on that moment has led some gay activists to threaten a boycott of the film. No matter how much Mr. Emmerich and Jon Robin Baitz, the estimable playwright who wrote the screenplay, insist that the movie pays tribute to a full multiethnic range of gay and lesbian characters, “Stonewall” falls short. Like it or not, symbolism matters.
 
Had the movie’s central character been Ray, a.k.a. Ramona (Jonny Beauchamp), an androgynous, volatile Puerto Rican who unrequitedly falls in love with Danny, there might be no quarrel. Ray’s saucy “girlfriends” include characters with nicknames like Queen Cong (Vladimir Alexis) and Little Orphan Annie (Caleb Landry Jones), who are treated with respect but remain peripheral.
 
 
AND,
 
What ‘Stonewall’ gets wrong about NYC history
By Lou Lumenick
 
September 24, 2015 | 11:42am
 
 

Jeremy Irvine (right) plays a Kansas farmboy who's new to New York in "Stonewall." Photo: Philippe Bosse
MOVIE REVIEW
Stonewall
 
Running time: 129 minutes. Rated R (sex, profanity, drugs, violence).
 
Did you know that a “straight-acting” Kansas farm boy threw the first brick in the riot that sparked the modern gay-rights movement? News to me, and probably most other New Yorkers.
 
Roland Emmerich’s seriously misjudged “Stonewall” turns the transgender drag queens who helped change America into dress extras in what’s basically a Big Apple retelling of “The Wizard of Oz” revolving around a Caucasian gay man’s coming of age.
 
Already accepted to Columbia University, teenage Danny (Jeremy Irvine) is kicked out of town by his football-coach dad after his high school teammates see him servicing the team’s hunky quarterback.
 
Danny’s sleeping on a park bench in Sheridan Square when Hispanic transgender Ramona (Jonny Beauchamp) invites him to share a crash pad with his flamboyant pals (all played by non-trans actors) on Christopher Street.
 
Modal Trigger
The crowd fights back against the cops in “Stonewall.”Photo: Philippe Bosse
Ramona has a crush on clean-cut Danny, whose own taste in men runs more toward Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a ripped gay-rights activist he meets at the Stonewall Inn. That’s the soon-to-be-infamous mob-owned drag bar managed by Murphy (Ron Perlman), who has half the officers at the Sixth Precinct on his payroll so he can disappear during police raids, where his customers are arrested and/or humiliated for wearing women’s clothing.
 
Danny learns he’s not in Kansas anymore while turning tricks to support himself and getting beaten by leering cops while cruising the Meatpacking District. Nevertheless, Emmerich keeps returning to the Midwest for flashbacks, as well as for a lengthy epilogue.
 
Back at the Stonewall, the NYPD’s public morals squad led by Inspector Pine (Matt Craven) stages an unscheduled raid while the regulars are mourning the death of Judy Garland. They’ve finally had enough, and their battle with the cops is the best-staged part of the film — even if the realistically detailed Sheridan Square set at a Montreal studio looks notably smaller than the real thing.
 
Emmerich — a hugely successful director of disaster movies who happens to be gay — deserves credit for trying to call attention to the plight of gay homeless youth in this self-financed, if seriously flawed, labor of love. But with thinly drawn characters, uneven performances and tin-eared dialogue, “Stonewall’’ plays at best like a musical without the songs.
 
 
 

Lousy reviews! Compete and utter fiction.
Shame.
 
Review: ‘Stonewall’ Doesn’t Distinguish Between Facts and Fiction
Stonewall
 
 
By STEPHEN HOLDEN SEPT. 24, 2015
 
Photo
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/09/25/arts/25STONEWALL/25STONEWALL-master675.jpg
Jeremy Irvine, right foreground, and Jonny Beauchamp, center, star in “Stonewall.”CreditPhilippe Bosse/Roadside Attractions

“Stonewall,” Roland Emmerich’s would-be epic film about a turning point in the gay liberation movement in 1969, is far from the first historical movie to choke on its own noble intentions. For its two-hour-plus duration, the movie struggles to fuse incompatible concepts.
 
On one level, “Stonewall” is a sweeping social allegory whose central character, Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine of “War Horse”), is an all-American boy from the provinces (Indiana) thrown out of the house by his father (David Cubitt), a high school football coach, for being gay. Arriving in New York with little money and no fixed abode, Danny is radicalized by observing, then experiencing, police brutality.
On another level, the movie wants to be as specific as possible in its reconstruction of chaotic events that took place 46 years ago and have acquired a mythic dimension that demands heroic enlargement. In hindsight, the Stonewall riots are rather like the Woodstock music festival later that summer. More people claim to have been present than could possibly have been there. But except for its identification of actual police officers, “Stonewall” doesn’t bother to distinguish among facts, fiction and urban legend.
Early scenes jump between Danny’s final days in Indiana, before he is observed having sex in a car with a high school quarterback, and his new life in New York. Exiled from his biological family, he bonds with a group of outsiders, homeless drag queens and hustlers who live on the streets or pile, as many as a dozen at time, into a shabby apartment. The neighborhood center of gravity is the seedy mob-owned Stonewall Inn, which is subject to periodic police raids.
 
The movie, filmed in Montreal, does a reasonably good job of evoking the heady mixture of wildness and dread that permeated Greenwich Village street life in those days. In the summer of ’69, homosexual behavior between consenting adults was illegal in New York. At any moment, the police could descend on a gay bar, round up the customers and haul them off.
 
By many accounts, the rebellion was led by drag queens and gay street people who for the first time stood up to the police, and “Stonewall” dutifully acknowledges their participation. But, its invention of a generic white knight who prompted the riots by hurling the first brick into a window is tantamount to stealing history from the people who made it. A trailer that focuses on that moment has led some gay activists to threaten a boycott of the film. No matter how much Mr. Emmerich and Jon Robin Baitz, the estimable playwright who wrote the screenplay, insist that the movie pays tribute to a full multiethnic range of gay and lesbian characters, “Stonewall” falls short. Like it or not, symbolism matters.
 
Had the movie’s central character been Ray, a.k.a. Ramona (Jonny Beauchamp), an androgynous, volatile Puerto Rican who unrequitedly falls in love with Danny, there might be no quarrel. Ray’s saucy “girlfriends” include characters with nicknames like Queen Cong (Vladimir Alexis) and Little Orphan Annie (Caleb Landry Jones), who are treated with respect but remain peripheral.
 
 
AND,
 
What ‘Stonewall’ gets wrong about NYC history
By Lou Lumenick
 
September 24, 2015 | 11:42am
 
 

Jeremy Irvine (right) plays a Kansas farmboy who's new to New York in "Stonewall." Photo: Philippe Bosse
MOVIE REVIEW
Stonewall
 
Running time: 129 minutes. Rated R (sex, profanity, drugs, violence).
 
Did you know that a “straight-acting” Kansas farm boy threw the first brick in the riot that sparked the modern gay-rights movement? News to me, and probably most other New Yorkers.
 
Roland Emmerich’s seriously misjudged “Stonewall” turns the transgender drag queens who helped change America into dress extras in what’s basically a Big Apple retelling of “The Wizard of Oz” revolving around a Caucasian gay man’s coming of age.
 
Already accepted to Columbia University, teenage Danny (Jeremy Irvine) is kicked out of town by his football-coach dad after his high school teammates see him servicing the team’s hunky quarterback.
 
Danny’s sleeping on a park bench in Sheridan Square when Hispanic transgender Ramona (Jonny Beauchamp) invites him to share a crash pad with his flamboyant pals (all played by non-trans actors) on Christopher Street.
 
Modal Trigger
The crowd fights back against the cops in “Stonewall.”Photo: Philippe Bosse
Ramona has a crush on clean-cut Danny, whose own taste in men runs more toward Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a ripped gay-rights activist he meets at the Stonewall Inn. That’s the soon-to-be-infamous mob-owned drag bar managed by Murphy (Ron Perlman), who has half the officers at the Sixth Precinct on his payroll so he can disappear during police raids, where his customers are arrested and/or humiliated for wearing women’s clothing.
 
Danny learns he’s not in Kansas anymore while turning tricks to support himself and getting beaten by leering cops while cruising the Meatpacking District. Nevertheless, Emmerich keeps returning to the Midwest for flashbacks, as well as for a lengthy epilogue.
 
Back at the Stonewall, the NYPD’s public morals squad led by Inspector Pine (Matt Craven) stages an unscheduled raid while the regulars are mourning the death of Judy Garland. They’ve finally had enough, and their battle with the cops is the best-staged part of the film — even if the realistically detailed Sheridan Square set at a Montreal studio looks notably smaller than the real thing.
 
Emmerich — a hugely successful director of disaster movies who happens to be gay — deserves credit for trying to call attention to the plight of gay homeless youth in this self-financed, if seriously flawed, labor of love. But with thinly drawn characters, uneven performances and tin-eared dialogue, “Stonewall’’ plays at best like a musical without the songs.
 
 
 

RIP Jackhammer and thanks for all the laughs.
In tribute:
 
A frustrated wife buys a pair of crotchless panties in an attempt to spice up her dead sex-life.
 
She puts them on, together with a short skirt and sits on the sofa opposite Cecil sipping a glass of wine.
 
At strategic moments she uncrosses and crosses her legs wide enough that Cecil asks "Are you wearing crotchless panties?
 
" "Y-e-s," she answers with a seductive smile.
 
"Thank God - I thought you were sitting on the cat."
 
Cecil never saw the glass coming

For Jackhammer....RIP
 
A LESSON IN LOGICS
 
The choices we make reveal the true nature of our character.
 
Two Tennessee farmers, Jim and Bob, are sitting at their favorite bar, drinking beer.
 
Jim turns to Bob and says, "You know, I'm tired of going through life without an education. Tomorrow I think I'll go to the Community College and sign up for some classes."
 
Bob thinks it's a good idea, and the two leave. The next day, Jim goes down to the college and meets Dean of Admissions, who signs him up for the four basic classes:. Math, English, History, and Logic.
 
"Logic" Jim says. "What's that?"
 
The dean says, "I'll give you an example. Do you own a weed whacker?"
 
"Yeah."
 
"Then logically speaking, because you own a weed whacker, I think that you would have a yard."
 
"That's true, I do have a yard."
 
The dean then says. "Because you have a yard, I think logically that you would have a house."
 
"Yes, I do have a house."
 
"And because you have a house, I think that you might logically have a family."
 
"Yes, I have a family."
 
"Because you have a family, then logically you must have a wife. And because you have a wife, then logic tells me you must be a heterosexual."
 
"That's great, I am a heterosexual. You're amazing, you were able to find out all of
that because I have a weed whacker."
 
Excited to take the class now, Jim shakes the Dean's hand and leaves to go meet Bob at the bar. He tells Bob about his classes, how he is signed up for Math, English, History, and Logic.
 
"Logic" Bob says, "What's that?"
 
Jim says, "I'll give you an example. Do you have a weed whacker?"
 
Bob says, "No, I don't."
 
"Faggot."