Is Denzel Washington Younger Enough?

We knew Denzel Washington was toying with the idea of starring in a revival of A Raisin in the Sun, but it looks more definite now. While promoting his new movie 2 Guns, he's told reporters the Lorraine Hansberry drama will begin Broadway previews by March. Washington at 58 is nearly twice as old as the lead character Walter Lee Younger originally played by Sidney Poitier. The  role was last played by Sean ("P Diddy") Colms on Broadway in 2004 and in a TV movie adaptation in 2008. Phylicia Rashad and Audra MacDonald won Tony Awards for that production. Washington can probably pull the age difference off. He won a Tony in 2010 for the revival of August Wilson's Fences, the age discrepancy worked in the opposite direction then. He seemed too young and not angry enough for Troy Maxson, the retired baseball player forced to haul garbage for a living. He's been thinking about directing Fences as a movie. There have been no official press statement about Raisin, so it's still in the maybe stage.

'Winslow Boy' Announces Dates

Roger Rees

Of course as soon as I post an updated listing for the Broadway season, there's a change. Roundabout Theater Company's revival of The Winslow Boy, Terrence Rattigan's drama, had previously been listed without a specific opening. I just got the email saying previews will begin Sept. 12 at the American Airlines Theater with an Oct. 17 opening. The previously announced Roger Rees will be joined by Michael Cumpsty (LA Law, 42nd Street, 1776), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Color of Money, Man of La Mancha), and Alessandro Nivola (A Month in the Country, A Lie of the Mind). Rees last appeared on the Broadway stage replacing Nathan Lane as Gomez in The Addams Family and is currently represented Off-Bradway as a director with Peter and the Starcatcher which he co-directed with Alex Timbers.

Updated 2013-14 Broadway/Off-B'way Schedule

Laurie Metcalf will star in
Bruce Norris's new play Domesticated.

Here's an expanded look at the 2013-14 New York theater season including Broadway and Off-Broadway. Most exciting on the Off-Bway horizon: the musical based on Little Miss Sunshine; Jeff Goldblum and Laurie Metcalf in Bruce Norris's new play Domesticated; and Mr. Burns, a weird play from Anne Washburn about a post-apocalyptic future with no electricity where people re-enacted episodes from The Simpsons for entertainment. I read the script for the American Theater Critics Association's New Play Award last year and I can hardly wait to see how it looks staged. This list is by no means complete. I'll add updates as we go along.   

July 14--Luis Bravo's Forever Tango (Walter Kerr)
July 24--Let It Be (St. James)
Aug. 4--First Date (Longacre)

Aug. 8—The Great Society (Clurman Theatre)
Aug. 15--Soul Doctor (Circle In the Square)

Sept. 12—The Old Friends (Signature Theatre Company)

Sept. 12—Fetch Clay, Make Man (NYTW)

Sept. 15--Mr. Burns, a Post-Electronic Play (Playwrights Horizons)
Sept. 19--Romeo and Juliet (Richard Rodgers)
Sept. 26--The Glass Menagerie (Booth)
Oct. 5--Big Fish (Neil Simon)
Oct. 10--A Night with Janis Joplin (Lyceum)
Oct. 20--A Time to Kill (Golden)
Oct. 24--The Snow Geese (Samuel Friedman)
Nov. 3--Betrayal (Barrymore)
Nov. 3--After Midnight (Brooks Atkinson)

Nov. 4—Domesticated (Mitzi Newhouse/Lincoln Center)
Nov. 10--Twelfth Night/Richard III (Belasco)

Nov. 12—The Patron Saint of Sea Monsters (PH/Peter Sharp)
Nov. 17--The Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (Walter Kerr)

Nov. 18—Small Engine Repair (Lortel/MCC)
Nov. 21--Macbeth (Vivian Beaumont)

Nov. 21—The Commons of Pensacola (MTC/City Center Stage I)
Nov. 24--Waiting for Godot/No Man's Land (Cort)
Mid-Nov.--Little Miss Sunshine (Second Stage)
TBA--The Winslow Boy (American Airlines)

Dec. 8 or 9—The Curious Case of the Watson Intelligence (Playwrights Horizons)
Jan. 16--Machinal (American Airlines)
Jan. 23--Outside Mullingar (Samuel Friedman)
Mid-Feb.--The Bridges of Madison County (Gerald Schoenfeld)

March 2—Stage Kiss (Playwrights Horizons)

March 18—Tales from Red Vienna (MTC/City Center Stage I)
March 23--Les Miserables (Imperial)
March 27--If/Then (Richard Rodgers)
April 11--Bullets Over Broadway (St. James)
April 17--Act One (Vivian Beaumont)

April 21—Your Mother’s Copy of the Kuma Sutra (PH/Peter Sharp)

May 5—The City of Conversation (Mitzi Newhouse/Lincoln Center)
Spring--The Real Thing (American Airlines)
Spring--Houdini (Theatre TBA)
Spring--Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Theater TBA)
Spring--Rocky (Winter Garden)
Spring--Holler If Ya Hear Me (Theater TBA)

June 9—Fly By Night (Playwrights Horizons)

June 17—When We Were Young and Unafraid (MTC/City Center Stage I)
Maybes for Broadway--All the Way, Disgraced, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Revisionist

Tivoli: A Short Story

We had found Tivoli the night before, searching for someplace to eat dinner before the opera in the next town to the south in the Hudson Valley area. The performance of the rarely-performed Oresteia by Taneyev was at a college campus as part of an arts festival (here's my review), but there were no nearby restaurants. So our weekend guest who was seeing the opera with us found a number of culinary choices on his Smartphone. We drove for maybe 20 minutes on Route 9G before the turnoff to the tiny town which contained a cluster of city-style eateries including the Japanese one we finally settled on, an avant-garde theater company, and a used-book store in what looked like a broken down old house.  

Project Runway 12: Episode 2: Not Again!

Sandro needs to just shut up!

My first reaction after this week's Project Runway was No! No! NOOOO! Just check my Facebook and Twitter. OK, I can see that neither the Eco-Terror Timothy or Nasty Sandro deserved to be eliminated. Their looks were both passable. But once again, the judges aufed the wrong designer. A perfectly acceptable contestant who let go in favor of a head case.

The challenge was pretty routine--make an outfit to show off expensive jewelry. Most of the workroom shots were basically Sandro acting like a bitch. First he can't remember anybody's name. Alexander is Red Hair, Jeremy is Irish Guy (even though he's English). Then he gets into a screaming match with Ken--I don't even know over what. Justin is so lucky, he can turn off his hearing aid to shut them out. To top it off, Sandro can't figure out how to work a steamer and actually pulls a production techie into the set demanding instruction. The stunned techie just stammers "I have no idea" and scurries back behind the scenes. That's gotta be a first where the "real" world of the production crew spills into the "unreal" world of the reality show. (Just like in this Off-Broadway musical I saw last week Nobody Loves You at Second Stage, but that's another story.)

Project Runway 12: Episode 1: Eco-Terror

It's the very first episode of Project Runway's 12th season and already the judges have f**ked up. They eliminated the wrong person. They elected to keep a goofball who definitely deserved to go because he made the stupidest dress. He was spared for the sole reason that he will cause drama in future segments. That person is Timothy, a pretentious flake obsessed by "sustainable" fashion with minimum carbon impact so the unicorns will not be endangered. (Earth to Timothy: Unicorns are mythical.) That means no makeup or hairstyling for the model and she goes barefoot. But that doesn't mean Timothy himself can't look fabulous by stealing the girl's high heels and wearing them. It just gets crazier. His dress was an awful raggedly thing that looked like a melted cheese sandwich with too much brown mustard. Not only that, he had a whole insane backstory with choreography for the garment--something about World War II and origami and Hiroshima victims--pointless as well as offensive. If you have to explain the dress, forget it.

More New Broadway Plays Possible

Update to yesterday's Broadway update:

Bryan Cranston

In yesterday's NY Times, Patrick Healy puts a more positive spin on the new play situation for the 2013-14 Broadway season than I did. In addition to original works The Snow Geese and Outside Mullingar, he points out two adaptations of books--Act One and A Time to Kill--will be coming to Broadway. You could count those as new plays, so that makes four. Healy also writes that a few new plays are being eyed by producers for possible Broadway production, all by Pulitzer Prize winners. These include Disgraced, the Pulitzer winner for 2012 from Ayad Akhtar; Domesticated by Bruce Norris (Clybourne Park); and All the Way, a study of LBJ's struggle to pass Civil Right legislation by Robert Schekkan (The Kentucky Cycle). I've read the script of All the Way when I served as part of the New Play Committee for the American Theater Critics Association. It's a fascinating piece and it would make a rarity for Broadway--a large-cast new play. It will be produced at American Repertory Theatre this fall with Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad, so his TV chops might help a New York transfer. There's another LBJ play playing Off-Broadway this August called The Great Society which also hoped to make it to Broadway, but the producer told the Times in a separate story by Healy he would wait for the reviews. Other possibilities include a Broadway transfer of the National Theatre of Great Britain production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which was broadcast to cinemas around the world, and Jesse Eisenberg's The Revisionist which starred himself and Vanessa Redgrave when it played Off-Broadway last season. So here's an updated Broadway list including maybes:

Broadway Updates

Debra Messing will make her Broadway
debut in a new play by John Patrick Shanley

Broadway updates: Brian F. O'Bryne (Doubt, Frozen) and Debra Messing (Will & Grace) will co-star in Outside Mullingar, a new play from John Patrick Shanley, produced by MTC at the Friedman (At last another new play to join the only other one announced for the season so far--The Snow Geese, also from MTC).

Bullets Over Broadway and If/Then have definite dates and theaters (See below). If/Then will take over the Richard Rodgers when Romeo and Juliet finishes its limited run.

A Night with Janis Joplin, a regional hit, will play the Lyceum.

Here's an updated list of the opening so far:

July 14--Luis Bravo's Forever Tango (Walter Kerr)
July 24--Let It Be (St. James)
Aug. 4--First Date (Longacre)
Aug. 15--Soul Doctor (Circle In the Square)
Sept. 19--Romeo and Juliet (Richard Rodgers)
Sept. 26--The Glass Menagerie (Booth)
Oct. 5--Big Fish (Neil Simon)
Oct. 10--A Night with Janis Joplin (Lyceum)
Oct. 20--A Time to Kill (Golden)
Oct. 24--The Snow Geese (Samuel Friedman)
Nov. 3--Betrayal (Barrymore)
Nov. 3--After Midnight (Brooks Atkinson)
Nov. 10--Twelfth Night/Richard III (Belasco)
Nov. 17--The Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (Walter Kerr)
Nov. 21--Macbeth (Vivian Beaumont)
Nov. 24--Waiting for Godot/No Man's Land (Cort)
TBA--The Winslow Boy (American Airlines)
Jan. 16--Machinal (American Airlines)
Jan. 23--Outside Mullingar (Samuel Friedman)
Mid-Feb.--The Bridges of Madison County (Gerald Shoenfeld)
March 23--Les Miserables (Imperial)
March 27--If/Then (Richard Rodgers)
April 11--Bullets Over Broadway (St. James)
April 17--Act One (Vivian Beaumont)
Spring--The Real Thing (American Airlines)
Spring--Houdini (Theatre TBA)
Spring--Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Theater TBA)
Spring--Rocky (Winter Garden)
Spring--Holler If Ya Hear Me (Theater TBA)

Tony Committee Grows to 46, Declared a Separate Country

A meeting of the 2013-14 Tony Nominating Committee

There are so many people on the 2013-14 Tony Nominating Committee, they have been declared a new country and are filing for membership in the United Nations. This time of year, during the summer doldrums, the Broadway League usually quietly announces the new members of the committee that decides who gets nominated for the Main Stem's biggest honor. But this year, the big story was the huge number of them. It shouldn't come as a surprise, the electorate has been steadily increasing while the number of Tony voters--those who chose the winners--has been decreasing.

Liberace and the Closeted 1960s

Liberace explores dualities on Batman

We got a peak at Liberace's real life in the recent HBO telefilm Behind the Candelabra. He also popped up as a guest star on a  DVD of a Laugh-In episode I bought for 50 cents at a used book store. And of course there is the infamous episode of Batman where he played the dual roles of Chandell, a variation on his public persona of a flamboyant pianist, and Harry, Chandell' gangster twin brother. The HBO film exposes the schizophrenic nature of the star's career and personal life and America's wink-wink attitude about homosexuality and "fabulousness" during the peak of his prominence from the 1950s through the '80s. In the Steven Soderbergh-directed feature, which was deemed too "gay" to be released in theaters, we see Liberace's schmaltzy stage act hiding his true same-sex-saturated lifestyle. His managers knew the truth, but covered it up, fearing homophobic attitudes would ruin his lucrative career. There's a telling scene where the pianist is pontificating for an adoring group of chorus boys that Jane Fonda and Ed Asner should stay out of politics. Performers are not here to change the world, he says, just to entertain. It was clear Liberace wanted to stay in the closet and the idea of changing anyone's mind about gayness was out of the question.

Michael Douglas will probably win an Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG Award for his performance. Matt Damon as his boyfriend will be submitted as a Supporting Actor so he can win too, but his role was equally prominent.

Snowden Praises Homophobic Russia

Last night I was listening to NPR on my car radio while driving upstate. After the Fabulous Beekman Boys finished talking about gooseberries, there was a news report that exiled NSA leaker Edward Snowden emerged from the gift shop at the Moscow airport to hold a press conference. He announced he was seeking temporary asylum in Russia which he called a champion of human rights. I nearly crashed into a guardrail. Obviously Mr. Snowden has been too busy browsing through vodka shot glasses and nesting dolls to hear that Vladmir Putin, the macho crime boss of Ruskieland, has passed draconian antigay laws. It is now a crime to hold a gay pride rally, espouse progay sentiments, or even wear rainbow suspenders in public. In addition, gay or progray foreigners can be detained for 14 days and then expelled from Vodkaville if they so much as do a Bette Davis imitation or start singing Lady Gaga songs. (Good thing I cancelled my St. Petersburg trip.) So much for human rights, Mr. Leaky Faucet. I supposed this hero of freedom (Snowden) doesn't consider gays eligible for equal treatment.

Joe Stalin--I mean Vlad Putin--has said Snowden can stay in Gulagtown if he doesn't harm the US. Snowden reportedly plans to go to South America at some point.  

There have been calls for boycotting the upcoming Winter Olympics scheduled to be held in Sochi. I'm all for it.

Zesty and Hot Commercials

Since this blog gets the most pageviews when I talk about interracial relationships on TV commercials--here's another one with an ambiguous message. It's for a Dunkin Donuts breakfast sandwich. Have you seen it? A very attractive African-American young woman and an average-looking white guy are driving in a car. She's eating the sandwich. It's early in the morning--breakfast time, get it--and they're dressed for work. She says in a flirty voice "This Dunkin Donuts Breakfast Sandwich is like you. It's kinda hot...but it's not too hot." To which the white guy replies in a suggestive voice, "Bingo." So what are they saying and who are these people to each other? Are they dating? Co-workers sharing a ride? Casual acquaintances who just picked each other up at the Dunkin Donuts? Is she suggesting he's safe enough to date but not to sleep with? And why would that please him? Is she saying, If you were too handsome, I'd be scared off, but you're just right for me. And is that why he says Bingo? And what has any of that got to do with a fattening sandwich? Will they get together and brave possible negative YouTube comments and maybe buy other Dunkin Donuts delicacies?

So far they has not been a storm of controversy over this one like there was about the Cheerios commercial with the multiracial family. But that depicted a married couple, here it's not even clear if these two have hooked up yet.

I've had the most all-time page clicks for my blog on the Jingos ad featuring a possible match up between a white slacker store clerk and an African-American teenage girl. That was in September of last year, since then this DD spot and the Cheerios ad are the only ones featuring an interracial couple. There was that Kindle commercial with the gay man vacationing with his husband. I notice One Million Moms has not protested about any of these. They did get bent out of shape over a Kraft salad dressing print ad that featured this really hot guy who's nearly naked except for the product placed in a strategic position. That must have been an interesting photo shoot. The conservative group wants to boycott Kraft unless they drop the campaign which includes ads with the model getting his clothes removed by the zestiness of the salad dressing. These Moms need to find something else to do if they think their kids will be warped by a hot guy exposing his chest. Are they afraid some of their sons will get as excited by Mr. Zesty as the Moms themselves?

Unfortunately, the commercial that's been sticking in my head the most these days is that Tena Twist one for adult diapers. The jingle will not get out of my brain. Maybe it's because I've been watching too many Golden Girls reruns.

Gay Marriage and Big Gulps: Liberty vs. Morality

For some, your right to drink a Big Gulp
 is more important than my right to gay marriage.

Thoughts for the day after independence day: On Rachel Maddow's show last week, Texas state senator Wendy Davis, the one who did the filibuster to stop the restrictive anti-abortion law, revealed that Governor Rick Perry vetoed a bill that would have banned texting while driving. His reason? It would infringe on the liberty of Texas citizens to recklessly endanger themselves and others. This is carrying libertarian thinking a bit too far. It reminded me of an archconservative relative who refuses to wear a seat belt because he feels the law forcing him to do so is an egregious example of government overreach. Similarly, you see that Sarah Palin and her ilk get all bent out of shape when New York mayor Mike Bloomberg bans the sale of huge sugary soft drinks, but are OK for people to have as many firearms as they like without background checks. Now if you think I should be able to text and drive, drink enormous sodas, and smoke cigarettes in public places, shouldn't I be able to marry my husband and live our lives as we see fit?