Proctors Theatre Archives - Page 4 of 5

Pippin, the musical (Five Photos, Five Stories #1)

The circus motif was quite effective in addressing Pippin’s search for meaning and purpose in his life.

I’d been waiting to see Pippin, the Stephen Schwartz musical, for the last forty-plus years, ever since I was living in my college town of New Paltz in the mid-1970s, and saw the “first TV commercial that actually showed scenes from a Broadway show” on the New York City TV stations.

“The commercial, which ran 60 seconds, showed Ben Vereen [as the Leading Player] and two other dancers, Candy Brown and Pamela Sousa who were in the chorus of the show, in the instrumental dance sequence from ‘Glory’. The commercial ended with the tagline, ‘You can see the other 119 minutes of Pippin live at the Imperial Theatre, without commercial interruption.'”

Pippin was originally directed and choreographed by the legendary Bob Fosse, and ran nearly five years, from October 23, 1972 to June 12, 1977, a total of 1944 performances. It was nominated for 11 Tony awards, and won five, including one for Vereen and two for Fosse.

Pippin was reimagined by director Diane Paulus with a circus motif. It ran for nearly two years on Broadway, from April 25, 2013, to January 4, 2015, with 709 performances. It won four of the 10 Tonys for which it was nominated, including Best Revival of a Musical and Best Director.

Now there’s a touring show, which I was REALLY excited about, especially since I saw this CBS Sunday Morning segment. John Rubinstein, the original Pippin, now plays his father Charles, a/k/a Charlemagne; yes, this VERY loosely based on actual historic figures.

The Wife and I saw the show on Thursday evening, May 28, at Proctor’s Theatre in Schenectady.

The circus motif was quite effective in addressing Pippin’s search for meaning and purpose in his life. And the performances in the first act were incredible – the magic, the athleticism. More than once, including at least one costume change, the audience wondered, “How did they DO that?”

In the Times Union review of the Tuesday, May 26 opening night performance, Times Union critic Steve Barnes described that cast members “twirl from long ribbons, stand three-tall atop one another’s shoulders, balance on a board precariously perched on four steel cylinders and even, in the show’s most extraordinary physical feat, create the human equivalent of a ring-toss game.”

We were wowed by 69-year-old Adrienne Barbeau, from TV’s Maude, playing Berthe, Pippin’s grandmother, singing, upside down, above the stage.

Sasha Allen, who was a contestant on the singing competition The Voice a couple of seasons ago, had been playing the Leading Player, part narrator, part circus ringmaster. Unfortunately, she damaged her hand in early May. The role when we saw it was played by Lisa Karlin, who was quite good. Barnes described her as “a looming, effective presence; you wouldn’t want to cross her.”

Then the second act, which is totally different. The contrast spoke to the pointlessness of the razzle-dazzle of war and the like, in favor of finding meaning in ordinary life. It’s only at the end when I finally GOT the message.

I enjoyed Pippin a great deal.

Useless detail I learned while looking up stuff: Irene Ryan, who played Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies television show, was nominated as Best Featured Actress in a Musical, for playing the grandmother in the original production of Pippin.

Note: I have been nominated by my buddy Lisa over at Peripheral Perceptions to participate in the Five Photos, Five Stories meme, which simply says I should post a photo each day for five consecutive days and attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction or non-fiction, a poem or a short paragraph and each day nominate another blogger for the challenge.

The problem is that almost all my posts are stories and have pictures. So I’m cheating and writing only one new post. And I’m nominating YOU!

The Theater!

The Mac-Haydn Theatre is a 350-seat theater in the round, the stage is not huge, yet they use it and the various entrances and exits so well.

It’s peculiar that I hardly ever write about plays and musicals, given the fact that I go to them quite often, at various venues.

One great location is Proctors Theatre in Schenectady, pretty much the next city over from Albany, in the once a rundown vaudeville house that’s now a refurbished gem. Shows that had been on Broadway and are now touring show up here. It holds about 2700 patrons.

The Wife and I saw at least two shows in the 2010-11 season:
February 2011: Lion King. Astonishing, starting with the entrances from throughout the theater
May 2011: Hair. The story doesn’t age well, but it was still fun, with a lot of talented vocalists.

2011-2012:
Mar 2012: Jersey Boys. The story of The Four Seasons gave me a lot more respect for the singing group. Well done.
April 2012: Memphis. Apr 12 This is why I watch the Tonys; I wouldn’t have known what this award-winning show about music and race was about had I not seen it on the awards show. Good stuff.

As a result of these, we decided to get 2012-2013 season tickets:
October 2012: Mary Poppins. The one show we took The Daughter to, it was colourful and charming. We saw this only a few months after we saw the movie, the Daughter and I for the first time.
November 2012: Wicked. As good as was promised, and much more interesting than the book. The one musical I did review.
January 2013: Million Dollar Quartet. The heavily fictionalized story of a recording session with Presley, Cash, Lewis and Perkins. It was pretty good, but the performances at the end were great. There’s a chat with some of the actors after some Thursday afternoon performances, and these guys were particularly charming.
February 2013: Priscilla. Very entertaining, occasionally provocative show I enjoyed. No, I never saw the movie.
May 2013: Les Miserables. I had never seen a theatrical production. The movie I found to be tiresome. This production, though, I found wonderfully compeling, with some great singing, and touching acting performances.
An extra show we saw that season-
June 2013: Billy Elliot. While it took some wide swings between comedy and pathos, I did enjoy it quite a bit, and it was ultimately effective storytelling.

After watching the previews of the 2013-2014 season back in March, which included a singer from Sister Act, we signed up again. I was sold not just by the fact that Book of Mormon was on the roster, but by seeing the War Horse horse, live on stage. You can see the three people controlling the large puppet, yet you buy into the horse’s actions. The neighing comes from them making three different pitches.
September 2013: Ghost. This was the first Proctors show that I thought was an outright disappointment. It was as though they still needed to work out the pacing bugs. Worse, I never really believed the romance of the two main characters. But the woman playing the Whoopi Goldberg role was great. I liked, didn’t love the movie. Here’s the Broadway World website.
October 2013: Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty. Was it dance? Was it theater? Good chunks of the story made no sense to me. It LOOKED great, but left me cold. The Wife liked it more than I. Here’s the Nippertown review.
January 2014: War Horse. This is an extraordinary event, this horse who is thrown into war, and his owner who fights to find him. Quite intense sat times. There may have been something in my eye at the end.
February 2014: Sister Act. I had very low expectations of this, another Whoopi Goldberg movie made into a musical. But it was GOOD! Entertaining, funny. Arguably better than the movie.
March 2014: Book of Mormon. I did not see. I was in the hospital with The Daughter. The Wife went – I told her if she had to stay all night at the hospital, I’d stay all day. She thought BOM was too raunchy for her taste.
May 2014: Phantom of the Opera. This was a new production, but since it was a totally unknown commodity, it didn’t matter. While we liked it quite a bit, we were both confused by a few things that maybe would have made more sense to a veteran of the musical.

Thus, for the 2014-2015 season, we opted out of getting season tickets again. It’s not that some of the shows were disappointing. It is that too many of the shows are familiar.
Newsies • Oct 11-17, 2014 – The Daughter and I saw this on Broadway in February 2014, only her second trip to NYC. It was really good, especially the second act, but I don’t need to see it again. Maybe The Wife will go with a friend.
Jersey Boys • Jan 13-18, 2015 – Saw this a couple years ago, and don’t need to see it again so soon.
The Illusionists Witness the Impossible • Feb 17-22, 2015 – Have no feel for this, whether it’d be interesting to me.
Annie • Mar 3-8, 2015 – I’ve seen no fewer than three iterations of Annie in the past four years, including my niece in a high school production. Even though this will be “new”, I’ll pass.
Pippin • May 26-31, 2015- Now THIS I’ve wanted to see since seeing the TV ads for the original production 40 YEARS AGO.
Kinky Boots • Jun 16-21, 2015 – And I’d see the recent Best Musical.

Another great venue is the Mac-Haydn Theatre, about 45 minutes away from Albany in Chatham, NY. It’s a 350-seat theater in the round, the stage is not huge, yet they use it and the various entrances and exits so well.

In June 2011, we saw The King and I, and the aforementioned Annie, and they were quite fine. This year, in June, we saw The Music Man, and Fiddler on the Roof. The former was quite good, but the latter, incredible. I can’t believe the number of people traveling on the stage without bumping into each other or falling off. This is my second-favorite musical, and it was a very worthy production. BTW, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who just turned 90, tells his story.

There have been plays in Washington Park in Albany for over a quarter-century, with the Park Playhouse, and I’ve seen 80% of them. The last two productions I recall seeing were West Side Story, my favorite musical, which I pretty much hated, especially the intermission huckstering; and Cabaret, which was considerably better.

Steamer 10 is a little community theater within walking distance of our house. It has a mixed fare of serious plays and things such as Robin Hood and the Good (& Bad) Fairies of Nottingham, which we took in back in March. But they’ve branched out; their production of Romeo & Juliet, outside near Lincoln Park, was quite fine, despite the incredible wind the day we saw it. Fortunately, my man Dan reviewed it.

For several different periods, but not in the past five years, I went to Capital Rep, an Equity theater. I know I saw these, and I may have forgotten one or three:
Dreaming Emmet by Toni Morrison (premiere)
The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe by Jane Wagner
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
Fences by August Wilson
Halley’s Comet by John Amos
A Tuna Christmas by Williams, Sears & Howard
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, adapted by Frank Galati – a particularly clever staging
Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (adapted by Christopher Sergel) – still powerful
Always…Patsy Cline by Ted Swindley
Over the Tavern by Tom Dudzick
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Pretty Fire by Charlayne Woodard
Forever Plaid by Stuart Ross
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol adapted by Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill
Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts
Menopause The Musical! by Jeanie Linders
Jacques Brel is Alive & Well & Living in Paris Words & Music by Jacques Brel, Conception, English Lyrics and Additional material by Eric Blau & Mort Shuman

The Anoinette Perry Awards 2013

In the past several seasons, by commercial necessity, a lot of product on Broadway is based on familiar concepts, just as film and TV tend to be.

The Tony Awards, championing Broadway’s finest, are on Sunday on CBS-TV. My wife and I and about 927 other people not involved in the theater will watch them – it’s traditionally a low-rated program – despite the fact that, of all the award shows, the entertainment value is the greatest.

We also watch them because, when a Broadway show goes on tour – in our case, to Proctors Theatre in Schenectady – we will be more familiar with the offerings.

Back in March, Proctors gave a preview of what it would be offering this coming season. While Phantom of the Opera has been a perennial favorite, and Book of Mormon was a big hit, the production I’m most excited to see in 2013-2014 may be War Horse. These horses are operated by three guys, who you can see (think the staging of Lion King). Yet you still get a sense of the horses’ motions and sounds as this trio of actors brings these creatures to life. It was OMG awesome. I wouldn’t have been familiar with this – except as a Spielberg film, a whole different animal, so to speak – if I hadn’t seen it highlighted on the Tonys a few seasons ago. Nor would we have been familiar with Memphis or The Drowsy Chaperone, which we’ve since gotten to see.

In the past several seasons, by commercial necessity, a lot of product on Broadway is based on familiar concepts, just as film and TV tend to be. Once (2012 winner for Best Musical), Catch Me If You Can (2011 nominee), Sister Act (2011 nominee, which we will see in the fall), and Billy Elliot (2009 winner, which we’re seeing this week) came from films.

It’s always advantageous to the Tonys, TV audience-wise when the familiar is nominated. I suspect that’s one of the reasons why they always have Best Revival of a Play (Golden Boy, Orphans, The Trip to Bountiful, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and Best Revival of a Musical (Annie, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Pippin, Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella). The host once again is Neil Patrick Harris, currently of the TV show How I Met Your Mother.

More names you might recognize, nominated this year:

Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre
Hands on a Hardbody – Music: Trey Anastasio, of Phish (with Amanda Green, who also wrote the lyrics)
Kinky Boots – Music & Lyrics: Cyndi Lauper (I suspect she will win)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play
Tom Hanks – Lucky Guy
Nathan Lane – The Nance
David Hyde Pierce (of Frasier) – Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play
Laurie Metcalf (of Roseanne) – The Other Place
Holland Taylor (of Two and a Half Men) – Ann; this is about the late Texas governor Ann Richards; thanks to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s book club, I’ve actually read the script, written by Holland
Cicely Tyson – The Trip to Bountiful

Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play
Richard Kind (of Mad about You) – The Big Knife
Tony Shalhoub (of Monk) – Golden Boy
Courtney B. Vance – Lucky Guy

Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play
Judith Light (of Who’s The Boss?) – The Assembled Parties

Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical
Andrea Martin (of SCTV) – Pippin

Motown the Musical was also nominated for some awards.

We’ll be watching.
***
Who is Tony?

From Evanier: “The Theatermania website picks out some of their favorite acceptance speeches at the Tony Awards. Make sure you don’t miss Michael Jeter’s for Grand Hotel. But my favorites are still Mark Rylance’s. Here’s what he said on the two occasions when he won…”

Living on Anbesol and Advil

The music group called Big Daddy (loved by many, including me) is staging a Kickstarter campaign to raise $35,000 to produce their new album.

As mentioned, I had a root canal a couple of weeks ago, and the pain was far less than the last one I had some 15 years ago. But then I had to have some work done on another tooth, and the mouth discomfort after that one was mighty steady; not a sharp pain, but a constant ache, for which I was surviving on certain medicines.

And it was not great timing. Last weekend, the daughter didn’t have soccer, but the Wife and I did have a wedding to go to, a co-worker of hers who I didn’t know to a guy I knew just as well. The service was at 2 pm in Niskayuna, in neighboring Schenectady County, and it was lovely. The reception wasn’t until 5 pm, in Altamont, in Albany County, a 30-minute drive, so we did what we needed to do; we went grocery shopping. Talk about being overdressed for an activity.

The reception was at a place called the Appel Inn; our friends Marc and Janna had their reception there in November of 1999. We sat with one of the bride’s and my wife’s teaching colleagues, and her husband, neither of which I knew, but they were a delightful couple. But somewhere during this, the throbbing returned and having no over-the-counter solutions, I tried Southern Comfort and 7-Up; singularly unhelpful.

After church on Sunday, we drove to Schenectady to meet my sister Leslie’s bus. She had flown from San Diego, CA to Charlotte, NC back in late September to go to a conference, and visit our sister and niece; then flew to New York City, and visited relatives and a friend; then took a bus to Binghamton, NY to do genealogical research and to attend her high school reunion; and finally to Schenectady.

We are at some downtown restaurant called Bombers, and I saw that the New York Giants football team (my team) was already down 14-0, after only five minutes in the game; sigh. They ended up winning 41-27. But I didn’t see it.

We went to see the 2 pm stage performance of Mary Poppins at the Proctors Theatre, and it was quite good. Perhaps a little long, with too much of the exposition done to the tune of “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” but there were so many WOW moments – the transformation of the park, Bert walking on the ceiling – that we were all impressed. By the time we got back to Albany, though, I was exhausted from pain and went to bed before anyone.

The Sister returned to San Diego on Tuesday, the pain has subsided somewhat, and we’re back to a busy schedule, mostly driven by the Daughter’s activities. Especially on the weekend.
*
Jaquandor saw Mary Poppins in Buffalo two years ago.

Says Mark Evanier (and I fully agree): The music group called Big Daddy (loved by many, including me) is staging a Kickstarter campaign to raise $35,000 to produce their new album. I would like to see them do this and have already backed…but it doesn’t look good. With only two days to go, they are a little over halfway there.

Movie Review: Made in Dagenham

Here, Sally Hawkins was matter-of-fact plunky without sinking to cliche. Indeed, once knows the basic outline, it is difficult to avoid a bit of predictability. Fortunately, the story, and performances were strong enough.

Late last year, my wife and I saw the trailer for the movie Made in Dagenham, and liked it well enough that we decided to go see the film itself. But for whatever reason, we didn’t make it.

Then we noticed that it was playing for three days at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady last week. So I took off early from work, went home, and we dropped off the daughter at the home of a teenaged daughter of a church member. We were running late for the 5:15 p.m. showing because of rush hour traffic, so Carol parked the car while I bought the tickets and popcorn. Walking from the ticket counter to the entrance, the door closed, and it was LOCKED!

So I walked back to the counter to comment on this. At that very moment, my wife showed up AND someone opened the door, we ran in and got led into the darkest theater I’ve ever gone into. Thank goodness for the guide’s flashlight.

We walked in during the opening credits, and I don’t know if there was anything before that; evidently, there were few or no coming attractions.

From the IMDB: In 1968, the Ford auto factory in Dagenham was one of the largest single private employers in the United Kingdom. In addition to the thousands of male employees, there were also 187 underpaid women machinists who primarily assemble the car seat upholstery in poor working conditions. Dissatisfied, the women, represented by the shop steward and Rita O’Grady, work with union rep Albert Passingham for a better deal. However, Rita learns that there is a larger issue in this dispute considering that women are paid an appalling fraction of the men’s wages for the same work across the board on the sole basis of their sex. Refusing to tolerate this inequality any longer, O’Grady leads a strike by her fellow machinists for equal pay for equal work. What follows would test the patience of all involved in a grinding labour and political struggle…

Sally Hawkins, who played Rita, was someone I wanted to see in the well-regarded Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), but didn’t. Here, she was matter-of-fact plucky without sinking to cliche. Indeed, once one knows the basic outline, it is difficult to avoid a bit of predictability. Fortunately, the story, and performances by Hawkins, Geraldine James as Rita’s friend Connie (who had a more interesting story arc), Bob Hoskins as her ally Albert (whose character has his own motivation), Daniel Mays as Rita’s trying-to-be supportive husband Eddie, and in particular the amazing Miranda Richardson as Cabinet member Barbara Castle, a glass ceiling breaker in her own right, were compelling enough. Another strong performance was by Rosamund Pike, who, like Hawkins, had a smallish role in the movie An Education (2009), which we did see.

The one complaint is that especially early on, we both had real difficulty discerning what was being said because of their accents. At least one reviewer had the same issue. I don’t know if my ear acclimated or the dialogue became easier to understand, but it did get better.

The movie had period music as its soundtrack, most of which I recognized, and it neither enhanced nor detracted from the movie for me.

Definitely inspiring without being mawkish, and worth the trip.
***

The UK trailer, I believe.