Despite the denials by its authors and creators, many insist Dreamgirls is a microscopic career examination of Motown singers, or the tatty machinations behind morphing The Supremes to Diana Ross And The Supremes (billing is everything). Surely there is some Supreme truth that sticks to the plot of Dreamgirls. It also trails threads of the lives of Berry Gordy, Jackie Wilson, Cindy Birdsong, James Brown, Mary Wilson, Ike Turner and many other whose names are dimmed by or lost to passing time. The story introduces us to Effie, Deena and Lorell, a Chicago chicks competing in neighborhood talent contests as The…
Author: Thomas_Dooney
Make no mistake about it. Our Song, currently running at New Phoenix Theatre, is not the story of romance gone bad. This is a wrong-headed hook-up which, for its partners, becomes more disastrous the longer it lasts. Our Song has adapted for the stage by Keith Waterhouse from his own novel. Even without knowledge that both script and book are based upon Waterhouse experience, it is intriguing in a voyeuristic kind of way. It’s U.S. premier is staged by Robert Waterhouse, the author’s son who is artistic director of New Phoenix Company. This adds another layer of intrigue which we can be…
Sometimes art is like a business. But only sometimes. As we all know, the year end holiday cluster keeps retailers happy and active. The same goes for our musician friends, singers especially. They do double and even triple duty trying to keep up with the public demand for carols, hymns, oratorio, popular winter tunes and other musical merriment. Buffalo Gay Men’s Chorus will be punching the holiday time clock as well as hitting high notes throughout the month. The all male chorus, seventy voices strong and approaching its tenth anniversary, maintains a performance history of consistently high quality as well as a…
Look, it’s 2010 years after the first Christmas. Today’s Christmas memories do not so much include horse drawn sleigh rides to visit friends, wassail and Yule logs. More like sitting home in your footies with Nestlé’s cocoa in while basking in a cathode glow. Those under the age of Social Security eligibility may not know if “nine” is “lords aleaping” or “ladies dancing” but can surely sing you the Whoville Christmas carol. We know all the characters from the all the television holiday shows and know all the good lines and we can sing ALL the music. And this is the…
THE IRISH EYED: Riders To The SeaWater Everywhere: Were he writing today, and in the U.S., John Millington Synge might very well set his short play Riders To The Sea along the Louisiana gulf coast where people still earn their livings and meet there deaths on the water. He might well have used the rich regional patois in his dialogue and mixed up the Christian faith with nature based paganism. But it is set in the Aran Islands, three rocky remnants off the west coast. Inishmohr, Inishmaan and Inisheer are only a brief ferry ride from the city of Galway, but…
THE IRISH EYED: James Joyce’s The Dead The first decade of the previous century must have been a quite a time in Ireland. Artists, especially in literature and theater, saw an opportunity to depict the variety of Irish life… provincial and urban, individual and societal, modern and traditional… in order to establish an essential, common appreciation of Irish in an Irish context. All too true to Irish contrariness, the Irish themselves objected to these depictions. So much so that fights and riots took place in Dublin theaters performing John Millington Synge’s plays. James Joyce faced similar public scorn, both writers criticized for disparaging…
Two shows recently opened both set in the 1930s. Kavinoky Theater regifts audiences with another staging of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter, repeating successful previous mountings of 1991 and 2001. By contrast to Cabaret, Present Laughter is a cool comedy in which you’d be hard pressed to tell that there was a single problem in the world of 1939 beyond the swank London apartment where the action is set.Time And Again: Present Laughter. The title of Coward’s comedy originates from a bit of verse from another English comedy about frantic attempts at romantic complications, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. What is love? ’tis not hereafter;…
Two shows recently opened both set in the 1930s. MusicalFare offers Cabaret, a musical classic, based on Christopher Isherwood’s remarkable Berlin Diaries, a collection of fictionalized reminiscences of the giddy, mad, bad days of the early 1930s before thing got grim, more mad and much worse. Willkomen: CabaretThe world created in MusicalFare’s production of Cabaret is very dismal. The set designed by Chris Schenk effectively evokes Albert Speer, a Third Reich strategist known as “Hitler’s own architect”. In tandem with Chris Cavanaugh’s austere lighting the stage provides opportunity for any number of striking images in light, shadow and silhouette. MusicalFare’s prevailingly…
Road Less Travel Productions publicized its production of Shakespeare’s Antony And Cleopatra as the first in this region in over fifty years. In those intervening decades, A&C has been an important vehicle on the English speaking stage. The nearby Stratford Festival itself has given audiences four productions of A&C since its founding in 1953. One reason for its regular revival elsewhere is that it provides a damn good role, a title role at that, for experienced actresses offering opportunity to play both passion and power. One critic described Cleopatra as Shakespeare’s most womanly character in a canon of maidens and matriarchs.…
An ongoing squawk amongst culture vultures pits “low brow entertainment” against so-called “fine arts”. For example, a cartoon or comic book couldn’t pull the same intellectual weight as masterpiece painting. Or pulp fiction the social impact beyond the paperback racks where they are sold. Certainly, a 30 minute episode of a T.V. series could never compare to a stage drama. The age of electronics, which brought a world of popular entertainment into American homes, only served to up the wattage on this argument. The young cathode muse was condemned by critics almost at birth. But even the man who coined the…