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Some enchanted evening: Pink Frolic, Marshalls and Rodgers Award

"My whole life flashed before my eyes," said Rob Marshall Saturday at the William Penn in his remarks on accepting the Richard Rodgers Award for Excellence in Musical Theater.

Ditto, sort of. When I arrived in Pittsburgh in 1968 to teach in the Pitt English Dept., fresh out of grad school, one of the first people I met was a fellow fugitive from New England, Bob Marshall, and then Anne and their kids, Maura, Rob and Kathleen (to list them in order of age, Maura being older than her twin brother by a few minutes).

We hit it off, and not just because we shared the Red Sox. (But Bob and I did found the two-man Rico Petrocelli Fan Club of Western Pa., which got us on Myron Cope's talk show in 1975 when the Red Sox played that great World Series with the Reds.)

Although the Marshall kids are a couple of years older than ours, they all grew up together as we and a couple of other English Dept. families shared family weekends and holidays.

So there's a personal as well as Pittsburgh pleasure in seeing their success. Along, doubtless, with others at the William Penn, we felt pride in how gracious they were, how affirmative about growing up amid the academics and performing artists of Pittsburgh.

Of course the 53rd Pink Frolic Ball would have been fun even without the Marshalls as its centerpiece, what with getting dressed up, good food and drink, and then dancing. But with them, it was a trip down memory lane.

It started off with a small cocktail reception, which included lots of theater people -- CMU's Barbara Anderson, Judy Conte and Greg Lehane and Laurie Klatscher, former CLO heads Bill Thunhurst and Charlie Gray, the Playhouse's Jodi Welch and Ron Tassone, comedienne Barbara Russell, and many more.

After that, I had a brief window in which to interview Rob and Kathleen for PG Video. (You can watch that video here.)

Then into the maelstrom of the larger cocktail party, with the fun of the grab-bag pink boxes that are a Guild tradition.

Finally we all crammed into our seats in the William Penn ballroom for a 20-minute revue by a 10-performer ensemble of numbers associated with the many Marshall shows on Broadway and elsewhere.

Point Park grad and Playhouse and Public Theater veteran Daina Griffith was charismatic in "Maybe This Time." There were also three current Point Park students: Ahmad Simmons ("Too Darn Hot"), Brittany Carricato ("Wrong Note Rag") and Justin Peebles ("Le Jazz Hot").

From Carnegie Mellon came Zachary Berger ("Hey There") and Steffi Garrard ("Whatever Lola Wants"). The University of Michigan contributed Stephanie Maloney ("Unusual Way"), and Penn State, grad JD Daw ("Kiss of the Spider Woman").

And representing the CLO Academy were Kristin Serafini and Ted Stevenson ("Favorite Things" and "I Can Do That").

The whole was arranged and directed by Jason Coll and choreographed by Kiesha Lalama-White, with orchestrator JC Carter conducting the band in the balcony.

Larry Richert was the evening's emcee. I think it was either he or the CLO's Van Kaplan (I was too surprised to take note) who introduced the evening's surprise guest, Harry Connick Jr.

As Kathleen said later, it really was a surprise: hearing it was someone who'd worked with her on "The Pajama Game," she ran through some possibilities in her mind without ever expecting it would be the star.

"Rob, I'm still waiting for the call for 'Nine'" (the movie musical Rob's about to direct), Connick joked from the podium.

He thanked Kathleen for taking on "Pajama Game" because it "saved us a lot of money," the implication being that she took less than a full director's salary. And he joked that she'd actually gotten him to dance, so that "sometimes I feel I don't even have to speak, I just move."

In the video tribute the CLO produced and showed, there were pictures of Rob and Kathleen as teenagers (I admit I provided those to CLO) and one of the two of them with sister Maura as Von Trapp children in the CLO's 1973 "Sound of Music."

Accepting her Rodgers Award, a handsome, engraved crystal bowl, Kathleen called the evening "a combination of 'This Is Your Life,' 'Queen for a Day' and, with Harry Connick Jr. here, a Friars' roast."

Kathleen said she and Rob were "so happy to be the home-town kids," and recognized some former teachers and other early mentors present.

She recalled that both of them received their Equity cards at CLO, but she traced her and Rob's love of musical theater back to doing Gilbert & Sullivan at Falk School in the fifth or sixth grade.

And "most of us who love musical theater probably fell in love with it at a Rodgers and Hammerstein show," she said, in tribute to the namesake of the award, which was presented to them (as is traditional) by Rodgers' daughter, Mary Rodgers Guettel.

Rob remembered having been a performer at a Richard Rodgers Award gala in the 1980s, wearing a tux "with a pink tie and cummerbund."

He mentioned the inspiration provided by their childhood idol, Lenora Nemetz, who, in the following summer at the CLO, when they were in "The King and I," would "slip us into dance rehearsals to watch."

But "it's time to retire those pictures of the 'Sound of Music' with the chubby boy in the knee-highs," he said.

An oddity about Connick's appearance is that I'd just written about him in connection with the Rodgers Award, in last Thursday's In the Wings column. That was only because it was just announced Kathleen is doing a newly devised Gershwin musical with him in the fall, but the CLO naturally feared for a moment that the news he was coming had slipped out.

Their care to keep it quiet even had him skulking unobserved around the hotel that afternoon and then sitting way off to one side before he was announced./p>

So much for the ceremonial part of the evening.

For me, the rest of it is a happy blur of dancing, laughing and a sip of wine or two.

It ended up with a group of us -- the awardees, Maura, Bob, Anne, Connick and several of us old (in either sense) friends -- sitting around laughing.

As the song says, it's "nice work if you can get it."

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Broadway Journal, Sunday: Broadway gypsy Courtney Mazza and homeward bound

Sunday, May 4, last day

The PG group left in the morning, and it may not shock you to hear I slept in and missed saying goodbye -- forgivable, perhaps, because I knew they were in good hands with Paul and Jackie. I think most would agree it was a good trip, with variety in the shows we saw and some appealing extras. As a bonus, we pretty much dodged the rain that irregularly threatened daily, throughout the trip.

Then I dove into more writing -- on this journal, mainly, but also the upcoming Weekend cover on Anthony Chisholm, featured actor of four of August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle plays in New York and now about to do "Two Trains Running" in Pittsburgh.

Just in time I cleared out of my room, checked my bags and sprinted down the block to the Marriott Marquis Theatre to see "Cry-Baby." Like "Hairspray" (with which it shares key creators), it's a musical comedy stage adaptation of a John Waters film about rebellious youth in mid-century Baltimore. The reviews were pretty dismissive -- not that I read the reviews when I'm soon going to review that show myself, but you hear about them anyway -- which as usual predisposed me to find the reviews wrong, as I did for a while.

In plot, "Cry-Baby" is really more like "Grease," with its good-girl-attracted-to-renegade (and of course renegade-attracted-to-good-girl -- ain't Nature grand?). Enough off the off-the-wall, subversive Waters spirit seeps through to keep it surprising for a while, but gradually it turns predictable, and along the way you realize that most of the characters are pretty cardboard and aren't going to deepen or develop.

It has sprightly early rock 'n' roll music, however. I'm a sucker for that sweet, bouncy sound from my youth.

There, that's a thumbnail review. I wonder if I'll find more to say when I come to write a review proper?

It's pretty rare to go to a Broadway musical without finding Pittsburghers in the cast, and "Cry-Baby" is no exception. To start, the bouncy, parodic choreography is by Point Park's Tony-winning Rob Ashford. In the featured quartet of straight, white-bread guys who are the villains of the piece, there's Peter Matthew Smith, a Quaker Valley and Point Park grad, also familiar from Pittsburgh Musical Theater. And cast as an invaluable swing is one of my favorite Pittsburgh talents, Courtney Laine Mazza, whom I recall seeing win a Kelly Award as a CAPA freshman (I think it was).

(Click here for a 2000 interview with Courtney and Sarrah Strimel, when both were 18-year-olds in the CLO ensemble.)

She performed that day, so I waited patiently at the stage door amid the autograph hounds with their armloads of posters and programs, to chat for a while. She said it was the fourth "track" she's done already -- a reminder that understudying is on the whole harder work than starring, since you need to know so many different parts and you find yourself dancing with yourself, as it were, playing a role that interacts with a role you just played. Talk about your out-of-body-experiences!

"Nobdy knows how hard it is to swing," she said. But she's also assistant dance captain, so although she has many more years of prime performing time ahead of her, maybe she'll also move into a creative role, as such Pittsburghers as Rob and Kathleen Marshall, Jeff Calhoun and Rob Ashford have done before her.

And now back to Pittsburgh to digest all this and continue writing reviews.

If you're interested in the Post-Gazette theater trips, whether to Broadway, London or the Canadian festivals, check out the advance schedule you can find by scrolling down the right column at www.post-gazette.com/theater. You can also call Gulliver's Travels, 412-441-3131, and ask to be put on the mailing list for those trip announcements that interest you.

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Broadway Journal, Saturday: 21 Club and "South Pacific"

Finally caught up on some sleep, woke to do some online research on what had taken me to the NYPL, then dashed back there to arrange for some images to be sent. (Not to make a mystery of this: it's about the history of my small town in R.I.)

Then I raced up to 48th St. with about a minute to spare to see "Boeing Boeing" -- yes, again. It opens on Monday, and they just started letting critics see it Thursday. So when the PG group went Wednesday, it wasn't yet open for review. I went anyway, but they told me I had to come back and review it later, so I did. Obviously I wouldn't have gone again if I hadn't liked what I saw, but I did, so I did, and I laughed just as much. I have no idea what the New York critics will say -- I rather fear they may condescend to it, since it is, after all, "just" a farce -- but there's no question it's an audience-pleaser. It sure pleased me.

The really distinctive performance is Mark Rylance's, but the others do good, strenuous work. Christine Baranski is an audience favorite from the start, and she and Bradley Whitford get entrance applause. Rylance gets only a smattering, since he's not known on Broadway, but by the end of the show, everyone knows he's been the heart of the comedy.

Seeing it for a second time in just four days, the main difference was Whitford, who was doing much more: he'd really settled in and started to expand. He's a fine stage actor. Well, maybe I just watched him more this time. I'll think about it.

The ShowPlane's farewell dinner was at 21, a restaurant with a comfortable present but also a sparkling past. I remember my parents' talk of having eaten there in the '40s, and I'm sure my father had been drinking there before that. On this visit Paul and Jackie arranged an extra treat, a visit to the Prohibition wine cellar, built underneath the adjacent No. 19 and hidden behind a giant, 5,000 pound steel and concrete door disguised as part of the cellar wall, so no crusading enforcement cops would bust through it.

The legend is that then-mayor Jimmy Walker liked to drink at 21, so once during a raid he hid out in the cellar under No. 19 and called to have the federal agents' cars ticketed.

Now, they say the cellar holds about 27,000 bottles. Amid them, there's a cozy dining room that seats up to 21 (of course). You can book it for a multi-course, five-wine dinner for just $495 per -- or you can settle for a 3-course, 2-wine luncheon that'll set everyone back only $120.

While we were eating upstairs, the Kentucky Derby was run amid some intense rooting. With all the racing decor, it felt appropriate, but what a sad end result it proved to have.

And then on to one of the main attractions of the week, the fine "South Pacific" at Lincoln Center, which is all cluttered up outside with construction work. But there was nothing wrong inside the Beaumont, where the delicious Kelli O'Hara is partnered with the matinee-idol looks and sumptuous baritone of Brazlian/Polish opera star Paulo Szot.

This one will be fun to write about, not the least because, amid all the pleasures of melody and romance, "South Pacific" also has a serious story -- surprisingly so for a popular art form in 1949.

Laughter all afternoon and laughter plus sumptuous melody, romance and a feeling heart at night. Not bad.

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May 2, 2008
Broadway Journal, Friday: Matt Scott and "A Catered Affair"

Sure, it's too bad the Penguins didn't sweep the Rangers, but as the Greek dramatists would say, it's better to temper success with a little becoming modesty rather than engage the envy and wrath of the gods.

More writing in the morning, then off to join some of the PG group for lunch at the Boathouse Restaurant in Central Park.

One of Paul and Jackie's skills is to vary events on our theater tours, and they always plan an optional walking tour of a different section of Manhattan -- this time, Central Park -- with a luncheon somewhere of note to follow. I don't usually have time for the tour, but I seem always to make the luncheon,

In the afternoon I spent a couple of hours at a favorite spot, the NY Public Library, one of the greatest institutions in a great city. I was researching some local R.I. history on behalf of a historical society I belong to, and there's enough of the scholar in me to enjoy digging around in old papers, especially when it's facilitated by someone with the knowledge and good humor of Thomas Lannon, the archives and manuscripts specialist on duty this day.

But I also just like the majesty of the NYPL's two main reading rooms, with their soaring stained glass ceilings, handsome brass lamps, ample oak tables and lovely oak chairs. I even have one of those chairs at home -- purchased, not spirited away in my briefcase.

Tonight's play was "A Catered Affair," a new musical, one of the recent openings, by Harvey Fierstein, with music and lyrics by John Bucchino. In truth, it's something of a misnomer to call it a musical -- that raises misleading expectations of something bigger than this modest, affecting piece with a company of 10, where the music accompanies rather than dominates and there are few of the bells and whistles a musical usually employs. Call it a play with music, just 90 minutes long.

Over a post-show drink at Sardi's, the ShowPlane group enjoyed a good discussion. Normally we discuss all three shows we've seen at that point, but we concentrated on "Catered Affair," partly because we'd just seen it but mainly because we had a guest, Matthew Scott, CMU '04, who understudies the young man in the show.

He hadn't been on that night, but he's been with the show since it premiered in San Diego and then moved to NY, and he proved an articulate, sensitive discussant. I'd bet that everyone came away with an enhanced appreciation for the modest but distinctive show we'd just seen.

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May 2, 2008
Broadway Journal, Wednesday and Thursday: Mark Rylance

Wednesday, April 30

Great news about the Penguins, going up 3-0 on the Rangers. These victories can be even more satisfying when you happen to be right in the heart of enemy territory.

This is the day the ShowPlaners from Pittsburgh arrived, shepherded by Paul and Jackie Busang of Gulliver's Travels. They've been making the arrangements for PG ShowPlanes and Critics Choice Tours since 1990 (and they handled my tours for the Pitt Informal Program for a decade before that), so I can't imagine even wanting to do this without their help.

My morning was filled with more hours on the laptop, writing about Lenora (here's the interview) and "Gypsy" (here's the review).

In the nick of time I went racing off to meet my friend Jane Hewes at the matinee of the Patrick Stewart-Kate Fleetwood "Macbeth." What a gripping play it is, as staged by designer Anthony Ward and director Rupert Goold -- as contemporary in presentation and meaning as a totalitarian putsch in Bosnia or Iraq.

More about that when I review it, which I might do in tandem with tonight's very different show, the 1960s farce "Boeing-Boeing." This duo goes in the "from the sublime to the (almost) ridiculous" category, i.e. from tragedy to farce.

I met the PG ShowPlane group at our welcoming dinner in the Charlotte Restaurant at our hotel, the Millennium Broadway on 44th, just east of Times Square. In recent years we've mainly stayed at the big Marriott Marquis right on Times Square, but their prices have gone through the roof. The Millennium is just as handy and very comfortable, and I like the fact that it's smaller and the elevators are quicker.

Of course, I don't pick the hotel for the PG trips -- Paul and Jackie do that -- but I do pick the plays, and in prospect, I like the variety of what we have on tap. It's heavily musical, of course, because that's what Broadway does best and why most people sign up. We have one play (farce), one classic musical and two new ones. We'll see how it goes.

It certainly started well: "Boeing-Boeing" is just as funny here as it was in London last spring. Director Matthew Warchus and star Mark Rylance are the only two carry-overs from London, with the rest of it cast here, led by Christine Baranski and Bradley Whitford ("West Wing") in place of Frances de la Tour and Roger Allam. Much more in the review.

I ended the day with a 90-minute phone interview with Anthony Chisholm, back in Pittsburgh. In my business, you've got to keep up with Broadway, but Pittsburgh theater never stops. Chisholm, who originated key roles in four August Wilson plays and brought them to New York, is in Pittsburgh working on "Two Trains Running" for the small Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre -- so we were talking until about 2 a.m.

Thursday, May 1

Happy May Day! With this unseasonable cold, it certainly doesn't feel much like May, but the calendar doesn't lie.

I did, however -- lie (abed) this morning, I mean, after that late interview. Then I wrote, then off to meet Mark Rylance for a luncheon interview at Joe Allen's, the theater hangout. That's the man who's played Hamlet at the Pittsburgh Public Theater and also Olivia ("Twelfth Night") and the Duke ("Measure for Measure") in Pittsburgh, the last two with the company from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, which he led.

Mark is the easiest interview in the world, disarmingly frank, with no airs. He's one of those abnormal actors who are more interested in the person they're talking to than in themselves, so you don't have an interview with Mark so much as a wide-ranging conversation that goes places you haven't anticipated. In the interests of whatever it is you hope to write, sometimes you have to wrench it back in that direction, even though you hate to because the direction it's taken has been so interesting.

We talked mainly about the play he wrote and produced last year, "I Am Shakespeare," which sounds like a hoot, and the Pittsburgh play he's writing now, about Carnegie and Frick. More about these when I publish the interview. (Here's the link to that interview.)

I assumed he was able to work on Broadway because he's an American citizen (he grew up in Wisconsin), but it turns out he gave up his American citizenship out of disagreement with recent policies abroad. So he's here courtesy of American Equity, presumably under the star exception -- and of course he is a star, albeit an unassuming one making his first appearance on Broadway.

About "Boeing Boeing," I asked him about the increased physicality since London (his character gets knocked about a lot), and he laughed. "American actors grow up on beef and milk," he said, meaning they're robust, and yes, he does have a few bruises to show for it.

In the evening, while the group was seeing "Young Frankenstein," I went to "In the Heights," which has been described as a Latino "Rent." Actually, it's less cutting edge than that -- the rap-inflected lyrics are understandable and there's a predictable (appealing) sentiment about the story of young love in the barrio under the George Washington Bridge. On first blush, I'd call this a strong contender for the Tony.

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April 29, 2008
Broadway Journal, Monday and Tuesday: Noel and Lenora

Monday, April 28

If getting there is half the fun, I'm in trouble: I flew up this afternoon, and it wasn't much fun at all. The problem was New York weather, USAir said. New York flights were being cancelled left and right, but my 4:05 p.m. flight was one of the lucky ones that made it out, albeit at 6 p.m.

Yes, there was weather! It was one of those smaller planes, a joint flight with Air Keokuk or Mini Aviation or something, and we bounced around for what seemed like forever but wasn't actually that much longer than usual. I think the taxi from LaGuardia went faster than the plane, so I was able to slip into my 8 p.m. show only about 40 minutes late, grateful to have gotten there at all.

The show was a real treat: "Private Lives Revealed: The Letters of Noel Coward," a mixture of excerpts from letters to and from Coward and some appropriate Coward songs, devised and narrated by Barry Day. He's the editor of a nice big thick edition of the "The Letters of Noel Coward."

The show was on the small stage in the dining room at the Players Club, and the lovely cast included Simon Jones as Coward, Patricia Conolly as various English women (Bea Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence), Dana Ivey as various Americans and others (Garbo, Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman) and Geoffrey Johnson (not an actor) filling in. Playing accompaniment and singing some songs was, of course, Steve Ross, and Stefanie Morse added her expressive singing voice on the distaff side.

The first two are friends, which is how I heard about the event. I first met Jones when he came through Pittsburgh in 1992, playing opposite Joan Collins in a "Private Lives" at the Benedum. He was (and is) forever memorable to me as the voice of the querulous earthling Arthur Dent in the immortal radio version of "The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy." I met Conolly, also in the '80s, when she was playing the great Shakespeare roles in Stratford, Canada.

Mainly, the evening reminded me what a smart, disciplined, hard working man Coward was beneath his carefully contrived image of social flippancy and graceful negligence. It was a great way to start a week of New York theater.

Tuesday, April 29

Today I spent writing, because of course I couldn't finish everything before I left Pittsburgh, and the Thursday Weekend section is insatiable, demanding to be fed every week.

Then I went to meet Lenora Nemetz at Angus McIndoe's, now a favorite theater district eaterie much patronized by actors. I was seeing her in "Gypsy" that night, and I wanted to find out how it felt for her to be back on Broadway, almost 40 years after she joined the ensemble of the original "Cabaret" as a shockingly young teenager.

My review of "Gypsy" and the interview with Lenora should be in Sunday's paper, but I'll just say here that the wattage of her smile made it clear how happy she is to be back where she belongs. She's really at home on that Broadway stage, like any other stage. Mazeppa is a fine comic cameo, and Lenora looks great up there (but she ought to return those legs to whatever woman half her age she borrowed them from).

Lenora also plays Miss Cratchitt, the tart-tongued mogul's assistant in Act 1 -- and she's the standby (that's an understudy of a higher rank) for Patti LuPone in the lead. More on this to come.

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