Oh, the Alliance Theatre. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love you for bringing Stephen King to your Taste of the Alliance Season tonight. His memoir “On Writing” sits on my night stand, and I can’t wait to see the new musical that he and John Mellencamp wrote!
I love you for bringing “Into the Woods” to the theater. It’s a show I have been wanting to see for years.
I love you for showing me a scene from the 2009 Tony Award-winning play “God of Carnage.” The scene and the acting we saw tonight were captivating.
I love you for hiring great Atlanta actors like Joe Knezevich, who performed wonderfully in a scene about an English blue’s musician in “I Just Stopped By to See the Man.” I would have thought Joe was actually from the UK had I not looked him up online and found that he is a local actor. He was such a wacky and animated Brit, I could swear I’ve seen that musician before!
I love you for daring to bring “The Wizard of Oz” to the stage. Who would dare to compete with Judy Garland? Not I. But if I had a voice like 14-year-old Paige McCauley, I would. She sounded nothing like Garland, but boy, McCauley had an ethereal, soulful voice and sang “Over the Rainbow” with her own unique emphasis on words and sounds. I was taken aback. Yeah, I would dare to bring her to my stage too.
I love you for bringing Tovah Feldshuh to reprise the role she played in New York in the longest-running one-woman show “Golda’s Balcony.” I love it when you bring great New York talent to Atlanta.
I think it is super cool that you are bringing Fred Willard to join the cast of The Second City when it performs “Sex and the Second City.”
I also love you for what you’ve done in the past: premiering “Bring it On: The Musical” — I will be shocked if it is not nominated for a Tony — and for premiering “Come Fly With Me.” They were two of the best shows I have ever seen at the Alliance. “Come Fly With Me” was one of the best shows I’ve seen anywhere.
I am so looking forward to your shows this season!
Thank you, Susan Booth.
One of the greatest Broadway performers and singers of all time, Patti LuPone, will be performing at Atlanta Symphony Hall this Friday and Saturday.
Of all the stars I’ve seen on Broadway, none stood out more than this dramatic actress with the powerful voice. I saw her play Eva Peron in “Evita,” for which she won her first Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, and I have seen her in the Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd, which aired on PBS.
LuPone has been nominated numerous times for Best Actress in a Musical for the Tony Awards and for the Laurence Olivier Awards. She won another Tony in the same category, in 2008, for her role as Rose in “Gypsy.” Performing since she was four, LuPone has starred on Broadway numerous times, most recently in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”
LuPone is also a New York Times best-selling author for “Patti LuPone: A Memoir.”
Jill Jane Clements and Carolyn Cook; Photo: Greg Mooney
A panoply of family dysfunction — suicide, incest and drug addiction – mixed with bitter humor, “August: Osage County” at the Alliance Theatre is riveting for the whole three hours.
Yeah, this Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play is long – it has two intermissions – but in some ways it’s not long enough. This story of the Weston family could keep on going and would still have me pinned to my seat.
Reminiscent of the plays of Christopher Durang, Sam Shepard at his tamest, and Eugene O’Neil, mixed with “Roseanne” at its best, playwright Tracy Letts introduces us to a household filled with verbal abuse, incest, suicide and tempestuous characters that hack at one another like chickens in a small caged pen.
Before Professor Beverly Weston (Del Hamilton) leaves his “cold blooded,” drug addicted wife, Violet (Brenda Bynum), he hires a young Cheyenne Indian woman, Johnna (Diany Rodriguez), to help care for her.
Although Beverly can’t stop drinking long enough to do his laundry, it is Violet who can barely walk or talk from taking too many prescription drugs. She teeters down the stairs, zig-zags across the floor, and knocks down a chair before she can greet Johnna.
When Beverly goes missing, Violet’s family arrives to console her: sister Mattie (Jill Jane Clements) with her husband and son; daughter Barbara Fordham (Tess Malis Kincaid) and her husband, Bill Fordham (Chris Kayser), with their 14-year-old pot-smoking daughter; single daughter Ivy Weston (Carolyn Cook); and daughter Karen Weston (Courtney Patterson) with her fiancé Steve (Joe Knezevich). Knezevich plays such a great, believable sleazeball that he’s at once despicable and likable, in the vein of Eric Roberts in “Star 80.”
Peyton Place, drama, comedy, lust and scandal.
Hear, hear, for Atlanta’s finest actors all on one stage in one helluva great play!
The stellar cast includes Andrew Benator, Richard Garner and Bart Hansard.
Written by Tracy Letts and directed by Susan V. Booth, “August Osage County” runs through May 8 at the Alliance Theatre.
Hear one of the most swinging hep cats around this Friday as Joe Lovano takes the stage with the Georgia State University Jazz Band at the Rialto Center for the Arts.
Lovano has been playing professionally since the ’70s when he toured with Tom Jones, recorded with Lonnie Smith and George Benson on “Afrodesia,” played with Chet Baker, and toured for three years with Woody Herman and his band.
In the 1980s he joined the Mel Lewis Orchestra when Bob Brookmeyer and also played in other large ensembles with Carla Bley, Bob Brookmeyer, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and Gunther Schuller. A year later he played in a trio with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell.
He has also played with Michael Brecker, Abbey Lincoln, Esperanza Spalding, Hank Jones, McCoy Tyner, Ornette Coleman and so many other all-time greats
Lovano will be joined by the GSU Jazz Band, and if it is as good as it was a couple of years ago when I last heard it, it will astound you!
Joe Lovano and the Georgia State University Jazz Band play Friday, April 22 at 8 p.m. at the Rialto.
Leigh Campbell-Taylor and Allan Edwards
Horizon Theatre’s “Legacy of Light” is a one of the best period piece I’ve seen in Atlanta in years.
Too bad it has a modern side to it.
Leigh Campbell-Taylor and Allan Edwards are stupendous as the French lovers mathematician Émilie du Châtelet and philosopher Voltaire, who actually had an affair in the 1700s, while du Châtelet was married. Watching these two perform whisks you into the 18th century allowing you sneak peeks at their clandestine rendezvous.
But alas, before you know it you’re thrown right back into the 21st century and have to listen to a mundane modern couple talk about their jobs and their desire to have a baby.
There’s a Shakespeare-like “Twelfth Night” mirror image of the French lovers and the modern married couple, scientist Millie (Kate Donadio) and her school teacher husband, Peter (Robin Bloodworth). But, for me, it’s formulaic and the modern scenes fall flat and interrupt a great story.
My companion, however, a playwright who agreed with my thoughts after the first half of the show, was in tears by the end of the play. She said that playwright Karen Zacarias, an Atlanta native, did a wonderful job bringing the past together with the future and that the story of the modern-day couple was just as real for her as the story of the that of French lovers Voltaire and Émilie du Châtelet.
Not my thoughts, but they are the thoughts of Letitia Sweitzer, who is an award-winning playwright. Here is what she wrote to me in an email:
“I think the combination of the two stories, while seeming redundant at first, was brilliant as it really came together comfortably and meaningfully in the second act. I also thought that it was surprising, and fitting, and therefore deft of the playwright that the surrogate mother character ended up in the spotlight in the final scenes.”
Directed by Susan Reid, the cast includes Corey Bradberry and Lane Carlock.
“Legacy of Light” runs through May 8 at Horizon Theatre.
Photo: Greg Mooney. Pictured: Jimi Kocina and Luke Robertson
And now for something completely different and wonderful, “Spoon Lake Blues,” in its world premiere at the Hertz Theatre.
Brothers Brady and Denis are about to lose their house, the one their grandfather built to start his family. The home is littered with beer cans, boxes and food wrappings and swarming with ants. The toilet doesn’t work and the front door is busted. To stop the bill collectors from seizing their home, the brothers burglarize the new homes that have turned this once dead-beat town by a lake into a summer vacation spot for the wealthy.
A mix of romance, comedy, hardship, and sex, the play is filled with twists, turns and laughs. Not since Sam Shepard’s “True West” do I remember such a good story with two brothers who act so dumb and dumber.
A good cast of actors turn this show into a one hour and forty minute wild ride of lunacy and laughs where the unexpected never ceases. A female police officer demands sex from big brother Denis; Caitlin, a black college coed, steals her father’s prized albums to help these “white-trash” brothers who earlier robbed her parents’ home, and college-dropout Brady exhumes his grandmother’s grave in hopes of finding out that he and Caitlin might be related.
Playwright Josh Tobiessen was a finalist for the Alliance Theatre’s Kendeda Award for best new playwright five years ago. Artistic Director Susan Booth told him then to continue to send her copies of future plays. Luckily for us, he did. It’s a must see.
”Spoon Lake Blues” runs through April 24 at the Hertz Theatre.
Cast: Veronika Duerr, Jimi Kocina, Lakisha Michelle May, Luke Robertson
Maverick Joan Rivers changes careers as often as she changes her face (She’s looking more and more like Lisa Rinna). But there’s one thing that doesn’t change, Rivers’ ability to keep on working.
More than fifty years after she began her comedy career, she is finally coming to Atlanta for a one-woman show Friday, March 25, 2011, at Atlanta Symphony hall.
While some things get old — her line “Can we talk?” and her red-carpet commentary with daughter Melissa — her comedy is as fresh as her new face. Her material is as original as she was more than four decades ago when she wrote sketches for the Italian mouse puppet Topo Gigio on The Ed Sullivan Show and when she first appeared on “The Tonight Show.” Carson then told her, “You’re going to be a big star one day.”
Carson was right. Rivers would go on to win an Emmy for her daytime TV talk show and a Tony nomination in 1994 for her starring role in “Sally Marr and Her Escort,” which she wrote. She would also become the winner of the second season of “The Celebrity Apprentice.” She is a best-selling author, playwright, screenwriter, motion picture director, columnist, lecturer, syndicated radio host, jewelry designer and a cosmetic company entrepreneur.
Like a Jack-in-the-Box, nothing seems to keep her down.
The question is this: After all these years, can Rivers pull off a one-woman show? If you watch the video above, I think you’ll have your answer.
Joan Rivers will be performing her one-woman show Friday, March 25, 2011 at 8:00 p.m. at Atlanta Symphony Hall.
Eric J. Little and Chris Kayser
If there’s anything superior about Horizon Theatre’s newest production “Superior Donuts,” it is Eric J. Little who steals the show as the educated, jive-talking Franco Wicks.
It’s Arthur’s donut shop, Franco’s neighborhood and they’re both in trouble.
Arthur’s donut shop has been in a low-income neighborhood in Boston since his father opened it nearly five decades ago. Superior Donuts has just been burglarized when Russian immigrant Max Tarasov (Bart Hansard) rushes in telling the two officers investigating the crime that he’s sure the culprits are those young black children who were running by. When the laid-back Arthur (Chris Kayser) arrives at the shop and everyone leaves, he locks the doors, shutters the windows and smokes a joint.
Franco is a young black man who’s looking for work so he can go back to college. Although Arthur is in no mood to hire anyone, the winsome student has laid out a stellar marketing plan for the shop to explode with customers. Within three minutes he’s hired.
“Superior Donuts” mixes drama with comedy and kept my attention nearly the entire time. It is smartly written, but there are a couple of rocky spots. I didn’t grasp the significance all of Arthur’s monologues, especially the information about his daughter, and I thought the ending was weak. If Arthur were serious about writing a book, it seems like he’d have learned his lesson and written it on a computer.
With all that said, the playwright, Tracy Letts is more than a mediocre playwright. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play in 2008 for “August: Osage County.” His earlier play “Man from Nebraska” also was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
What really made this show for me was the acting by Eric J. Little, who performs with such zeal and true-to-life (not forced) animation, he kept me captivated.
No less outstanding in their performances were Bart Hansard and Nita Hardy as the homeless Lady Boyle. If anyone could make you believe it is freezing cold outside and that it takes someone a while to warm up when the temperature is below freezing, it is Hardy.
I couldn’t care less about scenery, but for being one of the smallest theaters around town, Horizon does an excellent job of creating a life-like set. Yep, that’s a tiny donut shop that has been there for years and hasn’t grown with the times. I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone to have done better than sister scenic designers Moriah Curley-Clay and Isabel Curley-Clay.
Directed by Jeff Adler, the cast includes Bryan Brendle, Lala Cochran, Neal Hazard, Alan Heckner, and Sean Michael Moreno.
“Superior Donuts” runs through March 27 at Horizon Theatre.
David de Vries and Bethany Anne Lind; Photo: Greg Mooney
When Susan Booth calling “Carapace” “earth shattering” during the announcements on opening night at the Hertz Theatre, I leaned forward and applauded with anticipation.
“Carapace” was making its world premiere after winning the Kendeda Award for finest new play from a graduating college playwright. And, since two-time Tony Award-winner Judith Ivey had directed it, I figured it had to be good.
The stage was beautifully set with a prop that resembled an actual car and reminded me of the best show I have ever seen at the Hertz Theatre, “How I Learned to Drive,” which really was “earth shattering.” (It won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama.)
So my engine is revved, and I’m ready for this show to take me on a great ride.
But “Carapace” didn’t shatter me at all. Strange, because just hearing about a young girl who stutters and gets teased at school would bother me. And a story about a man who drinks and can’t maintain a relationship with his daughter or ex-wife could be shattering. But watching Margo as a child, a teenager and a young adult talk and stutter around Jeff (David de Vries), her father who becomes estranged from her, I felt almost emotionless.
When I saw “The King’s Speech,” I felt pain and joy for King George. Colin Firth made me believe he was King George and that he really could not get his words out of his mouth. His stutter seemed to emanate from something within him. When I saw Margo (Bethany Anne Lind) stutter, I thought it was the actress who was attempting to stutter rather than Margo trying not to stutter.
In a scene in which Margo is a young adult and comes home to her boyfriend who tries to comfort her as she sees her father there, I didn’t believe they were two people who were really in love. Nor did I believe that she was really scared of her father.
While the scenes that should have been touching left me cold, there were a couple of scenes in the play that were humorous. Ted (Mark Kincaid), who has been in rehab for substance abuse, doles out advice on how Jeff, his former brother-in-law, can “fix” his relationship with Margo. The play’s funniest scene is when Jeff goes to a pet store to buy a tortoise for Margo, who always wanted one when she was a young girl. Kyle (Paul Hester), who recognizes Jeff from drug and alcohol rehab, loves the animals so much he refuses to let Jeff buy them.
“Carapace” is not bad and doesn’t crash, but it isn’t earth shattering.
Written by David Mitchell Robinson and directed by Judith Ivey. Cast includes Mark Kincaid, Joe Knezevich, Tony Larkin, Bethany Anne Lind, David de Vries, and Paul Hester. “Carapace” runs through March 6 at the Hertz Theatre.
Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra big band will perform at Atlanta Symphony Hall Tuesday.
Man, this music sounds fun! Just click above to play the video.
Tuesday’s performance will feature original compositions, newly arranged music of Chick Corea and selections from the JLCO’s most recent CD release, “Vitoria Suite.”
The repertoire will also include “Swing Symphony,” a new symphonic composition by Marsalis, which will be performed by the JLCO with the Los Angeles Philharmonic featuring conductor Leonard Slatkin. The large scale work, Marsalis’ third symphony, was written for full symphony orchestra and jazz orchestra.
Before beginning the JLCO, Marsalis performed with Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers. He has also performed with Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry and Sonny Rollins. Additionally, he has created compositions for Peter Martins at the New York City Ballet, Twyla Tharp for the American Ballet Theatre, and for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.
For his jazz and classical recordings, Marsalis has won 9 Grammy Awards. And for his album “Blood on the Fields,” he won a Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra big band will perform Tuesday, Feb. 22 at 8 p.m. at Atlanta Symphony Hall.
