Preview '05-'06: Off-Broadway
Orfeh Saturday Night Fever plays a stripper named Pippi who moves into Armadillo Acres and threatens the marriage of toll collector Norbert, played by Oklahoma! Tony winner Shuler Hensley. The production also boasts a trailer-trash Greek chorus of three women. The Great American Trailer Park Musical features Kaitlin Hopkins Bat Boy, Bare, Marya Grandy, Linda Hart Hairspray, Leslie Kritzer Bat Boy, Paper Mill Funny Girl, and Wayne Wilcox The Light in the Piazza. The cast of seven will be backed by five musicians playing the country and blues score.
Alfred Kinsey, the doctor who revolutionized sex education, was the subject of a major film last year, with Liam Neeson in the title role. But before that film arrived, a musical version of the Kinsey story, entitled Dr. Sex, had a well-received premiere at the Bailiwick Repertory Theatre in Chicago. Now the musical is making its off-Broadway debut and is currently in previews at the Peter Norton Space on West 42nd Street.
With songs by Larry Bortniker and a book by Bortniker and Sally Deering, the off-Broadway production of Dr. Sex co-stars Brian Noonan as Kinsey and Jennifer Simard I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, Forbidden Broadway SVU as Dr. Kinsey's wife, Claire.
Urban Cowboy leading lady Jenn Colella was in the New York Musical Theatre Festival mounting of Trailer Park, but she's returning to the local stage as leading lady of another new off-Broadway musical, Slut. This one also had a previous New York life: It sold out at the New York International Fringe Festival in the summer of 2003.
Set in contemporary Greenwich Village, the show concerns self-proclaimed slut Adam, his shy best friend Dan, and rock singer Delia Colella who comes between them and changes their lives. Directed by Gordon Greenberg Paper Mill Baker's Wife, Slut has book and lyrics by Ben H. Winters and music by Stephen Sislen. Andy Karl, lately of Altar Boyz, plays Adam, and, in addition to Colella, the cast also includes Jim Stanek who will continue the season by co-starring in Broadway's Lestat, Altar Boyz' David Josefsberg, Mary Faber, Harriett D. Foy, Amanda Watkins, and Kevin Pariseau. Slut plays the American Theatre of Actors where Urinetown opened its commercial run before moving to Broadway beginning September 13. It opens October 1.
Based on the 13th-century work Aucassin et Nicolette, Chasing Nicolette will be the new tenant at the Little Shubert Theatre, scheduled to begin performances in September. With book and lyrics by Peter Kellogg and music by David Friedman, Chasing Nicolette was first seen at the Westport Country Playhouse in 2000, but had a new production at Philadelphia's Prince Music Theater last season that appears to be the basis for the off-Broadway version.
About the romance between a Christian and a Muslim, the comic romance finds the lovers facing enormous obstacles and aided only by the boy's servant, who was played in Philadelphia by the versatile Bronson Pinchot. Ethan McSweeny is directing.
Scheduled to open on October 2 at the Daryl Roth Theatre is A Woman of Will, a one-woman musical written by and starring cabaret diva Amanda McBroom, composer of the song "The Rose" and author and star of the musical Heartbeats. In A Woman of Will, McBroom plays a lady who turns to Shakespeare's women for advice during a midlife crisis. Joel Silberman is composer, co-author of book, and director. Under the title Lady Macbeth Sings the Blues, A Woman of Will had its first production last summer at California's Rubicon Theatre.
Opening October 16 at the Minetta Lane Theatre is Five Course Love, set in five different restaurants, and with three actors playing fifteen characters. Written by Gregg Coffin, the music is said to run the gamut from country-and-western to Berlin cabaret to '50s doo-wop to Italian opera. The cast includes Heather Ayers, John Bolton Spamalot, and Jeff Gurner.
Scheduled to open November 7 at the Theatre at St. Luke's is Bingo, which involves three pals and their weekly obsession, the bingo game at Hamerin County's St. Luke's Church basement. The book is by Michael Heitzman and Ilene Reid, who have written the songs with David Holcenberg.
Arriving November 14 at 37 Arts Theater is The Ark, the work of Michael McLean and Kevin Kelly, which is said to take a contemporary look at the story of Noah by showing us the backstory of his family. The talented Annie Golden is the star.
Concluding our list of commercial off-Broadway musical productions is Almost Heaven: John Denver's America, which weaves together the songs of John Denver to create a theatrical narrative that reflects upon the country during the years in which he wrote them, the late '60s and early '70s. The show is written and adapted by Peter Glazer, and directed by Randall Myler, who has been involved in earlier off-Broadway musicals about Janis Joplin, Hank Williams, and the Mamas and the Papas. Almost Heaven is scheduled for November at a venue to be announced.
Already noted is the fact that two of the original Altar Boyz, Andy Karl and David Josefsberg, will be departing that production to join Slut. A third member of Altar Boyz' cast, the highly amusing Tyler Maynard, has also left that musical, to star in a new off-Broadway musical, in this case Vineyard Theater Avenue Q's presentation of Miracle Brothers, entirely the work of Kirsten Childs The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin.
The swashbuckling story of two brothers --one black, one white-- who escape their plantation life in 17th-century Brazil, Miracle Brothers is directed by Tina Landau and also features Kerry Butler, Cheryl Freeman, Anika Larsen, Jay Goede, William Youmans, Clifton Oliver, Nicole Leach, Gregory Treco, Devin Richards, and Karen Olivo. Now playing previews, it opens at the Vineyard next month.
Back in the 1999-2000 season, composer-lyricist-librettist Michael John LaChuisa was represented on Broadway by two musicals, one Marie Christine produced by Lincoln Center Theater, the other The Wild Party a Public Theatre presentation. In 2005-2006, we have the off-Broadway version of this situation, with Lincoln Center Theater and the Public Theater each sponsoring the local debut of a new work by the always provocative LaChiusa.
At its Mitzi Newhouse space, Lincoln Center Theater will this winter present a musical version of Lorca's celebrated play The House of Bernarda Alba, with music by LaChuisa, a book by Richard Nelson The Dead, My Life with Albertine, lyrics by LaChiusa and Nelson, and direction by Nelson and Graciela Daniele Marie Christine. A recent workshop of the show, about a domineering mother and her five daughters, had a cast including Daphne Rubin-Vega, Yolande Bavan, Candy Buckley, Natascia Diaz, Sally Murphy, and Saundra Santiago.
LaChiusa's Public Theatre show, to be presented in October at the Public's downtown venue, is called See What I Wanna See. That's also the title of a LaChiusa song that Audra McDonald has sung, and indeed McDonald was in this show when it was called R Shomon and was presented at the Williamstown Theatre Festival last summer. As the original title was meant to suggest, See What I Wanna See uses the Rashomon device of a story told from multiple perspectives. Musical director/orchestrator of Light in the Piazza, Ted Sperling will direct See What I Wanna See, and the four-member cast will consist of Idina Menzel, Marc Kudisch of LaChiusa's Wild Party, Mary Testa of LaChiusa's Marie Christine, and Henry Stram.
Continuing with non-profit off-Broadway musicals, there's Grey Gardens, based on the fascinating Maysles Brothers film documentary about the eccentric aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Edith Bouvier Beale and her middle-aged daughter, Edie. With book by Doug Wright I Am My Own Wife, music by Scott Frankel, and lyrics by Michael Korie, Grey Gardens will be mounted this season by Playwrights Horizons, at the company's mainstage house on West 42nd Street. Mary Louise Wilson and Christine Ebersole will play mother and daughter, recluses in a dilapidated, twenty-eight-room mansion in East Hampton. Michael Greif Rent is the director.
The New Group has what's billed as a "play/opera" called The Music Teacher, with book by Wallace Shawn and music by Allen Shawn. Described as a blend of theatre and opera, The Music Teacher concerns a young teacher and his female student as they conceive and perform a new operetta.
New York Theater Workshop also has a musical, an adaptation of Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes, the story of conflict between the sons of Oedipus. Jo Bonney will direct the show, scheduled to begin performances in January.
Meanwhile, Transport Group, the company that offered recent musical productions like The Audience and First Lady Suite, will in October offer the world premiere of Normal, with book and lyrics by Yvonne Adrian and Cheryl Stern and music by Tom Hochan, at the Connelly Theatre. Barbara Walsh lately of Hairpspray, Erin Leigh Peck, Toni DiBuono, and Shannon Polly appear in this story of a mother's mission to save her daughter from a life-threatening eating disorder.
Speaking of the Public Theatre, its revival of the musical version of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona has just opened at the outdoor Delacorte Theatre. Also opened and playing at the Zipper Theatre is the new off-Broadway musical Once Around the Sun.
And it appears that we have the first off-Broadway musical of the 2006-2007 season: Next spring, Atlantic Theater Company will present the long-awaited New York premiere of a piece that was once to be a Roundabout production, the Duncan Sheik-Steven Sater musical version of Wedekind's Spring Awakening.