Have theatrical trilogies become the new 90-minute, single-set play? This season alone we’ve sat through Robert Lepage’s nine-hour triptych Lipsynch at BAM, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s bayou-myth epic The Brother/Sister Plays, and now the first installment of Horton Foote’s Texas-size The Orphans’ Home Cycle. Last season, we laughed all day at The Norman Conquests and not so long ago, playgoers courted thrombosis on The Coast of Utopia marathon days. In each case, you have to wonder whether size matters. With the exception of Orphans’ and Conquests, I think all of the aforementioned behemoths would have been improved by judicious cuts. However, I don’t really feel that a moment was wasted in Foote’s melancholy masterpiece, directly patterned on his father’s childhood and adulthood in Texas. Go read my review of Part 1: The Story of a Childhood. And if you really want to immerse yourself in Foote’s history—personal and theatrical—check out Wilborn Hampton’s engrossing, highly readable biography Horton Foote: America’s Storyteller. It may enhance your experience of the play. Not only will you learn much about the obsessive listening to family lore that imbued young Foote with a fascination with not just history but the reciting of history, you get a sense of the New York theater scene in the 1940s. See Foote hanging out with Jerome Robbins and Agnes de Mille, or making plans to spend a summer with Tennessee Williams working on a farm. Hampton goes into great detail about the origins of The Orphans’ Home Cycle, which the great writer, who died in March at age 92, never got to see. Given the near-unanimous raves today, the run is more than sold out. Still, doesn’t mean you can’t ask about waiting lists or standing-room-only spots here.

We are as excited as anyone to see what Rob Marshall, whose film version of Chicago is probably the best movie musical of the past 25 years, can do with the even trickier material of Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit’s 1982 Fellini trip Nine. The upcoming film’s excellent first trailer—which you can view here—was essentially a Ziegfeld-staircase–style introduction to Daniel Day-Lewis’s roster of A-list female costars, including Sophia Loren, Judi Dench, Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Kate Hudson and Fergie, whose performance of “Be Italian” served as background music for the video. (For a funny parody version, click here.) Now comes a new trailer, featuring Hudson in a kind of 1960s Britney Spears mode, performing a new song, “Cinema Italiano,” written expressly for the movie, as Yeston discusses in this interesting Playbill interview. We will leave the reviewing to our esteemed colleagues in the Film department, but we just gotta say: For musical-theater fans, at least, this sure looks like a lot of fun.

Here’s Sir Alan Ayckbourn by the numbers: He turned 70 this year, and this week he opens his 73rd play, My Wonderful Day, Off Broadway at 59E59. He’s had just under 40 plays produced on the West End. In January, he stepped down from the artistic directorship of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England, which he ran for 36 years. Last season, three of his plays ran on Broadway and won a Tony for Best Revival of a Play. That last bit of data might be slightly misleading. The three plays were the sequential comedic trilogy The Norman Conquests. The stupendous Matthew Warchus production (a transfer from the Old Vic) helped to remind New York theatergoers that Ayckbourn isn’t just a technically facile farceur. For decades, he has been documenting the English character in seriocomic works that maintain a masterly balance between silliness and sadness. Even though he’s about to start drafting Play No. 74, Ayckbourn hasn’t lost his sense of adventure about the blank page.

Oh, one last number for Ayckbourn. He’s given many, many interviews. They’re archived on his capacious website. How many, precisely, you ask? Er—too many to count while holding down a full-time job. What do you ask a man who has given hundreds of interviews throughout the years he’s been playwriting (50, to be precise)? Not to worry; Ayckbourn was graciousness itself as he sat in 59E59’s offices for an hour of pleasant chat about childhood, the West End and what makes him laugh. Read more »

John Kander and Fred Ebb’s first Broadway musical was 1965’s Flora, the Red Menace, which starred a teenage Liza Minnelli and ran for less than three months. It was an inauspicious beginning for one of the great musical-theater teams of all time; but the duo’s luck would change the next year with Cabaret, and continue with such shows as Zorba, The Kiss of the Spider Woman and especially the timeless Chicago. When Ebb died in 2004, it seemed like the end of an era. But Kander and Ebb left behind a number of shows that had never reached New York. Curtains made it to Broadway in 2007; The Visit and Over and Over have had prominent regional productions. And now comes word that the Vineyard Theatre is set to offer the world premiere of another Kander and Ebb collaboration: The Scottsboro Boys, a historical musical based on a tragic episode in American racial history. David Thompson, who also worked with Kander and Ebb on Steel Pier, wrote the book; Susan Stroman will direct. The production is set to begin previews in February, and open on March 12. Although Kander and Ebb’s late-career output was rarely quite on the level of their very best work, we are eager to give The Scottsboro Boys a hearing.

If you’re anything like me—in your thirties, Midwestern—you too probably dedicated a couple of late nights in the ’90s to “Crimetime after Primetime,” the grab bag of syndicated TV thrillers that filled out the late-night slots on the weirder analog channels. The best (Dark Justice fans, save your e-mails) was clearly the Canadian import Forever Knight, in which a vampire cop played by Geraint Wyn Davies swigged blood moodily from wine bottles, solved crimes and flew—which entailed the actor’s feet vanishing out of windows in slow motion. Geraint Wyn Davies earned my undying love for his work as Nick Knight, so even after he (disappointingly) turned his hand to quality fare like the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, the brilliant backstage TV show Slings and Arrows and last season’s crisp Women Beware Women, he still lingers in my imagination as a beruffled vampire wallowing in big-haired melancholy. (Oh, Twilight fans, we were there before ye.) Imagine my glee, therefore, when I learned that he will be starring as the poet Dylan Thomas in Leon Pownall’s Do Not Go Gentle. Why? Because the play finds Thomas “in Purgatory, reflecting on the influences on his life.” Geraint is back, baby. Back with the undead and just where he belongs.

We weren’t fans of the Broadway debut of David Mamet’s 1992 two-hander Oleanna. (Short version: miscast and misdirected…RTWT here.) Apparently, Broadway isn’t big enough for two major Mamets (the writer-director’s new play, Race, started previews last night); Oleanna just announced that it’s closing at the end of the year. Something similar happened last season, with a badly received revival of American Buffalo (which closed early) and the return of Speed-the-Plow (which fared much better, despite Jeremy Piven’s fishy exit). Did you click on that link to Race’s website? Very interesting.… Details of the script have been kept under lock and key, but clearly the producers are teasing us with the implication that the plot turns on a crime involving a young African-American woman in a penthouse suite. What’s the crime?

Exposition is the latest play by dramatist-blogger Matthew Freeman—although he might quibble with the term play. It’s an experimental collaboration between the author, director Michael Gardner and a great-sounding cast dominated by downtown divas: Kina Bermudez, Maggie Cino, Anna Kull, Alexis Sotile, Moira Stone and Jennifer Gordon Thomas (pictured, along with Sean Kenin, token male). We’re familiar with Freeman’s humorous, pretension-puncturing, commonsensical blog, and we’ve enjoyed his smart, disturbing, darkly funny plays. So we had to ask about this mysteriously titled work, which begins a three-show run at Williamsburg’s Brick this Thursday. Read more »

We’ve got some meatier posts coming down the pike, but for now, here’s a roundup of top theater headlines and items of note from the blogosphere.

Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, recently evicted from Melrose Place, joins the cast of Chicago at the end of the month. Apparently, she’s not good enough for trashy network TV but ready for Broadway! Think she might have saved Brighton Beach Memoirs?

Jay-Z, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith joined the producing team for soon-to-open Fela! What this means: Even if reviews are lukewarm next Monday, the show will be allowed to run and build word of mouth. (It’s already playing to 86 percent capacity.) Think they might have saved Brighton Beach Memoirs?

Soho Rep announced its Season Preview Party, next Tuesday at the space. It’s free, Cynthia Hopkins will sing, and maybe there will be an affordable cash bar. Will Upstaged be there, paying homage to downtown’s best theater? Oh, yes.

Tonight the cast of God of Carnage changes over. New quartet: Jimmy Smits, Annie Potts, Ken Stott and Christine Lahti. No word yet if critics will be invited to rereview.

New York Theatre Workshop gets clever in promoting its latest production, Rebecca Gilman’s adaptation of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Blogger and TONY contributor Garrett Eisler minutely analyzes the Brighton Beach Memoirs producing fiasco so you don’t have to. Think he might have saved it?

It’s refreshing (and embarrassing) to “discover” a director who has been on the scene for 35 years, but it happens. Such is the case with Christopher Alden and me. The opera director has been staging new and repertory works for years across America and in Europe, but somehow I missed his previous visits to New York City Opera. (In truth, I’ve only been attending opera in earnest for the last five years.) Now I can say: I’m an instant convert. This week I caught Alden’s severe, conceptually rich Don Giovanni. Here is a boldly reconceived staging that is impossible to imagine at the Met. If that institution’s conservative fans lustily booed Bondy’s Tosca, they would have torn down the Chagall canvases and shredded the lobby’s red carpeting—had Alden’s production opened in the House of Gelb. That’s as it should be. Newly appointed head George Steel’s New York City Opera ought to be the place where risks are taken. Read more »

We often complain that Off Broadway theater is too expensive. We also often complain that shows charge the same for previews, when they are theoretically still finding their bearings in front of audiences, as they do once they are officially ready for public consumption. To be honest, we complain about a lot of things. But now we have cause to laud instead, for Classic Stage Company is offering a terrific deal: All preview tickets for its new production—The Age of Iron, a mash-up of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Thomas Heywood’s little-known Iron Age—are just $10. That’s right: one measly sawbuck for hours of verse and Trojan warfare. When the show opens on November 22, that price will leap up to $60-$65. So act now. You can’t afford not to go!

One of the sadder flops in recent musical-theater history was 2008’s hapless Glory Days, which closed on opening night. We can’t honestly say it deserved a longer run; in fact, as we suggested in our review, the unfortunate thing about Glory Days was that it had been staged on Broadway at all. (”The producers do a disservice not only to audiences, but also to this unready show’s young creators and stars,” we wrote. “Sometimes it is cruel to be kind.”) Still, we’re pleased to see that the valiant Ghostlight Records—which we wrote about in this 2007 article—has recorded the show for posterity. As Ghostlight’s menschy Kurt Deutsch points out on the press release: “Just because it may not have worked on Broadway doesn’t mean it won’t work in colleges, regional theatres, high schools, or pretty much anywhere there are young actors who are looking for fresh, new musical theatre works.” (The CD will be released on November 24, and can be preordered here.)

So now, dear reader, we put the question to you: What unrecorded musical from the past ten years would you most like to see get a cast album? My vote goes to the Public’s 2006 Central Park production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, with a score by the Caroline, or Change team of Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori. We recently had a chance to hear the music again, at the Joe’s Pub simulcast of a benefit concert featuring original cast members Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Jennifer Lewis, Will Swenson and Austin Pendleton. The songs were as good as we had remembered them, especially Steep’s darkly carnivalesque “The Song of the Great Capitulation” and the stirring opening number (which sounds a bit like—aptly enough—”The Wages of Sin,” from Rupert Holmes’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood). The incidental music from this summer’s Central Park Twelfth Night is now on CD; surely a collaboration among artists on the order of Streep, Kline, Brecht, Kushner and Tesori deserves the same treatment.

“My moral-outrage meter just went sky high.”

That was Julie Crosby, producing artistic director of the Women’s Project today, after hearing that the National Endowment for the Arts—now with new leadership and swelling funds!—wouldn’t be funding the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab this year. (The NEA no longer funds general operating budgets; rather it underwrites specific projects.)

The amount at issue is a mere $20,000, but the impact of an NEA award goes far beyond its actual financial gift. Smaller foundations often look to the NEA as a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” and so any NEA decision always has a profound ripple effect.

According to Crosby, the Women’s Project has received NEA support steadily in recent years, though it did lose its grant for 2007 after the departure of artistic director Loretta Greco, perhaps because there was then a common perception of the Project as a theater on the skids.

Crosby, who has presided over the theater’s resurgence, is still fuming. “This is taxpayer money, and yet they aren’t going to fund the oldest and largest theater for women in America?” The NEA’s new director Rocco Landesman has made it clear that he wants to reward excellence rather than “worthiness,” so perhaps the theater’s mission has worked (paradoxically) against it. It certainly seems baffling, though. If a string of good shows, passionate advocacy for women theater artists and a commitment to new writing can’t keep the NEA’s attention, what can?

News in Off Broadway: Annie Baker’s lovely and enchanting acting-class comedy Circle Mirror Transformation has just announced a second extension through November 21. Get those tickets now, kids, or cry about it later. Our own Helen Shaw was there this weekend and says she “LOVED Circle Mirror Transformation. So did the other people in my row: Martin Short, Victor Garber, Sam Rockwell and Kate Winslet. Oh, starry night.” And not-so-happy news: The Toxic Avenger ends its run at New World Stages on January 3, before embarking on a national tour. That leaves you tons of chances to catch this campy, Jersey-themed audience favorite.

Last week, the pianist and singer Michael Feinstein announced plans for a solo Broadway show called All About Me, to begin previews on March 13 and open on March 30 (at a Shubert theater to be announced). The only problem? A rather unnecessary-sounding similarity to Dame Edna Everage’s upcoming Broadway show, It’s All About Me. “While I was very surprised to learn of the similarity of titles, I’ve always been a fan of Dame Edna, and I wish her all the best,” noted Feinstein in the press release for his show. Today, Dame Edna came out with an announcement as well, noting that her show would be starting previews on March 6 and opening on March 23 (at a Shubert theater to be announced), and adding this somewhat pointed rejoinder: “It’s All About Me is my title. While I was saddened to hear that Mr. Feinstein did not heed my sage advice to change the title of his show, I’m overjoyed to hear that he at least took my suggestion to open his show after mine. I’m sure Mrs. Feinstein is very proud of her son.” Watch the fur and gladiolas fly! (Or, of course, it could all just be a publicity stunt.)

To make matters worse, Time Out has learned of several other projects currently slated for this spring that can only add to the confusion. These include:

•About Me It’s All: Frank Oz stars as Jedi master Yoda, the galaxy’s most powerful spinach wonton, in a Star Wars–themed solo show inspired by Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking.

•All About Meese: John Goodman stars as Reagan attorney general, antiporn crusader and right-wing hit man Edwin “Ed” Meese III.

•All About Meerkats: The Lion King’s popular Timon gets his own musical spin-off, in which he must get his conservative family of African critters to accept his same-sex, interspecies life partner, Poombah.

•All About the Benjamins: A transhistorical fantasia weaves together stories about founding father Benjamin Franklin, 19th-century English prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin and Law & Order hunk Benjamin Bratt.

•Hall About Mee: The legendary English director Sir Peter Hall lectures Broadway audiences about the sprawling, intertextual work of postmodern playwright Charles Mee.

•All About Eve: On dark nights of their respective shows, Everage and Feinstein duke it out in an adaptation of the classic 1950 movie, with Dame Edna as the great stage star Margo Channing and Feinstein as her grasping understudy. Fasten your seat belts: It’s going to be a bumpy March!

The Performa festival drives me nuts. Founded by RoseLee Goldberg in 2004, Performa throws a very large umbrella over anything in town that can consider itself performance art—such a notoriously loose category that my actual kitchen sink, ignored dishes moldering away, has applied for a slot. Look, I’m in favor of anything that throws commissioning money at the arts (hooray!); however, even a devoted art-lover might be put off by the terrifying printed schedule (as impossible to fold as a London street map and printed in light, eyesight-destroying gray) or the website (confusing and alarmingly loud). Not to worry! First, Howard Halle alerted you to the splashy offerings from the artsy-art perspective; now we theaterites want to take a whack at the performance end. Keep reading for our top four…

Read more »

My review of Richard Foreman’s newest mind attack, Idiot Savant, is up. This delirious banquet of multisensory disruption stars the marvelous Willem Dafoe, Alenka Kraigher and slinky Foreman vet Elina Löwensohn, and it’s rumored to be the great writer-director-designer’s final play. We shall see if it’s just another of his periodic mock exits from the public stage. (Quick note about this production, which is markedly different from Foreman’s last three at the Ontological: Yes, it’s headlined by the well-known Dafoe, but it’s not like Foreman is unused to working with trained and distinguished actors. However, you wouldn’t know that if you only read the New York Times review. Blogger Isaac Butler offers a corrective post.) In other linkage news, Helen Shaw spied on an Idiot Savant rehearsal last month. And, if you want to get to know the homemaker behind the madness, check out TONY’s exclusive tour of Foreman’s jaw-dropping two-bedroom loft on Wooster Street. Enjoy the pictures of his insanely sprawling collection of books and other handmade ephemera—with commentary from the man himself. I’ve been to Dr. Foreman’s cabinet of wonders a couple of times—once, as an actor, for an audition, and later to interview him for a documentary. It is indeed a bibliophile’s paradise, and Foreman is a wonderful host. No, he won’t regale you with cookies and tea, but he’s a perfect gentleman and might even lend you a tome.

Our rave review of Taylor Mac’s gorgeous The Lily’s Revenge will not appear in print until next week, but since tickets and time are so limited—the show runs only through November 22—we just put up the review online. Click here to see it. Other reviews of the show are expected to appear soon, notably in the Times—so buy your tickets right here right now, while you can. With all seats going for just $35, this is currently the best theater deal in the city. To whet your appetite, here is an interview we conducted with Mac in 2007, and a collection of photographs that he recently took for us during rehearsals for The Lily’s Revenge.

The good news is official now: Geoffrey Nauffts’s moving and well-observed Next Fall, a Naked Angels production that ran upstairs at Playwrights Horizons this summer, will open at Broadway’s intimate Helen Hayes Theatre on March 11 with its Off Broadway cast intact—led by Patrick Breen and Patrick Heusinger as a gay couple divided by faith and fate. In this regard, the show is bucking the emerging conventional wisdom that declares a matinee-name star to be absolutely necessary for the success of a straight play on Broadway. Here’s your chance to rattle that dangerous notion: When tickets go on sale here on November 16, buy a pair and enjoy one of the year’s best plays—we reviewed it here—as performed by the right cast for the job.

Something strange is happening at New World Stages, the five-year-old theater complex on West 50th Street: You can actually see worthwhile shows there. Not so long ago, we’d associate the former Hell’s Kitchen cineplex with gimmicky tourist trash (Naked Boys Singing, My First Time, etc). But with today’s announcement that Jon Marans’s The Temperamentals will reopen there in March, we find ourselves looking at the space with new eyes. There’s actually a handful of decent shows playing there. Adam Feldman reviewed Love Child this week, I revisited Avenue Q, and Altar Boyz and The Toxic Avenger continue their runs. Sure, neither of those tuners is the next Gypsy or Spring Awakening, but they’re fun, well crafted and clearly fill a populist niche. The death of commercial Off Broadway is a constant refrain in theater news, but New World Stages continues to buck the trend. What does it mean when the venue becomes home to shows of actual quality? We’re still waiting for them to offer a residency to a major Off Broadway company: the New Group, Keen Company or MCC Theater.

We don’t see many Broadway concerts, but we’re making an exception on Monday, November 9, for Bernadette Peters’s one-night benefit for two charities: her longtime pet project Broadway Barks, which promotes the adoption of stray animals, and the Main Stem mainstay Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. We’ve never seen Peters perform a full live concert, and we’re pretty excited to see this eternal kewpie work her magic. We only wish we knew a little more about what she was actually going to perform: The concert promoters are being hush puppies indeed when it comes to the set list. A few possible clues: In the final minute of this video interview over at Broadway.com, Peters mentions that she will be kicking the concert off with the opening sequence from Into the Woods—with Broadway Barks cofounder Mary Tyler Moore guest-starring as the Narrator; she also mentions that she will take on six or seven new songs, and a sequence with dogs onstage. We’ve picked up some Twitter noise about a possible rendition of the beautiful “In Buddy’s Eyes” from Follies, but nothing definite. Can anyone spare a leak? If so, feel free to use our comments section below. And while you wait for Monday, you can sate yourself on two of Peters’s best performances: this heart-rending 1998 video of Peters performing “Not a Day Goes By” in London, and this classic Tony Awards clip of the ravishing “Rose’s Turn” from her underrated 2002 Gypsy—and, for a quick giggle, check out Cole Escola’s silly take on Bernadette in this video from the VGL Gay Boys.