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…

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This is my second post in five days about a WNYC show. Clearly, while everybody else dashes off into the new media, I’m hunkered over the radio dial, blissfully churning my own butter and putting up preserves. But this interview with Willem Dafoe on the Leonard Lopate show adds a fun dimension to the new Richard Foreman spectacular Idiot Savant at the Public, particularly when he raises a wicked eyebrow (you can actually hear it over the air) at Foreman’s avowal that this time he’s serious! He’s quitting! No more plays for him! Willem, for one, thinks Foreman will be back.

If you’re hungry for a little vintage Dafoe (not to mention a baby-faced Jon Stewart) watch this 2002 interview, in which he manages to shoehorn in some touching chat about his love for the theater, or pop over to UbuWeb to watch Rhyme ‘Em to Death, the Wooster Group’s bizarre film version of the “trial of the goat” sequence from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Perfect amuse-bouches for the Idiot Savant…

Full disclosure: I have a sound designer in the family. My sister sound designs and composes all over this fair city, so much so that in my paranoid moments I think she may be overcommitting herself deliberately so I will be limited in what I can review. I have occasionally shaken my clenched fist at the sky. But that tiny drawback aside, having a sound-designing sister has sensitized me to how this vital theatrical component too often goes unappreciated. Now that there’s a Tony Award for sound design, a little sunshine might be landing on these be-headphoned stalwarts. And happily, one of downtown’s most prolific sound masters Muttt Dog got some much-deserved stroking on this morning’s Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Muttt was there with Andy Donald to promote Naked Angels Radio and to demonstrate how to make Halloweeny sounds with produce. Enjoy.

Theater is cruel. Not because it doesn’t forgive mistakes (go one step too far and yep, you’ve fallen into the orchestra pit), but because there are sometimes nights when you have to decide between two hugely tempting shows. You can’t see both. And whichever one you elect not to see will of course be the one that turns into a classic and in 2040, you’ll be the only toothless critic staggering around the Old Reviewers Home unable to bask in reminiscence of that single perfect experience. Decisions. Bah! So here’s the torment. This week, Anne Bogart and the SITI Company are at Dance Theater Workshop with their Antigone, and Hanna Cheek is performing in the final week of Clay McLeod Chapman’s high-school-shooting monologue, Commencement. In the “pros” column for Anne Bogart: She’s an American master, the company does beautiful work with classics (I’m still shuddering from their soundscaped Macbeth), and who doesn’t love a little Sophocles? On Commencement’s side: Clay McLeod Chapman wrote one of my favorite pieces last season (Hostage Song) and, of course, Hanna Cheek. Hanna Cheek is a lead weight on the teeter-totter of decision-making, because she is an actor of rare gifts, and someday Hollywood will steal her, so you have to snatch at every chance to see her onstage. But on the other hand, there’s Anne Bogart!  For those of you lucky enough to have two evenings free this week, you should see both. But if you’re down to one measly free night, which should it be?

Oh, Halloween. For theater people, who dress up for a living, tramping about in a costume is a bit of a busman’s holiday. And yet, there are parties to go to and friends to impress. Where can you turn for fresh ideas? Broadway itself has been poaching from Halloween for ages now. (You could go as a troll from Shrek, a monster from Young Frankenstein, a witch from Wicked or a man-eating plant from Little Shop. Yawn.) As always, TONY is there for you. Here are five costume ideas, deliciously cheap to realize, that you’ll definitely have to explain to your non-theater friends.

1. Jeremy Piven in Speed-the-Plow. All you’ll need is a suede jacket (see picture), a sushi menu, black eyeshadow to draw bags under your eyes and a boxed set of Entourage DVDs for brandishing at hot women. Optional: a copy of the 44-page arbitration document that cleared the Piv of wrongdoing. You can force anyone who laughs at your costume to read it in its entirety. While you are in this costume, you should party heavily. Read more »

At the international Dialog Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, last week, the shows were so spectacular, I got depressed. Every day, there was yet another pair of astonishing shows to see, and every night (or morning, I never quite got my jet lag sorted out) I would grow entirely maudlin. “Why?” I would moan into my sour rye soup. “Why don’t we get to see this stuff in New York?” Actually, I know why, and I’m not taking it lying down, so check this space next week for some advocacy ideas. But in order to whet your appetite, to hone it to a razor edge of need for rock-’em-sock-’em international theater, I’ll just count down the top six Wroclaw highlights. Read more »

What the heck is it that Meredith Monk does? It’s not that I’m still flummoxed by her utter disregard for typical genre boundaries; in fact, her work in re-fusing music, dance and theater back into its ur-form feels so intuitively “right” that it’s weird that there was a time when interdisciplinary work seemed rebellious. Of course a body moves in response to the songs that it makes, of course those movements should weave together into a visual whole.

No, what feels strange about composer-choreographer-performer Monk’s latest, dreamy musical-movement piece Songs of Ascension is the way in which it stitches itself into the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, like a grape grafted perfectly onto a living vine. Read more »

Dear Michelle,

I know. I would look disappointed too. After your beautiful speech in Pittsburgh about the importance of the arts, for the administration to clamp down on all those poor international artists trying to tour the country (for pennies! or, rather, groschen!), certainly does feel like a smack in the face. One of the reasons we didn’t get the Olympics? Our stringent, expensive visa process that sends the message: Foreigners, stay put. And now, despite the pleadings of a slew of artist organizations, the long-standing policy that allows a single venue to apply for a touring company’s multiple locations has been wiped out. It doesn’t sound that bad, right? Wrong. Each theater the company goes to must now fill out piles of paperwork and incur costs, just enough in these troubled times to make those theaters say “pass.” And that’s what we can’t afford. Art is ambassadorship, and this is the administration that was supposed to be putting out the international welcome mat. It’s not too late! Make a call.

Love,

TONY

Hello from Wroclaw, Poland! I’m almost at the end of a fascinating week at the Dialog Festival, which has involved some staggering programming. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about (I’ll write you a nice, long report later.) No, this is a juicy bit of yumminess just for those of us who have been waiting impatiently to find out what Amsterdam rock-star-director Ivo van Hove’s next show in New York will be (see David Cote’s review of his last show at NYTW, The Misanthrope). Well: This spring (pending all sorts of things), Van Hove will be at New York Theater Workshop directing…drumroll…Lillian Hellman’s juicy The Little Foxes, starring Elizabeth Marvel. What? That’s right! At a press conference today, he let it slip, and so I’m letting it slip right on back to y’all. (Mind you, NYTW has an announcement here, but the casting of Marvel seals the deal for us.) Marvel and Van Hove have been an unbeatable team in the past, and I actually jumped up and down when I heard the news. Now you. Dobranoc!

You and I probably had very different Thursdays. You may have gone to your office, or your rehearsal studio, or your coal mine (we have a huge coal-mining readership), and you probably typed on a computer, or perfected Act 2, or hacked out some ore. Last week, I, on the other hand, spent two hours at the Public Theater, watching a rehearsal for Idiot Savant—the newest Richard Foreman spectacle—and had my mind quietly blown.

For two hours, the cast and crew very kindly let me watch and scribble in my notebook as Willem Dafoe and his costars Alenka Kraigher and Elina Löwensohn worked through what probably amounted to 20 minutes of the show. For a tech rehearsal, that’s a blistering pace. But of course, Idiot Savant doesn’t open until October 27. This wasn’t tech, people. This was rehearsal. Knowing that Richard Foreman likes to practice for seven weeks with full everything (costumes, sets, etc.) is one thing; seeing it in action is another. In some ways, the rehearsal felt like the Foreman show I’ve always wanted to see—infinite and varying, free to rewind at every branching choice. If the finished product shows us the mind of Foreman, these rehearsals slow it down so we can see each synapse firing. Dude should sell tickets. Read more »

Do you have your tickets yet?

Theater Communicatons Group is bringing back the nationwide Free Night of Theater on October 15, but a quick perusal of the offerings makes it look like almost every show is already full up. Some of the more sprawling festivals still have pieces on offer, but today—only one day after tickets went on “sale”—almost everything is gone. So, hooray for theater! But if you are thinking, “Screw theater, what about hooray for me?” then you will be glad to know that this year the Free Night of Theater also gets a parade. Okay, it’s not a parade yet, it’s more like a protoparade in Union Square. But there will be costume catwalks and face painting and performances and maybe Michael Bloomberg! Additionally, shows keep adding themselves to the Free Night (which is actually more like the Free Two-Week Period, Give or Take), so checking back is useful. But even if you don’t get into one of the shows, you should be planning to cluster in Union Square. If Hizzoner looks out over thousands of theater lovers, wandering around in full Phantom makeup and joining in spontaneous dance numbers from Mamma Mia!, maybe New York will finally give theater the parade she has deserved all along.

By now you may have seen this video, in which Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig take a moment at a preview of their Broadway show A Steady Rain to beg an audience member to silence a ringing phone. In a snazzy touch, the actors stayed in character, continuing to sound like Chicago cops as they asked, “You want to get that?” (The person did not want to get that for many, many humiliating rings.)

Since I’m in a generalization-slinging mood, I’ll say that there are more first-time theatergoers at star vehicles, and newbies haven’t yet internalized the “turn it off” rule. But there are plenty of fancy-actor-driven shows coming up, and so, as we launch into the new season, theaters have got to come up with something new. Announcements before the curtain aren’t working. Actors pleading (vowels nicely flattened) or freaking the hell out interrupts the show. In this space, we advocated the cell-phone damping technology that makes France such a lovely place to go to the theater, but a decent jammer may play merry havoc with a theater’s mike system.What’s left?

Don’t be fooled by how much supercritic Robert Brustein (left) looks like a cuddly pussycat. His photo may trick you into believing that he is the prototype of the genial professor, but Brustein is actually a firebrand of the first order, given to holding plays to his high critical standard and calling out mediocrity where he sees it. Next Wednesday, when he comes to Montclair State University to give The Four Horsemen of the Cultural Apocalypse: A Public Address, he will be sure to barbecue some sacred cows—and, we hope, to propose some solutions to the current crisis, one that he sees in particularly stark terms.

Brustein is the public intellectual (one of our last and best!) who went playwright-a-critic with August Wilson over issues of cross-racial casting, who was the founding director of both the Yale Rep and the American Repertory Theater (where, full disclosure, I met and was mentored by him) and who is now fully into a third-act career as a playwright. We got an advance look at his text, and a teaser follows…

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Even in all the adorable mayhem that is Joshua Conkel’s MilkMilkLemonade (see my review), the bantam Jess Barbagallo punches out a special place. The wry, spiky androgyne has shown up in almost every venue downtown, from playing a snarky narrator in Big Dance Theater’s The Other Here to being a seminal (if such a term dare apply) member of the lesbian serial Room for Cream. Barbagallo has also begun to turn her talents to playwriting, and though her dry, entirely bonkers worldview will make for some zany theatergoing, we must insist that she not give up her acting. Barbagallo is entirely sui generis, a package of John Hughesian longing and repressed violence, wrapped in an arch amusement.In MilkMilkLemonade she throws perfect pint-size tantrums; for Tina Satter, she was a lovelorn werewolf. We’re convinced that some roles simply must be played by Barbagallo—flash forward a few years, and historians of our decade’s avant-garde will note her as a formative muse.

Karinne Keithley works constantly. Odds are, if you’ve seen something downtown in the last year, Keithley was in it (playing ukulele in Big Dance Theater’s Orestes), or choreographed it (she once made a dance about Mark Antony writing his memoirs), or recorded a weird radio show about it. She’s a major talent, a Renaissance woman, and avant-garde theater buffs should be intrigued that her newest work debuts tonight.

The last piece I saw that was written by Karinne Keithley was Do Not Do This Ever Again at the Ohio Theater, and to be super-super-frank, it passed over me like a wave over the uncomprehending beach. It wasn’t her fault! Although, yes, she makes plays that are part dance and part language poetry, require the audience to drum up its own microdramas and reward a Zen “do not pursue it and it will come to you” viewing state. In the baking heat of the Ohio, the whirr of the box fans somehow exactly canceling out the actors’ voices, the show didn’t just feel like a dream state—it almost became one. But it whetted my appetite for more of Keithley’s work, and so I’ll be there this weekend at HERE Arts Center, when she returns with Montgomery Park, or Opulence. It’s only on through Sunday, so call ahead!

When Mother Courage didn’t quite manage to make it through its first preview at London’s National Theatre last week, some people got cheesed off. Now, ’round these parts, a massive production of the Tony Kushner translation (*pant*), directed by Deborah Warner (*pant pant*), starring Fiona Shaw (*tongue lolls out too far, chokes self, self passes out*) would be cause for celebration. I think we might even be OK with it if, say, the show only got to intermission.

Not so for the choosy Brits. At the first preview, Deborah Warner announced that, since the production staff hadn’t gotten through its tech rehearsal, the preview would be cutting out at the halfway mark. The National would refund all tickets and hand out seats to shows later in the run. But The Guardian’s Alex Needham wasn’t mollified.

It still seemed pretty amazing that deadlines had been missed so completely—and that Warner seemed so unapologetic about it. I wasn’t expecting her to grovel, but she’d ruined the night for more than 1,000 people. Not everyone can easily hop back to the National—for plenty of people, going to the theatre is an occasional treat. They might have to sit in inferior seats on a less convenient night—or even pass up the chance of seeing the whole play.

Oh and snap. So, what was happening backstage?

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The little fellow with the cow on his head didn’t know that today would be quite so wet, so the Governors Island Dutchapalooza is taking a little break. Tomorrow, though, the shows come roaring back, and despite some truly baffling ticketing procedures, I’m recommending the Ivo van Hove–helmed La Voix Humaine, the 1927 Jean Cocteau monologue. Even in this untranslated video, you get a sense of Van Hove’s cinematic way with images and actress Halina Reijn’s raggedly desperate performance.

It is that time again. It’s that time when we look to our hearts—those hearts that “heart” New York—and we think about leaving town. A three-day weekend stretches ahead of us, and we can hear the metaphorical bonging of the Liberty Bell, tolling out the good news: Philadelphia Live Arts the Philly Fringe Festival has come again! This is one of the finest festivals on the East Coast, and it’s only a wee Zipcar rental away. You still have time to snatch some tickets to this weekend’s productions of Pig Iron Theatre’s Welcome to Yuba City, which stars TONY favorites Geoff Sobelle and James Sugg, and to think seriously about planning another trip up for next weekend, when the excruciatingly lovely small metal objects makes its Philly bow. Something that I can’t vouch for, but looks amazingly, er, Polish in this video, is Witold Gombrowicz’s Operetta, directed by the young Michal Zadara. Look, I’ll even make it easy for you. Get your train schedule here. Ta-da!

When Susan Jonas very kindly pointed out some errors in my recent post on the relative percentages of women directing and writing (pull Barbie’s string and hear her say, “Math is hard!”), my first impulse was to skulk in and make the changes without mentioning it. But these numbers deserve their own post. Here’s Jonas:

I just wanted to offer a correction regarding an important statistic. The percentage of women playwrights rising 7% to 17% in three decades was actually NOT for Broadway. I don’t yet have a comparative figure for Broadway, (though) in 2007, the percentage of women playwrights was 4%. It soars to 8% if you add creative teams upon which there is a female member.

Cripes! And since even those close to me (very, very close—like sitting near me as I type) continue to back the claim that any season that includes classics will of course skew toward men because classics are mostly by men, perhaps these numbers about directors and creative teams will give them pause. Jonas is pointing out that high-profile outliers like superstar lighting designer Jennifer Tipton and directors Susan Stroman, Julie Taymor and Garry Hynes give us the cozy sensation that all is now equitable. The cold numbers don’t seem so comforting.

So let’s have a gander (a goose! I meant a goose!) at this season’s Broadway programming, shall we? What do the numbers tell us? Read more »

Usually we here at TONY try to keep our eyes on the theatergoer. But we’re also obsessed with the theater makers, those brave, nutty souls who risk financial ruin to get work on its feet—and that description includes those of you in basements hurling cherries at each other while wearing chicken suits and those of you who with health insurance. Isaac Butler’s excellent (warning: this means long) post about the independent theater scene points out the centrality of the funding issue. Not exactly news, but is there anything to do other than despair, wail and beat the breast? Michael Kaiser, the superstar arts administrator at the Kennedy Center who specializes in rescuing failing companies, has given a series of enormously practical lectures on the subject—I’ve been watching his 2007 talk in which he discusses his turnaround of the Alvin Ailey dance company. He advocates risk, targeted marketing and telling your dancers to elbow in front of Fleetwood Mac. (Just watch the video.)

Any other success stories from out there in the trenches?