Whoa, there’s a lot going on in the Big Apple over the next six months – Denzel Washington in An Iceman Cometh, Aaron Sorkin adapting To Kill a Mockingbird to the stage, Bette Midler tackling Hello Dolly.  By the end of the day, I was exhausted and I hadn’t left my chair. After a successful meditation, I calmed down and cherry picked. Women take centre stage.

On the small screen, Maggie Gyllenhaal plays savvy platinum blonde prostitute Candy  in The Deuce.  From the creators of The Wire, the fast-paced TV series is set in Manhattan’s seedy Times Square in the 70’s when the billion-dollar sex trade was on the rise, and Candy wants to get in on the action – without the help of the bejewelled, not always sweet as pie, pimps in her hood.

Battle of the Sexes starring Emma Stone as Billie Jean King and Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs is a sport I will be spectating.

Like The Deuce, this film resonates now; earlier this year tennis legend and sports commentator John McEnroe claimed Serena Williams would rank 700^th if she played on the men’s circuit. And let’s not forget Trump’s comments about women – there to be grabbed.

Leaping from screen to stage, get your Downton Abbey fix with the revival of J.B. Priestley’s 1937 Time and the Conways at the Roundabout Theatre. Actress Elizabeth McGovern can’t wait to be a bad mom.

 I’m just so blatantly loving being this woman. She’s not somebody who is very emotionally intelligent or developed or mature. She’s not really grown up herself, so she’s an absolutely terrible mother. And you see the damage that she wreaks on her children, all done in the most unconscious fashion, never meaning to tear them down, to break them apart”,

Mc Govern tells the NYT.

Warm, foul-mouthed feminist Amy Schumer is starring in a new comedy by Steve Martin and directed by four-time Tony Award winner Jerry Zaks. Also starring will be fellow American comedian Keegan-Michael Key (of Key & Peele fame, also played “Luther” – Obama’s anger translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner)

Meteor Shower takes a coastal Californian dinner party and lets it go very, very wrong.

I can’t wait to devour culinary queen Alice Waters’ long-awaited  memoir Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counter-Culture Cook.

The celebrated chef moved from a repressive household in suburban Chatham, NJ to UC Berkeley in 1964, the height of the Free Speech Movement. The bohemian lifestyle she discovered there formed the basis for Chez Panisse’s fresh and in season culture, revolutionary then, commonplace now.

I was a freshman at UC Berkeley in 1980, the same year Waters’ introduced her baked in-house Californian pizza drizzled with local ingredients. My boyfriend used to take me to  Chez Panisse’s cafe for pizza on  Saturday nights. The restaurant on the ground floor with its set menu was far too expensive and adult for us. But the homemade thin crust pizza upstairs was novel, mouthwatering and definitely impressed me.

I hadn’t grown up going to restaurants, no one did.  As a teenager I went to diners for a hamburger or grilled cheese sandwich. The only pizza I’d ever tried was from a NY chain called Ray’s where we burned our tongues gorging on greasy slices off of a paper plate. Then all of a sudden I’m being taken to this nicely designed cafe (I remember a lot of wood interiors)  with a pizza oven (!)  fresh mozarella and organic vegetables. On the same Berkeley street as Chez Panisse was a gourmet cheese shop and a homemade ice cream spot called Vivoli’s where we’d go post-pizza. It was a dazzling street for the times.

September 2017

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But low and behold, Marc is a natural director, no fake laughing required. Two hours well spent. Even my daughter Kate who equates theater with nap-time – unless it’s “Porgy & Bess” – loved the play.

I think really camp theater is my thing, she concluded as we strolled out.

Wasn’t Marc’s play hysterical? I said to my sister Diana. I can’t decide whether to blog it now or wait for the NYT’s review.

Let them do the heavy lifting, advised my older and wiser sister.

And so the ever obedient youngest, I followed instructions. The play made the NY Times Critics’ Choice today. Here’s what they said:

The main trouble, always, with Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s spirited satire “The School for Scandal” is that we don’t get enough of them. But they are played to such delicious perfection in Red Bull Theater’s jaunty new production, directed by Marc Vietor at the Lucille Lortel Theater, that I wish I could beg Sheridan for a spinoff. Frances Barber’s Lady Sneerwell, all acid words and narrowed gimlet eyes, is the ideal companion to Dana Ivey’s Mrs. Candour, who’s as innocent as a poisoned sweet.

I confess, Mr. Surface,” Mrs. Candour says, addressing a young gentleman, “I cannot bear to hear people attacked behind their backs; by the bye, I hope ’tis not true that your brother Charles is absolutely ruined?” …..

It’s also been nominated for Best Revival by Off Broadway Alliance.

Marc is not one to be bowled over by early success:

We have had such good reviews that I have a feeling that even when (audiences) don’t think it’s funny, they laugh because everyone tells them it’s funny. It’s that whole group thing. You don’t want to be perceived as an idiot because you don’t think it’s funny yourself.

Ignore Marc. It is funny. So funny that if you happen to be in NYC between now and May 8th, go. Buy tickets here before they’re gone. The play’s got rapid-fire wit, a starry cast – including five-time Tony nominee  Dana Ivey, uber-talent Mark Linn-Baker and award-winning Brit Frances Barber –  wig and hair to die for

 and actor Ben Mehl takes his small part as 4 different servants and goes uproariously big.

(Frances Barber, Marc Vietor and Dana Ivey below)

Sheridan’s play is as relevant today as when it first appeared on stage over two hundred years ago.

What interests me about older plays, some people call it “museum theater, is the fact that human nature never changes,” Ivey told Theater Mania.

People love to gossip, then as much as now. Apart from maybe Lincoln who said “If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?” (source: fun fact-filled program)

Clever directorial touches include the sound of birds chirping in the background as viewers find their seats and the set’s Twitter-adorned wallpaper. The logo of the program can be seen as a snake or an ear.

Marc slashed nearly three hours off of the original script which included five acts and intermissions.

I cut the hell out of it.

He rewrote several passages, replaced the boring butler Old Rolley with the exotic Master Ranji, replaced anti-Semitic Moses with money-lender Midas and cleverly dealt with zero wing space backstage.

That’s why I used the same five pieces of furniture for the play because there’s no room to put them off stage.There’s no hidden stage. Dressing rooms are above the theater.

The actors stay in character as they swiftly move the limited set around between scenes. And behind the scenes, Marc  worked over-time.

I had to talk everybody involved in this whole show, everybody from beginning to end I had to talk them into it, the set designer, the lighting designer, the guy who did the poster, the guy who did the program, I had to talk every single actor into doing the job, … every single dollar that’s in this show I had to scrape up from somebody. I’ve never done something like this before, and I’m never doing something like this again. Its nerve wracking and exhausting. This is it… a one-time experience.

 Now if someone comes along and sees it and decides they want to hire me as a director, I’ll do that in a minute.

 You heard it here readers – Terrific director for hire! And he’s great company too.

April, 2016

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