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PLAYBILL.COM'S THEATRE WEEK IN REVIEW, Oct. 24-30: Revival Revival
By Robert Simonson
30 Oct 2009
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Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth; Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson; and Abigail Breslin with Alison Pill
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| photo by Joan Marcus (Hayes, Chenoweth) and Aubrey Reuben | This was the week for major-league, big-deal Broadway revival announcements.
Tony Award winner Kristin Chenoweth and "Will & Grace" star Sean Hayes will star in a new revival of the Burt Bacharach-Hal David-Neil Simon musical Promises, Promises, which will arrive in spring 2010. Chenoweth will portray lovelorn Fran Kubelik and Hayes will by ladder-climbing executive Chuck Baxter.
This will be the first major revival of the 1960s hit musical, which was based on the Billy Wilder film "The Apartment," and Chenoweth's first commercial Broadway musical since Wicked (she starred in not-for-profit Roundabout's The Apple Tree, of course). The show also marks one-time theatre animals Craig Zadan and Neil Meron return to Broadway, as co-producers of the show. Involved in stage projects in the 1970s, Zadan and Meron have made a name for themselves over the past decade producing television (Annie, The Music Man) and film ("Chicago," "Hairspray") versions of famous musicals.
Tony and Emmy Award winner Rob Ashford (Thoroughly Modern Millie) will make his Broadway directorial debut and choreograph. More casting and creative team members will be announced in the near future.
On the same day Promises, Promises was announced, word came that Tony Award-winner Liev Schreiber and film starlet Scarlett Johansson would star in a new Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge at the Cort Theatre. Performances begin Dec. 28, 2009, with an official opening of Jan. 24, 2010. The limited engagement will run for 14 weeks only.
Unlike Promises, this is hardly the first Broadway remounting of the show since the original. In fact, it was most recently done only 11 years ago, in a memorable production that won Anthony LaPaglia a Tony Award. But, hey, when Schreiber and Johansson are available and willing, you flash the green light.
Schreiber will play conflicted longshoreman Eddie Carbone; Johansson, in her Broadway debut, will play Carbone's niece Catherine, with whom Carbone is obsessed. I'm guessing Johansson will make a pretty short study of playing an object of lust.
Also making her Broadway debut (it was announced this week) will be Academy Award nominee Abigail Breslin, of "Little Miss Sunshine," who will play Helen Keller in a Broadway revival of William Gibson's The Miracle Worker. Acting opposite her, as Keller's determined teacher Annie Sullivan, will be Tony Award nominee Alison Pill. This will be a major step up for Pill, who has been a steady presence on New York stages in recent years, but has never been asked to headline a commercial Broadway production.
Producer David Richenthal is backing the revival. It will begin an in-the-round staging at Circle in the Square Theatre on Feb. 12, 2010. Broadway newbie Kate Whoriskey, of Ruined fame, will direct.
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After a few years of inactivity, Richenthal is currently riding high, having woken up Oct. 30 to great reviews for his new revival of the musical Finian's Rainbow, a production that began life as an Encores! concert, now fully fleshed out. Happy critics, perhaps finding what they had missed in the recently opened revival of Bye Bye Birdie, talked about "all the comforting pleasures of musical comedy" and "blissful surrender" and "emerald-green enchantment." Another summed up the state of affairs neatly: "Things are great in Glocca Morra."
The reviews were particularly good for Kate
Baldwin, who is making a breakout performance as Irish colleen Sharon McLonergan, who gets to sing "Old Devil Moon," "Look to the Rainbow" and "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?," among other hits.
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Rob Ashford
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
Speaking of the above-mentioned Rob Ashford, things have been going well for the man lately. His production of Parade got good marks in London and L.A. Promises, Promises is on the horizon. And now the director-choreographer been appointed as new associate director of London's Donmar Warehouse, under artistic director Michael Grandage and alongside Jamie Lloyd, who took up the same title earlier this year.
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Finally, it's not often that a obituary speaks directly to not just a handful of theatre people, but hundreds upon hundreds, stretching over several generations. But such was the career of John Kenley, who died Oct. 23 at the age of 103, and whose name was synonymous with large-scale regional and summer stock theatre in his adopted home state of Ohio and elsewhere.
If you're an actor aged 40 or more, and didn't perform with the Kenley Players at some point, then you surely at least know someone who did. Kenley began his long career as a summer stock producer in 1940 in Deer Lake, PA, when he converted a Greek Byzantine church into a summer theatre and served as a producer-director. He presented plays in York, PA, Hershey, PA and other cities before settling in Ohio in 1957. In that state, he eventually set up theatres in Dayton, Warren, Akron, Columbus and Cleveland. The Kenley Players, servicing the Buckeye State's theatregoing public with plays and musicals featuring high production values and name stars, continued into the 1980s. Variety once stated that Kenley's was the "largest network of theatres on the straw hat circuit." Indeed, it would be hard to find a lifelong actor or designer with Midwestern roots who did not work for Mr. Kenley sometime in their career. Certainly, all the greats worked for Kenley, from Merman to Raitt to Tune.
The summer stock circuit that Kenley mastered so completely died out some time ago; The Kenley Players' fortunes began to falter in the mid-80s, and the last Players production was in 1995. It is often said when a theatre great dies, we won't see their like again. In this case that is most certainly, and most sadly, the case.
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