Review: Alan Cumming and Ari Shapiro

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This show is probably the gayest thing to come to the Cafe Carlyle, a stage that has seen Bobby Short and Isaac Mizrahi cross its boards. The famously lewd and frisky “Emcee” of Cabaret and Club Cumming, and the deep voiced host of NPR’s All Things Considered – on the face of it they seem to be quite the odd couple. But get them onstage singing “Bosom Buddies” from Mame and it quickly all makes sense.

Alan Cumming in his own way is as politically committed as journalist Ari Shapiro, and Shapiro is one hell of a singer in his own right, and once you find out about Shapiro’s Portland clubwear from the 1990s, the similarity comes into sharp focus (embarrassingly it sounds like something I once wore; Ari probably looked better in it).

Also, as they themselves point out, they are both very much in the business (no, the art) of telling compelling stories. And so here we are in a show they call “Och & Oy! A Considered Cabaret” – and yes they do both make jokes and get very serious about their respective Scottish and Jewish heritages. Also part of the joy of the show is their spontaneous interactions which are often hilarious, and just as often thoughtful.

Cumming is easily one of the most charismatic performers in America today, his take on songs, so very fresh, his singing as bold, big and beautiful as can be. A highlight is Alan singing a song Kristin Chenoweth made famous “Tyler the Latte Boy” by way of emphasizing that being married does not preclude outside crushes and flirtation. Cumming’s patter is nothing if not frank – sometimes even filthy – and the show as a whole is very emotionally direct, which makes for an experience that is both intimate and expansive.

Shapiro, for somebody most people think of as quite earnest, turns out to be every bit as naughty as Alan, and funny, and tuneful. He sings the Bette Midler song “Laughing Matters” which details the horrors of the world, and unfortunately (as he points out) is even more topical now than it was when Bette recorded it in 1998. The other side of the song is that, with all that’s going on, indeed laughing does really matter. And as incisive as these two are about so many things, they are both masterful at making us laugh. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

For more more about Jonathan Warman’s directing works, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: Pictures from Home

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A play based on a photo memoir – Sharr White’s Pictures from Home is both utterly unique and very much in the tradition of American family drama. Professor of photography Larry Sultan (Danny Burstein) starts off analyzing photographs from his childhood in Brooklyn, and then begins visiting his parents in their San Fernando Valley home, taking pictures of them in their later years. His irascible father Irving (Nathan Lane) is a retired razor blade company executive, his mother Jean (Zoë Wanamaker) a still working real estate broker.

As you might be able to tell by the cast, Pictures from Home skews toward the comedic, with Lane in particular taking Irving’s cantankerous personality as an opportunity for laughs. Burstein’s is the most understated performance, as Larry doesn’t even know what he’s looking for through his camera lens. A better understanding of his parents’ “American Dream” perhaps? Or what that dream even means – is it at all a positive thing? Wanamaker is also terrific, especially in silent reactions to Irving and Larry’s conflicted relationship that speak volumes.

We see projections of Sultan’s pictures of the actual Irving and Jean, which gives added depth to our understanding of Larry’s search for meaning beneath these images of American family life. Director Bartlett Sher’s touch here is deft and light, mostly getting out of the way of White’s skillful writing and this magnificent cast. Pictures from Home is not a high-impact show; aside from Irving’s prickly comic outbursts, it is a very subtle piece of work, with Burstein’s layered portrayal of Larry carrying most of the thematic weight. Recommended.

For tickets, click here.

For more more about Jonathan Warman’s directing works, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: Tennessee Rising

On By dramaqueennycIn Off-Off-Broadway, play, theatreLeave a comment

Jacob Storms’s Tennessee Rising is super-gay! From the subject, Tennessee Williams, to the director, Alan Cumming, to even the curtain announcement by none other than Drag Race champion Jinkx Monsoon! This one-man show is also very frank about Williams’s dalliances with men, in provocative detail. It follows Tennessee from 1939 through the Broadway premiere of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, also including many flashbacks to his childhood and youth. Storm is a skilled and canny writer-performer who covers this crucial time in the playwright’s life in Williams’s own voice.

In addition to tracing Williams’s career and love life, it delves into his very close relationship with his troubled older sister Rose. In a very effective moment, while Tenn talks about her mental health problems, a dark blue light illuminates another part of the stage. Williams based Laura in Glass Menagerie on Rose, and at one point Laura talks about confusing the lung disease pleurosis for “blue roses.” Nice touch. The play also delves into Williams’s worries about his own mental health, which he terms his “blue devils.”

Storms also mimics Williams southern accent more effectively than other portrayals I’ve seen. Tennessee Rising also captures the spirit of the Tennessee I know – from my extensive reading about the man – more honestly and accurately than most. Equally important, Storms’s writing mirrors Williams’s literary style with great finesse. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

For more more about Jonathan Warman’s directing works, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: John Pizzarelli

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So, my father was a great fan of two genius jazz pianists, George Shearing and Don Shirley. As a kid I would sometimes confuse them, and then my father would say, with the always present twinkle in his eye, “All you need to remember, son, is both their names begin with ‘Shhhh’.” Just listen. And I did. The subject of guitarist/vocalist John Pizzarelli’s latest (and as always brilliant) show is Shearing.

Pizzarelli always scales the heights of cabaret’s jazzier side with amazing musicianship and élan, and among that musical “mountain-climbing” he has in fact been influenced by Shearing, and even did an album with him some time ago. As a matter of fact, not long after, he brought Shearing onstage for an encore with him at the Cafe Carlyle, where he is doing his tribute to George.

John has a straightforward, but still astonishing, sort of virtuosity – his particular genius is in his chordal improvisations, finding hidden musical meanings in the most familiar of standards. Also, as measure of his attention to detail, he replicates Shearing’s tendency to arrange unison runs between guitar, piano and vibraphone, an unique and very elegant sound.

It’s common courtesy in a jazz setting to applaud for a bit after everybody’s solos, and indeed bandleader John frequently points at one of the instrumentalists as if to say “give it up for so-and-so”! More often in this show, though, the onslaught of flashy jazziness is so relentless that you don’t applaud for fear of missing something amazing. Neither jazz nor cabaret gets much better than this.

For tickets, click here.


For more more about Jonathan Warman’s directing works, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

News: The Meeting* returns!!!

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Huzzah! The Meeting of the International Order of Sodomites is back! The great writer, curator, femme and major homosexual Justin Elizabeth Sayre is returning it to Joe’s Pub. I’m not sure what this Sunday’s Meeting is about exactly, but it’s called an “Emergency” Meeting, and Goddess knows there are plenty of emergencies. And The Meeting* is fully back as a monthly phenomenon.

A recent quote from Sayre to pique your curiosity: “Glamour is about diligence, thought and restraint. We live in a time of enormous casualness. The time of the permanently busy, spinning on a wheel of being seen. To be glamorous is to change time and not merely to be seen but known. To make as a craftsmen makes, to curate, to perfect, to live in a world that reflects one’s self instead of being reflected upon.

“By believing and dedicating ourselves to glamour and her behavioral sister Elegance, we say to this greedy, ugly world quivering before us with its fearful blankness in hideously comfortable shoes, ‘No, I will honor my soul and the souls of those around me with beauty, kindness and rigor. I will not sink into the ease of a life prescribed and sold and advertised to me, but ultimately gifting me nothing. I will decide my own fate. I will be free.’”

Fasten your seatbelts…..

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks

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I’ve seen plenty of big bands at Birdland, mostly bluesy brassy blaring groups like Count Basie’s and Lionel Hampton’s, much of whose repertoire dates from 1940 or after. The mid-sized combo The Hot Sardines stays within the era of 1920s and 1930s, but does it with a saucy irreverence. Small big band Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks, though, covers the same era as the Sardines, but with more scrupulous attention to stylistic accuracy. Oh they swing, for sure, but the arrangements are recreated in detail from actual recordings from that time. Think Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington’s very earliest recordings.

Giordano himself plays the bass line on a variety of instruments, including an aluminum standing bass, bass saxophone and tuba. He’s also quite the character, wisecracking all the way – but also being the best kind of “infotainment,” like, say, Mark Nadler, John Pizzarelli or Michael Feinstein. In between numbers, he goes into detail about who recorded what and when, and who did the arrangements. There is also a bit of theatricality to the band’s performance style, as when a phalanx of 4 clarinets swing wildly from side to side in precise unison.

They do requests, and composer Harry Warren figured prominently there, especially in a very “hot” swinging version of “42nd Street”, and Fletcher Handerson’s “Shanghai Shuffle”. There was a request from within the ensemble for Original Dixieland Jass Band’s “Indiana” which was one of the most hard-swinging moments of the night. Highly recommended.

For tickets click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: Leopoldstadt

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The titular traditionally Jewish district of Vienna is the setting for Tom Stoppard’s latest play, also among his best in my opinion. This district was Jewish long ago, in the 1600s, when it was called Im Werd. Ironically it was renamed Leopoldstadt for Emperor Leopold I, who drove the Jews out of Austria. Later rulers allowed some Jewish families back, but it took time to rebuild. None of this is the subject of Leopoldstadt. Instead it follows a wealthy Jewish family between the years 1899 and 1955. If you know European history you can see where this is going, but Stoppard rings some very interesting changes on one’s expectations.

In 1899, Jewish Vienna – and Vienna in general – was at its most vibrant. Psychology legend Sigmund Freud lived there, the great composer and conductor Gustav Mahler was in residence (he later was director of the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera), both of whom are referenced in this scene, to the effect “they belong to us.” And they were just the tip of the iceberg for that era of Jewish Vienna. As years pass WW I and the Russian Revolution lead to disillusionment among the family.

Then comes the Anschluss – the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany. The family hurriedly devises escape plans, but the Nazis march into their house. This, however, is not the end of this very twisty scene. In 1955, the family members who have survived the Holocaust return to the house. The genius of Stoppard here is that he communicates not only the human cost of the Holocaust – although he does that, to devastating effect – but also the loss of a whole culture of immeasurable importance to Europe’s artistic and intellectual history.

The large cast of this epic play is uniformly excellent, especially the players in the 1955 scene: Jenna Augen, Brandon Uranowitz and Arty Froushan. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: Ain’t No Mo’

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I was sorely disappointed at the early closing of KPOP, a tightly structured musical that offered freshness, originality and innovative spectacle. Closed before I could even finish a rave review! Perhaps the first musical that made me say “WERQ! LIVING!” Well, I uttered those very same words the following night at the equally fresh and original play Ain’t No Mo’, which, dammit, seemed to be heading for exactly the same fate. Then, luminaries from Tyler Perry to Shonda Rimes stepped in, buying out whole performances, earning the play a week’s reprieve, and dammit, I hope for more.

The premise of the comedy is stated as “What happens if the American government offered African Americans a one-way ticket back to Africa?” Part of the innovation at play here is the structure: it’s a series of comedy sketches that nonetheless are all in service of a single story arc. The tone is also innovative: while this is mostly a wickedly satirical comedy, it can turn tragic on a dime and not be shy about staying there for minutes at a time. One of the songs I was listening to while writing this review, “Drop Dat” by Willie Thee Bawdy, rhymed “books by bell hooks” with “hip hop Mel Brooks” – yep that’s Ain’t No Mo’!

The glue holding the play together is Peaches, the gate agent for the flight taking people back to Africa. When she says the flight number out loud – 1619 (the year the first African slaves were shipped to the colony of Virginia) – it sent a chill up my spine. Mind you, Peaches is played in drag by one Jordan E. Cooper, who is also the playwright, and as such, at 27, the youngest American playwright in Broadway history (there’s a “WERQ!”). We re-visit Peaches several times with increasing urgency (never losing the comic notes) and Cooper delivers whip-smart timing, alternately combining straight up laugh lines and finely graded nuance. And often enough, rage.

The remainder of the cast is very much on Cooper’s level. The costumes are fabulous (I would expect no less from Emilio Sosa), the sets subtle but expressive (I would expect no less from Scott Pask). Run, don’t walk to see this utterly unique and fantastic masterstroke. THE VERY HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION!!

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: A Christmas Carol

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There have been a lot of stage adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: This holiday chestnut is an audience favorite, and – even better for theatres’ budgets – in the public domain. The best I have ever seen was a very warm and spectacular version on Broadway in 2019, which had the cast tossing and passing clementines and cookies to the audience before the show. This season’s Broadway version is second only to that one, but takes an opposite approach, leaning into the Gothic elements of what is essentially a ghost story.

In fact it’s so Gothic that in place of those clementines there are eerie sounds in the house, and a dimly lit ornate coffin on the stage. A sudden total blackout accompanied by a loud thud of a sound cue reconfirms the chilly, ominous tone. When the lights come back on, the brilliant Jefferson Mays begins narrating a version of the story closely adapted from an abridged version Dickens himself took on many a reading tour. Not for nothing Jefferson Mays is listed in the program simply as “The Mourner.”

But this is certainly not just a reading. The work of all the designers, especially Projection Designer Lucy Mackinnon, transmit the spectral atmosphere with great ingenuity – as spectacular as that 2019 production in an entirely different way.

Mays, long since known to be the master of playing multiple characters, plays no less than 50 here. Most effective: a Jacob Marley who truly appears to have cold dead eyes, a Bob Crachit who is genuinely warmly self-effacing, and of course Scrooge himself, whose arc of redemption Mays gives real heft. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.

Review: The Hot Sardines

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This band brought me back to life! I was a bit between blue and – as Blanche says in The Golden Girls – magenta, and The Hot Sardines gave me a solid kick in the ass. They’re on a mission to put the “hot” back into “hot jazz.” Think Louis Armstrong’s legendary Hot Five and Hot Seven combos, with a pinch of the gutbucket grit of swing revivalists like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. Their repertoire tends to pre-1930 songs, popularized by the likes of Sophie Tucker and Mamie Smith, but they also expand into reinterpreting songs from other eras in that style.

Lead singer Elizabeth Bougerol and pianist / bandleader Evan Palazzo met in 2007 after they both answered a Craigslist ad about a jazz jam session above a Manhattan noodle shop. Palazzo passed her litmus test – he knew Fats Waller’s “Your Feet’s Too Big” and could play it off the top of his head. Since then they have been increasing the size of the ensemble; it’s presently a hot eight-piece. Perhaps most inventively, the band includes a rotating cast of tap dancers, who intentionally play the part of a percussionist more than a dancer.

Bougerol was born in France and injects the occasional French-language vocal into the mix, regardless of whether the song was originally in French or not. This sort of playful irreverence forms a central part of the band’s aesthetic, showing up in Palazzo’s frisky fugue-like intro to “Comes Love,” and in Bougerol’s elaborating on the “single-entendre” metaphors that blues singers used for dirty or “hokum” songs. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.