Broadway Archives - Page 5 of 5 - Ramblin' with Roger

Mike Nichols

I found out about Mike Nichols’ death because my TV was possessed.

I don’t what surprised me more: that our college undergraduate intern knew who Mike Nichols was (he’s a film buff and LOVES The Graduate) or a guy I know in this thirties who knows a lot of stuff but didn’t recognize the name.

When I was growing up, it seemed that Mike Nichols and Elaine May were on the TV talk shows and variety shows all the time. This followed 306 performances on Broadway of An Evening with… for nine months in 1960 and 1961. “The LP album of the show won the 1962 Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.” Here’s Nichols and May on the Jack Paar Show.

Nichols then got into directing plays on Broadway, winning several Tony Awards for Best Director of the original productions of Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, and The Prisoner of Second Avenue, among others. He also won Tonys for producing Annie, and later, for directing Spamalot and a revival of Death of a Salesman.

He got into directing movies, and his first attempt was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Watch the dance scene. His second directing attempt was The Graduate, for which he won his only Oscar. I’ve seen that movie, plus Catch-22, Working Girl, The Birdcage, Charlie Wilson’s War, plus Silkwood, Heartburn, and Postcards from the Edge, the latter three which he also produced. Here’s the hit song from Working Girl, Let the River Run by Carly Simon. Read Mike Nichols’ five rules for filmmaking.

Nichols’ two Emmys came from fairly serious fare: the TV movie Wit (2001) starring Emma Thompson, and the TV miniseries Angels in America from 2003. This means he is one of a dozen people to win the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony). He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003.

I found out about Mike Nichols’ death because my TV was possessed on Thursday morning. Usually, I watch two minutes of the CBS Morning News at 7 a.m., but the DVR was stuck on the ABC affiliate. The lead was about the death, a story that didn’t show up on my New York Times and LA Times news feed until a half-hour later. The news was released, after the story on the air, by the ABC News president. Diane Sawyer, former GMA and World News anchor, and Nichols’ wife of 26 years, apparently arranged an exclusive for her network, noted not as criticism but just an observation.

The GMA folks – heck, EVERYONE who knew him, such as Meryl Streep – said he was always “the smartest and most brilliant person in the room,” rather like his Nichols’ third cousin twice removed on his mother’s side, scientist Albert Einstein. But he also a wonderful raconteur, and I feel as though I would have enjoyed being in his presence.

Mike Nichols died of a heart attack a couple of weeks after his 83rd birthday.

The Anoinette Perry Awards 2013

In the past several seasons, by commercial necessity, a lot of product on Broadway is based on familiar concepts, just as film and TV tend to be.

The Tony Awards, championing Broadway’s finest, are on Sunday on CBS-TV. My wife and I and about 927 other people not involved in the theater will watch them – it’s traditionally a low-rated program – despite the fact that, of all the award shows, the entertainment value is the greatest.

We also watch them because, when a Broadway show goes on tour – in our case, to Proctors Theatre in Schenectady – we will be more familiar with the offerings.

Back in March, Proctors gave a preview of what it would be offering this coming season. While Phantom of the Opera has been a perennial favorite, and Book of Mormon was a big hit, the production I’m most excited to see in 2013-2014 may be War Horse. These horses are operated by three guys, who you can see (think the staging of Lion King). Yet you still get a sense of the horses’ motions and sounds as this trio of actors brings these creatures to life. It was OMG awesome. I wouldn’t have been familiar with this – except as a Spielberg film, a whole different animal, so to speak – if I hadn’t seen it highlighted on the Tonys a few seasons ago. Nor would we have been familiar with Memphis or The Drowsy Chaperone, which we’ve since gotten to see.

In the past several seasons, by commercial necessity, a lot of product on Broadway is based on familiar concepts, just as film and TV tend to be. Once (2012 winner for Best Musical), Catch Me If You Can (2011 nominee), Sister Act (2011 nominee, which we will see in the fall), and Billy Elliot (2009 winner, which we’re seeing this week) came from films.

It’s always advantageous to the Tonys, TV audience-wise when the familiar is nominated. I suspect that’s one of the reasons why they always have Best Revival of a Play (Golden Boy, Orphans, The Trip to Bountiful, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and Best Revival of a Musical (Annie, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Pippin, Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella). The host once again is Neil Patrick Harris, currently of the TV show How I Met Your Mother.

More names you might recognize, nominated this year:

Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre
Hands on a Hardbody – Music: Trey Anastasio, of Phish (with Amanda Green, who also wrote the lyrics)
Kinky Boots – Music & Lyrics: Cyndi Lauper (I suspect she will win)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play
Tom Hanks – Lucky Guy
Nathan Lane – The Nance
David Hyde Pierce (of Frasier) – Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play
Laurie Metcalf (of Roseanne) – The Other Place
Holland Taylor (of Two and a Half Men) – Ann; this is about the late Texas governor Ann Richards; thanks to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s book club, I’ve actually read the script, written by Holland
Cicely Tyson – The Trip to Bountiful

Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play
Richard Kind (of Mad about You) – The Big Knife
Tony Shalhoub (of Monk) – Golden Boy
Courtney B. Vance – Lucky Guy

Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play
Judith Light (of Who’s The Boss?) – The Assembled Parties

Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical
Andrea Martin (of SCTV) – Pippin

Motown the Musical was also nominated for some awards.

We’ll be watching.
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Who is Tony?

From Evanier: “The Theatermania website picks out some of their favorite acceptance speeches at the Tony Awards. Make sure you don’t miss Michael Jeter’s for Grand Hotel. But my favorites are still Mark Rylance’s. Here’s what he said on the two occasions when he won…”

Black girls’ hair

In Whoopi Goldberg’s Broadway Show from the mid-1980s, she wore a yellow shirt or sweater over her head, and talked about her being a kid pretending to have long, luxurious blonde hair.

That first week of the London Olympics 2012, when I wasn’t watching, the primary storyline apparently was about Gabby Douglas’ great accomplishments in the Olympics. And her hair. Yawn.

As long as I’ve been alive, how black girls and women wear their hair has been “an issue” with someone. Processed or natural – “proves” how “black” someone really was, at least when I was growing up. Dyed or not – hey, do they “want to be white”?

In large part, I’m less upset by it than just sick of it. When the Daughter was about three, we were figuring out the best way to deal with her hair. At some point, we were experimenting with letting her hair go natural. Several black people I saw – who I didn’t even know, BTW – acted as though we were committing child abuse. “Hey, what are you DOING to that child?” Or “You get her to a stylist – NOW!” And these were some of the more reportable responses.

Back in 2009, Chris Rock made a movie called Good Hair which addressed his own daughter’s frustration with her “bad” hair.

Do you recall that poor white teacher in NYC who lost her job for READING the acclaimed children’s book called ‘Nappy Hair’ to mostly black and Hispanic third-graders “after parents complained and threatened her”? Sheer silliness.

I have, on LP, Whoopi Goldberg’s Broadway Show from the mid-1980s. She wore a yellow shirt or sweater over her head, and talked about her being a kid pretending to have long, luxurious blonde hair, just like she was “supposed” to have.

Seriously, I wish there was a moratorium on hearing about black females’ hair, especially by other people, but I’m not counting on it.

The Cats’ Meow

The theological implication of CATS?!

CATS was playing at Proctor’s Theatre in Schenectady this past weekend (July 16-18). I had never been to a production. Other than knowing that it was based on some minor poems by T.S. Eliot and that Andrew Lloyd Webber and his ex-wife Sarah Brightman were involved, I knew surprisingly little about it. So the wife, daughter, and I went; we got some seats on the side, about 2/3s of the way back, and we had a good sightline, especially since much of the action seemed to skew stage left (audience right), where we were. Separately, my brother-in-law, his wife, and their two daughters also attended.

Did you ever see a performance, whether it be a band or orchestra or play, where you recognize the tremendous talent of the performers, the excellent technique of the stage crew (I rather liked the lighting, which was strewn into the audience section), the imagination of the set design, yet somehow feel really disengaged from the performance? That’s how I felt about much of the first act. Oh, there would be a song or two that gained my attention, followed by gaps where I nearly fell asleep. Then near the end of the first part, a song I recognized: Memory. Oh, THAT song.

The second act featured a bizarre segment that none of the people I knew who had seen it years earlier remembered: a what the @#$! pirate motif. Still, the second act was stronger, if only because there was some sense of linear storytelling. The one downside, a reprise, and another reprise and maybe a third, of Memory.

Other distractions, not the fault of the production people. The guy in front of me needed to scratch his head, but does he need to hold his arm perpendicular to the top of his head, thus obliterating my sightline? And the guy behind me eating M&Ms; the eating wasn’t the problem, it was the repeated pouring them into his hand.

Afterward, we saw folks from church who told us about how someone from their previous church wrote a sermon about the theological significance of the story. I suppose this refers to the cat who goes up on a hovercraft that reminded both my wife and me of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The sermon writer wept at the end of Cats; wish I had had such a visceral reaction.

I mentioned to the group gathered after the production that CATS was the second-longest Broadway production ever. People asked me what was first, and I was drawing a blank – I HATE when that happens. Was it Chorus Line, Rent? No; I knew I’d know it if I heard it.

Turns out to be Phantom of the Opera, another Lloyd Webber product I’ve never seen. Check out the Wikipedia site, which seems to be updated weekly, or the Internet Broadway Database – IBDB.com, for the current status of each show.