This is the inaugural production of the Third Street Theatre, brand new (as a theatre, anyway–it formerly was a dance rehearsal hall for the likes of Fred Astaire, Ginger Rodgers, and Gene Kelly in the glory days of film). I saw it last night–it’s a flawless production–all seven principals were very strong, and it was one of the most moving theatre experiences I have ever had, and I’ve had LOTS. VERY highly recommended. Tickets are already reasonable, and can be found on Goldstar for half that price. Highest recommendation. – TSS Reader

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Third Street Theatre

NBC’s Broadway-set midseason musical drama Smash is getting a double-dose of star power: One from the Disney Channel universe, and one from the Great White Way.

The network has announced that Nick Jonas (Camp Rock, Jonas L.A.) will guest-star in the role of Lyle West, “a hot sitcom star who started his career as a child actor in a Broadway show” that was written and directed by two of the show’s core (and most argumentative) characters — Christian Borle’s Tom and Jack Davenport’s Derek.

Two-time Tony Award winner Bernadette Peters, meanwhile, has signed on to play Leigh Conroy, a one-time “theater sensation” reduced to living out her dreams through her ingenue daughter Ivy (played by series regular Megan Hilty).

Both Jonas and Peters will sing in their respective episodes.

Smash, which follows a group of Broadway types attempting to launch a musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, is set to premiere Monday, Feb. 6 at 10/9c.

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Jerry Leiber, the rock-and-roll songwriter whose hits were featured in seven Broadway musicals, died on August 22 of cardiopulmonary failure. Leiber had a 60-year-long partnership with Mike Stoller that produced hits such as “On Broadway,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Hound Dog,” “Yakety Yak,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “There Goes My Baby,” “Charlie Brown” and many more. He was 78.

Leiber met Stoller in 1950 when he was a senior in high school, according to Rolling Stone, and within three years, they were the hottest songwriters in the business, directing their efforts to black musicians. “We’re a unit,” Leiber said of himself and Stoller in 1990. “The instincts are very closely aligned. I could write, ‘Take out the papers and the trash,’ and he’ll come up with ‘Or you don’t get no spending cash.’”

In 1956, Leiber and Stoller hit paydirt when Elvis Presley recorded a song they had written four years earlier for Big Mama Thornton, “Hound Dog” (currently featured in the off-Broadway musical Million Dollar Quartet). Leiber, who specialized in lyrics, was offended that Presley added a line about catching a rabbit, explaining that “the song is not about a dog; it’s about a man, a freeloading gigolo. Elvis’ version makes no sense…of course, the fact that it sold more than seven million copies took the sting out.”

In 1995, Leiber and Stoller’s catalog of hits was turned into the Broadway musical Smokey Joe’s Cafe, which was nominated for seven Tony Awards and ran for more than 2,000 performances. Individual songs by the duo were featured in Dancin’, Rock ‘N’ Roll: The First 5,000 Years, All Shook Up, Ring of Fire, Million Dollar Quartet, and Baby It’s You!, as well as in Peggy Lee’s 1983 Broadway concerts, which featured their classic torch song “Is That All There Is?” American Idol devoted an entire evening to their music in May 2011.

Leiber and Stoller were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

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It was announced today by Barry O’Farrell, Premier of NSW, that Sydney has won the right to host the World Premiere season of the new musical AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN in 2012.

Based on the hugely successful Academy Award-winning film, this new production has been adapted for the stage by the original screen writer Douglas Day Stewart and co-writer Sharleen Cooper Cohen, with music and lyrics by Ken Hirsch and Robin Lerner. It will be produced by Sharleen Cooper Cohen and John Frost, and directed by Simon Phillips (Priscilla Queen of the Desert The Musical).

A hit across the ages, the 1982 film has become a phenomenon in cinema history, recently listed by the American Film Institute as one of the top ten love stories in cinema history. Featuring the iconic hit song “Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong” and a new score by Grammy® nominees Ken Hirsch and Robin Lerner this timeless tale of struggle, success, friendship and love promises to be the musical blockbuster of 2012.

AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN is a triumphant story of working class heroes surviving great tests; a classic modern day Cinderella story about a working class boy and girl who must overcome their upbringing and personal weaknesses to accept life and love.

Barry O’Farrell, Premier of NSW, said, “It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce another World Premiere musical for Sydney, AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN. Sydney is now officially the number one city for first run musicals in Australia. Sydney was chosen over London and New York for the World Premiere of this new stage production.”

John Frost is thrilled to be able to bring this classic tale to life in musical theatre form. “When we held a workshop of the musical in 2009, I knew instantly that I wanted to produce this wonderful show. And with the assistance of the NSW Government and the Events team at Destination NSW, I can produce the World Premiere right here in Sydney.”

Sharleen Cooper Cohen is doubly excited that her musical is opening in such a beautiful and elegant city! “The fact that Sydney is home to one of Australia’s naval bases is only one of the reasons that it’s a perfect place to premiere the show that celebrates a Navy officer. The audiences are welcoming and enthusiastic, the performers are so talented, the designers are outstanding and we all love our director, Simon Phillips. It’s a joy to work in Australia. I always believed that this moving and timeless romance, one of the most popular films of all time, would make the perfect musical, so I began pursuing it back in 2000. Now, I am thrilled to see it coming to fruition.”

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Jane White, Actress and Singer Who Found Racial Attitudes to Be an Obstacle, Dies at 88

Jane White, an actress who made her reputation in the 1960s and ’70s in Shakespearean and classical Greek drama in New York but who felt hampered by the racial attitudes of casting directors toward light-skinned black performers like herself, died on July 24 at her home in Greenwich Village. She was 88.

Jane White in 1959 as Queen Aggravain in “Once Upon a Mattress,” her first major Broadway role.
The cause was cancer, said Joan K. Harris, her friend and executor.

Ms. White, who also employed a rich mezzo-soprano voice as a sometime cabaret singer, spoke openly about the peculiar racial challenge she faced in the 1960s: though roles for black performers were increasing, casting agents were continuing to think mainly in terms of “black” parts and “white” parts.

“I’ve just always been too ‘white’ to be ‘black’ and too ‘black’ to be ‘white,’ which, you know, gets to you after a while, particularly when the roles keep passing you by,” she told an interviewer in 1968.

In her first major Broadway role, in 1959, as Queen Aggravain (to a young Carol Burnett’s princess) in “Once Upon a Mattress,” Ms. White was asked to lighten her complexion — or “white up” in the terminology of the day — so as not to confuse the audience with what a production staff member called her “Mediterranean” looks.

She rebelled against such racial straitjacketing — and escaped her limbo status — by choosing roles that transcended, or at least predated, the American race problem.

She played the shrewish Kate in “The Taming of the Shrew” at the 1960 New York Shakespeare Festival and Helen of Troy in a 1963 production of “The Trojan Women,” directed by Michael Cacoyannis, who died on July 25. A pair of roles in the 1965 Shakespeare Festival — Volumnia, the mother of the title character in “Coriolanus” and the princess in “Love’s Labor’s Lost” — earned her an Obie.

Ms. White never achieved the stardom she hoped for and believed she deserved. One issue — the larger one — was a paucity of roles for black actors, period, no matter the shade or hue of their skin, she told The New York Times in 1968. “We have one Sidney Poitier and one Diana Sands, and bang! — the door closes,” she said.

The situation became only more complicated for mixed-race actors like herself, she said. As she wrote in a 1992 essay, light-skinned actors of her time were still routinely dismissed as too white for black parts. They had to lighten their complexions for white parts and, in the case of light-skinned women appearing opposite black men, darken their appearance lest the black man “seem to be involved with a white girl — horrors!”

In the 1968 Times interview, Ms. White vented her frustration. “I don’t want to be disguised anymore,” she said.

Jane White was born in Harlem on Oct. 30, 1922, the first child of Leah Gladys Powell, whose heritage was black, white and Cherokee, and Walter Francis White, who identified himself as black but who calculated that he was only 1/64 African-American. A younger brother, Walter Jr., died in 1975.

Ms. White’s father, a civil rights advocate whose blue eyes and light skin helped him cross the color line to investigate lynchings in the 1920s in the South, served as executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. from 1931 to 1955. Ms. White graduated from Smith College in 1944.

Paul Robeson, the legendary actor and singer, who was a friend of her father’s, helped Ms. White get her first stage role the next year, as the lead in Lillian Smith’s “Strange Fruit,” a short-lived Broadway play about a doomed interracial love affair. The play received mixed reviews, but Eleanor Roosevelt, in her nationally syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” praised Ms. White’s acting for its “restraint and beauty.”

Her father’s prominence, like the complexion she inherited from him, was a mixed blessing, Ms. White said. It was nice having Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall among her family’s friends. It was also the touchstone for her worst anxieties as an ambitious black artist.

Ms. White told friends that her dilemma was summed up one day in 1959 when she took a cab to work already “whitened” for a performance in “Mattress.” “ ‘What if this cabdriver recognizes me?’ she asked herself,” said Jane Klain, a friend, recounting the story. “ ‘The daughter of Walter White. In white-face. What am I doing?’ ”

In 1965 Ms. White and her husband, Alfredo Viazzi, an Italian writer and restaurateur, left for Italy in search of a less stressful life. They returned to New York in 1968.

She played many more stage roles after that, had recurring parts in soap operas, was cast in the movie “Beloved,” made cameo appearances in spoken-part roles at the Metropolitan Opera and performed as a cabaret singer at Alfredo’s Settebello, the restaurant in the Village that she and her husband opened in 1976. Mr. Viazzi died in 1987.

Ms. White never reconciled herself to being less than a star. “Why didn’t I just go away and do something else?” she asked in an essay for the women’s history archives at Smith College in 1992.

Then she answered her own question. “I’m only 69. There’s still time, if my legs hold out.” And if nothing else, bringing humanity to the stage makes a difference in the world, she added, “in black face or white face.”

World War Two was a war effort that’s hard to imagine in our time – the country was actually unified by its commitment. In musicals, 1943’s Oklahoma! celebrated the American values we were fighting to preserve while 1945’s Carousel lamented the war dead and the children who would grow up fatherless. Carousel never really contemplates Julie and Louise’s relationship – it focuses instead on Billy’s and Louise’s absent relationship, its intent is to leave us with hope in our hearts as we walk on.

During the war, on the home front, women assumed roles previously assigned to men who were now off fighting; culturally, we celebrated Rosie the Riveter while promises were made not to sit under apple trees with the men left behind (who were either too young or too old, anyhow). In the war’s end, we’d seen the power of the atomic bomb and much of the 50’s were spent trying to keep that power from ever being used again.

Imagine, post-war, women had taken all of the energy that they had been using during the war years and when the men came home, bottle it and keep it somewhere deep inside. How did that repressed energy manifest itself? In the post-War Baby Boom – mothering children with all which during the war, had been potent and visible and had now been sublimated into invisibly preparing meals, playing bingo and paying rent; the division of labor in the traditional, theatre-going middle class home in the Baby Boom locked women and the children into their relationship and that force and energy which had once been freed was now being channeled completely and exclusively into this relationship. Rose Hovick was less a unique force of nature than she was a proxy for all of the women who channel all of their lives into their children. While it may take place in the pre-War past, it is a musical very much about the moment in which it is presented. Post-war mothers were all pioneer women; in their children was the new and–for most of them–only frontier.

Previous to Gypsy, perhaps the most repressed musical theatre mother was Showboat’s Julie Dozier, keeping a secret of her own lineage, repressing something that she knows would destroy her–and more importantly–Magnolia, her (surrogate) daughter, and the show’s focus. The uncomfortable darkness of this plot element was handled by Julie’s banishment from the primary plot immediately after revealing her secret until we see her at the bottom of her trajectory; Julie’s arc is ultimately of a mother’s noble sacrifice for her child, which satisfies the show’s dramatic construction, and comported neatly to the melodramatic sensibilities of the time.

There was a time when going to a musical was a reasonable gamble for the ticket buyer and you went to a Merman because you knew what you were getting – big voice, big tunes–big hit; you didn’t really consider the book in a Merman; people went blind based on the probability they would like what the saw (except for Happy Hunting, she was only in hits). A book serviced Merman, not the other way around –sharpshooter/ambassador, potato/potahto.

Imagine, then, a mother and her child of the Baby Boom attending their first matinee if you will – a Merman with a score by Julie Styne and some newer lyricist. We watch, satisfied when the Ugly Duckling becomes a Swan. But then Rose takes her turn – releasing all that repressed atomic fury, and she and the Swan walk on into the uncertainty of a fragile detente as the house lights come up and Mom and The Baby Boom Kid sitting in the matinee audience just look at each other…

And nothing is quite the same.

Tony Award-winning South Pacific and Light in the Piazza director Bartlett Sher has found his Fanny Brice. “Six Feet Under” star Lauren Ambrose will inhabit the legendary vaudeville comedienne in the Center Theatre Group production of Funny Girl.

Playbill.com previously reported that Ambrose was in negotiations to take on the iconic role originated by Barbra Streisand in the upcoming revival of the Jule Styne-Bob Merrill-scored musical. Representatives for the Center Theatre Group have now confirmed Ambrose’s casting to Playbill.com. Additionally, producers announced a plan to bring the show to Broadway in spring 2012

The Center Theatre Group Los Angeles tryout at the Ahmanson Theatre begins Jan. 15, 2012. The backstage musical that traces Brice’s rise to success and troubled love life will officially open there Feb. 1, 2012, for a run through Feb. 26. Rehearsals will begin in New York this November.

It is expected that the new incarnation of Funny Girl will incorporate music previously cut from the musical. Sher is also looking at strengthening the second act, which explores the dissolution of Brice’s marriage. The film famously jettisoned “The Music That Makes Me Dance” from the Broadway production to include Brice’s signature song, “My Man.” The film also included several period songs from the era that Brice performed.

Ambrose said in a statement, “Let’s face it, there is obviously more than a lot to live up to playing Fanny Brice, but I am humbled and thrilled by the opportunity to be a part of this revival. The character is complex, the music beautiful and challenging. I can’t wait to get into that rehearsal room with the team Bart is assembling — wish we could start tomorrow!”

Ambrose made her Broadway debut in 2006 under Sher’s direction in the revival of Clifford Odets’ Depression-era play Awake and Sing! for Lincoln Center Theater. Though she is not known for her singing, Ambrose studied classical voice and fronts the band Lauren Ambrose and the Leisure Class. She has covered “My Man” during several gigs at Joe’s Pub. Ambrose’s stage credits also include Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet for the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park and the London production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. She is well known for her role on “Six Feet Under.”

Director Sher said in a statement, “It’s important that people not see this casting process as trying to find the next Barbra Streisand. She is one of a kind. Instead, I really needed someone with whom I could explore the original musical and come to terms with Fanny Brice for a new era. I understand how difficult this part is to fill as well as the characteristics required to explore this in a new way. The world of burlesque, vaudeville and the Follies is a unique American invention and how Fanny Brice came up in that world is a wonderful story, but this show is also about the sacrifices of being an artist and the high cost that women in particular suffer when they find great success and the difficult choices that come with accomplishment. Lauren Ambrose has enormous accomplishments as an actor, especially a truthfulness in her acting that leads to great comedy, as well as a wonderful, rich voice that is fully trained and can genuinely soar.

“For me the key to any revival is finding the balance between respecting and unearthing all the deepest intentions of the original, and yet pushing the work ahead to see it in a new way. I know with Lauren that we can do that. We couldn’t be more thrilled to get to work and make something special and something new.”

Tony Award-winning producer Bob Boyett, who co-produced War Horse and South Pacific with Lincoln Center Theater, where Sher is resident director, holds the rights to Funny Girl.

Sher will reunite with his Tony Award-winning creative team from the 2008 South Pacific Broadway revival, which was produced by Lincoln Center Theater in association with Boyett. Funny Girl will have musical supervision by Kimberly Grigsby, choreography by Christopher Gattelli, set design by Michael Yeargan, costume design by Catherine Zuber, lighting design by Donald Holder and sound design by Scott Lehrer.

The L.A. engagement will be produced by the Center Theatre Group with special permission from Boyett, Sonia Friedman Productions, Jean Doumanian, Stacey Mindich and Tim Levy.

Funny Girl’s closest full-scale Broadway encounter since it closed at the Broadway Theatre in 1967 (it originated at the Winter Garden) was a 2001 Paper Mill Playhouse production starring Leslie Kritzer, in New Jersey. The production and its star were acclaimed. A separate short-lived Broadway-aimed national tour was launched in 1996 starring Deborah Gibson, but shuttered on the road.

Streisand had already achieved a level of stardom by the time she tackled the role of Brice at the age of 21. She was Tony Award-nominated for her performance and earned an Academy Award for repeating her work in the 1968 film. Funny Girl features music by Styne, lyrics by Merrill and a book by Isobel Lennart. “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade” are standouts from the score.

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Actress Alice Playten, whose career spanned nearly five decades in some of Broadway and television’s most recognizable productions, passed away this morning from heart failure at Sloan Kettering Hospital. She was 63 years old.

Playten made her Broadway debut in the original production of Gypsy as Baby Louise. She went on to star in Hello, Dolly!, Seussical, and Caroline or Change, to name a few. She was also a regular on the children’s television series The Lost Saucer and That’s Cat, and had a recurring spot on Frasier, Law & Order, Third Watch, and As the World Turns, among others.

Playten’s award recognition includes a 1968 Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical (Henry, Sweet Henry), a 1968 Theatre World Award (Henry, Sweet Henry), a 1973 Obie Award for Distinguished Performance (National Lampoon’s Lemmings), a 1989 Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play (Spoils of War), and a 1994 Obie Award (First Lady Suite).

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“If we thought it would take this long, there is not a chance on earth we’d have done it,” says Bono, who composed the music with his bandmate.

With Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark set to finally open Tuesday, U2′s Bono and the Edge are opening up about the troubled production.

The duo, who composed the music for the show, told the New York Times that they were not prepared for the ambitiousness behind director and chief creative force Julie Taymor’s ideas despite the fact that they fully embraced the script (Taymor was ousted in March).
In fact, they said they never would have signed on if they had known it would take a decade for the whole thing to finally come together.

“The hours and weeks and months,” Bono said. “If we thought it would take this long, there is not a chance on earth we’d have done it.”

The show — at $70 million and counting, the most expensive Broadway musical ever — has been plagued by technical issues, cast injuries and opening-night delays. In February, several critics posted mostly scathing reviews in a move that angered producers, who argued that they should have waited until the official opening night.

Part of the problem, according to Bono, was that no one involved in the show had even seen a full run-through before the November previews and that doing the previews before an out-of-town tryout was a “terrible decision” that put a lot of pressure on Taymor. But because of the massive sets and aerial technology, such a test would have been impossible

“Looking back, we, through inexperience, had no sense of the implications of that decision,” Bono said. “That the first time anyone saw a full run-through of the story, songs, staging, and show was the first night of previews. Can you imagine that? No one had seen the whole thing before everyone saw it.”

And U2 was on tour overseas, so Bono and the Edge didn’t see the show until later, on video. And they said they realized both the plot and music needed a lot of work, and the show lacked an ending. The creatives then began reworking the story, but Taymor was later ousted, with Philip William McKinley taking over as director.

Asked whether the two had plotted against the director, the Edge said: “Julie was clearly exhausted, overwrought, and we all thought that if we don’t tread carefully, she’s going to walk. We were tiptoeing around her, and I think that probably meant that people were careful in what they said or told her. I certainly didn’t feel I could be 100% frank with Julie, and that was because I felt she was carrying so much of the weight.”

Bono and the Edge — who revealed that he put some of his own money into the show but declined to say how much — claim that the musical still needs a little bit of work, mostly concerning the relationship between Peter Parker and the villain, the Green Goblin, that will be done this summer.
Meanwhile, Bono said he didn’t come to “love” the show — at New York’s Foxwoods Theatre — until recently.

“The first time I loved Spider-Man was two and a half weeks ago,” he said. “Even when I was really angry about its obtuse story and some of the awful readings of the music — even then I was still saying, it was kind of magical.”

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Plans are underway for a stage musical adaptation of Rocky.

Songwriters Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty have teamed with writer Thomas Meehan to create a new version of the 1976 Academy Award-winning boxing movie, and creators and producers — including the star of the film series, Sylvester Stallone — held a private reading of the work in New York last month. They hope to open the show in Germany late next year.

Meehan has previously worked on productions including ‘Hairspray’ and ‘Annie.’ He said discussions about the project have been ongoing for eight years and the group is now pleased with what they have come up with for the show.

“It’s been a long gestation period, but it’s come to be a work that we’re really proud of,” he told The New York Times.

“There was some worry early on — could we really make a musical out of a boxing picture? Could you make Rocky sing and dance? But when we did the reading, people were very impressed, and we’re going forward.”

Meehan said the small orchestra show will have around five principal characters. Stallone will be an artistic partner and producer, not as a cast member, and the plot follows the original Rocky movie, with emphasis on the emotional elements.

“At first I thought, all the world needs is a Rocky musical, but then I looked at the film. I thought it had beautiful construction and such high emotion, and it was a natural musical,” Meehan said.

“There is a David and Goliath story, a Cinderella story, a love story between two outcasts. It’s less about boxing than about finding self-respect and finding your soul mate.”

If the German production is a success, producers Stage Entertainment are hopeful of staging the musical on New York’s Broadway in spring 2013.

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