WHY DO THE WRONG PEOPLE TRAVEL?

Yesterday afternoon I braved the heat (it wasn’t too bad) for a trip to NYC to see the revival of the British comedy SOME AMERICANS ABROAD by Richard Nelson at the Second Stage Theatre on 43rd Street.

I learned about the show when its star, Tom Cavanaugh (tv’s ED), appeared on the CW11 morning news program. I did not at all recall the original production, which appeared at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in May and June of 1990 with a cast that included Nathan Lane, Kate Burton and a young Elisabeth Shue in a small role.

From the television interview I gathered the play was about a college-sponsored student trip to England. However as it turned out it was not at all what I had thought it would be.

I had expected a story about college students and their reactions to British culture and their interaction with their professors in a different setting. My cousin and her husband, a college art professor, have been escorting student excursions throughout the world for years, and my friend Ann did the same when she taught art at Beaver College (she also once escorted a trip of upper class New Jersey suburbanites to Italy as Director of the now-named Visual Art Center of NJ), and both have many interesting and humorous stories to tell.

But there was barely a student in sight. Instead it dealt with the professors, members of the English department of an un-named New England college led by new Department Chairman Cavanaugh, on an apparent annual pilgrimage to worship at the temples of their “gods” of English literature and theatre that is disguised as a summer course.

The only college students in the play were the Chairman’s daughter, who because of her parentage is forced to spend more time than I am sure she would like in uncomfortable social settings with the professors, and, briefly, a truant girl who gets involved in a “she said, he said” sexual harassment issue in the second Act.

Included among the instructors on the trip is an arse-kissing professor (played by Nathan Lane in the 1990 production), accompanied by his wife, who have paid their own way in the hopes their participation will increase his chances of extending his teaching contract for one more year, knowing full well that he is not on “tenure track”.

To be honest this play is nothing to write home about. In the beginning it was almost difficult to watch. For the most part the professors are typical pompous arseholes who enjoy the sound of their own voice, although you do feel some sympathy for the arse-kisser whose only failing is that he did not graduate from a prestigious enough university. The show, almost twenty years old, did not appear dated – I am sure that college professors of this ilk have not changed much over the years – but was an odd choice to revive.

It has its share of laughs, mostly resulting from interaction with the more secondary characters – the bigoted former department Chairman (excellently played by Broadway veteran John Cunningham), apparently a former professor and mentor of the current tenured profs from whom they still seek advice, who has retired with his wife to England, a bubbly former female student of the current Chairman who has also relocated to the UK and now purchases the theatre tickets for the trip (just as I do when in London it appears that the group attends 2 plays a day), and an “ugly” American tourist who the Chairman encounters during intermission at a Shakespeare play in Stratford-on-Avon.

The professors are certainly cheap. At the end of dinners in a Covent Garden restaurant that begin and end the play they attempt to split the bill literally based on what each had ordered, down to counting how many glasses of wine each had – the arse-kisser’s wife pointing out that the retired Chairman had more than the one bottle of wine he has claimed as the play ends.

As usual I purchased my ticket through tdf for $27.00. My seats were in the third row, again on the extreme aisle, but then no seat in this theatre is bad (I had only been here once before to see a revival of THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON). At $27.00 for the ticket it was an afternoon’s diversion, not distasteful but also not memorable.

TTYL

A LITTLE THIS-A AND A LITTLE THAT-A – WITH THE EMPHASIS ON THE LATTA

Sorry I have not been posting here lately – but I have been busy with the GD extensions and my other blogs. Here is some “stuff” you might find interesting.

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+ FIVE CENT NICKEL reports that a "Brothel Offers Free Gas to Customers".

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+ Did you know - you might be a redneck if you think “loading the dishwasher” means getting your wife drunk.

+ Prompted by the IndyMac Bank failure, Kay Bell of DON’T MESS WITH TAXES gives a good overview of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in her post “A Look at FDIC Coverage”.

+ Want to know the real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse? You cannot post “Thou Shalt Not Steal” and “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery” in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians.

+ According to an article in the entertainment section of my mail.com homepage, talk show host Wendy Williams called Trump’s buddy Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth "a delusional, D-list, pathetic woman" after the two went at it on Williams’ show. Delusional and pathetic pretty much describes every participant in a “so-called” reality tv show – man or woman!

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TTYL

A FAMILY AFFAIR

What a cast! Bette Davis, Ernest Borgnine, Barry Fitzgerald, Debbie Reynolds and Rod Taylor. I am speaking of course of the 1956 movie A CATERED AFFAIR, directed by Richard Brooks. It was written by Gore Vidal and adapted, like Ernest Borgnine’s movie MARTY, from a television play by Paddy Chayefsky, which appeared on the PHILCO TELEVISION PLAYHOUSE in 1955. I had seen the movie many years ago on tv.

Despite the assembled talent it was a small movie with a small story - a story that was not unique for its time. It is a different take on the Spencer Tracy/Elizabeth Taylor FATHER OF THE BRIDE tale, this time told from the perspective of a working class family living in the tenements of the inner city.

It has been turned into a small musical by Harvey Fierstein, who takes on the Barry Fitzgerald role, with words and music by John Bucchino - which I saw Tuesday night, via TDF, at the Walter Kerr Theatre.

According to the synopsis appearing on most Broadway sites, “In 1953, relationships are strained to the limit when a Bronx couple must choose whether to spend their life savings on a family business or to launch their only daughter's marriage with a lavish catered affair”.

While I had been interested in the musical when first announced, being a fan of the film, I was not planning to run to see it. However the closing notice (it will close following the Sunday, July 27 matinee) reported on the Broadway Blog sent me to the TDF site to book a ticket before the final curtain.

I was certainly glad I did!

I said above that it is a “small” musical. As Clive Barnes said in his 4-Star review, “it emerges less like a musical and more like a play with music”. There is no chorus, no big production numbers, a minimalist set, no “bells and whistles” – just a good story (as Clive Barnes says “with an honest heart”) told and acted well.

Parents of the bride Faith Prince and Tom Wopat are certainly not the typical Broadway musical couple. They give wonderful, touching performances in roles quite different from what we are used to seeing them in.

Tom Wopat’s character sums up the frustration of most fathers of the bride faced with paying for “a catered affair” – “A life savings flushed down the drain to feed dinner to a bunch of strangers!”

Harvey Fierstein, as one would expect, sparkles. As he wrote the book, with I expect himself in mind for the character of Winston, Harvey has made the live-in brother-in-law (he sleeps on the pull-out couch) gay – although, in keeping with the setting and context of the story, not “flamboyantly” or stereotypically so.

“This is what we do best,” Winston says as he takes over the details for the catered affair from his overwhelmed sister. “You mean the Irish?” asks the caterer.

The future bride and groom, Leslie Kritzer and Matt Cavenaugh, are also very good. I may have seen Leslie in THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAILER PARK MUSICAL – I will have to dig out my playbill.

The “Who’s Who” bios, which I read while waiting for the show to start, are usually pretty boiler plate. But the entry for Kristine Zbornik, one of the supportive players, caught my eye –

“The NY Daily News called her a ‘madcap mix of Merman, Bette Midler and Lucille Ball’. Her Dad called her ‘a lazy piece of s**t that wouldn’t amount to anything”. You decide. Theatre: An Evening With Joan Crawford (1980), A Catered Affair (2008) and a whole bunch in between. I have a close relationship with Jesus, and he’s a nice guy.”

As is common today there are a dozen separate producers, a few of which are multi-named groups. I guess the days of the David Merrick or Alex Cohen are gone.

The Tuesday evening performance has a unique 7:00 pm curtain, and the show is performed without an intermission. This worked out very well. I had no traffic coming over on the “bootleg” bus (I made it from the Jersey City heights to Port Authority in about a half hour), the restaurant I chose for my “pre-theatre” dinner, a return to La Revista on Restaurant Row for Veal Bolognese (I did not have to teach this bartender how to make a Stinger) was more than half-empty, and I was back in my apartment at a little after 9:30!

My seat, at the TDF price of $39.00, was in the 2nd row on the extreme left – though not too extreme. Not one that I would have necessarily picked, but not bad at all. Lately I have done well with TDF seats – I haven’t risked a nose bleed in quite a while now.

It is a true shame that this “small” musical had to close after such a short run. Pardon my continued rant, but I cannot see why a show such as this cannot survive while RUDE AWAKENING, from what I have seen of it basically teen-agers screaming and cursing for two hours, plays on.

According to Harvey Fierstein’s blog at the show’s listing on Broadwayworld.com - “Unfortunately, the numbers just don't match up with the enthusiasm and, although we have the MOST generous producers on Broadway, this is still a profit-making business and the numbers tell the tale.”

If you are looking for a enjoyable evening at the theatre you should try to see A CATERED AFFAIR before it closes.

TTYL

IDIOT'S DELIGHT

As Hollywoodlife.net reports in the article “Celebrity Feud: The Donald Disses Hathaway” – perennial arsehole “Donald Trump seems to feel the need to express an opinion about everything”, this time weighing in, as if anyone cared, on the recent split between Anne Hathaway and boyfriend Rafaello Follieri, who was recently arrested for fraud.

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Trump, who certainly knows about defrauding, or at least screwing, investors, supports Follieri, saying of Hathaway, “She hasn’t remained very loyal to him, has she? So when he had plenty of money, she liked him, but then after that, not as good, right?”

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The article replies, “Personally we think four years of standing by him with all the shady dealings going on was more than enough”.

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A word to the tonsorially-challenged idiot – Donald, no one gives a damn about what you think about this, or anything else for that matter.

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TTYL