If you are Tina Landau and Adam Guettel, you would know that the premiere of Floyd Collins was presented in 1994 in Philadelphia, and 1996 was the year it premiered Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. Its Broadway premiere was a mere 29 years later and has now taken a bow at Lincoln Center. It’s a good thing they waited so long, because Jeremy Jordan (Floyd Collins) clearly needed to grow into a man and be ready to take on the title role.
Hold Me In The Water is a master class in turning a story into magic. A sense of precision runs through this production from the tippity-top where Haddad emerges from out of nowhere to the final graceful denouement where he returns whence he came. In between, Haddad holds us in the palm of his hand. He is a gentle guide, beginning with his description of a “Relaxed Performance.”
It is a situation devoutly to be wished – to be saturated with artistic excellence everywhere you look for over two hours. “Just In Time” – recently opened at Circle In The Square will do that to you. From the moment you enter the theatre, you are surrounded by glowing blue lighting, drapes, and a cocktail table scattered across the orchestra section. This is Bobby Darin’s world, and welcome to it. Your host for the show is the thrilling Jonathan Groff, who makes no bones about NOT being Bobby Darin. He is there to tell the story. Well, SING the story might be more accurate.
The time is the early 1950s. The place is Harlem, specifically 126th Street between Lenox and Seventh. We are in the barbershop of one Russell Parker (Norm Lewis), who, when we meet him, has not been doing much barbering for the past few years. Since his dancing legs gave out, he is a man without a purpose or a desire to find one. He occupies his time sitting in his throne of a barber chair, reading the paper or playing checkers with his best friend William Jenkins (James Foster, Jr.), who has beaten Parker every single time they play.
Healing Mined is about loss and grief. Loss of a wife, a mother, a friend. What the play does is teach us to mine our pain. Going down into the labyrinth of grief, where it is dark, deep, and so all-encompassing that life no longer feels manageable. Sleep is the only way to hide from it. But even in sleep, there are haunting images of a tsunami approaching, crashing over you, and washing you away from existence. The tsunami is the dark deep pain, because like a tsunami, pain looms in the distance and then with little warning, suddenly there it is crashing over you, drowning you, carrying you away, tumbling you in all directions. Meneses’ beautiful, heart-endearing poetic prose is the story of this tsunami pain, the deepest pain humans experience, and how we manage it, or don’t. It is a poetic fable of human resilience and beauty, and the stories we tell ourselves, the realities we create to live by.
Charles Mingus, virtuoso bass player and visionary of music whose compositions transcend melody and rhythm with kinetic reimagining and human emotion, was like no other composer. He lived in a time of huge upheaval in this country through the 50s and 60s, and his compositions often addressed his disgust and anger at the total disregard for its citizens.
I am not a Gilbert & Sullivan aficionado – and it might have helped if I were. While there are no other writers listed, there are very few musical numbers that sounded like Gilbert & Sullivan. I know that this production has been adapted by Rupert Holmes. What he did remains a mystery to me. Perhaps that is the point. This is a stylized musical that reminds a person of Gilbert & Sullivan. Relocated to the New Orleans French Quarter, it is the tale of a Pirate King (and orphan) who has blown into town with an 8-man crew who are released upon the city to hunt down eligible women.
Once you hear the music though, the sounds are oh so familiar, the melodies already have a place in your heart, and Celia’s vocal range will take you into the time of the heyday of jazz when life was not fraught with phones, text, emails, instagrams, and all the distractions that keep us from the beauty of the moments of everyday magic.
If you don’t LIKE Sondheim, you may be suffering from some heretofore unnamed or unknown condition. If, however, you do like/love/adore Sondheim, you might need smelling salts to get you through this two-hour extravaganza.
There are certain rare evenings when the walls between centuries dissolve, when the spirits of long-departed composers seem to hover in the air, nodding with approval as their intentions are realized with breathtaking authenticity. From the moment one opened the elegantly designed program booklet, it was clear this would be no ordinary concert. With their 19th-century accoutrements and historically accurate construction, the ACO’s commitment to period instruments transformed familiar works into vivid new sonic experiences.
