Bernadette: A Broadway Treasure

By Anthony James Host

Theatre practitioners are opinionated… I think we all can agree with that. We all have our favorite performers and those who we always anxiously await to see what they will be doing next. There are several people who are on the Broadway scene today whose careers I am looking forward to watching in the upcoming years, but there is still one performer I wish were around a little more and would be given a new original musical or just another powerhouse vehicle. This person (and you already know who it will be by the title; I know I am not holding anybody in suspense) is truly unique and always has such an emotional attachment to her work and I always watch her work in amazement as she handles comedy and drama with seeming ease.

Bernadette Peters is someone who stood out to me even as a little kid. I was bizarre as a child because I always watched and preferred more adult programming than children’s television.  One of my favorite things was watching reruns of The Carol Burnett Show. One afternoon, a musical number came on with this very petite, sultry woman signing the then-new show tune “All That Jazz,” and I just remember that I was transfixed by her.  Around that same time, Ms. Peters was featured as a spokesperson for Ocean Spray on television and I made the connection that she was the same person as the one I'd seen on Carol Burnett. One of my mentors at the time told me that Bernadette was a theatre legend--thus began my education on her career.

I have only ever seen Bernadette perform live once and that was in her second Tony Award-winning performance in Annie Get Your Gun, a show that she made work wonderfully. It is still an experience that I treasure highly.

As I got older, I watched more of her cabaret and concert appearances (thanks, YouTube!) and also watched the filmed productions of Sunday in the Park With George and Into the Woods. What makes me love her in these settings is how she takes “her moment” before each song and then comes around to the microphone--making it seem she has lived the life of that character for years. I think the strongest example of this is when she sings “Not A Day Goes By” from the underrated Sondheim score of Merrily We Roll Along.”

If there was ever a musical showcase for her that showed the ability of how great she could command a stage and show off her versatility it was another underrated musical: Mack and Mabel. In this show, she went from being cutesy and peppy ("Look What Happened to Mabel)" to angry and bitter ("Wherever He Ain’t") to her final heartbreaking 11 o’clock number ("Time Heals Everything").  I also think she may possibly be the strongest Rose to ever come out on the Broadway stage for bringing her usual slinky alluring quality to someone who was normally seen as a monster by many people.

For reasons that I still can't exactly explain, my favorite performance of hers is the dual role of Dot/Marie in Sunday in the Park with George. From her first moment on stage, she steals the scene from Mandy Patinkin (who is definitely strong in his own right), and continues to steal it throughout Act One, particularly with her little moments in “Color and Light,” and then her two huge numbers, the underrated “Everybody Loves Louis” and then her emotional blow-up “We Do Not Belong Together." Dot and Marie may not be the main focus of the story, but she manages to steal the show.  I think she was truly robbed of the Tony Award from Chita Rivera in The Rink.

When she finally won for Song and Dance in 1986, I almost feel that it was an opportunity to reward her for a good performance in a year where she had virtually no competition, even though she had done much stronger in previous years. Then you had the category confusion of Into the Woods, in which some debated whether or not she was the lead or a featured player as the Witch . Of course, Joanna Gleason was in the same boat as she won the Drama Desk Award as a featured player, then got won as lead at the Tonys, while Bernadette was nominated for the Drama Desk as lead, then was snubbed at the Tonys. Despite the snub, I still think Bernadette will forever be the definitive Witch; no one has yet to come close to her.

Bernadette Peters is always good in whatever she does, even in weaker shows like The Goodbye Girl,  George M! and On the Town. She wiped the floor with Catherine Zeta Jones when she replaced her in the revival of A Little Night Music.then played a very commendable Sally in the recent revival of Follies (though she was overshadowed by the stunning Jan Maxwell).

I am always glad that Bernadette Peters comes back to the theatre, especially after she her forays into film and television, standing out in movies like “The Jerk,” “Annie,” and “Pennies From Heaven." She, like other Broadway standouts such as Angela Lansbury and more recently Audra McDonald, always come back to the theatre, and it is where she belongs.

My Theatre Manifesto - Kristin Arnesen of Theatre Reverb

By Kristin Arnesen, Co-Artistic Director, Performer, Media Artist Theatre Reverb

As a performance and media artist, I treat popular media and commercial products as archives of shared imagination and symbols that can access our collective unconscious. Taking a topical theme or question, for example: “anxiety about cultural collapse,” our Theatre Reverb method casts a net out into video sharing sites like YouTube, television programming, news headlines, and our own memories and associations. Treating the samples we collect as dream images, (which, as Jung claimed, carry their own logic), we address our search results as banks of intuitively connected ephemera and search for threads that join these disparate cultural archives and our personal associations.

We then enhance or project narrative threads and organize our samples in an episodic form influenced by dada, surrealism and the films of David Lynch. We assume the roles of characters engaged in the initial question we were exploring, and use a heightened style of acting influenced by Eco’s notion of hyperreality and classical Indian dance-theatre forms (which we studied on two training trips to Kerala India).  In performance, we often access my night job as an emcee and variety entertainer and alternate familiarity and humor with off-putting devices like noticeably ‘foreign’ modes of communication, direct address, and live spectator video feed.  This process comes together in large-scale, interactive, spectacles designed to recontextualize and manipulate familiar objects and social rituals and create a persistently unpredictable environment aimed at bypassing our viewers logical thought process and allowing them to experience familiar material differently, reconsider perceptions, and identify their engagement in a shared cultural space.  This is the method to our madness and the objective of our mission the best way we can describe it!  If you want more we’d say: Theatre Reverb’s supreme objective is perhaps best expressed in these words from their agent provocateurs:
"Our agents are storming the world, destroying the drawers of the brain and of social organization, spreading a spirit of excess everywhere they go, restoring the fecund wheel of the universal circus to objective forces and bringing tickles to secret places everywhere. After all, everyone dances to his own personal boom boom.

Perhaps you will understand us better when we tell you that Theatre Reverb is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all spaces that reason has not been able to fill (especially secret places)."

Kristin Arnesen is a performer, writer, dancer, media artist, and the co-founder of Theatre Reverb. She holds a BA in performance and an MA in theatre. Kristin’s work is influenced by classical Indian theatre forms which she studied on two trips to Kerala India to train in kathakali and kutiyattam. She has performed with such companies as Mabou Mines under the direction of Lee Breuer.  Kristin is also a regular emcee and dancer in variety shows and clubs around New York, she is a resident artist at Galapagos Art Space, she studies classical bharatanatyam with master dancer Kamala Cesar, she is a sponsored artist of the Brooklyn Arts Council, and a collaborator with the Ukraine-based international women’s movement FEMEN. Her critically acclaimed and "Most Innovative" award winning Theatre Reverb production initium/finis is set to play at the Mini-Fridge Festival in June and at HERE Arts Center in July.

For more information about Theatre Reverb, visit http://www.theatrereverb.org/ and for more information about the miniFRIDGE production of initium/finis, visit http://www.horsetrade.info/.

“GIVING THE NATION A NEW SYNCOPATION”: A discussion on “Ragtime”

By Anthony James Host

In January of 1998, at the age of 9, I was home from school on a snow day watching The Rosie O’Donnell show. She always had such wonderful guests and lots of funny bits, but the major draw for me was when she had casts of Broadway musicals grace her stage. She gave many wonderful musicals a boost, especially those that were struggling (Jason Robert Brown & Alfred Uhry’s Parade being the best example of that). The one musical that grabbed me, however, was probably somewhat bizarre for a nine-year-old: a period piece with very little movement and stuffy turn-of-the-century characters and costumes -- Ragtime, a new musical based on the amazing 1975 novel by E.L. Doctorow (which had been made into a rather lackluster 1981 film by Milos Forman).  I didn’t know anything about the history of the source material at the time, but I was drawn to it -- especially after Rosie gave it such a glorious introduction, enshrining it with a handful of other musicals that were “timeless, classic masterpieces”.

I really loved what I saw, even though the epic prologue was shortened due to the constraints of performing on a television show. Shortly after that appearance, Rosie O’Donnell brought back two of the show’s talented cast members, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Audra McDonald, to perform what could possibly be the show’s most famous song, “Wheels of a Dream”.  I wouldn’t say it is my favorite song in the show, but seeing these two lovely performers really lit a fire in me that shouldn’t be normal for any young boy.

I wanted to see this show.

BADLY!

It took me quite some time to actually get to go to NYC to see it, because no one would take me. I didn’t have a theatre conscious family, but I did have a lot of dear older friends with whom I worked doing regional and community theatre, who wanted to introduce me to more theatre. One in particular, Peter, offered to take me to NYC for my birthday to see not only Ragtime, but Peter Pan, The Lion King, The Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Cabaret, 1776, and The Scarlet Pimpernel.

I can’t even believe I was allowed to enter the theatre for Cabaret.

Needless to say, I was ecstatic. That October (thirteen years ago this week), I saw Ragtime. I never realized how truly epic the show was going to be, and I was in awe of the massive sets, the large cast, and the lovely orchestra. I have seen many Broadway shows since then, but none had the same impact as this one.

One thing that really upsets me is how a lot of people claim the show is nothing but full-throated power ballads with very melodramatic titles (okay, that may be true to an extent, but they are still very stirring) and that the sets distracted from the flaws in the book (yes, there are flaws, the timeline is very hard to follow, and some of the dialogue is not exactly perfect), but the one criticism that stunned me was that of Ben Brantley, the famed New York Times Theatre critic. I think Mr. Brantley is a great critic/writer and I enjoy reading his reviews, but this was one occasion where I disagreed with him completely -- he accused the show of lacking soul, saying it had “mechanical efficiency.” I honestly felt this production was one of the most soul-stirring things I had ever seen.

To this day, I feel so attached to the actors in this show that it’s hard to separate them from their characters, especially in the case of Audra McDonald, who played the role of Sarah. Keep in mind, this woman has four Tony awards and by this point already won two before she even reached the age of 30. I honestly feel the legend of Audra McDonald, for me, is traced to one moment in particular, her performance of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s masterpiece, “Your Daddy’s Son”. I just have to say this was quite possibly the best performance of a song that I ever witnessed on Broadway, both in terms of acting and singing. It may have also been the first time I truly realized the power and impact that a performance could have on someone.  Ms. McDonald’s work as the tragic Sarah haunts me to this day. In such a short amount of time (she is primarily in the last half of Act One), she left me believing Sarah was a real person and I still find it hard to shake the image because her portrayal was so compelling and the fate of her character also deeply affected me.

The aura of Sarah is what also deeply affects that of the character of pianist Colehouse Walker, Jr., played by Brian Stokes Mitchell. The dashing, charismatic Mitchell still remains my favorite Broadway leading man: a modern day Alfred Drake, Robert Goulet, Howard Keel, or Ezio Pinza. While Mitchell sang many of these full throated power ballads that people criticized, he (and Ms. McDonald) sold these with the most intensity that never went over-the-top. Mitchell’s 11 o’clock number “Make Them Hear You” could be considered a cliché peace ballad, but its simplicity and the power make it stand out. Mitchell’s last note is stellar and I remember that he got a two-minute standing ovation after he finished the song (one of the 5 or 6 standing ovations the show received that night).

If it went through the rest of the cast one by one this article would be a lot longer than it already is, but I do want to recognize them in some way. Marin Mazzie has always had mixed responses from many people, but I must say no role has ever fit her like the role of Mother did: her look and personality more than made her right for the role. Peter Friedman is usually the forgotten cast member/lead but his work is absolutely wonderful, especially because he never once becomes a stereotype as Tateh, (a dream role of mine). The rest of the cast -- Mark Jacoby, Lynette Perry, and especially Judy Kaye, to name but a few -- are standouts.

This production of Ragtime lives on through its original cast album which preserves the music even though it can never fully recreate the beauty of the full production. All of the lush orchestrations and emotions of the cast are just as intense and they are live (though live will always be better, especially hearing such great music and vocals).

Thanks to the expensive running costs of Ragtime and an eventual dip in audience attendance, the expectations of Ragtime becoming the American Les Miserables, dwindled away, and it closed in 2000 after a 2 ½ year run.

Perhaps a show of that production’s size couldn’t last nowadays, which is very sad, but Ragtime can work on a smaller scale, as the recent critically praised revival showed.  It began as a Kennedy Center production, before its brief run at the Neil Simon Theatre on Broadway. I did get to see the production and while I agree that it was a very well put together production with much style and also good work, particularly from Christiane Noll and a unique take on Mother’s Younger Brother by Bobby Steggart, I felt the production actually lacked a certain spark that the original had, even though some felt it was an improvement over the original.

I don’t want to end this article without discussing the creative forces behind the show. Composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens are up first. These two have created so many diverse scores that they can be compared Bock and Harnick (of Fiorello, She Loves Me, Fiddler on the Roof, The Apple Tree). Ahrens & Flaherty created Lucky Stiff, Once on this Island, My Favorite Year, Seussical, A Man of No Importance, Dessa Rose, and The Glorious Ones --all very different shows with different styles.  In my opinion, Ragtime remains their best work, and I really hope they write a new musical soon and bounce back to Broadway (they have not had an original musical there since Seussical closed in 2001).

Book writer Terrence McNally is more known for his plays like Master Class or Love! Valour! Compassion! He has written the books for other musicals like The Full Monty or more recently Catch Me If You Can. His work on Ragtime is great, but sometimes I feel like the dialog can be a little melodramatic, though that could be the fault of the director’s or actor’s interpretation. I do think Mr. McNally is a fantastic writer, nonetheless.

Frank Galati’s direction had moments of genius, but that year he was overshadowed by Julie Taymor and her gigantic vision for The Lion King. Mr. Galati managed to find the heart and soul of the piece amongst the massive moving sets and lighting effects (which were used to create a train track, silhouettes, a massive bridge that lowered down repeatedly, and several huge pictures of the Atlantic City landscape…and that is just the tip of the iceberg).

Due to my intense love for Ragtime, I jumped at the chance to talk about it in my first StageBuzz article. I feel that my views about theatre, why I love what I do, and why I aspire to do it in the future, stem from that first experience with Ragtime. I hope to one day meet Mr. Flaherty and Ms. Ahrens to express my respect and gratitude for them creating such a wonderful score.

Goodbye, Dear Elizabeth

By Elizabeth Claire Taylor

This is how I dealt with the death of my namesake: I didn't watch "Cleopatra." I didn't watch "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." I didn't watch "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Nope. Not even "Butterfield 8."

I did a photo shoot. Why?

Seeing her in live action would be too intimate – too real. For anyone, watching Elizabeth Taylor on screen is a powerful experience. But for me, as she is whom I was named after, it transcends “watching” a film. Unlike other actors whom we see on screen and feel pangs of longing for their grace, their beauty, etc – Elizabeth Taylor and I shared that direct link: our name.

Since childhood, it has always been impossible for me to sit through one of her films and not feel intense desires: adoration, yearning, jealously, love, fear, sadness. I'd like to confess that I have out grown all of that – that I can simply take her name and nothing else, but that would be a lie. I think her mega-watt bulb was too strong for me to ignore, even as a confused 8 year old, staring at the People magazine covers of her 8th marriage. Recognizing my name in bold purple print but not my face on the cover.

I'm emotional now, even as I write this, realizing that yes, she is gone and yet, you live on. You live on with a name that belonged to as USA Today claimed the “Biggest Star Ever” And yet, you – Elizabeth Claire Taylor – are not an accountant, nor a librarian like my savvy mother. No, you are an actor. A thespian. A drama queen. A diva. And maybe one day, a star.

Going to drama school at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts tore down what I had conventionally thought a 'star' was – they yelled at us Freshman year, “You were ALL the leads in your high school musicals – get over it!” Egos ripped apart, some students made it to graduation, some did not. Greek tragedy was studied – Kabuki theatre – Noh – but more importantly, we were imbued with a sense of duty to our art. The possibility of social change. “Think about it like this: you could be playing Nora in A Doll's House and in the audience that night, an abused housewife could see your performance and say, okay – that's it – I'm going to leave.”

I got chills down my spine the day I heard that, and everything changed. I realized that, yes, you could have the beauty and glamour of a star but it had to be rooted in the right concepts, concepts greater than you. Coming out of the haze of an eating disorder that had crippled my creativity and my spirit while at NYU I started telling my story – I started plus-size modeling – my world and the world around me was changing.

I had always heard of Elizabeth Taylor's commitment to AIDS research and diligent activism, but this was in the present looking back – it was only when I read a ton of biographies did I grasp how bold it was for her to speak out in the 1980's – when celebrity activism was unheard of, particularly in regards to something so taboo and shrouded in stigma as AIDS.

When I realized the through-line of my solo show Finding Elizabeth Taylor was a call to arms for young women to refute the corporate blitz on their bodies and minds, I saw the link. I recently saw solo performer Sarah Jones's work and she mentioned performing for the UN and White House councils on girls and women. Ah! The honor! “One day” I silently said to myself, “One day...”

I want to look back on my life and believe I did the best I could with the gifts I was given.

My show's growing success over the past 4 years has been encouraging - Elizabeth Taylor's name creates quite a buzz, regardless, but people love that it actually IS my real name (why would someone do this to themselves otherwise??) and I have a story to go with it. “So tell me, did you parents really name you after her?” “Did your parents do that on purpose?” “What were they thinking?!” Sorry, you have to see my show to find out!

And I knew Elizabeth was sick. I knew she had just turned 79 on February 27th – a Pisces, born in London to American ex-pat parents. I knew so much about her that her death felt like that of a family member. It was always a comfort, knowing she was alive. Like a guardian angel watching over me. Knowing that I really didn't have to live with that name all by myself. That it still belonged to someone else.

March 23rd I woke up to 5 text messages, half a dozen emails and my Facebook had exploded.

I called my mother and father first – with much tears, my mother saying back to me, “We are so glad we named you after her”. And finally, I called my friend and mentor Camryn Manheim. Sobbing to her I said, “My show – my show! What am I going to do about my show?”

“You have to address it – you have to work it in. And look at it this way – now you're free.”

Free? Free. Free from this name. Free from my life in her shadow. A diamond encrusted, brunette vixen of a shadow, but a shadow none the less. But do I ever really want to be free of it? I can't imagine my life without it. It IS my life. If you take her away, then who actually am I? We're getting existential here, I know – but this is why her death hits me so hard.

I took myself to Spa Castle that cold and rainy day, as ET would have appreciated – (she was known to be quite the frequent bather) and I sat in the lavender jacuzzi thinking, “Well, there will be all the covers of the newspapers tomorrow, then People magazine and Time next week, then the weekend long movie marathons on AMC and the 60 Minutes retrospectives – culminating with an over the top Oscar tribute next year – but then...it's over.” It's over. Then I'm the only one. Just me.

Her legacy will always be there in my life but not as sharp, not as in focus as she has been while alive.

And make no mistake, the timing is amazing – I'll be performing Finding Elizabeth Taylor as part of the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity the last two weeks of this coming June. April was the month my director, Morgan Gould and I were going to rewrite and tweak the script. May was rehearsal and publicity. Think about it: Elizabeth could have passed the week of my show. The morning of my opening night! This was a blessing. I am blessed.

So how I said goodbye to my namesake was a photo shoot.

Over the years I have re-created famous photos of Elizabeth Taylor as publicity for my show. Instead of sitting in bed with my Netflix streaming Cleo or Cat (as I have done numerous times in my life), I sat in front of a mirror and applied false eyelashes and fake nails.

Here's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof":

 "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?":

and the ever popular "Cleopatra":

The Daily News, The Post, and USA Today all had gorgeous, typical photos of Elizabeth for their obit story. Full color, alluring, cleavage, eyes – the seductress. I got two copies of each – one for my mother – and held them close to my chest as precious bounty. “Only 50 cents?” I said at the newsstand while buying The Post. The man smiled to me and said in a thick accent, “50 cents and Cleopatra” while handing me my change. I cried on the train heading downtown.

But when I spread them all out on my kitchen floor, the one that stood out to me was the New York Times cover. A simple black and white photo, Elizabeth with her head turned to the side – looking far away – a stunning broach on her off the shoulder dress – with the headline “A Lustrous Pinnacle of Hollywood Glamour” underneath.

I stared at that photo long and hard, wondering to myself: will I ever be as beautiful? Will I ever be as talented? Will I ever be as loved? As adored? As idolized? As demonized? If I put myself out there, will I be compared? Villainized? Insulted? Laughed at?

Then I calmed myself down and realized it was just my ego talking. I have my own path – my own story – and yes, they do converge at times – and yes, we do share the same name, much like a line of Queens – but only destiny will decide where the similarities truly begin.

So here is my interpretation of this iconic photo of Elizabeth Taylor – one that may not be as familiar as some of the others – but one that has significant meaning to me as a reminder of the sun setting on one life and rising on another.

FINDING ELIZABETH TAYLOR

Gene Frankel Theatre

24 Bond Street

NY, NY

6/15@ 6pm, 6/16@ 5pm, 6/19@ 4pm,

6/20@ 8:30pm, 6/22@ 5:30pm, 6/25@ 5pm

Tickets and info:

http://www.findngelizabethtaylor.com/