DiPietro, author of Over the River and Through the Woods and co author of the revue, I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, has been working for the past year and a half on this revision of the George and Ira Gershwin musical, Oh, Kay!. Commissioned by the Gershwin Estate, the redo, titled They All Laughed, recently had a private reading that "went as well as I could have imagined," DiPietro told Playbill On Line. Spokesperson Susan L. Schulman told Playbill On-Line that producing the readings are Jonathan Pollard, Dena Hammerstein and Bernie Kukoff -- the same team who produced Perfect/Change and Over the River.
Joining Bart and The Sound of Music's Benanti in the Laughed readings are Mary Beth Piel, Donna English (Ruthless!), Dick Latessa, Tovah Feldshuh (Sarava!), Kevin Chamberlin (As Thousands Cheer), Roxane Barlow, Michael X. Martin and Michael Mastro (Side Man). Patrick Brady and Ethyl Will will assist on piano for the ensemble piece.
"The Gershwin Estate gave me the script to read," DiPietro said of the process, "and the book was creaky but the concept was fun. It's about a playboy on Long Island who falls for a bootlegger just as he's set to marry this snooty woman. I made a lot of changes, but the germ of it was very much in the original [by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse]; I probably stuck to it even more than I thought I would."
Oh, Kay! first reached Broadway in 1926, with a return engagement two years later. Broadway last saw Oh, Kay! in 1990 and 1991, produced by David Merrick. James Racheff did that adaptation, based on a concept by Dan Siretta. The show, starring Brian Mitchell (sans the middle name "Stokes" at that time) and Angela Teek, closed after 77 performances. Merrick tried to bring tuner back a year later as a star vehicle for Rae Dawn Chong, but the redo closed in previews.
A busy fellow indeed, DiPietro is also just finishing the first draft of a rewrite of Allegro for the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization. "Definitely a challenging show to redo," said DiPietro.
Come February, DiPietro will also start work on a new musical using songs made popular by Elvis Presley. As reported by Variety, the piece won't be an Elvis biography or impersonation, so much as a concept musical using the songs to tell mini stories.
Maxyne Berman Lang, who administers the catalogue of recorded Presley songs for a subdivision of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, thought up the idea. Lang told Playbill On-Line she was thrilled about the project, because "it's a new way to have audiences embrace the songs." Lang told Variety, "Having lived with those songs for so many years, it seemed to me they had a story, a non-Elvis Presley story to tell." According to Variety, Elvis Presley Music has approved of the project.
Librettist DiPietro told Variety he saw the as-yet-untitled Elvis show following the format of the London smash, Mama Mia!, which uses ABBA songs "but doesn't mention ABBA at all. I want the songs [in the Elvis musical] to come from many different voices and situations that you don't expect."
Because the musical, tentatively targeted for Broadway in 2001, is in a "formative stage," Lang declined to mention which songs would be included. Tunes made popular by "The King" include "Love Me Tender, Heartbreak Hotel, Jailhouse Rock" and "Suspicious Minds."
DiPietro told Playbill On-Line (Dec. 22) the musical was still in the "man alone in a room with a piece of paper stage." He did say the show would be in "the musical-comedy tradition" and that he'll start to work on it, in earnest, beginning February 2000.
Theatregoers outside New York need not go DiPietro-less; Paul Provenza is starring in the West Coast premiere of The Kiss at City Hall, a romantic comedy running at the Pasadena Playhouse Jan. 7-Feb. 20.
from Playbill.com
Each short play is intended as a lampoon of the current age of information overload. The works include:
In Media Res by Constance Congdon
Tina at the Times/Below the Fold by Wendy McLeod
R.C.A. by Marsha Norman
The Entertainment Report by Christopher Durang
Unmemorable by Craig Lucas
Captive Audience by David Ives
This Town by Sidney Blumenthal
A Tooth for a Tooth by Terry George
Marcia Milgrom Dodge directs the evening.
Bart recently won a featured actor Tony for his portrayal of Snoopy in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, although the revival shut down soon after he claimed the award. Graff is a veteran of various musical comedies, including High Society, City of Angels and the 1999 Encores! revival of Do Re Mi, in which she played opposite Nathan Lane.
During the past season, Sella filled the role of the son in 1999's Tony winning play, Side Man, as well as finding time to play the emcee in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Cabaret.
For those scratching their head over the name of Sidney Blumenthal, this is his first foray into playwriting. His only other theatrical experience was as a supporting player in the first act of the Clinton administration.
In other Bay Street news, Kate Burton and Celia Weston lead the cast of the Bay Street Theatre's American premiere of Frank McGuinness' The Factory Girls. The production, which was previously seen this summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, opened on July 14 and will play through Aug. 1.
Burton was recently on Broadway in The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Weston
appeared on Broadway in The Last Night of Ballyhoo. Also in the cast are
Malcolm Adams, Gretchen Cleevely, Christopher McHale and Rebecca Shull.
McGuinness, the author of Someone to Watch Over Me, is best known for his
recent, celebrated adaptations of Sophocles' Electra and Ibsen's A Doll's
House, both of which were performed on Broadway. Factory Girls will be
directed by Nye Heron.
Admiration and support rarely spring from browbeating, prying, obsessing, distorting and fabricating, so it's highly unlikely to find the media topping any popularity charts. Among the alienated, you may count playwrights and those who commission them.
But rather than perpetual grumbling, Emma Walton and Sybil Christopher, who (as the daughter of Julie Andrews and the former wife of Richard Burton, respectively) have had occasion to witness the fourth estate at its grubbiest, put their money firmly in the service of their sentiments. Or, rather, the money of the Bay Street Theatre, where they hold the title of co-artistic directors.
The Sag Harbor theater decided to commission eight playwrights to address the provocative subject of the media, and the resulting evening of skewers, gathered under the umbrella title Fit to Print, will be the final and most anticipated production of its season. The octet of 10-minute playlets by Marsha Norman, Christopher Durang, Terry George, Constance Congdon, Craig Lucas, David Ives, Wendy McLeod and Sidney Blumenthal (yes, that Sidney Blumenthal) opens Wednesday and runs through Sept. 5.
The individual scripts deal with everything from "the press' search for the latest terrorist superstar and Arab attitudes to women" -- George's description of his satirical A Tooth for a Tooth -- to "the endless chatter that goes on on these entertainment-news talk shows" -- Durang's summary of his zany The Entertainment Report. Theirs and five of the other works are brand new; Blumenthal's, about the White House press corps, is excerpted from a full-length play he wrote in 1994 ("when I was a professional writer"), before he was named the assistant to the president of the United States.
Back then, Blumenthal recalls with a chuckle, "people thought that even though I'd written it as a comedy, it was too ridiculous, that I'd created an absurd situation [dealing with a potential scandal about the first dog's food]. Now, after all that people have been through, it seems like a fairly realistic presentation."
In Tina at the Times, McLeod's contribution, we find Tina (played by Randy Graff) at the helm of America's paper of record, determined that "all the news that's fit to print" is going to be light, frothy and suitable for a future movie "treatment."
"She's turning it into a show-business rag," Robert Stella, the actor who plays Tina's fawning assistant, explains. (For those woefully -- or perhaps blissfully -- out of the loop, Tina is the peripatetic editor Tina Brown and the Times is New York's.)
Fit to Print's impressive cast of five -- Roger Bart, Joanna Glushak and Dennis Ryan are the other actors -- changes hats (or, more likely, wigs) as the evening progresses. Ryan plays an anchorman, an editor, a television station manager, a "guy starting an intimate relationship," a translator and a reporter. Bart's roles include a "George Stephanopoulos-type press secretary," a Third World potentate and a budding starlet -- this last role hardly daunting considering his recent Tony Award for playing a dog (Snoopy in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown).
Neither media-hatred nor first-hand media experience was required as part of the audition process, although Graff recently played a reporter in the musical High Society and Ryan was once in a production of The Front Page. "The idea was to get a ‘Not Ready for Prime Time'-‘Saturday Night Live' group of players," says director Marcia Milgrom Dodge, who gives the production's subtitle as "Remotely Controlled."
It was Dodge's decision to "tie the evening together" with snippets from videotapes, not only for consistency, but also to enable the actors to "move from Third World terrorists to the world of Tina Brown in 60 seconds." George, who often sets his movie scripts in Ireland, says it was also Dodge's inspiration to call his Third World nation "Saaghavastan" in keeping with the production's locale. And she borrowed the frenetic, fast-talking pace of The Front Page for Blumenthal's present-day press corps because "it keeps the integrity, accelerates the comedy level and makes the point that nothing's changed. Everyone's still hungry."
The playwrights agree with Dodge's interpretations. Says Blumenthal, "Despite the education, glamour, celebrity and money that's fallen on the modern media, a lot of the old impulses of scandal-mongering still prevail."
Rehearsals began the weekend of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s airplane crash, which, Dodge points out, offered the cast ample opportunity to witness the media at its most vociferous -- "the best and the worst." That, along with the hype surrounding last week's debut of Tina Brown's magazine "Talk," convinced the director that "we're definitely doing this at the right time."
For Walton and Christopher -- the latter terming the media "so indiscreet and disgraceful" -- it's been the right time for a long time. They'd discussed doing a play about the press for years, and, after concluding that there really weren't any except that '30s chestnut The Front Page, Walton says Bay Street decided to go for its own original production.
They compiled a wish list of possible playwrights, all reasonably established but new to their theater -- though not necessarily to the East End. George and Norman have homes there; Durang set his last Off-Broadway play, Betty's Summer Vacation (also in part a satire on the media), in a Hamptons beach house. Prior work on the subject was not a prerequisite, although Congdon, a winner of Newsday's Oppenheimer Award, had written another play, Lips, about media manipulation.
Not everybody was able to accept the invitation, but Blumenthal, who wasn't on the original list, became a happy addition after his agent submitted his play. The full-length version had been performed elsewhere and was given a reading at Bay Street in the spring.
Fit to Print is not solely a condemnation of members of the media. Lucas says he was inspired in part by observing that "some of my friends who've been terribly hurt in the press will suddenly see bursts of schadenfreude [enjoyment at the troubles of others] when others get creamed." His play, titled Unmemorable, is the darkest of the lot, Dodge says.
Beyond the general topic, the playwrights were given free rein. "We didn't want to limit anyone," Walton says, admitting that while they were pleased with the results -- "the different voices make it interesting" -- they were also surprised.
"We thought they'd be more serious," Christopher says. "But when they began to come in, they were very larky." "Expecting real digs ... is a very personal point of view," Walton confesses. "But we'd thought everyone was equally venomous about the news media in 1999."
She smiled. "Next time, we may be more specific."
Fit to Print opens at the Bay Street Theatre on the Long Wharf in Sag Harbor on Wednesday. Performances run through Sept. 5 and ticket prices are from $26 to $40.
