Your Direct Access to Theater Stars and News

Some of the most fun in New York is in a small room at CUNY TV in the old B. Altman building, where theater notables collide – and when the stars do that, magical sparks fly. See below for some of Theatre Talk’s latest visitors.

How Theater People Transformed Disney Animation

Just being in the Theater Talk Greenroom before a taping means hearing a dizzying amount of news, gossip and opinion, ranging from parody titles for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-aborning Phantom Of The Opera sequel, Love Never Dies (Love Never Opens and Paint Never Dries) to the rumors about the Dumbo musical and the progress of The Addams Family musical since its lucrative, yet critically-panned Broadway try-out in Chicago … . And all in the space of five minutes! Whew!

Writer/reporter Patrick Pacheco, a Theater Talk regular, came by to discuss his new film, Waking Sleeping Beauty. With him was his new boss, Peter Schneider, former head of animation at Disney, an integral part of Disney Theatrical in its formative years, and the producer of Waking Sleeping Beauty. “I’m leaving journalism to make more money in documentary filmmaking,” quipped Patrick.

Their documentary is about the rebirth of Disney Animation, beginning in 1984 just after Disney’s The Black Cauldron -- according to Schneider, “the worst movie in the Disney canon” -- had crashed and burned. It was at this time that Schneider was hired as Disney’s President of Feature Animation. The film tracks the company for the next decade while it creates the hit films, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast, and The Lion King.

Waking Sleeping Beauty is also about the creative process at Disney at that time, which was not without conflicts, including those caused by the gigantic egos of the company’s executives: Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Roy Disney. The three were part of brutal corporate battles that received a great deal of press attention and caused a lot of personal pain.

The work that came out of that period was so extraordinary, however, that some of the old fires have cooled, and the participants cooperated in telling about this important time in their professional lives. Schneider brought Pacheco in to interview them for Waking Sleeping Beauty and structure the film – basically to “make it more dramatic and make it more emotional.”

That said, the “heart and soul” of this documentary is the late Howard Ashman, the brilliant librettist/ lyricist who had suffered a flop on Broadway with the musical Smile – and moved to Los Angeles to try his fortunes with Disney.

Ashman’s partnership with composer Alan Menken, and their working relationship with Schneider, was forged in 1982 with their hit Off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors, for which Schneider had served as Company Manager. Their subsequent collaboration at Disney would bring a theater sensibility to the creation of animated works that would revolutionize the entire animation industry and revitalize the Disney brand.

“Howard could be difficult,” Menken says in the film. “He was a self-flagellating artist; the problem with working with self-flagellating artists is that sometimes they miss and hit you.”

Waking Sleeping Beauty opens in limited release on March 26, the day that Theater Talk’s Pacheco/Schneider interview premieres on PBS/Thirteen in New York and is uplinked to satellite for national syndication. (See list of member stations at http://www.theatertalk.org/news.php?cmd=detail&id=1.)

Wresting Control of the Minstrel Show

One of the largest retinues in Theater Talk history arrived in the Greenroom to talk about and perform a song from the new Kander and Ebb musical, The Scottsboro Boys, at the Vineyard Theatre.

Wait, a musical about the notorious 1931 trial in Scottsboro, Alabama, where two white women accused nine black men of rape? We’ll get to that.

Traipsing into the Greenroom came veteran Broadway composer John Kander; super director-choreographer Susan Stroman (looking very glamorous without the hat she has worn for decades); actors Brandon Victor Dixon and Colman Domingo; pianist Paul Masse and guitarist Greg Utzig; Kander’s assistant “Bone,” Vineyard general manager Reed Ridgley, and press agent Sam Rudy. They all watched Carol Kane and Janeane Garofolo being taped, and then the two shows interviewees all mixed and gabbed and traded compliments. So fun!

Brandon Victor Dixon plays the most outspoken of the nine Scottsboro boys (who were all in their late teens when unjustly accused) and sang a moving ballad from the show, “Go Back Home.”

One fascinating aspect of Stroman’s production is the use of the once-popular American stage entertainment, the minstrel show, to tell the Scottsboro story. At first, the African-American actors were taken aback to hear the new show would be framed this way, but soon came to appreciate how Stroman, Kander and Ebb (the show got started before lyricist Fred Ebb’s death in 2004), and book writer David Thompson used the structure to tell this compelling story in a musical way, and turned the racist form on its head.

All eyes are on this production and whether it has Broadway potential. Judging by the talent and intelligence on display at the Vineyard and in the Theater Talk studio – combined with great word of mouth – we think this show will give the spring theater season a healthy and exciting boost.

What They Wore

Carol Kane arrived in black velvet, yellow hair blazing and lips ruby red, with stylish black glasses. With her little-girl voice and sweet, open manner, you could blink twice and think you were seeing Marilyn Monroe! Then in came Janeane Garofalo with a CBGB’s tee, leggings and a riot of patterns and colors, all very American Apparel.

These stylish women are in the current cast of Nora and Delia Ephron’s hit show, Love, Loss and What I Wore at the Westside Arts. Kane has been in Wicked on and off recently, succeeding Rue McClanahan in the Carole Shelley role– plus she’s been Richard Belzer’s wife on Law and Order SVU. And what is her fashion preference? “I have always worn black” and “I buy something and wear it till it falls off my body.”

As for Garofolo, she tells Michael and Susan that she’s devoted to American Apparel and her tattoos, which she’s always ordered to cover up. (She bares them for Theater Talk!) Her family was “never fashion-forward.” The women in the audience love the revue, particularly, says Kane, the mother-daughter teams that come to the show. Garofalo, noting her great respect for the artists who work in fashion, nevertheless decries fashion’s “let ‘em eat cake” attitude – creating expensive vanity items while so many in the world are doing without.

On The Trail of a Notorious Party Animal

OK, what do party animals have to do with Theater Talk? A lot, when one of them was the producer of the original production of La Cage Aux Folles. Let’s face it – fascination with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll never ends. Even if fewer and fewer of us are up at all hours indulging in them, the stories sure make for great reading!

Fitting perfectly into the groove of “if you made this stuff up, no one would believe you” is Robert Hofler’s new book, Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr, just out in trade paperback. While the juiciest stuff takes place in LA-LA land, those of us old enough to remember can recall celebrity mega-manager Carr’s publicity-hogging after-party for the premiere of Tommy the movie – held in the Sixth Avenue @ 57th Street subway station.

Hofler told Michael and Susan in the Greenroom, “I wrote the book because I was never at these kinds of parties!” In his interview, he says that – beginning in the early 1970s – Carr was the first to throw lavish parties that were a mix of old and new Hollywood (Mae West and Jack Benny, John Travolta and Ann-Margret) with rock stars (Elton John and Rod Stewart). And wait till you hear the stories about Allan’s $100,000 Egyptian disco (with spy cameras) and the famous Rudolf Nureyev “mattress party.”

Carr’s highest pinnacle, and biggest fall from grace, had to do with producing the 1989 Academy Awards telecast – with Hollywood Babylon director Steve Silver creating the infamous opening, featuring Rob Lowe singing “Proud Mary” to Snow White (among other oddities). It raised a furor. The next day, Carr had to endure the worst of Hollywood snubs – nobody talked to him when he went to lunch.

The book is a juicy read about a particular time in Hollywood and New York culture and makes for a great episode of Theater Talk.

Donald Margulies and Eric Bogosian

Playwright Donald Margulies – author of Time Stands Still, a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway with Laura Linney, Brian D’Arcy James, and Alicia Silverstone – taped an interview for Theater Talk, with another one of the play’s stars, Eric Bogosian, a well-known playwright himself.

In the Greenroom, Bogosian was chatting about his wife’s (director Jo Bonney) production of a new play by Darci Picoult, Lil’s 90th, just closed at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven with Lois Smith and David Margulies in the cast.

Bogosian is relishing playing the part of a New York photo editor (“A genuine nice guy” versus his customary “edgy New York Jewish” types) in Margulies’s new play about two couples, one of which is comprised of journalists who are recuperating from covering wars, and the other which is in the heady, early days of a relationship that can’t logically last. Margulies says the play is about “people trying to live a moral life” given society’s conflicts at home and abroad. The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dinner With Friends, Sight Unseen, and What’s Wrong With This Picture? Margulies has been teaching playwriting to undergraduates at Yale for 20 years while continuing to write and be produced in New York and around the country.

Beane's Bon Mots

With his new play Mr. and Mrs. Fitch opening at Second Stage, Douglas Carter Beane paid a visit to Theater Talk’s studio at CUNY TV -- and the laughs and one-liners flowed effortlessly, both off- and on camera.

His newest play is about married gossip columnists, portrayed by John Lithgow and Jennifer Ehle. Theater Talk co-host Michael Riedel comments that they “are still trying to live in an era that’s ended,” mirroring Beane’s own surprise at the state of New York City when he first arrived in 1977.

A native of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania who listened to Noel Coward CDs at the library and dreamed of life in New York City, he arrived in New York at a time when it was overrun with trash in the streets, street crime, and an out-of-control “Club Kid” scene full of drugs, sex and murder. (A bright side to today’s New York: “You can use a credit card in a cab!”)

Addressing the ever-shifting critical evaluation of his work, he marveled at the news that his plays are being taught at Colgate University (“I couldn’t get into Colgate!”) and how he was now “the toast of London” with excellent notices for his play, The Little Dog Laughed. Acutely aware of the “build ‘em up/tear ‘em down” strain in American life, he admits that what he loves about theater “is that you can never get too big … Just wait!”

News Updates from Recent Tapings

For Liev Schreiber, Naturalism is Tough

Coming off tremendous personal reviews for his role as Eddie Carbone in the newly-opened, lavishly-praised revival of Arthur Miller’s “A View From The Bridge,” Liev Schreiber tells Theater Talk hosts Michael Riedel and Susan Haskins that it “never occurred” to him to play Eddie – that, in fact, he is “not drawn to naturalism in general.” Before the taping, he admitted that for him it’s easier to play Iago (in “Macbeth”) than Eddie Carbone.

Schreiber has words of praise for his co-star, new-to-the-stage Scarlett Johansson. “She has tremendous composure… tremendous emotional facility,” and is “more interested in the goal of getting better than being appreciated” – “the sign of a great actor.”

Reprising his famous observation that actors can be compared to breeds of dogs, Schreiber says he’s “like the Jack Russell that won’t stop ripping the felt off of your tennis ball.” Director Gregory Mosher, also interviewed in the half-hour, describes him differently – “like a German Shepard, and the gentle St. Bernard, particularly for his stewardship of this production.”

This interview begins syndication on Feb. 5 -- and is on Thirteen/WNET in New York on Friday, Feb. 5 at 1 AM and streamed on www.cuny.tv by February 15.

Founder of Famed Circle in the Square
With his memoir of the founding of the historic Circle in the Square now out in paperback (“Journeys in the Night – Creating a New American Theatre with Circle in the Square,” Applause Books), Ted Mann paid a visit to Theater Talk.

Describing his frequent attempts in the 1950s to get the rights to the work of Eugene O’Neill – who, says Mann, was “considered forgotten and old-fashioned” – he names the Circle’s May 1956 revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” starring a little-known Jason Robards, as the theatre’s greatest production. With a cast of 25 and running 4-1/2 hours, Mann and director Jose Quintero decided, “If we’re going to go down, let’s go down BIG.” With a budget of $2,500, the show was a smash and revived interest in O’Neill. It led O’Neill’s widow, Carlotta, to give them the manuscript of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” and history was made once again.

Airdate TBA

Oscar-Nominated Maury Yeston’s Career
Composer/lyricist Maury Yeston dropped by Theater Talk for a 2-part review of his work, including a stint at the piano. Yeston is a fountain of Broadway lore, collected from his relationships with the late librettists Larry Gelbart and Peter Stone, director Mike Nichols, and many others, and regaled the Green Room with stories of Frank Loesser and “the one show that was perfect out of town and never needed any work – Kiss Me, Kate” (as passed on to him by other Broadway hands, as Yeston was only 3 years old when the show opened in December 1948).

Yeston’s Broadway hit “Nine” is now on movie screens, garnering him an Oscar nomination for a new song written especially for the film, and he is at work on a musical version of “Death Takes A Holiday.” His past triumphs include “Titanic” and “Grand Hotel.” He is a talent with one foot in the Old School, and one in the New – one that, we hope, has the opportunity to keep writing wonderful shows.

This two-parter begins syndication March 4 and will be streamed on www.cuny.tv

Mosher & Schreiber: ""A View from the Bridge"

Jan 29, 2010: A great time with celebrated director GREG MOSHER and the great LIEV SCHREIBER, discussing their hit Broadway Miller revival. Liev said that playing Eddie Carbone was more difficult than playing Iago, because he felt more comfortable playing the classics than "naturalism."