GRAND TIMES WITH YOUR GRANDKIDS
By Hal Drucker

THEATER

Abby, Lily and James“Look to the Rainbow”of the St. James Theater marquee.

Woody (Cheyenne Jackson) and Sharon (Kate Baldwin) share a
tender moment in the revival of Finian’s Rainbow. Photos: Joan Marcus.

Chuck Cooper, second from left, as Gospeleer Bill Rawkins, the former Bilbo-like white supremacist Senator Rawkins, sings the show-stopping “The Begat” with three fellow Gospeleers.

Finian’s Rainbow
St. James Theater
246 W. 44 th St.
212-239-6200

Review by Abby Drucker, 10

I liked the overall story, but at times I found it a little confusing. Especially some of the jokes, dialogue and words to the songs which had to be explained to me. For instance, in the song If This Isn’t Love, it mentions Carmen Miranda and Red Propaganda. My favorite song in the show is When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love, I Love the Girl I’m Near. Christopher Fitzgerald as Og the Leprechaun was outstanding singing it, to Susan the Silent Mahoney played by and danced by Alina Faye. I understand that Jim Norton who plays Finian has two grandchildren ( 8 & 11) who will be flying in from London to see him perform on stage for the first time. They are definitely in for a treat.

 
Review by Lily Feinberg, 9

The moment the curtain went up, I fell in love with Finian’s Rainbow. In fact, my favorite number in the whole musical was the opening song, This Time of the Year which is sung by the entire chorus who play sharecroppers. My grandfather told me that Finian’s Rainbow was the first musical in which both African-American and White actors were treated equally on the Broadway stage. I found the performance, not only interesting, but heart-warming. I loved the woman who played Susan the Silent, Alina Faye, a wonderful dancer. Other numbers that I loved were How Are Things in Glocca Morra, That Old Devil Moon and I laughed myself silly at Terri White’s singing of Necessity and Chuck Cooper leading a quartet in The Begat.

Click for James Feinberg’s review of Finian’s Rainbow in Grandkid’s Eye View.
Click for Hal Drucker’s review in Slice of New York.

On the Town
Paper Mill Playhouse
22 Brookside Drive
Milburn, NJ
(973) 376 -4343.
Nov. 11- Dec. 6
Leonard Bernstein's and Jerome Robbins' dance spectacular, sails to the Paper Mill Playhouse stage with brand new choreography by Patti Colombo (who did such a marvelous job with the Paper Mills’ Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) and Bernstein’s most melodious score and lyricists Comden & Green at their best with such iconic songs as New York, New York,Lonely Town and Lucky to be Me. It's the story of three sailors on a 24-hour leave. They search for Miss Turnstiles - and do they find her? What do you think? The musical of course is based on Robbins’ ballet Fancy Free.

Jaime Zatarain as Julio sings ”I can see us on an April night, sipping brandy underneath the stars, reading poems in the candlelight to the strumming of guitars,” to Jillian Louis as Jennifer Rumson. The talented “Musical Tonight” ensemble reaffirmed my view that “I Talk to the Trees” is Alan Jay Lerner and Frederic Loewe’s most glorious love song.

Jillian Louis as Jennifer Rumson and the gold prospectors perform one of Lerner and Loewe’s bawdiest and funniest songs, “What’s Going On Here.”

Paint Your Wagon, At Long Last is Revived By “Musicals Tonight!”
The McGinn/Cazale Theater
2162 Broadway (betwn. 76th & 77th Sts)
Above the Sephora Store.
212-362-5620
Last performance of Paint Your Wagon was Nov. 1.
Watch for Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings Nov. 3 – 15
Evenings @ 7:30; Wed. & Fri. Matinees @ 2 pm; Sun. Matinees @ 3 pm.
All tickets $20.
With the plethora of musical revivals that blanket the Broadway scene (from Finian’s, to South Pacific to Ragtime to Bye Bye Birdie) it’s unthinkable that no one has ever staged a revival of Lerner & Loewe’s magnificent Paint Your Wagon, which I had the joy of seeing in 1951, during my college holiday break. No, I certainly don’t count the ridiculous movie version as a revival. That original cast included Olga San Juan, James Barton and Tony Bavaar as Julio, who sang such exquisite songs as Cariño Mio, Another Autumn and the famed I Talk to the Trees. I was so taken by it that I co-wrote and appeared in a college fraternity version of Paint Your Wagon the following spring. When friends of mine, Jerome and Esther Plotner casually mentioned they were seeing Paint Your Wagon in a minimalist choral version (with scripts in hand, just in case) I did a double take (make that a triple take) and immediately contacted the brains behind the revival, self-proclaimed Pooh Bah/Artistic Director Mel Miller, who unbeknown to me, has produced a surfeit of other famed and not-so-famed musicals. Turns out he’s been doing it since 1998. I wish I had known of his work earlier and been able to counsel you to see Paint in the company’s 99-seat theater. The singing and acting were consummate and often thrilling. My wife and I reveled in the performances and look forward to seeing the next production, Silk Stockings (1955), based of course on the movie Ninotchka which first saw the light of night on Broadway with Don Ameche in the Melvyn Douglas role, singing Porter’s All of You opposite Hildegarde Neff in the Greta Garbo role. It was Porter’s last Broadway musical.

MOVIES

Zach Drucker and Chris Poldoian | Bad Samaritans
“Kids Films These Days.”

With fires a-blazin’ in the Medford manholes, we decided to hole up in the movie theater and see Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are. While we both had positive experiences, we felt differently about the film. So for the first time, the Bad Samaritans will give you (drum roll please) our first article with contrasting takes on a film.

Zach’s Take: Though I thought “Wild Things” is an artistic and aesthetic triumph, I don’t think it can be considered a children’s film because it is not kid-friendly. Kids venture to the cinema for adventure, laughs, animated characters, fun and candy. While “Wild Things” may deliver some of those qualities, the film as a whole is dramatic, action-packed and a little frightening. To me, it seemed as if Jonze constructed a tribute to childhood, targeting the people who grew up with Maurice Sendak’s eponymous book as their bible.

Now, I don’t claim to have a portal into the minds of young children, but I have a 10-year-old sister, Abby, and I still play with Legos. After contemplating her movie-going experience, Abby related her expert, concise opinion, admitting that the film was “a teeny bit” scary.

At one point in the film, Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), a hungry wild thing, chases Max (Max Records) through the forest vowing to eat him up. Next, in a fit of rage, Carol tears off the arm of another wild thing. Not since Tufts lost $20 million to Bernie Madoff has anyone been ripped off that badly (ba-zing!).

Furthermore, though there were a couple of laughs (I giggled at the thought of Catherine Keener bagging the much younger chick-flick guru Mark Ruffalo), the film seems more cute than funny. I believe children would not understand the poignant representations of adolescence that made me smile rather than chuckle.

At 111 minutes, the film has several dry exchanges that will leave kids dazed and confused. So, for those of you with younger siblings, cousins or friends (that would be a little creepy, though), if you’re going to the movies with a child to see a film based on a children’s book, I urge you to head towards Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, (2009).    

You know you wanted to see it anyway, but you never had the right excuse.

Chris’ Take: I think that we don’t give kids enough credit. As a wee lad, I was into the Disney scene. When I turned five, I had a Sleeping Beauty-themed birthday party replete with a pin-the-tale-on-the-Maleficent-Dragon game. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy adult movies. I remember enjoying all of Titanic (1997), not just the special effects-laden finale. My VHS copy of Forrest Gump (1994) was destroyed by countless viewings. While I admittedly lacked the historical know-how to get all the references, I got the film’s love-story core and Forrest’s goofy friendship with Lt. Dan and Bubba.   While kids may not appreciate the existential quandaries and neuroses of “Wild Things,” they will be able to identify with the protagonists’ need to feel happy. No, kids won’t analyze Carol’s attachment to K.W. (Lauren Ambrose) and Max’s relationship to Claire (Pepita Emmerichs) with a Freudian fervor, but they will be able to relate to the dirt-clod war and the snowball battle.   

As for the movie not being “funny enough,” I don’t equate kid-pics to comedies. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) has very little humor, unless you consider seven sexually repressed, coal-mining midgets funny. Also, scary is not all bad in kiddie films. Think about The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Santa Claus gets kidnapped and locked in a basement by a Buffalo Bill-esque Boogie Man. I remember being freaked out, but that’s the thing: kids enjoy getting scared. Are You Afraid of the Dark? (1997) was rated TVY7, but that didn’t stop me from joining the Midnight Society every Saturday night on SNICK.

Many claim that the movie is too long, scary, melancholy and complex for kids to appreciate. Some will claim that Jonze made a $75 million arthouse film for hipsters. They’ll say that it’s a good movie but the wrong one. My question to those naysayers is: What would you have preferred? Pop-culture references and fart jokes? The wild things aren’t Shrek and Donkey, and they don’t need to be. There are plenty of musically-inclined anthropomorphic animals in other films out right now. I say, give kids some variety in their films. The kids — and we kids at heart — deserve better. Though we have dissenting opinions about the appropriateness of the film, we do agree on one thing. “Wild Things” is an evocative, emotionally visual experience that will make you reminisce on your childhood days of yore, when you could frolic in the sandbox, play with your Barbies or Creepy Crawlers and chow down on the typical feast of Spaghetti-Os and PB&Js. So, see the film, think about your own youth, and let us know which of us you think is right.

We thank The Tufts Daily for permission to reprint Zach Drucker and Chris Poldoian's column.

MUSIC

Photo: Bert Huselmans

Sergei Prokoviev’s
Peter and the Wolf-Plus.
A First-Time Prequel Composed by
Philip Feeney and Licensed by the Prokovistate.
U. S. Premiere at
The New Victory Theater
209 West 42nd St .
646-223-3010
Nov. 13 –29
In the new re-imagined Peter and the Wolf prequel, see what happens to Peter and his friends Bird, Duck, Cat and the Wolf himself before the familiar scenes in which your grandchildren are introduced to the instruments of a classical orchestra, by linking a musical theme to each character in the story. Prokofiev was commissioned by the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow more than 70 years ago to compose a tale of a boy who conquers danger and who captures a wolf with help from his animal friends. Of course, very key to its success is the performance of the Narrator. My all-time favorite narrator was the smoky-voiced Sterling Holloway who did the voice-over for the marvelous Disney animated movie back in 1946. The present narrator is British stage and screen star Brian Blessed (Blessed are the Meek?) who created the role of Old Deuteronomy in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. He is backed by a prodigious olio of music, dance and theater, featuring 10 dancers and an ensemble of eight musicians. 90 minutes. All Ages.

CIRCUS

Bello Nock

Grandma

Bello, Daredevil Clown is Back in Town!
In the Big Apple Circus
Damrosch Park , Lincoln Center
62nd Street betw, Amsterdam & Columbus Aves.
(888) 541-3750
Through Jan. 18, 2010
Named “America’s Best Clown” by Time magazine Bello Nock, with his gravity-defying hair, trademark tuxedo, white gloves and spats and derring-do stunts, returns to the one–ring intimacy of the Big Apple Circus after an absence of nine seasons. He is augmented by BAC’s own star clown “Grandma,” new ringmaster Kevin Venardos and spectacular acrobats from Italy, Russian wizards of the trampoline and the flying trapeze, fiery steeds and cavorting canines, playful Chinese contortionists, and Spanish juggler Picaso Jr. Seats under the Big Top are no more than 50 feet from the ring. More than incidentally, our congratulations to one of the best PR people in the entertainment business, Phil Thurston, on the birth of twin boys Stanley and Hale.

MUSEUMS

“Inrush” by Mia Pearlman. Docented by Alan Levine. “ Inrush utilizes the natural light entering through the window cut on the west side of the MAD building to blur distinctions between interior and exterior space.” Photos: Hal Drucker.

Lily and James pose with Chris Gilmour's Saint George Triumphing over the Dragon, Cardboard, glue. 2009.

Slash: Paper Under The Knife Showcases
50 Artists Who Cut, Burn, Tear and Shred Paper
To Create Compelling Sculpture.
Museum of Arts and Design (MAD)
2 Columbus Circle             
212-299-7777
Through April 4, 2010.
Words to the Wise: Bring all the grandchildren to this marvelous exhibit; and if you can home in on Fridays at 1 p.m. you and they may have the good fortune of teaming up for a personal 40-minute tour (sans earphones) with New York finest docent I know, Alan Levine.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife is a fascinating, innovative and humorous excursion that adroitly showcases a variety of young artists’ inspired and diverse use of paper as a creative medium in a range of art forms. The exhibition surveys unusual paper treatments, including works that are burned, torn, cut by lasers, and shredded. Slash features 12 new site-specific installations and other recent work by more than 50 contemporary artists from around the world, including Thomas Demand, Olafur Eliasson, Tom Friedman, Nina Katchadourian, Judy Pfaff, and Kara Walker, among others.

“Paul Revere” by John Singleton Copley 1768 Boston Fine Arts Museum .

“The Power of Music” by William Sidney Mount, 1847. Cleveland Museum of Art.

“The Gulf Stream” by Winslow Homer, 1899, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

American Stories; Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
(212) 535-7710
Through Jan. 24, 2010
The Met’s new exhibition is a treasure trove of American stories from the War of Independence, the settling of the West, the Civil War, slavery and tenements of the Lower East Side. There are nine galleries of 103 pieces of art, that should be enormously appealing and instructive to your grandkids, especially since we are talking peopled art, limited to portraits or depictions of events real or realistically, vis-a-vis. landscape, religious, mythology or fantasy. As I undertook my first viewing of the exhibition (I intend going back at least twice more) I harkened back to my mother’s coffee table art books, where I first discovered Copley’s Paul Revere, and Homer’s haunting The Gulf Stream, with a black man adrift on a small disabled boat circled by sharks. My favorite of the exhibition is Christian Friedrich Mayr’s Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, an antebellum depiction of a black wedding celebration that is remarkably free of patronizing stereotype. The exhibition, drawn from 45 museums across the county invites repeat visits.

For more on American Stories; Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915
Click here: My Kind of New York - Slice of New York - November 2009

DANCE

Andrei Karmarevsky as Herr Drosselmeier, Godfather of Clara and Fritz and shaper of the toy nutcracker. Photo: Paul Kolnick

George Balanchine’s
The Nutcracker
NYC Ballet - 47 performances
The David H. Koch Theater
Lincoln Center Plaza
Columbus Ave. at 63rd St.
212-870-5570
Nov, 27 – Jan. 3, 2020
It is fair to state, that my wife and I – City Ballet subscribers for more than four decades - have surpassed our quotient of Nutcrackers on our children’s and grandchildren’s behalf. Yet that doesn’t in the least diminish our admiration for the beloved Balanchine-choreographed production. Based on the glorious Peter Ilyitch Tschaikovsky score, it boasts a Christmas tree that grows from 12 to 40 feet, a snowstorm, and hundreds of elaborate costumes, including one for Mother Ginger that measures nine feet wide and weighs 85 pounds. This year, New York City Ballet presents 47 performances of the holiday classic. The production includes the Company’s entire roster of more than 150 dancers and musicians, as well as two alternating casts of 50 children from the School of American Ballet, official school of New York City Ballet.

“'Buked” is one of Revelations’ most overpowering sequences.
Photo: Paul Kolnick

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Revelry & Revelations
New York City Center
131 West 55th Street , btw. 6th & 7th Aves.
(212) 581-1212
DEC. 2 – JAN. 3, 2010
Performances of Revelations:
Dec. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (mat), 6, 8, 9, 11, 12 (mat), 13 (mat), 13, 16, 19, 20 (mat), 20, 23, 24, 25, 26 (mat), 27, 31 (New Year’s Eve), Jan 1, 2 (mat), 3 (mat), 3
Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham! When I hear that triumphant refrain, it can mean only one thing. I am blissfully in the bosom of my favorite of all dance creations, Revelations, from one of the world’s great dance companies. The company, founded by Alvin Ailey who died much too young, continues to thrive under the nurturing leadership of the statuesque former Ailey dancer Judith Jamison. Taking my children and/or grandchildren each season in which the AADT visits City Center (this now being its 51st year) is as axiomatic as taking them to the Nutcracker at the City Ballet or to Peter Luger’s for steak. When readers and friends ask me for advice on where to take their kids or grandkids each holiday season, I simply say, “Revelations,” no matter their age. For you readers, there is no better time than New Year’s for revelry at Revelations.