My View   written by Stephen Sorokoff

Some confidential behind the lens info……Not all photos of performers are flattering.   My Delete Folder contains more jpegs than my Favorable Folder.   I’m not sure if it has ever happened before, but last night’s show at the Carlyle produced a 100%  perfect treasure  chest of photos and music.  Absolutely nothing to delete after viewing and hearing Lea Salonga.   Everything about this show hits the “save” button.  Lea has one of those perfect voices, perfect interpretations, perfect arrangements and perfect faces.

Her song list was also perfection.  Kern/Hammerstein, Schwartz/Dietz, Rogers/Hamerstein, Kander/Ebb, Blumenkranz,Kessler & Saines, Loewe/Lerner, Bacharach/David, Alicia Keys……..  get the picture?

It’s nice not having to edit or delete anything from a performance so now I’ll try to select a few photos to go along with My View.  It’s hard when everything is exceptional.

The space at 1514 Broadway will have competition, Vornado Realty Trust has large retail space at the base of the Times Square’ Marriott Marquis available 2015.

Google, paid $1.8 billion for their building in Chelsea, at 111 Eighth Avenue. Google now has about 3,000 employees in the city.

On June 5th, B.B. Kings proudly hosts the 5th Annual Birthday Bash and Autobiography Release for Gary U.S. Bonds who, in the sixties, helped define an era of party music…

 
His breakthrough was at the age of 19 with the release of New Orleans. The follow-up was the now-legendary party record Quarter To Three a number one hit with a spirit and energy that would eventually inspire and influence a generation.

Over the next three years, Bonds co-wrote and recorded hit after good time hit: School is Out, School is In, Dear Lady Twist, Twist, Twist Senora, Seven Day Weekend and others. He performed throughout the world, rising to a status so high that on a 1963 tour of Europe, he headlined above a group of relative newcomers… The Beatles.

A rare distinction for Gary is that he managed to transcend the decades with hits and in the eighties. His new friendship with longtime fans, Bruce Springsteen and Miami Steve Van Zandt led to a musical collaboration that resulted in Bond’s Dedication and On The Line albums with singles: This Little Girl, Out Of Work, Jole Blon and Daddy’s Come Home.. Billboard declared: “… his gritty and powerful vocals…even better than before….”

Like clockwork, twenty years later, Gary arrived with a new CD of contemporary blues Back In 20 …and the buzz was on again. It earned him “Comeback album of the year” from the Blues foundation. With the release of his newest CD, Let Them Talk, his 2012 Christmas CD, Christmas Is On and the forthcoming biography, “By U.S. Bonds-That’s My Story”, Gary continues bringing his never-ending tour to rapturous audiences

Songwriter, singer, music legend, Gary U.S. Bonds & his RoadHouse Rockers dishing out hearty, historical rock, roll and rhythm & blues.

By: Susan Hasho

May 16, 2013

Christine Ebersole was indeed attached in the most artistic and exuberant of ways to the jazz violinist Aaron Weinstein in Strings Attached. She gave him credit for the concept and we watched them both fly with it. I was expecting to speak about Ms. Ebersole a lot here; she is, after all, the more well known. But they achieved their stated goal of finding the perfect intersection of Broadway and Jazz, of violin and voice. I was constantly moved by how seamlessly his violin both supported her voice and extended the excitement and meaning of each song.

Ms. Ebersole was introduced as a performer with”sophisticated, screwball charm.” But in this show Mr. Weinstein makes use of what I would term as slightly wry, nerdy humor to great effect. The whole enterprise has a funny off-kilter, ebullient charm that serves the fresh, lively musical arrangements well.

Aaron Weinstein began the afternoon with Cheek to Cheek (Irving Berlin) playing his violin with an easy, light touch—effortlessly—and then happily enlarged his performance to the point of rhymically picking his violin with his fingers. Ms. Ebersole began with the Gershwin song Shall We Dance —or Keep on Mopin,’ and then, from her first Broadway show, 42^nd Street, “The Lullaby of Broadway.”

The most compatible pairing was with the song Every Time We Say Goodbye (Cole Porter), her voice warm and gorgeous and his violin expressing subtle aching tenderness. They built such an effective musical experience with this song that the violin and the voice seemed inseparable.

As charming and as quirky as Christine Ebersole can be, she is sublime as a singer when she is being serious. She spoke about her three adopted children and then sang Right as the Rain (Harold Arlen) with vocally beautiful, heart-stopping honesty and love.

Strings Attached is a sparkling, life-affirming creation. I should think Christine Ebersole and Aaron Weinstein will be together again. You are forewarned—look for them.

Accompanied by the brilliant Jon Weber on piano and the irrepressible bass of Tom Hubbard.

As the play begins, Hannah (Hannah Cabell) is bent over, bum up over a couch, appearing as though she is in position for sex with her husband, David (Elliot Villar). Nope, Hannah needs David to administer a shot full of hormones so they can conceive in vitro. As soon as David succeeds, Hannah’s black sheep sister Susan (Nadia Bowers) arrives unexpectedly from California for an indefinite stay. Susan, a self-serving bad seed talks Hannah into attending David’s support group, which she thinks is for AA, but is really for PTSD. Hannah gets lost and Ted (Maurice McRae), a member of Sex Addicts Anonymous, hits on her with a smooth entrapment. They go out for coffee.

In the meantime, Susan has bartered her way home by agreeing to smuggle drugs and needs to drop them off. David gets entangled into delivering them. Hannah and Ted make out as we find out David is not an alcoholic but in fact a survivor of a bridge collapse and is now afraid of heights. In the end, all four end up in a park as they face their fears and the things that could make them all mentally collapse.

There is a lot of disbelief going on. The biggest is why would you care if your husband is going to work or not? If there was a bridge collapse there is a settlement and enough to let him heal. A lot hinges on people losing work, jobs and paychecks, but if your wife is a lawyer, then you are getting a settlement.

The topics are serious and relevant but the ideas needed to be more fleshed out and given plausibility, which I hope this play will receive. Directed by Jackson Gay, the show is fast-paced and moves along at a clip.

The actors are all gifted and though some roles are written more stereotypically than others, all of them do a fine job.

Lee Savage’s set uses the space well and it is imaginative and functional.

We all can Collapse depending on the circumstance and we can all rebuild.

Collapse: Women’s Project, City Center Stage II, 131 West 55th St. Closed

The National Theatre of Scotland’s production is incomprehensible. I don’t quite understand why you would want to confuse the audience to such a degree that they fall asleep and/or walk out. Both occurred at the performance I attended. The most impressive feats are the striptease that leaves him naked and shows nothing, unlike The Testament of Mary and the section where he drowns himself for over ten minutes, if not longer. Now that was impressive.

The other two actors, a physician (Jenny Sterlin) and an orderly (Brendan Titley) do little and though their resumes speak of talented actors they just seem in the way.

Despite the dislike of this version, Cumming has the audience in his hands as they stand for the curtain calls. Love the actor; hate the production.

Macbeth: Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47^th Street, closes July 14^th.

Written by: Paulanne Simmons

If there is any more proof needed of the common roots gospel and rhythm and blues have, there was more than enough at Town Hall’s May 17 double bill: Bettye LaVette & The Blind Boys of Alabama. LaVette’s 50-year career has spanned R&B, Motown and Broadway,. The Blind Boys of Alabama (no longer boys) are living legends of gospel music. Yet both seem to touch our souls and set our hands and feet in motion in much the same way.

The Blind Boys led the way at Town Hall (123 W 43rd St.) with songs like “There Will Never Be Any Peace (until God is at the conference table)” and a truly amazing version of “Amazing Grace” set to the melody of “The House of the Rising Son,” which in their hands works out incredibly well. The group was celebrating their recent deal with Sony Masterworks, which will release their next album this fall. They gave the audience just a taste of what to expect, enough to whet the appetite.

True to their reputation, the Blind Boys encouraged audience participation, ending their set with the audience on their feet helping the boys get to heaven by raising hell. It was a hard act to follow, but LaVette didn’t seem at all nonplussed.

Having recently released both an autobiography, A Woman Like Me and a new album, “Thankful N’ Thoughtful,” LaVette should be confident that her career, which began when she was sixteen and her first single, “My Man is a Loving Man,” was released, is going stronger than ever.

When LaVette sings it’s as if she’s having a very personal heart-to-heart with the audience. And now that she’s close to 70 she’s willing to take risks and perform songs that did not originally sell well. Of course, LaVette’s 2005 release, I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, did extremely well.  And hearing “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” from that album, one can see why.

LaVette also sang a soulful version of the Beatles “Blackbird” and selections from Thankful N’ Thoughtful, songs that reveal the eclectic nature of her talent, from Bob Dylan’s “Everything Is Broken” to Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.”

Singing about getting to heaven or getting over a bad relationship often requires the same level of passion. And that was something there was plenty of at Town Hall.

by: Ruth Antrich

Florence LaRue’s gracious manner and homespun banter is both sincere and charming.  Her bluesy jazz wowed the audience at the Metropolitan Room as she began with the cozy number, “I Love Being Here” and gradually segues into The 5th Dimension song, “Up, Up and Away.”  Ms. LaRue, the only original member of the singing group The 5th Dimension, gives us the inside scoop on her friendship with Frank Sinatra and illustrates the tale with her rendition of “How Insensitive,” followed by a medley of lively songs from Ain’t Misbehavin.  With a shift in mood and temperature she gives us a cool “Never My Love” which allowed her pianist Ron Feuer to sparkle through and lifted her like a magic carpet of arrangements throughout the evening.  Her next melange included “I Can Cook,” “Stormy Weather” and an audience pleaser “Endangered Species” performed in a very funky (in its 70s music style meaning) style, with pre-recorded additional percussion and background vocals.  Florence then takes us home to her youth in Philadelphia with “Grandma’s Hands” which resonated with personal significance – “Grandma’s hands picked me up each time I fell.”  With her flashing smile, Florence added as a special request, The 5th Dimension big hit, “Wedding Bell Blues” which was not on the playlist.  Ms. LaRue’s “Avril à Paris” (sung in French) showed us yet another of her many facets.   After a gorgeous version of Burt Bacharach’s “One Less Bell to Answer” accompanied with the fluid warmth of guitarist, John Pondell, which brought a tear to her own eyes, Ms. LaRue switched gears yet again by topping the evening with a number from Hair that had everyone singing along: “Age of Aquarius.” How that hit came to be, she tells us, was because one of the band members had lost his wallet in a taxi; it was found by Hair’s producer, which resulted in the group being invited to see the show and then ultimately they recorded the song.

LaRue’s voice sounds exactly the same as it did on her original hits.  Her range may have even expanded a little especially in the low register. Ms. LaRue can transport her audience into her world of dreams, hopes, heartbreak and success, and it is surprising to hear that this is her first solo show in New York City.  May it be the first of many.

by: JK Clarke

The commoditization of “deviant” sexual practices is one of the most libido crushing consequences of progressive thinking and runaway capitalism. The most egregious example of this is Fifty Shades of Grey, last year’s best selling book about a young woman who succumbs to the wiles of a control-freak billionaire.

As any practitioner of BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Dominance/Submission, and Sadomasochism) will tell you, Fifty Shades is an uninformed insult to their lifestyle; as any lover of books knows, Fifty Shades is an insult to literature. The book is to sexual awakening what Sex and the City is to New York; both are fluffy fantasies dreamt by naïfs and neither come close to reality. But both have legions of fans. So it stands to reason that “Cuff Me: The Fifty Shades of Grey Unauthorized Musical Parody” will probably end up with sold out shows of appreciative audiences. That doesn’t say anything about the production, but rather about those who were fans of the book in the first place.

The production — conceived by Tim Flaherty, directed by Sonya Carter, and written by members of the Virginia-based improv group The Pushers — is essentially a collection of parody songs whose subject matter are storylines from the book: Anastasia has sexual fantasies and sings a slightly bawdier version of the Divinyl’s 1991 hit “I Touch Myself;” talk about Christian Grey spawns a parody of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” with his name swapped for the main lyrics. And so on. The numbers that come closest to working well are songs that were originally written for musicals: “Hey Big Spender,” (Sweet Charity) or “If I Were a Rich Man” (Fiddler on the Roof). Pop song parodies, for the most part, fall flat.

The four actors in the piece do the best they can with the material they are given. As Christian Grey, Matthew Brian Bagley sings well and hams it up. He,  Alex Gonzalez (Willy Blowmen) and Laurie Elizabeth Gardner (Anastasia) deliver the few genuinely funny lines of dialogue, usually self-aware jokes: “That’s weird!  . . . Weird? Weird is doing a sex farce in a synagogue!” (The production is at the Actors Temple). Overall, however, the characters are over-exaggerated and the actors far too loud. They are affixed with headsets that are entirely unnecessary in the relatively intimate 100 (or-so) seat theater. The blaring sound system ends up distorted, and makes one wonder if the audience isn’t being forced into participating in some sort of S&M act themselves.  Parody depends on one being able to hear the words and, too often, that wasn’t happening.

The producers should seriously consider moving the show to a venue where drinks are served and perhaps dancing is encouraged, because it’s not so much content as spectacle-driven; and it’s more of a destination for women of a certain age (or bachelorette parties) eager to spend a raucous night out with friends. A few cocktails would certainly have made some pleasure of the pain.

Cuff Me: The Fifty Shades of Grey Unauthorized Musical Parody. Opens May 19 at the Actors Temple Theatre, 339 West 47th Street. http://www.broadway.com/shows/cuff-me-fifty-shades-grey-musical-parody/