Word: graciela
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...KATE O.K., it's sad that the best musicals on Broadway are so often the old ones, but when you leave the theater on such a high, it's hard to complain. Bernadette Peters frees Irving Berlin's Annie Oakley from the iron grip of Ethel Merman in Graciela Daniele's revisionist production. Michael Blakemore plays it straighter with Kate but gives stars Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie a terrific showcase...
...show works better as an intellectual exercise than a moving theatrical experience. Director Graciela Daniele's rather dry production dwells in ponderous shadows for much of the first act and shifts abruptly (and half-heartedly) to Gay Nineties Chicago in the second. The transformation of Marie's lover (Anthony Crivello, solid if a bit too modern) from itinerant seaman to rising machine politician is not adequately explained--nor is the matter of why an ambitious candidate in 1890s Chicago would find it advantageous to claim two mixed-race kids as his own. Most crucial, LaChiusa's multihued, melodically challenging music...
Director and co-choreographer Graciela Daniele (Ragtime) creates a pretty, pastel production and fills the stage with inventive, witty movement. The members of the Wild West troupe are onstage most of the time, either dancing up a storm or providing rhythmic accompaniment to the action by slapping thighs or snapping scarves. When Frank (the fine Tom Wopat) sings My Defenses Are Down, he clings to the leg of one member of a male chorus line as they drag him across the stage--then he turns and drags them...
...Houdini, Emma Goldman) mingling with fictional ones like Coalhouse Walker Jr., the ragtime pianist turned antiracism firebrand. Composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens supply a score alternately catchy (the ragtime numbers) and affecting (a wife's proto-feminist lament, Back to Before). And director Frank Galati and choreographer Graciela Daniele have created stage pictures that are both lovely and thematically apt, from the exquisite opening dance in which three groups--blacks, immigrants and parasol-toting white society--circle one another warily, to J.P. Morgan on a walkway that slowly descends to crush the admiring workers below...
...there's an ethereal procession of dancers dressed as parti-colored birds. The avian stagecraft is not the only thing linking two complementary productions that have enlivened New York City's traditionally slow summer season. James Lapine's Twelve Dreams is a straight play that feels like a musical; Graciela Daniele's Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a musical that often feels like a straight play. Both appear under the aegis of Lincoln Center (though the first is off-Broadway, the second on). And both are smart, surrealistic and visually entrancing...