Word: off-broadway
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...off-Broadway show--in a lovely vest-pocket production by George C. Wolfe--begins in a basement laundry room where Caroline (Tonya Pinkins) is trudging between the washing machine and the dryer to the accompaniment of a transistor radio. The blend of naturalism and lyricism is established right away: all the appliances are embodied by human beings (a Supremes-style trio, for example, provides the voice of the radio). The anthropomorphic devices don't stop there. The moon appears with an evening gown--bedecked soprano inside. The news of President Kennedy's assassination is announced by a blues-singing city...
...Junked almost entirely is the old book, which focused on a middle-class kid from the provinces who leaves home to join the glitzy, decadent London club scene. The rewrite, by Charles Busch (creator of off-Broadway drag spectacles like Vampire Lesbians of Sodom), eliminates this somewhat clich?d character and plunges us more directly into the club underworld, and the rise and drug-addled fall of its most famous denizen, Boy George (Euan Morton). The book is better now, but still too unfocused, with too many characters vying for stage time, among them the campy, cross-dressing narrator, Philip Sallon...
...least 5.7 million people--plus everybody who saw the TV movie or the off-Broadway play--already know the story of Morrie Schwartz, Albom's Brandeis professor who died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Albom, who gave up jazz to become a sportswriter, still seems a little shell-shocked by Morrie's success. Six years of having complete strangers come up to you and bare their souls will do that. "Before that whole experience," Albom says, "if I walked through an airport and somebody recognized me, they'd always say, 'Who's going to win the World Series...
...bearded man turned out to be Ira Weitzman, a hot-shot Off-Broadway producer...
Take Craig Wilson's Recent Tragic Events, another off-Broadway arrival, starring Heather Graham as a Minneapolis single woman who has a blind date on the night of Sept. 12. The play wavers between curdled sitcom (the evening is interrupted by a busybody neighbor), witless absurdism (a visit by Joyce Carol Oates--played by a sock puppet) and failed melodrama, as Graham waits for word from her twin sister, who may or may not have been in the towers. Then it all takes off into the stratosphere, with a discourse on free will and determinism, a stage manager's voice...