Tag Archives: bobby steggert

BOY

Dr. Wendell Barnes (Paul Niebanck) bonds with Samantha (Bobby Steggert) in Anna Ziegler’s BOY (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 9, $62.50
www.keencompany.org
www.ensemblestudiotheatre.org

Award-winning playwright Anna Ziegler takes a unique and imaginative approach to the timely issue of gender identity in the expertly written, inventively staged drama Boy. A joint production of Keen Company and Ensemble Studio Theatre, Boy was inspired by the real-life case of David Reimer as well as the birth of Ziegler’s first child. Bobby Steggert stars as Adam/Samantha, a twin born in Iowa in 1967. Shortly after a botched, unnecessary circumcision accidentally sears off his penis when he is eight months old, his mother, Trudy (Heidi Armbruster), and father, Doug (Ted Koch), seek out the help of eminent physician Wendell Barnes (Paul Niebanck), a doctor in the relatively new field of gender reassignment. “Sam will never lead a normal life. He will never be a father. He will never be normal,” Doug opines in a letter to Dr. Barnes, while Trudy adds, “We saw you on that program and you said that we are blank slates at birth. You said we are shaped by society and not biology.” Dr. Barnes, who is eager to treat the boy, convinces the parents that it is best for the child to be raised as a girl, receiving hormone shots and ultimately an operation to give her a vagina, but he insists that she must never find out that she was born with male genitalia. The play shifts back and forth between various years from 1968 to 1989 as Samantha learns about great literature from Dr. Barnes and Adam falls for a single working mother, Jenny (Rebecca Rittenhouse). Delivering a lecture in 1977, Dr. Barnes explains, “How do we become who we are? Is it a process that takes place entirely within the dark mysteries of the womb, so we emerge fully formed, our character, our future set? Or do we build ourselves, brick by brick, ‘sufficient to have stood though free to fall’? Do we make our house or do we simply inhabit it?” But as Boy shows, there are no easy answers to those questions, whether it’s 1968, 1977, 1989, or today, when such topics as nature vs. nurture and being born a certain way are still rife with controversy.

Jenny (Rebecca Rittenhouse) and Adam (Bobby Steggert) consider a relationship in BOY (photo by Carol Rosegg)

No matter the age, Adam/Samantha wears the same outfit in every scene, reaffirming that what matters is on the inside. Steggert (Mothers & Sons, Ragtime) does a marvelous job of depicting how uncomfortable Adam/Samantha is in his/her own skin, displaying a jittery awkwardness that keeps the audience on edge. Ziegler (The Last Match, A Delicate Ship) fills the play with a wide array of literary and pop-culture references, but each one has a critical connection to the story, from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future 2 and Marlo Thomas’s Free to Be You and Me. Even when Adam imitates Elmer Fudd, saying, “Shh . . . Be vewwy, vewwy quiet . . . I’m hunting wabbits!,” it relates to Jenny’s first appearance onstage, in a bunny costume at a Halloween party, where Adam quite adamantly tells her that he is not Frankenstein but Frankenstein’s monster. “Frankenstein was the guy who made the monster. I’m just the monster,” he points out. The cast is uniformly excellent, with Armbruster (Time Stands Still, Disgraced) and Koch (The Pillowman, Abundance) bringing just the right confusion to the parents, while Niebanck (A Walk in the Woods, Blood and Gifts) is quietly effective as the doctor who befriends Samantha but also stands to gain fame from their association. And Rittenhouse (The Commons of Pensacola) makes Jenny a kind of onstage representative of the audience, not quite understanding all of what is happening but compelled to find out more about Adam. Evoking such works as John Cameron Mitchell’s Tony-winning Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Emily Bentley Solomon’s award-winning adaptation of Daphne Scholinski’s memoir The Last Time I Wore a Dress, Boy also investigates doctors and parents playing god, which continues as science makes leaps and bounds in genetics. Sandra Goldmark’s living-room set features a close-but-not-exact duplicate of the furniture upside down on the walls and ceiling, as if Adam/Samantha is caught between two worlds, unable to settle into his/her place. Director Linsay Firman (Lucas Hnath’s Isaac’s Eye, Ziegler’s Photograph 51) cleverly navigates through the years, dealing with complex issues concerning traditional gender roles in a gentle, tender manner that threatens to explode at any moment. About halfway through the play, Jenny worries that Adam, who named himself after the first man on earth, is just like all the other men she’s met in her life. “I’m not like them,” he insists. No, he most certainly isn’t.

BIG LOVE

Thyona (Stacey Sargeant), Lydia (Rebecca Naomi Jones), and Olympia (Libby Winters) strut their stuff in Tina Landau’s new production of Charles Mee’s BIG LOVE at the Signature (photo by T Charles Erickson)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 15, $25
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org
www.charlesmee.org/plays.shtml

The night we went to see the new production of Charles Mee’s 2000 play, Big Love, at the Signature, technical difficulties delayed the start of the show, but it didn’t bother us one bit. Instead, we enjoyed extra time to take in the glorious beauty of Brett J. Banakis’s breathtaking set. The Irene Diamond theater is dazzlingly bright, mainly white and aglow in shimmering colors, with Austin Switser’s projection of a calm blue ocean at the back of the stage and smaller projections of hummingbirds, flowers, and other heartwarming scenes popping up at various places on the walls and floor. Above, dozens and dozens of flower arrangements hang from the ceiling, a heavenly garden in the sky. Meanwhile, romantic music plays, as gentle as the waves lapping gently out at sea. Onstage is a white claw-foot tub and a white door. Eventually the show got under way, as Lydia (Rebecca Naomi Jones) enters, removes her dirty wedding dress, and settles into the bath. She is interrupted by Giuliano (Preston Sadleir), a young man who is somewhat surprised to find a naked woman in the bathroom. Lydia explains that she is part of a contingent of women who have escaped their native Greece, where their fathers had signed a deal to marry them off to their cousins, and they are now seeking asylum in Italy as refugees. Lydia is joined by Olympia (Libby Winters) and Thyona (Stacey Sargeant), while first Giuliano’s grandmother, Bella (Lynn Cohen), shares some thoughts about husbands and sons with the young women, followed by the arrival of Giuliano’s uncle Piero (Christopher Innvar), a wealthy, slick-talking Mediterranean man who is not so sure he wants all of the women staying at his expansive villa; he finally relents, letting them stay for dinner. The three women are very different; Lydia is the most realistic, Olympia is an immature dreamer, and Thyona is the tough one, ready to take on the world if she has to. “The male is a biological accident, an incomplete female,” she says, “the product of a damaged gene, trapped in a twilight zone somewhere between apes and humans, always looking obsessively for some woman.” Lydia responds, “That’s maybe a little bit extreme,” to which Thyona argues, “Any woman, because he thinks if he can make some connection with a woman that will make him a whole human being! But it won’t. It never will.” Just as she is completing her rant, the women’s prospective husbands, Constantine (Ryan-James Hatanaka), Nikos (Bobby Steggert), and Oed (Emmanuel Brown), show up looking for their brides, and all hell is about to break loose.

Three cousins fly in from Greece, having followed their prospective brides to an Italian seaside villa in Charles Mee’s Aeschylus update (photo by T Charles Erickson)

Big Love is a contemporary restructuring of Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Maidens, one of the oldest known plays and the only existing section of the Danaid Tetralogy by the Father of Tragedy. Mee, whose other classicist works include Iphigenia 2.0, Trojan Women 2.0, and Orestes 2.0 and who has cited German dance-theater guru Pina Bausch as a major influence, throws just about everything he possibly can at this tale of fifty brides-to-be being chased by fifty determined cousins, from cake and tomatoes to Tiffany boxes and the heads of Ken and Barbie dolls. The potentially kissing cousins serve as their own Greek chorus, occasionally breaking out into song, a conceit that works best the first time around, when Lydia, Olympia, and Thyona suddenly grab microphones and, under hot spotlights, deliver a rousing rendition of the recently deceased Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.” The play is directed with a controlled abandon by frequent Mee collaborator Tina Landau (A Civil War Christmas, Old Hats), who holds nothing back in this kitchen-sink production where anything can happen. The uniformly solid cast, sporting Anita Yavich’s delightful costumes, also includes Piero’s house guests Eleanor (Ellen Harvey) and Leo (Nathaniel Stampley), who are excited by all the festivities, but it’s Jones, Winters, and Sargeant who clearly command the center of attention. Big Love, which is part of Signature’s Legacy Program — Mee was the theater’s 2007-8 playwright-in-residence — doesn’t always hit its ambitious targets, but it’s an awful lot of fun, taking advantage of every little detail it can, from the way Oed, Constantine, and Nikos enter in helicopters to the absurdist use of a movable door to the appearance of a trampoline for no apparent reason. But what, no cake for the audience?

BIG FISH

Father Edward (Norbert Leo Butz) introduces son Will (Zachary Unger) to a mermaid (Sarrah Strimel) in BIG FISH (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Neil Simon Theater
250 West 52nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through March 9, $49-$142
www.bigfishthemusical.com

Based on Daniel Wallace’s slim 1998 novel and Tim Burton’s overwrought 2003 film, Big Fish the musical has arrived on Broadway, but it doesn’t leave much of a splash. The story of fathers and sons and family legacies, Big Fish takes place in Alabama, opening with Will Bloom (Bobby Steggert) preparing to marry his sweetheart, Josephine (Krystal Joy Brown). Will asks his father, Edward (Norbert Leo Butz), not to tell any of his endless collection of stories at the wedding, but Edward can’t help himself, boldly spilling a secret that angers his son. The rest of the show goes back and forth between the present, in which Edward finds himself ill, and the past, as he fills his child’s (alternately played by Anthony Pierini and Zachary Unger) head with fantastical adventures that include witches, giants, mermaids, and dragons, all of which he claims to be true. Edward also details his romance with the love of his life, Will’s mother, Sandra (Kate Baldwin). Unfortunately, most of these tall tales come up short in the entertainment department.

Sandra (Kate Baldwin) and Edward (Norbert Leo Butz) fall in love in BIG FISH (photo by Paul Kolnik)

From the opening number, Big Fish establishes itself as a completely standard Broadway musical, featuring a treacly, uninteresting score by Andrew Lippa (I Am Harvey Milk, The Addams Family), a book by August that confuses more than it intrigues, unnecessary video projections by Benjamin Pearcy, and flashy choreography by director Susan Stroman (The Scottsboro Boys, The Producers) that manages to be both tired and overdone. Like lesser Burton films, of which Big Fish is certainly one, style trumps substance; not even such Broadway favorites as Butz (Catch Me If You Can, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), Baldwin (Finian’s Rainbow, Giant), and Brad Oscar (The Producers) as circus ringmaster Amos Calloway can save such drowning, hook-free numbers as “Be the Hero,” “Daffodils,” and “Start Over,” although Ciara Renée conducts herself well as the Witch in her Broadway debut and JC Montgomery is likable as Dr. Bennett. Despite its grand ambitions, this Big Fish ends up being all wet.

YANK! TICKET GIVEAWAY

Stu and Mitch sing but don’t ask and don’t tell in new military musical

YANK! A WWWII LOVE STORY
The Theatre at Saint Peter’s
619 Lexington Ave. at 54th St.
February 16 – March 21, $67.50
212-935-5820
www.yankthemusical.com

Named Best Musical by audiences at the 2005 New York Musical Theatre Festival, YANK! had a sold-out extended run in San Diego and now comes to the York Theatre in Midtown for five weeks. A throwback to old-fashioned Broadway musicals, YANK! tells the fictional love story between draftee Stu and Private Mitch, inspired by actual events experienced by gay and straight military men and women. Directed by Igor Goldin, written by lyricist David Zellnik and composer Joe Zellnik, and choreographed by Jeffry Denman (who also appears as Artie), YANK! stars Nancy Anderson, Ivan Hernandez, and Bobby Steggert.

GIVEAWAY: Tickets are $67.50, but twi-ny has five pairs to give away for select nights. To be eligible to win a pair, all you have to do is name which New York Yankees superstar gave up three baseball seasons while in his prime to fight for his country during WWII. Send your name, daytime phone number, and the correct answer to contest@twi-ny.com by Wednesday, February 10, at 3:00 pm. Five winners will be chosen at random. All entrants must be at least twenty-one years of age.