Estelle Parsons, best known of late for her television role as Roseanne’s mother, is to appear at La Mama ETC beginning May 28 in “Extended Forecast,” by the German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz.
Parsons, 65, who on Tuesday is to be honored by the Retirement Research Foundation for her work on “Roseanne,” plays a woman about to move to an old-age home.
– Amid the raft of recent closings, the one surprise is “The Song of Jacob Zulu,” after a run of just over a month. The show closed Sunday, a day before it received six Tony nominations.
The show, an anti-apartheid drama by Tug Yourgrau, featuring the a cappella singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, received mixed reviews, but attendance figures were quite respectable, hovering around 75 percent throughout the run. In addition, the producers said this week, the show seemed to have found the core black audience that it had particularly sought.
“We advertised heavily in the black press, on black radio stations and we had a lot of contact with the black churches,” said Albert Poland, the production’s general manager. As a result, he said, “the audience was 50 percent African-American, very unusual for a Broadway show.”
The problem seems to have been twofold. First, the discount ticket program that initially drew people to the show never spawned enough word of mouth to spur full-price sales. Second, just at the time when the producers were expecting advance sales to take off, they died.
When Poland and the show’s producing entity, Steppenwolf Theater Company of Chicago, looked ahead only a couple of weeks, they envisioned not being able to pay their bills.
– The Rasputin of contemporary musicals, “Annie Warbucks,” rises again. Headed now, as rumored, for Off Broadway, the show is to open at the Variety Arts Theater on Aug. 9. Producers Ben Sprecher, Bill Miller and Dennis J. Grimaldi said the show would cost $1 million to stage.
