The Broadway premiere of “Angels in America: Perestroika,” the concluding half of Tony Kusher’s much acclaimed two-part drama, and the Washington opening of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Kentucky Cycle,” highlight the fall theater season on the East Coast.
In art, the big draw will be a 325-work retrospective of Joan Miro at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in honor of the 100th anniversary of the great 20th Century artist’s birth.
Other attractions this season include the New York premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” the Gregory Harrison stage musical version of the 1970s hit film “Paper Moon,” Richard Thomas’ star turn in “Richard II” at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre, a National Gallery of Art show of works by John James Audubon and an exhibition of some of the greatest American paintings of the 19th Century at New York’s National Academy of Design.
Last season’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches,” part one of Kushner’s parable of modern times, won four Tony Awards, five Drama Desk Awards, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Part two, “Perestroika,” picks up with the cliffhanging note on which “Millennium Approaches” ended.
After “Perestroika” opens Nov. 11 at Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre, the two productions will be performed in alternating repertoire using the same eight-member cast of Kathleen Chalfant, David Marshall Grant, Marcia Gay Harden, Ron Leibman, Joe Mantello, Ellen McLaughlin, Stephen Spinella and Jeffrey Wright, with Tony Award-winning George C. Wolfe again directing.
“Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” starring Michael Damian, of “The Young and the Restless,” opens at Broadway’s Minskoff Theatre Nov. 10. (It opens in Chicago on Sept. 26.) It is a pop musical retelling of the Biblical story of Joseph and his 11 brothers. The lyrics for Webber’s music are by Tim Rice, who shared an Oscar this year for his work in the animated “Aladdin.”(
Webber’s much-awaited “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Glenn Close as the ill-fated Nora Desmond, is playing Los Angeles this season (opening at the L.A. Shubert Dec. 2) and comes to Broadway in the fall of 1994.)
“Paper Moon,” opening on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre Dec. 5, brings music to the story of a Depression-era con-man and a young girl who might be his daughter, following them on a swindler’s tour of middle America. The 1973 Oscar-winning movie starred Ryan O’Neal as the con-man and his daughter Tatum as the girl, a role 11-year-old Natalie Delucia will play on stage.
Nancy Marchand, remembered as the mother in A.R. Gurney’s “The Cocktail Hour,” has returned to Broadway this season in the surreal “Black Comedy/White Liars,” in a limited run at the Roundabout Theatre that concludes Oct. 3.
Following it into the Roundabout Oct. 13 is a new nostalgia revue, “A Rodgers and Hammerstein Celebration,” featuring numbers from “Oklahoma,” “State Fair,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “Flower Drum Song,” “Cinderella” and “The Sound of Music.”
The British hit “The Madness of George III,” starring Tony-winner Nigel Hawthorne (“Shadowlands”) as the much-maligned king, will play the Brooklyn Academy of Music Sept. 28-Oct. 10 and Baltimore’s Morris A. Mechanic Theatre Oct. 12-31 in a limited American tour that does not include Chicago.
Despite the negative reviews from critics, Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre is playing a third season, commencing Nov. 3 with “Timon of Athens”-Shakespeare in the jazz age starring Brian Bedford and featuring the music of Duke Ellington.
Premiering Tuesday at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which originally sponsored the work as part of its “New Plays” program, the two-part, 6 1/2-hour “Kentucky Cycle” is the major event of the capital’s theatrical season. It stars Stacey Keach in a melodramatic saga of a much-troubled Appalachian family over 200 years of American history.
Though faulted by many Kentuckians for its inaccuracies and false stereotypes, it received rave reviews in regional productions in Seattle and Los Angeles, and won a number of awards in addition to the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Richard Thomas has combined his television career with a lot of serious, often risk-taking stage work. He comes to “Richard II” at Washington’s prestigious (formerly the Folger) Shakespeare Theatre Sept. 20 following a much talked about triumph in “Danton’s Death” at Houston’s Alley Theatre.
The Museum of Modern Art’s Joan Miro retrospective, covering the free-spirited surrealist’s work from 1915 through 1970, will be the first to be arranged in accordance with Miro’s penchant for producing his creations in series.
Curator Carolyn Lanchner said that presenting the 325 objects in the exhibition in series form is necessary to understand “an art founded on a symbiosis of passionate impulse and calculated design. In Miro the visionary poet and the meticulous craftsman met to create a universe whose central metaphor is passage-the reciprocal, converse and ceaseless mutations between the terrestrial and the celestial, the sensuous and the spiritual.”
Miro (1893-1983) himself simply said, “my life and work are governed by alternating phases.”
Among the series represented in the show are his “dream paintings” from the 1920s and his 1940-1941 “constellation” series. Opening Oct. 13, the exhibition will display 175 paintings as well as drawings, prints, book illustrations, sculpture and ceramics.
The National Academy of Design’s just opened “American Treasures: 19th Century Paintings From the National Academy Collection,” is a feast for lovers of traditional, representational American art. Though heavy on American Impressionism and landscapes, especially those of the fabled Hudson River school, the exhibition includes period portraits, still lifes and genre image paintings as well.
Among the notable artists represented are landscapists Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church and George Inness, and Impressionist, still life and genre painters George Bellows, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Louis Comfort Tiffany.
The portraits include one by Samuel F.B. Morse, one of the more notable founding members of the New York academy.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is letting its new costume department curator Richard Martin take center stage this fall with its just opened fashion exhibition “Versailles 1973: American Fashion on the World Stage.”
Drawn from the Metropolitan’s Costume Institute collection, the lavish show recreates the landmark 1973 Versailles exposition in which American designers Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows, Halston, Anne Klein and Oscar de la Renta had their collections matched with those of five leading French couturiers-an event credited with propelling American design and American sportswear to the center of the world fashion stage.
“French Drawings from the Pierpont Morgan Library” is a major exhibition opening Tuesday that includes works by Watteau, Fragonard, Ingres, Delacroix, Degas, Cezanne and Gauguin. Among the 125 works on view will be French mannerist Jacques Bellange’s “Orion Carrying Diana on his Shoulders,” Fragonard’s “He Won the Prize” and “The Gardens of the Villa d’Este,” Delacroix’s vivid watercolor “Royal Tiger,” Degas’ study of a woman for his memorable painting “The Rape” and a figure study of Cezanne’s for his famous “The Card Players.”
On Oct. 6, the Whitney Museum will open a showing of Arshile Gorky’s three major paintings “Betrothals” and, on Nov. 5, the first major survey of work by West Coast installation and performance artist Mike Kelley.
Opening Wednesday at the Morgan is a smaller exhibit honoring French author Antoine deSaint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince.” It includes the original manuscript of the children’s classic, published 50 years ago, numerous illustrations and 20 rare photographs of the heroic aviator/author, whose adult fiction and memoirs remain highly prized as well.
“18th Century Dutch Watercolors from the Rijksmuseum Print Room” features 70 rare works from the Amsterdam museum, on view at New York’s Frick Collection in an exhibition opening Tuesday.
The National Gallery of Art’s exhibition of John James Audubon works, drawn from the famous New York Historical Society collection, opens Oct. 3 and includes 90 original paintings by the naturalist used in “The Birds of America.” The images are life size, and the works show Audubon’s artistic progression from single profiles to elaborate canvases showing his subjects in their natural habitats.
On Sept. 24, Washington’s National Museum of American Art opens twin exhibitions with western themes-“Pueblo Indian Watercolors,” showing work by Native American artists of the Southwest between World War I and the early 1950s, and “The Arvin Gottlieb Collection: Paintings From the American Southwest,” featuring artists from New Mexico’s “Taos School” and representing work completed by artists in the American West between 1900 and 1940.
Jacob Kainen, a lesser-known but significant abstract expressionist of the mid-1950s, is featured in exhibitions at both the National Museum of American Art and the capital’s Corcoran Gallery. The N.M.A.A. show is a major retrospective featuring 75 paintings by Kainen, now 83. The Corcoran show concentrates on Kainen’s career from 1978 to the present. It includes seven large paintings and three drawings. Both shows opened Sept. 11.
Continuing its concentration on art involved in highly personal women’s issues, the National Museum of Women in the Arts has just opened “Forefront: Hollis Sigler-Breast Cancer Journal: Walking with the Ghosts of My Grandmothers.”
Described as “a powerful example of the link that can be forged between art and life-a link that empowers women to speak out for their health rights,” the exhibition of 13 grimly intimate images relates the Chicago artist’s response to her 1992 diagnosis of breast cancer and struggle with the disease.
On Wednesday, the Baltimore Museum of Art opens a real crowd-pleaser, William Wegman’s series of Weimaraners-in-costume photographs illustrating the children’s fables “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” Modeling in a variety of roles are his beloved, sorrowful-eyed hound Fay Ray and her daughter Battina.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has just opened its fall season with “Robert Cumming: Cone of Vision,” a survey dealing with the objects on which the artist has obsessively focused over the last two decades: the disc, the cone, the boat, the house and the chair.
