THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Tuesday, November 1, 2016

FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh

Lana Picciano

PAGES: 13, including this page

November 1, 2016

Producers of ‘Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812’

Offer to Settle Dispute

By Michael Paulson

Seeking to end an acrimonious dispute that has cast a shadow over one of this fall’s most promising new

Broadway musicals, the producers of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” offered on Monday to settle

litigation with the nonprofit that commissioned the show.

The three lead producers of the musical, Howard and Janet Kagan and Paula Marie Black, said in a joint

statement that they would agree to describe the nonprofit, Ars Nova, as it wished in the show’s program, if the

nonprofit would drop two legal claims that it filed late last week.

The dispute has fascinated Broadway, a largely for-profit industry that has become heavily dependent on

nonprofit theaters to nurture the most artistically ambitious shows. Billing disputes are not uncommon on

Broadway, where producers and artists often jockey for position in Playbills, but disputes that lead to public

battles and litigation are extremely rare.

Ars Nova, which not only commissioned the show but also presented its first production, has been seeking to

have the program include the words “the Ars Nova Production of” before the show’s title. The nonprofit says

such language was agreed upon in a contract signed by Mr. Kagan, who discovered the show while he was a

board member of Ars Nova.

But the show, now starring the pop singer Josh Groban, is in previews on Broadway, and the program does not

include those words.

After several weeks of failed negotiations to reach a compromise, Ars Nova said last week that it was seeking

arbitration with the producers over their alleged breach of contract, and was suing Mr. Kagan for allegedly

breaching his fiduciary duty to the Ars Nova board.

Mr. Kagan, who had previously declined to explain his thinking, issued a statement with his fellow producers

on Monday saying that he would concede the language in exchange for ending the battle. The statement made

clear that the producers believed they had legal grounds for the billing language they chose (Ars Nova right

above the title, but without the ‘production of’ language) based on more recent legal agreements concerning the

show and changes to the show as it has developed.

“We sincerely want to end this disagreement so that the incredible artistry at the core of this production can,

once again, be our primary focus,” the statement said.

In an interview on Monday night, Renee Blinkwolt, the managing director of Ars Nova, said that the theater had

called a board meeting for Tuesday morning to consider the offer. She said the settlement offer had come in a

formal legal document that would have to be reviewed.

A24

“The board has to consider and vote on any response, but I remain hopeful that we can resolve this,” Ms.

Blinkwolt said. “This has always only been about credit for Ars Nova, so if we are able to get our contractual

billing, I would say that’s positive — we would love to be able to accept that.”

November 1, 2016

Review: In ‘Coriolanus,’ a Politician for a Campaign Season

By Charles Isherwood

You don’t have to squint too hard to discern unsettling contemporary relevance in the Red Bull Theater’s

gripping new production of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus,” which opened on Sunday at the Barrow Street Theater.

The director, Michael Sexton, all but pulls out a pen and starts highlighting from the get-go.

With the cast members wearing contemporary clothes — conservative suits or slouchy casual wear, depending

on their class — the time, clearly, is now; the place, America. This is hardly an unusual approach for

Shakespearean productions in any season, but “Coriolanus,” a late tragedy, exposes the dangerous rifts in the

newly republican, deeply divided and highly stratified Roman society that ultimately led it to the brink of

violent collapse.

With this most disturbing presidential campaign drawing to a close, and Americans by the millions tearing their

hair out, setting this particular play in a simulated United States of today carries greater weight.

At the center of the plot, and underscoring the eerie resonance, is a volatile, polarizing election. The title

character, played by the magnetic actor Dion Johnstone, is a Roman Army general who, after vanquishing the

Romans’ latest foes, the Volscians, returns and is persuaded to run for consul — to add a political laurel to his

martial ones. Doffing his camouflage, he dons a sleek suit and red-and-blue-striped tie. (Rare is the American

politician running for public office who chooses, say, fuchsia.)

What results is a virulent and essentially disputed election, when the people, whom Coriolanus fundamentally

holds in contempt, rise up against his campaign and, by extension, the senators and upper-crust Romans who

support him. Urged on by their representatives, the tribunes Sicinius Velutus (Stephen Spinella) and Junius

Brutus (Merritt Janson), they clamor for revolt.

Some in the audience are given red or black chits to cast votes yea or nay, and we later see the ballot box being

smashed. Ugly point taken.

But there are also intriguing correspondences between the title character and today’s prominent political figures

that Mr. Sexton’s production implicitly underscores. Coriolanus contains multitudes, it would seem. He is

demonized by certain sectors of the public. He is stiff when acting the role of the politician. And he has a

volatile temper, an undisciplined voice (“What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent”) and an ego that

drives him to threaten the republic when his election falters.

I could go on, but is anyone really craving more references to this infernal election?

Fortunately, Mr. Sexton’s streamlined production (minor characters are cut), staged on a bare platform with the

audience on three sides, won’t just have you sitting in your seat, bemoaning the troubling future of our own

country. It will also hold your attention in its own right, through simple but forceful staging and superb acting.

C2

Although he is among the least inward-looking of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, Coriolanus, as embodied

by Mr. Johnstone, has a powerful dignity and smoldering eloquence, never more so than when he is angrily

resisting his allies’ promptings to have him woo the people with flattering speeches. His acts should speak for

themselves, he insists, eventually ripping off that pandering tie.

Ultimately, his outrage at his treatment by the Roman populace leads him to abandon the city, and to join its

enemies, the Volscians, to lead an attack on it. Mr. Johnstone radiates a dangerous hunger for vengeance — and

a soldierly virility — that make his actions more than an idle threat.

As the tribunes whipping up the fever against what they see as, you might say, a rigged election (although they

themselves are scheming to manipulate it), Mr. Spinella and Ms. Janson are cool and glibly malevolent. They

exploit the people’s dissatisfaction and poverty — in an early scene, we hear plebeians complaining bitterly of

their lack of food and railing against the elites, specifically Coriolanus — for their own ends.

As Menenius, a Roman senator and supporter of Coriolanus’ bid for consulship, Patrick Page gives a smooth,

beautifully spoken performance, his suave baritone and patrician bearing ideally suited to the character, who

eventually tries to persuade Coriolanus to return to the fold, to little avail.

More successful in the same enterprise are the women in Coriolanus’ life: his wife, Virgilia (a grave Rebecca

S’Manga Frank), and his domineering mother, Volumnia, played by the superb New Zealand-born actor Lisa

Harrow. Early on, Volumnia most suavely asks her son to play the politician (read in this context: hypocrite),

but it is also she who later seals his dark fate by beseeching him, when others have failed, to abandon his

vengeful campaign. Ms. Harrow brings a regal presence to her role, and her delivery of Shakespeare’s verse is

hypnotic in its beauty: What loving son could resist a mother of such commanding eloquence?

In other significant roles, Aaron Krohn exudes military honor as Cominius, leader of the Roman armies, who

gives the title character the name Coriolanus for his valor in conquering the city of Corioli. And as Coriolanus’

primary combatant, the Volscian general Tullus Aufidius, Matthew Amendt has a wolflike ferocity that makes

their antagonistic encounters on the field persuasive. His smoldering anger at Coriolanus’ capitulation to his

mother’s wish for him to return his allegiance to Rome inspires him to concoct the plot that will ultimately lead

to Coriolanus’ death.

The title figure and the trajectory that leads to his violent demise are part of a turbulent portrait of Roman

society in a state of upheaval. But you might say that there is a simple takeaway — one that the current

presidential campaign amply demonstrates — whatever your party allegiance. No matter your history of

achievement, or maybe no matter your history of anything, enter politics at your peril.

November 1, 2016

Review: Sisters at War in ‘Sweet,’ a Triangle Amid ’60s Tumult

By Laura Collins-Hughes

As a little girl chasing fireflies in her tiny Kansas town, Nina always caught more than her big sister, Retha.

“Mama used to say it was because I was so sweet,” Nina says, reminiscing.

“That was bees, Nina,” Retha corrects her. “Mama used to say you were sweet, and that’s how come you got

stung all the time.”

These days, Nina’s the one doing the stinging, and Mama isn’t around to stop her. Harrison David Rivers’s

crowd-pleasing new play, “Sweet,” at the National Black Theater, opens on the eve of Mama’s funeral and soon

pits sister against sister in a competition for George, the boy next door. Unfortunately for Retha (Maechi

Aharanwa), she and Nina (Renika Williams) operate by very different sets of rules.

George (W. Tré Davis), their old playmate, does appear to be a catch. Newly graduated with honors from

Columbia, he’s come home to ponder a job offer. It’s June 1968, and he’s thinking of moving to Chicago to

become a reporter. Nina, fresh out of high school, looks at him and sees her ticket to the wider, fast-changing

world. Retha, who takes in laundry for a living, sees in him the man she’s always loved.

Directed by Raelle Myrick-Hodges on a set (by Matthew McAdon) strung with clotheslines, Mr. Rivers’s play

aims for poetry but settles for cliché. Luckily, Ms. Aharanwa is on hand to elevate the script, bringing a kind of

glow to the dreamy, dutiful Retha, whose own stubborn selflessness is her undoing.

Well, that and the fact that George, who supposedly loves her, must have left all of his self-discipline back in

Morningside Heights. Mr. Davis has a charming chemistry with Ms. Aharanwa; at Sunday’s matinee, members

of the audience were softly rooting for Retha and George to get together.

But George, alas, is the very model of passivity. He made it all the way through college without a girlfriend, yet

he doesn’t bother to resist the advances of the bold and frivolous Nina, whose appeal, beyond her prettiness,

Ms. Williams doesn’t make clear. As sisters go, she’s basically the Bad Seed, though no one seems to pick up

on this.

The political upheaval and the space exploration of the late ’60s are faint background noise in “Sweet,” which

gets its strongest sense of the period from the occasional bit of pop music and the handsome, spot-on costumes

(by Ari Fulton).

The plot, on the other hand, is a real throwback.

C4

November 1, 2016

Review: ‘In the Room,’ About Lessons Learned at a Writing

Workshop

By Anita Gates

All six of them are instantly hateable. The way they enter, slam their books and things on the table and angrily

take their seats, in unison. Then Rainer (Suzy Jane Hunt) arrives, inconsiderately late, and she turns out to be

married to a movie star.

In Lawrence Dial’s intimate drama “In the Room,” the characters have shown up for a playwriting class. Their

space used to be a small theater; now the rooms are rented for various purposes. (Sometimes you can hear the

martial arts class next door.) The teacher, Seymour (Matt Harrington), would rather be writing. He has some

past connection with Rainer, which the play’s director, Adam Knight, lets us know with a momentary touch of

Seymour’s hand on her shoulder.

Theresa Rebeck also presented characters in a writing workshop in her slick Broadway comedy “Seminar,” but

“In the Room” has more in common with Annie Baker’s Off Broadway play “Circle Mirror Transformation,”

set in a community-center drama class. No one here is likely to get to the big time; they may, however, learn a

little about themselves.

I identified with Scott (Jacob Perkins), who has just moved to the city — last week — from a small town where

the tallest building is four stories. And with Clementine (Susan Neuffer), who is decades older than everybody

else and has lived in the same Greenwich Village apartment since Madonna was young.

The pleasures of Mr. Dial’s play, presented by the Slant Theater Project, are threefold: Watching the motley

assortment of students emerge as real people; laughing at the barely concealed connections of their fiction to

their real lives; and taking the course along with them. When Seymour asks the students, “In one word, what is

your play about?,” you get to come up with an answer of your own — for whatever project you might be

working on, or just for your life.

“In the Room” offers no flashes of universal revelation, but it’s solid and smart. These seemingly angry people

have good reasons for defensiveness, but a generous overlay of wistful humor ends up making them pleasant

company.

And the cast’s fierce commitment renders the experience — seeing a bare-bones production in a third-floor

walk-up, with an audience of mere dozens — thoroughly transporting.

C4

November 1, 2016

Tammy Grimes, the Original ‘Unsinkable Molly Brown,’ Dies

at 82

By Anita Gates

Tammy Grimes, the throaty actress and singer who conquered Broadway at the age of 26, winning a Tony

Award for her performance in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” and went on to a distinguished stage career,

died on Sunday in Englewood, N.J. She was 82.

The death was confirmed by Duncan MacArthur, her nephew.

Ms. Grimes was largely unknown in 1960 when she was cast as Molly, the rags-to-riches turn-of-the-century

socialite-philanthropist who survived the sinking of the Titanic. The show’s producers, who clearly considered

the music and lyrics by Meredith Willson more marketable than their female lead, declined to put her name

above the title, which meant that (because of the Tony regulations of the time) she could be nominated only in

the featured-actress category.

Her second Tony, for a 1969 revival of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” was decidedly for lead actress. Clive

Barnes, writing in The New York Times, called Ms. Grimes’s interpretation of her character, the reluctant

1930s divorcée Amanda Prynne, “outrageously appealing” and “so ridiculously artificial that she just has to be

for real.”

Coward was a major influence on Ms. Grimes’s career. In 1958, he saw her performing at the Manhattan

nightclub Downstairs at the Upstairs and cast her as the lead in “Look After Lulu,” a new comedy he had

adapted from a Feydeau farce. In 1964 she appeared in “High Spirits,” a musical version of Coward’s “Blithe

Spirit” (directed but not written by Coward), playing the ghost of the leading man’s first wife. The cast included

Beatrice Lillie as a medium trying to summon her and Edward Woodward as the husband. It was one of more

than a dozen Broadway productions in which Ms. Grimes starred.

Her mop of blond-red hair, a pointed chin, a wide mouth and a ski-slope nose that was often compared to Bob

Hope’s gave her a distinctive look.

“I never looked like an ingénue,” Ms. Grimes acknowledged in a 1960 interview with The New York Times

Magazine. But that didn’t matter to her, she said, because “I don’t want to be America’s Sweetheart; I’d rather

be something they don’t quite understand.”

Tammy Lee Grimes was born in Lynn, Mass., on Jan. 30, 1934, the second of three children of Luther Nichols

Grimes, who managed the Brookline Country Club, and the former Eola Willard Niles. Many fans believed Ms.

Grimes was British, partly because of her Mid-Atlantic accent, which she attributed to a finishing-school

education.

She attended Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Mass., and graduated from Stephens College in

Missouri, which she often said she had chosen because of its drama program. Then she went to work for the

B14

Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut and studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York,

where the playwright Anita Loos saw her in a student presentation and chose her for the title role in “The

Amazing Adele.”

That show closed during out-of-town tryouts but did get Ms. Grimes noticed. So did her Off Broadway debut, in

“The Littlest Revue,” a 1956 musical production whose cast also included Joel Grey.

Critics loved Ms. Grimes from the beginning. Howard Taubman hated “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” but

praised Ms. Grimes as its “buoyant interpreter” in introducing lively, often comic song-and-dance numbers like

“Belly Up to the Bar, Boys” and “I Ain’t Down Yet.”

Walter Kerr compared her more than once to a stormy force of nature. Of her 1976 performance in Neil

Simon’s “California Suite,” he wrote, “Everything out of her face is thunderously funny,” and a year later he

reported that as Elmire in “Tartuffe” she called down “laughs sharp as thunderclaps.”

Ms. Grimes made films, including “Play It as It Lays,” “The Last Unicorn” and “Slaves of New York,” and

appeared in dozens of television movies and series (including her own short-lived sitcom, “The Tammy Grimes

Show,” in 1966). But the starring role in the film version of “Molly Brown” (1964) went to Debbie Reynolds,

who had a more traditional Hollywood look and sound.

The stage was Ms. Grimes’s first home. The Off Broadway productions in which she starred included Marc

Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock,” at City Center in 1960, and a 1979 Roundabout Theater production of

Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” with her daughter, Amanda Plummer. Ms. Grimes also worked at the

Stratford Festival in Ontario, performing at least once with her first husband, Christopher Plummer; in “Henry

IV, Part I” (1958), he was Bardolph and she was Mistress Quickly.

Ms. Grimes said she fell in love with Mr. Plummer after seeing him on Broadway in “The Dark Is Light

Enough” (1955), a comedy in which he played a 19th-century Hungarian count. They married in 1956 and

divorced in 1960. She married Jeremy Slate, a television actor, in 1966, and they divorced the next year. She

was with her third husband, the musician and composer Richard Bell, from 1971 until his death in 2005. Ms.

Grimes is survived by her brother, Nick, and her daughter.

She quickly developed a reputation for star attitude. In 1961, Earl Wilson referred to her in his New York Post

column as “terrible-tempered Tammy Grimes” and reported that she had been known to “hit or bite her fellow

actors.” Sometimes she was more politely called mercurial.

In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor in 1980, she addressed that perception. “Well, I was very

young,” she said. “It’s difficult to know what to do with success when you’re so young.”

Her last feature film role was as Ally Sheedy’s Old World mother in “High Art” (1998). Her final Broadway

appearance was a supporting role in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending” (1989) starring

Vanessa Redgrave.

In 2003 Ms. Grimes was part of the rotating cast of “24 Evenings of Wit and Wisdom,” a production of Off

Broadway readings about aging. At the time, she told a writer for Theatermania that she was “about as

ambitious as a water buffalo.”

Her voice, once described as a “lyric baritone,” also aged, but if it became whispery it also remained strong, as

she demonstrated in 2010 with “Miss Tammy Grimes: Favorite Songs and Stories,” a solo cabaret show at the

Metropolitan Room in Manhattan.

In a 1964 interview with The Saturday Evening Post, Ms. Grimes speculated about old age and a life that she

fully intended to dedicate to work. “Perhaps all you have left in the end is a scrapbook filled with old newspaper

clippings,” she said.

She quickly reconsidered, however, sounding a bit like the debutante she once was. “If things get too bad,” she

added, “well, there are always far-off cities and cowboys with guitars, new clothes, music boxes and large funds

of traveler’s checks.”

November 1, 2016

4C

November 1, 2016

A18

November 1, 2016

27