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» April 11, 2007: A Brush With Georgia O'Keeffe puts canvas to life at St. Luke's Theatre
» April 11, 2007: New York Times review by Neil Genzlinger
June 3rd, 2008
ARRIVING OFF-BROADWAY! A Brush with Georgia O’Keeffe puts Canvas to Life at St. Luke’s Theatre June 14th A Brush with Georgia O’Keeffe, a new play by Natalie Mosco slated for an open-ended Off-Broadway run will begin previews Saturday, June 14th at St. Luke’s Theatre before opening June 21st. Directed by Broadway veteran Robert Kalfin, the show is presented by Earl Productions and Briana Seferian in association with Edmund Gaynes and Julia Beardsley. The play stars Natalie Mosco as Georgia O’Keeffe, Virginia Roncetti and David Lloyd Walters.Mosco’s play follows the remarkable life of the celebrated American painter Georgia O’Keeffe. One of the most important artists of the 20th Century, O’Keeffe was once torn between a career as an artist or musician and seemed to strike a balance between the two by infusing her painting by what she termed “visual music”. As Alfred Stieglitz’s model, muse and lover, she became the widely known subject for a long series of photographs that were part of his artistic legacy. But it was only after Stieglitz’s death that she was finally free immerse herself in nature once again, the source that had truly defined her paintings and offered her 99 year old life its greatest meaning.
Playwright and actress Natalie Mosco has structured A Brush with Georgia O’Keeffe in a way that captures O’Keeffe’s abstract vision. By engaging the use of several different rhythmic styles the playwright brings the same aesthetic inherent in O’Keeffe’s painting into a drama about her life.
Natalie Mosco has played leading roles on Broadway (The Magic Show), in London (Grand Hotel) and was a member of the original Broadway production of Hair from which emerged an enduring satire called Haircut that she choreographed with film and stage director Baz Luhrman at the Sydney Theatre Company. She recently appeared in the Paper Mill Playhouse’s acclaimed revival of Follies. As a performer in Australia she played leading roles in musicals, plays and television series.
Robert Kalfin founded the multiple Tony and Obie award winning Chelsea Theatre Center. Some of his most notable credits include Broadway productions of Strider, Happy End (starring Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd), and as producer of Harold Prince’s production of Candide at CTC. He directed the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Mistress of the Inn with Tovah Feldshuh and The Prince of Homberg starring Frank Langella for the PBS Great Performance Series.
A Brush with Georgia O’Keeffe begins an open ended Off-Broadway engagement at St. Luke’s Theatre (308 W 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues) with previews Saturday, June 14th, Sunday, June 15th and Monday, June 16th. The play opens Saturday, June 21st. All performances including previews are Saturdays and Mondays at 8PM and Sundays at 2PM. Tickets are $56.50 and $31.50. Student tickets are $26.50. For tickets and information call Telecharge at (212) 239-6200 or go to telecharge.com.
April 11, 2007
Theater Review | 'Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh'
How a Queen Lost Her Heart Before She Lost Her Head
By Neil Genzlinger
Only three characters inhabit “Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh,” but this impeccably acted play has the sweep of a historical novel. » Read the Full Review
April 11, 2007
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http://www.backstage.com/bso/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003569660
Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh
April 10, 2007
By Nancy Ellen Shore
Joel Gross gives history a refreshingly human face in his richly detailed psychological study of an imagined love triangle between doomed Marie Antoinette; her portrait painter, Elisabeth Vigée le Brun; and a fictitious radical leftist playboy-aristocrat, Count Alexis de Ligne, lover to both. Spanning two politically explosive decades surrounding the French Revolution, all rioting, beheading, and battling transpire offstage in this elegant, intimate drawing-room-and-boudoir drama. Deftly weaving politics, history, art, and romance to create a highly sympathetic "Toinette" reflective of recent biographies belying the let-them-eat-cake stereotype, Gross underscores the young queen's total unpreparedness for marriage, sexual inexperience, and political naiveté.
Under Robert Kalfin's expert direction, luminous Amanda Jones' Marie Antoinette progresses from innocence to experience in a stunning, emotionally complex tour-de-force portrayal. She begins as a fun-loving, well-meaning young woman determined to uphold majestic ideals learned from her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, and moves through sexual awakening and motherhood to a fierce popular backlash that she cannot understand, gaining a courageous, stoic maturity during her final days in a Paris prison. Summoning the full strength of her acting prowess late in Act 2 for a scene requiring passionate indignation, with her graceful upper-class demeanor, intelligence, and simmering sensuality, eyes ablaze, Jones recalls a young Elizabeth Taylor. She's well-matched by Jonathan Kells Phillips' count, who begins as a flirtatious, posturing fop, grows into emotional and political maturity, and ends up disillusioned and broken by revolutionary ideals he helped foster. Unfortunately, Samantha Ives is miscast as the lowborn painter. Playing a single note of cheery, no-nonsense practicality throughout, Ives' lacks the disarming sensuality of a calculating seductress who uses her connections with powerful men to rise to 18th-century French society's pinnacle as a celebrated artist and the queen's best friend.
Historical exposition is all too apparent in one or two scenes, and the show runs long at two wordy hours, but that's nitpicking. Give me this kind of passionate, inspired wordiness anytime. T. Michael Hall's costumes are dazzling, and Kevin Judge brilliantly creates the illusion of depth and space on the tiny, off-kilter stage painted a stark, minimalist white.
Presented by Earl Productions at the 45th Street Theatre, 354 W. 45th St., NYC. April 5-29. Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 2 p.m. (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.
April 11, 2007
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nytheatre.com review
Kimberly Wadsworth · April 6, 2007
"You are so very good with the surface of things," says Marie Antoinette to her friend and portrait artist Elisabeth le Brun at one point in Joel Gross's new play The Color of Flesh. It is a fitting compliment for a socialite in 18th-century France, in the years just before the Revolution when the two women first become acquainted. But a surface show is only part of the story—as this staging from Earl Productions soon proves.
Le Brun begins the play as an aspiring painter trying to escape from a childhood spent in poverty. One of her subjects—and an occasional paramour—is the Count Alexis de Ligne, a charming nobleman with a reputation as a Lothario. Le Brun sees her romance with the Count as the perfect chance to become acquainted with France's new queen, Marie Antoinette, and to become the Queen's official portrait artist. Le Brun convinces the Count to charm the young Queen; but the Count is a romantic in his ideals as well as in his affairs, and uses his audience with the Queen to press forward his political ideas of revolution and equality as well. For her part, Marie, just barely out of her teens and homesick for her native Austria, welcomes the companionship of them both, and by the time the Count sails for America on a quixotic mission to serve under Lafayette in the Revolutionary War, Marie is just as worried about his well being as is Le Brun. Over the play's 20-year span, covering the decades just before the French Revolution, the three are irrevocably altered as the Count encounters real revolution, Le Brun's pursuit of "beauty" starts ringing hollow, and Marie grows more desperate for real companions she can trust.
As Marie Antoinette, Amanda Jones ably gives the most nuanced performance of the night; her character needs to go from being a sheltered, naïve ingénue of 18 to a disillusioned—and dethroned—woman of almost 40. The play takes a sympathetic view of her character, and even comes up with a very plausible defense for the famous "let them eat cake" quip; but rather than being saintly, she is presented as ill-prepared, struggling as best she knows in a situation where she is way over her head, and when even her closest friends are a little too awed by her title to give good counsel. Jones, a veteran of Jean Cocteau Rep, rises to the performance with aplomb. But Samantha Ives and Jonathan Kells Phillips also do admirably as Le Brun and the Count, whether engaging in playful banter at the show's opening, or in a heartfelt meeting of the minds towards the show's close. In their scenes with Marie Antoinette, they also walk a fine line between genuine friendship and the admiration of loyal subjects.
Even the "servants" are well served—Hugo Salazar, in the non-speaking role of a footman, sets the stage before each new scene, but as the French Revolution draws near, you can see the smiling graciousness with which he conducts his duties start to give way to a peasant's frustration.
That set, designed by Kevin Judge, is Spartan in its simplicity, with only a few pieces of furniture and a bare white wall standing in for scenes in Paris, Versailles, and Vienna. But I didn't miss a more elaborate set at all: the tiny 45th Street Theater would have been overwhelmed by anything larger, and the cast, richly outfitted in T. Michael Hall's costumes, were even more highlighted by the sparseness of their surroundings. Similarly, the most elaborate lighting effects from designer Paul Hudson are a series of projected title cards giving the date before each scene, and Merek Royce Press's sound design also just gives us a touch of birdsong in the garden here, a hint of a waltz at the Paris Opera there. Clearly, director Robert Kalfin knows that the characters and the story are the real stars of this show, and sought to concentrate chiefly on them rather than trying to recreate the gardens at Versailles onstage and dazzling us with a surface show—for appearances and the surface of things may be pretty, but they aren't the whole story.