Tag Archives: Barry Cutler

In Whitley County covers BroadwayWorld recognition – PLUS, video of numbers from “Life is a Cabaret” #cabaret4relay

9 February 2018

2 Comments

Thank you, Bridgett Hernandez and In Whitley County, for this lovely coverage of my recent BroadwayWorld Detroit / BroadwayWorld / Cennarium Award for Ann Arbor Civic Theatre’s Mystery of Edwin Drood. And for the connections you make between play and work and how important it is to have both.

Plus, enjoy these videos of numbers from the final dress rehearsal of “Life is a Cabaret” – click to view. Thanks, Lia, for capturing! You can also view as a continuous playlist here – more videos will be added as available.

_________________________________

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital).

In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan.

My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

Canton Chamber of Commerce Business Spotlight on “Life is a Cabaret,” February 7, benefiting American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life (VIDEO)

23 January 2018

4 Comments

Enjoy this video coverage of our upcoming cabaret performance: https://youtu.be/B5HoWBkM3wU – the Canton Chamber sure did a lovely job covering our event. Cabaret producer/director Denise Staffeld is exceptional, isn’t she? As is music director Kevin Robert Ryan – and, yes, you get to hear me sing in this clip. (And, to my animal loving friends, I have nothing to do with that coyote commercial in the middle of this, nor am I particularly thrilled with the guidance it offers toward the end.) Tix for Feb 7 are going fast! Click here.

A live musical fundraiser featuring Broadway tunes. Hosted by Relay for Life in partnership with Women’s Life Society Chapter 827, Chicks for Charity. Enjoy delicious desserts & a Cold Stone Creamery Ice Cream Bar; while bidding on the Silent Auction. Cash Bar will also be available. Join us with residents of Canton, Plymouth and surrounding communities to kick-off the annual fund-raising season. All proceeds and donations will benefit the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life of Canton and Plymouth to attack cancer from every angle. Be entertained at ‘Life is a Cabaret’ while attacking cancer. Relay For Life of Canton and Plymouth is May 19, 2018 in Heritage Park, Canton. Relay for Life is a team fundraising event where team members take turns walking around the pond in Heritage Park. A complementary luncheon for Cancer Survivors is also held during the event. Relay is the signature fundraising event of the American Cancer Society. Reception 6pm-7pm. Performance 7pm-9pm.

www.cantonvillagetheater.org

Ticket Information

Adults  $22.00

Senior  $22.00

Youth  $22.00

Tickets: Online or visit or call the theater 10am-2pm Monday-Friday. 734-394-5300 ext 3. PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE. CALLS WILL BE RETURNED WITHIN 24 HOURS OR WEEKEND CALLS BY END OF DAY MONDAY. All ages must have a ticket. No refunds or exchanges.

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital). In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

“She skated better when she was enraged.” I, Tonya (Plus, poetry readings, resolutions, and cabarets, oh my!)

14 January 2018

13 Comments

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

I, Tonya is a troubling film … and not for just the obvious reasons. Yes, director Craig Gillespie’s take on the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan scandal does a good job highlighting America’s obsessive and misogynistic need to pit women against one another, regardless the tragic outcomes that may result. Yes, Steve Rogers’ script addresses the notion that competitive ice skating is a sport that often favors artifice over reality, faux-elegance over athleticism. The film nails the tragic economic disparity in this country that can toxify and curdle unfulfilled and unrecognized raw talent into resentment, rage, and unbridled violence.

Yet, it’s the film’s tone that I found most unsettling. There is probably no other way to go than “dark comedy” for an insane and still-somewhat-unresolved story like this: one skater from the “wrong side of the tracks” and one skater with a perceived “princess complex,” surrounded by a band of male idiots who thought it would be a nifty idea to turn the lead-up to the 1994 Winter Olympics (with an eventful stop at Detroit’s Cobo Hall) into a road-show Goodfellas as performed by the cast of Green Acres.

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

The cast is beyond reproach. Deserving Golden Globe winner Allison Janney (Spy, Tammy, The Help) dazzles and horrifies as Tonya’s “mommie dearest” LaVona whose intentions may be noble but whose approach to child rearing is two shades to the right of the Marquis de Sade. Sebastian Stan (Captain America: Winter Soldier, Logan Lucky) is perhaps a bit too pretty but nonetheless gives us a hauntingly comic portrayal of an abusive milquetoast in Jeff Gillooly. Ethereally engaging Julianne Nicholson (August: Osage County) is suitably and allegorically icy as Tonya’s coach.

Of course, Margot Robbie (Suicide Squad, Wolf of Wall Street) rocks the title role. Robbie is an absolute firecracker of a performer, and, while exceptional as Harding, I’m not sure we’ve yet seen that one landmark career-making turn from her. I’m certain it’s on the horizon, but I, Tonya in its entirety doesn’t quite rise to the commitment of what Robbie is doing here.

I also admit that, while Robbie gets Harding’s swagger and little-girl-lost qualities just so, she doesn’t quite have the look. I, like most of America, have wearied of Amy Adams, but watching a documentary of Harding following the film, it was clear that Adams is more of a doppelganger for the troubled athlete.

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

And that brings me back to the film’s tone: a bit Coen Brothers (Raising Arizona, Fargo), a bit Gus Van Sant (To Die For), and a heaping helping of postmodern cynicism, but not nearly enough heart. The tragic circumstances of  Harding’s upbringing are bandied about as cutesy one-liners, and the choreographed sequences of domestic abuse (Harding’s mother and husband both dish out brutal beatings on the poor soul) are almost treated like musical interludes. Even the heartbreaking yet admittedly hilarious lament from Robbie’s Harding that “I get hit every day, but Nancy Kerrigan gets hit once, and the whole world sh*ts!” comes off more like a punchline than an authentic assessment of America’s trivialization of violence toward women.

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

Perhaps I am overly sensitive in this moment of “#MeToo/#TimesUp. Perhaps I have seen too often how insidious and destructive the evil-that-men-do can be to the self-esteem and self-worth of women. Perhaps I just thought I, Tonya was trying to have its cake and eat it too -painting Harding as this heartbreaking misunderstood ice queen Icarus while lobbing spitballs at the back of her head, just in case America wasn’t quite ready to forgive her yet.

As Janney’s LaVona intones in one of the many “mockumentary” style interviews sprinkled throughout the film, “She [Tonya] skated better when she was enraged.” The film gives us an ugly, bruising, arguably self-indulgent depiction of why Harding should be and was enraged, but  it is never quite brave enough to offer her much sympathy or redemption. That may be the saddest crime of all.

______________________________

Miscellany …

  • [Biber with – clockwise – Sexton, Rachel Biber, & Rebecca Winder]

    Had a great time Saturday, January 14 with these crazy kids celebrating the launch of pal Rebecca Biber’s first book of poetry Technical Solace from Fifth Avenue Press. [Photos by Rebecca Winder here.] Enjoyed playing Johnny Carson to Rebecca for the reading/Q&A at lovely Megan and Peter Blackshear’s exceptional store Bookbound in Ann Arbor. Thanks to a great crowd including Rebecca Winder, Rachel Biber, Barry Cutler, Beth Kennedy, Toby Tieger, Russ Schwartz, Peggy Lee, Steven Wilson, John Mola, and more. You can purchase the book at Bookbound or via Amazon. Click here. Ann Arbor District Library’s Pulp reviews the event here.

[Musical director Kevin Robert Ryan and Sexton – photo by Denise Staffeld]

  • Thanks, Jennifer Zartman Romano and Talk of the Town Whitley County, for running this announcement! Whitley County native Roy Sexton is among the cast of “Life is A Cabaret,” a live musical theatre fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. The performance is planned for February 7, 2018, at 7 p.m. in Canton, Michigan at Canton Village Theater. The live musical fundraiser will feature Broadway tunes. The event is hosted by Relay for Life in partnership with Women’s Life Society Chapter 827, Chicks for Charity. Attendees will enjoy delicious desserts from a Cold Stone Creamery ice cream bar while bidding on the silent auction. A cash bar will also be available. All proceeds and donations will benefit the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life of Canton and Plymouth, MI to attack cancer from every angle. Tickets are $22. For ticketing information, click here or call 734-394-5300 ext 3. If there is no answer, leave a message and your call will be returned within 24 hours.
  • Thanks, Legal Marketing Association, for this shout out in the latest Strategies magazine.

______________________________

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital). In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

[Biber & Sexton, photo by Rebecca Winder]

“Everybody’s got the right…” Farmington Players’ production of Assassins

2 March 2014

10 Comments

[Image Source: Farmington Players]

[Image Source: Farmington Players]

I suspect theatergoers have a love/hate relationship with Stephen Sondheim. I know I kind of do. Sometimes his work is sheer brilliance, spinning elegant insight out of ugly misanthropy. Other times, he is so self-indulgent it makes my eyelids hurt.

What follows is not a review. This is one of my “I have wonderful, talented, fantastic theatre friends and I am proud of the show they just did” blog entries.

In this case, I just got back from closing night of Farmington Players’ production of Sondheim’s Assassins. If you aren’t familiar with the show, in essence it is a musical revue of sorts with a meta thematic narrative tying together the experiences and motivations of the most notorious presidential assassins in American history. Fun night at the theatre, eh?

[Image Source:
Farmington Players]

Well, morbid as it may make me sound, it actually is. Michael Smith with the assistance of Margaret Gilkes does a fabulous job directing this spiky material with stellar musical support from Rachael Rose. Kristi Schwartz also adds the perfect light touch to some comic choreography.

[Image Source: Farmington Players]

The show is an allegorical treatise examining the underdogs in our society and the effect that perceived/real persecution, disparity, and frustration can have on the most fragile of psyches. Assassins offers prescient analysis of our Instagram-happy, “Real Housewives of … Wherever” world in which fame is its own reward, regardless of the ugly costs. Sondheim also anticipates our ongoing collective debate about gun culture, asserting quite plainly that firearms and their immediate availability are a uniquely horrifying American tradition.

The cast, as I’ve indicated, is populated by some of my favorite theatre friends. Barbara Bruno (who deserves an extra shout-out for wringing every bit of comic gold from her role as “Sarah Jane Moore”), Bob Cox, Daniel Crosby, Barry Cutler, David Galido, Keith Janoch, Nick Rapson, Michael Soave, Alex Spittle, Keith Firstenberg, and Jason Wilhoite all do spectacular work in the principal roles, nailing the rich content of not only the score but the incisively written monologues. The ensemble (Erik Elwell, Jayne Firstenberg, Jim Moll, Martin Rinke, Pat Rodgers, and Patrick Wehner) all have the tough task of setting the atmosphere of any given historic era, and they accomplish it with aplomb.

[Image Source: Farmington Players]

This is not an easy show and it can quickly slide into creepy, clammy, artsy-fartsy territory without a strong cast and directorial vision, but this production deftly avoids that trap. Like another Sondheim classic Company, Assassins revels in its lack of any discernible plot and in playing mind-bending, dream-like tricks with time and place.

The Farmington Players’ production grounds the material with heart and humor, beautiful singing, sharp sound and lighting design, atmospherically minimal set pieces, and great character work. I’m sorry to say this is closing night and if you didn’t get to see it, you missed out on a wonderful production.

As the main characters espouse in what is arguably the best song from the score, “everybody has the right to be happy.” And I certainly was tonight.

___________________

Reel Roy Reviews is now a book! In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the book currently is being carried by Bookbound in Ann Arbor, Michigan; by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan; and by Memory Lane Gift Shop in Columbia City, Indiana. Bookbound and Memory Lane both also have copies of Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series.