SZ's Theater Work

[Ace]

SZ in "Romantique"[/color]

www.playbill.com/news/article/79082.html

Hershey Felder's New Work Romantique, with Crivello and Zimbalist, Plays A.R.T. in MA, Aug. 1-17

By Ernio Hernandez
20 Apr 2003

The American Repertory Theatre has announced the world premiere of Romantique and a return engagement of George Gershwin Alone. Both works, written by Hershey Felder and directed by Joel Zwick, will play this summer at the Cambridge, Massachusetts stage.

Felder's Broadway solo work George Gershwin Alone returns to the A.R.T. July 5-26, followed by the world premiere of his new work Romantique, Aug. 1-17.

Romantique introduces audiences to the world of another composer, Frédéric Chopin, with his love, authoress George Sand, and friend, painter Eugène Delacroix. The story follows the three artist's
relationship while highlighting Delacroix's art, Sand's tales and Chopin's music. The work is set one summer evening in 1846 when the composer and painter make what would be their final visit to the scribe's retreat.

Joining Felder (who plays Chopin) in the cast are Tony Award winner Anthony Crivello as Delacroix and television star Stephanie Zimbalist as George Sand.

Crivello won a Tony for his portrayal of Valentin in Kiss of the Spiderwoman. Other Broadway credits include Marie Christine, Les Misérables, The News and Evita.

Zimbalist is remembered for her role on the TV series, "Remington Steele" opposite Pierce Brosnan. The actress has played in The Tempest with Anthony Hopkins at the Mark Taper Forum, The Cherry Orchard at the Long Wharf Theater, Summer and Smoke and Barbarians at the Williamstown Theatre Festival as well as the national tour of My One And Only.

Felder appeared on Broadway in George Gershwin Alone, which he has performed over 1200 times in several major venues across the country as well as Back on Broadway with James Barbour. Other credits include Stempenyu in Stempenyu, Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Waiting for Godot, Gigi, Fiddler on the Roof and Ellis Island.

Director Zwick directed of the film "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" as well as the Broadway production of Dance With Me. He also helmed the national tours of Shenandoah and Oklahoma!

Ticket to George Gershwin Alone and Romantique at A.R.T.'s Loeb Drama Center in Harvard Square at 64 Brattle Street in Cambridge, MA can be purchased by calling [phone] or online at www.amrep.org.

========================================

Ace

[curious george]

I'm not sure SZ would be happy being classified as a "television star." She's done a significant amount of theatre, hasn't she, and considers herself more of a stage than screen actress?

cg

[Ace]

Yes and she's done a significant amount of TV going back to the late 70's, and she became a star doing TV, and it's what the public at large know her best for. That's the way the public perception cookie crumbles.

When PB was on RS he was a "TV star" even if he'd just done 10 years of theater before that. Now he's a "movie star" who's a former "TV star". Yadda yadda...

Honestly only in the U.S. do actors even mind such distinctions. In the UK actors movie between stage, tv and film very easily. Dame Judi Dench was winning an Oscar, playing M in Bond, while winning awards on the stage while having her own TV series. It's all about the work. ;D

Ace

[Yuliya]

Ironic though that once again SZ plays a woman who had to assume a man's name, even though George Sand was worlds apart from Laura.

SZ is finally coming to Muhammed (that's me.) I think I'll try to see the play, unlesssomething comes up or the ticket prices exceed my wildest expectations.

[Ace]

Yes worlds apart.... Laura only hid behind a man's name, she didn't assume it, dress like Remington Steele, smoke cigars in public, take on the role of sexual pursuer and seducer and really really like it. ;D Maybe she should have, she might have had more fun. Then again she wouldn't have had Steele, so maybe not.

Ace

[curious george]

Yuliya said:

SZ is finally coming to Muhammed (that's me.) I think I'll try to see the play, unless something comes up or the ticket prices exceed my wildest expectations.

Get autographs for all of us!

cg

[rsfanatic]

curious said:

Get autographs for all of us!

cg

Yes, please.

Stephanie

[Ace]

More in depth info on the play can be found at the SZ Website Romatique page at

theatre.stephaniezimbalist.com/romantique/index.shtml

Ace

[Myrtle Groggins]

Wish I could attend. SZ has a wonderful stage presence. I'm sure anyone who goes will enjoy her.

I do love Boston. Some of my fondest memories of the area are my hours spent in the theatre. Wish I could have had more leisure time there. - sigh-

[Yuliya]

And a shameless site plug. I've just updated my site - Remington Zeal - with lots of things, including an article on SZ's upcoming play (it opens this week-end) - or more like an article on SZ in regards to her new play - with 2 new pictures of hers and one old RS promo (you wouldn't expect to see a new RS promo, would you?) The article, complete with the pictures, can be found in "Cast" area - just follow the links.

Intersting tidbit on co-star-cum-playwright Hershey
Felder. Not only can he write and act, he can (and
will) also play Chopin on stage.

I'm intrigued. I love Chopin. I hope I won't be disapointed.

[Ace]

Yuliya great article and photos! Here's another tidbit on the play and I'm sure rviews will be coming after it opens.


Isn't It 'Romantique'?

Christian Science Monitor:
Arts & Leisure > Music / Performing Arts
from the August 01, 2003 edition

www.csmonitor.com/2003/0801/p13s01-almp.html



ISN'T IT 'ROMANTIQUE'? Hershey Felder (left, with costars Anthony Crivello and Stephanie Zimbalist) stars as Chopin in his new play.

SHANNON SHAPER


He has an ear for musicians' lives

Actor-pianist brings Chopin and Gershwin to life in his plays

By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. – What do George Gershwin, Frédéric Chopin, and Ludwig van Beethoven have in common (besides, well, the obvious)? Each composer's artistic triumphs were mirrored by personal tragedies, with Gershwin and Chopin dying before 40 and Beethoven going deaf. They're also all being reborn onstage thanks to Hershey Felder, himself a composer and pianist.

As a writer, Mr. Felder has meticulously researched their lives. As an actor playing them, he's got a trump card: He's an outstanding pianist, who can authentically bring each man and his art to the stage.

Felder's one-man show "George Gershwin Alone" has just completed a 1,200-performance tour across the US, including a stop on Broadway, to generally strong reviews and packed houses. Friday night marks the
world première of "Romantique," his three-person play about Chopin, at the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in Cambridge, Mass.

For "Romantique," Felder dons a blond wig to play Chopin. He's called in two friends, actress Stephanie Zimbalist and actor Anthony Crivello, to play the roles of Chopin's lover, author George Sand, and his friend, painter Eugène Delacroix.

The play takes place at Sand's serene chateau in the French countryside on a weekend in 1846. It was the last time Chopin and Delacroix ever visited there. What we learn about Chopin, Felder says, "is that sometimes the art may be perfect, but the man is not."

To research "Romantique," Felder took his entire 22-member cast and crew to France to visit neighborhoods in Paris and elsewhere associated with the three artists. "We had the greatest time in the world," he says. "Whether it will add anything to the play, I don't know," he says with a shrug. "But, God, it was fun."

Each of Felder's plays has something a little different to say. The Gershwin show is about the songwriter's "relationship with his audience," he explains. "Chopin is the relationship of artists to each other and to their art." The yet-to-come Beethoven play, he says, is about "man's relationship to God. He was perhaps the greatest composer who ever lived. He was deaf. Is that an injustice? Was it a necessity? ... Think what it means to be deaf and yet have that gift."

TV and film director Joel Zwick ("My Big Fat Greek Wedding") codirected the play with theatrical veteran Andrew Robinson. But make no mistake: This is a Hershey Felder "imagination," and he loves being involved in every nook and cranny of it.

"It's my nature," he says of the personal way he runs his production company. "I just enjoy being creative." With his wavy dark hair, he looks even younger than his 30-something years as he settles into a seat in the ART auditorium to talk about "Romantique" and his career.

"I want to create an ensemble in which people trust each other and have a good time," he says, explaining why he chose people he already knew and didn't hold auditions. "It's just my style. I don't know if it's right or wrong, but it's the way I want to do it."

Felder, who is married to Kim Campbell, former prime minister of Canada, is able to talk passionately about everything from the importance of music at dinner parties to his ultimate wish "to be an ambassador for peace." He can even avoid making that last sound ridiculous - maybe because he's the first to concede it's
a "ridiculous thing to say."

Mr. Robinson says he's run into another one of Felder's passions: a demand for authenticity. When Robinson wanted to make dialogue changes, Felder insisted that any new words come from either Delacroix's diaries, Sand's autobiography, or Chopin's notebooks. Robinson tried to convince him that the audience won't know the
difference, but Felder "doesn't want anything that we're just concocting," Robinson says.

Felder listened to Gershwin's playing when he created his one-man show, but Chopin lived before the era of audio recordings. So Felder is drawing on "tons" of written material about the Polish expatriate's style and technique.

"Probably a lot of people nowadays play better than Chopin ever played," Felder says. "But we imagine it to be something else. It was new in those days - the quiet playing, the virtuoso stuff. This is a whole other time now."

When he sits down to write, Felder concedes, "it hurts just to get the stuff on paper." But he has found writing for three characters this time "much more fun" than creating a monologue.

"I don't want to tell the audience everything," he says of his playwriting style. "Clues. Clues. Always clues. And let the audience put the pieces together."

"Romantique" was originally "two huge acts," he says. But he cut and cut until "you only see what you need to see to get the picture." It now runs at less than two hours, with no intermission.

What music and playwriting have in common, Felder says, is a certain mathematical structure, carefully planned but hidden. Rhythm and sound are crucial. "Sometimes an actor will suggest a line, and I'll
say, 'No, no, you can't do that.' And they'll say 'Why?' And I say, 'because if I'm sitting in an audience, my ear doesn't hear that.' "

"George Gershwin Alone" won kudos from critics as thoroughly entertaining. But some questioned whether Felder really revealed anything significant about Gershwin and his demons.

"Gershwin was a man who wasn't looking deep inside [himself] and that's what I reveal in the play," Felder says. "And it took the right critics to understand it. That was the darkness of the character, that he refused to let anyone inside, or couldn't let anybody inside."

In the course of a four-year run that ended this summer, that criticism "slowly disappeared because people saw this was a success: [They began to say] 'maybe he knows what he's talking about.' "

He says he now realizes that some people are always "going to tell you you're not worth anything. And I'm going to get that on ['Romantique'], too."

Felder says his interest in pursuing his own "imaginations" isn't about having to have control. "The only power I want is to be completely and unequivocally generous," he says.

Ms. Zimbalist, who once teamed with Pierce Brosnan on the TV detective series "Remington Steele" before going into a long career in theater, can attest to that. Recently, during Felder's only night off from a grueling schedule of Gershwin performances he invited eight people, including Zimbalist, to his home for a dinner he prepared. "That's Hershey Felder," she says in a phone interview. "He didn't even think about it."

But Felder isn't about to relinquish control, either. Right now, commitments to take the show to Philadelphia, Washington, Florida, and New York are tentative.

"I will make the final decision about whether it's going to happen," he says. No matter what anyone else says, "If I don't like it, it ain't happening. So we'll see."

[Ace]

Publicity photos from Romantique

amrep.org/romantique/

Ace

[Yuliya]

Thanks, Ace. Here are bigger versions of the same pictures (from the same site, but they can't be reached from thumbnails because something on the website is screwed up.) Just click on the URLs:

amrep.org/images/romantique/rom01a.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom01b.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom02b.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom03b.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom04b.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom05b.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom06b.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom07b.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom08b.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom09b.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom10b.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom11b.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom1a.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom2a.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom3a.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom4a.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom5a.jpg
amrep.org/images/romantique/rom6a.jpg

[Ace]

Yuliya thanks for the direct links! I tried to opening them on site and couldn't without an error message and thought about doing the leg work for the specific links but was too lazy.

Ace

[curious george]

Great, Yuliya, thanks!! I like the one with all three of them at the piano, where Stephanie's hair is down. The shot of her in pants is interesting, too. What was happening in that scene?

cg

[Ace]

The photos where her hair is down look like they were the taken when they all went to France... and it's a MUCH MUCH more flattering look than the braided, side curls and part down the middle horror which is hopefully a wig (that should be burned!) that she's wearing in the play. UGH!!!!

Ace

[curious george]

Ace said:

it's a MUCH MUCH more flattering look than the braided, side curls and part down the middle horror which is hopefully a wig (that should be burned!) that she's wearing in the play. UGH!!!!

Ace

:: applauds Ace's opinion ::

cg

[Ace]

Boston Globe

ae.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2003/08/05/chopins_life_
plays_out_as_melodrama

STAGE REVIEW
Chopin's life plays out as melodrama
By Ed Siegel, Globe Staff, 8/5/2003

CAMBRIDGE -- Most creative people hate repeating themselves, so it is perfectly understandable that Hershey Felder, the auteur and performer of the megahit "George Gershwin Alone," wanted to expand
his horizons with his next "musical imagining" at ART -- a play centered on the life of Frederic Chopin.

Understandable but unfortunate. "Romantique" does away with what Felder does best -- explicate the music while tying it in to the artist's life -- and emphasizes what he does least well, namely act and write.

Many adjectives come to mind about "Romantique" lethargique, melancholique, but certainly not dramatique. This look into the desperate relationship between Chopin and George Sand, with Eugene
Delacroix as a Nick Carraway-like onlooker, is meant to delve into the heart of French Romanticism but instead settles for a melodramatic to-ing and fro-ing that could be subtitled "Who's Afraid of George Sand?"

If only sparks flew between George and Frederic the way they did between George and Martha in the Edward Albee play. Obsessive love tinged with pathos and cruelty is the nexus of "Romantique," but you
can find more interesting relationships in any 19th-century novel than on the American Repertory Theatre stage. It is an oddity that Felder's ultra-romanticism has found a home in this house of hyper-modernism, though in this world premiere you get the presumably unintended message that Romanticism was such a silly artistic movement that Modernism had to do away with it. What else are we supposed to make of pronouncements -- all quotes from the artists -- such as "You know, Chopin, once we release a work, it doesn't belong to us anymore, it belongs to them"; "I don't suffer, I just write"; and my personal avorite, "You must get back to your work as soon as you can. It always helps to dispel the vapors."

Yael Pardess's set design forms a perfect frame -- actually a frame within a frame within a frame -- for the play, which is mostly set at Sand's house in Nohant, France. But Andrew J. Robinson and Joel Zwick's direction is stiff and unimaginative. Felder's Chopin sits at the piano and coughs lamely while Stephanie Zimbalist's Sand stares wistfully and kvetches sispiritedly, and Anthony Crivello's Delacroix looks on with a smile that simultaneously suggests self-importance and nausea.

Delacroix's unfinished painting of the pair, is the 90-minute play's visual focal point, but never do we get the sense Delacroix, Sand, or Chopin is an interesting thinker. And only Chopin comes across as a significant artist.

Chopin rises to the top because of Felder's playing, particularly the Ballade in G Minor. His technique doesn't rival specialists such as Krystian Zimerman for nuance and delicacy, but it is certainly moving and informed.

And those are the two qualities most missing from the rest of the play. Let's hope that when Felder takes on the great one, it's "Ludwig van Beethoven Alone," rather than a play that goes nowhere.

Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@g...

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

========================================

Boston Herald

`Romantique' script not attuned to characters' drama

by Terry Byrne
Tuesday, August 5, 2003


``Romantique,'' presented by the American Repertory Theatre and Eighty-Eight Entertainment, at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St., Cambridge, through Aug. 17.

A lushly decorated set combined with the emotionally complex music of Frederic Chopin create an atmosphere of high drama on the American Repertory Theatre stage. So it's a disappointment when the story line driving Hershey Felder's ``Romantique,'' which is having its world premiere there, is rather bland and colorless.

In an effort to illuminate the people behind their often magnificent creations, Felder brings together three artists of the Romantic period of 1846. Chopin (Felder) is a ``poet of the piano,'' able to coax intricately layered emotional landscapes in his compositions. Eugene Delacroix (Anthony Crivello) is a successful painter - ``What I paint is behavior,'' he says. And George Sand (Stephanie Zimbalist) is the provocative writer who defies convention by dressing as a man,
and yet is the most practical of the three (``I don't suffer, I write,'' she says). The trio are longtime friends and when we meet them, Chopin and Sand have been lovers for eight years.

The action takes place at Sand's summer retreat in the French countryside of Dohant, a place where the sickly Chopin can rest and compose. Delacroix has been entreated to come for a visit because Chopin's neediness is starting to drive Sand mad.

Since we are arriving at the end of Sand and Chopin's relationship, Felder tries to provide some background by jumping back and forth in time - to the night Delacroix introduced Sand to Chopin; to an unpleasant visit Sand and Chopin made to Majorca; to a concert performance given by a terrified Chopin. But even as these scenes offer factual information, they don't deliver the dramatic tension the piece needs to be a compelling evening of theater. The scenes are too scattered and superficial, zigzagging between an extended fart joke and a pee-pee waltz to a tender piano lesson given to Sand by Chopin and a bizarre moment in which Chopin staggers about in a fever from the consumption that eventually killed him.

Crivello and Zimbalist do a great job creating fully realized characters, with Crivello, in particular, adding nuance and personality to the proud and driven Delacroix. But Felder doesn't give them much more than a sketchy outline to work with, and his insight into the relationship between Sand and Chopin consists of
having them say ``I love you'' to each other when Chopin's not acting like a fruitcake and Sand's not whining.

Felder's subtitle to ``Romantique'' is ``an imagination with music'' and, like his earlier ``George Gershwin Alone,'' the piece works best when he sits down to play, and also when he talks about what goes into the building of a musical composition. Felder plays exquisitely, giving a Chopin nocturne and several of his preludes all the color and emotional richness missing from the characters as he's written them.

Co-directors Andrew J. Robinson and Joel Zwick have created a kind of rhythm in the movement of the trio around the stage, and Michael T. Gilliam's lighting, along with Yael Pardess' set - including the evocative backdrops that suggest the location of the various scenes - create a drama the script does not support.

When a composer like Chopin crafts a musical piece, the story is contained within the music, but in a play, the story must be driven by the words. As a playwright, Felder still needs to learn to let the script support the music rather than the other way around.

========================================


Ace

[Ace]

Boston Phoenix
www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/events/theater/documents/03056069.
asp

Beautiful music Felder and Zimbalist get Romantic
BY IRIS FANGER

Hershey Felder, the outsize talent that rolls pianist, actor, and playwright into one package, thinks nothing of seating himself at the Steinway grand that graces the Loeb Drama Center's center stage to blast away at Chopin's heroic A-flat Polonaise before an audience of
one. Talking about Romantique (which the American Repertory Theatre is giving its debut beginning this Friday), the second of his "imaginations with music" and the follow-up to George Gershwin Alone, Felder connects the two shows with a single theme: "The artist and his relationship to the world around him."

The differences between the two productions are evident. Gershwin Alone has the 35-year-old, Montreal-born performer on stage solo, shmoozing the audience as Gershwin in between performing his music and singing his songs. The idea, says Felder, is to become "the composer inviting the audience into his living room. My goal is to lessen the distance between the audience and the performer."

With Romantique, Felder takes a more traditional approach to dramatizing the story of the Polish-born composer FrŽdŽric Chopin, his lover the novelist George Sand, and their friend the painter Eugene Delacroix. The trio of oversize personalities lived in Paris during the 1830s, when the attitude of the Romantic period in art,
music, and literature dominated the work of the then-cutting-edge artists. "Romantique is a play," says Felder. "I don't break the theatrical concept of the fourth wall. The fun thing is telling the story. Gershwin is about the composer and his audience. Romantique is
about the relationship of Chopin to the other artists around him. My next project is Beethoven, about the relationship between man and God."

The liaison between Chopin and Sand (the pen name of Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, baronne Dudevant) began in 1837 and ended shortly before the composer's death, in 1849. The couple lived in ecstasy for a while but parted bitterly; however, their pairing became fodder for Sand's writing.

Felder, of course, plays Chopin; Anthony Crivello, a Tony winner for Kiss of the Spiderwoman, plays Delacroix. Cast as Sand is Stephanie Zimbalist, who's best known for her five seasons on TV's Remington Steele. Trained at Juilliard in drama, as Felder was in music, she views her stage career as part of a continuum. "When I had the face and youth, I was on television. That's what you're supposed to do. Now that I have the craft and experience, I do theater."

Zimbalist has been busy reading through the many biographies of Sand. "She had a pattern with her men: needy, sick, ill men but all brightly talented. She fed them in every way, in terms of their health. She was also a wonderful cook, and she fed them socially. She
bought out the house for one of Chopin's concerts and arranged for every patron who could be of value to him to be in that audience."

Chopin and Sand were indeed opposites: he was a sickly man who relished the indoor life of the salons of Paris whereas she was partial to her country estate at Nohant. The contrasts between the two could fuel a series's worth of soap operas, but Felder argues that "the point is not to take the most exploitive parts but the most human. Part of the question in these plays is the struggle to connect the person to the work. With Chopin, the music might be perfect, but the man was not. From what I'm able to analyze, he had melancholia,
what we would call bipolar disorder, but he was a genius. You can never answer where the art is coming from."

Romantique is presented by the American Repertory Theatre August 1 through 17 at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $45; call [phone].

Issue Date: August 1 - August 7, 2003

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Ace

[curious george]

"When I had the face and youth, I was on television. That's what you're supposed to do. Now that I have the craft and experience, I do theater."

Interesting assessment.

cg