THE MORNING LINE DATE: Wednesday, April 27, 2016 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Claire Manning, Amanda Price PAGES: 14, including this page

April 27, 2016

Review: ‘Tuck Everlasting,’ a Lyrical Meditation on Life, Death and Immortality

By Charles Isherwood Family-friendly musicals on Broadway generally come in just one flavor: flashy.

Enter “Tuck Everlasting,” a warm-spirited and piercingly touching musical that has nothing flashy or splashy about it. The nearest this small-scale production comes to the kind of spectacle we associate with kiddie bait is a toad hopping across the stage.

Based on the popular children’s book by Natalie Babbitt, the musical, which opened on Tuesday at the Broadhurst Theater, has been deftly adapted by Claudia Shear (“Dirty Blonde”) and Tim Federle and features a winning, varied score by Chris Miller (music) and Nathan Tysen (lyrics).

A little surprisingly, the show is directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, who specializes in the kind of musicals “Tuck Everlasting” very much is not: the razzle-dazzly “Aladdin”; the exuberantly vulgar “The Book of Mormon”; and last season’s anything-for-a-laugh Elizabethan spoof, “Something Rotten!” (Remarkably, he now has four musicals running on Broadway.)

Mr. Nicholaw does let loose in a couple of rousing numbers led by the show’s mysterious villain, a carnival worker, with high-kicking dancers swirling and strutting across the stage; you can almost feel his delight in getting to flex the muscles he’s most often used. But he also evinces a natural feel for the tender emotional core of the material and even its layers of mildly dark philosophical inquiry.

Yes, I did just use the phrase “philosophical inquiry” in reference to a Broadway musical aimed at the family crowd. “Tuck Everlasting” rings a variation on the fountain of youth myth, ultimately asking what life would mean if it never ended, and whether a never-ending life would be worth living.

It also provides an answer in the enthralling, wordless climax, a ballet that depicts, with moving clarity, what another, much-celebrated musical would call the circle of life. (The musical “Tuck Everlasting,” incidentally, hews more closely to the book than the 2002 Disney movie, and Disney is not involved in the production.)

In a cluttered opening number, which bears paying close attention to, we meet the Tuck family — Mae (Carolee Carmello) and Angus (Michael Park) and their sons, 17-year-old Jesse (Andrew Keenan-Bolger) and the older Miles (Robert Lenzi) — in the early 19th century, and watch as they drink from a spring at the base of a tree. (This tree, which stretches across the proscenium and is composed of Frank Gehryesque curving slivers of wood, is the most striking aspect of Walt Spangler’s handsome set designs.)

In the same sequence, we jump forward to 1893, where we meet Winnie Foster (Sarah Charles Lewis), an 11-year-old whose mother (Valerie Wright) keeps her on a suffocating leash. Poor Winnie longs to go to the fair

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that’s come to town — or just about anywhere — but is kept at home by her widowed mother, who believes that it would be improper to be seen having fun less than a year after the death of Winnie’s father.

Expressing her frustration, Winnie, who is played by Ms. Lewis with winning spunk that (miraculously) never cloys, sings of her fervent wish to “raise a little something more than heaven.”

The rebel spirit within eventually wins out over the obedient girl. In a fit of frustration, Winnie skips into the woods behind her house, chasing that toad. There she meets Jesse, drinking from the spring. But when Winnie tries to do the same, he stops her in confusion and distracts her by inviting her to climb the tree.

When they jump down, it’s to find Mae and Miles sitting at its base, aghast when they discover that Jesse has a young friend in tow. For, as Winnie soon learns, the family has a secret that they have strenuously hidden. The water in the spring is a magic elixir. Since the day they drank from it, none of them have aged. Jesse is 17, but he was born 102 years ago.

“It must be so fun to be you!” Winnie exclaims, but while she delights in spending time with the Tucks, she will come to see that infinite life does not necessarily mean infinite happiness.

The rather complicated story is cleanly shaped in Ms. Shear and Mr. Federle’s book, which contrasts the sometimes somber story of the Tucks with the comic bumbling of the detectives — Fred Applegate’s Constable Joe and his eager and smarter assistant, Hugo (an endearing Michael Wartella) — who are called in to look for Winnie when she doesn’t come home after running into the woods.

Also enlivening the proceedings is the presence of that villain, called only the Man in the Yellow Suit, who’s on the trail of the Tucks and their secret of immortality and who is played with gleeful, grasping menace by Terrence Mann.

In one of the frisky bits of comedy, Winnie’s grandmother, played with acerbic wit by Pippa Pearthree, glowers at him and says, “You’re an evil banana.”

The actors throughout are excellent. Ms. Carmello sings with her usual pure, clarion tone, and has a nice maternal rapport with Ms. Lewis. She and Mr. Park also movingly indicate their love for their sons and the pain of the strange predicament that forces them to separate from the boys for long periods. And Mr. Keenan-Bolger gives a terrific, ebullient performance as Jesse, whose delight in finding a friend he can confide in carries him away.

“Tuck Everlasting” can sometimes be a little ham-handed in addressing its central theme, the notion that life’s beauty is inseparable from its inevitable end.

Taking Winnie out for a fishing trip, Angus tells her: “Don’t be afraid of death, Winnie. Be afraid of not being truly alive. You don’t need to live forever, you just need to live.” This, just after singing a song with the lyric “You can’t have living without dying.” Noted, and noted.

When in the production’s thrilling final moments, Mr. Nicholaw’s choreography, and Mr. Miller’s rapturous music, take over, the cast and dancers express the same ideas with a kinetic beauty that startles with its emotional resonance and theatrical force. Among the many refreshing surprises of “Tuck Everlasting” is this reminder that a musical doesn’t necessarily have to sing or speak its truths to bring them home to us.

April 27, 2016

Review: ‘One Funny Mother’ Delivers One-Liners Without Depth

By Neil Genlinger

“One Funny Mother,” Dena Blizzard’s solo show at New World Stages, is all about her and her family, but by

the end of it you haven’t really learned anything specific about either. You’ve heard a lot of generic one-liners

involving amusing children and clueless husbands, some of them pretty funny but none of them especially

illuminating. It’s an evening of safe laughs for people, especially young mothers, who think that raising children

is an impossibly demanding task.

In Ms. Blizzard’s case, there are three children, which of course will cause anyone with an old-fashioned big

family — common a few generations ago — to say: “Only three? What are you so flustered about?” But never

mind; the point here is to enjoy the small challenges and serendipitous moments of levity in the parental

experience.

Ms. Blizzard, a comedian and former Miss New Jersey, delivers the jokes while folding clothes that are strewn

all over the stage in a vision of domestic chaos. She’s a very good folder, and a recurring sight gag that won’t be

spoiled here is the show’s best feature.

She calls herself “the mayor of Crazytown,” though apparently there’s nothing about her household that makes

it crazier than any other with children in it. The jokes about her children are in the “kids say the darnedest

things” vein, amusing in a forgettable way, and her children don’t emerge as individual characters; they’re just

punch lines or providers of punch lines.

The same is true of her husband, who endures a fair amount of bashing.

“If there’s a wrong thing to say, it’ll just pop into his head,” she says. “It’s like a gift he has.”

Some of the show’s best laughs come not from Ms. Blizzard, but from videos in which other parents comment

on child rearing, sex and other topics. It’s a funny way to add surprise to the evening, but a better one would

have been to have an overarching point beyond the predictably mushy one Ms. Blizzard closes with. There is no

through line to this collection of domestic gags and, for the audience, no real lesson learned.

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April 27, 2016

Madeleine Sherwood, 93, Actress on ‘The Flying Nun,’ Stage and

Screen, Dies

By Sam Roberts

After Madeleine Sherwood, a Canadian actress, hitchhiked to New York in 1949, she slept on a stone bench

outside the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue for two nights and subsisted on unbuttered rolls from the

Automat.

She got a nursing job, but her patient died after 10 days, so she worked as a cigarette girl at the Havana Madrid

nightclub on Broadway and modeled coats until, after two and a half years, her agent sent her to the stage

director Jed Harris.

“I told him I’d done a TV show about witchcraft,” she recalled, “and he said, ‘You look like a witch.’”

It was a compliment. Harris was recruiting actors for the premiere of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” Ms.

Sherwood, who died on Friday at 93, was cast as Mercy, the colonial servant who falsely accuses neighbors of

witchcraft, and understudied Abigail, the minister’s niece whose accusations trigger the Salem trials. She was

soon given the role of Abigail and originated it when the play opened on Broadway on Jan. 22, 1953,

performing with “fire and skill,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times.

She went on to star in Broadway and film versions of Tennessee Williams’s plays but reached her widest

audience as the strict but benevolent Rev. Mother Superior Placido in the proto-feminist 1960s television

fantasy “The Flying Nun,” with Sally Field.

Reviewing that show in The Times in 1967, Jack Gould wrote that the premise of a 90-pound nun with an

oversize, aerodynamic coronet offered the potential for “basically a one-joke event,” but added, “In the byplay

with a bemused senior nun, played very effectively by Marge Redmond, and in the compassionate sternness of

the mother superior, played by Madeleine Sherwood, there are the ingredients for a very human comedy in an

uncommon environment.”

It ran for 82 episodes on ABC until April 1970.

In the 1950s, Ms. Sherwood was blacklisted for suspected Communist sympathies (around the time of her

appearance in “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s allegory about McCarthyism), and in the 1960s she was an

impassioned — and imprisoned — advocate for civil rights.

Madeleine Louise Helene Thornton was born in Montreal on Nov. 13, 1922, to Laurence Thornton and the

former Yvonne Villard. The granddaughter of McGill University’s dean of dentistry, she first appeared in a

church Passion play when she was 4 and was later cast in Canadian television dramas and soap operas. She

attended the Yale School of Drama.

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She never gave up her Canadian citizenship and returned to Canada in the early 1990s. She died at her

childhood home in Saint-Hippolyte, Quebec, about 50 miles northwest of Montreal, according to Melissa Fitch,

a family friend.

Her marriage to Robert Sherwood ended in divorce. She is survived by their daughter, Chloe Fox; two

grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

In a video interview by Miriam Laurence, titled “Madeleine’s Method: Recipe for the Actor,” Ms. Sherwood

recalled going to New York after escaping from a hospital in Hartford, where she had been treated for

postpartum depression and, she said, faced a lobotomy.

“All my life, since I was a tiny girl, my idea has been to be in New York and on the stage,” she told the

columnist Ward Morehouse at the time, saying she had hitchhiked there.

In 1952, she filled in briefly for Kim Stanley on Broadway in Horton Foote’s “The Chase” before getting her

big break as Abigail in “The Crucible.”

After “The Crucible,” Elia Kazan cast her as Mae Pollitt, the odious sister-in-law, in Williams’s “Cat on a Hot

Tin Roof,” and as Miss Lucy, Boss Finley’s mistress, in Williams’s “Sweet Bird of Youth.” She reprised both

roles on the screen. “She is perfection in the part,” the film historian John DiLeo wrote.

A member of the Actors Studio since 1958, Ms. Sherwood appeared again on Broadway in “Camelot” in 1961,

“The Night of the Iguana” in 1962 and Edward Albee’s “All Over” in 1971.

Her film debut was in Williams’s “Baby Doll” in 1956, directed by Kazan. She also appeared in Otto

Preminger’s “Hurry, Sundown” in 1969 and “The Changeling” in 1980 as well as on the soap operas “As the

World Turns,” “One Life to Live” and “The Guiding Light.”

A member of the Congress of Racial Equality, Ms. Sherwood was arrested in 1963 during a freedom walk and,

according to several profiles was sentenced to six months’ hard labor, although it was unclear how much time

she actually served.

During the blacklist, when performers were denied work because of their leftist ties, Ms. Sherwood was never

called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. But Kazan, a former Communist, was

and named names, which prompted critics to question his Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1999 when he was

an ailing 89-year-old.

Interviewed on a 2003 PBS “American Masters” documentary, Ms. Sherwood was asked whether she would

have testified if she had been summoned.

“I think I was not well known or important enough, but people have said to me, ‘What would you have done if

you had been called up?’” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows what they would do if they

were not in that position.

“It’s all very well to say of Kazan, Why give him a lifetime achievement award? But the name of this

documentary is ‘Not Without Sin.’ You have to look inside and question yourself. And it’s not easy to do.”

April 27, 2016

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