There are certain lines that become so famous they almost swallow the work that created them. “You can’t handle the truth!” is one of them. Jack Nicholson’s explosive delivery as Colonel Nathan Jessep in the 1992 film A Few Good Men became part of the cultural vocabulary, quoted and parodied so often that it is easy to forget something rather important: before Hollywood got hold of it, A Few Good Men was a play.

Now Aaron Sorkin’s breakthrough work is returning to the stage, and at a recent press meet and greet, the company of Lincoln Center Theater’s new Broadway production gathered ahead of its first preview Thursday, October 8, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

The revival brings together an intriguing combination of generations.

Bradley Whitford

Bradley Whitford

Bradley Whitford

Bradley Whitford

Bradley Whitford takes on Colonel Jessep, the role forever associated on film with Nicholson

Tom Blyth

Tom Blyth

Tom Blyth

Tom Blyth

Tom Blyth

Tom Blyth stars as Lt. Daniel Kaffee

Krysta Rodriguez

Krysta Rodriguez

Krysta Rodriguez

Krysta Rodriguez

Krysta Rodriguez plays Lt. Cdr. JoAnne Galloway.

Michael Arden

Michael Arden

They were joined by members of the company, Sorkin, director Michael Arden

Lear deBessonet

Lear deBessonet

and artistic director Lear deBessonet as the production offered its first real glimpse of what this A Few Good Men intends to be.

Aaron Sorkin, Michael Arden

Aaron Sorkin, Michael Arden

Arden seems considerably less interested in recreating an icon than in rediscovering a play.

Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin

That is precisely what makes this revival potentially fascinating. A Few Good Men premiered in 1989, when Sorkin was still in his twenties, before The West Wing, The Social Network, Steve Jobs and the unmistakable verbal rhythms that would eventually make “Sorkinesque” almost an adjective of its own. Sorkin has returned to the script himself for this production, revising and polishing the work and acknowledging that he considers himself a better writer today than the young man who originally wrote it.

Cast and Crew

Cast and Crew

There is something wonderfully audacious about that. Most writers would probably like to sneak back into their early work in the middle of the night with a red pencil. Sorkin actually gets to do it.

Bradley Whitford

Yet the essential conflict remains potent: a military courtroom, the death of a young Marine, questions of obedience and responsibility, and the dangerous territory between following an order and being morally accountable for carrying it out. The play asks who gets to define duty, where authority ends and individual conscience begins, and what happens when institutions protect themselves by demanding unquestioning loyalty from the people inside them.

Tom Blyth

Tom Blyth

Tom Blyth

Those questions haven’t exactly grown quaint.

Krysta Rodriguez

Krysta Rodriguez

Krysta Rodriguez

Krysta Rodriguez

Arden, whose work as a director has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to approach familiar material without embalming it, is looking for new truths inside Sorkin’s text rather than treating the original production—or the enormously successful film—as sacred territory. That becomes particularly important with Whitford’s Jessep. Trying to reproduce Nicholson would be theatrical suicide. The far more interesting possibility is discovering another man entirely inside those words.

Bradley Whitford

Michael Arden, Bradley Whitford

Aaron Sorkin, Michael Arden, Bradley Whitford

Michael Arden, Bradley Whitford, Krysta Rodriguez

Whitford also arrives with his own long history inside Sorkin’s universe, most famously as Josh Lyman on The West Wing. There is an irresistible bit of theatrical symmetry in watching an actor so associated with delivering Sorkin’s language now inhabit one of the writer’s most formidable characters.

Aaron Sorkin

The company also promises to lean into something that sometimes gets lost beneath the courtroom fireworks: Sorkin can be extremely funny. His dialogue moves quickly because his characters think quickly, and humor frequently becomes both weapon and defense. Allowing that wit to breathe may help separate the stage production from the darker cinematic weight that has hung over the story for more than three decades.

Cast

At the meet and greet, what emerged was not a company attempting to compete with a beloved movie but one intent on reminding audiences that A Few Good Men was built for a room where actors and audience breathe together. A courtroom confrontation has a very different electricity when there is no camera deciding where we look.

Lear deBessonet, Aaron Sorkin, Bradley Whitford, Michael Arden, Krysta Rodriguez, Tom Blyth

Then there is that line. Everyone knows it is coming. That may be Whitford’s greatest challenge. How do you say five words that millions of people already hear in somebody else’s voice? The answer may lie in the philosophy behind the entire production: don’t try to erase what came before. Find the truth underneath it.

A Few Good Men begins previews Thursday, October 8, at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater and officially opens October 29.

More than thirty-five years after Sorkin first put these men and women in a courtroom, America already knows the line.

Now Michael Arden and his company get to ask whether we ever really understood the question.

There are few places better suited to celebrating John Kander and Fred Ebb than Dizzy’s Jazz Club. On Sunday, October 4, New York was misty beyond those magnificent windows, the room was filled with Kander and Ebb melodies, and, making the evening even more special, John Kander himself was sitting at the table directly behind me listening to his music come alive.

John Kander

Hosted and curated by Deborah Grace Winer, Songbook Sundays: Life Is Kander and Ebb brought together three very different vocalists—Karen Ziemba, Matthew Scott and Vanisha Gould—with music director and pianist Jon Weber, Mark McLean on drums, Jay Leonhart on bass and Sam Chess on trombone. The talent was unquestionable, the musicianship superb and the surroundings quintessentially New York.

Karen Ziemba

Yet I left wanting more as I know this songbook inside and out.

Vanisha Gould, Karen Ziemba, Matthew Scott Vanisha Gould

Not more talent. There was plenty of that. What I wanted was more Kander and Ebb.

Karen Ziemba opened with “Where You Are,” immediately reminding us why she has had such a remarkable career. Ziemba doesn’t merely sing a lyric; she understands what is underneath it. That quality served her particularly well throughout the show, whether she was having wicked fun with “Don’t Tell Mama,” finding the aching simplicity of “My Coloring Book,” or delivering “How Lucky Can You Get.” Kander and Ebb frequently wrote characters who perform one emotion while another one is quietly breaking through, and Ziemba knows exactly how to live in that contradiction.

Matthew Scott has a terrific voice coupled with genuine acting chops, something especially evident in “Not Every Day of the Week” and “Love and Love Alone.” When he arrived at “Theme from New York, New York,” he wisely didn’t try to compete with the ghosts surrounding one of the most recognizable songs ever written about this city. Instead, he found his own way into it, allowing us to hear the song rather than an imitation of the singers who made it famous.

Then there was Vanisha Gould, who possesses a fabulous smoky, growling voice that sounds as though it was made for the 1930s. There is something wonderfully lived-in about her sound, a little dangerous around the edges, and it gave “Funny Honey” and “All That Jazz” an entirely different texture. “Maybe This Time” allowed her to move beyond the sass and into the vulnerability underneath, where Kander and Ebb so often do their best work.

The musicians were every bit as important to the performance.

Weber knows how to support a singer without disappearing beneath one, and McLean, Leonhart and Chess gave the music the swing and bite it requires. “Sing Happy” put the band front and center, while

Leonhart—whose career has included playing for an extraordinary roster of great performers—stepped into the spotlight to deliver his own “Razzle Dazzle.” It was an irresistible reminder that sometimes the musicians have a few tricks of their own.

Ziemba and Scott joined forces for “But the World Goes ‘Round,” another quintessential Kander and Ebb song about continuing when life has other plans. “Cabaret,” naturally, also made its appearance, bringing us back to the musical that remains inseparable from the Kander and Ebb name.

Which brings me to the one thing that bothered me about an otherwise beautifully performed performance.

Jon Webber and John Kander

Perhaps having John Kander sitting directly behind me made me even more aware of the sheer size of the catalogue being celebrated. Here was one of the architects of American musical theatre, listening to songs from a collaboration that stretched across decades, and I kept thinking about everything we weren’t hearing.

Vanisha Gould, Karen Ziemba, Matthew Scott

There were three selections from Chicago and three from Cabaret, along with two each from Flora the Red Menace and New York, New York. They are terrific songs, certainly, and nobody is going to object to hearing them sung this well. But Kander and Ebb wrote so much more.

John Kander, Matthew Scott

Where was The Happy Time, Zorba, 70, Girls, 70, The Act, Woman of the Year, The Rink, Steel Pier, Curtains, or The Scottsboro Boys? There is an astonishing amount of material in that catalogue, including songs that deserve to be rediscovered rather than allowed to sit quietly in the shadow of “All That Jazz” and “Cabaret.”

That is particularly what I look for from something called Songbook Sundays. A songbook series has the opportunity not merely to celebrate the songs everybody already knows, but to open the book a little wider. Give us something we have forgotten or haven’t heard in years. Give a younger audience a song they didn’t know existed. Let us hear the journey of the writers, not simply their greatest hits.

Kander and Ebb were never just Chicago and Cabaret. Their partnership was far richer and stranger than that. They could be cynical and sentimental, sophisticated and vulgar, politically savage and heartbreakingly romantic. Again and again they wrote about people performing confidence while quietly falling apart underneath it. Their characters keep dancing, keep singing, keep putting on the makeup and facing the world because, as one of their greatest songs reminds us, the world goes ’round.

Maybe that’s why I wanted more.

What Winer gave us was beautifully sung and beautifully played. Ziemba remains a masterful interpreter, Scott impressed with both voice and dramatic instinct, and Gould made me want to hear much more from that wonderfully smoky voice. Weber and his musicians gave us sophistication, warmth and swing.

Outside those windows was a mist-covered New York, while inside sat John Kander himself listening to his songs. Really, how much more New York can you get? Except, of course, for a few more Kander and Ebb songs.

I enjoyed Life Is Kander and Ebb immensely. My complaint is actually a compliment: with a songbook this extraordinary, I didn’t want the afternoon to end with so many pages still unopened.

Matthew Morrison returns to Broadway’s Just in Time on October 20, stepping back into the role of Bobby Darin at Circle in the Square for a limited three-week encore engagement.

Morrison previously took over the role last spring following Jonathan Groff’s departure, bringing his own considerable Broadway pedigree to Darin’s music and swagger. Now he is returning once again, following Jeremy Jordan, who plays his final performance on October 18 alongside Carrie St. Louis as Sandra Dee.

The return is an intriguing one because Just in Time has proven unusually adaptable to its succession of leading men. Groff, Morrison and Jordan are decidedly different performers, and rather than demanding an imitation of the actor who came before, the production allows Bobby Darin to shift with the man standing at the microphone. Morrison brings a particularly polished show-business quality to Darin—the confidence of someone who knows exactly how to work a Broadway house while making it look effortless.

Long before television audiences knew Morrison as Will Schuester on Glee, Broadway knew him. He made his Broadway debut in Footloose, originated Link Larkin in Hairspray, earned a Tony Award nomination for The Light in the Piazza, and later appeared in South Pacific and Finding Neverland. Darin gives him the opportunity to combine acting, vocals, movement and old-fashioned leading-man charisma in a role built around a performer who understood that entertaining an audience was an art unto itself.

Directed by Alex Timbers, Just in Time transforms Circle in the Square into an intimate nightclub, placing the audience inside Darin’s world rather than safely on the other side of a proscenium. With a live band and a score packed with “Beyond the Sea,” “Dream Lover,” “Splish Splash” and “Mack the Knife,” the musical traces Darin’s extraordinary career alongside the knowledge that a childhood illness had left him believing his life would be short.

That ticking clock gives the evening its energy. Darin wasn’t merely ambitious; he behaved as if time itself were chasing him. He wanted to sing, act, write, perform and conquer whatever room happened to be in front of him before the opportunity disappeared.

For Morrison, the return offers something Broadway performers rarely receive: the chance to come back to a role almost immediately and discover what else is inside it.

Sometimes the encore turns out to be just as interesting as the original engagement.

Do not miss Morrison on October 20, as he will once again be Just in Time.

I originally saw Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play downtown at the Lucille Lortel in 2017. Nearly a decade later, now playing Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, the play remains wickedly funny, painfully recognizable and far more disturbing than its buoyant title initially suggests. If I were going to retitle it, I might call it Being Made to Feel Ashamed of Your Skin Color, because beneath the teenage rivalries, vicious jokes and beauty-pageant dreams lies something much darker: what happens to young girls when they are taught that the lighter their skin, the more beauty, opportunity and even love the world will make available to them.

Jordan Rice, Denée Benton, Nia Otchere-Sarfo, and Erin Morton Photo by Matthew Murphy

Set in 1986 at a girls’ boarding school in Ghana, the play revolves around Paulina (Denée Benton), the reigning queen bee who rules her little kingdom with a  highly manicured—sting. Paulina is cruel, calculating and manipulative, and Benton lets us know it almost before she speaks. Her entrance alone communicates that everyone else in the room understands exactly where she sits in the hierarchy. Best friend Ama (Lucia Aremu), the heavy set quiet Nana (Erin Morton), and cousins Mercy (Jordan Rice) and Gifty (Nia Otchere-Sarfo) orbit Paulina almost as a single organism, parroting her opinions, laughing when expected and carefully measuring the consequences of stepping outside the protection of the hive.

Jordan Rice, Nia Otchere-Sarfo, Lucia Aremu, Erin Morton and Denée Benton Photo by Matthew Murphy

Paulina has set her sights on becoming Miss Ghana and eventually reaching the Miss Universe stage, and she has constructed an elaborate version of herself to support the fantasy. She claims American relatives, invents a professional soccer-player boyfriend and judges everything from her friends’ food to their clothing with the authority of someone who desperately needs everyone else to believe that she belongs to a world she has never actually been allowed to enter. Then Ericka (Jasmine Amy Rogers) arrives.

Patina Miller Photo by Matthew Murphy

Ericka is American, beautiful, talented and, most importantly to the world Bioh is examining, fair-skinned. Almost instantly, Paulina’s friends are fascinated by her longer hair, American products and easy glamour. What begins as ordinary teenage curiosity becomes something much uglier when Eloise (Patina Miller), a former beauty queen recruiting a contestant for Miss Ghana, arrives looking for a girl with what she considers a more “universal and commercial look.” The euphemism barely disguises what everyone in the room understands: the closer a Black girl can come to a white ideal of beauty, the more acceptable she becomes.

Patina Miller and Heather Alicia Simms Photo by Matthew Murphy

This is where School Girls stops being merely a very funny play about teenage cruelty and reveals what that cruelty has been built upon. Paulina is absolutely a bully, and Bioh never pretends otherwise. But gradually we discover the architecture underneath her viciousness. She comes from poverty, has an absent father and has been allowed to remain at school largely through the intervention of Headmistress Francis (Heather Alicia Simms). Most devastatingly, Paulina has been using skin-bleaching creams in an attempt to make herself lighter causing extreme damage.

Denée Benton photo by Matthew Murphy

The moment when her damaged skin breaks and begins to bleed is horrifying precisely because we have spent so much of the evening laughing at her. Suddenly the armor splits open with the skin. Paulina hates what the world has told her she is, and because she has no idea where to put that hatred, she turns it outward. She attacks other girls before they can discover how frightened she is that she will never be beautiful enough, wealthy enough, sophisticated enough—or light enough—to receive what she desperately wants.

Lucia Aremu, Denée Benton, Erin Morton, Nia Otchere-Sarfo, Jasmine Amy Rogers, Jordan Rice iPhoto by Matthew Murphy

Benton is extraordinary in navigating that contradiction. She never asks us to excuse Paulina, but she makes it impossible simply to dismiss her. The cruelty remains cruelty, yet underneath it we can see the wounded child who learned that survival meant becoming the person with the power to wound first. Benton gives us both girls simultaneously, and that is what makes the performance hurt.

Denée Benton, Erin Morton, Lucia Aremu, Jasmine Amy Rogers, Nia Otchere-Sarfo, Jordan Rice, and Heather Alicia Simms Photo by Matthew Murphy

Rogers wisely refuses to make Ericka merely Paulina’s angelic opposite. Her openness and desire to connect initially make her seem everything Paulina is not, but Ericka possesses no more control over the circumstances that have elevated her than Paulina has over those that diminish her. She did not choose her American upbringing, her family or the color of her skin. Yet those things immediately become currency. When Eloise chooses Ericka to compete for Miss Ghana, the supposed victory becomes another kind of violation. Rogers understands that contradiction beautifully. Ericka ultimately leaves for the pageant in tears rather than triumph.

Erin Morton, Nia Otchere-Sarfo, Heather Alicia Simms, Jordan Rice, Lucia Aremu, Denée Benton Photo by Matthew Murphy

The ensemble is terrific. Aremu, Morton, Rice and Otchere-Sarfo make the girls wonderfully funny without turning them into caricatures, and their gradual separation from Paulina becomes one of the play’s quiet pleasures. Simms brings warmth and authority to Headmistress Francis, while Miller gives Eloise enough polish that the ugliness of what she represents becomes even sharper. Eloise does not have to announce that darker skin is undesirable. The system has already taught everyone the rules.

Two-time Tony nominee Whitney White directs with tremendous control, particularly over the play’s dangerous tonal shifts. For much of its approximately 80 minutes, School Girls is joyous, fast and enormously funny. White allows us to enjoy these girls before exposing what the world has taught them to do to one another. She can move us from laughter to discomfort, anger and heartbreak without making the play feel as if it has suddenly become something else. The darkness was there all along. We were simply having too much fun to notice it.

Then comes the ending.

The girls gather around the television to watch the Miss Universe pageant. Countries are announced. South Africa sends a white contestant. Ericka fails to make the semifinalists. Slowly, almost silently, the realization settles over Paulina and the other girls. They have fought, competed, lied, humiliated one another and tried to reshape themselves according to a standard that was never designed to include them in the first place. They are watching the women the world has declared its most beautiful and none of them look like these girls.

That is where Bioh leaves us, and it physically hurts. All the adolescent warfare suddenly seems heartbreakingly small beside the machinery that created it. Paulina believed Ericka was her enemy. Ericka briefly became the chosen one. Eloise believed she understood what the marketplace wanted. Yet ultimately they are all negotiating with the same question: What happens to a girl when the world teaches her that the face and skin she was born with stand between her and being loved, admired or chosen?

School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play has lost none of its sting even after nearly ten years after I first saw it. If anything, it lands harder because beneath all that laughter is a truth we still have not managed to leave behind.

School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play is must-see theatre and plays at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through November 15.

Live From The Hotel Edison Times Square Chronicles Presents, is filmed from the Hotel Edison and is a podcast extension of T2C. We are back after a small hiatus.

Today owner Suzanna Bowling talks with with Caricaturist Ken Fallin and his new book About Face. Fallin’s big break was in 1983 doing the posters and advertising for the popular satirical revue Forbidden Broadway. In 1987, he was commissioned by the Boston Herald to do a celebrity caricature every week in the Sunday arts and entertainment section. Fallin has illustrated roughly 500 notable people for the Wall Street Journal, including President Barack Obama, Paul Newman and Tim Russert for Peggy Noonan’s memorial of the newsman in the paper.

The Fabulous Ken Fallin

His Forbidden Broadway posters promoted the show in London, Tokyo and Sydney. Outside of entertainment, Fallin developed relationships with corporate clientele, particularly American Express, which engaged him on several national media campaigns as well as private work. Belvedere Vodka hired him to turn famous icons like the Playboy Bunny and Quentin Tarantino into bottles of the alcohol. Other clients have included HBO, Showtime and Walt Disney Productions.

Ken Fallin in Shubert Alley

His new book About Face is a distinctive art and cultural publication that brings together a broad collection of caricatures celebrating notable figures from entertainment, music, Broadway, Hollywood, and contemporary popular culture. Through expressive artwork and recognizable subjects, the book captures the personalities and visual character of individuals who have made an impact on audiences across different generations. The collection reflects the author’s ability to transform familiar faces into engaging artistic interpretations while maintaining recognizable characteristics. With its combination of artistic expression, cultural familiarity, and entertainment value, ABOUT FACE offers readers more than a traditional collection of drawings. It presents a visual journey through the personalities and cultural figures that have shaped entertainment and public life.

Join Ken Fallin on October 7th at New World Stages, 340 W 50th St, from 5 – 7 for the unveiling of his art with a wine and cheese soiree. You have been invited.

I am so grateful to Ken Fallin for his conversation, his joy of life and his art that captures the imagination.

We are so proud because the show and our guests are featured on the TV screens in the lobby and the hotel rooms.

Rommel Gopez, Ken Fallin, Suzanna Bowling

Thank-you Magda Katz for videoing and creating the content to go live, Rommel Gopez and The Hotel Edison for their kindness and hospitality, Broadway HD and Dr K and at 200 West 54th Street for giving me back my health and my smile.

We have been named by Variety Entertainment News as one of Summer’s Best Picks in the category of Best Television, Radio, Podcasts. The company we are in, has made us so humbled, grateful and motivated to continue.

“The Daily Geek Report” named host Suzanna Bowling on the list of Most Engaging Hosts.

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