Mothers and Sons and Balkanika

Tyne Daly is a force to reckon with in Terrence McNally’s new Mothers and Sons. Daly won a best actress Tony nomination for originating the role of tightly wound, unapologetic Katherine Gerard, who shows up unannounced from Texas at the New York home of her late son’s lover, twenty years after her son’s death from AIDS. She insists that she does not want to stay long, and she can’t bring herself to leave. Her helpless outrage has little place in this swank Upper West Side apartment, where Cal lives blissfully with his new husband and adopted son. He should never have let Katherine in the door, but he doesn’t throw her out, and that’s what makes it interesting.

Frederick Weller as Cal and his partner Will (Bobby Steggert) go about the evening rituals of bath and bedtime for their six-year-old, Bud, while Katherine plants herself in the living room with a scotch, sentimentally remembering Andre, her late son. Cal misses him too, but has gone forward since Andre died. Katherine can’t and won't. Who was hurt the most is one of the topics for discussion. She’s angry and out of touch—and then very funny. It’s heartbreaking to watch. Sheryl Kaller directs. McNally’s many plays and screenplays include Master Class, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Dead Man Walking, and Frankie and Johnny.

Balkanika Restaurant serves healthy Mediterranean / Yugoslavian fare in a cozy, dark wood, deep-set room. From the street you’d never guess how far back the dining room goes. Old World manners prevail. A bartender lets you sit for as long as you like. However, two flat screens were muted but on—one had a chef prepping Balkan dishes including beef burek like we had for dinner, and the French Open was on the other. It’s an unwelcome restaurant trend to have multiple TVs and recorded music playing simultaneously.  

The colorful meze sampler platter has a choice of one, six, or eighteen spreads, served with toasted, whole-wheat pita triangles. After all eighteen were sampled, the favorites were walnut paste, artichoke with Parmesan, mushroom with sour cream, and Urnebes (feta, spicy red pepper flakes, egg whites, garlic and olive oil). The wine and beer selection includes Croatian, Macedonian and Turkish brands. Only five desserts, besides chocolate fondue, include Nutella raspberry plazma (minced cookies) crêpe.

After Midnight and R Lounge

Best-dressed Broadway musical for us, costumes by Isabel Toledo, was After Midnight, recommendable on the basis of its clothing alone: the bejeweled, fingerless opera gloves, slinky gowns, black tuxedos with black top hats—and white tuxedos with white top hats. It took the Tony for choreography, no surprise. Julius “iGlide” Chisolm and Virgil “Lil’O” Gadson are worth a show of their own, not to mention Karine Plantadit and the synchronized tuxedoed quintet.

Recreation of Harlem’s Cotton Club has been attempted many times, by Martin Scorsese among others. Every other version tempered high times with low seriousness, at least in one tune that hinted at the dark side to artistic life, almost as a corrective to the joy and abandon of the rest. Not so After Midnight, which banishes the blues and is a total, screaming joy at ninety minutes (no intermission).

The Jazz at Lincoln Center All-Stars big band recreates the Duke Ellington sound, which will reverberate for days after you have seen the show. And the singers are perhaps even more amazing than the dancers. Patti LaBelle and Gladys Knight will be taking turns as featured singer. In February, k. d. lang made her well-publicized Bdway debut as After Midnight’s featured performer. 

The night we were there, “American Idol” discovery Fantasia Barrino blew us away with her distinctive renderings, total engagement with music and audience, and blasé, nonchalant way of leaving the stage when she finished. Toledo barely covers Fantasia in a fringed costume that Rihanna might feel comfortable in.

The inspirational, soigné, comic genius Adriane Lenox is the Cotton Club habitué who embodies the spirit of not just After Midnight, but nightclubs everywhere, and is the font of all wisdom in Women Be Wise, by Sippie Wallace. In her two numbers the audience seriously falls in love. Adriane Lenox was new to us, but now we’re dying to see her in the film The Butler.

The singing is worth a show of its own, particularly risqué ballads like Women Be Wise. Creole Love Call, known as “the orgasm song,” sung by Rosena M. Hill Jackson, was as tender as it was shocking. It had more plot than the entire play.  After Midnight has a very loose plot of two of the dancers getting hitched, then one of them dying—though reviving long enough to jump out of the casket and have one last dance. Yes, that is quite a plot. But it’s a bit sketchy—whereas Roseana M. Hill Jackson‘s orgasm had three acts and a couple of subplots.

Julius "iGlide" Chisolm

 R Lounge, in the Renaissance Hotel in Times Square, has that view that you see with the ball dropping on New Year’s Eve. On any night but New Year’s you enjoy an almost reasonably priced, more-than-adequate tasty meal. The chefs work hard to make it memorable, thus the 99-cent homemade potato chips on the menu are unavoidably everyone’s starter. The chips are good but save your appetite for a healthy main course such as seared salmon with Israeli couscous and vegetables.

On an average weeknight office workers—mainly female—share apps and cocktails or even sit alone and talk on their cell phones. When you feel on top of the world you go to R Lounge—or when you need to unwind by yourself, apparently. Women eating alone is a great recommendation for any restaurant. It shows that the place is cool, meets a certain high standard (the ladies’ room is lovely, in fact, with ikebana, an artistic sink, and gentle lighting), and is, moreover, romantic: not a sports bar. And possibly it has a romantic view out the window.

The view comes with no cover charge most days. Maneuvering yourself into the window seat may take some tries. But if you go there on New Year’s Eve, it will cost you a million dollars (actually, one thousand dollars) to sit at that very same table, eating potato chips.

Mama Mia and Jekyll & Hyde

Mama Mia! opened on Broadway thirteen years ago and still fills the house with ABBA fans. In the 70s, single and pregnant Donna opens a resort on an island in Greece. Twenty years later, her daughter decides to get married and the three possible fathers show up for the wedding. In the film starring Meryl Streep as hippie Donna the footage of Greece is breathtaking. But in the stage version you get invited to the party.

The audience sang along and rocked out which no doubt they do at every performance of Mama Mia! around the world. Theatre veteran Judy McLane, after seven and a half years of playing Donna’s girlfriend, now plays Donna. Her strength, relaxed delivery, and vocal pop chops are perfect for the role. She is Donna. Trio numbers with sidekicks Lauren Cohn (Rosie) and Corinne Melancon (Tanya understudy) were fun. The young lovers were precipitous and hunky. Dance numbers got the audience up and swinging their Spandex-clad hips. The florescent swimsuit and flippers song was too much fun. Both my eight-year-old daughter and seventy-seven-year-old mother-in-law loved it.

Jekyll & Hyde is a haunted restaurant and bar in Times Square named for 19^th century grave robbers Burke and Hare, who inspired the book by Robert Louis Stevenson. There’s a choice of two entrances from the street: one normal and the other scary. Impromptu science experiments, talking wall sconces, and unexpected guests at your table are the norm. The Asian salad with cashews, mango, red peppers, and soy ginger sauce was surprisingly good. Burgers and hearty pasta dishes are also. If you want to avoid the weekend crowd you can pay for a J&H membership. Fifty dollars for a one-year Esteemed Pass will get you priority seating and you’ll wiz right past the waiting crowd. The Chamber of Horrors is in a back room. Entertainment fees are tacked onto the bill. 

Early Shaker Spirituals and Omen

Elizabeth LeCompte, Suzzy Roche, Frances McDormand and Cynthia Hedstrom 

In the 19^th century guests visited and reported on Shaker services, where hymns were accompanied by barely choreographed, ecstatic dance movements and gestures, such as “shaking off of sins.” The startling Quick Dance is the first illustrated in Kate Valk’s Early Shaker Spirituals, based on a record album of the same name made in the 70s by Maine Shakers. Of two productions of the album, we saw Side One, which includes “'Tis the gift to be simple, 'Tis the gift to be free, 'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.” 

Having enjoyed the mischief of Kate Valk in such Wooster Group productions as North Atlantic, we missed seeing her onstage. Hilton Als called Valk “the Meryl Streep of Downtown.” Used to usual Wooster shenanigans, a couple in the audience laughed distractingly to Early Shaker Spirituals, but the play’s serious intent was never in doubt.

Among the Shakers are Elizabeth LeCompte and Suzzy Roche, who looks like the ultimate Shaker, a Dorothea Lange Dust Bowl figure, even though we know her as hip Suzzy Roche, member of the singing group The Roches. The perfection of Frances McDormand (Fargo’s Marge Gunderson) in a bonnet raises this event to a religious experience. She sings “My life I freely have laid down, to bear the cross and wear the crown.” You entered the theater a jaded sinner and leave feeling clean and new.

The spare set by Elizabeth LeCompte and Jim Clayburgh is easy enough to reproduce as the production tours Europe. An electric reading lamp reminds us how the Shakers, for all their spartan living, were among the first to wire their homes for electricity and drive around in cars. They were pastry chefs and made a different pie for every month of the year. As songwriters they were Transcendentalist poets, and they invented the clothespin, metal pen nibs, flat broom, wringer washing machine, and wrinkle-free clothing. So what if their dancing looked weird?

They are mostly known for cabinetry, and every museum in the US displays something Shaker. Founded by illiterate English factory worker Ann Lee, she and eight of her disciples came to America in 1774. The Shakers were at their height in 1840. They were celibate and adopted into the community orphans and runaway slaves, in some cases paying for the slaves' freedom. Everyone called each other brother and sister and had equal rights.

Because we know them for their furniture, essentially, a more elaborate set with unpainted wooden Shaker chairs might have suggested that Early Shaker Spirituals was about to crack the mystery of the Shakers, but its aim is more simple.  

Kyoto-style Omen restaurant in Soho

Omen A Zen, in Soho, is the single offshoot of a historic fish and udon restaurant in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan. The highly refined Kyoto aesthetic is plain and unadorned.

Kyoto cuisine may taste bland at first, then you realize the ingredients are so fresh that little seasoning is involved or needed. Tzukemeno, pickled vegetables, are white and yellow daikon or radishes and cabbage gently pickled, with textures and flavors sharpened by the lightest treatment. If you're not used to raw food, there are cooked dishes, including grilled salmon or chicken teriyaki and broiled eel.

Chewy, thick udon noodles with broth, crushed sesame seeds, and a photogenic bowl of slivered roots (lotus, ginger, scallion and burdock), vegetables and seaweed. The noodles, imported fresh from Kyoto, and broth are served cold or hot. There is a changing seasonal menu that includes their eggplant with sesame-miso sauce and buckwheat soba noodles other times of the year.

Though Omen has the look of a rustic Kyoto teahouse, the New York restaurant has made some changes from the original Omen, where every piece of pottery and every sake cup was made by a potter. It still feels like Kyoto, though the dessert menu includes green tea tiramisu. What’s shocking is to enter such a traditional and lofty Japanese restaurant without leaving your shoes at the door.

Cleopatra's Needle and Debutante

Cleopatra’s Needle on the Upper West Side is a no-cover-charge jazz haunt. French and Japanese tourists can be seen picking at their food (Middle Eastern salad platters and hamburgers, mostly). Drinks are not the strong point either: a frozen margarita, served in a milk shake glass, was half foam. Come here for open-mic night and the changing jazz ensemble.

If you were wondering where all the single men are in New York, they are lining the bar at Cleopatra’s Needle. The girls in Debutante would consider them “practice” and might learn about Chet Baker and John Coltrane in the process.

Debutante Rochelle Slovin, photo by Bailey Carr

Ryann Weir’s cheerful debut, Debutante, created and directed by Annie Tippe, takes place in the 80s of big hair, Tab and television's “Dynasty.” Three young heiresses stop their personal evolutions long enough to learn a complicated, antiquated, and highly questionable ritual. The disparities of rich and poor are not so much the topic as the tension between tradition and moving forward. Keilly McQuail is Barbara, a third-generation debutante living with her grandmother, Sylvia (Rochelle Slovin, pictured), who teaches her the cotillion dip and “People who uphold tradition are impervious to change.”

Elizabeth Alderfer, Keilly McQuail and Anna Abhau Elliott can curtsy

Brenda (Elizabeth Alderfer) wants to run off with the Indian foreign exchange student (Eshan Bay) and skip the cotillion, but first shoot her parents so they’ll never know. Extreme dieters, offered a carrot stick Brenda says, “No thanks, I’m allergic.”

Frankie (the charming Anna Abhau Elliott), an equestrian, also knows what she likes, and it’s not the debutante world. She gives a  rousing eulogy to her late show horse, a “Polish-Arabian” (there really is such a breed). Money can’t buy you love, unless you can afford a Polish-Arabian.

All the Way and Southern Hospitality

President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas is known for escalating the Vietnam War in the sixties. All the Way shows us Johnson before that, when he recognized that he would make his mark by ushering in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with Martin Luther King, Jr. (movingly played by Brandon J. Dirden, who does an exact rendering of MLK’s voice). Robert Schenkkan’s play is prescient, as a discriminatory voter suppression law in Wisconsin was just this week struck down as unconstitutional.

Bryan Cranston’s LBJ is a non-stop powerhouse of stories, craft, and passion. Cranston gives a master class in how to pull strings, wheedle your way with detractors, stab people in the back (Johnson would not congratulate MLK on his Nobel Peace Prize), and gloat over any tiny victory. With his sincere Midwestern VP, Hubert H. Humphrey (superbly acted by Robert Petkoff), they made a formidable pair. Betsey Aidem is super as Katharine Graham and does as much as she can with the oddly retro role of Lady Bird. Rob Campbell and Richard Poe do those rapscallians, George Wallace and Everett Dirksen, to the hilt. William Jackson Harper is a standout as Stokely Carmichael.

Like the strong cast, the set and staging are marvelous. Within Senate-like seating, often occupied by the players keeping watch, a small stage works marvels, including chillingly exhuming the body of a civil rights worker murdered in the Mississippi Burning, against a Johnson campaign speech. While other theatrical productions have used video to tell the story, this time it really works, with live performance feeds and archival footage, including Johnson’s swearing in on Air Force One.

All the Way is part one of a trilogy that Robert Schenkkan is perfecting at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We’re looking forward to part two. All the Way shows a leader revealing his mind and soul. It’s not a criticism, but the ending reminded us of an equally ambitious history play last season about Ann Richards, Ann by Holland Taylor. At the end, Taylor stands at the edge of the stage and delivers her last, deeply personal story of the night. It was a delicious nightcap that sent the audience out in tears after thunderous applause. Cranston’s version of that, delivered with remarkably realistic tears, left the audience cheering wildly, however dry-eyed. But then Robert Caro, too, has had a hard time wrapping up the story of LBJ.

Memphis ribs at Justin Timberlake's

You’d expect a suave, swank product out of the artist who gave us “Suit and Tie,” but Justin Timberlake’s rustic restaurant reveals his Texas roots. The signature drink is a refreshing tequila cocktail called the 901, the area code of Memphis, with muddled mint, raspberry and agave. If you like meat, you will love the main course: spareribs brushed with smoky BBQ sauce or dry-rubbed. One of the sides is mac and cheese and another collard greens—clearly very fresh collard greens but overly seasoned. With all the strong flavors in the rest of the meal, greens could be served on the bland side. Chopped salads and the desserts (especially Grandma Sadie’s bourbon pecan pie) looked great at a distance. 

Southern Hospitality began on the Upper East Side, but found its true following when it moved to Hell’s Kitchen. It’s packed out with a young business crowd every weekday at lunch and, particularly, on weekends for a brunch that includes limitless bellinis and mimosas for $15. A bluegrass band plays on Sundays. We expected to hear Justin Timberlake on the soundtrack, but didn’t. Timberlake doesn’t want to hear his own music at his restaurant. That’s how cool he is. Words lining the room are taken from a jam session at Sun Record Studios in Memphis in 1956, with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. Manager Josh Livesay, pictured, impressed upon us how genuine the whole enterprise is, recommended the fabulous dry-rubbed ribs, and said the cornbread is extraordinary.

The Realistic Joneses and Palm

A four-character drama, taking place in the country where two couples – both named Jones – are neighbors. Tall pines and a hooting owl frame their next-door lawn furniture. It’s a dream to live in the country like this, and Will Eno‘s new play, The Realistic Joneses, let’s you hold on to that dream, even to see it more clearly.

When John and Pony Jones (Michael C. Hall of “Six Feet Under” and “Dexter,” and Marisa Tomei, stripper with a heart of gold in The Wrestler and the mother of Jonah Hill in Cyrus) wander over one night to the yard of Bob and Jennifer Jones, it feels a little menacing that they invade the privacy of the more conservative neighbors (acting superstars Tracy Letts and Toni Collette). 

The couples live there to be near Dr. Leavey, one half of the experimentally-treated Harriman Leavey Syndrome. The husbands have been diagnosed with this (fictional) degenerative condition that is not yet recognized by AMA. They’re four talkative people navigating murky waters and carrying on inventive conversations. The play has many laughs, which you wouldn’t guess from this plot summary.

What’s great is seeing four stellar actors go at it body and soul. Toni Collette anchors the ensemble with her “realistic” presence. Having loved her on television and in films, onstage Toni Collette is out of this world. Stalwart Tracy Letts adds interest to the role of cranky Bob Jones, though this character seemed borderline abusive to his wife (our beloved Toni Collette). Oscar-winning Marisa Tomei is excellent here, however playing a ditz with lines including malapropisms worthy of Gracie Allen. Apart from the zingers, Tomei is fun.

We never dream these two couples could have anything in common. They do. They briefly switch horses midstream, affairs that are offstage and too quickly swept under the rug. But perhaps we saw Betrayal too recently. Pony Jones did not seem lost enough to agree to a romantic interaction with Bob. Toni Collette, on the other hand, was totally believable as likely to get it on with the Michael C. Hall character. She’s a superb actor and makes even her role as Bob’s bookkeeper wife soulful, especially when she put her hand on John's thigh.

Michael C. Hall is John Jones, a not-too-bright electrician afflicted with the uncharted disease. Hall’s unexpected magnetism onstage makes losing one’s marbles seem a sort of adventure or, at least, nothing to be angry about, as Bob was. Maybe the moral is that with the diagnosis of a terminal disease there are many ways to respond.

The original Palm restaurant on Second Avenue opened in 1926 and reporters, especially from the nearby Daily News, and Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton, wrote their columns while eating steak and lobster there. That is so believable when you see the big portions at the Palm. Consumed at a reasonable pace, one could write a novella over dinner. Or even over the iceberg lettuce wedge salad topped with blue cheese and onion rings. Or the bacon-wrapped sea scallops.

As if surf and turf were not enough, chicken parmigiana and pasta are on the menu. We went to a pre-matinee business lunch, an extensive prix fixe, including filet mignon medallions à la Oscar: on an asparagus spear raft, with a topping of jumbo lump crabmeat, and frothy Hollandaise on the side. Signature desserts include carrot cake with cream cheese icing and crisp pecans, and a remarkable dark-chocolate layer cake that you will remember always.

Clubby fittings of the theatre-district Palm imitate the Palm on Second, where the original caricature drawings by Jolly Bill Steike reside, duplicated in the wallpaper in its other restaurants. Many famous cartoon characters were drawn there by their makers, including The Phantom, Popeye, Felix the Cat, and Mr. Magoo. The current caricaturist is Al Evcimen.

The Palm is still owned by the same family and serves a menu that looks the way it did when brilliant Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin began eating and writing there.