Bill Berloni isn’t just at the top of his profession, he’s practically the only member of his profession. When the extensively rethought Broadway 2012 revival of “Annie” made a point of involving performers and designers who had never done the show before, when it came to Bill Berloni, they had no choice. Berloni has trained many, many “Sandy” dogs, including the one in the national tour of “Annie” that will visit the Waterbury Palace and New London’s Garde Arts Center in April.
Here in Connecticut, where Berloni raises and trains his animals (many of whom are rescued from shelters), he’s worked with regional, college and high school theaters. It was Berloni who supplied the live sheep used in the 2013 Long Wharf production of Sam Shepard’s “Curse of the Starving Class.” He trained the tiny dog that got carried around in “Anything Goes” at the Goodspeed last year. He even trained a pet bird for Hartford Stage’s production of “Light Up the Sky” in 1997.
On May 19, Bill Berloni receives a Drama League Award for “Unique Contribution to the Theater.” The league has been handing out awards for more than 80 years, and is considered the oldest American theater prize.
The Great TV Show Musicals
The eagerly awaited musical episodes of two superhero shows on the CW network are finally airing. The crooning crossover event begins on “Supergirl” March 20 and concludes on “The Flash” March 21.
The singing, dancing, flying, dashing, highly theatrical shows feature Darren Criss as the Music Meister. That same sinister singing character fueled a wonderful episode of the animated series “Batman: The Brave and the Bold” in 2009 — only then he was voiced by Neil Patrick Harris. (Interestingly, both Harris and Criss have starred in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” on Broadway. Secret identity!)
Here are five other fine examples of TV shows that broke format to go musical:
1. “Atomic Shakespeare,” a “Taming of the Shrew” take-off from the Bruce Willis/Cybill Shepard show “Moonlighting.”
2. “Once More, With Feeling” on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The Yale Cabaret once staged a live version of this. An instant classic, paving the way for Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.”
3. Hard to pick a best musical-theater segment from The Simpsons, but I still double over laughing whenever I watch “Oh, Streetcar!” as presented by the Springfield Community Players on the fourth season.” (“Stella! Stella!…You’re puttin’ me through Hell-ah…”). In current cartoondom, “Bob’s Burgers” is doing exemplary work with unexpected musical interludes, such as the fever-dream episode “Flu-ouise.”
4. “Elementary School Musical,” a “High School Musical” parody from “South Park” season 12 in which a slaphappy dad wants his kid to be a musical theater geek and not play basketball.
5. “Psych The Musical,” a two-act, two-hour spectacle that served as the seventh season finale of “Psych.” It co-stars Anthony Rapp of “Rent” fame (seen at The Bushnell last year in “If/Then”). Great hand-waving.
It’s Curtains!
In Meghan Kennedy’s new play “Napoli, Brooklyn” last month at Long Wharf Theatre, a curtain at the back of the stage fell to denote the crash of an airplane into a New York neighborhood.
In the national tour of “The Sound of Music” last week at the Palace in Waterbury, Nazi banners were yanked down from the back of concert stage set to show that the Trapp Family Singers had escaped Nazi persecution.
And in the Caryl Churchill classic “Cloud 9” currently at Hartford Stage, a flag/curtain at the back of the stage crashes down, symbolic of the fall of the British Empire.
In all three cases, the theaters had to create special stage areas so they could drop these special curtains. Long Wharf and Hartford Stage don’t even have proscenium stages in the first place; curtains aren’t a constant there. There’s no great statement to be made about shifting curtains in theaters that don’t swear by them.
Somebody should stitch up some new metaphors. Curtains don’t cut it anymore.
Lin-Manuel Miranda Update
Still an “O” shy of a “PEGOT” distinction, the esteemed Wesleyan grad and “Hamilton” creator known in some circles as “LMM” did not win an Oscar for his “Moana” song last month (unless of course they opened the wrong envelope). But kids still dig him. The “Rockabye Baby!” series has released an eight-track album of “Hamilton” tunes performed on glockenspiel, wood blocks and other percussive instruments. The “Lullaby Renditions of Songs from ‘Hamilton'” are all instrumentals. Strangely, since these are renditions intended to calm children down, “Take a Break” is not among them.
Soundtrack To An Award
Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize was just the beginning. The lines between songwriting and other kinds of writing continue to blur. In April, Stephen Sondheim will be the first composer and lyricist to receive the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award from the free-speech advocacy group PEN America. The composer’s 1990 musical “Assassins” is playing this month at the Yale Repertory Theatre, which premiered his “The Frogs” back in 1974.
‘Wall’ Around the Country
Robert Schenkkan, who wrote the Pulitzer-winning “The Kentucky Cycle,” the LBJ biodrama “All the Way” and the Oscar-nominated movie “Hacksaw Ridge,” wrote his latest play “Building the Wall” this past fall as a response to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. To ensure that “Building the Wall” gets seen far and wide, Schenkkan is working with regional theaters as well as the National New Play Network. Five different theaters will do the play this year, starting with a premiere March 18 at the Fountain Theatre in L.A. There are other productions scheduled in Denver, Maryland, Arizona and New Mexico. Surely it won’t be long before one of the many fine regional theaters in New England takes an interest.
