Encore Atlanta

High offers half-price tickets to Dali

Through Aug. 31, adults will only pay half-price ($9) to see exhibits at the High on Tuesdays, all day. From Sept. 7 through Oct. 29, half-price tickets will be available for lunchtime visitors between the hours of 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Discounted tickets are available to walk-up visitors, although $9 tickets for Thursday evenings (4-8 p.m.) are available online or to walk-up visitors. Groups of 10 or more interested in visiting during lunchtime hours can receive two additional free tickets by calling 404-733-4550.

Currently on display is “Dali: The Late Work,” which features 115 works, including large-scale paintings, rarely seen portraits and jewelry. “Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland” will open on Oct. 17.

He’s quite a character, that Bill Murphey!

By Kathy Janich

In A Confederacy of Dunces, now at Theatrical Outfit, 16 actors play more than 25 characters. Among them is William S. Murphey, who, for my money, is the best character actor in town.

He plays two roles in Dunces: Mr. Claude Robichaux, a befuddled, irascible old man with an unusual mustache, and Mr. Clyde, an enthusiastic hot dog vendor wheeling a full-service weenie-shaped cart. His aren’t the biggest roles, but they are among the most memorable. As he’s done for a long time, Murphey breathes humanity into even the smallest slices of character.

“If they weren’t important to the show, and they didn’t have some sort of spark of life in them, they wouldn’t be in the script,” he says. “If [I] can find that spark of life, it’s much more rewarding for me to play and much more rewarding for the audience to watch.”

He’s being modest.

Murphey, a Decatur native who goes by “Bill,” has been acting in Atlanta since finishing grad school at the University of Mississippi in 1986. He’s an affable guy with a dry wit, 732 Facebook friends (at last count), and an annual Christmas open house that attracts throngs. He likes the Beatles, Green Day and the Three Stooges. He’s been reading Hemingway, Salinger, Bradbury and Steinbeck lately. And if you need a house- or pet-sitter, he’s your man. Such gigs help supplement his income as an actor, one who’s been on almost every professional stage in metro Atlanta. His legion of credits include:

• The unemployed actor named Sam, a society matron, a Hannibal Lecter-like chef, and a gangster who wants his parents serenaded with “The Lady Is a Tramp” – a few of his 40 roles – in the one-man dining satire Fully Committed at Theatre in the Square.
• The warmly funny, Irish-accented Catholic priest in The God Committee, a medical drama about organ transplants at Theatrical Outfit.
• The quick-stepping campaign manager (to a dead candidate!) in the political satire Lying in State at Georgia Ensemble Theatre in Roswell.
• Detective Fix and “a huge number of smaller characters” in the Outfit’s stage version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days.
• Doc Gibbs in GET’s Our Town; and Constable Warren, funeral director Joe Stoddard and history-spouting Professor Willard in a multiculti interpretation of the Thornton Wilder classic at True Colors Theatre Company.

For Murphey, doing Detective Fix and the rapid-fire arsenal required in Fully Committed stand out, as does his work as ever-patient son Boolie Werthan in Driving Miss Daisy at the Outfit.

GET Artistic Director Robert Farley calls Murphy a “comic genius”; in his Atlanta Journal-Constitution review of Around the World, the notoriously tough critic Bert Osborne wrote: “Who can resist the versatile, ubiquitous William S. Murphey? Put him in an opium den, give him a hookah and some throw pillows, and sit back and enjoy.“

Murphey is at the Outfit with Dunces through Sept. 5, then returns to Theatre in the Square for A Tuna Christmas, which opens Nov. 16. He did Greater Tuna, the first of the Tuna plays, at the Marietta playhouse in June and July. In both he’s one of two actors, both radio announcers, who portray – with loving care and to hilarious effect – the multitudinous inhabitants of quirky Tuna, Texas. Murphey does the straight-man, radio announcer Thurston, as well as big girls Bertha Bumiller and Aunt Pearl, Tastee Crème waitress Inita Goodwin and frustrated theater director Joe Bob Lipsey, among others.

In the Christmas chapter, he manhandles a dozen roles, including Bertha, who returns with her kid and husband troubles, and Aunt Pearl, a “mean, old Texas woman who loves her chickens. If she has to kill a dog or two with her bitter pills, it’s OK with her. Just so those chickens are protected.”

Murphey hasn’t killed any dogs, or chickens, that we know of, but he’s killed for plenty of audiences. If you get a chance, check out his work. And, if any directors are listening, he’s available again as soon as A Tuna Christmas closes Jan. 2.

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Kathy Janich is an Atlanta theater artist and freelance writer. After years in daily newspapers, she’s found a joyous second career at Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theatre. She’ll be blogging regularly about the metro arts scene for Encore Atlanta.

New award from Emory to honor community-centric artists

By Kathy Janich

The Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts has announced a new awards program intended to raise the profile of Atlanta artists and arts organizations. It will recognize contributions made in Fulton and DeKalb counties as well as the Emory University campus.

The Community Impact Award is open to any artist, administrator, educator, activist, supporter or group in any artistic discipline. Nominees must be current or former DeKalb or Fulton residents, and can come from any area of the arts, from grass-roots community engagement to broad-based activity. Nominees should have made an impact in the region, on the Emory campus or beyond. No self-nominations are allowed. The program has similar awards for Emory’s faculty, staff, students and alumni, and an arts campus volunteer. For details, visit Emory’s website. Nominations are due by 4 p.m. Friday, Aug. 20 and can be made online.

Winners will be celebrated Sept. 10 (4-7:30 p.m.) at the third annual Creativity & Arts Soirée at the Schwartz Center. The casual, drop-in event — which is free and open to the public — is Emory’s art season kick-off party. It will feature theater, dance and music performances, as well as contributions from the creative writing, film, visual arts and poetry departments. Parking in the nearby Fishburne deck is also free that night.

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ASO Songster competition down to 3 finalists

By Kathy Janich

Two Georgia singers and one from Ohio have been named finalists in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s “American Idol”-like Songster 2010 amateur vocal competition. The winner, who will be named during an Aug. 14 ASO concert, will receive round-trip airline tickets to New York to see the symphony perform at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 30, concert tickets, a hotel room and a Turner Classic Movies gift basket full of books and DVDs.

Joseph Brewer of Columbus, Rebekah Dossou of Lilburn and Christina Lewis of Cincinnati will each sing “Over the Rainbow” with the symphony before the Aug. 14 concert at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park in Alpharetta. The concert is a screening of The Wizard of Oz, with the ASO providing live accompaniment. The competition (not the concert) will be streamed live on UStreamtv.com, and audience members will be asked to choose their favorite by text message or online voting. The winner will be announced at intermission. The second- and third-place finishers will receive free ASO tickets and more.

The finalists’ YouTube.com video entries can be seen on the ASO website.

Debbie Allen to dish about Twist

Debbie Allen, who is directing and choreographing the new musical Twist, will talk about the piece in a “Dialogue With Debbie” event at 7:30 p.m., on Aug. 6 at the Alliance Theatre.

Twist moves Charles Dickens’ classic “Oliver Twist” to New Orleans in 1928, as the Roaring ‘20s dance their way down Bourbon Street and an orphan in search of home finds family in the most unexpected places. Twist begins previews on Sept. 1 and opens the Alliance Theatre season on Sept. 8.

Allen, whose sister Phylicia Rashad has acted on the Alliance stage and with Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company, directed Soul Possessed at the Alliance in 2000. More recently, she directed the Broadway and London revivals of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  She’s a regular on the TV reality show “So You Think You Can Dance” and probably is best known for her long-running portrayal of dance teacher Lydia Grant on the 1980s TV drama “Fame.” As a performer, she is a two-time Tony Award nominee for revivals of West Side Story and Sweet Charity.

Allen calls Twist – still in rewrites as rehearsals progress – “heart-wrenching, wonderful and funny.” The creative team includes book writer William F. Brown (The Wiz), composer-lyricist Tena Clark and co-composer Gary Prim.

Visit alliancetheatre.org for ticket information and to view quick video chat with Allen.

ASO Songster Competition a bit like ‘Idol’

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? The answer, generally, is “practice, practice, practice.” But the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has another way: Take part in its “American Idol”-style Atlanta Symphony Songster 2010 Vocal Competition and you could win a round-trip airline ticket to hear the ASO perform at New York’s venerable concert hall.

Here’s the deal. By midnight Wednesday, July 28, amateur solo singers age 18 and older must submit an application to the ASO and a two-minute video of themselves singing “Over the Rainbow” to the ASO’s YouTube channel. Judges will choose and announce three finalists on Aug. 4. The finalists will then sing a portion of the song with the symphony before its Aug. 14 concert at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park in Alpharetta. The performances also will be streamed live on UStream.com/atlantasymphony. The program that night features the music to The Wizard of Oz.

Audience members will vote for the winner online or by text message. Ben Mankiewicz, the weekend daytime host of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), will announce the winner at intermission. First prize is two domestic round-trip tickets to New York, one hotel room and two concert tickets to the ASO concert at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 30, plus a TCM gift basket of books and DVDs. The other finalists also receive prizes.

Paula Abdul? Raquel Welch? On the Tony Awards? Puh-leeze.

I’m going to say it straight out. I’ll even beg. Dear CBS, please let us theater folk have our one night a year.

The Tony Awards, honoring the best of the Broadway season, happened Sunday, June 13, and a lot of genuine Broadway glitterati were MIA. Where, for example, was Patti LuPone and Tony Kushner, Marin Mazzie and Donna Murphy, Audra McDonald, Taye Diggs, Cherry Jones, Brian Stokes Mitchell, J. Robert Spencer, Mandy Patinkin, Stephen Sondheim and dozens of other real theater people who should have been onstage at Radio City Music Hall?

“Probably in the balcony,” Atlanta actor Clifton Guterman offered in response to one of my Facebook rants.

Ironically, the Tonys have won Emmys (plural) for being the best awards show on TV. They will,  however, never top the Oscars, the Emmys or the Grammys in terms of popular appeal. And they shouldn’t have to.

CBS refuses to acknowledge this fact and, year after year, trots out Hollywood types and other “celebs” to deliver the medallions. This will, they reason, cause hundreds, nay millions, of non-theater viewers to tune in. It doesn’t work. Never has. Never will. Tony viewership leveled off at 7 million this year, down from 2009 but up from 2008. It will never approach the 36 million that Oscar attracts.

Let me say this clearly: IT DOESN’T MATTER!

Viewers who don’t plan to watch the Tonys will not do so just to see Green Day bask in strobe lights or Denzel or Will Smith stumble through lines on the Teleprompter.  Those of us who watch because it is theater will wonder, infuriated and frustrated, why bona fide Broadway royalty isn’t there. The result: a watered-down telecast that pleases no one.

“This is the way to make theater temporarily flashier but far less relevant,” John Ellison Conlee, a Tony nominee for The Full Monty a few years back, offered in a Facebook riposte.

And Guterman? “Rough show this year. Very rough.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. CBS wants the prestige of the Tonys but not the responsibility of doing them justice. Already a third of the winners are named off-air — the CBS brain trust doesn’t want to bore viewers with unimportant honors like best director. And the telecast is held to a strict three-hour limit. Never mind that the Academy Awards can stretch into hour four or five or, God forbid, a sports event be taken off the air when it dribbles into prime time.

It wasn’t always so.

I was a little Wisconsin kid — on my belly as close to the TV as possible, head in hands, elbows cushioned by shag carpeting — living  for that Sunday night in June when the lights of Broadway shone just for me. I remember Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, Robert Preston, Arthur Miller, Jerome Robbins, Edward Albee, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. I want that magic back, and I don’t think I’m alone.

Put the Tonys on TV an hour earlier so we can cheer all the winners. Let the show run as long as it needs to, brightened by the star power of those who actually sing, dance, direct or emote eight times a week in the middle of Manhattan. Turn down the volume and let the stage bewitch us as it so naturally does. Tell Hollywood to stay home. And ask Patti LuPone and Stephen Sondheim to step up front and center where they belong. Give us our Tonys back, please.

After all, it’s only one night.

Fox, Encore co-host Tony party and auction

Food, drink and a red-carpet experience await guests at the Tony Award Viewing Party and Silent Auction on June 13 in the Fox Theatre’s Egyptian Ballroom.

The event, sponsored by Encore Atlanta and the Fox Theatre, is a fund-raiser for The Fox’s educational outreach programs and UNICEF’s relief efforts in Haiti. Silent auction items will be available online on June 1. Partygoers will sample nibbles and libations from Livingston Restaurant + Bar, Shout, Gordon Biersch, Sotto Sotto, Veni Vidi Vici, Joey D’s, New York Prime, Broadway Diner, Max Lager’s, Nickolai’s Roof, Hudson Grille, Il Mulino, Hard Rock Café and Terraces Restaurant, among others. Additional sponsors include Comcast, Wellstar and Lenbrook.

This year’s awards have a bit of local flavor. Sahr Ngaujah, who cut his teeth with the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta (YEA) and 7 Stages Theatre, is nominated for Best Actor in a musical for the title role in Fela! The show, a pulsing, high-energy biography of Afro-beat pioneer Fela Kuti, is nominated for best musical.

For more information, visit foxtheatre.org.

Dali exhibit to open at the High in August

An exclusive exhibit of Salvador Dali’s late work will be on display at the High Museum of Art from Aug. 7, 2010 through Jan. 9, 2011. The show will feature more than 100 works that explore the artist’s evolution past his involvement with the Surrealism movement, including his connection to and influence on famous “pop” artists of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Willem de Kooning.

Some of the highlights of the exhibition, like “Christ of St. John of the Cross” and “Santiago El Grande,” haven’t been seen in this country for more than 50 years. In addition to 40 paintings, drawings, prints and other articles will be on display, illustrating Dali’s fascination with science, Catholicism, optical effects and illusionism.

“Salvador Dali: The Late Work” is produced by the High in conjunction with the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., and the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali in Figueres, Spain. Atlanta’s High Museum of Art is the only venue this exhibit will appear at. For tickets or more information, visit high.org.

Plan Your Meetings and Encore Atlanta win big

Atlanta Metropolitan Publishing Inc. walked away from the GAMMA Awards luncheon a big winner. Both its publications took home honors from the Magazine Association of the Southeast (MAGS).

AMP editorial and design team bring home the Gold.

Encore Atlanta, the official arts publication of the Fox Theatre, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Atlanta Opera and Alliance Theatre won an Honorable Mention for Best Custom Publication for its December 2009 Fox Theatre issue.

Business to business publication Plan Your Meetings won three top awards. Its editorial and design staff brought home a Silver GAMMA for Best Feature, for the article “Change Begins With You,” which appeared in Plan Your Meetings magazine, Volume 14, Issue 1 2009. The same issue also won two Gold GAMMA Awards — Best Service Journalism, for the article “Making Cents: 75 Ways to Stretch Your Planning Dollars,” and Best Single Issue.

Of “Making Cents,” the judges said: “What an empowering piece that directly meets the needs of its readers. Thorough, actionable, and intelligently reported, ‘Making Cents’ is guaranteed to spark ideas for readers — and make them look like heroes to their companies. Even better: The editors compile more tips online. Smart, savvy, superb way to serve a readership.”

Of the 2009 issue as a whole, the judges said: “Packed with useful tips for the part-time meeting planner, Plan Your Meetings’ light, breezy design makes it fun to read.”

This was the first year AMP submitted to the MAGS GAMMA Awards, and AMP Editorial Director Kristi Casey Sanders was pleased with the results. “To win in almost every category we submitted for was a huge validation of the hard work and tireless hours my editorial and production teams have put in over the past couple of years,” Sanders said. “I am incredibly proud of them. If anything, this has inspired us to raise the bar of quality and value for our readership even higher.”