John Lamb

Michelle Hand, Greg Johnston and Jonathan Foster in Mustard Seed Theatre's Falling.

​The Professional Theatre Council announced its nominees for the 2012 Kevin Kline Awards last night in person at Tucci & Fresta Trattoria and simultaneously online at its Facebook page. As has been the case since the awards' inception, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, the Muny and Stages dominated the proceedings, with 28, 18 and 17 nominations respectively.

Judges seemed to have some difficulty narrowing down the competition in two categories. The field for Outstanding Lead Actor is seven-deep, and Outstanding Costume Design has eight unique nominees.

Of special note are former Riverfront Times theatre critic Deanna Jent's multiple nominations as both writer and director. Her production of Godspell for Mustard Seed Theatre is up for Outstanding Production of a Musical, Outstanding Ensemble in A Musical and Outstanding Supporting Actress in A Musical, as well as Outstanding Director of a Musical. Jent's powerful family drama Falling is up for Outstanding New Play or Musical (an award it should win handily) and Falling's Michelle Hand and Jonathan Foster have been tipped for Outstanding Actress in a Play and Outstanding Supporting Actor in Play.

The full list of nominations follows.
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King and the cast of Issues of Love.

​When we last checked in with Joel King, the playwright, director, advocate of urban theater and subject of the February feature story "Drama King" was preparing to move to LA to revise his latest production, Real Life, and take it on the road. He did the rewrites and made the cuts his producers requested.

Things got slow. For the first time in his life, he started to feel homesick. (His mother, Rosalind, says now she was secretly glad, but resisted the impulse to call and tell him to come home.) Providentially, he met the actress Kendra C. Johnson, who, most famously, co-starred with Mo'Nique in the the 2006 movie Phat Girlz and had a recurring role on the BET series The Game. She reminded him of home. They became good friends. Then Johnson left LA for a job in New York.

Earlier this summer, King returned to St. Louis to work on a play commissioned by a friend. It's called Issues of Love. It's exactly what it sounds like: An examination of different kinds of romantic relationships told through three interconnected families. Urban theater focuses on problem-solving, so the stories were going to be instructive. He sent out a Facebook invitation announcing auditions, but thought how nice it would be if Johnson could star in it. Five minutes later, he got a text message from her saying that she happened to be in St. Louis visiting her sister and would love to audition for his show.

King and Johnson told this story last Thursday night at a sneak preview of Issues of Love in the Syndicate Lofts downtown. The audience agreed that somehow, this was all meant to be, and settled in to watch a twenty-minute excerpt. The show will have its theatrical run this weekend, August 26 to 28, at the Grandel Theatre in Midtown.

"It's the most amazing thing you're going to see," promised the producer Dwayne Bess.

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Fran Landesman in 1996.

​Fran Landesman, a poet and songwriter who, along with her husband Jay and brother-in-law Fred, ran the Crystal Palace nightclub in Gaslight Square in the late 1950s, died last Saturday, July 23, in London. She was 83.

Her website proclaims her "the poet laureate of lovers and losers" and "the jazz world's answer to Dorothy Parker," but Landesman will probably always be best remembered by St. Louisans as the lyricist of The Nervous Set, the world's first (and only) beatnik musical, which had its premiere in St. Louis in 1959. Two songs from The Nervous Set, "All the Sad Young Men" and "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" became jazz standards.

(Here's a fun fact: "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" was a hepcat jazz translation of "April is the cruelest month," the opening line of The Waste Land by another St. Louisan-turned-Londoner, T.S. Eliot.)

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John Claridge

​Jay Landesman, who founded the Crystal Palace nightclub, which became the linchpin of the Gaslight Square hipster/entertainment district, and wrote the novel The Nervous Set, which became the basis for the world's first (and only) beatnik musical, died Sunday in London. He was 91.

His son Cosmo, now a film critic for the London Sunday Times, wrote in his 2008 memoir, Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family and Me:

My dad has had an interesting life. He's never had a job that bored him. He is an original man, a man who has opened minds and emptied a few rooms in his time ... He's taken tea with Bette Davis, cocktails with Bessie Smith and LSD with Timothy Leary. His is a life that many would envy; I know I do. And yet my dad has never thought of himself as a success, for one simple reason: he isn't a big name. His life has always lacked the imprimatur of celebrity.

If only he had stayed in St. Louis...

But to begin at the beginning:

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Now that you've had a chance to read this week's feature story about Joel P.E. King and his latest show, Real Life, you're probably wondering, Gee, I wonder what that show's like?

Fear not. Here's a video that King and his cohorts at JPEK Creative Works put together when the show first hit the stage of the Grandel Theatre last summer.

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Joel P.E. King

​This Sunday, November 21, is your last chance to catch Joel P.E. King's hip-hop/pop/gospel musical Real Life at the Grandel Theatre. There will be two performances, one at 2 p.m. and one at 6 p.m., and Project Ark will be there to collect toys for kids who have been affected by HIV.

Real Life ran at the Grandel back in August, and King and his company JPEK Creative Works are bringing it back for a one-day revival, in part to show the production off to potential investors who might be interested in taking the show on the road.

The play, which was written and directed by King, takes place on St. Louis Avenue in North City, a space inhabited by junkies, hoods, church ladies, single mothers, a pair of sassy queens and, most of all, a young man named Ray whose life went into a steady downward spiral the day he choked in the last six seconds of an important high-school basketball game.

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The curtain is about to rise on the Ivory Theatre's second -- or third? -- act.

​As of last Friday, November 5, the homepage for the Ivory Theatre went dark, sparking rumors of the troubled theater's demise. But those rumors are unfounded says Scott Steele, the new general manager who replaced Donna Perrino, known to some in the St. Louis theater community as "the Ivory Theatre Horror Show."

"The Ivory Theatre is alive and well!" Steele informs Daily RFT.

So what about that website?

"When Donna Perrino was removed -- or whatever the term is -- when she ceased to be part of the Ivory family, we couldn't continue to use the old website," Steele explains.

And why is that?

"I can't comment on that. But we have a new website now." The Ivory's current online home is www.theivorytheatre.com.

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Jennifer Silverberg

Perrino and Allen in happier days at the Ivory.

​Ever since it opened three years ago, the Ivory Theatre in Carondelet has been beset by controversy. Aggrieved theater companies have accused the Ivory, specifically its general manager Donna Perrino, of negligence and general mismanagement. Among other things, Perrino was said to have reneged on agreements to let groups use the space, ignored requests for improvements and trashed the theater. (For more, see "Stage Fright: The Ivory is turning into a horror show for some St. Louis theater companies.")

But times have changed. Perrino has left her position at the Ivory. Or, as the anonymous blogger who has been chronicling Perrino's misdeeds on the blog The Ivory Theatre Horror Show puts it, "Ding Dong the witch is dead."

(A correction of this paragraph appears at the end of the post.)

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​The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis has just received a $25,000 grant to participate in the National Endowment of the Arts' Shakespeare for a New Generation program, plus an additional $10,000 from Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The Rep will use the money to teach the young folks of this city about the twin glories that are Shakespeare and live theater, starting with Macbeth.

Well, there are probably worse ways to introduce kids to Shakespeare than that cheerful little tale of witches, ghosts, murder and madness. Especially kids who are already serving time.

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Picture This...Photography

If Tennessee Williams had died in 1945, if he had never written A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or any of his other plays and screenplays and novels and poems and essays, he would still hold an indelible place in the American theater as the author of The Glass Menagerie. This is one of those rare "rite of passage" plays. Young actresses cut their teeth on the fragile Laura; young actors test their chops on her anguished brother Tom.

​The arc of the play is so simple: the trials of a St. Louis family trying to survive during the Depression. Yet as the restless Tom and his smothering mother Amanda tell each other, "There's so much in my heart that I can't describe." Despite the play's eloquence, perhaps it is what's unspoken here that has resonated with three generations of viewers. This weekend the play is on view yet again, this time under the auspices of the Kirkwood Theatre Guild. The production continues through Saturday, January 23.

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