Good Morning Folks,
This is a short, special edition of News That Matters for the
sole purpose of getting you out of your house this afternoon and over
to Arts on the Lake for the last performance of Harold
Pinter's "The Dumbwaiter" at 3PM this afternoon.
Let's be honest: it's a crappy day. You could stay at home
and veg, bemoaning the weather and watch re-runs of F Troop and
I Love Lucy or you could go to the mall and run up your
credit card debt or you could finally get to cleaning out the basement.
So, since those options are not really options, get your butts off the
couch and get yourselves to the old firehouse on Route 52 (just south
of the Route 311 causeway) and see some live theater.
Pinter's 1960 short play (or a long one-act, if you like)
sets two hitmen in a dingy basement wondering about their next job and
who their victim might be. Here's the full (edited) release from
Friday's Things To Do Edition of News That Matters:
Arts on the Lake is partnering with the
Liberty Free (NY) Theatre to present Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter's
play The Dumb Waiter at the Lake Carmel Cultural Center, 640
Route 52.
The Liberty Free Theatre returns with the play that established Pinter
as a master of "comedy of menace." The Dumbwaiter is about two
hit men,
played by Michael Frizalone and Paul Jannicola, holed-up in a dingy
basement waiting to be sent out on their next job. The play is
one of the first that established Pinter as a master of what would
become known a "comedy of menace."
English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director and political
activist Harold Pinter (1930-2008) was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2005. Beginning with his first play, Pinter's writing
career spanned over 50 years and produced 29 original stage plays, 27
screenplays, many dramatic sketches, radio and TV plays, poetry, one
novel, short fiction, essays, speeches, and letters. His best-known
plays include The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and
Betrayal, each of which he adapted to film. His screenplay adaptations
of others' works include The Trial and Sleuth. He directed almost 50
stage, television, and film productions and acted extensively in radio,
stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.
 Mike Frizalone is an
actor/writer/singer who has performed on stage and film from Bangor,
Maine to New York City. He recently played in a new film by Peking
Productions that was shot in Sullivan County. His work at the Liberty
Free Theatre includes Goods and Guns, Off The Wall, and last season’s
Kinfolks and Mountain Music.
 Paul Jannicola is a singer/songwriter and multi instrument
musician.
His compositions have been featured in the award-winning animated
short, Hardly Workin', the acclaimed episodic web series, Tra5hTa1k
and
MTV's comedic Life in the Virtual Hills. Paul and Director
Kerria
Seabrooke won Best Machinima Series for the Grid Review in the
Machinima Film Festival 2007 in Leicester, UK. In addition to music,
Paul is an animation cinematographer whose work has been seen on the
Jumbotron at 1 Times Square.
Director Paul Austin's many TV appearances include Law and Order and
West Wing. Recent films include Tune in Tomorrow and Sommersby.
(Photo Credit: Ted Waddell)
The play follows Paul Austin's evocation and updated
interpretation of "The Nazz", Lord Buckley's version of
the story of Jesus of Nazareth. And just who is this Lord Buckley?
Lord Richard Buckley, the hipster’s
hipster, was, arguably, the most original American comedian of the 20th
Century. Tall, tuxedoed and mock elegant, his appearance, behavior and
intellect belied the facts of his humble California Gold Country
beginnings.
Dick Buckley grew up in the idyllic settings of California's
Mother Lode country. He was a natural mimic and by the age of three his
mother had to admonish him not to imitate the neighbors when they came
for a visit.
Entering show business rather by accident in the late 1920’s
Buckley cut his teeth as an MC for countless Midwest dance marathons.
It is possible that he also worked some of the last of the medicine
shows in the Midwest. Eventually settling in Chicago, he worked in
Vaudeville and Burlesque as well as Leo Seltzer's Walkathons at the
Chicago Coliseum, and a number of gangster owned nightclubs. Mobster Al
Capone loved Buckley's ability to handle hecklers and was quoted as
saying “He’s the only guy who ever made me laugh.” Capone even
bankrolled a short lived nightclub for Buckley called “Chez Buckley.”
In 1930’s Chicago, Dick Buckley, as he called himself, lived
the high life hanging out with the hippest of Chi Town’s black and
white jazz musicians. With his uncanny ear for dialect he picked up on
the sounds, and the rhythms and the cultural nuances of what was then
called “hep” or “jive” talk And, at the same time, began to develop the
persona of Lord Buckley, a strange but intriguing mix of a proper
English peer of the realm and a street corner jive hipster. Though he
still called himself Dick Buckley his manner and antics began to
resemble those most closely associated with his final incarnation as
The Lord.
Through the ‘30s and ’40s he continued perfecting a stage act
that included hilarious gymnastic routines and a mad ventriloquist
routine called “The Four Chairs” with selected audience members. During
WW II he did countless USO hospital Shows with Ed Sullivan who became a
life long friend and patron.
By wars end Vaudeville was on the ropes, atomic bombs had
radically changed political and culturally assumptions and television
was about to pounce. Dick Buckley, always hip and always ready to
explore change, finally declared himself “Lord Buckley”.
Casting around for a new act, Buckley, at the urging of Lady
Elizabeth, his sixth wife, began offering his audiences beautifully
reimagined stories from history, literature and The Bible delivered in
a black jazz patois. Originally these stories were used to entertain
dressing room guests. But soon Jesus, Gandhi, Einstein, Nero and the
Marquis D’ Sade found their way on stage with him. He called Jesus “The
Nazz”, Gandhi “The Hip Gahn”, Einstein “The Hip Einie” and D’Sade “The
Mark”.
From 1947 on, Buckley, like a hipster preacher, worked small
jazz clubs and coffeehouses, with occasional gigs on TV. He appeared on
Ed Sullivan’s show eight times. He also appeared on The Tonight Show,
You Bet Your Life, House Party and a number of other local and network
programs. But for all this exposure his new and brilliant work was not
bringing much financial reward. He did his best work for his worst
money.
And what of his works? Here's a short-take from The
Nazz:
"Now the fame of The Nazz is jumpin'! The grapevine is
shootin' off
sparks forty feet long and they talkin' about what he said and how he
stood up to all these big bad cats and dug all that bad jazz and put
'em all down, and what he said he gonna do and where he's gonna be and
how he's gonna be until the grapevine is jumpin' so bad there is now
sixteen thousand of these studs and kitties in the Nazz's little home
town where the cat live, lookin' to get straight. Well...the Nazz know
he can't straighten them all there - it's too small a place, don't want
to hang everybody up, nobody can make it. So The Nazz look out at these
sixteen thousand studs and kiddies and he say to them "Come on, babies.
Let's cut on out down the road."
"There
went The Nazz, swingin' away ahead of all these studs and kiddies, and
sixteen thousand stompin' up a big - oh! - big swingin' beat behind
him. And a great necklace of love is superchargin' and chargin' to 'em
and - oh! -it's brother to brother and sister to sister and The Nazz is
stompin' on a sweet swingin' beat goin' down the road, Nazz talkin'
about how pretty the flowers, how pretty the hours, how pretty me, how
pretty you, how pretty he, how pretty she..."
Three PM. Reservations are not necessary. Twelve Dollars or
Ten if you've joined Arts on the Lake.
And when you get there, tell them News That
Matters sent you.
Be there, cats! Or you lords and kitties will be just settin' and
lookin' at them hubcabs go round and round on the black and jivin' on
the wonder of where your life went.
JmG
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