Before a performance of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the backstage and dressing room areas of Broadway’s Foxwoods Theatre are abuzz with activity.  Members of the wardrobe crew work with quiet and focused intensity as they lay out the myriad costumes that will be quickly donned and just as rapidly doffed as this musical tale of superhero vs. super villains comes to life.  Amid all this bustle, you also hear voices through the theatre’s sound system as the stage management crew carefully works through the cues for the show’s lighting changes, making sure everything is in order.

Just past all of this, in a dressing room that’s shared by half a dozen or so of the show’s male ensemble members, is Adam Roberts, a handsome, chiseled southerner who tackles a host of roles in the show.  It’s 6:30pm. He doesn’t need to be at the theater until 7pm, but he likes coming in early because, he says with a gleaming smile, “As the saying goes, ‘If you’re early, you’re on time; if you’re on time, you’re late; and if you’re late, you’re forgotten.’”

But it’s not just this adage that brings him to the theater early each day he’s performing.  He says that the extra time allows him to visit with other members of the company (“We share a great camaraderie.”) and to do his prep work from applying makeup to a stretching routine that he performs in private in a secluded hallway.

Roberts, a native of Myrtle Beach, SC, grew up in a family of performers.  “My dad played the Grand Ole Opry for years and toured with people like Andy Williams.  He also was the last person to sing with Louis Armstrong before he died.  My grandfather is in the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame.  He traveled and played with Hank Snow and a bunch of other country artists for many years and did studio work.”  As for Roberts, his life onstage began at an early age:  “I worked professionally starting at ten in Myrtle Beach, with my father, at a variety show, in a 2,200 seat theater called the Carolina Opry.”

The performer’s ambitions lay beyond work in country music, though, and he always dreamed of landing a role on Broadway.   That dream became a reality just a year and a half ago when he joined the Spider-Man company.

He is perhaps most visible in it when he hoists a pair of 70 pound carbon fiber wings on his back, gets into a four-point harness, and become the aerialist Green Goblin during the climactic battle scene between the title character and his arch nemesis.  Roberts smiles when asked if this is the most difficult thing he has to do in the show, saying “No,” and then continuing “It sounds like the Goblin fight would be the most ‘ARGHHHH’ sort of fearful thing I do, but it’s not really.  It’s all computerized and I’m actually steering the device.”

What he says is more demanding on him physically is one of the earliest dance routines in the show, “Bullying by Numbers.”   “In that, I’m lifting a 180-pound man eight shows a week.  He’s jumping in my arms, and I’m flipping him and throwing him around.  That’s pretty difficult.” The performer also says that it’s rough “just keeping the show fresh and new for the audiences, finding new ways to be creative and stay alert onstage, mindful and not complacent when you’re doing it eight times a week.”

And Roberts has a lot to keep fresh in the show. Not only does he do the “Goblin flyover” and “Bullying” number, he also takes on roles ranging from a priest to the blood-spewing villain Carnage. In addition, he tackles some of the flying stunts as Spider-Man (there are a total of nine performers used for these in the course of a performance), and he serves as a puppeteer during the number “Bouncing Off the Walls” when awkward high school student Peter Parker discovers that he’s gained the strength and agility of an arachnid.

You might assume that the demands of the show might mean that a typical day for Roberts is filled with prep work, but he says that on some levels the show itself is enough of a workout.  Nevertheless, he does maintain a routine at a gym, going several times a week “to stay in tip top shape” and there’s a weekly massage.  He adds, “I just try to keep everything strong and the joints lubricated, stretched and elongated.”

There are, he says, days when he’s called in for brush-up rehearsals, or days in which he’s on call to help integrate new cast members into the show, “Obviously the Spider-Man can’t do the Spider-Man/Goblin fight without the Goblin, so they bring me in to synch it up with new performers and make sure everything runs like it needs to up in the air.”

Beyond that, he spends his time away from the theatre pursuing activities that hone his talents.  “I’m taking ballroom lessons with one of our female ensemble members,” he says and “I also take acting classes, just to keep my craft sharp.  In addition, he says, “I’m trying to learn guitar–which is ironic since my father’s a guitar teacher–and I’m starting to dabble with songwriting a little bit.”

Looking to the future, he says he has his eyes on assuming leading man roles, and in particular, Jersey Boys. “I’ve had my eyes on that show for a while.  One my strongest suits is that I can hear a harmony, and I’ve been singing since I was like seven in like choral groups.  And I grew up listening to Frankie Valli music and I love it.  That show would be a great way to use my singing, dancing and acting.”

At this juncture, though, Roberts, is simply enjoying life in New York, saying that “Everything I’ve done  has led up to this, including putting myself through college while working a full-time job.  And now it feels like all of my dreams have pretty much come true.”  He then quickly adds with a wry smile, “And this is a pretty badass show to have for your Broadway debut!”

Sometimes raising culturally sophisticated kids starts with a good villain. At least that seems to be the first step for my 12-year-old son.

Even though we live just 45 minutes away, Romano, who is 12, had never been to Broadway. It seemed easy to introduce my daughter to the glamour of the big stage, but a boy who still thinks anything gross is funny? It seemed like a bigger challenge.

Before we headed to 42nd Street, Romano was expecting Broadway to be a lot of operatic singing, wooden acting and high-brow staging. He didn’t expect action, adventure and rock ‘n’ roll.

Enter Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

This Broadway blockbuster has everything a boy needs to be fully entertained: an “awesome” and familiar story, thanks to countless comic books and a couple of hit movies; special effects that are cool enough to impress a computer-aware, video-game-addicted generation; stars who soar overhead; a techno extravaganza of smoke and explosions, and an evil villain who is just as funny as he is menacing.

Best of all, it starts the minute you walk in the lobby of the Foxwoods Theatre with the opportunity to have your photo taken with Spider-Man himself. Romano was thrilled to have a close encounter with his favorite superhero even before the show began. The excitement built as we shopped the Spider-Man store in the lobby and continued all through the show as the actors ventured off the stage and into the audience, culminating in an explosive finale where the good guy and the bad guy flew over our heads battling it out in an intricately choreographed aerial fight scene.

What’s not to love — whether you’re a 12-year-old boy or an adventure seeking adult, Spider-Man has enough thrills to bring out the kid in all of us.

The goblin villain in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is everything you would want him to be — snarky and self-effacing but still cool and conniving.  But, as we all know from the comic books and movies, the green villain is no match for Peter Parker, the geeky, mild-mannered teen who was bitten by a spider and turned into New York’s hometown hero — Spider-Man.

Romano summed up the show as a “4-D” experience — four dimensional — high praise indeed from a tween.

“The ending was the best,” Romano says. “The goblin and Spider-Man were flying all around the stage, up and low, and over our heads. When Spider-Man needed to spray his web, long strips of confetti came out.  It was the best part!”

This first Broadway outing delivered exactly what I wanted:  a 12-year-old boy who now thinks Broadway and live theatre are cool. Thanks to this teen-boy-friendly experience, he’s ready for anything.  He even wants to come back and take the VIP backstage tour to see all the costumes and props… and learn how Spider-Man flies.  There’s a wide variety of shows on Broadway – but Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has set the standard so high it will prove hard to beat.  In fact, I’m already planning a return trip with my husband and daughter.  Why should they miss out on all the fun?

By Kim Orlando
TravelingMom.com

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Shakespeare rules! That’s certainly how Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad feel about playing the world famous lovers in the upcoming Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet.  Both actors first encountered the great Bard’s work at acting school, but this is their first time in a full-length Shakespeare production on the professional stage. Two years ago, in a change of pace from playing an Elven prince in The Lord of the Rings movies and aswashbuckler in The Pirates of the Caribbean series, Bloom performed a few scenes from Romeo and Juliet at a concert of Tchaikovsky music by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. “I was exhilarated and inspired by the experience and wanted to explore this classic in its entirety,” Bloom reports. Shortly after, he met with director David Leveaux and they started work on a Broadway revival of Shakespeare’s tragic love story. For her part, Rashad says, “Shakespeare has been one of my biggest goals; I always wanted that to be part of my career. When I heard through the grapevine that they were doing auditions for Romeo and Juliet, I called my agent and my manager and said ‘you’ve got to get me in there!’”

“I have always loved this play, in particular because I think there are shades to Juliet that have yet to be discovered. I wanted to take a shot at it,” Rashad continues. She kept it secret that she was auditioning for the role over the long six month casting process, which involved three call-backs. “I didn’t want to jinx anything so the only person I told was my mother,” she relates. Her mother, of course, is Phylicia Rashad, the Tony Award-winning actress and singer, known to the world as Clair Huxtable from the hit NBC sitcom The Cosby Show.  (Her father is former NFL player and sportscaster Ahmad Rashad.) Their daughter has more than proved that she has showbiz blood in her veins. The year after she graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 2008, she made a splash, at age 23, in the off-Broadway production of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined.  In 2011, she made her Broadway debut in Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly, and received her first Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play. This year, she is nominated once again in the same category for her current performance in The Trip to Bountiful.

Bloom’s career has followed a different trajectory. He studied at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and was offered an understudy contract with the Royal Shakespeare Company upon graduating.  But instead the movies beckoned: he landed the plum role of Legolas, Elf of the Woodland Realm, in Peter Jackson’s screen adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Soon after the Tolkien trilogy was completed the newly minted box-office star continued his screen adventures, most notably playing the blacksmith Will Turner in the first three The Pirates of the Caribbean movies (2003-2007).  But by then, having turned 30, Bloom says he was looking for a change. “I had been incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to be a part of some of the most popular franchises in recent film, and I wouldn’t trade those experiences for the world,” he explains. “As I have matured in my career, I have wanted to return to the theater so I could draw on those experiences, having worked with some of the most talented artists.” He made his West End debut in the 2007 London revival of David Storey’s In Celebration, playing the youngest of three brothers who return to the small English mining town of their birth to celebrate their parent’s wedding anniversary. “It was exhilarating and thrilling because I was able to connect with a live audience and feel that electrical energy.  There’s no safety net in the theater.”

After her two call-backs in New York last year for Juliet, Rashad was called in once again this January, on this occasion to  Los Angeles, for a “chemistry reading” with Bloom. “He was really nice,” she recalls. “We had a good connection as people, as artists, and we were both really passionate about the work itself.”  Says Bloom, “I felt an immediate connection and thought she’d make an amazing Juliet.”  A few days later she had the role. Rashad contends that Juliet is neither frail nor passive as some believe “I think there is a strength and wit to Juliet that I’m very excited about exploring,” she explains. “Juliet speaks poetry, but she is not trying to be poetic. I love how her brain is so active and colorful. It moves with the blink of an eye.  It’s just like how we go back and forth in our minds about things.”

Rashad is keeping herself incredibly busy in the months prior to taking on her dream role.  While performing nightly in The Trip to Bountiful through July, she is currently recording tracks for an album with her own rock band, Condola and the Stoop Kids.  She is also taking classes to brush up on her Shakespeare. “Some actors get caught up in what I call ‘Shakespeare tone,’” she says.  “If you just trust the language, then it works. The other difficulty,” she adds, “is how to make this story seem new when everybody knows what happens in the end.  I love the challenge, that’s what draws me to the work.”  For his part, Bloom is psyched about making his debut in New York: “Performing on Broadway is such a great honor for an actor,” he says.  “It’s terrifying, yet that is also what makes it so exciting and rewarding.”

By Gerard Raymond

David Leveaux’s prime consideration for the first Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet in over three decades is ensuring that the 16^th century Shakespeare classic feels contemporary. “At the end of day, Romeo and Juliet is about a miracle of love between two young people, and in these very cynical times we need to address the play with as much heat and directness as possible for a modern audience,” says the British director.  And, of course, there was the question of who would play Shakespeare’s famous star-crossed lovers.  Leveaux’s production, which begins performances at Richard Rodgers Theatre on August 24, with a September 19 opening, will star Orlando Bloom as Romeo and Condola Rashad as Juliet.

Movie star Bloom, internationally famous for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Pirates of the Caribbean series, was the first of the two leads to be cast. “I was just so fascinated by his passion and his absolute boyish love of this language,” says Leveaux.  And Rashad, a Tony nominee this year for The Trip to Bountiful, was a perfect fit for the role, he says. “Once I had seen her and we had several working sessions together, I realized that this is our contemporary Juliet.  She has comedic and passionate qualities, and she’s just hugely charismatic.” Given the ethnicity of the leads, Leveaux then decided that Juliet’s blood relatives, the Capulet clan, would be black and Romeo’s clan, the Montagues, white.

Color-specific casting for the two feuding families makes a vivid statement, but Leveaux says he doesn’t intend imposing an “ethnic commentary” on the play.  “We all know that the chief reason to enter Romeo and Juliet is to be swept up by this impossible and brilliant love story,” the director continues. “But it exists in the context of some very potent ideas and experiences of how family– and loyalty to family — works. These two very different family units operate according to their own laws and rules. They are highly cultivated but they have forgotten the original cause of the quarrel that exists between them; it is simply being repeated generation after generation, being handed on down to the young again and again and again without ever being interrogated.  The notion of a young scion from the Montague family falling in love with the prized daughter of the Capulet family is a brilliant and miraculous transgression that changes the rules of the way that society exists.”

“A modern version of Romeo and Juliet doesn’t mean updating it,” Leveaux explains.  It is the young lovers’ contravention of familial strictures and bonds that makes this new production of Romeo and Juliet “reverberate very immediately” for 2013, in New York, he suggests. “The play actually addresses the issue of fundamentalism–what happens when young people press against rules that are handed down to them, written in stone as it were, and why that leads to such violence. I feel very strongly that Shakespeare evoked a world which was only civilized to a degree,” he adds. “There is only about an inch deep of civilization upon miles and miles of profound barbarism. So it is always a very dangerous and, in some ways, a very primal world.  We like to call our contemporary world civilized as well, but it is not always so.”

Leveaux, a five-time Tony nominee, says that Romeo and Juliet shares something in common with the revivals of plays by Tom Stoppard (The Real Thing, Jumpers, Arcadia) and Harold Pinter (Betrayal) he directed over this past decade on Broadway. “Those are writers who changed the way we hear the English language,” he notes. “And Shakespeare is the ultimate example of somebody who takes your expectations of the English language and gives you a new way to use the language to describe the world you live in.  This play contains some of his most thrilling language. There is no one in Shakespeare who speaks like Juliet. She has a unique way of picturing the world.” One could experience Romeo and Juliet the way one might a great jazz concert, he offers. “It’s the thrill of watching two people, who, in part, fall in love because they both find in each other an equal excitement in their ability to conjure images and to reinvent a world that is different from the way their parents and elders see it. I think part of the pleasure and the fun of the play is that joy of experiencing what the English language can do.  Young people are always pushing at the borders of language, particularly now with new techniques of social communication.”

Taking a cue from Juliet, who describes the pace of events in the play as “too much like lightning,” Leveaux believes that Romeo and Juliet must “have real fire and speed” to engage a contemporary Broadway audience. “I had an idea that if we were to cover the stage with sand and set it on fire, that would convey the sensual and emotional temperature of the play,” he says. “Broadway is a gladiatorial place, so whatever you do there has to have a sense of event.” Years ago, Leveaux recalls, one of his mentors, Joseph Chaikin, a pioneer of avant garde theater in the 1960s, passed on to him the most enduring discovery from that era of experimentation: there’s no excuse for an audience to leave the theater with less energy than they came in with. “Being near this play when it is being played in full heat can be an absolutely rapturous experience,” he promises. “There’s no excuse for not giving people the night of their lives.”

By Gerard Raymond

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Win two tickets to Broadway’s most romantic night, Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella.

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In a Broadway season filled with notable female roles – the title characters alone include Ann Richards, Little Orphan Annie, Matilda, Sue Mengers and the Virgin Mary – a young woman with a big dream and some fabulous costume changes has become an audience favorite. Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella recently snatched up nine Tony Award nominations, including ones for two of its stars: Laura Osnes, who plays Cinderella, and Victoria Clark, who plays her fairy godmother. Josh Austin sat down with these two women and their costars Harriet Harris and Ann Harada, who play Cinderella’s slightly-less-wicked-than-usual stepmother and stepsister, to discuss their familiarity with the piece (which began as a pair of beloved TV specials) and how they keep the show fresh for a new generation of Cinderella fans.

When did you first experience Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella?

Victoria Clark: As a kid. Not the first one, not the Julie Andrews one, but the Lesley Ann Warren one. It was just one of those things — you watched Cinderella and The Sound of Music.

Ann Harada: I’m just like Vicki; I watched the Lesley Ann Warren version every year growing up. I remember my parents sitting me down in front of the TV with my dinner on a TV tray going, “Okay, you’re going to watch this right now [laughs] and you’re going to really have a good time.”

Harriet Harris: I had forgotten how much it had penetrated my psyche when we started working on this again. I had really just thought, “Oh, ‘Cinderella,’ that’ll be cute.” Then a couple of hours in, I went [gasps], “Oh, my god, it’s in my DNA. I know all of this. I know this music.”

Laura Osnes: My first introduction to this was learning “In My Own Little Corner” when I was probably 10 in voice lessons. I saw the Brandy version once on TV, but that’s kind of it.

Who is the audience for “Cinderella”?

Clark: We get everybody. We get college roommates coming for girlfriend reunions. We get same-sex dates and hetero dates. We see a lot of grandparents bringing a grandchild for their birthday. Then they go home and they tell the generation between, “You gotta come see it.” Then they come back and they bring their other kids.

Harada: I feel like this is a throwback to the time when Broadway was the currency of popular music. Every family had a copy of Oklahoma! or My Fair Lady or The Sound of Music because they heard all the songs on the radio. It was a much more broad-based entertainment, and I think this is a throwback to that. At any age you’re going to be able to appreciate our production.

Harris: When I did Thoroughly Modern Millie, [composer] Jeanine Tesori said, “I would just, for once in my life, like to have a show that I helped create that I could bring my daughter to.” And I think that the same thing is here.

What was recording the cast album like?

Harris: I loved it because I love listening to everybody every night, and I thought, “I’ll have this album forever.” I also thought, “My godparents, who aren’t going to be able to make the trip, they will be so excited to hear this.” … We’ve been told it sounds great.

Osnes: Yes, they all say it sounds good. We haven’t heard the album yet.

Clark: It was really easy for me because I just have two songs! [Laughs] … But it was exciting.

Harada: It’s thrilling to record any show knowing this will be the standard that other productions of Cinderella will be listening to and comparing themselves to from now on.

How do you put your own stamp on such familiar characters?

Osnes: Cinderella is so well known that I think our job was just to portray what was written truthfully. That’s what I try to do. I just am going out there and saying what’s on the page truthfully, and apparently it’s working. [Laughs]

Clark: Luckily for us, the whole story has changed so much with [Douglas Carter Beane’s] book that it’s hard for us to be compared to any of our predecessors. It really feels like we’re creating roles in a new Rodgers and Hammerstein show with an old Rodgers and Hammerstein score.

Harada: To me it was a new script and we were working on it like it was a new play. We had to figure out our character arcs and what we were doing in every moment as these characters, not as the ones in the older versions or versions past.

Harris: Well, these parts, I think, are archetypes, but they’re not stereotypes. So there is a lot of room to interpret, and because they wanted it to be a multigenerational experience, the fairy tale element is very strong, but the cartoon element that could be attached to that is minimized.

What is your personal favorite moment in the show?

Harada: “Lovely Night.” To me, it’s the heart of the whole show. It’s what Cinderella’s family should always be like. It only happens in this one point in the show where we’re all on the same page, we’re all remembering this amazing event that happened together, and we all belong. I really feel like Cinderella, that all she ever wanted was to belong and in this one moment she kind of does. There’s so much joy in that number.

Harris: We enter into her world, which is a superior world. This beautiful moment, this lovely bubble where love is in the room, and we unite. I think the audience is so thrilled. It’s a turning point and a possibility … and then reality comes back and it’s like, “Oh, no, song’s over, quitting time. Back to work, missy.” [All four laugh]

Osnes: I do love that moment. The first thing that came to my mind is the transformation into the gold dress, because no one is expecting it. I love getting ready for that moment and throwing the rags into the air and being like, “Here I go, I’m gonna make magic.”

Clark: I would say the whole sequence from when the sun is starting to set and I show up in her yard, through to the end of the fight. It’s not really a moment — it’s a whole chunk.

What do you think Cinderella has brought to the Broadway season?

Osnes: I think it’s enchanting. That’s the word that comes to my mind. There’s enough of it that’s relevant to today. But there’s also something about it that’s completely timeless, with the story and with the old-school stage magic that we’re doing and the fairy tale that we’re telling. It’s kind of the best of all worlds.

Harris: And I think it’s a phrase Vicki uses, “the promise of possibility.” You go to bed at night and you think, “Tomorrow might be this.” It’s that yearning and straining for something else to happen.

Harada: It’s irony free. We are giving you our genuine hearts. It transports you back to a different time. Not that it’s not part of this time, because it is. But that these songs are just so beautiful and that we’re able to bring it to a new generation of audience members — that’s very, very special.

By Josh Austin