League Of Professional Theatre Women 2019 Leadership Luncheon

Andre De Shields

Donna Walker-Kuhn

Inspiring others was the theme at the League of Professional Theatre Women 2019 Leadership Luncheon celebrating the inaugural Rachel Crothers Leadership Award to Donna Walker-Kuhne, an expert in audience development who has raised more than $23 million to promote the arts to multicultural communities.

The ceremony, held on June 24 at Sardi's, featured entertainment by Marvin Lowe, who sang "Siyahamba," and Tony Award winner LaChanze (The Color Purple), who performed "Feeling Good"-- and was hosted by Tony Award winner Andre De Shields (Hadestown).

Yvette Heyliger, chair of the LPTW Rachel Crothers Leadership Award and co-vice president of programming, introduced De Shields, who she said inspired her since she just turned 60 and he recently won his first Tony at age 73. DeShields urged the audience to "stay on your chosen path until you win." A charismatic master of ceremonies, he noted a day after the first Democratic primary debate that Crothers was the one who coined the phrase, "A woman's place is in the home and in the Senate."

Walker-Kuhne is the founder of Walker International Communications Group, a boutique marketing, press and audience development consulting agency that specializes in multicultural marketing, group sales, multicultural press, and promotional events. She is also a senior advisor of community engagement at New Jersey Performing Arts Center. 

A veteran of over 22 Broadway productions, she has provided multicultural marketing and group sales for the shows Once on This Island, The Lion King, Aladdin, Smokey Joe's Cafe, among others, and for nonprofit clients such as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, The Billie Holiday Theater and The August Wilson African American Cultural Center. She is an adjunct professor at New York University and Bank Street College, and the co-founder of Bite the Big Apple, an annual multicultural audience development tour that brings Australian arts professionals to New York, and the co-founder of Impact Broadway, an initiative that encourages African American and Latino students to participate in theatre.

She was introduced to the crowd by playwright/filmmaker Rehana Lew Mirza (Hatef**ck). Walker-Kuhne said she came from a long line of warriors and educators and that she never gives up on her vision because that's in her heritage. She emphasized the crucial role teachers provide in people's development and cited a list of her own mentors who inspired her, including Arthur Mitchell, dancer/choreographer/founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, who exposed her to classical ballet.

She encouraged the audience to acknowledge and embrace diverse experiences and opinions and said, "Your job is to change the world and once completed, do it again."

The Rachel Crothers Leadership Award is given to a woman in theatre who has shown exemplary service and sacrifice for a common cause that creates a better society. Crothers, the first woman playwright and director to find commercial success on Broadway, had more than a 30-year theatre career and produces over 25 plays. 

(Press ticket)

Summer: The Donna Summer Musical

Sometimes, it's genuinely unfair when shows on Broadway flop. Countless worthwhile productions close in debt due to poor timing, a few weak links, material that's too dark or sophisticated or sad to lure mainstream audiences, not enough money to attract audiences in the first place. These poor, innocent, not-all-bad flops are somehow even more heartbreaking when compared with shows that are totally, astoundingly, mesmerizingly terrible in so many ways you lose count--especially when such shows do surprisingly well, at least at the outset. Which brings me to Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, the title of which, now that I think about it, says a lot about the production. What the hell does summer have to do with anything, or are we not referencing the season? If we aren't, why bother to mention the woman's stage name twice? Couldn't anyone have come up with a more creative, less repetitive title--maybe one that draws on her songs or legacy? The Queen of Disco? Or Hot Stuff, or Bad Girls, or, hell, Dim All the Lights Sweet Darling 'Cause Tonight It's All About Reenacting Donna Summer's Life in the Dumbest Ways Possible, But At Least the Songs Are Catchy? Because I'm on a roll here, I'm going to toss one out that I think fits the show best: Someone Left the Cake in the Rain. You know, cuz it's a soggy mess. Get it? Get it? Get it?

Kevin Berne

Look, I know, slamming an entertainment product that people work hard on for a long time is cheap and easy. And truly, I'd hold back and be a lot nicer about this one, but Summer was created by a group of very accomplished, ludicrously established dudes who know from Broadway--Des McAnuff, Sergio Trujillo, the effing Dodgers, for pity's sake--and who, I assume, will live to see another day and better shows. I don't feel terribly bad for them for having spawned this disaster, especially since it's just so insulting in its half-assedness. Also, the show appears to be raking it in for now; to me, this implies that plenty of gullible people will shell out enormous buckage to sit for just over ninety minutes in a big shiny theater and come away impressed because some familiar songs are performed by a cast that, as a group, is curiously moving in its ability to look like they give a flying fuck about what the hell they're doing up on the stage eight times a week. It's not easy, I imagine: the only thing the creative team seems to have agreed on with this show is that a musical about Donna Summer really, really needs lots of blue lighting and the excessive use of hydraulic lifts.

Summer is in many ways derivative of McAnuff's more creative, compelling, and uncondescending Jersey Boys. The creative team seems here to have decided to borrow amply from that show in terms of structure, look, and design, but the result is less smart and sharp, and more like someone took a lot of pasta, dyed it a variety of cool blue hues, threw it against a sleekly-lit wall, and then moved it around on platforms that sank below the stage and back up again, as if constant movement would maybe trick the audience into believing that this production actually works. 

Good ideas abound, sure, but something--or a lot of things--seem to have gotten lost between page and stage. There are, for example, three perfectly fine actors portraying Donna Summer at various points in her life. But what the hell with the names and who is playing whom at any given time? Storm Lever plays Summer as a child--she's listed in the program as "Duckling Donna," I think because there was some conversation about the ugly duckling story in the show, but whatever, I wasn't paying attention at that point. Ariana DeBose plays "Disco Donna," which I guess would be Donna in the 1970s. This was confusing, though, because for some reason, many of the '70s scenes are aesthetically reminiscent of the '80s, which makes me feel incredibly old, and also pissed off that no one on the creative team could bother to remember that neon lighting and Robert Palmer videos were '80s phenomena, not '70s phenomena, for fuck's sake. Anyway, the great LaChanze, who deserves way better than this, is "Diva Donna," because I suppose "Born-Again Christian Donna Who Gives a Farewell Concert and Looks Back on Her Life Before She Dies, or Maybe It's Supposed to Be After She's Dead But Either Way, There's More Hydraulic Lifting" is way too wordy. Whatever; the names of the three Donnas at different ages is consistent with the fact that nothing at any age seems remotely clear, consistent, or well-developed. Sometimes La Chanze plays Summer; sometimes she plays her mother; sometimes Storm Lever plays Donna's daughter. You'd think the creators would give the poor women a break and hire more people so Donna Summer wouldn't have to play her own mom and/or kid all the damn time.

Among the many other things that are frustrating about this musical is that Donna Summer actually seems to have lived a pretty interesting life, which I genuinely would have liked to know more about. As it stands, fleeting, thin scenes touch very superficially on the fact that she was, at various points, sexually abused by her priest, the witness to a murder, a wild bohemian expat in Germany, an abused girlfriend, a drug addict, a disco queen, an ardent feminist, an open-minded embracer of difference who reigned supreme at Studio 54, a born-again Christian, a homophobe, a painter, a devoted wife, a loving mother. Any one of those things, really, could be enough for a musical. But so much of her life story is here told through fleeting narration in place of action or nuanced scene work, and the result feels flat and forced for all the effort. There's no depth or exploration to anything presented onstage, which makes the whole show seem manipulative and cheap. Worst of all, notwithstanding the manipulative and bullshitty scene excusing Summer's homophobic comments as misunderstood jokes, is the decision by the all-male creative team to capitalize on the current women's movement by featuring an almost-but-not-quite-all-female cast, which makes no sense at all. Why are chicks playing dudes sometimes, but not at other times, and why are there dudes in the cast at all, and who the hell came up with the idea that Donna Summer's one late-career hit about women's work made her some kind of ardent feminist warrior? Are you kidding me? And truly, how dare you?

Again, the songs are fine. It was nice to hear them again, even if some of them are remarkably stupidly staged. It's an example of how half-assed this show is that "Dim All the Lights" is re-envisioned as a funeral dirge for Neil Bogart, and that this is nowhere near the worst idea. I'd vote for the car chase as even dumber, but then, I just don't have the energy to revisit the musical ever again to assess all the dumbness more carefully.

I've been chided in the past by friends in the business for expressing any pity at all for working actors, but truly, I feel for this cast, I hope they're paid well, and I hope something better comes along and hires them all away from this mess. They're clearly....um....working hard for the money.

If/Then

If/Then, an original musical by the Next to Normal writer/composer team of Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt, has a great deal going for it: a dynamite cast headed up by the bona-fide Broadway star Idina Menzel; a strong supporting cast featuring talents like LaChanze, Anthony Rapp, and Jerry Dixon; the Rent and Next to Normal director Michael Greif at the helm. The score, which bears some strong similarities to that for Normal, reflects real growth by Kitt--whose bouncy, contemporary melodies are perfectly suited to Menzel's distinctive brass--and especially by Yorkey, whose lyrics for Normal felt a titch too obvious a titch too often, and whose lyrics here are, for the most part, sharper, savvier, and more organic. And the musical's "road not taken" concept is, if not entirely original (Robert Frost, Frank Capra, and Gwyneth Paltrow got to it before Yorkey and Kitt did), certainly fresher and more challenging than, say, taking a classic movie about a boxer who slurps raw eggs and punches meat and plunking it onto the stage. If/Then has a lot of imagination and a lot of talent behind it. It thus pains me to say that I found it to be an overcooked, ponderous, frustrating musical. 

If/Then has two simultaneous plot-lines, both of which feature the same characters doing slightly different things, so it's easy enough to lose track of what's going on sometimes, especially in the long, overstuffed second act. The gist: A brilliant urban planner named Elizabeth, pushing 40 and recently divorced, returns to New York City after a decade of unhappy marriage in Phoenix. During the musical's first scene, Elizabeth goes to Central Park to meet up with two of her old friends, who do not know one another: Kate (LaChanze) is a kindergarten teacher; Lucas (Anthony Rapp) is a community organizer and activist. When they meet and the introductions are made, Kate announces that Elizabeth should start referring to herself as "Liz" in celebration of her new life, and then suggests that they spend the rest of the afternoon in the park. Lucas, on the other hand, calls Elizabeth "Beth,"which is how he knew her back when they were in college together. He suggests that they leave the park and attend a fair housing rally in Brooklyn.

The rest of the show follows Liz, who remains in the park with Kate and meets a man who becomes her husband, and Beth, who leaves the park with Lucas, runs into another college friend who gives her a job in the city planner's office, and becomes a respected career woman. While the two paths Elizabeth takes have significant overlaps, there are divergent outcomes: Liz and Beth both get pregnant, but by different men, to different ends and with different consequences. Liz and Beth both make compromises--the former chooses work over family, the latter marries and has kids, and demeans herself professionally by taking what we all know is a fate worse than death: an academic job. I like to think that in New York City in 2014, a woman like Elizabeth could have a successful, satisfying career and a fulfilling family life, but I guess if this were the case, there'd be no point to If/Then at all.