KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Len Cariou, Tony Award winner for the original production of “Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and star of his one-man show, “Broadway and the Bard,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky.

Although recognized for his presence on television for the past eight seasons (as Tom Selleck’s dyspeptic father on the long running hit series “Blue Bloods”), Cariou has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the theatre, including originating leads in two landmark Stephen Sondheim musicals. In Broadway and the Bard, he is able to give full voice to an idea that he has harbored since his first prophetic Broadway season when he appeared as Shakespeare’s Henry V and followed by a starring role in the musical Applause. In this delightful play of verse and song, Cariou combines his two great loves – Shakespeare and American Musical Comedy –into one rich and diverse tapestry.

Len Cariou is a distinguished member of the Theatre Hall of Fame and a three-time Tony® nominee for Applause, A Little Night Music, and for his legendary performance as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tony®Award winner, Best Actor). His other Broadway credits include Nightwatch, Cold Storage, Teddy & Alice, Dance a Little Closer, The Speed of Darkness, Neil Simon’s The Dinner Party, and Proof. Showing his range, he toured the U.S. as Cap’n Andy in Showboat, and as Nils Bohrin in Copenhagen. He scored his most recent triumph in The Gate Theatre’s definitive, hit production of All My Sons in Dublin, Ireland, reprising his role as Joe Keller, for which he alsowon raves at the Geffen Theatre in Los Angeles in 2007.

Broadway and the Bard plays June 21-24, 2018 at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

Lesher Center website

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Steven Bach (1938-2009) author of the biography “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl”, interviewed in 2007 by Richard Wolinsky.

Leni Riefenstahl was the film maker behind the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Reifenstahl, who died in 2003 at the age of a hundred and one, to the end of her life denied her work was political, that she was an artist.

Stephen Bach, who died at the age of 70 in 2009, had been a studio executive and began writing  books with “Final Cut”, his memoir about the making of the film Heaven’s Gate. He followed that with a biography of the playwright Moss Hart, and then a biography of actress Marlene Dietrich, which as he says, led him to Leni Riefenstahl. The interview was recorded in the KPFA studios on May 7, 2007. Guardian Obituary.

In an interview perhaps more timely than the year it was recorded, Bach compares Reifenstahl’s work to right-wing propaganda in America, and the use of the Hitler playbook. What’s scary is that he could have been describing the Trump campaign and administration.

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Tayari Jones, whose latest novel is “An American Marriage,” is interviewed by host Richard Wolinsky.

Tayari Jones is the author of the novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, and her latest, An American Marriage (Algonquin Books, February 2018). Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, and Callaloo.  A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship.

“An American Marriage” deals with a marriage torn apart by the unjust arrest and imprisonment of the husband after an accusation by a white woman at a motel, and how both spouses deal with the following few years. “An American Marriage” is a 2018 Oprah’s Book Club Selection.

Tayari Jones website

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Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was one of the most important writers to come out of World War II. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, stunned the literary world with its hard-boiled and graphic depiction of life in the army. After a handful of other novels, including The Deer Park and An American Dream, he turned to reporting and what came to be called New Journalism with works such as The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of a Fire on the Moon, The Executioner’s Song and Oswald’s Tale. His later novels include Harlot’s Ghost and Ancient Evenings. As a public figure, he was known as pugnacious and irascible. A political activist, he attended several Democratic conventions and once ran for Mayor of New York.

Norman Mailer’s final novel, The Castle in the Forest, about the early life of Adolf Hitler, was intended as the first of a trilogy, but Mailer died a few months after its publication. He never got around to writing his long-awaited sequel to Harlot’s Ghost.

This podcast is taken from two interviews, the first on November 6, 1995, with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff during Mailer’s tour for his biography, Picasso, and the second, a solo interview by Richard A. Lupoff, on May 19, 1998, came during Mailer’s tour for his collection “Time of our Time.” Digitized and re-edited in 2008 by Richard Wolinsky; revised in 2018.

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This interview contains spoilers for the play and film.

Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, authors of “The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky. The book is an oral history of the play by Tony Kushner, looking at not only its history, but how Angels in America fits into the fabric of the American saga and theatrical history.

The play Angels in America has become a stage classic since it was first produced in the early 1990s. Dealing with the confluence of the AIDS epidemic, the Reagan era, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the rise of gay liberation, the seven-hour epic theater piece also became a 2003 film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep, Mary Louise Parker, Justin Kirk, Jeffrey Wright, Emma Thompson and Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, available now on CD and via HBO.

At present, major productions of Angels in America are mounted in both New York and Berkeley. The New York production, which runs through June 15, 2018, stars Nathan Lane and Andrew Garfield, and is up for eleven Tony Awards. The Berkeley Rep production, starring Stephen Spinella and Randy Harrison, runs through July 22, 2018.

The evening after this interview, Dan Kois and Isaac Butler were on stage at Berkeley Rep with Stephen Spinella, who plays Roy Cohn in that production. It turns out that it was Spinella himself who wanted to restore the scene, and Tony Kushner gave the go-ahead, saying that it was fine to stick it in during or after the bows at the end of the play, like the teasers at the end of superhero films. At some point, though, director Tony Taccone chose to move the scene before the epilogue because the stage would be too crazy at the bows to suddenly do another scene with effects. Thus it became part of the play. Two other changes new to this Berkeley Rep production, mentioned by direcctor Tony Taccone: a revelation is made by the character Harper to her husband Joe in their final scene together, and a speech by Prior Walter during the heaven sequence.

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