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[[image]] Danny's Boys Danny Glover-who debuted on Broadway over 20 years ago in "Master Harold"...and the boys.-returns to Athol Fugard's powerful play in a different guise by Harry Haun Two boys hath Hally (or "Master Harold," as he stridently insists that they call him), but the are no more "boys" than he is their "Master," These are two fully grown black waiters, living in a racially divided South Africa of apartheid while they toil for 17-year-old white prep-schooler Hally's parents at the shabby St. George's Park Tea Room in the Port Elizabeth of 1950. Willie is the younger, affable and unflappable one, fast to flash an easy smile to hide his darker side. Sam is the older and wiser one, a father figure for both Willie and Hally in the eight years they've been together; with a little respect for ourselves and others, he contends, we can "dance life like champions." This idyllic picture quickly curdles when Hally learns his real-life father-a bigoted drunk-is coming home from the hospital, and he lashes out at the first father he can find: Sam. The upshot, said the Times's Frank Rich of "Master Harold"...and the boys. when it opened at the Lyceum on May 4, 1982, was "an unstoppable...outpouring of ugliness, in which Hally humiliates the black man he loves by...mocking their years of shared secrets and spitting in his face." The play earned Tony nominations for its author and director, Athol Fugard, and there 12 www.playbill.com were awards for Danny Glover (a Theatre World Award for his Broadway debut as Willie) and Zakes Mokae's Sam (the Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Play). But that was then, and this is now. And a lot can happen in one and twenty years. Apartheid can end. Nelson Mandela can be freed. Glover can even play Mandela in a TV movie. And two-thirds of the first cast can return to the scene of the "crime." Lonny Price (Hally in 1982) is now directing the play's first Broadway revival. And Glover has graduated to Sam status, having grown from gregarious to grave. He has also grown considerably in star power since he went Hollywood. Now, with over 40 films and five NAACP Image Awards, he is back on Broadway in the same play-albeit with a more mature mien/role. The only other New York theatre acting Glove had done, Off-Broadway two years before, was another Fugard- The Blood Knot- and that was the one that convinced the young economics major to give up a career in community development in San Francisco and study acting across town at the American Conservatory Theater. "I found a voice in Blood Knot. Fugard became a voice for me as an actor," he says. He exercised that voice in Boesman and Lena on film. A Lesson from Aloes at Steppenwolf, The Island and Sizwe Banzi Is Dead in rep. Glover feels "Master Harold"...and the boys. still speaks powerfully, even with the world in a different place. "Since it has a great deal of universality," he reasons, "it could say some of the same things, even though it specifically refers to apartheid. It doesn't mention that word, but it lays out a certain degree of relationships-dominate and subordinate-and that's what the play is about. Those exist. You can translate that in terms of what's happening in Iraq. This country has become an empire, and those relationships it has formed with other countries are subordinate because we're the dominant power. There will always be those relationships unless we begin to talk about it in terms of what our agendas are as people and not in terms of what our national agendas are. Certainly man has had enough time to find ways of relating to each other. At every point in man's history, some statement is made. Slavery was abolished, and that sets another form of relationships. Now, does that play say that? Perhaps it does..." www.playbill.com Barbara Cook in Mostly Sondheim [[image]] Barbara Cook in Mostly Sondheim with (illegible wording) DRG-18001 The legendary star of Broadway's "The Music Man," "She Loves Me" and "Candide" sings the songs of Stephen Sondheim and the songs he wished he had written. Recorded live and mastered in Dolby 5.1 surround sound, this 85 minute program captures the unmatched performance of one of America's most gifted artists. "Musical theater's greatest living singer delivering material written or admired by musical theater's greatest living songwriter." -USA Today "Brilliant! Transcendent." -The New York Times Available on DVD & VHS [[logo for Tower]] (C) 2003 DGR Records Inc. * 740 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 All Rights Reserved * Visit www.drgrecords.com [[drg logo]] "I often wonder why serious students of the human psyche look to anything but theater folk for most of the answers they seek." -Joseph L. Mankiewicz writer/diretor All About Eve [[image of TV with Theater Talk written across]] "a spicy gabfest."-Newsday Fridays at midnight on PBS Thirteen [[image of State of Arts NYSCA logo]] www.theatertalk.org made possible in part by The New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency 13
