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Stage: Hot Ticket
By JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 11, 2001
Annie get your microphone
Could Bernadette Peters turn out to be the true successor to Ethel Merman? At first, it seems a preposterous notion, considering the stylistic distance between the two. Nobody would ever mistake the mush-mouthed hillbilly twang Peters adopted in the current revival of Annie Get Your Gun for Merman's brassy belting as the original Annie Oakley in 1946.
Now another role created by Merman is under discussion for Peters: Mama Rose in a proposed revival of Gypsy, with an updated book by Arthur Laurents and directed by Sam Mendes, best known for his Oscar-winning film debut, American Beauty. It would open in London before moving to New York.
Are you ready for a passive-aggressive, codependent Mama Rose? That's the sort of radical reinterpretation Peters might bring to the domineering stage mother.
Since leaving the Broadway production of Annie Get Your Gun last summer, Peters has been giving concerts of songs by Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Irving Berlin, among others. She performs with an orchestra at 8 p.m. Saturday at Ruth Eckerd Hall. Tickets: $45.50-$49.50. Call (727) 791-7400.
Food for thought
Cooking is the metaphor in Uncle Bends: a home-cooked negro narrative, a one-man show written and performed by Bob Devin Jones as part of the WordBRIDGE playwright's lab this month at Eckerd College. Jones plays the title character, meant to suggest Uncle Ben of rice fame, and serves up a meal of beans and rice while telling stories from the African-American experience.
"There's irony among the ingredients, but no anger," wrote critic Peter Haugen, reviewing Jones' performance in the play's 1995 premiere in Sacramento, Calif. "In short, it is the story of the African-American majority, those who work, those who have used honest perseverance and no little creativity to make their way through a society fraught with obstacles."
Jones, a St. Petersburg resident, is directing a production of From the Mississippi Delta that opens later this month at American Stage.
Uncle Bends is staged at 8 p.m. Saturday in Bininger Theatre on the Eckerd campus. Tickets: $15. (727) 864-8279.
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