The eminent Ms. Eikenberry and myself are knee-deep in rehearsals for a play at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, MA. We’re doing a terrific new play by David Epstein called Brace Yourself and it’s directed by James Naughton.

Here’s how it’s billed- “Everyone is preparing for the hurricane to arrive, but at Sunny’s house the storm has already hit. With a huge wedding to plan, an unhappy bride to appease, a promiscuous son to keep track of and a dead aunt to dispose of, it’s no wonder Sunny is a bit tense. However, it’s only once the hurricane finally hits that Sunny learns that it’s ok to let go, in more ways than one. Hilarities abound in this outrageous world premiere directed by two-time Tony Award winner, James Naughton.”

It’s sure to be a good time, -and of course we’re there- so if you have an inkling to escape the city that doubles as the suface of the sun this summer come see us in this short-run.
WORLD PREMIERE

by David Epstein
directed by James Naughton

Previews August 14–August 17;
Opens August 18 at 8pm; Runs through August 25

Opening Night includes post performance reception with the cast
Tickets • Previews: $37 All other performances: A: $57 B: $47 C: $37
 

Hear what people are saying!

“A darkly comic first novel by a veteran LA Law actor, After Annie is a brilliant entrée to the mind of a man who has always been surrounded by women but doesn’t quite know how to exist without the one he’s always counted on . . . With an acerbic, sarcastic bite and a depth of honesty rare in most first novels, After Annie is a refreshing, heartwarming, and introspective read.”

-Booklist-

“After Annie has an urban edge. This is not an introspective weeper; rather it is the honest rant of a man whose lover has been taken from him and who discovers that his only choice is to pick up and start again. It’s not easy. The writing has a bite. The story has an edge. We want the central character, a guy named Herbie, to rally and win. What’s he winning?  He gets to continue living.”

— Charline Spektor- The book Report

“Earthy, humorous, and poignant stories that will draw readers in.”

-Library Journal-

Get your copy today!

Rave reviews from the New York Times for ‘Young Adult’;
‘Young Adult’ is awarded NYT Critics Pick!
New York Times
Shorter than a bad blind date and as sour as a vinegar Popsicle, “Young Adult” shrouds its brilliant, brave and breathtakingly cynical heart in the superficial blandness of commercial comedy. More radically than “J. Edgar” or even “Greenberg,” this movie, written byDiablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman, challenges the dreary conventional wisdom that a movie protagonist must be likable. Along the way, it systematically demolishes a china shop full of shopworn sentimental touchstones about — for starters — high school, small-town life, heterosexuality, Minnesota and the capacity of human beings to change, learn and grow.
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Jill’s latest film stars Acadamy Award winner Charlize Theron and is coming to the big screen December 9th!

by Kate Ward of Entertainment Weekly

It’s not often that “the girl you hated in high school” is the heroine of a film. But that’s what Charlize Theron plays in Young Adult, a dark comedy that follows Mavis, a writer who returns to her hometown in an attempt to win back her married high school boyfriend (who just happens to also has a baby on the way). Shopping for a sexy get-up to attract her ex, played by Patrick Wilson, Mavis tells a store employee why she needs to impress: “He’s seen me recently … But his wife hasn’t seen me in awhile.”
 

If there’s anyone who could turn such a woman into an endearing character, it’s Juno dream team Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, who are reuniting for this Dec. 9 flick. Watch the trailer after the jump — and then jump for joy seeing that Patton Oswalt’s involved too.

Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry, round out a brilliant cast in Enter Laughing, The Musical 
*A review by Aileen Jacobson of the New York Times*

In a play loaded with clever words, the funniest scene is one about not being able to get any out. That’s largely because Josh Grisetti, the appealing young star of “Enter Laughing, the Musical,” mimes stage fright so expertly that his struggle becomes as comical as a well-crafted line….Ms. Eikenberry is wonderfully droll in her two big songs, “My Son, the Druggist” and “Your Mother’s Heart”, and Mr. Tucker gets his star musical turn in “Hot Cha Cha,” a duet with Ray DeMattis as David’s employer at a machine repair shop. A lively trio led by the pianist-music director Phil Reno provides all the accompaniment that is needed.


Credit for the show’s many belly laughs must also go to Stuart Ross, the director who rescued this failed 1976 musical three years ago with his deft staging at the York Theater Company Off Broadway. Now he is working his magic again at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, in preparation for a planned move to Broadway.
If that happens, Mr. Grisetti, who is clearly a major talent, will finally get the Broadway debut denied him two years ago. A revival of Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound,” in which he was to star, was canceled before it opened because of poor ticket sales for another Simon play, “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” with which it was to run in repertory and which also got the hook.
Here, as he would have in “Broadway Bound,” Mr. Grisetti portrays a young man trying to break into show business. “Enter Laughing” is based on a semiautobiographical novel by Carl Reiner that was adapted (first as a hit play, then a screenplay, then the musical originally called “So Long, 174th Street”) by Joseph Stein. Mr. Simon, Mr. Reiner and Mr. Stein (best known for “Fiddler on the Roof”) all became writers in the 1950s for that fertile comedy breeding ground, “Your Show of Shows.”
Mr. Reiner is a producer of this production, and Mr. Stein, before he died last year at age 98, helped to resuscitate the musical. Mr. Grisetti, who is in his 20s, conveys a perfect mix of goofiness and bravado in his role as the aspiring actor David Kolowitz. He is given able assistance by a strong supporting cast. The married couple Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker, who played a couple on “L.A. Law,” here are David’s parents, who want their son to become a pharmacist.

Richard Kind seems born to the role of Harrison Marlowe, a thespian who runs a seedy theater and acting school. He gets what may be the most hilarious of the witty songs by Stan Daniels, who wrote the show’s music and lyrics. It’s a naughty ditty called “The Butler’s Song,” in a sequence in which David imagines that he has become a desirable Hollywood star.
As it is, David is an amazingly successful Lothario, with three women in his orbit: the theater owner’s lusty daughter (Kate Shindle), a sexy hat store clerk (Gina Milo) and his loyal but exasperated girlfriend, Wanda (Emily Shoolin). Wanda leads a chorus of women in a bluesy song, “Men,” set in an ice cream parlor, in which linked napkins pulled from a metal container become feathery boas.
It’s one of the many inventive bits tossed in regularly by Mr. Ross; the costume designer, David Toser; the set designer, James Morgan; and the rest of the creative team. Even the scene changes are choreographed humorously.
Let’s hope that a Broadway stage doesn’t gobble up the musical’s intimate allure. The only alteration it needs now is some tightening up. At two and a half hours, it feels long for a spoof. I can’t think of a single double take or delicious lyric I’d want to see trimmed, however.

Emile Norman – By His Own Design. A documentary written and directed by Will Parrinello, produced by Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry.
*A review by David Wiegand of the San Francisco Chronicle*

Will Parrinello calls his film “Emile Norman: By His Own Design,” but had Noel Coward not gotten there first, he could have well chosen “Design for Living” for the title of the documentary.
Regardless of what you think of the work of Big Sur artist Emile Norman, you’ll come away from this gentle, loving documentary with irresistible appreciation for Norman’s greatest work, his own life. From his beginnings on a San Gabriel Valley walnut farm to his life today on a hilltop home in Big Sur, Norman has determined the order of his own life.
Now 90, Norman defines iconoclast in every way. He could have gone into farming in the San Gabriel Valley where he grew up, but instead he decided to make art. After his first gallery show in New York drew raves from an influential art critic and sold out the next day, Norman could have stayed in the East at a time when the Abstract Expressionism of Jack Pollock was all the rage. Instead, he returned to Big Sur to create gentle, nature-inspired carvings and reliefs, adorned with inlays of wood whose natural tones Norman admires too much to sully with stain.
He could have tried to live up to the image his gallery fostered of being a “California rancher turned artist,” but, after dressing in macho tweeds and popping a pipe in his mouth to look the part, he returned to California and fell in love with the man who came to fix his radio. Norman’s relationship with Brooks Clement lasted 30 years, until the latter’s death from cancer in 1973. To friends in Big Sur, the two became one with a single signature, “Clemile,” decades before anyone thought gay men would ever be able to get married in California.
In this film, produced by Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry, with award-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“The Celluloid Closet”) serving as advisers, Parrinello has created a valentine to one man’s life, but it’s hard to argue that “Emile Norman” could be anything but. His relationship with Clement had a bit of a rocky patch, but they stuck it out.
A few years ago, doctors advised him that it wasn’t a good idea for him to live all alone in the breathtaking hilltop home he and Clement built themselves, so Norman invited a younger gay couple to move in with him. Norman defined “family” on his own terms.
Throughout his career, Norman has followed his own muse, in art as well as life. At one point, he designed ornate headgear for the leggy chorines in the 1946 Hollywood musical “Blue Skies.” Later, he created window displays for Bergdorf Goodman in New York. But for many, his greatest creation can be seen atop Nob Hill in the San Francisco Masonic Center, where Norman not only created that massive and ornate glass mosaic window that overlooks California street but also carved the sculptural reliefs on the building’s exterior.

We’ll be doing summer stock for the first time since we were in our teens, I think – “Enter Laughing – The Musical” at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. We open on August 9th and run to Labor Day.
It’s a fun show. We first did it at the York Theater a couple of years ago and I don’t think either of us had ever been in a more successful show. It was the hottest ticket in town. People came back to see it — two, even three times. So, catch us out in the Hamptons, dancing and singing. Between then and now, we’ll be in Italy, tending to some
important eating and drinking. It’s a job, a responsibility that somebody has to do.
We’ll post the latest happenings right here – as they happen.
If they happen.

Photo Credit: Kristine Walsh

Jill was nominated for a Drama Desk Award this spring for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance in “The Kid” at The New Group in the spring of 2010.
She was delighted to be nominated in a category that included Laura Benanti, Victoria Clark and Patti Lupone.  ”The Kid” was written by Michael Zam, with music by Andy Monroe and lyrics by Jack Lechner. It was based on the book by Dan Savage (played by Christopher Sieber) about how he and his partner Terry (played by Lucas Steele) adopted a kid. Jill played Dan’s mom.