Monday, October 27, 2014

Anita Cerquetti, Opera Fill-In Who Soared

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Anita Cerquetti in 1957. Her rise to fame was dramatic.CreditLumachi Photo
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Anita Cerquetti, a gifted Italian soprano who rose to instant fame in 1958 when she was called on to substitute for the mythic and sometimes mystifying Maria Callas in one of opera’s most dramatic episodes, and three years later surprised people again by ending her own career, died on Saturday in Perugia, Italy. She was 83.
Her death was confirmed by Alfredo Sorichetti, a conductor who helps oversee an annual singing competition and academy named in Miss Cerquetti’s honor, in her hometown, Montecosaro. She had been hospitalized for several days after a heart attack, he said.
The drama that brought Miss Cerquetti worldwide attention began on Jan. 2, 1958, a Thursday, the opening night of Bellini’s “Norma” at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. After Callas, the glamorous American-born prima donna in the lead role, received a few derogatory whistles amid much applause for the first aria, “Casta Diva,” she began to appear tense. She never emerged for the second act, locking herself in her dressing room.
Boos, hoots and foot-stomping shook the cheap seats. In the royal box, the president of Italy, Giovanni Gronchi, and his wife waited nearly an hour before leaving, and the show never resumed. Explanations varied: Callas’s husband said she had a throat infection; there were assertions that she had celebrated too enthusiastically on New Year’s Eve; the Italian press suggested she had not been pleased with the audience response.
Callas retreated to her hotel, insisting she was ill, and stayed there for five days. She could hear chants in the street below: “Down with Callas!”
By Saturday, there was a new chorus: “Long live Italian women!”
Those were the words that met Miss Cerquetti, a rising star who happened to be performing the same role in Naples, when she stepped in for Callas at the Teatro dell’Opera for the first time on that Saturday night. The audience loved her, roaring at her version of “Casta Diva.”
Callas apologized for her absences and offered to return to the stage the following week — to sing two performances free. The manager of the opera house declined, and the Italian government, which subsidized the opera house, ordered her replaced.
The role now belonged to Miss Cerquetti, who had a powerful, dramatic voice that audiences adored.
Miss Cerquetti, who was just 26, had already impressed opera lovers in the United States, making her debut with the Chicago Opera in 1955, singing the role of Amelia in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera.” But while replacing Callas thrust her to a new level, it also took a toll.
For a time, Miss Cerquetti pulled off an unlikely twin billing — alternating standing in for Callas in Rome and performing the role in Naples, more than 100 miles away. In mid-January, suffering from what a psychiatrist called “nervous exhaustion,” she backed out of Bellini’s “The Pirate,” at the Palermo Opera. A psychiatrist, citing her heavy workload, prescribed sedatives and 20 days of rest.
She went on to noted performances at La Scala in Milan and elsewhere, and on Italian radio broadcasts, but just three years after those tumultuous days at Teatro dell’Opera, she abruptly retired and all but disappeared.
This time, it was Miss Cerquetti who faced questions. Had her voice failed? Did she have neurological issues? Heart problems? She blamed fatigue.
“I was very tired because I couldn’t sleep at night and during the day I sang,” Miss Cerquetti said in a 1996 interview with Stefan Zucker, president of the Bel Canto Society, an organization devoted to the history of opera singing. “It got to the point where I had absolute need of physical rest. Above all, I needed to sleep. This was from stress. But, thank God, my vocal cords remained intact and have remained so until today. This is the truth.”
She added: “So many things were said, understandably, because I had left my career at its most beautiful moment. It’s only natural that people asked why. And since everyone needed a reason, each one invented his own.”
Miss Cerquetti was born on April 13, 1931, in Montecosaro. Her mother was a schoolteacher, and her father was a farmer who became her manager early in her career. She studied violin before switching to singing in her late teens. In 1951, she won a competition in Spoleto, and she made her professional debut in Florence at 21. She graduated from the Conservatorio di Musica di Perugia.
Critics praised her natural talent but saw room for refinement, pointing out what at times was noticeably heavy breathing.
“Miss Cerquetti’s recorded performance of arias by Verdi, Bellini, Spontini and Puccini leaves no doubt that her voice is a remarkable instrument,” John Briggs wrote in The New York Times in 1957 in a review of “Operatic Recital by Anita Cerquetti,” one of a small number of commercial recordings she made. “Whether it is being used with skill is another question.”
She is survived by a daughter, Daniela. Her husband, the baritone Edo Ferretti, died several years ago. Callas died of a heart attack in 1977 at 53.
In a moving moment in Werner Schroeter’s 1997 film about opera singing,“Love’s Debris,” Miss Cerquetti is shown listening to herself in her glory years — a recording of one of her 1958 performances in “Norma.”
“I received many offers to return,” she told Mr. Zucker. “There were moments when I almost accepted. But then I thought, what’s the point? I’ve already found my peace, my serenity. To return under the gun? Basta! And so I closed the door.”
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4QZ0Vz-YHU

Elizabeth Pena, Actress on the Big and Small Screens

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Elizabeth Peña and Chris Cooper in John Sayles’s “Lone Star” (1996), for which she won an Independent Spirit Award. CreditAlan Papp/Castle Rock Entertainment
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Elizabeth Peña, an actress who appeared in major studio pictures like “Rush Hour,” independent films like John Sayles’s generational drama “Lone Star,” and a host of television shows, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 55.
Her manager, Gina Rugolo, confirmed her death, saying it followed a brief illness.
Ms. Peña played everything from love interest to comedic sidekick in movies and on television for 35 years. She was a demolition specialist alongside Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in “Rush Hour” (1998). As Pilar Cruz, a history teacher who rekindles a romance with a small-town Texas sheriff in “Lone Star” (1996), she won an Independent Spirit Award for best supporting actress. “The sultry Ms. Peña gives an especially vivid performance as the character who is most unsettled by the shadows of the past,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times in 1996.
Her first major film role was as Tim Robbins’s lover in Adrian Lyne’s psychological thriller “Jacob’s Ladder” (1990). She reportedly won the part over stars like Julia Roberts, Andie MacDowell and Madonna.
A television regular, Ms. Peña appeared on shows like “L.A. Law,” “American Dad” and “Boston Public.” In the mid-1980s, she starred as a maid who marries her employer to stay in the United States in the short-lived sitcom “I Married Dora,” and starting in 2000 she played a hairdresser in “Resurrection Blvd.,” the Showtime drama about an upwardly mobile Latino family.
More recently she played the mother of Sofia Vergara’s character on the hit ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” even though she was only 13 years older than Ms. Vergara.
Elizabeth Peña was born in Elizabeth, N.J., on Sept. 23, 1959. Her father, Mario, was a Cuban actor, director and playwright, and Ms. Peña spent much of her childhood in Cuba before returning to the United States. She graduated from what is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan.
She performed in a production of “Romeo and Juliet,” translated into Spanish by the poet Pablo Neruda, at the Gramercy Theater in 1979 and made her film debut in the Spanish-language film “El Super” that year.
Ms. Peña went on to play the mistreated wife of Ritchie Valens’s half brother in the biopic “La Bamba” (1987); Jamie Lee Curtis’s confidante in the action film “Blue Steel” (1989); and Richard Dreyfuss’s and Bette Midler’s maid in the comedy “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” (1986).
She also did voice-over work in the animated film “The Incredibles” (2004) and cartoons like “Justice League.”
She married Hans Rolla in 1994. He survives her, as does their son, Kaelan; their daughter, Fiona Rolla; her mother, Estella Margarita Peña; and a sister, Tania Peña.
Ms. Peña said that she researched Mexican-American culture to prepare for her part in “Lone Star.”
“I recorded people’s voices to get the proper inflection,” she told The Ottawa Citizen in 1996. “I crossed the border a whole bunch to collect a lot of history. I would sit for hours looking at the women, how they dressed.”


“In the United States, all Spanish-speaking people are lumped into one category,” she continued. “But we’re all so different.”

Friday, October 17, 2014

Jan Hooks, "Saturday Night Live" Star

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Nora Dunn, left, and Jan Hooks on “S.N.L.” in 1989. CreditNBC, via Everett Collection
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Jan Hooks, an actress whose flair for comedy and ability to inhabit a character were showcased during her five years on “Saturday Night Live,” died on Thursday in New York. She was 57.
Her death was confirmed by her agent, Lisa Lieberman, who did not provide any other details. Some news reports said she died of an undisclosed illness. A spokeswoman for “S.N.L.” declined to comment.
Ms. Hooks joined “S.N.L.” in 1986 and was part of a cast that is widely regarded as one of the best in the show’s history, alongside the likes of Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn and later Mike Myers.
Among the prominent women she impersonated were Donald Trump’s wife, Ivana, and the television evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, whom she had seen on cable in Atlanta before Ms. Bakker and her husband, Jim, became nationally known. After leaving the show in 1991, Ms. Hooks returned several times to portray Hillary Rodham Clinton — the first “S.N.L.” cast member to tackle that assignment.
She was probably best known for her frequent appearances with Ms. Dunn as the Sweeney Sisters, an excruciatingly enthusiastic but minimally talented lounge act. Recalling the original “S.N.L.” stars Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, Allan Johnson of The Chicago Tribune wrote in 1999, “If Aykroyd and Belushi were the perfect comedy partnership on ‘S.N.L.,’ then Hooks and Dunn were close behind.”
Ms. Hooks’s first job after “S.N.L.” was a role on “Designing Women,” the long-running sitcom about women who run a design business in Atlanta. She replaced Jean Smart, playing the sister of Ms. Smart’s character.
She had not been planning to leave “S.N.L.,” she told The Associated Press in 1991: “Although my five-year contract was up, I was fully intending to return. But I wanted to investigate other possibilities.” The “Designing Women” offer came, she said, “out of nowhere.”
Ms. Hooks later had recurring roles on “3rd Rock From the Sun” and “The Simpsons.” Most recently she played the mother of Jenna Maroney, the flaky and self-centered TV star played by Jane Krakowski, on “30 Rock,” the Tina Fey sitcom about life behind the scenes at a late-night sketch show not unlike “S.N.L.” (Ms. Fey had been a writer and regular performer on “S.N.L.” after Ms. Hooks left the show.)
Ms. Hooks’s movie roles included a memorable turn as a tour guide at the Alamo in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (1985). She was also in “Batman Returns” (1992) and “Simon Birch” (1998). In 1995 she replaced Sarah Jessica Parker as an anthropomorphic dog in “Sylvia,” an Off Broadway comedy by A. R. Gurney.
Born in Decatur, Ga., on April 23, 1957, and raised in Atlanta, Ms. Hooks got her comedy training, as many other “S.N.L.” performers did, at the Groundlings, the Los Angeles improvisation and sketch troupe. Another Groundling was Mr. Hartman, who joined the “S.N.L.” cast the same year she did and who was a frequent sketch partner. (He was killed by his wife in 1998.)
Ms. Hooks often credited Mr. Hartman with helping her overcome what she called her “horrible stage fright.”
“I was one of the ones that between dress and air was sitting in a corner going, ‘Please cut everything I’m in!’ ” James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales quoted her as saying in their book “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live” (2002).


In an interview with The Toronto Star in 1998, Ms. Hooks acknowledged that it had become “stylish” for female former “S.N.L.” cast members to “bash the show.” She did not, she said, because “it did me a lot of good.”

Iva Withers, Theatrical Standby Star

The Standby Star Who Stole Broadway’s Limelight

Iva Withers, 93, tapped her cane on the hardwood floor of her neat West 55th Street apartment with the ferocity of a dance instructor. She was about to describe a bit of Broadway musical history: the afternoon and night when she played the leads in what are now two classics.
Marcus Yam/The New York Times
Iva Withers, 93, in her West 55th Street apartment in Manhattan. More Photos »
Remembering how Rodgers and Hammerstein had signed her to a three-year contract in 1945, she said, “There was even a Saturday that summer where I played Julie in ‘Carousel’ at the matinee and Laurey in ‘Oklahoma!’ in the evening,” shuttling between the Majestic and the St. James Theaters on West 44th Street.
The energy level of that trouper is still there 65 years later, as Ms. Withers reminisced at her home about her Broadway career. It was an unusual one in that she was a standby or replacement for famous names in famous roles from 1945 to 1970, yet never originated a lead part of her own on Broadway, though she was the first Julie Jordan in the original London production of “Carousel.” She knew a lot of those working in the show business of her day and remembers them on cue.
“Iva represents one of the last living links to the golden age of Broadway,” said the theater and film historian Foster Hirsch, who interviewed her when he wrote his 1998 book, “The Boys From Syracuse: The Shuberts’ Theatrical Empire.” “The Shubert brothers became less historical and more like real people when she shared memories about when they ruled Broadway.” He added, “Iva has complete recall.”
It is those memories that will be tapped again by Mr. Hirsch on Wednesday at the Showbiz Store & Cafe on West 21st Street in Chelsea, where the Harvardwood Club, an alumni arts organization of Harvard University, is presenting an evening with Ms. Withers.
Five feet tall (“without the heels I wore in ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown’ ”), with a slender figure (“If you’re a dancer you have to control what you eat”) and perfect posture (nearly 80 years of almost daily dance classes), Ms. Withers arrived in New York in 1940 from the Canadian prairie province of Manitoba, where she was born in 1917. She had come to study singing, she said, so she could improve her voice when she performed in church, but by 1944 she had found an agent (“in the Brill Building”), and the next year had signed a contract with the creators of “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel.” Losing a brother and a “sweetheart” in World War II nearly sent her back to Canada, but she ultimately decided to stay.
Beginning in 1945, she was the replacement in the original companies for the roles of, among others, Laurey and Julie, as well as Miss Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls.” She toured with “Carousel” and, in the early 1950s, “South Pacific” (as Nellie Forbush), and replaced a pregnant Carol Channing when “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” went on the road.
Yet the Broadway of today doesn’t really know her. She left the industry in 1970, partly over frustration that the notoriously cheap producer David Merrick wouldn’t pay her more, even though she was the standby (the performer who stands in the wings in case a lead actor cannot go on) for two roles and an understudy to Julie Harris in Merrick’s production of “Forty Carats” on Broadway.
But mostly she left because her husband of nearly 30 years, the Broadway actor and dancer Kasimir Kokich (who previously had been married to the ballerina Alexandra Danilova), had a drinking problem that Ms. Withers felt was ruining their lives. “We all loved Kasimir but we couldn’t help him,” she said. “He returned to his native Croatia and died in 1982.”
She supported their two children by doing clerical work for several doctors, retiring at 77. Because of them, she said, she figures she still has some of the best health care in New York. The cane is for balance, she explained, after she sprained her ankle in a fall two years ago in her home, but it wouldn’t surprise you if she used it to tap dance.
The bookshelves in her rent-controlled apartment ($80 a month when she moved in 61 years ago) brim with photos and show posters that celebrate a life in the theater, which wasn’t all roses. Two printable memories:
“John Raitt was the biggest egotistical jerk I ever worked with,” she said, still sounding annoyed about the first Billy Bigelow in “Carousel.” “I performed more than 600 times with him and he never once said ‘Hello,’ never once said ‘Good evening.’ ”
On Mary Martin: “I suspected she was never nice to me because I was the first person who made you forget who had done the original Nellie Forbush.”
The blue eyes were still flashing as she turned philosophical: “But I am happy with everything that happened to me, although I had to struggle and work hard. I got to work with all the greats: Meredith Willson, Jule Styne, Rodgers and Hammerstein. I’m very lucky.”

*****




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A Bit of Broadway History

A Bit of Broadway History

CreditLeft, Leo Friedman; right, Alfredo Valente
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If there were a Tony Award for best understudy, Iva Withers might well have won repeatedly during her nearly three decades on Broadway.
Though she appeared in the first Broadway run of musicals like “Carousel,” “Oklahoma!” and “Guys and Dolls,” she never originated a starring role of her own. Instead, Ms. Withers, who died on Tuesday at 97 at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, N.J., made a career as a backup for actresses like Julie Harris and Carol Channing.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Kim Kokich.
A petite blonde with a powerful voice, Ms. Withers was a Broadway utility player. “Her motto was never to learn just your own lines — learn everybody’s,” her daughter said.
On Sept. 15, 1945, that work ethic helped Ms. Withers become the first actress to play the lead in two hit shows in one day. She was playing Laurey Williams in “Oklahoma!” while understudying for Jan Clayton as Julie Jordan in “Carousel” when Ms. Clayton became sick before the matinee. Ms. Withers played Julie in the afternoon and Laurey that night without a hitch.

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Ms. Withers in 2010.CreditMarcus Yam for The New York Times

Ms. Clayton left “Carousel” for “Show Boat” in 1946, and Ms. Withers took over. She also played Julie in the original London production of “Carousel,” as well as during a national tour and in a 1949 Broadway revival.
“Iva Withers’s Julie has a modest though unconquerable spirit — just right for the part,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in a review of the revival in The New York Times in 1949.
In the early 1950s Ms. Withers replaced a pregnant Ms. Channing for the touring production of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and played Miss Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls” after Vivian Blaine left the cast. She backed up Tammy Grimes in the play “Rattle of a Simple Man” and the musicals “High Spirits” and “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”
In 1961, when she was Ms. Grimes’s standby in “Molly Brown,” she received a startling phone call at her West 55th Street apartment in Manhattan: Ms. Grimes had fainted during the first act.
“In seven minutes I was onstage,” she told The New York Journal-American, which reported that the rest of the show went smoothly and that Ms. Withers received an ovation.
For all her winning moments onstage, Ms. Withers was not a perennial understudy by choice, and she continued to hold out hope for a star turn of her own.
“I’ve been only in hits, but I’ve built my career in following people,” Ms. Withers told The New York World-Telegram and Sun in 1953. “I’m still wondering what will happen when they give me something to create.”
She finally got the chance in 1968, in the comedy “Forty Carats,” directed by Abe Burrows, in which she originated the minor role of Mrs. Adams. She also understudied for Ms. Harris as the female lead, Ann Stanley, and even played the Stanley role herself for a while before Zsa Zsa Gabor took over.
After “Forty Carats” closed in 1970, Ms. Withers struggled to find roles, and finally left Broadway.
Pearl Iva Edith Withers was born in Rivers, Manitoba, on July 7, 1917. Her parents, Edith and Roy Withers — a seamstress and an insurance salesman — had immigrated from Ireland around 1913. She grew up in Winnipeg, where she began appearing in local vaudeville productions at 10 and singing in church as a teenager.
She went to New York in 1940, working as a night cashier at Stouffer’s restaurant while auditioning for Broadway. (She shortened her name for the stage.) She went to Rodgers and Hammerstein casting calls for about a year before Richard Rodgers selected her for the “Carousel” chorus. In time she became Ms. Clayton’s understudy.
In 1943 she married Robert Strom. A few years later she met the ballet dancer Kazimir Kokich, who was also married, while performing in the national tour of “Carousel” in Chicago, and they fell in love. They annulled their marriages and married in 1949.
Mr. Kokich died in 1982. In addition to her daughter, who was a reporter for NPR, Ms. Withers is survived by a son, Jerry, a former dancer with the Joffrey Ballet and a ballet coach; and two grandchildren.
After her Broadway career, Ms. Withers returned to work as a cashier and became a physician’s assistant.
“I am happy with everything that happened to me, although I had to struggle and work hard,” she told The Times in a profile in 2010. “I got to work with all the greats: Meredith Willson, Jule Styne, Rodgers and Hammerstein. I’m very lucky.”