Rodzinski - I wonder if TPunks' friend was working for Joel Grey in 1993, when Mr. Grey was starring in one of Skip's show, HERRINGBONE (Skip was going by his full name, Walter Edgar Kennon, in those days), at Hartford Stage. Mr. Grey was as far as I could tell a great artist, and gave a phenomenal performance. This is an excerpt form the NY Times review back then:
June 6, 1993, Sunday
SUNDAY VIEW; In a One-Man Show, Joel Grey Is a Crowd
By DAVID RICHARDS
If Joel Grey rolls up his pants to the knees, opens his baby blues to their full circumference and puts a little red-and-white schoolboy's cap on his head, he can, at the age of 61, pass for 8. By puffing up his cheeks, extending his arms out from his sides and lowering his body to a seated position -- although there is no chair nearby for him to sit on -- he is able to transform himself rather convincingly into a frog. And when he lets his wrists melt, allows his hips to expand in a circular swivel and draws his mouth into the shape of a rosebud, he could be any floozy in the lobby of a third-rate hotel looking for a good time.
Mr. Grey can also sing and dance, by the way.
All of this makes him the right person to take on "Herringbone," a bizarre one-man musical in which the man in question, a bowler-hatted, cane-twirling entertainer named Herringbone, plays 10 different characters -- among them, an 8-year-old boy, a floozy and a frog, or at least a crazed vaudevillian who was once part of a team called "The Chicken and the Frog." Written by Tom Cone, with sprightly music by Walter Edgar Kennon and singular lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh, "Herringbone" attracted attention at Playwrights Horizons in 1982 when the late David Rounds was doing all the transformations and having to change sex, voice and personality every other line or so.
