AboutEnnis grew up in Cincinnati, the sixth of ten children. In his first life he was an actor and singer; embarking on his second, he completed his BA at Empire State College, where he was a Richard Porter Leach Fellow.
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Ah come, come quickly, spring! come and lift us towards our culmination, we myriads; we who have never flowered, like patient cactuses. Come and lift us to our end, to blossom, bring us to our summer we who are winter-weary in the winter of the world. D.H. Lawrence, Craving for Spring My ambivalence about spring…
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To have a body that’s its own punch line, or a voice so instantly recognizable it coaxes a smile from the listener—many comics inhabit one or the other genre, or work the two simultaneously, like the great Eugene Pallette (if you haven’t seen The Lady Eve, you’re depriving yourselves of sublime hilarity). Or Dom DeLuise….
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No fun to be found in the papers this weekend. Jack Cardiff, the groundbreaking cinematographer of many films, but notably, The Red Shoes and one of my favorites, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, said goodbye. So did Beatrice Arthur, an actress who did her strong woman number in the TV series Maude and…
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Yep, it’s a miserable day in NYC—I’m craving heat on the kind of chilly, wet Monday that makes one wonder if spring will ever show. As any actor knows, one of the warmest places on earth is a stage bathed in light. It’s an uncommon, artificial reality that isn’t any less palpable merely because the…
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Haul out the superlatives for Every Little Step. James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo have made a documentary that on its surface is about the casting of the 2006 revival of Michael Bennett’s 1975 Broadway smash, A Chorus Line. A wise man once said the theater is a metaphor for life, but one doesn’t…
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Fox’s Prison Break is back from hiatus–it’s the final season, and for those of us who like our jailbreaks hot and twisty, 9pm on Friday is now blacked out on our calendars. Above, Dominic Purcell, Wentworth Miller and William Fichtner
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The past feels very present in the current revival of Hair (Al Hirschfeld Theater). As the kids bop and bounce in Diane Paulus’ high-flowered production, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic about another revolutionary time that mirrors America’s present state. True, those times were fraught with draft card anxieties, routine quells of civil unrest by…
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…well, yes, I was Jack Wrangler’s butt boy…I’m totally kidding. But I actually worked for him back in 1997, under circumstances more akin to an ass-kicking; I was a replacement for one in a trio of boy singers who backed the female lead in a review called It Could Happen to You: The Songs of Jo Stafford….
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Though we both hailed from Ohio, I never knew Bud Shank, but when I was in grade school he got me in trouble. It all had to do with a flute solo of his, a contribution of dreamy coolness that helped make California Dreamin’ (it’s the song’s break) a hit for the Mamas and the…
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The clock is ticking in 33 Variations, the gentle, thoughtful play starring Jane Fonda at Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theater. Playwright Moisés Kaufman explores the dual dilapidations of two characters who straddle past and present, fiction and history: musicologist Katherine Brandt (Fonda) and Ludwig Van Beethoven (Zach Grenier) both find themselves rushing to complete works (her…
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