POINT ME TOWARD TOMORROW

The mission of Career Transition for Dancers is "to empower current and former professional dancers, as well as their younger counterparts, with the knowledge and skills necessary to clearly define their career possibilities after dance and to provide the resources to help make these possibilities a reality." CTFD held its annual between-shows get-together, sponsored by The Shubert Organization, at Sardi's on Wednesday, March 26.

Among the attendees was this merry group from Curtains: Christopher Spaulding, Noah Racey, and Jen Frankel.

Also on hand: Seth Stewart and Michael Balderrama, from In the Heights.

Event co-host Graciela Daniele with John Selya, praised for his thrilling dancing in Movin' Out, and Andy Blankenbuehler, whose choreography of In the Heights has the whole town talking.

A Chorus Line's Jeffrey Schecter and Heather Parcells with Hairspray's Joe Abraham.

Alexander J. Dubé, CTFD's executive director, with event co-host Mercedes Ellington.

Mary Lou Westerfield of Actors' Equity and Judith Anderson, vice president of CTFD, flanked by Phil Smith and Gerald Schoenfeld of The Shubert Organization.

Event co-hosts Allyson Tucker, John Selya, Mercedes Ellington, Graciela Daniele, Brenda Braxton, and Andy Blankenbuehler.

WHITE HOUSE KEEPING

If you missed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during its Broadway run, you are forgiven. The show only lasted for 13 previews and seven regular performances at the Mark Hellinger Theatre (now a church!) in 1976, although it boasted music by Leonard Bernstein, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, and a cast that included Ken Howard, Patricia Routledge, Emily Yancy, Beth Fowler, and Reid Shelton. Even Michael Lichtefeld was in it!

At the behest of the Bernstein estate, about 90 minutes of music from the score was later adapted as a concert piece titled A White House Cantata. Kent Nagano conducted the 1997 premiere in London, and the work was recorded by Deutsche Grammophon. But, believe it or not, the cantata has never been heard in New York -- until now. Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall in the Time Warner Center is the place to be on Monday, March 31 at 8pm, when Robert Bass will conduct The Collegiate Chorale and the Orchestra of St. Luke's in the New York premiere performance. (The timing is fortuitous in that 2008 is the 90th birthday year of both Bernstein and Lerner.)

"I think the cantata includes the best music from the show," says Bass (pictured above). "The choices that were made in putting it together were really wise. What remains is a pastiche of a lot of American musical styles: love songs, minstrel music, jazz, marches, hymns, and anthems, all connected by the history of the White House itself. It's a very exuberant work -- and, in concert form, the strength of the music and lyrics is first and foremost."

The idea of a musical set in the White House may sound like a joke to present-day audiences, given the awful things that have been going on there for the past eight years. But 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the cantata drawn from it are by no means celebratory. Indeed, the show was subtitled "a musical about the problems of housekeeping." A press release for the upcoming performance of the cantata describes it as depicting "the absurdity of period social hierarchies within the first 100 years of the United States' executive mansion, using 11 presidents, selected first ladies, and three generations of black servants." Some of the sequences explore James Monroe's refusal to halt slavery in Washington, Andrew Johnson's impeachment, and Thomas Jefferson's affair with a black maid -- still only alleged in 1976, but later proven to have occurred.

Roger Rees will direct the semi-staged concert performance, with soloists including Anita Johnson as Seena, Emily Pulley as the First Lady, Robert Mack as Lud, and baritone Dwayne Croft -- a stalwart of the Metropolitan Opera -- as the President. "There is some spoken dialogue in the cantata," says Bass. "There's a movement with the British characters, where they burn down the White House and destroy the furniture at a state dinner. It's called a sonatina, but it's mostly spoken. Roger Rees is not only directing, he's also got the lead speaking role of Admiral Cockburn."

The most famous song from the score is probably the moving anthem "Take Care of This House." Bass says that his favorite sections include "The President Jefferson March" and "the beautiful love ballad 'Seena,' which sounds a little bit like 'Somewhere' from West Side Story. I also hear a lot of Wonderful Town in the score, but some of it is very grand and operatic. For example, there's a huge, climactic hymn at the end. It's called 'To Make Us Proud,' and it reminds me of the finale of Candide. The cantata is a wonderful piece, and I'm delighted that we're presenting its New York premiere in Rose Hall, which is the perfect venue for it."

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EUAN MORTON, HERE AND NOW

Any number of powerhouse performers are currently or very soon to be found doing their stuff in Manhattan's cabaret venues, from Tovah Feldshuh, Rita Moreno, and Spring Awakening's Lea Michele at Feinstein's at the Regency to Amanda McBroom, Annie Ross, Karen Mason, and Marilyn Maye at the Metropolitan Room. But I'd like to call particular attention to Euan Morton's engagement in the historic Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, which continues through March 29.

Euan garnered rave reviews and a Tony nomination, not to mention a Theatre World Award, for his amazing performance as Boy George in the failed but largely fabulous Broadway musical Taboo. (If you missed it, buy or rent the DVD of the documentary Show Business: The Road to Broadway, in which he's prominently featured.) Winner of a 2006 Obie Award for his work in Measure for Pleasure at The Public Theater, he has played the title roles in Tony Kushner's adaptation of Brundibár at the New Victory and the Berkeley Rep, The Who's Tommy at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, and the NYMF presentation of Caligula. Euan appeared Off-Broadway opposite Alfred Molina in the Roundabout's Howard Katz, and he had a colorful featured role in the recent Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Kevin Kline.

One of the most expressive and versatile singing actors in the business, Euan offers a wonderfully eclectic program in his show at the Oak Room, which is titled Here and Now. Selections range from "Pure Imagination" (Bricusse/Newley, from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) to such standards as "It's Only a Paper Moon," "You Go to My Head," and "Someone to Watch Over Me," with a little Stephen Sondheim ("No One Is Alone," from Into the Woods) and Leonard Cohen ("Hallelujah" ) thrown in for good measure. His patter is thoroughly witty and charming, as it has been in his appearances at the aforementioned Metropolitan Room, Joe's Pub, Birdland, the Zipper, and other clubs and theaters.

One cavil: Euan does a fantastic job of playing to everyone in the long and narrow Oak Room, sometimes going so far as to walk among the patrons while singing (in the manner of the room's most frequent star, Andrea Marcovicci). But this effort is handily undercut by the fact that the house lights remain off while he's roaming, and he's therefore left in near-complete darkness. I can only hope that this strange, easily fixable problem has been addressed since I attended. No technical weirdness should detract from the talent of this great Scot, who has happily decided to pursue his career on our shores.

A PIECE OF CAKE

Sex sells! Actor Jonathan Cake has gained lots of attention for having displayed his ripped, muscular body in various degrees of undress in three different shows this season: Shakespeare's Cymbeline at Lincoln Center; the Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2 production of Almost an Evening, Ethan Coen's trio of one-acts; and now, the Atlantic's mainstage production of Jez Butterworth's Parlour Song. (In a TimeOut New York review of Parlour Song, Adam Feldman wrote: "It may be time for Jonathan Cake to legally change his first name to Beef.")

The fellow is definitely in demand for his acting talent and his plummy British accent as well as for his pecs, so much so that he couldn't sign on for the Atlantic's commercial run of Almost an Evening at The Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street, because he had already committed to the same company's production of the Butterworth play. I recently spoke with Cake about his burgeoning career, what he does to keep in shape, and the new addition to his family.

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BROADWAYSTARS: You've done three shows back to back in New York. I'm guessing that you're legally able to do so because you're married to an American?

JONATHAN CAKE: Yes. I attribute my work spree to the fact that I'm an English actor in New York with a green card. It's pretty handy that I'm legal, but it's funny: We've been living here for two years without anyone really offering me any theater work at all and then, suddenly, three shows came along in a row. I've been delighted about it, but it's been kind of intense. For the last six months, I've pretty much always been rehearsing during the day and performing at night, sometimes rehearsing one show and performing another. I'm not sure it's good for anyone to do that much acting. I think you can do it during the day or at night, but when you're doing both, it feels a little weird.

STARS: I imagine it would have been hard to turn down any of these projects.

JC: I've loved all three of these incredibly different, fascinating parts, and the people I've worked with have been extraordinary. But my wife and I have a new baby -- our first kid -- and there's that thing that happens when you become a parent. You have to abdicate the part of you that's selfish. For a while, I was getting that confused: I was being this sort of selfish person at home and this selfless provider at work. I couldn't quite get the balance right. But it's been amazing to go from difficult, complex, late Shakespeare to those deceptively slight one-act plays, which actually have an incredible amount of nuance and reverberations, and then to the concrete but, at the same time, surreal world of this new play by Jez Butterworth. It's been a glorious range of different styles.

STARS: Your wife is an actress.

JC: Yes. Julianne Nicholson. She plays one of the detectives on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, opposite Chris Noth. We met about five years ago in L.A., when we were both doing a Steven Bochco pilot for HBO. My line is that the show didn't get picked up, but she did.

STARS: I was lucky enough to see you play Jason in Medea on Broadway in 2002, opposite the great Fiona Shaw. Was that your American stage debut?

JC: Yes. I'd never acted on stage here, and I'd never even been to New York. That was a very exciting time for me. I think that production had a profound effect on people. There's something special about the New York audience in that they're literally hungry for discussion of what artists working in the theater think about what's going on in the world. In that respect, it's a little different from London, where they're more reluctant to tune into the issues of the day. For example, when Margaret Thatcher was in power, there were no state-of-the-nation plays. But in New York, there's a great appetite for talking about what's going on. Medea was done not long after 9/11, and people were very interested in what the Greeks had to say about unimaginable suffering and brutality.

STARS: Tell me about Parlour Song.

JC: Emily Mortimer and Chris Bauer play a married couple living in a suburb of London. They've got to a stage in their marriage when things are stagnating. I play their next-door neighbor, the husband's best friend. Without giving too much away, the three of them cement each other's mid-life crises. You read these newspaper stories all the time where someone kills his wife and all of the neighbors say, "He seemed like such a nice guy." That's the sort of passion that's explored in this play.

STARS: In every show I've seen you in thus far, you've had a Brit accent. Can you sound American if you need to?

JC: After Medea, I did Doubt in L.A., so I got to do a Bronx accent. I'd love to do more American parts. I don't know many actors who don't have a good ear. If we work hard enough, we can do just about any dialect, because it's in our DNA. And I think it's generally easy for Brits to do American accents because we're constantly exposed to American culture through movies and TV shows.

STARS: So, Jonathan: What's up with your semi-nudity in these last three shows?

JC: I come from a tradition where, if a production or a play will benefit from that, it's just not an issue. In Cymbeline, there were very good reasons for setting that scene in the baths, the one where Posthumus meets Iachimo and the rest of these kind of loose Europeans. Then there was the scene where Iachimo comes to Imogen's bedchamber at night, and it made complete sense that there should be the sexual element of having him be this half-clothed voyeur. In Almost an Evening, Ethan Coen had a scene set in a steam room, and I wasn't going to say to him, "Ethan, could you rewrite this scene, because I took off my clothes in the last show?" And in Parlour Song, Jez has a great scene where the guy is playing Scrabble in bed with his mistress. The fact that these things happened for me one after another is coincidence, really. I hope people won't draw the conclusion that I have it specified in any contract that an author has to write me a scene where I'm semi-nude. I don't ever want it to be a distraction.

STARS: What's your exercise regimen?

JC: I particularly tried to get in shape for Cymbeline, because I felt the character is a complete narcissist and would pride himself on looking good. Iachimo is off stage for about an hour, so I would go and do a sort of spartan, prison-style workout in an empty rehearsal room. But that was really the only time I had to exercise, because I was dealing with a new baby.

STARS: The bar has been set incredibly high for any actor who displays his or her body on stage in New York, yet you've gotten a lot of positive response for that.

JC: I'm sort of perversely flattered, because I'm 40, and I haven't seen the inside of a gym in months. All I've been doing is rehearsing, performing, and changing diapers. There's something to be said for what I call "the play diet." The incredible Emily Mortimer has been eating like a horse, but she's been losing weight hand over fist while we've been doing this play. What happens when you're performing is that your metabolism is sped up to a great extent, because you spend most of your time in an abject state of fear. That's very good for your body fat ratio.

STARS: As you've proven in your last three shows!

JC: I know, I know. Listen, I don't want to do my next part in a burka, but it would be nice to maybe wear a suit or something.