Newsday from New York, New York • 69

nA i B9 ERTAINMENT Unknown Quantity At 18 debut impresses but 'makes no promises HEW YORK CHAMBER SYMPHONY Music by David Diamond Shostakovich WaUtagford Rieggar and Bizet Daniel Lee cello Gerard Schwarz conductor Saturday night Alice Tuly Halt Uncoin Center seasons and then shunted aside for yet another Yo Yo impossible on the basis of one performance to know whether his personality is fitted out with the peculiar combination of opposites toughness and sensitivity self-assurance jind self-examination discipline and elasticity to make a good working virtuoso His performance of the Shostakovich suggested he has the gumption to rattle and rivet an audience as well as win his older admiration Whether he can do it night after night 150 times a year living on room service and out of a garment bag is another question The orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz was less impressive at times threatening to come unglued from the soloist during the Shostakovich though Schwarz always managed to clamp them back together The rest of the program was an oddly random assemblage of pieces none of which was either so bedazzling or so spectacularly played that it justified being dropped into inappropriate company The concert opened with David Concerto for Small Orchestra from 1940 a mildly pleasing if somewhat stolid arrangement of preludes fugues and fanfares The 83-year-old Diamond has spent most of this century producing such vigorously attractive and solidly built pieces and was frequently skewered for doing so Restoring the gleam to the Diamond name has been longtime project and he has been having some slow success The avant-garde who once considered Diamond old-fashioned is now suffering File Photo bjr Hmiy Fair For ora night Daniel Lee rattled and riveted the audience By Justin Davidson STAFF WRITER DEBUTS ARE DICEY to evaluate The most ballyhooed are also usually the most belated made by performers who let New York get a look at them until they are already famous somewhere else So while the 18-year-old cellist Daniel Lee gave a clearly transfixing performance of First Cello Concerto Saturday night with the New York Chamber Symphony hard to know how to gauge his New York orchestral debut as news Lee played the piece with fire ferocity and grace bringing out its jumpy mood swings and angry melancholy The music ranges from gritty to glassy from passages of jagged savage virtuosity in the outer movements to the uncanny brittle beauty of the harmonics that lead into the vehement cadenza and Lee handled these extremes with aplomb This is talent that makes one worry Lee still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia is at that point in his career when he runs the risk of being rocketed around the world for a couple of the same reputation but his less-than-gripping Concerto suggests there might be a reason why his music requires such tirelessness of its champion In the second half the orchestra took a dutiful look at Wallingford chewy in for 10 violins an instrumental "combination only slightly less irritating than 10 flutes The program then slouched to its conclusion with a mostly lackluster performance of Symphony in that did however offer some fine oboe playing by Randall Ellis Jokes in a Broad Way Theater sequel is second to none Joyful Town TOWN from B3 Part 2 NEWSDAY MONDAY NOVEMBER 23 1998 bW FORBIDDEN BROADWAY CLEANS UP ITS ACT! Created and written try Gerard Alessandrini Directed by Phillip George and Alessandrini At Vie Stardust Theatre 51st Street and Broadway Manhattan Seen Friday By Jan Stuart STAFF WRITER HAVING those strange dreams again just like the ones you have after eating pizza right before bedtime In one Ethel Merman is coaching the Phantom of the Opera on how to project his singing voice In another the lascivious emcee from proved Gabey trusts the material and these dullish ballads make it easy for him enough to stand still and simply sing it The women again tend to be bigger than these men and if memory serves the pushy dames are even more boisterous sexual predators Do so many of the women have to be so overbearing and scary? Anyway Sarah Knowlton has gutsy comic timing if not quite the vocal top for Claire DeLoone the libidinous anthropologist Mary Testa is even funnier think Joanne Worley with taste as the boozy singing teacher and Annie Golden is so terrific as gurgling mousy roommate that we yearn yet again for someone to find her a part worthy of her gifts Tai Jimenez is a real find as the new Miss Turnstiles and the object of obsessive Bearch through Manhattan We have to look in the program to see that Jimenez has the long-legged hyper-ex-tended alacrity of a dancer from the Balanchine by way of Arthur Mitchell esthetic More surprisingly Young who replaced Christopher who replaced Feld as replacement shows less of his Twyla Tharp background or MTV background and more of a cool Balanchinian sense of form in the dream ballet The show is more unassuming than overwhelming and less important than mqjor work Still if 42nd Street hookers and East Village bohemians can be used for theme-park musicals a big-city Valentine that sings York New York a seems a to quote the word the 1949 movie say helluva pleasant travel destination has turned into one of the Von children and is pulling naughty on his sisters and brothers Trapp pranks ing as ever His song parodies and sketches always manage to express what all thinking: that and cheat in the set department that songs manipulate shamelessly with long final notes that the new really is way out of the closet despite the and denials to the contrary As ever this updated is at its most inspired when it finds an appropriately ridiculous visual joke to underscore wicked rhymes We never tire of seeing the Mise sendup in which the actors spin around like chain-gang zombies on the mercilessly unceasing revolving stage An uproarious addition and an instant keeper thanks to costumer Alvin delicious nod to Julie Taymor is a redux in which an oppressively outfitted ensemble limps out to the revised lyric you feel the pain In the weaker moments Alessandrini comes up with nifty ideas that are not satisfyingiy fulfilled as in a spinoff in which the two actresses who played the Siamese twins solve their unemployment dilemmas by becoming surgically grafted together The cast (Bryan Batt Lori Hammel Edward Staudenmayer and Kristine Zbomik) perhaps less secure at impersonation than some in past editions are nevertheless deft and winning performers throughout So you can either see till you drop or you can mosey just next door and spy an Andrew Lloyd Webber with a harelip as high as an eye new and forever the innocent-but-sly words of Betty Comden and Adolph Green hit less frantically now not to mention the wonders of first urban-eclectic show-biz score For the millions raised on just the Stanley Donen-Gene Kelly movie the show Bhould be little short of a musical revelation Only four of songs were used by Hollywood much to his dismay Has anyone ever captured the nervous insistent jazzy rhythms the late-night sensuality and screwball charms of city music with such accessible yet brainy theatrical flair? With a superb orchestra high onstage on Adrianne enchanting bridge of a set we can finally understand the range so much talent gushing out in exhilarating if sometimes undisciplined directions And we try to imagine what Bernstein would have made of the American musical if he were not ashamed of its lowbrow connotations Except for DeLaria who was a theatrical novice two summers ago this is again a no-star ensemble multiethnic cast meant to capture the anything-can-happen idealism of the creators while looking like the colors of today Jesse Tyler Ferguson the skinny puny redhead with the big style remains as unlikely love interest played by some guy named Sinatra in the movie Robert Montano has settled comfortably into the amiably macho role of Ozzie while newcomer Perry Laylon Ojeda the new im this you say? wide awake? Perhaps not dreaming at all Perhaps merely stumbled down the stairs below a diner at West 51st Street and into the looking-glass world of that irrepressible Broadway mad hatter Gerard Alessandrini After umpteen years ensconced in such far-flung neighborhoods as the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan fiendishly clever has settled in for its second season at a proper theater-district boite The latest edition Broadway Cleans Up Its intends to be a G-rated revue in deference to Mayor Rudolph Disney-fication of Times Square but it continues to throw its punches squarely below the belt radar for vulnerabilities is as acute and penetrat.