Nathan Lee Graham to play Miss Understanding
in Priscilla Queen of the Desert
Opening in March 2011
Toronto’s Prince of Wales Theatre

Nathan Lee Graham will join Tony Sheldon and Will Swenson in the previously announced pre-Broadway run of Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Nathan will play Miss Understanding with cast C. David Johnson (Bob), James Brown III (Jimmy), J. Elaine Marcos (Cynthia), Jessica Phillips (Marion), Steve Schepis (Farrah), Keala Settle (Shirley), plus "Divas" Jacqueline Arnold and Anastacia McCleskey. Featured in the ensemble are Nick Adams, Thom Allison, Kyle Brown, Joshua Buscher, Susan Dunstan, David Lopez, Eric Sciotto, Bryan West, Wayne Wilcox and Tad Wilson.

Priscilla Queen of the Desert is a heart-warming, uplifting adventure of three friends who hop aboard a battered old bus searching for love and friendship in the middle of the Australian outback and end up finding more than they could ever have dreamed. The show, written by Stephan Elliott and Allan Scott, had its world premiere in Australia in 2006.

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August 31, 2009 9:30 pm
Joe’s Pub New York City

Art Of Lyric- An Evening with the Effervescent Nathan Lee Graham
SPECIAL GUEST
ELISEO ROMAN “ IN THE HEIGHTS”

www.joespub.com for tickets

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The Last Event of the Summer...

Nominating Committee of the 75th Annual Drama League Awards nominated Nathan Lee Graham in the category of Distinguished Performance for your work in the Vineyard Theatre's production of Wig Out!   

On behalf of the Nominating Committee of the 75th Annual Drama League Awards, it is my pleasure to inform you that you have been nominated in the category of Distinguished Performance for your work in the Vineyard Theatre's production of Wig Out!. 

As a 2009 Distinguished Performance Award nominee, we cordially invite you to be a guest of honor at the 75th Annual Drama League Awards Luncheon on Friday, May 15, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel. A highlight of each theatre season, The Drama League Awards Luncheon celebrates excellence in American theatre by bringing together the season's most gifted actors with past recipients of our Distinguished Performance Award to create an extraordinary dais of more than fifty performers. This annual event is held before a distinguished audience of 700 theatre professionals and Drama League members. 

The day begins at 12:00pm promptly with a private press reception for you and other Nominees. After 12:30pm, no one will be admitted, so that we may assemble the honorees for their entrance in the the Broadway Ballroom to take their places on the dias. The luncheon and awards ceremony will begin immediately and will conclude no later than 3:00pm. Our Co-Hosts, Jeremy Irons and Cynthia Nixon, will introduce each honoree on the dais and offer you an opportunity to briefly speak. This is when the day becomes yours, and it is what makes the Annual Awards Luncheon a fun and unique event for all.

April 24, 2009 9:00 pm
Art Of Lyric- An Evening with the Effervescent Nathan Lee Graham

An Upright One Night Stand

Celebrating the poetry that accompanies the music. One shouldn’t just hear music, one must also listen. says Graham. Mr. Graham intends carry on the the torch of traditional supper club cabaret and to pay tribute to the likes of Mabel Mercer, Bobby Short, Julie Wilson and Eartha Kitt. All of whom made the world a better place, or at the very least more elegant.

Music Director Christopher Lloyd Bratten
Tickets: $15-$25
$30/$25 at the door (if available)
Table minimums apply. Tickets bought online get first priority in seating.

 Mark’s Restaurant
861 N. LaCienega Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069
(310) 652-5252

Families Come in All Shapes and Hairstyles
Published: October 1, 2008

The Fates 3, the voluptuous trio that sings a mean backup to daily events in a place called the House of Light, say that “Vogue is the official language” of their world. But though the poses of high fashion figure flamboyantly here, this pronouncement doesn’t begin to do justice to the richness of the lingo spoken by the characters in “Wig Out!,” the new play by the astonishing young dramatist Tarell Alvin McCraney, which opened on Tuesday night at the Vineyard Theater stars Erik King and Nathan Lee Graham.

The outcasts in this gutsy, pulsing portrait of uptown drag queens and the men who love them have reinvented the world from the ground up — no, make that from the Garden of Eden onward. These are people with their own heroic guiding myths — of creation, nation and divinity — and their own intricate and inviolable rules for what constitutes a home, a family and a sexual identity.

Their talk is replete with the pop, hip-hop and glamour-goddess references you might expect from folks who live to dress (and just, as important, walk) fabulously. And the program for “Wig Out!,” directed by Tina Landau, includes a glossary to explain argot like to “throw shade” (which means to diss or derogate).

But there are reverberant echoes of Homer, Milton, the Bible, Shakespeare, vintage Hollywood and homespun American melodrama. Like most writers of worth, Mr. McCraney, whose “Brothers Size” made the American theater prick up its ears when it was presented at the Public Theater last season, is a hard-core linguistic scavenger. And he has blessed each of his characters with the authority of playwrights who beg, borrow and steal lustrous words to re-shape the world in their own images.

Though its centerpiece is a competitive drag ball, and it features the expected extravagant clothes and lip-synching routines, “Wig Out!” is not a cross-dressing revue or comedy of the sort familiar to downtown audiences. Instead it is a thorough and original anatomy of an alternative universe. The backdrop of James Schuette’s set establishes the tone: it depicts a galaxy exploding out of a mirrored disco ball.  

Millions Join NEA, Cat in the Hat To Read Across America Nation’s largest reading event culminates with Cat-a-Van tours, celebrity read-ins

In Compton, Calif., dozens of celebrities donned signature Seuss gear and read the Dr.’s classics to more than 750 local public school students.  The red carpet worthy reading roster included Emmy-award winning actress Jenna Fischer of “The Office,” hotel heiress Nicky Hilton, Corey Feldman of “The Two Coreys,” Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian of “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” A.J. Buckley of “CSI: NY,” Jowharah Jones of “Ugly Betty,” Emmanuelle Chriqui of “Entourage,” Shamyl Brown of “The Wire,” Robbie Jones of “One Tree Hill,” and Skye McCole Bartusiak of real-time thriller “24.”

To put the “across” into the special reading day, NEA revved up its engines again this year with three Cat-a-Van tours hitting the road to bring the gift of reading to thousands of schoolchildren.  Covering more than 1,200 miles, the Cat-a-Van tours will visit more than 18 cities in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas. 

The weeklong Cat-a-Vans will provide books and cash donations valued at more than $100,000 to public schools and their libraries along the reading route through a generous donation from NEA’s Books Across America.  In recent years, Cat-a-Vans have traveled through Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. 

The Cat-a-Van tours will keep trekking throughout the Sunshine State in early March for “Read Across Spring Training,” designed to bring reading fun to ballparks as Major League Baseball teams show they “got game” by hosting special read-ins for local schoolchildren.  This year’s reading line up includes the Boston Red Sox, Florida Marlins, Houston Astros, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Mets and Washington Nationals.

The challenge to get youngsters to read continues to grow, according to a recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts that found teenagers and young adults are reading less often and for shorter amounts of time.

“Nowadays children have all sorts of distractions—video games, Internet surfing and high-tech gadgets—which can take them away from reading,” said Weaver.  “NEA’s Read Across America provides tools, resources and tips for parents and educators that make reading a fun and enjoyable experience so kids will keep turning pages.” 

Visit www.nea.org/readacross for additional information on Read Across America Day and the Cat-a-Van Reading Tour.  

Bryten Goss, “Riding Pig”, 2005, oil on linen.

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There Amid the Madness, Dark Humor Lies in Wait
Published: January 9, 2008
By ALLAN KOZINN

Correction Appended

Depending on how you look at it, “Three Lost Chords” is a single work in three loosely related acts, or three short, single-character operas yoked together. The source material is far-flung, with Kafka and Poe as the outer acts, and a slighter story by Muriel Spark between them. But these monodramas have something in common, apart from music by Lance Horne and librettos by Mark Campbell. Each of their protagonists is dead, insane or (somehow) both. And ghoulish though the stories are, Mr. Horne, Mr. Campbell and David Schweizer, who directs the production at the Zipper Factory Theater, have found a current of dark humor within each.

“A Hunger Artist,” based on the Kafka story, is the eccentric memoir of a man who made an art of fasting, a calling to which he was suited because he loathed eating. He rhapsodizes about the good old days, when fasting was a respected art, and remembers his own championship 40-day fast as his moment of glory; he would have extended it except for his manager’s insistence that the public would lose interest. That glory gives way to bitterness as he recalls the fickle public’s abandonment of fasters, and his own degrading death in a circus cage.

Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times

For Kafka the story was an allegory about art and public comprehension, and Mr. Schweizer and the costume design consultant, Jacob A. Climer, may have been getting at that by putting Nathan Lee Graham, the tenor, in a tailcoat and a black T-shirt. Mr. Graham sings the role with an electrifying clarity and magnificent dramatic timing, but his strongest assets in this theater’s intimate confines are his vast repertory of expressive facial gestures and a commanding, powerful voice. It hardly matters that his character is fading to an emaciated wisp; the power of his voice seems to suit the hunger artist’s domineering spirit.

Caroline Worra brings a persuasively carefree style and a lovely vocal timbre to “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” the Spark story about a young woman waiting at a bus stop, troubled about something important she forgot at her office and irritated by her boss’s constant whistling of the British folk tune for which the story is titled.

As in “A Hunger Artist,” Mr. Horne has supplied lyrical, long-lined vocal writing supported by an eclectically angular score, heard here in a piano version (with the composer at the keyboard). The twist is his use of the folk song. Ms. Worra’s unnamed character lapses into it twice before remembering herself and resuming her monologue. She sings it complete — refracted through the prism of Mr. Horne’s spiky musical language and Mr. Campbell’s topical revisions — only at the end, when she returns to her office and discovers her strangled body on the floor.

Mr. Horne and Mr. Campbell turn the final act, Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” into a mad scene, although a notably calmer one than you typically find in an opera. Michael Slattery sings the entire act standing on a box, with leather straps around his torso and his hands behind him (though not tied). Mr. Slattery uses both a broad timbral palette and a repertory of off-the-edge facial expressions to convey Poe’s tale of murder and guilty self-betrayal.

Mr. Horne’s score puts considerable restrictions on the singer: Madness here isn’t conveyed through histrionics, but through the more subtle virtuosity of a quick, changeable vocal line, sometimes raspy and almost whispered, sometimes at full power. Mr. Slattery provides all that, with madness to spare.

The final performance of “Three Lost Chords” will be on Wednesday night at 9 at the Zipper Factory Theater, 336 West 37th Street, Manhattan; (212) 352-3101, zippertheater.com.

Correction: January 11, 2008

A music review on Wednesday about “Three Lost Chords,” at the Zipper Factory Theater, misstated the surname of the composer at one point. As noted elsewhere in the review, he is Lance Horne, not Holmes. The review also referred incorrectly to the song in the section “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” It was written by Mr. Horne; it was not the British song of the same name. And schedule information gave an incorrect telephone number for the Zipper Factory Theater. It is (212) 352-3101.