Upstage-Downstage

Seeking the Soul of 'Wit'

2012-01-22T14:02:00.007-05:00

Cynthia Nixon stars in 'Wit'

See that woman dressed in a thin hospital gown, head shaved and covered with a baseball cap? She is Vivian Bearing, whose surname ironically describes the dual nature of her current status.

On the one hand, she has the regal bearing of a highly regarded scholar at the height of her career, admired by those in her academic circle and held in fear and trembling by the students in her metaphysical poetry class. This is an image she has cultivated for herself, one that she has lived with most satisfyingly for many years.

Now, however, another meaning of her name has come into play, referencing the fact that Professor Bearing is bearing up under a terrible regimen of experimental chemotherapy, in the minuscule chance that it might beat back stage four ovarian cancer. She has no choice; as she reminds the audience, “there is no stage five.”

This is the conceit of Wit, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson, now in revival at the Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Whatever plans we may have for ourselves, life has a way of following its own course; however many layers of self-protective armor we wrap ourselves in, life has a way of stripping things down to the basics.

At the play’s start, Vivian (Cynthia Nixon) puts on a brave front, using sarcasm and badinage to deal—or to avoid dealing—with her situation. She realizes, she says, that this is a matter of life and death, but “I know all about life and death” as a specialist in the metaphysical poetry of John [Death Be Not Proud] Donne.

Enduring eight months of debilitating chemotherapy turns out to be rather more physical than metaphysical, however, and Vivian is forced to relinquish all vestiges of her own pride for the sake of survival. And the woman who has always considered herself to be fiercely independent is now dependent on others—the condescending doctors (Michael Countryman and Greg Keller) who see her as little more than a means for collecting research data, and the nurse (Carra Patterson), who singularly shows her a degree of compassion.

Through flashbacks, we get to see bits of Vivian’s life-before-cancer: as a young child encouraged by her father to use and cherish her intellect; as a less-than-stellar student gaining her first knowledge of Donne from her mentor (Suzanne Bertish, perfect in a role that gives her the play’s most touching moment); and as a demanding professor giving her own students a hard time.

Ms. Edson, the playwright, who has determinedly remained in her career as an elementary school teacher, drew upon previous experience working in the cancer and AIDS unit of a research hospital and her own education as a literature major to create this powerful opus.

Wit is not without its flaws—there is a confrontational scene regarding a “do not resuscitate” order that seems unnecessarily shoehorned in for dramatic effect, and the flashbacks don’t always add to our understanding of Vivian—yet the story itself is one that can and does resonate with audiences. Death, after all, makes no exceptions. We just hope for a more benign final journey than the one Vivian has to face.

For Ms. Nixon and director Lynne Meadow, both of whom are breast cancer survivors, this first-time Broadway mounting of Wit seems to be a labor of love for a play they believe most strongly in. But everything does depend upon the actress playing the central role.

The New York Times Magazine this week published a profile of Ms. Nixon that describes her as “eager to please.” I felt that eagerness in her performance and found it a bit off-putting. It seems to me that Vivian should arrive wrapped in more self-assuredness, even arrogance, especially in the first half before the illness has rubbed away the façade.

Whether you find Ms. Nixon to be compelling or underpowered will need to be your personal response. For myself, I prefer Emma Thompson’s portrayal in the Mike Nichols filmed version and highly recommend it as an alternative.

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Angry, Angrier, Angriest

2012-01-17T20:04:00.017-05:00

Matthew Rhys is John Osborne's "Angry Young Man"

Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

Well, if nothing else, they got the “angry” part right.

That, unfortunately, is the best that can be said for the rage-infused revival of John Osborne’s groundbreaking play, Look Back In Anger, now on view at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theater.

Look Back In Anger, a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued portrait of the lost generation of post-World War II 20-something Brits, has always had a mixed reputation. Ever since its London premiere in 1956, it has been both reviled and revered, but, having seen two very different productions in the past couple of years, I believe there are depths to be found within this seemingly endless rant of a play that are waiting to be corralled by the right director and the right actors.

In this case, the director is Sam Gold, who in recent years has shown himself to be a wunderkind (Circle Mirror Transformation, The Aliens, Seminar) and who is now—for better or for worse, it remains to be seen which—a Roundabout Associate Artist. Look Back in Anger, however, seems to have eluded his grasp.

Here, Gold has opted to rev up the audience with a pre-show recorded jazz concert (Dizzy Gillespie?), which, depending on your predilection for such things, is either highly entertaining (I enjoyed it) or migraine-inducing (as a theater-going colleague called it).

The connection to the play is peripheral. Osborne’s “angry young man” Jimmy Porter (Matthew Rhys, who is Welsh and at least sounds authentically British) had, at one time, performed with a jazz band. During the course of the play, he pulls out his trumpet from time to time and bleats some dissonant riffs, seemingly for the sole purpose of annoying those around him. If he could play like the recorded jazz musicians, he would have a brilliant future indeed (but then he might lose his hallmark frustrated edginess.)

The play itself opens with a long period of silence, as Jimmy and his friend Cliff (the ubiquitous Adam Driver, for whom Roundabout and various efforts at British accents have defined his work through several recent productions) are reading the Sunday papers, while Jimmy’s wife Alison (the unfortunately shrill Sarah Goldberg)—dressed in a bra, slip, and open house robe—is doing the ironing.

This opening, set in a squalid room that defines the narrow boundaries of Jimmy and Alison’s flat and of their lives, is rather Pinteresque in its snapshot of skewed domesticity and its discomfiting air of foreboding. Alas, however, the silence is soon broken, and Jimmy spends much of the rest of the play spewing forth a steady stream of invective aimed at Alison and her upper class family, Cliff, the landlady, the government, the church, the world in general, and, upon occasion, himself.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the play as it is being presented on the stage of the Laura Pels.

But it needn’t be that way. The play raises some intriguing issues that beg to be explored. If Pinter shows up in the opening scene, there are also pieces of August Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee to be found.

Borrowing from Strindberg, imagine if Miss Julie had married her footman. What would their lives be like? That’s Alison and Jimmy, locked forever in some fatal love-hate attraction that is beyond easy understanding.

Alison is Jimmy’s equal in many ways, but her tactics are her own, and she definitely is not afraid of his bluster. For the most part, she gets in her digs by choosing not to react to his baiting, by being openly sexual with Cliff, and by cultivating friendships with people she knows that Jimmy despises. There is also in the play a scene that has been deleted for this production, a reunion between Alison and her father that is very telling about the world she has left behind. This is an important moment, because it unexpectedly shows her father to be a kind and sympathetic character and adds another layer of complexity to the unfolding events. Yet it has been sacrificed, either to spare the expense of hiring another actor or in service of the vexing and constant battle.

Then there is Tennessee Williams. A passing remark is made about Marlon Brando, and, indeed, Jimmy does have a lot in common with Stanley Kowalksi, the brutish character Brando so indelibly brought to life in A Streetcar Named Desire. Like Stanley famously yelling for his Stella, there is a core of pain underlying Jimmy’s anger, a pain that—if brought out though directorial and acting choices—would humanize Jimmy and give the audience someone they could actually care about.

There is also Jimmy’s puzzling relationship with Cliff, another important key to understanding Jimmy that could be explored more deeply. The production I saw back in 2010 by The Seeing Place at A.T.A. Sargent Theater played up this aspect and made the triangle a most interesting one. In this production, however, Cliff seems to lack personality and serves solely as the mediator between Jimmy and Alison.

Later, the delicate balance they have all maintained is threatened with the arrival on the scene of Alison’s friend Helena (a solid performance by Charlotte Parry). Major upheaval ensues, yet in this production Jimmy seems pretty much unaffected, unable or unwilling to move out of the role he has assigned to himself. In the end, a temporary truce comes into play (à la Albee's George and Martha at the end of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), but we cannot leave the theater imagining it will last for long.

In the final analysis, I found this production of Look Back In Anger to be disappointing. Jimmy, our jazz trumpeter, is purely a Johnny One-Note, and Osborne’s significant portrait of a sadly lost soul is itself lost on us.

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'Lysistrata Jones': She Likes Basketball. How About That!

2012-01-04T22:02:00.014-05:00

Patti Murin as Lysistrata Jones

Sometimes, while settling into your seat prior to the start of a performance, it’s fun to eavesdrop (and pretty much impossible to avoid, in any case) on the conversations around you.

Take today for instance. While awaiting the matinee curtain of the bouncy, cute musical Lysistrata Jones (at the Walter Kerr Theatre), I heard this great conversation behind me:

Theatergoer A: I don’t really know what this is about. Do you?

Theatergoer B: Something about basketball…and sex.

Theatergoer A: Well, I can handle one or the other, but I’m not sure about both.

I think Theatergoer A handled it just fine, at least based on the intermission conversation.

And what’s not to like? Lysistrata Jones is a charming romp of a show, with book by Douglas Carter Beane and performed by a talented cast of 12 and an equally talented band, visible on a catwalk above the stage and actively involved in the proceedings.

You might call Lysistrata Jones a labor of love by Mr. Bean’s circle of friends and his life partner, composer and lyricist Lewis Flinn. The pair collaborated on Mr. Beane’s very funny The Little Dog Laughed; the show is directed by Dan Knechtges, who choreographed the musical Xanadu, with book by DCB; and the band performs under the baton of Brad Simmons, who worked on Mr. and Mrs. Fitch, written by Guess Who.

It should come as no surprise that Lysistrata Jones (the title role is played in lively 'Legally Blonde' style by Patti Murin) is inspired by the Greek comedy, Lysistrata, by Aristophanes.

As in the original, our heroine persuades her girlfriends to withhold sex from their boyfriends in order to get them to do something they want. In this case, it is not anything quite so dramatic as putting an end to war; instead, what the girls want is for the boys to actually try to win a basketball game—something the team at their very laid-back college has never done. (“No more givin’ it up ‘til you give up givin’ it up” go the lyrics to one of the catchier numbers).

The shenanigans are overseen by a formidable Liz Mikel as the goddess-like Hetaira (the hetairai were courtesans in Ancient Greece, and this Hetaira is a madam at a brothel), who makes sure everything stays on track until lessons are learned and all is well in the world.

You could argue, and I would not disagree, that perhaps a Broadway theater is not the best home (size-wise or ticket-price-wise) for this bit of cotton candy, which made the trip uptown from its former home at the probably more appropriate Judson Memorial Church Gymnasium at Washington Square South.

Indeed, despite some very positive reviews, notably by Ben Brantley in The New York Times, Lysistrata Jones is set to close on Sunday. However, it is almost certain to become a fixture at college and community theaters around the country, and could very well show up for a longer stay at an Off-Broadway house like the New World Stages, where it would be right at home alongside other former Broadway shows like Avenue Q, Million Dollar Quartet, and Rent.

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Stick Fly: The Little Play That Could

2011-12-31T22:07:00.013-05:00

A Confrontational Moment in 'Stick Fly'

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I would like to end 2011 by championing a play that shouldn’t need championing, save for the fact that some of the professional critics have decided it is not Broadway-worthy. A little snobbery, perhaps?

It’s called Stick Fly, and for the past five years, it has had successful runs at theaters in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D. C., Boston. Along the way, it has garnered a number of awards for seasoned playwright Lydia R. Diamond, including a L. A. Critics Circle Award last year.

It is now on view at the Cort Theater, and a better crowd-pleaser I have not seen in a long time. It is a family drama that, like real-life family dramas, is both serious to those experiencing it and very funny to those on the outside looking in (i. e. the audience).

Stick Fly tells the story of an upper middle class African American family, the LeVays, who get together for a summer getaway weekend at their home in Martha’s Vineyard

The characters include two sons, Kent (nicknamed “Spoon”), and Harold (aka “Flip”), each of whom has brought a girlfriend home to meet the parents. Spoon’s girlfriend, to whom he has recently become engaged, is Taylor; Flip’s is Kimber. Rounding out the cast of characters are Joe, the patriarch of the LeVay clan, and Cheryl, daughter of the family’s housekeeper, who is holding down the fort for her ill mother for the weekend.

Amidst games of Trivial Pursuit and Parcheesi, intellectual debates, and the social fuel of mojitos and pot, the playwright sets things up like a snake of dominoes, then lets them fall where they will.

And fall they do. Yet this is no August: Osage County. The quarrels and disappointments are far less melodramatic and soap opera-ish than that totally over-the-top encounter group of a play. It’s more in line with one of A. R. Gurney’s tales about the foibles of America’s WASPs, both sharp and comic.

With Stick Fly, the triggers are issues of race, social class, and gender. Kimber is herself a WASP (though Flip absurdly tries to pass her off as “Italian”), and her presence stirs up some passion in Taylor, who has spent her life trying to get her mostly white peers to understand that race still matters. Taylor and Cheryl, though both well educated, were raised in middle middle class homes, and they feel an awkwardness of not quite fitting into the LeVays’ social milieu. To add to the mix of problems, both Cheryl and Spoon have issues with Joe LeVay.

All of the “little murders” unfold over the course of the evening, though rarely does anything feel too coincidental for words or outside of the realm of the dramas that every family goes through. There are a couple of meltdowns, but these are fairly well contained, and the clan survives the weekend without any major collapses. They will all live to fight another day, and will undoubtedly do so when they get together for major holidays and events—just like the rest of us.

This is a real strength of Stick Fly. It never loses touch with reality, and it is clear that the playwright is fond of each of her flawed characters. As much as I admired August: Osage County, for example, the real feeling at the end of that play was one of relief. With Stick Fly, we leave the theater feeling like we had had a really enjoyable time among the LeVays, and that even snarky Joe had his moments.

There is a lot of honesty contained within the arguments that go on under the roof, and the issues that are raised ring true. While some of the discussions about race and class and gender may seem collegiate, they are exactly the kinds of conversations that take place among engaged, intelligent college students and seem all the more real for coming out of the mouths of the young people in the play.

The playwright has also planted some intriguing ideas about exploitation. Much, for example, is made of the fact that this was the first black family to have a home in Martha’s Vineyard, thanks to a gift of land that was made to an ancestor, a sea captain whose exact line of work is never discussed. It’s not difficult to imagine that this free black sea captain had been in the business of transporting slaves.

It is also interesting to observe Cheryl’s interactions with the family. Even though she has been a part of the family on some level her entire life (she is at least a decade younger than Spoon and Flip), she is still a black servant in a black household, and, as we learn, she and her mother have been exploited in other ways as well.

Finally, although Spoon and Flip are the scions of the family, it is the women—Taylor, Kimber, and, especially Cheryl—who are most interesting to watch. Despite their differences, the form an unexpected bond of real sisterhood which is certain to grow through the years.

The play is well directed by Kenny Leon, with a smart cutaway set by David Gallo and great summer duds by Reggie Ray. One of its producers is singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, who has provided incidental music for the show.

The ensemble of players give solid performances and work well together: Dule Hill as the sensitive Spoon; Mekhi Phifer as the more worldly older brother Flip; Rosie Benton as the rebellious Kimber; Tracie Thoms as the insecure Taylor; and Ruben Santiago-Hudson as the crass but occasionally charming Joe.

But the play’s real kudos go to Condola Rashad, who shines as Cheryl. Ms. Rashad (yes, she is Phylicia Rashad’s daughter) has excellent comic timing and serious acting chops (she was splendid in Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Ruined, a couple of years back). And speaking of Lynn Nottage, that is a playwright I also thought of while watching Stick Fly, especially the humor that she wove through By The Way, Meet Vera Stark.

All told, Stick Fly is a highly engaging and entertaining work, one that I hope will draw an audience through word-of-mouth. I attended on a very stormy evening earlier this week, one that would have certainly kept me at home if I didn’t already have a ticket. The rest of the rain-soaked audience, I imagine, felt the same way. Yet I have seldom sat with theatergoers who were obviously having such an enjoyable time. Lots of laughter, positive chatter during the intermission, and cheers at the end.

Catch it while you can, and Happy New Year to all!

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Look, I’m Eating My Hat: Revisiting 'Follies'

2011-12-30T21:09:00.017-05:00

Follies' Magnificent Cast. Photo by Joan Marcus

I don’t often return to see an existing production for a second time. After all, life is short, and there’s a lot of theatergoing to do.

Nevertheless, ever since I saw an early preview of Follies, I have had a hankering to see it again, wondering what changes might have taken place between then and now. It is such a significant musical, and the opportunity to see a full-scale production with a full-scale orchestra in the pit is not likely to come around again for a long, long time. I simply could not get it out of my mind.

In my blog review of the show back in early September, I noted that while I admired much about the production, I was less than thrilled with the performances of the two leading women. Jan Maxwell as Phyllis seemed tentative and in over her head as a singer and dancer; Bernadette Peters as Sally seemed unsure of how best to approach her role and was—much to my surprise—over her head herself as a singer. I also thought that the former Follies girls in attendance at the reunion--save for Susan Watson--were pretty much devoid of individuality or presence.

And yet, I could not stay away.

And now I say, WOW, WOW, and yet again WOW!!!

Any doubts I had were washed away in one sublime evening of near perfection. It’s as though everyone involved has come to realize that this is the experience of a lifetime, and they are finding inspiration from each other to continue to perfect their performances.

The women playing the former Follies girls have found personalities in every tiny bit they have been given to work with from the script, and each is a delight. Solange (Mary Beth Peil), Stella (Terri White) and Carlotta (Elaine Paige) are more than just moment-in-the-spotlight performers; they have developed into real characters. Ms. Watson and Jayne Houdyshell continue to shine, as do the actors playing the young Ben (Nick Verina), young Buddy (Christian Delcroix), young Phyllis (Kirsten Scott), and especially Lora Lee Gayer as young Sally (so very Bernadette in appearance and manner).

The leading men, Ron Raines as Ben and Danny Burstein as Buddy, remain terrific in their roles, but it is the two ladies at the center of things, Ms. Maxwell and Ms. Peters, who have spent the weeks since previews figuring out who they are and why they are there, and they are now giving absolutely stellar performances. Their numbers during the Loveland portion of the show are nothing short of phenomenal. I now cannot imagine anyone ever doing a better job of performing “The Story of Lucy and Jessie” (Ms. Maxwell) or “Losing My Mind” (Ms. Peters). Indeed, the entire Loveland sequence is utter perfection. Would that I could bottle it and take it out on a gloomy day!

With Follies set to close on January 22, do yourself a favor for the new year and go see it for yourself (or see it again). You’ll not have another opportunity like this anytime soon.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

A Brilliant 'Blood And Gifts': Spy Vs. Spy in the Cold War Era

2011-12-10T22:00:00.009-05:00

Whenever you go a play that is based on actual history, you run the risk of feeling as though you were attending a lecture as much as a theatrical event. For instance, while I enjoyed last season's The Scottsboro Boys—and even the more melodramatic Irena’s Vow from the year before--it has occurred to me that the ideal audience for these shows would be a high school history class studying the Jim Crow era or the Holocaust.

Occasionally, however, the history lesson is contextualized within a truly compelling narrative aimed at the grownups in the audience. One example that comes to mind takes me back to 2003 and the terrific I Am My Own Wife, whose star, Jefferson Mays, is back and giving yet another outstanding performance in the play that is the subject of this review.

That would be Blood and Gifts, J. T. Rogers’ intelligent and highly engaging work now on view at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, about how we so foolishly got ourselves entangled in the quagmire that is Afghanistan.

Rogers gives us the history lesson we need in order to understand what is going on, but he does so in a way that is neither simplistic nor overwhelmingly dense as, say, Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia and Rock ‘n’ Roll. And he wraps it around a cynical, sharp, and frequently darkly funny story of espionage during the 1980s Cold War era, one that will leave you shaking your head at the stupidity of nations, and perhaps wondering if we truly learned nothing from Vietnam.

If you are concerned that you have not followed the timeline leading up to our current entanglement in Afghanistan, you can pick up what you need to know by reading the six-paragraph insert (by dramaturg Anne Cattaneo) that comes with the program. Alternatively, you can prepare by watching the 2007 movie Charlie Wilson’s War, starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, that touches on some of the same events as Blood and Gifts.

The play opens in 1981 and joins CIA agent James Warnock (Jeremy Davidson, John Wayne-like in his self-assurance) as he begins an assignment in Pakistan aimed at driving the Soviet Union out of neighboring (and officially off-limits) Afghanistan.

Before long, Warnock is working both with and against his espionage counterparts from the Soviet Union and Great Britain. His task is a tricky one. He needs to arm Afghan tribal freedom fighters against the Soviet army while maintaining “deniability” on behalf of the U. S. government, dancing around the KGB’s Dmitri Gromov (a funny, sardonic Michael Aronov) and keeping in tow his British MI6 ally, the burned-out Simon Craig (a brilliant performance by Mr. Mays).

Meanwhile, their ostensible Pakistani host Colonel Afridi (Gabriel Ruiz), representing his own country’s intelligence agency, has other reasons for wanting to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

The interplay is reminiscent of Antonio Prohias's Spy vs. Spy cartoons from Mad Magazine, or something from Graham Greene or John le Carré, yet the events are all too real, as we discover—contrary to the cliché— that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Meanwhile, on a trip back to the States, Agent Warnock is torn between struggling to save his marriage and fighting to convince Congress to provide additional military aid for the Afghan fighters. It is in this part of the play, that deals with the political maneuvering, conniving, deal-making, and in-fighting back home, that you will recognize the connection with the movie Charlie Wilson’s War.

It’s all very theater-of-the-absurd, except that the stakes are high indeed, both for the people of Afghanistan (some two million died during the anti-Soviet conflict and the period of civil war that followed) and for the people of the United States, who find themselves scratching their heads over why are at war in Afghanistan.

No bones about it, Blood and Guts is a top-notch play, flawlessly directed by Bartlett Sher, who has brought out the best from a uniformly strong cast. May it find great success along the lines of last year’s wonderfully grownup play, Other Desert Cities, that also began at the Mitzi E. Newhouse and is now happily ensconced on Broadway.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Chita Rivera Rules the Stage in Kander and Ebb's "The Visit"

2011-12-03T22:43:00.013-05:00

Chita Rivera Dances the 'One-Legged Tango'

The mighty musical-writing team of John Kander and Fred Ebb made history once again this week when the long-running (15 years and counting) revival of Chicago at the Ambassador Theater stepped aside briefly for a special and spectacular performance of the pair’s The Visit, a show that has been long overdue for its turn in the bright lights of Broadway.

Not only were there two Kander and Ebb musicals sharing the same stage, but the star of the evening was none other than the actress who had created the role of Velma Kelly (opposite Gwen Verdon’s Roxy Hart) in the original production of Chicago over 35 years ago.

That star was—need I say?—the incomparable Chita Rivera, who, at 78, can still dominate a stage like none other and who repeatedly brought the house down at the singular event, a fundraiser for The Actors Fund and the Vineyard Theatre.

The Visit, based on the acid-dripping 1956 play of the same name by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, tells the story of “the richest woman in the world,” Claire Zachanassian, who has returned to her now-impoverished hometown in post-war Germany seeking revenge on her one-time lover, Anton Schell, who years before drove her away and into a life of prostitution. In an added twist, her plan involves bringing the townspeople to their knees as well, for they were complicit in her shabby treatment as the much-maligned daughter of a Jewish man and a Gypsy woman.

Ms. Rivera has played the role twice before, beginning with its first short-lived production at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, where it faced the unfortunate timing of opening just after the attacks of September 11, 2001—which rather put a damper on an audience’s desire for such a dark and stinging satire. A later mounting, a short run at Arlington, Virginia’s Signature Theater in 2008, was very well received, however, and I am hoping very much that this week’s one-night event will serve as a precursor to a Broadway or Off-Broadway production.

Kander and Ebb offer up a musical mix of irony, satire, and interludes of romance in their two dozen numbers, supported by Terrence McNally’s adaptation of Dürrenmatt’s play and Ann Reinking’s choreography. However, since the character of Claire has an artificial leg and walks with a cane (which Ms. Rivera tossed aside for her curtain call to demonstrate that she herself does not need it, thank you), there was not a lot of opportunity for her to dance and show off her ageless gams, save for a number appropriately titled "The One-Legged Tango," which she tackled with great élan.

It would be remiss of me not to note that Ms. Rivera’s singing voice is rather on the raggy side these days, but she has so much showmanship in her that it hardly matters. She took charge of that stage from the moment of her first appearance, and never let up for an instant. Even though it has been more than three years since she last performed the role, she was completely off book for the benefit production (all right, almost completely; there was one tiny lapse in which she sidled over to take a peek at the script in one of the other performer’s hands, but she didn’t miss a beat in doing so).

This is not, of course, a one-woman show. The rest of the cast was solid, starting with John Cullum, another Kander and Ebb alum, having starred in last year’s The Scottsboro Boys. Cullum, three years Ms. Rivera’s senior, did need to keep his copy of the script open throughout, but he made a fine Anton Schell, a man who progresses from a desire to flee his fate to accepting it--or or at least appreciating its ironic elements.

While the show’s focus is on the pair of long-ago lovers, within whom there still lives a spark of genuine mutual affection, the cast included 21 other uniformly strong performers, along with a small orchestra under the fine direction of Jon Kalbfleisch. If you have seen the production of Chicago, the musicians used the same tiered space across the width of the stage.

Musically, Messrs. Kander and Ebb have incorporated a wide range of styles, including singing parts for countertenors (relevant to the plot), and connections to Brecht and Weill and to their own enduring hit musical Cabaret.

One of the great shames is that no recording of The Visit has been made to date, a mistake that I hope will be rectified. There are many songs that stand out, even on first hearing, among which are a lovely little waltz, “You, You, You,” and the Act I curtain number, “Yellow Shoes.”

While I took great pleasure in what was essentially a staged reading, I would love to see The Visit given a full-scale New York production, and soon enough so that Chita Rivera can remain its star!

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Back to the Good Old Days with "Maple and Vine"

2011-11-27T12:55:00.015-05:00

Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Do you love your life?

Do you love your job?

If your answer to either or both of these questions is “not really,” then maybe you are up for joining a community whose members have all elected to eschew the hustle and bustle of life in the fast lane and relocate to a world that is permanently anchored to the year 1955.

That is the premise of Jordan Harrison’s satiric new play, Maple and Vine, now in previews at Playwrights Horizons.

The unnamed community, located somewhere in the Midwest (or possibly, in The Twilight Zone) could be called "Pleasantville," "Stepford," or even "The Village," as Maple and Vine brings to mind all of these previously-depicted fictional locales, where folks are unencumbered by cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and reality TV.

In Act I, we meet a high-powered New York couple, Katha and Ryu, (she a publishing executive, he a plastic surgeon), who are seeking to escape the hamster cage that has become their lives. Katha (well played by Marin Ireland) can no longer cope, having been pushed to the edge following the miscarriage of their long-desired child. Ryu (Peter Kim) wants nothing more than to be a supportive husband but is close to his own breaking point, torn as he is between the demands of his liposuction-seeking clientele and the desperate needs of his wife.

A promise of relief comes in the form of Dean (Trent Dawson), a pitchman for the "Society for Dynamic Obsolescence," the 1950s reenactment organization he represents. This is no cult, he promises, but a way to escape the dehumanizing pressures of 21^st century life. Try it for six months, he suggests. See what you think.

So Katha (renamed “Kathy” by the community’s "Authenticity Committee") and Ryu take the plunge. Soon she is spending her days under the tutelage of Dean’s wife Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), learning the difference between chopping vegetables and dicing them, and he is employed at a box factory, where the source of greatest pride is being able to assemble a box in 30 seconds, under the watchful eye of his friendly yet somewhat threatening supervisor, Roger (Pedro Pascal).

As the rest of the play unfolds, we get glimpses into the parts of life in 1950s America that many of us would consider to be less desirable, with respect to social norms about race relations, sexual orientation, the role of women, and a rigid adherence to a strict set of rules for both overt and covert behavior. (For a reference guide, consult Peyton Place).

Certainly the buttoned-down '50s is a an apt target for satire, but Jordan Harrison, the playwright, gives us mostly episodic sit-com humor and not nearly enough of the kind of edgy bite that Maple and Vine needs in order to breathe new life into what already has been well-mined territory. I can imagine, for example, what someone like Christopher Durang might have been able to do with the material.

A great deal of editing, including slashing most of the first act set-up (as if you could provide enough exposition to establish what follows as anything other than a fantasy), and a greater attention to sharpening the details of Katha’s and Ryu’s new lives, might still result in a strong one-act with some real zing. The same could be said of Anne Kauffman’s overly fussy direction. "Less is more" is an adage that would fit in well with the play’s conceit of downsizing lives.

Harrison does raise some interesting ideas that might benefit from deeper examination. For instance, what would it really mean to be given the opportunity to reinvent yourself? Can we truly leave our past behind, or will it always resurface to bite us in the rear? These are potentially intriguing aspects of identity that are dealt with in a shallow way in Maple and Vine, yet which could have given the play the focus that is currently lacking.

* * * * * *

Playwright’s Horizons is continuing its policy of offering discounted tickets for the regular run through December 23.

Order by November 30 and use the code VINEGR
$40 (reg. $70) for all performances Nov. 19-27
$50 (reg. $70) for all other performances Nov. 29-Dec. 23

Online: www.TicketCentral.com.

Or call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 between noon and 8 p.m. daily, or purchase from the Ticket Central Box Office, 416 W. 42nd Street between 9^th & 10^th Avenues

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The Blue Flower: Offbeat But Compelling

2011-11-10T22:39:00.014-05:00

Meghan McGeary as Hannah in The Blue Flower

If you are the kind of musical theater fan who craves a linear storyline, songs that propel the action, and richly developed characters you can relate to, well…let’s just say in all probability you will not warm easily to The Blue Flower, now on view at the Second Stage Theatre.

Nevertheless, this is a show that deserves to be seen, and it is unlikely it will ever receive a better production than the top-notch one it is now getting. So if you are at all curious, you should go.

In turns inventive, compelling, confusing, and absurd, The Blue Flower draws on imagery and ideas that channel La Belle Époque, the anti-art Dada movement, the sexual libertinism of the Weimer Republic, and the theatrical music style associated with Brecht and Weill.

The Blue Flower is the creation of composer Jim Bauer and artist Ruth Bauer, a husband and wife team whose work is to musical theater as Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s creations were to environmental art. (Remember "The Gates" in Central Park?) They have taken a song cycle (his) and built a theatrical experience around it, with a dreamy sort of plot that follows the lives of four characters who are vaguely suggestive of artists Max Beckmann and Franz Marc, the Dadaist Hannah Höch, and scientist Marie Curie. A tale of love, loss, and regret unfolds before, during, and after World War I.

Instead of allowing the characters to reveal themselves through dialog, the Bauers have chosen to incorporate a great deal of narrative and film, and it is quite possible to grow impatient with this technique that distances the audience from the characters. Yet this approach is frequently fascinating; the projected clips often have the appearance of old newsreels, and the show incorporates at least one authentic Dada film, Hans Richter’s "Ghosts Before Breakfast." (I recognized it from a Dada exhibit I attended at the Museum of Modern Art.)

As for the songs, they are many pleasures to be found, with truly lovely ballads, upbeat numbers, and music that ranges from Weill-like to country-western in sound. More importantly, they are performed by a terrific cast that includes Marc Kudisch, Sebastian Arcelus, Meghan McGeary, and Teal Wicks in the lead roles.

This is not an easy show to perform; Marc Kudisch as Max, for example, has to deliver a rather large chunk of dialog in a made-up language his character calls “Maxperanto,” and the work’s non-linear style has got to keep the performers on their toes. Yet they are all first-rate throughout, with nary a misstep among them.

The singing is accompanied by an onstage band of splendid musicians, under the direction of Dominick Amendum, who perform on piano, cello, drums, guitars, bass, bassoon, and accordion. All of the proceedings are smartly directed by Will Pomerantz, with choreography by Chase Brock.

Admittedly, The Blue Flower will not appeal to everyone. It is an art piece, and an eccentric one at that. Yet once I got past my initial confusion over the unexpected approach, I found it to be compelling and rewarding. You just might too.

If you would like to see Hans Richter’s Dada film, "Ghosts Before Breakfast," check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqguzDeejFk

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Burning: Naked Folks Acting

2011-11-10T09:57:00.020-05:00

Hunter Foster: Musical Comedy Star Appears in Psycho-Sexual Play

It’s difficult to know what to make of Burning, a darkly comic psycho-sexual drama on view at Theatre Row's Acorn Theatre that is jam-packed with enough ideas about sexuality, identity, obsession, art, and politics to serve a half dozen projects, and enough nudity and flesh-on-flesh encounters to serve as a live version of a Google search on the word "porn."

Regarding the latter, you pays your money and you takes your choice, sort of like being in the Times Square area in its former disreputable and sleazy days. Ya got yer man/man sex, man/boy sex, hetero sex, brother/sister sex, oral sex, anal sex, sex with hermaphrodites, and prostitution (both the hustling kind and the legal kind), not to mention plenty of dorsal and full-frontal nudity.

Amidst all of this is an actual play, made up of intersecting storylines about the lives of at least a dozen different characters, written by Thomas Bradshaw and directed by Scott Elliott, who has a penchant for bringing an edgy, in-your-face style to his work. You may recall his star-studded, deliberately annoying version of The Threepenny Opera that landed with a thud at Roundabout’s Studio 54 five years back.

The New Group, for which Mr. Elliott serves as artistic director, has as its mission a “commitment to developing and producing powerful, contemporary theater.” I’m not sure that Burning fills the bill; the “ick factor” does not necessary equate to “powerful,” and the play (stripped of its insistent nudity and sexual encounters) offers only the kinds of surprises that come from occasionally clever writing and unexpected turns.

Thematically, Bradshaw seems to have taken his cue from Tony Kushner, though with rather less artistic success. Consider the questions he tries to juggle: What does it mean to be a black artist? To what extent is our world view shaped by our parents’ beliefs and values? Where lies the line between self-control and self-indulgence? What is the nature of exploitation? And where do forgiveness and redemption come into the picture?

Add to the mix references to the AIDS crisis, Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, racism, personal identify, and the business side of art and theater—all punctuated with periodic bits of show tunes and pop songs and sprinklings of quotes from that all-time great philosopher, the Marquis de Sade. (For an alternate view by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, you’ll need to go see Venus in Fur five blocks north at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.)

The cast, which includes Sutton Foster’s big brother Hunter (known mostly as a performer in musical comedies) is certainly game; I can only imagine the amount of trust they had to have developed with each other during rehearsals. But all in all, this is a real head-scratcher.

By the way, in preparing this blog entry, I thought of an appropriate song to accompany it. Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wCtvco1FRU&feature=fvsr

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Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away!

2011-10-21T18:37:00.016-04:00

Angela Lewis, Nikiya Mathis, and Cherise Boothe in Milk Like Sugar

Depending on your point of view, Milk Like Sugar, the gritty and engrossing new play by Kirsten Greenidge now in previews at Playwrights Horizons, is either an inspirational tale of potential and hope, or a cautionary tale warning us what the expression "impossible odds" really means.

Poised on a pinpoint midway between the two possibilities is Annie (Angela Lewis), an African-American teenager living in the inner city and surrounded at home, in school, and through her circle of friends by an unspoken conspiracy aimed at keeping her mired in place.

As the play opens, we encounter Annie and her friends Margie and Talisha (call her “T,” she insists) hanging out at what at first sight appears to be a hair salon, but is, in actuality, a tattoo parlor. Annie, whose sixteenth birthday is being celebrated during a night out with the girls, has decided (or has been peer pressured) into getting her first ink.

Margie (Nikiya Mathis) and T (Cherise Boothe) sport rather large images of roses, but Annie, still clinging to her innocence, wants only a tiny ladybug, a reminder of the nickname her mother used to call her.

While they are waiting for the tattoo artist (LeRoy McClain) to show up, the girls start talking, sipping “water” (a bottle of one of those sweet pastel-colored “alcopops” for whom teenage girls are the target consumers), and texting on their cell phones.

For a while, it all seems lightweight and relatively harmless (depending on how you feel about the combination of teenage girls, alcoholic beverages, and tattoos). Even as Margie and T are texting their boyfriends, the clean-cut, pony-tailed Annie is mostly waiting for her neglectful mother (Tonya Pinkins) to call from work to wish her a happy birthday.

But don’t be taken in by the lighthearted tone, for there is some serious stuff going on. The texting, we come to realize, is more along the lines of “sexting” with various boyfriends and male acquaintances, and the girl talk turns to a pledge that all three will become pregnant at the same time—it hardly matters by whom. For Margie, who is already “pg,” as she puts it, and for T, who is working on it, this is no joke. They both are convinced that having a baby will give them someone cute, sweet, and cuddly to love, and raising their children together will solidify their bond.

They have already picked out a match for Annie in Malik (J. Mallory-McCree), a senior at the high school they all attend. Malik is clear-eyed enough to have a vision of himself finishing high school and getting into college, and he has no intention of getting caught in a trap that would lock him into the kind of life he has grown up in.

He befriends Annie, though, and tries to get her to consider her own potential—something she has never really thought about before. Annie also gets advice from a misfit classmate, Keera (Adrienne C. Moore), who is branded a loser—especially by the increasingly hardened T—but who offers Annie a vision of domesticity and inner peace through the church, another avenue Annie has never explored.

So Annie stands at a major threshold, pondering her future for perhaps the first time in her life. How can I think of having a baby, she says, “if all I know is what I see and can touch?”

This is an exquisitely delicate moment, one that can either open doors or slam them shut. The tipping point is finally reached through Annie's mother, who herself was a teenage parent with her own unfulfilled dreams, and who is now finding that the walls are closing in on her.

Milk Like Sugar (the title refers to sweet powered milk, ubiquitous in the inner city) is a provocative play that raises many issues, and not only about the difficulties of “bootstrapping” one’s way out of a world where children like Annie are confined from birth. When the only available advice, mentoring, and support come from peers who are in the same boat, what chance does any of them have?

The play is not without its flaws.The actresses playing the teenager girls look considerably older than their roles call for, and Kirsten Greenidge, the playwright, has tacked on an ending that attempts to maintain the tension between hope and capitulation but that truly does not fit well with all she has so carefully laid out.

The plot also incorporates a number of clichés about urban life, but Annie’s story is so significant, and the playwright’s ability to capture the language, tone, and attitude of her characters is so spot-on, that Milk Like Sugar deserves to be seen by a wide audience.

Discount tickets Milk Like Sugar are available for readers of this blog.

Order by October 25 and use the code MILKGR
$35 (reg. $55) for Fri, Sat, and Sun evenings, Oct 21-23
$40 (reg. $55) for all other performances through Nov 20

Online: www.TicketCentral.com.
Call: (212) 279-4200, noon to 8 pm daily

In Person: Ticket Central Box Office, 416 W. 42nd Street

Milk Like Sugar is a co-production of Playwrights Horizons, Women's Project, and La Jolla Playhouse, and is directed by Rebecca Taichman.

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'Lemon Sky,' Early Lanford Wilson Play, Gets A Mixed Production

2011-10-03T00:58:00.010-04:00

A Sour Reunion: Keith Nobbs and Kevin Kilner

Playwright Lanford Wilson, who recently passed away after a most distinguished career, was considered by many to be the theatrical heir of Tennessee Williams.

I can’t say that I fully buy into that premise.

Wilson did have a Williams-like way of creating vulnerable characters who are filled with emotional longing. But when it comes to capturing the poetic beauty of the English language—as Williams was able to do in his masterworks from the 1940s, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire—other names come to mind ahead of Mr. Wilson's.

One is Robert Anderson, whose play about father-son warfare, I Never Sang For My Father, was given a splendid production last year by the Keen Company, under the direction of Jonathan Silverman, who wisely allowed Anderson's marvelously-crafted words to take center stage. It didn't hurt that the production featured multi-layered performances by veteran actors Keir Dullea and Marsha Mason.

The Keen Company identifies its mission as one of producing “sincere plays” that are “generous in spirit and provoke identification.” With I Never Sang For My Father, that mission was fully and most satisfactorily realized.

Now the company and director Silverman are back with another “sincere play,” an early work by Lanford Wilson called Lemon Sky. Unfortunately, the results are not quite so sublime, despite some standout performances, most notably from Keith Nobbs who carries the lion’s share of the play on his shoulders as Wilson’s stand-in, Alan, and Kellie Overbey as Ronnie, Alan’s stepmother.

The play presents us with Alan’s recollections of a summer-long reunion with the father who abandoned him and his mother when Alan was only five years old. Dad had fled from the family home in Nebraska to Southern California, where he now lives with Ronnie, their two sons, and two teenage foster girls. Still, no hard feelings, until what begins as a relatively pleasant attempt to reconnect gradually grows disturbing and ugly as secrets and lies reveal themselves.

Lemon Sky is a difficult play to bring to fruition on the stage. For one thing, it constantly breaks the fourth wall as characters stop what they are doing in order to address the audience. It also jumps back and forth across time between the late 1950s, when most of the action takes place, and 1970, where Alan serves as narrator of his memories of that earlier period in his life.

To hark back to the Tennessee Williams model, Lemon Sky is a “memory play.”

When I previously wrote about last year's Roundabout Theatre production of The Glass Menagerie, I argued that what we were presented with represented Williams' memories only as these were carefully filtered through many drafts and rewrites. We were allowed to see only what Williams wanted us to see, and not what he truly remembered.

In a sense, Lemon Sky is more realistically memory-like; it depicts both the playwright’s recollections of a particular time in his life and the messy act of trying to recall and sort through past events. Wilson gives us memory as it actually occurs, in a non-linear fashion with many asides and tangents.

That’s all well and good, but it might have helped if some effort had been made to separate the time periods. It took me a long while to figure out we were leapfrogging across time, since nothing about the staging or lighting hinted at what was going on, and 17-year-old Alan and 30-year-old Alan looked and acted exactly the same.

The difficulties with the storytelling are not helped by the set that is clumsily spread out across the stage of the Clurman Theatre and a mixed bag of acting, with an unfortunate weak link in Kevin Kilner as Alan’s father, Doug, who should give us the creeps but who seems, at most, annoying.

The most interesting character is the cheery, chirpy Ronnie (well played by Ms. Overbey), who seems to be a stereotypical Southern California ditz until we begin to see the consequences of the poor yet entrapping bargain she made for herself when she ran off with Doug.

This production of Lemon Sky is worth the visit only if you are a Lanford Wilson fan and want to catch one of his early efforts. I can’t fault the sincerity, but I wonder if perhaps the Keen Company and its director might do better with something more straightforward. Another Robert Anderson play, perhaps?

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Frank Langella Gives A Mesmerizing Performance in 'Man And Boy'

2011-09-10T22:59:00.006-04:00

It’s not hard to see what drew the folks at Roundabout to mount a production of Terrence Rattigan’s 1963 drama Man and Boy, now in previews at the American Airlines Theatre.

For one thing, they had a story that could have popped out of today’s headlines. Think of Bernie Madoff or the gang of thieves at Enron, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of the central character, Gregor Antonescu, a flim-flam artist extraordinaire who has lied, cheated, and stolen millions of dollars by out-Ponzi-ing Ponzi throughout Europe and the United States at the height of the Great Depression.

The second thing going for Man and Boy, which takes place in a Greenwich Village apartment on a single evening in 1934, is that Gregor Antonescu is played by Frank Langella, at the height of his powers as a stage actor and for whom this is another Tony-worthy performance.

Despite the fact that his character has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, you cannot take your eyes off Langella. Almost against your will, you even root for him as he uses his undeniable gifts of charm, gab, and rock-steady nerve to manipulate people in order to keep his empire from crumbling under its own weight. Antonescu is the Devil incarnate, and Langella instills every moment with his own devilish gusto.

Before you run to pick up a ticket, let me advise you that outside of the central character, the play is a bit of a mess, and it is also not hard to see why it lasted for all of 54 performances on Broadway in its initial run and has not been revised until now.

One of the biggest problems with the production lies with the second key character, Antonescu’s estranged son Basil, in whose apartment the play takes place. Rattigan has given us, at least on paper, a complicated relationship between a totally selfish and self-absorbed father and his damaged, needy son, who left home five years earlier with the intention of never seeing his father again.

There are lots of ways to play this relationship, but what we are given, at least as performed by Adam Driver, is a son who is almost devoid of personality—as if the father had drained all the life out of him years ago. Driver, who has shown himself to be a terrific young actor on the New York theater scene over the past several years, either does not know what to do with the role, or he has been miserably directed by Maria Aitken to mope around and accept the abuse his father still heaps upon him.

There are other characters, not all of whom serve much of a purpose, including Basil’s girlfriend and Gregor’s wife, played respectively by Virginia Kull and Francesca Faridany. The women do a good job with their roles, such as they are, but both characters could be excised from the script without harming it one iota.

The others--Gregor’s right-hand man (Michael Siberry), an American businessman whom Gregor nastily manipulates (Zach Grenier), and an accountant who has uncovered a $6 million fraud (Brian Hutchison)--are needed to move the plot forward, and the actors do well by their roles.

The set design by Derek McLane makes good use of the cavernous space of the stage, though the separateness between the living area and the bedroom is not clearly delineated. Perhaps some changes in the lighting design (Kevin Adams) could help. It might also help alleviate the confusion that occurs when Mr. Siberry first appears on the scene to a smattering of entrance applause by those who believe it is Mr. Langella.

To be fair, this is early in the preview period. Maybe it will improve. But for now, if you can ignore what needs to be ignored, and you can appreciate a top-notch, often mesmerizing performance by Mr. Langella, by all means head on out to the American Airlines Theatre and this production of Man and Boy.

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'Follies' Is Back on Broadway for a Limited Run: Do Not Miss!

2011-09-05T13:27:00.010-04:00

Here’s a bit of advice.

If you’ve never seen Follies, James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim’s magnum opus of a musical, get ye hence to the revival now in previews at the Marquis Theater. And thank your lucky stars that you have been given this opportunity to see a full-blown production with a cast of 41 accompanied by a 28-piece orchestra performing Jonathan Tunick’s wonderful orchestrations.

And, you know what, even if you’ve seen it before, get ye hence to the Marquis Theater. If nothing else, you’ll love debating the casting and directing decisions, for Follies will forever stand beside Leonard Bernstein’s Candide in never offering up the complete and definitive version. How could it, when every audience member knows with ego-centric certainty who should play each role and how each song should be performed?

That may be Follies’ greatest strength, the fact that it can be interpreted and reinterpreted from production to production. Even this one, which comes to New York after a successful and well-received run at Washington’s D. C.’s Kennedy Center, made the transfer having undergone a good deal of tinkering on its way up I-95.

Back in 1971, when Follies opened on Broadway, The New York Times critic Clive Barnes gave it a mixed and somewhat smarmy review, but he provided a succinct plot summary that I could not hope to match, so I will quote him: “Years ago, in 1941, Buddy loved Sally, Sally loved Ben, Phyllis loved Ben, and Ben loved Ben. Buddy married Sally, Ben married Phyllis, but their marriages are not working out.”

The various meltdowns occur before our eyes during a one-time reunion of performers from “Weismann’s Follies,” who have come together 30 years later at the theater where they once shared the spotlight. The theater, which is about to be torn down to make way for a parking lot, is haunted both by memories and by the ghosts of their former youthful selves, who sometimes lurk in the background, sometimes interact with the living, and sometimes compete directly for the audience’s attention.

This all may sound rather soap opera-ish, but it’s certainly real enough to Buddy, Ben, Phyllis, and, especially, to Sally, who has carried an unrequited torch for Ben for so long she can barely distinguish reality from fantasy.

As the four lost middle-aged souls struggle to exorcise their various demons, the rest of the cast members wander in and out, stopping to perform songs from their heyday, including such showstoppers as “Broadway Baby” and “I’m Still Here,” both of which have been performed and recorded by so many singers that it’s the rare audience member who hasn’t heard them before.

Indeed, Follies could be considered to be a mini-version of Sondheim’s Greatest Hits. In addition to these two powerhouse numbers, usually reserved for singers in late career, there are Sally’s songs, the romantic yet ironic “In Buddy’s Eyes” and the wrenching “Losing My Mind;” Ben and Sally’s soaring duet “Too Many Mornings;” and Phyllis’s scathing ”Could I Leave You?” all of which have established lives of their own beyond the stage.

OK. Now comes the part where I get to discuss my own likes and dislikes about the production. Know, however, that nothing I say is intended to keep you away from the Marquis. Follies is a must-see show that serves as a touchstone between the musical theater history it tapped into and the next generation of musicals that it influenced, including A Chorus Line just five years later. (Michael Bennett co-directed, with Hal Prince, the original Follies before coming up with A Chorus Line).

Let me begin with some comments about casting. The roles of Ben, Buddy, Phyllis, and Sally are played, respectively, by Ron Raines, Danny Burstein, Jan Maxwell, and Bernadette Peters. I thought the gentlemen were fine, both strong singers and performers and both good fits for their characters. Each does splendidly with his personal psychological breakdown number in the section of the show known as “Loveland,” a surrealistic re-creation of songs from the imagined Follies of long ago.

If I have any doubts, it is about the leading women. I have come to envision a Phyllis as a goddess of shattering rage, especially with the delivery of her tour de force song, “Could I Leave You?” I have, for example, seen Donna Murphy perform this number with such toxic fury that I wanted to cringe beneath my seat and call 911.

Jan Maxwell is a terrific actress, and she can sing well enough and dance (sort of), so that she can get by. But she is not the Phyllis of my imagination. Rather, she gives us a more complex characterization, one that lets us see her self-doubt and the last glimmer of love for her supercilious husband, who has kept her at arms-length for many years.

There surely is room for such an interpretation; I just need to mull this one over a little more.

Then there is Bernadette Peters as Sally, a character who is emotionally complicated and who may be suffering from bipolar disorder. We need to see Sally as someone whom Buddy has loved all of these years while being thoroughly frustrated by her obsession with Ben.

Sally is supposed to be unglamorous, a bit of a frump, someone who does not wish to stand out in a crowd despite her earlier career. That’s a pretty tall order for Ms. Peters—not because she is incapable of meeting the acting challenge, but because she is uniquely Bernadette Peters no matter what role she plays.

In watching her perform, it seemed to me that she is still struggling to find the right mannerisms and tone for Sally. And I am not entirely certain she is comfortable with the specific musical range required for Sally’s numbers. I know precious little about vocal technique, but in the performance I saw, she appeared to be reaching mightily for notes that were below her comfort zone, and there was altogether too much vibrato in her singing.

By way of comparison, consider the incomparable Barbara Cook, who, in her 80s, can still perform “In Buddy’s Eyes” and “Losing My Mind” like no other. So, here’s something else I need to reconcile in my mind.

Of the rest of the cast, I liked the younger versions of the four leads, as played by Lora Lee Gayer (Sally), Kirsten Scott (Phyllis), Christian Delcroix (Buddy), and Nick Verina (Ben). They did a credible job of “ghosting” their older counterparts, and of performing their numbers in the “Loveland” sequence—“You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow” and “Love Will See Us Through.”

Those playing the former Weismann Follies performers also did well as they took turns center stage offering up their featured numbers, but only one stood out as being a flesh-and-blood character. That was Susan Watson as Emily. Ms. Watson still has the gamine looks and the lithe moves of a dancer that made her seem genuine. With the little she was given to do, she imbued her character with a poignant touch of age-borne forgetfulness and confusion that left a real impression that here was a true veteran of the long departed Follies.

I'll tip my hat as well to Elaine Paige, who was apparently having trouble earlier on remembering the lyrics to “I’m Still Here.” In the performance I attended, she nailed it, sold it, and made it her own, leading to waves of sustained applause. I also liked Jayne Houdyshell (“Broadway Baby”), largely because she seemed to be having such great fun just being there.

I’ve got to say, I wasn’t overly thrilled with the costumes, wigs, and makeup—especially for the older women. Surely former Follies performers would know how to dress, fix their hair, and have their makeup done for a reunion of this nature without looking like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

In any event, my quibbles are my own. I encourage you to go see Follies and form your own judgment. This is being touted as a limited engagement, with tickets on sale only through January 1. Whatever its flaws, given the economics of Broadway, you're not likely to have the opportunity to see a large-scale production of Follies any time in the near future. Next time might be with a cast of four playing all of the roles as well as the musical instruments.

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Modern Love Among the Scientific Set

2011-08-30T21:46:00.002-04:00

Aubrey Dollar and Karl Miller "meet cute" in grad school

Relationships are complicated.

This is true whether the relationships are between two yeast molecules or two human beings.

That’s sort of the message of Completeness, Itamar Moses’s new play that is alternately romantic, comic, intellectually intriguing, and, occasionally, too clever for its own good.

Completeness, now on view at Playwrights Horizons, begins as two attractive and bright graduate students—she a molecular biologist, he a computer scientist—meet cute in a computer lab on campus and begin a hot romance that mirrors the work they are doing both individually and collectively.

Karl Miller, a fine young actor full of goofy charm, is Elliot, the computer scientist whose short-term goal is to crack the “Traveling Salesman Problem,” the elusive holy grail of his field. (It’s real; look it up and you’ll learn, among other things, that it is “an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization.”)

As soon as he eyes Molly, winningly played by Aubrey Dollar, you can almost hear Elliot’s heart (among other parts of his anatomy) go “boing,” In order to hook up with her, Elliot gladly sets aside his maybe-not-so-urgent-after-all work and offers to help her devise a shortcut to study potentially significant interactions among yeast molecules. For her, he will develop an algorithm or computer model that will save her the trouble of examining each and every interaction, by identifying those that are likely to produce the kinds of results worthy of her efforts.

As you can see, neither Elliot nor Molly considers the old painstaking methods of their fields to be worth their time. “Life is short” is their credo, which they apply equally to scientific studies and to personal matters.

Because Elliot and Molly make such a lovely couple, in the way that we have come to expect from exposure to too many on-screen romantic comedies, we do expect them to somehow evolve into some modern day version of Marie and Pierre Curie. But life rarely imitates the movies, and we learn quickly enough to set aside such fantasies for the reality of modern romance, consisting of speed dating and short-term relationships.

Thus it is with Elliot and Molly. They are like the fruit flies that geneticists like to study because they play out their lives in about a month. On human terms it looks like this: meet someone, take up with them, edge toward the possibility of something more permanent, and then end it—and begin again.

In between, we learn an awful lot about both computer science and molecular biology. The playwright has done a masterful job of explaining the science (data mining and derivation errors, anyone?), and the actors have done a terrific job of learning to spout the complicated lingo so that it sounds second nature to them.

If the juxtapositioning of conceptual science and human foibles reminds you of something Tom Stoppard might have cooked up, it’s not a coincidence. Itamar Moses and Mr. Stoppard have a bit of a mutual admiration society going, and the latter even wrote the preface for the published edition of Moses’s earlier Bach at Leipzig. The scientific conversations in Completeness are very reminiscent of the discussions about mathematics in Stoppard’s Arcadia and about quantum physics in Hapgood. There are worse role models for Mr. Moses to have, though one hopes he will eventually find his own unique voice.

Lest I leave you with the impression that Completeness is a two-character play, I hasten to add that there are actually several others, various former or waiting-in-the-wings partners of Molly and Elliot, all portrayed by Brian Avers and Meredith Forlenza. Whether it is the fault of the playwright or of the director, Pam MacKinnon (she has directed a production of Bach at Leipzig, so Moses is not new to her), it is very difficult to differentiate among the other characters who flit in and out—though perhaps they are intentionally non-distinguishable.

There is also a bit of breaking of the fourth wall that doesn’t seem to serve much purpose, except, possibly, to remind us that science allows us to control things just so much, but that life is ultimately unpredictable in its variability.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

For Theatergoers, New York Is A Summer Festival

2011-08-07T18:17:00.005-04:00

Broadway or Off-Broadway: The Theater Capital of the World!

Summertime is supposed to be a down time for New York theater-going, but this summer has been offering up a lot of unexpected treats. Certainly, there has been plenty to keep me busy so that it doesn’t feel like the doldrums at all.

Two of this summer’s big openers on Broadway are the excellent revival of Master Class, starring Tyne Daley in what is likely to be a Tony-nominated performance as opera diva Maria Callas, and the upcoming revival of Follies, with a cast that includes Bernadette Peters, Elaine Paige, and Jan Maxwell. Not so shabby! I’ve already seen (and written about) Master Class, and I’ve got my Follies ticket for a couple of weeks from now.

There’s also the opportunity to partake of the “summer of love” that is Hair, making a short return to Broadway following a 20-city tour. If you failed to catch Diane Paulus’ Tony-winning revival, now would be the time to do so. I speak as one who saw the original Broadway company in1968, and found the current production to be as energetic, exciting, and fun, with a great ensemble cast. I’m seeing it again next week, as it happens. Who knows? Maybe this time I’ll join the end-of-show onstage dance party!

If you want to see a Broadway show but don’t want to pay full Broadway prices for your tickets, I have noticed that the August heat and humidity have been accompanied by shorter lines at the Times Square TKTS discount tickets booth.

Yesterday (for a Saturday matinee), I walked right up to the window and snagged a half-price ticket to Anything Goes, splendidly directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall. The Tony-winning production boasts a top-notch cast and a truckload of marvelous Cole Porter tunes. Even if you feel you are overly familiar with the show and the score, there are surprises and delights to be found in the de-lovely dance numbers and in the comic timing displayed by John McMartin, Adam Godley, and Jessica Stone in supporting roles.

The names over the title, Sutton Foster and Joel Grey, are no slouches either. She is a dynamo, and he is teddy bear adorable, and the newly refurbished and renamed Stephen Sondheim Theatre (formerly Henry Miller’s Theatre) is an inviting and comfortable venue, with good sight lines throughout.

Moving to Off-Broadway, I’m looking forward to seeing Elysian Fields, set for a short run at the Kraine Theater in the East Village (August 22-26) as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. The playwright, Chris Phillips, has come up with an intriguing concept, to create a play around characters who are discussed but not seen in three Tennessee Williams plays: Allen from A Streetcar Named Desire, Sebastian from Suddenly Last Summer, and Skipper from Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

This being the centenary year of Tennessee Williams' birth, there have been quite a few opportunities to see revivals of both his well-known and lesser-known plays. Elysian Fields sounds like an interesting addition and tribute to the mix, which has included the recent One Arm (an unproduced screenplay written by Willams and adapted for the stage by Moisés Kaufman) and the current production of The Pretty Trap, an early one-act version of The Glass Menagerie at Theatre Row’s Acorn Theatre, starring Katharine Houghton in the pivotal role of Amanda Wingfield.

And as long as we are taking a stroll along West 42^nd Street, I look forward to paying a visit to Playwrights Horizons and its latest production, Completeness, a new comedy about romance and sexual politics written by Itamar Moses and directed by Pam MacKinnon. Playwrights Horizons continues its policy of offering discounted tickets through this blog. Regular priced tickets are $70, but discounts are available for $40 for performances from August 19-September 4, and then for $50 through September 25. For more information, go to www.playwrightshorizons.org or call 212-279-4200. When ordering, use the discount code COMPBLOG.

I've got my summer tickets lined up. What are you waiting for?

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Gay History Becomes Visible At Last, And the Theater Leads the Way

2011-08-05T12:45:00.005-04:00

Unnatural Acts -- Photo by Joan Marcus

Nothing has been more ignored in the teaching of history than the history of gay and lesbian individuals. As far as US public schools are concerned, a policy of “don’t ask; don’t tell” remains pretty much intact.

This may start to change, however, with the enactment last month of a California state law requiring public schools to teach gay and lesbian history. California is a big state, and its public schools spend a lot of money on textbooks and other educational materials. It will be interesting to watch as the curriculum unfolds.

In support of this effort, educators might do well to turn to the recent spate of plays steeped in various aspects of gay history—among them, The Temperamentals, The Pride, and the revivals of The Normal Heart and Angels in America, not to mention older plays such as The Laramie Project (first produced in 2000) and Bent (1979).

All of these plays have something of significance to say, and collectively they have the power to shed light on what has been covered by an invisibility cloak for far too long.

Two additions to the growing list are Unnatural Acts, based on the true story of a group of gay students who were driven out of Harvard University back in 1920, and A Strange and Separate People, about the crossed paths of homosexuality and Orthodox Judaism.

Both of these have just ended short runs, Unnatural Acts at the Classic Stage Company and A Strange and Separate People at Theatre Row’s Studio Theatre. Chances are, however, that both will see additional productions around the country, given their compelling topics.

Unnatural Acts is actually the second version of the story of Harvard’s “secret court,” convened following the suicide of one of the gay students. The first to hit the boards was Veritas, written by Stan Richardson, with a first production in 2007. I’m not sure of the details, but it seems that Mr. Richardson and Tony Speciale, the director of Unnatural Acts, were working together on the project but at some point decided to go their separate ways. In any event, the authorship of Unnatural Acts is credited to “members of the Plastic Theatre,” a loose-knit collaborative of artists headed up by Mr. Speciale. In the theater program, however, two individuals, Heather Denyer and Nick Norman (she is a dramturg, he an established playwright) are singled out as co-authors. (As it happens, I sat next to Mr. Norman’s father at the performance I attended, and he filled me in on some of the convoluted background.)

Surprisingly, for a play with a collective authorship, Unnatural Acts is quite cohesive and well-structured. If it is a tad melodramatic and “collegiate,” as The New York Times critic Ben Brantley put it in his review, it is appropriately so, for the play is both a theatrical retelling of a long-quashed historic event and the kind of cautionary tale that is likely to be performed in college towns across the country and perhaps read and studied in classes. There is no doubt where the play’s sympathies lie, but the fact is, the socio-political context would make for some serious analytic discussions in a political science class, a law class, a drama class, or a queer studies class.

The group of students who gathered in the rooms of one of their more flamboyant brethren were not terribly discrete in their behavior and, being mostly children of privilege, they took it for granted that Harvard would turn a blind eye at their lack of attention to their studies, their frequent and loud parties, and their illegal drinking (this was during Prohibition, after all). We learn, in passing, that at least some of the students were attending Harvard after leaving other colleges, under circumstances that we are left to surmise.

In point of fact, Harvard officials may very well have stayed out of it had it not been for the pressure put upon them by the brother of the young man who committed suicide. That the students were interrogated in secret is hardly a surprise; what would the wealthy alumni donors think if this “dirty laundry” were to be aired in public?

If there are truly shocking moments in the play, these occur through the depictions of the interrogations, in which the students were brought individually before a group of deans and pressed to answer the most intrusive of questions about their sexual practices. It is here where all of the other issues—academics, partying, drinking—become non-issues, and the focus is on the one thing that sets these students apart. The resulting denials, confessions, and betrayals, and the subsequent expulsion of most of the students involved, caused permanent damage, as we learn in an affecting epilogue based on research into the lives of those involved.

Any “docudrama” of this sort has the difficult task of balancing historic truth with dramatic truth. For the most part, Unnatural Acts succeeds quite well and leaves us much to ponder in both arenas.

* * * * * *

A Strange and Separate People -- Photo by Michael Portantiere

Turning next to a more contemporary work, we have the less successful but potentially powerful drama, A Strange and Separate People, written by Jon Marans, who gave us the multi-award-winning The Temperamentals and who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Old Wicked Songs. It is because Marans is such a gifted playwright that I am hopeful he will come back to A Strange and Separate People and flesh it out.

As it stands, this is a two-character drama with three characters and a muddied script that takes on too many issues. Focus, Jon, focus!

Still, at its heart, it tells a most interesting story by crossing two lives—those of Jay, a closeted gay man who is an Orthodox Jew, and Stuart, an “out” gay man who is transitioning from being a casual Jew to Orthodoxy. In telling their story, Marans raises many intriguing questions about the intersection of faith and sexuality, a subject that previously saw the theatrical light of day last year with Next Fall by Geoffrey Nauffts, who juxtaposed homosexuality with conservative Christianity.

Marans sets A Strange and Separate People around religious rituals, Sabbath prayers at the home of Jay and his wife Phyllis, and services in the Orthodox Upper West Side synagogue that all three attend.

As the play currently stands, Phyllis has little to do beyond reacting to learning about her husband’s sexuality—so in order to build up her role, Marans has given the couple a child with autism, whose presence is heard and felt, if not seen. It’s too much for the play to work with; it either needs to be cut to a one-act or expanded into a deeper two-act.

I support the latter. I want to know more about Phyllis, the couple’s son, his caregiver, the unseen but noisy neighbor, the president of the congregation, and others whose presence could only serve to enrich the plot. I think of the wonderful ensemble piece that was The Temperamentals and can envision this play transforming into something of that ilk. Until that happens, however, I can only recommend A Strange and Separate People as an interesting work-in-progress.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Never Trust A Character Called 'Death'

2011-07-25T23:27:00.010-04:00

Don’t be taken in by the alluring advertising art for Death Takes A Holiday, now playing at the Laura Pels Theatre. By the looks of it—a beautiful couple dressed to the nines and elegantly waltzing on air (literally)—you could be forgiven for expecting that you are about the see a classic romantic musical comedy à la Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

If you do have Fred and Ginger on your mind when you take your seat, however, you will soon be dispelled of that notion. Death Takes A Holiday is romantic the way that Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is romantic, and it is a comedy the way that Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well is a comedy. Both terms, “romantic” and “comedy,” tap into their older meanings rather than the ones we’ve come to know from watching those charming movies of a bygone era. Expect something other than smiles and sighs.

Come to think of it, pretty much everything about Death Takes A Holiday takes on multiple meanings, and unless you parse the words and enjoy a certain bitter irony, you may end up confused and disappointed. Even the term “holiday” (Philip Barry wrote a light and airy play with that title; perhaps you remember the film with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn) here means nothing more than a short suspension of business-as-usual, an interlude, like a bank holiday in which debts are not forgiven, just briefly uncollected.

Adapted by Thomas Meehan and the late Peter Stone from a 1924 Italian play by Alberto Casella, and filled with soaring music and unfortunately moribund lyrics by Maury Yeston, Death Takes A Holiday is mostly about what takes place during that interlude.

Death has decided to suspend his normal routine of collecting souls in order to adopt the persona of a Russian prince so that he may satisfy his curiosity about what it feels like to be human. (If this sounds a tad familiar, perhaps have seen the movie Meet Joe Black, yet another version of Casella’s play, starring Brad Pitt in the central role).

During the course of the play, in which “Prince Nikolai” joins the family of Duke Vittorio Lamberti at their villa, Death learns paradoxically to embrace both life and the duke’s lovely daughter Grazia. For her part, Grazia is totally smitten and immediately breaks off her engagement in order to take up with the interloper. Only the duke knows of his guest’s true identity, and he is sworn to secrecy—though, at least in this version, secrets and promises are quickly and easily set aside by both the quick and the dead whenever it suits them.

Actually, this is not the first time Death has come calling. The family is still mourning the loss of Grazia’s brother Roberto, a World War I fighter pilot who was killed when his plane was shot down. The few truly poignant moments in Death Takes A Holiday are those in which Roberto’s mother (the ever wonderful Rebecca Luker, here given too few opportunities to shine) and Roberto’s pal Major Eric Fenton (well played by Matt Cavenaugh), sing separate numbers about him. In “Losing Roberto,” his mother, the duchess, steps into his bedroom and sings of her loss and grief, and in “Roberto’s Eyes,” the one number that made me sit up and take notice, Eric sings of seeing death reflected in Roberto’s eyes just as his plane went down.

For me at least, this is where the musical falls apart. There is nothing romantic about Roberto’s death and the obvious pain it has caused; to have another death waiting in the wings is just too much weight for this musical to carry.

As the pair of oddly matched lovers, Jill Paice as Grazia and Julian Ovenden as “Prince Nikolai,” give strong performances and sing beautifully. But all in all, there are just too many elements that simply do not work, including a plot that does not know what to do with this most strange and altogether disturbing of stories. In the end, any remaining shred of hope—has death learned nothing?—is dashed; the clock strikes midnight and the “holiday” is over.

* * * *

Another play in which Death hovers over the proceedings is the two-hander, Tryst, playing at the Irish Rep. Playwright Karoline Leach, in her first full-length outing, has given us a piece that draws from George Bernard Shaw, along with perhaps a dash of August Strindberg and any number of period melodramas (the play takes place in 1910 in London and at a seaside resort town).

Mark Shanahan plays a con man who calls himself “George Love,” a sort of Harold Hill without the musical instruments. It is George’s mission in life to woo spinster women, pretend to wed them, give them one night of connubial bliss, and then abscond with their money.

When George sets his sights on Adelaide Pinchin (Andrea Maulella), a shy, timid, and self-effacing hat maker, you watch as the two of them play off each other. It isn’t long before both Adelaide and George start to show they have unexpected depths, and, in the course of things, she softens him up, while he gives her some confidence in herself.

Predictable enough, and perhaps there might have been a sufficiency of charm on display to end the play right there.

However, the playwright has rather more to say, and so, after Adelaide has figured out exactly what George has been up to, she turns into one of Shaw’s highly independent modern women and decides that they should stay together—married or not—and set up shop, where she can manage the business and he can charm the lady customers. Ending Number Two, perhaps.

But, no. There’s more. The pair continues to circle one another, dark secrets come to the fore, and it becomes evident that neither really has the upper hand (think of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, with the seesawing power struggle that spins out of control).

Shanahan and Maulella do their best with the material, but the problem is the obvious one. The playwright is neither Shaw nor Strindberg, and ultimately, it is the tone of melodrama that wins out. In the end, the lesson is: never trust a sociopath.

And Death once again takes the final bow.

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How Much Will You Enjoy 'Baby It's You'? Tell Me How Old You Are, and I'll Let You Know!

2011-07-08T06:06:00.017-04:00

How can you predict the extent to which you are likely to enjoy the journey into nostalgia referred to—usually in a scornful way—as the “jukebox musical?”

As it happens, I’ve seen three of these in recent weeks, and I’ve been thinking about my own reaction to them, as well as why people seem to either love them or hate them.

Indeed, why such a passionate response either way? Everyone knows what a jukebox musical is—a forum for performing a collection of songs associated with an individual singer, a once-popular singing group, or a particular era. If you go, why would you expect to be even remotely surprised? It is what it is.

So, here’s my hypothesis. Let’s call it ProfMiller’s First Law on the Pleasures to Be Obtained from Jukebox Musicals.

I attribute everything to puberty.

That’s the time in your life when you began to develop your own musical tastes. Those songs, whatever they may be, embed themselves permanently into your head and heart, so that whenever you hear them—even decades later—they carry you back to a place and time when all of this was new. It’s part of how you come to identify with your cohort group, your generation.

Given this premise, how could I fail to like Baby It’s You!? It’s my music, the soundtrack of my young adolescence, the tunes that emerged from my transistor radio and enveloped me day and night.

For what it’s worth, there is also a story to be told, in this case one that is based on the life and times of Florence Greenberg, the middle-aged housewife from Long Island who established her own record label and shepherded the careers of the Shirelles, the Kingsmen, the Isley Brothers, and Dionne Warwick.

Admittedly, what there is of a storyline is slim and has more holes than Swiss cheese. It’s the target audience of baby boomers who need to fill in with their own recollections of life in post-war suburbia, the emerging battle for women’s rights and racial equality, payola as a way of doing business in the record world, and the rapidly changing musical tastes across generations. If you don’t know about these things, you may have a hard time latching on to the significance of the unfolding events.

But, if like me, you are of a certain age, the more than two dozen songs featured in Baby It’s You!—performed by a talented and energetic cast—will give you ample reason to put this on your list of "must sees." To name but a few of the hits: ‘Book of Love,’ ‘Mama Said,’ ‘Dedicated to the One I Love,’ ‘Shout,” and ‘Soldier Boy.’ Are you singing along already?

Among the performers, standouts are Christina Sajous as Shirley, lead singer of the Shirelles; Allan Louis as Luther Dixon, the African American record producer who became Greenberg’s business partner and lover; and Geno Henderson in several different roles, including those of singer Ronald Isley, and Jocko, a popular and influential DJ.

Mostly, though, the show belongs to Beth Leavel as the gritty and determined Greenberg, who unexpectedly leaves her husband and children to make her own way in the world of record producing. Leavel, who is a terrific belter in her own right, displays an air of gritty defiance that seems to be aimed as much at the critics of the poorly reviewed Baby It’s You! as the world that her character reshaped by willpower alone. She seems to be saying to the audience, “to hell with the critics. I know why you’re here, and we’re going have a great time together!” The crowd at the sold-out performance I attended seemed to agree, as do I.

As for the thin script, it’s less thin that those that were written for the Beatles show, Rain, which is little more than a tribute concert, or for Million Dollar Quartet, co-written by Floyd Mutrux and Colin Escott, who also did the book for Baby It’s You!

Your enjoyment of Rain or Million Dollar Quartet will also rest on your familiarity with and level of nostalgia for their music. For me, Million Dollar Quartet, with the songs of Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley, represents a time just prior to my own golden age of popular music, and Rain represents the music of my later adolescence. There are plenty of pleasures to be found in both of these shows, but it is the sounds of the early 1960s that are on glorious display in Baby It’s You! that resonate most for me and why I consider it to be a terrific choice for a night out.

Will you like it as much? It depends. When were you born?

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'Catch Me If You Can' Is Entertaining but Weak on Telling Its Story

2011-07-02T13:09:00.017-04:00

Aaron Tveit and company. Photo by Joan Marcus

It took me two viewings of Catch Me If You Can, the lively new musical at the Neil Simon Theatre, to figure out why the whole adds up to rather less than the sum of its parts.

This happens sometimes when an actor is woefully miscast, or the performers simply do not work well together and you wind up with a production where everyone seems to be at cross purposes. (For an egregious example, consider the woefully misguided revival of Hedda Gabler from a couple of years back, where no two actors seemed to be appearing in the same play.)

That is not the problem with the mixed bag that is Catch Me If You Can, where the company generally meshes well as an ensemble. Rather, the disconnect here lies between the musical side of this splashy and often entertaining show, and the unfortunately tepid book by Terrence McNally, upon which it rests. (McNally’s talents are on far better display a couple of blocks south with the excellent revival of Master Class).

On the plus side, you’ve got Norbert Leo Butz”s hyperkinetic and Tony-winning performance as the indefatigable FBI agent Carl Hanratty; Tom Wopat’s lost soul turn as Frank Abagnale Sr.; and Aaron Tveit's con artist Frank Abagnale Jr., the young forger and identity chameleon whose story this is.

The best numbers in the show are the duets (with affectionate banter) that feature these fellows in pairs (Wopat and Tveit doing “Butter Outta Cream;” Wopat and Butz doing “Little Boy, Be A Man;” and Butz and Tveit doing “Strange But True”). These songs bring back fond memories of what always felt at the time to be impromptu bits from the likes of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, or Dean Martin and any of the guests on his eponymous TV variety show.

Indeed, much of Catch Me If You Can is presented in the style of a TV variety show from the early 1960s—the ones that featured skits, songs performed by the likes of the "Rat Pack's" Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis Jr., and choreographed numbers by The June Taylor Dancers (The Jackie Gleason Show) or go-go girls (Hullabaloo.) Catch Me If You Can even features an appearance by television’s king of the sing-along, Mitch Miller.

The conceit is that Frank Jr., about to be arrested, is stalling by sharing a glitzy version of his life story with the audience, and the tale unfolds as if it were one of those TV shows.

As homage, this all works up to a point, but it also makes for a herky-jerky retelling of the events surrounding the teenager’s life of crime and of the FBI’s efforts to catch him. To cite Chicago's Billy Flynn, we are being given the old razzle dazzle, while the focus ought to be on the ongoing chess match between Abagnale and Hanratty--and the unexpected rapport that develops between the defiant misfit trying to stay one step ahead of the law and the compliant representative of social order.

In the end, what Catch Me If You Can delivers is winning performances under the well-paced direction of Jack O’Brien, spirited choreography by Jerry Mitchell, catchy tunes by Hairspray’s Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (who have nicely captured the sound of the era), and the onstage dinner-jacketed band under the direction of John McDaniel, doing a fine job of selling the score.

For many Broadway musicals, that would be more than enough cause for celebration. Unfortunately, Catch Me If You Can is undermined by the decision to tell the story in short, self-contained vignettes that prevent it from captivating us with the true story of the boy who was able to take advantage of generally lax professional oversight during a more naïve and pre-Internet time in US history.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

A Masterful 'Master Class' Brightens the Post-Tony Season

2011-06-26T13:35:00.019-04:00

Tyne Daly. Photo by Joan Marcus

Normally, the weeks following the Tony Awards are a down time for new productions on Broadway, a space in which to catch up with shows you haven’t gotten around to as yet or to make a return visit to ones you’ve already seen.

So how amazing is it that we are being gifted this summer with not just one, but with two likely candidates for Tony nominations for 2011-2112—one for best revival of a play, the other for best revival of a musical!

I speak of the masterful production of Terrence McNally’s Master Class, now in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, and the forthcoming production of the iconic Stephen Sondheim musical, Follies, set to open later this summer at the Marquis. Both of these are arriving in New York after successful runs at the Kennedy Center.

It is too soon to say much about Follies, especially since casting has yet to be solidified, but I do want to sing the praises of whomever it was who decided to give New York theatergoers the opportunity to see and hear it performed with a full 28-member orchestra and with Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations. No tuba-totin’ Sally in this production!

Meanwhile, there is Master Class, starring the über-talented Tyne Daly as the operatic über-diva Maria Callas in McNally’s Tony-winning play, which he based on a series of actual master classes that Callas conducted for opera students at Juilliard in the 1970s (closing in on the end of her life, as it happens, lending the play some extra poignancy.)

On the face of it, Ms. Daly is not an obvious choice to play the role of the famous—some would say infamous—jet-setting, self-promoting, and, at least as depicted in Master Class, well-past-her-singing-prime soprano.

“I’m not glamorous, I don’t have a look, I don’t know anything about opera, I have no Italian, and I’m too old,” Ms. Daly is quoted as saying of herself in a recent New York Times Magazine profile.

Assuming all of these things not to be merely a matter of false modesty, then it must have taken a lot of mut (German for “courage” or “guts,” a word the character of Callas—who certainly had a lot of mut herself—says is the only thing German she is partial to) for Ms. Daly to take on the role.

The pants suit and scarf created for her by Martin Pakledinaz and the wig by Paul Huntley take care of the glamor; wonderful acting takes care of the rest.

When the original production of Master Class opened on Broadway in 1995, it won a ton of praise for its star Zoe Caldwell as well as for the then 25-year-old Audra McDonald as one of the young students who face Callas’s critical review of their singing. That production ran for just shy of 600 performances, with Patti LuPone (and later, Dixie Carter) stepping into the lead role after Caldwell's departure. It was Ms. LuPone whom I saw in the role, and what I recall is a Maria Callas with a load of arrogance, a vicious tongue, and a dismissive attitude toward the young and vulnerable vocal students who paraded before her.

Ms. Daly’s take is far different and rather more complex. For one thing, her Callas has a real sense of humor--laced with sarcasm, yes, but a gentle sarcasm that is actually quite funny.

When she speaks of Joan Sutherland, for instance, she pauses as if trying to find a way to be kind, before finally settling on “she did her best.”

That line, and similar put-downs, would have been delivered by Ms. LuPone as if she truly meant them to stab; instead Ms. Daly gives us an experienced crowd-pleaser who knows how to play to a gathering of admirers.

Indeed, the early lines of the play are directed straight to the audience, as if we were actually there to observe these master classes. We’re told, for example, that we have no “look,” and that if we are unable to hear everything she has to say, “it’s your fault; you’re not concentrating.” Again, as you might imagine, these lines could be delivered as if spewed forth by a harridan.

But Ms. Daly’s Callas is no Nazi bitch from hell; rather she is audience-savvy, intelligent, and insightful about her craft. And—despite her occasional lapses into reverie and at least one moment where she forgets to contract her claws—she provides what sounds to this amateur opera-goer to be good advice to the students.

By the way, the three students, played by Sierra Boggess, Alexandra Silber, and Garrett Sorenson, are wonderfully cast and—to the extent we are allowed to hear them sing without interruption—have lovely voices. Jeremy Cohen as the accompanist Manny and Clinton Brandhagen as the unimpressed stagehand also do excellent work. It is a pleasure to see an entire company of actors so in sync.

Bravo as well to director Stephen Wadsworth and to scenic designer Thomas Lynch, who makes us feel as though we were in a studio or small auditorium where a real master class would be taking place.

I’d be remiss if I were to suggest that Master Class is utter perfection. It could use some editing, and surely little would be lost if the near schizophrenic “conversations” Callas has with Aristotle Onassis, the long-time lover who discarded her for the even more glamorous Jacqueline Kennedy, were to be excised. I wonder, too, about Ms. Daly’s shifting accent (vaguely Greco-Roman, mixed with traces of German), but all in all, this is a splendid production that should garner at least a couple of Tony nominations (revival of a play, leading actress) when the time comes.

A masterful kickoff to the new theater year!

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Idle Thoughts About the 2011 Tony Awards Show

2011-06-13T20:13:00.016-04:00

Frances McDormand: Dressed for the Red Carpet?

Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan?

I generally do not indulge in the annual folly of predicting Tony Award winners, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy indulging in the morning-after folly of commenting on the event itself.

So, if you are interested, here are my random notes from the 2011 Tony Awards ceremonies that I watched on television from the living room sofa, just as most of you probably did.

To begin with, I liked that the venue was changed from Radio City Music Hall to the Beacon Theater, regardless of whatever problems were caused by its smaller size (2894 seats as opposed to RCMH’s 5,933). The huge stage of Radio City, which had a prior booking by Cirque du Soleil, has always seemed too big for the production numbers, both visually and in the way it swallowed the sound. Last night, all the numbers had an equal chance to try to sell themselves.

Neil Patrick Harris was a charming and congenial host. I liked his opening and closing numbers, as well as his banter with Hugh (“I only play the big rooms”) Jackman, himself a charming and congenial four-time host who was given a spot just for the banter (“Any show you can host, I can host better…”)

The clever opening number, written by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger, who wrote the score for Cry-Baby, made gentle fun of the notion that Broadway attracts only a small segment of the population:

It’s not just for gays…for gays and the Jews,

And cousins in from out of town you have to amuse,

The sad and bitter malcontents who write the reviews

And, at the close, we were treated to Harris’s performance of a quickly-penned “insta-rap” summation of the evening, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and star of In The Heights. Sample line, referencing a performance by one of the stars of The Book of Mormon:

Andrew Rannells sang “I Believe” and he landed it

So well now he’s Mitt Romney’s V.P. candidate

Before I discuss the production numbers and the awards, do allow me a Joan Rivers Red Carpet moment by asking of Frances McDormand and Whoopi Goldberg: What were they wearing? And why?

Ms. McDormand, who picked up what was certainly a well-deserved Tony for lead actress in a play (Good People), came out on stage wearing a most unflattering red and black-striped shmata, over which she wore a cheap denim jacket. And Whoopi Goldberg, who introduced the number from Sister Act, the musical for which is producer, wore an outfit that looked as if it belonged in the closet of Guinan, the futuristic character she played in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not that it really matters. Just sayin’.

Good to see Larry Kramer up there on stage as his play, The Normal Heart, took the Tony for best revival (along with acting awards for featured performances by Ellen Barkin and John Benjamin Hickey). Too bad Joe Mantello didn’t win for best actor in a leading role. That honor went to Mark Rylance for his work in Jerusalem, a play I found tedious to sit through. For his acceptance speech, in keeping with the anti-establishment character he plays in Jerusalem, Rylance chose to recite an oddball piece, a "prose poem" by Louis Jenkins titled Walking Through A Wall. It begins:

   Unlike flying or astral projection, walking through walls
               is a totally earth-related craft, but a lot more interesting
               than pot making or driftwood lamps...

Make of it what you will.

As for the the musical production numbers, they all made for good advertising plugs for their respective shows. The best of these was the title song from Anything Goes, which showed off as much as anything choreographer Kathleen Marshall’s brilliant work, so that it seemed right for both the show and Ms. Marshall to pick up top honors. A close second was the song “I Believe” from The Book of Mormon, thanks to the terrific performance by one of the show’s stars, Andrew Rannells.

Even the much ridiculed Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark (Neil Patrick Harris allotted 30 seconds for some lame Spiderman jokes, though a couple more slipped through during the course of the evening) had its moment in the sun with a well-produced tender little tune from the yet-to-officially-open show.

And even though The Scottsboro Boys was honored only through its many nominations (trounced pretty much at every turn by The Book of Mormon), it does seem that a national tour is in the cards—at least according to Don Cheadle, who introduced the medley of upbeat and winningly performed numbers from the show. That few minutes of air time ought to sell some tickets for a show that deserves to be seen by many more than caught it during its short Broadway run.

And you gotta hand it to Norbert Leo Butz, who picked up the Tony for best performance by a lead actor in a musical for his role in Catch Me If You Can. Butz always gives 110% and would carry any show solely on his back if he could. (Did you happen to see him in the otherwise tepid Enron last year?) He sold the number from Catch Me If You Can as well as anyone ever could, although I have to confess I preferred the few moments of singing by Aaron Tveit that preceded the main number.

Speaking of Mr. Butz, his acceptance speech was one of the more gracious and humble ones I’ve heard in a long time, and it made for an emotional moment when he paid tribute to his sister, without playing up the fact that she was murdered in what was deemed to be a homophobic hate crime at the time when her brother was in the midst of rehearsals for Catch Me If You Can.

There were, of course, some other moments that I could have lived without—some long-winded or under-prepared acceptance speeches, some bits of entertainment that weren’t so entertaining, and a repeat performance of a number from last year’s winning musical—but on a whole, this was one of the better Tony Awards shows in recent years, with more Broadway show people and fewer drop-ins from Hollywood, better timing, better acoustics, and good solid hosting.

Nice way to wrap up a year of Broadway theater-going. Bravo!

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Welcome to the Magical World of Tony Kushner's 'The Illusion'

2011-06-06T14:14:00.014-04:00

Amanda Quaid, Peter Bartlett, and Finn Wittrock

Here’s a trivia question for you.

What do these two plays have in common: A Free Man of Color, John’s Guare’s off-kilter take on US history that played last fall at the Vivian Beaumont, and Tony Kushner’s The Illusion, now on display at the Signature Theatre Company’s Peter Norton Space?

The answer is, they both give a nod to a 17th century French playwright by the name of Pierre Corneille, prolific and successful in his time but rather less well-known nowadays than his contemporiares Molière and Racine.

In Guare’s play, Corneille is the supposed father of the title character, Jacques Cornet. For his part, Kushner based The Illusion on Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique, in which Corneille wove elements of classicism and commedia del’arte into a kind of tragi-comedy along the lines of one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” say Measure for Measure or A Winter’s Tale. (Come to think of it, that tragi-comedy motif does seem to run through Guare’s work as well.)

The Illusion is the third and last of Kushner’s plays being presented by Signature this season (following Angels in America and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures.) Originally produced in 1988, three years before Angels was unveiled, The Illusion is unlike pretty much everything that Kushner has written since, a work that owes as much to Shakespeare as to Corneille (I detected references to Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest) and one that uses heightened language, poetry, and romantic imagery, while throwing in a mix of modernism, all to great effect.

Being unfamiliar with L’Illusion Comique, I can only discuss The Illusion based on its own merits, of which there are plenty, despite Kushner’s seeming unwillingness to acknowledge that pencils have erasers as well as points (which is to say the play, which does sag occasionally, could stand a 20-minute trim).

The Illusion opens very dramatically and spookily in the dark (the spookiness is splendidly aided and abetted by Bray Poor’s just-right sound design that includes creepy echoes and hawk screeches). The elderly Pridamant of Avignon (depicted here most magnificently by David Margulies, one of the production’s three terrific stage veterans) has entered the grotto of the magician Alcandre.

Pridamant is desirous of finding out what has become of long-estranged son, whom he kicked out of his home 15 years previously. It seems that time has softened some of the edges, and Pridament wants to bring about some sort of reconciliation before he dies. Alcandre (the resplendent Lois Smith, veteran actor #2, in a role usually played by a man) agrees to help, and as the play unfolds, Alcandre shows Pridamant various scenes from the son’s life.

In the three scenes, which shift in style and mood, the son’s personality runs the gamut from callow romantic to callous womanizer. Finn Wittrock does a fine job in the shifting roles, as do Sean Dugan as his chief rival, and Amanda Quaid and Merritt Wever as the women in his life. Wever plays a spunky maid of the type often found in a Molière play, though I must confess she is so modern in her outlook that at one point I half expected her to start singing "The Miller’s Son" from Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music.

Peter Bartlett, veteran actor #3, does a laugh-out-loud star turn in the wildly comic role of Matamore, another would-be rival, who transforms over time into a dreamy and lost soul seeking to find his way to a life of solitude...on the moon, no less

While I am handing out praise, I want to recognize the splendid original music by Nico Muhly, the costume design by Susan Hilferty, the set design by Christine Jones, and the best swordplay I have seen in a very long time, thanks to fight director Rick Sordelet. All of the strange and powerful proceedings are well-directed by Michel Mayer.

On many different levels, this lovely play is infused with magic, in which Alcandre is assisted by her (sometimes) deaf and mute servant (the excellent Henry Stram), who offers his own touch of strangeness and shape-shifting to the goings-on.

But ultimately, it is the magic of theater that prevails—a wonderful message for any dedicated theater buff to walk away with, and a splendid way to bid adieu to the old Peter Norton Space as the Signature Theatre Company prepares to move to its new home (designed by architect Frank Gehry) down the street.

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And the Envelope, Please: Announcing the 2011 ProfMiller Kudos Awards

2011-05-29T16:49:00.008-04:00

In the spirit of the theater community’s annual awards season, I bid you welcome to our own ProfMiller Kudos Awards for Outstanding Theatrical Achievement, 2010-2011.

Once again, I am please to report that as a committee of one, I was able to reach unanimous decisions in all of the categories. Needless to say, the selection criteria I have employed reflect my personal biases and judgments, and ties are not unheard of when I deem them to be appropriate. As I am an equal opportunity theatergoer, these awards encompass both Broadway and Off Broadway productions.

And so, without further ado, the envelope, please:

We begin with a special award, for the Most Underappreciated Show, which goes to The Scottsboro Boys. While I imagine the Kander and Ebb trunk holds more songs that may yet see the light of day, this was the team’s final fully realized musical following lyricist Fred Ebb’s death in 2004. But no sentiment need be attached. This simply was an excellent show, an edgy retelling of the true story of a group of African American teenage boys who were falsely accused of raping two white women in segregated Alabama in the 1930s. This was one of the few transfers from Off Broadway to Broadway that made a fitting transition to the big stage, with a first-rate cast and strong directing and choreography by Susan Stroman. It’s nice that it received 12 Tony nominations, but it is likely to be squashed under the juggernaut that is The Book of Mormon.

* * * * * * *

In the category of Best Revival of a Play on Broadway, we declare a tie between The Merchant of Venice and The Normal Heart—the former, exquisitely directed by Daniel Sullivan, the latter by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe. At the performance of Merchant that I attended, the audience, many of whom had quite probably come to see Al Pacino and had little prior knowledge of the play itself, audibly gasped at a couple of key plot turns. When is the last time Shakespeare was able to garner such a reaction? As for The Normal Heart, it could easily have come off as mired in yesterday’s headlines. Instead, it resonates deeply with today’s audiences and reminds us of the potential for theater to fully envelop viewers in both powerful drama and emotional intensity. When is the last time a speech given by a character in a play (in this instance, by Ellen Barkin) stopped the show by drawing waves of sustained applause?

In a similar vein, we declare a tie for Best Revival of a Play Off Broadway. The Kudos Award goes to the Atlantic Theater Company’s production of a double bill of one-act plays by Harold Pinter, The Collection and A Kind of Alaska, and to the Signature Theatre Company’s brilliant production of Tony Kushner’s masterwork, Angels in America. The Pinter plays, under the direction of Karen Kohlhaas, were a revelation of flawless style and splendid acting. Angels in America, stunningly directed by Michael Greif, managed to juggle all of Kushner’s deeply complex ideas without once dropping a ball, and boasted a cast that poured themselves into layered and emotionally honest performances.

* * * * * * *

For his performance in The Normal Heart, the Kudos Award for Best Actor in a Play goes to Joe Mantello. This has been quite a season for Mantello. In addition to his tour de force performance in Larry Kramer’s drama about the early days of the AIDS crisis, he directed two terrific productions—Other Desert Cities at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, and The Other Place at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

Other Desert Cities, a family drama steeped in politics, takes the Kudos Award for Best New Play, while The Other Place serves as the vehicle for Laurie Metcalf’s outstanding performance as a mentally and emotionally fragile medical researcher, a portrayal that earns her the Kudos Award for Best Actress in a Play.

For Best Featured Actress in a Play, the Kudos Award goes to Estelle Parsons, for her turn as a busybody landlady in Good People. It’s unfortunate she was not nominated for a Tony for this funny, quirky, and compelling performance.

For Best Featured Actor in a Play, the winner of the Kudos Award is Christian Borle, who did outstanding work in both Peter and the Starcatcher and Angels in America. Watch for him in Steven Spielberg’s new NBC TV show, Smash, which depicts the efforts of a group of people to put on a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe.

* * * * * * *

Moving on to the musicals, we’ll start with the Kudos Award for Best Actress in a Musical. The winner is Laura Benanti, for her wigged out performance in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. She’s likely to win a Tony for the same role, but in the category of Best Actress in a Featured Role. I’m not bound by the Tony rules, and thought hers was the one truly outstanding performance in this mishmash of a musical.

For Best Actor in a Musical, the winner is Rob McClure, for his funny and charming performance in Where’s Charley? Mr. McClure played the title role in the Encores! production of Frank Loesser’s lighter-than-air musical, and was outstanding in taking on the mantle that has been indelibly associated with Ray (“Once in Love With Amy”) Bolger.

Both Mr. McClure’s performance and the show itself were a real treat, earning Where’s Charley? the Kudos Award for Best Musical Revival. A sheer delight, thanks to a stellar cast, sharp directing by John Doyle, and brilliant musicianship of the orchestra, under the baton of Rob Berman.

* * * * * * *

Finally, in the category of Best New Musical, the Kudos Award goes to The Book of Mormon. Likewise, the show’s directors Casey Nicholaw and Trey Parker win for Best Director of a New Musical. This odds-on-favorite to win the Tony Award for best musical deserves all of its accolades.

And that’s a wrap. Cue the music and call it a night!

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An Obscure Rock Band with Mythic Roots Becomes the Stuff of Compelling Musical Theater

2011-05-22T14:58:00.014-04:00

As the decade of the 1960s was coming to a close, an oddball rock group known as The Shaggs briefly appeared on the scene. By most accounts, the band—consisting of three sisters from the small town of Fremont, New Hampshire—displayed little talent for songwriting, musicianship, or singing. The group's one album, The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, came and went in a flash and the band sank into obscurity.

Except…inexplicably…long after the sisters, Helen, Betty, and Dot Wiggin, had happily pushed the entire experience behind them, The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World continued cling to life by being passed around among outsider music aficionados, drawn to the band’s uniquely unpolished and unaffected style.

And now, forty years on, the outré yet compelling Wiggin sisters find themselves the subjects of a outré yet compelling theatrical work, a musical titled—what else?—The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, currently on view at Playwrights Horizons.

The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, the musical, is the story behind the recording—a story that, if the Shaggs were coming on the scene now, would surely be on display as a reality TV show.

So, who are the Wiggins, and why are they deserving of a musical about them? And why, like The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World (the album), has The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World (the show) kept popping up in productions since its inception eight years ago: Los Angeles (2003), Chicago (2004), and New York (2005 and now)?

I’ll leave it to you to decide what to make of The Shaggs’ music. You can hear samples on YouTube, or you can buy a copy of a limited edition of the band's album through the run of the show, now scheduled to end July 3. You can also hear snippets of the band’s actual music in the show, although the bulk of the tunes are original numbers penned by Gunnar Madsen (with co-lyricist, Joy Gregory), a composer whose eclectic career has encompassed writing music for television, movies, the Minnesota Opera, and the National Beef Council.

As for the tale itself, its complicated, disturbed, and self-deluding heart lies not within the would-be rock star Wiggin sisters, but within their father, Austin, a textile worker with a dream born of some inner need to raise his family’s name out of the mundane world it inhabited into the rarer air of fame and fortune.

Austin, a strict paterfamilias who was no fan of rock-era music and kept his children (there were six in all) under tight rein, got it into his head one day that he was destined to turn Helen, Betty, and Dot into rock stars.

Austin’s near mythic conviction—which he connected with a prediction made by his late and sorely-missed mother—was so strong that he dragged everyone along, including his loyal if confused wife Annie, plunging the family into debt and pulling the girls out of school so they could rehearse under his always watchful eye. It was Austin who named the group The Shaggs, coerced the local community hall to hire them to perform on a regular basis, and paid to record and press their album—of which perhaps 100 copies ever saw the light of day. Despite a total failure through every phase of this enterprise, Austin kept his daughters performing until 1975, when he died and the spell was finally lifted. The story lived on through the cultish devotion of a handful of followers, an occasional re-release of the album, and an article about the band written by Susan Orlean that appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1999.

And, eventually, that is the story that became the musical, The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World.

Madsen and Gregory have written songs that serve the story well, and that nicely blend touches of humor, irony, and earnestness. The performances throughout are strong. Peter Friedman, a better actor than singer, brings a real sense of fervor to the role of Austin, and Annie Golden, a better singer (actually, a terrific singer) than actor, shows us both devotion and doubt as his wife. Sarah Sokolovic (Betty), Emily Walton (Helen), and Jamey Hood (Dot) do well as the sisters, overwhelmed by their father's demands and expectations of them, but also showing healthy signs of rebellion. Kevin Cahoon, Corey Michael Smith, and Steve Routman round out the cast, and John Langs does a sold job of directing.

I’ve got to say, the true story behind the show is so compelling that it is difficult to even guess whether the musical would be nearly as interesting if it has been completely invented. Since seeing it last weekend, I have spent a lot of time reading about the Wiggin family and the Shaggs, and listening to their music. I cannot separate the experience of seeing the musical from the rest of these activities.

If you brush off The Shaggs as simply another wannabe rock band, this is not the show for you. If, on the other hand, you are intrigued by the real life story of the Wiggins, then I encourage you to get to Playwrights Horizons for a performance of The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World before it, too, becomes a piece of The Shaggs' underground cult.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Tonys, Yes, But Don’t Forget About Off-Broadway

2011-05-07T09:16:00.021-04:00

Now that the Tony Award nominees have been announced and everyone else is busy picking at the list and making their predictions, I thought I might use this time to talk about some of the Off Broadway offerings from this season.

I recently gushed about a little gem of a downtown show called Peter and the Starcatcher, a clever, funny, charming, and delightful prequel to Peter Pan. If you missed it but wish you hadn’t, the buzz is that a move uptown, possibly to a Broadway theater, may be in the offing. Since the play was commissioned by Disney Theatrical Productions, there may be some real money behind the buzz. So keep your eyes open and don’t let the grass grow beneath your feet should the transfer happen.

Another “second chance” show you should be looking out for is Other Desert Cities by playwright Jon Robin Baitz. This is a smart, sharply drawn family drama with political undertones, directed by the multi-talented and ubiquitous Joe Mantello. Montello just came off directing Laurie Metcalf’s Obie-worthy performance as a mentally damaged woman in Sharr White’s The Other Place (sorry, that one’s closed, too), and he is now knocking them dead as an actor in the lead and Tony-nominated role of Ned Weeks in the revival of Larry Kramer’s masterful The Normal Heart on Broadway. Other Desert Cities had a sold out run at Lincoln Center and boasted a stellar cast that included Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, and Linda Lavin. Ideally, a Broadway transfer would keep director and cast intact. My advice: don’t miss it this time!

Or course, you haven’t missed everything. So here are some Off Broadway shows you might want to see before they, too, are gone.

High on my list is By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, now on view at the Second Stage. The play, by Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage (for Ruined) is a funny and satirical look at the life and career of an African American actress whose claim to fame was her featured role as a maid in the fictional but authentic-seeming 1933 film, “The Belle of New Orleans.” Nottage takes jabs at Hollywood racism, both then and now, and also at the over-intellectualizing of serious questions of race in America. Act I is presented as a very funny screwball comedy that, in Act II, segues into rich satire. If you need more convincing, go to the website www.meetverastark.com for a video glimpse of a mockumentary about “The Belle of New Orleans” and Vera Stark’s place in cinematic history.

This is also a big year for playwright Tony Kushner, who hit the headlines this week when the City University of New York Board of Trustees chopped his name from a list of intended recipients of honorary degrees. The brouhaha was triggered when one trustee challenged Kushner’s alleged criticism of the State of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. I’ll confine my comments here to my view that the decision was a pretty foolish one that makes the trustees look like a bunch of idiots, and turn instead to Kushner’s current season in the sun as the focus of the Signature Theatre Company's annual single-playwright showcase.

To begin with, we had a glorious revival of Angels in America, one of the great American plays of the twentieth century, given a grand production in the small confines of the Peter Norton Space. I’ve already praised it to the skies in a previous blog entry, so let’s turn to the second of the season’s three Kushner plays, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, now on view at the Public Theater.

“IHO,” as the lengthy title is sometimes abbreviated, lacks the cohesion of Angels, but it does contain a spinning array of plots and subplots, fine acting, and brilliant discourse about politics, unionism, Marxism, theology, suicide, fidelity, family ties, birth order, same-sex marriage, prostitution, and more--often told with humor (an early line about cell phone users in the theater draw a hearty laugh and a round of applause) or sharp-tongued sarcasm ("I came here to tweeze your head off and spit in the stump!" is one memorable line). Kushner will say whatever is on his mind when he is writing a new play, and this one, coming in at nearly four hours, could use some editing. Still, it is well worth a visit and beats the heck out of the pretentiousness that is Jerusalem.

Finally, I'd like to tell you about three new Off Broadway shows that are about to open.

Now in previews at the Little Shubert Theatre is Lucky Guy, a campy romp of a musical featuring Leslie Jordan, best known for his role as Beverley Leslie on the TV sitcom "Will and Grace," and Varla Jean Merman (aka Jeffery Roberson), a very talented drag performer. Willard Beckham provides the book, lyrics, and music, which ranges from country to rockabilly to novelty numbers to ballads. The story line, such as it is, centers on a plot to steal a song from the winner of a talent contest. If you go, expect a lot of burlesque-type humor, but also take note that within all the silliness, Kyle Dean Massey, who sings the lovely title song, emerges as a star to be reckoned with.

If you long for more tales of Neverland while you await another opportunity to see Peter and the Starcatcher, you should head on out to the New Victory Theater for the return engagement of Mabou Mines' wistfully poignant production of Peter and Wendy (yes, another Peter Pan play, this one adhering close to J. M. Barrie's original story). Peter and Wendy features the always brilliant Basil Twist doing duty here as the lead puppeteer, and Karen Kandel as the storyteller, a role for which she has earned a truckload of highly deserved awards. This is a short run that began yesterday and is scheduled to end on May 22. Hesitate and you become one of the Lost Boys!

Also something to look forward to is a co-production of the New York Theatre Workshop and Playwrights Horizons of the musical The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, based on the true story of a working class father who is determined to find fame and fortune by promoting his not-particularly-talented daughters as a great rock band in the late 1960s.

Playwrights Horizons, where The Shaggs will be performed, is offering discount tickets of $40 (for performances between May 12 and May 19) and $60 for the rest of the run, through July 3. You can order online at www.ticketcentral.com, using the code SHAGGLOG, or by calling Ticket Central at 212-279-4200 between the hours of noon and 8 p.m. dailty, or by presenting a printout of this blog post to the Ticket Central box office at 416 West 42^nd street at the hours listed above.

So there you have it, a reminder that Broadway alone does not make New York the greatest theater city in the world. Catch an Off Broadway show today!

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Reconnecting With My Inner Child

2011-04-28T11:15:00.015-04:00

Adam Chanler-Bedrat (Peter) and Christian Borle (Black Stache)

When I wrote recently about the highly acclaimed production of War Horse at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, I mentioned that my less than enthusiastic response was perhaps tied to my inability to tap into my inner 12-year-old self, who—had he accompanied me—would surely have led to my being swept away by the grand spectacle of it all.

I feared we had lost touch altogether or that I had contracted a fatal case of curmudgeonness. But I am happy to report that my inner child and I had a happy reunion last weekend at productions of Peter and the Starcatcher and Wonderland. Both shows succeeded in reminding me of the magical power of storytelling that had captivated me as a youngster.

Let’s start with Peter and the Starcatcher, a delightful romp of a show. I haven’t read the book of (nearly) the same title by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, so I can’t speak to how well Peter and the Starcatcher sticks to its source material. But anyone who grew up with the story of Peter Pan—as a book, the Mary Martin musical, or the Disney animated version—would certainly recognize the show as a prequel, addressing the origin of the Boy-Who-Would-Not-Grow-Up, the Lost Boys, Captain Hook, Tinker Bell and even the clock-eating Crocodile.

The play, adapted by Rick Elice (co-writer of Jersey Boys and The Addams Family) and directed by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers, represents theatrical imagination and creativity at their very best. A fine cast, a handful of simple props, and a shipload of whimsy and silliness—including a chorus line of singing and dancing mermaids, conversations in Dodo language, and more puns than should ever be allowed to be expressed in a single evening—combine in such a glorious way as to please anyone’s inner or outer child.

Of the acting company, I would like to single out Christian Borle for high praise for his performance as the wicked and wickedly funny pirate captain, Black Stache, the precursor to Captain Hook. For the role, he became the embodiment of a young and totally wigged-out Groucho Marx, with maybe a dollop of Cyril Richard, who starred as Captain Hook opposite Mary Martin’s Peter Pan. Every moment Borle was onstage was sheer delight, and how nice to see him having what seemed to be a ton of fun after his recent excellent performance in the decidedly un-fun role of the AIDS-infected Prior Walter in the revival of Angels In America.

Alas, Peter and the Starcatcher has ended its run at the New York Theatre Workshop, but surely it will return there or to another venue. Clap your hands if you believe!.

Janet Dacal (center) and the cast of Wonderland

From Neverland, we move on to Wonderland, a full-scale tuneful Broadway musical, now on view at the Marquis Theatre.

Wonderland had me even before the curtain rose, with its use of projected images of iconic drawings by John Tenniel from the original Alice in Wonderland book that serves as the musical’s inspiration. But it wasn’t just the drawings that put the smile on my face; it was the accompanying projections of quotes from the book that meandered snake-like across the curtain. The twisting lines were reminiscent of "The Mouse’s Tale," a short segment in an early chapter of Alice in Wonderland, in which the words are typeset so as to follow the curves of a mouse’s tail (pun intended by Lewis Carroll). Someone knows their “Alice,” I thought, as I happily awaited the unfolding of the musical.

Wonderland is hardly the perfect show, but it has enough going for it to make the visit worthwhile, especially if you happen to be an admirer of Lewis Carroll’s off-kilter nuttiness. The well-known characters are all there and cleverly portrayed, with uniformly strong performances. Noteworthy are Janet Dacal as Alice, Kate Shindle as the Mad Hatter, Karen Mason as the Queen of Hearts, and E. Clayton Cornelious as the Caterpillar, but no one is miscast or is a weak link. Director Gregory Boyd (who is also the book writer, along with Jack Murphy) and choreographer Marguerite Derricks keep things hopping.

Frank Wildhorn, a generally underappreciated tunesmith, has come up with a batch of catchy, bouncy, and entertaining songs (lyrics by Mr. Murphy)—even if at times it feels as if you were in the audience at a Las Vegas revue (lots of amplification and wall-of-sound orchestrations). Terrific, Tony-worthy costumes by Susan Hilferty and video projections by Sven Ortel add tremendously both to the Las Vegas effect and to the production itself.

I feel obliged to note that my take on Wonderland veers sharply from that of many of the professional critics, who have brushed it off as trite and inconsequential. For me, though, Wonderland shows a real strength in its ability to tap into the spirit of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the plot of which, if I may be so bold as to mention, is no less inane the one whipped up by Boyd and Murphy. The old don himself even makes an appearance in a scene that is perhaps tangential but is also charming and heart-warming.

If you are not a fan of Alice in Wonderland, as I have been lo these many years, you should consider this to be a caveat.

I think Wonderland is a worthy entrant to the Broadway scene. Time and box office receipts will tell if it will become the next Wicked, another show based on a classic children's book that failed to thrill the critics when it opened in 2003 and yet is still playing to capacity crowds.

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Jerusalem: Into the Woods with Mark Rylance

2011-04-22T16:04:00.008-04:00

Mark Rylance as "Rooster" Byron

If you decide to check out the production of Jerusalem, the ponderous and meandering showcase for Mark Rylance’s not inconsiderable talents now on view at The Music Box, you may find your mind wandering upon occasion as you strain to sort out accents and try to figure out if there is anything like a plot that runs through the three-hour event.

Here’s one mental game you can play with yourself. Who does Rylance’s character, Johnny “Rooster” Byron remind you of? Here is my own partial list:

· Falstaff—perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest creation—charismatic and repulsive in equal measure.

· The Pied Piper, leading the village children astray.

· Pan, the amoral seducer.

· Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up.

· Ed Bloom, the character played by Albert Finney in the movie “Big Fish,” a weaver of magical tales that proved, in the end, to have a basis in reality.

· Big John, the pedophile played by Brian Cox in the film “L. I. E.”

· Archie Rice, the burned-out vaudevillian portrayed so memorably by Laurence Olivier in John Osbourne’s “The Entertainer.”

You can’t go wrong. Rylance gives us all of them and more as he roars his way through Jerusalem, written by Jez Butterworth and coming to us by way of an acclaimed production at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

Look—you either love Rylance or you think of him as too much of a good thing. I’m in the latter camp. I admired his exquisite farcical timing in Boeing Boeing a couple of seasons back, but I avoided La Bête, even though I am told I missed the greatest comic monologue ever in the history of theater. Now, with Jerusalem, I found myself once again appreciating his ability to completely take over a role and dominate every single moment of the play, but I also found his portrayal of “Rooster” Byron to fall into the “sound and fury” category, all surface and lacking any of the subtlety that would truly bring the character to life.

I much preferred some of the smaller performances, particularly those of Alan David as The Professor, but also Mackenzie Crook as Ginger and John Gallagher, Jr. as Lee. All of their characters—sidekicks and hangers-on though they may be—drew me in far more than did Rylance.

Rylance’s “Rooster” Byron is a rooster indeed, a crowing, self-inflating supplier of drugs and alcohol and dreams to young teenagers who serve as an audience for his tall tales, in which he evokes a kind of Shakespearean Forest of Arden or an Arcadia or a Shangri-La or some other mystical, mythical place. His kingdom is the mobile home he has parked for years just outside of a suburban tract, and his neighbors—at least the adults among them—would just as soon send him packing. The opening scene, which might make you think you have wandered into a performance of American Idiot by mistake, will tell you all you need to know about why he is not considered to be adding value to the community.

Of the three acts that comprise Jerusalem, only Act II seems to be going somewhere, with our “Falstaff” appearing to be moving along the path toward rejection and self-destruction. But that potential movement of plot fades and we are left with what amounts to a character study. That the character is both larger-than-life and a scourge on society does not, in my view, make the trip worth the effort—even if Jerusalem winds up walking away with a Tony Award for best play and another for best performance by a leading actor.

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The People in the Picture: The Wrong Music and Messy Storytelling Mar a Potentially Moving Story

2011-04-20T23:04:00.009-04:00

A tender moment from The People in the Picture

Here’s a quick quiz:

Say you were putting together a musical about a Yiddish theater troupe in 1930s Poland. In order to capture the flavor of the times, you would:

A. Use authentic period Yiddish music.
B. Hire a klezmer band to write and perform original pieces.
C. Turn the job over to the guy who wrote “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,”and “Love Potion #9.”

If you answered C, congratulations! You have the honor of knowing you are in synch with the folks behind The People in the Picture, an earnest if klutzy take on the recollections of a Jewish woman haunted forever by memories of a life upturned by the rise of Naziism.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of Mike Stoller’s rock era songs, written with his partner Jerry Leiber—the soundtrack of my youth. Mr. Stoller is responsible for half of the music in the show. The rest of the songs were written by Artie Butler, the music arranger for Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright,” among other hits. I have no doubt that both are talented songwriters, but, please, not for this show, and, do pardon me if I say “oy vey!”

The People in the Picture stars Donna Murphy (undoubtedly the first name that pops into your head when you think of a Yiddishe mama), who jumps back and forth in time portraying an elderly bubbe in 1970s New York and her younger self in Warsaw during the Nazi years. Remember, though, this is Donna Murphy we’re talking about here; to her credit, the two-time Tony Award winner gives it her all against the ineffective music and messy book and lyrics by novelist Iris Rainer Dart, best known as the author of Beaches.

The premise of the show is that a grandmother, Bubbe Raisel, is passing on the story of her life to her granddaughter. As she speaks, her earlier years as a star of Yiddish theater unfold on the stage. Ms. Murphy does a fine job of moving between the two roles so that the transitions are clear. But the potentially compelling storyline, which might have worked with more appropriate music, is further lost when the framing device encompasses a separate plot about the stormy relationship between Raisel and her daughter.

The single truly authentic moment in the show occurs when the songwriters step aside, and Ms. Murphy sings a tender and popular Yiddish children’s song (Oyfen Pripitchik, written in the 19^th century by Mark Warshavsky) a tune you might recognize from its use in the movie Schindler’s List. I could hear members of the audience, who undoubtedly remembered the song from their own childhoods, quietly singing along.

Of the rest of the performers, I would like to tip my hat to some old favorites: Chip Zien, Lewis J. Stadlen, and Joyce Van Patten as members of Raisel’s Polish acting company. Victims of the Holocaust, their spirits surround Raisel in her old age and offer peace and comfort against a troubled heart.

These few effective elements suggest lost possibilities and make one wish for a better showcase for this story. As it stands, the People in the Picture fades quickly from memory—the exact opposite of what Raisel would want to see happen.

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High: Can Faith See Us Through the Pain of Life?

2011-04-18T22:04:00.004-04:00

Kathleen Turner and Even Jonigkeit

Question: Is playwright Matthew Lombardo planning to specialize in writing three-character dramas with complicated alcoholic foul-mouthed women at their center?

Just asking. Cuz last year he gave us Looped, a three-character play starring Valerie Harper as the complicated alcoholic foul-mouthed Tallulah Bankhead. And now, he is offering High, a three-character play starring Kathleen Turner as a complicated alcoholic foul-mouthed nun/drug counselor. Both plays, incidentally, were helmed by the same director, Rob Ruggiero. These guys may have quite a little franchise going.

In any event, High, like Looped, is a downtown play that got on the wrong subway and landed in the midtown theater district. As such, it has all of the markings of a vanity production in which a well-known actress rather past the ingénue stage of her career is brought on board to chew up the scenery and bring in the paying customers.

Oddly enough, this doesn’t mean that High isn’t interesting or compelling. It is actually both, thanks to some sharp dialog and strong performances by the two main characters: Ms. Turner as Sister Jamison Connelly, and Evan Jonigkeit, making his New York debut as Cody, a teen-aged gay hustler and drug addict undergoing court-ordered counseling. (The third character, a Catholic priest, is gamely played by Stephen Kunken, but the role itself is little more than a plot device that, unfortunately, takes away from the veracity of the play).

Despite the play’s shortcomings, it is fascinating to watch Turner and Jonigkeit dance around the boxing ring as they face off. Life has made Sister Jamie, as she is called, as tough and nearly as street-wise as Cody, and his efforts to psych her out lead him nowhere. As the play progresses, there are enough revelations about both characters to keep us engaged, and while the ultimate outcome is predictable, it is predictable in ways that are honest, if sadly inevitable.

Along the way, the playwright encourages us to consider questions of trust, faith, guilt, forgiveness, and even the routines and responsibilities of life that compel most of us to pick ourselves up and forge ahead, even during those times when we would just as soon chuck it all.

Had High been ensconced at a small off Broadway house, it might have fared better than it is likely to at the Booth Theatre. This is no grand enterprise about nuns and priests and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, like Doubt; it is a domestic drama of the sort that doesn’t draw the Wednesday matinee crowds or the accompanying must-see buzz. Still, it has the ring of truth (Mr. Lombardo has dedicated the play to his “sponsor,” which suggests he may know a thing or two about the subject matter of alcoholism and/or drug addition) and two solid performances at its core that make it worth a visit.

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Where's Charley: A Sparkling Delight from Encores!

2011-03-21T16:38:00.005-04:00

Lauren Worsham, Rob McClure, Jill Paice, and Sebastian Arcelus

Thank you, Encores!

Ever and ever, I have wanted to be part of an audience of happy theatergoers singing the bouncy and infectious Frank Loesser tune, “Once In Love With Amy.” Yesterday evening, it finally happened, and I couldn’t have been more pleased.

The sing-along, famously introduced by Ray Bolger during the original run of Where’s Charley? back in 1948, is the highlight of the sparkling production of this cotton candy of a show that just concluded its run at City Center. And what a treat it was!

Where’s Charley? is a piece of fluff, a farce based on the 1892 play Charley’s Aunt by Brandon Thomas. When Charley’s wealthy, widowed, and long-absent aunt plans a visit to her nephew, Charley (Rob McClure) and his pal Jack (Sebastian Arcelus) want her to chaperone a rendezvous they have planned with their respective sweethearts, Amy (Lauren Worsham) and Kitty (Jill Paice)—who, being respectable young ladies, would not otherwise join them. When the aunt postpones her trip, the only way to save the day is for Charley to pretend to be her. He dons a costume he has on hand for a theatrical production, and the rest is what you would expect it to be: lots of running around, complications, and the triumph of love.

Farce isn’t easy to pull off; indeed, the sillier the premise, the more difficult it is to carry the audience along. And Where’s Charley? is about as silly as they come.

Happily, the cast, under the direction of John Doyle, is perfection. They land every line with perfect comic timing, and they sing Loesser’s songs with such panache that every tune comes off as a polished gem, whether it be a straightforward love song like “Lovelier Than Ever,” winningly sung by veterans Howard McGillin and Rebecca Luker, or a comic number, like “The New Ashmolean Marching Society and Students’ Conservatory Band,” which serves no purpose whatsoever and which I would not excise for the world.

The Encores! Orchestra, under the baton of Rob Berman, is in glorious form, as is the choreography by Alex Sanchez, as are the singers and dancers of the chorus. Indeed, I would like to shower everyone associated with the Encores! production of Where's Charley? with rose petals.

But if I must single out one performer, it would be Rob McClure as Charley and as Charley’s alter ego, his aunt Donna Lucia D’Alvadorez who has lived for many years in Brazil…”where the nuts come from.” Mr. McClure’s performance is inspired. He may not be Ray Bolger, but he is Rob McClure, which is high praise indeed.

I want to end this blog entry by taking a cue from Where's Charley? and inviting you to sing along with “Once In Love With Amy.” Direct your computer’s search engine to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puvavzSbgS0, where you will find a clip of Ray Bolger singing his signature song, from the 1952 film version of Where’s Charley?. Enjoy!

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A Tiger Seeks Wisdom While War Rages On and Souls Wander Aimlessly

2011-03-20T16:23:00.015-04:00

Robin Williams stars in Bengal Tiger

Quick. What pops into your head when I say the words “comedy” and “Robin Williams” in the same sentence?

Wild, perhaps? Inventive? Unpredictable? Hilarious?

Whatever your response, chances are your list does not include such terms as war, rape, death, or angst.

Yet these are exactly what you get with the new play by Rajiv Joseph, Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo, now in previews at the Richard Rodgers Theatre and most definitely billed as a comedy starring Robin Williams.

War is hell, or at least purgatory, for both the living and the dead who inhabit the world of Bengal Tiger, and the comedy that comes through is of the darkest existential kind.

Williams plays the title character—yes, the tiger—shot to death after he chomps off the hand of a U. S. soldier who has foolishly stuck it into the beast’s cage at the Baghdad Zoo sometime during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After death, the tiger becomes most philosophic, seeking to understand the nature of God and the universe, of sin and redemption: “Why does God make predators and then get angry with us when we prey?”

The tiger finds he is not alone in his quest for answers. Soon he is surrounded by both the dead and the still-living souls whose lives have been upended by war. These include two American soldiers, Kev (Brad Fleischer), the tiger killer, and Tom (Glenn Davis), he of the amputated hand.

Both soldiers are young and inexperienced in war and in the ways of the world. Kev is rattled to the bone with a never-ending dread that consumes him, and he is haunted by the vision of the tiger he has shot until he can no longer live with it. Tom is obsessed with smuggling out of the country a gold toilet seat he has taken from Saddam Hussein’s mansion, and imagines the prize will be his ticket to luckytown.

As the play progresses, the parade of souls continues to grow. Musa (Arian Moayed), a Turkish gardener who has been employed as a translator by the U. S. military, is haunted by the ghost of his sister, who was raped by Saddam Hussein’s son Uday (brilliantly and scarily portrayed by Hrach Titizian). When we first see Uday, he too is dead and is carrying around the head of his decapitated brother.

Laughing yet?

Being dead stops no one from interacting with the living as if in life. Uday, in particular, is a very physical presence as he goads Musa into becoming a terrorist, while Musa wants nothing more than to get back to being a gardener. Rounding out the cast are Necar Zadegan as a leper, and Sheila Vand as both a prostitute and as Musa’s dead sister.

It should be noted that all of the cast, save for Robin Williams, are recreating their roles from the original production of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Their experience with the play shows, and all of these performances are sharply drawn, under the polished direction of Moisés Kaufman.

At the preview performance I attended, Mr. Williams played it straight, seemingly wanting to fit in without disturbing the well-established flow. There were a couple of moments in which he seemed poised to let loose his comic tongue, but then he pulled back.

This kind of existential dark comedy is difficult to pull off. Williams has had a shot at it before, when he played Estragon opposite Steve Martin’s Vladimir in Waiting for Godot back in 1988. But Rajiv Joseph--while an interesting playwright--is not Samuel Beckett, and Bengal Tiger--while an interesting play--is not Godot, so Mr. Williams will need to find his voice as the tiger on his own.

It should be interesting to watch him grow into the role so as not to be seen as a being there solely on the basis of his box office draw. It would help his cause, I believe, if the production were not billed as a comedy. Word-of-mouth will make that abundantly clear, in an event.

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War Horse: Indulge Your Inner Pre-Teen Self

2011-03-19T17:58:00.014-04:00

Joey, the War Horse, with his owner, Albert.

If I were 12 years old—or even if I could be more in touch with my inner 12-year-old self—I believe I would be enthralled with War Horse, now on view at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.

Certainly there is much to be admired in this magnificent pageant of a show, presented with obvious love, pride, and skill by the National Theatre of Great Britain. Central to its magnificence is the amazing work by the Handspring Puppet Company (design, fabrication and direction are credited to Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones), which has found a way to bring life-size horses onto the stage and to give real personality to the “character” of Joey, the War Horse of the title. Basil Twist and Julie Taymor, eat your hearts out!

There are 45 performers on hand to enact this staged version of the novel of the same name by Michael Morpurgo, a popular and prolific author of children’s books. (A film version, directed by Steven Spielberg, is also in the works.)

The production stints on nothing. There are revolving turntables and lifts, video imagery and projections similar in style to those used so effectively in the Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of Sunday in the Park With George a couple of years back, depictions of battles, a full-size military tank, fog machines, and live and recorded music to both underscore and heighten the action onstage.

Given all that has gone into this production, I blush at my curmudgeonly take on the show, which is that whatever War Horse is, it is not a play—and I say this knowing that it is certain to be in strong contention for a Tony Award for best play.

But first the plot, such as it is: boy meets horse, boy loses horse, boy and horse may or may not be reunited in the end. (I’m not so much of a curmudgeon that I would give away the ending). All of this is set against the backdrop of World War I, as seen through the eyes of Joey and his human companion, Albert (Seth Numrich). Don’t go looking for any psychological drama in the manner of Equus; the plot is exactly as I have described it.

And therein lies the problem. There may be 45 in the cast, but no character seems to be anything more than a plot device. Oh, I’ll confess to a drop of moisture in my eyes at one or two pivotal points, but watching War Horse is like watching the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall or Riverdance or some other extravaganza. It may be theatrical, but it isn’t theater. It may be dramatic, but it isn’t drama. It may be well performed, but it isn’t acting, at least not in the sense of depicting fully realized characters or even of serving some grand theme.

War Horse, the show, is perhaps ideal for the same audience as War Horse the book—with the proviso that there are some potentially disturbing scenes of war and one or two uses of the “F” word. So PG-13 rather than PG.

I want to reiterate that everything is so well done that if you want to see War Horse just for the spectacle of it, by all means dig up your inner 12-year-old and indulge yourselves.

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The Book of Mormon: Raunchy, Wild, Crazy, and Great Fun

2011-03-19T13:13:00.025-04:00

The Book of Mormon. Photo by Joan Marcus

Let me cut to the chase. The Book of Mormon is the funniest, cleverest, most original and most crowd-pleasing musical I have seen since Urinetown a decade ago.

It’s also the raunchiest and most irreverent, if those things matter to you—though surely you shouldn’t be surprised, given that two of its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are best known for the long-running raunchy and irreverent animated television show, South Park, and the third, Robert Lopez, co-wrote the raunchy and irreverent Tony Award-winning musical Avenue Q.

By the way, it’s OK if you are not a big fan of South Park the television show, which is not particularly geared toward a Broadway musical audience. The question is, did you like South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut, the—yes—raunchy and irreverent musical movie from 1999 that Parker and Trey co-wrote? If so, you will probably also like The Book of Mormon, which, except for the aforementioned ranch and irreverence, is a good old-fashioned Broadway musical presented with great joy and polish by a uniformly strong cast, under the direction of Mr. Parker and Casey Nicholaw, the director and choreographer for Elf: The Musical and The Drowsy Chaperone, as well as choreographer for Spamalot.

I’ve got to say that I greatly enjoyed South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut, and at least two of its songs stick in my mind to this day: "Blame Canada," which was nominated for an Academy Award even though its colorful language meant it couldn’t be sung at the Awards show exactly as written, and "What Would Brian Boitano Do?," a song that Mr. Boitano, the Olympic figure skating champion, must have appreciated since he now has a cooking show called What Would Brian Boitano Make?

The songs in The Book of Mormon are at least as much fun. Many of them parody or at least reference other songs with which you may be familiar, including a very funny variation on "Hakuna Matata" from The Lion King but whose meaning is rather different from the “no worries” message of the Elton John/Tim Rice song from the Disney musical. Indeed, there are several references to The Lion King throughout The Book of Mormon, as well as tunes that riff off of numbers from Annie, Wicked and, most hilariously, from The King and I.

The story follows the adventures of Elder Price, a 19-year-old missionary-in-training who is about to embark on his first tour of duty on behalf of the church. Elder Price (Andrew Rannells, formerly of Jersey Boys and Hairspray, who here has incorporated a bit of Jim Carrey into his performance) is the star pupil. Everything is going his way, and he is convinced he will be sent to serve the Lord in his dream location—Orlando, Florida.

Much to his surprise, however, Elder Price is assigned to do his mission work in Uganda, partnered with the shlubbiest of the entire bunch, the dorky, overweight, daydreamer Elder Cunningham, wonderfully enacted by Josh Gad (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) as a pop culture film fanatic who references pretty much everything he says to Star Wars, Star Trek, and Lord of the Rings.

We join this mismatched pair as they meet up with their fellow Mormons in Uganda and take on the task of conversion and baptism. Meanwhile, the villagers are less concerned with the state of their souls than with the misery of their day-to-day existence (“I have maggots in my scrotum,” the tribal doctor informs Elder Cunningham, wondering how Mormonism will help him). The villagers are also being threatened with forced genital mutilation and other assorted acts of brutality by a self-declared revolutionary general (Brian Tyree Henry) and his band of thugs. With so much to deal with, it is not surprising they show little interest in the message the missionaries bring to them.

That is until Elder Cunningham begins to embellish the official line with his own tales, offering up an unusual treatment for AIDS and warning the villagers that they need to change their wicked ways, lest they “burn in the fiery pits of Mordor!”

Finally, here is one missionary who makes sense, and they begin to warm to this new religion. The funniest moments in the show come when the villagers take Elder Cunningham’s bits of advice and string them together to create a pageant depicting the founding of Mormonism, which they present with great exuberance to the Mission President (Lewis Cleale) who has come to check on how things are progressing.

Needless to say, since The Book of Mormon is truly an old-fashioned musical comedy at heart, all is resolved in the end and the audience leaves the theater in a happy, happy mood.

Hakuna Matata, indeed!

Come Tony Awards time, The Book of Mormon will be the musical to beat. The only question is, what can they possibly show on the televised broadcast without bleeping out every other word?

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Kin: A Sharp and Funny Look at Friends and Family

2011-03-13T09:05:00.006-04:00

Sam Gold, Kristen Bush, Bathsheba Doran, & Patch Darragh.

If I were to have a play of my own produced, I can’t think of a an organization I’d rather have behind me than Playwrights Horizons, with its stated mission of supporting and developing contemporary American playwrights—a mission it lives up to consistently and with great results.

This season alone has given us such lovely little gems as Amy Herzog’s After the Revolution, and Adam Bock’s A Small Fire, both of which I have written about previously. Now we have Kin, a new play by Bathsheba Doran, which is so clearly a labor of love for all concerned.

Ms. Doran, who also writes for television, has several plays to her credit and has garnered a number of playwriting awards, although, to judge by published reviews (I’ve not seen any of her previous work), she has not always been wildly embraced by the critics.

However, I predict a more enthusiastic response to Kin, a sharp and funny riff on the theme of “boy meets girl” that is being performed by a strong ensemble cast—beautifully directed by Sam Gold, a rising star who continues to bring out the best in the productions he is associated with (Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens, and Kim Rosenstock’s Tigers Be Still, to mention but a few of his recent successes).

Kin tells the story of Anna, an Ivy League English lit professor, who becomes romantically involved with Sean, an Irish immigrant who works as a personal trainer. The pair, well-acted by Kristen Bush and Patch Darragh (“Tom” in Roundabout’s wonderful production of A Glass Menagerie last season), come together, drift apart, and reunite over the course of the play.

Ms. Doran weaves a tapestry out of short scenes involving the pair and various members of their intersecting and growing circle of friends and family, of which there are perhaps a few more than the weave of the plot can comfortably carry. At times, I felt as though I were watching one of a series of plays, and that—over time—each of the characters would take turns being the central character. Who knows? Maybe this is what the playwright has in mind.

If that is so, at least two of them deserve plays of their own. One is Anna’s neurotic actress friend Helena who keeps popping in and out of Anna's life. As portrayed by Laura Heisler, Helena is both wacky-funny and a little scary. If a scene involving a bear and a hunter seems to have been dropped into Kin from some other play altogether, it is also very much in keeping with the character.

The other deeply compelling role is that of Linda, Sean’s agoraphobic mother back in Ireland. Richly portrayed by Suzanne Bertish, Linda is given a powerful and moving back-story, so that when she emerges from her home for the first time in decades, it becomes a momentous occasion.

Director Gold manages all of the intersecting storylines with great skill, aided splendidly by scenic designer Paul Steinberg, who keeps the many scene changes moving at a rapid pace and throws in at least one surprising touch that takes a common theatrical device and pushes it over the top to hilarious results.

Given Ms. Doran’s increasing visibility as a television writer, the playwright may decide that Hollywood is where her future lies. If that’s the case, I would encourage her to keep the characters she has so lovingly introduced in Kin and further develop them for a wider audience. And while she is at it, I hope she continues to find time for writing for the theater. Perhaps an Obie or two would provide the impetus to keep her coming back to New York.

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Timon of Athens: Smart and Engaging Production of a Problematic Play

2011-03-06T15:31:00.005-05:00

Richard Thomas as Timon

Timon of Athens, which may or may not have been written by Shakespeare, is seldom trotted out for public viewing due to its reputation as a confusing mess of a play—either a lesser work by the bard or a not-ready-for-prime-time collaborative effort by two or more of his contemporaries.

Thus, I attended the current production at the Public Theater with some trepidation, not expecting much but drawn by curiosity about a play I’d neither seen nor read before, not to mention the allure of the $15 ticket price.

So—drum roll please—it gives me great pleasure to offer up kudos to all involved for giving us this very accessible and most engaging Timon, directed by Barry Edelstein and performed by a very able cast, headed up in the title role by Richard Thomas, someone I never would have imagined to be so solid a Shakespearean actor.

Edelstein has taken the five-act original and broken it into two, and each act has its own tone and style. Some of the critics have found the two parts somewhat incompatible, but I have a different take, which I will explain anon.

But first the plot: In what we shall call Act I, Timon, a wealthy Athenian, surrounds himself with men he considers to be his closest and most trustworthy companions. He provides for their entertainment and lavishes generous gifts on them in the naive belief that this is simply what good friends do for one another. The seeming friends are, not surprisingly, eager to be the recipients of Timon’s largesse but are also quick to turn their backs on him after he has spent himself into ruinous debt.

In Act II, having lost his home and his worldly possessions, not to mention his trust in his fellow man, Timon has become a mad hermit, hiding out in the wilderness and declaiming: “I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind.” In his few encounters with others, he rails against humanity for its inhumanity, and in the end dies alone, likely by his own hand.

One hypothesis about the play’s creation posits that Timon represents a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, who counted The Revenger’s Tragedy among his works. Middleton was a member of Shakespeare’s theatrical company, which makes the idea at least plausible. But more convincing is the shift in the aforementioned tone and style of the play itself. The language of the first half of the play fits in well with the Jacobean age, more cynical and modern-seeming than the second half, which is far more Elizabethan (i. e. Shakespearean) in its use of heightened tone and poetic language.

Assuming Edelstein and company did not tinker with the language of the play itself, the stylistic transition from Jacobean to Elizabethan is quite pronounced. It might be the reason some critics have found the play disjointed. Another way of looking at it, however, might consider the change in language to reflect the change in Timon’s world view. A modern take would be that Timon suffers from a bipolar disorder. We see him in the early scenes displaying a manic personality—partying all night, throwing around his money with a patent disregard for the consequences. Then, in the second half, we see his descent into a generalized rage that turns in the end to despair and suicide. While the play toys around with being a more typically Jacobean revenge tragedy—there is a subplot involving a military rebellion that Timon supports—it may be that Shakespeare had something else in mind altogether as he took over the writing duties.

For me, at least, this production of Timon of Athens amounts to the unearthing of a previously undiscovered treasure. Coming on the heals of the terrific Broadway production of The Merchant of Venice, along with still-evolving but generally strong presentations of works by Middleton and his peers by the estimable Red Bull Theater, Timon is yet another example of how Americans are finding new ways of thinking about these classic dramas without the use of fake British accents or silly gimmickry. I look forward to more such discoveries.

In addition to praising Edelstein and Thomas, I would like to tip my hat to scenic designer Neil Patel, who has managed to make much out of little, to the fine guitar work by Simon Kafka, and to actor Triney Sandoval (a standout, as well, in the recent A Free Man of Color) who ought someday to play Harpo or Chico Marx in a production of Minnie's Boys or Animal Crackers.

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The Unkindness of Strangers: The Wooster Group Does Tennessee Williams

2011-02-21T11:27:00.005-05:00

Tennessee Williams

Vieux Carré is generally considered to be one of Tennessee Williams’ late works, since it was originally produced (and had a very short run) in 1977. But the play has so much in common with the The Glass Menagerie (1944) that it could very well be a sequel to the more famous work. Indeed, recent Williams scholarship has identified a working script dating to 1939, when the writer was living at the very street address where Vieux Carré takes place.

As in The Glass Menagerie, the central character is a writer—here referred to as “The Writer,” but most certainly he could be called “Tom.” Imagine that Tom has fled his home in St. Louis and has found himself ensconced, at least temporarily, in a rundown boarding house on Rue Toulouse in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It is here, among the poor, physically ill, and mentally and emotionally precarious denizens of the household, that Tom finds both his sexual identity and his voice as a writer.

Now, you don’t go to a theatrical production by The Wooster Group expecting to see a straightforward interpretation of a play. The SoHo-based company, with its roots in experimental, avant-garde performance art, loves to push the envelope in an effort to make the audience think about the content while feeling, perhaps, a tad uncomfortable with its deconstructed and reconstructed works.

The current effort, officially titled The Wooster Group’s Version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré, leaves the company’s reputation intact. In this case, however, it is difficult to say which provides the most discomfort—the production itself or the physical space where the audience is seated in the Jerome Robbins’ Theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center on West 37^th Street. Surely someone unfamiliar with the human anatomy, or possibly with a large investment in a chiropractic treatment center, came up with the idea of steeply banked rows of thinly upholstered straight-backed pull-down benches, where the audience is crammed, two to a bench—and, in the case of Vieux Carré, at least—for two solid intermissionless hours yet. Not good.

As for the Wooster Group, it has taken a relatively delicate piece of writing—which, unlike the leaden The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore from 1963 (currently on view at the Laura Pels Theatre), contains some of that lovely, ethereal language that Williams at his best was so very good at—and beats it to a pulp.

In order to connect with the play at all, we are forced to deal with annoying and distracting affections such as pointless video images and characters strutting around in leather thongs and protruding erect prosthetic phalluses that are about as sexually interesting as the character of the tubercular street artist who repeatedly attempts to seduce The Writer while coughing into an oversized bloody handkerchief. What a turn-on!

It is only during those times when the actors are actually allowed to perform the play that we get any sense of Williams’ voice emerging from the noise, and the characters come into focus through generally good performances by the company. I especially liked Kate Valk in her dual roles of Jane Sparks (a down-on-her-luck character who bears a resemblance to Blanche DuBois) and Mrs. Wire, the brash and crazy landlady and would-be surrogate mother to The Writer, who, like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, has had quite enough of mothers, thank you.

Taken as a whole, The Wooster Group’s Version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré is rather an ordeal to sit through. I’m not sorry I did sit through it as I had not previously seen a production of the play, but I would love to see a straightforward production, possibly in rep with The Glass Menagerie. If you are similarly motivated, then by all means head on out to the Baryshikov Arts Center--but you might want to bring your own cushion or stand in the back.

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The Merchant of Venice: Compelling Production of A Challenging Play

2011-02-14T20:10:00.013-05:00

Lily Rabe and Al Pacino

Anyone planning a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice needs to wrestle with how to portray Shylock, the money-lending Jew who demands payment of a “pound of flesh” when the title character in the play defaults on a loan.

Should the rampant anti-Semitism of the age—not to mention Jew-baiting theatrical precursors to Shakespeare—hold sway? Or should we view Shylock through more modern and sympathetic eyes? Both are legitimate interpretations, as the text itself offers enough leeway to allow for either perspective to hold sway.

Whatever choice is made, the thing I ask for as a playgoer is that the portrayal be an honest one. To give what I consider to be an egregious example, I was deeply offended by the inane and condescending production of Christopher Marlowe’s vicious-tongued The Jew of Malta, directed by David Herskovits a few years back with a twitchy wink-and-nod-we’re-only-joking sensibility that ruined the experience of watching the play. I get that the 16^th century was not particularly kind to Jews. Please don’t insult my intelligence, and don’t fear so much for my delicate sensibilities that you feel compelled to offer up such a cowardly production.

So I am both relieved and delighted to report that the current Broadway production of The Merchant of Venice is compelling, smart, and thoroughly honest. Actor Al Pacino and director Daniel Sullivan offer us a Shylock who is both victimizer and victim, in acknowledgment of the truth that being on the receiving end of bigotry does not necessarily mean you are a kind and loving person deep down inside.

Pacino, in a measured performance that embodies the layers of meaning contained within every word he utters, gives us a Shylock who has spent his life being demeaned and scorned by his Christian countrymen and who has survived by his wit and intellect alone. This Shylock has hardened himself to the cruelties of the world, and that has left precious little room for the softer emotions, including mercy (an important theme of the play) or the ability to show any tenderness toward his daughter Jessica. This cold-heartedness, however self-protecting its origin, is the cause of his downfall and gives plausibility to his daughter’s abandonment of him and of her Jewish faith.

Of course, The Merchant of Venice is not only about Shylock, whose story comes to its conclusion well before the end of the play. Playing off the tragedy of Shylock is the tale of Antonio, the merchant of the title, who finds himself before the court of law when he is unable to replay a loan of 3,000 ducats. It is his pound of flesh that is to be given in forfeit, in accordance to the agreement he accepted when he took out the loan.

Antonio is another complicated character. We know he is a virulent anti-Semite, yet he willingly joins into a monetary arrangement with Shylock--and not out of any need of his own, but to provide funds to give to his friend Bassanio so that the latter may woo the lady Portia. Why would Antonio do that? Thanks to a strong and convincing performance by Byron Jennings, we see a psychological basis for his actions, for his general air of melancholy, and, later, for his willingness to sacrifice himself. He is not just a plot device, but a complex human being who earns our sympathy despite his initial bigotry and arrogance.

The characters of Portia (Lily Rabe) and Bassanio (David Harbour) belong less to a Shakespearean tragedy than to one of his romances, but both actors serve their parts well. Ms. Rabe, in particular, rolls that Elizabethan English off her tongue so well that it seems absolutely natural to her, and she gives full range to both the comic and the serious sides of her character.

In truth, there is not a weak performance among the cast of 32, who work together as well as any ensemble I can recall seeing. If I were compelled to single out a few more, Christopher Fitzgerald as Launcelot Gobbo, Heather Lind as Jessica, and Marsha Stephanie Blake at Portia’s lady-in-waiting give splendid performances in these smaller supporting roles.

I also want to hand it to director Daniel Sullivan. Shakespeare is, after all, Shakespeare. It takes a lot of work to make it accessible to a modern audience. At the performance I attended, it was clear there were many there who were drawn by the star power of Mr. Pacino and who were unfamiliar with the play itself. I heard gasps on more than one occasion as plot elements were revealed (e. g. Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity). It’s nice to know that the Bard still has the power to astonish.

I also liked that, despite the seeming all’s-well ending, we can see there will be some troublesome days ahead, especially for Jessica who has yet to work through her issues with both the father and the faith she has abandoned in a pique of rebellion. It’s most intriguing that she is given the final moments onstage.

Finally, a word about the scenic design by Mark Wendland, the costume design by Jess Goldstein, and the incidental music by Dan Moses Schreier. That word would be “Brilliant.”

Bravo to all who were involved in giving us this splendid production!

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The Witch of Edmonton: Red Bull's Best Work Yet

2011-02-04T22:18:00.015-05:00

Let me begin by acknowledging that 17th Century Jacobean drama is not everyone’s cup of tea.

But I am a huge admirer both of the form and of the gutsy job of performing it for today’s audiences that has been the hallmark of Red Bull Theater and its resident artistic director Jesse Berger.

One thing I have been waiting for, however, while attending Red Bull’s productions over the last several years, is for Mr. Berger to display more trust in the original creators of these (usually) tales of sexual obsession and vengeance among the high and the mighty of royal society.

The outpouring of stage blood and sometimes outlandish directorial choices (I’m pretty sure that John Webster did not interpolate a Rodgers and Hart song into The Duchess of Malfi when he wrote it in 1612) that have accompanied Red Bull productions to date have tended to make things rather more off-kilter than perhaps they have needed to be.

Still, what I have particularly appreciated about Red Bull is that it has continued to improve with each new production: better staging, better sets, better costumes, better casting, better performances, and, most significantly, a sharper eye toward revealing the sometimes hidden treasures that abide within these 400-year-old dramas.

Indeed, I get a sense that Mr. Berger has become a true student of Jacobean theater, worrying less about how to bring the play to the audience and more about how to bring the audience to the play.

And so I am quite pleased to say that the company’s current production of The Witch of Edmonton, at the Theater of St. Clement’s, is its best yet—hitting the mark in almost every area, fully embracing the play in a highly engaging production without resorting to the old bag of stage tricks aimed at appeasing an imagined antsy audience.

The Witch of Edmonton itself is a much different play than others from that age. While revenge is a theme, it is not the all-encompassing driver as it is in The Duchess of Malfi or Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. For one thing, The Witch of Edmonton is not about the lusty lives of dukes and duchesses; rather it is what you might call a domestic drama, dealing with the foibles and follies of everyday foks—the good citizens of Edmonton.

The play itself, dating from 1621, near the end of the Jacobean era, is attributed to three collaborating authors, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, who based the work on a fairly well-known contemporary pamphlet that reported the story of one Elizabeth Sawyer, said to be a witch.

The witch's story is one of three plot threads to the play, making it likely that the three writers worked individually on their parts before combining them for production on stage. Elizabeth is a poor, elderly, and justifiably cantankerous woman who, for no apparent reason, is hounded and bullied by her neighbors. She wishes so fervently to be avenged on her tormentors that the devil arrives (in the form of a talking shaggy dog named Tom), with a proposition to help her get even in exchange for her soul.

By being summoned into existence by Elizabeth, Tom is also free to pull his demonic tricks on others. One of these is Frank, who, without the devil’s help, has entangled himself into a case of bigamy, which ends rather badly for the second of his wives when Frank murders her. Tom hovers over Frank when he commits the crime, but it is unclear whether the devil is acting as a goad or merely as an observer.

The other plot thread is about a young, rather simple-minded fellow named Cuddy, who also befriends Tom—with a surprising result.

Devil or not, the characters in this play have a psychological complexity that leads us to ask serious questions about the extent to which humans are responsible for their own actions.

While The Witch of Edmonton has its share of bloodletting, these moments are handled with far more restraint tham anything that Mr. Berger and Red Bull have shown previously, and the play itself ends on an unexpected and heartfelt note of forgiveness and redemption—hardly the usual stuff of Jacobean drama.

The quality of the performances is somewhat mixed, but the key players requite themselves well, with particularly strong work by Adam Green as Cuddy, Charlayne Woodward as Elizabeth, and, especially, Derek Smith, who is mesmerizing as Tom the Dog, bringing both his dog-like and devlish qualities to full and disturbing life.

Also worthy of note are the costumes by Cait O’Connor, and the set by Anka Lupes, who has taken full advantage of the small workspace afforded at the theater.

By the way, tickets to The Witch of Edmonton start at $20, and are widely available at discounted prices through the usual sources (BroadwayBox.com, TheaterMania.com, and Playbill.com to name three). You may have noticed that Red Bull is offering some of its lower priced tickets for seats that it calls “onstage.” This is actually misleading, as the audience is simply seated on two sides of the set. Don’t fear to purchase one of the “onstage” seats; you will not be dragged into the action, and, actually, you may have a better view than those sitting on the other side of the theater.

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Speaking of discounts, while you are shaking your piggy bank and deciding whether you are willing to shell out the big bucks to see Robin Williams in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo or Ben Stiller and Edie Falco in The House of Blue Leaves on Broadway, here are a couple of less expensive alternatives.

Danny and Sylvia: The Danny Kaye Musical has announced a cute promotion now through March 26th, 2011. If your name is either DANNY or SYLVIA, you can get two tickets for the price of one. Just bring your proof of ID to the St. Luke’s Box Office, 308 West 46th Street, at least 30 minutes prior to any performance beginning this Saturday, February 5th. (This offer is not valid for the February 12th performance.)

In addition, Playwrights Horizons is offering discounted tickets to its next production, the world premiere of a play called Kin, written by Bathsheba Doran and directed by Obie Award winner Sam Gold.

Playwrights Horizons describes the play thusly: Anna’s an Ivy League poetry scholar. Sean’s an Irish personal trainer. They hardly seem destined for one another. But as their web of disparate family and friends crosses great distances — both psychologically and geographically — an unlikely new family is forged. Bathsheba Doran’s play sheds a sharp light on the changing face of kinship in the expansive landscape of the modern world.

Purchase tickets by March 21 with code KINGR and you get a discount: $40 (reg. $70) for the first 16 performances (Feb. 25 – March 10) or $55 (reg. $70) for all remaining performances March 11 – April 3. You can online at www.ticketcentral.com. Use code KINGR, or call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily), or present a printout of this blog post to the Ticket Central box office at 416 West 42nd Street (Noon-8pm daily). Do note that a limited number of $40 discounted tickets will be available for purchase. Subject to availability. Valid only in select rows.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.