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

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.
                          
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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

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

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!

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

 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'

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!

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. 

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

Modern Love Among the Scientific Set

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.

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For Theatergoers, New York Is A Summer Festival

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? 

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