A TREASURE TROVE OF GREAT THEATRICAL MOMENTS IN 2016

A Celebration of the 2016 Theater Year

Among the 163 productions I saw on and off Broadway in 2016, there were many delights, surprises, and moments that triggered a surge of Pure Delight. Here are six standouts:


A Surprising Turn After A Raggy Start

AL PACINO: By the time I saw David Mamet's much maligned play China Doll near the end of its Broadway run, things had miraculously fallen into place. Mr. Pacino had no trouble with his lines, his enunciation, voice projection, or performance, all of which were sharply criticized (along with the play itself) during previews and after the long-delayed opening. With rewrites in place and after a lot more work, the star was excellent in a demanding, non-stop role in the play about the waning days of a major power broker who hasn't quite lost his edge, no matter how trapped he seems to be. Other than an ending which came across as oddly tacked on, it seems that Mr. Mamet and Mr. Pacino were on to something after all. And despite predictions that this would be the last we'd be seeing of the 76-year-old actor on stage, he soon will be co-starring with Judith Light in God Looked Away at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. Pacino will be playing Tennessee Williams in the final rocky years of his life in the play penned by Williams's close friend and biographer Dotson Rader. Assuming Mr. Pacino wants to bring it to New York, expect to see it in the spring.



Two Performances that Got Better and Better

DANNY BURSTEIN AND JESSICA HECHT:  The delight in this latest rendition of the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof was in seeing two masterful performers, Danny Burstein as Tevye and Jessica Hecht as Golde, continuing to grow into these iconic roles over time.  I saw it early in the run, and then again several months later.  Happily neither had fallen into the famous Ethel Merman mantra concerning her opening night performances: "Call me Miss Bird's Eye; it's frozen." In the early days, Mr. Burstein tried so hard to not be Zero Mostel that his Tevye seemed to be just one of the residents of Anatevka  – a great ensemble player but not the over-the-top milkman we've come to expect. For her part, Ms. Hecht's Golde started out as an overbearing shrew who you might imagine (as does Tevye) "screaming at the servants day and night." Yet by my second viewing, Burstein had found his Tevye and made him as assertive and generous of spirit as you could ever want to see, and Ms. Hecht shaped her Golde into a tough yet tender-hearted women, beaten but not thwarted by her harsh life.  When they sang "Do You Love Me?" you absolutely could see them as the couple at the core of Fiddler.


A Special Year for a Special Guy

SHELDON HARNICK: 2016 was a great year for the spry, witty, and effervescent 92-year-old lyricist and delightful raconteur.  Mr. Harnick showed up at celebrations and tv shows and lecture halls all over the city as revivals of his shows sprang up everywhere:  Fiddler on the Roof and She Loves Me on Broadway, and Fiorello! and a reworked version of The Rothschilds off Broadway.  What a guy!

A Director Soars

RACHEL CHAVKIN:  It's a sure bet she will be nominated for a Tony for her thrilling direction of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, now wowing audiences on Broadway. Ms. Chavkin directed all of the previous incarnations of David Malloy's pop opera, which is derived from a section of Tolstoy's War and Peace. A great strength has always been the way in which the performers have woven around the audience members seated at cafe tables in relatively small off Broadway venues. But how on earth could the director recreate that feeling in a large Broadway house?  Suffice it to say, she had taken on the challenge and has flown with it to the stratosphere. Think "Yellow Brick Road" to get an idea of how she skillfully makes the entire Imperial Theater feel like an intimate Russian cafe. Ms. Chavkin has shown herself to be one of the most exciting directors working in New York now.  Great Comet is merely the latest production to have been polished by her gifted  hand.  Recently, she helmed the sit-up-and-take-notice production of The Royale at Lincoln Center, and the folk opera Hadestown at the New York Theatre Workshop. Both were resplendent. Don't be surprised if you see the latter return to another venue before too long.


Theater Company Bats 1000


RED BULL THEATER and its artistic director Jesse Berger keep improving year after year. Just a little over a decade old, the company began by doing off-the-wall productions of rarely-seen Jacobean dramas (e. g. The Revenger's Tragedy)  in whatever venues it could manage to find, and now it is doing first-rate productions with top-tier actors. In 2016, Red Bull gave us two glorious productions:  a fiery version of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and a brilliantly comic production of Sheridan's The School for Scandal.  Three mighty cheers for Red Bull!


A Chance to Brush Up Your ... 

SHAKESPEARE: It was a great year for the bard, as well. In addition to Red Bull's bravado version of Coriolanus, we got to see a marvelous Troilus and Cressida, along with the great Janet McTeer strutting the boards as Petruchio in the all female production of Taming of the Shrew, both  at Central Park's Delcorte Theater. More recently, we had the opportunity to enjoy the innovative Seeing Place's edgy production of Macbeth in the East Village. Right across the street from it, and playing at the same time, was the Broadway-bound production of Othello, starring David Oyelowo in the title role and Daniel Craig as the nefarious villain Iago.  We also had a quirky and rare production by a company calling itself Bad Quarto of The Tragicall History of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, the earliest known published version of Shakespeare's tragedy.  

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There were many other highlights to the theater year, of course.  In a previous entry, I identified 15 performances that stood out.  Click here to link: (15 great performances in 2016). 


Have a Happy New Year, everyone, and here's wishing you all the best of theater-going in 2017!!!



Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

  

CONVERSING WITH DANNY BURSTEIN at American Theatre Critics Association 2016 Bash

Danny Burstein at ATCA Event at Sardis

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of chatting with six-time Tony Award nominee Danny Burstein at the 2016 American Theatre Critics Association bash at Sardis.  

Although he is best known for his work in Broadway musicals (The Drowsy Chaperone; South Pacific; Follies; Cabaret; Fiddler on the Roof), I took the opportunity to single out his performance in the glorious 2013 revival of Lanford Wilson's play Talley's Folley and to ask why he doesn't do more straight plays.  (Here's a link to my review - TALLEY'S FOLLY).

He told me he loved working on that show (a Roundabout production at the Laura Pels) with his co-star Sarah Paulson. But, he said, he sustains his career through a mix of musicals, straight plays, television, and movies. Because he is best known for his performances in musicals, those are the offers he generally gets when it comes to theater work. 

It certainly can't hurt that, as he pointed out, musicals generally run longer than straight plays. Longer runs mean longer periods of time for receiving a pay check, cuz even Tony nominees gotta pay the bills! 

Still, I'm hoping to see him back in a straight play like Talley's Folly or like Clifford Odets' Golden Boy, in which he performed the same year (a production that was helmed by his director from South Pacific, Bartlett Sher.) Burstein nabbed a Tony nomination playing the role of the kind-hearted boxing trainer Tokio. (Here's a link to my review of that show - GOLDEN BOY)

By the way, Burstein is as down-to-earth and friendly as anyone in the business.  While many performers are cautious about even shaking hands, especially while they are in a show (germs, you know!), Danny was giving out bear hugs like they were going out of style.  

You can catch him in his Tony-nominated, Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk-winning performance as Tevye in the stellar Broadway revival of Fiddler On The Roof (directed by none other than Bartlett Sher, who is clearly a Burstein fan). Just so you know, the show is closing December 31, so best get your tickets now!  

Oh, and Danny, if you are reading this, tell your wonderful co-star Jessica Hecht that I've had a burning question I've been wanting to ask her for years -- about a Christmas tree. I didn't have a chance to talk to her at Sardis, but she can reach me at middledoc@gmail.com.  

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

Cabaret: Willkommen Back, But Should We Care?

Alan Cumming and Cast of 'Cabaret'
Photo by Joan Marcus

“You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.”

This quote, attributed to Josef Stalin, is a good way of explaining why the current revival of the 1998 production of Kander and Ebb’s iconic musical Cabaret—which takes place, after all, in Berlin in the midst of the rise of Nazism—fails to even remotely perturb its audience. And that, I think, is a problem. 

Case in point.  As the Emcee, Alan Cumming invites a couple of members of the audience onstage to dance with him.  At the performance I attended, the following conversation took place:

            Emcee to audience member:  What’s your name?

            Woman:  Laurie.

            Emcee:  Hi, Laurie.

            Woman:  Hi, Alan. 

Of course, Mr. Cumming is a pro. Though clearly taken aback at the breaking of the mood, he covered up by asserting that he was not “Alan,” whoever that is, but the emcee at the Kit Kat Klub.  The audience laughed, and the show went on.

Silk gloves. 

So my question is, why go through all the trouble of reconfiguring the seating so as to simulate the milieu of the decadent club and then offer up a show that is so incredibly tame? By comparison, the Nazis in The Sound of Music are more disturbing. 

Before I go further, let me explain that I did not see the previous incarnation of this production—though I did see the 1966 original and, of course, the memorable movie with Joel Grey repeating his performance as the Emcee and Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles. My understanding, however, is that what is now on view at Studio 54 cleaves closely to the 1998 Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall staging, so forgive me if I am raising questions about points I very well might have brought up a decade-and-a-half ago. 

I’m not suggesting that the initial interpretation of the role is sacrosanct. But one thing I liked about it is that the Emcee seemed not to be human, but the kind of being that might have been conjured up by Ray Bradbury for the carnival of lost souls in his shiver-inducing novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Among such company, the Kit Kat Klub becomes a scary place to visit. We risk losing our own souls if we are not very careful—for instance, by getting caught up in the song “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes” and being hit in the face with its final anti-Semitic line.  That moment is truly disconcerting, not because it offends (although it does), but because it forces us into being complicit.     

The Emcee should be our amoral guide through the hell that is taking shape all around us—an opportunist willing to go in whichever direction the wind happens to be blowing.

But with this production, he is now an Everyman, clearly pretending to be naughty, repeating his same old shtick night after night (“Ladies…and gennlemen”) and someone we can picture removing his makeup and living a very ordinary life at the end of the performance. This Kit Kat Klub is no more scary than La Cage Aux Folles.   

Towards the end of the evening, as the Emcee becomes less steady, we are perhaps meant to identify with him, to share his sense of entrapment until the final image that is supposed to make us gasp.  The trouble is, with this reconceptualization no one has bothered to give the Emcee a backstory or any personality at all other than that of the ever-present overseer.  How are we to empathize with him when we don’t get to know anything about him? How much more effective would that final scene be if it were Herr Schultz we see in the hands of the Nazis? 

So, like the reporter at Ford’s Theater interviewing Mary Todd Lincoln right after her husband was shot, you might want to know “aside from that, what did you think of the play?” 

The songs are grand, of course, including those interpolated from the film, and Mr. Cumming and the rest of the Kit Kat Klub crew of performers and musicians are in solid form.  If some of their movements seem jaded and rote (especially in the opening number), that actually is appropriate and in character. It’s easy to imagine that the Emcee and his colleagues have been performing the same bits forever, so that they have become routine for them. 

As for the rest of the cast, only Aaron Krohn as Ernst and Gayle Rankin as Fräulein Kost, both of them Nazi sympathizers, capture the spirit of their roles. Linda Emond and Danny Burstein are fine as the middle aged couple who are drawn together out of mutual loneliness and a certain degree of affection, though their connection as a couple remains so tenuous that, frankly, it is no great loss when it falls apart. 

Much the same could be said of Bill Heck as Cliff, present as an observer of the scene, and Michelle Williams as Sally Bowles—a character who has been raised to a level of great significance by Liza Minnelli’s take on her but who seems to be just another lost and unaware wanderer. Neither the characters nor the actors portraying them in this production add much to the sketchiness of their roles, so that they seem to be cut from the same mold as Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz. 

In the end, all of them are types rather than flesh and blood people that you can care much about. You could say that Cliff represents America as it blandly watched the rise of the Nazi state; that Sally represents the self-absorbed British; that Fräulein Schneider represents the ordinary German people who cast a blind eye and declared that they were helpless to do anything about politics; that Herr Schultz represents the German Jews who rationalized themselves into Concentration Camps; and that the Emcee represents the general corruption of the times.  

It all makes for a nice thesis, but, as Ms. Edmond’s character Fräulein Schneider sings early in the show, “It will all go on if we’re here or not. So who cares?  So what?” 

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‘The Cradle Will Rock:’ Brecht and Weill For The Rest of Us

Encores!, the well-established and popular series of quickie revivals of seldom-seen Broadway musicals, now has a younger sibling.  Called Encores! Off-Center, it hopes to follow in its predecessor’s successful footsteps by offering up semi-staged versions of Off-Broadway shows. 

To judge from its first production at City Center, Marc Blitzstein’s Depression-era musical The Cradle Will Rock, it is still a little wobbly on its feet. 

In a speech before the invited dress rehearsal, artistic director Jeanine Tesori talked nervously about the breakneck speed at which everyone involved put the production together.  But, with all due respect (and I do have tremendous respect for the near-miracles that Encores! has pulled off over the years), if you want to be part of the Encores! family, that’s how they operate. 

So, let’s take a look at this first effort. 

On the plus side, the cast is wonderful, with outstanding performances by Anika Noni Rose, playing both the downtrodden prostitute Moll and the condescending woman-of-wealth Mrs. Mister;  Judy Kuhn as a corrupt newspaper editor; and Danny Burstein as the arrogant and powerful Mr. Mister, owner of the steel mill and pretty much everyone and everything in the town. In smaller but key roles, Raúl Esparza and Da’Vine Joy Randolph give rousing star-turn performances of their respective numbers as well.

However, there are some problems, beginning with the fact that—even though the talented Sam Gold is credited as director—this is a concert production, not even partially staged. In truth, Encores! itself does not always hit a homerun in the staging department, but still…a concert is a concert.  If you go, know that you will be seeing folks dressed in tuxes and gowns sitting on a row of chairs and rising to sing at stand mikes. 

Second, while the performers are nicely accompanied by a 13-piece orchestra, under the sure hand of Chris Fenwick, the orchestrations are not the ones that Mr. Blitzstein wrote; rather, they have been written by Josh Clayton.  Mr. Clayton is a fine orchestrator, but using the originals is kind of a hallmark of Encores! productions and serves its mission well. 

The Cradle Will Rock has a famous (indeed, legendary) history surrounding its first performance, which featured Mr. Blitzstein doing solo duties at the piano.  The new orchestrations are cool, but the originals would have been cooler, and having just a piano accompanying the singers would have been coolest.  A couple of years back, I saw a piano-accompanied production by Theater 1010 at the Park Avenue Christian Church.  It was vibrant, very well performed, and strove to capture the feel of the 1937 original.  I was hoping for the same again.

As for the musical itself, The Cradle Will Rock is a solid work, thanks to Mr. Blitzstein’s timeless and always-engaging jazz and pop-infused score.  It certainly owes much to Brecht and Weill—and the Encores! Off-Center production, which has shrunk the show to a taut 90 minutes, plays up the themes of corruption and cynicism, which, for obvious reasons, resonate with today’s audiences.  It even evokes the spirit of the founder of the philosophy of cynicism, Diogenes, though the use of one of his more stinging quotes displayed in large letters on the back wall:  “In the rich man’s house, the only place to spit is in his face.” 

If you’ve never seen a production of The Cradle Will Rock, I do recommend you go.  This initial outing by Encores! Off-Center may disappoint for the reasons I’ve explained, but given the caliber of talent singing into those mikes, it is certainly worth the visit.

By the way, the other two productions for this initial season are the already-sold-out single performance of Jeanine Tesori’s own Violet (starring Sutton Foster), and Nancy Ford’s I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road.  

I wish Encores! Off-Center well.  To have a home like this for Off Broadway musicals is a splendid enterprise.  Some suggestions:  The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Dames At Sea, Little Mary Sunshine, or even something else by Blitzstein, perhaps No For An Answer, his follow-up to The Cradle Will Rock.  

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share your own theater stories by posting a comment.