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.  

  

SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL: Joyous Production from Red Bull Theater of 18th Century Comic Romp

To start with, kudos to Charles G. LaPointe for yesterday’s well-deserved Drama Desk nomination, garnered for his wig design that is one of the many delightful details that mark Red Bull Theater’s rollicking production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s late Restoration comedy, The School For Scandal, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. 

As much as we have enjoyed Red Bull’s forays into the dark and blood-soaked world of Jacobean drama (The Duchess of Malfi, The Revengers Tragedy, The Changeling), it is a pleasure to be able to attend one of the company’s productions designed (and succeeding) solely at making us laugh – and with a play dating to 1777 to boot. The Colonists across the Atlantic may have been in revolt, but that didn’t prevent the patrons of the Drury Lane Theatre, or us, from delighting in the follies and foibles of characters who traded in the literal backstabbing of the Jacobean era for more stylish and gleeful gossip and social intrigue.   

And what a marvelous bunch of prattling busybodies, pretentious rumormongers, and flingers of persiflage they are:  Lady Sneerwell, Snake, Mrs. Candour and the rest, all eager to dish and luxuriate in schadenfreude as one or the other of their circle gets enmeshed in some delicious scandal and subsequent public humiliation. 

Lady Sneerwell (Frances Barber) is the queen bee of the coterie of meddlers and blatherskites.  As the play opens, she and her colleague Snake (Jacob Dresch, he of the green wig and slithering manner) are conniving to arrange a tryst between Maria (Nadine Malouf), the ward of an acquaintance, and the seemingly honorable Joseph Surface (Christian Conn). It’s not that she gives a fig for either of these young folks; she simply wants to keep Maria away from Joseph’s disreputable brother Charles (Christian DeMarais), whom she is eager to capture for herself.

Frances Barber and a green-wigged Jacob Dresch

Meanwhile, Maria’s guardian, Sir Peter Teazle (Mark Linn-Baker, who performs with his usual perfect comic flair) has his own problems trying to keep up with his much younger wife (Helen Cespedes). Lady Teazle is relishing her immersion into the world of upper class shenanigans and is on the verge of leaping into a tryst of her own, preferably with Joseph. For his part, Joseph is eager to get his hands on any money he can garner out of a relationship with Lady Teazle. 

There are more twists to the convoluted plot than a pretzel on LSD, but suffice it to say, all works out happily in the end.

Periodically popping in and out of the story, Dana Ivey (bearing herself rather like Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess of Grantham on Downtown Abbey) beguiles as Lady Candour, a woman who loves gossiping about the shamefulness of gossipers – and she is more than happy to name names to anyone who will listen. Also on board, and playing it to the hilt, is Henry Stram as Sir Oliver Surface, the uncle of Joseph and Charles who shows up in multiple guises to determine which of his nephews is trustworthy.

But really, the entire cast, under Marc Vietor’s masterly direction, is top-rate, and every little detail is nigh unto perfection. Mr. LaPointe’s wigs, for example, along with some shuffling of accents, allow Ben Mehl to shine as he plays four separate servants, roles that would otherwise fade into the woodwork if they hadn't been so fine-tuned.  Andrea Lauer’s detailed period costumes and Greg Plasma’s original jaunty music add greatly to this joyous production.

I would be remiss if I were not to point out that the production retains a few lines and situations that reflect anti-Semitic and racist attitudes. Be prepared for some such moments, but be prepared, as well, to accept them as reflections of the times in which School For Scandal was written, and enjoy the play for what it is – a jolly romp. 

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 new website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

THE CHANGLING: Rare Production of Jacobean Drama Tries to Capture Grand Style of Blood and Lust -- With Mixed Results

Red Bull Theater Presents THE CHANGLING

Red Bull Theater and its founding artistic director Jesse Berger are well known for their over-the-top productions of blood soaked Jacobean dramas. So it surprises me to have to say that its current presentation of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s 17^th Century play The Changeling is rather tame in its staging and rocky in its embrace of heightened language. 

Oh, there is plenty of stage blood, and even a severed finger in the mix, but this is a play that is drenched in secrets, lies, treachery, and unbridled lust along with the gore, and it needs to engulf us in a tale of a pair of hell-bound souls who are beyond redemption.

The Changeling begins almost as if it were going to be a romantic comedy.  Beatrice-Joanna (Sara Topham) is betrothed to Alonzo (John Skelley), but is smitten at the very first sight of Alsemero (Christian Coulson), a handsome stranger who crosses her path. How will she dump the fiancé in order to get her heart’s desire? 

This could be the lead off into a madcap romp, perhaps one involving wily servants, that ends happily with the lovers united.  But things quickly veer in another direction altogether when Beatrice-Joanna concludes that the only way to rid herself of Alonzo is to have him killed.  

Without giving a thought to possible consequences, she enlists the aid of De Flores (Manoel Felciano), a servant in her father’s household, a man she despises but who has long lusted after her and is primed to do her bidding.  When the deed is done (the severed finger is the proof he offers to her), De Flores declines the gold she throws at him and insists that she give herself to him instead. Before you know it, the two are mutually bound together in their shared guilt, while Beatrice-Joanna tries to figure out how to hide what she is doing from Alsemero, whom she is now free to wed.

There is also a comic subplot that takes place in a madhouse and a clever bit of chicanery (involving another servant) by which Beatrice-Joanna contrives to hide her loss of virginity. But for all intent, this is still a moral tragedy, and tragedy steeped in utter corruption is what should be at the core of the production. 

Instead, what we get is more like melodrama, with an underplayed sense of sexual madness (we hear quite a bit about it, but see very little of it). Even the play’s dark humor has been mined for laughs rather than for the way its sardonic quality reflects the overall tone.  And while the cast generally performs, projects, and enunciates the unfamiliar dialog well enough for the audience to understand, there is an unfortunate mix of elocution styles.  Some of the actors (Sam Tsoutsouvas as Beatrice-Joanna’s father is a prime example) manage to make the 17^th Century language seem most naturalistic, with the words falling “trippingly off the tongue,” as the playwrights’ contemporary William Shakespeare put it in Hamlet. Others, however, speak with unfortunately modern cadences, so that, once more, the production lacks consistency.

Admittedly, it does feel as if there are two different plays that were cobbled together long, long ago.  (Presumably, Middleton was responsible for the traditional Jacobean tragic scenes, while Rowley tackled the comic elements.) What is missing here is a clear enough vision to bring the two sides together. 

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 new website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

'Loot:'' Joe Orton's Anarchic Comedy In Madcap Revival By Red Bull Theater

Inspector Truscott of Scotland Yard is keeper of the keys in the land of Topsy-Turvydom in Red Bull Theater’s madcap revival of Joe Orton’s Loot.

Loot was one of three full-length plays (the others were Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and What The Butler Saw) that Orton penned between 1964 and the time of his brutal death three years later at the hands of his long-time lover Kenneth Halliwell. 

With his death, Orton’s quick-fire output solidified his legacy and his reputation as an iconoclastic writer who used dark humor to skewer the Church and persons in positions of authority. 

Although Orton provided Loot with a wafer thin plot and occasional swerves in tone, the play is anarchically comical, like the best of the Marx Brothers movies (e.g. Duck Soup). 

The “Groucho” of the play is Inspector Truscott, performed here to the very edge of manic madness by Rocco Sisto. Truscott has invaded the home of the McLeavy family just as they are about to hold funeral services for the recently deceased Mrs. McLeavy. He is ostensibly investigating the theft of a large sum of money (of which the McLeavys’ son Hal and Hal’s undertaker buddy Dennis are, indeed, guilty).

In order to conceal their crime, the miscreants have pulled the corpse out of the coffin and replaced it with the “loot.” Thereon hangs the plot.  But all of this is merely an excuse for Orton’s quite funny dialog, in which it is possible to find echoes of Oscar Wilde, W. S. Gilbert, Lewis Carroll, and the aforementioned Marx Brothers. 

Truscott, who despite having the best lines, represents what Orton saw as the stupidity, the oafishness, and the corruption of the police. There is, for example, a scene in which he smacks around one of the suspects—a bit of realism that does shock us out of the comic absurdity of most of the rest of the proceedings (as does a reference to Pakastani child prostitutes). With Orton, what you see is what you get.

Truly, though, Truscott is an inspired invention. All through Act I, he justifies his takeover of the McLeavy household by insisting he is a representative of the “Water Board,” there to inspect the plumbing. (Although Orton clearly was not referring to “waterboarding,” that does add an appropriately contemporary image he would undoubtedly appreciate as another opportunity to wag a finger at authority figures).

When Truscott is finally forced to confess his subterfuge, he brushes it off this way:  “Any deception I practiced was never intended to deceive you,” a line that Oscar Wilde would have been delighted to lay claim to.  

Another gem is Truscott’s boastful story of how he broke the case of “the limbless girl killer.”

            “Who would kill a limbless girl?” he is asked, as

            a picture out of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus 

            pops into mind. 

            “She was the killer!” he explains, though he 

            refuses to elucidate lest it trigger a run of 

            copycat crimes.   

Try wrapping your head around that image. 

Loot is full of these fantasmagorical twists of language that are constantly flying around the set—along with Mrs. McLeavy’s mummified body (Another Truscott-ism: “The theft of a pharaoh is something which had not crossed my mind”). 

Even though Orton undoubtedly planned the set pieces carefully so as to allow for the word play, most of these bon mots feel anything but forced; rather they seem a logical reflection of the crazed minds of Inspector Truscott and the other characters. These include Hal (Nick Westrate); Dennis (Ryan Garbayo); another member of the police force, Meadows (Eric Martin Brown); Mr. McLeavy (who, as played by Jarlath Conroy, equals Mr. Sisto as master of the requisite tone and timing of Orton’s twisted variation on farce); and Fay (Rebecca Brooksher), the homicidal nurse and devout Catholic who—having worked her way through seven husbands, all deceased—is eyeing the others in search of Number Eight. 

Red Bull Theater, helmed by its founding artistic director Jesse Berger, built its reputation over the past decade by offering rarely produced Jacobean dramas and other plays of “heightened language,” along with a well-regarded program of readings. It is good to see the company expanding into producing contemporary works like Loot. 

Coming up in the spring will be a revival of Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep, another outlandish work that is right up Red Bull’s alley.  Should be fun!  Meanwhile, there’s Loot, which is set to run to February 9 at the Lucille Lortel Theater. 

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