'The Trip To Bountiful': A Revival To Cherish For Bringing Cicely Tyson Back to the Stage

Cicely Tyson and Condola Rashad in 'The Trip To Bountiful'

Music suffuses the endearing new revival of The Trip To Bountiful, on view at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre and starring the indomitable Cicely Tyson as Carrie Watts, an elderly widow bound and determined to escape her stultifying urban existence and return to live out her days at her family home in rural Texas. 

The music comes from many sources:  from Perry Como crooning on the radio, from the chirping of the redbirds and scissortails that floods Mrs. Watts with joyful memories, and, most of all, from the hymns she loves to sing and in which she finds great strength and comfort.  (I don’t know whether this is occurring at every performance, but at the one I attended, many in the audience joined Ms. Tyson in singing one of the hymns; far from distracting, it felt like a spontaneous and transcendent moment.)

Playwright Horton Foote originally wrote The Trip to Bountiful as a teleplay in 1953, during the Golden Age of Television when first-rate theatrical dramas and live televised productions were standard fare. The original TV production starred Lillian Gish as Mrs. Watts, and the iconic actress took the play to Broadway shortly thereafter. Over the years there have been several theatrical revivals, along with a movie (1985) that garnered an Academy Award for Geraldine Page.  Later, in 2006, Lois Smith won a  Drama Desk Award for her portrayal of the same character in an off-Broadway production at the Signature Theatre Company. 

In short, Mrs. Watts has been very kind to actresses of a certain age.  At the time she entered into their lives, Ms. Gish was 60, Ms. Page was 61, and Ms. Smith was 76.  But Ms. Tyson beats them all.  At what has been widely reported to be the age of 88, she grabs hold of the character, the stage, and our hearts from start to end. 

The plot of The Trip to Bountiful is a simple one (the title pretty much says it all), and the play would be most resistant to any sort of fussy production.  Thankfully, Michael Wilson, who has had a lot of experience directing Mr. Foote’s plays, helms the evening with a gentle hand.  The story unfolds without a lot of sentimentality and avoids melodrama during several potentially melodramatic scenes. 

Mrs. Watts feels trapped, living as she does with her hapless son Ludie (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and sharp-tongued daughter-in-law Jessie Mae (Vanessa Williams) in a two-room flat in Houston.  The only thing to do is to make her escape and return to her family home in Bountiful, where she intends to live with a childhood friend. 

Along the way, she shares a bus ride and swaps stories and hymns with a young woman (Condola Rashad), loses her handbag with her pension check inside, and spends the night in a bus station just a few miles from her destination. 

It is not difficult to imagine a version of the play in which the final miles of Mrs. Watts’s journey are made in a pine box, but this is an ending that Foote wisely stayed away from in the writing. Instead, he sends a kind-hearted sheriff (Tom Wopat), who has been dispatched to find Mrs. Watts and reunite her with her family. 
  

It is the sheriff who drives her the rest of the way to Bountiful, where she finds her childhood friend has passed away, her family home is in ruin, and the world of her dreams has long since returned to nature.  Still, it is enough that she has made the journey, and she is able to conjure up a sense of satisfaction and inner peace.  When Ludie and Jessie Mae show up, she is content to return with them to Houston, carrying Bountiful inside her. 

The acting company does a fine job all around, mostly performing roles that are only modestly defined and that serve largely as foils to the central character.  Mr. Gooding, who is making his professional stage debut with this production, does seem somewhat ill-at-ease onstage, and when I saw him, he was losing his voice.  Yet I found him to be most appropriately cast in the role of the befuddled Ludie, trying to little avail to be the peacemaker in the constant struggle between his mother and wife.   

The more experienced Ms. Williams, as the self-centered and mean-spirited Jessie Mae, and Ms. Rashad and Mr. Wopat make the most of their parts.  

But, of course, it is Ms. Tyson who carries the play. She is in turn charming, devilish, forthright, sweet, stubborn—and always fascinating to watch.  Whether she is 79, as her official biography has it, or 88, as The New York Times has declared, It hardly seems to matter.  To quote Shakespeare, writing of Cleopatra:  “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” 

Brava, Ms. Tyson, and yet again brava!!!

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

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.  

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