Farewell, Elaine Stritch - 1925-2014

Tonight they dimmed the lights on Broadway in honor of Elaine Stritch, who passed away yesterday at the age of 89.  Even without the salute, the lights will be a bit dimmer without her living presence.

Stritch’s reputation was that of a tough old broad with an inexplicable talent that could both attract and repel. She appeared in movies and television, of course, but always and ever she was a Broadway baby, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get mix of chutzpah and vulnerability who could charm the cream from a cow or scare the manure out of it. As playwright/actor Harvey Fierstein tweeted yesterday, she was  “a great pain in the ass [who] cooked with atomic power.” 

My only non-theater encounter with her showed me a bit of both one late night a few years ago. As I was walking south on Fifth Avenue, she was headed north, accompanied by a young woman who I imagine had been entrusted with getting her home safely to the Carlyle. But Stritch would have none of being fussed over, and was clearly in a foul mood as she used some of that atomic power to lash out at her assistant. I decided this was not a good time to express my admiration, and so I kept on walking like any good New Yorker, pretending not to notice.   

Pain in the ass she may have been, but there is no doubting she was a  amazing performer, with the uncanny ability to sell anything through the act of selling herself. 

She will always be remembered for “The Ladies Who Lunch” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company, and I did see her in that show a couple of months into the run. But what made the performance an indelible piece of theater history is the unforgettable filmed recording session for the original cast album, in which she struggled mightily to get a good take of the song. Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf52APstI0A and see what I mean about chutzpah and vulnerability.  

I first discovered Stritch through recordings of Goldilocks (1958) and Sail Away (1963). I was barely into my early adolescence when Leroy Anderson’s Goldilocks came out, and while I did not see it, it became a much listened to album during my regular visits to the library’s listening room in my hometown of Baltimore. By the time Sail Away opened, I was already a regular theatergoer, though again I only knew this Noël Coward work from the recording (by then, I had quite a growing collection of original cast albums).  When most people speak of Stritch’s work on Sail Away, they single out the song “Why Do The Wrong People Travel,” but I was more taken with a novelty number called “The Little Ones’ ABC,” which she sang in her role as a cruise ship social director stuck with caring for a group of bratty children. The tone of tooth-sucking exasperation and sarcasm with which she sings it left a permanent image of the performer in my mind. Again, a link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEWXd-_wdjU

I also enjoyed her performance as Cap’n Andy’s cranky wife Parthy in Hal Prince’s lavish 1994 revival of Show Boat. In it, she was given the song “Why Do I Love You” to sing as a lull-a-bye to her infant granddaughter. It did seem out of character, but she did a fine job. I do recall, however, reading a review in which the critic said that he had been afraid she was going to eat the baby instead of sing to it. 

Fast forward to more recent appearances, I will always remember her singing “I’m Still Here” during Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday bash at Avery Fisher Hall in 2010 (Stritch was 85 at the time). When she took center stage, she looked so frail, I wasn’t sure she’d make it. She was tentative at first, but as she got into it, she dropped 20 or more years from her appearance and from her voice and absolutely nailed it, to loud and rapturous applause.  At that gala, it was Patti LuPone who sang “The Ladies Who Lunch,” and she fearlessly sang it directly to Stritch. On the line “does anyone still wear a hat?” Stritch smiled and tipped her hat. Another priceless moment.

That was the same year Stritch took over the role of Mme. Armfeldt from Angela Lansbury in A Little Night Music.  During the early weeks of her performances, the buzz was all about her inability to remember the words to her big and difficult number, "Liaisons," yet when I saw her in it, she pretty much nailed that as well.  She did it by incorporating her own frailness into her depiction of the elderly doyenne. 

I regret missing her one-woman show At Liberty, which she performed to great acclaim and a Tony Award in 2002, but I can absolutely commend the recording of the show as a must-have, in which toughness and vulnerability and, at least so it seems, honesty come together in an extraordinary way. If you want to see the performance, that is available as well, and as of this writing, it can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15a5jz6J0lM

So farewell, Elaine Stritch. Your journey through life in the public eye was a force of nature to be reckoned with. May you rest in peace!

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

'tick, tick...BOOM!' Gets a Loving Production at Encores Off Center!

There is so much love onstage and in the audience at the Encores Off Center! semi-staged production of Jonathan Larson’s tick, tick…BOOM! that it grieves me to have to make note of the fact that Lin-Manuel Miranda—the source of a lot of that love—is not a very good singer. Unfortunately, it is kind of hard to overlook since this a musical that we’re talking about here, and—when you set aside the admittedly impossible-to-set-aside connection with its creator’s biography—it does need a first-rate presentation to show it in the best possible light.  

Before we go further, let’s take a minute to talk about Encores Off Center! It is in its second season as an Off Broadway version of the well-established Encores! series of short runs of old Broadway shows at City Center. As a new enterprise, it is still finding its way, and perhaps even its mission. The first season saw a concert version of Mark Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock; the Gretchen Cryer/Nancy Ford musical I’m Getting My Act Together And Taking It On The Road (which I didn’t see, but which Charles Isherwood of The New York Times  called “loving but creaky”); and a single performance of Jeanine Tesori’s Violet, which, of course, wound up on Broadway this season. Ms. Tesori, by the way, is the artistic director of Encores Off Center! 

This year, tick, tick…BOOM! is being joined by Pump Boys and Dinettes, as well as a single performance of Randy Newman’s Faust (featuring its composer), a show which has never had an Off Broadway production. So…what exactly is the mission of Encores Off Center! remains fuzzy. 

But getting back to tick, tick…BOOM! The title alone resonates, given that it first saw light of day just five years before Mr. Larson’s sudden death from an aortic aneurysm on the eve of the powerhouse success of his breakthrough musical Rent, a phenomenon on Broadway with a 12-year run. The version of tick, tick…BOOM! at City Center is the one that playwright David Auburn (Proof) reshaped from Larson’s original “rock monologue” for an Off Broadway production in 2001, for which Raúl Esparza (a very good singer!) won an Obie Award in the lead role. The show is about a character called “Jon” (played by Lin-Manuel Miranda in the Encores Off Center! production), who is on the brink of turning 30 and who is trying to decide whether his career goal as the writer of musicals is worth the sacrifices he’s had to make. Jon’s roommate and close friend Michael (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Jon’s girlfriend Susan (Karen Olivo) are tugging at him to hang it up and either get a “real job” or leave New York for New England, where Susan, a dancer, is planning to relocate. That is tick, tick…BOOM! in a nutshell. 

Mr. Miranda, despite his unfortunate off-key singing, does an excellent job of providing the character of Jon with a teetering balance of angst and self-deprecating humor. Leslie Odom Jr. (Sam in the 2012-2013 NBC musical drama series Smash) does nicely as Jon’s gay and HIV-positive friend Michael, who has given up his acting ambitions for a steady and well-paying job. Karen Olivo (In The Heights, West Side Story) raises the roof with a socko performance of the song “Come To Your Senses.” Add to that Larson’s running homage to his idol Stephen Sondheim, whose song “Sunday” from Sunday In The Park With George is parodied in a number about Jon’s job as a waiter serving up Sunday brunch, and there is no denying that tick, tick…BOOM! packs a truckload of charm and heart. Carrying on nicely with the Encores! tradition of always getting the music right, the onstage band is top notch, and the low-key production values are also appropriate for the small-scale musical.

It’s impossible to watch tick, tick…BOOM! without seeing what lies ahead for its composer and to think of him wrestling with his future, so out there for all of us to see. If only Mr. Miranda, who surely can find something of himself in Jon and who is not long from his own breakthrough hit In The Heights, could sing the role as well as he can act it--because it just might be time for a new Off Broadway mounting.  

Any suggestions for who might head up the cast?

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

'The Killer': Glimpsing Heaven, Hell, and Oblivion in Rare Revival of Challenging Ionesco Play

The Theatre for a New Audience ends its inaugural season at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center as it began—with a dream. 

Just as Julie Taymor launched the season with a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was filled with dreamlike images, from floating bed sheets to pillow fights, the director of Eugène Ionesco’s 1958 absurdist play The Killer, Darko Tresnjak, sends us on a long day’s journey into a fever-dream nightmare landscape.   

The Killer (the fine new translation from the French is by Michael Feingold, the former theater critic for the Village Voice) has not been seen on a New York stage since 1960. It is not the easiest or the most accessible play in Ionesco’s oeuvre, but there is much to admire and appreciate and even enjoy in this well-conceived production, which suggests a trippy sojourn to Purgatory, with glimpses of Heaven, Hell, and Oblivion along its borders.

Heaven is represented in the play’s first act. Berenger (Michael Shannon), who bears the name of the playwright’s favorite Everyman character, has wandered by chance into “the radiant city,” a place where a bureaucratic functionary known as the Architect (Robert Stanton) assures our hero that everything is as perfect as it is technologically possible to arrange. Berenger, who lives in a place “where even the fire in the fireplace is damp,” is enthralled and wants more than anything to move in. But just as he is about to do so, he learns that this Eden has a serpent among its inhabitants, someone who kills three people every single day and who has long eluded detection and capture despite the fact that his (appropriately odd) modus operandi is well known.  

In the second act, it is safe to assume we are seeing glimpses of hell, especially since Berenger’s landlady (a delightfully comic Kristine Nielsen) uses the word “hell” over and over again in her speeches. Berenger has fled back to the city, a noisy, dirty, crowded Paris. When he returns to his grubby little apartment, he finds an old acquaintance, Edward, awaiting him. The consumptive Edward (an impressively creepy Paul Sparks) throws around many clues that suggest he may be the very killer that the none-too-keenly-observant Berenger is determined to track down.

Much of Act II is comically crazy, and represents the playwright and the director at their absurdist best, before we enter into the final third of the play where the mood becomes increasingly nightmarish. Berenger finds himself walking on a path that takes him further and further from the city, until he ends up all alone along a dark and anxiety-inducing expanse. It is here that he comes face to face with the killer, who—when Berenger challenges him to explain his motive—merely shrugs his shoulders. 

That shrug would make for a good ending for the play. But Ionesco gives Berenger a lengthy (painfully so) speech in which he tries to use logic to convince the killer to cease and desist. After all the tantalizing bits that have come before—including an inexplicable but marvelous depiction of a fascist rally in which Ma Piper (Ms. Nielsen again) promises her followers that she will exchange their old delusions for new delusions—this last static section is pretty much responsible for bringing the play to a crushing halt.  

Unfortunately, I’m also not convinced that Mr. Shannon is the best actor to portray Berenger, a character who tells us early on: “I couldn’t go on the way I was living, but I didn’t have the power to die.”  The production’s star comes across as too much of a take-charge kind of guy, whereas Berenger is one of life’s unfortunate victims, someone who reacts rather than acts. I'm thinking that someone like Bill Irwin might be good in the role—but still something would need to be done about that interminably long slide that marks the final section of the play. 

My reservations notwithstanding, I found it well worth the visit to see this rarely performed work. The rest of the cast, including all of the ensemble players, are quite good. Mr. Tresnjak's direction is imaginative, as are Suttirat Larlarb's set design and Matthew Richards' eerie lighting work. There are twists and turns to the non-linear plot that can only be understood by viewing the play as a dreamscape, and enough to keep you puzzling for some time over how to interpret the experience.

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

'The Few': A Trio of Lost Souls Longing to Connect

Playwright Samuel D. Hunter is a tenderhearted herder of souls who are lost out there somewhere in the great vast empty spaces that still mark parts of the United States. This is most evident in his latest work, The Few, about a trio of lonely folks who teeter between anxious hopelessness and a vague and undefined sense of faith—inhabitants, as one of them puts it, of a “church without God.” 

In a solidly acted production at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, The Few takes place in a trailer that serves as home to a pennysaver newspaper catering to long-distance truckers. Its income is derived from classified personal ads that truckers call in and record on an answering machine; we get to hear a number of these during the course of the evening, and they too contribute to the mixed atmosphere of isolation and wistful longing that runs through the play.   

The enterprise is barely enough to pay the bills for its editor QZ (Tasha Lawrence) and her young assistant Matthew (Gideon Glick), for whom the trailer and the work provide a sanctuary from a world that has not been kind to him. The pair are managing to keep things afloat as best they can when in walks Bryan (Michael Laurence), the newspaper’s founder and still its owner, who skipped town four years earlier.  Now he is back, though the reason for his return remains nebulous, possibly even to him.

The characters give up their secrets slowly, and even when they do there are no surprise revelations, only moments where quiet truths come to the fore. What there is of tension derives from the question of the newspaper’s future. It began as a means of trying to create a sense of community among the readership, but it has gradually lost that intent in the name of making ends meet.

Matthew (terrifically portrayed by Mr. Glick as a twitchy bundle of social awkwardness) wants nothing more than to see the paper return to its founding principles. He keeps a copy of Bryan’s initial statement-of-purpose in his wallet and periodically pulls it out and reads aloud from it.  But Bryan has long since lost any such sense of purpose, and QZ—with whom Bryan was in a longstanding relationship when he skipped out—is pretty much ready to call it quits herself.

Hunter’s world of quirky characters may remind you of something conjured up by Sam Shepard, but where Shepard’s cache of weaponry includes serious ammo, Hunter literally offers up BBs, capable of laying down new wounds on top of old scars without destroying.  QZ, Bryan, and Matthew are richly drawn and richly acted by the cast, under the sure hand of director Davis McCallum. As they and the voices of the truckers on the answering machine seek to make connections, we can only wish them well.    

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