2015 On Stage

It may be redundant at this point, but I want to echo my colleagues and reiterate that it's really just gob-smacking to be able to live in a time of such bounteous creation, and to have the opportunity to see as much theater as I do. Between my personal theater-going, my responsibilities for our humble blog and my position as a regional critic for Talkin' Broadway (where I cover theatrical productions in Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware), I saw well over 100 shows in 2015. Some were unbelievably good, some unbelievably bad, and many held moments of wonder. Narrowing down the list to a manageable number of "bests" wasn't easy, but that is what I have attempted to do herein. So, without further ado, here are the theatrical experiences that have remained foremost in my mind throughout the year (in alphabetical order):

Daniel N. Durant and Krysta Rodriguez in Spring Awakening.
Photo: Joan Marcus

Barbecue

Photo: Joan Marcus

My colleagues Wendy and Liz generally offered praise for Robert O'Hara's Barbecue, which runs through next Sunday at The Public's Newman Theater (read their thoughts here and here). In keeping with their earlier reviews, mine will be somewhat cagey, as I agree that knowing too much about this play before going in may spoil the experience. However, unlike my co-writers, I am not going to enthusiastically recommend this play, which too often feels like a Tyler Perry movie without the Christian subtext. O'Hara may have set out to skewer the ways in which Hollywood/Broadway/the memoir industry prey on the sad, drug-addled lives of the downtrodden, but the finished product is neither profound nor particularly interesting. The large cast work their butts off but can't overcome the fact that the play isn't as funny the author thinks -- and I had a hard time believing that many of the actors, playing siblings, were family. (Most of them seemed like they'd just met moments before taking the stage.) Kent Gash's production is, oddly, too slow and too short. I wanted to like Barbecue, but like a burger that stays on the grill a few minutes too long, it left an odd and unsatisfying taste in my mouth. -- by Cameron Kelsall

[Member tickets, mid-orchestra]

Sylvia

Annaleigh Ashford garnered praise and a Tony nomination for her scene-stealing work in Kinky Boots; a year later, she walked away with the prize for her dizzyingly satisfying turn as Essie Carmichael in an otherwise banal revival of You Can't Take It With You. The occupational hazard of being a brilliant supporting performer is that one can end up fenced into the sidelines, never given the chance to shine in a leading role. And, of course, there are those whose talents don't translate to the ability to carry a production (I'm reminded of the usually wonderful character actor Michael Park, who floundered when tasked with leading Atlantic Theatre Company's revival of The Threepenny Opera). When it was announced that Ashford would headline the Broadway premiere of A.R. Gurney's sweetly funny 1995 play Sylvia, I found myself excited and trepidacious. Would her quirky comic style extend widely enough to cover this fairly substantial role? Or would it become clear that her gifts are best sampled in small doses?

I don't know why I worried. Ashford's Sylvia is a marvel, and one of the most ebulliently joyous comic performances I've witnessed in years. The role is tricky -- in case you didn't know, the lady in question is a an anthropomorphized dog -- and some of Gurney's humor can feel middlebrow. Ashford transcends any weakness in the writing, offering a master class in physical comedy, pitch-perfect timing, and even surprising subtlety.

Fool For Love

Sam Shepard's Fool For Love is a strange, searing play. Although it takes place in real time, in the stark and unforgiving Western landscape the author so often favors, one cannot shake the feeling that the play is part dream, part nightmare. Does the dusty motel room occupied by May (Nina Arianda) truly exist? Is her long-lost cowboy lover, Eddie (Sam Rockwell), recently returned from a long absence, a figment of her imagination? And who, exactly, is the old man (Gordon Joseph Weiss) who haunts the periphery?

The weirdness that can make this work thrilling also renders its execution beastly. The two central actors need to be in perfect syncopation; the play's single act (70 minutes) must unfurl at a breathless clip. The director must strike a delicate balance between realism and fantasy. Robert Altman took too heavy a hand in the 1985 film version, starring Shepard and Kim Basinger. When watched today, it comes across as an unintentional comedy. A 2006 London production starring Juliette Lewis drew poor reviews. What, then, would be the fate of its long-awaited Broadway debut, at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, under the direction of Daniel Aukin?

Cameron Kelsall Joining Talkin' Broadway

I am pleased to announce that I will be joining Talkin' Broadway as a contributing critic. I will be covering theatrical productions in New Jersey and Philadelphia. Although I can't provide a firm date at this time, I expect to begin filing reviews sometime in the very near future. I will continue to serve in my capacity as a contributor for Show Showdown. -- Cameron Kelsall

Spring Awakening

Two young women reflect each other through a mirror. One is dark-haired and slight, with a deeply expressive face. The other is blond and fuller-bodied, with a guitar strapped to her back. They both sing: one uses her voice; the other, her hands. Despite their differences, there is no question that they reflect the same person. This is how Deaf West's extraordinary production of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's Spring Awakening announces itself.

photo: Kevin Parry

Directed by the actor Michael Arden, this revival of the 2006 musical -- currently playing at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, after a successful run in Los Angeles -- puts the action in the context of the 1880 Second International Conference on Education of the Deaf, which occurred a decade prior to the publication of Franz Wedekind's Spring's Awakening, on which the musical is based. Known colloquially as the Milan Conference, it banned the teaching of sign language in favor of lip reading and oralism. Assimilation was prescribed as the only answer to the "deaf question;" those who could not essentially pass for hearing had no place in society.

Mercury Fur

I find it hard to believe that Philip Ridley's Mercury Fur -- written in 2005, but just now receiving its New York premiere, under the auspices of The New Group -- caused such ire upon its original London bow that the critic Charles Spencer to basically call Ridley a pervert and the author's regular publisher, Faber and Faber, refused to issue the text in print. After all, the play premiered a decade after Sarah Kane's Blasted, a truly unsettling piece that actually simulated rape, mutilation and cannibalism in full view. Horrible things are the purview of this dystopian drama, but the vehicle is almost entirely talk. The talk is laced with fucks and cunts, but it's hardly shocking on the language or the content level. The play portrays a post-apocalyptic world in which any fantasy can be bought for the right price; brothers Elliot (Zane Pais) and Darren (Jack DiFalco) facilitate these encounters and act as purveyors of the drug-du-jour, taken in the form of butterflies.

photo: Michelle V. Agins

I won't reveal the particular fantasy being bought in Mercury Fur, though other critics have. But I will say that by the time it becomes clear -- after nearly two intermissionless hours -- it's hard not to feel that the playwright hasn't earned the shock he's trying to sell. Ridley is obsessed with the minutiae of life in a dystopia -- surviving in a nightmarish landscape becomes just as boring as trying to climb the corporate ladder. But does his writing and the action that surrounds it (Pais and DiFalco spend much of the play's first half-hour cleaning an apartment, doing little else) have to actually be so boring in order to portray banality?

Although the acting is largely good -- Tony Revolori (late of The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Paul Iacono (apparently playing a cisgender woman, for reasons never fully understandable) are particular standouts -- the play never catches fire. And it never feels disquieting. The best works of art in this genre should make you question the darker aspects of your own society. That is something Mercury Fur simply doesn't achieve.

[discounted ticket, almost impossible to accurately describe my seat given the theater's current configuration]

The Flick

Not much happens in The Flick, but you probably know that already. The play's languid running time -- three-and-a-half hours, with the fist act clocking in at almost two -- and liberal use of silence caused a minor stir when it premiered at Playwrights Horizons, in 2013. The controversy was such at PH's artistic director, Tim Sanford, took the somewhat unprecedented step of actually writing an open letter to the company's subscribers to explain why he programmed the play. When Annie Baker's play went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the following year, the award was met by cheers from some and eye-rolls from others. That award -- and the growing interest in Baker's works, with include the currently-running John (Wendy's and my reviews here) -- prompted a commercial return of The Flick, which is currently playing at Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village until January 2016.

photo: Joan Marcus

Like most of Baker's plays, The Flick is set in a somewhat crumbling corner of New England -- in this case, a run-down single-screen movie theater in Worcester, Massachusetts. The theater's claim to fame, if it can be described as such, is the presence of one of the last 35mm projectors in the state. This is the express reason why Avery (Kyle Beltran), a 20 year old cinephile on leave from college, decides to work there. His colleagues include Sam (Matthew Maher), a 35-year-old lifer who seems to hide a wellspring of sadness under his Red Sox cap, and Rose (Nicole Rodenburg), a mysterious, sexually vivacious projectionist. Over the course of the play, we watch these three enact the mundane indignities of daily life, from sweeping popcorn to threading projectors, punctuated by a healthy amount of movie trivia and hard-won personal revelations.

The Flick is not as grand and philosophically concerned as John; nor is it as precise as Baker's 2009 breakthrough play, Circle Mirror Transformation. It does, however, feature her most astute characterizations of human life. The trio of movie theater works -- a fourth actor, Brian Miskell -- plays two small parts -- regularly find profundity in minutiae, whether or not they realize it. The acting is unbelievably good, especially considering that Beltran, Rodenburg, and Miskell are only in their first week of performances. (The peerless Maher has been involved since the Playwrights Horizons run). Beltran especially puts a quivering voice and tender, expressive face to good use in projecting both Avery's savant-like cinema knowledge and deep-seeded self-doubt.

The Flick won't be for everyone. Large swaths of the audience at the performance I attended fled at intermission; many of the audience members who stayed allowed their boredom to give way to boorish behavior. (I also witnessed this behavior at John, which is similarly lengthy). I question whether these attitudes towards Baker's plays have less to do with her content -- even though the plays are long, and slow, they are fairly conventional -- and more to do with her style. My suggestion is that if you go to see an Annie Baker play, give yourself over to the experience. You might end up beguiled.

[Rear orchestra]

An Intervention

photo: Paul Fox

Mike Bartlett --whose Oliver-winning satire King Charles III will premiere on Broadway in the fall -- wrote his taut, often funny, surprisingly moving An Intervention for a man and a woman. However, there is nothing in the text which specifically genders the characters, called only "A" and "B". (I know, I know: that does ping pretty high on the pretension meter). Williamstown Theatre Festival -- which is producing the American premiere of the play, in a production by the talented Lila Neugebaer -- is presenting the play with two rotating casts: a male/female pairing (Debargo Sanyal and Betty Gilpin) and a male/male pairing (Justin Long and Josh Hamilton). And on four occasions, including yesterday afternoon, both casts will take the stage.

It's certainly taking a big leap of faith to assume that your play is good enough that an audience will want to watch a play, take a ten-minute break, then immediately watch it again, albeit with different actors. And there were a handful of walkouts after the first cast performance yesterday. However, after watching Sanyal and Gilpin, I couldn't wait to see it again with Long and Hamilton.

In brief, the action centers around a friendship between A (Gilpin/Hamilton), a socially conscious teacher, and B (Sanyal/Long), his so-called best friend. Their relationship becomes strained when their government initiates the intervention of the title, which B supports and A vehemently opposes. Further, A is openly hostile towards B's new girlfriend, who views him/her as an incorrigible alcoholic and bad influence.

Although both pairs have their strong selling points, I felt it worked better with Gilpin and Sanyal. There was something kinetic about the male/female dynamic that was missing from Hamilton and Long's interpretation of a platonic heterosexual male friendship. Also, Betty Gilpin -- of whom I've heard but I don't think seen in anything before yesterday -- is a star in the making. What a committed, daring, and heartbreaking performance she is turning in.

Neugebauer's staging is bare bones, yet effective, with subtle differences in pacing and blocking to accommodate the variances in style between the two acting partners. An Intervention runs through Sunday, with Gilpin and Sanyal performing tomorrow night and both performances on Saturday, Long and Hamilton performing at the Thursday and Sunday matinees, and both casts performing on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights. See one or both casts, but see the play if you can. Bartlett is an undeniable talent.

[Rush tickets, house left box seat]

A Moon For the Misbegotten

photo: T. Charles Erickson

Audra McDonald cemented her living legend status in 2014, when she won her sixth competitive Tony, becoming not only the first actor to achieve that feat but also the first to win an award in each of the four major acting categories. She's excelled in musicals and opera, in Shakespeare and contemporary drama, in concert and on television -- to put it simply, she has nothing to prove. And yet, she continues to dazzle with her seemingly limitless range, which is currently on view in Gordon Edelstein's somewhat lopsided production of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon For the Misbegotten, playing through Sunday at Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.

Anyone familiar with the play will know that the character of Josie Hogan is written as Irish American. McDonald, of course, is black, as are the excellent Glynn Turman and Howard W. Overshown, who play her father and brother. Having the Hogans played by actors of color offers two benefits: it strips the roles -- particularly that of Phil, the patriarch -- of their blarney, and dissuades the actors from playing them as drunken shanty stereotypes; further, it accentuates the class distinction between Josie and Jim Tyrone (played here by Will Swenson, who is white), the landlord of the farm the Hogans tend, for whom Josie secretly pines.

John

photo: Matthew Murphy

No one path leads to an indelible, unforgettable performance. Sometimes an actor takes a classic, timeless role and makes it truly their own, to the point where anyone else repeating it seems pointless. For me, Vanessa Redgrave's fearless Mary Tyrone (in 2003's Long Day's Journey Into Night) and Simon Russell Beale's intense, broken Lophakin (in Sam Mendes' underrated production of The Cherry Orchard, at BAM) fill out this category. Sometimes, an actor plays a real person more clearly than the person herself: think Christine Ebersole' Little Edie in Grey Gardens, or Audra McDonald's Billie Holliday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, both instantly legendary. Occasionally, a writer creates a role for an actor that fits them like a glove, and the synergistic effect is immediately evident inside the theater: I felt it watching Tonya Pinkins at the first performance of Caroline, or Change, and I felt it again more recently, at two performances of Annie Baker's John at Signature Center.

The actor, in this case, is Georgia Engel, probably best known as the daffy Georgette Franklin on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. That instantly-recognizable voice -- something between a squeak and a wheeze, though carrying layers of possibility underneath -- is still there, but Engel's current creation couldn't be any further from her sitcom past. She plays Mertis Katherine Garven, the amiable proprietress of a tchotchke-stuffed bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where she's as likely to discuss the transmigration of birds or theories of love as she is to serve Vienna fingers and chocolate tea to the young couple (Hong Chau and Christopher Abbott) who serve as her only guests.

Cymbeline

Photo: Carol Rosegg

There really is no such thing as a bad night at the Delacorte Theater, the venue nestled inside Central Park where The Public Theater has offered free Shakespeare (and Sondheim, and Chekhov, and Brecht, etc) for over 50 years. But this past Saturday was a night to beat the band. The weather was ideal: neither too warm nor too cold, with just enough breeze to stave off sweaty discomfort. The sun was still high at the beginning of the performance, but it gradually faded into a perfect rouge sunset, before settling into a clear, dark night. There was minimal air traffic going on in the sky above the stage. The audience was appreciative and exhibited good theatrical manners -- not always a given in this particular theater, where eating and drinking is not only allowed but encouraged, and the staff seems to let people wander in and out as they please. Yes, everything about Saturday night at Shakespeare in the Park was perfect ... except the production.

Fish in the Dark

Photo: Joan Marcus

Larry David may have left his hit play Fish in the Dark, but make no mistake: he's still up on that stage. And I'm not just referring to the fact that his replacement is his one-time television alter ego, Jason Alexander -- although that's certainly part of it. The role Alexander now inhabits -- Norman Drexel, a nebbishy, middle-aged Jewish man -- is little more than a David stand-in. But so is his wife, Brenda (the odd Glenne Headly) and his mother, Gloria (the always reliable Jayne Houdyshell). Norman's brother (Ben Shenkman, always a welcome presence) is supposed to be younger, richer, cooler -- nope. He's Larry David. Norman's maid, Fabiana (Rosie Perez, who barely acts), who harbors a secret you can smell a mile away: Larry. David. Even Norman's father, who speaks four lines before dying (a waste, since the fine Jerry Adler has the role), is Larry Fucking David.

But I guess that's what people paid upwards of $500 a pop for when the man himself was headlining. Full disclosure: I loathed Curb Your Enthusiam, David's screed of an HBO series that passed reprehensible behavior off as comedy for far too many years. And a lot of that "humor" inhabits this play, although I'd be lying if I said there weren't a few legitimate laughs. But the play itself is thinner than a dime, and the "twists" are about as expected as Kramer sliding uninvited through Jerry's apartment door.

I will say, though, that Alexander impressed me. A Tony winner for Jerome Robbins' Broadway, this replacement gig marks his first Broadway appearance in twenty-five years. (He's been active in West Coast theater, including several years as artistic director of the now-defunct Reprise series). Rarely have I seen an actor so confident in his ability to hold an audience in the palm of his hand. It's even more impressive considering that Norman is a pretty terrible role, written in such a way that a non-actor (which David firmly is) could succeed. I'm glad I saw him. He made me laugh. But if I'd paid more than rush prices, I would've felt somewhat cheated.

[$35 rush ticket, the most full-view box seat I've ever had]

The Weir

Photo: Carol Rosegg

Irish theater values the act of storytelling as much as -- if not more than -- the story itself. The danger each playwright faces is that taken too far, this approach can feel like fetishization. Unfortunately, that's my impression of Conor McPherson's 1997 drama The Weir, which the Irish Repertory Theatre is reviving at its current digs in Union Square (the company previously presented this play -- with several of the same cast members -- two years ago). The play is little more than storytelling: in a remote Irish pub, the locals belt Jameson and Harp and indulge in spinning supernatural yarns they claim as true. McPherson is fascinated by the supernatural -- his plays The Seafarer and Shining City address the spirit world more directly -- and The Weir is a humanist attempt at a ghost story. It's also neither particularly poetic nor convincingly chilling. The actors give mostly fine performances, although more than a few line readings felt oddly tentative, and Amanda Quaid -- the lone woman, who shares the most disturbing story -- seemed young for her role. However, although only ninety-five minutes, Ciaran O'Reilly's production feels like a night where you stayed at the pub a few drinks past your limit.

[4th row, discounted ticket]

Shows For Days

photo: Joan Marcus

The trickiest part of crafting a memoir is getting your very personal story to speak to something universal and recognizable for a wide audience. The best works of autobiography -- whether on the page (think Helen Keller's The Story of My Life or, more recently, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking) or the stage (Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Glass Menagerie) -- burrow deep into their authors' most private, painful and significant life experiences to create work whose power supersedes the specific. In an era where memoirs are more ubiquitous than ever, it is becoming harder and harder to strike this balance.

Unfortunately, Douglas Carter Beane's Shows For Days (at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater) misses the mark by a wide margin. In telling his own story, Beane is so hyper-specifically focused on minutiae that you're left to wonder if the people he's writing about would care to spend time with -- much less recognize the humanity in -- themselves.

The Qualms

Photo: Joan Marcus

Bruce Norris can write. His dialogue crackles, his jokes mostly land, and occasionally he creates surprisingly vivid, three-dimensional characters. He's also a polemicist, and while he's less didactic -- and far less capital-S Serious -- than present-day windbag David Mamet, it's always clear that he has a point to put across, and he won't rest until you get it. This usually results in his plays, at some point, devolving from breezy, mildly unsettling evenings into a full-on death match, in which the characters basically form a circle and start berating each other. (For reference, see: pretty much the entire second act of his Pulitzer Prize winner, Clybourne Park). Again, this is not to say that the man's without talent. It's just that some people are better at using the sugar to make the medicine go down.

Norris' latest, The Qualms (at Playwrights Horizons through July 12), has a lot going for it. For my money, it boasts the tightest acting ensemble currently treading boards in New York. The action -- no pun intended -- centers around a beachfront condo where a group of middle-aged, well-to-do suburbanites have gathered to swap partners. Most of the guests are old pros; the too-cutely named Chris (Jeremy Shamos) and Kristy (Sarah Goldberg) are the newbs. Kristy hooks up with the host's partner (the brilliant Kate Arrington) within the first five minutes of the play; Chris spends the full ninety minutes resenting the entire arrangement, despite the fact it's implied that the idea to attend was his. 

Heisenberg

photo: Joan Marcus

An almost-bare stage, two actors, razor-sharp direction, simple lighting, a few props: sometimes this is all you need to create an absolutely magnetic piece of theater. Such is the case with Heisenberg, the new play by Simon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) Stephens receiving its world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club's intimate Studio at Stage II. It may well be the hottest ticket in town these day, due in large part to the low ticket price ($30 a pop) and the presence of Mary-Louise Parker, returning to her Off-Broadway roots and giving her best stage performance in over a decade.

In Georgie -- a pathologically lying American living in London -- Parker has found a role exquisitely tailored to her particular strengths. We first meet her in a train station, where she's embarrassed herself by kissing the neck of a complete stranger, an Irish butcher named Alex (the extraordinary Denis Ardnt). You see, she momentarily lost herself, thinking Alex her late husband. She poignantly explains how much she misses him, tears held perfectly in her eyes. Moments later, she confesses that she's never been married.

After the chance meeting, Georgie continues to insert herself in Alex's life, alternately exasperating and beguiling him. She appears at his butcher shop, not looking to buy any meat. She makes confessions as quickly as she retracts them. The writing places Georgie perilously close to stereotype -- the audience could as easily be annoyed with her as Alex sometimes is -- but Parker's finely wrought work helps accentuate the character's seductive and sensual elements. Parker has never been a particularly sexy performer, despite playing sexualized characters; here, when she asks Alex to bed, you never question whether it's something she would do, or what the outcome would be.

Arndt is an actor primarily seen in California and West Coast regional theater. If the Lortel Archives are accurate, this production represents his first foray onto the New York stage in nearly thirty years. Let's hope the next interval isn't so lengthy, because he is a revelation. Playing against an actor as plugged into the text as Parker cannot be easy, yet Ardnt's Alex matches her step for step, and he manages to be just as spontaneously surprising as his co-star. Together, they comprise the most kinetic couple on the New York stage.

[$30 full price ticket, fourth row audience right]

Skylight

photo: Sara Krulwich

Every theater season has a "snob hit," according to William Goldman's classic 1969 insider's guide to Broadway, The Season. It's a play--usually British--that cultured New Yorkers flock to en masse, out of a sense of obligation. They don't want to see it, per se, but feel they have to, in order to preserve their cred as serious art lovers. This season's snob hit is almost certainly the revival of David Hare's 1995 play Skylight, currently at the John Golden Theatre after a successful, sold out, screened in movie theaters worldwide run in London. Directed by the supposed wunderkind Stephen Daldry and starring heavy hitters Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan, it's attracting droves of the well-heeled denizens of the Upper West Side and Park Slope, who dutifully applaud, laugh when appropriate, nod appreciatively, and feel grateful that they managed to wrangle up a ticket.

Skylight is a talky, boring play meant to comment on the perilous class divide in post-Thatcherite England. However, it really boils down to nothing more than a charismatic older man talking his way into a fragile young woman's knickers. Tale as old as time, with or without the pretense of liberal politics to make it seem more palatable. Tom Sergeant (Nighy), a successful restaurateur, shagged his former employee, Kyra Hollis (Mulligan), for six years while she lived with him and his now-deceased wife as a de facto family member. When Mrs. Sergeant discovered the affair, Kyra fled to North London, to begin a self-prescribed penance as a teacher in a slum school. When Tom turns up round her flat after three years of silence, it's not long before they are back in the roles they once inhabited, and back in bed.

And did I mention they talk? And talk. And talk. And talkkkkkkkk. About everything. Which amounts to nothing.

Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci

When the classic verismo double bill of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci last appeared at the Met, in 2009, it was clear that Franco Zeffirelli's war-horse production was badly in need of retirement. Six years later, a new production has arrived, helmed by Sir David McVicar, who's easily the most reliable director currently working in the Gelb Met. As seen over the weekend (at a performance that was also simulcast into movie theaters), McVicar's stagings scored a success, with the Mascagni appropriately dark and impassioned and the Leoncavallo brimming with passion and pain just underneath its brightly-colored surface.

Marcelo Alvarez and Eva Maria Westbroek
Photo: Cory Weaver/Metropolitan Opera

Aside from the creakiness of the previous production, the raison d'etre for this new production was star tenor Marcelo Alvarez's desire to sing the leading tenor roles in both operas. However, the first opera--set here in 1900--really belongs to the soprano. Santuzza, excommunicated (a faith worse than death in a repressive Catholic society) and scorned, longs for her former lover, Turiddu, who has returned to the bed of his married former flame, Lola. Lola's husband, the rich driver Alfio, is a vengeful and violent man; when the jealous Santuzza informs him of his wife's activities, she signs Turiddu's death warrant.

In McVicar's production, Santuzza remains onstage throughout the entire hour-long opera, silently watching from the periphery when the action doesn't involve her. It's a wise, striking choice, a reminder that she lives on the margins, integral to the life of the village though shunned by her neighbors. Especially striking was the staging of the central Easter mass (the opera takes place on Easter Sunday), which Santuzza hears from outside the church. As she prays and sings the stirring "Inneggiamo, il Signor non é morto" ("Rejoice, the Lord is not dead"), the audience is reminded of the opera's important context: though it takes place on the Catholic calendar's holiest day of forgiveness, it is something Santuzza will never receive from her supposedly pious neighbors.

Living on Love

Renee Fleming, Jerry O'Connell, Douglas Sills
Photo: Sara Krulwich

Full disclosure: I left Living on Love, the wretched attempt at drawing room comedy improbably playing at the Longacre Theatre, at intermission. Even fuller disclosure: I would have fled after the excruciating first scene had I been seated on an aisle.

How this made it to Broadway is truly a puzzler. I imagine the producers put a fair amount of stock in the hypothetical selling power of their star, the opera singer Renee Fleming, in her first non-musical role. That Fleming--perhaps the most recognizable soprano of her generation--would be playing a temperamental diva surely seemed like synergy. Yet at the performance I attended, there were a lot of empty velvet seat-backs, despite a preview deal offering tickets for $19.57 (the price reflects the year the play takes place).

Living on Love was adapted by Joe DiPietro (Memphis) from a third-rate play by Garson Kanin called Peccadillo. A fiery Italian conductor (Douglas Sills) seems more interested in wine and women than dictating his memoir to his ghostwriter (Jerry O'Connell). When the maestro fires his scribe, his wife (Fleming) hires him to write her own autobiography, while the maestro sets his sights on a mousy young copy-editor (Anna Chlumsky).

Hilarity is meant to ensue, I suppose, but the jokes aren't just old enough to vote--they're old enough to collect social security. The actors do their best with some truly crappy material; for a first time actor, Fleming manages not to embarrass herself, despite the script's many attempts to embarrass her. Still, I don't see this as the beginning of a fruitful second career.

And I also don't see this play hanging around Broadway for long after the reviews are published. Addio--molto rancor.

[Rear orchestra, way more than it's worth]