Betrayal

On the surface, Betrayal is about entitled Londoners who meet for fancy lunches, during which they chat about art and literature and the best way to get to Torcello from Venice during summer holidays. They schedule games of squash, exchange niceties about their children and their loveless marriages, and engage in long-term affairs that they eventually throw over for other long-term affairs. On the surface, I do not give much of a rat's ass about people like this, who are hardly unique to London and who have always struck me as occupying a world utterly foreign to me in its material comforts, privileges, and casual amorality. But damn if the current Broadway revival, directed with devastating understatement by Jamie Lloyd, didn't burrow deep into my head. Spare, sparse, and exceedingly restrained in execution, the production gives us characters who have mastered the art of lying to themselves and one another, even as they fail to escape their stasis, disappointment, and sorrow.

Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox.
Photo by Marc Brenner.

Loosely inspired by the seven-year affair Pinter had with the journalist Joan Bakewell during his unhappy marriage to the actress Vivien Merchant, Betrayal follows three characters backward in time, beginning two years after the dissolution of a seven-year tryst between gallerist Emma (Zawe Ashton) and literary agent Jerry (Charlie Cox), and ending just at the very beginning of it. Emma's husband, book publisher Robert (Tom Hiddleston), is Jerry's best friend and a frequent business associate. In a series of scenes that I suspect could easily feel like so many actors' exercises in the wrong hands, Pinter's characters betray one another in myriad ways as they keep up appearances year after year after year.

Pinter's style is pronounced and influential enough to have earned its own adjective; Pinteresque plays reflect the playwright's penchant for, among other things, terse dialogue sliced through with long pauses, lots of repetition, and vague, benign chatter that belies deeper, sometimes menacing subtext--hence, in Betrayal, so much more than lunch and squash and Torcello, even though these are the topics mentioned over and over and over again. On the page, Pinter doesn't offer much more to go on--his stage directions are as sparse as his dialogue--so I can imagine the temptation to fill in all his gaps with lots of actorly business and overwrought delivery in search of the subtext. Segments of dialogue certainly would seem to court some seriously explosive bluster, as when Robert informs Jerry (over lunch, natch) that he occasionally gives Emma "a good bashing" simply because he feels like it,  or when Emma confesses her affair to Robert, or when Jerry learns that Robert has known of the tryst for years, even as he's continued to schedule lunch dates and invite Jerry for games of squash.

But this production holds back in just about every way: the actors all lean into their restraint, even when you'd expect them not to. The stage, outfitted with a huge turntable that moves the company around in space, remains nearly bare, even as the walls close in and then open out again on the characters. And while every scene is a two-hander, the odd actor always remains onstage nonetheless, lurking in partial shadow: memory is selective, after all, and sometimes time and distance can numb the intensity of even the most intense passion, pleasure, or pain; nevertheless, the characters are, even despite physical absences, always deep in one another's heads.

Rather than making the three characters seem even more obtuse and distant, the silence and minimalism work to reveal layers of meaning in the text. The three characters depicted may be as well-practiced in how not to make a scene as they are in knowing how best to travel to a highly exclusive island resort, but they feel a whole lot realer and more nuanced for the choice. They may be worn amoral from lives of privilege, but this production does a beautiful job of demonstrating how they are also world-weary and searching and sad, no matter how sumptuous the lunches or beautiful the views from their exclusive holiday retreats.

Hadestown

It's a sad song

It's a sad tale, it's a tragedy

It's a sad song

But we sing it anyway

'Cause here's the thing: 

To know how it ends 

And still begin to sing it again

As if it might turn out this time

I learned that from a friend of mine

See, Orpheus was a poor boy

But he had a gift to give: 

He could make you see how the world could be

In spite of the way that it is

Helen Maybanks

One of the many miracles of Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell and Rachel Chavkin's strange, stunning folk opera at the Kerr, is the richly bittersweet way it manages to simultaneously lament and celebrate the endless repetitions that make up human lives. In so many ways, most all of them beautiful in execution, this haunting show teases out the endless redundancies and rituals that lead us from birth to death, pointing out along that way that cycles can be a drag, but also the source of joy and celebration. Life might seem futile in its repetitions, Hadestown implies, but so long as there's the potential for beauty, love and ritual, it isn't a waste.

Choir Boy

Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy, just extended at the Friedman, is poignant, moving, and lovely. A coming-of-age drama set in an exclusive all-male, all-black boarding school, the swift 100-minute show focuses on Pharus Jonathan Young, a queer high-school senior whose greatest pride and source of comfort is his role as leader and star tenor of the school choir. Played by a truly exceptional Jeremy Pope, Pharus is deeply nuanced and often highly contradictory: smart, headstrong and self-possessed; unsure of who he is and where he belongs in the world.

Matthew Murphy

Much like McCraney's Moonlight, Choir Boy places focus on the personal development of a single gay, black, male character over time; whereas Moonlight followed Chiron from youth to adulthood, Choir Boy covers events that take place in the course of a single year. Scenes are frequently punctuated by choreographed choral arrangements of gospel chestnuts, many of which touch on the character's situations or emotional highs and lows. Some of the choral arrangements are more sophisticated than others, but the concept works consistently, and some of the numbers are particularly effective.

The general consensus among critics about Choir Boy is that Pharus is far better developed than the characters who surround him, and who alternately make high school life less or more difficult for him. But I don't care, even a little bit, about the fact that the supporting characters don't have the depth or nuance of Pharus. They're engaging enough; the company is well-cast and talented to a man. And anyway, this is Pharus's story, and his very real ups and downs are well worth the audience's attention. How many times, after all, have characters like Pharus been made secondary, flimsy, shoved off to the side, reduced to two dimensions and a couple of stereotypical gestures designed to amuse spectators?  

King Kong

While I appreciate it as a landmark in both film making and scoring, I've otherwise never much understood the appeal of King Kong. Sure, there's incredibly cool stop-motion animation and over-the-top Max Steiner aural grooviness, both of which are even more admirable since this is 1933 we're talking about. But otherwise, the movie has always seemed strongest as a genuinely depressing racist allegory, garnished with enormous doses of sexism and greed. The plot itself is hogwash: mercenary film director Carl Denham takes wannabe starlet Ann Darrow to the mysterious Skull Island to film a picture. There, they encounter deeply offensive "native" stereotypes, some prehistoric creatures, and the titular ape, who lusts after and kidnaps Ann. She screams endlessly, gets rescued, and then Kong is drugged and brought back to New York for Denham to put on display. In New York, the ape completely loses his shit, destroys large amounts of Manhattan, recaptures Ann, climbs the Empire State Building with her, and then gets shot down, surely crushing many innocent onlookers as he plummets to his death. In the film's final moments, Denham, who started all the mayhem in the first place, gets all faux-philosophical but reveals he's totally incapable of self-reflection or personal growth: he blames everything on Ann with a famous last line that makes no sense considering everything that's just happened. Come on, Carl, you dumbass: beauty didn't do shit. You did.

Special effects seem to dominate all remakes of the film; they are, I suppose, the point of revisiting King Kong in the first place. An awful lot of people, it seems, will tolerate steaming mountains of racist, sexist crap if they get to watch enough shit blowing other shit up in the process.

Joan Marcus

Spectacle certainly dominates the stage version of King Kong, which may not be the most well-balanced or wholly satisfying production, but is not without its pleasures and small victories. I appreciate the production for trying to rid the plot of at least some of its most offensive parts. Gone, in this iteration, are the grunting, monosyllabic, dark-skinned natives of Skull Island, and with them at least some of the stereotypes the movie played on. Gone too is the stupid line at the end about how beauty killed the beast. There's more of an attempt at moral trajectory: Denham (Eric William Morris, doing what he can), it's implied, will suffer economic ruin and isolation for his actions. Also, he doesn't blame everything on Ann; his famous "'tis beauty killed the beast" line is referenced in one of the show's exceptionally forgettable songs (songs are by Eddie Perfect; the persistent and weirdly porny electronic score is by Marius De Vries). But it no longer serves as the last line.

While the image of Kong being shackled and shipped far from his home will never not reference both the slave trade and the vilest of persistent racist tropes, some of the sting of the latter is offset in the production by Christiani Pitts, who plays Ann. Pitts is black, and thus not the traditional pale-blond, uber-Caucasian Ann of previous Kong iterations (Fay Wray; Jessica Lange; Naomi Watts). The choice works to temper at least a few layers of racist assumption that can be inferred in what was previously an allegory about primal, predatory black men and their insatiable lust for pure, helpless white women; the musical tries instead to paint Ann as smart, independent and headstrong--a modern woman before her time. Her connection with Kong, it is suggested, becomes a knowing friendship between two lost, misunderstood, disenfranchised fellow travelers.

Any attempt to expose and excise stereotypes is noble, but in addressing King Kong's problem areas as superficially as it does, the production opens up newer, bigger holes in a plot already full of them. Pitts does as much as any human can with the role as it's been rewritten, but hers is a thankless task. If Ann is now so insightful and level-headed and wise, what the hell convinced her that getting on a boat for months on end with a penny-ante director she talks with for five minutes in a diner is a good life choice? Yeah, sure, whatever, she's hungry and desperate for work. Get a fucking grip, all-male creative team: you can't have a modern, independent heroine who occasionally doubles as a shrieking damsel in distress. Pitts' Ann doesn't scream and play helpless as convincingly (or as endlessly) as Fay Wray did, but she is no more nuanced or developed a character, either: here, Ann bonds with Kong, then immediately sells him out, then feels remorse, then sings a song about how She Has Learned Something About Herself and Others. But what has she learned, exactly? That directors who hang out in diners are not to be trusted? That the world is cruel? That love is blind? That nature abhors a vacuum? That crime does not pay? Where's the build, the conflict, the cohesive story?

Anyway, whatever, story schmory; clearly, we're here to see spectacle. In this iteration, as in all iterations past, Kong is truly the star of the show, and while it's a shame he has to die, he at least gets the final bow here. The production's Kong is impressive: he's about the size of the stage and is operated by ten black-clad puppeteers who yank pulleys, manipulate the ape's body, and see to it that its hands and feet land correctly lest some poor cast member be crushed beneath its truly impressive weight. Another three dudes operate the facial expressions and the sounds Kong makes from a booth at the back of the theater. If you are solely interested in watching the puppet, and go to see King Kong with no other expectations at all, I suspect you won't be disappointed.

But heat? Conflict? Tension? Emotion? Forget it. The show, like the film, left me cold. Oh, except for two moments: in one scene depicting Kong's captivity in New York, his facial expressions were so real and so sad that I felt genuine pity for the character, stuck as he was in yet another exploitative entertainment that didn't do him justice. There was a smaller, more profound moment, as well, during which one of the puppeteers took exceptional care in placing Kong's left hand on the floor of the stage. It was the gentle, lovingly tender act of someone who has bonded deeply with the character they're responsible for giving life to. It was beautiful and one of the sweetest moments in the show for me. If only the company had been able to figure out how to extend such genuine sentiment throughout the entire musical.

The Waverly Gallery

A friend of mine often uses the expression "pretty little play" to describe a show that's easy to digest, not especially profound or layered, and pretty satisfying nonetheless. The Waverly Gallery is very much a pretty little play--one I confess I probably wouldn't have gone out of my way to see, had my parents not been big enough fans of Nichols and May to have followed both their careers for decades. After they read about Elaine May's depiction of Gladys Green, an elderly gallery owner nearing the end of her life, they asked if I might like to se it with them. I'm a sucker for free theater and, ultimately, for hanging out with my folks. I'm so glad I didn't miss this one--and especially May's performance, which kicks brilliant, glorious, 86-year-old-woman ass up Waverly Place and back down again.

Marc J. Franklin

Directed by Lila Neugebauer and performed by a strong and likeable cast, the Broadway production accepts Lonergan's early piece (it was written in 1999) for what it is: a gentle, unfussy memory play about somebody's gradual loss of it. This production is as straightforward as the play itself: scenes unfold in chronological order; set changes take place behind a scrim on which projections of the city--grainy, black and white, and generic enough to be timeless--drift slowly from one side to the other before dissipating like smoke, accompanied by fittingly melancholy music by Gabriel Kahane. At times, the play is basic enough to feel almost pageant-like: Gladys's grandson Daniel (Lucas Hedges) steps forward during a few scene changes to address the audience with direct-address prose about his family, their relationships to one another and to his grandmother, and various other expository points that aren't spelled out in the dialogue.

Still: basic and straightforward are not necessarily bad or amateur, and in this case both work exceptionally well. Lonergan's play doesn't need to dig all that deep to resonate, after all: dementia affects a lot of people, which is why plays, films, tv shows and books about it prevail in popular culture. An awful lot of such stories, in fact, aren't nearly as effective as this comparatively low-key one. The strong acting, of course, helps a lot: Hedges is blunt but never stiff or self-conscious, whether interacting with other characters or during his confessional curtain-speeches, wherein he admits how difficult it is for him to spend time with Gladys, even as he clearly adores her. The same goes for the rest of the cast: Joan Allen and David Cromer play Gladys's daughter and son-in-law; both are believably caring, kind, boneheaded, and impatient with Gladys in equal doses. Michael Cera rounds out the cast as Don, the last artist to display his works at Gladys's small gallery. A kind and well-meaning drifter whose life hasn't worked out especially well, Don is the sole denialist of the bunch in insisting that Gladys's memory lapses are entirely the fault of what he assumes are sub-par hearing aids. His opinions, however, don't get in the way of his loyalty to Gladys or his willingness to help her and her family as she declines.

At the center is Gladys, played downright majestically by May who, much like the production she anchors, never forces anything, even though it would be incredibly easy to. It's so much more typical to play aging, addled characters in bellowing, raging, do-not-go-gentle fashion--or as one-dimensional punchlines. But May's portrayal is solidly dignified, and all the more remarkable since Gladys is a fairly big personality to begin with: she's as endlessly chatty, headstrong, opinionated and irritating as she is bighearted and smart and endearing. Aided with small, gradual changes to her appearance--a graying wig here, an alarmingly roomy dress there--her Gladys starts to diminish in ways that feel no less sad or unfair, but are a whole lot more convincing for the actor's excellent choices: favorite expressions start getting repeated ad-nauseum like so many tics; remembering the right words or finding the house keys becomes harder; recognizing dear friends and close relatives grows frustratingly challenging. May never lets Gladys become a caricature or cruel joke, even as she becomes less coherent or independent.

There may be nothing remarkable about aging, or even about losing your memory as you do. But of course, something as commonplace as decline can still pack a punch. This quiet, lovely production of The Waverly Gallery is all the stronger and more resonant for never once forgetting that. 

Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America's Past (book review)

After all that's been written about Hamilton, one might think that there's nothing left to say. Turns out there's at least 400 pages' worth, as shown in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America's Past (edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter; see table of contents, below). The book should be of interest to people who love theatre, more interest to people who love history, and a treat for those (myself included) who love both. (For the record, three of the people who contributed to Historians on Hamilton specialize in theatre, rather than history. One of them, Elizabeth Wollman, writes for this blog.)

Some of the questions discussed in Historians on Hamilton: Who was Alexander Hamilton? How true is Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton to the real man? How much historical accuracy should we expect from art? Is Hamilton doing good work by getting young people engaged with history? Or is it doing bad work by getting young people engaged with inaccurate history? How has Hamilton managed to have a significant effect on thousands of people who will likely never see the show? How has Hamilton managed to win over people on both the left and the right? What is the role of race in Hamilton? Does it matter that none of the characters are actual people of color? Does Hamilton represent a revolution or the next step in theatre's evolution?

Jesus Christ Superstar

To stage Jesus Christ Superstar, I've long been convinced, is to set yourself up to fail. I'm not just being crabby, here; I love the piece very much. But it was not conceived for the stage in the first place, so putting it on one tends not to work very well. 

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice initially hoped to develop it for the West End, but after every theater producer laughed the young men out of their office for the very idea of rock-operafying the days leading up to Jesus's crucifixion, Superstar was instead composed and released in 1970 as a remarkably popular concept album. The studio setting arguably contributed to the rock opera's worldwide success: recording happened over many weeks, so vocalists could take breaks whenever they needed to rest their shredded vocal cords; flaws detected in playbacks could be nipped and spliced or recorded anew. And unlike West End producers, executives at Decca--flush from the recent success of the Who's Tommy, which had almost singlehandedly revived the dying label--were all too happy to market the daylights out of the finished product. To that end, the Murray Head recording of "Superstar" was released a full year before the album was; the BBC teaser, in which Head wanders earnestly around some church ruins while sporting a mullet and a cloth choker, is awesome. 

The album version of Jesus Christ Superstar went platinum in the US, and sold incredibly well in many European and South American countries. Its success--compounded by reports of numerous amateur stage and concert versions taking place across the US--finally convinced theater producers that a rock opera about Jesus's last days wasn't such a stupid idea after all. But among the many problems people encountered when trying to launch one: fans had already bonded deeply with the album and expected live versions to sound just like it; voices straining through full productions multiple times a week couldn't hold a candle to ones that could shriek for an hour and then rest for a few days, probably at a spa paid for by Decca; it's more interesting to listen to people thinking about things than it is to watch them wander in circles, however purposefully, scratching their chins or wringing their hands as they wonder "what then to do about Jesus of Nazareth." Directors have pulled out all kinds of stops to counter what is ultimately a pretty stagnant show: tiered, obstacle course-like sets; groovy laser Floyd-inspired lighting; gaudy makeup, day-glo costumes, an insect-inspired subtext. And yet I've never seen or studied a stage production of Superstar that has managed to triumph over a lack of dramatic build. 

James Dimmock

A "live in concert" televised event, however, is a different story, especially when it's been staged in a venue the size of an airplane hangar (an armory, actually, which is close) before an audience that sounds like it's having a collective orgasm for two-and-a-half hours. The spectators helped galvanize a production that drew almost immediately from a frequently overlooked ingredient that makes the sound recording as powerful as it is: its instrumentals. The son of a composer and organist (dad) and a violinist and pianist (mom), Lloyd Webber knows way more about music than his haters like to acknowledge; of all his pieces, Superstar is paced particularly beautifully. Beneath and between the voices, the score builds from those first distinctive licks on electric guitar into what eventually becomes deeply satisfying epic Wagnerian hugeness. This production not only took note of that fact, but milked it: following the first sweeping shots of Brooklyn, the armory exterior, and the audience of superfreaks within, cameras lingered lovingly on the large, multiply tiered, beautifully diverse orchestra, and then on four of its string players, who jammed together onstage in a tight circle before ushering in the cast. Yay, huge orchestra! You rocked!!

The production continued to deliver throughout, which is not to say that it didn't have its problems. There will always be a pacing issue with Superstar due to its tendency to dwell on chatty ruminations; the frequent commercial breaks sucked a little of the energy, too. But for the most part, jump-cuts, whizzing cameras, closeups, oceans of glitter, and a big giant cross that floats into an even bigger cross before being swallowed up in a beacon of light kept the action moving, even when the audience needed to pause to keep from hyperventilating. The sharp, active choreography by the exceptionally talented Camille A. Brown helped a hell of a lot, too; I can't say I've ever seen a Superstar with more dance than this one had, and it turns out that the stage production was crying out for it all along. Who knew? Not me.

People are already weighing in on the actors' interpretations, so here's what I think: they were all fine, though some certainly strayed from the original recording in ways that took some getting used to. The most noticable in this case was John Legend's Jesus. Whatever, the man's not a heavy metal screamer, and while I missed the dramatic, shouting-Jesus moments that occur through the piece, Legend's not nearly as petulant or whiny as Ian Gillan's Jesus was. This was a fair trade for me, especially since Jesus is not really the most interesting character in Lloyd Webber and Rice's retelling, anyway. As the second-least interesting character, Sara Bareilles's Mary was terrific, especially with her sweet and plaintive "Could We Start Again, Please?"

I have enough riding on Alice Cooper's aura that I could overlook the fact that he can barely move at this point in what has been an exceedingly excessive life (while not as iconic as JCS, Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies is a brilliant concept album from the 1970s that is a favorite of mine, too). The supporting cast was beautiful, committed, terrific sounding, and diverse enough to remind anyone who cared to watch that the very point of world religions is that they are followed by lots of different people everywhere, and not just blonde Caucasians in the American midwest and south. And while I suspect it didn't enter into consideration, since it kind of never does, the multicultural ensemble helped negate the not-so-subtle implication that one particular group of people (mine, in fact!) killed Jesus; if you view this piece as inherently anti-Semitic, this production just might make you feel a little less alienated from it, though I can't promise you anything. Anyway, for what it's worth, I appreciated Norm Lewis and Jin Ha's chilly, Matrix-like takes on Caiaphas and Annas.

And, like everyone else, I was thrilled by Brandon Victor Dixon's intense, muscular Judas. Not afraid to experiment vocally while doing a fair amount of scenery-chewing in a role that pretty much requires it, Dixon owned the piece. He has long been a dedicated Broadway performer; I hope this thrillingly successful live-tv event makes him a household name. Christ, he deserves it.

Hello, Dolly!

Don't tell anyone, but until earlier this month, I'd never seen the stage or film version, or even listened to the score, of Hello, Dolly! This is kind of like a Vermeer specialist admitting she's never been to the Frick, a professional chef who's just never gotten around to cooking with rosemary, or a linguist who has a pretty good grasp of every Romance language except French. Oh, the shame! Aside from the titular song, which I've heard plenty because who the hell hasn't, I've never once crossed paths with the show. The current Broadway revival thus appealed to me less because of the allure of Bette Midler (though I'm sure she's swell) than because I could finally stop acting all nonchalant and informed whenever someone mentioned Dolly in conversation. Which, in my circles, happens way more often than you probably think.

Yippee! I've officially seen Hello, Dolly! and guess what? It was downright delightful. No offense to Midler, but I'm glad I got to see Murphy, who's shiny, bright-eyed, cheekbony, and goofy in the titular role. She's clearly enjoying playing to an adoringly receptive crowd (don't forget that she, too, has an ardent fan base and megatons of theatrical street cred). As Dolly, she's being over-the-top, stagy, playful Murphy--not super-serious, Passion-y, buried-deep-in-the-role Murphy. But that's exactly the right choice: the production, while perhaps not as glorious or storied as the long-running 1964 Merrick original, is great fun that no one in the cast takes too seriously, and that no one in the audience should, either. Especially since the plot kind of makes no sense and only gets stupider the more you think about it.

This revival of Hello, Dolly! strikes me as best received for the musical's flaws, not despite them. It's a bubbly, affectionate history lesson: a living reminder of the kind of sturdy, spectacular, joyfully imperfect show that dominated Broadway for decades during the so-called Golden Age, and that was already becoming kind of passe when Dolly first appeared. I say this as someone who favors contemporary musicals: seeing an old-school one, especially one done as well as this one is, can really be something special.

1984

The stage version of George Orwell's 1984, grippingly adapted by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, might not be the masterpiece the book is, but it's pretty damned good just the same. It's beautiful to look at, slickly performed, jarringly paced, and terrifying. It also has the ability to fuck with your head in much the same way the book does. Well, I can't speak for your head, I guess, but I can certainly attest to mine.

Much of the novel makes it into the swift stage adaptation. So too does the book's famously unfamous appendix, The Principles of Newspeak, which Orwell worded to seem as if it had been written several decades following the events described in the novel. I don't think I'm in the minority in admitting to have never before glanced at said appendix, despite having read the book twice. For the stage, Icke and Macmillan, who also direct, use the appendix as a framing device. As the play begins--some fifty years after the reign of Big Brother, and presumably long after the Party has fallen--a group of people sit, seminar-style, around a long table and discuss who Winston Smith was, what his world was like, and why newspeak never overtook oldspeak as the common vernacular.

Spring Roundup, Part II: Anastasia and A Doll's House Part 2

Anastasia
Time was when a middle-of-the-road, slightly overstuffed show like Anastasia would have sent me into paroxysms of self-righteous outrage, but I'm older, wiser, wearier, and maybe a titch less self-righteous these days. Plus, there's so much other stuff--more urgent, meaningful, relevant stuff--to get outraged about lately. Anyway, despite its vanilla predictability and its failed attempt to successfully emulate the very slickest of Disney's slick confections, I just couldn't muster the energy to get mad at--or even mildly irked by--Anastasia.

Joan Marcus

Sure, the musical doesn't quite nail the landing. But it zips along amiably enough, features sturdy and committed performances from its large and uniformly buff cast, has lots of fluid scene changes, and boasts some genuinely beautiful costumes. It's not really all that funny or deep, but it does a lot of what big splashy, classic Broadway musicals do well. Anastasia strikes me as a perfectly good show to see if you're coming in from (or hosting people from) out of town, have never seen a Broadway show before, have long wondered what all the fuss is about, and want to dip your toe in without thinking too hard or taking out a second mortgage on your house for top Hamilton tickets. It's shiny and pretty and consistently engaging, and the audience really seemed to have a great time watching it.

Count my daughter among the thrilled crowds. For some reason that I think relates to dim memories of one of the many films this musical was inspired by, she really wanted to see Anastasia when we found ourselves hanging out during spring break with nothing much to do. She wanted to see it so much, in fact, that she agreed to have lunch and attend the show with no one in tow but her boring, lame mom, which is a rare event these days (she's 14). Anastasia might not have been my cup of tea (she drinks a lot of tea, by the way; I much prefer coffee), but my starry-eyed, dreamily romantic girlie loved every goopy, attractive minute of it. She's even thinking she'd like to see it again.

Maybe that, in the end, is why I just couldn't muster much but fond if slightly bemused appreciation for Anastasia. Watching my daughter watch it--from front-row seats that allowed us both to watch the stage and the pit simultaneously!--was well worth the (reduced) price of admission. In sum: See it, if you have the time and the desire--ideally, with your favorite moony, uncomplicatedly romantic teen.

The Glass Menagerie

Hi, Show Showdown visitors!

My take on the highly unconventional and mildly controversial Sam Gold production of The Glass Menagerie is currently featured on Broken and Woken, the blog affiliated with Extreme Kids & Crew. Extreme Kids is a nonprofit organization that provides play spaces and support for special-needs children and their people.

You can see the review here: http://brokenandwoken.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-glass-menagerie.html

If you like what you see, please consider poking around the Extreme Kids & Crew website, which you can link to here: http://www.extremekidsandcrew.org

Thank you,
Liz

946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips

Kneehigh's stage adaptation of the 2006 children's novel The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips by Michael Morpurgo is so bubbly, energetic, and wacky that a few times during the performance, I was surprised by how suddenly I found myself choking up.

Told largely from the perspective of the feisty, funny, endearingly odd 12-year-old Lily (and, at the beginning and the end, her equally engaging elderly self), Adolphus Tips revolves around a search for the lost cat of the title. But since the setting is coastal England during World War II, and since the cat very quickly becomes a symbol for so many other kinds of absence--that of fathers and sons, of safe spaces, of food and supplies, of peace, and of a general sense of well-being--the production is ultimately a lot weightier than it can sometimes seem. Never heavy-handed or overwrought, Adolphus manages to tell a gentle, genuinely moving tale without cutting back on the clowning, drag, broad humor, folksy music, and energetic dance.

Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812

The great comet in question was actually in 1811. Just sayin'. Not like it matters: Broadway musicals are hardly the medium through which accurate historical information gets passed along to the masses, and if you don't believe me, you'll be surprised to learn that in reality, this country's founding generation was built overwhemingly of white dudes who didn't know shit from shinola about rap. But the fact that the real comet was in 1811 and the one in Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet shows up in 1812 (in truth, it was still visible early that year) bugs me a little because someone clearly thought long and hard about changing the date, in the same way that someone--hell, maybe the same someone--thought long and hard about how it might be cool to throw little boxes of potato pelmeni at the audience before the show and also about how it might be cool to have chandeliers that constantly rise and fall over the hyped-up action, and also animal masks and day-glo clothing and strobe lights, but did not put the same amount of thought into plotting, pacing, or character development.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, I know I sound old and fussy about this, call me an old biddy. But hear me out: I know full well that some shows are about things other than that old-fashioned Golden Age of Musicals shit. But I saw Blue Man Group before you were born, probably. I saw The Donkey Show before knowing anything about it or what the hell it was, and it blew me away. Last summer, I saw Hadestown, which was also more about mood and space and multisensory immersion than it was about plot and character, and I haven't been able to stop listening to the concept album on which it was based, or thinking about aspects of the production since.

I had high hopes for Natasha precisely because of my experiences at these aforementioned shows, as well as because Rachel Chavkin impressed me immensely last season with her moodily gorgeous production of The Royale at Lincoln Center. Also, I've long regretted the fact that I never saw Natasha during its original run, first at the teeny Ars Nova and then in a huge pop-up tent in the meatpacking district, where I bet it was really cool.

Aspects of it are really cool on Broadway, too. Chavkin is ingenious when it comes to utilizing space, and I can't think of a show on Broadway that manages to immerse its audience--even those of us who saw it up in the cheap rear balcony seats--any better than this one does. The stage has room for something like 200 audience members, who sit amid the action, and the entire house is covered in red velvet and photographs and outfitted with tiny little table lamps. The cast makes frequent visits up to the mezzanine and balcony to dance, engage with spectators, toss dumplings around, and harmonize in venue-shaking sonorities that I very much appreciated. There are, as my fellow blogger Sandra noted in her slightly more positive review of the show, a few truly moving numbers that bring the house down. I was especially taken by "Dust and Ashes," Groban-as-Pierre's big solo number that muses moodily about the difficulty and miracle of finding love; "Sonya Alone," too, digs deep into the nature and demands of real friendship, and stayed with me long after the show. But the rest of the score, with a few motifs here and there as the exceptions, struck me as a weird combination of very complicated (lots of chromaticism, lots of tricky meters, lots of unexpected melodic directions) and simultaneously repetitive and uninteresting.

The production tries hard to make up for the lack of character depth or clear plot with a lot of energy and pep. There is lots of winding through aisles, lots of fast-paced dance numbers, lots of constant motion. But it signifies nothing; at one point, right before intermission, a friend I saw it with erupted in near-manic giggles at the masked ball scene, which sent many members of the enormous cast up into the balcony in various animal masks and typically amped choreography. "Of course there are animal masks!" she cackled. Why not, really? There is just about everything else.

I suspect the correct way to see a show like this would be to sit right in the middle of it--either on the stage or, if one could go back in time, under a huge tent, where Russian food (and lots of vodka) was apparently served and where the cast wound tightly around the spectators, who were thus both plunged into and made part of the action. Chavkin does wonders to create intimacy here, too--my respect for her has hardly been shaken by this. But I came away feeling that the nearly-1500 seat Imperial (late the home of Les Miz) couldn't quite handle the show it's housing. The result was emotional distance from characters who aren't terribly developed in the first place, in exchange for sensory overload that felt forced and exhausting.

What Did You Expect?

In Richard Nelson's Hungry, which ran at the Public last spring, the Gabriel family of Rhinebeck, New York, had just finished scattering the ashes of their brother / husband / ex-husband / son / brother-in-law Thomas on the shores of the Hudson River. Six months have passed between then and now, and here the Gabriels are, again sprawled around the same table in the family homestead where Thomas lived until his death with his third wife, Mary, who continues to hold down the fort. This time preoccupied with prepping both dinner and a picnic planned for tomorrow, the Gabriels chop and mix and stir while chatting about a wide range of subjects, ranging from old family stories to whether the potato salad needs more mustard to national politics to financial concerns to whether or not they should open another bottle of wine. In short, What Did You Expect? finds the Gabriels more or less the same as we left them at the end of Hungry, if perhaps more tired, more anxious, a little sadder.

Can you blame them, really, given the state of the world right now? What did you expect, indeed?

Joan Marcus

I'll admit it: As moved and impressed as I was by Hungry, and as eager as I was to get tickets to the second and third installments of Nelson's sold-out cycle about the Gabriel family, I found that I wasn't particularly eager to see What Did You Expect? once showtime came around. Lord knows we've all had a long, unpleasant, exceedingly rocky six months of news that's ranged from bad to worse to hide-under-the-bed-and-hyperventilate awful; by showtime, the prospect of sitting and watching a middle-class American family sitting and talking--about politics, no less!--came to seem more psychically exhausting than I felt I could handle. I was wrong, of course, just as I was wrong in assuming, prior to seeing Hungry, that watching people talk and make dinner would put me to sleep.

Nelson's process, which you can learn more about here, makes for remarkably up-to-date theater; in rehearsals and being frantically rewritten up until opening night, What Did You Expect? was frozen on September 16th, and takes place just prior to the first presidential debate. But the Gabriels' conversation goes no deeper into politics than your average American family's does, and this turns out to be both curiously reassuring and precisely the point. The Gabriels are certainly concerned about the upcoming election, but they're also preoccupied by a multitude of other matters, all of which are discussed at length, if never neatly, stagily, artificially resolved.

Hungry

The Gabriel family of Rhinebeck, New York, has just finished scattering the ashes of Thomas, one of its men, on the shores of the Hudson. Now that the simple ceremony has ended, they have retreated to the house Thomas shared with his third wife, Mary. Together, they gather around Mary's large wooden table to reminisce, mourn, catch up, listen to music, and set about preparing a nice dinner for themselves. Bread dough is kneaded and popped into the oven; vegetables for ratatouille are peeled, chopped, tossed in olive oil, and set on a burner; apples are peeled, chopped, and tossed in lemon juice for a crumble; bottles of red and white wine are poured. The family members chat in the sort of wide-ranging and amiable, ambling way people who are comfortable with one another tend to: one topic segues easily into another, doubles back, segues again. There are things someone wants to push further and things someone doesn't want to talk about; there are digressions and thoughtful pauses and reiterations. No topic is especially revelatory or unique; there are no Big Dramatic Moments or Deep Secrets That Get Revealed. Instead, topics include exactly the sort you'd expect people to discuss while they're sitting around shooting the shit for a while at a gathering: interfamily dynamics, work, local and national politics, Hillary and Donald and feeling the Bern, what old friends and acquaintances have been up to, how to properly chop the vegetables, the good old days, the way things have been changing around these parts. When dinner is ready, the family retreats from the kitchen into the dining room to eat, and that's when the play ends; only the faint smell of freshly baked bread remains.

Joan Marcus

"Yeah, but how is that a play?" my husband asked when I arrived home to tell him about Hungry, Richard Nelson's beautifully acted first installment in a planned trilogy--collectively titled "Election Year in the Life of One Family"--about the Gabriels. If you agree with his reaction, I'd strongly recommend that you skip this one--and the two Gabriel family plays to follow at the Public this September and November. But if the chance to be a fly on the wall in the kitchen of a fairly typical white, middle-class, contemporary American family appeals to you, Hungry will satisfy your soul.

I'd never before seen a Richard Nelson play, but his reputation preceeds him. I knew that he'd done a series of plays like this before--his four so-called Apple family plays, written between 2010 and 1013, focused on the fictional Apple family, also from Rhinebeck, during important moments in contemporary American politics. And I knew that many of my friends and colleagues, all avid theatergoers whose wide-ranging tastes I trust and respect, find Nelson's plays to be indulgent, pointless, boring wastes of time. I was fully prepared to feel much the same way, and am, frankly, still a little surprised that I didn't.

Hungry is slow and ruminative, for sure--it's not paced like most plays are, which is to say that nothing really happens except chat and chopping and kitchen work. But I found myself mesmerized by this small, quiet play, which was so expertly, realistically and convincingly directed by the playwright and performed by an almost all-female, universally strong, cast of six: Mary Ann Plunkett, Roberta Maxwell, Jay O. Sanders, Lynn Hawley, Amy Warren, and Meg Gibson. There is something beautiful about a quiet, unspoken celebration of so-called "women's work," and the peaceful synchronicity that results from it.

Watching people sitting around and chatting for almost two hours is most certainly not for everyone, and I came away from Hungry keenly aware of the reasons why Nelson's plays tend to be very mixed, reception-wise. If, and only if, what I've described above appeals to you, I'd recommend this one; if it doesn't, you'll likely be bored to tears. Me? I came away feeling real affection for the Gabriel family. I am looking forward to visiting with them again when the next two plays open, and the 2016 presidential election looms ever larger.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a curious craving for ratatouille and fresh bread.

The Royale

A few seats were empty in the Mitzi Newhouse Theater the evening I saw Marco Ramirez's The Royale, and that struck me as kind of a bummer, because man, oh man, The Royale is a play worth seeing--especially in a production as tightly realized and inventively directed (by Rachel Chavkin), and as beautifully performed (by an iron-strong five-member ensemble) as this one is.

I suppose the idea of a one-set play about an early-20th century African American boxer is not exactly going to make a lot of the typical patrons of Lincoln Center froth at the mouth in a rabid rush to the box office. I get it: I'm about as big a fan of boxing as I am of rolling around naked in ground glass. But The Royale grabbed me almost as soon as it began, and I am most grateful that it did.

T. Charles Erickson

 Inspired by, if not closely based on, the life of the heavyweight fighter Jack Johnson (1878-1946), The Royale focuses on Jay Johnson (Khris Davis), a brilliantly talented and ambitious black heavyweight boxer who wants to break the color barrier by fighting--and beating--Bixby, the undefeated and now-retired heavyweight world champion. When Bixby accepts the challenge, Jay starts training with the help of his coach, Wynton (Clarke Peters), his sparring partner, Fish (McKinley Belcher III), and his white promoter, Max (John Lavelle).

But as the big fight nears, the physical training Jay puts himself through turns out to be the easy part of his preparations. Far harder is grappling with the fact that earning the title is no simple path to glory, but a double-edged sword that threatens to drive race relations backward even as they are also driven forward. And after a visit from his beloved sister, Nina (Montego Glover), who reminds him why he wants the title in the first place, but also of the fallout that might result from his win, the mind games only get worse. Will Jay manage to block out the doubts, the threats, the endless racism, while he's in the ring? Or will he lose (or throw) the fight for fear that his win will result in white anger and countless acts of brutal racial violence?

Weighty, looming questions like these do not, of course, result in easy answers, and The Royale doesn't tie up the loose ends in a tidy bow. That is, of course, to its credit: things have certainly gotten better in America since the turn of the century, but the present remains a veritable forest of double-edged swords when it comes to black lives, nonetheless. The Royale is so consistently engrossing, Jay's inner game so engagingly depicted, and the cast and direction so flawless and fine, that the ending is not the point so much as the getting there is.

Fifteen for '15

It's humbling, really, just how much theater happens in this town--and just how much talent there is making it. Because I've been on sabbatical this year, I've seen many, many more shows than I typically do over the course of a year. Even so, it's a little overwhelming to think of the fact that I haven't even scratched the surface of what's out there--and that for all I've seen, I've still missed plenty of must-see shows that were gone before I could find time to get to them. How do the critics do it?

Even though I'm not a critic, it's fun to play one at this time of year. So here's my top 15 list for 2015. The shows are in rough chronological order. Links to the original posts I wrote about them, if I wrote about them, are embedded in the titles. I've embedded links to preview clips, interviews and the odd critics' review in the body of the text in case you prefer to skip my yammering and go right to the visuals. 

Happy new year, all. Here's to the theater--and to a happy, peaceful 2016!

On Your Feet! The Story of Emilio and Gloria Estefan

When it comes to biographical jukebox musicals that are produced by the same people being depicted, you could do worse than On Your Feet! The Story of Emilio and Gloria Estefan. The musical may be an extended advertisement for the Estefan empire, but hell, the couple seems to have lived lives that were destined to be made into a big, dancy, feel-good Broadway show, so I can't begrudge them the sanitized recounting of their rags-to-riches story.

It's a pretty good story, at least as it's presented here: the daughter of an aspiring singer and a Vietnam veteran, both Cuban immigrants, Gloria (ably portrayed by Alexandria Suarez as a child and Ana Villafane as an adult) is a college student in Miami in the late 1970s when she first sings with a local group called the Miami Latin Boys, managed by Emilio. Emilio (played with enormous charisma, if a highly questionable relationship with tonal accuracy by Josh Segarra) is quick to recognize Gloria's monstrous talent--and her sex appeal--so changes his group's name to the Miami Sound Machine once she officially signs on as a member.

Allegiance

Allegiance, the Broadway musical about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, is not the most flawlessly rendered musical you will ever see. Some of its lyrics are a little clunky, some of its character motivations don't quite resonate, and some of its scenes feel a little heavy handed. I agree, for the most part, with the criticisms my fellow blogger Sandra listed in her review of the show, which she posted on Show Showdown a few weeks back. But like Sandra, I ultimately fell for Allegiance nonetheless: It's honest, earnest, and charming, and it manages to shed light on an ugly chapter in American history without being too pedantic on the one hand, or too flip on the other. It has some rough spots, sure, but they were hardly disruptive enough to keep me from rooting for its (wholly well-performed) characters, connecting with its swiftly-paced plot, or surreptitiously swiping big fat tears from my eyes in the final moments. In short, for its flaws, Allegiance does exactly what a Broadway musical is supposed to do: entertain its audiences, perhaps teach them a thing or two about inclusion (an endlessly reiterated tenet in American musicals), and move them emotionally with song, dance, and plot.

Matthew Murphy

With all this in mind, I suppose I agree, as well, with Charles Isherwood's assessment of the aesthetic shortcomings noted his review in the New York Times. Yet his final comment, which he seems to have intended as something of a sting, has been stuck in my head for days: "If anything, the authors, feeling the responsibility of illuminating this shameful chapter in American history, pack the show with so much incident and information that 'Allegiance' often feels more like a history lesson than a musical. A singing history lesson, yes, but a history lesson nonetheless." This comment has stuck with me not because I agree with it--rather, I can't shake it because it really, really pisses me off.

Ripcord

Last night, the cast of Ripcord, David Lindsay-Abaire's play at MTC, seemed a little off. Maybe it had been a rough weekend, or someone got accidentally plastered during the half-hour call, or was working with a fever or an injury or something. For whatever reason, lines were flubbed and focus occasionally seemed to wane. But while I would have loved to see the cast at their very best, the occasional missteps didn't matter in the long run: Ripcord is hi-freaking-larious. 

Off night or not, the cast is filled with pros, who are briskly directed by David Hyde-Pierce (yeah, the actor, proving here that he is as droll and funny behind the scenes as he is in front of the camera). And while the show is predictable in some ways, it's genuinely surprising and inventive in others.