The Cher Show

In lots of ways, The Cher Show is remarkably similar to Summer: The Donna Summer Musical. Both are big, shiny, spectacular jukebox musicals about iconic female superstars, created by overwhelmingly male creative and production teams. Both feature three actresses playing different versions of the star in question at various points in her life. And for whatever reason, both use a great deal of blue lighting and trapdoor lifts, though Summer's excessive reliance on the latter ultimately kicks The Cher Show's measly, single-trap ass. In every other way, though, The Cher Show is the superior production.

Joan Marcus

Don't misunderstand me: The Cher Show is not Brilliant Art. It's silly and breezy and light, so skip it if the idea of a fun if slightly flimsy couple of hours in the theater offends you. This is the kind of jukebox musical that elicits gleeful applause at the opening notes of a pop standard, or when an actor manages a passable impersonation of a beloved celebrity (that's quite the groovy Sonny Bono voice you've nailed down, Jerrod Spector!). Still, it works in ways that Summer, which was weirdly tentative and frustratingly convoluted in execution, did not.

In the first place, Cher has a concept, however basic, that it doesn't veer from. It knows what makes its subject simultaneously larger than life and appealingly vulnerable. It recognizes that Cher has had thrilling highs and devastating lows, and it plays to them. It wisely lingers on the stuff that is most dramatically viable: her discovery by and relationship with Bono, her shifting personae, her diverse career, her relationship with her wise, tough mother--without dwelling for too long on any one thing, or attempting to dig too deep. It also knows how to make fun of itself from the outset. Having the three Chers greet the audience at the top of the first act by calling us all bitches before immediately confronting how bizarre it is, even to them, that there are three Chers hanging around onstage pretty much establishes the tone. In fact, this tactic won me over immediately, even as I remain uncertain as to why the hell there were three Chers up there, or what they were all supposed to be representing. But then, seriously now, who the hell cares? I certainly don't plan to lose sleep over the question, and I'm sure none of the three Chers give a shit, either--truly, I feel pretty secure in the notion that they all just want the spectators to enjoy looking at the shiny Bob Mackie costumes, some of which got their very own huge and elaborate production number. Reader, enjoy them I did.

Another enormously important thing The Cher Show gets right is its audience, which is largely if not entirely gay and/or female. The creative team might be just as male as Summer's was, but at least this show doesn't pander or condescend. There was something decidedly off-putting, for example, about how Summer tried to present itself as inclusive and empowering, even as as it quickly swept its heroine's infamous born-again-influenced homophobia under the rug with a few glib platitudes.

The Cher Show is hardly deep: you won't get much about Cher's life here that you couldn't learn from a glance at her Wikipedia page; probably the Wiki would tell you more. A sister is mentioned only once and in passing. Cher's relationships with her children are almost entirely off-limits. Her romances are all surfaces: they form, peak, and wither. Sonny remains an important force in her life after their divorce, but how, why, and in what ways aren't plumbed; nor is anything about Bono save that he was ambitious, business-minded, and extraordinarily controlling. Only Cher's mom (played by a fine Emily Skinner) has some depth; anyway, she seems like she was a consistent, positive force in Cher's life, whether that's true or not. Still, the show's constant nod to the importance of women doing shit for themselves--or, whatever, for their daughters, especially when their daughters turn out to be Cher--speaks volumes. So do the costumes, the huge wigs, and the autotune.

In short, this is a fluffy bauble that knows exactly what it is and exactly how to entertain. Kind of like its title character. Have fun, bitches, or stay home.

Oklahoma!

Daniel Fish's absolutely stunning Oklahoma, currently at St. Ann's Warehouse where I wish it could somehow live forever, never loses sight of America's gloried past even as it confronts its darkly sinister present. The production is all the more remarkable considering the fact that it's a revival of the alpha and omega of the musical stage, for crying out loud: Oklahoma! is so frequently positioned as the culmination of all that came before it and the catalyst for all that came afterward that it would seem much easier to just not bother revisiting it at all. The last time the musical had a major revival in New York City was in spring 2002, not even a year after the attacks on the World Trade Center. That revival billed itself as an updated take on an old favorite, but it really wasn't: it clung so desperately to what I suppose was a pre-9/11 embrace of clear-eyed optimism and gosh-darn American gumption that I barely made it through the first act and was overjoyed to split at intermission. 

Scholars of the American stage musical, myself included, are quick to say that the genre reflects its time and place. But then, when it comes to revivals, cultural relevance all too often takes a backseat--or no seat at all--to nostalgia and familiarity. When they do get trotted out, plenty of musicals that are no longer remotely as relevant as they once were end up coming off like someone's beloved antique tableware: dutifully buffed of as much tarnish as possible, but still sort of futzy and vaguely ridiculous nevertheless. 

Sara Krulwich

Not so Daniel Fish's stripped, stark revival, which flays Oklahoma! to expose all the rot that--who knew?--festers beneath its cheery, wide-eyed facade. Staged in the center of a huge performance space, with the audience lining either side of the action, the production is a near-perfect blend of old and new, of joy and foreboding, of what Americans have and what we are rapidly losing. It is an object lesson in how to make a hoary old chestnut roar back to life without changing a single word. And since the lights remain up for most of the performance, spectators can watch one another reacting as the production unfolds: every smile of nostalgic recognition at the start of a beloved musical number, or knowing nod at the recitation of lines evocative of America at its rosiest; every grimace at the cock of a gun or a cheap punchline delivered at a woman's expense.   

Oklahoma! must have felt like a miracle when it hit Broadway in 1943. The first offering by the venerated dream-team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the musical not only became the blueprint for The Broadway Musical as Artistic Triumph, but also enjoyed pitch-perfect timing: after all, it celebrated all that was strong and sure and promising and wonderful about America just as the country was entering the Second World War to rid the globe of evil. Stories of young soldiers weeping openly with patriotic pride at performances before marching gallantly off to confront the Nazis fit perfectly into Oklahoma's breathless hagiography. This revival still gives credit where credit is due, while simultaneously zeroing in on aspects of the American experiment that have dimmed of their bright golden haze and begun to curl around the edges. It's a delicate balance for sure, but in mixing the sticky sweet with the excruciatingly sour, the revival blends up something absolutely dead-on in its relevance in the way only the very rarest of productions can.

It helps that the cast is so stunningly good. Damon Daunno has a gorgeous, clear voice that can trill and swoop, and his Curly is at once appealing and predatory: he's a good-looking, self-assured bro who knows exactly how tall he stands in the pecking order, and who has no problem resorting to cruelty when he doesn't get his way. His "Pore Jud Is Daid" scene with Laurie's comparatively awkward suitor Jud (Patrick Vaill) is done in darkness, save for a huge projection of Jud's face, rapt and practically twitching with longing when Curly suggests he commit suicide in exchange for the love and affection he desperately craves. Jud remains as off-putting and strange in his angry solitude as he's always been, but then, Daunno's Curly is precisely the sort of guy who gets off on devising new ways to make outcasts like Jud sadder, angrier, and more isolated than they already were. 

Laurie (Rebecca Naomi Jones) is a lot better than Jud at playing Curly's game; for the most part, the female characters are painted as smarter and more solid than the men in this production. It doesn't amount to a hill of beans, of course: they're still stuck in a place and time when women are treated about as well as a prized horse if they're lucky. Laurie is attracted to both Jud and Curly, though neither is an ideal match, which helps explain both the seething rage that roils beneath Jones' quiet depiction, and the fact that moments of particularly heated sexual tension are lit in a queasy, medicinal green.

While Laurie is clearly aware of just how small her life is going to turn out to be, Ado Annie (a bubbly Ali Stroker) enjoys playing the field, even though her romantic options are also limited. Annie is being courted by the sweet if dim Will Parker (James Davis) and the slightly brighter, if oilier and far less sincere Ali Hakim (Michael Nathanson). Will wants to buy Annie from her father; Ali wants to sell her on promises that he clearly has no intention of keeping. The bitter, totally-over-it bluntness of Mary Testa's Aunt Eller drives the womens' plight home, as does a silent, memorable scene in which the female characters shuck corncobs, breaking them into a pot with irate efficiency while the men in the cast lean idly against a wall of the theater that just happens to be covered completely with guns.

Layered over the same old dialogue that presumably passed for hilarity in the 1940s--and still does in too many corners of this grand land--is a more knowing acknowledgment of the subjugation of women as fuckable objects, as spent and sexless old crones, as nagging freedom-destroyers, or as livestock. The dream ballet, performed by the powerful Gabrielle Hamilton, neatly demonstrates just how trapped the women depicted in Oklahoma! are. I can't stop thinking about Hamilton, flanked by a group of young women in matching shirts emblazoned with the words DREAM BABY DREAM, racing frantically toward a door that slides shut before they can escape the blasting, electrified medley of songs from the score, while cowboy boots fall around them, striking the floor of the stage with gunshot-like pops. 


To that end, nor can I stop thinking about the flat, resigned, almost mechanical way federal marshal Cord Elam--here depicted by Anthony Cason, who is black--asks that Jud's death be properly investigated, even as the predominantly white cast insists that Curly quickly be pronounced innocent so he can honeymoon with the obviously traumatized Laurie. 

Fish's production sums up the American experience as it was and as it is. America still has its wind whipping 'cross the plain, its statue-like cattle, its beautiful mornings and its sounds of the earth like music. It's still home. It's still worth fighting for. But it's also blood-soaked and cruel, violent and unfair: it's a place where a guy like Curly will always get any girl he wants in the end; where a dimwit like Will Parker will always be content so long as he can buy sex and violence on the cheap in up-to-date places; where a woman like Laurie is free to dream of a new day, even if it never arrives. It's no wonder, then, that the cast's rendition of the title song near the end of the show blends whoops of joy with what sounds suspiciously like growls of rage and howls of pain. 

Groundhog Day

Humorless buzzkill that I am, I've never been a big fan of the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, even though just about everybody else on the planet seems to think that it's one of the most brilliant comedy films ever made. Also, while I appreciated the stage adaptation of Matilda, and found its Tim Minchin score inoffensive, that musical, too, ultimately left me kind of tepid, if not utterly cold. For both of these reasons, I've been a little slow in getting around to seeing the Broadway musical version of Groundhog Day, which is Minchin and director Matthew Warchus's followup collaboration.

Joan Marcus

I can't say I loved every minute of the musical, or that it totally changed my life, or even my opinions about the musical version of Matilda or the film version of Groundhog Day. But I certainly enjoyed it. It has a lot of strengths, and at least one number that I haven't stopped thinking about. Sure, there are weak links: the set and sound are both a little murkier than they should be at various points, and the whole production came off as a little too darkly lit. The first act gets a little bogged down with a lot of exposition and the constant repetition that's part of the fabric of the plot. And many of Minchin's lyrics and melodies just don't stick with me, even after repeated listening (truly, I tried).

But the cast is strong and committed. The car chase, done with little car puppets and black light, made me laugh, and there were some excellent stage tricks during the suicide attempts. And if you have never seen Andy Karl on stage, you're missing out. As Phil, the arrogant and condescending weatherman who learns to be a mensch by the end of the show, he's endlessly appealing. In everything I've seen him do, I'm newly struck by how gifted Karl is both as a verbal and physical comedian. Here, his talents and his charisma are put to excellent use, especially since he walks the same fine line Bill Murray managed so well in the film (and just as a general proposition): Karl's Phil is never enough of a smarmy, insufferable dick that you genuinely hate him, but he's just enough of one that his gradual transformation and self-actualization into a reasonably good guy remain consistently engaging.

Then there's the wonderful "Playing Nancy," which pretty much made the musical for me. Performed at the top of the second act with absolutely no fanfare by a secondary character who previously has been fooled into sleeping with and subsequently dismissed by Phil, the piece is beautiful, delightfully meta, and astoundingly forthright in its commentary. I loved it, I haven't stopped thinking about it, I listen to it often and fondly. Thanks, Tim Minchin. You might not be my alltime favorite Broadway composer, but with this song, you've earned my respect. Hats off to you for considering, even momentarily, the roles women play in the most heralded and blockbustery and revered of mass entertainments, which are ultimately and almost always about men--and for writing a song that doesn't flinch, pander, or condescend. I'd make like Bill Murray and sit through all of your future musicals twice in a row, anytime, as long as you keep writing songs like this.

Say Something Bunny!

On her website, Alison S.M. Kobayashi describes herself as an identity contortionist. This is, as it turns out, a pretty accurate description for the highly interdisciplinary work she does, which lies somewhere between curating and performance art, with a little anthropology, visual art, filmmaking, and playwrighting tossed in at various points for good measure.

As an interdisciplinarian myself, I not only relate to never quite fitting into any number of different camps, but I also was particularly taken by Kobayashi's Say Something Bunny! Especially since that piece, which she has created and in which she performs, is one I have my own weird interdisciplinary relationship to.

The connection Kobayashi and I share is to one David Newburge, whom I interviewed in the mid-aughts when I was working on Hard Times, my book about 1970s nudie musicals. We met in his lawn-green Greenwich Village apartment, where he had many birds and and a grand piano. We talked a lot about his 1971 show Stag Movie, and when I asked him what he'd been doing since, he broke out some of the porn films he'd worked behind the scenes on, and some of the erotic stories he'd written for various publications. It was one of the more memorable, strange interviews I've ever conducted. We said our goodbyes, and some months later, I learned that he'd died.

Alison contacted me sometime after Hard Times was published. Someone had given her a wire recorder purchased at what was presumably Newburge's estate sale. In it were various recordings Newburge had made of his family when he was in his late teens and early 20s, and Kobayashi was in the process of creating a show around them. I shared what materials I had about him, and forgot all about the exchange until learning that her show was up and running in New York, after a successful stint in Toronto. How could I miss it?

I'm so glad to have seen the finished product. Say Something Bunny, performed in a cozy and inviting Chelsea gallery, is not only visually appealing, but it's also gentle, smart, and warm. It simultaneously paints a vivid portrait of a family and brilliantly reflects the artist's obsession with--even love for--said family, which she has partly and painstakingly documented, and partly invented. Every family, I think, should be so brilliantly and lovingly reincarnated.

Styled like a table reading and drawing from a script made largely of transcripts from the wire recordings, Say Something Bunny is less about Newburge himself than it is about the people on the tapes he made (an assortment of family, neighbors, and friends), the time and places in which they lived (the 1950s through the 1970s; various points in New York City's outer boroughs), and the artist's own interpretations of their lives, relationships, and fates. It is an impressive, extraordinarily well-researched and executed piece, that manages as well to be deeply touching and quite funny.

I fully admit that my initial curiousity about the piece was based largely on its relationship to my own work. It's not often, after all, that a short section in your obscure academic book about obscure 1970s musical theater helps inform someone's curatorial performance-art piece--or that said book actually makes a cameo appearance in said curatorial performance-art piece! But Say Something Bunny is an amazing accomplishment all on its own. Experience it if you can through July. While you're there, say hello to David and his extended family for me. I've never met the lot of them, but I'm quite sure they'd like to know that they're being richly, respectfully rendered by a fellow traveler--especially one who is so very good at what she does.

Dear Evan Hansen

Dear Evan Hansen is an intimate, well-crafted, well-performed musical, the kind that tidily trashes the generalized dismissal of musical theater as an emotionally overwrought genre filled with forced cheeriness and an abundance of glitz. Performed by a small cast on a sleek, deceptively simple set of sliding panels designed to look like the glossy, liquid screens of laptops, tablets and cellphones, Dear Evan Hansen is, on one level, about the way teenagers relate to their peers and to adults (or don't) in the technological age. But it goes deeper to examine contemporary cultural phenomena, like technology's role in what is sometimes referred to as "inspiration porn" and the ways that the very existence of the Internet can magnify the sorts of awkward, unpleasant social shit adolescents struggle with and always have, even when it couldn't be magnified and instantly replicated across the world with the click of a button.

The musical is moving, layered, and very impressively performed. There's been a lot of buzz, which began when the show premiered off-Broadway at Second Stage last spring, about just how brilliant Ben Platt is in the title role, and it's entirely warranted. Only a handful of years older than Evan, a high-school senior, is supposed to be, Platt clearly remembers well the emotional roller-coaster of adolescence. His Evan is all coiled anxiety, crippling self-consciousness and monstrous self-doubt, and the character is as frustrating and as heartbreaking as your average teen can be. Evan's single mom, an equally memorable Rachel Bay Jones, works long hours, takes classes at night, and thus tends to worry about and dote on her son from a harried distance. It's a testament to the writing and the performances that their relationship, ultimately the heart of the musical, never feels hollow or strained.

Neither, really, does the slightly tidy ending, which is a little cleaner than it surely would have been had the proceedings depicted in Dear Evan Hansen taken place in real life instead of over the course of a two-hour musical. Still, and while it never tortures its characters, Dear Evan Hansen makes it clear that none of them make it through a tough, morally questionable stretch without consequences: some close relationships are ruined; others grow much stronger. Still, the show implies, everyone involved will move on, heal, eventually be all right. This is not a bad message to impart; I took it as a gift.

And for the record, my daughter, the friends I saw the show with, and I can't wait for the cast recording to be released later this winter.

2016 Top Ten: Liz Wollman

In years as rough and depressing as 2016 has been, I am extra-super-duper thankful for the theater. I have no desire, after a year as harsh as this one was, to come up with a "worst" list--enough with the snark! Anyway, I've found that even productions that disagreed with me most were automatically more enjoyable than the news of the world, so I won't be dissing anything here.

I do, however, want to celebrate the shows that brought me particular joy during these dark times, so here's my top ten "best" in chronological order.

What I Did Last Summer (And Fall and Winter and Spring)

From April 2015 to March 2016, I served as a judge on the Lortel Awards, which recognize excellence in the Off Broadway theater. The term was a little daunting--I was told to expect (and ultimately was invited to) just over 100 shows over the course of the year. I missed a few--a couple closed before I could get to them, a couple press agents never got back to me--but I saw nearly all of them. Just before I was asked, my year-long sabbatical was approved and I had been planning to see a lot of theater during leave anyway, so the invitation seemed particularly fortuitous. Plus, while I'm lucky that my husband usually likes having me around, he insisted that he and our kids would survive--perhaps even thrive--despite the fact that I'd often not be around to warm up leftovers or mumble distractedly at them while staring at the computer, so I took him at his word.

Before I accepted the gig, I asked a friend and colleague who has judged the Lortels in the past if he recommended it. He did--and added that while it is indeed an enormous commitment, it was also a rare chance to see a lot of shows one wouldn't otherwise, and was thus "a great education." Figuring that it would be seriously lame for a scholar to turn down something educational, I submitted my name and contact information to the Lortel Foundation. Thus commenced the deluge of press invites to Off Broadway shows, which lasted the year, peaking (with surprising intensity) in March before halting entirely when my term elapsed.

I spent much of the past year bouncing from one production to another, seeing one or two--and occasionally more like five or six--Off Broadway shows a week. I took notes on the shows I saw; my notes ranged from lengthy paragraphs about character and direction and lighting, to one- or two-word dismissals or superlatives. The experience was exhausting, irritating...and completely fucking wonderful. Also, my colleague was right: It was educational--just not always in ways I'd assumed it would be. Yes, I got the chance to see shows I would not have chosen otherwise. Yes, I went to many theaters that I'd never set foot in or sometimes even heard of before. But here are a few other things I learned over the course of the year, all of which surprised me a little.

Disaster!

Disaster! totally isn't one. Sure, it could maybe be shorter by about fifteen minutes, and maybe a little sharper in spots, but I saw the third preview and it was already pretty damned funny. How could it not be, really? Look at the cast list to the right. Just look at it. The show is chock full of Broadway people who aren't just famous at this point but the creators of their very own goddamned personae. How could a show with a cast this awesome possibly suck? HOW COULD IT?

I suppose it could if it took itself too seriously, but believe me, it isn't a dumbass, so it knows way better than to do anything that boneheaded. Disaster! has its own long history at this point: it was first performed at a benefit in 2011, and has popped up Off Broadway a whole bunch of times since then, with rotating cast members including greats like Mary Testa, Mary Birdsong, Judy Gold, and Annie Golden. The cast has been a little more Broadway-fied now that Disaster! has landed at the Nederlander, but there are a few holdovers from its Off Broadway days, including Seth Rudetsky, the co-creator (along with Jack Plotnick, who directs, here), who has appeared in every production as noted disaster expert Professor Ted Scheider. Also, Jennifer Simard, who I want to own stock in, reprises her role--more on her and the rest of the cast in a second.

The Humans

In The Humans, Stephen Karam's funny, sad, squirmily accurate play about family dynamics in troubling times, the supernatural is repeatedly implied. The newly rented, ground-floor New York apartment the play is set in--creepy enough as it is in its whitewashed, prewar emptiness--makes all kinds of strange creaks and groans, is subject to frequent and random power outages, and is regularly stomped upon by a never-seen upstairs neighbor who is, even by New York standards, excessively noisy. Family members talk over dinner about the unknown: scary comic book creatures, brushes with death, strange and unsettling dreams. And while the ending of The Humans builds toward a climax befitting the kind of terrifying surprise one expects of a horror flick, the eerie vibe infusing this smart, affecting play ultimately has little, if anything, to do with the otherworldly. People, it turns out--especially the ones you love and trust the most--can burrow into and fuck with your head way better than any ghost can. Especially when they, like you, are preoccupied with the most terrifying of human anxieties: rejection, poverty, sickness, age, death.

Joan Marcus

Preludes

Kyle Froman

Preludes, which has been extended through early August at the absolutely lovely Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center, is a dense and chewy musical that will not thrill everyone who sees it, but will certainly intrigue and challenge those with patience and an affection for postmodernism. An endlessly layered, circuitous, diffuse piece, Preludes is more intellectually challenging than it is warm and fuzzy. Riveting in some segments, quietly mesmerizing in others, and uncomfortably edgy in still others, Preludes comes off less as a straightforward musical than as an extended waking dream. This makes sense, since the show takes place in the hypnotized mind of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. 

Hamlet

Photo: Carol Rosegg

Hamlet's a real pain in the ass, if you ask me. I don't mean the titular protagonist, though he's a pill, too. I'm talking about the show itself, which is so well-known, so riddled with famous phrases, so regularly referenced, and so often staged that, in CSC artistic director Brian Kulick's words, Hamlet "is really not a play anymore--it's kind of a sporting event: You come, you watch, you know it, and you wait--you see, well, how does Hamlet do 'to be or not to be?' How does this Hamlet do 'O this too too solid flesh?'" Hamlet might be a challenge to seasoned performers and directors in this respect, but I'm neither, so I don't feel like a total moron admitting that the very thought of tackling a show everyone knows so well--one whose lead character comes off as maddeningly mopey and indecisive; whose plot doesn't really progress all that much; and whose characters mostly stand around brooding for three-plus hours, uttering lines so familiar that they've become cliches, only to end up in an orgiastic hamster-pile of death in the last scene--seems to me like a nightmare.

The production of Hamlet at CSC, however, shook me out of my own trepidation. It is sleek and engaging, well-staged, and solidly performed. I am not convinced that the production, which takes a highly stylized, contemporary approach, will appeal to everyone (and indeed, a handful of people left during intermission at the matinee I saw). But at least as I see it, for all the glum indecision, confusing character motivations, and lack of taut pacing that this particular Shakespeare play packs into its lengthy five acts, the CSC production pays off in the end. There are very few sudden moves and no stage gore (though the deliciously scenery-chewing Glenn Fitzgerald, as a slow-burning Laertes, finally pops off at the end by racing around the house while bellowing madly, which is awesome). Yet the show never drags, thanks to the intensity of the company and the shrewd, careful direction of Austin Pendleton.

Hamilton

Much like the titular subject of his densely chewy, enormously satisfying new musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda is clearly so driven by, fascinated with, and passionate about something that he has been unable to keep from inserting himself into it, messing around with its guts enough to leave an indelible mark. Alexander Hamilton, the exceptionally driven founding father, loved his adopted, newborn country so deeply that he couldn't help but pour most of his energies into it, tinkering endlessly with details of its very foundation in hopes not only of ensuring its best possible future, but his legacy along with it. Just as Hamilton helped make this country what it is, Miranda has worked obsessively to push forward, and thereby ensure the continued relevance of, one of its more iconic art forms, which will not be the same as a result of his multifaceted attention to it.

Even before Hamilton entered previews, it became the hottest show in town, and tickets to see it became almost astonishingly hard to come by. When I finally snagged a pair, I decided to avoid reading or listening to other people's opinions about the musical. It's been a long time since any show snowballed the way this one has, and in far less breathless situations, I tend to believe the hype. I've almost always experienced serious disappointment as a result. It turned out to be pretty hard to tune it all out this time around, no matter how hard I tried. When a production gets lauded as often as this one has--when it regularly gets called game-changing, paradigm-shifting, unparalleled, and even revolutionary--it becomes pretty hard to keep the wax in one's ears and remain bound in ignorance to the mast.

An Octoroon

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon is one of those plays that is so excellent, challenging, insightful and funny that it leaves me with the desire to see it again immediately, several times even, and also to read it a couple of times for good measure. It's one of the strongest and most satisfying shows I've seen in a while. It serves as a reminder of the fact that as a nation, we tend not to talk meaningfully, effectively, or straightforwardly about race, and that our inability to do so makes our ugly racial past bleed into our present. It does all this without crushing the possibility of frank talk or real, productive change. And it's really fucking funny.

While not a straightforward history lesson, An Octoroon does a seamless job of demonstrating to its audiences some of the ways our distant past and immediate present remain entwined. The show simultaneously reconstructs, comments upon, and updates aspects of Dion Boucicault's 1859 melodrama The Octoroon, which was, in the states, second only in popularity to the big commercial blockbuster of the time, the melodramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Clearly, as it remains now, race was on a lot of American peoples' minds during the leadup to the Civil War. Go figure.

Jacobs-Jenkins' Talmudic reworking of the Boucicault piece is at once respectful to and critical of the original, and through it, An Octoroon compares past performance styles, social mores, views on race (and class and gender), and collective national consciousness with their contemporary equivalents. Lots has changed; lots hasn't. The production is unsettling, and even disorienting at times--especially since Jacobs-Jenkins doesn't let his audience get too caught up in the comedic aspects of the show before abruptly reminding us about what we're laughing at in the first place. He also refuses to tie up all the loose ends he and Boucicault have introduced in the process. There are just so many, after all--and as a collective, contemporary Americans are still trying to figure out, a century and a half after slavery ended, who is allowed to approach them, and in what ways, let alone how we are supposed to work them out once we do.

I am humbled by and grateful for An Octoroon. I hope you run right out and see it if you can. I hope it continues to be staged, seen, and discussed. And for the love of this stained, strained country, I hope like hell it's not the only contemporary American theatrical entertainment to do so.

The Academy Awards

Awards shows can tell us a lot about ourselves, which is why I insist on watching them, even when I haven't consumed much of the entertainment content being awarded. Last night was a case in point: I think I've seen about four films in the past year, only two of which were up for awards. I was pretty bored for most of the Academy Awards ceremony, and some of my ennui certainly had to do with my lack of connection to the films themselves. But my lack of enthusiasm was not entirely due to the fact that I don't go to the movies much of late. Nor was it entirely due to the thudding predictability that plagues such ceremonies at this point.

No, what bored me--what bores me in general--is how rooted our entertainment industries are in routine, and how truly resistant they seem to real, actual, honest change.

I don't mean to imply, here, that films themselves can't reflect life in interesting and important ways. Nor do I mean to imply that people who make movies can't do so with insight, intelligence, and the real desire to teach, reach, inspire, and impel. I'm not saying that at all. We are a country that makes great movies (and also plenty of really shitty ones). That's a good thing. But the disconnect between what is made and what is lauded by the industry that makes it riles me, and I found myself especially riled by last night's flat, strange, strained charade.

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical

Beautiful is one of those shows I meant to see when it first opened, and then right before Tony time, and then right after Tony time, and then over the summer. . .  and then I just sort of moved on once I realized that (a) getting cheap tickets to the show wouldn't be easy as long as the Tony Award-winning Jessie Mueller was heading up the cast as Carole King, and that (b) I did not want to cough up a lot of cash to see a musical that was roundly received as sweet and diverting, if hardly brilliant.

But then, fellow-blogger and longtime friend Sandra got a special offer, and we leapt upon discount tickets to Beautiful like--well, honestly, like two middle-aged women who grew up listening to Tapestry and who are exactly the target audience for this particular musical would. The upshot? Beautiful is indeed sweet and diverting, if hardly brilliant. That doesn't mean I didn't tear up a couple of times, and chuckle genuinely at other times. An added bonus: Jessie Mueller remains in the show, as does a vast majority of the original cast. They remain fresh and committed and sharp, and I was glad to see them. Mueller is as strong in the title role as everyone in the universe has already said she is; I'd like to add that Anika Larsen, as Cynthia Weil, and Jarrod Spector (no relation) as Barry Mann, are particularly appealing and well-suited, too.

On the Town

As Carol Oja points out in her new, excellent book Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War, the 1944 musical On the Town is not nearly as well-known or celebrated as Jerome Robbin's and Leonard Bernstein's 1957 collaboration, West Side Story. It's also not as cohesive or as deep, which is not to imply, at all, that it's bad. It isn't--especially in joyful revival at the historically cursed Ford/Hilton/Foxwood/Lyric Theater. 

A landmark work that is perhaps celebrated less for its aesthetic achievements than for its introduction to Broadway of a young, superlatively talented, and enormously influential creative team (Bernstein! Robbins! Betty Comden! Adolph Green!), On the Town was the result of disparate elements that were blended together in a hurry. Based in part on the short ballet Fancy Free, which premiered to enormous acclaim at the Metropolitan Opera House in April 1944 (and which you can see in its entirety here), On the Town was expanded into a full-length musical that opened on Broadway in December of the same year. Still deeply rooted in dance and, like Fancy Free, primarily about three sailors on shore leave, On the Town's book and lyrics were added by Comden and Green, who drew largely from material they'd been using in their nightclub comedy troupe, the Revuers (which also featured Judy Holliday, and for which Bernstein sometimes served as pianist).

The resultant musical is as dense a mix of highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow elements as the disparate influences imply: moody classical dance sequences are accompanied by Bernstein's symphonic scoring, while hips grind suggestively to his jazzier, bluesier numbers. Other numbers are all about wide-open, smiling faces and optimistic Broadway brass. Through the show, erudite, elitist characters mix easily with crasser, coarser ones. There are ridiculous plot-lines and moving ones (sometimes, these are one and the same). There are subtle jokes, corny jokes, recurring jokes, cheap jokes, dirty jokes.

Waiting for Godot (Vartn af Godot)

Waiting for Godot is one of those masterpieces of modern drama that everyone has read or seen or, at the very least, picked up the basics of through cultural absorption. (If you have managed to make it to this point in your life without ever having heard a thing about the play, here you go: Two guys with memory issues wait around in a sort of dreamy, disconnected wasteland for someone named Godot. They meet two other memory-challenged guys who are locked in a real whopper of a power struggle, and the four of them all kill time together. Then there's an intermission, and pretty much the same things happen again in act II. At the end, the original two guys go back to waiting on their own. Godot never shows up.) Being the landmark that it is, Godot has been translated into many languages and gets staged an awful lot all around the world. Since it first showed up in New York City in 1956, Godot has been performed by Very Big Names. The Broadway premiere featured Burt Lahr and EG Marshall; a revival the following year starred Geoffrey Holder, Earle Hyman, and Mantan Moreland.

As if convinced that the show wouldn't click with....well, with anyone unless very famous men were in it (Becket wasn't cool with with the idea of women doing the show), producers seem to have made star-studded casts a requisite for any New York-based Godot revival. BAM staged it in the late 1970s with Sam Waterston, Austin Pendleton and Milo O'Shea. The Mike Nichols production at Lincoln Center in 1988 went simply balls out with megawatt famousness: it featured Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Bill Irwin, F. Murray Abraham, and Lukas Haas. In 2009, Nathan Lane, John Goodman, John Glover and Bill Irwin (again) took Godot on; just last fall, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley appeared in yet another starry revival.

It occurred to me the other night, after agreeing to attend a performance of Godot in Yiddish at the tiny Barrow Street Theater in the West Village, that the play has been revived so frequently, and so fancily, that I've just never bothered to see it. I've read it, sure, but I've never seen one of the star-studded casts perform this monster masterwork about the tragicomic nature of human existence. My bad; it's just one of those shows, like King Lear or Grease, which shows up so often that I always figure I'll easily be able catch it the next time around.

The other thing that occurred to me--after I'd committed to a date and secured a ticket to the Yiddish version--that maybe my first time seeing Waiting for Godot should have been in a language that I actually understand.

Parade (New Hazlett Theater, Pittsburgh, PA)

Parade (book by Alfred Uhry, music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown) is a musical about the 1913 Leo Frank case, which culminates in his lynching in 1915. A lot of people find entertainments about abominations of justice that culminate in brutal murders by angry mobs of morons to be sort of oxymoronic, which explains, at least in part, the chilly reception Parade got when it opened on Broadway in 2000, and closed after 39 previews and only 84 regular performances (the collapse of its chief producer, Livent, during its run, probably didn't help boost sales, either). Sure, it's possible to have a musical that is a smash hit and also a total downer--Cabaret and West Side Story are proof--but Parade came off as just a little too clinical, a little too two-dimensional, to stir the emotions of its audiences.

While this may be a central flaw in the musical, it's also one that I find particularly understandable. Leo Frank, after all, was unfairly accused of a murder, given an outrageously sham trial, and wrongly sentenced to death, basically because he was Jewish and unpopular. When the sentence was finally commuted to life in prison instead of death by hanging, he was promptly lynched by several upstanding members of the Marietta, Georgia, community (including a former governor of Georgia, several sheriffs, a judge, the mayor, and a general assemblyman who later formed the town's first Boy Scout troop). At their most basic, the events are so dreadful, so grotesque, so completely Kafkaesque, that I can understand the hesitancy among the creative team to flesh out the characters too deeply. Encouraging your audience to bond with a character who was, in reality, so terrifyingly doomed is its own fucked-up kind of torture. I would be willing to bet that the creative team struggled mightily on this front.

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill

When one monstrously talented person impersonates another monstrously talented person, the desire to resort to cliches doubles in intensity. And since seeing Audra McDonald in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill on Tuesday evening, I admit I've been struggling with ways to talk about the show that don't resort to trite blathering about how incredible and heartbreaking Holiday was, or how incredible and heartbreaking McDonald's portrayal of her is.

But believe me when I tell you that every single blathery, trite, cliched superlative I can come up with applies here. At least when it comes to McDonald's performance, which is brilliant, sublime, superb, extraordinary.

The show itself is not quite as superlative, but I don't think that matters, at least not in this case. There have been other productions that I can't speak to: Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill premiered in Atlanta in 1986 and opened Off Broadway at the Vineyard in the same year (S. Epatha Merkerson, later of Law & Order fame, took over for Lonette McKee as Holiday during that year-long run). It has been bouncing around the country in regional productions ever since. I can understand why--Lady Day is small and easily staged, and it allows for black, female actresses to take on a challenging, interesting character.

After all, Billie Holiday is, in the end, just the leading character of this show--a fictionalized one based closely on the real woman. What we see of Holiday in Lady Day is playwright Lanie Robertson's reimagining of a concert she gave to seven audience members at a rundown bar in South Philadelphia in March 1959. A few months later, Holiday would die at 44 of cirrhosis of the liver and heart disease, both the result of excessive drinking and heroin use. It has been pointed out by other critics that at this point in her life, Holiday probably would have been completely unintelligible, totally ravaged, impossible to listen to. It has also been pointed out that the real Holiday was a famously private performer who suffered recurring bouts of stage fright, and that she certainly wouldn't have chatted amicably and at great length between songs as she does here. 

Post-Tony Snark

The Tony Awards are always my favorite awards ceremony, but this year they really pissed me off. And while I am the first to argue that the Tonys are never an accurate barometer of the broader state of commercial theater in New York or anywhere, I was nevertheless dismayed by the direction last night's broadcast chose to take.

Generally speaking, Broadway has been in a weird place for the past, oh, near-century or so. Once an epicenter for popular culture in this country, Broadway has been struggling to reclaim its legitimacy since at least the 1950s, when rock and roll came along and sent Tin Pan Alley packing. I sympathize--it's tough to be made to feel like you're past your prime. Thus, while I can be snarky and loudly critical sometimes, I'm nevertheless fairly supportive of whatever the theater industry chooses to do to keep musicals alive and relevant, not only because I love and believe in the theater (commercial and otherwise), but because, selfishly, I want to patronize it as much as I possibly can and would have to find something else to do with my life were it to go away.

That being said, last night's ceremony seemed to be imitating the bigger ceremonies--the Academy Awards, specifically--in ways that it shouldn't. I hope that next year's broadcast doesn't think these things were worth revisiting: