The Year-End Roundup

Every year, I rack up regrets over shows I never got the chance to see. I missed Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 &3) this year, for example, and also Sticks and Bones and Bootycandy. That being said, I got to see some great productions, among them 18 I blogged about for Showdown. While a few of them--Bread and Puppet Theater's summer circus and New Hazlett Theater's production of Parade--were so far off Broadway as to be in different states entirely, most of them were right here in New York, a city that I love mightily and want the very best for.

Sure, this year, I experienced some theatrical lows. I made no secret of really, really disliking If/Then. And I really have no idea what the fuck was going on with Outside Mullingar, despite some good performances and a nice set. There were a few shows I chose not to blog about at all because I had nothing terribly insightful to say about them (and, in the case of The Death of Klinghoffer, because I just didn't want to wade into the controversies that drew away from what was, in the end, a beautiful if flawed opera in a beautiful if flawed production).

But as Wendy notes in her end-of-year post, one of the joys of being a theater blogger is that we don't have to see stuff that we know will suck. We might pay for all our tickets, sit in crappy seats, and waste far more time on this blog than we should, especially when we have books to work on and classes to prepare for. But on the other hand, we are predisposed to like the things we choose to see, and we get to share our impressions with people who read our blog posts and almost never feel compelled to leave abusive comments or spam us with porn. Really, as I see it, it's a win-win situation.

Constellations

Marianne and Roland first meet at a barbecue. No, wait. It was a wedding. She's interested in him, but he has a girlfriend. Or was it that he was just out of a relationship, not ready to date? The answer, actually, is all of the above. Constellations, Nick Payne's 2011 play, which is currently receiving its American premiere at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, espouses the wormhole theory that the world is made up of millions of parallel universes existing side by side. On each wavelength, we might live an identical experience, altered only by a minor variation. It affects how we live our lives, and, more to the point here, how we fall in love.

It's almost impossible to speak more specifically about the plot of this brief, beguiling play without ruining the eventual experience you'll have when you see it. And you should see it. Payne has managed to squeeze more meaningful interaction and thought-provoking questions into sixty unbroken minutes than any other play I've seen thus far this season. And despite what you might expect from the highly-stylized text and dramatic devices, Constellations is, at its core, a portrait of romance and connection. It's funny, moving, occasionally frustrating, and deeply human; in short, everything you could want from a play.

Constellations marks not only the Broadway debut of playwright Payne, but of the production's marquee names: Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson. Gyllenhaal previously starred in Payne's If There Is, I Haven't Found It Yet Off-Broadway; Wilson, a two-time Olivier Award winner in London, is best known for her current starring role on Showtime's The Affair. Both are extraordinarily good here. Never leaving the stage, they manage to map the complicated trajectory of an entire relationship in several dozen mini-scenes, some non-verbal, some lasting mere seconds. Rarely have I seen such an intense connection between two performers, and I imagine their bond will only grow stronger as this production moves towards its official opening on January 13. It's almost certainly guaranteed to be 2015's first must-have ticket.

[Last row mezzanine, deeply discounted ticket]

The Best of 2014

Rebekah Brockman, Tom Pecinka
in Arcadia
Photo: Joan Marcus

Aaah, the joys of being an online reviewer. I don't get paid, and I often have to buy my own tickets, but I don't have to see shows that don't interest me. This may be why I always have robust "best of" lists--I'm choosing among shows I was predisposed to like. This doesn't mean I love everything. I saw some serious stinkers this year (Your Mother's Version of the Kama Sutra, Architecture of Becoming, Nothing on Earth (Can Hold Houdini), Bullets Over Broadway, Intimacy). But on a whole, I had a very exciting year in the theatre.

Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy)

He's not really the messiah. His mom is Mandy, not Mary. She's certainly not a virgin. For that matter, neither is he. Well, you know the story.

It's Monty Python's Life of Brian, only now it's an oratorio, called Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy). It's written by Eric Idle with Pythonian flair and composed by John Du Prez in a variety of styles (e.g., pop, Broadway, folk, etc.), all delightfully ear-friendly. Ted Sperling does a fabulous job conducting and directing, using the Collegiate Chorale and Orchestra of St. Luke's to their fullest, as they don hard hats, comment on the action, argue really well, and make a truly joyful noise.

Eric Idle, Victoria Clark, William Ferguson, Laura Worsham
with the Orchestra of St Luke's and the Collegiate Chorale,
conducted by Ted Sperling
Photo: Erin Baiano

Once Upon A Bride There Was A Forest

In the first scene of Kristen Palmer's Once Upon A Bride There Was A Forest, Josie (Rachael Hip-Flores) tells her boyfriend Warren (Chinaza Uche) that she will finally marry him but first she has to search for her father. Warren doesn't want Josie to go off on her own, but she promises to call every night and to be back in a fortnight. Off she goes. Soon her car breaks down. There's this big house...

Rachael Hip-Flores, Kristen Vaughan
Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum

And now....the audience

Have you seen the Broadway League's recent report on the demographics of the 2013-14 Broadway audience? If you haven't, and you're interested, you can check it out here.

I recognize that demographic surveys strike a lot of people as about as interesting as watching a boring person eat a sandwich. But I look forward to the ones the League release, because they give us as clear a picture of the commercial theater audience as anyone can get. Believe me when I tell you that there is nothing more maddening, when it comes to writing about popular entertainment, than not being able to truly assess the audience. Until we develop some sort of magical device that allows us to read, with incredible accuracy and clarity, the Borg-like hive-mind that makes up any group of spectators, the Broadway League's demographic reports mean a lot, and I'm grateful for them.

That being said, the findings in this particular study don't strike me as especially celebratory.

Side Show

Call me Joanne Kaufman. I knew from the downbeat of the horrifically misguided new production of Henry Krieger and Bill Russell's Side Show, currently in its final weeks at the St. James Theatre, that when intermission came, it would be time for me to go. The original production--which made Broadway stars of Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner, despite a similarly short run--is beloved by many, myself included. Coming of age musical-theatre obsessed in the late nineties, I don't think there was a cast album I subjected my parents to more. (Love ya, mom and dad!) The compelling story of conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, the unabashedly melodramatic score, and the harmonious blending of those two leading voices--what more could you want? Maybe my personal bar was set too high, but the heavily revised book and lyrics pale in comparison to the original, and Act One (which is all I can fairly judge) crawls along at a snail's pace. The staging, by Academy Award winning film director Bill Condon, has no spark; attempts at freak show hyper-reality bring to mind Spencer's Gifts more than Tod Browning.

It also doesn't help that Emily Padgett and Erin Davie, playing Daisy and Violet, respectively, are as charisma-free a pair of headliners as I've ever seen in a major musical production. In the original production, Skinner was a strong alto capable of riffing her face off, while Ripley employed both an angelic soprano and a fearlessly high belt. Padgett and Davie both sing like church sopranos, dull as dishwater. It's smart singing, perhaps, but never exciting. Their voices and physical presentation (both done up in mousy brown wigs) are so similar that it's often hard to tell them apart, much less care about their hopes and dreams, which they enumerate in "Like Everyone Else," a merciful holdover from the original production. The rest of the cast--which includes Ryan Silverman, Matthew Hydzik, David St. Louis, and Robert Joy in principal roles--is serviceable, if hardly captivating.

photo: Drew Angerer

Side Show will shutter on January 4, 2015, seventeen years and one day from the original production's closing date. It will have played even fewer performances than its predecessor. Perhaps, as was the case then, the closing notice will bring renewed interest to this struggling revisal. I'd say that you'd do just as well to stay home and listen to the vastly superior original cast recording.

[Last row orchestra, all the way to the side, TDF]

Pocatello



photo: Jeremy Daniel

Since his brilliant debut play, A Bright New Boise, had its New York premiere in 2010, Samuel D. Hunter's output has been both prodigious and prolific. At 32, he's already picked up an Obie, a Lucille Lortel Award, and a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. He's been averaging 2-3 new plays a year, including The Whale, a problematic, fascinating look at obesity and isolation, and The Few, a strange and satisfying little play that recalled early Sam Shepard. Time and again, Hunter has chronicled life in his home state of Idaho with the same gimlet eye that August Wilson once brought to Pittsburgh. All of which makes the spectacular failure of his latest work, Pocatello, so nakedly glaring. Set in a failing Italian chain restaurant (you know the one, even though it's never named), this boring and formless attempt at dark comedy is staler than a day-old breadstick.

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.

Asymmetric

Is all really fair in love and war? Not according to the thriller-comedy-love-story-political-commentary Asymmetric, written by the wonderful Mac Rogers, directed by the also wonderful Jordana Williams, and produced by Group UP and Gideon Productions at 59E59. 

Sean Williams, Kate Middleton, Seth Shelden
Photo: Deborah Alexander

As political commentary, Asymmetric offers a fascinating and important debate about the idea of "us" versus "them," with one character viewing "us" as the United States, our people, our guys, and the other viewing "us" as the human race, with no "them." I am struck by the fact that Rogers uses a woman character to embrace humanity and turn against drones and killing, despite (because of?) her previous close relationship with human destruction. Rogers is the second playwright this year to have a tough woman fight the idea of raining death down from the sky, and I have the same questions I discussed in that review (Grounded by George Brant):

... I wonder, does Brant believe that women, ... feel sympathy/compassion differently/more than men do? Is [the main character] supposed to be unique or representative? Or both? Would Grounded be the same if it were about a father rather than a mother? Men and women can be so different and yet so similar....

Sticks and Bones

The 1950s and early 1960s masqueraded as an innocent time in the United States, and nowhere was the masquerade more vivid than on television, with its faux perfect white families with their faux problems and their faux reality. In his deeply disturbing play, Sticks and Bones, David Rabe uses one of those families--Ozzie, Harriet, David, and Ricky Nelson--as his canvas to show how America's war in Vietnam stripped the United States of its masks and revealed the confusion, hatred, and violence underneath. What raises this angry comedy to brilliance is Rabe's compassion for the faux perfect family as their willful blindness is destroyed when David, the older son, returns from Vietnam suffering from actual blindness.

Raviv Ullman, Bill Pullman, Holly Hunter,
Ben Schnetzer, and Morocco Omari
Photo: Monique Carboni

In a way, the main conflict in Sticks and Bones is between reality and denial: David can only survive with reality, and the others can only survive in denial. [spoiler] This is why the family is so eager to aid David by helping him to kill himself. It is not his pain that are seeking to end, it is their own, and they are all willing to have him die for their sins. [end of spoiler]

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.

Lost Lake

Lost Lake is a brief, largely unsatisfying two-hander that only catches fire in its final moments. As the title suggests, both Hogan (John Hawkes) and Veronica (Tracie Thoms) are lost: she's a widowed mother whose professional life quickly unravels in light of a stupid mistake, and he's the wayward caretaker of a dilapidated, largely unrentable lake house in Upstate New York. Longing for idyll and escape for herself and two children, and suffering from a shortage of cash, Veronica agrees to take Hogan's place for a week; she's his only renter for the season. The first seventy-five minutes of this ninety-minute one act unfold banally, with Hogan and Veronica alternatingly arguing over repairs he promised but failed to deliver and disclosing their personal troubles. We learn why Veronica lost her job; why Hogan is estranged from his daughter and essentially homeless; we learn the ways in which they're more alike than might seem at first. Unfortunately, Auburn's writing hardly strikes sparks, and while Thoms and especially Hawkes (under Daniel Sullivan's direction) do fine work, a majority of the play remains uninvolving.

The play's final scene, however, is another story. In fifteen minutes, Auburn is able to capture the depths to which these two people have fallen, and how painfully alone they feel. It's striking in its profound darkness; the playwright rejects the redemptive sluice so fully, and that in itself feels gratifying. I cannot say that it's enough to recommend the play overall, though. Would that Auburn had written an entire work worthy of those fifteen minutes.
[Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission. Last row, extreme side. TDF.]

The Elephant Man

photo: Joan Marcus

Unique questions arise when presenting differently-bodied characters in theatrical productions. Should one be painstakingly literal--either out of respect, or to offer the audience a chance to fully wrestle with its collective prejudices and preconceived notions--or should the artists let the mind's eye do at least some of the work? Recently, Samuel D. Hunter's The Whale (presented by Playwrights Horizons in 2012) and Donald Margulies' The Model Apartment (first produced in 1995, and revived to acclaim last fall; both by Primary Stages) used extraordinarily convincing body suits to present morbidly obese characters, played by Shuler Hensley and Diane Davis, respectively. The effect was primal and immediate: there was no hiding from plain fact of two people succumbing to their size. Oppositely, the recent Broadway premiere production of Violet, in which the title character has a disfiguring facial scar, used no make-up at all. The physical deformity was evoked solely through the actions of the actor (Sutton Foster) playing the role, and the reactions of those around her. Cases can be made for both the strongly literal and the evocatively figurative characterizations.

Bernard Pomerance's ever-popular The Elephant Man has always stringently shied away from using anything other than vocal or physical mannerisms in portraying John (real name: Joseph) Merrick, a real-life Victorian man whose horrible deformities gained him notoriety and a certain amount of celebrity in his own time. In fact, most productions have taken pains to cast conventionally attractive men in the role. The original production starred Philip Anglim, who had worked as a model prior to becoming an actor; Mark Hamill (at the height of his Star Wars fame) and David Bowie acted as replacements. A 2002 Broadway revival featured the dashing Billy Crudup. The current revival, in previews at the Booth Theatre after a successful Williamstown Theatre Festival engagement two summers ago, outdoes them all, with box office megastar and former People Sexiest Man Alive Bradley Cooper assuming the title role. And while this handsome but lifeless production does not make a case for the play as an enduring stage classic, Cooper's anchoring central performance is imbued with both skill and passion.

Love Letters

Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

Alan Alda and Candice Bergen replaced Carol Burnett and Brian Dennehy as the two life-long pen pals that rarely physically connect in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on November 9. This third Broadway rotation of famous pairs follows the play’s usual bare-basics format, with no real set– just two chairs, a table, two scripts, two beverages and two actors that remain on stage reading letters placed in a binder. Alda and Bergen enter with no pomp, merely suddenly appearing on stage: She in a soft, dark sweater and pants; He in a blue button-down topped with a gray blazer.

Without changing sets or elaborate costumes, the play relies on the actor’s physical interactions and pacing to add intimacy during the letter reading of the 50-year correspondence between Connecticut elites Andrew Makepeace Ladd III (Alda) and Melissa Gardner (Bergen). Despite a slow start, where seven-year-old versions converse at length about drawing pictures for one another and other childhood sundries, Gurney’s tale, ultimately, becomes moving as the letters’ simplicity convey the humor and tragedy of life in a compact 90 minutes.

While such a scaled-down concept allows for poignant sentimentality, it offers little context. While, the play touches on serious issues like sexual abuse and fractured families, it does so without ever delving deeply into these situations—allowing time between confessions to flash forward without much commentary from the other party. Even when Melissa tells Andy she’s going to see her father with his new family in California and he prods her persistently, “Write me about California. How’s your second family?,” she only eventually replies that she doesn’t have any such thing. This happens often: a character reveals some horror without any follow-up.

It is not the clichéd story that grabs the audience here—where the man becomes a senator with the perfect wife, who works part-time sales in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gift shop, and three strapping sons and the free-spirited Melissa travels the world but ends up depressed, divorced and spending $155 a day drying out in rehab—rather the reassuring idea that even unfulfilled promise can elevate the importance of human existence.

Gurney’s play initially opened at New York’s Promenade Theater in 1989 and has become a regular staple of regional theater since, probably because it is easily mounted and allows actors a platform that requires no dancing, accents or pages of memorization. In this version, Alda often relies on his script, and goes for handfuls of minutes without making eye contact with the audience. Still, he imbues Andy with the proper New England remoteness and pomposity that hints of an underlining sensitivity of a more thoughtful man. Bergin is the opposite; she animates Gurney’s words with eye rolls, grimaces and gesticulations. Sometimes, all the activity feels over-the-top but she makes Melissa likable and fun, even as the character’s life darkens.  It’s nice to see Bergen back on Broadway in a bigger role than in her last venture as another suffering wife in Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.

Alda and Bergen appear in Love Letters until December 18^th. Stacy Keach and Diana Rigg star in the show from December 19th-January 9 and Anjelica Huston and Martin Sheen from January 10-February 15.

The Real Thing

Many people consider The Real Thing to be Tom Stoppard's most accessible play, and I suppose that's true--but at what cost? Instead of Stoppard's usual verbal and mental fireworks, and frequently big heart, we get a bunch of whiny, unlikable people who couple and uncouple and talk and talk and talk. The biggest talker bears more than a passing resemblance to Stoppard himself: playwright, discerning, exact, witty, etc. However, Stoppard is no kinder to his stand-in than he is to the other characters. All of them are painfully self-involved and deeply annoying. It might be more possible to sympathize/empathize with these people if we saw more of their good sides (assuming they have them), or even if their bad sides were more interesting (see George and Martha, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf).

The current Roundable production--directed by Sam Gold and starring Ewan MacGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton, and Cynthia Nixon--does the show no favors. The performances range from competent to wooden, and none of the four manages to truly inhabit his/her character. (Then again, why would any of them want to?) The last production, with Jennifer Ehle and Stephen Dillane, was better, but the play still came across as thin. Eloquent, of course, but thin.

I will match my love of Stoppard's work (see reviews here and here) to anyone's, but the popularity of The Real Thing  baffles me.

(full-priced ticket; last row balcony)

Indian Ink

The show is by Tom Stoppard. It takes place in two time periods. In the more recent period, a scholar is trying, with mixed success, to understand what happened in the earlier one. The play's themes include memory, love, class, and social mores.

Rosemary Harris, Romola Garai, Bhavesh Patel
Photo: Joan Marcus

No, this is not Stoppard's magnificent Arcadia. It is instead his not-quite-as-magnificent but-still-amazing Indian Ink. 

A Delicate Balance

photo: Brigette Lacombe

A classic boulevard comedy is back on Broadway. The side-splitting laughter that rings through the auditorium is fairly deafening. No, I’m not talking about the acclaimed revival of Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You, which I reviewed a few weeks back. Nor am I discussing Terrence McNally’s It’s Only a Play, which is minting money over at the Schoenfeld Theatre thanks to its starry cast. And no one has snuck a Neil Simon favorite into the season’s line-up. The play in question is Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, and it’s a scream.

Apparently, A Delicate Balance is uproariously funny. A real knee-slapping laugh riot. At least, that’s the impression being given by the current, woefully misguided revival of this Pulitzer-Prize winning masterpiece, which is several weeks into previews at the John Golden Theatre. Directed by the usually reliable Pam MacKinnon and featuring an ensemble cast with boldface names to spare, this production projects a tone-deaf unsteadiness from the moment the curtain rises.

Sticks and Bones

photo: Monique Carboni

 

I wasn't around forty-three years ago, when David Rabe's Sticks and Bones premiered at Joseph Papp's Public Theater, the second work in his trio of plays about Vietnam (the other two being The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Streamers). It quickly moved to Broadway, where it earned the Tony for Best Play of 1972 over a boulevard comedy by the then-almighty Neil Simon. It ran six months and was adapted into a TV movie for CBS, a controversial move that resulted in over half of the country's affiliates refusing to air the film. No, I wasn't around when this play premiered, but I can imagine the impact it had, because the first New York revival (being presented by The New Group at the Signature Theatre complex on West 42nd Street) stick packs one hell of a wallop.

Bedbugs! It's a Musical

Rex Bonomell

Every stage musical is a reflection of its place, time, and culture, and this is no less true for Bedbugs! It's a Musical than it is for something comparatively celebrated or canonized--say South Pacific, Hair, or In the Heights. If I wanted to give you an extensive reading on the sociocultural subtext of Bedbugs!, for example, I could start with the obvious: the collective fear of those dreadful, elusive, blood-sucking little beasties. But then, I could easily move on to discuss the show's reflection of contemporary environmental concerns, the ramifications of celebrity and power, the search for love and sexual fulfillment in an increasingly technology-driven world, and, finally, national anxiety over the potential for terrorist attacks in post-millennial America.

But fuck all that. I'm convinced that the creators of Bedbugs!--bless them, every one--don't want you to focus on anything too deep or upsetting while you're at the show. I'm going to go even further and guess that they want you, instead, to have a great time watching an appealing group of very committed actors perform a show about how a dedicated (if slightly batty) scientist (Grace McLean), her long-suffering sidekick, Burt (Nicholas Park), and the fallen megastar Dionne Salon (Brian Charles Rooney) bond together to save present-day New York City from a scourge of human-sized mutant bedbugs, which is being led by a hunky, preening bedbug king, Cimex (Chris Hall; picture what Cheyenne Jackson and Tim Curry's love child might look like in glitter makeup and an enormous, tentacled headpiece and you've arrived.). 

Arcadia

I'm sad to say that the Yale Rep production of Arcadia closed yesterday. It's one thing for me to suggest that you take a train up there to see it and another to suggest a time machine. But if you do happen to have a time machine...

Tom Pecinka, Rebekah Brockman
Photo: Joan Marcus

The Yale Rep production of Arcadia was lovely. Smoothly and clearly directed by James Bundy, this production of Tom Stoppard's most wonderful play honors and underlines its perfect balance of brain, heart, and genitals. The two story lines are gracefully intertwined: one, about Thomasina Coverly, a young math genius in the 18th century, and the messy lives of the people around her; the other, about 20th-century scholars trying to understand what happened during the time period depicted in the first.

[spoilers]
Thomasina is my favorite Stoppard character. Her innocence and brilliance, her straightforward way of seeing the world, her development from girl to woman are deeply real. That you know that she will not live past the time period shown in the play is devastating. One measure of the strength of this particular production is that I had tears in my eyes for most of the 2nd act. It was my 6th production of Arcadia, yet the emotions were as deep as the first time.

The Real Thing

photo: Joan Marcus

 

The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard’s popular romantic comedy (if it can be called that), is back on Broadway in a starry revival from the Roundabout Theatre Company. This is Roundabout’s second Stoppard offering this season; their Off-Broadway space is currently housing the first major New York staging of his 1995 play Indian Ink. Regular readers of this blog will remember that I favorably reviewed that production last month. Unfortunately, despite a strong central performance from Ewan McGregor, in his American stage debut, this outing is far less successful.