The Addams Family

photo: Matt Hoyle

Near the top of the second act of The Addams Family, Uncle Fester (Kevin Chamberlain) turns to the audience to ask if we think that the story will all work out in the end, or if we think we'll go home in an hour vaguely depressed. The story works out of course, insofar as there is a story, but we're likely to leave vaguely depressed anyhow. Impeccably designed and blessed with the enormous good will of the audience (whose affection for the characters is so strong that most snap along with the TV theme song in the overture) the ill-conceived musical comedy would be forgiven a lot - including its bungled storyline - if it was funny. But even Nathan Lane, committing completely with the full force of his clowning genius as Gomez, can't make it so. He works his ass off - mugging here, spinning a line there - but since he hasn't been given even one single genuinely funny line, his determination starts to reek like flop sweat. For a show about endearingly macabre, outside-the-box characters, the musical is awfully square, from Andrew Lippa's show tune score (which lacks cohesion - one number has a bossa nova beat while another sounds like a Kander-Ebb trunk song) to the love-conquers-all theme that doesn't suit the characters. There are moments - for instance, Fester's number in the second act, in which he seems to swim through a sky of chorus-girl-faced stars up to the moon, has a quirky, magical charm that shames the rest of the show's boulevard coarseness. And the sight of Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia, dancing with Death's sickle around her waist and leading a chorus line of ghosts, is more amusing than what passes for jokes in the show. Jackie Hoffman scores some laughs - I'm not sure that depicting Grandmama as an aged Woodtsock hippie with a peyote stash in the attic was the best way to go, but at least a decision was made that translates the character to the real world.

Million Dollar Quartet

photo: Joan Marcus

In order to dramatize the one-time, impromptu 1956 jam session between Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, writers Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux have constructed the thinnest of books while playing fast and loose with the facts. (As they have our narrator Sam Phillips (Hunter Foster) tell it, the session was also the occasion when 3 of the 4 music legends ditched Phillips' Sun Records label.) But why argue with the false, formulaic excuse to showcase the music, when the music is the main attraction and it rocks the roof off the place? Foster commits to his narrator role with skill, in earnest, and Elizabeth Stanley delights in her minor functionary role (I adored her rendition of "Fever"; she's done her homework) but the show is all about the quartet. As you watch the 4 actor-musicians tear into some vintage rock in character, you are reminded of the icons' musicianship and get a sense of what it must have been like to see these men perform way back when rock was the world's brand new, dirty fascination. Apart from Eddie Clendening, whose acting is often tentative as Elvis, the performers do more than impersonate the icons - they seem to connect to them as fellow musicians, and find their personalities through the legends' performance styles. Levi Kreis attacking the piano with jackhammer force as Lewis; Robert Britton Lyons rolling his shoulders as Perkins as if his guitar riffs are expressing his body; Lance Guest as Cash demonstratively staring down the crowd as if in challenge: these are pleasures that will make any vintage rock fan ecstatic.

Anyone Can Whistle

A legendary flop, Anyone Can Whistle ran for nine days in 1964. Did it fail because it was ahead of its time? Were the critics and audiences blinds to its brilliance? Uh, no. As the excellent production at Encores! reveals, it's just not a particularly good show. Could it have been saved by a better book than Arthur Laurents'? Possibly. The score is glorious, full of show stoppers ("Me and My Town," "Everybody Says Don't") and heartbreaking emotion ("Anyone Can Whistle," "With So Little to Be Sure Of"). The basic idea is an engaging old standby: crazy people being saner than sane people. The theme--live your life to the fullest--is vintage Broadway. But that book is a clunker, with weak jokes, badly delineated relationships, and unmotivated changes of heart. (In all fairness, Encores! did not present the entire book, so perhaps it is better than it seems in this production. However, reviews of the orginal production suggest that it is not). In addition to providing the mediocre book, Arthur Laurents directed the original production; if his work on West Side Story and Gypsy is any indication, his direction probably was no gift to the production. Luckily, the Encores! production is directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, who maximizes the show's gifts and provides choreography that ranges from tongue-in-cheek hysterical to gorgeously emotional. The cast is superb. Raul Esparza plays Dr. Hapgood with complete commitment and the ability to renew songs that have been sung a thousand times by a thousand people. Sutton Foster delivers "There Won't Be Trumpets" with perfect fervor and "Anyone Can Whistle" with perfect simplicity. Donna Murphy, all knees and elbows, raises sheer unmitigated hamminess to an art form.

The Scottboro Boys

Despite a compelling story, an excellent cast, and some lovely songs, Kander and Ebb's musical, The Scottsboro Boys, fails to pay off. Kander and Ebb have already told us that life is a cabaret, as well as a steel pier, full of razzle dazzle and corruption. Here, along with book writer David Thompson and director-choreographer Susan Stroman, they make the claim that life, at least for the real-life African-American men unjustly arrested for a rape they did not commit, is a minstrel show. Or their trials were a minstrel show. Or other people saw them as a minstrel show. Or something. As an overarching metaphor, the minstrel show fails in many ways, not just in its lack of clarity. It takes focus off of the story, it tries to make the audience complicit for something the audience did not do, and it's painful to watch. As just one example, Stroman's decision to combine energetic tap-dancing with nightmare scenarios manages to dilute both the dancing and the nightmares. In addition, the minstrel humor is mostly flat-out bad and the whole concept is ultimately a distraction. Some reviewers have called this show provocative and daring. I found it flat and disappointing.

Red

photo: Johan Persson

With its pronounced lack of subtext and its relentlessly unimaginative seriousness, John Logan's two-hander about painter Mark Rothko and his fresh-faced assistant is certainly of a piece. Due to high production values, chief among them Neil Austin's purposeful lighting, it's also visually compelling. It isn't, unfortunately, especially believable: despite the actors' efforts these are two opposed sides of an argument, not flesh and blood characters. The 90-minute one-act casts Rothko (a committed, focused Alfred Molina) as the self-absorbed last gasp of "serious" art, holding the gates closed against the Pop Art barbarians who are making his work increasingly irrelevant, circa 1958. His speeches, which sound like interview quotes researched and cobbled together, are spat at the generally passive assistant (Eddie Redmayne) for 2/3rd's of the play's 90 minutes. It's like a somber Devil Wears Prada for middlebrow snobs. The teacher/student device is as dramaturgically limp as it sounds, more so once the assistant reveals a backstory that scores a perfect zero for believability. The play eventually gets going in its last half hour, when the assistant finally stands up to the bullying boss and calls him a sell out for making pictures to adorn the new Four Seasons restaurant. It isn't the old art vs. commerce conflict that gives late life to the play but the overdue deeper depiction of Rothko - he's suddenly exposed to us as an old man who sees that the times have moved beyond him and who worries how time will judge him. It isn't hard to be moved by that, even in a contrivance such as this.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

photo: Joan Marcus

A smart bad-ass show that illustrates the 7th U.S. President's celebrity and maverick status by anachronistically depicting him as an Emo rock god, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson pokes snarky fun at rock musicals (Spring Awakening, especially) while putting over some provocative ideas about Andrew Jackson’s legacy. Was he a hero or an American Hitler? Was the populism he preached a recipe for pure democracy or for chaos? The often snarky pop musical (songs by Michael Friedman) isn’t out to make a definitive statement and it steadfastly refuses to get too serious until the very end, but that’s part of its infectious appeal. As written and staged by Alex Timbers, it’s silly and smartypants at the same time. (Has any other show, ever, made jokes about both Cher and Susan Sontag?) Benjamin Walker is right on target as Jackson, simultaneously no-nonsense and whiny adolescent, heading a cast that is well-attuned to the jokey spirit that guides most of the material.