The Light in the Piazza

The excellent student production of The Light in the Piazza put on by the NYU Program in Vocal Performance ran just four performances, so too few people were able to experience it. I am grateful to have been one of them. Directed by William Wesbrooks, with music direction by Grant Wenaus, this production of The Light in the Piazza missed a lot of the humor of the show but was well-acted, smoothly directed, and beautifully sung. As Margaret, Melanie Field caught the character's fears and hopes for her unusual daughter, and her version of "Fable" was an exciting cap to a lovely evening. If you are in New York or plan to visit, I strongly suggest that you keep track of shows done at NYU, which are regularly worth seeing. The theatres are comfortable, the tickets are inexpensive, and the performers and musicians are wonderful. (Past productions include Assassins and Parade).

Langston in Harlem

Photo: Melinda Hall

When I read that Langston in Harlem features Langston Hughes's poetry set to music, I imagined a staid, respectful, good but quiet evening in the theatre. Boy, was I wrong! Langston in Harlem throbs, stomps, cries, and explodes--and still manages to honor the words of a great American poet. Often thrilling (though too long), Langston in Harlem takes us on an emotional tour of Hughes's life, including his writing, family, and friends, his love of his people, his slow acceptance of his homosexuality, his interest in communism, and his ambivalence about his success and the price paid for it. The jazz score by Walter Marks is flat-out wonderful, and the superb choreography by Byron Easley runs an amazing gamut from joy to anger. The cast is filled with prodigiously talented actors, singers, and dancers, including Jordan Barbour, Jonathan Burke, Francesca Harper, LaTrisa Harper, Dell Howlett, Krisha Marcano, Kenita Miller, Okieriete Onaodowan, Josh Tower, Gayle Turner, Glenn Turner, and C. Kelly Wright. Most importantly, Langston in Harlem transmits a strong sense of Hughes's talent, importance, and heart.

Some small criticisms: the mikes are obtrusive, especially in a small space where they aren't needed at all; many cigarettes are smoked and the smoke just hangs in the theatre; and late in the show the music takes a startling and distracting turn into a Broadway-type sound, as though John Kander had dropped in (I love Broadway musicals, and the song is question is good, but its sound just doesn't fit).

The Subject Was Roses

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Langston In Harlem

photo: Ben Hider

When I saw a workshop of this vibrant, original musical two years ago at The Public, it was clear that the show was special and that there would be a full production sooner rather than later. A loosely-shaped biography of Langston Hughes (Josh Tower) that sets his writings to a rich, original jazz-heavy score (by Walter Marks), the musical is formally unconventional and often spellbinding. It's a portrait of the poet etched mostly by his own words, with sophisticated, evocative music that honors rather than disturbs the rhythms of his poems. The book scenes (by Marks, along with director Kent Gash) are kept at a bare minimum - there's just enough dialogue to set the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance (shout out to Kenita Miller, memorable as Zora Neale Hurston) and to move us through some of the events in Hughes' life that inspired his writings. If the book scenes and musicalized poems - among them "The Negro Mother", "Genius Child", and "Troubled Water" - form a biography of Hughes' artistic life more than his personal one, it's a small price to pay for the musical's multitude of pleasures.

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.