Follies: Revisited

I am not sure there is anything left to be said about Follies. I saw it early at the Kennedy Center and was more grateful for its existence than evincing its greatness. I was surprised it transferred to Broadway but hoped it might settle and find its legs if not its heart.

A few of the problems from those early days have been resolved. The choreography in Who’s That Woman is no longer a cluster tap, and the character of Solange is now intelligible (understated and humorously played by Mary Beth Peil). While I greatly enjoyed Linda Lavin at Kennedy Center, Jane Houdyshell is a surprising delight. [Total aside: As I dropped money into the BC/EFA bucket, I said to her, “You were wonderful.” She responded, “Thank you, so were you.”]

Some of the show has improved with age. Jan Maxwell’s interpretation of Could I Leave You? is stronger than ever. Who’s That Woman is the single most thrilling part of the show. One More Kiss rended my heart. And with Regine’s exit, the trio of Rain on the Roof, Ah Paris, and Broadway Baby comes together for a swelling conclusion befitting a big time Broadway show.

One of the most joyful surprises of the show was Bernadette Peters’ honest and touching and personal performance. Sadly, it was during the post-curtain speech urging donations to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids. Oh, that she could have brought a moment of that to the script. Unfortunately, her “performance” has gotten more self-conscious and self-important (her final exit was so protracted and masturbatory that it was embarrassing). Perhaps it was just the day, but she also had a more tenuous relationship with the music than she did with Buddy.

The show still has insufficient heart. The director and, by extension, many of the performers don’t seem to trust the songs. Elaine Paige shows no more interest in telling a story with I’m Still Here than she did in May. Danny Burstein’s The Right Girl is now more about a Tourette’s of jazz hands than an inner conflict. Ron Raines continues his one note performance that never quite finds the right key.

Instead of finding its way in the months since the Kennedy Center, the show seems to have lost considerable steam. It did, however, get me to thinking about its future. Will it close? Will it continue with a trickling of replacements? Or might they refresh the proceedings when Bernadette Peters goes with a new foursome?

I would love to see Reba McEntire step in as Sally, not just because she made stupid direction make sense in Annie Get Your Gun and offered a superior performance to Peters’ original, but also because I think she would be original and heartbreaking in the role. I have no idea how strong her soprano range is, but she would be certain to make the role and score her own. As Ben, I would be excited to see Tom Wopat, who was so achingly impressive in Catch Me If You Can. The replacement Phyllis is so obvious to me that I can’t believe she hasn’t performed the role on Broadway already. Bebe Neuwirth is all ice and stems and scared little girl gone hard. Finally, for the role of Buddy, my dream would be John Goodman. He has the chops, the comedic energy, and the everyman believability to play salesman, cheat, and unsettled man who settled.

I love this show so much. I long for it to be better. I saw the 2001 revival several times and, despite its deficiencies (particularly the female leads’ voices and the male leads’ "it"), it was haunting, beautiful, and devastating. And it had the perfection of Polly Bergen. I wish this version had half the heart and even a fraction of the vision. Like the characters in Follies, for now, I will just have to comfort (and torture) myself with the memories.

Queen of the Mist

Michael John LaChiusa is unique among musical writers. He often writes the book and the lyrics and the music for his shows, and his interests are wide and varied: perception, fame, sex, lack of sex, love, lack of love, self-deception, filicide, ambition, lust, and revenge. His music is often gorgeous, if sometimes difficult on first listen, and he generally brings a unique and elucidating point of view to his subjects, which span many time periods and plotlines.

Queen of the Mist, currently being presented by the Transport Group, is not one of LaChiusa's more impressive efforts, though it has many strengths: an interesting main character, Anna Edson Taylor, the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and live; some beautiful songs, including "There Is Greatness in Me" and "Letter to Jane"; a compelling metaphor in the tiger that inhabits Taylor's imagination throughout her life; Mary Testa giving an impressive performance in the lead role; and Theresa McCarthy, lovely as Taylor's sister.

However, LaChiusa is on much-treaded ground here, and Queen of the Mist has little new to say. Fame and obsession are popular theatrical themes, and the show has echoes of Ragtime and Assassins. (I imagine anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President McKinley, would be nonplussed to find himself featured in not one but two musicals written decades after his execution.) The show also fails to land emotionally. Taylor is not a likeable character, and her relationships with her sister and her manager are too thinly drawn for the audience to care much when they fail. 

The score is perhaps LaChiusa's most accessible but not one of his most intriguing. And the lyrics are surprisingly bland and predictable coming from the man who wrote the brilliant "When It Ends" for The Wild Party and "The Greatest Practical Joke" for See What I Wanna See. LaChiusa is capable of limning a character in a line or two--as when the spoiled college boy in Hello Again asks if he looks like Bobby Kennedy or the Young Wife in the same show sings during an adulterous encounter in a movie theatre where Follow the Fleet is playing, "I am morally bankrupt" and then adds "I hate Ginger Rogers"--but that level of acuity is missing here.

For all of my reservations, however, I would still cautiously recommend this show. While it does not live up to the high bar established by LaChiusa's other works, it still offers much that is worth seeing and hearing.


(press ticket, first row)

Seminar

Is it fair to have high expectations of a preview? Medium expectations? Any expectations? What if the preview ticket is full priced? Discounted?

Previews live in a gray area, particularly in the era of blogging, when many of us review at least some shows that we pay for ourselves. The area is even grayer when it is an early preview.

(When we receive press tickets, the situation is clear: we go to late previews, when the shows are deemed ready to critique, and we don't post our reviews until the official opening.)

Theresa Rebeck's Seminar (directed by Sam Gold) is set to open in 11 days. It feels early to write about it, but tickets are being sold, and I did pay for one. Also, the show seems to be in good shape, with polished performances. And the negatives are in the sinews of the play, rather than being tweakable over time. For these reasons, I have made the decision to write this review and post it now.

So, here's the thing: I didn't believe a single character, situation, interaction, or conflict in this show.

Seminar is the story of, yes, a seminar. Four young writers--two women, two men--pay a famous writer/editor (Alan Rickman) $5,000 each to teach ten classes in the home of one of the writers. Anyone who has ever seen a show or movie or TV show depicting a writing class--or who is aware of Rickman as an actor--knows that the teacher will be snarky, insulting, and belittling and claim it is for the students' own good. That some of the students will be better writers than others, that at least one will only care about art, that at least one will very much care about commerce, that sexual pairings will occur, and that a secret or two will be revealed are all also predictable.

And that's okay. Plays don't have to be startling or ground-breaking to be interesting. The playwright can show us why this group of students is interesting, why this grumpy teacher is compelling, why these two people do or don't get together, and so on.

But Rebeck doesn't. Instead, she gives us people, with random arrays of attributes, whose behavior is neither consistent nor convincing. Take Lily Rabe's character, Kate, a Bennington graduate with an enviable rent-controlled apartment. [Spoilers follow.] She's a feminist who lets repeated, egregiously sexist use of the word pussy go unremarked. She's foolishly attached to a story she has been working on for six years, yet suddenly can write a whole book in a couple of weeks. She hates the teacher yet sleeps with him, but not because of the sort of love-hate attraction that does occur in real life. Instead, it's a shock effect that doesn't work.

Or take Izzy (Hettienne Park), who seems to exist to provide a contrast to Kate. She seduces the teacher and one of the students, and in some confusing chronology seems to be sleeping with them virtually at the same time. Writing doesn't seem that important to her--certainly not $5,000 important.

Rickman's character Leonard is set up as a rat, but we find out later that he has done nice things for some of the students. Rather than this adding a level of complexity to his character, it elicits a "huh?"  For example, early in the play Leonard insults an artistically inclined writer by telling him he should be writing for Hollywood. Late in the play, we're supposed to perceive Leonard's introducing that writer to a Hollywood bigwig as a mitzvah.

Another annoying fault of Seminar is that the characters' writing is evaluated without having been read. Leonard eviscerates one story based on the first line and is greatly impressed with two others based on the first couple of pages. Later, Martin (Hamish Linklater), the student who is least impressed with Leonard, becomes convinced that Leonard has written a great book based on, yes, the first couple of pages.

The direction is smooth. The acting is fine. Rickman nails his big speech. But the play just isn't good.


(tdf ticket, third row, rear mezz)

Venus in Fur

A story I once heard kept haunting me during Manhattan Theatre Club’s presentation of David Ives’ Venus in Fur: when Michelangelo worked on the Sistine Chapel’s The Last Judgment, the Pope’s Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, continually complained about the nudity in it. So Michelangelo added his visage to the painting, casting him as a character in the underworld, for all to see.

Ives’ character, Thomas (Hugh Dancy), seems reminiscent to Biagio. A sanctimonious director/playwright, who says “ciao” at the end of his phone conversations, relinquishes his identity of game master, of controller, so readily in the play that the story becomes, in a sense, the ultimate revenge fantasy—which got me wondering: who pissed off Ives so much? After all, the playwright-director/actor-director relationship isn’t always ideal. Wouldn’t seeing a comeuppance on stage offer liberation? Could Thomas be more than just a character? And, for me, that was the problem: this conspiracy theory fascinated me far greater than the play itself.

This sexy story about submission, based on the 1870 novel Venus im Pelz by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch—a work that coined the phrase “sado-masochism”— contains a clever construct, a play-within-a-play structure: we see both the audition and Thomas’ new play unfold. Thomas, as director/playwright, has just finished auditioning actresses and the dearth of talent frustrates him. He vents to his fiancée on his cell phone that he longs for femininity, something the current crop of performers—dressed half like hookers, half like dykes—cannot provide. A clap of thunder, much like the sound of a snapping whip, interrupts his tirade and Vanda (Nina Arianda, who also played the role in the 2010 Classic Stage Company production) bursts in from the rain, wrapped in a trench coat, and brandishing a broken umbrella.

A force of nature herself, she chatters continuously until Thomas reopens the casting for Venus in Fur, a play coincidentally that’s also based on the same von Sacher-Masoch’s book about an aristocrat who becomes a willing slave to a woman. At first, Vanda and Thomas can’t connect. She sees his play as S&M porn; he insists it shows a great love story. As the audition progresses, though, Thomas’ perception of Vonda changes as she convincingly mimics the Continental diction of a refined Victorian woman completely transforming herself. As the two continue reciting lines, Vonda and Thomas switch roles, as she offers him direction and, ultimately, subjugates him.

Arianda makes Vanda a multilayered character—initially she poses as a bondage babe clad in high-heeled ankle boots and black leather with a trash-talking mouth, before metamorphosing into someone doe-eyed and naïve, perhaps even stupid, to a more calculating figure, who just happens to bring costumes, including a white virginal dress for her and a $3 green velveteen coat for Thomas. Dancy’s portrayal isn’t as vivid. He often gets a laugh with a wide-eyed look of incredulity or a well-placed grimace. Yet, at times, his character feels withdrawn, almost too insular, rather than displaying the passivity of subservience expected.

The set, designed by John Lee Beatty, realistically portrays the cold barrenness of a rehearsal hall, with its eerie fluorescence—especially effective are the shafts of light filtering through the window as if the building once housed a factory (designed by Peter Kaczorowski). Directed ably by Walter Bobbie, the juxtaposition of the past with the present never becomes confusing and the machine-gun like dialogue moves easily, combining humor with an eroticism that’s both sensuous and uncomfortably sinister. Unfortunately, though, the story never surpasses its initial frothiness. It provocates without really moving you, which gets me thinking again: who is Ives’ Biagio?

Limited 10-week engagement through Sunday, December 18.
(Tickets purchased at Telecharge/mezzanine D3)

The Blue Flower

Jim Bauer and Ruth Bauer's musical The Blue Flower, currently in previews at Second Stage, has an awful lot going for it. Its sweeping, romantic plot covers both world wars, and its complex, interconnected themes explore the fine line between creativity and madness; the highs and lows of love, both romantic and brotherly; the hellishness and deeply unsettling beauty of war; the impact of world history on the national, the local, and the individual. Its book, like its very pretty score, is entirely original. It is not based on a movie, television show, comic strip, or golden oldies radio station.
This production of The Blue Flower makes ample use of projections and short films, which appear on a screen suspended within an interesting, multi-tiered, wooden set, on which the small, excellent cast and notably tight, swinging band perform. Chase Brock's choreography frequently twists the actors' bodies into surprising shapes, and the cast into cool vistas. The show is ably directed. What The Blue Flower lacks, however, is any sort of unifying thread that brings its ingredients--not to mention its enormous thematic ideas and concepts--together into anything approaching a satisfying whole.

The show places focus on Max, a German artist who speaks in his own, invented language that he calls Maxperanto. Max has left Europe--and everyone he loves, living and dead--for the United States during the onset of World War II. As the show begins, Max suffers a fatal heart attack, and the musical proper takes us back through his life--presumably as it flashes before his eyes during his dying moments--from the turn of the century through both wars, with emphasis on the first. Because Max has been working on a book of collages about his past, the show unfolds as a series of memories, which are presented through the use of movement, song, projections, and short films.

Yet The Blue Flower misses the mark. It can't seem to figure out if it's supposed to be serious or flip, which very quickly becomes very frustrating: A lengthy speech that Max gives--entirely in gibberish--about the murder-suicide of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, and his mistress, is played, it seems, for broad laughs, while the death of a horse amidst a roadside bombing is treated, a bit later, as if it's the worst thing that has ever happened in the entire history of every war that has ever taken place on the planet. What should be funny is often glossed over; what might be truly touching or gently moving gets too bogged down in grandiose ideas to tangle with.

Horses, it seems, carry some sort of symbolic weight in the show, at least given the frequency with which they are mentioned, or shown on projections, but I was never able to catch why; conversely, curiously, the relevance of the blue flower that the musical is named for is given passing mention once. Throughout the show, things that should be justified are not: why is the score, pretty as it is, so steeped in American country and western music? Is it because Max delivers a lecture--in gibberish--in Texas? Speaking of gibberish, why is the need for a whole new language so important? Maxperanto is explained, near the end of the show, but not in any way that is relevatory, or even satisfying. So the use of the made-up language throughout the show becomes just one more gimmick that never finds true relevance.

I can't tell if this show has been workshopped to death, or if it never cohered to begin with, but there seem to be altogether too many ideas and not enough grasp of the source material. A show about Dadaism and Expressionism is a great idea, but not if the aesthetics of these movements fail utterly to translate effectively to the stage. Similarly, a show using film as a backdrop is a great idea--and has been used effectively in all sorts of other productions these days--but not if the projections merely alternate between showing images that don't quite mesh with the live action, and flashing lines of dialogue that the actors have just delivered. What might have added depth and deeper meaning to the show, then, becomes yet another distraction.

In such a mishmash of ideas, innovations, and techniques, the characters quickly get lost. They fall in love, drift apart, fight, forgive, wound and betray, but they remain stick figures throughout: they are Profound Artists, with the exception of one Profound Scientist, but we don't get the chance to draw close to any of them, nor to fully grasp why they all love one another as passionately as we are told they do. So when they die--and they all die, because we all die, eventually--it doesn't really matter. They were never anything but big ideas to begin with.

Question of the Week: What Are Your Spookiest Theater Memories?

When I was a kid, growing up in Pittsburgh, I saw what must've been one of the spookiest, most unsettling productions of Ibsen's Ghosts, ever, at Carnegie Mellon University. The audience sat upstage on bleachers facing the performers, who did the show downstage in front of a huge, empty auditorium. The floor of the stage was covered in dirt, which, by the end of the show, covered the actors, too. A life-sized dummy of each castmember was set at stage left, and at various times, actors would address the dummies instead of one another. As they became more unhinged, they became more expressive with one another's dummies than they were with one another. My stomach, which began to twist midway through the show, was in some of the most painful knots I can remember by the curtain call. Ghosts is a weird, creepy show as it is; this double weird, creepy production scared the bejesus out of me, and continues to haunt me every so often.

I don't think that it was until I saw Conor McPherson's Shining City, which ran on Broadway in 2006, that anything in the theater came close to scaring me as much as that CMU production of Ghosts did. But Shining City is not a scary play, per se. It just packs a terrifying, awesome punch at the end--one that that made me scream and my husband pee a little. I loved Shining City and its surprise ending, but Ghosts still takes the cake for me.

How about you? What is the scariest production, or moment, or scene, or character you've ever seen? What continues to haunt you after all these years of theatergoing? What tapped into your deepest, darkest fears? Happy Halloween, all. BOO!