Theater with Children: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Photo: Gerry Goodstein

When I was a kid, my parents took my sister and me to a lot of theater in our hometown of Pittsburgh, which has a much stronger arts scene than I think most people assume. My folks subscribed (and still do) to Pittsburgh Public Theater, and sometimes took us to summer stock productions under a huge tent at Hartwood Acres. They frequently took us to shows at Carnegie-Mellon University, which had consistently excellent offerings (and has sent about a gazillion starry-eyed graduates to New York over the years). They also took us, for a couple of years, to a great Shakespeare festival. Now sadly defunct, the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival operated, at least through the late 1980s, out of the lovely little Stephen Foster Memorial Theatre on the University of Pittsburgh campus.

A few days before we'd attend a particular Shakespeare play, my mother would haul the dark gray, heavily inked copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare that she had purchased as a college student out from the study and read through it. Then, over dinner or in the car en route to the show, she'd tell us a chatty, child-friendly synopsis of what we were about to see: "Lear was a king, and he had three daughters. Can you guess, just by hearing their names, which one we are supposed to like best?" or, "Wait until you see what an awful man Iago is. Just a terrible guy. Here's what he does to Othello." Her synopses were typically bookended with impassioned reminders that we were not going to be able to understand everything the characters said because they spoke in an older form of English, but that we shouldn't worry about that. Her approach didn't always work (I clearly remember my dad shushing me with growing irritation while I squirmed my way through Richard III, a play I have grown to appreciate but still really don't love), but it helped more often than it didn't. At the very least, whether we connected with the play or not, my sister and I always had some inkling of what the hell was going on at any given time.

Simple Dreams (Book Review)

Simple Dreams is Linda Ronstadt's "musical memoir," and in it, she discusses her forays into light opera (The Pirates of Penzance) and opera (La Boheme). Ronstadt is remarkably modest for someone with her many successes, and she is clear as to her limitations. When she is offered Pirates, she insists on auditioning. When she does Boheme, she writes, "I realized that I should have insisted on auditioning for this production, too, as it was beginning to dawn on me how difficult the singing was going to be." She later quotes Frank Rich's criticism of her performance and agrees with him!

I was an usher at the Public Theatre in the 1970s and still had many friends there when Pirates was done in the early 1980s. By all accounts, Ronstadt was a lovely, unassuming woman. That comes through in Simple Dreams, as does her sheer love of music. It's far from a great book, but its 200 or so pages include enough interesting stories to make it worth the while of anyone interested in Rondstadt or in music in general.

(library book)

The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence

Madeleine George's latest play, The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence is by turns breathtaking, annoying, beautiful, overwritten, and gorgeous. A mash-up riff on three Watsons--the Jeopardy-winning computer, Alexander Bell's assistant, and Sherlock Holmes' buddy--The Watson Intelligence wanders hither and yon, taking on romantic relationships, deep friendships, sanity, emotional bravery, and the meaning of being human. In some ways, it's a mess. But, oh, the writing.

David Costabile, John Ellison Conlee
Photo: Joan Marcus

The Watson Intelligence is stuffed full (overfull?) with glorious monologues, each of which could stand alone as a short play. A case in point is Bell's Watson explaining why he feels neither humiliated nor put-upon to always stand in the great man's shadow. This monologue handily tells a story, reveals character, and provides insight into the human condition--all in luxuriously rich language.

Ultimately, the show fails to coalesce, and its sheer wordiness becomes overwhelming. It was also weakened in its recent Playwright Horizon's production by Amanda Quaid's unimpressive performance, which paled beside the strength of her costars, David Costabile and the protean John Ellison Conlee, leaving the triangle unbalanced.

But, never mind. The strengths of The Watson Intelligence far outweigh its weaknesses. And Madeleine George deserves the nurture and support given to her by Playwrights, which makes a habit of presenting the future of dramatic writing. (Playwrights also presents many female playwrights and hires many female directors, without making a big deal out of it. Like women are people, or something weird like that! Bravo!)

I can't wait to see George's next play.

(second row, membership ticket)

Fun Home

Joan Marcus

The composer Jeanine Tesori has a knack for capturing, in her scores, the ebbs and flows of complex, imbalanced relationships. Through recurring motifs, overlapping melodic lines, and a flow of orchestral support that frequently allows characters to segue imperceptibly between aria and recitative, she deftly mimics the voices of people who love one another deeply, fight with one another viciously, try desperately to understand one another, erupt in frustration when they fail. Her ensemble harmonies clash with heartbreaking dissonance when crises occur, and melt luxuriously when there is consolation. Her particular talent for capturing the endless nuances of complicated families--which means all families, I guess--struck me during the first few minutes of Fun Home. Like the brilliant Caroline, or Change, Fun Home focuses largely on the strained domestic life of a child. As far as I'm concerned, Caroline was a landmark work--one that took the musical theater genre in new directions and raised its aesthetic stakes. And damn if Fun Home isn't just as beautiful, moving, and nuanced. Since seeing it, I have come to believe that Tesori is not just a wonderful composer, but one of monumental importance. People who dismiss the musical theater outright with a roll of the eyes and a terse "I HATE musicals"--as if the entire genre can be easily boiled down to a late-run performance by a second-rate touring company of Cats--have clearly never encountered the work of Jeanine Tesori.

Yet in raving as blatheringly as I do about Tesori, I hope not to imply that she is on some kind of creative pedestal, towering above the people with whom she has collaborated. Part of brilliance is knowing how to listen to and work with other brilliant people. Tony Kushner's no slouch, after all, and neither is George Wolfe. And like Caroline, or Change, Fun Home doesn't really have any weak links. I've read a few reviews arguing that Michael Cerveris was miscast, which I think is bullshit. And I've read others that place Judy Kuhn in the "thankless" role of the mother, which I think is a slightly smaller bunch of bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless. Sure, the musical explores, even more intensely than the graphic novel does, the relationship between a father and a daughter, and this kind of gives the mother figure short shrift in some respects--and this is the case even more in the musical than it was in the book. That being said, Kuhn's final number brings the whole show home; it (and, in the role, she) is a carefully controlled masterpiece of sorrow, fury, and frustration.

2013 in Review (The Disappointments)

Disappointing shows, in alphabetical order:

• The Big Knife: A waste of an excellent cast. And while Richard Kind was fine, I don't know why everyone made such a big deal of his being able to play a mean character. He is an actor, after all.
• Orphans: I have no idea why anyone would want to revive this show. It was fun, however, to watch Tom Sturridge leap around the stage.
• Collapse: Ick. I mean, ICK.
• Macbeth: The Alan Cumming one-man show: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (For a different opinion from Liz Wollman, click here.)
• Far From Heaven: A musical that needs the same advice that Jerome Robbins gave about Forum: define it from the opening song. A serious, heart-felt, traditional "I want" song from the female lead would focus it usefully. And then, I think, they should keep the focus on her. As it was, the show was diffuse and hard to care about.

2013 in Review (The Best)

Whew! Another year has jetted by with astonishing speed, leaving me some 80 shows in its wake. While reviewing the year as a whole, it strikes me that the lesson of 2013, as of the past few years, is that Off-Off-Broadway and Off-Broadway are the future of New York theatre, while Broadway is largely its past.

The Three Alisons of Fun Home

I saw 15 Broadway shows, all at deeply discounted prices (except for Pippin, for which I paid $69 for the second-to-last row balcony). Once upon a time, I saw nearly everything that opened on Broadway; now I see only a fraction. And yet my theatre life is still full, if not fuller. And that's due to Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway.

I saw 54 Off-Broadway shows. (I'm including Encores! here, and shows at St. Ann's. Sometimes I find the definition of Off-Broadway inexact.) People often write that Off-Broadway is dead, and I suppose that, in the sense of original new commercial productions, it's at least seriously ill. But in terms of nonprofit theatres, it is as vibrant as can be. Playwrights Horizons. New York Theatre Workshop. The Mint. The New Group. The Public. 59e59. The CSC. The low-price small theatres at Roundabout (Roundabout Underground) and Lincoln Center (the Clair Tow). The Pearl. The Signature. Each of these produces work that is sometimes exciting, sometimes challenging, sometimes fascinating, often excellent, and rarely a waste of time. That sounds like good health to me.

The rest of the shows I saw were Off-Off-Broadway. OOB can be a crapshoot, of course, particularly when you stumble onto a vanity production that should only be forced upon loved ones. But that's true of Broadway and Off-Broadway as well. And the best OOB theatre is as good as the best anywhere, with intimate spaces, low prices, and that wonderful sense of discovery that gets harder and harder to experience when you've been going to the theatre for decades. But Flux, Gideon, and HERE surprise and delight me with some regularity, and I love them for it.

THE BEST I SAW THIS YEAR--IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

Intimate Apparel. I missed this show's run a few years back, but I was lucky enough to catch a benefit reading starring the amazing Quincy Tyler Bernstine. The show is everything the reviews had said, and Bernstine gave the sort of performance that touches your heart and causes your head to start muttering, "Why isn't she being given the lead in, well, everything?"