Fun Home

The brilliant Fun Home opens at the Circle in the Square on April 22nd, and the big question is, "How does it fare in the round?"

This is a classic glass-half-full, glass-half-empty situation, but the glass is both half-full and half-empty. (For my review of the Off-Broadway production--a rave--see here.)

Glass half-full: Fun Home made it to Broadway! This is wonderful news all around: it will become better known; it will likely have more future productions; the creators and cast may receive some well-deserved awards; and we all get to see it again (or for the first time) and maybe again (I already have my tickets for next time).

And Sam Gold has staged Fun Home about as well as I could imagine it being staged in the round (oval, really). He is aware of the whole audience, and he uses the space in some satisfyingly creative ways. (I don't want to spoil them by describing them here.)

Wolf Hall

The Royal Shakespeare Company production of Wolf Hall is a simple yet gorgeous production based on Hilary Mantel's best sellers Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Gracefully adapted by Mike Poulton and elegantly directed by Jeremy Herrin, it gives us Henry VIIIth, some of his wives, Thomas Moore, Cardinal Wolsey, and that whole world from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell. It is beautifully designed (sets and costumes by Christopher Oram; lighting by Paule Constable and David Plater), and the acting is of the high caliber you would expect from the Royal Shakespeare Company.

And I just didn't care.

Wolf Hall is an exquisite but empty pageant. Scenes that should be heart-breaking fly by, and the show never gives the audience a moment to just feel. It is the proverbial well-oiled machine, admirably efficient but lacking heart.

(tdf ticket; 2nd row center for Part I; row N on the far side for Part II)

The Visit

Photo: Joan Marcus

To watch Chita Rivera in The Visit is to watch a great artist at the top of her game, fully in command of the stage and fully realized in the performance that she's giving. Theater lovers should be grateful that, after fifteen years and a handful of regional incarnations, this beguiling, frequently chilling, and not entirely successful musical has finally made it to Broadway.

For one thing, it may very well be the last original Kander and Ebb musical to make it to the main stem. The brilliant team began working on the musical adaptation of Friedrich Durrenmatt's 1956 play in the late nineties, and it was first produced (with Rivera and John McMartin) in Chicago in 2001. An Off-Broadway staging at The Public Theater in 2003 was announced, but never came to fruition. Ebb died suddenly in 2004, but Kander, Rivera, and librettist Terrence McNally continued to work tirelessly to bring this daring musical to a wider audience. A 2008 production at Signature Theater in Arlington, Virginia, led to further development and a one-night-only concert in New York, in 2011. The current production, now at the Lyceum, originated at Williamstown Theatre Festival last summer. It's been streamlined to a clean ninety minutes and directed with airtight precision by John Doyle.

Hamilton

Much like the titular subject of his densely chewy, enormously satisfying new musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda is clearly so driven by, fascinated with, and passionate about something that he has been unable to keep from inserting himself into it, messing around with its guts enough to leave an indelible mark. Alexander Hamilton, the exceptionally driven founding father, loved his adopted, newborn country so deeply that he couldn't help but pour most of his energies into it, tinkering endlessly with details of its very foundation in hopes not only of ensuring its best possible future, but his legacy along with it. Just as Hamilton helped make this country what it is, Miranda has worked obsessively to push forward, and thereby ensure the continued relevance of, one of its more iconic art forms, which will not be the same as a result of his multifaceted attention to it.

Even before Hamilton entered previews, it became the hottest show in town, and tickets to see it became almost astonishingly hard to come by. When I finally snagged a pair, I decided to avoid reading or listening to other people's opinions about the musical. It's been a long time since any show snowballed the way this one has, and in far less breathless situations, I tend to believe the hype. I've almost always experienced serious disappointment as a result. It turned out to be pretty hard to tune it all out this time around, no matter how hard I tried. When a production gets lauded as often as this one has--when it regularly gets called game-changing, paradigm-shifting, unparalleled, and even revolutionary--it becomes pretty hard to keep the wax in one's ears and remain bound in ignorance to the mast.

The Liquid Plain

Ito Aghayere, Michael Izquierdo, and Kristolyn Lloyd
Photo: Joan Marcus

As with her previous offering earlier this season, And I and Silence (which Wendy reviewed), Naomi Wallace's The Liquid Plain is daring, messy, serious-minded, and unapologetically poetic. It's also quite possibly the most interesting and invigorating play I've seen all year. Working from the true story of a smallpox-infected female slave who was thrown into the Atlantic Ocean, Wallace constructs an admirably complex narrative that encompasses the history of slavery in America, the fluidity of love and gender, and the overwhelming familial bonds that even profound indignity cannot weaken. In the first act, Adjua and Dembi (Kristolyn Lloyd and Ito Aghayere, respectively), two runaway slaves, toil on the docks of a Rhode Island port town to earn enough money for passage to Africa. They are deeply in love and long to start a family, a fact complicated by the fact that Dembi is biologically female. One day, an amnesiac sailor (Michael Izquierdo) washes onto their docks, sitting in motion a series of mystical events that threaten the two lovers best laid plans. Act Two takes place forty-six years later, when Adjua's daughter, Bristol (the extraordinary LisaGay Hamilton), a free black woman raised in England, arrives stateside to enact a long-dreamed revenge plot. However, it doesn't take her long to realize that the history she believes she's been sent to avenge is far more complicated than she could imagine.

Paint Your Wagon

Alexandra Socha and Keith Carradine
Photo: Joan Marcus

One of the many worthy aspects of City Center's Encores is that it often provides a venue for musicals that would otherwise go unrevived. Some of my personal favorite Encores productions--Juno, Pardon My English, Fanny, Pipe Dream, Of Thee I Sing!--are, for one reason or another, not likely candidates for a commercial Broadway production any time soon. Yet this invaluable concert series provides the opportunity to hear these scores sumptuously performed by some of the best singers in New York, backed by a full orchestra. For a musical theatre lover, this is as close to heaven as it gets.

Lerner and Loewe's 1951 musical Paint Your Wagon, which concludes its Encores run with two performances today, fits squarely in this category. (Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre is actually planning to mount a full production of the musical in 2016, albeit with an entirely rewritten book). The story itself is almost beside the point, and, as is the case with most Encores concerts, the book has been pared down to the absolute essentials. Ben Rumson (Keith Carradine), a widowed prospector, strikes gold in California; soon enough, he's got a town named after him, with men flocking from all over the country looking to similarly strike it rich. Ben's teenage daughter, Jennifer (Alexandra Socha), is the only girl in town--it soon becomes clear that the love-starved miners are taking an interest in her. Ben wants to send her to a finishing school in Boston, but Jennifer has set her eye on Julio (Justin Guarini), a soulful Mexican miner who seems as likely to quote poetry as pan for gold.

The show itself might not be much, but the score is resplendent, and it's getting a first-rate treatment. Despite being saddled with some truly unfortunate fake facial hair, Carradine is wonderful as Rumson. His light baritone is less secure than it was twenty-five years ago, when he headlined The Will Rogers Follies, but he makes up for any vocal shakiness by singing with great refinement. He beautifully handles Ben's two big numbers, the hauntingly lovely "I Still See Elisa" (an ode to his late wife) and the folksy "Wand'rin Star."

Socha is perfectly cast. She deftly conveys Jennifer's girlishness and her blossoming womanhood. She's equally adept in comic numbers like "What's Going On Here?," where she puzzles as to why the miners are so fascinated by her every move, and romantic songs like "All For Him," about her devotion to her love. Guarini is an ideal match. Although his accent is a bit shaky, he wraps his elegant tenor around Julio's beautiful music and all is forgiven.

The supporting cast--which includes Jenni Barber, Robert Creighton, and William Youmans--is uniformly excellent. As the miner Steve, Nathaniel Hackmann leads a rousing rendition of what's perhaps the musical's best-known song, "They Call the Wind Maria." It was no accident that he received some of the loudest applause at the curtain call. He's on the fast track to stardom.

Under the baton of Rob Berman, the Encores orchestra is lush and lovely. This is exactly the kind of show Encores should be doing. If I may say, they've struck musical theatre gold. And for those who won't be able to make it to City Center to catch the final performances, fret not: It was announced yesterday that a cast recording will be made.

[Front balcony. $30 + an insane amount of fees, but worth every cent.]