Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago closes today after just 49 performances (including previews) ... and that's a shame. Because even though it mostly deserves the mixed to negative reviews it received, the show has its merits, including some stellar performances and musical numbers. It didn't get any Tony nominations, but Tam Mutu as Yurii Zhivago was nominated for a Drama League Award for Distinguished Performance and Paul Alexander Nolan as Pasha Antipov/Strelnikov got an Outer Critics Circle nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical.

Two well-deserved nods since both gave rich performances at the show I saw on Thursday night, especially Mutu, known for roles in the West End productions Les Miserables and City of Angels and who made his Broadway debut in the show. As Dr. Zhivago, a poet/doctor, he convincingly shows the conflict he feels for loving Lara Guishar (Kelli Barrett) while married to childhood sweetheart and mother of his son, Tonia (Lora Lee Gayer).

The show, based after the 1958 Boris Pasternak novel, offers lovely ballads--although a few more upbeat numbers would enliven the show more--from composer Lucy Simon (The Secret Garden) and lyricists Michael Korie (Grey Gardens) and Amy Powers (Lizzie Borden). The book is written by Michael Weller (Moonchildren, Loose Ends). "Watch the Moon," a romantic duet between Yurii and Tonia, before he leaves for war, and "Love Finds You," a summary of the mismatched loves of the major characters beautifully describe the power and despair that love offers. The one truly upbeat piece, "It's a Godsend," is a fun send-off piece that features the traditional Russian squat dancing.

Still, the show's bulky source material trimmed down often leaves plot holes (SPOILER ALERT HERE: What exactly happens after Lara escapes? How does Pasha go from earnest school boy to ruthless dictator? Why does everyone love Lara so fiercely when her character is written mostly as a milquetoast?) Plus, is the CSI-style depiction of war, with its bloody wounds and loud pepper of gunfire, necessary?  Perhaps Director Des McAnuff wants to show the brutality of war, but what is most evocative of the despair such battles render is seen in the quieter moments of the musical--when the displaced people show their sorrow and bewilderment over everything they've lost.

Perhaps the show will get a second chance in touring productions. Producer Anita Waxman offered such possibilities in a statement, saying such: "We look forward to this soaring and beautiful new musical having a long future with productions playing not only North America, but also around the world." 

(Press tickets, front mezzanine)

Merrily We Roll Along

The Astoria Performing Arts Center (APAC) is presenting an excellent production of Merrily We Roll Along, and you've got two more weekends to catch it. With a top ticket price of $18, it's quite a bargain.

Park, Bonino, Mosbacher, Rhodes-Devey, Horton

As you likely already know, Merrily was written by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth (based on the drama by Kaufman and Hart), is told backward, and was a huge flop when it opened on Broadway in the 1980s. It has since been rewritten in ways that both add to and take away from the original, but the basic story has remained the same: Franklin, Charley, and Mary are three best friends, artistic and ambitious, whose lives fly off into different trajectories that tear the friendship apart.

Little Shop of Horrors (movie review)

Since Encores! Off-Center is presenting Little Shop of Horrors in July, I thought it would be an interesting time to revisit the movie and see how it holds up.

It holds up very well.

Ellen Greene

[many spoilers to come]

What luck that various stars said no, and the lead role of Audrey, the sweet and ditsy floral arranger, was given to Ellen Greene. Greene originated it Off-Broadway and owns the part. (It will be interesting to see her at Encores!, years too old for the character yet likely to be wonderful.) I wish that Lee Wilkof, the original Seymour, had also been cast, but Rick Moranis acquits himself nicely as the good-hearted, murdering nebbish whose life improves drastically when he starts taking care of the "odd and exotic" plant he names Audrey II. The rest of the cast is pretty wonderful: Steve Martin, Vincent Gardenia, Levi Stubbs, James Belushi, Christopher Guest, John Candy, Bill Murray, and Tichina Arnold, Michelle Weeks, and Tisha Campbell as Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon, the Skid Row Greek chorus girl group.

Skylight

photo: Sara Krulwich

Every theater season has a "snob hit," according to William Goldman's classic 1969 insider's guide to Broadway, The Season. It's a play--usually British--that cultured New Yorkers flock to en masse, out of a sense of obligation. They don't want to see it, per se, but feel they have to, in order to preserve their cred as serious art lovers. This season's snob hit is almost certainly the revival of David Hare's 1995 play Skylight, currently at the John Golden Theatre after a successful, sold out, screened in movie theaters worldwide run in London. Directed by the supposed wunderkind Stephen Daldry and starring heavy hitters Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan, it's attracting droves of the well-heeled denizens of the Upper West Side and Park Slope, who dutifully applaud, laugh when appropriate, nod appreciatively, and feel grateful that they managed to wrangle up a ticket.

Skylight is a talky, boring play meant to comment on the perilous class divide in post-Thatcherite England. However, it really boils down to nothing more than a charismatic older man talking his way into a fragile young woman's knickers. Tale as old as time, with or without the pretense of liberal politics to make it seem more palatable. Tom Sergeant (Nighy), a successful restaurateur, shagged his former employee, Kyra Hollis (Mulligan), for six years while she lived with him and his now-deceased wife as a de facto family member. When Mrs. Sergeant discovered the affair, Kyra fled to North London, to begin a self-prescribed penance as a teacher in a slum school. When Tom turns up round her flat after three years of silence, it's not long before they are back in the roles they once inhabited, and back in bed.

And did I mention they talk? And talk. And talk. And talkkkkkkkk. About everything. Which amounts to nothing.

Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci

When the classic verismo double bill of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci last appeared at the Met, in 2009, it was clear that Franco Zeffirelli's war-horse production was badly in need of retirement. Six years later, a new production has arrived, helmed by Sir David McVicar, who's easily the most reliable director currently working in the Gelb Met. As seen over the weekend (at a performance that was also simulcast into movie theaters), McVicar's stagings scored a success, with the Mascagni appropriately dark and impassioned and the Leoncavallo brimming with passion and pain just underneath its brightly-colored surface.

Marcelo Alvarez and Eva Maria Westbroek
Photo: Cory Weaver/Metropolitan Opera

Aside from the creakiness of the previous production, the raison d'etre for this new production was star tenor Marcelo Alvarez's desire to sing the leading tenor roles in both operas. However, the first opera--set here in 1900--really belongs to the soprano. Santuzza, excommunicated (a faith worse than death in a repressive Catholic society) and scorned, longs for her former lover, Turiddu, who has returned to the bed of his married former flame, Lola. Lola's husband, the rich driver Alfio, is a vengeful and violent man; when the jealous Santuzza informs him of his wife's activities, she signs Turiddu's death warrant.

In McVicar's production, Santuzza remains onstage throughout the entire hour-long opera, silently watching from the periphery when the action doesn't involve her. It's a wise, striking choice, a reminder that she lives on the margins, integral to the life of the village though shunned by her neighbors. Especially striking was the staging of the central Easter mass (the opera takes place on Easter Sunday), which Santuzza hears from outside the church. As she prays and sings the stirring "Inneggiamo, il Signor non é morto" ("Rejoice, the Lord is not dead"), the audience is reminded of the opera's important context: though it takes place on the Catholic calendar's holiest day of forgiveness, it is something Santuzza will never receive from her supposedly pious neighbors.

Grounded

Photo: Sara Krulwich

A 2011 one-character play about a fighter pilot who transitions from combat to an assignment on an Army base as a drone pilot, Grounded, by George Brant, has been produced around the country and last ran in New York in January 2014. As Charles Isherwood's review of that production points out, the show examines the life of one woman facing "particular traumas," but "ultimately doesn't provide much fodder for larger reflections on American foreign policy or the changing mores of a changing military." An interesting profile of one woman's descent into severe PTSD, the production at the Public nevertheless doesn't pack quite the punch I wished it would.

Anne Hathaway plays a nameless, swaggering, aggressively unsentimental fighter pilot, who loves being in the air--the blue--more than anything else. She brags at the beginning of the show about her speed, stealth, and ability to drop bombs on suspicious "military-age males" from miles above. One evening, while drinking with the fellas while home on leave, she meets a man, Eric, who doesn't flinch at her tough demeanor or feel threatened by the traditionally macho work she does. She takes him home for a weekend of what confides is enormously satisfying sex. When she realizes, after redeployment, that she's pregnant (she intuits that it's a girl), she reluctantly takes leave, because as much as she loves the blue, she just "can't kill her"--and also, she's in love. After marrying Eric and giving birth to Samantha, she is reassigned to what she sneeringly refers to as the "chair force": a team of trained pilots who work out of a trailer on an Army base in Las Vegas, directing drones to drop bombs on targets thousands of miles away. While skeptical and unhappy at the thought of sitting and staring at a computer screen for 12-hour shifts instead of taking to the skies, she finds some comfort in the fact that she doesn't have to separate from her family, and that the threat of her own injury or death no longer exists.