She Loves Me

She Loves Me is my favorite musical, hands down. The book is funny and drum-tight; the score is comprised of one sparkling number after another. It has no fewer than eight knockout roles. Savvy theatergoers can perhaps understand why I was filled with a fair amount of trepidation when it was announced that Roundabout Theatre Company would be producing a new revival of the musical. Although they gave us the acclaimed 1993 Broadway revival -- which ran for a year and netted Boyd Gaines his second of four Tonys -- their track record with musical revivals has been dubious (remember Bye Bye Birdie?).

I needn't have worried. Seen at the third preview on Saturday night, this production is firing on nearly all cylinders.

Buried Child

Sam Shepard's Buried Child presents the American nightmare. Family is poisonous; religion is useless; ambition is pointless; nothing has been planted in over 30 years. A bizarre, rotted Norman Rockwell painting, Buried Child knows that the American Dream is an unreachable tease to most people.

Ed Harris, Paul Sparks
Photo: Monique Carboni

Shepard's play melds naturalism and symbolism, with each character's flaws--and they have many--representing something larger and deeper. Dodge, the father/grandfather, is a sick alcoholic full of anger and shame; his son, the one-legged Bradley, is an emotionally ugly man swimming against a tide of fury; his other son, the soft-headed Tilden, is almost silent, perhaps obsessing mentally about the many horrors in his past. Halie, the mother/grandmother, seems healthier than the men, even "normal," but she is a religious hypocrite, sleeping with a minister and constantly rewriting the past.

Cabin in the Sky

The Encores! presentation of Cabin in the Sky is over, so I'm going to limit this post to three comments:

1. I am so glad that musicals have evolved over the years. Cabin in the Sky, while often delightful, is truly weird in the randomness of its songs--"In My Old Virginia Home (On the River Nile)," anybody?--and the book is beyond silly.

2. The singing and dancing in this Encores! version was so extraordinarily good that I was thrilled almost continuously for over two hours. It was a wow, wow, wow! evening. I am now officially a huge fan of choreographer Camille A. Brown. And the cast just blew me away: Harvy Blanks, Chuck Cooper, Marva Hicks, Carly Hughes, Jonathan Kirkland, LaChanze, Norm Lewis, Forrest McClendon, Michael Potts and J.D. Webster. With Denisha Ballew, Darius Barnes, Chloe Davis, Timothy L. Edwards, Doug Eskew, Carmen Ruby Floyd, André Garner, Nkrumah Gatling, Rebecca L. Hargrove, Bahiyah Hibah, Andrea Jones-Sojola, Jared Joseph, Kristolyn Lloyd, Tiffany Mann, Sydney Morton, Mayte Natalio, Wayne Pretlow, Malaiyka Reid, Devin L. Roberts, Willie Smith III, Jay Staten, Dennis Stowe, Nicholas Ward, and Hollie E. Wright.

3. It's always a treat to see J.D. Webster in a nice role. After his many Encores! appearances, he feels like an old friend.

Wendy Caster
(second row; was given the ticket!!)

Disaster!

Disaster! totally isn't one. Sure, it could maybe be shorter by about fifteen minutes, and maybe a little sharper in spots, but I saw the third preview and it was already pretty damned funny. How could it not be, really? Look at the cast list to the right. Just look at it. The show is chock full of Broadway people who aren't just famous at this point but the creators of their very own goddamned personae. How could a show with a cast this awesome possibly suck? HOW COULD IT?

I suppose it could if it took itself too seriously, but believe me, it isn't a dumbass, so it knows way better than to do anything that boneheaded. Disaster! has its own long history at this point: it was first performed at a benefit in 2011, and has popped up Off Broadway a whole bunch of times since then, with rotating cast members including greats like Mary Testa, Mary Birdsong, Judy Gold, and Annie Golden. The cast has been a little more Broadway-fied now that Disaster! has landed at the Nederlander, but there are a few holdovers from its Off Broadway days, including Seth Rudetsky, the co-creator (along with Jack Plotnick, who directs, here), who has appeared in every production as noted disaster expert Professor Ted Scheider. Also, Jennifer Simard, who I want to own stock in, reprises her role--more on her and the rest of the cast in a second.

Utility

Chris (an unusually subdued James Kautz) wants Amber (the superb Vanessa Vache) to take him back. They've been together on and off since they were teens, and Chris admits that he's messed up again and again: laziness, affairs, drugs. But now he claims he's changed. Amber is tired: tired of his bullshit, tired of trying to scrape together enough money to get by, tired of being tired. She succumbs to Chris, but not optimistically:

Alex Grubbs, Vanessa Vache
Photo: Russ Rowland

Chris: It's gonna be good this time. 

Amber: You don’t know that. 

Chris: I do know that. I’m telling you that cause I know that to be a fact. 

Amber: You don’t know that, Chris. 

He wraps his arms around her, and she lets him. 

Chris: I do know that. I know it. I swear.

Seussical

Dr. Seuss, renowned children's author, managed to tuck away some pretty radical thoughts in his accessible, funny, tightly rhymed, and sweetly illustrated books. Seussical, the musical based on a number of his stories, goes even a little further. Individual thought is cherished, even if it annoys the people around you ("oh, the thinks you can think"). War is stupid (does it really matter which side the bread is buttered on?). All people are important ("a person's a person, no matter how small"). You have much to offer just the way you are (as Gertrude learns when she goes to extreme measures to impress Horton). And love is triumphant, even across species. (Horton the elephant and Gertrude the bird decide to help their elephant-bird deal with, uh, cultural challenges by having Horton teach it about earth and Gertrude teach it about sky.)

Seussical doesn't particularly push these messages. Instead, in the strong production currently at the Gallery Players in Brooklyn, it presents an energetic party, with much singing, 17 actors playing over 70 characters, a stage full of inviting props (and many hats), and tons and tons of energy. Seussical is the sort of show where you frequently notice that you're grinning.