Ain't No Mo'

It was sad to see Ain't No Mo' come and go so quickly, but was Broadway the right place for it?

I get the attraction of Broadway. It's the place. But was there ever a chance that Ain't No Mo' would be profitable? 

Of course, that may not have been the point. Even a brief run on Broadway puts a play into a special category, and it probably improves the likelihood of other productions all over the country. Also, the chance for a Tony Award or two is certainly attractive.

But: wouldn't Ain't No Mo' fit Off-Broadway better? Might it still be running? 

Off-Broadway has two solid advantages: intimate space and cheaper tickets. I would personally be thrilled if most theatre occurred in small venues. For example, Merrily We Roll Along felt exactly right at NYTW, just as Kimberly Akimbo fit perfectly at the Atlantic. But with their fairly large casts, plus musicians, they need Broadway-size audiences to pay the bills. But Ain't No Mo', with its small cast, would be perfect for Off-Broadway. As would many other shows!

Wendy Caster

Hadestown

My third viewing of the amazing Hadestown was from third row mezz on a Wednesday matinee. Although I have an aversion to Wednesday matinees going back to the 1970s, I was pleasantly surprised by a full, enthusiastic, non-texting, non-talking, non-eating audience. Are Wednesday matinee audiences better than they used to be (they used to be awful) or was this an anomaly? Either way, it was a treat.

Also, there was no sense of the performers slacking off because it was a Wednesday matinee, something I have heard rumors of for decades. They brought their A game. 

Sitting in the mezzanine for the first time (versus front orchestra and back orchestra) gave me quite a different view of the show. From that vantage point, the mechanics of the show are on display, and they are fascinating and fabulous. The timing of the revolves, and the timing of the actors on them, is balletic. The constant movement and action is carried out impeccably. 

What a weird thing it is to be an actor dealing with moving here, turning there, going on this revolve and off that revolve, moving this table or that prop, and still being authentically in the emotional moment. I've been going to the theatre since the late 1960s, and I'm still impressed over and over by the skill and talent onstage all over New York.

I also want to give a shout-out to the stage management crew, who keep things moving like clockwork show after show after show. It's an impressive feat.

And, oh yeah, Hadestown is a brilliant, kick-ass musical, hurt only by the fact that Orpheus is a complete tool. Had their positions been reversed, Eurydice would not have looked back.

Wendy Caster

1776

Here's the amazing thing: the musical 1776 is so solid, so excellent, that the creators of the current Roundabout production didn't manage to completely ruin it. Though they did try. 

When re-thinking a show like 1776, based on real events and people, there are two important things to keep in mind: (1) how much respect is owed to the people depicted, and (2) how much respect is owed to the original creators of the piece. 

Our so-called founding fathers were deeply flawed. One of the best moments in this production is Jefferson listening to congress read his Declaration of Independence (i.e., Declaration of Freedom!) while his slave dresses him. It's quiet, quick, and hard-hitting--and doesn't mess with the original show. It's also relatively subtle in a production in which subtlety is rare. 

Do Peter Stone (book) and Sherman Edwards deserve to have their work respected? Absolutely. The only legitimate reason to maybe mess with their show would be to make it better. This production doesn't, though at least--as said above--it doesn't completely destroy it.

The all-non-cis-male cast is fine as a concept. (There are many weak performances in the show, but that is due to bad acting and direction rather than gender.) The different sexual identities change the emphases and meaning by definition. For example, that gender is a performance is made vivid through women performing masculinity. So, okay, fine. The nontraditional casting is fine.

It's nearly everything else that's the problem. The direction (Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus) is ham-fisted and frenetic. Every moment is underlined and mimed and exaggerated and overdone. Some scenes come across as though a bunch of kids are putting on a show and making all the mistakes kids make: indicating, emoting, telegraphing. 

One example: the solo song "Mama Look Sharp" depicts the horrors of war quietly and subtlely--and breaks the audience's heart. In this production, the song is blared, and the entire cast is on stage, pulling focus. The decision to have one performer play the "Mama" of the song by rending her clothing and tearing her hair, sobbing, pulls even more focus, and makes the audience feel less rather than more. (Well, it makes the audience feel less grief, but more embarrassment.) 

Simply put, Page and Paulus did not respect the material, evincing a serious lack of judgment on their parts. If they wanted a musical with which to judge the founding fathers harshly and reframe the revolution, they should have written one. 

Wendy Caster

Merrily We Roll Along

 

Merrily We Roll Along was and shall always remain a hot mess of a musical. Based on a longer-running if also financially unsuccessful 1934 play of the same name by Kaufman and Hart, Merrily opened (and quickly closed) on Broadway in 1981, ending the storied decade-long collaboration between Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince. Their version follows a spiritually bereft if materially successful playwright backward in time, beginning with scenes from a wealthy, empty life as a producer of junky films and ending with his idealistic youth as a promising composer and burgeoning Great Artist. Close friendships fray, marriages end badly, and a son becomes estranged in the process. Why should we care at all about a guy we're told from the outset has traded his soul for fame and fortune? The show never bothers to let us in on that secret, which is why it does not work and never will--unless, if your glass is half-full, maybe someday it might. That's the Gordion knot of Merrily in a nutshell. 

It fascinates me to think about all the machinery that has chugged along behind Merrily from its premiere. The show purports to draw a line between art and commerce, and to take a stand on the side that values Great Art and that trusts money only so far as a means toward more Great Art. But, irony of ironies, it's the impossibly famous, incredibly monied, insanely connected and endlessly revered Great Men who made Merrily that has kept it from having been forgotten in the first place. There's the score, which has plenty going for it even if it, like the much weaker book, was hardly rapturously received by critics (though Frank Rich did tip his hat to it while trashing the rest of the show). Only when Columbia Records granted the company the rare opportunity to record a cast album despite the show's flop status (again, because Sondheim) did the score catch on. The many frequent attempts at reviving and attempting to "fix" Merrily followed suit: there have been countless revivals, many of which have been recorded for posterity, too, featuring new or revised or reordered or retinkered material--as if a few nips and tucks would somehow solve the problem of three not-especially-developed characters stuck in a slowly decaying friendship that never comes off as especially meaningful or interesting to begin (or, whatever, end) with.

Don't get me wrong: Maria Friedman's production--done apparently because she was good friends with Sondheim and wanted to do his poor, suffering, misunderstood show more justice than it's apparently ever been given--does help the show as much, I think, as it can possibly be helped. The superb casting goes a long way: the star-studded cast digs deep, and the performances are gorgeous as a result. Daniel Radcliffe is adorably wiry and neurotic as Charlie, and his frustrations with his friend are crystal clear--but then, so too is the fact that his life isn't so terribly miserable or bereft without Franklin in it, anyway. Jonathan Groff is always appealing and watchable, and his Franklin is framed as a sad, wistful cipher who knows he's gone about all the things the wrong way, even as he can't fix any of them. But mining the emotions of these characters is still not enough to turn the show around: self-aware or not, Shepard's an id-driven, money-hungry, womanizing dick, and we are told as much from the outset, so whatevs. To that end, while the phenomenal Lindsay Mendez finds more depth to Mary than any other actor I've ever seen in the role, the character nevertheless remains an angry, empty drunk who harbors a blinding love of an angry, empty Franklin. Her relationship with booze still makes a lot more sense than anything else about her. 

In short, the NYTW production of Merrily is a wonderful thing to see if you love this show despite (or perhaps for) all its warts. If you, like me, enjoy watching Sisyphean attempts at getting this particular rock up to the very top of the hill, you'll get a kick out of this acme of a production. Otherwise? Maybe go instead to a show that's not as impossible to find a ticket for, or stay home and stream any or all of the many, many, many recordings of past attempts at pushing the rock up the hill. I'm sure this cast will add a new one to the ever-growing pile soon enough.  

Ain't No Mo'

Closing notices have been posted for Jordan E. Cooper's wonderful Ain't No Mo', which is a  shame: the show, which only opened on Broadway three weeks ago, richly deserves to connect with audiences. I hope ticket sales pick up as a result of attempts on the part of the company to keep it alive. 

This season has been particularly rough-going for lesser-known properties, which struggle to find spectators even in good times. It's especially hard right now, given a muted holiday season in which tourism remains down and infections from Covid (along with a number of other dangerous ailments) remain up. Still, if you're in the mood for a heady, high-energy satire that lets everyone in on the joke even as it centers on the joys and trials of Black life in contemporary America, put on a high-quality mask and get your butt into a seat at the Belasco for a swift, deeply rewarding 90 minutes that, if you're like me, will leave you wishing for more. 

Ain't No Mo' is essentially a series of sketches held loosely together with an overarching conceit: the US government is offering all members of the African diaspora free one-way tickets back. Black people are free to stay in the US if they want, but the show regularly implies that such a choice isn't going to be especially safe or wise. That such a premise can be taken as both ridiculously funny and deeply painful results in dichotomies that are mined brilliantly and fluidly throughout the show: Ain't No Mo' is frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious, until all of a sudden it's unbearably sad. Don't worry: you'll be laughing again in a minute, even if you're wiping away tears as you do. 

A sketch show is inevitably going to suffer some inconsistencies, but even during Ain't's occasional lulls, I found myself all-in. The breakneck speed--not only of many of the sketches, but also of some of the more impressive monologues--helps a lot. So does the extraordinary ensemble, which includes the playwright in drag as a harried new employee at an airport check-in counter responsible for sending Black Americans off on the last flight out of the US. The rest of the cast is consistently on point, and so committed that I found myself occasionally wondering if there were uncredited ringers turning up on stage for star turns. Nope: it's just that the cast of six disappears so deeply into some of their characters that they're virtually and thrillingly unrecognizable when they pop up later as someone else. 

I'm pretty cleareyed about the fact that a lot of shows simply don't last for deeply unfair reasons: Broadway is a business, and business is not kind, so a lot of really good shit fails while a lot of not-at-all-good shit thrives. But if any show deserves an audience right now, it's this one: it's generous, hilarious, challenging and cathartic, and I appreciated it very, very much. I hope it stays alive for longer than the three weeks it's run so far--and I hope you get to see it, too.

Some Like It Hot

I saw Some Like It Hot too early to give it a full review, but I do have some comments. 

At first I was put off by the show. It's so energetic, and so enthusiastic, and so cheerful that it feels like an attack. But eventually I surrendered and embraced its hyperactive broad-stroke old-fashioned Broadway-ness. (It would have been a big hit in 1980.) 

Many of the songs are catchy and fun (though there too many of them). The ensemble work their collective butts off. The choreography is clunky. For example, there's a farce-type extended number that lacks logic and rhythm and ends up abrasive and annoying. However, the ensemble sells everything with that wonderful Broadway-triple-threat energy and skill. 

The main performances make or break a show like this, and Some Like It Hot features two kick-ass, star-making turns. Adrianna Hicks as Sugar and J. Harrison Ghee as Daphne have all the skills you could possibly ask for, topped with great charm and likeability. They are both consistently delightful. Christian Borle is ok; I don't think he is well-cast.

There has been some controversy in the chat rooms about this being a "woke" musical. "Woke" is often used judgmentally, so I don't want to go there. However, the way that the show embraces the existence of people of color and differing sexualities and identities is lovely. 

The show needs polish. I hope that they will use the rest of previews to fix the timing on one-liners (give them a moment to breathe!), balance the sound (50% of the lyrics are not intelligible!), trim the show, and dial the vibe down from 125% to, oh, 110%.

Some Like It Hot is not great. It is fun. And Ghee and Hicks are fabulous.

Wendy Caster