Broadway & Me

Applauding A New Trend: Playbill Extras

2013-05-18T06:54:00.000-05:00

It’s another can’t-find-time-to-blog weekend for me but rather than turn the ghost light on yet again, I’m going to give a brief shout out to a new trend I've noticed: the fancy inserts producers are tucking into the Playbills for their shows.

The one for The Testament of Mary, which closed after just 16 performances and 27 previews, was written by its playwright Colm Tóibín and reads like a mini dissertation on depictions of the Virgin Mary over the centuries. It even includes a list of additional readings for those who might have wanted to dig deeper after seeing Tóibín’s controversial portrayal of the mother of Jesus as a grief-stricken but angry woman who, years after the crucifixion, still questions the divinity of her son. Despite a powerful performance by Fiona Shaw, the production, over-directed by Deborah Warner and featuring a self-consciously arty set by Tom Pye, was off-putting. But this author’s note makes an elegant case for the play itself.

The producers for Lucky Guy slipped two glossy inserts into the Playbill I got when my husband K and I saw this bio drama about the late columnist Mike McAlary and the heyday of tabloid journalism in the '80s and ‘90s. One of those cards has a note from director George C. Wolfe on one side and an excerpt from an essay called “Journalism: A Love Story” by the show’s late playwright Nora Ephron on the other. The second insert contains an illustrated note from set designer David Rockwell, detailing how he put together the collage of subway graffiti and other images from the period that decorate the curtain that greets theatergoers when they enter the Broadhurst Theatre.

Getting these extras is like the theatrical equivalent of the bonus items on a DVD. They’re a nice treat and I hope the trend continues to catch on.

"Lucky Guy" Showcases Good Guy Tom Hanks

2013-05-15T09:13:00.000-05:00

Even if Nora Ephron hadn’t written it and Tom Hanks weren’t starring in it, Lucky Guy would probably be a hit. For the play, now running at the Broadhurst Theatre, tells the story of the late New York Post columnist Mike McAlary and is set in the then-high-flying journalism world of the ‘90s. Every reporter I know (and I know a lot of them) has been going to see the show and to relive, at least for a couple of hours, a time when memories of Woodward and Bernstein’s bringing down a president were still fresh, ad-fat magazines were paying big fees for stories and it was just cool to be in the news business.

Ephron, who died last summer, got a job at the Post straight out of college in the early '60s, later married three journalists and, as she says in a posthumous program note, loved journalism. This is her paean to the profession and it is fun to see her unabasedly rose-tinted version of those old glory days on onstage.

The story she tells is a fairly conventional bio-drama. It unspools as a series of anecdotes (drawn from interviews Ephron did with the real-life people who populate the play) about McAlary’s career.

The tales about McAlary track his days as a rookie beat reporter right through his success as a columnist who specialized in writing about cops and crime, which culminated in a Pulitzer Prize for his exposing the story of Abner Louima, the Haitian security guard brutalized and sodomized with the handle of a bathroom plunger by Brooklyn cops.

The play both begins and ends with a wake in a bar for McAlary, who died from colon cancer at just 41. The fact that Ephron wrote those scenes while facing her own imminent death (a fact she kept secret from all but a few family and friends) makes them all the more poignant.

But, alas, there’s no real dramatic tension in Lucky Guy. Some critics have also complained that the show is too insidey and of little interest to people who lack Ephron's (and my) passion for journalism.

For the record, my husband K, a non-journalist and a notoriously picky theatergoer, like the show a lot. On the other hand, my college roommate, a one-time actress, and her economist husband in from the coast for a visit, liked it less.

Ephron might have fixed some of the problems had she lived but now we’ll never know how. Luckily, director George C. Wolfe, a friend of Ephron’s, has staged the show with great energy, imagination and wit. His efforts are ably supported by the mood-enhancing video projections designed by Batwin + Robin Productions.

Wolfe has also put together what is arguably the best ensemble of the season. Even small parts are played by terrific character actors like Peter Gerety, Richard Masur and Peter Scolari.

But the first among equals in the 17-member supporting cast are Christopher McDonald who captures the dapper flamboyance of the master fixer Eddie Hayes, who was McAlary’s close friend; and Courtney B. Vance, whose nuanced performance as McAlary’s frequent editor Hap Hairston has earned him a deserved Tony nomination.

Of course, I’d expected those experienced stage vets to be good. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the show’s star Tom Hanks. So I’m delighted to be able to report that Hanks, who is making his Broadway debut and hasn’t appeared on any stage in 30 years, gives a terrific performance that totally merits the Tony nomination he got. (Click here to read a piece about his preparation for the role).

Hanks needs none of the grading on a curve that is sometimes used for Hollywood arrivistes. He commands the stage with natural ease. He is funny (Ephron’s script crackles with her customary humor) and touching and I’m beginning to think that Hanks may be the best actor we’ve got in this country in any medium.

After the show, K and I walked over to our favorite theater district hangout for a late supper. A few minutes later Hanks arrived and joined a table near ours. Celebrities seem to like the place as much as K and I do and over the years we’ve seen many famous people holding forth there as their companions paid deferential attention.

But Hanks listened just as much as he talked, living up to his rep as one of Hollywood—and now Broadway’s—truly good guys. He’s truly good in Lucky Guy too and, if you’re lucky (most performances are sold out) you can catch him and the show before its extended run ends on July 3.

"The Call" Tries to Say Too Much

2013-05-11T07:10:00.000-05:00

Performers who’ve made their name in musicals often jump at the chance to show that they can do straight dramatic roles as well. In just the past year, Norbert Leo Butz and Nathan Lane have shown how nimble they can be with superb performances in How I Learned to Drive and The Nance. The latest to make that move is Kerry Butler, perhaps best known as the roller-blading muse in Xanadu but now starring in The Call, a new drama about interracial adoption that is playing in a joint production by Playwrights Horizons and Primary Stages through May 26.

The Call tells the story of Annie and Peter, a white couple, who, after many failed attempts to conceive a child, decide to adopt a baby from Africa. Their best friends, an African-American lesbian couple, are equal parts supportive (they want their friends to be happy) and skeptical (they wonder how Annie will deal with a black child’s hair).

The plot, as they say, thickens when the adoption agency makes the titular call to say that it has found a child but she is slightly different from what Annie and Peter had expected. Will they still take her? Will the experience redefine their feelings about parenthood and even about one another?

Playwright Tanya Barfield is the mother of two children adopted from Ethiopia and she writes with great empathy about people who desperately want to be parents. (Click here to read about how her own experience informed the play).

But Barfield trips herself up by layering on so many other issues— homosexuality, AIDS, poverty in Africa, relationships between blacks and whites in this country—that the central questions almost get lost.

Indeed, even Barfield has trouble keeping up with all of it: the gay couple actually gets married twice but for no apparent reason. And an emotional speech by Annie and Peter’s African neighbor, nicely played by Russell G. Jones, goes on so long that I think I might have dozed off.

What keeps the show on track (and kept me awake) are the performances, particularly Butler’s. The actress is also the mother of two young daughters adopted from Africa (click here to read about that) and she conveys Annie’s hunger to be a mother with heartbreaking clarity.

Kelly AuCoin is equally affecting as Peter. Meanwhile, Crystal A. Dickinson provides comic relief as the more outspoken of the two black friends. And, in the play's least flashy role, Eisa Davis is quite good, too, although she and Dickinson display none of the chemistry you'd expect from newlyweds.

Still, the maternal relationship is the primal one here. And despite whatever reservations I may have, Barfield gets points for at least trying to connect the personal preoccupations of upper middle-class folks that dominate so many contemporary plays with the political concerns of the rest of the world, which appear in far too few of them.

Why "Here Lies Love" is So Totally Lovable

2013-05-08T07:57:00.001-05:00

Let me make two things clear right at the beginning of this post. The first, as regular readers know, is that I hate audience participation. The second is that I absolutely loved Here Lies Love, the new musical at the Public Theater that has the audience on its feet the whole time and taking part in every scene, even at one point doing a line dance.

I don’t know how to explain this contradiction. Except to say that no other theater happening I’ve encountered has been as much fun—or as inherently theatrical—as this one is.

The show, conceived and co-written by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, tells the story of Imelda Marcos, the former First Lady of the Philippines whose husband Ferdinand lead a corrupt and oppressive regime for over two decades.

During those years, she threw lavish disco parties, hobnobbed with celebrities from the heiress Doris Duke to the B-movie star George Harrison and spent millions on a Jackie Kennedy-style wardrobe (including the notorious 2,700 pairs of shoes that were discovered after the People Power Revolution pushed out the Marcos government in 1986).

It's a story kind of like Evita's, only with a disco beat. And the club-music score by Byrne and the British musician Fatboy Slim is irresistibly catchy. It was originally released as a concept album in 2010 and there’s no orchestra for the stage show; instead, a dj in a booth spins the recorded instrumentals. But this isn’t just shake your booty music.

Most of the lyrics (and the brief bits of dialog that aren’t sung) are drawn from quotes by the real-life main players who include not only the Marcoses but the opposition leader Benigno Aquino, who, at least in this telling, was also Imelda’s first love.

This is Byrne's first musical but each song advances the story, while remaining true to character. “Why don’t you love me,” Imelda, still determinedly self-involved, laments in her final ballad.

The performances, lead by Ruthie Ann Miles as Imelda, Jose Llana as Ferdinand and Conrad Ricamora as Aquino, are all terrific. And the main three not only have great pipes but loads of charisma as well.

But it’s the staging that makes this show and the credit for that goes to Alex Timbers, who here confirms his position as his generation’s most inventive director of musicals.

Timbers and his design team, lead by set designer David Korins, have transformed the Public’s LuEsther Mertz theater space into a ‘70s era nightclub, complete with a big shiny disco ball, video screens on which are projected scenes and settings from Imelda’s life and a series of movable platforms that are constantly being reconfigured by a crew of hardworking young stagehands in brightly-colored jumpsuits.

The audience stands around the platforms and moves as they do. Sometimes we were urged to dance, at others to stand-in for adoring Marcos supporters (I’ll admit I did swoon a bit when the hunky Llana—click here to read an interview with him—shook my hand) and later we became the disaffected citizens who mourned Aquino after his assassination and joined in the revolution that ultimately brought down the Marcos regime.

The politics do get a little fuzzy amidst all the activity. But the total experience, including the terrific choreography of downtown dancemaker Annie-B Parson and the eye-catching projections by Peter Nigrini, works on a visceral level.

There are a few seats in a balcony area overlooking the playing area but it’s far more fun to be down on the floor. Byrne, clad in a grey jumpsuit and looking like some really hip garage mechanic, was in the crowd the night my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended Here Lies Love and it was an extra treat to watch him bogeying to his own music.

The show’s banal title is drawn from words that Imelda, now 83 and, remarkably, a member of the Filipino congress (click here to read about her current reelection campaign)—is said to want on her tombstone. An apt description for the show itself might be, Here Lies Fun.

Barbara Cook and a Real New York Evening

2013-05-04T18:59:00.000-05:00

Even if you were born and raised in New York, as both my husband K and I were, you've probably had fantasies of living “the real New York life.” Of course the definition of what that is varies from person to person.

For me, the phrase has always conjured up images of post-War Manhattan and that early Mad Men period when people went to swank nightclubs and hip jazz clubs. And this past week, I got to realize my fantasies: K and I went to 54 Below to see the great Barbara Cook and then afterward, we took a cab over to a little club on the East Side called Somethin Jazz to hear a trio lead by our young friend the pianist Kevin Harris. It was a real New York evening.

I’d been wanting to go to 54 Below ever since a group of Broadway producers got together last year and converted the space underneath the old Studio 54 disco (now a home for Roundabout Theatre Company productions) into a cabaret and nicknamed it Broadway’s Nightclub.

It's a Broadway production through and through. Tony winner John Lee Beatty designed the place, Tony winner Ken Billington has done the lighting and Peter Hylenski (nominated just this week for his work on Motown: The Musical) did the sound design.

And the lineup of headliners reads like a Who’s Who of Broadway. Patti LuPone was the opening act and has already returned a couple of times. Ben Vereen, Sherie Rene Scott, Andrea Martin, Donna McKechnie, Victor Garber, Jason Robert Brown and Norbert Leo Butz, to name just a few, have all performed there too. (Click here to check out the podcast that features interviews with many of them).

Still, it’s hard to think of a better person to see there than Barbara Cook. For she is the last great voice from the Golden Age of Broadway musicals still singing. Cook made her Broadway debut in 1951 and quickly became one of its leading ingenues, later creating the role of Marian the Librarian in the original production of The Music Man.

During the '70s, she hit a bad spell of depression, alcoholism and weight gain but she got through it and made a legendary comeback with a series of concerts and club dates that reestablished her as one of the leading interpreters of the American songbook.

My husband K and I caught one of the performances she gave at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont back in 2004, shortly before her friend and collaborator, the pianist Wally Harper died. It remains one of the Top 10 theatrical experiences of my life and so when I saw that she was making her debut at 54 Below, I knew it was really time for me to get there.

I have to confess that I was a little disappointed at first. The room reminded me of one of those two-drinks-on-the-table clubs they used to have in Las Vegas. The cocktails seemed overly expensive; the waiters too harried.

But then, Cook, now 85 and leaning heavily on a cane, entered the room and slowly made her way through the audience. By the time she was helped up on the stage and began to sing, the room seemed more elegant, the lighting more romantic. Two men at the table in front of ours moved their seats closer and leaned their heads together as they listened. I reached over for K's hand.

She warned us that she, although a leading Sondheim interpreter, would sing no Sondheim songs. Instead, she did tunes by Hoagy Carmichael, Eddie Cantor, John Lennon and a few lesser known composers.

I’ve read that the act is pretty much a reprise of the one she did at the now closed Feinstein's last spring and later at her birthday concert at Carnegie Hall last October. But I didn’t mind and nor did anyone else in the room.

Her voice cracked a couple of times during her first number but a couple of sips of water cured that. “Don’t go home and tell people that Barbra Cook can’t sing,” she joked. “Cause I can.”

And while it’s true, that she talks as much as she sings during the 80-minute concert, it’s also true that when she sings, there’s no one like her. Her engagement at 54 Below ends tonight but, with luck, she’ll be back many more times.

And with luck, more people will get to know and hear Kevin Harris. He’s a friend and so I can’t review his performance (you can find out more about him here).

However I can say that, like Cook, Kevin tells stories with his music. He told K and me that he's planning to move to New York from his current home base in Boston. I'm looking forward to his interpretation of the real New York life.

Taking Time Out for Tony Talk

2013-05-01T06:56:00.000-05:00

You don’t even have to be a theater lover to know that the Tony nominations were announced yesterday. There were, as usual, the fairly predictable nods. Hollywood heavyweight Tom Hanks got a nomination for Lucky Guy, the love song to old-school journalism that is itself a frontrunner for Best Play because it’s the final work of the much-beloved writer—and big theater booster—Nora Ephron, who died last summer.

And, of course, there were the somewhat surprising omissions. Neither Alan Cuming nor Bette Midler got recognized for their performances as, respectively, all the characters in Macbeth and the only person onstage in I’ll Eat You Last, the one-woman show about the late Hollywood superagent Sue Mengers.

After Fiona Shaw failed to get a nod for her controversial portrayal of Jesus' mother in The Testament of Mary, the producers announced that the show will close this coming Sunday.

Al Pacino also got passed over for his idiosyncratic performance in Glengarry Glen Ross. In fact, large swatches of the disappointing fall season got deservedly passed over. Luckily the shows that opened in the spring brought some razzle dazzle back to Broadway and there’s stiff competition in several categories.

Hank’s competitors for best actor in a play include the perennial favorites Nathan Lane for The Nance and David Hyde Pierce for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Not to be counted out are Tracy Letts who gave a revelatory performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the young scene stealer Tom Sturridge from Orphans.

The best featured actress in a musical category is equally fierce, with every single one of the nominees—Kinky Boots’ Annaleigh Ashford, Cinderella’s Victoria Clark, Pippin’s Andrea Martin, Hands on a Hardbody’s Keala Settle and Lauren Ward from Matilda—having performed a number that stopped her individual show.

Meanwhile, any one of the guys (the first three of them previous Tony winners) who are up for best choreographer— Andy Blankenbuehler for Bring It On, Peter Darling for Matilda, Jerry Mitchell for Kinky Boots and Chet Walker channeling Bob Fosse for Pippin—could dance away with that prize. The chance to see their numbers will definitely be a win-win for the viewers who tune in to the awards broadcast.

But this year’s biggest showdown will be between the cheery homegrown musical Kinky Boots (which picked up 13 nominations) and its leading rival, the witty British import Matilda (which got 12). Both are big shows and neither fills the underdog role that made Once a winner when it faced off against Newsies last year but they do represent different wings of the answer to the question “what should a 21st century musical be?"

The Tonys are unlikely to have a definitive answer for that but all the winners will be announced at the ceremony, back this year at Radio City Music Hall, on Sunday June 9 and broadcast on CBS.

However, the fun has already begun as everyone has started second guessing the choices that the nominators made. And this year, my theatergoing buddy Bill and I decided that we’d chime in too. So, click the orange button below to hear us sound off on what we thought of the nomination choices and of the 2012-2013 season as a whole:

Turning on the Ghost Light, Again

2013-04-27T06:45:00.000-05:00

I know. I know. This is two Saturdays in a row that I've turned on the ghost light, signaling a temporary pause in these posts. But what can I tell you? It's a crazy time and I'm seeing so many shows (and juggling so many other things in the non-theater parts of my life) that I can't find the time to write about what I've seen. But I will. And I hope you will come back to read about those shows and about all the hoopla of the awards season that will follow the announcement of the Tony nominations this coming Tuesday morning.

Hailing "Julius Caesar" in a Contemporary Way

2013-04-24T06:41:00.000-05:00

Transposing Shakespeare to a different locale or time period no longer earns a director the automatic cool points it once did. In fact, doing so has become almost as ho-hum as a standing ovation at the end of a show.

So I'm thrilled to be able to say that it’s been a long time since I’ve experienced the heat and blood of the Bard’s work as intensely as I did while watching the Royal Shakespeare Company’s all-black production of Julius Caesar, which is ending a two-week (and too short) run at BAM’s Harvey Theater this weekend.

Director Gregory Doran has placed the action in a contemporary, but unspecified, African nation and his staging is so visceral and immediate that it almost seems as though Shakespeare had been clairvoyant and intentionally wrote the play to be set there and now.

Of course it's easy to see the similarities between Ancient Rome, wrestling with its adoration of a strongman leader and its desire for every man to rule his own destiny, and the many African nations now roiled by that same tension. The parallels emerge in ways large and small in this production.

Its Caesar, who makes his entrance dressed in a casual safari suit and brandishing a leather scepter, displays the volatile mixture of benevolence and menace that calls to mind charismatic despots ranging from Idi Amin to Muammar Gaddafi.

Meanwhile, the senators who conspire to assassinate Caesar wear the traditional African robes that resemble togas. And the hoi polloi are appeased not with bread and circuses but with drink and lively Afro-pop music, performed by a terrific seven-member band that is playing as theatergoers take their seats and remains onstage to underscore the action throughout the show.

Acoustics are always tricky at the Harvey. And so my friend Mary Anne and I, seated towards the back of the orchestra, did have some trouble understanding all the dialog—a task made even more difficult because the actors assume pronounced African accents. And a couple of the players look so similar that it can be difficult to keep track of who is who.

And yet none of that matters. The intense commitment of the actors, the supple lighting and striking set, dominated by a giant statue of Caesar, get the message across loud and clear: there are few heroes in politics.

The play’s main characters—Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Mark Antony—are all motivated, like so many political leaders, by both fear and opportunism. Its familiar lines (“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings,” “Cry ‘Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,” “The evil that men do lives after then; the good is oft interred with their bones.”) resound like dispatches from today's conflict zones.

When all the elements fit together so powerfully, the credit has to go to the director (click hear to listen to his interview with Charlie Rose and to catch a few glimpses of scenes from the show). Doran is in the process of settling in as the new artistic head of the RSC and this production suggests that his tenure could be very cool indeed.

Turning on the Ghostlight

2013-04-20T06:48:00.000-05:00

It's crazy time on Broadway—six shows opened this past week and five more are due next week before the season officially closes on April 25—and so I should be here writing like a madwoman to keep up with them all. Alas, it's a crazy time in my non-theater life too (no disasters; just an unusual amount of work) and so I'm forced to turn on the ghost light in imitation of what theaters do when they're temporarily vacant. I'll try to get back sometime next week and I hope you'll return to because there is so much to talk about!

“The Last Five Years” Has Wonderful Moments

2013-04-17T14:36:00.000-05:00

People who love musicals really seem to love The Last Five Years. In fact, those who saw the original 2002 production are still singing its praises. And there have reportedly been over 3,500 productions of the show since then (including one now running through April 28 at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va.). Plus a movie version is scheduled to begin filming this summer with Jeremy Jordan and Anna Kendrick.

I missed the original production, which starred Sherie Rene Scott and Norbert Leo Butz, so I bought a ticket to the revival currently playing at Second Stage Theatre through May 18, to see what all the fuss has been about.

Now, this is the point in the post where regular readers might expect me to say something like “it’s not about much.” But I’m not going to say that. Because it’s easy to understand why this small show (it runs 90 minutes, has just two characters and the original orchestration calls for a six-member orchestra, two of whom are cellist) is so adored.

For starters, it has a great score by Jason Robert Brown that sits right at the crossroad between the Broadway sound that traditionalists love and the more contemporary pop vibe that can draw in new audiences.

Also, like so many beloved musicals, its sung-through book, also by Brown, has a showbiz setting: it tracks the five-year relationship of a writer named Jamie and an actress named Cathy as his career soars and hers stagnates. The fact that the story is based on Brown’s own failed first marriage adds an extra frisson.

So what’s not to love? Well, there is the fact that the story unfolds in a series of scenes that crisscross one another in time. His part starts as he’s getting ready for their first date and ends with his decision to walk out of the marriage. Hers begins with the pain of the relationship’s end and moves back in time to the giddy hopefulness of their first kiss.

It’s a clever conceit. But it’s also as confusing as hell. And although Brown’s direction (he’s kind of a one-man band for this production) is elegant, it doesn’t help clarify what’s going on (click here to listen to an interview he did with NPR.)

I kept trying to figure out where in the timeline each song fell and to match up the his and hers moments of elation, frustration and disillusion. But I failed and simply ended up treating each song as its own little story. Which somewhat undercuts the emotion of the whole piece.

Luckily, the performances by Adam Kantor and Betsy Wolfe are so strong that the conceit doesn’t undermine the entire evening. He adds self-awareness to the jerk that Jamie can be. She makes clear the battle between love and envy that is roiling inside Cathy. And both actors have got great pipes.

Because they interact so little, it’s hard to feel the connection between the characters but I felt a kinship with each of them, as though I were the friend in whom each was confiding his or her version of the marriage.

In the end, their story evoked memories of the happy and sad moments that defined my own past relationships and allowed me to forgive, at least a bit, the transgressions that those lovers—and I—had committed.

How can you not love a show that does that?

Getting a Kick Out of "Kinky Boots"

2013-04-13T07:12:00.002-05:00

It may not be politically correct to say this but I’m getting tired of drag queens. Not the real people but the theatrical versions of them that keep turning up in Broadway musicals in far greater numbers than their true presence in the general population would suggest.

So although I was moved by the love story of Georges and Albin in all three Broadway productions of La Cage aux Folles and amused by the moxie of the cross-dressing trio in last year's Priscilla Queen of the Desert, I have to confess that I couldn't shake a been-there-done-that feeling when I thought abut seeing the new crew of gender benders in Kinky Boots, which opened last week at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. But guess what? I had a good time.

For Kinky Boots, which has a book by Harvey Fierstein and music by the ‘80s pop star Cyndi Lauper, is an old-fashioned musical comedy that wears its heart on it sleeve while it’s kicking up its heels. It's not trying to revolutionize the musical; it's just happy to entertain you.

The story, which is based on the 2005 British movie of the same title, focuses on two guys with father issues. One is Charlie Price, whose family has run a shoe company that has been the main employer of a northern British town for several generations. Charlie has no interest in shoes but when his dad dies unexpectedly, he reluctantly steps in to rescue the business, which is losing the battle against cheaper imports.

The other guy (or gal, if you prefer) is Lola, a drag queen estranged from her disapproving father and in the market for high heels sturdy enough to support the heavier weight of a man. In the spirit of supply (Charlie can make shoes) and demand (Lola and her friends need them) these lost boys team up to design a new line that they call Kinky Boots and, in the process, each achieves a deeper acceptance of who he is. Plus, there’s a lot of great dancing and some genial humor too.

This is the kind of feel-good show that is right up the alley of director Jerry Mitchell (who helmed Legally Blonde and choreographed the first revival of La Cage, as well as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Hairspray) and he pulls out all the stops. There are some terrific production numbers, including one on a conveyor belt.

There’s also a terrific cast. The Broadway vet Billy Porter is drawing big kudos for his portrayal of Lola. And he does hit just the right mix of sass and insecurity that drives the boy in Lola who disappointed his dad and has to forge his own definition of manhood (click here to read an interview with him).

But Stark Sands, who plays Charlie, deserves praise too. Charlie is—in every sense of the word—the show’s straight man and yet Sands manages to hold his own amidst all the razzle dazzle (click here for a piece on him).

Meanwhile Annaleigh Ashford, who, in the tradition of Faith Prince and Kristin Chenoweth, combines cheerleader looks with killer comic timing, steals every scene she’s in as the employee who has a crush on the engaged Charlie.

But the true star of the show is Lauper’s score. Unlike so many rockers who come to Broadway, Lauper had the good sense to hook up with people who know how to put a musical together and she has the talent to know just how much she should follow their advice without losing her own distinctive voice. Her songs, to paraphrase her 1979 hit, wanna have fun and they know just how to do it.

In fact, the whole show (including David Rockwell’s appealingly antiquated factory set and Gregg Barnes’ appropriately over-the-top costumes—and shoes) hits the sweet spot in these times when most right-minded people are pulling for working class folks to get a break and same-sex couples to get their rights. As the showstopping conveyor-belt number advises, “Everybody Say Yeah.”

"Hands on a Hard Body" Quickly Loses Its Grip

2013-04-10T08:07:00.001-05:00

It’s always sad to hear that a show is closing prematurely. And that’s true whether or not you had a good time when you saw it. Cause I’m feeling badly for the cast and crew of Hands on a Hard Body, which posted its closing notice just 18 days after it opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, and I had a really bad time when I saw it.

Now, I have to say that the fault isn’t entirely the show’s. Although its premise, based on a 1997 documentary of the same name, isn’t what you’d call natural material for a musical.

Here it is in a nutshell: an assortment of down-and-nearly-out Texans enter an endurance contest. The prize is a red Nissan truck. The winner will be the person who keeps his or her hands on it the longest.

In the show’s favor, however, seemed to be the fact that it has a book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Doug Wright (click here for a Q&A with him); music by Broadway baby Amanda Green and Trey Anastasio, frontman for the cult jam band Phish (click here to read about their collaboration); a talented cast lead by Keith Carradine and Hunter Foster; and choreography by the always inventive Sergio Trujillo.

Alas, it turns out that Wright’s book is unable to make its 10 contestants more than clichés; they’re barely introduced before we’re supposed to be rooting for them. The songs, with the exception of one syncopated gospel number (click here to read about the staging of it) sound as though they’ve all been ladled out from the same country-pop stewpot.

So despite the game stagecraft of Trujillo and director Neil Pepe (the car turns, the actors perform emotion-baiting arias) Hands on a Hard Body remains pretty much what its title advertises: a bunch of people standing around with their hands on a truck.

But, as I said, the show is only partly to blame for my having such a bad time. What really did me in is that about 15 minutes into the first act, a guy sitting in the row behind my theatergoing buddy Bill and me, leaned over and threw up.

He and his family left immediately but, of course, the problem didn’t go with them. Although those of us sitting nearby had been spared direct damage, we all started looking for an olfactory escape. Bill and I spotted some empty seats and moved into them but about 10 minutes later, their very late-arriving owners turned up and the usher proceeded to chastise Bill and me for taking seats that weren’t ours.

Somehow, the show went on. One usher came in and sprinkled some disinfectant. Another found some other seats for Bill and me but they were right in the midst of a group of rambunctious teens who seemed to be on their high school spring trip and who, judging from the whoops and bouts of uncontrolled laughter, seemed to like the show a lot.

"Buyer & Cellar" Gives Full Value

2013-04-06T14:43:00.000-05:00

If you’d asked, I’d have said that one-person shows were my least favorite form of theater. So it’s been truly surprising to find that some of the shows I’ve most enjoyed this season have been solo performances. I had a lovely time when I saw All the Rage, actor and child-abuse survivor Martin Moran’s show about forgiveness and I’ve already sung the praises of Ann, Holland Taylor’s one-woman tribute to the late Texas governor Ann Richards (click here for that review). But now at the top of my list is Buyer & Cellar, which opened this week at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

The buyer in question is Barbra Streisand and the cellar is the “street of shops” the star created in the basement of her Malibu home to store all the things she’s collected over the years. Seeing the shops featured in Streisand’s book “My Passion for Design,” both amused playwright Jonathan Tolins and inspired him to create a fictional situation in which an out-of-work actor name Alex is hired to tend the shops and, in the process, their sole customer.

It’s a funny premise and Tolins has filled the 90-minute show with one laugh-out-loud moment after another. But tucked in the interstices, are some poignant reflections on celebrity, loneliness and the meaning of friendship that are made even more affective by a brilliant performance by Michael Urie.

The Julliard-trained actor is best known for his fay-gay roles on TV sitcoms like “Ugly Betty” and “Partners” but he’s also got serious dramatic chops as he showed in The Temperamentals, the moving play about the founding of the first gay rights organization, The Mattachine Society (click here for my review of that). This time out, Urie gets to combine his comedic and dramatic skills and the result is altogether winning.

Buyer & Cellar is presented as a story that Alex tells about the time he spent working in the titular cellar and Urie plays Alex, Alex’s boyfriend, who is an avid Streisand fan, Streisand’s acerbic housekeeper, the star’s husband James Brolin and, best of all, Streisand herself.

Urie’s Streisand isn’t a full-blown impersonation but with a twist of his shoulders, tilt of his head and the Brooklyn inflections so distinctive to her voice, he manages to capture the keen intelligence, the sharp defensiveness and the underlying neediness that define the woman. It's a bravura performance.

As my theatergoing buddy Bill and I made our way across Sixth Avenue for dinner at the nearby restaurant Morandi, I couldn’t help wondering what the famously prickly star might think of this portrayal of her or even if she might sue (even though the play actually begins with the disclaimer: “What I'm going to tell you could not possibly have happened with a person as famous, talented, and litigious as Barbra Streisand.”)

The odd thing is that I suspect Streisand might like it. I sure did. And I’m pretty sure you would too.

The New "Cinderella" Still Has Old-Style Charm

2013-04-03T08:22:00.000-05:00

Fairy tales ain’t what they used to be. Books like “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister” and “Glass Slippers & Jeweled Masques” have brought an edgier, and even erotic, vibe to the old stories. Meanwhile, movies now portray characters like Hansel, Gretel and Snow White as crossbow-wielding vigilantes.

So it's a nice surprise to find that the musical now called Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella is a more or less traditional spin on the old beloved fable about the neglected girl who gets to marry the charming prince. It may not be a great show but it is a pleasant one.

This Cinderella is the latest update—and the stage debut—of the TV musical that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote for Julie Andrews back in 1957 (click here to see it on YouTube). It was revised for Lesley Ann Warren eight years later (click here for a 10-minute excerpt) and given a multi-racial makeover starring Brandy in 1997 (click here for see all of it).

The master revisionist for this new version is Douglas Carter Beane, who, while keeping the fairy godmother and the glass slipper, has also tucked in some contemporary elements.

Among the additions are Carter’s trademark campy one-liners. They sometimes clang on the ear but they aren’t really all that different from the anachronistic wisecracks now common in animated fairy stories ranging from “Shrek” to “Tangled.”

A more significant change is Carter’s decision to beef up the role of the prince to the point that an alternate new title for the show might have been “Cinderella’s Fella.” Borrowing from the now-popular rom-com trope that reverses the old fairytale scenario, it’s the guy who really needs rescuing in this tale.

The prince, who gets the opening number in the show, is a well-meaning guy (he’s been given the hip-dude name of Topher) but he hasn’t quite grown up and what he needs is a smart gal to show him how to do it. Enter Cinderella who has the kind of you-go-girl spunk that now seems to be requisite for all young heroines.

Topher could have been a generic airhead but Santino Fontana, the ever resourceful actor who was equally terrific as the stoic lead character in Sons of the Prophet and as the firebrand brother in Billy Elliot, brings an appealing earnestness to the role that makes this prince truly charming (click here for an interview with him).

Meanwhile, Laura Osnes, starring in her fifth Broadway show in just six years, is petite and pretty and posses a crystalline soprano that is perfect for Cinderella. I’ve occasionally found Osnes to be bland in the past but here she gives a spirited performance and confirms her status as Broadway's reigning ingenue.

This made-for-each-other couple is surrounded by an incredible supporting cast that includes the ever-droll Peter Bartlett as the prince’s duplicitous prime minister, the wry Harriet Harris as Cinderella's evil stepmother, a hilarious Ann Harada as one of the evil stepsisters and Victoria Clark in glorious voice as the fairy godmother (click here to read an interview with her).

And, of course, there are the vintage songs. This is a B-grade Rodgers & Hammerstein score but it does include such can’t-stop-humming-them tunes as “In My Own Little Corner, “Impossible,” and "Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful.” A few additional songs have been recruited from other R&H shows but they fit in nicely with the originals.

The creative team does its part too. Anna Louizos' enchanted forest makes an idyllic setting for the show but it’s William Ivey Long’s costumes that provide the real magic, transforming Cinderella’s shabby dress into a beautiful ball gown while she's in full view of the audience.

There are some missteps. Director Mark Brokaw has Cinderella sitting outside, instead of by the chimney, when she sings about being in her own little corner. A scene in which the stepsisters fantasize about what life with the prince might be strains much too hard to be funny.

The show is also too long. What was originally a 90-minute TV special now clocks in at nearly two-and-a-half hours.

But none of that seemed to matter to the little girls in sparkly dresses who dotted the audience on the school night that my sister Joanne and I saw the show. Most of them got their parents to buy the $15 tiaras on sale in the lobby.

Fairy tales may be fractured and rewritten to fit the vagaries or gender norms of the day. But the one thing that never seems to change is the yearning to be a princess, even if it's just for one enchanted evening.

An Exchange Between Signature Theatre & Me

2013-03-30T06:36:00.000-05:00

Even before it opened the Pershing Square Center complex last year and turned it into a prime hangout for theater lovers, the Signature Theatre Company was beloved for focusing an entire season each year on the work of a single playwright, redeeming the reputations of some further deepening our appreciation of others.

And so perhaps you, like me, were a little dismayed when you got the news that the 2013-2014 season will feature world premieres by multiple playwrights. Now there is no question that all of them—August Wilson, Martha Clarke, Regina Taylor, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Edward Albee, Will Eno, David Henry Hwang—are terrific playwrights.

Albee and Wilson have had previous Signature seasons devoted to their work and Hwang is currently in residence. The others are excellent additions to Signature’s new Residency Five program, which champions currently less-renowned playwrights. And the company has done all-premiere seasons before, from 2000-2002 when it introduced new works by Romulus Linney, Horton Foote, Sam Shepard and others.

And yet, I couldn’t help worrying that Signature might be abandoning the singular one-writer focus that has always made it so special. So I summoned up my courage and asked if I could talk to the company’s artistic director James Houghton about what was happening.

It turns out that Houghton is traveling but he was gracious enough to take the time to send me a reassuring response that I now get to share with you. Here’s what he said:

It was always our plan for David [Henry Hwang], as our Residency One playwright, to have three productions, as all our Residency One playwrights do. We had originally announced KUNG FU for Fall/Winter, but since we’re developing this piece with Chinese collaborators, and the scale of the project is so enormous, timing on all fronts made it make the most sense to do it in early 2014. This is really a change of just a couple of months to make sure we have time to develop the piece with the attention it deserves, with the parties we wanted to work with.

We’ve also found since opening the Center that it really makes sense to have our Res One writers with us for 14-18 months, instead of the traditional 12 months. It deepens the relationship and the commitment we make to each other, and gives some breathing room for each production, and has resulted in some exciting overlaps of Res One writers (like it did for David and Athol Fugard this past season). I imagine this overlap will continue to be the case going forward.

We’re looking at next season’s All Premiere line-up as a chance for our Residency Five program to catch up – since the program is about building new bodies of work, we always knew it would take three full years to fully launch, and next season will complete that launch, with four full Res Five productions (Taylor, Clarke, Eno, Jenkins). That, in combination with the continued Res One presence of KUNG FU and the new Albee and the Wilson piece, meant for this one year only we wouldn’t be introducing a new Residency One playwright. We don’t view this as a change in mission at all, and we’ll absolutely be announcing a new Residency One playwright for the next season.

"Honky" Has Good Fun with the Race Card

2013-03-27T09:05:00.000-05:00

Honky, the provocatively named comedy now running at Urban Stages, kicks off with a not very funny incident: a black kid is killed for his sneakers and sales spike at the Nike-style company that makes them because the shooting makes white suburban teens regard the shoe as an authentic emblem of the black experience that so many of them want to imitate.

So it surprises me as much as it may surprise you that I found the show to be a smart and endearing look at the ways in which white and black people stereotype one another—and themselves.

In fact, playwright Greg Kalleres’ tale has the kind of political-correctness-be-damned daring that reminded me of The Colored Museum, George C. Wolfe’s side-splitting satire that poked fun at the shibboleths of black culture back in 1986. My friend Sydney and I laughed so hard when we saw it that we fell out of our seats (literally asses on the floor).

Honky isn’t quite as funny as that. But it has its moments. Its characters include the white president of the company, the black guy who designed the shoe, the white ad man whose catchphrases made it popular, the ad man’s racially carefree girlfriend, a Buppy shrink, a two-person everyman chorus and the creator of a pill that promises to cure racism.

Their responses to the sales spike—varying degrees of liberal guilt and shameless self-interest—unfold in short scenes that bounce from the boardroom to the bedroom with stops along the way in affluent apartments, chic bars, the shrink’s office and the realm of magical realism.

All of these locales are smartly rendered by the clever stacking and restacking of simple black boxes that Roman Tatarowicz has devised for the set design, aided by the adroit video projections of Caite Hevner and lighting by Mirian Nilofa Crowe.

The actors are just as terrific and, under Luke Harlan’s sure-handed direction, nimble at navigating the tricky line Kalleres has drawn between being politically incorrect and being flat-out offensive (click here to read an interview with the playwright and director).

The silver-haired men in blue blazers and the women with Ann Romney-style bouffants who showed up for the patrons night performance my sister and I happened to attend hardly seemed the target audience for Honky. And there was just a handful of black people in the audience that night. So the mix could have made for an awkward I-don’t-know-if-I-should-laugh situation. But Honky is so disarming that none of us could help but chuckle along with it.

The play is far from being a cure for racism but it makes the case that the ability to laugh together is going to have to be part of the remedy.

Why "My Name is Asher Lev" Is Different From All Other Plays Currently Running

2013-03-23T05:27:00.001-05:00

Passover begins on Monday evening and although My Name is Asher Lev opened four months ago and has extended its run at the Westside Theatre through
Sept. 1, it’s hard to think of a better time to talk about this show, which both challenges and celebrates what it means to be a Jew.

I’ve never read the Chaim Potok novel from which Aaron Posner has adapted his play but male Jewish friends who were, like the title character, artistic or otherwise sensitive boys tell me that the book helped them get through their youths, making them believe, sometimes against great odds, that they could become the men they dreamed they might be.

In both the book and this play, Asher Lev is a boy prodigy growing up in Brooklyn who becomes obsessed with making art at an early age. This brings him into conflict with his father Aryeh, a devout Hasidic who is equally obsessed with his work setting up yeshivas and preserving Jewish life in Europe in the difficult years after the Holocaust.

Asher’s mother Rivkeh supports their son’s artistic ambitions but when the leader of their sect gives his approval and introduces the boy to a famous but non-observant artist named Jacob Kahn, Asher begins controversial work that takes him further into a world alien to that of his parent’s.

Posner and his director Gordon Edelstein have decided to tell Asher’s story with just three actors—Ari Brand plays Asher from boyhood to young manhood; Mark Nelson plays Aryeh, Jacob Kahn and several other male characters as well; and when my husband K and I saw the show Jenny Bacon played all the women in Asher’s life, including Rivkeh. Ilana Levine now plays those roles (click here to read about her).

I usually hate it when actors double in roles because it can be so hard to keep the characters straight. But it works beautifully in this production. That’s a testament to Edelstein’s lucid direction, (click here to read about his approach to the show) James F. Ingall’s trully illuminatin lighting and a pitch-perfect cast.

Brand only has the one character to play but he carefully delineates Asher’s evolving sense of himself over the years. And while I also usually hate having adults pretend to be children, Brand burrows so deep into the role that he even manages to be convincing as the six-year-old Asher. (Click here to read a Q&A with him).

Nelson is not a subtle actor but he uses his innate extravagance to good effect and grounds every line and gesture in such emotional truth that I could tell which character he was playing before he said a word.

But the real standout was Bacon, who seemed to physically transform herself right before one’s eyes as she moved from one character to the next. Her Rivkeh was the emotional heart of the play.

Another shout-out has to go the master set designer Eugene Lee, who has made a simple but exquisite set that is both specific and versatile, believable as both the Lev family’s home and Jacob Kahn’s studio.

There are some missteps. Posner tries to pack in too much of the 369-page book—scenes with Asher’s uncle fill in some backstory but don’t seem necessary in a 90-minute play. And at least half the play is delivered in direct address to the audience, as was the entire book. And yet, My Name is Asher Lev is still a richly theatrical experience.

Like the religion at its center, My Name is Asher Lev proudly adheres to the traditions of its form. It is an old-fashioned play that deals unironically with the big issues like the obligations of faith, the bonds of family love, and the power of art. And like Passover, it is a celebration of liberation. But, to paraphrase a famous ad from my own youth, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love it.”

"The Mound Builders" Falls Totally Flat

2013-03-20T06:22:00.000-05:00

The expectation we have for playwrights is the same as we have for parents: that they should love all their children equally. Of course they don’t. Both tend to have a soft spot for their problem child.

By several accounts, Lanford Wilson’s favorite from the nearly two dozen plays he wrote was The Mound Builders, which has just been revived in the Linney theater at The Pershing Square Signature Center.

It tells the story of a group of archaeologists working a dig outside a small Illinois town in the mid-‘70s. Wilson clearly wanted to grapple with issues like how we define and value the past. But he didn’t make the task easy.

The Mound Builders is a memory play that unfolds in a series of flashbacks recalled by the leader of the expedition and the action bounces back and forth between scenes in which he dictates notes about what happened during a fateful summer at the site and scenes of the events he is recounting.

The archaeologists are a rag tag group that includes the head of the expedition August Howe and his wife and tween daughter, Howe’s deputy and his wife, and Howe’s sister, a famous novelist and recovering addict.

Also on hand is Chad Jasker, the son of the man who owns the land on which the site is located. Jasker yearns to be accepted by the scholarly team but he also has other plans for the land on which they’ve set up camp. As others have noted, comparisons to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard were clearly intended.

The original Circle Repertory Theater production won an Obie back in 1975 but the reaction to Wilson’s play was mixed. “This is his most ambitious work," wrote New York Times critic Mel Gusow. "And it must have presented enormous problems to the director, Marshall W. Mason.”

Judging from the rest of the review, Mason, Wilson’s frequent collaborator, proved up to the challenge. Alas, Jo Bonney, who directed the Signature production that opened on Sunday night, has been less successful.

Bonney's muddled staging is so confusing that I gave up trying to figure it out about a third of the way into the first act. I wasn’t the only one either.

During intermission, the two couples sitting behind me debated whether they should leave. “There’s not much happening,” said one of the wives. “Should we stay?” asked the other. “I don’t think much more is going to happen,” chimed in one of the husbands. The four of them left. As did the couple sitting in the aisle seats next to me.

I felt marooned by their departures but I stuck it out. The second act did pick up. Albeit not enough. The actors, several of them miscast, seemed as listless as the direction and as befuddled as the audience.

And yet, poking through that debris are the bones of a potentially engaging play that, in the right hands, just might reveal how deserving it is of its father's love.

"Ann" and "All in the Timing" Make Me Smile

2013-03-16T08:07:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you just need a good laugh. At least that’s how I’ve been feeling over the past couple of weeks as I’ve gone from one disappointing show to the next. I usually tack towards dramatic plays about meaty subjects but I found myself craving something lighter that might remind me of the simpler pleasure that going to the theater can be.

Thankfully, tucked in between all the duds were two small shows that offered just that (along with some smiles and even a few belly laughs). They are All in the Timing, the collection of comedy sketches by David Ives that is playing in a Primary Stages production at the 59E59 Theaters through April 14; and Ann, Holland Taylor’s paean to the life of the Texas politician Ann Richards that opened at the Vivian Beaumont Theater last week.

I’d had my doubts about both. The playlets in All in the Timing (which include one about three monkeys in a lab testing the theory that if they sit at a typewriter long enough one will end up writing Hamlet and another called “Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread”) sounded to me like onstage versions of the kind of skits you might see on “Saturday Night Live,” which I’ve never watched a complete episode of during its 38 years on air. Meanwhile, one-person shows like Ann tend to be my least favorite form of live entertainment.

But, as I said, I was desperate for a good time and the word of mouth on both shows promised that each would deliver that. And so they did.

What sets the skits in All in the Timing apart from the average variety-show routine is Ives, who is wickedly smart and has a fondness for both highbrow wordplay and lowbrow slapstick. The combination in All in the Timing proves irresistible. And a couple of the skits—a man tries to pick up a woman at a cafe, a lonely woman enrolls at a shady language school—manage to touch the heart even while tickling the funny bone.

John Rando, the Tony-winning director of Urinetown and, more recently, of A Christmas Story, is a master of comic timing and he keeps the action moving along at a suitably snappy pace.

Big kudos also have to go to the five-member cast, all of whom are terrific. But first among equals are the wonderful Jenn Harris, who is even more hilarious than she was in Silence! The Musical; and the rubbery-faced, loose-limbed Carson Elrod, who has operated under the radar in supporting roles in shows like Peter and The Starcatcher and Noises Off but delivers a breakthrough performance here that draws the big laughs in scene after scene.

The man sitting in front of my friend Joy and me was so delighted with the whole thing that he bounced in his seat like a five-year-old who’d been expecting spinach for dinner but got double scoops of chocolate ice cream instead. I appreciated the sugar rush too.

The laughs were gentler at Ann but the evening was just as entertaining. Holland Taylor, most familiar form her TV stints in shows like the CBS sitcom “Two and a Half Men,” wrote the play herself after spending years doing research on Ann Richards, the big-haired, quick-tongued mother of four who became governor of Texas. Done up in a white wig and one of the big-shouldered power suits that Richards used to favor, Taylor is a dead ringer for the governor.

She and her director Benjamin Endsley Klein have carefully calibrated the onstage action so that, unlike too many one-person shows, you don’t hanker for someone else to come on (click here to read how they did it). Indeed Taylor’s performance so fills the huge stage at the Beaumont that it’s easy to forget that you’re watching a show and not somehow eavesdropping on Richards herself. She makes good company and so do both of these shows.

Let Down Badly by "Belleville" and "The Flick"

2013-03-13T13:45:00.000-05:00

Maybe I’m just in a cranky mood. Because I’ve seen nearly two dozen show so far this calendar year and I can count the ones I’ve liked on one hand, with a few fingers left over. And as if that weren’t bad enough, a lot of the shows that have disappointed me have been praised by other folks.

That’s certainly the case with two new shows by two of my favorite playwrights: Amy Herzog’s Belleville, which opened at the New York Theatre Workshop last week and Annie Baker’s The Flick, which opened at Playwrights Horizons last night.

Charles Isherwood, who reviewed both plays for the New York Times, called Belleville “a quietly devastating play” when he saw the current production during an earlier run at the Yale Repertory Theater. And he’s almost as tickled by The Flick, which he declares a “moving, beautifully acted and challengingly long new play.”

Now, I long ago realized that Isherwood and I hew to very different aesthetics so I might have discounted what he thought about the plays but a quick look at StageGrade, the site that aggregates the reviews of the city’s major theater critics, shows that a lot of other voices are cheering on these new works as well.

And yet, even as I read their reviews, I find myself wishing that the plays had been better or that I’d been able to like them even a tiny bit as much as I’d liked earlier works by each of these playwrights, both of whom were recently nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, which honors female playwrights.

When I saw her circle mirror transformation back in 2009, Baker grabbed a spot at the top of my leader board for up-and-coming playwrights of either gender and her adaptation of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya was one of the highlights of my 2011-2012 theatergoing season.

And I wasn’t the only one smitten. The New Yorker recently ran a profile of the 31 year-old playwright (click here to read it) and while my husband K and I were standing in the lobby at Playwrights Horizons waiting to see The Flick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage walked by, spotted Baker and came in to give her a big sisterly hug.

Like Baker’s previous plays circle mirror transformation and The Aliens, The Flick is set in a small New England town and focuses on people who are biding their time because they’re unable to figure out how to make better use of it. This time, the action is set in an old movie theater (expertly rendered by David Zinn with tatty rows of seats facing us in the audience) and the biders are a trio of young people who work there.

As with Baker’s past work, this play is directed by Sam Gold. They’ve been a winning combination in the past but Baker and Gold made some annoying choices for The Flick.

Right at the beginning, they extend a joke until it wears out its welcome (the end credit music goes on and on and on for almost five minutes) and then they repeat similarly senseless interludes throughout the first act.

In other scenes, the characters silently sweep the floor for minutes on end. A sequence in which the green-haired Louisa Krause freestyles a dance was amusing but it, too, didn’t know when to stop.

I can’t tell you anything about what happened in the second act because K and I (and a bunch of other people) left at intermission. Doing that is not a move I make lightly; in fact, it’s something I do less than once a year. Maybe all the action (and the lack of it) would have come together if we’d stayed through to the end but the odds seemed to weight heavily against that outcome.

We did stay for all of Herzog’s Belleville but I found myself scratching my head about what it meant too. The plays that made Herzog’s name—After the Revolution and 4000 Miles—were inspired by the interactions between the extended members of Herzog’s leftist family but Belleville zeroes in on the relationship between a young married couple who’ve moved to the eponymous multi-ethnic neighborhood in Paris so that the husband can do AIDS research for Doctors Without Borders.

The play opens with the wife Abby coming home in the middle of the day and finding her husband Zack whacking off to a porn video in their bedroom. A few minutes later their Senegalese landlord shows up and, while Abby is taking a bath, tells Zack that he’s going to have to evict the couple unless they pay the back rent they owe.

All this and some other stuff—Abby’s decision to quit her antidepressant medication, Zach’s over fondness for weed—is thrown into the pot during the first 10 minutes and director Anne Kauffman keeps it at a high simmer. But neither she nor Herzog, who according to the Playbill has been working on the play since 2007 and put it through three complete rewrites, makes it clear why we should care about this couple.

It does help that Abby and Zach are played by the attractive and talented Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller but not enough. Tidbits are doled out over the next hour and 40 minutes that reveal more about the couple and some major secrets are disclosed in the closing scene but they all add up to a picture of an improbable marriage and it’s hard to draw any life lessons from it since few marriages are based on lies to the extent that this one is.

But it’s the final scene that really made me cranky. It, too, involved people silently cleaning up an untidy space. And doing it for such a long time that I’m beginning to think that brooms should be banished from all plays, unless they’re directly associated with witches or wizards.

"Talley's Folly" is a Serious Treat

2013-03-09T08:18:00.000-05:00

Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly is a small play in almost every way. It’s a two-hander and all the action takes place on a single set, a rundown boathouse near a farm in Lebanon, Mo., a month after D-Day. The plot is slight: a 42-year-old Jewish accountant named Matt ardently woos a Protestant spinster named Sally who is a decade younger and a lot more wary about the idea of romance. The whole thing unfolds, as Matt tells the audience at the beginning of the play, in just 97 minutes. And yet, Talley’s Folly won the Pulitzer Prize.

The revival that opened this week at the Roundabout Theatre’s Laura Pels Theatre shows why this little play won that big prize. It’s not just that Wilson tells his tale in language that is simultaneously plainspoken (the way we are) and poetic (the way we yearn to be) but that he has created a love story that speaks to the heart of anyone who has ever believed him or herself to be unlovable. And who hasn't, at some time, felt that?

As luck would have it, my friend Phil and I had tickets for the original 1980 Broadway production (it transferred after a run at Circle Rep) on the very day that the play won the Pulitzer. The performances by Judd Hirsch and Trish Hawkins had already drawn lavish praise (“Mr. Hirsch’s performance is surely one of the finest of this season, last season, any season,” declared Walter Kerr in his review for the Times) and so Phil and I were feeling pretty smug about seeing the show. But then our luck ran out.

Two women with large shopping bags sat right in front of us and began talking animatedly, which they continued to do throughout much of the performance, despite Phil’s polite requests that they quiet down. I was so mad at, and distracted by, them that even when they finally did shut up, I couldn’t focus on the play. So I was eager for this chance to see it again. And now I’m really glad that I got to see this production of it.

For director Michael Wilson doesn’t do anything fussy. He simply trusts the play and the two wonderful actors that bring Matt and Sally to life.

Danny Burstein has been on a roll these past couple of years with his sensational performance as the lovelorn Buddy in last season’s revival of Follies and his scene-stealing turn as the loyal boxing trainer Tokio in Lincoln Center Theatre’s recent revival of Golden Boy (click here to read a piece about him). But he's never been better than he is as Matt, the unlikely suitor who, against the odds, decides to take a chance on love. Indeed, Burstein is so winning that he earns the affection of the audience as soon as he walks onstage.

Sarah Paulson has recently gained a following with her role on the cable TV show “American Horror Story” (click here to read a piece about her) but she, too, is an accomplished stage vet and she, too, has never been better. Sally’s role is less flashy than Matt’s; she’s the sensible yin to his exuberant yang. And yet, it is gratifying to watch as Paulson strips away the defensive layers and allows Sally to open up to the possibility that someone might love her even if she isn’t perfect.

The production isn’t perfect either. Jeff Cowie, perhaps trying too hard to avoid copying the Tony-award winning set John Lee Beatty did for the original production, has created an overly prissy boathouse. And I think costume designer David C. Woolard erred with Sally’s dress. Paulson looks lovely in it but it but it might have served the play better had she looked a little less so.

But these are nitpicks. Talley's Folly is a serious treat and serious theater lovers should make every effort to see it.

Why This "Passion" Failed to Seduce Me

2013-03-06T08:29:00.000-05:00

Well, I guess it’s official: I am truly not a John Doyle gal. The Scottish- born director has earned all kinds of kudos from critics (most notably the New York Times’ Ben Brantley) for his innovative staging of musicals, particularly those by Stephen Sondheim. But not from me.

I’ve acknowledged that, as the wife of a longtime pit musician, I might have been biased against Doyle’s revivals of Sweeney Todd in 2005 and Company in 2006 because his signature innovation for those productions was replacing the traditional orchestra with actors who could play instruments and accompany themselves.

But I’d read that Doyle had abandoned that gimmick for the revival of Sondheim’s Passion, which opened at Classic Stage Company last week, and I was looking forward to this show because it has always struck me as Sondheim’s most heartfelt.

So I was happy to see an eight-member band playing in a new skybox space the theater built to accommodate the musicians, some of whom are our friends. But, alas, I was disappointed by the overall production.

Doyle is most celebrated for the intimacy of his productions, which originally reflected the limited budgets he had at the small theater he lead in the south of England. I’ve no problem with intimacy (click here and here to read my praise for two other small-scale productions) but Doyle’s minimalist stagings also strip away most of the emotion from his shows. And when you strip away the emotion from Passion, there ain’t much left.

The story, adapted from the movie and epistolary novel “Passione d’Amore,” centers around Giorgio, an Italian military officer in the mid-19th century who becomes entangled with two women: Clara, a beautiful married woman with whom he is having an affair; and Fosca, a homely invalid who becomes obsessed with him.

But the musical’s true subject is the meaning of romantic love and its ability to incite both ecstasy and agony. Those themes inspired Sondheim to compose some of the most sumptuous music that he's ever written—“Happiness,” “I Wish I Could Forget You,” “Loving You”—filled with seductive melodic lines that mimic the swoon of falling uncontrollably in love. And the score remains as intoxicating as ever.

James Lapine’s book is a little awkward (it’s not easy to write for a character—Clara—whose main contributions are limited to the letters she writes) but the story is clear, moves quickly (there is no intermission) and is wrenching.

In the original 1994 production, Marin Mazzie played Clara, Donna Murphy won (as she should have) a Tony for her portrayal of Fosca and Jere Shea, a name less known to me, played Giorgio. I was so shattered by their performances that I couldn’t move when the show ended and people had to squeeze around me to get out of our row at the theater.

This time out, Giorgio is played by Ryan Silverman (click here to read more about him), Melissa Errico portrays Clara and Judy Kuhn, who won praise for the role in a 2002 Kennedy Center production of Passion (click here to read more about her), takes on the major challenge of Fosca.

They are all talented people and yet, although the Classic Stage is a far more intimate playing space than the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, which was called the Plymouth when the original production played there, I felt removed from what was happening to the love-longing trio. And I’m blaming Doyle for that.

Surrounded on three sides, CSC’s small thrust stage area is notoriously difficult to decorate and block and yet I’ve seen some terrific stuff there with smartly imagined sets. This production, designed by Doyle himself, has a set so bare-bones that key pieces are missing.

Passion opens with Giorgio and Clara in bed after rapturous lovemaking but in Doyle’s staging, they are on the floor because there is no bed. Nor is there one when a dying Fosca begs Giorgio to spend a night with her. Instead, Kuhn and Silverman are forced to play the scene in straight-backed chairs.

In both cases, the staging undercuts the passions of the moment. Doyle may be trying to suggest that everything happening onstage is just Giorgio’s fractured memory of those events but it’s unlikely that even the most tortured mind would forget to include a bed.

But even more distressing is the way Doyle has directed his actors. Fosca is a particularly tricky role to pull off. Nearly every description of her in the play stresses how frail and unappealing she is and yet the actress who plays Fosca must project the inner steel that allows her to pursue Giorgio and the inner grace that makes it plausible for her to win him over.

Audiences reportedly laughed at the character during previews of the original production until Sondheim added the song that explained her motivations (the achingly beautiful declaration “Loving you is not a choice, it’s who I am”). But Kuhn comes across as more persistent than passion-driven. And that difference between being merely desirous and being unabashedly enthralled is what this show is all about.

Similarly, the success of Passion rises and falls on the journey that Giorgio takes as he discovers his true feelings for Fosca. But the arc is aborted in this version: first he is repelled by her, then, suddenly, he is inextricably drawn to her. We, the audience, are cheated out of seeing him work through that transformation.

When my husband K and I got home from the theater, I dug out our DVD of the original production that was filmed for the old American Playhouse TV series. And watching it over this past weekend, I was able to surrender, once again, to the true pleasures of Passion.

Two Hot Plays by Two Celebrity Playwrights

2013-03-02T17:05:00.000-05:00

Young Hollywood stars coming to New York to act in plays is so last year. Now, they’re writing the plays. Just this past week, I saw The Revisionist, a new play by Jesse Eisenberg, most famous for playing Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network;” and The Vandal, by Hamish Linklater, best known for his role on the CBS sitcom “The New Adventures of Old Christine.”

The Revisionist, which opened on Thursday night at the venerable Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, is the more high profile of the two because it stars not only its playwright but the great Vanessa Redgrave as well. However, The Vandal, which finishes a six-week run at The Flea Theater in Tribeca tomorrow, is the one that will stick with me.

Although Eisenberg is only 29 and Linklater 36, both plays center around older women struggling to cope with loss and loneliness. And both playwrights have been blessed with actors who are so natural and grounded in those roles that I almost forgot they were acting.

Of course it’s no surprise that Redgave delivers a performance like that. Indeed, no self-respecting theater lover should ever pass up the chance to see her on stage and so my theatergoing buddy Bill and I were really looking forward to seeing The Revisionist, despite my tepid response to Eisenberg’s first play, the quirky buddy comedy Asuncion, which was also produced by the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater (click here to see my review of that).

This time Eisenberg's odd couple are David, a narcissistic young writer from New York who has traveled to Poland to stay with an elderly cousin he barely knows; and David's host Maria, a survivor of both the Holocaust and the Cold War who is so devoted to her American kin that she’s hung their photos over her bed. Maria sees David's visit as a reflection of their familial bond; he’s just looking for a place to crash.

This crone-succors-cub scenario is reminiscent of the dynamic in Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles and Alexander Dinelaris’ Red Dog Howls but this is a less accomplished effort than either of those. Eisenberg has created interesting characters and he’s given them some snappy things to say but he hasn’t given the play much heart (click here to read about him and the making of the play).

That, luckily for theatergoers, is where Redgrave steps in. For with just a sideways glance or the shrug of a shoulder, she’s able to convey the emotional whirl thrumming beneath Maria’s affable exterior.

Redgrave doesn’t entirely make up for Eisenberg’s own self-indulgent acting (egged on by fans who hooted at everything he said and did at the performance Bill and I attended) or for Kip Fagan’s lackluster direction but she’s mesmerizing all the same and worth the price of the ticket.

An intergenerational encounter also sparks the action in The Vandal. As a morose middle-aged woman and a garrulous teen wait for a bus, the boy chips way at the woman’s reserve until she finally agrees to purchase some beer for him since he’s too young to buy it himself.

Complications arise when the curmudgeon who owns the nearby deli professes to be the boy’s father. As the play unspools over the next 70 minutes, the relationships between the three—who are identified only as Man, Woman, Boy—shift and secrets are revealed.

Another marquee name, Helen Hunt, was originally slated to play Woman but when she withdrew, Jim Simpson, the artistic director of The Flea, who also directed this production, wisely brought in Deirdre O’Connell, who seems incapable of giving anything less than a superb performance. Here, she makes the character’s somewhat surreal journey from despair to hope entirely believable.

O'Connell gets strong support from her co-stars along the way. Robbins, who in the past has brought a jittery but honest intensity to such roles as Eugene in the 2009 revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs, is terrific here. In fact, he’d probably be great as David in The Revisionist too.

Meanwhile, Zach Grenier, who usually gets cast as bombastic grouches such as the divorce attorney David Lee on TV’s “The Good Wife,” is given the chance to show a softer side and makes the most of it in the quiet final moments of the play.

Like Eisenberg, Linklater leans a little too heavily on a bet-you-didn’t-see-this-coming plot twist and on the hoary device of having a character tell all after drinking too much. But Linklater (click here to read a piece about him) seems to care more about his characters and in the end, aided by Simpson’s sensitive direction, so did I.

Update: I'm happy to be able to say that The Vandal has scheduled a week of encore performances from March 22 to March 31. You should go.

"The Dance and the Railroad" Then...and Now

2013-02-27T08:28:00.000-05:00

Few things are more annoying than having someone go on and on about how some long-gone production was so much better than the one that you can see right now. So I’m going to have to beg your forgiveness because that’s exactly what I’m about to do.

For as lovely as it is, the revival of David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad that opened on Monday in The Griffin theater at The Pershing Square Signature Center is nowhere near as magical as the original production that debuted at the New Federal Theater at the Henry Street Settlement in 1981 and then moved to the Public Theater where I saw it.

This revival is the second production of the season that Signature, which celebrates one playwright each year, has dedicated to Hwang. Although 25 years have passed since he wrote his best-known play, M. Butterfly, Hwang remains the only Asian-American playwright with broad name recognition (click here to read a profile of him).

The American-born son of Chinese immigrants who made good (his dad was a banker; his mom a pianist) Hwang specializes in plays that deal with assimilation, alienation and other mutabilities of modern identity. The first play in his Signature season was Golden Child, a wry comedy from 1996 that tells the story of how a traditional Chinese family with one husband and three wives made the transition to western ways.

My friend Jesse and I enjoyed that production even though the acting and some of Hwang's updates on the original script were uneven. It also made me look forward even more to seeing The Dance and the Railroad again.

I didn’t know who Hwang was when I first read about that play back in 1981 but I was intrigued by it because a Chinese-American friend had told me stories, then left out of history books, about the scores of young men who emigrated from China to America in the 19th century, believing that they’d make their fortunes here only to end up as underpaid laborers on the transcontinental railroad.

Hwang’s 70-minute play is a series of encounters between two of those workers: Lone, who, after two years in the country, now finds his sole comfort in the rituals of the Chinese opera he studied as a boy; and Ma, a callow youth who has been in the U.S. less than a month and is still optimistic about the future, particularly because, as the plays opens, the Chinese labors have gone out on strike for higher wages to match those paid whites doing the same jobs.

The production was such a close collaboration between Hwang and the actors John Lone and Tzi Ma that the characters still carry those actors’ names. John Lone, who, like his fictional counterpart, had trained for Chinese opera, also directed and choreographed the production and even wrote the music for it, infusing the show with his own ethereal elegance.

Like Ma in the play, I was transfixed by him and although the conversations between Lone and the less-refined Ma offer plenty of laughs, I ached for the plight of those young men, so far from home and in a place that resembled so little of the heaven they’d imagined.

It's probably unfair to expect the current production to have the emotional charge that the original drew from the personalities and passions of the people who created it but the revival does have its virtues.

Mimi Lien’s set is lyrical in its simplicity and superbly lit by Jiyoun Chang. Composer Huang Ruo’s music is nicely evocative and May Adrales, assisted by Chinese opera consultant Qian Yi, has made the dance moves the highlight of the show and cast it with appealing actors.

Yuekun Wu has some lovely moments as Lone, even if he isn’t as soulful as John Lone was in the role. Ruy Iskandar lacks the earthiness that Ma brought to his namesake part but Iskandar has an engaging goofiness that almost makes up for that shortcoming.

Still, while much of the dance they perform is the same as the original's, the steps for me are just slightly off.

"Really Really" is Actually Really Worth Seeing

2013-02-23T08:26:00.000-05:00

It takes both talent and moxie to make it in show business. And Paul Downs Colaizzo, the 27-year-old playwright whose first play Really Really opened at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Tuesday night, seems to have both.

According to the several profiles that have already been done on him (click here to read one) Colaizzo had moxie enough to walk up to director David Cromer in the street, strike up a conversation, and, eventually, get Cromer to stage his play’s New York production, with follows its premiere at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va. last year.

And although Really Really is far from perfect (beginning with the vapid title) it shows that its author has got talent too. And he’s also got something to say, both to and about the members of his generation.

It’s obvious that this is a young writer’s play. It’s occasionally too on-the-nose and not as insightful as it thinks it is. But Colaizzo gets big points for breaking outside the comfy sinecure of domestic drama to take on the issue of class in this country. And although I didn’t agree or like everything he has to say about it, I admire him for speaking up.

Colaizzo wrote the first draft of his play while he was still in college at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. It was around the same time that some Duke University lacrosse players were accused—wrongfully, it now seems—of gang raping a woman who’d been hired to perform a strip number at one of their parties and a similarly complicated sexual incident sets off the action in Really Really too.

It opens with two young women—Grace and Leigh—returning to their dorm room from what seems to have been a boozy college party. The next morning, Leigh, a scholarship student, admits that she had sex with Davis, a rich and hunky good guy on campus, who also happens to be a good friend and teammate of her also wealthy fiancé Jimmy.

When Jimmy returns from a family vacation, Leigh claims the encounter was rape. Davis says he was so drunk he can’t remember what happened but insists he’s not the kind to force himself on a girl. Their mutual friends—a handy cross section of slacker jocks and ambitious geeks—try to get as far away from the mess as they can.

But Colaizzo isn’t really concerned with what actually happened between Leigh and Davis that night. Plot twists constantly switch the audience’s sympathies between them. His real focus is on what’s going on inside this pair and their friends. And by his reckoning, that’s the true scandal.

For, much like Lena Dunham and her controversial HBO show “Girls,” Colaizzo is tough on his peers, portraying them as total narcissists concerned solely by what they can gain from a situation. As Grace, president of the school’s Future Leaders of America chapter, says in a speech she delivers directly to the audience, their motto is “What can I do to get ahead?”

The "Girls" connection is driven home even more by the fact that one of that show's stars Zosia Mamet (yes, daughter of David, who wrote the he-said-she-said drama Oleana) plays Leigh. Adding to the production's coolness factor is the presence of Matt Lauria from the cult TV show "Friday Night Lights” as Davis.

But this is not just stunt casting. Both Mamet (click here to read a Q&A with her) and Lauria are excellent, as is the rest of the seven-member cast. During the talkback that followed the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended, Colaizzo said he most identified with Johnson, the friend played by the black actor Kobi Libii. So I wish I were going to be there for one of the three performances when the playwright steps into that part while Libii films a TV pilot this weekend.

As always, Cromer is a master at getting his actors to plumb the emotional depths of their characters. Although I could have done without his decision to have the clunky scene changes in which stagehands come out to push the bulky set around as the action moves back and forth between the students’ apartments.

Colaizzo says that Really Really is the first part of a trilogy called “Want, Give, Get.” The other two are supposedly already written and I’m betting that based on the reception to this one (the show has already been extended until March 24) they’ll get produced. And I, for one, plan to be there to see them.