| 02 May 2010
Kerry Washington, James Spader, Richard Thomas and David Alan Grier in Race.
I had a 6:30 p.m. flight home Saturday, so I wasn’t going to see a matinee, the first time a play would be on that I was not in a theater seat.
But a press agent recommended I see David Mamet’s latest play, Race. It’s only 100 minutes long including intermission and I’d heard good things about it, so why not, I figured.
Well, one reason is Mamet’s most recent output, a couple of inconsequential comedies, Romance and November, neither of which was A) particularly funny or B) worthy of Mamet. Race, however, turned out to be another electric male-female tug-of-war, not unlike Oleanna or Speed-the-Plow, dramatically heightened by racial perceptions. Like those other two Mamet plays, the premise is rather artificial, but such liabilities are glossed over by the juicy acting opportunities the volatile playwright gives his performers.
In this case, a wealthy white businessman (Richard Thomas) has been accused of raping a black woman in a hotel room and he comes to a law firm with one white partner (James Spader) and one black partner (David Alan Grier), seeking legal representation because of the psychological edge the team would afford him. As the case is revealed, like the layers of an onion, everyone’s prejudices are tested, including that of a young, attractive, black assistant lawyer (Kerry Washington).
The audience’s attitudes also get a workout, judging from the nervous laughter to lines that suggest we all see the world through a racial filter, blacks hate all whites, and whites see all blacks as inferior. Race may not be top-drawer Mamet, but he still knows how to generate heat onstage.
* * *
Just before the opening curtain, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Bill Hayes, artistic director of Palm Beach Dramaworks, who happened to be in New York to hold auditions for his fall season, happened to be seeing Race at the same matinee performance, and happened to be on the same aisle as my wife and I were, a few rows behind me.
He caught me up on the latest happenings with the West Palm company -- Peter Haig has signed to play opposite Barbara Bradshaw in The Gin Game this summer and, no, there is nothing new with Dramaworks’ longtime search for a larger theater.
* * *
After the play, we collected our bags and headed to the airport, confident that we had plenty of time to make our flight. We did, but it was not until we arrived home that I heard about the parked SUV in Times Square with the suspected bomb that caused the evacuation of thousands of people from the area shortly after we were on the way to La Guardia. I often jokingly say it is a successful trip to New York when I avoid being mugged. I guess I will have to include not becoming the victim of terrorist bombings, too.
| 01 May 2010
Sahr Ngaujah in Fela!
My season-end Broadway visit is coming to a close, and it is fair to say it has been a surprisingly strong year for plays and a pretty disappointing one for musicals.
Tony Award nominations get announced Tuesday and the committee is going to have to be pretty creative to fill some of the musical categories. (There are only two musicals with original scores, so the eligibility branch has declared such plays as Enron and Fences to be nomination-worthy for their incidental music.)
Not only will the 2009-2010 be remembered for some woeful new shows and even worse revivals, but as the season when plot became virtually absent from the musical landscape. I probably made a mistake in not seeing American Idiot, based on the Green Day concept album, which director Michael Mayer cobbled into a plotless story about three suburban guys confronting adulthood, but it typifies this dubious trend.
The same goes for Million Dollar Quartet, the recreation of a recording session among emerging stars Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley. And if there is a plot to Twyla Tharp’s dance concert Come Fly Away, I missed it.
I guess you could say the same for the explosive Fela!, a musically vibrant, high-energy biography of the late Nigerian songwriter-performer-political activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti, but the show is so infectious that the lack of a story line seems irrelevant. Bill T. Jones (Tony winner for the dance moves of Spring Awakening) directs and choreographs a cast of high-stepping, tush-shaking dancers who roam throughout the aisles, while Sahr Ngaujah as Fela gets the audience up on its feet for a little tribal dancing and call-and-response singing.
Broadway has been slow to embrace other cultures, but Fela! takes a major leap into the exotic, beat-heavy world of Fela’s Afrika Shrine club. The show has been able to draw a sizeable, enthusiastic audience and it will be interesting to see whether Tony Awards will follow, because there really is no traditional musical to fall back on this season.
* * *
Trying to wash away the bad taste left by The Addams Family, I headed off Friday to the Museum of the City of New York to take in a wonderful exhibit of cartoons, drawings and New Yorker covers by Charles Addams, a reminder that, yes, he can be funny when he is not being clumsily re-interpreted on Broadway. The exhibit traces the gradual invention of the Addams family unit, which perversely was discouraged from appearing in The New Yorker after Gomez, Morticia and the clan became too “commercial” after they had their own sitcom on television.
The exhibit continues through June 8.
| 30 April 2010
Holley Farmer and John Selya in Come Fly Away. (Photo by Joan Marcus)
Eight years ago, Twyla Tharp won the Tony Award for choreography, using the music of Billy Joel for her quirky, alternately graceful and clumsy leaps and lifts in a show called Movin’ Out.
The Playbill program for it contained a three-paragraph synopsis of the plot -- something about couples drifting apart as the guys went off to the war in Vietnam and then eventually coming home to the difficult readjustment of peacetime. The dance was enjoyable to watch, if gradually rather repetitive, but try as I might, I never really saw that story played out onstage.
Now comes Tharp again with Come Fly Away, set to music popularized by Frank Sinatra. In fact, it’s set to recordings of Sinatra accompanied by a live orchestra and, occasionally, he sings duets with a live female band vocalist.
There is no plot synopsis this time, and I would say virtually no plot, but a series of couples who meet and become intertwined, physically and romantically, at a nightclub. Oh, and during the second act, much of their clothing falls away, so that they dance in their skivvies, which is always a plus.
It is an enjoyable evening’s dance concert, though it insists that it is a “musical,” and seems to stretch that term’s definition to the breaking point. The choice of individual Sinatra songs -- there are 34 in all during the evening -- seems exceedingly arbitrary. And while the program lists character names, there is no dialogue and no way to know who is who other than matching faces with Playbill photos.
Still, Tharp’s eccentric choreography remains compelling and she has gathered some terrific, seemingly tireless dancers to execute it. And the way this season is going, she seems like to win the choreography Tony again. She could win two if there were an award for Best Dance Concert.
* * *
During the day Thursday, I did another interview for the coming season, with Rob Roth and Matt West, the director and choreographer of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, which is coming to the Kravis Center next season in a newly redesigned production.
As Roth concedes, they have finally solved the problem of the ineffectual wolves, which looked like cardboard yappers originally, and will now be represented by menacing puppets -- is that a contradiction in terms? -- by Basil Twist, the guy who designed the puppets for The Addams Family.
The hardest part of the interview was finding Roth and West. They had suggested meeting at the Starbucks at Rockefeller Center. That sounded fine, but, like a punch line to a Jackie Mason routine, there are two separate Starbucks in Rockefeller Center, a dilemma that was further complicated by the fact that I did not know what Roth and West looked like.
Alas, they wore no Beauty and the Beast jackets or caps, but I took a calculated guess, found them and now know far more about the show − which thanks to the Disney marketing machine is the seventh longest-running musical in Broadway history − than I ever wanted to. More on this eventually.
Next: The African musical Fela!
| 29 April 2010
Tom Wopat in Sondheim on Sondheim.
It is the rare New York season that does not see a production of an existing Stephen Sondheim musical, but the brilliant composer-lyricist has not had a new show on Broadway since 1994’s Passion.
So those of us who remain in awe of his abilities to push the boundaries of the musical theater have had to content ourselves with revivals, such as the current A Little Night Music starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury -- which I did not see, being advised to content myself with the memory of the original 1973 production -- and with retrospective revues such as the recently opened Sondheim on Sondheim.
Conceived and directed by one of Sondheim’s collaborators, James Lapine (Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Passion), it attempts to do something that Sondheim discourages, blend his songwriting and his autobiography. When sets the show apart from past revues of his work are the frequent videotaped interviews with the man about his life and creative impulse.
Avid Sondheim fans may not learn much new, but the juxtaposition of his views and his craft is often instructive. It is taking nothing away from the revue’s entertainment quotient to note that the cumulative effect of Sondheim on Sondheim is that of a television variety show as conjured up by public television.
Singers on the order of Barbara Cook, Tom Wopat and Vanessa Williams are drawn to the challenges Sondheim’s music and lyrics, and here they get plenty of rewarding material to perform. Even those who know his musicals well may not be familiar with some of the outtakes and cut songs included here from Gypsy, Forum and Company. The show’s order of presentation seems haphazard, but on balance Sondheim on Sondheim is a satisfying way to celebrate his 80th birthday this season.
* * *
Christopher Walken in A Behanding in Spokane. (Photo by Joan Marcus)
If Sondheim changes chameleon-like from show to show, British playwright Martin McDonagh is reliably constant with his signature dark, grisly comedies (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Pillowman, The Lieutenant of Inishmore.) His newest work, the loopy, macabre A Behanding in Spokane is more of the same, it is a pleasure to report, except that it represents his first ever play set in the United States.
When the tacky, torn curtain is drawn aside, we are in a fleabag Spokane hotel where a one-handed soul named Carmichael is holed up, continuing his 47-year quest to find his missing left hand, severed when his arm was held down by blackguards on railroad tracks as a train approached. If that image does not sit well with you, pass on A Behanding, for that is only the beginning of this raucously comic, if insubstantial, romp.
Christopher Walken heads a dandy four-member cast as Carmichael, spouting the most unconventional line readings, with Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan as a couple of pot purveyors who try to peddle a hand of unknown origin to him, and Sam Rockwell as the philosophical desk clerk.
At a little over 90 minutes without an intermission, A Behanding in Spokane will probably always be thought of as minor McDonagh, but that does not make it any less entertaining.
Next: The Twyla Tharp dance musical, Come Fly Away
| 28 April 2010
Adam Riegler, Jackie Hoffman, Bebe Neuwirth, Nathan Lane, Kevin Chamberlin, Krysta Rodriguez and Zachary James in The Addams Family.
After another downpour Tuesday morning, the rains ended but it got even colder. Don’t the weather gods realize that it is almost May?
Nor did I have much luck with theater. I can be fairly Pollyanna-ish when it comes to refusing to believe the prevailing opinion about a bad show until I see for myself. And since Nathan Lane, Bebe Neuwirth and Kevin Chamberlin seem so perfectly cast, how could their show be as disappointing as I have heard?
Oy. Of course, I am referring to The Addams Family, with Broadway’s reigning clown as Gomez Addams, the deadpan two-time Tony winner as his slinky wife Morticia and the very talented Chamberlin -- who should have played Shrek, don’t you think? -- as Uncle Fester.
But good as they are, they need material to play. Even though the script is written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, the guys who gave us the drumskin-tight book to Jersey Boys, they came up short here. As many have already observed, the plot of The Addams Family echoes that of La Cage aux Folles -- a grown child is embarrassed by her parents’ unconventional lifestyle and demands they pretend to be more normal when her prospective in-laws come for a visit -- but the show’s focus keeps shifting away from Gomez and Morticia, the only characters we really are interested in.
And Andrew Lippa (The Wild Party) seems the wrong choice to pen the score, since he is not inherently funny. Things do get a little better in the second act: Uncle Fester sings a love song to the moon that suggests the surreal quality of the show that might have been, and a vaudeville number for Lane, Chamberlin and Jackie Hoffman (as Grandma) is tasty, even if very reminiscent of the superior Everybody Ought to Have a Maid from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
The much-anticipated show has a sizeable advance sale and the audience seemed to have a good time, but there was too much talent involved for the results to be so wrong-headed.
* * *
I usually visit Broadway at this time of year, because of all the openings just before the Tonys deadline. In addition, this is the time of the Easter Bonnet Competition, which has nothing to do with Easter and everything to do with the end of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS’ fund-raising season.
Now in its 24th year, the Bonnet show has grown from a small event in the basement of the Palace Theatre to a two-day celebration on the stage of Minskoff Theatre (where The Lion King reigns) of the theater community’s work raising money for a great cause.
The show is a series of skits by the casts -- OK, mostly chorus members and understudies -- who wink at their own shows or kid other shows. Each skit then culminates with the arrival of an elaborate bonnet, usually the creation of the technical staff of each show.
This year, for instance, the target of many running jokes were the bloated, stalled Spiderman:The Musical and the Phantom of the Opera sequel, Love Never Dies. The winning bonnet came from the show Memphis, a hat festooned with sticks of dynamite, a follow-up to a skit of camo-clad soldiers in Iraq (I think), but the bonnet then exploded with colored streamers, revealing a “love” heart.
OK, you had to be there.
Even if this year’s Bonnet show was a little below par, it remains one of the most enjoyable events of the Broadway season, a rare glimpse at how performers spend their treasured off hours and a lot more entertaining than some of the hot-ticket Broadway productions (see The Addams Family above.)
Next: A Behanding in Spokane and Sondheim on Sondheim.
