Sure, Les Miz is gone after running forever. Urinetown was evicted — sending Lockstock and Barrel to the unemployment line. Neil Simon and Mary Tyler Moore couldn’t get along through previews, and Farrah Fawcett’s new show was kayoed before opening night. Ellen Burstyn’s one-woman show couldn’t outlast the next morning’s reviews, and the once bankable Jackie Mason — politically incorrect three years before anybody could spell Bill Maher — couldn’t last two full weeks.
But despite these well-publicized flops, fizzles, fights, and fade-aways, the sky isn’t falling on Broadway.
With all the aborted, maimed, and euthanized projects that littered Manhattan’s glitzy theatre district — including a Miracle with Hilary Swank that never worked — attendance at Broadway shows last year was off only 1.8% compared with 2002. Producers actually saw an increase of 3.2% in ticket revenues by boosting their prices.
Compare that with the movies’ picture: attendance at America’s cineplexes was down 5% and gross ticket sales were down 0.5%, the first decrease since 1991. Still, I haven’t heard any predictions of the imminent demise of Hollywood, have you?
Hilary and MTM aren’t the only big names from Hollywood and TV who are flirting with the Great White Way. Jimmy Smits, Ashley Judd, and John Lithgow are all doing straight plays. Adam Sandler and Phylicia Rashad are reportedly headed toward Manhattan marquees — even Gennifer Flowers had a musical gig booked off-Broadway though her bouquet quickly wilted.
Fueling the year-end sales surge was the ballyhooed return of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick to The Producers, now extended through April 25. Real-life producers on both the left and right coasts are capitalizing on the phenomenon. The ink was barely dry on the duo’s record-breaking sales numbers when the announcement came out that Lane and Broderick will star in an upcoming movie version of The Producers — opposite red-hot Nicole Kidman. Nor will the team break up after the film shoot wraps. They’re rumored to be fielding offers to star in revivals of La Cage aux Folles or Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple.
Notwithstanding the widespread grumbling over ticket prices, Broadway is not in danger of becoming an elitist ghetto. But while the job market and economy breathed signs of fresh life in January, ticket sales took an unexpected nosedive. It’s the weather, stupid! Some shows are shutting down prematurely while others are offering discounts.
We saw eight new Broadway shows over the holidays, plus two operas at the Met. The crowds were swelled with seasonal tourists, and it was obvious they were thrilled with the product. For the most part, their enthusiasm was amply justified.
Here’s my roundup of the 10 shows we saw in the Big Apple:
PlaysThe Retreat from Moscow — One of the reasons our lives and loves are so seemingly random is our instinctive grasp of the effort and cost of steering our own path. So we go with the flow. In a brilliantly layered performance, John Lithgow stars as a professor who has gone with the flow and endured his wife’s tyranny for over 30 years — until suddenly, he’s had enough.
Eileen Atkins is no less brilliant as the snobbish, possessive, poetry-loving wife who belittles her Edward once too often. Edward’s implacable demand for a divorce isn’t nearly as shocking as Alice’s disintegration when it happens. Because Alice hasn’t done that one big thing to justify dissolving their marriage, Edward’s retreat is that much more harrowing, riddled with guilt and self-doubt as his selfhood emerges from its long hibernation.
We’re faced with the harsh reality that there was no extraordinarily powerful reason for Alice and Edward to marry in the first place. Ben Chaplin has been rightfully praised for his portrait of the couple’s son Jamie. But while he’s saddled with the task of serving as liaison between his feuding parents — and of propping up his mom’s collapsed morale — playwright William Nicholson makes him so neutral that he’s neutralized as a compelling character.
After more than two hours, Nicholson awkwardly attempts to correct the structural weakness of his drama by giving Jamie the last word. While this only underscores Jamie’s lack of authority to make such a pronouncement, it is laudable that Nicholson wishes to balance things by taking the last jab away from either of his marital combatants.
Emasculating as Alice has been, she could have been confronted decades ago — could have been given the second chance she begs for now. Edward’s sudden maturation and liberation aren’t wholly personal triumphs. His ego has been boosted by the love of a student’s mother, never seen onstage, whom he marries.
So yes, Edward has learned to be cruel — and to survive his own self-loathing. Life can be cruel, too, particularly when you allow yourself to be swept away by outside forces that determine your destination. A beautiful, humane, and brainy piece. By the time we reach the end of Edward’s harrowing separation from Alice, the historical parallel with Napoleon’s retreat doesn’t seem overblown.
GRADE: A
Golda’s Balcony — OK, I’ll admit that playwright William Gibson’s portrait of Golda Meir often comes too close to turning the dowdy one-time Israeli prime minister into a Harrison Ford action hero. But at age 90, the man who gave us The Miracle Worker back in 1959 hasn’t lost the knack of delivering a rip-roaring, crowd-pleasing story, thick with heavy import.
He’s helped by a fast-paced production directed by Scott Schwartz, with multimedia projections that whisk us across the hemispheres, spanning Golda’s Milwaukee girlhood, her frontier motherhood in an Israeli kibbutz, and her ascent to world renown as a UN ambassador and chief-of-state. Explosive sound effects grab us by the neck and return us, again and again, to the grim dilemma Meir faced in October 1973 when Israel was withstanding the infamous Yom Kippur bombardment of her Arab neighbors.
Israel desperately needed conventional weapons from the US to defend itself. But the 75-year-old Meir also had the option of nuclear retaliation. There were 13 A-bombs, hastily assembled in a secret underground facility known as “Dimona” when the 1973 hostilities erupted. By missile and by fighter planes, this cache was poised to trigger a possible worldwide holocaust if conventional reinforcements didn’t arrive.
For a one-woman show, Golda’s Balcony achieves amazing dramatic tension with all its bombs and whistles. At its core is an amazing performance by Tovah Feldshuh as Golda. She captures the humor, the toughness, and the commonsense of the great lady — with the occasional side-splitting impression of Henry Kissinger. We get a whole range of historical characters from Feldshuh, but whenever we approach the tender, maternal side of Golda, Gibson quashes the sentimentality with a sudden salvo of aerial munitions.
The repeated device becomes slickly predictable and robs this Golda of her full agony and humanity. But when we’re perched on Golda’s underground nuclear balcony, we’re being treated to a precious historical excavation.
GRADE: A-
Anna in the Tropics — Nilo Cruz has established that young playwrights can win the prestigious Pulitzer Prize before their work is produced in New York. Or Jersey. The current production starring TV heartthrob Jimmy Smits, catapulted to Broadway by the prestige of the Pulitzer, is a transplanted production that first played in Princeton.
Cruz takes us authoritatively to 1929 Tampa, where the fine art of hand-rolling cigars is giving way at local cigar factories to the efficiency and profitability of machine production. Santiago, who drinks and gambles more than is prudent, is one of the last holdouts against the tide of mechanization. At his factory, he still employs a professional lector to read literary classics to the workers, helping them through the tedium of rolling fine cigars — while giving them a taste of high culture.
Smits plays the dapper lector Juan Julian, a quietly charismatic troubadour who is proud of his profession and bitterly aware of its imminent extinction. He brings seething sexual tensions to Santiago’s circle, already enmeshed in the futile struggle of tradition, elegance, and craftsmanship to overcome the tide of mass-market commercialism.
As Juan reads Anna Karenina to the workers, Santiago’s married daughter, Conchita, falls victim to his allure and follows in Anna’s adulterous footsteps. Jealousies are aroused not only in Conchita’s husband, but also in her younger sister who worships Juan and in the factory’s proponent of change — who has his lecherous eye on that virginal younger sister.
Smits generates sufficient electricity to convincingly foment this tragic storm — because so much of his passion is wrapped into the art that is his livelihood. David Dayas as Chech, the mouthpiece of modernity, is a steely, imploding adversary. But Emily Mann’s lame direction doesn’t do the lyrical script any favors, and she doesn’t light a Latin fire in any of the women in her cast — or, at times, even audibility. Peter Kaczorowski’s resourceful lighting helps overcome the shortcomings of Robert Brill’s moribund set design, which really isn’t good enough for Charlotte.
Anna signals the arrival of a powerful new Hispanic voice on the American scene. Cruz’s message rings true, clear, and passionate. Like August Wilson, Cruz taps into a part of ourselves that most of us have never known. Hopefully, this vital new playwright’s artistry will mature as he shows us more.
GRADE: B
I Am My Own Wife — No doubt about it, Jefferson Mays’s performance as Charlotte von Mahlsdorff is a wonder to behold. And Berlin’s most celebrated transvestite, nee Lothar Berfelde, is a fascinating survivor. She escaped detection during the last gasp of the Nazi regime and somehow thrived in East Berlin under Communism, openly flaunting her lifestyle while establishing the Grnderzeit Museum of antique furnishings.
Mays also portrays, among other people, playwright Doug Wright as he interviews Charlotte and researches her life. Here the style drifts into the journalistic mode codified in The Laramie Project. And guess who’s directing — Mr. Laramie himself, Moises Kaufman!
Wright discovers that Charlotte was very likely an informant for East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi — a plausible reason why the German Democratic Republic tolerated Charlotte’s lifestyle. But though Wright broaches the question of whether the new German Republic should reclaim the Ribbon of Merit awarded to Charlotte, we never reach certainty on her culpability — and we never delve into the depths of a soul that would sacrifice friends and intimates for the sake of a museum.
That’s a pity, because Wright wrestled so bravely in Quills with the enigmatic the Marquis de Sade, another man who supremely valued the production and preservation of artworks while perversely discounting the costs in human life and liberty. In Quills, Wright audaciously twisted history — twice! — to challenge theater and movie audiences. He here surrenders to tame objectivity and exact science.
GRADE: B-
MusicalsHairspray — This acclaimed musical takes us back, via the 1988 movie of the same title, to 1962 Baltimore and the struggle to integrate a daily TV teen dance show. Frankly, I worried that the noble energies of the teens — trying to bridge racial gaps that their elders were too bigoted or complacent to cross — would be diluted and trivialized by the musical simplicities and vulgarities of rock & roll.
Surprise! Marc Shaiman’s musical score is a jubilant affirmation of the diversity of pop. Not only do we veer into ballads, we cruise into doo-wop, wander into a double duet, and finally ignite into gospel. The Act 2 curtain-raiser in the Baltimore Women’s House of Detention, after the teens are busted for demonstrating, is actually a jazzy jailhouse rocker evoking the late Cab Calloway.
Shaiman’s lyrics with collaborator Scott Wittman also overachieve, particularly in “Timeless to Me,” the funniest geriatric duet since Zero Mostel warbled “Do You Love Me” to a shrieking Maria Karnilova in Fiddler on the Roof. Still, you need to get tickets by May 2 to catch Harvey Fierstein in his Tony Award performance as Edna Turnblad, the intrepid Tracy’s basso profundo mom. Fierstein means more to the quality of Hairspray than Nathan Lane will ever mean to The Producers.
Kathy Brier oozes perkiness and spunk (if not youth) as Tracy while Clarke Thorell expertly balances sensitivity and slickness as Corny Collins, the glib host of the dance show. Matthew Morrison is sufficiently cool and hunky as Link, Tracy’s dreamboat, and Mary Bond Davis is sensational as Motormouth Maybelle, the spiritual queen of black Baltimore.
Despite all the flamboyant tackiness, outrageous wigs, and Fierstein’s comedic bravura, Hairspray actually builds to an uplifting ending as Tracy wins her personal battles. Against the odds, Tracy dethrones her dance queen rival, Amber (Tracy Jai Edwards), and displaces her in Link’s affection. Amid those personal struggles, integration of the Corny Collins Show feels amazingly like a community triumph we’ve all shared. A wonderful goofball experience.
GRADE: A+
Avenue Q — Not too far from TV’s legendary Sesame Street, there’s another gritty urban locale teeming with puppet population. Nobody says it openly, but the Q stands for queer. However, with catchy music and clever lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marz, we might as well be on Avenue R for raunchy, Avenue I for irreverent, or Avenue A for militantly adult.
Early in this loopy send-up of Sesame simplicity, the well-educated Princeton moves into the neighborhood, openly pursued by the maiden called Kate Monster. Nearby, Brian is beginning his adventures in married life with his Asian bride, Christmas Eve.
Next door to the newlyweds, two roommates are clumsily sorting out their feelings and sexual orientations. In an upstairs apartment at the end of the row house, Trekkie Monster occasionally pokes his head out the window to acquaint us with his bestial needs. The landlord is none other than Gary Coleman, starting life over again with a toolbelt, portrayed by the curvaceous Natalie Venetia Belcon.
The songs they sing are designed to give Mister Rogers a mighty embolism. Instead of an anthem to racial harmony, we hear “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” The mutual probing of the roommates, intercut with petulant bickering, includes the balladry of “If You Were Gay.” Trekkie Monster lets us into his innermost feelings in “The Internet Is for Porn,” and moments later, another young man confides, “I’m Not Wearing Underwear Today.”
Presumably, we’re being shown what happens when the generation that was babysat by Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood grows up and encounters the realities of adulthood for the first time in an affordable outerborough of New York City. Therefore, they’re personified by the puppets who were their role models in youth and pursued by the same alternately sensitive and cheery music — as twisted by the new millennium.
Lopez adds one final ingredient that serves as icing on the cake: animated segments that condescendingly explain such bugaboos of young adulthood as finding your purpose in life. The nine-member ensemble all wield puppets with them every hard-won step of the way, including puppet creator Rick Lyon. Most memorable are Ann Harrada’s brassy Asian and John Tartaglia’s dual portraits of Princeton and one of the gay roomies.
Inspired naughtiness in a pint-sized musical.
GRADE: A-
Taboo — For all the bad press showered on this Boy George bio, Taboo was actually a very good musical. But when your producer has bankrolled your enterprise to the tune of 10 mil while she’s perpetually swimming in free face time from tabloid TV, you’re apt to incur the wrath — and dare we say, the envy — of the print establishment. How dare Rosie O’Donnell be so pugnacious, so litigious, so openly gay, and so much more admired than we are!
First impressions may also have damaged critical reception. Charles Busch’s fine book frames Boy George’s rise to fame as a flashback, which means we wait through an entire scene before the core action begins. But the clutter of Boy George’s music, affixed to each character as he or she enters, further impedes the story from picking up steam.
Once we’re introduced to everyone — and convinced this is a musical, not a concert — Taboo effectively immerses us in the London club scene of the 80s. There’s a flamboyant, androgynous, carefree decadence about the songs, the costumes, and the decor. We are very much about style here, and the pagan worship of style.
Yet there’s also an innocence about Boy George’s ambition, a pure openness that permeates both his singing and the way he reaches out to the handsome working class photographer Marcus to be his lover. There’s a twisted, irascible dignity to performance artist Leigh Bowery as he pushes the envelope of fashion with a priestly piety that belies his outrageousness, all the while fighting a futile personal battle against AIDS.
George O’Dowd has grown somewhat corpulent in middle age, a somewhat shocking transformation since he was known only as Boy George to adoring fans. But he’s perfectly suited to play the imperious aesthete Leigh Bowery, simultaneously showing us what Boy George wants to become and what he does become while performing his moving tribute. He nearly steals the show in a subordinate role.
That he doesn’t is a tribute to Euan Morton’s determined grit, rapacious libido, and exuberant wholesomeness as Boy George. There’s a whole gallery of fascinating types who come quickly alive, thanks to Busch’s fine script and the superb cast, beginning with Jeffrey Carlson as George’s friend Marilyn, so pathologically gloomy and resentful that she winds up being heavy-metal hilarious.
George is vulnerable to love — and to hard drugs. At the height of his fame, he can afford both to excess. Yet he never gets enough. We’ve seen this storyline before in backstage romances and musicals. But perhaps it’s the exaggerated stylishness of Taboo‘s ambience that succeeds, more than other backstage epics, in stripping the glamor and the glitter from the stars.
As Taboo slowly cast its spell, Boy George’s music seemed to improve as it became more intimately entwined with dramatic context and urgency. I left feeling that I’d been entertained, enlightened, at times inspired — and soberly warned.
GRADE: B
Never Gonna Dance — Based on an acknowledged Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers screen classic, Swing Time, with a solid stage adaptation from Jeffrey Hatcher, this musical looks eminently bankable on paper even if Noah Racey and Nancy Lemenager aren’t familiar names in the leading roles. Surely the elongated parade of Jerome Kern standards, written with an honor roll of great lyricists — including Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Jimmy McHugh, and P.G. Wodehouse — should trample all difficulties.
Racey and Lemenager aren’t the problems. As Lucky Garnett and Penny Carroll, a journeyman hoofer and a promising Manhattan dance school teacher, the couple looks like a ballroom dream, dancing together with serene elegance and joyous dash. Racey shows fine solo chops singing and dancing “I Won’t Dance” amid the bustle of Grand Central Station. Lemanager is no slouch either as Penny teaches Lucky the steps of “Pick Yourself Up.”
We reach a memorable peak at the end of Act 1. On a moonlit rooftop, with choreography that takes them across platforms and girders, Racey and Lemanager coo to the delicious strains of “The Way You Look Tonight.”
Nothing after intermission really measures up to that magic. In fact, Jerry Mitchell’s choreography for Act 2 gets to looking downright pedestrian and repetitious as we plod toward the predictable ending. Then we climax with the title song, descending into halting pretentiousness as Penny agonizes over whether she can forgive Lucky’s harmless lies. Of course she can! But with nothing explosive or amazing coming from the partners’ nimble feet anymore, we hardly care.
GRADE: C
OperasBenvenuto Cellini — If the Metropolitan Opera had waited just one more week to offer its premiere of Hector Berlioz’ first opera, opening night would have coincided exactly with the composer’s 200th birthday. Still there were compelling reasons to believe the Met had waited far too long.
The libretto by Lon de Wailly and Auguste Barbier beautifully distills Cellini’s fabled Autobiography, so that its teeming chaos of anecdote and strife becomes two beautifully interconnected plotlines that deliver awesome spectacle and exhilarating romance. Over a span of three hours, Berlioz’ score retains all the vibrant energy and tension of Cellini’s narrative, swelling repeatedly to meet the grandeur of the rich libretto — and Cellini’s stature as a sculptor.
Cellini has wooed Teresa, the beautiful daughter of the papal treasurer, Balducci, who favors a match with the more respectable Fieramosca. At the same time, Cellini is working against deadline to complete his incomparable statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa, commissioned by Pope Clement VII. Here again, the sculptor is being thwarted by Balducci, who underpays Cellini’s workmen while trying to lobby on Fieramosca’s behalf as the right sculptor to complete the statue.
The comedy of hoodwinking Balducci and eloping with Teresa turns to tense drama when Fieramosca tries to disguise himself as Cellini and kidnap his intended bride. But in the end, Cellini has the manhood to protect Teresa and the selfless dedication to his art that enables him to complete the Perseus as time is running out.
There’s an undeniable skeletal grace to George Tsypin’s set design that chimes well with James Ingalls chaste lighting and Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvilli’s vibrant-hued costumes. But if set and costumes intriguingly uphold the spirit of Berlioz’ opera, stage director Andrei Serban is constantly twisting, crowding, mugging, or ignoring the letter.
Serban isn’t content with the metalworkers and carnival-goers written into the libretto. He’s always clogging the stage with people, sending clusters of monkish-looking folk solemnly filing by in white, black, and even red cowls. When the deadline for completion of the Perseus draws near and Cellini’s life hangs in the balance, Serban misses obvious cues and opportunities to ratchet up the tension. If that weren’t more than enough, he deploys a sagely guy with a book to descend through midair with quill and book, presumably Berlioz with Cellini’s Autobiography.
We’re extremely fortunate to have tenor Marcello Giordani introducing the title role. His pure tenor captures the vigor of Cellini, if not his pugnacity, and beautifully embodies the fervor he feels toward his higher calling. Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian lavished some nifty coloratura on her cadenzas as Teresa. While John Del Carlo was rarely tolerable as Balducci, Robert Lloyd gave us a wonderfully crusty Pope.
More than 162 years after it premiered in Paris, the Berlioz bicentennial celebration has finally brought Cellini to New York. It’s here to stay.
GRADE: B+
The Merry Widow — After discovering the majesty of Berlioz’ paean to artistic genius, I found Leh·r’s familiar operetta to be a rather bland porridge in the big Met Opera hall. Certainly our romantic leads shouldn’t bear the brunt of the blame. Susan Graham captures all the facets of the title role, her aristocratic grace, her convivial joie de vivre, and her endearing vulnerability. As the fabulously wealthy Hanna Glawari, she sings like a lark — albeit at a volume level that sounds chronically muted in the large hall.
Bo Skovhus isn’t quite so seamless vocally, but he perfectly projects the proud hauteur of Count Danilo, the handsome rakehell who secretly adores Hanna but disdains the appearance of hungering after her money. There’s real charisma and chemistry in every encounter between Graham and Skovhus.
But the power of the leads is not only diluted by the size of the hall. Franz Leh·r intended to transport us to an exotic locale, a mythical Balkan kingdom and then to a risqu Parisian-style nightclub. Antony McDonald’s sets and costumes, however, seem calculated to plop us in a straight-laced Vienna cleansed of its belle epoque sensuality. Amid a bevy of grisettes, Graham does things in Act 3 that you’ll rarely see from an opera diva, but it’s too late in the evening to ignite a truly crackling fire.
GRADE: C+
This article appears in Feb 18-24, 2004.
