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THE WAVERLY GALLERY

THE WAVERLY GALLERY rings truer than any play I’ve seen in memory because it reminds me of my mother, Annette, who died just a year ago at the age of 93 (well, actually one month short, but I give her 93).  Her last years were similar to those of THE WAVERLY GALLERY’s central character Gladys Green, the octogenarian whose decline into senility is compassionately and beautifully told by playwright, film director and screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan.   And in a flawless performance, the legendary Elaine May (way back when the comic partner of the legendary Mike Nichols) makes Gladys entirely believable.  

Gladys, an agnostic Jewish New Yorker whose parents fled Europe, retired lawyer and long-time widow, owns an inert West Village art gallery where selling art happens even less frequently than the visits from non-existent art patrons.  She spends her time reminiscing about her career, her long-gone relatives, and her former, active social life.  Her grandson Daniel, who lives in an abutting apartment in a building next to the gallery, visits her regularly.  On Wednesday nights every week she goes to her daughter and her husband’s (Daniel’s stepfather) Upper West Side apartment for dinner.  Gladys is a kind, loving person.  

My mother and Gladys’ had vastly different backgrounds.  My mother was Catholic and a New Englander.  Widowed for three decades, she was close to her two granddaughters and remained civically active.  Annette was a kind, loving person.

In my mother’s last years, she talked a lot about her own childhood, cousins long gone and falling in love with my father.  My mother’s slips in senility, before her body ceased thriving,  wasn’t terminal as it is THE WAVERLY GALLERY.  But in Elaine May’s Gladys, I again was witnessing those silent spaces mid-sentence, the elliptical storytelling with an endless middle but neither beginning nor end, the same question asked over and over again. Gladys’ grandson (a perfectly low-keyed Lucas Hedges), who tells Gladys’ tale as a memory play, observes how Gladys’ memory is all in pieces but all the pieces are still hers.  About six months before Annette died,  she said to me “Danny, I know I have all these beautiful memories but I can’t remember them.”

Playwright Lonergan‘s trueness applies to Gladys’ family experiences.  Daughter Ellen (the wonderful Joan Allen) struggles to put aside submersed mother-daughter strife and find patience.  Son-in-law Howard  (a stolid David Cromer) tries to keep peace.  The appearance of Don (a fine Michael Cera), an outsider, a struggling artist from Boston whom Gladys takes in at her gallery, seemed puzzling at first.  He’s a loner, a drifter, sort of a lost soul.  He’s neither here nor there.  Gladys shelters him because she’s neither here nor there, too. Her transit isn’t complete.

Lila Neugebauer‘s direction is as sensitive as Lonergan's writing: Her pacing suggests both the passage of time past, and lapses in the present.   The God-gifted, impeccable comic timing of Elaine May, illuminates many funny, sometimes absurd, moments in THE WAVERLY GALLERY.  Still, it’s a sad play, but NOT a depressing one.   Gladys’ grandson Daniel wonders why Gladys kept going on so long and concludes “it makes you think it must be worth a lot to be alive.”  This wonderful play simply but profoundly reminds us of how much the living memory  means.

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TORCH SONG

From a cultural and political POV, the revival of Harvey Fierstein's TORCH SONG is, as the French say, “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”.   Since 1981, when Fierstein’s trilogy covering the life and loves of drag queen Arnold Beckoff appeared as one play, there have been historic advances in gay rights, but the characters and conflicts in TORCH SONG still persist.  Like Ed, Arnolds’ on-again-off-again lover, many gay men use a bisexual cover to avoid loving, same-sex relationships.  Like Alan, Arnold’s lover murdered with savage hate,  gays are being attacked by Proud Boys marauding the streets (even in Manhattan).  Arnold’s mother is pretty accepting of Arnold's sexuality but still harbors reservations about his “lifestyle”:   today, evangelical Christian parents (even a Vice President) advocate conversion therapy.  Kudos to TORCH SONG on Broadway to remind the struggle for individual rights and dignity isn’t over.

From a dramatic POV, this TORCH SONG disappoints. Being of a certain age, I remember vividly Fierstein’s TORCH SONG TRILOGY way back when, and although it’s unfair to compare ANYbody to the one-and-only Harvey,  there was an immediacy and revelation that’s missing now.  Fierstein has shrewdly adapted the play and reduced it from four to two hours, forty five minutes but its narrative weaknesses get exposed and its shortened length seems endless.   Director Moises Kaufman’s casting complicates matters.  Ward Horton’s Ed, Arnold’s man-of-his-dreams, is All-American blond , blue-eyed and handsomely built, but doesn’t get much beyond bisexual cipher.  Michael Hsu Rosen as Arnold’s “boytoy” Alan with whom he finds “true love” is okay, but their relationship is so undeveloped it’s almost incomprehensible that there’s anything to Arnold’s attraction to him other than the prizes underneath his revealingly snug, low cut briefs.  Jack DiFalco’s David, whom Arnold wants to adopt as a teenager, gets reduced to schtick caricature:  besides looking well beyond sixteen-years old, he acts like he spent more time in the Borsch Belt than in foster homes.    

The uber-talented Michael Urie carries TORCH SONG beginning to end, even in the interminable, third part of the trilogy.  The first act, “International Stud” is his finest, when he introduces himself as he gets into drag, then when he goes looking for love in all the wrong places.  Give Urie credit just for sustaining a performance after hilariously executing a scene of vigorously taking back entry in a back room while trying to light a Marlboro in the dark.  It’s so over the top, how do you top that?   Urie manages a lot of repetitive histrionics in the final part, “Widows and Children First”, when he’s playing off an excellent Mercedes Ruehl as his widowed mother (and she off him).  Arnold’s still grieving the loss of Alan, which is hard to pull off because the weakest second part,"Fugue in a Nursery", never dramatizes how deep their love was.  Still, there’s a beautiful reconciliatory discovery between mother and son near the end.  The torch song Arnold’s mother knew is only in the movies.  Arnold’s challenge going forward with Ed, this time for good, is to get the torch song out of his life for good.  And THAT’s for the better.

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MIDNIGHT AT THE NEVER GET

MIDNIGHT AT THE NEVER GET celebrates cabaret to tell a gay love story, and sweetly and unexpectedly transcends its limitations with poignant observations about gay culture.   It’s the mid-1960s and lounge singer Trevor Copeland falls in love with his closeted pianist and composer.  They find safe haven for performances of their uncompromising lyrics for he-and-he love songs at a West Village cellar dive, The Never Get, on weekend midnights.  As in many backstage melodramas, the relationship suffers when success creeps in. 

Sounds like pretty standard stuff, but Mark Sonnenblick, who wrote the book plus MIDNIGHT’s thirteen original songs, personalizes Trevor’s story to dramatize how Stonewall and the movement changed gay lives.  (MIDNIGHT acknowledges, too, the plague that followed the giddy, post-Stonewall 1970s.)    Sonnenblick’s songs are homage to the great American songbook, recalling themes, lyrics and melodies of the greats, like Porter, Gershwin and Arlen.  Some tunes are jazzy, some bluesy but torch song rules, particularly in the opening, mood-setting “The Mercy of Love” and “I Cannot Change the Way I Am”.

Director Max Friedman and choreographer Andrew Palermo manage stage movement of the two characters on the tidy York Theatre stage so that the 90-minute show neither stalls nor speeds ahead.  The onstage, five-piece club band is excellent as is the piano playing - and acting - of Trevor’s lover portrayed by Jeremy Cohen.  Sam Bolen (who co-conceived the show with Sonnenblick) as Trevor turns piano-bar singing into tour de force:  Minnelli sang way better than Sally Bowles was ever supposed to, too, but so what?  What’s more, Bolen’s Trevor, always sensitive, never gets maudlin.   In a moving, surprise ending with the haunting ballad “A Little Less to Lose” sentiment speaks all for itself.  

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OKLAHOMA! – St. Ann’s Warehouse

We’ve seen OKLAHOMA!  many times before, but never like director Daniel Fish’s startling version at St. Ann’s Warehouse.   Fearless, provocative and totally unconventional this OKLAHOMA!, might well be seen as boldly innovative as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s  1943 production, regarded as the first “modern musical” to integrate fully book, action, music and dance.  With white-hot textual focus, exciting new country /western musical arrangements and daring production technique, Fish has re-examined this all-American musical fable, exposing a darker essence.  What’s more there’s more raw power from Fish’s cast of 11 and band of 7 in Brooklyn than there often is in full casts and orchestras on Broadway. 

As he did at Bard Summerscape where this OKLAHOMA! premiered in the summer of 2015 (and where I saw it twice), Fish, with scenic designer Laura Jellinek, has transformed the Steinberg Theater at the Warehouse into an old-fashioned Grange Hall.  Fringed banners hang from the ceiling.  Racks of shotguns decorate raw plywood walls.  The configuration is an alley stage with five tiers of seating either side, with the front row audience seated at church tables.  The small band is in a shallow pit at one end.  Chili crockpots - with real chili dot - the tables.  Aunt Eller’s Jiffy Mix recipe for cornbread (executed while in song by the wonderful Mary Testa) gets served at intermission with the chili, but that’s the least novel aspect of the production. The lunch is a theatrical device to suggest community, a theme central in Hammerstein’s book and a notion that Fish’s plumbs to subversive effect.  

The year is 1906. On the verge of “modernity” the territory of Oklahoma awaits statehood to the Union, but land conflicts still pit farmers and ranchers.  Bachelor rancher Curly has his sights on “nice girl” farm owner Laurey.  Her Aunt Eller overseas the farm, tended by Jud, a strange loner, who lives in the smokehouse.  Like Curly, he wants Laurey.  In contrast to Laurey, Ado Annie is the town flirt, who is wooed by Jud’s fellow rancher Will but at the same time entertains Ali, a Turkish, traveling dry goods salesman.   Ado Annie is all for fun and therein lies most of OKLAHOMA!’s lightness and laughs, which Fish doesn’t ignore.  But the tragedy implicit in the Curley- Laurey-Jud triangle is the fulcrum of Fish’s interpretation of Hammerstein’s book. 

The very first, familiar notes of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” signal how distinctive this OKLAHOMA!  is.  Instead of lofty violins, a banjo plucks, joined by mandolin, bass, guitar, and fiddle.  Rodgers’ score is full of folk music influences, but in these new, crisp orchestrations by Daniel Kluger, favorite Broadway melodies sound as if newly composed,  strummed by bluegrass legends.  Vocal interpretations follow suit, especially in twangy renditions of “I Can’t Say No”, “Kansas City” and “All Er Nothin'.”

But it’s in the romantic ballads where the steely musical adaptations reveal a rawness and sexuality unexplored before.  As the stanzas progress in “Surrey With the Fringe on Top”, Kluger’s musical arrangements take Curley and Laurey’s aloof flirtation from jaunty clip/clop tempo to a slow, hold-your-breath state of suspended seduction as Curly’s head moves in for a nuzzled caress of Laurey’s arched neck.  Gordon McRae and Shirley Jones never played it like this in the movie.  Nor ever before were Curly and Laurey a bi-racial couple.

A repressed, prurient variant of sexuality surfaces menacingly in the character of hired-hand Jud, who challenges cowhand Curly for Laurey’s affection. This OKLAHOMA!’s  Jud isn’t the beefy, muscled brut.  As brilliantly played by Patrick Vaill, he’s more a greasy-haired punk, progenitor of the lone wolf in today’s headlines.  He’s the outsider lurking at the community edge, dwelling in squalor on Laurey’s farm.  When Curley visits Jud’s hovel to challenge him over Laurey, director Fish plunges us into Jud’s den - into the dark, literally.   Lights go out and projected live on the end wall of the theater -in tight close-up via infrared camera - are Curly and Jud alone, sitting cross -legged, face-to-face, man-to-man.  Curly, exploiting Jud’s insecurities, croons “Poor Jud is Daid”.  Jud rejoins, wallowing in self-pity, with “Lonely Room”.  The “duet” is foreboding and eerie.  It's the most psychologically arresting scene I've ever witnessed in a musical, marking the inevitability of Jud’s fate and, by way of its intimacy, Curly’s complicity in it.  It’s almost if Curly has seduced Jud into his own demise. 

The new choreography by Mark Morris-trained John Heginbotham flows functionally from the text. Most playful  is cowhand Will, played by a lanky James Davis full of Jimmy Stewart charm, leaping over crockpots of chili on the church tables.  Dance springs naturalistically from song, most evident in the sprightly square dance to “The Rancher and the Cowman”.  

But the most radical choreography (and biggest change from the original production at Bard) is the dream dance sequence. Laurey, to relieve her stress over the mounting tension between Curly and Jud, takes a “magic potion” (a mix of opium and morphine) which she buys from Ali, the salesman.  The dream induced imagines her life with either Curly or Jud and prophesizes Jud’s death.   Heginrbotham’s choreography is over-the-top Agnes DeMille, taking the surreal aspects of the watershed 1943 sequence to sexual nightmare.   Musical arranger Kluger provides a harsh, electronic score that modulates the traditionally light melodies and motifs of “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’ “ and “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” into a pastiche of loud, ominous dissonance.  Dancer Gabrielle Hamilton executes a solo ballet that is both carnal and violent.  She’s clad in a white T-shirt dress, trimmed  in sequins, labeled in black block letters  “Dream Baby Dream”,  joined episodically by a “posse” of over a dozen female dancers, clad the same, who clip-clop in galloping patterns across the stage. 

Lighting designer Scott Zielinski intensifies the mood shifts between everyday public townsfolk activity to Laurey and Curly’s internal dynamics abruptly, shifting from drenching the stage in the bright sunlight of the Western plain to painting intimate scenes in dusty, golden-green.  Costumes by Terese Wadden combine timeless elements of Western outdoor gear and all-American workaday clothes.  At the box social, men don a version of Sunday best.  At the square dance, fancy women’s skirts combine the girliness of party dresses with the womanliness of saloon dancer’s petticoats.

The cast is uniformly excellent.  Particularly impressive as Laurey is Rebecca Naomi Jones who transforms the romantic standard “Out of My Dreams” into a narcotic lullaby with goosebump effect to close Act I.  The willowy Damon Daunno plays Curly as more the ordinary-but-kinda-cute-guy-next-door than movie-star stud.  The full-throated Mary Testa, with just the right notes  of wise-ass authority, is a perfect Aunt Eller, the cool, practical observer of tragedy festering in her community.  The biggest casting change from the Bard production is Ali Stroker, who made history as the first actor in a wheel chair on a Broadway stage in Deaf West’s revival of “Spring Awakening”.  As Ado Annie, she combines perkiness and naughtiness perfectly, almost stealing the show with “I Can’t Say No” and then with James Davis as Will in “All Er Nothin’ “.

The most controversial aspect of this OKLAHOMA! is the staging of the death of Jud and Curly's part in it.  Fish's dramatic license (which was approved by the Hammerstein literary estate) makes plain Jud’s murder is deliberately committed by Curly, though Jud is willful of it.  Narratively, Jud’s demise is inevitable; psychologically, it’s fulfillment of a tacit murder/suicide pact.   Aunt Eller makes sure, in Wild West fashion, that a self-defense verdict gets dispatched and quick.  The outsider is eliminated, wrong is righted, justice gets rendered, community endures, order prevails, good triumphs over bad.  Is it that pure and simple?  Listen carefully to the undertones in the title song in its reprise rendition for the powerful finale.  This OKLAHOMA! asks anew if “the land we belong to is grand”.

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GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY - The Public Theatre

One needn’t be a devotee of Bob Dylan to appreciate how the poetry of his song fits an Irish poetic vision of Depression-era America in GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY in its US premier at The Public Theatre.   First performed at the London’s Old Vic before its West End transfer last year, GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY plumbs the American soul through both the brooding Irish fatalism of Conor McPherson, award-winning playwright of THE WEIR, and the lyrical introspection of America’s Nobel Prize-winning native son, songwriter Dylan. 

Set in a boarding house in 1934 in the depths of the Great Depression in Duluth, Minnesota (Dylan’s actual birthplace was Hibbing), GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY, sometimes integrates, sometimes inserts, 20 of Dylan’s songs in a sometimes sprawling, but always intimate, tale of about a dozen disparate characters hanging on to dreams and yearning to be free.  McPherson, in a nod to Thornton Wilder's stage manager in OUR TOWN, sets the story with Dr. Walker, the local family doc, who has a little morphine habit, introducing the audience to the beleaguered Nick Laine.  Nick, fending off foreclosure, rents out rooms in his ramshackle Victorian house.   His dream is to rid himself of the whole, exhausting grind, but he’s imprisoned by the constant care of his demented wife, Elizabeth, and worry for their Black adopted teenage daughter who’s pregnant (she won't say by whom or how) and his son Gene, a Hemingway wannabe and alcoholic.  Nick’s boarders are Mrs. Nielsen, a widow waiting for funds from her husband's meager estate, who gives Nick private comfort on the sly, and the Burke family of a belligerent, macho father, a floozy mother, and Elia,  their emotionally disturbed adult son with a violent streak.  Enter an ex-con and boxer, Joe Scott, and a shady, itinerant preacher, Rev Marlowe.   The townspeople who wander through include Mr. Perry, town cobbler and old geezer who wants to wed Marianne, and Kate, a nice girl who has dated Gene.

Nick’s boarding house is sort of a weigh-station. Everybody seems en route someplace else, although they’re uncertain to where.  McPherson directs his own book, and with scenic designer Rae Smith and lighting designer Mark Henderson creates nicotine-drenched, impoverished communal dwelling place: absent the universal alcoholism, Nick’s boarding house has a mis-en-scene that recalls Harry Hope’s salon in Eugene O’Neill’s THE ICEMAN COMETH.  The Irish McPherson taps into the socialist bent of American Depression-era dramas.   Clifford Odets’ notions of social justice rumble through GIRL FOR THE NORTH COUNTRY.  McPherson's treatment of gender, class and race couldn’t be more relevant to the test that the great American experiment in democracy now undergoes. 

Simon Hale has beautifully arranged and orchestrated Dylan’s songs for a band of four (piano, guitar, violin and bass) that shift spots on stage, joined by cast members who at times will group around an old-fashioned, Big Band microphone or upright piano.  McPherson, with movement director Lucy Hind, achieves a fluidity that delicately integrates band, characters and props on a fixed set.

The entire cast is excellent.  Of the 20 numbers, the standouts are a mesmerizing "I Want You", one of Dylan’s most popular songs, re-arranged as a woeful duet, where the young Gene, played by a distinctly tenor-voiced Colton Ryan, and Kate lament the painful realization they have no future together.   Sydney James Harcourt delivers a knockout performance as the ex-con Joe Scott, starting with an electric, sensual version of “Slow Train”, accompanied by marvelously choreographed female members of the ensemble.  The wonderful Mare Winningham as the demented wife Elizabeth brings a haunting clarity to “Like a Rolling Stone” perhaps Dylan’s most famous ballad in the show.  Kimber Sprawl as the pregnant Marianne enraptures the audience with a piercing rendition of “Tight Connection to My Heart”.  

Ms. Winningham leads the full cast in the moving finale “Forever Young”,  rich in both ironic reality and hopeful dream.  “May you build a ladder to the stars/ and climb every rung/ May you stay forever young”.  In this haunting and beautiful  GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY, the Irish McPherson and Dylan, the American, illuminate the dream still alive.  

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KINK HAUS – Downstairs at La Mama

Direct from the Philadelphia Fringe Festival now at Downstairs at La Mama arrives KINK HAUS, a gay fantasia that celebrates with outlandish dance and visual spectacle “a search for identity and freedom”, from the apparently autobiographical experience of its creator Gunnar Montana credited as “choreographer/ director/ creative director/ music/ art installation and graffiti art”.   Along with set designer Oona Curley, he’s transformed La Mama into an underground disco, with the dance floor as performance space and the walls covered with graffiti and homo iconography of artists from Basquiat to Tom of Finland.  

Montana’s fantasia enfolds in a series of about a dozen vignettes of boldly athletic dances choreographed to a1980s/90s soundtrack of techno, disco, club and pop tunes (some re-mixed). Montana is joined by an ensemble of six - four men and two women - with backgrounds in modern dance and gymnastics.  The themes of sexual exploration and drug experience stay woven tightly in the 55-minute show even when the loose narrative thread that stitches the vignettes together unravels. No matter. The propulsive mix of sound and movement and dazzling exhibition of lighting, costume and prop design is nonstop. 

KINK HAUS never ceases being theatrical. It makes the erotica in the most risqué Spiegeltent, which it resembles in format, look innocent.  Its visual imagery is often stunning: a lone figure in a see-through hoodie with its lining wired with Christmas tree lights cavorts solo through a pitch dark house.  Drag gets patriotic with a vengeance: Montana as a flag-draped Lady Liberty lip-syncs a country/western diva’s rendition of “God Bless America” clasping a large dildo as hand-held microphone.

Sex - homo, fetishistic, S&M - abounds, sometimes with inspired, satiric wit (the gym number turns a Jane Fonda workout carnal), sometimes with astonishing, technical finesse  (a G-stringed Stephi Lyneice performs a dance solo sliding on the floor of a small space awash in baby oil to “Addicted to Love”). Wild gymnastics inform both a drug-crazed pas de deux around an ottoman piled high with a pyramid of cocaine (remember Pacino in “Scarface”?) and a violently sexual, male pas de deux between Montana (as top) and an amazingly flexible Avi Borouchoff (as bottom).

Nothing tops, however, Jessica Daley’s dance solo in, out, over and around an old, rusty bathtub. When she gets tied to the tub with a long metal chain on one wrist, she buzzsaws her release with a chainsaw held by her free hand.  Sparks fly.

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GETTIN’ THE BAND BACK TOGETHER – Belasco Theatre

Decades ago when Manhattanites referred to a “bridge and tunnel crowd”,  they simply meant commuters, but now they refer  pejoratively to suburbanites of lesser social or cultural sophistication. “Gettin’ The Band Back Together”, a new musical about the reunion of a New Jersey high school rock band, celebrates “bridge and tunnel” and with a smile on its face gives the middle finger to elitists, many of whom will likely label this folksy, sometimes offensive, unoriginal production, a “bridge and tunnel musical.”

The heart of “Gettin’ the and Back Together” is in the right place: its theme is the restoration of the dreams of youth.  When the single, just turned 40 (read mid-life crisis) Mitch Papadopoulos, native of Sayreville, a suburb stuck in the middle of nondescript northern central New Jersey, gets fired from his Manhattan stockbrokerage firm, he returns home to live with his mother, Sharon, former groupie, known to Mitch’s friends for her Rice Krispie bars.   Mitch had a garage band when he was in high school, but gave up his dream of rock stardom for the stable, money-making job.  Mitch learns his mother’s house is being foreclosed by his arch-rival and high school  nemesis  Tygen Billows, now  rock star  who has built a real estate fortune from his commercial success in the music biz.  Mitch reassembles the band with Bart, now a high school teacher (for whom Mitch’s mother has maintained a special affection over the years),  Robbie, a dermatologist, and Sully, a local cop.  The lead guitarist died, so Mitch recruits a high school, hip-hop punk, Ricky.  To save the house he grew up in, Mitch and his band Juggernaut challenge Tygen’s band Mouthfeel  in a Battle of the Bands.  Meanwhile, Mitch discovers his  high school girlfriend Dani is Tygen’s main squeeze.  Each of the other bachelor band members is missing a woman in his life too. When a female character appears for each of them, “Getting’ The Band Back Together” telegraphs immediately where it all ends up.

Producer Ken Davenport (Tony winner for Best Musical Revival for “Once on This Island”) pasted together the predictable plot from a series of improvisational rehearsals by a group of performers and writers called The Grundleshotz.   Someone has peppered the book with a lot of inside-baseball jokes about New Jersey geography and suburban culture, rock music and nasty things that happen to Mafia bosses in men’s prison.   A stereotype drunk wanders in and out of scenes like a gratuitous nod to substance abuse - a topic that, for a play about the rock business, this musical curiously ignores. 

The score, of a bland Broadway-1980s rock mode, is by Mark Allen in his first Broadway outing.  The lyrics range from unmemorable  to  a challenge to forget.  In the duet “The Best Day of My Life” Mitch and Dani sing fondly about a high school date at Six Flags where Dani threw up her corn dog in a slurpie cup.   There are two distinctive numbers in the second act. The very talented young actor Sawyer Nunes as Ricky leads a clever rap rendition of “Hava Nagila”,  when the band gets tricked into playing an Orthodox Jewish wedding by the dastardly Tygen.   As Bart, Jay Klaitz, who seem to specialize in roles in rock musicals like "Rock of Ages" and "High Fidelity",  hams it up  in “Bart’s Confession”  where he  fesses up to Mitch that Rice Kripsies bars aren’t the only treats he enjoys from Mitch’s mom.   

The cast does its job with fierce determination that this is going to be as much fun, damn it, for the audience as it for them.  Marilu Henner of "Taxi "sitcom fame who plays Sharon the mom serves Rice Krispie bars to the audience at intermission.  Mitchell Jarvis as good guy Mitch shoulders-on through all of it.  Brandon Williams as bad guy Tygen mugs and muscles through his part.   Tony-award winning director John Rando, who has managed better material  (“Urinteown”, “On the Town”), miraculously keeps it humming along, bit-by-hackneyed bit, using every directorial trick in the book.  Chris Bailey, choreographer, is capable of more originality, as he demonstrated last year with “Jerry Springer – The Opera” at The New Group.

A rock musical about New Jersey couldn’t ignore Bruce Springsteen, New Jersey native and the USA’s favorite son of rock n’roll.  At one point, Dani, a single-mom waitress, manages to purchase tickets to Springsteen’s sold-out Broadway show, which could cost a month’s wages or more for millions of Americans like her.  It’s a sweet moment, but, cynically, belies the real cost of living to working class Americans.  Pathetic, too, is how “Gettin’ the Band Back Together” reduces what Springsteen’s poignant song and music say about  his Jersey roots and the American state-of-mind to vulgar sitcom with a crappy score. 

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HEAD OVER HEELS

What do you get when you marry an Elizabethan romance with 1980’s American new wave pop songs?  HEAD OVER HEELS,  an exuberant, raucous and joyous musical based on Sir Philip Sidney’s 1580 prose romance The Arcadia propelled by the infectious beat of songs of the all-woman rock band The Go-Go’s, that’s what.  

First staged at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, HEAD OVER HEELS boasts impressive creative credentials. It was conceived by Jeff Whitty (AVENUE Q) who penned the original book, then adapted by James Magruder (TRIUMPH OF LOVE and stage versions of lots of 19th century literature), and directed by Michael Mayer (Tony Award for HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH).  Add in choreographer Spencer Liff (SPRING AWAKENING)  and Tom Kitt (Pulitzer Prize and Tony for NEXT TO NORMAL) to orchestrate and arrange The Go-Go’s songs  and the classic “trouble in paradise” fable gets a most inspired and modern reboot.

Life is perfect in the kingdom (it’s Arcadia) ruled by the smugly satisfied Basilius (played by Jeremy Kushnier) and his wife Gynecia (Rachel York).  The opening number, “We Got the Beat”, one of the Go-Go’s biggest pop hits, relays “we got this covered”: tradition and order is fixed among the royals, their court and subjects. But when Pythio the Oracle prophesizes doom, they are set on journeys that turn their precepts about life around.  In Whitty and Margruder’s version, Sir Sidney’s paean of romantic love gets re-imagined as a parable of tolerance for all combinations of sex, gender and class.

Musidorus (played by Andrew Durand), the lowly shepherd, falls in love with Princess Philoclea (Alexandra Socha). To stay close to Philoclea, as he is not of her station, Musidorus disguises himself as a female Amazon, but he soon becomes the object of royal lust of King and the ueen, who discovers her latent Sapphic tendencies.  Meanwhile, Pamela (Bonnie Milligan), Philocela’s older sister,  who’s always assumed her match would be a prince charming, finds both soul and bed mate in her court handmaiden Mopsa (Taylor Iman Jones).

Director Mayer serves the fable up with pomp and romp.  Some language observes Shakespeare’s iambic form. The colorful sets and lavish costumes are informed with a sophisticated period visual vocabulary accented with cartoonish wit, like the whimsical reproduction of Botticelli’s Italian Renaissance masterpiece “The Birth of Venice.”  The romp comes from a chock-a-block of double-entendre, sexual innuendo, parody and physical hijinx, including a Chinese fire drill of bed partner-swapping in silhouette. High camp prevails, championed by Pythio The Oracle as diva, majestically played by Peppermint of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” fame, making Broadway history as the first transgender woman to create a principal role.

Adaptor Whitty ingeniously slips The Go-Go’s songs into the classic tale.   “Mad About You” perfectly expresses the infatuation of Musidorus with Philoclea.  “Our Lips Are Sealed” voices the princesses’ secret pact not to let the parents know they’ve found partners whom they wouldn’t approve.  “Heaven is a Place on Earth” emerges as a happy reconciliation of foretold doom and adjusted ideal. “Vacation”, with a mermaid chorus cavorting amongst leaping fish, set on the isle of Lesbos, epitomizes the giddiness of the whole production.  

The ensemble performs with uniform talent, but the women featured shine through.  Besides diva Peppermint, Broadway newcomer Bonnie Mulligan brings sweet bravura and salty voice to Princess Pamela’s newfound same-sex pleasures.  Rachel York’s imbues Queen Gynecia’s awakening to a full womanhood of mind and body with throaty, lusty gusto.  

“Habemus percussio”, inscribed on the proscenium of the Hudson Theatre stage, presides like a dictum through all the rollicking, bouncing gaiety. The Arcadia restored in HEAD OVER HEELS creates a world that’s better for this smart and silly, imaginative musical.

[dandwyeroffscript-blog]

MY FAIR LADY

Spectacle supersedes Shaw in Lincoln Center’s overscaled revival of Lerner & Lowe’s MY FAIR LADY.  Still, Loewe’s marvelous score and Learner’s ageless lyrics prevail.   With the beloved musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s well-known PYGMALION  tale of the common, Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle and the elitist, phonetics professor Henry Higgins,  director Bartlett Sher seeks again at Lincoln Center to create both an expansive production of a musical theater classic and a contemporarily insightful  version untried before.  This approach worked marvelously with SOUTH PACIFIC (2008) then less successfully with THE KING AND I (2015).  This MY FAIR LADY places a distant third. 

Sher’s previous musical revivals at the Vivian Beaumont, set on sweeping Pacific beaches or in grand Asian palaces, fit the stage, the largest on Broadway (Radio City and the Met being the only two in Manhattan larger).  But aside from the famous ensemble scenes in MY FAIR LADY - Covent Garden, the Ascot race, and Eliza’s debut ball -the story largely occurs in private chambers, mostly Higgins' library.  Set designer Michael Yeargan constructs a huge, two-story library on rotating stage that gets hauled from upstage to down and back again repeatedly.  The behemoth’s to and fro is distracting, and its scale inappropriate for the intimate battle of wills that eventually builds between Eliza and Higgins. This isn’t to suggest MY FAIR LADY is a chamber musical, but it’s a narrative that transacts in chambers.  At the Vivian Beaumont, much of it floats in space.

Decorative elements of Higgins’ domain are peculiar.  The library is anchored at one end by a huge, double-story Palladian-style window, more appropriate to a Hamptons macmansion than to a proper Victorian household.  Another oddity is Higgins’ library walls are adorned with abstract paintings, awkwardly mid-century Abstract Expressionism, perhaps a hint that Higgins is a “modern man” cut from Shaw cloth.

But in Sher’s version, Henry Higgins isn’t particularly complicated.  (Jonathan Pryce in 2002 in the West End ingeniously played Higgins as a Freudian neurotic.)  Shaw’s Higgins can be downright mean, sexist and crass.  Instead, with the open-faced, boyishly handsome West End favorite Harry Hadden-Paton (best known to American audiences for “Downton Abbey”) this Higgins is part Mama’s boy,  part “I’ll never grow up” Peter Pan.  This Higgins lacks acid:  when his sidekick Colonel Pickering wonders what will happen to Eliza if Higgins’ efforts to transform her fail, Hadden-Paton’s delivers Higgins retort that he throw her back “to the gutter” like a throwaway line.      

Lauren Ambrose is fine as Eliza. Her singing voice, rather small for the Beaumont, is versatile and effectively navigates the change in Liza’s diction and emotions from a wistful naïf in “Wouldn’t  It Be Loverly?” in Cockney in the opening scene in Covent Garden to an angry sophisticate in “Without You” in the Queen’s English near the play’s end.  In dialogue her Cockney accent sounded so accurate, some of her lines were incompressible, and sadly her timing was off in delivery of the Eliza’s famous “move your bloomin’ arse” line at the Ascot race

Norbert Leo Butz as Eliza’s father Alfred P. Doolittle hams it up with “A Little Bit of Luck” then steals the show with the Act 2 showstopper “Get Me To The Church On Time”   The dance is fine elsewhere  -including “The Rain in Spain “ with just Eliza, Higgins and Pickering - but Gattelli pulls out all the stops in “Church on Time”, with all of Doolittle’s tavern buddies,  floozies, even some in drag,  in a rousing, glorious, bawdy  ensemble.   When Gattelli choreographs the ensemble  - almost three dozen performers in a single dancing queue midstage right diagonal to downstage left led by Butz - for the crescendo notes of “Church", MY FAIR LADY achieves for one giddy, heady moment, the transportive magic that musical theatre is all about.  

In other supporting parts, Allen Corduner plays Colonel Pickering unremarkably: wanting is a kindred affection Pickering has for Eliza.  Veteran Diana Rigg plays Higgins‘ mother pretty much as Diana Rigg.  Jordan Donica, as Freddy, the aristocrat who proposes marriage to Eliza, executes the famous “On the Street Where You Live” with an obliging tenor.

Catherine Zuber’s costumes are richly detailed, especially for the upper-crust attire for the Ascot scene where they curiously resemble, beyond homage,  Cecil Beaton’s smashing wardrobe in  the 1963 film version.  She costumes Abrams boldly in a nude-colored gown that is unexpectedly Art-Deco in style for Eliza’s formal social debut at the embassy ball.

Besides “Church on Time”, Sheer’s other spectacular production number is “The Embassy Waltz” which opens Act 2 with the full orchestra playing on stage.  Kudos to sound designer Marc Salzberg who oversaw an extra system, apart from the pit, but Yeager’s set is head-scratching.  Although the story occurs in 1913, the orchestra is arranged stage left in three tiers, with solid-faced music stands in front of each musician, creating an impression of a night club with a dance band in an Astaire and Rogers 1930s musical rather than a Victoria ballroom.

Indeed, Lincoln Center’s MY FAIR LADY seldom fails to impress, even if its parts seem non-integrated.  Under the musical direction of Ted Sperling the Loewe melodies can’t help but satisfy, recalling sweet memories of an original cast LP vinyl album many American households wore out on stereo consoles in the late 1950s and 60s.

But, at its core, this MY FAIR LADY fails to elicit any empathy for either Higgins or Eliza. These are the could-have-been lovers of musical theatre, the odd couple, a pair of eccentrics from opposite ends of the social spectrum perhaps destined to wage an endless war-of-the-sexes , but there’s not much authentic conflict here to care about.  At the play’s famous ending, when Higgins demands of Eliza “where the devil are my slippers”  Sher’s Eliza rips a page from Ibsen’s playbook for Nora.  This Eliza has evolved into a person with an emotional sophistication that this Higgins hasn’t realized:  Eliza is more of a woman, than Higgins a man.  Sher’s MY FAIR LADY takes a big, modern step forward by dramatizing “why can’t a woman be more like a man” by upending what Higgins meant, layering the classic with a twist laden with contemporary value.  

That’s fine and good, but the rapturous swell of the final chords of “I Could Have Danced All Night” at curtain seems a bit incongruous.  It’s bittersweet, surely, but Shaw’s ambiguity is more romantic.    

[dandwyeroffscript-blog]

RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN’S CAROUSEL

A glorious score by Richard Rogers and a superbly sung, groundbreaking male lead performance can’t quite make the current revival of CAROUSEL the most memorable.  Still, the tragic love story of the restless, bad-boy carnival barker Billy Bigelow (Joshua Henry, last seen in VIOLET and THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS) and loner, factory girl Julie Jordon (Tony winner Jessie Mueller for BEAUTIFUL) falling in love in a Maine seacoast town at the turn of the 19thC emerges as the beloved life-affirming tale of redemption and the goodness of human nature. 

First premiered in 1945, as a follow up to their landmark OKLAHOMA, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s CAROUSEL is based on the German play LILLIOM first seen in English translation in the US in 1921. Billy isn’t really cut out for family life, but when Julie announces she is pregnant, Billy resolves to straighten up so his “Boy Bill” doesn’t end up “a bum like me”.  Led back to the lowlife by a sinister partner-in-crime Jigger, a robbery scheme goes fatally wrong for Billy, leaving Julie pregnant and widowed.  From the afterlife years later, guided by the Starkeeper, Billy returns to earth getting a second chance, not to change his fate but by visiting his daughter (not a son) to set her on the right course of life, and finding his own peace of heart.  

The book by Hammerstein suffers time-warp hiccup when Julie reveals Billy has hit her. The MeToo movement rightly renders both of their responses -  hers forgiving, his “I didn’t beat her, I only hit her once” - painful, awkward reminders that the more things change, the more some things remain the same. 

The first twenty minutes of Carousel from the instantly engaging “Carousel Waltz” through the spell-binding, lovely duet “If I Loved You” are about the most perfectly integrated scenes in the American musical canon, and one of the highpoints of this revival.  The exposition of characters Billy and Julie and their improbable match, contrasted with Julie’s best friend Carrie and her traditional expectations with her Mr. Snow, plays seamlessly   but not for long.  Casting undoes the magic.  Joshua Henry, the first African-American to play Bigelow in a major production, muscular in both movement and voice, fits the part. Mueller, although exceptionally vocally skilled, brings no physicality to Julie. The coupling isn’t sexy.

Casting’s a mixed bag for the undercast too.  Lindsay Mendez shines as Carrie with giggling zest and full-hearted humor:  her solo “”Mister Sow”, sweet and memorable.  Margaret Colin, in the minor role as carousel owner Mrs. Mullin, has an earthy moxie that leaves no doubt that Billy bedded her when lights went out at the amusement park.  And the estimably powerful John Douglas Thompson brings gravitas to the minor role of The Starkeeper.

Julie’s cousin, the older and wiser, Nettie, played woodenly by opera soprano Renee Fleming, presumably hired to bring opera luster to “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, stylizes the treasured anthem  back to the realm of a Jeanette Macdonald solos in early 1930s MGM operetta musicals.  The classic needn’t be sung like an aria to be the tearjerker it’s guaranteed to be.  Fleming’s stiffness is out of place with the rousing ensemble in the robust second act opening “A Real Nice Clambake.”   Fleming fares well enough in the plaintive duet with Mueller in “”What’s The Use Wondering’?

Ballet, which has figured in Carousel since its original production with Agnes De Mille’s choreography, gets expanded here with new dances by Justin Peck, resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet.  Peck's dances are surely balletic, freely acknowledging De Mille's landmark work.  Using a vocabulary which surpasses usual Broadway fare, Peck's athletic choreography works best in numbers with the male ensemble in “Blow High Blow Low” led by Jigger played by dancer Amar Ramasar also of the New York City Ballet.  Ramasar’s athleticism in dance is genuinely powerful, but in the spoken parts he can only act tough. His Jigger has no menace.

Multiple Tony-winner Jack O’Brien directs with seasoned, but uneven hand regrettably allowing his cast to take a scattershot, undisciplined approach to down-east (Maine) accents.  New England dialects are challenging even with dialect coaching. (No dialect coach is identified in the program.).  Joshua Henry uses strains of African American dialect and John Douglas Thomas, a theatrical accent, both appropriate to their parts.  And Corey John Snide, the excellent replacement for the role of Enoch Snow, held an old-fashioned Maine dialect perfectly in dialogue and in song, but the rest of the cast sounded like they came from Brooklyn. O’Brien’s cast would have fared better by defaulting to plain, American stage English.

Ann Roth’s period costumes are pretty and chromatic.  Santo Loquasto’s set design evokes not the period of the story so much as it does old-fashioned set designs of past productions.   Regrettably, his reveal of the carousel opening up like an upside-down umbrella in the opening prelude “The Carousel Waltz” is a sad, rather small, interpretation of Bob Crowley’s spectacular, jaw-dropping carousel designed for the National Theatre production staged at Lincoln Center in 1994, which remains the CAROUSEL revival nonpareil.

Still, the magnificent Rodgers’ score - arguably his finest with lyricist partner Oscar Hammerstein II - is in superior hands under Jonathan Tunick’s unpretentious orchestrations, and sensitive musical supervision of Andy Einhorn, With a full orchestra - an increasing rarity on Broadway these days - Rodgers’s music soars, both accurate to the original score and vital and fresh.  Bigelow’s “Soliloquy” which closes Act 1 remains one of the great solos of American musical theatre and Joshua Henry’s riveting performance of it ranks among the best.  

[dandwyeroffscript-blog]

SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL

Despite its potential,  SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL not only takes the jukebox musical backwards but also renders as uninteresting as possible the life of the Queen of Disco, who plays a larger role in American pop culture than this show  is willing to take on.  And a trio of immensely talented women, who play Summer at different stages of her life each with astounding vocal power and authority, cannot compensate for a dismal book, credited to a committee of Colman Domingo, Robert Cary and Des McAnuff, who also directs.  Pity - ironic, too - because it was McAnuff who directed the Tony and Olivier- award winning JERSEY BOYS which evolved the jukebox musical into a serious realm of musical theatre.

Diva Donna, the oldest, narrates, more or less chronologically, with some time-shifting, her own tale.    Born LaDonna Gaines, in an African Adventist Episcopal- observant Boston household ruled by an authoritarian, unloving father, the stage is set for a life of men-trouble.  From a soloist debut with the church choir, where we later learn she was abused by the minister, LaDonna escapes high school classes to audition in Manhattan where she gets cast in a German production of HAIR.  Life in Munich brings a German husband, last name Sommer (later misspelled on her first album so she stuck with it), and modest success until she records “Love to Love You Baby” for Italian pop-recording impresario Giorgio Moroder.  American promoters move the record into the gay disco scene exploding in the big cities.  Summer protests feebly she doesn’t want to be packaged as the disco queen but success rushes in and the rest is history. Or the history at least in SUMMER is how Donna got taken advantage of by the industry and men in general, until she meets her last husband Bruce Sudano, settles down, raises her family and taps the positive shoots of her Christian roots.  She succumbs to cancer. Her most important legacy is loyal daughters.  Diva takes back seat to mother, and gay diva (redundant I admit) is the phenomena that almost dare not speak its name.  

With slick stagecraft, McAnuff grafts into the book 23 musical numbers recorded (and in many cases co-written) by Summer, most of  which are her instantly recognizable Billboard hits, but it’s as if her pop songs had nothing to do with the exploding gay culture from which they emerged.  If ever there was a musical that naturally called for a male ensemble (ok, as a gay man, I can say it), indeed a gay male ensemble, it is SUMMER but the chorus is all female. And instead of looking at SUMMER in the context of how Dona’s disco propelled gay culture into the mainstream - as DREAMGIRLS dramatized how Diana Ross and The Supremes were the symbiotic vehicle for Black music being appropriated by mainstream pop - McAnuff et al serve up a parable of women’s liberation, sub-themed with spiritual redemption from objectification and commercialization, which the musical itself celebrates.   How did a nice Christian girl from Boston (not one of the “Bad Girls” she celebrated in song) unwittingly become an international gay icon? Had no one involved in this production ANY sense of irony?

The show hooks us early with “I Feel Love” and Summer’s breakout “Love to Love You Baby”.  SUMMER’s musical direction and orchestration cleverly evoke, even with necessary over-amplification (after all, it IS disco), the sound of Summer’s music from Walkman, or disco floor, or Top 40 station, as one heard it for the very first time - that euphoric, synthesized, hook-filled mix of pelvic-centric percussion, swooping strings, punctuating big brass, and primitive electronica. Summer’s voice was a perfect match, the deep throated alto, part sweet, part fury, both faithful to and rebel of - like all the great African American pop music divas - the church choir.

Indeed, it’s the voices of the three Donnas - Storm Lever (Duckling Donna), Ariana DeBose (Disco Donna) and LaChanze (Diva Donna) - that are the stars of the show.   The young, Broadway newcomer Ms Lever commands respect early with “On My Honor” a soulful ballad that establishes early in the show how a good girl gets done wrong.  Ms DeBose (who has an amazing high-kick when pulled into the dance ensemble) gets the show into high drive about midway with “She Works Hard for the Money”.  Each gets diva turns at showing off incredible vocal range, especially Ms DeBose and LaChanze with a stirring gospel-themed “I Believe in Jesus.” LaChanze (Tony Awad for THE COLOR PURPLE in 2006), though, out-divas both with “Unconditional Love”, where the late-life private Donna reconciles her family past with her daughters.   LaChanze earns special acting kudos, too, for pulling off the self-serving apology Summer made for disparaging, homophobic remarks about gays and AIDS:   somehow LaChanze manages to sustain Summer as a sympathetic character.

The  choreography by Sergio Trujillo (JERSEY BOYS, again) breaks into period disco moves on occasion but largely defaults to generic Broadway pop dance, more akin to a very hip holiday cruise show.   The set, an open, rather chilly and sterile white backdrop that accommodates digital projections which shifts constantly with set pieces for scene changes, sees as much movement as there are songs.

At the end of an imtermissionless hour and forty-five minutes, comes the double punch of Summer’s two biggest disco hits for finale and curtain call, “Hot Stuff” and (surprise!)  “Last Dance.”   Finally, disco balls drop, the three Donnas reunite in emotional unity and the audience –  just like the last number of MAMA MIA - is on its feet.  There’s a moment or two of fun, but the thrill is gone.  Disco down. And out.

[dandwyeroffscript-blog]

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

The reliable finesse of choreography and direction of Susan Stroman can’t compensate for the clunky, labored book by David Thompson of THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE,  billed as a “dance play” adapted from the Henry James novella, now at the Vineyard Theatre.   An aging, internationally successful New York art dealer John Marcher (played by Peter Friedman) acquires a Matisse study of  the La Dans (the famous dancers on the beach) which prompts him to confess a lifetime tale of emotional failure to his nephew (Tony Yazbeck).   Time-tripping backwards, Yazbeck assumes the role of a Lothario Marcher in his young adulthood in Naples where his “beast “- the fear of emotional commitment - dooms a blossoming love of May (ballerina Irina Dvorovenko), a beautiful young Russian émigré.  Decades later Marcher gets a second chance  with May, when he procures art for an English client who, coincidentally, is married to her.  Marcher hunts down the study of the famous Matisse painting he and May admired on a museum date when infatuated with each other in Naples.

Childhood trauma is the root of Marcher’s emotional dysfunction but that is so dramatically undeveloped, it plays as cliché.  And Thompson, distinguished by a vibrant THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS, here pens dialogue that is stiff or just plain corny.  In a series of rhyming, flirtatious back-and-forths with young beauties, a  conjugal prospect of Marcher jests “meet me in the cloisters”:  he retorts “I’ll bring the oysters”    

Any narrative vitality in BEAST arrives in Stroman’s dance sequences and  choreographed story-telling. Collaborating ingeniously with scenic designer Michael Curry, Stroman creates charming sequences like May’s rescue of a skiff in deep waters off the beach in Pompeii, or a tableau of garden statuary on May’s husband’s Cotswold estate.  The six dancers from Matisse’s study come alive as dance ensemble cum Greek chorus.

Composer John Kander provides a haunting, elegiac score with a waltz motif, sensitively played by a nine-piece orchestra, that weaves in and out for a slowly paced, needlessly long, one hour and 45 minutes.  Kander’s music is pretty, but its more effective as a substitute for dialogue.

As his career matures,  Yazbeck - arguably the best male lead dancer in the business  recalls Gene Kelly more and more.  Dvorovenko’s feminine grace complements perfectly Yazbeck's masculine athleticism.  They’re best in an exquisitely choreographed dance of lustful lovemaking.   Freidman, with only a speaking role, can’t dance his way around a badly written part, but he’s not believable as what a young, sexy Marcher would have aged into anyway.  

And what about the Matisse study of the dancers?   It provides both narrative basis and visual motif for the chorus for the entire production, but it inexplicably vanishes from the storyline.  Whatever happened to it?   I’m still scratching my head.

[dandwyeroffscript-blog]

MEAN GIRLS

AH, YOUTH! 

Being “of a certain age” I’ve often observed facetiously that the world is 28 years old.  At the August Wilson Theatre there is no better proof of that than the audience, which delights -almost cultishly - to the musical version of the 2004 teen comedy movie MEAN GIRLS.   When the film was released, the target audience for this musical was in the adolescent throes of high school, which is the topic of MEAN GIRLS , or, as a pair of high school nerds Janis and Damien sing out thematically in the opening number, “a cautionary tale …of corruption and betrayal.” 

Tina Fey, former SNL comedian and producer and star of the NBC sitcom 30 ROCK, recreates her original screenplay for MEAN GIRLS and jam-packs it with 19 serviceable, pop-lite songs written by her husband, composer Peter Richmond, with lyrics by Nell Benjamin, whose lyrics for LEGALLY BLONDE cover similar ground  (in case MEAN GIRLS  hasn’t already recalled that musical).  Ms. Fey has inserted some new jokes plucked from today's headlines dealing with Facebook and Trump, but much of the dialogue is word-for-word from the movie just as much of MY FAIR LADY is lifted directly from George Bernard Shaw’s PYGMALION. (Well, not quite the same, but you get the idea.)  

The plot transposed scene-by-scene from the film involves Kenya-raised, home-schooled Cady transplanted from Africa to a suburban Chicago high school where she struggles to adapt to the tribal rituals of American high school society.  Initially under the tutelage of class weirdoes Janis and Damian, she is eventually befriended by the elite, super-cool - and mean - Gretchen, Karen, and its leader Regina (the queen, get it?).   Cady’s need for acceptance makes her susceptible to the trio’s shallow values of snobbery and callousness.  Soon pettiness and jealousy (you guessed it - over a boy, the class hunk, naturally) leads Cady to revenge Regina and co-opt Gretchen and Karen’s allegiance.  Through Cady’s scheme, Regina is publicly humiliated, then harmed (the comedy goes a little dark but bounces back to a joke real quick).  Cady sees the wrongness of her ways, learns a lot about herself, and, in a happy-ever-after way, everybody grows up a little.  

Tony- winning (BOOK OF MORMOM) director and choreographer Casey Nicholaw rolls out this staged movie of a musical, with big assist from scenic and video design, like a fast moving cartoon.  Technical aspects are impressive.  The backdrop is a semi-circular screen that instantly shifts scenes from high-school locker room to hallway to classroom, plus projects social media posts and texting. Nicholaw's pacing is uniformly adrenalized, leaving little breathing room between number after number after number. His choreography ranges from a version of hip-hop that one sees on the annual big dance production number on the Oscars to 70’s aerobic exercise routines and back again, briefly distinguished by an ensemble tap number “Stop” led by Damian that opens Act 2, which is an odd throw-back to Broadway musicals of the 50s. Gregg Barnes' costumes are fun, especially for teenage fashionistas. 

The real asset of MEAN GIRLS is casting and the young performers in all the principal roles.  Each has an impressive set of pipes, and each personalizes the role appealingly.  Erika Henningsen as Cady maneuvers the difficult task of maintaining the likability of a good girl going bad and claims top billing with her Act 1 solo “Stupid With Love.” Grey Hansen as “the almost too gay to function” Damien averts his character from totally slipping back into the foppish camp of a Charles Nelson Reilly of the 50s/60s musicals: beneath his nerdiness he’s way cool. His weirdo pal Janis played by Barrett Wilbert Weed reveals a maturity over her peers that doesn’t slip into arrogance. Plus, she nails “I’d Rather Be Me” in Act 2. 

The real powerhouses of MEAN GIRLS are the trio of mean girls. As Regina the Queen Bee, Taylor Louderman negotiates making a bitch likable, and reveals unique physical comedy skills in a neck brace.  Ashley Park as Gretchen is a perfect bundle of teenage, nervous insecurities – “I’m like an Iphone. I have a lot of good functions but then I can sometimes shatter.” The real star of the show, however, is Kate Rockwell as Karen, who redefines Barbie Doll, dumb blonde, airhead and Valley Girl all at the same time with impeccable timing and winning charm. 

I could bemoan the commercialization of the Broadway musical: no matter how professionally or slickly staged, MEAN GIRLS is more a marketable product than artistic labor, blah, blah, blah, but MEAN GIRLS carries a positive contemporary message about the cruelties of peer pressure and bullying.  It leaves millennial theatergoers feeling better about themselves and maybe the world outside.  (With a toe-tapping finale called “I See Stars” it should.) I could lament too the juvenilization of the Broadway musical but that wouldn’t occur to me if I were 28 year old, and I am not.  Definitely not. 

[dandwyeroffscript-blog]

JERRY SPRINGER THE OPERA

The New Group’s production of JERRY SPRINGER THE OPERA explodes as outrageous moral fantasia, lewd, cultural carnival, and black-humored political satire in the first, New York full staging of the British 2003 Olivier-award winning musical.   Perfectly conceived for a wide thrust stage and ingeniously directed by John Rando, the theater space at Pershing Square Signature Center transforms into TV studio. We theatergoers become Springer’s live audience.  Springer’s guests emerge, literally, from the audience of us.  When Springer, played by Terence Mann with a talkshow host’s unctuous blend of innocuous banality and detached curiosity asserts “I don’t solve problems… I just televise them”, it’s clear where the show’s moral crosshairs focus.  And when Springer defensively laments that his show isn’t trash but a platform for “the marginalized and dispossessed”,  the phenomenon of  how a reality TV star both championed socially and exploited politically a population of “losers” sits like the elephant in the room.

Opening the proceedings is Springer’s Warm-Up Man played with adrenalized macho by Will Swenson. With the audience red-meat ready for spousal conflict and physical violence, American flotsam and talkshow fodder enter.  Dwight, the sheepish, bisexual  philanderer admits to girlfriend Peaches he is not only cheating with her best friend from grade school but also with the cross-sexed Tremont, played by Sean Patrick Doyle, who with a diva’s vocal virtuosity sings the tale of a chick-with-a-dick in  “Talk To the Hand".  Next up, Montel, a diapered, coprohillic husband admits to his All-American wife, Andrea, that his fetishistic soulmate, Baby Jane, likes to get spanked, too.  Shawntel, an overweight and sexually unsatisfied wife who dreams of being a pole dancer avenges her un-endowed husband by outing him as KKK member.  As Shawntel, Tiffany Mann stops the show with a soaring, soulful aria “I Just Wanna Dance”.  Act 1 concludes with a hilarious, tap dancing chorus line of Klanners singing “This is My KKK Moment”: everybody gets their Jerry Springer 15 minutes of fame. Thanks to choreographer Chris Bailey, forget the quaint old ladies with walkers in The Producers.  In an onstage brawl, Springer gets shot.  

The defining asset of this production is that it is supremely sung.  Indeed, the story with over 40 “songs” is sung-through completely (with the exception of Springer’s on-air hosting and interstitial commentary) to an intricate, sophisticated score by Richard Thomas and witty lyrics (replete with profanity or vulgarity depending on your cultural p.o.v.) by Stewart Lee, who wrote the book .  The musical numbers evoke Baroque chorals, contemporary Gospel, and Italian opera.  Think Puccini with lots of the “c” and “f” words.  

Acts 2, 3 and 4, after an intermission, run through seamlessly, taking Springer from Purgatory to Hell, where he is visited by the doomed souls of the guests whose lives were ruined by their appearing on his show.  Swenson’s Warm-Up Man re-appears as Satan, this time played with perfect sleazy ambisexuality.  Satan forces Springer to recreate his talk show.  When Jesus arrives as guest, the debate between Heaven and Hell erupts.  Then Mary the Mother of Jesus, Adam and Eve, join the tempest.  God arrives: Luke Groom, reprising his Carnegie Hall concert version role of 10 years ago with Pavarotti power, brings down the house leading a glorious anthem “It Ain’t Easy Being Me’.  Springer atones as honestly as he can. Hope in humanity prevails. (Really?)  

In media-manic, Christian-phillic America, all sinners get redeemed, everybody gets a moral mulligan, just like you-know-who.  JERRY SPRINGER THE OPERA sings that out, grandly, blasphemously , with vulgar, knowing words of the devil and the marvelous exaltation of angels` voices.

[dandwyeroffscript-blog]

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS: THE BROADWAY MUSICAL – Palace Theatre

True to its cartoon origin and with no pretense other to entertain in that spirit, SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS: THE BROADWAY MUSCIAL splashes onto Broadway spreading smiles and goodwill all over the Palace Theatre.  Based on the hugely popular Nickelodeon series, which began in 1999 and which spawned a $14 billion international merchandising phenomenon, this $20 million musical extravaganza pleases not only SpongeBob’s loyal fans but also audiences just looking for fun.  

As each of the beloved characters is introduced in a book by Kyle Jarrow, which is predictable but charming and bizarre both, cheers erupt from the audience (much like those shouted out from adoring parents and siblings at the high school graduation of the youngest child).  There’s even a scattering of SpongeBob wannabees in the audience attired in plaid pants, plain shirt and nerdy tie - just like SpongeBob!  Costuming, conceived ingeniously and articulated with imagination and wit as is the scenic design by David Zinn, doesn’t disguise actors as in, say, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.  Character dominates, well beyond costume.

The plot of SPONGEBOB spins around an Armageddon premise.  SpongeBob loves Bikini Bottom, where he and his sea-life friends live in their underwater world, and he likes his job for owner Eugene Krabs at the restaurant Krusty Krabs but wants to be more than a short-order cook.  When Krabs’ daughter Pearl makes known she’s not interested in taking over her father’s business, SpongeBob sees his chance at management.  But everyday life is threatened when an underwater volcano starts erupting.  Anchorman Perch Perkins arrives to tell the town the volcano will erupt with 24 hours.  The villainous Sheldon Plankton who owns the restaurant Chum Bucket, the failing competitor to Krusty Krabs, exploits the fears of Bikini Bottom residents. He convinces them to abandon their town and escape in a submarine where once aboard he will hypnotize them into finding delicious his inedible chum, thereby finally winning the restaurant war.  Even The Mayor falls for the scheme.  To raise money for the vessel, SpongeBob’s friend and lousy clarinetist, a four-legged Squidward Q. Tentacles, puts on a variety benefit show and secretly dreams he will become its musical star.  SpongeBob’s best friend Patrick Star turns on SpongeBob when, smitten with becoming something other than second-fiddle, he succumbs to being the leader of cultist sardines.  SpongeBob relies on Sandy Cheeks, his squirrel friend (the only mammal in Bikini Bottom) who’s a brainiac to invent a plan that will stop the volcano from erupting.  SpongeBob and Sandy Cheeks set off to climb to the top of the volcano to apply Sandy's secret formula.

Sound silly? You bet. Sure, there are references to totalitarianism, inequality, political venality and media manipulation in the script, but SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS doesn’t ask audiences to take the bait (pun intended).  Do SpongeBob and Sandy Cheeks make it to the top of the volcano? Do SpongeBob and Patrick resume their friendship?  Does SpongeBob get his promotion at Krusty Krab? Dah all around, but for two and half-hours of dazzling staging and 20 musical numbers, SPONGE BOB SQAUREPANTS is all smiles. The score has many parents - 14 composers - but no matter.  The unified production is the brainchild of director Tina Landau who, previously known for fringish Off-Broadway fare, more than deserves the explicit credit of “musical production conceived” by.

Songs, most original, come from the likes of songwriters Cyndi Lauper ((KINKY BOOTS) and Sara Bareilles (WAITRESS), as well as rock bands like Aerosmith, The Flaming Lips and Panic! At the Disco, and Grammy winners as diverse as Yolanda Adams, John Legend, T.J.  and Lady Antebellum.  Astonishingly, thanks to Landau’s unified artistic vision and deft musical direction by Julie McBride, diverse genres meld into a delightful pop-music pastiche.   “Bikini Bottom Day”, a bouncy, bubble-gum tune that’s the opening ensemble number sets the musical’s overarching giddy tone.  Broadway duet ballad gets featured im Plain White T’s  “BFF (Best Friend Forever”) a charming ditty in Act 1 between SpongeBob and Patrick.  Rap gets its due with “When the Going Gets Tough” with the evil Plankton and the Town (aka the emsemble).  Gospel gets its turn in a rousing “Super Sea Star Savior” where Patrick assumes a  secular ministry over a choir-robed pack of sardines.  Really.  And acid rocks-on in “Bikini Bottom Boogie” by Aerosmith with Pearl and The Electric Skates, a trio with guitars, costumed like Steven Tyler, dancing on skateboards. Yup.

But this Broadway musical saves its very own musical genre for the showstopper in  Act 2’s “I Am Not a Loser” by They Might Be Giants”.   Squidward takes a flight of fancy and imagines himself to be the star of the benefit show he’s producing.   With choreography of inspired lunacy not seen since the “Little Old Ladies” number with walkers in THE PRODUCERS, Squidward, perfoming a four legged tap, leads  sea anemones (sparkle-clad bodies with scarlet-plumed heads) in the kick-step chorus line of in the best Broadway tradition.   Gavin Lee, as Squidward (who played Bert in MARY POPPINS) damn near steals the show. The number alone is worth the ticket price.

As with Gavin, the show is perfectly cast.  Broadway newcomer Ethan Slater masters both the gee-whiz nerdiness of SpongeBob along with the vocal and athletic demands of the role. (Watch him perilously scale on the vertical the mouth of the volcano.)  Kudos all around to Lilli Cooper  as squirrel Sandy Cheek,  and Danny Skinner as Patrick and Brian Ray Norris as Eugene Krabs making their Broadway debuts.

But it’s director Landau whose vision prevails, unifying performances and song.  With Zinn and production designer Peter Nigrini, she’s created a Bikini Bottom world, complete with towering Rube Goldberg-like structures on either side of the stage that figure prominently in delivering volcanic tremors. (No spoiler.) Or the sea of jellyfish, hot pink and clear plastic umbrella contraptions that waltz down the aisles.  If Zinn’s visual style here is animation-on-acid, the eye-popping lighting design by Kevin Adams can be coined dayglorama.  

Like all crowd-pleasing musicals, SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS concludes with a crowd-pleaser.  For SPONGEBOB, it’s “The Sponge Bob Theme Song”, of course.  Sing along if you know the tune.  And if not, just smile along awash in a cascade of seaweed streamers and sparkles, and clear plastic beach balls bouncing all over.  SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS is a blast.

[dandwyeroffscript-blog]

ONCE ON THIS ISLAND

“There is an island where rivers run deep” begins the radiant ONCE ON THIS ISLAND, and under Michael Arden’s imaginative direction, this radiant musical fable flows beautifully, magically, from beginning to end.  Combining a tragic tale of young love with the mystery and wonder of legend, this first major revival of the 1990 musical reveals more rhythms in its storytelling and beauty in its staging than ever before.  

Based on the 1985 novel “My Love, My Love” by Rosa Guy, adapted by Lynn Ahrens, who also wrote the lyrics for music by her partner, composer Stephen  Flaherty, ONCE ON THIS ISLAND is set in the Caribbean French Antilles.  Staged in the round at Circle in the Square, the design transports theatergoers immediately to the beach tropics – sand covered stage, with water-lapping shore - where country locals meander in everyday routines. In the rousing number “We Dance”,   they revel in a zest for life and begin the folkloric legend of Ti Moune, an orphan mysteriously discovered in a tree having survived a massive storm.  With the island gods - protective and fateful both - hovering over her life, Ti is raised by dark-skinned peasants, largely of African descent.  On the other side of the island live the wealthy islanders, fairer-skinned, identifying with their French lineage. When Daniel, scion of a wealthy family, is found comatose from a car accident near her village far from his city home, Ti, with trepidation from her parents, nurses him after promising the gods she would give her life for his recovery.  Romance blossoms but when Daniel is rescued by his family’s guards, Ti, at great risk, travels by foot over the island mountains to find him in his family’s palatial residence, where they become lovers, and she gets used to urban life, although never accepted by society.  Soon, though, Ti’s happiness is threatened and her pact with the gods to sacrifice her life for her love tested, too.

The cast shifts roles as storytellers and as players in Ti Moune’s story. The book is largely sung-through with 20 songs, which comprise the first Broadway success for collaborators Ahrens and Flaherty. Combining calypso beats, reggae rhythms, and tender ballads, ONCE ON THIS ISLAND emerges here as their most appealing work, more spontaneous and intimate than the more accomplished RAGTIME and ANASTASIA now on Broadway. Chris Fenwick, with his vibrant music supervision, and Annemarie Milazzo and Michael Starobin, with their colorful, new orchestrations, deserve much credit for this.

Broadway unknown, 18-year-old Hailey Kilgore, discovered after an extensive search, as Ti Moune, is a marvel, conveying open-faced zeal with charming audacity, claiming the role as her own in the early number “Waiting for Life” with ensemble and then stirringly later in a solo reprise.  Phil Boykin and Kenita Miller as Ti Moune's adoptive parents shine in the score’s most popular ballad, “Ti Moune” with its wistful, bittersweet melody.  Lea Salonga (herself at 18, the original Kim in 1989’s SAIGON) as the god Erzulie, protector of Ti Moune, with a matured but still crystal-clear soprano, contrasts perfectly with Merle Dandridge, with a menacing alto, as PapaGi, the god of fate, who tests Ti Moune's bargain for love.  The showstopper, however, belongs unquestionably, to R&B/disco singer Alex Newell who, as the goddess Asaka, channels Aretha Franklin, bringing his own gospel power to a diva level in “Mama Will Provide.”  

Director Arden, who wowed Broadway two years ago with Def West’s revival of SPRING AWAKENING, optimizes the textures and colors of Dane Laffrey’s gorgeous set. The theater walls are festooned with laundry lines of colorful clothing and Christmas lights, the playing area a beach, littered with household and everyday relics. A real goat joins the action, too.  Arden’s imaginative, non-stop movement is best displayed when the cast recreates Daniel’s speeding car with driftwood and metal parts they pick up from the beach.  Arden integrates Camille Brown’s exuberant choreography into the ceaseless flow, culminating in the spectacular “Ti Moune’s Dance” wherein Ti Moune leads the uppercrust of Daniel’s society in a limb-flung celebration of her rural, spiritual roots.

The inspirational power of ONCE IN THIS ISLAND is joyous. Indeed, this production, timed as it is, brings contemporary events like natural disasters and issues like inequality, wealth, and race to mind. In the end, though, what prevails in this entrancing musical is the healing power of storytelling.  Embracing Ti Moune's tale, in the rapturous finale, “Why We Tell the Story”, the choir of  islanders sing out “For out of what we live, and we believe, our lives become the stories that we weave.”  

[dandwyeroffscript-blog]

THE BAND’S VISIT

Often the loveliest gifts come in small packages.  Such is the case THE BAND’S VISIT, one of the first musicals of the 2017-2018 Broadway season.  From its premiere at The Atlantic Theatre off-Broadway last year, THE BAND’S VISIT transfers to the Great White Way perfectly intact - a tender, intimate gem of musical theatre.  Based on the 2007 Israeli film, now  adapted for the stage by Itamar Moses, THE BAND’S VISIT is defined by a delicately calibrated score (lyrics, too) by David Yazbek (his best yet, even after such big productions like  THE FULL MONTY, DIRTY ROTTEN SCANDALS and WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN) and the sensitive,  relaxed direction of David Cromer, a Macarthur Foundation Fellow who took New York theatre by storm years back by re-staging the American classic OUR TOWN, with not much more than metal folding chairs.

 Opposite cultures mix in 1996 when the all-male, eight-member Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, arrives in Israel from Egypt, but, by fluke of misunderstood Hebrew pronunciation, ends up in a small town in the Negev Desert.  As there are neither busses out that evening nor hotels, the band members are housed by the locals.  In the overnight stay,  what Israelis and Egyptians share in common becomes clear in the most ordinary but most revelatory ways.

 The central story pivots around Tewfiq, the orchestra conductor, and Dina, owner of the local restaurant and the unofficial “mayor” of the town.  Locals don’t have much to do but hang out in Dina’s meager café. One lonely soul, known as the Telephone Guy, spends all his time waiting constantly for a call from a lost girlfriend at the pubic phone in the center of town.  In the evening, locals meander to the local bar, the younger to a roller-skating rink.  

 Passing time dominates these Israeli lives, which the ensemble laments in the opening number “Waiting”, a nervous, wistful melody that sets the tone for the dozen songs that follow.  The locals declare plainly their ennui with their town in the follow-up number “Welcome to Nowhere” in which they somewhat suspiciously (but underneath enthusiastically) greet the lost Egyptians as curious, exotic diversion.  

 The sexually vibrant and street-smart Dina (alluringly played by the versatile Katrina Lank), a Sabra beauty fast approaching middle-age, oddly but immediately takes to the meek, formally-mannered,  almost brooding, Tewfiq (perfectly played by the wonderful Tony Shalhoub).   Dina reveals her romantic needs and fascination with the foreign to Tewfiq in “Omar Sharif”, a charming recollection of her pubescent infatuation with the Egyptian movie-idol.  Over the course of the evening, more of Dina’s past,  which explains her tough, hardened view of the world,  becomes evident, as do the reasons for Tewfiq’s contained, stoic demeanor.  

 In little ways, the other locals and stranded visitors find common ground.  Counterpoint to Tewfiq, is the youngest member of the Egyptian band,  Haled (charmingly played by newcomer Ari’el Stachel), a vital, handsome Romeo, who comically tries to woo every women he meets with a few sung bars of “My Funny Valentine”.  Haled  accompanies Papi,  a local nebbish who’s too awkward to make any advances to his girlfriend, to the roller skating rink where Papi laments his romantic fecklessness in the amusing “I Hear in the Ocean”  In reply, the aspiring man-of-the world Haled instructs Papi in the beautifully melodic (and best song in the show) “Halad’s Love Song About Love”

 Across the village, Simon, the orchestra’s clarinetist, happily married for twenty years with family back home, has dinner with an immature father Itzik (John Cariani) and his unhappy wife, both uncomfortable with new parenthood.  Avrum, a middle aged, recent widow joins them. With his music, Simon conveys to all that things do get better.

 And so life’s little exchanges proceed in THE BAND”S VIST, creeping-in quietly, yet steadily. When Tewfiq observes Dina’s frustrations with her futile life, he challenges positively “Who can’t live without hope?”   But when Dina’s chip-on-her-shoulder becomes fatalistic his placid demeanor cracks: “You CAN forgive” he explodes.  Something changes a little, and Tewfiq and Dina commemorate that in a lovely duet of mutual reconciliation “Something Different”

 Director Cramer lets the individual stories enfold, like relaxed, conversations between strangers getting to know each other. Yazbek’s songs emerge naturalistically from Moses’ book.  Cromer inserts a couple of Yazbek’s Arab-style musical compositions by members of the band (supplemented with some musicians off-stage) in-between scenes. The set by Scott Pask is a background of bland, concrete housing commonly seen in Israeli settlements. The action occurs on a rotating stage that not only shifts scenes but also moves characters between apartments and public spots.   

 The ensemble finale, aptly called “Answer Me”, an allusion to the Telephone Guy’s waiting for his lover’s call, is a rousing yet bittersweet anthem.  Life’s problems - and its little (and not so little) ups and downs – get answered in small, unsuspecting ways.  In coda, the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra celebrates with a little concert.  The audience cheers.