| SAME OLD, SAME OLD
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By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN
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| Denzel Washington and Stephen McKinley Henderson/ Ph: Joan Marcus |
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When you look at the Tony nominees, you realize it was a pretty darn good season. For best musical there was Fiorello!, Gypsy, Once Upon a Mattress, Take Me Along, The Sound of Music; for best play, A Raisin in the Sun, The Best Man, The Miracle Worker, The Tenth Man, Toys in the Attic.
The winners – The Miracle Worker and a tie between Fiorello! and The Sound of Music – were popular rather than artistic choices. Gypsy and A Raisin in the Sun were probably worthier selections.
Yes, that’s 1960 I’m writing about. But looking a half-century into the past simply confirms the feeling that the 2009-2010 Broadway season can best be described with one word – mediocrity.
Sure, there were some decent plays and some good performances – though not one good musical. Broadway brings in the (tourist) crowds and the (tourist) dollars. That’s good for the producers, at least those smart enough to figure out what Middle America wants. And if they make all that money maybe a few of them will decide once in a while to add a bit more quality to the recipe.
This season, the only Tony-nominated musical with an original score, Memphis, has a clichéd book, an adequate score and a couple of better-than-adequate Tony-nominated performances, by Chad Kimball as a white 1950s DJ and Montego Glover as his African-American girlfriend. In a better season, Memphis would not have been worthy of the final four.
Its competition? American Idiot is a stage version of one-and-a fraction rock albums. Idiot is at least sit-throughable, but its director, Michael Mayer, did it better with Spring Awakening.
Million Dollar Quartet has a score of familiar rock oldies and a superb performance by Levi Kreis, channeling Jerry Lee Lewis. But his three co-stars in the quartet provide only rough approximations of Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley.
Fela! has a winning performance by Sahr Ngaujah in the title role of the Nigerian composer, a rousing score and dynamic Bill T. Jones choreography, but a minimal book – it’s more like a concert of Fela’s music with CliffsNotes of his life – and it goes on too long. A taste of the music is enjoyable, but an entire meal is repetitious.
Of the non-nominees, The Addams Family gives new meaning to the word disaster. It destroys the estimable Nathan Lane, who tries and tries with total nobility and can’t bring life – or death – to Gomez. Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia is a character in search of an author, or a librettist, or a worthy song, or a musical. The fact that it’s a hit with its tourist audience says more about the Broadway stage than just about anything else.
Sondheim on Sondheim is a pleasing recreation of some of its 80-year-old genius’ greatest works. (I believe there were a couple of celebrations this season of his 80th year.) The show features the magnificent 82-year-old Barbara Cook, perhaps the best living interpreter of this composer’s – or any composer’s – songs. But the show’s a revue, not an original musical.The longer-lasting honor is renaming the newly renovated Henry Miller's Theater the Stephen Sondheim Theater.
In the world of drama and comedy, Red, John Logan’s bio-drama about the abstract artist Mark Rothko, has strong performances by the always-dependable Alfred Molina as Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as his young assistant, but the play is more art history lesson than drama.
Geoffrey Nauffts’ Next Fall is an at times moving play about a gay couple and the role religion plays in their relationship, but it’s also a bit like a Lifetime TV movie, and I wouldn’t expect that it will be remembered 50 years hence.
Donald Margulies’ Time Stands Still, about a photographer wounded in the Iraq war and her difficult return from the battlefield to Brooklyn, is probably the best of the Broadway lot, with moving portrayals by Laura Linney as the photographer and Brian d’Arcy James, Eric Bogosian and Alicia Silverstone. It’s returning to Broadway in the fall, and it will be good to have it back, though it’s hard to see how it will make money.
The fourth nominee, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), Sarah Ruhl’s fascinating take on Victorian women and sexuality, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize – and deserved to win over last season’s Next to Normal, the Pulitzer board’s choice when it overruled the nominating jury and rejected all its recommendations. (Time Stands Still will be eligible next year.)
Of the other Broadway plays this season, perhaps only David Mamet’s take on Race deserves mention, and then only because it was certainly not among his swiftest.
In the land of the musical revival, Finian’s Rainbow was the best, with a glowing performance by Kate Baldwin as the Irish lass from Glocca Morra. Sadly, the show failed to capture the public’s imagination – a pot of gold largely undiscovered.
The latest La Cage aux Folles, an audience favorite, perhaps because it stars Kelsey Grammer of Frasier fame, has an intense Douglas Hodge as the cross-dressing partner, but for my taste there was a bit too much of Dame Edna in his prancing. Still, what could be bad about seeing right-wing Kelsey kiss a man at the final curtain?
The play-revival category has the two finest productions of the season on any Broadway stage. August Wilson’s Fences stars the mighty Viola Davis as the passionate, caring and severely wronged wife, and a daring Denzel Washington braving comparison with the original production’s James Earl Jones. In the end, Washington doesn’t quite have the overwhelming power and physical presence that made Jones’ Troy Maxson so frightening. But Kenny Leon’s direction is worthy of Wilson, and it’s a production well worth seeing – as sell-out audiences have found out eight times a week.
For me, though, the pinnacle of the Broadway season was director Gregory Mosher’s take on Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, which featured titanic performances by Liev Schreiber as the tragically flawed Italian-American longshoreman Eddie Carbone, Scarlett Johansson as the niece he loves too dearly and Jessica Hecht as his suffering wife. The play was a Miller attempt to illustrate that Greek tragedy can apply to everyday life. On the printed page, and in earlier stage versions, it almost but not quite worked. On Broadway this year, though, Mosher and his cast managed to make the play better than it actually is. The uneasy anticipation of Carbone’s doom, and the catharsis it provides, were palpable at the Cort Theater – also, coincidentally, the home of Fences – each night of its own sold-out run.
Other highlights
Jude Law took on Hamlet; for some it was to be praised, for others not to be.
Christopher Walken was, as usual, bizarrely funny, this time as a loon in search of his lost hand, in Martin McDonagh’s otherwise-uneven A Behanding in Spokane.
Linda Lavin was compelling as a writer betrayed by her protégé in a revival of Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories.
Jan Maxwell twice displayed her riotously funny comedic royalty, in revivals of The Royal Family and Lend Me a Tenor.
Valerie Harper was sadly convincing as Tallulah Bankhead in Looped, a bare outline of a play about the stage legend.
Catherine Zeta-Jones was acceptable and Angela Lansbury was the always-reliable Angela Lansbury in Trevor Nunn’s misconceived revival of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. It should be played as a farce, Mr. Nunn, not a lugubrious display of Scandinavian sorrow.
Kudos also to Kevin Chamberlin, for keeping his humor intact in The Addams Family; Jon Michael Hill in Tracy Letts’ vastly underappreciated Superior Donuts; Sherie Rene Scott for her exuberance and energy in her autobiographical Everyday Rapture, a musical that seemed misplaced at the larger American Airlines Theater (it really worked best where it began, at the much smaller Off Broadway Second Stage, and never should have moved); and Sean Hayes in the disappointing revival of Promises, Promises, who, despite a Newsweek critic’s ridiculous lament, charmingly illustrated that gay can definitely play straight.
Huzzahs to the zany Katie Finneran, also in Promises, Promises, who showed that the humor in Neil Simon’s libretto, at least in Act Two, has aged well over its 42 years.
Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman suited Broadway to a T. They raised much money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS via the sale of their used and sweaty undershirts, and raised even more for their producers by playing cops in their sold-out run of A Steady Rain, a play notable solely for its stars.
Christiane Noll and Bobby Steggert stood out in a revival of Ragtime that otherwise mostly displayed the musical's deficiencies.
When it came to deficiencies, few productions could top Enron. The play, a huge hit in London, lost all its energy en route to Broadway, suggesting that perhaps the Brits' fondness for ridiculing their former colonies was the reason for the play’s across-the-pond triumph.
And a poorly directed first Broadway revival of William Gibson's The Miracle Worker, despite caring efforts by Abigail Breslin as Helen Keller and Alison Pill as her teacher, Annie Sullivan, showed that in this case 1960 did not translate well in 2010.
Off Broadway
The best performance of the season anywhere – on Broadway or Off – was Cate Blanchett as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Blanchett, and the rest of the Australian cast from her Sydney Theatre Company, illuminated the tragedy of Blanche and gave new clarity to Williams’ poetry.
Off Broadway also provided some of the other critically praised plays and musicals of the season. Among the plays were Annie Baker’s Obie-winning Circle Mirror Transformation, Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Brother/Sister Plays and David Ives’ Venus in Fur; among the musicals, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, The Kid, The Scottsboro Boys and Yank, most or all of which appear headed for Broadway next season.
Stephen Dillane’s Prospero at BAM, under Sam Mendes' direction, didn’t quite cause a Tempest, but it enraptured some and totally bored others (myself included).
Peter Brook's Love Is My Sin was small, gentle, quiet, and superb: two actors, Natasha Parry (Brook’s wife) and Michael Pennington, reciting selected Shakespeare sonnets, accompanied by a lone musician. It was all about love, and all about Brook again showing his mastery of things theatrical.
Speaking of love, there was Brief Encounter, which in its all-too-brief run at St. Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo made critics rapturous in praising its sometimes-humorous dissection of the classic tearjerker movie of the same name, enlightening audiences about what they think about when they think about love.( The Roundabout Theater Company recently announced that it's moving Brief Encounter to Broadway in September, so more theater lovers will be able to encounter it.)
And finally, there was the late Horton Foote’s nine-play, nine-hour Orphans’ Home Cycle, fictionally following Foote’s father in Texas from age 12 in 1902 to 1928. Since it contains earlier work, it may not have been a new play, but it made for three absorbing evenings, or matinees – or a morning, a matinee and an evening – at the Signature Theater Company, one of Off Broadway’s best.
On reflection, I guess it was just Broadway that was mediocre. That was nothing new. Off Broadway was better, more often than not the place to be. That was nothing new, either.
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