Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals

Review - Finding Neverland at the American Repertory Theatre

Quick quiz:

1. What musical is the following lyric from? 
2. Which character is singing?
3. What is this character singing about? 

All that matters now
Is where we go from here.
There's an easier way
If we live for today.
The singing in my heart 
Is all that matters.

Well, you can probably tell from the title of this review, as well as the accompanying artwork, that we're talking about the new Broadway-bound musical Finding Neverland. The character singing is named Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, played memorably by Kate Winslet in the 2004 movie of the same name. And the character is singing about...well...I really have no idea. Therein lies one of the major liabilities of Finding Neverland in its current form: You could hear the entire score and still not really understand what was going on in the show.

When the first announcements appeared about Finding Neverland becoming a musical, the composer and lyricist were to be Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, respectively. After multiple readings and productions, Frankel and Korie were suddenly no longer attached. We may never know how the show would have fared with Frankel and Korie, but based on my experience with their previous work (Grey Gardens, Happiness, Far From Heaven), I have to conclude that the show would have been significantly more intelligent, tuneful, integrated, and original than the uninspired concoction that is currently playing at the American Repertory Theatre.

As anyone who's seen the original movie knows, Finding Neverland concerns playwright J.M. Barrie and his relationship with a young widow and her four boys, who inspire him to write his best-known work, Peter Pan. It's a wonderful idea for a musical, and there are brief moments in the current show that hint at the magic that could have been. Most of these come in the form of stagecraft, as at the end of the show when Sylvia makes her most significant transition. Powerful fans emerge in a circle in the center of the stage, which create a whirlwind of golden glitter, a gorgeous moment that brings the stories of the musical and Peter Pan together in a stunning coup de théâtre. 

In between these rare moments of wonder, we must contend with an inferior score and a merely serviceable book. Producer Harvey Weinstein replaced Frankel and Korie with musical-theater neophytes Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy (music and lyrics together). Their lack of musical-theater experience shows, partly in the overabundance of slant rhyme, poor scansion, and forced extra syllables, but also in their tin-eared, derivative contemporary musical style. The only decent song in the entire score is "Neverland," although you'd never know it from Jennifer's Hudson's riffando version on the Tony Awards. Add in James Graham's bald-faced dialogue and ham-fisted plot exposition, and we have a musical that would seem more fitting for The Disney Channel than the legitimate Broadway stage.  

Barlow and Kennedy also show their inexperience in their choice of moments to musicalize. The third number in the show, when I saw it in previews, was a rather odd number for J.M. Barrie's wife, called "Rearrange the Furniture," which is pretty much as it says on the box. The number is superficial character work at best, and the character doesn't really warrant a number in the first place. On the other hand, we have a major moment in the second act, when J.M. Barrie brings the entire cast of Peter Pan to recreate the show in the bedroom of an ailing Sylvia, a moment that would seem to cry out for a musical number, but all we get is a stylized retread of Barrie's play. 

Another problem with Finding Neverland is a rather bizarre mismatch of styles. The generic pop score is at odds with the Victorian time frame, which would be fine if not for the rather literal period costumes and sets. We also get a series of jarringly angular and jerky dance sequences from choreographer Mia Michaels, a self-aggrandizing style that disappears about a quarter of the way through the show, never to return. (Michaels' most significant credit would seem to be So You Think You Can Dance. Yeah, that's who I'd hire for a 19th Century period piece.)  

Director Diane Paulus seems to be struggling with how to bring the material to life, and a number of sequences reflect this uncertainty. There's a dinner-party number that's meant to show how the kids, Sylvia, and Barrie occupy one world, while Barrie's wife and Sylvia's mother are in another world entirely. It's a good idea, but as currently staged the number has no focus. There's so much going on, it's hard to know what to pay attention to, an issue exacerbated by a spate of mugging chorus members continually trying to pull focus.

Another number, called "Believe," is meant to be inspirational, with Barrie encouraging the Llewelyn boys to let their creativity take flight, but Paulus fleshes out the number with a rather bizarre admixture of buskers and bees. As I sat watching the show, I kept thinking of Big Fish, another show that wanted to celebrate story-telling and imagination, but wound up demonstrating very little of either. 

One thing that Finding Neverland has in its favor is a stellar cast of first-rate Broadway performers, including Jeremy Jordan as Barrie, Laura Michelle Kelly as Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, and Carolee Carmello as Madame du Maurier, Sylvia's mother. They all get their chance to belt their brains out, if that's your idea of great theater, but I had to feel sorry for Carolee for having to deliver the reprise of "All That Matters," generic lyric and all. Also in the cast is Tony winner Michael McGrath as theatrical impresario Charles Frohman, and I swear I could sense McGrath gritting his teeth while trudging through a show that is decidedly beneath his talent. 

On a final note, why is such a manifestly commercial show even playing at the ART to begin with? Other than money, that is? I suppose it's possible to argue that All The Way, The Glass Menagerie, Porgy and Bess, and even Pippin might in some way intersect with the artistic mission of a major nonprofit theater at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. But Finding Neverland? Such a patently mercenary venture feels like filthy lucre, and nothing more. 

Review - The Visit at Williamstown Theatre Festival With Chita Rivera

John Waters writes in one of his books (I think it was Crackpot) that he wishes that someone would discover an unpublished Jean Genet novel. He's read everything extant by Genet, he says, and longs for that special feeling of experiencing something truly great for the first time. 

That's how I felt watching The Visit, the hauntingly satisfying "new" musical with music by John Kander and lyrics by the late Fred Ebb: thrilled to experience something genuinely ambitious and frequently wondrous, and yet sad that most of the genius involved in crafting this stunning show is either gone or in its dotage.  

The Visit was one of four musicals that Kander and Ebb were working on upon Ebb's death in 2004. Two of these shows have subsequently made it to Broadway: Curtains and The Scottsboro Boys. One has yet to see any significant exposure: a musical version of Thorton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, called All About Us. 

And then there's The Visit, which had a well-received run in 2008 at The Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, although talk of bringing that production to New York never bore fruit, purportedly because of the 2008 recession. Thankfully, The Visit is now enjoying a stunning production, significantly revised and shortened from previous versions, at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, playing now through August 17th. 

The musical is based on the eponymous 1956 play The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and the musical sticks fairly close to its source. The story concerns one Claire Zachanassian, who returns to her hometown after becoming the richest woman in the world. She offers to save the town from its ruinous state, but with one chilling proviso: the town must kill her former lover, Anton Schell, now an indigent shopkeeper with a wife and two children. 

If that conceit seems static -- I mean, once the horrifying condition is revealed, where do you go from there? -- both the play and the musical follow up with an intriguing series of developments and revelations that add layers to the seemingly inert premise. The musical is by turns arresting, poignant, and darkly humorous. It also manages to paint a balanced portrait of horror and justice: Claire is clearly a deeply wronged woman, and yet Anton makes for a penitent and sympathetic foil. When we discover exactly what Anton did to Claire, we almost accept the righteousness of her demands, the justice inherent in her savage proposal. 

I've seen many musicals attempt to balance dark subject matter with a satisfying sense of entertainment and humor, and it's a really difficult task to pull off. (Just ask the authors of Lestat, Bare, Heathers, The People in the Picture, Scandalous, Soul Doctor, etc.) Librettist Terrence McNally finds just the right balance of the edgy and the enjoyable in The Visit, something he was unable to do for Catch Me If You Can.

Composer John Kander matches McNally's balance with a lush and soaring score with numerous complex contrapuntal passages. Kander and Ebb together crafted songs that can easily stand among their classics, including "Love and Love Alone," a triumphant 11 o'clock number for Claire, and "You, You, You," a soaring love duet for Young Claire and Young Anton, who act as mostly silent witnesses throughout the entire show. (Young Anton is played here by golden-voiced Boston Conservatory grad, John Bambery. Full Disclosure: John is a former student of mine, but trust me, the guy's got the pipes. Yowza.) 

The Visit benefits greatly from the sensitive direction of, and stark presentation by, director John Doyle. (And, in case you're wondering: No, the performers are not required to play instruments here.) In concert with scenic designer Scott Pask (who creates a gasp-inducing unit set) and costume designer Ann Hould Ward, Doyle has fashioned a hauntingly expressionistic, black, white, and gray production, punctuated with increasing accents of vibrant yellow, a symbol of the avarice that overcomes the townspeople as they gradually turn against Anton. 

For many people, the big draw of this production will be the first-rate cast, lead by the irreplaceable Chita Rivera, so fluid and sharp, even at age 81. Roger Rees fares considerably less well as Anton: he's more than up to the acting challenge, but his singing voice is sadly lacking in strength and sustain. Also notable are Judy Kuhn, laser-sharp as always as Anton's beleaguered wife, and Jason Danieley, positively heartbreaking as the schoolmaster, and Anton's last remaining ally.  

If The Visit never finds the thematic cohesion of, say, Cabaret or even The Scottsboro Boys, it still has much to reveal about the dark side of human nature and the artistic ambitions of musical theater. I'm not sure The Visit has much of a commercial future, but it would be great to see one of the Broadway nonprofits like the Roundabout or Lincoln Center scoop it up for a limited run. 

Reviews - 2014 New York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF) - Part 4

Here's my final roundup of reviews from the 2014 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). I saw 19 shows over the course of three weekends. It was a bit grueling at times, but overall I found it exhilarating. There's so much passion out there for musicals, both in writing them and in attending them. Even if most of these shows never make to Broadway, or even Off-Broadway, the sheer number of shows in development is an encouraging sign. 

Watch for future posts from me on the winners of the NYMF Awards for Excellence (for which I served as a juror), as well as for my take on lessons learned. Essentially, I'll be compiling a list of questions that would-be writers and composers for musical theater can ask themselves as they work on their shows, questions that, I hope, will help them avoid some of the pitfalls that I've seen over and over in developing musicals. (Just call me a dramaturg in absentia.) 

Mr. Confidential - Anyone looking for an object lesson in the term "dramaturgy problems" need look no further than Mr. Confidential. I can't recall another show during which I had to continually ask "Um...what?" as frequently. It's not the plot that's befuddling: it's basically about a guy and his family starting a gossip magazine and pissing the wrong people off. What's confusing is understanding what people are singing about, why this particular person needs to be singing, and why the events are unfolding the way they are. Mr. Confidential has book and lyrics by Samuel Bernstein, music by David Snyder, and while Snyder's music is often quite good, often exciting, Bernstein's book and lyrics are a mess. I continually found myself asking: What's this song about? Why is this person making this choice? What the hell is going on? And so on. Bernstein needs to decide what he really wants each song to be about and then craft lyrics that more explicitly meet those intentions. Bernstein's book raises even more questions than the lyrics. For example, the magazine publisher, Bob Harrison, attempts to hire a recently unseated anti-communist politician to help find stories for the magazine, and because for some reason this guy would give Harrison access to famed columnist Walter Winchell. But why would Winchell help a rival publication with story ideas? He's got his own media empire to feed. The biggest WTF moment comes at the end. Apparently there's a car crash, which takes the lives of two of the characters, but the headline accompanying the scene says it was the publisher who killed himself and his wife. But Harrison is shown announcing the accident to the press, despite the fact that he's the publisher. It was a fittingly opaque end to a bewildering show. 

The Travels - The Travels was perhaps the most thematically ambitious show I saw at NYMF this year. The book and lyrics are by Aaron Ricciardi, the music by Kelly Hoppenjans. The story involves a comic dystopian tale of a future America, including a daily TV show to encourage conformity, discourage travel, and foster devotion to a Big-Brother-like authority figure. Not so much a musical as a play with music, The Travels features diegetic, commentative numbers, not unlike half of the score to Cabaret, or most of the score to Chicago. For the most part, this approach works: the song interludes take us out of the story and remind us of the show's Brechtian ambitions. Ricciardi also makes the interesting choice to start each scene with a show card announcing the impending fate of the characters, a clear nod to Brecht's alienation techniques. Ricciardi displays a keen intelligence and sharp comic instincts with his imaginative language and precepts for his fictional world, even if the whole affair seems just a tad too dependent on 1984 and Brave New World in its fundaments. There are some clear flaws in the show's logic: when two foreigners enter the country and are forced to become "domestic domicile disinfectors," they seem to have no prior knowledge of the country's shift toward totalitarianism. But the show tells us that the current regime has been in place for 25 years. It's hard to imagine that word wouldn't have somehow gotten out over a quarter of a century. Still, The Travels works rather well, at least until it starts taking itself too seriously. If Ricciardi could find ways to sustain the satire and edge throughout the show, he and Hoppenjans might have a winner on their hands. (A final note: As I said last year, apropos of her star turn in Julian Po, the fabulous Luba Mason, featured prominently in The Travels, should always be in a Broadway show. Will someone please rectify this, stat?)

Madame Infamy - As I've mentioned, I hadn't been all that impressed by the quality of the music is this year's NYMF shows. That is, until my final NYMF weekend, when I started to hear some really strong music. Madame Infamy has a book by JP Vigliotti, and music and lyrics by Cardozie Jones and Sean Willis. The book and lyrics need quite a bit of work, but Jones' and Willis' score is pretty darned fabulous, despite a preponderance of what I call "beltando" and "riffando" on the part of some of the singers. Jones and Willis have quite a touch with memorable and stirring music, including some ambitious contrapuntal pieces. Madame Infamy tells the parallel stories of Marie Antoinette and Sally Hemmings, the latter a slave owned by Thomas Jefferson who also allegedly became the mother of a number of children by Jefferson. I kept expecting the two stories to come together, but they never really did. Apart from seeing each other from afar at a ball at Versailles (Jefferson is in France to garner support for the American Revolution), the women never come in direct contact. The authors would be wise to create more of a link between the two characters, historically justified or no. As a whole, the show feels like a combination of Les Miserables, Wicked, and The Princess Diaries, as produced by The Disney Channel -- sort of a schoolgirl's take on history. The lyrics need quite a bit of work: I frequently had no idea what characters were singing about, and somtimes didn't even know who the characters were. Much of the dialogue feels artificial, even creaky. Plot turns and character motivations are frequently difficult to discern. People in support positions act in ways inconsistent with their station. Members of court act condescendingly and imperiously toward Louis XVI and Marie. One of Jefferson's slaves tracks him down to punch him in the face. Um, who's in charge here? This isn't a high school dance in 2014. It's the court at frickin' Versailles. (Final note: the authors should re-familiarize themselves with the rules of pronoun-case usage. The show is littered with such erroneous phrases as "...between you and I...," "It's rare for we women to be taken seriously," and "You shall accompany Martha and I..." I'm sorry, but we're talking Thomas Jefferson here, one of the greatest writers this country has ever seen. This is one guy who would know the difference between the nominative and the objective case.) 

Propaganda! - Here's another trend I noticed at NYMF this year: opening numbers that don't fully set the scene. I'm sure it's easy, when you're writing a show, to lose track of what the audience knows and when, and what they need to know from the beginning so that the rest of the show makes sense. All the more reason to make the Who, What, Where, and When as clear as possible, and as soon as possible. Propaganda! - The Musical is a case in point. The opening lyric keeps repeating "This just in, on the radio," as if that's supposed to be enough to tell us where we are and what's going on. But it isn't. I kept trying to guess: Is this a TV station? A newspaper? A PR firm? The republican national headquarters? In turns out that we're witnessing the goings-on at a secret government agency that specializes in covering up scandals. Three numbers into the show, this still wasn't clear. Once clarity sets in, Propaganda! is actually quite enjoyable, often hilarious. The book, music, and lyrics are by Taylor Ferrera and Matt Webster, and the pair show great promise as comedy writers. Propaganda! gets a bit messy at times, but overall it's a hoot. There's a tongue-in-cheek meta quality to much of the dialogue, which works in fits and starts. There's some inconsistent logic regarding character traits and plot ramifications. But there are also some terrific insider musical-theater jokes that had me roaring. The songs are hit or miss, but there are some really strong showstopper-type numbers, particularly the show's chief evildoer, Agent X, played with great relish here by the wondrous Kenita Miller. Conversely, there's an 11 o'clock number that stops the show in a bad way, called "Sing Me to Sleep," which unfortunately lives up to its name. Much of the fun in the show comes from the shameless showboating from the ensemble, which was jarring at first, but eventually built to a comic crescendo that contributed greatly to the show's overall fun index. Also notable was the outstanding choreography from Jason Sparks, which gave the mincing queens (and I mean that with love) in the ensemble a chance to shine. (Also, I would strongly suggest a change of the show's title. Propaganda! doesn't really capture the spirit of the show. Might I suggest changing it to Cover Up!, while retaining the classic musical-theater exclamation point.) 

Fable - My final NYMF musical of the year was Fable, a show with a bit of an identity crises. The book is by Harrison Kaufman, the music and lyrics by Christopher Anselmo. I feel I must preface my remarks by pointing out that both Anselmo and Kaufman are still in college: Anselmo at Northwestern, Kaufman at NYU. Judged from that vantage point, the work here is outstanding, if uneven. But from an audience perspective, it doesn't really matter how old the creators are. What matters is what's on stage. Well, Anselmo shows tremendous promise as a composer and lyricist. Anselmo's music is by turns soaring, jaunty, and hard-rocking, even if it does reflect just a touch too much RLNS (Really-Long-Note Syndrome). His lyrics are among the cleanest I've ever heard at NYMF: I don't recall hearing any significant slant rhyme, faulty scansion, or reversed syntax. The main liability of the show in its current form is that the high stakes evident in the score don't match the rather mundane events depicted in the book. We're basically at a graduation party in which six high-school friends reveal -- and wring their hands over -- a series of rather quotidian revelations: someone's parents are getting divorced, someone makes out with another girl's boyfriend, some says "I Love You" too soon, someone reveals that she lied about getting into Princeton, and a brother tells his sister that he didn't go to college so the family could afford to send her. Which is all fine and good, except the momentous, weighty ballads that emerge toward the end of the show don't feel justified based on such prosaic concerns. For instance, one character sings a "Get Out, and Stay Out" type number to his friends. but it's not entirely clear why he's so upset. The cast features a decidedly strong sextet of young performers, including star-to-be Dan Rosales, making his NYMF debut. (Full disclosure: Dan is one of my recent BoCo students. But trust me, you're going to hear from this amazingly talented young man very soon, of this I have no doubt.) 

Reviews - 2014 New York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF) - Part 3

Here's my third round of reviews, out of four, of shows from the 2014 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). Seeing so many shows in such a short time has been a really rewarding process, one that I recommend to anyone who aspires to write for or about musical theater. Nothing puts the finished product into perspective like a glimpse at the development process. It's also very heartening to see so many people who are passionate about musical theater, on both sides of the footlights.    

One somewhat disheartening trend this year has been the rather colorless music evident in many NYMF shows. It's not always clear whether this is a product of the actual composition, the sound design, the orchestrations, or some combination thereof, but I haven't heard much music that I found interesting, intriguing, or pleasant. In fact, on my NYMF juror ballot, I only cited two shows for Best Music, although the ballot allows jurors to list as many as three shows. Otherwise, the music at NYMF this year has lacked flare, tonality, a predictable downbeat, consonant intervals, plus whatever indefinable something goes into making a score memorable and effective.

No, not every score needs to sound like Richard Rodgers composed it, and there is certainly plenty of room for growth in the type of music that musical theater has historically embraced. But style and quality are not synonymous: scores that reflect rock, rap, R&B, emo, country, afro-beat, or any other style of music don't get a pass because they're atypical Broadway. They also need to be good. (Whatever that means, right?) 

Mother Jones and the Children's Crusade - As I mentioned in my most recent round of reviews, I had been noticing fewer NYMF shows with significant dramaturgical issues than in previous years. Then, for some reason, I suddenly started seeing a spate of shows that were raising who, what, where, when and why questions. One show that could benefit from more dramaturgical effort is Mother Jones and the Children's Crusade. (Full disclosure: Mother Jones is being produced by one of my recent students, but my students know that, once they graduate, I will approach their efforts with the same tough-but-fair approach I would apply to any other show.) The book, music, and lyrics for Mother Jones are by Cheryl E. Kemeny, and Kemeny might be wise to bring on a collaborator or two: while her music is strong, tuneful, and often rousing, the lyrics here are uninspired and peppered with cliché. The main area needing attention is the book, which is full of holes. The story concerns Mary Harris Jones, known as "Mother Jones," a firebrand labor activist and community organizer, and her efforts to call attention to the horrors of child labor in the very early 1900s. The show isn't always clear about where a scene or song is taking place. Are we in a West Virginia coal mine? Or a Pennsylvania textile mill? Or a convent? I was, at various times, confused. This is indicative of a larger problem with Mother Jones: the rationale behind the scenes and songs isn't always clear. Characters make choices that aren't fully justified in the narrative. One character spends most of act one as a cartoonish musical-comedy stereotype, only to undergo an abrupt change of heart in act two. Mother Jones sings a song that's meant to explain her involvement in the Children's Crusade, but the song is about losing her husband and children to yellow fever. It's a powerful song, rendered triumphantly here by the always marvelous Lynne Wintersteller, but it's not really clear what this admittedly horrific experience has to do with organizing unions and abolishing child labor. Mother Jones itself is going to need a bit more organizing if it's going to have any chance of bringing its message to the masses. 

Clinton - the Musical - You might think a musical about Bill Clinton would be one long dick joke. And you'd be right. (Get it? Long? Dick? Tee-hee...) That's pretty much what Clinton - the Musical amounts to right now: a two-hour parade of sniggering schoolboy innuendo and vulgarity. There's even a song called "I'm Fucking the Fucking President." And it gets a reprise. The show has a book by Paul Hodge and Michael Hodge, with music and lyrics by Paul Hodge, and just about the only inspired choice the Hodges make is to have Clinton played by two different actors, one representing his presidential side, and the other his horn-dog side, although this isn't fully exploited at this point in the show's development. The rest of the show pretty much amounts to a rather flabby attempt at topical humor. The well-known cast of characters here become broad characterizations of the most obvious sort. Al Gore is played by a cardboard cutout. Monica Lewinsky becomes a shallow ditz who sports a stylized cum stain on her dress for more than half the show. Newt Gingrich is a cackling demon: the fight over the big government shutdown of 1995 is represented by a boxing match. Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr is introduced with a number called - I kid you not - "A Starr Is Born." When the show isn't trafficking in the obvious, it utlizes such past-its-sell-date humor as having the cast sing and dance about the legal definition of "sexual relations" to the tune of the "Macarena." Toward the end of the show, there were a few effective sequences, including one in which the two Bills and Hillary practice together for the State of the Union address in order to remove any possible double entendres. Yeah, we're still talking dick jokes, but there was at least some craft behind it. The Hillary character also gets a fairly effective, even moving, 11 o'clock number in which she finally confronts Bill about all the lying and infidelity. But, on the whole, Clinton is rather flaccid. (Which, BTW Messrs. Hodge, is traditionally pronounced "flack-sid," not "flassid.")

The Snow Queen - Most of the shows at NYMF are on a pretty tight budget, so the physical production values tend to be modest. The show with the best design this year was The Snow Queen, which is based on the tale by Hans Christian Anderson. The costumes, projections, even the show's logo represent a top-notch sense of overall design. Now, all that sharp stagecraft needs is a better show to support. The book here is by Kirsten Brandt and Rick Lombardo, the music by Haddon Kime and Rick Lombardo, the lyrics by Brandt, Kime, and Lombardo. The show seems to have Peter and the Starcatcher ambitions, with a sort of objet trouvé feel, a stage full of actor/musicians, and various attempts at suggested versus literal stagecraft. Right now, though, The Snow Queen lacks the spark and sense of riotous fun that Peter and the Starcatcher so vividly reflected. The story concerns two chIldhood friends, Kai and Gerde. Kai falls under the spell of the Snow Queen and follows her to her icy lair, and Gerde sets off the find him. Along the way, she meets a succession of would-be vivid comic characters, but only a few of these characterizations were fully successful. The ensemble cast is mostly quite strong, although there was some scenery chewing going on. The show has significant dramaturgy problems at present: when the show starts, it's unclear whether the Snow Queen or another character, the Troll, would eventually become the antagonist. Are these two characters in cahoots, or are they separate malevolent forces? Later, when Kai first encounters the Snow Queen, he suddenly becomes obsessed with counting. Eventually we learn that this has a purpose, but it was quizzical at the time. But the main liability here is the score, which is thoroughly unappealing, a wall of undifferentiated sound that makes it difficult to understand most of the lyrics. This may be partly due to poor sound design and muddy orchestrations, but whatever the cause, the music comes off as an amorphous emo drone. I'm sure the composer is going for something modern and outré, but this is a kids show, and children haven't yet developed the parts of their brains that can appreciate dissonance. That's why most children's music features perfect intervals. I think there's a solid show in the making here, but the music is going to need a significant overhaul. 

Zombie Strippers - With a show named Zombie Strippers, it can go one of two ways: brilliant camp or forced, self-conscious muddle. Zombie Strippers is much closer to the latter, and even at only 65 minutes, significantly overstays its welcome. As the title implies, Zombie Strippers is about a trio of strippers who...well...become zombies. A mourning coworker visits the graveyard with her douchebag boyfriend, which sets the plot in motion. The book, music, and lyrics by Mark LaPierre, and really the only thing here that's promising are LaPierre's lyrics, which show some talent for word play and occasional flashes of genuine wit. But there are some lyrics that just don't make any sense, for instance, "Life is like a play. It's depressing and unfair." Um, is that really what plays are? More likely this is simply due to faulty modification, but clarity is part of the craft, folks. At times, it's not entirely clear that the characters are aware of what they're saying. In one song, the two key females are supposed to be revealing something significant about themselves, but one character actually says nothing new, meanwhile seemingly ignoring a major reveal on the part of the other character. The music here, canned and live electronic synth, is far too languid for a purportedly comic show. LaPierre frequently undercuts the comedy of his lyrics by crafting extended vocal lines that kill that joke. Like many of this year's NYMF composers, La Pierre seems to be deliberately avoiding tonality, which makes for an unpleasant aural experience. Just because the show is about zombies doesn't mean the audience should be in pain. As for the book, it's not clear that the show even understands, let alone reflects, its internal rules about what creates these zombies or how to kill them. Even a show with a ridiculous premise needs to have an internal logic; any sci-fi fan will tell you that. I get the feeling that Zombie Strippers, unlike its titillating titular characters, isn't looking at much of an afterlife. 

Reviews - 2014 New York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF) - Part 2

Here's my second installment of reviews from this year's New York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF). I continue to be impressed at the overall higher caliber of shows at this year's festival. In particular, there seem to be far fewer shows with major dramaturgical problems.

"Turgid-drama-whah?"

Yeah, I know. Let's break it down. Dramaturgy basically refers to act of shaping a show into a performable piece, as distinct from actually writing the play. A dramaturg is sort of like an editor for playwrights. Examples of dramaturgical problems would include songs that don't have sufficient justification in the story, characters who make choices that we don't fully understand, events that occur without clear causes or antecedents, etc. If a show has you asking, "Wait, what? Who? Where? Why?," then that show has problems with its dramaturgy. 

As we'll see in my next installment of reviews, there have been a few NYMF musicals that had me scratching my head at various times throughout the show, but again that number is significantly smaller than in previous years. 

Coming of Age - Songs cycles are tricky to pull off. There needs to be a certain cohesion to the material, a clear sensibility to the writing. Oh, and they need to be short. At two and a half hours with a 15-minute intermission, Coming of Age is anything but short. Not only does the entire show go on too long -- about an hour too long -- but each of the numbers tends to overstay its welcome as well. The music and lyrics for Coming of Age are by Jon Provan, and his music is not without merit; some of it is quite pleasant, actually. Provan's lyrics are passable when the tone of the song is upbeat, as is the case with a charming song early in the show in which a Jewish girl complains that "nobody gives a shit about a bat mitzvah." However, the lyrics here are replete with enough slant rhyme, faulty scansion, and forced extra syllables to outfit a season of developing shows. When the songs get serious, out come the New Age platitudes and ponderously anthemic vocal lines. The entire show gives off an air of self-consciousness, a security in its own importance. As the title implies, Coming of Age is about rights of passage. However, Provan seems to have mistaken breadth for depth, and includes numbers from a risibly broad range of epochs, including numbers about Norse warriors heading out to sea, a child king about to be crowned, a young Spartan who's reluctant to be trained, and an adolescent Cro-Magnon hunting the wooly mammoth. I kid you not.  

Bayonets of Angst - I almost wasn't going to see this one, but I'm so glad I did. Bayonets of Angst, despite the awkward title, is a hoot and a holler. The hilarious book is by Rick Kunzi and Justin Zeppa, and basically amounts to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson without all that annoying emo music. The story is essentially The Civil War filtered through the authors' wonderfully twisted sensibility. If only the rest of American history had been this howlingly funny, I might have paid closer attention in high school. The show begins with the last surviving veterans of the War Between the States, who have gathered for their 149th reunion -- although, clearly, none of them are moving very fast -- and they resolve to tell the "truth" about the war while they still have time. We then flash back to the time of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman, but these are very likely not to be the people you're familiar with from history books. Much of the fun here comes from the sure-handed comic direction of Michael Lluberes, who keeps the proceedings going at a fevered pitch for most of the show's 90 minutes. The score is slightly less effective than the book and direction, but that was pretty much the case with Bloody Bloody as well. Another major source of joy here is the supremely gifted cast, flawless to a man (which might seem like a sexist phrase, except that the entire cast is male). The protean ensemble includes J. Robert Spencer (Lincoln), Paul Whitty (Grant), Michael Abbot Jr. (Sherman), Ryan Andes (Robert E. Lee), and Brian Charles Rooney as Gen. George B. McLellan. Rooney is a man with an almost frightening vocal range and character intensity. Someone find this show, preferably with this cast, an Off-Broadway berth. It's just about ready for prime time. 

Rescue Rue - Here's another one I wasn't planning to see, but I'm a NYMF juror, and they needed someone else to cover this show. I haven't had very good experiences with musicals aimed at children; people seem to think that a kids' show doesn't need to be well-written. Yeah, well, talk to the guys at Pixar about that. The book for Rescue Rue is by Stacey Weingarten, the music and lyrics by Kate Steinberg, Joshua Zecher-Ross, and Weingarten. A show that could have been twee and cutesy winds up being warm and sweet, even moving. Think Avenue Q without the sex and profanity. Oh, and the irony. Actually, just about the only things Rescue Rue shares with Avenue Q are the puppets and the ingratiating way of telling the story. The story starts with an unnamed dog (who eventually acquires the name "Rue") being kicked out into the world by an uncaring family. She meets up with her Fairy Dog Mother, who grants Rue a wish. When Rue asks for a "Happily Ever After," the Fairy Dog Mother reluctantly agrees (knowing that Happily-Ever-Afters only arrive after many trials and setbacks) and what follows is Rue's bumpy journey to her own happy end. Unlike, say, Freckleface Strawberry, Rescue Rue treats its audience with respect, offering the linear narrative and character consistencies that Freckleface sorely lacked. The resolution for Rescue Rue is so darned cute, not to mention dramatically apt, that by the end I was sniffling happily along with the rest of the audience. There's just the right touch of agitprop here in showcasing the plight of rescue dogs. Well, message received: when I get a new dog this fall, I'm defintely planning on going the rescue route. 

WikiMusical - There's always at least one musical at NYMF that thinks it's a whole lot more clever and funny than it actually is. This year, that show is WikiMusical, a deceptive title, in that the users don't actually get to log in and edit the show. (If only...) The book and lyrics are by Frank Ceruzzi and Blake J. Harris, the music by Trent Jeffords. The writing here is sort of on the level of a high-school skit: sophomoric humor, awkward dialogue, and pedestrian lyrics, complete with poor scansion and slant rhyme aplenty. The story concerns two brothers who somehow get sucked inside the Internet, and need to find a way back home. What follows is an aimlessly episodic series of would-be comic set pieces that, despite fleeting moments of wit, tend to fall flat. It's the sort of show that thinks topical references (a scheming Nigerian prince, a cemetery of unsent emails, a climactic game of Mario Brothers) will automatically make it funny. Eventually we get the obligatory expository dialogue from the evildoers, attempting to bring all this muddle to a conclusion, but the denouement is thoroughly inexplicable, rivalling that of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (the first version, before Taymor was fired). The songs feature lots of screaming and reeeeeeealllllly loooooooong noooooootes at the end. As I sat enduring the show, I couldn't help thinking of the actors in these NYMF shows, and the challenge they face of fully committing to material that is not always worthy of their talents. (I happen to know one of the performers in WikiMusical. Pumpkin, I feel your pain.) 

The Gig - I was surprised to see The Gig listed among the NYMF offerings this year, mostly because I've seen the show before, some 12 years ago at the Lyric Stage in Boston. The performance rights for the show are available from Samuel French and a cast recording came out in 2008. So, what's it doing at NYMF? I can only assume that composer/lyricist/librettist Douglas J. Cohen (No Way to Treat a Lady, Children's Letters to God) thinks the show deserves another chance at the limelight, whatever that might entail. The fact that The Gig has been in development for years is quite evident: the show has a polish that few NYMF shows can boast. It's the story of an amateur jazz sextet, a bunch of middle-aged guys who get together once a week to jam. Along comes a chance at an actual paid gig, and the men take time from their careers (dentist, used-car salesman, real-estate agent, etc.) to spend two weeks in the Catskills. The show starts with an infectious opening sequence that efficiently establishes the main characters and sets the plot in motion. Cohen's score is complex and satisfying, continually taking the music in interesting directions, and reflecting a deft hand with complex group numbers. What's more, Cohen makes these people real and distinct, with easy character-based humor and an infectious sense of camaraderie. Along the way, Cohen crafts charming moments of joy and loss, while successfully avoiding schmaltz. He effectively develops the characters of all six men, while making the supporting characters real as well. That's quite a feat. I don't know what sort of future might lie ahead for The Gig, but I can say it's a terrific show, and that I hope Cohen keeps on writing.

Reviews - 2014 New York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF) - Part 1

Ah, summer. Looks like it's time for a little NYMF-ing. Well, maybe more than a little. I mean, faced with the prospect of 24 new musicals, 9 concerts, 10 development readings, and numerous workshops, I'm basically a kid in a candy store here. This will be my third year at The New York Musical Theatre Festival, my second as a juror. I just spent my first of three weekends bingeing on musicals in development, and I must say that overall I've noticed a higher quality caliber of shows than in previous years. 

The good folks at NYMF seem to be doing a better job of selecting more artistically promising shows. Sure, there are still quite a few shows that will need considerable work to get anything close to produceable form, but on the whole, there's better storytelling, stronger lyrics and more mature music than I've noticed in previous years. Now, I have yet to see anything to rival the overall excellence of last year's Crossing Swords or Julian Po, but I do still have two weekends and 12 shows to go. As I have in the past, I'll be publishing three to four collections of capsule reviews. Here's my first batch, in the order in which I saw the shows: 

Academia Nuts - My first NYMF show this year was Academia Nuts, a sort of would-be Spelling Bee with book and lyrics by Becca Anderson and Dan Marshall, and music by Julian Blackmore. Academia Nuts centers around a national quiz-show competition, with two teams vying for the championship, one comprising a family of home-schooled Christians, the other a more conventional-yet-still-geeky crew from a public high school. The show is certainly as funny as Spelling Bee, but as yet it's not quite as tuneful or moving. Anderson and Marshall show great promise as librettists: the scenario here is compelling and the book is at times uproarious. (One Evita-inspired pun had me rolling.) However, their lyric writing needs some work. According to their bios, the authors met at NYU in its graduate musical-theater writing workshop. Apparently NYU never covered prosody, as the lyrics to Academia Nuts are a bit too replete with faulty emphasis for my taste ("Play-TOH" for "Plato" and "high SCHOOL" being two notable examples). Blackmore's score is rather tuneless at times, although my reaction may also be the result of the colorless orchestrations and ear-splitting sound in evidence at the performance I attended. Still, in the asset column we have the extremely humorous book, plus some strong characterizations: Jennifer Simard gives the single funniest performance I've ever seen at a NYMF show, bringing a hilarious deadpan to the role of the home-schooling mother and coach of the rival team. 

ValueVille - One of the biggest challenges in writing a musical is developing a consistent tone. I've seen many a developing show struggle with finding a unified voice: comedy? tragedy? black comedy? satire? ValueVille is a musical that has yet to fully establish its ideal tone. The book, lyrics, and music for ValueVille are by Rowan Casey, and in future efforts Casey might be wise to take on some collaborators. Almost all of the show's songs are generic, with blandly unspecific lyrics. If you were to just listen to the score, you would have no idea what was going on in the show. But the main problem here is the book, which tries unsuccessfully to shift back and forth between knockabout comedy and grave contemplation. At first, ValueVille appears to be a light-hearted satire of big-box discount stores, but eventually it turns into a sort of tragicomic take on Sartre's No Exit. Casey never really makes it clear as to exactly what's going on. I mean, there's mystery and there's muddle. You're allowed to challenge the audience, but not to baffle them. ValueVille left me baffled. The internal logic of the show is inconsistent; characters react with shock to events that they should already be used to. Casey's book does reflect some intelligence and humor, but by the end the show becomes irritatingly ponderous, with ham-fisted attempts at deeper meaning and bland proclamations about the true meaning of life and love.  

Searching for Romeo - Unlike ValueVille, Searching for Romeo has a triple-threat author who seems more than up to all three tasks. This charming show is by Brian Sutton, and it's one of the most promising shows I've seen at NYMF this year. Searching for Romeo is a modern, comic riff on Romeo and Juliet, except from the perspective of two relatively minor characters: Rosaline and Paris. It's sort of like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, but far more light-hearted in tone, and without the philosophical wordplay. Sutton's music is extremely pleasant, retro pop, tuneful and infectious. Sutton seems to have strong instincts about which moments to musicalize, and is especially adept at creating opportunities for multiple characters to sing about the same subject, thus creating engaging duets, trios, even sextets. The lyrics reflect a fair amount of slant rhyme, but in this case it seems defensible in light of Shakespeare's frequent use of eye rhyme. The story is told in a sort of daydream, as a young women drifts off in English class while the class is reading Romeo and Juliet aloud. This presents Sutton with the opportunity of mixing modern lingo with Shakesperean meter and phrasing to deft comic effect. The dialogue features Shakespeare puns and allusions aplenty, which might have been more groan-worthy in less capable hands. The show has some transition issues to work out, but on the whole seems in terrific shape already. The NYMF production featured a particularly strong ensemble of players, including a valiant director's assistant by the name of Dan Drew, who at the eleventh hour stepped into the male lead role, script in hand, when the original actor fell ill. Bravo, dude. 

Cloned - Each year, NYMF seems to feature at least one campy mad-scientist musical, usually with mixed results. This year, there's Cloned, and the results are on the whole better than with previous entries in this NYMF subgenre. The book is by Jacey Powers and Dan Wolpow, lyrics by Dan Wolpow, and music by Adam Spiegel. Cloned features a very promising scenario, clever comic dialogue, and strong storytelling. A young scientist is trying to invent a teleportation machine, but accidentally winds up closing himself and others. The show takes a while to warm up, but eventually features some wonderfully humorous sequences. One problem might be the borderline racist landlord character, a la Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, but that could easily be toned down. Overall the story works; would that I could say the same about the score. When the music in Cloned isn't bland, it's rather unappealing, sometimes painful. Spiegel demonstrates little gift for tonality here, although the uptempo songs fair slightly better than the ballads. The NYMF production features a very solid cast overall, with three particularly strong performances from John Alban Coughlan as Dr. Marshall, the mad professor; Matthew Knowland as Fizz, the stoner roommate; and Crystal Kellogg as Sharon Stone. Yes, that Sharon Stone. With some work, Cloned could be a winner. Well, if about half of the songs were replaced, or at least got some more euphonious music.  

Somewhere With You - Sometimes, when I'm watching a show, I have to remind myself that there's no such thing as a bad idea, only poor execution. Somewhere With You was a major challenge in this respect. The show has a book by Peter Zinn, music and lyrics by JT Harding. On paper here, there's absolutely nothing that I would normally respond to. The score is wall-to-wall country music, a genre to which I have no connection. The characters are essentially white-trash crystal-meth addicts and their ilk, one of whom volunteers for the National Guard and is deployed to Iraq. Not my music, not my people, not my world. So you need to make me care. And I didn't. I wasn't quite sure what to make of the show, other than these were unsympathetic people involved in an increasingly unpleasant series of events. Yes, musicals can feature bad people and tragic circumstances, but you need to have the artistic chops to make it work. The score for Somewhere With You apparently includes songs that have already been hits on the country charts, which is probably why a number of them felt generic. Other songs felt in questionable taste, including one for the resident psychopathic drug dealer about the phone sex he has every Friday night while in prison, complete with scantily clad maidens writhing in the foreground. The book has some significant dramaturgical issues regarding who knows what and when, and features a number of scenes that are of questionable relevance, including a bizarre one-off song about a character who has shot a bunch of Iraqi children. We've never seen the character before and never see him again. I think part of my negative reaction to the show came in response to the exaggerated friends-and-family applause from the audience at the performance I caught. Never a good idea, folks.

Review - Fly By Night at Playwrights Horizons

I can't recall the last time I was so genuinely enchanted by the first act of a show, only to be so disenchanted by the final curtain. The new musical Fly By Night at Playwrights Horizons feels a little like a bait and switch. What begins as a sweet, refreshing little show with imaginative staging and deft handling of a non-linear plot eventually careens into annoyingly vague metaphysical speculation. 

 

Fly By Night starts off charming, whimsical, with a number of quirky but endearing characters. The story features a 1965 love triangle involving a young man (Adam Chanler-Berat) who works in a sandwich shop and two sisters (Patti Murin and Allison Case) who move to New York City from South Dakota. 

 

The music, lyrics and book are by Kim Rosenstock, Will Connolly, and Michael Mitnick, three names I don't recall encountering before Fly By Night. There's a tremendous amount of promise on display here. The score is pleasant, the lyrics clever, and the story handles the use of shifting times frames far more adeptly than does that of If/Then, another musicals that tries, but fails, to create a non-linear story. Despite the occasional anachronism (I'm not sure "in the zone" was a current phrase in 1965) and a few instances of bad scansion, the score shows great craft, and leaves me eager to see what the creators might produce in the future.   

Director Carolyn Cantor shapes a sharp and fluid production, with an appealingly brisk pace, at least for the first half of the show. The second half becomes attenuated, partly due to a grating shift in tone, but also due to the fact that the show is about an hour longer than the premise would seem to justify. It's hard to sustain whimsy for 155 minutes. The moment the show started to lose me was when the young man and his boss sing a rather unpleasant duet while making a bunch of sandwiches. Prior to that, the Fly By Night had me grinning ear to ear.

Later in the show, things get dark, both literally and figuratively, as the story is set before and during the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. A number of uncharacteristically grim things occur in the plot, and the book never really comes to any resolution, apart from some mystical speculation about how we're all made literally from stardust. (Scientifically true, but metaphysically pretentious.)

Fly By Night also has a major plot device that never really meshes with the rest of the story, regarding the young man's father and how the young man ignores the father's numerous attempts to reach out to him after the death of the young man's mother. We never really learn why the son has been so callous, we only hear him apologize.  

But, again, the first act of Fly By Night is a real charmer, and the cast includes some of the most reliable and appealing performers working in New York today, including the above-listed trio, as well as Bryce Ryness, Peter Friedman, and Henry Stram. I'd love to see Fly By Night get some significant revisions, because there's so much here already that's just delightful. And, again, I look forward to seeing what else Rosenstock, Connoly and Mitnick come up with the the future. 

Reviews - Act One, Casa Valentina, Lady Day at the Emerson Bar & Grill

Regular readers will recall that I occasionally attend "straight" plays. (I prefer to call them "non-musicals.) My attendance at these belting-deprived affairs is usually contingent on the presence of some intriguing crossover from the world of musicals. Some of the actors perhaps, or members of the creative staff, might be slumming in between musical gigs.

The recently-ended season presented a fairly decent stock plays with musical-theater resonance. In preparation for the Tony Awards this evening, I'll be engaging in a little desk-clearing with this post, hoping to bring you up to speed on some of the "legitimate" offerings from the spring. (Musicals, as you know, are illegitimate, spawned disgracefully out of the holy bonds of wedlock)

Truth be told, I actually enjoy non-musicals a great deal. I try to focus my trips to New York City on seeing as many of the Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals as I can, but there's often time to add a play here or a dance performance there.

But don't worry, dear reader: my heart remains where it likely will always remain, firmly ensconced in the thoracic cavity of musical theater. (How's that for an overly specific metaphor?)

Casa Valentina has quite few ties with the musical-theater world, starting with author Harvey Fierstein, presenting his first non-musical in more than 20 years. Also present are director Joe Mantello, and a cast that features Patrick Page and John Cullum, certainly no strangers to the musical stage. The play concerns one weekend at a country getaway for heterosexual men who nonetheless like to dress in female clothing. Secrets and shame lurk behind every bush, as it were, and we eventually learn that the titular Casa Valentina is just shy of foreclosure, and desperately needs to form a seemingly unholy alliance just to stay afloat. As is typical in Fierstein's recent work, things get preachy as all hell, and there's a lot of expository speechifying. Nonetheless, Fierstein creates some vivid characterizations and crafts a setup that wrings compelling drama from the scenario. But then, at the end, he drops the ball with a denouement that is both forced and inscrutable. The show is worth seeing mainly because of two standout performances in the otherwise ensemble cast: Mare Winningham as the seemingly understanding wife of one of the men, and genial hostess for the weekend. Winningham really shows her stripes toward the end as the fabric of their little dreamworld begins to unravel. Tony nominee Reed Birney crafts a searing performance as the honored guest who knows everybody's secrets and is not above using them to her advantage.

The women who received Tony nods for Best Actress in a Musical this year can thank the fact that Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill is technically a play, not a musical, although it does contain a full complement of Billie Holiday classics. Otherwise, Audra would have picked up her sixth Tony Award in a category with mostly strong competition this season. (Mary Bridget Davies? Puh-Leez.) It almost isn't fair how stunning Audra is onstage, and how versatile she is. So far, her Tonys are in three categories: Best Featured Actress in a Musical, Best actress in a Musical, and Best featured Actress in a Play. If she wins tonight, as I think and hope she will, she will have won in all four acting categories. (Perhaps then, we should take a tip from sports and retire her number, as it were.) Audra crafts a flawless rendition of Billie Holliday, but unlike Davies with her Janis Joplin impersonation, delves deeply into the character to show us her state of mind and spiral downward. The play takes place just months before Holliday's death, and Billie has seen better days. So we see her right before the end, and yet unlike End of the Rainbow, which dredged up a squalid and pathetic Judy Garland, Lady Day allows Holliday her last shreds of dignity.

I had heard mixed reactions going into Act One. Tedious and bloated, some said. Overly long and flat, said others. I, however, was thoroughly charmed, even captivated by author/director James Lapine's loving tribute to Moss Hart, based on Hart's own Act One, considered by many (myself included) to be the finest theatrical memoir ever written. The book and the play concern Hart's early rise into the world of show business, focusing primarily on his impoverished childhood, desperate need to work in the theater, and big break landing George S. Kaufman as a collaborating on his first big hit, Once in a Lifetime. Along the way we meet many colorful characters (many of them played by the always delicious Andrea Martin). I was predisposed to falling in love with these people, partly because I'm such a fan of the book, but also because I consider Moss Hart to be one of the unsung founders of musical theater. Sure, we hear about his Kaufman collaborations, but Hart was also instrumental in bringing greater cohesion, ambition, and social conscience to the American musical, including the shows he wrote himself (Lady in the Dark, As Thousands Cheer, Face the Music) as well as the ones he directed (My Fair Lady, Camelot). Central to making Act One the joy that it is are the two central performers, Santino Fontana as Hart as a young adult (three actors play Hart at various ages) and Tony Shalhoub, who plays Kaufman, among others. These remarkably appealing performers create the emotional center of the production, and Shalhoub is a riot when wrapping his teeth around Kaufman's legendary and infuriating mannerisms.

Review - Working at Boston's Lyric Stage

The musical Working has always held a sort of fascination for me. Opportunities to see it staged live are somewhat rare, but it's one of those shows that, when I listen to the original cast recording, it's hard to believe it was such a flop on Broadway in 1978. There's just so much good material in the score. (My favorites are "Just a Housewife," "Fathers and Sons," and "It's an Art.")

Of course, Working the musical was originally adapted from the Studs Terkel book, Working. Composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz provided the adaptation, with one Nina Faso. Schwartz also directed the Broadway production, in addition to contributing three of the show's strongest songs ("All the Livelong Day," "It's an Art," "Fathers and Sons").

But Working is one of those shows that authors and adaptors keep returning to, like Merrily We Roll Along or Mack and Mabel, shows that, very similar to Working, sound so great on their cast recordings, it's hard to believe that the shows themselves don't work.

Unfortunately, Working has never quite worked as a show, despite the superior quality of some of its songs. The show's ongoing revisions continue to be hampered by a fundamental flaw: because the show sets out to portray such a broad swath of working people and their individual stories, there's not enough time to become emotionally invested in any of these people. 

The latest reworking of Working includes revisions by Gordon Greenberg and two new songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, of In the Heights fame. This version of the show played an engagement at New York's 59E59 Theaters in 2012; I was, however, unable to catch the show during that limited run. Fortunately, Boston's Lyric Stage is currently presenting Working in its updated form (through February 1st), which thankfully gave me a chance to play a little catch-up.

 

The piece remains detrimentally fragmented, but Working plays best when it's celebrating the individual, the unacknowledged. There are numerous moments of great poignancy, but by the time we form a bond, it's usually time to move on to the next vignette. I did notice during this viewing of the show that there were some very apt juxtapositions of characters (a hooker and a socialite, a health-care worker and an au pair, etc.), and an admirably smooth flow from one scene to the next.

In terms of new material, the most effective new segment comes from Lin-Manuel Miranda, a touching new song called "A Very Good Day," in which the aforementioned health-care worker and au pair sing plaintively about doing what "no one [else] wants to do." Miranda's other song about a delivery boy is bland and unimpressive, but "A Very Good Day" seems to fit right into the intent of the show.

The Lyric production features a cast of local professional and semi-pro actors, and the results are almost universally strong. There was a bit of artificiality to a few of the performances, and the singing voices weren't all up to par, but for the most part these are people who wouldn't be out of place in a New York production of the show, or indeed any other show. Especially strong are the versatile Christopher Chew and the vibrant Shannon Lee Jones playing the more mature roles throughout the show.

Director/choreographer Ilyse Robbins does a fine job with the character work, but her musical staging here is somewhat amateurish. The group numbers feature unimaginative movement (step-touch, step-clap, allemande left, promenade right, etc.) giving the thankfully few ensemble moments a decided "Waiting for Guffman" feel. Also, the pacing of the show needs picking up: if you're not going to have an intermission, it's wise to keep the proceedings to about 90 minutes. This production clocks in and about 110. On the plus side, Robbins and lighting designer John Malinowski make very effective using of lighting to set the mood and emphasize transitions.

Working may never work overall as a piece, but there's plenty of pleasure to derive from the fragments, as well as the Lyric production of same. At a time when even the most well-heeled of regional theaters are falling back on safe, predictable choices, it's commendable that the Lyric would take a chance on an admittedly flawed but nonetheless fascinating show.

Review - Little Miss Sunshine at the Second Stage

The end-of-the-semester crush is upon me, and I find myself scrambling to grade papers, plan finals, meet with students, and yet still keep up with my blogging backlog.

As Tevye said, "It isn't easy."

One rather interesting byproduct of the crush is that I find myself writing reviews of shows that I saw about a month ago. (I still have Murder for Two and A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder in the pipeline. Both are absolutely delightful, and I'm going back to see Gentleman's Guide again next week. Watch for my reviews.)

The interesting part is that, as I return to consider these pieces critically, I find that some of them have really stuck with me, creating a lasting impression of the grand old time that I had while attending, for instance, both Murder for Two and A Gentleman's Guide.

And then there's Little Miss Sunshine, the new musical with music and lyrics by William Finn, and with book and direction by James Lapine. The show is just now rounding out an extended engagement at the Second Stage Theatre. The musical is based, of course, on the delightfully quirky 2006 movie "Little Miss Sunshine," but the stage version has had a bit of a rocky development. It played an out-of-town engagement in 2011 at La Jolla Playhouse, and was anything but well-received. The musical has since undergone considerable changes, to the point where only three of the original songs remain.

Despite the show's poorly received tryout, and some pretty dismissive word-of-mouth, I went into Little Miss Sunshine with a hopeful sense of expectation. This is, after all, the team that gave us Falsettos, A New Brain, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. And while I was watching the show, I remember thinking that it was a whole lot more engaging and enjoyable than the advanced word had me expecting.

But unlike both Murder for Two and A Gentleman's Guide, Little Miss Sunshine just hasn't stuck with me. The tone of the show is clear, if not quite as sharp as that of the movie. And the characterizations are vivid and endearing: you're genuinely pulling for these people as they race to make it to California so that little Olive Hooper can participate in the beauty pageant.

Finn is at his best here when crafting quirky uptempo sequences, of which there are thankfully quite a few. But the edges seem a lot softer, the neurosis a bit more tame. Which is unfortunate, because the source material really cries out for edge. His ballads for this show reflect a tad more simple sentiment and earnest cliche than he has exhibited before. Also, Finn would seem to have no ear at all for how young girls speak to each other. His songs for a passel of mean girls who taunt Olive sound like what a sixty-something man might imagine nine-year-old girls sound like, but without having any direct experience in same. In other words, fake and forced.

Director James Lapine keeps the action moving at a fast clip, providing a number of inspired sequences along the way, particularly those involving the family VW microbus, getting it started, and then getting all the folks on board. There are clear Lapine touches in the set design, particularly in the chairs on wheels used here to suggest the family van (greatly reminiscent of the wheeled set pieces he used in Falsettos), which allow for great efficiency in traveling from sequence to sequence. These modular pieces are set amid a genuinely striking unit set, designed by Beowulf Boritt, that comprises a serpentine road map climbing up the back wall, and then snaking onto the ceiling over the audience's head. It's stunning.

The cast for Little Miss Sunshine features a number of usual suspects in the New York City theater world, including Will Swenson as the father, Stephanie J. Block as his wife, and Rory O’Malley as the suicidal Uncle Frank. All extremely professional performers, but, getting back to my point about a lasting impression, I find that none of the performances has really stuck with me, except perhaps for little nine-year-old Hannah Nordberg as Olive.

So, I'm glad Little Miss Sunshine made it to New York, and that I got a chance to see it. But the show, while possessing admitted charms, will very likely not have the staying power of a Falsettos or a Spelling Bee. Even so, I'll take second-rate Finn-Lapine over first-rate work from many of the other teams currently working any day of the week.

Review - Fun Home at The Public Theater

Every once in a while, a musical comes along that restores my faith in the art form. Fun Home, the shattering new musical now playing an extended engagement at The Public Theater, is one of those musicals. I'll elaborate as to why below, but suffice to say, if you haven't already seen Fun Home, you should. And if you have seen Fun Home, you should go again, which is exactly what I did.

Seriously, go get your tickets now. I'll wait.

OK, so you've got your tickets, and now you're back. Cool. Now, here's the thing about Fun Home. It shouldn't be nearly as enjoyable as it is, at least based on the subject matter. It's about a young lesbian who grows up in a funeral home, and whose father, a closeted gay man, commits suicide by stepping in front of a Mack truck. (We learn this at the very top of the show, so it's not really a spoiler.) I mean, talk about your "bad ideas for a musical," right?

Thankfully, librettist Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori have found just the right balance of humor and pathos to bring vivid life to Alison Bechdel's intensely moving graphic novel, also called Fun Home. (The title represents the family's jocular twist on "funeral home.") Kron's book features some slight changes from the graphic novel: while the musical is unequivocal that the father committed suicide, the novel ruminates on this point and never really comes to a resolution.

The production is directed with both subtlety and bite by Sam Gold, and features an outstanding cast of newcomers and New York regulars alike. (More on these folks later.) The show starts with a slow burn, then builds into a shattering climax, culminating in a series of solos at the end for the three main characters: the father, the mother, and Alison (played at three different ages by three separate actresses). Gold includes some marvelously apt touches, including a final graphic taken directly from Bechdel's book that provides the heartfelt piece of punctuation to bring the production to a close.

Fun Home, the book and the musical, is all about character study, and Tesori and Kron provide an abundant assortment of character numbers, which just seem to get richer and deeper as the story progresses. The show begins with a number in which the mother, Helen, played with quiet intensity by the always remarkable Judy Kuhn, feverishly exhorts her three children to get the family's museum-like house in shape for a visit from a woman from a preservation society. Here, we not only learn about Helen's frantic desire to please, we also get a strong sense of the father's sharp, exacting nature. And he's not even on stage. That's dramatic efficiency.

What follows are many rich and flavorful character numbers: the youngest version of Alison sings touchingly about a butch delivery woman - and her fascinating ring of keys - who has just entered the diner where Alison and her father are eating. The middle Alison has a wonderfully funny solo about having sex for the first time while she's away at college, proclaiming, "I'm changing my major to 'Sex with Joan.'" And the score, as well as the show, just keeps getting better.

In fact the show ends with a trio of numbers that almost seem like an embarrassment of riches. The oldest Alison gets her own thrilling set piece during a car ride with her reticent father. The father, played with an almost nerve-wracking sense of palpable conflict by Michael Cerveris, ends the show with nervous breakdown of a song in which the new house that he's restoring becomes a heartrending metaphor for his shattered life. Tesori includes some achingly deft uses of leitmotif here, in which the father picks up some of the very same observations that the middle Alison employs during her sex-with-Joan song, but turns her empowering sense of discovery into a nightmare of fragmented regrets.

But my favorite moment of the show, the one that knocked the wind out of me both times I saw it, came when Helen, the mother, is sitting at the kitchen table talking to her daughter (middle Alison), telling Alison that she's known about the father's affairs with men all along. "I don't know how you did it," Alison says. At which point the mother starts into a number that is so raw, so emotionally honest, and ultimately so moving that I can quite easily rank it among my favorite moments in a lifetime of theater. Seriously. Tesori again employs leitmotif to stunning effect, this time quoting the opening number -- "Welcome to our house on Maple Avenue." The phrase becomes here an ironic rumination, and at the end of the song a discordant crash of loss and resignation.

OK, now, one final note, on a personal level. I have a special connection to the subject matter here, partly because I grew up in the 1970s, as Bechdel did, and many of her cultural signposts -- The Partridge Family, The Jackson Five, "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" -- brought smiles of wistful nostalgia to my face. Also, I grew up in a funeral home. No, really, I did. Like Bechdel, I grew up playing around the caskets, helping my father arrange the flowers, even occasionally helping him with "removals," a euphemistic term for picking up and transporting a body to a funeral home. Fun Home features a scene in which young Alison is called into the embalming room by her father so that she can hand him a pair of scissors from a tray that he is unable to reach. Her sense of both fascination and revulsion brought back a flood of memories that added to the already rich tapestry Fun Home represents. 

Clearly, you don't have to have grown up in a funeral home to derive intense pleasure from Fun Home. (But, hey, all the better if you did.) You just need an open mind and a desire to experience what, in my humble opinion, is the best damn musical to hit New York City in 2013. Hands down.

Review - Love's Labour's Lost in Central Park

One thing I've noticed lately is that my tolerance for flaws in a musical depends on the overall feeling that I'm developing as I'm watching a performance. When a musical, overall, is well-crafted, I'm willing to make allowances for flaws here and there. But when a show isn't taking me along for the ride, I'm more likely to wince at things like slant rhyme, insufficiently developed characters, poor scansion, forced comedy, and the like.

So, for instance, the same flaws that I found forgivable in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson I found increasingly irksome in Love's Labour's Lost, the new musical by the same creative team: composer/lyricist Michael Friedman and librettist/director Alex Timbers. Whereas Bloody Bloody reflected a unity of vision, and a ripe sense of college-boy snark, Love's Labour's Lost, while occasionally diverting, overall feels laboured and just a bit lost.

Of course, Love's Labour's Lost is based on the original Shakespeare play of the same name. The plot is essentially this: The King of Navarre and three college friends make an oath to devote the next three years of their lives to their studies. Enter a local princess and her three ladies in attendance to cock the whole thing up. There's also a subplot involving a random Spaniard, Don Armado, and his amorous attentions towards the local bar wench, and a bunch of subsidiary characters who come in and out to keep the action moving. Or not, as the case is with Timbers' adaptation. There's too much going on, and not enough development of any one particular element.

Timbers' adaptation includes almost all of the original Shakespeare characters, which creates significant problems in character development. To make room for songs, Timbers would have been wise to excise a subplot or two. Indeed, the only character who felt even close to fully fledged was Lord Berowne, played here by the always engaging Colin Donnell. It's really a shame, because the cast of Love's Labour's Lost represents a who's who of current and future Broadway stars, including Daniel Breaker as the King, and Lucas Near-Verbrugge and Bryce Pinkham as his other two Lords. In the female cast we have Rebecca Naomi Jones and Patti Murin, among many other fine performers. It's a shame to see all this talent underused in thinly developed roles. Even worse, we also have the wonderfully gifted Rachel Dratch and Jeff Hiller somewhat wasted here as two supposedly comic academics.

As for the score, I must confess that I've never been a fan of Mr. Friedman's work, despite my admiration for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson as a whole. His songs for Bloody Bloody were poorly wrought but for the most part dramatically effective. His score for Saved was unmemorable at best, clumsy at worst. Here, Friedman's songs are intermittently engaging, but not exactly indelible. (I have friends well-versed in musical theater, however, who disagree with me on this point.)

There are some fairly decent solos and chorus numbers, including "Are You a Man" for Berowne and "Not a Good Idea" for the female cast. There's a somewhat effective song about subtext, in which one character speaks out loud the internal thoughts of two other characters, although How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying handles this device far more adroitly. Too many of the numbers feel thrown in without context or purpose, including a rather quizzical song about a guy who loves cats.

My biggest peeve with Friedman is that he seems incapable of writing, or unwilling to write, a song in which he doesn't force extra syllables into every other line. He seems downright contemptuous of metric convention. One of the most enjoyable moments of the show was when the four central men perform the boy-band number "To Be With You," interpolated here for comic effect. As enjoyable as this number was, it emphasized what many of the other songs in the show were missing: appealing tunes and regular structure.

[SPOILER ALERT: I reveal the end of the show as well as a significant staging surprise in the paragraphs below.]

As director, Timbers does provide some moments of comedic inspiration in between Friedman's often cloddish songs. However, much of the fun feels grafted on through anachronistic quips and asides rather than crafted through sharp characterization or deft wordplay. One number ends with a kick line in the style of "One" from A Chorus Line, a knowing nod to the Public Theater's venerable cash cow. Cute, but hardly organic.

Late in the show, apropos of nothing I could discern, a high-school marching band descends upon the stage. I would imagine it's supposed to be this delightful surprise, but it only served to remind me that the production team didn't have many staging ideas that actually connected to what was going on in the show. At another point, one of the supporting cast members comes out dressed in a costume from Cats, possibly as a callback to the random number earlier in the show about a feline fetish. But it felt tossed in as an ineffective attempt at zany, madcap unpredictability.

By the end of the show, everything appears to be working out happily among the various pairs of lovers, until a messenger arrives to inform the princess that her father has passed away and that she must return to her kingdom at once to assume the throne. The princess and her ladies ask the boys to wait one year and come calling upon them again. It's a rather glum ending, staged rather solemnly, and it brings the momentum of the production to a grinding halt.

Yes, I'm aware that that's how the Shakespeare play ends. But My Fair Lady changes the end of Pygmalion. West Side Story has Juliet alive at the end. In musicals, faithfulness is neither necessary nor desirable. Indeed, slavish fidelity is the refuge of the artistically bereft.

 

Reviews - New York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF) - Part 4

This past month, I saw 25 musicals in 17 days. Even for me, that's a lot. Eighteen of those shows were at the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). As one might expect, many of those shows were either in need of serious revision or were probably beyond repair. It would have been easy to become discouraged about the musical form.

But, I actually had a much higher NYMF hit rate this year than last year. Out of those 18 shows, three were outstanding, albeit in need of some tweaks: Julian Po, Legacy Falls, and Crossing Swords. That's about 16%, which is quite remarkable when you think that all these shows are still under development, plus the fact that I'm pretty darned difficult to please.

We all owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the good folks at NYMF, and NAMT, and The O'Neill, and the Goodspeed, and all the other wonderful programs out there that give new artists and works a chance to grow. If I took anything away from NYMF this year, it's that there are tons of people interested in creating and seeing new musicals. Thanks to NYMF, these two sets of people have the opportunity to come together and celebrate the art form they love.

I was one of the NYMF jurors this year, so I had to chance to weigh in on the Awards for Excellence that some of these shows received. In this, my final roundup of NYMF reviews, I make note below of where I and my distinguished fellow jurors concur, and also where we disagree.

Crossing Swords - Hands-down, the most promising show I saw at NYMF this year, Crossing Swords is a charming modern take on Cyrano de Bergerac. The book, music and lyrics are all by Joe Slabe, a fact that makes the show all the more remarkable. Crossing Swords concerns a student production of Cyrano, which Slabe uses as the backdrop of a more present-day love triangle: boy loves girl, girl loves other boy, second boy loves first boy. We also have the male and female teachers who act as chaperon and director, respectively. Slabe's characters are rich and fully realized in a way that the authors of some other NYMF shows -- Volleygirls and Gary Goldfarb in particular -- could learn from. Slabe has also crafted an accomplished score, full of charming tunes, touching moments, and ambitious counterpoint. What's more, he deftly interweaves song and dialogue, particularly effective in a song at the end of act one that brings all five characters together for a dramatically compelling finaletto.The show has a few problems: the male teacher has a back story about a fallen WWII comrade that doesn't reach fruition. The show seems to imply that the relationship was romantic, but then toward the end of the show, the male teacher responds amorously to the female teacher's kiss. There's also the continued reference to an off-stage character, Hopkins, that isn't quite satisfying. In fact, the resolution of this plot line felt a little trans-phobic, or at least trans-insensitive. Crossing Swords won NYMF awards in direction and music direction. It also won an award for its book, plus a well-deserved outstanding performance award for Steven Hauck as the male teacher. I would also have given the show best music and best ensemble, although the show did receive honorable mentions in both categories. I eagerly await the next incarnation of Crossing Swords, as well as the future work of the talented Mr. Slabe.

Volleygirls - This big winner at the NYMF awards this year was Volleygirls, picking up Best Ensemble, Most Promising New Musical, the "Best of Fest" audience favorite award, among others. The show is certainly a crowd-pleaser, but I didn't find it particularly well crafted. (Book by Rob Ackerman, music by Eli Bolin, lyrics by Sam Fromin.) The scenario is promising: an English teacher at local high school was also once an Olympic volleyball competitor. The principal calls upon her to coach the school's girls' volleyball team, which forces her to confront her embarrassing gaffe at the Olympics. The production featured the rather distracting element of having the entire cast on-stage most of the time, with cast members visibly reacting in ways that seemed inconsistent with their characters. Even more damning were two irredeemably irritating characters -- one, the mother of one of the players, and another, the daughter of the principal -- who are each painted as gross caricatures. The mom is cartoonishly evil, and the teen is insufferably belligerent. (The painfully abrasive song "I'm in Hell" had me audibly agreeing with the character.) Sure, characters can have negative traits, or even be evil, but you have to develop them in a way that's believable. And then, at the end of the show, each of the characters pulls a convenient 180 that's totally out of step with her previous development. One of the main attractions for this production was the always delightful Susan Blackwell, who, despite some evident vocal fry, does not disappoint. But then Blackwell probably just fell victim to the chief mode of communication between all of these characters: screaming, both during songs and during scenes. Clearly, I'm in a minority here, but I can't imagine enjoying any future incarnation of Volleygirls unless it undergoes some significant rewrites.

Gary Goldfarb: Master Escapist - This show picked up two NYMF awards: Best Lyrics and a distinguished performance award for lead actor, Jared Loftin. Loftin was certainly a worthy performer, but the show surrounding that performance was a gawd-awful mess. I have no idea what my fellow NYMF jurors saw in these lyrics, replete as they are with reversed syntax, poor scansion, and clumsy attempts at rhyming. (The book and lyrics are by Omri Schein, music by James Olmstead.) Gary Goldfarb concerns the plight of the eponymous Gary and his desire to do his magic act in his high-school talent show. The show clearly thinks it ought to be a laugh riot, but it isn't nearly as funny as it thinks it is. The staging featured tons of awkward comic business that simply didn't land. What's worse, Gary is encircled by an extremely unappealing cast of characters, from his harridan mother, to his rival magician, to the school pretty boy and pretty girl, all of whom actively conspire to make Gary's life miserable. Everyone tortures Gary for being fat, except the girl in the wheelchair, who has a thing for Gary. But the other characters also taunt the handicapped girl relentlessly. Yeah, shows have a right to showcase unpleasant activities, but it wasn't entirely clear to me that the authors weren't enjoying the taunting, particularly during a painfully unfunny song that Gary sings to the crippled girl, called "You'll Never Walk Over Me." (Get it? Oh, I tell you, that's a knee-slapper.) What's more, like Volleygirls, Gary Goldfarb features two characters that change on a dime at the end of the show without the slightest hint of development. Gary's mom, who has unrelentingly derided Gary for his interest in magic, is suddenly the proud Jewish mother when the talent show comes around. And the school bully has a similarly out-of-the-blue...change of team, shall we say? I can't say that I saw much in Gary Goldfarb worth salvaging.

Marry Harry - One of the benefits that NYMF affords to the writers and composers who participate is the opportunity to see their shows performed by Broadway-caliber performers. Ironically, that can also be a liability: It can be hard to determine whether material is working because it's good or whether the pros are giving it more polish than it deserves. Such was, I think, part of the problem with Marry Harry, an amiable but awkward show with book by Jennifer Robbins, music by Dan Martin, and lyrics by Michael Biello. The cast of Marry Harry featured some really strong established performers, including Philip Hoffman, Jane Summerhays, and Annie Golden, plus two really strong newer faces, Jillian Louis and Robb Sapp. Perhaps with a less accomplished cast, the authors might have had more of an opportunity to see what's wrong with the show. Marry Harry centers around a struggling family restaurant and the son who wants to leave to become a chef, not just a cook. We also have the female landlord whose daughter is about to get married, but whose fiance dumps her right before the wedding. The young man and young woman go out on a date and impulsively agree to be married. The rest of the drama hinges on the repercussions of this hasty decision. For a good portion of the show, the story works, aided by some lovely character songs. But right now, the charming aspects of the show are overshadowed by some rather unbelievable plot developments, the worst of which involves the young woman becoming jealous when a female performance artist captures herself kissing the young man on film and uses it in her act. First, the two numbers for the performance artist were woefully out of sync with the style of the rest of the show. But, more to the point, the young women now calls off the wedding, but in a way that feels completely out of character. It felt manufactured, as though act two needed a lift and this was the best the authors could come up with. Even worse was an incredibly offensive song in which a Caucasian actor plays an Asian waiter, singing about the couple in sing-song-y pidgin English. Overall, Marry Harry shows some merit, but it will likely need more prep before it's ready for public consumption.

Castle Walk - Just before my final NYMF weekend, I taught the last lesson in my summer course on the history of musical-theater dance. During the course, we not only discussed the big-name dance greats, like Jerome Robbins and Agnes de Mille, we also discuss the significant precursors and influences, such as minstrelsy and social dance. Two prominent figures in the social dance discussion were Irene and Vernon Castle, largely forgotten today, but who in their time had an enormous impact on popularizing ballroom dance, in particular their signature Castle Walk. When I heard that one of this year's NYMF shows would tell the story of the Castles, I knew I had to take it in. The show Castle Walk takes place mostly during the filming of the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Vernon has died, and Irene is serving as technical consultant for the film, but it quickly becomes clear that the studio doesn't really want her input. The drama in the show comes from the increasing tension between Irene and the film director, as she continues to object to the various liberties that the movie is taking with her story. The frustrating thing about Castle Walk is that is feels so professionally crafted, but it doesn't yet add up to a satisfying show. The book, music and lyrics, all by Milton Granger, never feel less than polished. It's just that he show isn't very exciting. Oh, it's wistful, and heartfelt, but it's also just a wee bit dull. When Irene starts schooling a group of dancers on how to do the Castle Walk, Granger gives a a mini dance-history lesson: prior to the Castles, dance was either stuffy or lewd. The Castles made it elegant and fun. Suddenly I was in, but only momentarily. The production reflected great skill in both the performances and the presentation. Lynne Wintersteller as Irene was superb, with a glorious voice and the ability to convey a great deal of character in even the slightest glance. Both Wintersteller's performance and the show's copious dance were recognized by the NYMF jurors, and rightly so. By the end of the show, I found myself wishing that Granger could find a way to breathe a little more life into his show. The subject matter is certainly compelling. What it needs is a little inspiration.

 

Review - Nobody Loves You at Second Stage Off-Broadway

I had the opportunity to see the new musical Nobody Loves You a few years ago while it was still under development.

Some backstory: For the past three years, a handful of students from the Boston Conservatory have participated in the Festival of New Artists at the venerable Goodspeed Opera House. While attending the Festival, I've had the pleasure of watching my students perform in staged readings of a number of promising new musicals, but Nobody Loves You marks the first time that of these shows has made it to a major stage in New York City.

When I saw the reading of Nobody Loves You in 2011, I was moderately entertained, but not really blown away. I remember thinking authors Itamar Moses (book and lyrics) and Gaby Alter (music) would need to do a good deal of work before the show might have any chance of a commercial future.

Well, cut to 2013, and it appears that Moses and Alter have indeed done a considerable amount of work on Nobody Loves You, at least as evidenced by the delightful new production at the Second Stage Theatre. Their efforts, combined with the taut comic direction by Michelle Tattenbaum, and a dynamite cast of some of New York's best working actors (but, alas, none of my students from that initial reading) have made Nobody Loves You an infectious comic confection that also just might have something to say as well.

Nobody Loves You is also the title of a fictional reality TV show within the show. The lead male, Jeff, is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy doing his dissertation on ontology. (A.K.A. The nature of reality. Get it?) Jeff's girlfriend breaks up with him because he's so cynical about her enthusiasm for reality TV. Jeff auditions for her favorite show in an effort to get her back.

Now, admittedly, reality TV is a pretty easy target for ridicule. But Moses has the chops to actually hit this blight where it lives, smartly dissecting the sociological aspects of the genre without ever making it seem didactic. In fact, the show is a buoyant delight, thanks in part to Moses's sharp characterizations and facile feel for comedy.

Moses is aided immeasurably in this regard by the superb cast. As the two leads, the philosophy student and the TV production assistant who fall for each other over the course of the show, we have Bryan Fenkart and Aleque Reid, both remarkably appealing and nuanced as the reluctant participants in this crass phenomenon.

In the supporting cast are three of the most reliable performers now working: Leslie Kritzer, Rory O'Malley, and Lauren Molina. Kritzer is a pro, and handles her multiple roles with equal comic dexterity. Rory O'Malley was virtually unrecognizable at first. His countenance for his character at the top of the show was just so at-odds with that of his Tony-nominated role in The Book of Mormon, it wasn't until later in the show when he was playing a gay blogger that I even realized it was him. That's range. Lauren Molina likewise demonstrates her great versatility in a delightfully trashy role that is markedly different from her roles in both Sweeney Todd and Rock of Ages. And Heath Calvert is endearingly vapid as the reality show's host.

The only sour notes, pun intended, in the show came from the music department. Gaby Alter's uptempo tunes often seem like they're on a fruitless search for a melody, and the sound level often bordered on deafening. (Admittedly, not necessarily the composer's fault, but a liability nonetheless.) Plus, some of his ballads feature rather odd-sounding intervals. But Nobody Loves You isn't really a show that's about pretty tunes and hummable melodies. It's feel-good satire, if that makes any sense, and one that introduces the musical-theater world to a promising new writing team.

Reviews - 2013 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) - Part 3

Here's round-up number three, out of four, of my reviews of the shows at this year's New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). As in my previous review round-ups, there's a fairly wide range of quality represented here, but in this batch, most of the shows were aiming at comedy.

The operative word here is "aiming." Some hit a comedic bulls-eye, while others missed the target entirely, hitting a wayward barnyard animal in a completely different county. As any writer, actor, director, or any other person in the business will tell you, comedy is hard. It doesn't seem hard when you're watching it, because the best comedy feels effortless. But, chances are, a whole lot of effort went into that seeming effortlessness, as the following shows will bear witness to.

Stay tuned for my final batch of reviews in the days to come.

Legacy Falls - I genuinely never thought that I would so thoroughly enjoy a musical about a soap opera, of all things. But, as I've said many times, it's all about execution. And Legacy Falls, while not without its flaws, has a tremendous amount going for it: an appealing score (music and lyrics by James Burn) rich characterizations, and a genuinely humorous book (by Burn and Ian Poitier). The plot concerns the efforts of the TV show's new producer to save the thirty-year-old program from cancellation. Rumors abound that some catastrophic event will occur in the plot of the soap to get rid of some old faces and make room for new blood. Some of the actors, including the show's male lead, have been with the show since its inception. Just as he's wondering whether it's time to move on, he falls in love with a younger man who works for the TV show's sponsor. Word gets out about the formerly closeted star, and the plot thickens both on and off the screen. The appeal of Legacy Falls the musical lies both in the genuinely lovely moments for the central lovers, as well as in some terrific numbers for the delightfully bitchy female soap stars. The show could use some work: there's a bit too much slant rhyme for my taste, and act two could use a bit of pruning. But, on the whole, Legacy Falls is an eminently enjoyable musical that I hope to see have a significant life after NYMF.

Mother Divine - It sounded pretty good on paper: Father Divine is a charismatic Harlem preacher during the Depression. His wife, Mother Divine, becomes gravely ill, but since he's supposed to be this faith healer, he hides her away in a rundown hospital. When Mother Divine passes on, Father tries to pass off this buxom blond as the new fleshly incarnation of his wife, and Mother comes back from the afterlife to set things straight. You'd think with this setup the show might be replete with rousing gospel numbers and the comedic wisdom of some sassy African American women, neck rolls and all. Instead we get some rather thin characterizations, songs with very little shape or craft, and many forced attempts at comic business. (Book and lyrics are by Laurel Klinger Vartabedian, music by Bill Evans.) Particularly painful were the would-be comic ministrations of Mother Divine and her dealings with a cartoonish IRS agent, played here but the normally reliable Howie Michael Smith. But because the scenes are underwritten and the direction almost nonexistent, Smith is forced into paroxysms of comic desperation in an ill-fated effort to make the scenes work. The show gains a bit of momentum when Mother Divine comes back via seance at the end of act one, but by that point the damage is done. One decent number can't redeem an act that's otherwise been devoid of craft.

Boys Will Be Boys - The first thing I noticed when I sat down to watch Boys Will Be Boys was a sign over the set that said "American Legion, Post 69." Uh-oh, I thought. Is that an example of the level of wit we could expect from the show? Sadly, yes. The premise is appealing enough: Four gay guys and a gal pal have supposedly put together this review as a benefit for "Gay-DD," the inability to focus on any trend for more than a few weeks. Not bad. But what follows often feels like a never-ending barrage of bitchery and labored puns about "openings," "holes," "balls," and "wood." There's even an ode to Viagra called...wait for it..."You Lift Me Up." The show is not without charm, nor the writing without craft. The book and lyrics are by Joe Miloscia, the music by Kenneth Kacmar. Miloscia seems at his best when trafficking in pastiche, as when he crafts genuinely witty homages to "Some People" from Gypsy and "Somewhere That's Green" from Little Shop of Horrors. And there are some moving moments in the show, particularly a very sweet song called "A Giant in My Eyes," the title of which is thankfully not a double entendre. But the benefit concept just sort of peters out, and the final number is rather limp. (Sorry. Couldn't help myself.) Still, the show is not without charm, and might find opportunities for summer runs in Provincetown or other gay havens.

The Pirates of Finance - As you can probably tell from the title, The Pirates of Finance is based on the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. Specifically, author Charles Veley has taken the music of Sir Arthur Sullivan and crafted new lyrics to tell a modern comic tale of financial misdeeds and derring-do. Veley would seem to be quite the G&S aficionado, and he seems to have the narrative and physical chops to do Sir Arthur Sullivan's music a certain amount of justice. The story features an idealistic young man, Frederick Freemarket, who has just inherited a Wall Street financial company from his uncle. The financial markets are in crisis, but Frederick's uncle, before he died, invented a "cash machine" that can sort through all of the worthless derivatives in the marketplace and find buyers for them. Enter a corporate raider called Mr. Behemoth who openly plots to take over the company and proceed to rule the world. That's certainly a setup of which Sir William Schwenck Gilbert would approve. Some of Veley's plot logic felt a bit wonky, even for a G&S piece. Gilbert and Sullivan shows may often be ridiculous, but at least the made a certain offbeat sense. Sometimes Veley's characters react in ways that seem inconsistent with their development, as when the normally placid Freemarket starts singing about perpetrating violence in a passage based on "Away, Away" from The Pirates of Penzance. At other times, the point of an entire number will remain opaque, as when the female CFO is supposedly trying to distract Behemoth with something tantalizing about a file full of toxic assets. Honestly, I have no idea what was going on here. But the show, for the most part, shows promise, and features some very apt repurposing of Sullivan's music. The show could benefit from being much shorter, maybe ninety minutes with no intermission, as some of the comic business grows attenuated. But, true to the spirit of G&S, the show ends with a series of ridiculous revelations and coincidences that lovingly strain credulity. But, this time, the nonsense makes sense.

Reviews - 2013 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) - Part 1

I've never really been a summer person. I get bored at the beach, and I assiduously avoid the sun. Thankfully, summer provides lots of heavily air-conditioned theater-going opportunities, what with various regional houses and their summer offerings, plus the new-works festivals in New York City. Last year, I spent an inordinate amount of time seeing shows at the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF), both as a critic and as an educator. In fact, we presented one of the shows that I caught at NYMF last summer, Shelter, as part of our new-works program at the Boston Conservatory.

I'll be seeing about 18 or so of the NYMF shows this year, and will be presenting my capsule reviews here on my blog. So far the festival has been full of highs and lows, representing a surprisingly wide range on the quality scale, much wider in fact than I encountered last year. In other words, I've already seen shows that are far better and far worse than anything I saw at NYMF 2012. And I'm not even halfway through. This will be my first of four NYMF review roundups. Look for the others in the days to come.

Songs for a More Funnier World - One of the more promising entries so far at NYMF this year was actually the first show on my docket, this smart little four-person revue by Stuart McMeans and a bunch of additional composers. The show seems to be aiming for the territory of I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, or even better, Closer Than Ever. The songs are all about modern life in the big city, with a much more generous dose of gay culture than those previous two shows. Satiric targets include many of the usual suspects: self-satisfied yuppies, men who won't commit, awkward first dates, etc. And the show definitely needs a rewrite or two to iron out some dull patches, to cut some bits that aren't working, and to put more of a satisfying finish on each of the numbers. But there's enough genuine craft here already that I'm encouraged both by future prospects for the show (perhaps an Off Broadway run at Westside Arts) and for McMeans and his composing partners and their future efforts.

The Dead Legend - It feels churlish beyond words to dump on this show, but alas dump on it I must. The Dead Legend is a collective effort by one Michael Gilboe and the musical-theater students from the University of Great Falls in Montana. It seems clear that this was a labor of love on the parts of these students, and they must be quite proud of bringing their original work to New York City. The premise is intriguing: the show takes place at a sort of afterlife after-hours bar, with various dead celebrities dressed as the character or persona with which they are most associated (Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale, Humphrey Bogart as Rick Baine, etc.). A mysterious stranger dressed in black appears among them, and it becomes clear that in order to pass through to their reward, the celebrities must relinquish their additiction to fame. Again, intriguing. However, the quality of the writing is quite painfully low. The songs have very little structure, many lacking any discernible tune. What's more, the writers didn't even try to capture the idiom of, say, Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe. I applaud these students and their mentors for having the guts to write their own show and raise the money to bring it to New York. But the show itself is unlikely to have any, you should pardon the pun, afterlife.

Life Could Be a Dream - Another highlight from my early festival selections was Life Could Be a Dream, a jukebox show compiled by Roger Bean, the man responsible for the entertaining The Marvelous Wonderettes. Life Could Be a Dream concerns the efforts of four regular guys trying to put together a close-harmony male quartet during the Four Seasons era. The show needs work, but it already has a certain charm, particularly it terms of its vivid characterizations and slick, professional staging. There's a certain inconsistency as to when these folks are performing in character versus singing diegetic numbers, which needs cleaning up. There are some hints at the homosexuality of one of the characters, mostly for comic purposes, but this gets conveniently brushed aside when the guys start vying for the attentions of the female love interest. Whereas act one could use some trimming, act two needs a major makeover, particularly in terms of ramping up the conflict, which dissipates at the end of act one. The second act also needs better song integration. As it stands, it feels like a dull slog through a seemingly forced series of numbers. Act two also features some ponderous, forced dialog when the going gets serious. As I said, Life Could Be a Dream does show promise, but it needs another draft or two before it can be considered in the same league as Bean's delightful Wonderettes.

The Awakening of Angel DeLuna - I can tell a show isn't quite soup yet when I start asking questions like, "Who is this person, and why should I care?" Or, "What is this song supposed to be telling me?" Or, "Why is this character reacting this way?" I asked all these questions and more while watching The Awakening of Angel DeLuna (book and lyrics by Judylynn Smith, music by Lee Ellis), a well-meaning and occasionally touching show that takes place at a formerly family-owned circus. The show starts with a trapeze act that ends badly. Then we see a hobo singing, and it's not immediately clear who he is. It turns out he's the guy on the trapeze, but he looks nothing like the guy who played his younger self, so it was confusing. Angel DeLuna is full of these moments, raising questions as to the motivations of the characters, the purpose of musical numbers, and the believability and meaning of plot developments. The hobo, called Ollie, gets a job with the circus as a clown in the hope of rekindling his love for Angel, his trapeze partner, who's still with the circus. The nefarious new circus owner discovers Ollie's identity almost from the start, yet quizzically allows Ollie to remain. Despite some pedestrian lyrics, the ballads have charm, but the uptempo numbers are almost universally clumsy. The production also makes the same mistake as the current Broadway production of Pippin, featuring acrobatic acts that upstage the intent of the numbers they accompany. And yet, the show has a certain appeal, particularly in the character of Angel, who after suffering a fall from the trapeze, now thinks she is an actual angel awaiting her wings. It sounds twee, but the show handles this particularly well. And the final trapeze moment was extremely touching. So, enough promise here to warrant some more work, but there's much work to do.

Sasquatched - Each year, NYMF seems to include a show or two aiming for the ironic, high-camp status of, say, Bat Boy or Little Shop of Horrors. This year, we have Sasquatched, (music, book and lyrics by Phil Darg), which is essentially about the eponymous creature (tremendously misunderstood, of course), and a young boy who becomes lost in the woods. Surrounding them we have the boy-hunt and concomitant media circus. It's not a bad idea, and the story flows reasonably well. Darg chooses such apt satiric targets as "helicopter" parents and reality TV shows. But then the numbers themselves aren't particularly funny, or are humorous in conception only. And then there's the would-be comic set piece about incidental characters who don't have any lines and are thus reduced to spouting "rhubarb" over and over. What this is supposed to have to do with a show about Bigfoot I can scarcely surmise. The show is also irrevocably hampered by derivative music and painfully repetitive lyrics, although there are fleeting touches of genuine wit in the dialog and staging. Sasquatched also makes the mistake of introducing the eponymous hairy guy himself in the second number of the show with a banal, repetitive, introspective ballad, robbing the beginning of the show of any comic momentum. I get the sense that future sightings of Sasquatched will be rare indeed.

Finally, a general note: I have yet to encounter a show at NYMF that didn't fall back on that laziest of lyrical faults: slant rhyme. Even the best NYMF shows have exhibited the tendency to rhyme "girl" with "world," or "drama" with "karma," or "colder" with "over." Have we as musical-theater practitioners completely given up on getting the rhyme right? Must we all slide en masse into the indolent assonance of popular music? As my friend Geoff so aptly puts it in quoting Madame Armfeldt, "Where's craft?"

Review - Far From Heaven at Playwrights Horizons Off-Broadway

Composer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie really seem to like a challenge. The first musical of theirs to gain widespread attention was Grey Gardens, an admittedly flawed but nonetheless exquisite show based on that most unlikely of sources, a documentary, and a rather off-beat one at that. Their next show was the ambitious but ponderous Happiness, which at its core was essentially about what makes life worth living. Neither show met with great financial success, but that hasn't stopped the pair from forging ahead with even more ambitious projects.

Now comes Far From Heaven, based on the 2002 movie of the same name directed by Todd Haynes. The show is currently playing to sold-out houses at Playwrights Horizons, although based on the mixed critical response, it seems unlikely that the show will have a commercial future. That's really a shame, because the show, in my opinion, is the best thing that Frankel and Korie have produced to date. I sat transfixed by the ravishing music, the layered characterizations, the crisp direction, and the immensely talented cast.

Scott Frankel's music seems to get richer and more complex with every show. He seems less concerned here with crafting a realistic 1950s idiom than with creating a psychological milieu in which to explore the character interactions. The opening number, "Autumn in Connecticut," sets a tone of ordinary family life, complete with hints of Aaron Copland in the accompaniment. The tone starts to shift when Frank, Cathy's husband, is arrested for "vagrancy," and the song that Frankel and Korie craft here deftly plays around with time signatures in a manner reminiscent of "Daddy's Girl" from Grey Gardens. Both characters are experiencing a sudden upheaval in their heretofore balanced lives, and the effect is similarly effective and unnerving.

Frankel and Korie have also created for Far From Heaven some very complex and effective musical sequences, with song coming in and out of scenes as befits the story. Although there's lots of musicalized dialogue, it never sounds like recitative. The pair also make wonderfully effective use of diegesis, for instance when Cathy and Frank are on vacation and are dancing together at a party. The band plays a song called "Wandering Eyes" while Frank begins to notice a rather attractive young man eyeing him from the sidelines. Simple, and perhaps obvious, but nonetheless effective.

Some of Frankel's music for Far From Heaven can sometimes seem a bit too self-consciously Sondheim, but then again, these days that's a charge that gets trotted out whenever a composer shows any kind of ambition. And Korie's lyrics are not entirely immune to cliché, as when one song asks "How do you fly on broken wings?" But the score and the accompanying words are for the most part skillful and at times transcendent.

Much of the interest in Far From Heaven comes from the cast of theatrical notables, particularly Kelli O'Hara, who is remarkably touching and downright luminous as Cathy, a woman who at first seems like your typical 1950s housewife, and the always remarkable Steven Pasquale, giving a marvelously rich performance as Cathy's sexually conflicted husband. Notable among the supporting cast is the stalwart Nancy Anderson as Cathy's best friend, making an eminently credible transition from supportive neighbor to close-minded suburbanite.

Many of the reviews I've seen of Far From Heaven focus on the supposedly slow pace of the show, but I didn't see it that way. The show's libretto, by Tony-Award-winning playwright Richard Greenberg, unfolds in a way that feels eminently natural, moving when it needs to, and lingering when it wants to. Admittedly, the second act did feel a bit more diffuse than the first, losing a bit of focus in setting up husband's denouement.

And Michael Greif's sensitive direction is never less than taut. Greif demonstrates a subtle touch with the character relationships, all the more remarkable considering that the source material is an homage to 1950s cinematic melodrama. To create a sense of paranoia, Greif ensures that there's always someone watching key interactions, as when Cathy discovers her husband's struggle with his sexual identity, and finds what she clearly hopes will be solace in the person of her African American gardener, played here by Isaiah Johnson to smoldering effect. The scene in which the two hesitatingly dance with each other in a bar in the black part of town was almost unbearably tense, with darting eyes, suspicious glances, and an ever-present sense of impending conflict.

I certainly hope that Far From Heaven has some kind of afterlife, at the very least a cast recording, which Happiness unfortunately did not receive. Perhaps Finding Neverland, Frankel and Korie's next show, will find these talented gentlemen the kind of critical and popular success they deserve. And since the show just signed on the redoubtable Diane Paulus as its new director, odds are certainly looking in their favor.

 

Review - Good News at the Goodspeed Opera House

The 1920s was a heady and busy time for American musical theater. Musicals were still a relatively new art form, and the rules for creating them were only just emerging. That didn't stop composers, writers and lyricists from pounding out show after show, in numbers that we are unlikely to see again. The 1927 to 1928 season saw 51 new musicals. Of course, most of them were forgettable and have since been forgotten, but one of those shows was Show Boat, which represented a turning point in the pursuit of quality craftsmanship in musical theater.

Also from that record-breaking season was Good News (music by Ray Henderson, lyrics by B.G. "Buddy" DeSylva and Lew Brown, book by DeSylva and Laurence Schwab), another of the few musicals from the 1920s to establish anything close to a lasting legacy. Good News is perhaps the quintessential example of a significant 1920s subgenre: the collegiate romp. (Two other subgenres were the Cinderella story, exemplified by Sunny and Irene, and the bootleg show, best embodied by Oh, Kay.) Good News made playful fun of the fact that colleges in the 1920s were, to a large extent, just four-year country clubs. This was, of course, just an extension of the dissolute, hedonistic lifestyle of the moneyed set in the '20s.

Of the handful of 1920s shows that have survived, few if any are performed in their original form. Even Show Boat has no official version, and seems to get rewritten and revised for every production. For its current production of Good News, the venerable Goodspeed Opera House has enlisted Jeremy Desmon (The Girl in the Frame, Pump Up The Volume) to provide a revised libretto, and the result is fizzy and fun, if at times anachronistic, at least with respect to conversational idiom. Desmon adds some snappy touches of his own, while on the whole staying true to the feel of the '20s musical: frothy and frivolous.

Good News relates the classic tale of the college quarterback who needs to pass an important astronomy exam so that he can lead his team to victory in the big game on Saturday. Local female brainiac agrees to tutor the quarterback, and the two predictably fall in love. (The 1947 film "Good News" maintains this basic plot, but is considerably rewritten.)

The original score to Good News included the hit songs "The Varsity Drag" and "The Best Things in Life Are Free." As often happens with revivals of shows from this period, the Goodspeed production includes interpolations from the rest of the Henderson/DeSylva/Brown songbook, including "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries," "Button Up Your Overcoat," "You're the Cream in My Coffee" and "Keep Your Sunny Side Up." The reason it's so easy to do this is that songs from the period weren't necessarily written to be contextual within the framework of a show. They were written to be hits, and the above-listed songs without question became hits.

The Goodspeed production is directed and choreographed by Vince Pesce, and Pesce's joyous dance is one of the highlights of the show. The numbers are brisk, varied, and lively. Pesce really knows how to dress a stage and create engaging, often charming dance numbers. So, the dance is strong. Would that the same could be said for his direction, particularly in terms of the abundant comedy in the show. Pesce keeps things moving at a fast clip, and the transitions between scenes and numbers were fast and efficient. But somehow that sense of sharpness escapes Pesce when creating comic business for a scene or guiding his cast members toward an effectively timed punchline.

The cast members themselves are almost universally top-notch, including Ross Lekites as quarterback Tom Marlowe and the lovely Chelsea Morgan Stock as braniac Connie Lane. Also worth mentioning are the protean Barry Shafrin as Bobby Randall, the prototypical 98-lb. weakling, and the animated Tessa Faye as Babe O'Day, the campus sexpot. This Good News makes the astronomy professor a female, and even gives her a love interest in the football coach. Beth Glover as the professor and Mark Zimmerman as the coach make for a delightfully humorous and charming older couple.

Good News runs at the Goodspeed through June 22nd. We don't often get the chance to see this show, and even if you're not in the immediate area, it might just be worth the trip. They don't make 'em like that anymore, and yes there are good reasons for that. But every once in a while it's nice to just turn off your mind, turn on your heart, and enjoy a lovingly crafted throwback to a bygone era.

 

 

Review - The Last Five Years at the Second Stage Theatre

There are some musicals that achieve cult status, despite - or perhaps because of - relatively short runs in their initial incarnations. Often these musicals live on through their cast recordings, as well as the occasional production by ambitious regional and college theater productions.  

Anyone Can Whistle comes to mind, as do Mack and Mabel and Merrily We Roll Along. Upon closer inspection, these particular shows do indeed have fascinating scores, while the shows themselves simply don't work in performance, despite numerous attempts at revision.

A particular sub-category of this cult-musical niche is the Off-Broadway succès d'estime, such as Floyd Collins, Violet, and The Wild Party (Lippa). For some reason, this sub-genre has a significantly higher quality-to-dreck ratio, although I'm not really much a fan of The Wild Party (either version). I think the reason there are more artistically solid Off-Broadway cult shows is that some strong musicals never make it to Broadway, and probably shouldn't even try. But that kind of leaves them with one foot in obscurity, almost from the start.

Which brings us to The Last Five Years, by Jason Robert Brown, a show that I had previously only been acquainted with through its excellent cast recording, which features Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott. The show played a two-month run at the Minetta Lane Theater in 2002, and then went on to become beloved by musical-theater mavens the world over, mostly because of Brown's rich and characterful songs, and the emotional pull of the story itself.

Well, for once, I find myself siding with the faithful on this one, because The Last Five Years in performance is simply stunning, at least as evidenced by the fine revival currently enjoying an acclaimed at extended run at the Second Stage Theatre in New York. Jason Robert Brown is also the director for this production, and based on this show I'm hoping he does more directing. His staging work here is simple but very effective. Brown creates a wonderful sense of connection and loss between the characters, and crafts transitions between scenes that enhance that larger story arc without distracting at all from the meaning of the songs themselves.

The Last Five Years is sort of a direct descendant of Merrily We Roll Along, which famously has a plot that travels backwards in time. The Last Five Years goes both forward and backward: the story for the male character, Jamie, goes in chronological order, while the story for the female, Cathy, goes in reverse. The story is essentially about how the characters meet, marry, and separate over a five-year period, and having Cathy's story run in reverse creates a touching sense of dramatic irony: we start the show by witnessing the painful end of the relationship, then we switch to Jamie's point of view at the beginning and see the sense of adventure and promise.

What's marvelous about The Last Five Years is that we never feel lost as to where we are in time because Brown has done such an effective job of showing us where and when we are, every step of the way. Also marvelous is the sense of balance we experience as to who is responsible for the difficulties that the characters experience along the way. The show's plot is apparently based on based Brown's first marriage, and to his credit, Brown paints a complex picture of the relationship. Cathy and Jamie are multifaceted as characters: sympathetic, flawed, idealistic, deluded, appealing, unnerving, and most of all real.

It's remarkable how real the characters are, and how clear the temporal progressions are, since the show is almost entirely sung-through. So Brown is conveying all of this through songs, and mostly solo songs at that. Cathy and Jamie only appear in a song together when the chronologies meet in the middle of the show. (Perhaps all of these pop dilettantes who think that writing hit songs automatically qualifies them to write the show to a Broadway show should be forced to listen to The Last Five Years as an object lesson on how to convey character and story through song.) Even more remarkable, the songs themselves work extremely well out of context, as many a cabaret artist and auditioning actor has demonstrated over the last 11 years.

Brown's score reveals a songwriter equally comfortable with both searing ballads ("Still Hurting") and comic character numbers ("A Summer in Ohio"). The score is rife with appealing melodies, such as the haunting waltz leitmotif that recurs throughout the show. Brown also shows a knack for crafting lyrics with deceptively simple turns of phrase, from "Jamie is over and where can I turn? Covered in scars I did nothing to earn" to "I will not fail to keep you comfortable. I will not lose because you can't win." And yet, at least in this score, Brown never calls conscious attention to the craft of the lyricist, allowing the erudition to appear to emerge from the characters themselves. 

The Second Stage production of The Last Five Years is blessed with two wonderfully animated yet subtle performances from Adam Kantor and Betsy Wolfe. Kantor has a slight tendency to channel Norbert Leo Butz (although in truth that may be written into the fabric of the show), but he finds many ways to make the part his own, particularly during "Moving Too Fast," one of the many highlights of the show. And Wolfe reinforces what she demonstrated earlier this season in The Mystery of Edwin Drood: that she's a lot more that just a pretty young woman with a lovely voice. She's also a hell of an actress, both in the somber moments of the show and in Cathy's neurotic character numbers.

If you can't make it to the Second Stage between now and May 18th to see The Last Five Years in person, have no fear. A film adaptation of the show, scheduled to star Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, is apparently in the works. And the new cast recording for the show is scheduled to come out later this year. I know I'm eagerly anticipating both.

Review - Here Lies Love at The Public Theater

Yeah, I don't get it.

I saw the new musical Here Lies Love recently at The Public Theater, and found it reasonably diverting, if shallow and repetitive. But the reviews were overwhelmingly positive, even ecstatic, and the show has been extended multiple times, most recently until June 30th.

Again, I don't get it.

I didn't have a chance to catch Here Lies Love last summer at its sold-out run at Mass MoCa, but I heard it was going to move to the Public, so I figured I'd wait until the New York run.

I had heard that the show had a score by David Byrne (formerly of The Talking Heads) and somebody named Fatboy Slim. (I figured with a name like that he would be a rapper, but it turns out he's a British DJ, musician, and producer. Go figure.) I had also heard that the show was about Imelda Marcos, former First Lady of the Philippines, and that it was directed by one of the most in-demand directors today, Alex Timbers.

So, I was intrigued with, if not all that excited about, Here Lies Love. I had also heard that the show would feature immersive staging, in this case taking place in a Filipino dance club circa the 1970s. I'm not really a fan of immersive theater, so I was pleased to discover that there were a limited number of box seats, poised above the throng, one of which I was thankfully able to secure. I mean, I get the whole idea of setting it in a dance club: Imelda's life was to a great extent one big party, filled with celebrities, world leaders and the jet set from across the world. But that doesn't mean I have to spend 90 minutes bouncing up and down and being herded by a bunch of hired handlers. (My one regret here was not being able to hobnob with David Byrne, who was bopping around with the rest of crowd the night I saw the show.)

Here Lies Love really goes all out in providing what appears to be an authentic dance club experience, including multimedia projections, a spinning mirror ball, and a DJ spinning mad jams, or whatever, and the overall sensory experience is visceral and infectious. What the show fails to provide is a compelling narrative and believable characterizations. There are some genuinely stunning moments, particularly when the narrative progresses as far as the events surrounding Benigno Aquino and his tragic demise. But up to that point, it's mostly a by-the-numbers "simple country girl who has a dream" narrative that is far too reminiscent of Evita, and lacking in that show's compositional and storytelling flair.

The mostly sung-through show follows Imelda from her life as a young girl, through her beauty-pageant days, to her marriage to Ferdinand Marcos and years as First Lady. It makes for a fairly efficient history lesson, but it doesn't really give us a sense of who these people were, nor why they were motivated to do what they did. Apparently, Imelda dated Aquino when they were younger. When Aquino speaks out against the corruption and graft in the Marcos regime, he is thrown into prison. After he's been incarcerated for seven years, Imelda arranges for him to escape. Although we see bits of their earlier relationship, we don't really have a sense of why Imelda would allow this man to escape, especially when he is clearly either going to be dangerous to the regime or be killed in the process.

I wasn't really sure what to make of the Here Lies Love, mostly because the point of view wasn't clear. Is it meant to be satirical, or serious, or perhaps a bit of both? The show portrays some of Imelda's excesses, as well as hints of the human-rights abuses under Ferdinand and his autocratic rule, but I didn't come away knowing anything more than I did by watching the news in the 1980s, when the Marcoses were ousted from power.

The most effective part of the show, both in terms of the narrative flow and the immersive staging, was during and after the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, in which the hall full of dancing audience members suddenly becomes a funeral procession and a nation in mourning for the fallen Filipino hero. Here the show reveals what it could have been: a poignant and visceral document of a fascinating woman and the people around her at a pivotal moment in one country's history.

(One finale note, albeit a trivial one: a musical about Imelda Marcos and not a word about shoes? Clearly there were no gay men involved.)