"The Pitmen Painters" Is a Vivid Display of Art

My husband K declined when I invited him to see The Pitmen Painters, the latest British import that opened last week at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. He said the show sounded too much like Billy Elliot.  And, having seen that musical about the miner’s son who becomes a ballet dancer here and in London, K said he didn’t need to see the same story again.

I got what he was saying. The Pitmen Painters, a stage adaptation of a book about real-life coal miners who were celebrated as artists during the 1930s and ‘40s, isn’t a musical but it was written by Lee Hall, who also did the book for Billy Elliot.  And, once again, Hall takes on the theme of the transformative power of art. 

Hall, who grew up in Britain’s coal country, is, at heart, a cultural populist, set on making the case that art isn’t just an elitist thing but can be appreciated and created by working class people. As one line in the play says, “Art belongs to everyone.”

That message resonates with me.  As does The Pitmen Painters. 

The play divides the miners’ tale into two parts.  The first act sketches out how the men discovered the joy of expressing themselves on canvas after a professor they recruited to tutor them in a continuing-ed style class decided that the best way to teach them about art was to have them make it. The second act focuses on the challenges the miners faced once their work was taken up by the art cognoscenti.

The eight-member cast, brought over intact from a successful run at London’s National Theatre and beautifully directed by Max Roberts, is superb in both acts. But the first is more fun. It’s filled with good-natured humor as the miners make their first forays into the art world.  And there are soul-stirring moments as their understanding and love of art deepens. As an added bonus, copies of the paintings the real miners made are projected on the overhead screens that are a central part of Gary McCann’s understated but effective design. 

The second act gets more serious and, at times, pedantic as Hall repeatedly drives home another of his favorite themes: the breach between Britain’s upper and lower classes.  The succession of soapbox speeches exhausts some listeners. Many of the critics say the play would be a masterpiece if it had ended with the intermission curtain (click here to read some of those reviews). 

Yet I liked a lot of that second act.  Yes, the upbeat energy flags a little but Hall isn’t afraid to use some of that time up on the soapbox to spout off about some less-feel-good—but still important—stuff like the way the people who became the miners’ patrons also patronized them. Or the way the most gifted of the miners wrestled with the fear that his talent would isolate him in a no man’s land between the two classes.  

Maybe it’s because my story—a poor kid whose passport to the wider world was marked by books, art and, of course, theater—isn’t so far from the miners’ story.  But from the first to the last, The Pitmen Painters rang true to me.  I suppose it is what's often dismissed as middlebrow entertainment. But that is pretty much the location of my brow—and those of the intellectually curious and courageous men who inspired The Pitmen Painters. 

"Next to Normal" is Next to Great

Springtime in New York is also class trip time. High school seniors from all over the country crowd (or, depending on how desperately you need to get somewhere when you find yourself walking behind them, clog) midtown streets. At some point most of them end up at a Broadway show. Still, I was a little taken aback when I got to the Booth Theatre a few days ago and saw a group of them waiting to go inside. For the Booth is now home to Next to Normal, the new musical about a middle-aged woman who has a bipolar disorder.

To be honest, I’d had my own reservations about seeing the show. I thought it would be depressing. So did my husband K, who opted to stay home, saying “I can depress myself right here.” As it turns out, K and I were wrong about Next to Normal. It is a heartbreaking show but it’s an uplifting one too, particularly if you care, as I do, about the future of the American musical. I was wrong about the kids too. Judging by the youthful-sounding cheers emanating from the balcony at the curtain call, they loved it.

The music is probably a large part of what appealed to them. Tom Kitt’s pop-rock score would be right at home on an Emo radio channel. And Brian Yorkey’s profanity-spiked lyrics are lingua franca for kids raised on potty-mouthed shows like “South Park.” But they work as Broadway songs too, advancing the story and revealing the inner lives of its characters (click here to hear excerpts and a Playbill interview with Kitt and Yorkey).

Or they do if you’re open to thinking of Broadway music as more than just one kind of sound. I love classic show tunes as much as any theater geek but I also came of age during the heyday of introspective singer-songwriters like Laura Nyro, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and Graham Nash and although I wish Yorkey’s lyrics had been less predictable (I figured out most of the rhymes before the actors could sing them) this music speaks to my soul.

Yorkey also wrote the book and its story—an original, not based on a movie, a book or a videogame—is even more audacious than the music. It examines how a mother’s mental illness infects her entire family. There are suicide attempts and death, there is prescription drug abuse and electric shock therapy. But Yorkey is smart enough to know there can be humor in even the most dire situations and he leavens the show’s many dark moments with a genuine affection for his characters and even a few glimmers of optimism.

But there’s plenty smart about this show. The actors, lead by Alice Ripley who gives a fearless performance as the mom, are perfectly cast. J. Robert Spencer and Jennifer Damiano are particularly good as the compassionate husband and confused daughter. But I have a special fondness for Adam Chandler-Berat who plays the daughter’s stoner-boyfriend with a sweetly geeky devotion that I haven’t seen since John Cusack’s underachiever Lloyd Dobler tried to woo the class valedictorian with a boom box serenade in the classic 1989 romantic movie “Say Anything.”

My only concern is whether their voices will hold out in what is almost a sung-through show, with more than a few of the songs calling for full-strength, power-ballad volume. The Playbill doesn’t list the songs but according to IBDB, there are 36 of them, including several reprises which helped wedge songs such as the love duet “Perfect for You” into my mind and makes me want to hear all of them again.

The creative team is in tune too. Mark Wendland’s set, an abstract, three-tiered jungle gym, doubles deftly as the family’s home and the inner recesses of the mom’s fractured mind. While the lighting by Kevin Adams brilliantly captures all the subtleties of the characters' emotions. And director Michael Grief keeps it all in harmony.

Kudos are also due the producers who stuck with the show through a winter 2008 run at Second Stage that got mixed reviews and a retooling in Washington later in the year. I didn’t see either of those but folks who did say this version is sharper and more emotional. If the creative team had worked a little more on the ending, they would have a truly great show instead of just a really good one. Even as is, Next to Normal may give Billy Elliot a run for the Tony gold on June 7.

Still Next to Normal isn’t for everyone. “It’s not incredible but it’s good. It’s a different kind of show,” the woman sitting behind me commented during the intermission. She, her mother and sister spent the rest of the break listing musicals they would have preferred seeing: Oklahoma!, South Pacific, West Side Story, A Chorus Line.

Of course, each of those shows was innovative in its time. Now, as part of a burgeoning trend that includes Spring Awakening, Passing Strange, and In the Heights, Next to Normal could help ensure that young people like those high school kids in the balcony think of Broadway as a living artform and not just as a museum dedicated to the memories of one.

The Magnificent Reentry of "Exit the King"

Have you ever played the truth-or-consequences style game where you drink a lot and then say which celebrities you’d kick your spouse out of bed to sleep with? Regardless of your sexual orientation, you’re supposed to choose both a man and a woman. My guy-of-choice depends on my mood but I always pick the same woman: Susan Sarandon. So I was really excited about the prospect of seeing her in the new revival of Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King.

Sarandon doesn’t turn me on just because she’s a great looking dame and a gifted actor but because she’s also smart, politically courageous, and refreshingly honest. Exit the King marks her return to Broadway for the first time in 37 years and right from the start, she’s been open about her nervousness and about how, as rehearsals went on, she worried whether she was up to the challenge. (Click here to see the interview she gave New York magazine.) Reading all that just made me want to love her more.

Frankly, I was more excited about seeing Sarandon than I was about seeing the play. It was cool to be into the theater of the absurd when I was studying theater in college but, with the exception of Waiting for Godot, plays by writers like Beckett and Ionesco usually left me cold. So imagine my surprise when I found myself shrugging at Sarandon but head-over-heels crazy about the play and totally gaga about her co-star Geoffrey Rush.

The exit in Exit the King is death. At the beginning of the play, Sarandon, playing the monarch’s first wife, tells us that he’s going to die by the end of the show. But even though he is 400 years old, the king doesn’t want to die and the play is a chronicle of his attempts to resist his foretold fate.

Death has been stalking Broadway this season. Everywhere you turn, spirits from the afterworld are haunting this one (the ex-wife in Blithe Spirit, the mom in Billy Elliot, the bookstore owner in The Story of My Life.) Meanwhile, the live characters are wrestling with the inevitability of their mortality (the musicologist in 33 Variations, the matriarch in Dividing the Estate). Still none of those dealings with death display more pathos or panache than Rush does in this sensational Broadway debut.

Rush and his friend and fellow Aussie, director Neil Armfield developed the production and even wrote the adaptation of Ionesco’s original French script. Their translation is fresh and surprisingly funny. But it’s the staging that enchanted me. The play is presented in commedia dell’arte style with clown-face makeup, oversized costumes, live music (a trumpeter plays fanfares and serenades) and hearty doses of slapstick.

Laughing at death, Armfield and Rush seem to say, may be the only weapon we have against it. I’ve read that Ionesco wouldn’t like this approach to his work. I obviously don’t know enough about him to know if that’s true but I do know that I loved it.

I especially loved Rush who literally tries to outrace death or, in limber-limbed displays of acrobatics, to tumble free of it. His antics are matched by the scene-stealing Andrea Martin’s as the palace’s severely overworked servant. Lauren Ambrose is lovely and appropriately sincere as the king’s devoted younger wife. And William Sadler and Brian Hutchinson are pitch perfect as the king’s doctor and his sole remaining guard.

Alas, only Sarandon seems off-key. Her role is, admittedly, the most difficult. She is the voice of reason, which, in this case, means the voice of doom. While the other characters are engaging in all kinds of macabre tomfoolery, she is the show’s straight man. And a nervous one on the night my friend Mary Anne and I saw the show.

“Did you see her hands?” Mary Anne asked when the lights came on for intermission. “I know,” the man sitting on the other side of me leaned over to say before I could answer. “She kept opening and closing them like she was trying to grab hold of her lines.” Her voice, particularly in the early scenes, also carried less well than her castmates’s. But Sarandon comes into her own, and Rush achieves true dramatic greatness, in the show’s remarkable closing scene. I won’t tell you what happens but I will say those final moments are to die for.

Who Are the Most Powerful Women in Theater?

I had planned for this entry to be about Jane Fonda’s triumphant return to Broadway in 33 Variations, the new play by Moisés Kaufman, but then I came across Harper’s Bazaar UK’s list of the 20 Most Powerful Women in the Theater in London (click here to see the full list) and I knew Jane, a feminist to the bone, wouldn’t mind if I put off writing about her show until my Saturday post so that I could talk about the list now (but if you’re dying to know, I’m going to say good things about her and the show).

Judi Dench made the Harper’s Bazaar list. So did Helen Mirren, who as I’ve noted in one of my tweets (click here to see everything I’ve written on Twitter) will star in a new production of Phèdre at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. in September. And so did Gillian Anderson, who is best known on this side of the pond for her work in the TV series “The X-Files” but has won honorary Brit status for her work there including a Donmar Warehouse production of A Doll's House scheduled to open this spring.

Of course the fun thing about lists is that they usually tell us more about the people who compiled them than the folks who end up on them. And that’s probably true for this one too. I can’t even pretend to be knowledgeable about London theater but I bet if there were a gender-neutral list of its 20 most powerful people, I’d recognize a helluva lot more male names on the list. In fact, I’m sure there would be a helluva lot more male names on that list than female ones. Cause the sad bottom line is that guys are still in charge.

All of this set me to thinking about who would make the cut for a list of the 20 most powerful women in New York theater. So I made up my own list. And here, in alphabetical order, it is:

Victoria Bailey, executive director of the Theatre Development Fund, the folks who are best known for running the TKTS booth but who also do other good stuff like introducing NYC public school kids to theater

Whoopi Goldberg, who uses her spot on TV’s “The View” to give Broadway shows national exposure

Susan Haskins, the executive producer of "TheaterTalk," which offers the best conversation about theater

Donna Karger, the host of NY1’s "OnStage," which provides the most complete coverage of the New York theater scene

Nina Lannan, the leading general manager who makes sure that shows like Billy Elliot and the upcoming 9 to 5 run smoothly, while also finding time to serve as chair of the Broadway League

Elizabeth McCann, who for over 40 years has produced such daring shows as Edward Albee’s The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia and Stew’s Passing Strange

Lynne Meadow, the longtime artistic director of the Manhattan Theatre Club, the perennial incubator for new plays like Proof, Doubt and now Ruined

Rosie O’Donnell, the tireless promoter of Broadway and the founder of Rosie's Broadway Kids, which teaches NYC school kids how to put on a show

Laura Pels, the angel whose generosity has made a difference at the Roundabout and the Public Theater

Mary Rodgers, the guiding light at the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, which holds the rights to all the R&H musicals but also represents other biggies like Jerome Kern, Stephen Schwartz, and Andrew Lloyd Webber

Carole Rothman, the artistic Director at Second Stage, which promotes emerging playwrights and is about to take over the Helen Hayes Theater

Judy Samelson, the editor of Playbill, which keeps more theatergoers in the know about Broadway than any other publication

Sherrie Rene Scott, the co-founder of Sh-K-Boom and Ghostlight Records, which provide an outlet for original cast recordings and albums by Broadway stars like Sutton Foster and Kelli O’Hara

Charlotte St. Martin, the executive director of the Broadway League, the trade organization that represents producers, presenters and theater owners across the country

Meryl Streep, because she’s Meryl Streep and can not only turn any show she does into a must-see but is also the mother of two up-and-coming young actresses who are setting the standard for their generation.

Susan Stroman, the Tony-winning director and choreographer behind shows like The Producers, Contact and Happiness, the new musical currently in previews at Lincoln Center

Julie Taymor, the innovative director who brought her downtown sensibility to The Lion King and who has now persuaded investors to give her $40 million to mount the upcoming Spider-Man musical

Paula Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who has become a mentor to a new generation of writers like Gina Gionfriddo

Linda Winer, the longtime Newsday theater critic, who was the only female voice among the major critics until Elisabeth Vincentelli joined the New York Post this year.

Fran Weissler, the producer who, with her husband Barry, has become such a distinctive player in the industry that she's inspired characters in other people's shows

OK. Don’t just sit there grumbling, let the rest of us know what I got wrong, who should never have gotten on the list and who you can’t believe I left off.

"You're Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush" is Funny But Far Too Polite

It probably wasn’t intentional but the Cort Theatre, home for the next five weeks to You’re Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush, comedian Will Ferrell’s genial send-up of the Bush presidency, is just half a block away from the headquarters of Fox News, perhaps the only place in Manhattan where people are actually lamenting the end of the Bush presidency.

I doubt you’ll find many Fox staffers in the Cort audience but there’s nothing really mean-spirited about the show, a reprise and extension of the sketches Ferrell did on “Saturday Night Live” before he left to star in such endearingly goofy movie comedies as “Elf,” “Anchorman” and “Blades of Glory.” In fact, Ferrell is such a likeable guy that I, who literally wept when Bush was re-elected in 2004, found myself thinking that maybe the man who is the worst president in the nation’s history may not have been all that bad.

Which bothers me a little and makes me wonder why we Americans, who so revere our freedom of expression, express so little political dissent in our theater. Are today’s playwrights just too unconcerned with the sad state of our current affairs? Are today’s producers just too reluctant to put on works that deal with them? Are today’s theatergoers just too uninterested in seeing shows like that? If it weren’t for the folks down at the Culture Project there would hardly be any serious examination of American politics on a New York stage.

The Brits, as anyone who has seen the “Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher” number in Billy Elliot (or seen any number of David Hare plays) knows, are less squeamish about taking on their leaders. And this week I read an article about how even Russian playwrights are going after the tsar-like Vladimir Putin (click here to read it). But when you look around at the plays scheduled to open on and off-Broadway this spring, nearly all deal with interpersonal relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, old friends. Important stuff sure, but what about the financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global warming?

Ferrell and his longtime collaborator Adam McKay, who co-wrote and directed the show, do throw some barbs about Bush’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina and mishandling of the Iraq war into their 90-minute show. But You’re Welcome America is mainly a revue of Bush bloopers—the endless malapropisms, the Mission Accomplished flight suit prematurely celebrating victory in Iraq, the attempted exit through a stuck door at a summit meeting in China—leavened with the comedians’ trademark loony humor. There are funny bits about Barbara Bush, Condi Rice and Dubya’s delight in bestowing silly nicknames as well as frat-boy jokes about penises, “fags” and pole dancing.

The audience the night my buddy Bill and I saw the show was filled with Ferrell lovers and Bush haters who lapped up all of it. The run is pretty much sold out but even if you can’t get a ticket, you can catch the show when HBO airs the final performance on March 14.

You’re Welcome America is funny and I had a good time. Unless you’re related to Dick Cheney you probably will too. But, in the end, I can’t help thinking about the mess the real George W. Bush has left us in. And that’s no laughing matter.

The Best Theater in 2008

Good art provokes a conversation between the person who makes it and the person who sees or hears it. Each dialog is unique and so I can’t really tell you what were the best shows of this past year but I can say that the following 10, listed in alphabetical order, really spoke to me.

Adding Machine Because this adaptation of Elmer Rice’s 1923 play about an everyman accountant who snaps after being replaced by an adding machine not only taps into the zeitgeist of our own scary economic times but shows that chamber musicals can produce real show tunes and not just the ersatz arias that make so many of them a chore to sit through.

The Bacchae Because the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Euripides’s tragedy provided flamboyant proof that a production of classic Greek drama can be simultaneously true to the play’s ancient text and thoroughly entertaining for modern audiences.

Billy Elliot Because this adaptation of the movie about a British miner’s son who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer is one of the most out-and-out entertaining musicals to open on Broadway in years and because, in the tradition of the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals like the year's equally splendid revival of South Pacific, it also has something to say.

Black Watch Because the National Theatre of Scotland’s meditation on the war in Iraq was a truly innovative production, superbly acted, marvelously staged and fully reproducible in no medium other than the theater.

A Body of Water Because this mysterious little play about a couple who seem to suffer from joint amnesia ruminates on questions about life and death and love and redemption in such a compelling way that I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.

Fela! Because newcomer Sahr Ngaujah is phenomenal as Fela Kuti, the Nigerian pop musician and political activist who challenged his country’s corrupt and repressive leaders, and because Afrobeat, the exuberant mix of jazz, funk and traditional African rhythms that Fela helped to create, is irresistible.

Gypsy Because Patti LuPone’s performance as Mama Rose in this classic backstage musical is one of those once-in-a- lifetime performances that people will talk about for years to come and because not only LuPone but her terrific co-stars Laura Benanti and Boyd Gaines stayed with the show right through to the end.

In the Heights Because although it’s not a great show, it’s a really great feel-good show that brings new energy and contemporary sounds to the musical and new audiences to Broadway.

The Seagull Because this production of the Chekhov classic got the mix between the comic and the tragic just right and because the 22-year-old British actress Carey Mulligan gave the most heartbreaking performance of the season.

Top Girls Because Caryl Churchill’s play about what it costs women to succeed was the most soul-nourishing night I had at the theater all year.

Is "13" Too Immature for Broadway?

Tweens, that precocious generation between the ages of 8 and 15, have turned “High School Musical” into a cash cow for Disney. They made the Jonas Brothers (ages 17, 16 and 13 when they formed their band in 2005) one of the hottest acts in the music business today. They put 15 year-old Miley Cyrus on the cover of Vanity Fair this year. And they even helped Broadway’s Wicked become the international girl-powerhouse that it is. So as I sat watching the new musical 13 that opened on Sunday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, I found myself wondering “Why didn’t someone think of this before?

This is a musical about 13 year-olds, starring a cast of 13 in which no one is older than 18 and even the onstage band is composed of players who probably just began to shave and wear bras. Unlike most of the shows aimed at this demographic (Wicked, Legally Blonde, The Little Mermaid), 13 has its eye on the boys who feel they’ve outgrown The Lion King. In fact, Broadway seems to be going a bit boy crazy this season because both the upcoming shows Billy Elliot and Shrek are aiming for the same audience.

Thirteen tells the story of Evan Goldman, a New York kid whose mother moves him to Indiana after his parents divorce and just a few months before he’s due to celebrate his bar mitzvah. The plot centers around Evan’s efforts to fit in with the kids at his new school so that they’ll join the festivities marking his entry into manhood. The book is by Dan Elish (who’s written such kid-friendly novels as “Born Too Short: The Confessions of an Eighth-Grade Basket Case”) and TV writer Robert Horn. And the music and lyrics are by Jason Robert Brown, composer of the Tony Award-winning score for Parade and the critically acclaimed The Last Five Years.

The whole idea is so smart and appealing that I really wanted to like 13. But, alas, I didn’t. It’s not the fault of the kids in the cast, who are, for the most part, talented and comfortable onstage, particularly Graham Phillips, who played Evan at the performance my friend Priscilla and I attended (he’s scheduled to take Saturday nights off). Phillips has the kind of bright, easy, and yes seductive, charm that brings to mind a junior version of the “M*A*S*H”-era mensch Alan Alda.

Other standouts include the clarion-voiced Allie Trimm as Patrice, the nice-but-non-cool girl who lives next door to Evan; and Aaron Simon Gross as Archie, a kid who gets around on crutches and a strong sense of humor. And even the young band plays well, although some of the heavy lifting is done by conductor and keyboardist Tom Kitt, whose last spin on Broadway was as the composer of the short-lived High Fidelity.

But aside from Kitt and director Jeremy Sams, who does a good job with such as young cast, I blame the show’s shortcomings on the grown-ups involved in the production. While its tunes are poppy and its lyrics witty (click here to hear a sampling), 13 struck me as the kind of show that adults think kids will find cool rather than a show that kids actually do find cool.

And I was totally turned off by how it fed into stereotypes. Does Indiana really have to be, as one song calls it, “the lamest place in the world” to live? Does the school jock have to be the predictably dumbest kid in the school? Does the blonde girl have to be the one that all the boys want? Does everyone have to be so thoroughly grossed out when two boys accidentally kiss?

Yeah, I know. I’m no where near the demographic 13 is hoping to draw. And I admit the audience the night I attended, heavily sprinkled with kids, seemed to enjoy the show, which runs just over 90 minutes. Even I got a kick out of seeing each young cast member show off in the joyful finale. And Priscilla, whose youngest is 14, said she's going to go back with her daughter and thinks that kids will like it. So what do I know? I don't even own any Jonas Brothers records.