Summer Festivals—and a Summer Giveaway

We're now in the midsummer of this year's theater festival season. It's the time when small companies and fledgling productions get a chance to strut their stuff. Some of these showcases, like ANT Fest, a lineup of edgy entertainments curated by Ars Nova, are already over. Others like the compact Summer Shorts series of short plays at the 59E59 Theaters, which started previews yesterday; and the mammoth anything-goes FringeNYC, which will run from Aug. 12-28, are still in the wings.

Also now underway is the New York Musical Festival, more familiarly known as NYMF. Over the years, NYMF has spawned such shows as Next to Normal, [title of show] and Himself and Nora, a musical now playing at the Minetta Lane Theatre about the relationship between James Joyce, the Irish author of such modernist classics as "Ulysses" and "Finnegan’s Wake," and Nora Barnacle, the woman who was his lover, his muse, the mother of his two children and eventually his wife.

My friend Jessie and I saw Himself and Nora earlier this week. Written entirely (book, music and lyrics) by Jonathan Brielle it's a straightforward bio-musical with a pleasant, Irish-accented score and charming performances by Matt Bogart, who has been with the show since its NYMF days (click here to read an interview with him) and Whitney Bashor in the title roles plus a standout performance by Lianne Marie Dobbs, who like the other two cast members plays a variety of roles and makes each one distinctive.

It was an agreeable way to spend a summer evening (or summer afternoon; the cast is scheduled to perform at next Thursday's Broadway in Bryant Park) even if the show, directed by Michael Bush, a veteran of 10 NYMF productions, didn't reveal anything new about Joyce, Barnacle or the times in which they lived.

The full-length productions for this year's NYMF began this week. There are 18 of them, ranging from A Scythe of Time, a stage version of two Edgar Allan Poe stories; to Tink, the Peter Pan story as seen through the fairy Tinker Bell's eyes.

One of the shows, The Last Word, about a guy who tries to save his debt-burdened restaurant by, the press notes say, "hustling across America - one game of Scrabble at a time," has offered me the opportunity to give away a pair of tickets to its final performance at The Duke theater next Friday night, July 29.

You can learn more about the show by clicking here. You can win the tickets by naming the three NYMF grads that made it to Broadway. Send your answers to me at jan@broadwayandme.com by noon on Tuesday, July 26. Then, as usual, I’ll put all the right answers in a hat and have my husband K pluck one out. I’ll announce the lucky winner next Wednesday.

The Pains of Summer Festival Fatigue

We theater lovers used to beg for things to see in the summer.  And so we got festivals. Lots and lots of festivals. Maybe too many festivals.  

There’s the New York Musical Theatre Festival, the Midtown International Theater Festival, the Lincoln Center Festival, the New York International Fringe Festival and a bunch of mini-festivals at the 59E59 Theaters, including the East to Edinburgh Festival, which showcased 16 of the American productions that are among the nearly 3,000(!) shows playing this month at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Summer Shorts, a grab bag of six one-acts by well-known and upcoming playwrights.  
 

From all accounts, very little of what any of them have offered this summer has been worth seeing.  I skipped NYMF this year because my husband K and I were out of the country. But my blogger pal Chris Caggiano at Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals saw 18 of the 250 productions; he really liked three of them but just the thought of having to sit through the other 15 depresses me. (Click here to read Chris' final report on the festival.)

 

I also couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for the salmagundi of international productions that Lincoln Center served up this year and so I passed on them too. The New York Times critic Charles Isherwood's recap of the shows, including Monkey: Journey to the West, the circus-like extravaganza performed entirely in Chinese, confirmed that decision (click here to read what he wrote.)

And now, alas, I can tell you from personal experience that this year’s Summer Shorts offerings aren’t faring much better.  Or at least that was the case with the three one acts my husband K and I saw in Series A, the first of the two bills that are being presented this year.

The lineup had seemed promising: playlets by the old masters Neil LaBute and Tina Howe, both of whom are Summer Shorts regulars, plus one by the young playwright Lucas Hnath, whose A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney stirred up a lot of buzz when it was performed at Soho Rep in the spring. 

The evening started off with LaBute’s Good Luck (in Farsi), a piece that he also directed about two actresses trying to psyche one another out as they wait outside an audition room. It includes so many of LaBute’s tics—the jousting for power, the obsession with looks, lots of profanity—that it almost seems a parody of a LaBute play.  Still, the put downs are mildly amusing and the young actresses game.  So no harm, no foul. 

But Hnath’s About a Woman Named Sarah completely baffled me. It’s an imagined recreation of the conversations between John and Cindy McCain and Sarah and Todd Palin during their first meeting. The four actors playing the characters sit on benches and get up when it’s their turn to perform a series of two-person dialogs that are punctuated with a clicking sound, whose purpose I’m still trying to figure out. 

The deadpan actors make no attempt to mimic the well-known people they play and director Eric Hoff gives them little else to do.  So there are no new insights into any of the characters—and no enjoyment on my end.

 

Howe’s Breaking the Spell was, at about 25 minutes, the longest and most ambitious of the three. I had been expecting another of her meditations on WASP culture but Howe seems to have taken to heart the notion that playwrights can play around with one acts. Her story is set in a fairytale kingdom where a princess has fallen under a sleeping spell. The King, her devoted father, has watched over her for 100 years, trying everything he can think of to break the curse.

The play seems to nod to Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist drama Exit the King, which I loved when Geoffrey Rush brought it to Broadway back in 2009 (click here to read my review of that) and the theater vet Michael Countryman does a nice job with this king. But Breaking the Spell also seems custom-tailored for the talents of the young pianist and saxophonist who play the many suitors who try to awaken the princess.  

They may be talented musicians—the program proudly notes that one of them, Evan Shinners, will play a different prelude from Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” at each performance—but they are both amateur actors and that undercuts the impact. At least for me.  The actress Jane Alexander, a friend of Howe’s since their student days at Sarah Lawrence College, was in the audience at our performance and howled at almost every line.  

 

It isn’t popular to say that there is too much theater (Rocco Landesman, one of Alexander’s successors as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, got blasted when he said as much a couple of years ago (click here to read about that dust-up). But I’m going to stick my neck out and say it anyway:  there are too many people doing theater in New York and  many of them should be doing something else.

 

The Fringe Festival begins today.  I’ve enjoyed some of its productions in past years (click here to read about the day I spent theater-hopping last year) and I’ve really tried to gin up some interest in this year’s slate but, on the basis of how the festival season has feared so far, I'm probably going to sit this one out.

"Baby Case" Doesn't Fully Make Its Case

There’s a lot that's similar about Bonnie & Clyde, the Frank Wildhorn musical about the Depression-era gangsters that closed in December after just 36 performances, and Baby Case, the musical about the Lindbergh kidnapping that opened at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Monday as part of this year’s New York Musical Theatre Festival.  Maybe they have too much in common.

Both are based on real-life crime stories that made headlines in the '30s.  Both have listenable scores—not perfect scores but ones with songs built on catchy, and sometimes lovely, melodies that stick with you (click here to sample some from the new show). And both are old-fashioned book musicals.  Which I usually like. The problem is that both these books are so wobbly they undermine the resulting show.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: book writing must be the hardest job in show business. A good one should tell a story that makes a point, in addition to providing good set-ups for the songs. And it’s got to be even harder to do when one guy writes the book, composes the music and crafts the lyrics, which is what Michael Ogborn has done for Baby Case. 

My husband K and I attended Monday's performance of Baby Case and we sat near some people who were clearly friends of Ogborn’s and who, even before the show began, marveled to one another about how talented he is. Indeed, he does seem to be so. But it could have helped his show to have had someone else in the room when he was putting it together.

Baby Case tracks the Lindbergh story from Charles Lindbergh’s historic non-stop solo flight over the Atlantic in 1927 to the 1936 execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing the aviator’s 20-month old son. The crime remains, like those of Bonnie and Clyde, a fascinating and oft-told tale. Which poses a question for anyone who decides to tell it again: why do it?

Ogborn attempts to answer that by condemning the media circus that surrounded what was then called “the crime of the century” and by questioning whether Hauptman was really guilty.  Both are valid ideas but without having had anyone else in the room to bat them around with, Ogborn doesn’t develop either fully. 

There are plenty of scenes—and a few song and dance numbers—in which reporters and photographers hound Lindbergh and his wife Anne both before and after the kidnapping. The publisher William Randolph Hearst pops up periodically to push for more sensational coverage and the columnist Walter Winchell to demonstrate some of the worst of it. But Ogborn doesn’t seem to have anything to say about all of this besides, isn’t it a shame?

Similarly, he drops hints that Hauptmann may have been framed but he doesn’t make a clear argument for why he was or who was behind it. The real problem may be that Ogborn was not only trying to do too much but to cram too much into his show. 

Baby Case name checks almost everyone with any connection to the incident—a Lindbergh family maid who committed suicide, an eccentric school teacher who got involved in the ransom negotiations, a celebrity reporter who covered the case and even mobster Al Capone. The show extends their 15 minutes of fame far beyond their expiration date: does the truck driver who discovered the baby’s body really need a song?

Everyone in the hardworking cast plays multiple roles.  Even Will Reynolds who plays Lindbergh doubles as Hauptmann.  Having one actor play both those parts is an interesting conceit but again not enough is done with it to make a point. Is Ogborn saying that both men were victims of the media?  Or is he implying that Lindbergh may have been just as easily culpable as Hauptmann in the child’s death?  Inquiring minds want to know.

The 10 producers listed on the program have given Baby Case a quality production. Most of the cast members have Broadway credits, including Melissa van der Schyff, who was a standout as the sister-in-law Blanche in Bonnie & Clyde and does a fine job of singing one of this show’s most plaintive ballads. 

Martin T. Lopez’s set is simple but his costumes —and there are a lot of them—nicely evoke the period. Meanwhile, K marveled at how the actors could have learned all the choreography that Warren Adams devised in what must have been a short rehearsal period for this six-show run, which ends on Sunday. And Jeremy Dobrish has directed with equal vim.

Still, I’m being so nitpicky about Baby Case because it has so much potential. Unlike so many NYMF shows, it isn’t a goofy spoof and the fact that people remember and continue to debate a crime that was committed 80 years ago underscores the potency of the story. But Ogborn has been working on Baby Case for over a decade now (it won four Barrymore Awards, including Best Musical, in his native Philadelphia back in 2002) and this may be as far as he can go with it.