Has there been a sale on snowmakers this season? It seems as though every other show I’ve seen over the past couple of weeks has featured a blizzard of some sort. That made sense for White Christmas and Slava’s Snowshow but less so when the downfall comes in the middle of The Black Monk, the small musical that South Ark Stage opened earlier this month at Theatre Row’s The Beckett Theatre. Alas, there isn’t much about The Black Monk that makes sense.
Yeah, I know what you regular readers are thinking. In my previous post I kicked the megamusical Shrek and now I’m picking on this little one. But no, nobody slipped me a Mickey of grumpy juice. And I had high hopes for The Black Monk when I first head about it. The piece is, as the Playbill notes, “inspired by the Anton Chekhov story” of the same name. I’ve seen a number of Chekhov’s classic plays this year and the idea of seeing a new Chekhov intrigued me. I also admire the show’s star Austin Pendleton. So I emailed my friend Ellie, the one-time actress, current poet and professor and longstanding lover of Chekhov, and off we went to see it.
The Black Monk tells the story of a young Russian (a philosopher in the story, an artist in the show) who, torn between the demands of the people he loves and the work he loves, makes a Faustian pack with a mysterious monk. And since the monk may be imaginary, the story also explores the relationship between genius and madness.
Wendy Kesselman, who did the adaptation for the 1998 revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, wrote both the book and music for The Black Monk and she's turned a delicate metaphysical tale into a mundane musical. Just as with Jill Santoriello, who took the same one-woman-band approach to the recently-departed A Tale of Two Cities, the results make you want to lobby for a law requiring all musicals to be written by at least two collaborators so that one person will be around to tell the other “This isn’t working.”
Its producers call The Black Monk a chamber musical. And the production could fit into most one-bedroom Manhattan apartments. There are just four actors and two—yes, count ‘em, 2—musicians: a hardworking pianist and cellist who have to churn through 23 unremarkable songs in just 90 minutes.
Of course, size shouldn’t matter but it seems to me that when you’re this small you should pay extra attention to the little details, which director Kevin Newbury definitely doesn't do. If a character is going to make a big fuss about sunflowers shouldn’t she be holding sunflowers instead of lilacs and roses? If the title character has to sing, shouldn’t he be able to carry a tune or at least be persuaded to talk his way through the number? As Pendleton warbled his way through one song after another, I squeezed my eyes shut like a toddler who believes that doing so means people will go away because it can’t see them. It didn’t work.
The miscast Pendleton aside, the actors—Elon Rutberg as the artist Andrei, Julie Craig as the woman he loves Tanya and Scott Robertson as her father Igor—do the best they can with what they’ve been given. But the real stars of the show are the technical folks—operating on limited budgets, they still manage to work a bit of stage magic. About half an hour in, a lovely old bed was wheeled on stage and Ellie leaned over and whispered “The bed is the best thing so far.” She still felt that way an hour later. I was enchanted by D.M. Wood’s lighting which painted luminous pictures on Charlie Corcoran’s simple but elegant set, helping it to morph gracefully from outdoor gardens to indoor chambers.
The actor David Rasche was in the audience at the performance Ellie and I attended. I assumed he’d come out of friendship for someone in the cast and wondered if his recent experience with the equally-disappointing To Be or Not to Be would help him know what to say when he made the obligatory backstage visit after the show. Whatever he said, he must have said it quickly because just minutes after Ellie and I settled in at the bar of the always reliable West Bank Cafe across the street, Rasche and his companion came in. A stiff drink is always welcomed after you’ve had to trudge through slush.
I hadn’t planned to write about Slava’s Snowshow. But I hadn’t planned to like it either.
Slava Polunin is a Russian-born clown who has created a show composed of a series of near-totally silent sketches that exist in a primary-colored wonderland. There are funny costumes and pratfalls that play out against recorded versions of songs like the theme from "Chariots of Fire". But like the very best clowns—Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp in the movies, Emmett Kelly’s Weary Willie for the Ringling Brothers’ circus, Bert Lahr’s Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—Slava concocts his comedy with a touch of tragedy.
At the beginning of the show, the main character, who is called Yellow in the Playbill, ostensibly because of the baggy banana-colored jumpsuit he wears, comes on with a rope, apparently intending to hang himself. But, of course, he doesn’t get the hang of how to do it. Instead, he falls in with a group of playmates decked out in long green coats, large thin feet and floppy-eared hats. There is no plot, they simply move from one funny bit to the next, at times pulling the audience into their shenanigans. (Click here to see excerpts from the show.)
I usually shudder when I hear the words “audience participation.” Which explains why I didn’t go down to the Union Square Theatre to see Slava’s Snowshow during its two-year run there. But the show, which has now played around the world and even won an Olivier Award in London, opened on Sunday for a four-week, holiday-season run at the Helen Hayes Theatre. So, off I went with my theatergoing buddy Bill and his good friend Rosemary. To my surprise and delight, the irresistible good cheer of Slava’s clown show melted even my priggish reserve.
Kids, of course, aren’t burdened with those kinds of inhibitions and they take to Slava’s Snowshow right away. Even before the performance starts, the aisles of the Helen Hayes are filled with bits of thin white paper that are there to simulate snowflakes. A serious-eyed little boy sitting across the aisle from us could hardly contain himself and kept jumping out of his seat to scoop up armfuls of the stuff and throw them into the air and sometimes at us.
Watching his sheer joy made me smile even more. For this is the kind of experience that can make a child believe that the theater is a magical place. What makes me frown, though, is that the experience is best appreciated if you sit in the orchestra and tickets for those seats, even for the tiniest tyke, cost a cool $111.50. Luckily, discounters like TheaterMania are offering cheaper tickets (click here to see TheaterMania's deal). Still, pricey but worth it if you want to turn a child into a theater lover in the future or to see the sense of wonder in his or her eye right now.
The holidays are upon us. And so are the holiday shows. The 76th version of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular is already two weeks into its seven-week run. The Big Apple Circus pitched its tent in Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park the day before Halloween. The Nutcracker is due to kick off at the New York City Ballet the day after Thanksgiving. And starting Dec. 1, Nutcracker: R Rated, a naughtier spin on the tale, opens at Theater for the New City down in the East Village.
Meanwhile, the Cirque du Soleil folks have brought Wintuk, their holiday-aimed extravaganza, back to the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden for the second year in a row. But this time, it may get some head-to-head competition when the clown-show Slava’s Snowshow opens in Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre on Dec. 7.
But the big news this season is the arrival of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, which opened at the Marquis Theatre on Sunday night. I can take or leave these holiday offerings but my sister Joanne is crazy about them. In fact, it would be hard to find someone with more holiday spirit than my sister. She’s already scouring the TV listings for the annual showings of holiday specials and Christmas movies. And the 1954 classic “White Christmas” has always been one of her favorites.
It starred Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye as a famous song-and-dance team and Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen as an up-and-coming sister act. The plot, such as it is, centers around their romantic entanglements and combined efforts to put on a show to save a friend’s country inn but it’s really just an excuse for them all to perform lots and lots of great Berlin songs (click here to see a trailer for the movie).
The stage version, which debuted in San Francisco in 2004, has been joyfully making its away across the country over the past four holiday seasons. But, as one of its producers told a workshop I attended in May, he and his partners hadn't planned to bring it to Broadway because they thought we New Yorkers were too jaded for such an old-fashioned kind of show. I don’t know what made them change their mind. But I suspect that, just as they predicted, most New York theatergoers will find the show corny.
This White Christmas is such a faithful recreation of the movie that I wondered if Stephen Bogardus had been cast because he so much resembles Crosby. Or if they’d made him up to look that way. David Ives, who usually performs a similar task for the Encores! series, adapted the screenplay along with Paul Blake but they don’t do much to update it. Is there anyone under 50 who gets references to Topo Gigio, Senor Wences and other regulars on the old “Ed Sullivan Show”?
Still, it looks as though no expenses have been spared. There are 33 people in the cast and another 25 in the orchestra pit. Costume designer Carrie Robbins has whipped up scores of festive costumes. And set designer Anna Louizos, ably assisted by lighting designer Ken Billington, turns out a procession of picture-perfect sets, building up to the grand and appropriately snowy finale.
Director Walter Bobbie, another Encores! vet, keeps the whole thing moving. But the show’s MVP is choreographer Randy Skinner who concocts one crowd-pleasing dance number after another, most of them winningly performed by Jeffry Denman and Meredith Patterson (click here to see a trailer for the show).
The resulting confection may prove too sweet for folks who prefer their musicals spiked with irony. But there is an audience for this show: families who’ve already seen the other holiday offerings, tourists who still think of Broadway as a place where musicals are bright and happy things, and people who just love Christmas and all the sentiment that comes with it. People like my sister Joanne. She loved Irving Berlin’s White Christmas.
Has there been a sale on snowmakers this season? It seems as though every other show I’ve seen over the past couple of weeks has featured a blizzard of some sort. That made sense for White Christmas and Slava’s Snowshow but less so when the downfall comes in the middle of The Black Monk, the small musical that South Ark Stage opened earlier this month at Theatre Row’s The Beckett Theatre. Alas, there isn’t much about The Black Monk that makes sense.
