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.
My California friends Bill and Joyce visited New York last month and, of course, they wanted to see some Broadway shows. I suggested the Tony winners August: Osage County, In the Heights and South Pacific. They got tickets to the first two and while they really enjoyed August, they were knocked out by In the Heights. Earlier this week Bill emailed to tell me that they’d just ordered the cast album. If they could have gotten into the sold-out South Pacific, they might also have bought its sensational new cast recording.
If you love Broadway musicals, then you probably own a bunch of cast albums too. They’re the closest way we’ve got to bring the thrill of a musical home. But I confess to envying cinephiles whose DVDs of their favorite movies come with all kinds of special features, like director's commentaries and making-of videos. With cast albums, what you see (or hear) is pretty much all you get.
It wasn’t always that way. In the golden era that began with the original cast recording of Oklahoma!, which came out on six discs in 1943, the major record studios released recordings on multiple LPs that were often accompanied by coffee-table-sized souvenir books, color photos, liner notes, and lyric sheets. But in the Dark Ages of the 1970s and ‘80s the labels started backing away from recording shows, sometimes trimming their scores to fit on just one LP and often jettisoning most of the extras.
Since 2001, Sh-K-Boom and Ghostlight Records, owned by Sherie Rene Scott, who’s currently in The Little Mermaid, and her husband Kurt Deutsch, have been recording hits, flops and cult favorites (In the Heights and Passing Strange are among their recent releases; a version of [title of show] came out in 2006). And all praise to them for doing so. But these new recordings and the few produced by other labels come out on CDs (or as digital downloads) and their extras have to be crammed into that small space.
So although I’ve written about it before, I’m giving another big shoutout to the folks at Sony Masterworks Broadway. Their original cast recording of the new Lincoln Center production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific came out right before the show won the Tony award for Best Revival. And while the actual CD comes in the customary no-frills packaging, there are loads of extras online, including some truly terrific podcasts that can be downloaded to your iPod.
Nearly everyone connected with the show has recorded his or her thoughts about it and there are eight separate podcasts, running in length from eight minutes to 22. Kelli O’Hara talks about how she based Nellie Forbush’s racial attitudes on those of her grandmother, a southerner who grew up in the 1930s and was “carefully taught certain things.” Loretta Ables Sayre expresses how much it means to her to be the first woman from the South Pacific to play Bloody Mary. Director Bartlett Sher explains how he cast the show and battled the ghosts of Mary Martin and Enzio Pinza. But my favorite is Bert Fink, the head of publicity for the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, who is a font of tidbits about the history of the musical including what happened on the closing night of the original production.
Videos and photos from the recording session (and what straight woman or gay guy doesn’t want another look at the show's leading man Paulo Szot) as well as a sampling of songs from the album are available on the website, masterworksbroadway.com/south-pacific/ (click here to go there). You can find all of the podcasts on iTunes. It's all totally enchanting and totally free.
One entire page in the Playbill for Lincoln Center Theater’s sensational new revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s South Pacific is devoted to an acknowledgment of the 14 individuals and institutions who put up the extra funds for the production. Now I’m adding my thanks too. Because you can see what a difference their money has made in Michael Yeargan’s idyllic set, Donald Holder’s sensitive lighting, Catherine Zuber’s spot-on costumes and the uniformly brilliant cast of 40.
But nowhere are the extra dollars more evident than in the care that has been given to the music, something that shouldn’t be, but often is, the neglected stepchild in today’s Broadway musicals. It's not the score that usually gets short-shrift, but how it’s played. There are 30 musicians in the South Pacific orchestra, almost twice the current number for a Broadway musical and six times as many as those playing in the mini-orchestra for the current revival of Sunday in the Park with George. This means the South Pacific orchestra is able to play Robert Russell Bennett’s original 1949 orchestrations including a sumptuous, nearly six-minute-long overture that had the audience at the performance my friend Bill and I attended cheering before the show had even begun.
In an extra gracious nod to the players, the front part of the Vivian Beaumont’s thrust stage actually retracts so that you can see the tuxedoed and gowned musicians, beautifully conducted by Ted Sperling, as they play through that opening medley of gorgeous melodies like “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Bali Ha’i”, “Younger than Springtime” and “This Nearly Was Mine.” Every aural detail has been given attention: sound designer Scott Lehrer has somehow managed to make each note and lyric heard clearly without strapping those lumpish cigarette-pack-sized mikes to the actors. This is how the music was meant to be heard and it’s an unbelievable treat to be able to hear it this way.
I’d like to think that this is the start of a new trend. The size of orchestras has been shrinking steadily over the last couple of decades, and virtually disappeared in the recent John Doyle productions of Sweeney Todd and Company that had the actors playing instruments in between saying their lines. But the current revival of Gypsy also has a larger than normal orchestra with 25 musicians, including my husband K. And, seated on stage behind a scrim that rises and falls as the action requires, they, too, get their moments in the spotlight.
The actors rise to the high level that the musicians sets in both Gypsy and South Pacific. And there is no doubt that the hardest decisions for Tony voters will be those categories in which both shows are nominated. Kelli O’Hara has been terrific before in shows such as Sweet Smell of Success, Light in the Piazza, and The Pajama Game but she breaks into the front ranks of musical stars with her performance as the spunky navy nurse Nellie Forbush, a southern girl who falls in love with a French planter on the Polynesian island where she is stationed during WWII but whose racial prejudice causes her to break off their affair when she learns that he had a previous relationship with a native woman. The role was originally written for Mary Martin but O’Hara makes it her own and will give Patti LuPone, also certain to be nominated for her powerhouse performance as Mama Rose in Gypsy, a run for her money for the Best Actress in a Musical award.
Similarly, the Brazilian opera singer Paulo Szot’s lush baritone and virile good looks redefine the role of Emile de Becque, the planter Nellie loves. “He may be the best musical leading man I’ve ever seen,” Bill remarked after the show. And equally good are the also-hunky Matthew Morrison as Lt. Joe Cable, the young officer who falls in love with a native girl but, like Nellie, succumbs to the racial mores of the time; Danny Burstein adding more than just the usual comic relief as the camp fixer Luther Billis; and the Hawaiian actress Loretta Ables Sayre, as the amusing but also self aware Bloody Mary, the native woman who sells souvenirs and other goods to the sailors.
This is the first time South Pacific has been revived on Broadway since its original production opened nearly 60 years ago but K and I saw a concert version at Carnegie Hall in 2005. That casting seemed perfect—Reba McEntire as Nellie, Brian Stokes Mitchell as Emile and Alec Baldwin as Billis—but we were ultimately disappointed. This time around, though, it was, well, a totally enchanted evening.
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.
