Feeling Chilly About "Spring Awakening"

"I dare you to knock a show starring deaf people and a girl in a wheelchair," my husband K said when I got home from the Deaf West Theatre's revival of Spring Awakening that is playing a limited engagement at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre through Jan. 24. 

Well, I don't have the cojones to do that but I do have to say that as great as it is to see those folks onstage (and all the deaf people in the audience too) I wasn't really moved by the production itself.  

And that surprises me because I was totally smitten by the original production that opened in 2006 and won eight Tonys, including Best Musical, the year before I started writing B&Me. I was such a fan of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's pop-rock score that I bought the cast album and had it on repeat-play for months.

German playwright Frank Wedekind's 1891 story of teens misunderstood by their parents, confused by the roiling of adolescent hormones and beset with one woe after another touched me. And I was equally seduced by the backstory of how it took Wedekind 15 years to find anyone daring enough to stage a play that dealt sympathetically with homosexuality, masturbation and teen pregnancy.

I also was won over by the perspicacity of the 2006 production's casting folks who gave the nod to the then-fledgling talents of Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele, John Gallagher Jr., Gideon Glick and Krysta Rodriguez, who graduates from an ensemble member in that earlier production to an awards-worthy portrayal of the local bad girl Ilse in the current one.

So even though it seemed a bit too soon for a Broadway revival (click here to read about the producer's decision to bring it back), I was intrigued by the new production’s concept of highlighting the miscommunication between the generations by making many of the youngsters deaf and literally unable to speak to their parents or hear them. 

But when I actually saw the show, I found its conceit of having deaf actors sign their dialogue and song lyrics while hearing actors simultaneously speak and sing the same lines to be distracting and to lessen, instead of heighten, the emotion.

Yet, I still admire the skill that, under the taut direction of Michael Arden, went into syncing the two languages. And I also appreciate how Spencer Liff, building on Bill T. Jones' stylized movements for the original production, finds imaginative ways to incorporate American Sign Language into his choreography (click here for a story about how they put it all together).

Those efforts are helped by the casting of the TV actress Camryn Manheim, who learned ASL in college (click here for a Q&A with her) and the veteran deaf actors Marlee Matlin, who won an Oscar for her work in "Children of a Lesser God" (click here to read an interview with her), and Russell Harvard, the heart and soul of the terrific 2012 off-Broadway show Tribes (click here for my review of it), all three making their Broadway debuts. 

And, of course, it's always a pleasure to see—and hear the dulcet voice of—Patrick Page, who shares the adult male roles with Harvard. Several of the young deaf actors, including the lovely Sandra Mae Frank, as the naive Wendla, and Daniel N. Durant as the tormented Moritz, are very good too. 

But my biggest kudos go to Austin P. McKenzie, a charismatic hearing actor with the pretty-boy looks of the young Warren Beatty, who sings wonderfully, does his own signing and, perhaps because he's able to control the role, allowed me to invest a little in the main character of Melchior who most successfully defies the adults.

And then there's that girl in the wheelchair. Her isn't technically a starring role. Ali Stroker, who was paralyzed in a car accident at two and is the first wheelchair bound actor to appear in a Broadway show (click here to read more about her) is a member of the ensemble but the exuberant abandon with which she performs makes her a standout. And I dare anybody to knock that.

"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.

Repeat Performances

There are some theater lovers who will see a show over and over again. I’m not one of them. I always think there are too many other shows out there to see and only so much time—and even less money—with which to see them. And yet, over the past few weeks, I’ve gone back to see two shows that I’m particularly fond of and that were scheduled to close this month, along with so many others during this winter of our economic descent.

Spring Awakening opened in December, 2006, a few months before I started writing this blog and so although I’ve referred to it many times, there has been no one entry that says how much I love this show. Until now. Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play about German teens coming of age and into their sexuality moved me in a way I hadn’t expected.

After I first saw it, I spent weeks listening to the cast album with the kind of obsession I hadn’t felt since, well, my own high school days. Not only do Sheik and Sater’s songs tell the characters’ story, as all good show tunes should, but they seem to tell the listener’s story too. And I was equally knocked out by Michael Mayer’s staging and Bill T. Jones’ kinetically expressive choreography.

Still, I was a little hesitant about seeing the show again when my theatergoing buddy Bill suggested that we should go back before it closes on Jan. 18. I worried that it wouldn’t be as wonderful as I remembered. It wasn’t (what is?) but it was still deeply satisfying and confirmed my belief that this show deserves a longer run.

It’s tough to beat Jonathan Groff as the original Melchior, and John Gallagher Jr., who won a Tony for his portrayal of his friend Moritz, but I thought Alexandra Socha was splendid as the naive Wendla and Matt Doyle put a delightfully arch spin on Hanschen, the more sophisticated member of the group. And the music continued to haunt me.

There were lots of young people at the performance Bill and I attended. Some of them had probably come to see Hunter Parrish, the teen heartthrob on the Showtime series “Weeds” who is now playing Melchior, but others were clearly there for the show. “I get a feeling this isn’t the first time for most of them,” Bill said as he looked around the audience during intermission. It was a potent reminder that Broadway’s constituency doesn’t have to be restricted to those over 50 and under 12.

My second repeat performance was different. Gerard Alessandrini is always updating Forbidden Broadway, the revue that lovingly parodies Broadway shows, so it is slightly different whenever you go. I went last year and had a good time. But my husband K had never seen any version and when we heard that the show was planning to shut down after 26 years, we ordered tickets.

This latest edition is called Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab. Musical numbers aren’t listed in the Playbill because they change according to Alessandrini’s creative whims. The performance we attended included a send-up of Liza's at the Palace, just four days after Minnelli’s new show opened.

Rehab is winningly co-directed as always by Phillip George and credit for the costumes still goes to Alvin Colt, the venerable designer who died this past May at the age of 92. The hardworking quartet of performers—this time out Christina Bianco, James Donegan, Gina Kreiezmar and Michael West—is terrific, doing spot-on imitations of everyone from Patti LuPone to [title of show]’s Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell. K, a pit musician playing hooky that day from Gypsy, which is closing on Jan.11, got a particular kick out of Kreiezmar’s interpretation of LuPone.

Old fans, and we were seated in a row with a bunch of them, treat Forbidden Broadway the way fans do rock concerts, calling out for their favorite numbers. “I really hope they do Annie,” one man told his friends during intermission. Luckily for him, they did. Luckily for theatergoers in general, Rehab’s close date has been pushed back from Jan. 15 to March 1.

After the show, K and I walked up Broadway and then stopped at Café des Artistes, our favorite spot in the city. Max, the restaurant’s bartender extraordinaire, made our usual cocktails and we sat sipping them, talking theater talk, grateful that shows like these exists and hopeful that despite these tough times, others, equally bold and imaginative, will come to take their place.

"Adding Machine" Adds Up to a Great Show

It seems that ever since Stephen Sondheim’s Company changed the way people think about musicals, the generation of musical makers who followed him has struggled to bring ever more serious subjects and complex music to the stage. Jason Robert Brown, Adam Guettel, Jeanine Tesori, and Michael John LaChiusa have all had varying degrees of success with this formula but I still often find myself groaning when someone suggests going to see one of these “new school” musicals. They can be so unrelentingly solemn that I almost expect to find hemlock cocktails waiting at the refreshment bar.

And so even though I was pleasantly surprised (actually totally thrilled) by the dark and complex Spring Awakening last year, I had my doubts about seeing Adding Machine, which is playing through Aug. 31, at the Minetta Lane Theatre. But friends kept talking and blogging about the show. And it recently won Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle awards. So my always-up-for-a-theatrical adventure pal Bill and I agreed that we ought to see it. And now, if you haven’t, I urge you to do so too.

The show seems to be a fairly close adaptation of Elmer Rice’s 1923 play The Adding Machine, which tells the story of an everyman named Mr. Zero, who, after working as a bookkeeper for 25 years, is replaced by an adding machine. The dehumanizing effects of industrial progress was a popular topic of that period (Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal and Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” also tap into that nightmarish side of the American Dream) but no one is more despairing than Rice, who even rules out salvation in the afterlife. I know what you’re thinking: bring on the hemlock.

But what makes Adding Machine work for me is the same thing that made Spring Awakening my favorite show of 2007: the understanding that even a show about the darkest or most complex subject also has to entertain its audience. Josh Schmidt and Jason Loewith’s score for Adding Machine is filled with songs that convey character and emotion (click here to listen to a few samples) and that succeed as artfully crafted show tunes, not the ersatz arias of the kind that weigh down so many of the new school musicals.

David Cromer’s direction, Takeshi Kata’s scene design, Keith Parham’s lighting design and Tony Smolenski IV’s sound design all not only beautifully reinforce the bleak state in which Zero exists but offer enough surprises to keep the audience engaged and, at times, even gratefully amused. The performances work too. Joel Hatch as the seemingly affectless Zero, Cyrilla Baer as his shrewish wife and Amy Warren as the office mate who secretly longs for him are all spot on.

I confess that some of the surrealistic elements seemed a little daffy (according to the New York Times review of the original play they seemed daffy back in 1923 too) but for me Adding Machine adds up to an evening that is bracingly intellectual and stirringly visceral. It’s an original but I hope it won’t be the only one of its kind.

Regrets Only for “A Catered Affair”

My regret is that I didn’t like the new musical A Catered Affair more. Its pedigree seemed to promise such great things. The story about a blue collar Bronx couple who decide to throw their daughter a big wedding that she doesn’t want and they can’t afford is based on “The Catered Affair,” a drama the great Paddy Chayefsky wrote for "The Philco Television Playhouse" back in 1955 at the height of The Golden Age of TV. Gore Vidal adapted it for a movie the next year that starred Ernest Borgnine, fresh off his Academy Award-winning portrayal in "Marty", as the taxi driver dad; Bette Davis as his unhappy wife and Debbie Reynolds as their daughter. (My unendingly resourceful friend Bill discovered that Turner Classic Movies is running that version on its On Demand channel through mid-May).

The book for the new musical is written by Harvey Fierstein, a longtime fan of the movie and a four-time Tony winner including for writing Torch Song Trilogy and the book for La Cage aux Folles; and the music is by John Bucchino, the acclaimed cabaret performer and songwriter whose work has been performed by such singers as Deborah Voigt, Liza Minnelli and Audra McDonald, who has become a virtual one-woman bandwagon for the post-Sondheim generation of show composers. The cast is lead by Faith Prince, turning in a sensationally moving performance as the mother; Tom Wopat, almost as good as the father; Leslie Kritzer, a standout as one of the original sorority sister’s in Legally Blonde, as the daughter; and Fierstein, who expanded the part of the family’s bachelor uncle for himself, turning the character from a drunk lady's man into a gay guy. And yet, this may have been the most dour wedding since Miss Havisham got left with her molding cake in Dicken’s “Great Expectations”.

I suppose expectations might be my problem here too. The show’s advertising doesn’t help. Its logo centers around a smiling bridal couple enjoying their first dance. The Catered Affair website (click here to visit) includes a chatty blog by Fierstein, invites readers to write in with their own wedding stories and promotes a “Mother Of The Bridal Shower” that offers ticket holders discounts for lunch at Tavern on the Green and a special Wedding Cupcake at one of the Cupcake Cafés. It all makes the show sound like it’s fun but it isn’t.

The critics have lined up on both sides of the aisle. “This is the saddest show about a wedding that I ever saw. And I can't imagine anybody who would want to see it,” wrote The Journal News’ Jacques le Sourd. "A Catered Affair demands serious attention from an audience, but the effort is worth it," declared the AP’s Michael Kuchwara. The show won 7 San Diego Theatre Critics Circle Awards, including Outstanding New Musical, during its pre-Broadway run there last fall.

I have to say that I’m sitting in the naysayers pew on this one. Musicals obviously don’t have to be light and frothy (as regular readers know, my all time favorite is Sweeney Todd) but they don’t have to be unrelentingly grim either (both Grey Gardens and Spring Awakening deal with some pretty depressing stuff but still manage to allow you a few chuckles). The small amount of humor in A Catered Affair revolves around the anachronistic jokes Fierstein has written for the uncle, who in this version is constantly making “Queer Eye”-style quips at a time when a gay man in a working class family like his would have been burrowing into the closet or leaving home.

And the one thing that every successful musical needs is memorable music. It doesn’t necessarily have to be tunes that you’re humming when you leave the theater (I couldn’t hum the music from Passing Strange if you paid me and yet it fuels that show). There are 16 numbers in A Catered Affair. They’re pleasant but they’re also all so similar that I actually came home thinking there had only been about five. And none of them gave you anything to celebrate.

A Catered Affair runs just 90 intermissionless minutes. Some folks are calling it a chamber musical (minimalism in one way or the other seems to be a trademark of director John Doyle, who had actors playing their own instruments in the recent revivals of Sweeney Todd and Company). And those fans, like my blog colleague Chris at Everything I Know I Learned from Musicals, are calling the show charming. The tickets, however, are full symphony-priced. And my frequent theatergoing companion Bill had a different adjective for it. “Lugubrious,” he said as we walked to the subway after the show. I, with much regret, nodded in total agreement.

Dancin’… But With Wade Robson

Word came earlier this month that a revival of Dancin', the Bob Fosse revue that opened in 1978, is coming to Broadway in the spring of 2009, following a run in Toronto. I'm crazy about Fosse's work but I'm also conflicted about this new production. The original ran for four years. Then in 1999, a posthumous tribute revue—Fosse—opened and ran for 18 months. And, of course, the now-and-forever revival of Fosse's Chicago is in its 11th year. So do we really need another Fosse fest? I imagine the producers want to trade in on the new surge of interest in dance generated by TV shows like "So You Think You Can Dance," "Dancing with the Stars" and "High School Musical." But if that's the case, why not go to some of the young choreographers who are helping to make those shows so popular? Why not draft Wade Robson to do a Broadway show?

Robson is a 25 year-old Australian who has been dancing professionally since he was five. He's earned his pop cultural street cred by having danced with Michael Jackson as a kid (in fact, he was one of the boys questioned about sharing a bed with Jackson during the Gloved One's pedophilia trial), dated Britney Spears (it's rumored that he broke up the pop singer's relationship with Justin Timberlake) and hosted "The Wade Robson Project," a hip-hop dance competition show on MTV. He's directed a bunch of music videos and even markets his own line of hip dance shoes. None of this would matter if it weren't for the fact that he's such a terrifically exciting dancemaker.

You might not think so if you only see his early work which borrows heavily from Jackson's "Thriller"-era moves and the booty-shaking gyrations of most music videos. But in the last couple of years, Robson has found his own movement vocabulary, one almost as distinctive as Fosse's: you can tell a Robson dance after the first few moves. One of the numbers he created for "So You Think You Can Dance" won an Emmy last month (click here to see it). And a couple of weeks ago he performed a splashy cameo on "Dancing With the Stars" that mixed contemporary hip hop sensibility with old school showmanship. I would have been happy to see it on a Broadway stage.

From Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins to Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett, choreographers have helped to make the Broadway musical the great art form that is. Dancing fell out of favor during the reign of the British megamusicals in the 1980s but Savion Glover's Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk, Twyla Tharp's Movin' Out and Susan Stroman's Contact were the most viscerally enjoyable shows of the last 10 years. One of the things that helped make Spring Awakening so special for me was Bill T. Jones' dynamic choreography for which he deservedly won a Tony. Broadway needs more of that kind of kinetic energy and innovation. Wade Robson just might bring it, and he might even bring along some new fans too.

"Grease" Isn't Slick Enough

There's a reoccurring dream that I have: I'm back in my old high school and no matter what I do or where I go, I can't get out. That's kind of how I've felt the last couple of weeks after seeing the totally sophomoric off-off Broadway show Idol: The Musical, both versions of the Disney Channel’s High School Musical and now the new revival of Grease that opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Sunday. Broadway seems obsessed with high school too. There are the socially conscious high schoolers in Hairspray, the sexually repressed ones in Spring Awakening, the overachieving bunch in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the slightly older sorority sisters of Legally Blonde and those witchy schoolmates in Wicked. Who says Broadway isn't trying to reach out to the youth market?

As anyone who has been to high school knows, popularity is the prime currency for success. And this production of Grease arrives with a built-in clique. Its stars were chosen by viewers who tuned into the NBC reality show, "You're the One That I Want" and phoned in votes for their favorites. "You're the One.." wasn't a big hit, as TV shows go, but it was big enough that the stage show now has a reported $15 million advance. Audience members at the performance my sister, niece and I attended reveled in being part of the in-crowed, mouthing the words to the songs and mobbing the souvenir shop, where T shirts went for $25 a pop—cash only, no credit cards.

The 21 year-olds who won the talent contest—Max Crumm and Laura Osnes—aren't bad. He has a goofy charm that doesn't really fit the character of the sexy greaser Danny Zuko but is nonetheless winning. She is appropriately sweet as goody girl Sandy Dumbrowski and nails her songs. But neither is ready to anchor a show and even though their castmates are more experienced (Kirsten Wyatt as Frenchy, the ditzy beauty-school dropout, and Jeb Brown as the lecherous radio DJ Vince Fontaine are particularly good) and nearly everyone on the creative team headed by director Kathleen Marshall has won, or at least been nominated for, a Tony Award, this Grease has an amateur feel about it. The best part for me was watching conductor Kimberly [not Karen as originally posted] Grigsby lead the onstage orchestra. Grigsby has a lithe swagger that even Rizzo, the show's bad girl, would envy and she danced and rocked her way through the entire evening. My husband K, the pit musician, has never played with Grigsby but some of our friends have and a few have been put off by what they call her show-off antics but she brought a sizzle to Grease that everyone else on stage lacked.

Truth is, I've always been so-so about Grease. But it was the object of my sister Joanne's first crush on Broadway. She saw the original production the fall she turned 16 and couldn't stop talking about it and or singing the songs in the weeks that followed. Good big sister that I was, I gave her the original cast album for Christmas, which she played and played and played. Her passion didn't fade with time; in fact, it revved up with the 1978 movie version starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. And though Joanne has seen scores of Broadway shows over the years, Grease, like all first loves, continues to hold a special place in her heart. She wasn't thrilled by what she saw at the Brooks Atkinson. But my niece—her daughter—Jennifer was. It won't surprise you to learn that Jennifer was a faithful viewer of "You’re the One That I Want". Of course, at 27, she's also one of the ones that Broadway wants. And so, although critics and traditionalists have decried it, this probably won't be the last time American TV viewers get to play casting director for a Broadway show.

The Singular Pleasures of "Passing Strange"

There are shows that you eagerly anticipate seeing and others that sneak up on you, demanding to be seen. Passing Strange, the blazingly original musical that closed at the Public Theater on Sunday, is one of the latter. "Everybody in my set is talking about it," said my twenty-six year old stepdaughter Anika when I asked if she wanted to see it. Anika's set is young, hip and multicultural and lives in the artistic parts of Harlem, the Lower East Side and Brooklyn's Fort Greene and Williamsburg. But it wasn't just young bohemians who were talking about the show. A couple of weeks ago, I was having a late dinner at the Broadway canteen Angus McIndoe and the gifted comediennes Jackie Hoffman and Mary Testa, currently in previews with the Broadway musical Xanadu, were sitting at the next table with friends and they too were talking about Passing Strange. "You gotta see it," I overheard one of them say.

So did the show live up to the hype? Sure did. Anika and I made it to one of the final performances last week and we were both knocked out by it. Part rock concert, part story theater, Passing Strange is a bildungsroman whose protagonist is a young black man coming of age in the 1970s and it refuses to fit neatly into any of the categories set aside for black musicals or any of the stereotypes reserved for describing black life. Instead it explores the experience of the post-Civil Rights generation of suburban black kids, many of whom grew up chanting Buddhist mantras, reading existential writers and listening to both hip-hop and hard rock. Racial identity in Passing Strange isn't political, it's personal. Anika was a city kid but she identified totally.

The show is based on the life of its primary creator, Mark Stewart, a brown-skinned cannonball of a man with explosive talent who goes by the single-name Stew. The music he and his collaborator Heidi Rodewald have written flows from punk and gospel to show tunes and classical, with detours along the way into cabaret, country and Gilbert and Sullivan; the lyrics are the wittiest this side of Sondheim. Stew, who plays electric guitar and narrates the action, was backed up by three jamming onstage musicians and a terrific sextet of actors. Director Annie Dorsen concocted imaginative staging and light designer Kevin Adams used the same style of fluorescent lighting that brilliantly illuminates Spring Awakening to equally good effect in this show (click here to see a YouTube video of highlights from the show). One cast member, Rebecca Naomi Jones, turned out to be a childhood friend Anika hadn't seen in years. But my favorite was Daniel Breaker, who played Stew's teenaged alter-ego with the zany loose-limbered grace of the young Jerry Lewis and the irony-laced, rubber-faced innocence of the young Richard Pryor.

The last time I've seen such a fresh and audacious theatrical debut was when George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum played at the Public in 1986 and I laughed so hard that I literally fell out of my seat. Wolfe, of course, went on to lead the Public for 11 years and to direct such groundbreaking shows as Jelly's Last Jam; Angels in America; Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk; Topdog/Underdog and Caroline, or Change. I have no idea what Stew will do next but I do know I intend to be there when he does it. And if you missed him this time around and you love theater, then you ought to do everything you can to be there too.

Tweaking the Tonys

O.K. So, the ratings for Sunday night's Tony Awards broadcast, which faced-off against both the finale of "The Sopranos" and the NBA finals, were down 20%. And it's true there were only a few surprises when the awards were announced because, as predicted, The Coast of Utopia and Spring Awakening took most of the prizes. But it was still a terrific celebration of Broadway.

I loved the wacky way Julie White burbled on when she accepted the Best Actress award (which was a surprise) for the long closed The Little Dog Laughed; and the exultant little jig Bill T. Jones did when he literally danced down the aisle to collect his award for the cathartic choreography he created for Spring Awakening; and the defiant passion of Bill Haber's explanation about why he decided to produce the WWI drama Journey's End despite the fact that no production of the 78 year old play has ever made money; and Frank Langella's eloquent tribute to his fellow actors when he claimed the Best Actor award for his performance in Frost/Nixon [click here to read all the speeches]; and the movie trailer-style film clips of all 35 shows from the past season—the hits and the misses. I just wish there had been more award categories.

I'm not suggesting that the Tonys go the way of the Grammys with 3,917 different categories or the Olympics which is so eager to appear hip that it seems ready to declare a competition for one-handed fry pan sautéing. But as Broadway adds new elements to make itself more relevant to 21st century audiences, I think the people who create those parts of its magic should be recognized along with their peers. I'm speaking primarily of the projection designers and the sound designers, particularly those who compose scores for straight plays. This isn't a radical proposal; the Tonys have a history of creating awards—and abolishing them (Best Conductor got pushed off the podium after 1964). There are currently 25 categories and there were only 11 when the prizes were first given out in 1947. A Best Play award wasn't included until the next year and one for Best Musical wasn't introduced until 1949 (Kiss Me, Kate got that one). The award for lighting was added in 1970, one for orchestrations in 1997 and the Special Theatrical Event, won this year by ventriloquist show Jay Johnson: My Two and Only, was established just in 2001.

If the Lighting Designer deserves a nod, and I totally agree that Kevin Adams contributed to the gestalt of Spring Awakening, then why shouldn't the Sound Designer be eligible for one? And it's not just because my husband K is a pit musician that I think the guys who write what's called the "original music" for straight plays should be recognized. The swirling overture Mark Bennett wrote for The Coast of Utopia played when each of the show’s record 7 awards was announced on Sunday night and hearing it transported me instantly back to the experience of that remarkable trilogy. In movies, they call it a soundtrack. The people at Ghostlight Records are calling Bennett's score "music from the play." Whatever. They released an album of it yesterday. Like me, you probably missed the launch party at the Lincoln Square Barnes and Noble in Manhattan but all of us, even the people who determine Tony categories, can get the CD at a local B&N or at Amazon.com.

Time Out For Talk About Tony Nominations

I had originally intended to post an entry on another of the shows that opened in the final weeks of the season but, like every other theater nut, I'm now obsessed with the Tony nominations that were announced yesterday. There's plenty of commentary around on who got one, who didn't, who should win and who shouldn't. Much of it is fairly routine but I've come across a few things that add something extra to the conversation and so thought I'd share them with you.

Much of the talk is about Spring Awakening, which got 11 nominations. This musical about group of young people and their sexual angst in 19th century Germany has been a critical favorite since it opened in December and has already won the New York Drama Critics' Circle and Outer Critics Circle awards. It's my favorite show of the season too but I still enjoyed reading the argument that Theatermania's Peter Filichia makes for why it shouldn't win the Tony for Best Musical. Proudly calling himself a traditionalist, Filichia criticizes Duncan Sheik's score ("anachronistic") Steven Sater's lyrics ("incorrect rhymes") and Michael Mayer's staging ("non-essential use of hand-mikes"). I don't agree with him at all (I found the staging inventive and engaging and I listen to the cast album all the time) but he still has some interesting things to say (click here to read his article). My feelings about Spring Awakening are more in keeping with those of MTV's John Norris (click here to read his piece) who praises the show for its relevance to contemporary teen life and urges the network's teen and twentysomething viewers to see it (click here to get a sneak peek at the show in a MTV video clip).

And if you're just looking for an unabashedly opinionated—and quite entertaining—take on the nominations, check out Chris Caggiano's blog, "Everything I know I Learned from Musicals" (click here to read it).

Walking the Plank with "The Pirate Queen"

After years and years in which one person shows and two handers have made up too large a part of its diet, with even the musicals tending towards small portion productions like Grey Gardens and Avenue Q, Broadway seems to be bingeing on big cast shows this season. There are 44 actors in The Coast of Utopia, 38 in Les Misérables, and 34 in the straight play Inherit the Wind. But not even 41 hard-working singers and dancers are enough to make a satisfying meal of The Pirate Queen, the Les Miz duo Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical version of the story of Grace O’Malley, a 16th century Irish proto-feminist and nationalist who not only commanded a ship of pirates but maneuvered a face-to-face summit meeting with Queen Elizabeth I.

I didn’t go to the show with high expectations. I’d heard about the poor notices it got during its fall tryout in Chicago. And even though I don’t read reviews until after I’ve seen a show, I had a sense that the New York critics weren’t much happier with the changes that show doctors Richard Maltby (pitching in on the book and lyrics) and Graciela Daniele (helping out with the staging) had made for the Broadway production. So when I called to invite my niece Jennifer to see the show, I warned her that it probably wasn’t going to be the best time she’d had in the theater. Jennifer, who’s now 27, has been going to the theater since before she was old enough to read a Playbill and she has very strong opinions about what she likes (Spring Awakening) and doesn’t like (Tarzan) but she’s obsessed with the Tudor era and so I thought she might see something in the show that others hadn’t. She didn’t.

It wasn’t a total washout. We both enjoyed the Irish step-dancing numbers choreographed by the Riverdance folks, who also produced the show. And we got a kick out of the over-the-top costumes that Martin Pakledinaz created for Queen Elizabeth. But neither the book nor the music did much for us. In fact, the show proved to be the theatrical equivalent of the proverbial Chinese meal that leaves you hungry an hour later—on the bus ride home neither of us could remember even one song from the score. And if you believe New York Post theater columnist Michael Riedel, The Pirate Queen’s landlord is hungry for something else too. Riedel reports (click here to read it) that agents for Live Nation, which owns the Hilton Theater where the show is playing, recently showed the space to director Susan Stroman as a possible home for the new Mel Brooks show, Young Frankenstein. Undaunted, The Pirate Queen’s producers are maintaining their swashbuckling attitude and posting daily entries to their website. Take a peek (click here to visit it); it’s more entertaining than their show and a lot cheaper.