As soon as I hear about a new jukebox musical, I call my sister Joanne. She loves them. And she’s not ashamed of that. It’s been eight years but I still regret rushing her out of the Winter Garden before she’d finished bopping out to Mamma Mia!’s curtain call reprise of “Dancing Queen.” And I knew Good Vibrations had no chance when she tried to hurry me out of that theater. So it was a no-brainer to ask her to go with me to see Rock of Ages.
Unlike Mamma Mia! (ABBA) or Good Vibrations (The Beach Boys) or All Shook Up (Elvis), Rock of Ages isn’t built around the songbook of one artist. Instead, it’s a kind of three-dimensional tribute album to the arena-rock era of the ‘80s (Pat Benatar, Bon Jovi, Journey, Styx). The musical’s first-time lead producers say they got the idea for the show when they heard a Journey song on the radio and thought it would be great to have a whole theater of people singing along to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” (click here to read a New York Times article about the making of the musical).
I have to confess that I didn’t know the Journey song because it came out during that period of music, between ‘70s folk rock and disco and ‘90s grunge and gangsta rap, that I tuned out entirely. What excited me about seeing Rock of Ages is its policy of in-seat drink service during the performance. Just the idea of that has appalled many traditional theatergoers (“I hope you don’t sit next to some hurling college student,” my husband K said as I was leaving home for the theater that night). But I was willing to take the risk for a chance to kick back and sip a little chardonnay while I watched a show.
The wine ($10 bucks for a big plastic cup that contained very little of the grape) was only so-so. But it was amusing to watch the waiters scoot up and down the aisles in a Grouch Marx crouch as they looked for thirsty customers and tried to stay out of people's sight lines. Somehow they missed the woman sitting in the row in front of Joanne and me, who kept waving and flashing one of the mini-lights the ushers handed out and that our waiter said would summon drink service. It didn’t. She bolted for the bar at intermission.
To my surprise, however, the real fun was on stage. Now let me say it as clearly as I can: this is not a good show. But let me also say this: it’s a totally entertaining show. The boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl plot is predictable and silly and the jokes and Kelly Devine’s pole-dancing-centric choreography are cheesy. But Rock of Ages doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. Book writer Chris D’Arienzo and director Kristin Hanggi have made sure that when you laugh, you’re laughing with them, not at them. This is a Xanadu for straight guys.
The action takes place in a soon-to-be demolished rock club on L.A.’s Sunset Strip. The boy, a recent arrival from the Midwest with dreams of rock stardom, is winningly played by Constatine Maroulis, a finalist from the fourth season of TV’s “American Idol,” which is turning out to be quite a farm team for Broadway. The waitress he loves is played by the talented Broadway vet Amy Spanger. The other man, the lead singer of a hit rock band who temporarily lures her away, is James Carpinello, who, as his Playbill bio points out, has become the king of juke box musicals with roles in Saturday Night Fever and Xanadu (although he broke his foot before opening night). The crowd-pleasing role of a Cabaret-style emcee is played by Mitchell Jarvis, who looks like the love child of Jack Black and Norbert Leo Butz and gets extra points from me for one of the funniest Playbill bios I’ve ever read.
The music is LOUD. But the songs are nicely integrated into the flimsy plot. And hearing them is what most of the people who will go to see Rock of Ages will care about. And they won’t all be aging Gen-Xers either. Music video games like “Guitar Hero” have created a whole new audience for rock music and those young fans will get a kick out of this too. The producers (all 25 of them) are doing everything they can to woo both of these groups to Broadway. Instead of holding audience talkbacks, they've invited real arena bands to play after some performances. And in a move that I hope will catch on, they've capped the ticket price at $99. Rock on!
I love summer and I try to be outside in the warm weather every minute I can. Which is sometimes a problem when you’re a theater lover. Sure, there are outdoor productions like Shakespeare in the Park and Broadway at the Seaport. But more often than not, you’re heading inside a theater just when the temperature seems to be at the height of its shank-of-the-evening glory. And I’m clearly not the only one who feels this way because the exodus at intermissions in the summer tends to be larger than usual and getting people back into their seats a little more difficult. Still, I found it telling when I looked around outside City Center towards the end of Tuesday night’s mid-performance break of the new Encores! production of Damn Yankees and realized that most of the stragglers were the city’s major theater critics.
Eventually an usher came out to shoo us in and we all trooped back to our seats but I suspect that a good number of us might have preferred sitting at one of the outdoor cafés on the block or maybe even in the bleachers watching the real Yankees play in their final season in their venerable stadium before moving to a new one next year. As you probably know, the Bronx Bombers don’t actually appear in this 1955 musical; the team it celebrates is the old Washington Senators (now the Minnesota Twins) and its protagonist is Joe Boyd, a middle-aged fan so devoted to them that he offers to sell his soul if the Devil will transform him into a gifted young player who can help the losing team win the pennant over its New York nemesis (click here to read Theatermania columnist Peter Filichia's wonderful interview with a now 91 year-old Shannon Bolin, who played Boyd’s wife Meg in the original production).
Damn Yankees was never a classic musical—the book is barely robust enough to make it to second base—but its score is delightful and its performances were nearly all home runs. Especially Gwen Verdon’s star-clinching turn as Lola, the Devil’s femme fatale helpmate who is charged with distracting the young Joe. The show’s choreographer Bob Fosse, who would later marry Verdon, created sensational numbers custom-made to her distinctive and prodigious talent (click here to see her in action). After Damn Yankees was turned into a movie in 1958, with the entire Broadway cast intact except for having Tab Hunter take over the role of young Joe, everyone, including the little-girl me, was vamping around and singing Verdon’s signature song, “Whatever Lola Wants.” Classic or no, the show gives any revival a lot to live up to.
Unlike the staged readings that Encores! usually puts on, the Summer Stars series, now in its second season, is a full sets-and-all affair. The series scored last year with its powerhouse production of Gypsy, which transferred to Broadway and won Tonys for all three of its leads—Patti LuPone, Laura Benanti and Boyd Gaines. So that has given this Damn Yankees revival another set of expectations to meet. And, alas, all those demands prove too tall an order. By intermission, those of us loitering outside City Center had already seen the show’s biggest numbers—“Heart” (you know, as in, “You gotta have…), “Shoeless Joe From Hannibal, Mo” and, of course, “Whatever Lola Wants” and we knew it wasn’t going to be anywhere near as good as either Gypsy or the original 1955 production.
Which isn’t to say it’s bad. Sean Hayes, the flamboyant Jack from TV’s “Will & Grace” who is 
making his New York stage debut as the Devil who uses the pseudonym Mr. Applegate, is a crowd pleaser, although his Satan is more a naughty boy than the diabolical dealmaker of the original’s Ray Walston, whose wry wit would later enliven his own hit sitcom, “My Favorite Martian.” Jane Krakowski, a Tony-winner for the 2003 revival of Nine and now on TV’s “30 Rock,” looks fabulous and gamely tries to master Fosse’s choreography, although even she seems to know that she can’t match Verdon’s virtuosity. Cheyenne Jackson, on furlough from Xanadu, also looks great and is a valiant young Joe. But none of them seem to really get inside their characters and make them their own.
After the show, in between bites of deluxe cheeseburgers at the nearby Brooklyn Diner, my pal Bill suggested that the limited rehearsal period for the three-week run, which ends July 27, might not have given them enough time to develop their performances. And that may be true but, given the same amount of time, Randy Graff managed to find the emotional center of the wife Meg, making her a fully realized person.
My husband K, a pit musician, usually performs in the Encores! orchestra but this time out, he stayed with his steady gig, playing for Gypsy, and so he was even more curious than usual to hear what I’d thought of the show when I got home. “Ah,” he said, after I described it, “sounds like summer stock.” And that’s the perfect description. This production of Damn Yankees is light entertainment for a summer night, the equivalent of watching a Triple-A-Baseball game. Except, of course, that with the game, you'd get to spend the evening outside.
Like many kids, I was enchanted by the stories of Greek and Roman mythology. Like, I suspect, only a few, I spent the summer between 7th and 8th grades, reading “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad.” And I’ve never quite shaken my fascination with their original superheroes. I may be the only person living in a Manhattan zip code to admit to not only having seen but actually liking Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy” with Brad Pitt as the mighty Greek hero Achilles and Eric Bana as his worthy Trojan rival Hector. And yet, it was with no little trepidation that I made my way to the Rose Theater in the Time Warner Center to see the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Euripides’s The Bacchae, which kicked off this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival 08.
I think it was all those pictures of a golden-skirted Alan Cumming as the god Dionysus that gave me pause. Did I really want to see him do his androgyny thing again? I needn’t have worried. Both he and the production are splendid. And I suspect that Euripides would have liked it all as well. According to the reference books, Greek plays were divided strictly along genre lines—tragedies, comedies, and something call satyr plays that tended to be raunchy. But Euripides seems to have liked to mix them up a bit. And that’s just what this show does.
The Bacchae tells the story of Dionysus, the son of the chief god Zeus and a human woman, who returns to his mother’s homeland, demands that his countryman recognize him as a god and wreaks retribution when they refuse. Despite the life and death subject matter, there’s campy humor (Xanadu fans would feel quite at home), rousing gospel and soul singing by a nine-member chorus of black women dressed in fabulous red gowns, and flamboyant stagecraft (I know you’ve already heard about the opening where an upside-down Cumming descends from the heavens with his naked butt facing the audience). But there’s harrowing tragedy too, most notably in the Italian-born and British-trained actress Paola Dionisotti’s affective portrayal of Agave, the mother who, in typical Greek drama fashion, unknowingly murders her child (click here to hear Cumming and Dionisotti discuss the play and to see excerpts from the original Scottish production).
Anyone with just a passing knowledge of Greek drama knows that dysfunctional families are the ur-theme of western theater. Of course, even the experts have only a passing knowledge of Greek drama because so little of it has survived. The plays grew out of religious rituals and were often one-time only events written to be presented at festivals held to honor Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstatic good times and, eventually the divine patron of the theater.
Only the works of the playwrights Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus remain and so we don’t really know how they would compare if we could read or see the works of their peers. But there are indications that they were considered the big dogs of their day. Aeschylus, the eldest of the three, is reported to have won the top honor at Athens’s annual City Dionysia festival 13 times; Sophocles did even better with 18 first prizes. Euripides took home that award just five times but he may have gotten the last laugh. And not just because more of his plays survive than those of the other two. It’s because Euripedes is actually sort of a postmodern kind of guy.
The characters in his plays are more complex, even recognizably neurotic to a 21st century sensibility. His tone tends to be cynically irreverent and almost contemporarily wary of the establishment. The once-again-hot debate over rationalism versus religion is the main subject of The Bacchae, which was first performed posthumously after Euripides died in 406 B.C. at the august age of 74 and which won his final Dionysia honor. But what I most like about him is that judging from such works as Medea, Andromache, Hecuba, Electra, The Trojan Women, Iphigeneia in Tauris and even the characters Agave and the Maenads, or mad women, in The Bacchae, Euripides was comfortable dealing with strong female characters, even if the parts back them were played by men.
And for that reason alone, I don’t know why we don’t see more of his works done, given all the brilliant female actors who have far too few opportunities to really strut their stuff. David Greig’s colloquial script shows that the dialog can be adapted for modern ears. And John Tiffany, the director who created last year’s highly acclaimed Black Watch at St. Ann’s Warehouse, has mounted a 90-minute production that is simultaneously true to the play’s ancient text and thoroughly entertaining for modern audiences even if the only Odyssey they know is the new Honda minivan. But the run ends on July 13 so there are only a few days left if you want to revel in this surprisingly satisfying bacchanal.
There weren’t a lot of surprises when the Tony nominations were announced earlier this month. Except maybe that Cry-Baby had won a shot at the Best Musical award. It’s not a terrible show and people who see it will probably have a good enough time (click here to see excerpts from the show). But, with one exception (Rob Ashford’s high energy choreography), it isn’t an award-caliber show either. What it is is simply another homage to the Fifties.
Which raises the following question: hasn’t the time come for Broadway to declare a moratorium on plays and musicals about the Fifties? This past season alone, A Catered Affair; Grease; Come Back, Little Sheba; The Country Girl; Thurgood and, of course, Cry-Baby, were all centered around events that took place in the post-War period between 1946 and 1964 and I’m not even counting leftover shows like Jersey Boys. And then there’s Happy Days, a musical version of the old TV series about life during the Eisenhower era that is currently playing at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut.
Why all this looking back? And why to that period? I can’t believe it’s because people feel that the music back then was so great. Is everyone really all that nostalgic for the supposedly more innocent era of ducktailed bad boys and poodle-skirt wearing good girls? Or is Broadway trying to make up for the fact that it overlooked rock and roll when it first arrived on the scene? Whatever the reason, isn’t it time to move on?
And while I’m making suggestions, it probably isn’t such a good idea either for Broadway to pick up the Hollywood bad habit of trying to make sequels to successful shows. The current thinking seems to be if The Producers or Hairspray sell well, let’s see what other Mel Brooks or John Waters movie we can turn into a cash-cow musical. Well, you didn’t see Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein turning to other states after their Oklahoma was a hit.
Cry-Baby suffers in comparison to its predecessors—both the other '50s shows now on stage, and the movie that spawned it. The show’s publicity campaign makes much of the fact that the score is by David Javerbaum, executive producer of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show”, and Adam Schlesinger, a founder of the rock band Fountains of Wayne. And it is great that guys with such hip credentials are interested in working on Broadway but it’s also clear that here, they are simply guns for hire. Even so, several of their songs are clever enough that I’d like to see what they’d do when given free reign.
A more charismatic leading man might have diverted attention away from the show’s shortcomings or given it the kind of edge Johnny Depp did in the movie version. James Snyder, making his Broadway debut, works hard and sings well but his Cry-Baby tends to get lost in the crowd when the ensemble is on stage. I can’t help thinking what someone like Cheyenne Jackson (now starring in Xanadu and in a zillion chatroom complaints about why he didn’t get a Tony nomination for his role as that show’s muse-needy artist Sonny) might have done in the part of Cry-Baby. Although he's probably had his fill of the Fifties too, having already done All Shook Up, the ill-fated juke box musical based on Elvis songs.
Souvenir shops have become almost as common as Playbills at Broadway and off-Broadway theaters. So much so that I actually know some people who have skipped the show that's playing and just run into the lobby to pick up a CD, a T-shirt, or a keychain. The Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre doesn't usually host that kind of goodie-bag show. And so as the audience filed out of the performance I attended of Beyond Glory, Stephen Lang's one-man tribute to men who have received the Medal of Honor, we found a young woman standing next to a pile of books simply stacked on the floor. "Buy the book on which the show is based," she called out. "Only $20 and signed by the author." Several men, some of them visibly wiping tears from their eyes, snapped up copies.
Broadway has begun playing the niche market game, targeting different shows to different audiences—Wicked and Legally Blonde for tween and teen girls, Spamalot for their big brothers, The Color Purple for black church ladies and Xanadu for camp-loving show queens—but there's been little aimed at the "Saving Private Ryan" set. In fact, there’s been little entertainment for them period. Even Clint Eastwood is making rueful war movies these days. After four years in Iraq, Americans are fed up with war. But even the most diehard opponents of the war in Iraq, determined not to repeat at least one mistake of the Vietnam War, bookend their harangues with statements of support for the troops. In that, Beyond Glory, which Lang adapted from the oral histories in journalist Larry Smith’s book of the same title, is a play of its time.
I hadn't planned to see it. I've never been a big fan of Lang's (he's always seemed to overpower his roles) and I'm tired of war talk too. But the reviews were so strong that curiosity got the best of me. And I'm glad it did. Director Robert Falls has crafted a production that is elegant in its simplicity. And Lang, in total control of how to best use his natural aggression, is superb. Aided only by assorted pieces of military uniforms that he pulls from an old trunk, he transforms himself into eight very different men, most of them ordinary joes, who showed extraordinary valor under extreme circumstances in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. His co-stars are the show's design team (including lighting designer Dan Covey, sound designer Cecil Averett, projection designer John Boesche, and original music composers Rober Kessler and Ethan Neuberg) each of whom has contributed work that is non-intrusive but powerfully effective.
There was none of the usual coughing and no restless moving in seats at the performance I attended. The only sound was grateful laughter during the 80-minute show's few humorous moments. The New York run, which ends on Aug. 19, is only the latest stop on a tour that has taken the show to American military bases around the world and the floor of the U.S. Congress. Lang has insisted in interviews that the show isn't making a political statement. But it is unabashedly patriotic. Only 3,463 medals have been given the nation's highest award for military service since Abraham Lincoln signed the law establishing the honor in 1861; just two have been granted to soldiers involved in the Iraq War. Beyond Glory honors all of those who are serving.
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.
As soon as I hear about a new jukebox musical, I call my sister Joanne. She loves them. And she’s not ashamed of that. It’s been eight years but I still regret rushing her out of the Winter Garden before she’d finished bopping out to Mamma Mia!’s curtain call reprise of “Dancing Queen.” And I knew Good Vibrations had no chance when she tried to hurry me out of that theater. So it was a no-brainer to ask her to go with me to see Rock of Ages.
