"The Burnt Part Boys" Leaves Me Cold

Is there any harder job in America than writing a decent book for a musical?  I’m beginning to think not. Yeah, I know there’s more at stake in being the president of the country or finding a cure for cancer but at least the folks in those positions seem to know what their job is even when they can’t fulfill it to everyone’s satisfaction.  I’m not sure that’s always the case when it comes to writing the book for a musical. The latest evidence is The Burnt Part Boys, the new show that’s playing at Playwrights Horizons through June 13.

The Burnt Part Boys has been in development for 10 years, dating back to when Chris Miller, who wrote the music; and Nathan Tysen, who wrote the lyrics, were grad students in NYU’s musical theater program. Like so many musicals today their show began with the music—Miller and Tysen wanted to write a score that used the blue grass, gospel and other Americana sounds of their Midwestern and southern childhoods—and so the book kind of got gerrymandered around that. I always thought you started off with a story first.  Otherwise, don't you just have a jukebox musical without any familiar tunes?

The duo knew they wanted their story to be an adventure yarn, a kind of boys-coming-of-age tale in the tradition of the ‘80s-era movies “Stand By Me” and “The Goonies.”  They also thought it would be cool to include a ghost story.  After five years, they brought in Mariana Elder, another NYU grad, and she overhauled the book, drawing on an interest in coal miners she’d developed in an American Studies class and her grief over the then-recent death of her father. 

You can find traces of all those things in The Burnt Part Boys, which is now set in 1962 and centers around the young, and still grieving kids of miners killed in a cave-in 10 years before. But what you won’t find is a compelling narrative, a believable story arc, a book sturdy enough to provide the backbone for a strong musical. Just about every young musical writer today wants to emulate the seriousness of Stephen Sondheim's work. Why aren't more young book writers striving to emulate the book-writing mastery of Arthur Laurents, Joe Masteroff or James Lapine?

About 10 minutes into The Burnt Part Boys, which runs about 100 minutes without intermission, I heard my theatergoing buddy Bill sighing at the thought of having to sit through the rest of it. Five or so minutes later, four people with aisle seats actually jumped up and fled.  And then shortly after that, a woman sitting in the middle of a row crawled over the people between her and the aisle to leave.  I sat still. But I kept checking my watch.

There are some lovely melodies in The Burnt Part Boys but the songs sound so much the same that they’ve all mushed together in my mind. And the lyrics are so heavy on exposition that I gave up trying to follow them.  This is, admittedly, a pet peeve of mine but whatever happened to metaphor in lyric writing?  Or, as Bill said later over dinner across the street at the West Bank Café, couldn’t there be a little subtext?  Does everything have to be spelled out so literally?

As you can probably tell, watching this show made me grumpy.  So much so that during the performance, I had to remind myself that actors feed off the energy of the audience and I had become an enervating black hole. So I sat up and tried to be more supportive. But I kept slipping. 

The backdrops that Brian Prather created to represent the mountains are lovely and beautifully lit by Chris Lee but the use of ladders and chairs to simulate the mountain passages and streams the character trudge and forge as they make their way to the site of the disaster (the “burnt part” of the mountain) is not only cheap-looking but confusing. “What’s that supposed to be?” I had to lean over and ask Bill at one point.

Director Joe Calarco brings some imaginative touches to the staging—the image of the miners that opens the show is as powerful a stage picture as any I’ve seen all year—but he has the actors running into the audience far too much. The cast sings well enough but the acting, perhaps hobbled by the script, is nowhere near involving enough. 

As we left the theater, an usher stood by the door handing out a six-page interview with Miller, Tysen and Elder.  Reading it when I got home made me feel badly about my response to their show. These young folks clearly feel deeply about musicals and they’ve obviously worked long and hard on this one.  Maybe, I told myself, The Burnt Part Boys might fare better as children’s theater.  But maybe not. Kids can be even more demanding of a decently told story.

The Stars Shine in "This Wide Night"

The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, named for an actress who worked in both the U.S. and London, is awarded annually to a female playwright whose work is deemed “of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theater.” Nominations come in from all over the world but most people, including me, assumed that Ruined would make Lynn Nottage a shoo-in for the prestigious prize two years ago.  Instead, the jury, which that year included such notables as Edward Albee, Emily Mann and Sigourney Weaver, gave the Blackburn to the British playwright Chloë Moss for her two-hander This Wide Night. 

I knew right then, I wanted to see that play.  And now, the Naked Angels company has given me that chance with an all-star production of This Wide Night that’s running at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater thru June 27.

Moss was commissioned to write This Wide Night as part of a project to help imprisoned women understand how difficult life on the outside can be. In a note at the front of the production’s annoyingly odd-shaped program, she dedicates the play to six inmates she interviewed four summers ago. I found myself wondering if, after watching the grim 90-minute drama their stories inspired, those women had all appealed for longer sentences.

The play is set in a room that designer Rachel Hauck has made so convincingly seedy that you can practically smell the cheap but ineffective disinfectant used to ward off the rot. The lighting by Matt Frey and sound by Robert Kaplowitz are equally evocative.  

The room’s tenant is a twentysomething woman named Marie who spends most of her time starring at a small, fuzzy-screened television that has no sound because the audio doesn’t work. Her listless days are interrupted when her recently-released former cellmate, an older woman named Lorraine, arrives, clearly hoping that they can be roomies again.

I’m not really sure what the Blackburn jury members saw in the play because not much happens, what does happen isn’t all that surprising and the play’s insights—it’s tough to move on after you’ve been in jail—aren’t really original.  But maybe what their experienced eyes saw is that the play offers one of those rare opportunities for two actresses to pull out all their stops. And it would be hard to find two finer actresses to do that than Edie Falco and Alison Pill. 

Falco, of course, has won fame and a following as Carmela, the mafia wife on “The Sopranos,” and now as the title character on the Showtime series “Nurse Jackie” (her co-star Merritt Wever, looking much trimmer than the junior nurse Zoey Barkow she plays on the show, sat behind my pal Bill and me at the performance we saw). But Falco is an old theater hand who regularly returns to the stage and she is almost unrecognizable and totally heartbreaking here as a woman who has had everything, including her vanity, stripped from her and so clings desperately to whatever shred of optimism she can grab.

Pill is every bit as good. The actress, who is only 25, has practically grown up on the New York stage, having appeared in some nine plays (and earning raves and award nominations for nearly all of them) since moving here from her native Canada in 2003. Her Marie is a woman-child, and Pill makes her simultaneously flinty and needy.

Both actresses struggle a bit with their working class British accents but they adeptly mine every nuance of these displaced women.  (Click here to see them, along with Moss and the show’s director Anne Kauffman talk about the play.) They are so fine together and so supportive of one another, that I wish someone would offer a commission for playwrights—female or male—to write a whole series of plays for them to team up on.

Its Director Tarnishes "The Metal Children"

Adam Rapp is one of those up-and-coming playwrights whose work every theater lover should have seen at least once by now.  He’s written more than 15 plays over the past decade and a half, including Red Light Winter, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer in 2006. I, however, somehow managed to miss all of them. And, adding insult to injury, I’ve usually confused Rapp with his actor brother Anthony, the once-and-forever Mark in Rent. Eager to correct these shortcomings, I jumped at the chance to see The Metal Children, Rapp’s latest play which is currently running at the Vineyard Theatre.  Maybe I should have waited a little longer.

The play’s subject is certainly compelling: its protagonist is Tobin Falmouth, a New York writer whose young adult novel has been banned by the school board in a small, white-bread town called Midlothia.  Upping the stakes, Rapp makes the book a supernatural tale in which pregnant teens mysteriously disappear, leaving behind metal statues of themselves. It ends when the novel's main character defiantly aborts herself with her father's hunting knife.

As one might expect, religious conservatives in Midlothia are outraged by the book. The head of the town’s high school English department (nicely played by Connor Barrett) just as fervently believes that it's an appropriately artistic expression of the kind of issues young people face. Local teens have lined up on both sides; some are beating up the book’s supporters, others are showing their solidarity with it by actually getting pregnant themselves. Falmouth is invited to town to defend his work. 

Plays that deal with big ideas and issues like the tension between artistic freedom and responsibility are usually right up my alley. And Rapp, who has written young adult novels and had one banned (click here to read a New York Times article about how an incident in his life inspired The Metal Children) would seem the ideal person to take on this one.

He does get points for writing a play that allows both sides to have their say—there’s an emotional speech by a conservative woman near the beginning of the second act. But he loses them for directing the play himself in such a cartoonish way—the speeches the townsfolk give may raise valid points but what they say is largely undermined by their portrayal as eccentric yokels—that I ended up not caring who was right or what happened to the characters and sneaking peeks at my watch to see when the whole thing would end. And I felt that way despite a brave performance by the always-fascinating Billy Crudup, who fought hard against the temptation to portray Falmouth as an avatar of lefty virtue.

Despite my reservations, however, both the play and this production have their supporters.  The critical response is split (click here to read the reviews on StageGrade.) But the night my friend Ellie and I saw the show, the audience was peppered with people I’d seen on other stages, including the talented actress Annie Parisse, terrific in both Becky Shaw and Clybourne Park. 

There’s a small area outside the green room at the Vineyard where people waiting to see cast members after a show can stand.  About a quarter of the audience seemed to gather there that night, as though the word had gone out on the theater insiders' grapevine that The Metal Children shouldn’t be missed or that its actors would need support.

"The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity" is a Total—and Totally Delightful—Knockout

Even those of us who consider ourselves theater lovers have to admit that there are few nights in the theater that can truly be described as fun. But I defy anyone to find a more fun-packed evening of theater than The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, the outrageously entertaining new play that opened at Second Stage Theatre on Thursday night.

Let me say right off the bat that I had no intention of seeing this show.  It has a silly-sounding title and the advanced publicity said it was about wrestling, something I haven’t paid any attention to since Hulk Hogan’s heyday back in the late ‘80s.  But then, seemingly out of nowhere, the play was listed as a runner-up for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama. My theatergoing buddy Bill and I decided we had to see for ourselves how that had happened and we bought tickets immediately. 

Good move on our part because we had a ball and it’s now going to be a tough ticket to get.  The show is a kinetic mix of gut-busting jokes, fast-paced video projections, blaring music, hip-hop-infused dialog, real wrestling moves and energetic audience participation that even I, who usually cringe when actors run into the audience, loved, although I confess that may have something to do with the fact that one of the wrestlers chose Bill to brandish the America flag while he ripped his muscles and whipped the crowd into a U.S.A chanting frenzy. The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity could turn a frat-boy into a show queen. (Click here to see some scenes from the show.)

But beneath all the razzle dazzle—and the reason the smart Pulitzer jury singled the play out—is a sharp, satirical look at many of the major issues that keep body-slamming the U.S. in the 21st century: the fascination with celebrity, the obsession with money, and the preoccupation with race that constantly pits one ethnic group against another.

As advertised, the show centers around the stars and supporting players of a fictional wrestling federation. A Puerto Rican wrestler named Mace serves as the color commentator, in all senses of the word, as the action unfolds.  Mace is the perpetual fall guy, whose assignment is to lose to the pretty boy and pop-muscled stars in a way that makes them look like better wrestlers than they really are.

Mace’s usual opponent is the title character, Chad Deity, a black showboat with limited talent.  Mace’s new protégée is Vigneshwar Paduar, a wiry Indian kid, whom the sleazy white owner of the federation assigns the ring name The Fundamentalist and costumes as Osama bin Laden, complete with turban, beard and a signature move called the “sleeper cell kick.”  The wrestlers know it’s all just show biz but their festering resentment about the roles they’re forced to play moves The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity from an amusing cartoon into a cautionary tale.

Black and brown actors don’t often get layered roles like these. And Terence Archie as the charismatic Chad and Usman Ally as the conflicted Paduar are both sensational (not to mention sensationally buffed--kudos to the casting team for finding actors who both look the part and play it so well). The standout, however, is Desmin Borges, whose Mace won me over from his first speech in which he declares a love for wrestling (feel free to substitute America) that began in childhood and that he can’t give up despite how badly it treats him. Borges is both funny and touching.  It’s a bravura performance.

But everyone involved in this show has brought his or her A-game.  Christine Pascual’s costumes are LOL funny. Brian Sidney Bembridge has conceived an equally amusing set that centers around a large wrestling ring, overseen by giant video screens (well stocked with images designed by Peter Nigrini) and magnificently lit by Jesse Klug.  Meanwhile, Mikhail Fiksel’s sound design keeps the proceedings at an appropriately high pitch.  And, needless to say, fight director David Woolley deserves a big shout out for the wrestling choreography (click here to read a New York Times piece about how the actors trained).

Still, star billing has to go Edward Torres, the artistic director of Teatro Vista in Chicago, where the show recently had its world premiere earlier this year.  It’s hard to imagine how any succeeding director is going to top the stagecraft he devised for this high-powered production. The critics have gone crazy for the show (click here to read some of the reviews on StageGrade).  All I can add is, Believe the hype.

The ITBA Awards for the Season's Best

The winners of this year’s ITBA Awards, given out by the Independent Theater Bloggers Association, the group of theater watchers who regularly express ourselves online, have just been announced. I can’t say I voted for everyone of the winners but I can say that they’re all deserving and I applaud all of them.  You can see our full list of nominees by clicking here and below is the video of the official announcement of the winners read by Jeannine Frumess, Susan Blackwell, and Ann Harada, all currently appearing in the new off-Broadway musical The Kid:

Here's the complete list of the winners:
OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY
Red

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY PLAY REVIVAL
A View From The Bridge

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL
American Idiot

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY MUSICAL REVIVAL
La Cage Aux Folles

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY
circle mirror transformation

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL
Yank!

OUTSTANDING OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL
The Glass Menagerie

OUTSTANDING OFF-OFF BROADWAY SHOW
Viral

OUTSTANDING SOLO SHOW
A Boy And His Soul

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE
circle mirror transformation

CITATIONS FOR EXCELLENCE BY INDIVIDUAL PERFORMERS
Nina Arianda, Venus In Fur
Kate Baldwin, Finian's Rainbow
Desiree Burch, The Soup Show
Rebecca Comtois, Viral
Viola Davis, Fences
Jon Michael Hill, Superior Donuts
Douglas Hodge, La Cage Aux Folles
Sarah Lemp, The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side & Happy In The Poorhouse
Laura Linney, Time Stands Still
Jan Maxwell, The Royal Family & Lend Me A Tenor
Bobby Steggert, Ragtime & Yank!
Amy Lynn Stewart, Viral

Coming Face to Face With "That Face"

Over the years I’ve found there are several ways to gauge how an audience feels about a play.  One is the number of Playbills left behind when people leave at the end of the show. A Playbill is a keepsake, a tangible reminder of that evening’s performance. When people go home without one it often means they’re not all that interested in remembering what they’ve seen.

So make of it what you will that the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage 1 auditorium was littered with Playbills the night my friend Jesse and I saw That Face, young British playwright Polly Stenham’s musings about a dysfunctional family.  “Looks like the inside of a plane after a long flight,” I overheard one man saying to his wife as they surveyed all the programs left behind.

Now I grant you that the greyheads at that performance probably aren’t the target audience for this show.  Stenham was only 19 when she wrote That Face and just 21 when it was produced in London’s West End in 2008.  And this is definitely a young person’s play.  I mean for really young people, whose primary relationship struggles are with their parents, as opposed to cheating spouses or needling bosses or the sickle-bearing specter of imminent death, as are so many plays with an eye on attracting the AARP set. And that is refreshing.
 

But it’s also a young person’s play because the playwright, while precocious, is still immature.  Like many fledgling writers, Stenham oversamples works from those who have tread similar ground before her.  I spotted bits of Edward Albee, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams in her work.  And like many young people, her passions overflow and she tends to repeat her point over and over again.  The point nailed home here being that parents these days are so screwed up that their kids have to screw up their own lives to care for them.

That Face begins at a ritzy girl’s boarding school and then moves to the home of Mia, a girl who has committed a horrendous deed there and is facing expulsion from the place. But Mia's home is something of a horror too. Her businessman dad Hugh has abandoned the family and lives in Hong Kong with a younger woman.  Her divorced mother Martha is strung out on booze and drugs.  Her older brother Henry has dropped out of art school to become a fulltime caretaker, surrogate parent and maybe even the incestuous lover of their gorgon of a mum. It’s Henry’s face that seems to be the one alluded to in the self-consciously elliptical title.
 

I had been eager to see That Face because it got marvelous reviews in London. The Telegraph’s Charles Spencer called it “one of the most astonishing dramatic debuts I had seen in more than 30 years of reviewing.” While the Independent proclaimed it “a razor-sharp dissection of a dysfunctional upper-middle-class family that achieves a rare balance of raw emotion and knowing, black comedy.”  

The play was nominated for an Olivier and won awards from both the Evening Standard and London’s Critics Circle. Feature stories chronicled Stenham's upbringing, fashion sense and ambisexual dating habits (click here to read one in the Evening Standard.)
 

Only my fellow bloggers The West End Whingers demurred. “The Whingers just didn’t get what all the fuss has been about,” they wrote. “True, Stenham paints a shocking portrait of an dysfunctional family where children are forced to act like parents and parents behave selfishly but sadly the Whingers couldn’t quite suspend their disbelief sufficiently to be shocked.” (Click here to read their review.) 

According to the raves, the terrific British actress Lindsay Duncan found a way to make audiences feel for the mother.  But the MTC production is an entirely American affair, directed by Sarah Benson, the artistic director of Soho Rep who won kudos for  the brutal war drama Blasted, and starring an entirely new cast that, at least at a very early preview, seemed overwhelmed by the material.

Laila Robins, another terrific actress, was working hard to make the mom more than just a monster but her Martha still came off as shrill and totally unlikeable.  In fact, it was hard to feel for—or even believe in—any of the characters.  Instead, although I know you’re not supposed to assume that plays are autobiographical, I ended up feeling sorry for Stenham’s real-life mother, about whom her daughter seems to care for as little as I do this play.

Lost in "The Forest"

The best part of the Classic Stage Company’s current production of The Forest came the day after my husband K and I saw the show. It was reading the background information about the play in the company’s newsletter.

I’d never heard of the play’s author Alexander Ostrovsky before but it was fascinating to learn about how he had been a contemporary of Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, is considered by many to be the father of Russian drama and was an inspiration for both Chekhov and Stanislavski (click here to read about Ostrovsky yourself).  Alas, seeing the show was nowhere near as satisfying. 

Like so many Russian stories, The Forest involves a country estate. The one in this comedy of manners is owned by Raisa, a wealthy but miserly woman who is the uneasy guardian of a destitute niece and an equally impoverished nobleman’s son. The plot centers around her efforts to marry them off to one another and is complicated by the surprise visit of her nephew Gennady, whom she hasn’t seen in years. Other characters include a greedy businessman and his timid son, sycophantic local merchants, and, this being a 19th century Russian work, the requisite recalcitrant servants. 

Ostrovsky idolized Shakespeare and he also filled The Forest with comically misbegotten romances, cases of confused identity and philosophical soliloquies. It is supposedly one of his most popular plays in Russia, where his work is still frequently performed. But something obviously got lost in the translation. And much of the blame for that goes to Kathleen Tolan’s adaptation, which seemed to clatter back and forth between the colloquial and the highfalutin', comfortable in neither. 

According to the newsletter, Brian Kulick, the CSC's artistic director, came up with the idea of doing an Ostrovsky play, but Kulick's direction of the production offers this one little help. I’ve always thought one of the primary jobs of a director is to make sure that all the actors perform as though they’re in the same play.  But everyone here seems to wander off on his or her own, including the show’s stars Dianne Wiest as Raisa and John Douglas Thompson as Gennady.

It was the chance to see Wiest and Thompson that made K and me want to see The Forest.  Both disappointed us. Wiest usually delivers work filled with original and nuanced choices, as she did in the Broadway revival of All My Sons a couple of years ago.  But she seems off her game in The Forest, unsure of how to play Raisa and so scurrying between the comedy and the pathos in the character instead of finding a way to fuse the two. Thompson, by contrast, seems bursting with confidence.  Unfortunately, the wrong kind.  

Thompson is an actor blessed with a rich baritone, majestic stage presence and dimples so deep and alluring that if I weren’t a happily married woman, I’d want to curl up in them. His bravura performances as Othello (which I didn’t see) and the Emperor Jones (which I did and was impressed by as much as everyone else) earned him deserved accolades last year.  So I was more than willing to go along with having him, a black actor, play a Russian character. And that's not the problem. What bothered me is how Thompson's performance this time out amounts too little more than stentorian declarations and flashing those dimples. He, like the others, seems lost in The Forest.