"A Man's A Man" is Brecht with Heart

Bertolt Brecht famously championed the theater of alienation but the revival of his A Man’s a Man that opened last week at Classic Stage Company is oddly endearing.

Like so many works by Brecht, the play (Man is Man, in the literal translation) deals with war, corruption and the suppression of individualism. In this case, the time is 1925 and the war is between nationalistic Indians seeking their country's independence and soldiers of the British Raj assigned to hold onto that part of their empire. 

 

The play opens with four of the soldiers trying to rob a temple so that they can get money for booze. When one of them suffers an injury that will connect them all to the crime, his mates hide him away and then draft a naïve farmer named Galy Gay to assume his identity so that their fierce unit commander Bloody Five (an almost unrecognizable but appropriately blustering Stephen Spinella) won’t become suspicious. 

Also important to the plot are the money-hungry Widow Begbick, who runs the local tavern and also happens to be Bloody Five’s paramour, and Mr. Wang, a local warlord.

 

It’s a ridiculous premise and Brecht knows it but that’s all part of the game. The idea is to reel in the audience with the silliness and then shock it with the way the guileless Galy is made over into a ruthless fighting machine.

 

Brian Kulick, CSC’s artistic director, seems most comfortable with the humor, staging the show with the kind of self-consciously arch zaniness that marked the old Ealing Studios comedies from the 1950s. 

 

He’s aided by an affable cast.  And to amp up the merriment, the widow is played by a man, the drag artist Justin Vivian Bond, formerly of Kiki and Herb, while Mr. Wang is played by a woman, Ching Valdes-Aran. 

 

In customary Brechtian style, there’s a lot of direct address to the audience and some musical interludes, supplied in this production by the busy Duncan Sheik, who, in addition to doing the score for American Psycho now playing in London, also composed the music for the less successful production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle that CSC did last spring (click here to read an interview with the composer). 

The set created by Paul Steinberg is spare but malleable. He uses a painted backdrop, a green carpet and a collection of orange oil cans that are rolled around to create a variety of settings, from the widow’s bar to the inside of a pagoda—and to make one inanimate character.

It all adds up to a good time and it seems unfair to single out any one performer but Bond is particularly winning. His Widow Begbick may have more heart than Brecht intended but Bond brings such ardent poignancy to the melodic ballads Sheik has composed that even Brecht might have been moved. 

This was my first encounter with A Man’s a Man so I can't say for sure that this approach is exactly what Brecht intended it to be (a few characters have been cut and maybe some scenes too) but I enjoyed it. So much so that even though I usually shrink from any kind of audience participation, I was drawn in this time.  When one of the soldiers came over and, with the full audience looking on, locked eyes with me, I leaned in and gazed right back.

Love Overcomes All in "Outside Mullingar"

Plays about the Irish so often portray their characters in such a twee way that you’d think they were just one step removed from leprechauns. And I feared I was in for more of that kind of blarney during the first few minutes of Outside Mullingar, the new romantic comedy by John Patrick Shanley. But then I got charmed.

Outside Mullingar, which is set on two adjoining farms in the Midlands of Ireland, isn’t a serious, thought-provoking work like Shanley’s Pulitzer-Prize winning play Doubt. And it’s as predictable as any other rom-com, including the 1987 movie “Moonstruck,” which won Shanley an Oscar for his script and to which even he has compared this new romance (click here to read a piece he did on why he wrote this play). 

 

But what Outside Mullingar has going for it is an eagerness to entertain and ingratiating performances by all four of its cast members. 

Here’s the plot: Anthony Reilly and Rosemary Muldoon have been neighbors all their lives and even though Rosemary, now pushing 40, has been pining for him since she was 6, neither has married. Now their parents are dying (the play opens right after the burial of her father) and decisions have to be made about what will happen to the land since the apparent heirs seemed destined for spinsterhood.  

  

The action unspools over a few years and there’s a touching deathbed scene between Anthony and his father, played by the character actor Peter Maloney, who is clearly delighted to have been given something he can sink his teeth into and makes a nice meal of it. And Dearbhla Molloy is equally affecting as Rosemary’s fatalistic mother. 

Despite all the talk about death, doom and real estate, Shanley packs in plenty of laugh, or at least chuckle, lines. But the best moment in this 95-minute love story is the sweet climactic scene he's crafted for the would-be lovers. 

Brían F. O’Byrne, so terrific as the priest in Doubt, stumbled as Jake Gyllenhaal's brother in last season’s If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet. But he is back in top form as the socially awkward Anthony, portraying both the decency and the dignity of a simple man who yearns for happiness even while he fears it (click here for an interview with the actor). 

The more extroverted Rosemary is played by Debra Messing, who hasn’t been on the New York boards since the Manhattan Theatre Club's original production of Collected Stories back in 1997, before she got cast in the hit sitcom “Will & Grace.” But the raven-haired actress hasn’t lost her stage chops and she shines in her Broadway debut.

Messing makes Rosemary’s blunt speech and tenacious passion both amusing and poignant and she even manages a brogue that compares favorably with that of her Irish-born co-star's (click here to read about her). 

Anthony and Rosemary’s coming together is almost marred by a final bit of whimsy that Shanley apparently couldn’t resist adding. But under Doug Hughes’ steady direction, O’Byrne and Messing keep the show grounded.

No one would call Outside Mullingar, which is running at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through March 16, a major work.  But not every play has to be.  Sometimes, a theatergoer just wants a bit of pleasure. And this romantic tale offers plenty of it. 

"Stop Hitting Yourself" is Too Self-Indulgent

Mincing words would be a waste of time so I’m going to get right to it:   
I don’t know what the hell the folks at LCT3 were thinking when they booked Stop Hitting Yourself, a theatrical hodgepodge created by Rude Mechs, the experimental theater collective from Austin, Texas.

LCT3, the part of Lincoln Center Theater that champions new plays, has made its name with shows like 4000 Miles, Slowgirl and the Pulitzer-Prize winning Disgraced that all center on intimate familial relationships that provide a prism through which to view larger societal issues. To say that Stop Hitting Yourself is a departure from those dramas would be like saying Lady Gaga likes to dress up.  

 

Maybe the LCT3 folks were swayed by the group's reputation. Over nearly 20 years, the Rude Mechs have devised works collaboratively and their eccentric productions have played around the world. The company was one of the first to receive a grant when the NEA launched its New Play Development Program three years ago. They have a hip rep (click here to read about the group).  

For Stop Hitting Yourself (I'm assuming the title has some masturbatory meaning) the company has thrown together songs, tap dancing, deadpan humor, diatribes about global warming and income disparity, some slapstick and a heavy dose of audience participation.

But although the Rude Mechs clearly pride themselves on being idiosyncratic, the production employs several tropes that have been popping up with increasing regularity.  The set features a collection of thrift-store items, albeit in this case all gold-gilded. There’s a lot of direct address to the audience, in this case, ad-libbed confessionals. The result is a self-indulgent mess. 

 

Now I’ll admit that I tend towards the traditionalist end of the theatergoing spectrum but I’ve been known to enjoy venturing outside my comfort zone. Here, I just kept wondering if anyone in the company (perhaps Kirk Lynn, listed as the show's writer, or Shawn Sides, credited as director) had the veto power—or even the inclination—to say “No, this isn’t working.”

 

Stop Hitting Me’s plot, such as it is, revolves around a talent contest that will be judged by the queen (here played by a guy in drag who gets around on a motorized scooter) of the mythical country in which the show is set. 

One of the contestants is Wildman, a Christ-like figure who represents altruism. He is lying on the stage when the audience enters and after he persuades an audience member to help him get up, he announces that the coming events will end with his death. 

 

Wildman's sole opponent is listed in the Playbill as The Unknown Prince.  He represents greed. The prince will end the play with cheese on his face. Literally. One of the centerpieces of the set is a fountain that, for some unknown reason, spews a Velveeta-like goo.

According to the program notes, the show was inspired by thoughts about “charity and money and personal extravagances” as seen through the prism of Ayn Rand’s dystopian novel “Anthem,” about a Big Brother-style society that oppresses individualism. Workshop productions were held in Austin before the show migrated to Lincoln Center.  

Stop Hitting Yourself still carries the air of show put on by a smug group of college kids, conspicuous with their intellectualism and more concerned with entertaining one another than the audience. Several cast members cracked up as their colleagues tried to top one another with their revelations during the confession sequences at the performance my friend Ann and I attended.  

Still, there may be an audience for this kind of showing off. During one of the audience participation sections, a cast member brought a guy up onstage and offered him a dollar if he’d strip. The guy did it. 
   
I thought he might have been a plant but when Ann and I rode down from LCT3’s roof-top Claire Tow Theater, the stripper was on the elevator.  “I thought you were part of the show,” another rider said.  “No,” replied the stripper before he and his date walked off into the cold winter night. “I guess I’m just a wild kind of guy.”   

I guess he's also the kind of audience the LCT3 folks were thinking of when they scheduled the show. 

"Machinal" is a Finely-Crafted Piece of Theater

Machinal, the 1928 drama inspired by the real-life story of a woman who murders her husband, is not an easy play to like. And so I can’t really use the word "like" to describe how I feel about the revival that recently opened at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre. But I can say that I greatly admire this production. And since I’ve so often complained about the shows the Roundabout has chosen to put on, let me also say that I applaud the company’s decision to give this play its first Broadway production in 86 years.

Plays by women still have a tough time making it to Broadway let alone into the canon of works that get revived there. But Machinal was written by Sophie Treadwell, a journalist (she covered the Mexican Revolution and interviewed Pancho Villa) playwright (she wrote over a dozen plays between 1906 and 1967, three years before her death at 85) and feminist who marched for women’s suffrage (click here to read more about her). 

 

In a kind of precursor to the ripped-from-the-headlines approach of TV procedurals like “Law & Order,” Treadwell based Machinal on the sensational 1927 case of Ruth Snyder, a Queens housewife who killed her husband and was the first woman to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing.  

The real Snyder took up with a lover and took out a life insurance policy on her husband before the murder. But Treadwell, echoing the theme of alienation in Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, turned the story into an expressionistic character study of how an everywoman trapped in the gears of the Machine Age might resort to desperate means to break out. 

 

Opportunities for women today are obviously different from what they were in the '20s but Treadwell’s writing is still surprisingly fresh. There are sharp references to homosexuality, abortion and an ambivalence about motherhood that must have shocked the play’s original audiences. And Helen remains a juicy part for an actress. 

This production boasts the Broadway debut of Rebecca Hall, the gifted British actress who is also the daughter of the celebrated director Peter Hall. And Hall commits fully to the role. Using her impressive height (she looks to be almost 6 ft.) she turns Helen into a figure who physically can’t fit into the confines of marriage and motherhood that society has set for her (click here to read a Q&A with the actress).  

It’s an impressive performance. And director Lyndsey Turner stages the play with an even more impressive flair that includes syncopated speech and choreographed gestures (click here to read more about their approach to the play).  

But I wasn’t onboard with all the choices Turner and Hall made. I would like to have seen a bit more of Helen's falling apart instead of just the deadening end result of her repression.  

On the other hand, I totally bought the choices made by the always admirable Michael Cumpsty who makes the husband neither odious nor overly sympathetic, which, in turn, makes the wife’s inability to accept him all the more symbolic and tragic. 

Also good is Morgan Spector, who brings the right mix of hunkiness and wariness to the role of the lover, the part that marked the Broadway debut of Clark Gable (click here to listen to cast members talk about the show).

 

But it’s the design that’s the true star of this production. Es Devlin has created a monochrome box that revolves on a turntable to create the play’s different settings, making literal the cramped feelings Helen suffers. The nine brief scenes are strikingly lit by Jane Cox and Matt Tierney’s sound design is outstanding, evoking both the relentless noises on the street and the similar cacophony inside Helen’s troubled mind.

The box's machinery broke down on opening night and reportedly stopped the 95-minute show for nearly an hour (click here to read how stagehands rescued the evening by using muscle-power to turn the box). But everything worked perfectly when my friend Jesse and I saw the show a week later. 

 

Machinal may not be for everyone and there's even a Gud-oh/God-oh debate over how to pronounced its name.  I've always said it "Mack-in all" but some posher folks are now saying "Mache-in all. However, you say it, true theater lovers should make the effort to see it.

"Beautiful" is a Pleasing Mash-Up of "Jersey Boys" and "Funny Girl" for Baby-Boomer Gals

The baby boomer musical, shows stitched together around the songbooks of acts popular in the ‘50s, 60’s and ‘70s, is taking over Broadway. The  trend started with the ABBA-scored Mamma Mia! and Movin’ Out, in which choreographer Twyla Tharp set a ballet about the Vietnam generation to some old Billy Joel hits. But it got its Big Mo with the 2005 arrival of Jersey Boys, the bio-musical about The Four Seasons that is still running at the August Wilson Theatre.  

Within just the past year, it’s been joined by Motown: The Musical, a bowdlerized version of the life of Berry Gordy Jr., the famed label's founder; Soul Doctor, a musical about Shlomo Carlebach, a singing rabbi popular in the ‘60s, which closed after just 66 performances; and A Night With Janis Joplin, a concert version of that rock star's life that just announced it will close next month. Now comes Beautiful: The Carole King Musical that opened last week at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre.

People like these kinds of shows because they can come in humming the tunes and mouth or murmur their familiar lyrics all through the show. And it’s hard to think of catchier melodies or more affecting lyrics than those of songs like “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Up on the Roof, “(You Make Me Feel Like) “A Natural Woman” and others written by King and Gerry Goffin, her writing partner and first husband.  

 

What gives Beautiful its real edge at the box office, however, is that it focuses on how King survived a troubled marriage with Goffin but eventually made a new life for herself with her landmark solo album “Tapestry,” which sold over 10 million copies and won four Grammys. It’s a self-empowerment tale that’s catnip for the menopause matrons who make up Broadway’s most frequent theatergoers. 

But, as is so often the case with these kinds of shows, the book isn’t as good as the music. Beautiful echoes the Funny Girl narrative: a Brooklyn gal with big talent and equally big insecurity about her looks falls for and lands a hot guy, eventually loses him but ends up with a great 11 o’clock number. But Douglas McGrath (best known for co-writing Bullets Over Broadway, which will make its own Broadway debut later this season) takes a paint-by-the-numbers approach to this version of that fairy tale. 

 

Maybe that’s because so many of the main characters are alive (a long haired, guitar-wielding admirer of King’s is clearly modeled on James Taylor but for some reason is called Nick). Or it could be because King and Goffin’s grown daughter Sherry Kondor has been a very involved producer of Beautiful even though the lady herself has said she won’t see the show because it’s too emotional to relive those days. (Click here to read about the making of the show).

King’s story is better told in Sheila Weller’s excellent book “Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—And the Journey of a Generation” but that version comes without the songs, which are nicely staged in Beautiful by Marc Bruni and choreographed by Josh Prince (click here to read about how the dances were created).

 

Weller's book also lacks the show’s terrific performances.  Anika Larsen and Jarrod Spector bring winning energy and great voices to the roles of Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, King and Goffin’s close friends and songwriting rivals, who wrote such pop classics as “Walking in the Rain” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.”  

Jake Epstein is a little one-note as Goffin but he sings well and he bears a strong resemblance to photos of the young Goffin. There’s a bad-boy sensuality about both men that makes it easy to see why a woman would fall for and then cling to him.

 

Of course a Carole King musical has to rise or fall on the shoulders of whoever plays King. I’d had my doubts when I’d heard that Jessie Mueller had been cast in the role. And it’s not because I didn’t think she was talented. In fact, I worried that Mueller’s talent (she’s got a great jazzy belt) might be too overpowering for the gentle, earth-mother essence that the real King exudes.

I’m happy to say that I underestimated Muller. It’s wonderful to see her complete the journey from her terrific breakout performance just two years ago in the otherwise misguided revival of On A Clear Day You Can See Forever to this bonafide star-making turn in Beautiful (click here for a profile of the actress).

Mueller gives an understated performance that doesn’t call attention to itself but instead captures King’s awkward shyness (not to mention the distinctive rasp of her voice) as well as the emotional turmoil of so many good girls who came of age in the ‘60s.

Those now-mature women sitting around me in the audience (including my jukebox-musical loving sister Joanne) purred with pleasure when Mueller, sporting King’s wavy natural-woman hairdo, launched into the songs from “Tapestry.”  We were all, in King’s words, home again and feeling right. Which, of course, is just what one wants from a baby boomer musical.

A "Loot" Revival that Offers Few Rewards

The challenge of reviving a game-changing work is that the game has already been changed and so it’s really tough to recreate the titillating shock of the original. The challenge of doing a farce is akin to that of making a soufflé, you need the right touch to transform its ingredients into an airy treat; in less deft hands, what’s in the pan falls flat.

The Red Bull Theater company takes on both challenges with its revial of Joe Orton’s dark comedy Loot, which opened this week at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, but the result is no puffier than a reheated pancake.

 

To be fair, Loot has always been a difficult show to pull off. Britain was just emerging from its dour post-War period and The Beatles were still wearing shag haircuts and matching outfits when the play premiered in a Cambridge theater in 1965 and closed a month later. 

It scandalized audiences with its tale of bisexual bank thieves who hide the titular money they’ve stolen in the coffin of the mother of one of them; a shady detective who pretends to be from, of all places, the Water Board; a larcenous nurse whose seven husbands have all died under mysterious circumstances and a corpse that gets stuffed in a closet. The play lasted just 22 performances when it eventually migrated to Broadway. 

Still, Loot has always had its fans. Its West End production, shortly after the Cambridge failure, won the Evening Standard Award. In 1970, three years after Orton’s longtime lover bludgeoned him to death in a jealous rage, a movie version of the play starring Richard Attenborough, Milo O’Shea and Lee Remick was a hit at the Cannes Film Festival.

Later in 1986, a Manhattan Theatre Club production won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Revival and introduced Alec Baldwin to Broadway when the show transferred there. And just this past summer, the New York Times proclaimed a production at the Westport Country Playhouse to be “comic perfection.”

 

Alas, the comedy in the current revival is far more heavy-handed. The six-member cast, under the direction Red Bull’s artistic director Jesse Berger, seems at times too timid to be as zany as the material demands and at others to be pushing too hard for laughs.   

Several of the actors repeatedly tripped over their lines at the performance my friend Priscilla and I attended. Which is really a sin because although Loot may not be able to shock as it did five decades ago, it is still wickedly funny enough to make a modern-day audience laugh. 

 

Only Jarlath Conroy, who plays the grieving and pious widower of the corpse, seems to get that. He manages to strike just the right note of serious inanity that the rest of this production sorely misses.

"I Could Say More" Tries to Say Too Much

Gay plays usually fall into three categories: the coming-out story, the AIDS drama, the cri de couer for acceptance from the wider society...or from the self.  So I was intrigued when I heard about I Could Say More, which bills itself as the tale of a modern family, centered around the long-together-but-recently-married couple Carl and Drew, their adopted teen son and the friends and relatives who visit them at a beach house in the Hamptons.

I thought it might be kind of like Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart or Love! Valour! Compassion!, only without the underlying existential angst. But it turns out that angst, or at least the right kind of angst, is useful when it comes to making a sturdy play.

Playwright Chuck Blasius has stocked his tale with plenty of anxieties and many of them are ripe for dramatic exploration: the gay couple struggling to figure out what marriage means for them, the challenge of romantic love between a gay man and a straight woman, the adolescent confusions of a straight kid raised by gay parents. 

But Blasius, who directed the play and stars in it, doesn’t develop any of those themes. He does include a few nice speeches and an audience-pleasing supply of bitchy lines (plus a few groaners) that keep things moving along.  But he never makes it clear where it's all supposed to be moving toward.  

Story lines are picked up and dropped, characters behave one way and then another without apparent reason, except for the overused crutch of too much drink. Then, after almost two and a half hours, the play simply stops. Ironically, the only people who seem to have reached any kind of resolution are the sole hetero couple.

The production, particularly Clifton Chadick’s comfy-looking set, is nicely put together and although the acting is uneven, there were some nuanced turns by Keith McDermott and Monique Vukovic as two of the houseguests and Brandon Smalls as the son (click here to watch the cast talk about the show). But these parts don’t add up to a satisfying whole.

My intrepid theatergoing buddy Bill and I happened to attend Monday’s opening night performance at the Hudson Guild Theatre and so the audience was filled with folks eager to be supportive. But although they whooped when each member of the nine-person cast took a bow at the curtain call, most of them looked just as confused by what we'd just seen as Bill and I were.

I don’t necessarily need, or even want, a play to spell out everything for me but it doesn’t really work when one just throws a bunch of stuff at you.  In the end, I Could Say More is just as frustratingly opaque as its doesn't-say-anything title.