"Dames at Sea" Has Missed the Boat

Joe Cino, who turned a gay coffeehouse into a theatrical haven for audacious playwrights like John Guare, Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson during the 1960's, famously introduced each evening's free performance at his Caffe Cino with the phrase "it's magic time."

One of his cafe's final and perhaps most magical shows was a spoof of Hollywood musicals called Dames at Sea, which made a star out of a youngster named Bernadette Peters and became such a hit that it went onto a long commercial run, won 1968 Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards, and was even turned into a TV movie starring Ann-Margret.

So there was understandable excitement among theater nerds, including my buddy Bill and me, when it was announced that the show would finally make its Broadway debut at The Helen Hayes Theatre this fall. But, alas, it seems the magic has gone.

Dames at Sea, with book and lyrics by George Haimsohn and Robin Miller and a pastiche score by Jim Wise, still pokes fun at the old backstage musicals in which a plucky chorus girl becomes an overnight star while also finding the man of her dreams, all against a backdrop of splashy Busby Berkeley-style production numbers and silly plot twists (the theater is being torn down, the U.S. Navy rides to the rescue).

But these kinds of self-referential shows have become so plentiful and the budget for this version of Dames seems so minimal that the show never achieves the giddiness that is its only reason for being. If you're going to do a retro show like this you need to really go for it, in the tongue-through-cheek style of a Drowsy Chaperone.

Randy Skinner, who both choreographs and directs Dames at Sea, tries to amp things up with every trick he learned from having choreographed such Dames descendants as the 2001 revival of 42nd Street and the constantly returning productions of Irving Berlin's White Christmas but that's hard to do when you've got a cast of 10, compared to the 30-50 for those previous shows.

Skinner devises an impressive variety of high-energy tap-dance routines but the dancers look lonely up there doing them. And yes, I know that there were only six people in the cafe's original 1968 production but that was in a much, much smaller venue.

The current cast is game (each one has a nice voice and fast feet) and vets like John Bolton as the show-within-a-show's harassed stage manager and Lesli Margherita as its temperamental star have no shame when it comes to milking laughs but there are no standout performances that make this a must-see.

The sets seem kind of generic and I couldn't even find interesting feature stories about the show to link to. All in all, this production has as much excitement as one of those national tours that's been on the road for a long time.

In fact, the underlying concept for this production seems somewhat unmoored. Its references to the musicals of the 1930s (the leading lovebirds are  named Ruby and Dick in homage to that era's song-and-dance stars Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell) are unlikely to strike a chord with the folks who are name checking the rapper Biggie Smalls in Hamilton. And people who like their musicals light on their feet can find more satisfying fixes in Aladdin and American in Paris.

I still wish I'd been able to see the original production of Dames at Sea but this production has missed the boat.

"Kill Floor" & "Ugly Lies the Bone" Showcase Marginal Lives—and Promising Playwrights

This past week, Adam Szymkowicz posted the 800th interview he's done over the past six years on his website "I Interview Playwrights" (click here to read it).  Many of his subjects have won awards, done fellowships and had readings at prestigious places but only true diehards will have heard of most of them because there simply aren't enough chances for young playwrights to get their work before real-live audiences.

Which is why I so appreciate Lincoln Center Theater's LCT3 and the Roundabout Theatre Company's Underground series, both of which specialize in putting on well-cast productions of new plays by fledgling playwrights in their small black box theaters and charging just $25 a ticket as a way to encourage theatergoers to take a chance on seeing them—and to bring in new theatergoers who haven't seen much at all.

Each company is currently running a play centered around the kind of people (in this case, working class women) whose stories are seldom told on stage and while neither work is anywhere near perfect, both are worth seeing.

Abe Koogler's Kill Floor, which will end its run at Lincoln Center's Claire Tow Theater next weekend, focuses on Andy, an ex-con who's trying to get her life back together after serving time for dealing drugs. 

But the only job Andy can find is in a slaughter house where she has to strip carcasses before the animals are completely dead and the only home she can afford is too tiny to accommodate the resentful son she had to leave in the care of strangers while she was in prison.

Andy's only hope for a better life is to sleep with her boss, who's a nice guy but married and not above dangling the possibility of a job away from the horrors of the titular kill floor in exchange for favors. 

In the meantime, Andy's biracial son Brendan, whom she calls B, is wrestling not only with conflicted feelings about his mother but unrequited ones about another boy at school who seems willing to hang around only when B supplies him with pot and blow jobs.

Marin Ireland is achingly good as Andy, who knows how the rest of the world sees her and knows, too, that the odds are stacked against her being anything else, a realization underscored in a poignant scene in which Andy attempts to bond with a more affluent woman she meets in a supermarket. 

And the baby-faced Nicholas L. Ashe (click here to read a Q&A with him) is totally convincing as her teenage son B, creating a heartrending portrait of a youngster tottering on a high rope between boyhood and manhood, with no security net underneath.

Koogler and director Lila Neugebauer (click here to read an interview with her) try to relieve the grimness of Andy and B's lives with comic relief supplied by B's crush Simon, a white kid who affects the mannerisms of a black rapper, but the play is better at charting the emotional damage that society too often inflicts on its weakest members.

The damages are both emotional and physical in Lindsey Ferrentino's Ugly Lies the Bone, which will play through Dec. 6 at the Roundabout's Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center. It tells the story of Jess, who, during her third tour in Afghanistan, was the victim of an IED attack that's left her with severe burns over most of her body and face, in need of multiple operations (three alone to reconstruct her eyelid) in severe pain (hovering between 8 and 9 on a scale of 0 to 10) and in fear of crippling flashbacks that can be set off by the sight of a burning match or an unexpected sound.

Jess finds some relief in therapeutic virtual reality sessions that take her mind off the pain by transporting her—and the audience—to the place of her dreams, a snow-covered field  that is far away from her every day life in a sultry Florida town grappling with hard times caused by the shutdown of NASA's shuttle program.

When Jess leaves the rehab sessions, she has to deal with the actual reality of an old boyfriend who has married someone else and a mother who has dementia and may not recognize her.

Working with what seems to have been an extremely limited budget, Patricia McGregor's directorial options are limited but Ferrentino has created nuanced characters and McGregor has gotten fine work out of her five-member cast.

Mamie Gummer, who has spent the last four years doing TV series like "Emily Owens, M.D. and movies like "Ricki and the Flash" opposite her mom Meryl Streep, turns in the best performance I've seen her give (click here to read an interview with the actress). She makes clear the pain Jess suffers, without succumbing to the stereotypes of saintly victim or cocky survivor. 

Both plays felt simultaneously overstuffed (I'm not sure we needed the coming out subplot for B in Kill Floor or the deadbeat boyfriend of Jess' sister in Ugly Lies the Bone) and slightly undercooked (neither runs longer than 90 minutes and both seem to stop mid-thought) but it's clear that their authors have curiosity about lives outside the theatrical mainstream and talent that should be nurtured. I'm eager to see what each of them does in the future and which other writers these terrific initiatives showcase next.

"Ripcord" Opts for the Easy Way Out

David Lindsay-Abaire plays come in two flavors. They can be serious and thought-provoking dramas like Good People and his Pulitzer-Prize winning Rabbit Hole about parents surviving the death of a child. 

Or they can they can be quirky absurdist comedies like Fuddy Meers and Kimberly Akimbo, both of which put Lindsay-Abaire on the theatrical map back at the turn of this century. Ripcord, his latest play, now running at Manhattan Theatre Club's City Center Stage through Dec. 6, falls into the latter category.

Regular readers will know that my tastes run toward the former and so it will come as no surprise to them that while people all around me were chuckling at Lindsay-Abaire's tale of two elderly women engaged in a no-holds barred competition for a prime room in an upscale retirement home, I sat silently, with my mind wandering off to which leftovers I'd warm up when I got home after the show.

I can't blame the acting for my inattention cause it's terrific all-around. The roles of Abby, a grumpy retired school teacher who condescends to everyone around her; and Marilyn, the garrulous newcomer who starts off just wanting to be friends, seem tailor-made for the always-patrician Holland Taylor and the always-perky Marylouise Burke.

Both actresses look to be having a good time as their characters engage in a series of escalating pranks designed to drive each other out of the room they're uncomfortably sharing. And costumer designer Jennifer von Mayrhauser has fun with the character-defining outfits she's created for them: straight tweed skirts for Abby and floral muumuus for Marilyn.

But it's the pranks—including one in a haunted house and another in a skydiving plane—that draw the laughs and David Hyde Pierce has staged them with an intentional cheesiness that keeps the first act popping along. 

In time, though, the pranks become more sharp-edged, prompting revelations, reconciliations and a sentimental ending that makes Ripcord too saccharine for my palate.

The Public Continues Its Hot Streak with "Eclipsed" and "First Daughter Suite"

Is there any theater company hotter right now than the Public Theater? It started the year off with the literally revolutionary production of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton that moved to Broadway in August (click here for my review). It also picked up four Tonys, including Best Musical, for Fun Home, which began its life in the Public's lab series back in 2012 and became a history maker in its own right as the first show written by an all-female team—Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron—to win the top Tony. 

And right now, the Public is running Barbecue, Robert O'Hara's cheeky satire on race, class and the media which ends its three-week run tomorrow; First Daughter Suite, a new chamber musical about the clash between the private and personal lives of five presidential families by the always-boundary pushing composer Michael John LaChiusa and Eclipsed, a moving drama about women surviving in war-ravaged Liberia that not only marks the New York stage debut of the Oscar-winning and fashion-forward actress Lupita Nyong'o but recently announced that it too is moving to Broadway in March.

These shows aren't all great but the Public has attained its heat by championing shows that dare to create theatrical experiences that speak, in one way or another, to the way we live now, bringing to center stage stories about women, gays and people of color.

LaChiusa, who created Giant, The Wild Party and Marie Christine, has always marched to his own drum, usually writing the music, book and lyrics for shows that venture into all kinds of genres. But this time out, LaChiusa has returned to the territory that first put him on the map when the Public produced his First Lady Suite in 1993.

That show, which I saw because a friend insisted that LaChiusa was the most original musicals talent since Stephen Sondheim, consisted of four unrelated fantasias about the inner lives of the mid-century first ladies Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower and Jackie Kennedy.

Now, LaChiusa is exploring the latter part of that century when Republicans reigned in the White House and he has focused on the mother-daughter tensions between Pat Nixon and her daughters Julie and Tricia, Betty Ford and her daughter Susan, Nancy Reagan and her wild-child daughter Patti and Barbara Bush's interactions with both the ghost of her daughter Robin who died of leukemia at age three and her daughter-in-law Laura, first lady to Barb's eldest child and the nation's 43rd president George (click here to read more about the composer's fascination with first families).

I'm a longtime LaChiusa fan but even I will admit that musical books aren't his strong suit. The scenarios in First Daughter Suite are often amusing. It's fun to see the Nixon girls snipe at one another and their mother on Tricia's wedding day; Nancy and Patti tussle over Patti's tell-all novel about her first family. 

But the jokes are too often obvious, playing to the biases of the Public's presumed liberal audiences. And some of the gibes are cheap shots, particularly Susan Ford's putdowns of her mother's drinking problem. Only Rosalynn Carter and her daughter come off well in a fantasy sequence in which Amy tries to rescue the American hostages held in Iran. 

No new insights are provided into any of the women and LaChiusa doesn't tie their stories together, although common themes are hinted at—water plays a role in each roughly half-hour vignette, reinforced by Scott Pask's set in which panels in the floor change color to reflect different bodies of water. 

Still, LaChiusa is one of the few composers who regularly creates strong roles for women and here he's been blessed with a cast of eight gifted actresses, who, under the precise direction of Kirsten Sanderson and with the expert costumes by Toni-Leslie James, turn in sensational performances. 

Barbara Walsh is particularly good at capturing the icy elusiveness with which Pat Nixon protected herself, Alison Fraser is a hoot as both Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan and Mary Testa, a frequent LaChiusa collaborator, was born to play the no-nonsense Barbara Bush (click here to listen to an interview about the creation of the characters).

LaChiusa's music is, as always, lush and gorgeous and although there's a sameness to some of the arias, there are a few glorious moments when the women join together in a harmony that evades the show, which has been extended through Nov. 22, as a whole.

Women also band together in Eclipsed, which began its life at the Yale Drama School in 2009 but had trouble getting other productions because artistic directors and commercial producers feared it was too similar to Lynn Nottage's Ruined, which chronicled the plight of women in the Congo.

But the Yale Drama-school trained Nyong'o (click here to read more about her) had understudied for the show when it was done in New Haven and when the Public's artistic director Oskar Eustis invited her to do something at his theater, she said she wanted to do Eclipsed.

The play is written by Danai Gurira, the Zimbabwean actress who is probably best known for her role on TV’s “The Walking Dead” but who is also an accomplished playwright. And it's directed by Liesl Tommy, a South African who has been making a name for herself as a  rising go-to director in this country. Together, they steep this production in the unaffected authenticity and unapologetic feminism they share (click here to read more about their collaboration).

The setting is the ramshackle hut that is home to the women who are the sex slaves of a rebel commander fighting in Liberia's 14-year civil war. As the play opens two of the women are trying to hide a village girl who has wandered into the camp but she, too, soon becomes a "wife" to the commanding officer whom they refer to only as the "CO."  

They don't refer to themselves by name either, but by numbers derived from the order in which the warlord kidnapped and raped them. Gurira completes her portrait of the options open to Liberian women at the time with the additions of the former No. 2 wife who has escaped subjugation by joining the rebel fighters and becoming as heartless as they are and an affluent woman, whose own experiences with the war have lead her to join the coalition of women who eventually ended it.

The play centers around the competition for the heart and soul of the village girl played by Nyong'o. But Eclipsed is truly an ensemble piece and each woman gets a chance to shine. It's a testament to Nyong'o's belief in the play that she didn't insist on a star vehicle for her New York debut and a testament to her talent that she shines so bright amid a display of stellar performances.

Saycon Sengbloh vies for MVP honors as the No.1 wife who protectively rules over the others. Pascale Armand provides leavening comic relief as the most vain, and ultimately most pragmatic, of the group. Zainab Jah is fierce and frightening as the wife-turned-warrior. And Akousa Busia brings a quiet dignity to the role of the peacemaker.

It's no spoiler to say that there are no happy endings for any of these women and yet the play pays beautiful tribute to their struggles. It took a few seconds for the applause to start at the end of the performance I attended, not because those of there hadn't been move by what we'd seen but because we had been.

"Cloud Nine" Takes Off Again

Cloud Nine made the great British playwright Caryl Churchill's name when it was first produced in London back in 1979. And when it moved to New York a couple of years later, it won an Obie for Best Play and became a touchstone for a generation of theater lovers awed by both its inventive form (it not only juxtaposes two time periods but requires men to play non-campy female roles—and vice versa) and its then-bold content (gimlet-eyed examinations of colonialism, feminism and gender identity). 

Yet I was nervous about seeing the revival which ends a month-long run at the Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater this weekend, thinking it might be too brainy or weird. And this isn't the first time I found myself intimidated by the prospect of seeing a Churchill play. 

I felt the same way about the revival of her 1982 Top Girls, which had a brief Broadway run in 2008; and her most recent work, Love and Information, which played at New York Theatre Workshop last year. But I ended up loving both those productions. And I'm now, albeit belatedly, cheering this one too.

The first act of Cloud Nine takes place in an African country under British colonial rule during the Victorian era. Clive, the local British administrator, reigns over the natives and over his domestic household, which includes his young wife Betty (who is played by a man) their two children (the boy is played by a female actor and the daughter by a doll)  a governess, Betty's visiting mother, two friends seeking refuge from local native uprisings and a Gunga Din-like black servant, who is played by a white actor.

Everyone, except the doll, is having secret affairs that cross age, gender and race boundaries. And yet almost everyone is dissatisfied with his or her life, with the notable exception of Clive, who blithely enjoys the privilege of his whiteness, his maleness and his straightness.

But Churchill has always been an unabashed feminist. In the second act, the place and time change to the London of 1979 in the full bloom of the women's and gay liberation movements. Some of the same characters from the first act are there but they've aged only 25 years, underscoring Churchill's point that society's attitudes toward women and gay people remained stuck in the Victorian era until after the social upheavals that followed World War II.

The actors also switch roles in the second act. The actor who plays Betty in the first act now plays her gay son. The actress who played the son as a boy now plays a middle-aged Betty. Tellingly, no version of Clive appears at all, an indication of the disappearing power of the old white male hegemony.

The gender-bending and role reversals may sound confusing but James Macdonald's sharp direction makes them easy to follow and the performances by the show's seven-member cast are across-the-board superb.

Each actor really deserves to be name checked but I have to single out Brook Bloom, who so thoroughly embodied the quiet ruefulness of the older Betty, who can see the new opportunities—professional and sexual—that are opening up for women but coming too late for her, that she took the curtain call with tears still in her eyes at the performance I attended.

But the production doesn't get everything right. I can't help wishing that Macdonald had cast some actors of color, particularly in this play where having a white actor play a black character was intended to make a political statement. Having a black actress play the role of the governess (who in the second act becomes a radical lesbian) would have been totally in keeping with that progressive audaciousness.

And then there's the seating. The regular seats inside the Linda Gross have been ripped out and temporarily replaced with wooden bleachers. The Atlantic has acknowledged how butt numbing they are by making cushions available to people who ask for them. Even so the people sitting behind me (and a handful of other folks) opted to leave at intermission. 

It's too bad they didn't stay because the power of the play comes in seeing the two acts and thinking about how much further we've come even since then.

Turning on the Ghost Light, Yep Again

October is always a crazy month for me. Not only do work demands kick into high gear, so does the theater season. And, on top of that, five of the people I most love have birthdays—and requisite celebrations—this month and the beginning of the next. These are all good problems to have but they also cut into my time and ability to post here as regularly as I'd like. Which is why you're looking at the ghost light theaters use when they're temporarily empty instead of at my thoughts on some of the fascinating shows I've recently seen.

I'm determined to get something up about at least one of them at some point next week but in the meantime do check out some of the pieces from other theater-obsessed writers that I've collected in the B&Me magazine on Flipboard, which you can find by clicking here.

"Perfect Arrangement" is a Sweet-and-Sour Mix of Comedy, Tragedy...and Gay History

History, they say, is written by the victors. But sometimes there's a game change and new tales get told. Which may explain why long suppressed parts of the American story are finally making it to the stage in shows like Allegiance, the soon-to-open musical about the Japanese-Americans who were forced into internment camps during World War II; and Perfect Arrangement, the subversive comedy about the McCarthy-era witch hunt of gays and lesbians that opened last week at Primary Stages.

The persecution of people for loving someone of the same sex didn't strike me as a laughing matter and so I was somewhat uneasy about seeing Perfect Arrangement. The perky '50s pop tunes that played before the show began and the sight of a glossy, sitcom-ready set did little to qualm my concerns as my friend June and I settled into our seats at The Duke on 42nd Street where the show is playing through Nov. 6.

But playwright Topher Payne and director Michael Barakiva know exactly what they're doing (click here to read an interview with them). The domestic comedy hijinks at the start of their production make all the more poignant their eventual ruminations on all the obstacles—including shame and self loathing—that had to be overcome before gay people could stand up for their rights and openly tell their stories.

Here's the setup:  it's 1951 and Bob Martindale, a mid-level manager in the internal affairs division of the State Department, and his stay-at-home wife Millie are entertaining two other couples in their Georgetown duplex: Bob's co-worker Norma Baxter and her school teacher husband Jim, who live next door; and Bob's boss Ted Sunderson and his ditzy wife Kitty.

After the cocktails and canapés are served, Ted announces that Bob and Norma have done such a great job rooting out suspected communists in the department that they're now being given the job of finding and firing people suspected of being homosexuals. 

The rationale is that these folks are security risks because they're susceptible to blackmail that would make them betray the country's secrets since no one would want to be openly identified as gay.

What Ted doesn't know is that the Martindales and the Baxters are all gay, and that once behind closed doors they rearrange themselves into the actual couples of Bob and Jim and Norma and Millie, moving back and forth between two adjacent apartments through a secret door that is, pointedly, inside a closet.

So now Bob and Norma have to figure out a way to rid the department of gays without literally outing themselves and losing their jobs and reputations. And that task is made even more complicated when they have to juggle unexpected visits from the ditzy Kitty and an older lover of Millie's. 

As in any farce, identities are mistaken, wisecracks exchanged and doors slammed. The seven-member cast is uniformly terrific at all of it and the women look gorgeous in the period flared-skirt-pinched waist costumes that Jennifer Caprio has designed for them.

But, of course, there's more at stake here than in the usual boulevard comedy. The situation turns serious when some members of the foursome begin to tire of the charade and yearn for a life in which they can live openly with the person they love. Others, however, are determined to maintain the facade and protect the only way of life they can envision.

The campaign against gays that we now call the Lavender Scare isn't as well known as the anti-communist Red Scare but it may have been even more destructive, causing a couple of generations of gay people to burrow deep into the closet for fear of having their lives ruined in the way that those accused of being "deviants" experienced during the 1950s (click here to see a terrific 30-minute documentary on the subject). 

Payne's well-constructed play sheds valuable light on that era. Now I'm not saying that Perfect Arrangement is perfect. Payne also indulges in a bit of the wish fulfillment and historical revisionism that Quentin Tarantino used when he had Jews kill Hitler in "Inglorious Basterds" and slaves shoot down masters in "Django Unchained". 

Still, Payne remains sympathetic to all his characters (except the one out-and-out bigot) and his play reminds us that the real way to change history is to take one courageous step at a time.