Three Little Shows Making the Big Time: "Be More Chill," "Hadestown" and "Oklahoma!"

It’s rare for me to see a production more than once. Time is limited. Money is too. And besides there are always new show to see. But this season, three high-profile off-Broadway musicals have transferred to Broadway and in my role as an awards nominator and voter, I’ve had the chance to revisit—and reassess—them. So here are a few quick thoughts on each:

BE MORE CHILL. Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz’s adaptation of this 2004 YA novel is the most unlikely phenomenon. It's about a nerdy high school kid named Jeremy who discovers that he can become popular and impress the girl of his dreams (who's a theater geek!) by taking a pill that is actually a super computer that embeds in his brain and tells him how to be cool. Which, of course, turns out to be more problematic than he anticipated.

The show had a so-so run at the Two Rivers Theater in New Jersey four years ago but its soundtrack engendered 250 million streams online and led to a second production at the Pershing Square Signature Center last fall where I saw and enjoyed it, surrounded by scores of rabid young fans who clearly identified with its striving hero.

Now the show has taken up residence at the venerable Lyceum Theater and it’s even better. Director Stephen Brackett has smartly streamlined the storytelling, without sacrificing its wit or its underlying pathos. Iconis’ songs are still catchy and the performances of the show's multicultural cast, led by Will Roland, Stephanie Hsu and fan favorite George Salazar have been sharpened too.

You also can see where the producers spent the money that comes with a move to the main stem. The costumes are funnier, the sets are flashier and yet neither go overboard.

This feel-good show has always been aimed at young people but I saw a lot of 40-plus folks in the audience and we were all having a good time too.

HADESTOWN. Singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell’s retelling of two Greek myths about the couples Orpheus and Eurydice and Hades and Persephone totally enchanted me when it played down at New York Theatre Workshop in 2016 and I worried that it wouldn’t play as well on Broadway. But I should have known better because it's directed by Rachel Chavkin.

Just as she did with the closed-far-earler-than-it-should-have Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, Chavkin has created a hip and wholly inventive production that combines the contemporary and the timeless. Honing the production during stops in Toronto and London, she’s restaged it for a proscenium instead of it playing it in the round as she did downtown.

She’s also added an ensemble of dancers to fill out her imaginary world and, most importantly, she’s recast some of the principal roles and allowed the new actors to bring their distinctive flavors to her still-savory stew.

Chris Sullivan, now familiar to TV watchers as Toby on the NBC series “This is Us,” was the linchpin of the NYTW production as the fedora-winning god Hades who serves as the show’s narrator. He’s been replaced by the sharkskin-suited Andre De Shields, who adds a flamboyant elegance to the proceedings. 

Reeve Carney is a shier and more socially-awkward Orpheus than his predecessor Damon Daunno was but Carney's soaring high tenor voice adds a poignance to the young lovers' songs. Eva Noblezada turns Eurydice into an appealingly spunky little cookie but I missed the fragile quality that defined Nabiyah Be’s portrayal of the young heroine.

Meanwhile, Amber Gray continues to portray Persephone and to be the crowd favorite, although she seemed to be pandering a bit to the audience at the performance I saw. The basso-voiced Patrick Page remains the perfect Hades.

The show remains pretty close to perfect too. Its reminder of the essential need for trust in love and its warning that unbridled power can lead to fascism remain potent. Plus it’s one of the few musicals in my recent memory (Hamilton and Next to Normal being the other two) whose songs I can’t get out of my head. And don’t want to.

OKLAHOMA!  Among the hottest tickets of the season are ones to this controversial revival of the first collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. As anyone who knows anything about musicals knows, this show centers around a cowboy named Curly and a ranch hand named Judd competing for the affections of a farm girl named Laurie in the days before the eponymous state entered the union in 1907.

Without changing the dialog or the classic score, director Daniel Fish has given the show a grittier makeover. His non-traditionally-cast actors wear contemporary clothes. The songs are orchestrated with a country twang. The show’s central dream ballet has been converted into an intense modern dance by a solo performer. Some scenes are played in the dark. And just as it was when the show played at St. Ann’s Warehouse last fall, chili is served at intermission.

But the most important change in this telling of the story is that all the show’s underlying class, gender and sexual tensions are made explicit, as the former New York Times theater critic Frank Rich details in a trenchant essay that you can read here.

Seeing this  show and liking it has become a badge of theatrical hipness. But I’m afraid it’s one I can’t wear. The direction struck me as too self-conscious and, in places, even gimmicky. Some of the singing fails to do justice to Rodger's glorious melodies. 

Ali Stroker and James Davis are a delight as the comic couple Ado Annie and Will Parker. But as my theatergoing buddy Bill observed, an Oklahoma! doesn’t really work if those characters are the bright spots of the show.

Facing up to this country’s troubled past can be a good thing but unlike the original 1943 production (which ran for a then-unheard of 2,212 performances) this incarnation provides little hope for the future. Even the upbeat title song becomes a dirge. 

Not all mornings may be beautiful but some are and in these times, a show that believes in the possibility that more of them could be would be welcomed, at least by me.

Back in the Hole...

Life has gotten away from me again.  In my role as a diligent awards nominator (and in preparation for a live reunion episode of "Theater Talk-click here to read more about that) I'm seeing four shows this weekend, plus working! So I've slipped back in the hole with no time to write more than this before I run out the door...

"Accidentally Brave" is Honestly Good

The producer Daryl Roth acquired a bank building near Union Square and converted it into an off-Broadway theater back in 1996 but I’ve only begun attending shows there recently. In its early years, Roth's eponymous theater tended to feature shows like De La Guarda and Fuerza Bruta, quasi-circus productions that seemed aimed at young people whose idea of entertainment was still defined by a mosh pit and lots of beer. 

But in the past year, Roth seems to have switched the focus to other demographics. Last fall, she opened Gloria: A Life, a full-throttled tribute to the feminist Gloria Steinem that was catnip for baby boom women. And now ensconced in the theater’s smaller DR2 space is Accidentally Brave, Maddie Corman’s one-woman bio-show that seems destined to be just as enticing for that segment of Gen-X women who grew up believing that they actually could have it all.

For 20 years, the now 48-year-old Corman did seem to have it all. Although not a marquee name, she enjoyed a thriving acting career, appearing in scores of movies, TV series and a few plays. At the same time, she was happily married to Jace Alexander, the actor son of the actress Jane Alexander who eventually became a successful TV director. 

They had three children, a big house in Westchester, lots of friends, great vacations, warm family traditions and the kind of picture-perfect life that people always seem to be boasting about on Facebook or in the pages of alumni magazines.

Then, as Corman says right at the beginning of her show, it all fell apart four years ago when police raided their home, seized the family computers and arrested her husband on charges of promoting child pornography. He later plead guilty. The remainder of the 90-minute show is Corman’s account of how she attempted to put her life back together. 

Under Kristin Hanggi’s sharp direction, her storytelling is aided by projections of family photos, a few props and some sound effects. But mainly it’s just one small woman on a stage reliving the worst months of her life.

A recent New York Times story about the show (click here to read it) made me think it would be somehow icky or self-indulgent. But it isn’t. Corman has the quirky charm of a Beta girl determined to be everybody’s best friend and despite the woes she shares and the pain she still obviously bares, she’s fun to hang out with.

There’s virtually no suspense to the story she tells.  She says at the top that she’s still recovering and that she’s still with her husband. And she also makes it clear that she’s going to focus solely on her response to what happened, with only minimal references to what her husband actually did, why he did it or how her kids dealt with it.

Still, Corman is unflinchingly honest about the way she pinged between moments of anger at her husband, shame over the publicity his case drew, fear about becoming the family's sole breadwinner after he was fired from all his jobs and gratitude when people said and did kind things like keeping the kids for a weekend or gifting her a massage.

The only thing she doesn’t share is the identity of the famous woman she’s nicknamed the Angel, who served as a sounding board and Oprah-like life coach, bucking Corman up whenever she most despaired. I have my suspicions about who the mystery woman might be but since it’s just pure speculation, I’m following Corman's lead and keeping my guess to myself.

Going through it all at each performance seems to be cathartic for Corman. If you’re sitting close enough, you can see the tears welling up in her eyes. I couldn't help wondering what effect having their mom rehash the whole thing over and over again might be having on her now teen kids but she says they’re fine. We'll have to wait for their plays to know if that's true.

In the meantime, Corman also says she wants her story to serve as a morality tale. And it just might. Her life certainly isn’t typical.  And it isn’t monumental as Steinem’s is. But it is a model of feminine perseverance. And it seems quite at home in Roth’s theater and judging by the full house at the performance I attended, its' likely to settle in for a good stay.

Why "The Lehman Trilogy" Disappointed Me

Sometimes you want to like something more than you actually do. That’s how I feel about The Lehman Trilogy, which has just opened at the Park Avenue Armory to rapturous reviews.

I’d been expecting rapture too. I’d read the exultant reviews when the show, a nearly three-and-a-half hour chronicle of the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers investment firm, wowed London audiences. I knew that it was one of those big British state-of-the-world pieces that I admire (I’m among the few who loved the short-lived New York production of Enron) that it starred three fantastic actors, led by the always-great Simon Russell Beale; that it was staged by Sam Mendes, now at the top of his directorial powers (click here to read about him); and that it even had a clever modernist set by the hip designer Es Devlin.

So what was there not to like? I prayed for the show to come to New York. My theatergoing buddy Bill and I bought tickets back in September, within an hour of their going on sale. And I felt smug as we made our way into the cavernous Armory to see it. I’m not sure when the show lost me.

Maybe it was within the first few moments when I realized that the story of the three Jewish brothers who emigrated from Bavaria to the U.S. in the mid-1800s wasn’t going to be dramatized but narrated with the actors speaking in the third person to describe how their characters made the journey from poor immigrants to cotton merchants to merchant bankers to the avatars of Wall Street greed when the firm’s collapse in 2008 helped spark The Great Recession. 

Or perhaps it lost me as I struggled vainly to keep the relationships between all of the characters straight. For without ever changing their 18th century frock coats, Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley play not only the three founding brothers but their children and grandchildren, their wives, customers, business associates, rivals and eventual successors.

Or it could be that it’s just harder than I thought it would be for me to work up much sympathy for people whose foundational fortune was rooted in the slave labor of the 18th century and whose irresponsibility later lead to the misery of the millions who lost their livelihood and their life savings in the economic downturn of the 21st.

And it didn't help when I got home and discovered (thanks Wikipedia) that many of the events chronicled in The Lehman Trilogy hadn’t occurred at all. This may be a spoiler for those of you who have tickets to the show's sold-out run but Bobby Lehman, the last family member to chair the firm, died at age 77.

I suppose the Italian playwright Stefano Massini who conceived The Lehman Trilogy as a five-and-half hour radio piece; and Ben Powers, the longtime dramaturg at London’s National Theatre who adapted it into English for the stage, mean the play to be a parable about the perils of unbridled capitalism. 

But the play's tender attitude toward the Lehmans, accompanied by a melancholy piano score performed live by Candida Caldicott, undercuts that. And I just can’t mourn this loss of American innocence when I know it was steeped in self-interested collusion with the country’s original sin.

Not all is lost. Mendes’ direction keeps things moving along and Luke Hall's projections are acid-trip glorious. Devlin’s set, a transparent box that revolves between a modern-day conference room on one side and stacks of timeless cardboard boxes on the other, is as elegant as advertised, albeit not as innovative for theatergoers who've seen similar setups in the recent Young Vic revivals of A Street Car Named Desire and Yerma.

And the actors are flat-out terrific, adeptly modifying the inflection of their voices and the physicality of their movements as they slip into the roles of different characters (the toad-shaped Beale is a particular delight when he morphs into female characters). But there were simply too many people to keep track of and too little time to develop real feeling for any of them once the original siblings died.

A family tree in the program tries to help, as does a timeline a page or so later and several essays on immigration and Jewish identity in America. But shouldn't a play be able to stand on its own two feet?

And while I’m griping, let me register a complaint about that program itself, which is the unwieldly size of an old copy of Life magazine. Like The Lehman Trilogy, its ambition seems outsized. As perhaps were my expectations for what is essentially a pretty pageant of America’s checkered financial past that I really wanted to like but found difficult to cheer.