Will NBC's "Smash" Go Boffo or Bust?

Does it make me a heretic to say that I’m not yet sold on “Smash”?

NBC has certainly done everything it can to push its new series about the making of a Broadway musical, including buying full page ads in The New York Times, doing social media networking up the wazoo and running a big splashy all-stars commercial right before Sunday’s Super Bowl (click here in case you missed it).

According to the Times (click here to read the piece) NBC has spent more than $25 million to persuade people that Broadway can be as cool and water-cooler (or Twitter feed) hip as working in an ad agency in the ‘60s or living in an English manor house around the time of World War I. So it feels almost ungrateful to complain.

Besides, like you, I’ve only seen the pilot. It debuted on Monday night but sneak previews have been available on iTunes, Hulu and YouTube for weeks. And the job of the first episode of any TV series is to introduce the characters and establish the set-up, which “Smash” does well enough. 

Its main players include a successful writing team—Julia, who has a cranky husband, a crankier teenage son and, for some unknown reason, is thinking about adopting a baby from China; and Tom, her gay BFF—two ingénues who desperately want the starring role in Tom and Julia’s new musical about Marilyn Monroe; a brilliant but pain-in-the-ass director; and the show’s producer who is in the midst of an acrimonious divorce.

Will Julia’s family adopt the baby?  Will the Broadway chorus kid (played by Broadway’s own Megan Hilty) get the part or will it go to the fresh-faced newcomer (“American Idol” runner-up Katharine McPhee)?  Will the producer’s vengeful husband wage financial warfare that will kill the show?  Will non-show queens in the TV audience care about any of it?

The NBC folks are clearly hoping that “Smash,” complete with fully-staged musical numbers, will catch on the way that “Glee” did.  But I don’t know about that since most of the “Smash” songs will be originals and much of “Glee’s” appeal has been that its songs are familiar ones, allowing viewers at home to get off on seeing how each one is performed—the same dynamic that has worked for ratings champ “American Idol."

Still, it’s hard to recall a series arriving with a stronger pedigree than “Smash” has. NBC’s new honcho-in-chief Robert Greenblatt brought it with him when he made the move from the cable network Showtime and has been endlessly vocal about how much he loves “Smash.” 

Hollywood heavyweight Stephen Spielberg is credited with coming up with the original idea for doing a show about Broadway and he hasn’t been shy about his feelings towards “Smash” either (click here to read a Q&A with him). 

They’ve hired Theresa Rebeck to run the series and since she’s worked on TV (writing shows like "Law & Order") and in the theater (her latest play Seminar is currently running on Broadway) it would be hard to find someone better suited for the task.  Meanwhile, the Hairspray duo of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman is writing those original songs for the show-within-a-show musical.

And in addition to some please-the-general public names like Debra Messing of “Will & Grace” fame as Julia and a sensational Anjelica Huston as the producer (click here to read a profile of her), the “Smash” cast is filled with so many theater vets (Hilty, Christian Borle, Brian D’Arcy James, Michael Cristofer, Will Chase and Wesley Taylor) that the show is almost a full-employment program for Broadway.

Maybe the problem is that my expectations were too high. But “Smash” seems unfocused to me. I want a clear central character—a Don Draper, an Earl of Grantham, a Tony Soprano—around whom all the others can pivot instead of having my attention diverted by a little from this one a little from that one before I've developed an attachment to any of them. 

And I don't want so many clichés: the wide-eyed ingénue, the lecherous director, the overly ambitious go-fer. Just one original character would have been nice to have in the mix. 

It wouldn’t have been difficult to find one. Spielberg bought the rights to the 1982 novel “Smash” by Garson Kanin, who worked on some 30 Broadway shows including directing the original Funny Girl and writing Born Yesterday and so certainly knew his way not only around backstage but how to tell a good story.  

Kanin’s “Smash” chronicles the making of a Broadway musical through the eyes of a smart young production assistant. It’s now out-of-print but it's a romp of a read and I wish Spielberg, Rebeck and the gang had held on to more than its title.

But maybe the actors will put some flesh on the bones of their TV characters and Rebeck and her writers will pull out some surprises as the series develops. 

The critics so far have been kind (click here for a round-up of their reviews) and there will be no badmouthing from the New York Post scandalmonger Michael Riedel because Rebeck was smart enough to write him into the show and ask him to play himself, which he's scheduled to do in the third episode (click here to read the back story on that). 

The first-night ratings were respectable: about 11.5 million viewers tuned in, earning the show a 4.2 rating (3.8 in the cherished 18-49 demographic), although it did slip to 3.8 (3.4)  in the second half hour. 

Meanwhile, however, not only is Playbill doing an overnight recap of the show (click here to read it) but so is The Onion’s AV Film Club (click here to read that) which is definitely cool. 

It's hard not to root for the show. As the producer Ken Davenport noted on his blog Monday, “ Imagine what a smash ‘Smash’ would mean to theatergoing and theatermaking all over this country” (click here to read his call to support the show).

So, I’m keeping my fingers crossed (and the show in my Tivo queue) because despite my reservations, I, too, would love it if "Smash" turned out to be must-see TV.  

A Farewell to—and Final Lament for—"Smash"

“Smash,” which ended its two-season run on NBC this past Sunday night, was like that friend you’re embarrassed by and are always thinking you should drop because she just doesn’t know how to behave herself. And yet, when she packs up and leaves town for good, you can’t help mourning the loss. 

 

There have already been legions of eulogies for the show (click here to read executive producer Marc Shaiman’s) and about what its failure will mean for any future shows that try to put stories about Broadway on TV. So I hesitated about adding to the pile. But “Smash” was my wayward friend too and so I’ve decided to have my little say. 
 

I had held back from sounding off about the show after my lukewarm—but hopeful—review of its pilot episode back in February, 2012 (click here to read that). I just didn’t want to join the ranks of the hate watchers who could hardly wait for an episode to end before badmouthing it.  

 

Even before the second season began with a new head producer brought in from the successful show “Gossip Girl,” new story lines aimed at a younger audience and new stars like Jeremy Jordan to play those parts, naysayers were performing autopsies on the show (click here for a detailed analysis of what went wrong with the first season). 

One week, the popular A.V. Club entertainment site gave the show an F for “The Phenomenon” episode in which the series regulars dealt with the sudden death of the character Kyle, the co-writer of “Hit List," the show’s Rent-like show-within-a-show musical. It was bad but not bad enough to deserve an F.

Even while sighing my way through some of “Smash’s" most exasperating episodes, I got a kick out of seeing familiar Broadway faces (“look, there’s casting director Bernie Telsey”) and places (“they’re sitting right next to the table we had at Bond 45”).  But at the same time, I knew that most viewers wouldn’t have a clue about any of those inside references. 

 

And I think that may have been the main problem with the show: its creative team never figured out how to please the general viewers who don’t care about Broadway or the world of New York theater while still satisfying us theater geeks who care about it too much. 

 

The standard soap-opera stuff that might have attracted a wider audience never got fully developed. Flirtations started up and quickly fizzled out. Problems popped up and were instantly resolved. When characters no longer served the shaky plot, they were just tossed aside.

Meanwhile, the process of putting together a musical that we geeks craved to see was etched in such ridiculously broad strokes that those scenes made the old Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney let’s-put-on-a-show movies seem like “Frontline” documentaries.

The handwriting appeared on the wall when news leaked in March, a full six weeks before NBC officially canceled “Smash,” that Debra Messing, who portrayed one-half of the show’s main songwriting team, was doing a pilot for a CBS sitcom. 

 

Messing, of course, knows from her days on “Will & Grace” what it feels like to be in a hit series. And so her dismay with “Smash” was understandable as it jerked around her character Julia—making her a clueless writer one minute and a brilliant one the next, having her trying to adopt a baby from China while cheating on her husband.

“Smash” was originally conceived as a cable show. But its big fan Bob Greenblatt brought it with him when he moved from Showtime to head up NBC and I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t have been better to have left it behind. About 11.5 million viewers tuned in to see the first episode of "Smash;" 15 months later, only 2.4 million watched Sunday’s finale.

Shows on broadcast networks need big numbers to survive. Those on cable don’t. During its second season, “Mad Men” drew an average 2 million viewers per episode. Now in its sixth season, the show pulls in around 3 million but remains one of the most buzzed about series on TV.   

“Smash” may never have developed the cult status of “Mad Men” (only a handful of shows in the 70-year history of TV have done that) but, without the pressure to draw a mass audience, it might have had a chance to become the show that those of us who love theater could have loved.  And it’s that lost opportunity that I now mourn the most.

The Martin Musicals: "Smash" & "Boop!"

Bob Martin burst onto the Broadway scene back in 2006 with The Drowsy Chaperone, a loving send-up of Broadway musicals that ran for 674 performances, was nominated for 13 Tony awards and won five of them including Best Book of a Musical, which Martin shared with his co-writer Don McKellar. He followed that up by collaborating with Thomas Meehan on the musical adaptation of the movie "Elf". That one only ran for 74 performances but it has since become a Christmas staple. Next Martin collaborated on the book for The Prom, whose relatively short yearlong run belies the true depth of affection that theater folks have for this tale of a group of self-involved performers who put aside their narcissism to help a young lesbian who wants to take a girl to her high school dance. 

So it makes perfect sense to me that producers wanting a big, flashy feel-good musical should turn to Bob Martin. And this season two shows, both of them opening over the past week, did exactly that. The book for Smash, an adaptation of the TV show about the making of a musical, was co-written by Martin and Rick Elice, who, having written Jersey Boys, is no slouch himself. And Martin flew solo with the book for Boop!, a modern-day fantasia about the cartoon character Betty Boop (click here to read a piece about how he managed working on both). 

The strengths and weaknesses of the two shows are the same: Martin’s love for the old-fashioned musicals of yesteryear is evident in everything he does but he seems far better at parodying those old shows than he is at coming up with fresh ideas for new ones.

The underlying storyline for Smash remains the same as it was on TV: a group of theater people try to create a bio-musical about Marilyn Monroe called “Bombshell”. The series, which itself stumbled through only two seasons, had lots of subplots but its central question was whether Monroe should be played by a veteran performer who worked her way up through the ranks or a fresh-faced newcomer—and how far each would go to win the role. 

Martin and Elice's stage musical has done away with the subplots. And they’ve thrown out the central question too. Instead, they’ve replaced them with a dim sum menu of well-worn backstage tropes: the gay director with an eye for cute chorus boys, the drunk writer who can’t hold his liquor, the overweight stage manager who once dreamed of being onstage, the imperious star who has pretensions of being a method actress. 

But because they don’t want to insult anyone who is gay, has a drinking problem, has a weight problem or is an asshole, they go out of their way to give each of these characters a scene in which they get to redeem themselves. And no matter how well intentioned, that performative earnestness saps the humor. 

Old comic hands like Brooks Ashmanskas as the director and Kristine Nielsen as a vampirish drama coach are capable of pulling laughs out of thin air. But too many supposedly funny bits fall flat, leaving other talented folks like Krysta Rodriguez, John Behlmann and Caroline Bowman adrift.

Stage vet Robyn Hurder is supposed to be the star of the show (click here to read about her) and she belts her heart out but she lacks leading lady “ris” and having to share the show’s signature song “Let Me Be Your Star” with two other actresses (it’s reprised over and over and over again) doesn’t help.  

As they did for the TV show, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman supply the score and their songs are serviceably tuneful. But Martin, Elice and their director, the usually resourceful Susan Stroman, haven’t figured out how to smoothly integrate them into the plot. Although that may be because there really isn’t one.

The best scenes in the show may be the two video montages put together by S. Katy Tucker to make fun of Reddit and TikTok influencers. They made me laugh but they also made me wonder if a show, particularly a wobbly one like this one, can afford to piss off a group that is becoming increasingly, well, influential when it comes to getting butts in seats.

Martin fares better with Boop!  But only slightly. Appearing for the first time in 1930, Betty Boop had big eyes, long lashes and pouty lips pasted onto a big head. And unlike so many cartoon heroines who were thin and had long blonde locks, Betty’s hair was dark and bobbed and she had a curvy body outfitted in a tight Jazz Age-mini dress. Her sassy signature tag line was “Boop Oop a Doop,” 

That innocent sexiness appealed to me when her cartoons started popping up on TV in my girlhood and she appealed to lots of others too (click here to read more about that) but I wasn’t sure that Betty was remembered well enough nowadays and I was nervous about how she’d be treated on Broadway. 

Betty’s short animated features were simple. Men chased her and she hit them over the head with heavy objects to make them stop. But as with Smash, this musical version of her story is filled with lots and lots of storylines: a cartoon character discovering the real world, an orphan misfit pursuing her dream of becoming an artist, a crooked politician running for mayor, a woman realizing her full potential, three separate love stories, including a gay one and a cute puppet dog (copies of it available for sale in the lobby). 

The result is a little bit of Annie, a little bit of Back to the Future, a little bit of The Wiz and a lot of both the movie “Barbie” and Martin’s own Elf adaptation. David Foster has written the bouncy if anodyne music and Susan Birkenhead has done the lyrics, some of them clever. The show is directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, a firm believer that more is more, that kicklines are essential in musicals and that there’s no situation that can’t be helped by a confetti canon.

David Rockwell’s sets and Gregg Barnes’ costumes are thoroughly delightful. In a reverse homage to the classic 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz," Betty’s cartoon life is all in black and white and then everything bursts into color when she transports to the real world of contemporary New York. In one highlight, the ensemble is dressed in costumes that are black and white on one side and candy-colored on the other, allowing them to flit back and forth between Betty's worlds just by turning around as they dance.

But what really makes this show spin is a star-is-born performance by Jasmine Amy Rogers, a 25-year-old former finalist of the Jimmy Awards and a triple threat who has a terrific singing voice, can dance up a storm and knows how to hit every comic note be it with a quip or a sly smile (click here to read more about her). The show wouldn't be even half as good as it is without her. 

The critical reviews are all over the place for both Smash and Boop!. So whether you'll find these shows to be delights or disappointments will depend on what you're looking for in a musical. As for me, I'm afraid I'll be looking elsewhere.   

 

Theater Books for Summer Reading 2013

Summer is my favorite time of the year. And one of the things I love about it is sharing this annual list of books for theater lovers to read at the beach, under a tree or, perhaps like me, on a city terrace while sipping something cool, crisp and refreshing (Prosecco is my drink of choice this summer). The books this year are a bit more eclectic than usual, which I hope means there will be something to suit your theatrical interests whatever they may be:

Showbiz, A Novel by Ruby Preston. If you’re still in “Smash” withdrawal, this may be the one for you. For Showbiz is a mash-up of fiction (the murder of a theater critic) Broadway legends (an ogre-like producer named Margolies borrows the birth name and personality of David Merrick) and the contemporary Broadway scene (everyone is competing for Hollywood stars to anchor their shows). It follows the professional and amorous adventures of a young producer named Scarlett Savoy as she tries to solve the whodunit and put on her first show. Just as with “Smash,” true insiders may wince at some of the details (I mean does anyone really call the restaurant Angus McIndoe, “The Angus"?) but the story is still a romp and Preston has already written a sequel called Staged. (You can find it here.)

 

The Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook by Antony Sher. The South African-born actor is as accomplished a visual artist as he is a theatrical one and both of his talents are on vivid display in this illustrated memoir of the year 1984, from the time he was approached to star in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Richard III straight through to the triumphant opening night. It would be hard to find a finer book about the process an actor uses—or the angst he sometimes goes through—to create a memorable role. The book is also filled with cozy anecdotes about his friends and acquaintances (Michael Gambon, Laurence Olivier) and the pen and ink drawings that Sher made as he tried to envision his image of Richard. (You can find it here.)

In Sunlight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin. The main characters in this literary novel are Catherine, a young heiress trying to make a name for herself in the New York theater world; and Harry, a former OSS officer struggling to save his family business from the mob after returning home from World War II. Their love affair plays out over 700-pages and the parts devoted to the theater are smaller than I wanted them to be but the writing is gorgeous. If beautiful prose is your thing, this could be an enchanting way to while away lazy summer afternoons. (You can find it here.) 

Jack Be NImble: The Accidental Education of an Unintentional Director by Jack O'Brien. As his Tonys for Hairspray, Henry IV and The Coast of Utopia show, O’Brien is a hell of a director.  But who knew he was an equally gifted writer? I’m only half-way through this myself but O'Brien’s coming-of-age-in-the-theater memoir is shaping up to be one of the best books of any kind I’ve read this year. The heart of the book is his relationship as general factotum to the director Ellis Rabb, who founded the APA, the repertory company that took serious theater to cities across the country in the ‘60s before regional theaters were common. It’s a wonderful look back at an almost-forgotten time in American theater.  And it’s a great yarn too cause O’Brien doesn’t hold back; gossip is shared, secrets are told and the whole thing is a delight. (You can find it here.)

 

The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan. To be honest, this isn’t technically a book about theater but its fictional account of the teenage ballerina who posed for Edgar Degas’ famous statue, is the source material for the same story that will be told in Little Dancer, the new Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens musical that is scheduled to debut at the Kennedy Center in Fall 2014 in a production directed by Susan Stroman.  It’s also a heartrending look at how difficult life could be for young girls who aspired to be on the stage in the 19th century. (You can find it here.)

The Making of Cabaret by Keith Garebian. Based on interviews with the show’s creators, this detailed chronicle tracks the evolution of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s now-classic musical from its origins in the stories Christopher Isherwood wrote about his time in Weimar Germany through the original 1966 Broadway production—and beyond, including the 1972 movie version with Liza Minnelli and the landmark 1998 Broadway revival with the late Natasha Richardson and Alan Cumming as the MC. Along the way, Garebian makes informative detours into such topics as the history of European cabarets. It's catnip for theater history junkies. (You can find it here.)

Bad Publicity by Joanne Sydney Lessner. Isobel Spice, the heroine of this mystery series, is a struggling actress who makes ends meet by taking temp jobs.  As luck would have it—and fiction demands—people keep turning up dead wherever she’s assigned and so, in between auditions, she helps suss out who the killer is. There are more red herrings in this book than you’ll find pickled at a kosher deli but Lessner, herself an actress (and, full disclosure, a friend) has a good time tossing in bits of theater lore as well. (You can find it here.)

Great Moments in the Theatre by Benedict Nightingale. Who doesn’t love lists?  And who better to put one together on the most significant productions in theater history than Nightingale, the longtime chief theater critic for The London Times?  The first production cited is The Oresteia back in 548 B.C. but the book quickly moves on to Richard Burbage’s Hamlet in 1601 (the Hamlets of David Garrick in 1742, Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 and Simon Russell Beale in 2000 get their own chapters too). Productions in Dublin, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, St. Petersburg and New York are noted but most of the shows discussed first appeared in London, including Mark Rylance’s performance in Jerusalem, which ends the book. Nightingale deftly weaves erudite scholarship, backstage gossip and personal memories into short, easily digestible chapters that can be read sequentially or at random. (You can find it here.)

And to keep things easy, here are the links to my previous summer reading suggestions:
2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

 

Why Death Came Early for "Dead Accounts"

Dead Accounts is playing its final performance tomorrow, closing three months before it had planned. I’m writing about it at this late date because I want to make the argument that the production’s high-profile Hollywood émigré Katie Holmes shouldn’t be blamed for the aborted run.  

Instead, the fault should fall fully on its playwright Theresa Rebeck. Which makes me also want to raise the question whether Rebeck's play making abilities may be less than we've thought they were. Cause let’s not mince words: Dead Accounts is a hot mess. And this isn’t the first time that description could be applied to a Rebeck project.

Over the past five years, she’s had six major productions open in New York. Three of them have been on Broadway, making Rebeck one of the few female playwrights whose work is regularly done there. But during that same period, she’s also churned out at least two novels, a steady flow of magazine pieces, op-ed articles and blog posts, plus scripts for the TV series “Canterbury’s Law” and “Smash.”

While I applaud—and maybe even envy—that kind of productivity, it can also result in work that’s shallow and desultory. Which has been the case with several of the Rebeck plays I’ve seen (click here to read my review of the previous one).  It may also explain why Rebeck has been replaced as executive producer for the second season of “Smash” which starts up again next month.

The sad thing about Dead Accounts is that Rebeck seems to have tried to go deeper.  The plot centers around Jack, a New York banker who cooks up a scheme to siphon off the money held in inactive, or dead, accounts.  He figures that since no one is using it, he might as well spend it. 

The play opens after suspicions have arisen and Jack has fled to his boyhood home in Cincinnati where his mother is struggling to cope with an ill and bedridden husband and his thirtysomething sister is trying to figure out what to do with her aimless life.

Rebeck seems to want to say something serious about American values in this second decade of the new millennium but her ADHD tendencies make it difficult for her to focus.  The play has long rants about money, religion, ice cream, trees and the superficialities of New Yorkers.

Snappy, joke-riddled dialog has always been Rebeck’s strong suit and she does get in a few zingers but she stumbles when she ventures into heavier terrain. The talk just circles around and around until it runs out of steam. 

When the lights went off signaling the end of the show, you could feel the confusion rippling through the audience at the performance my husband K and I attended. None of us could figure out what the hell had happened.

That, again, is not the fault of the cast, which, in addition to Holmes, includes stage pros Norbert Leo Butz, Josh Hamilton and Jayne Houdyshell. Under the direction of Jack O’Brien, another old Broadway hand, they all work hard. Too hard.  

Butz, in particular, summons up near-manic energy to give Jack some semblance of believability and almost pulls it off (click here for a Q&A with him). Houdyshell provides her usual emotional ballast and Holmes is fully committed to her role.  

The camaraderie the actors feel for one another is apparent onstage and off—K and I spotted them having dinner at a Broadway hangout and they looked to be totally enjoying one another.  

They've also protectively circled the wagons around Holmes, often doing group interviews to make it harder for journalists to grill her about her recent divorce from Tom Cruise (click here to read one of those group sessions).

Of course the curiosity about Holmes, making her first professional appearance since the breakup, was suppose to help draw audiences in. But audiences are often smarter than they're given credited for being. And in this case they were unwilling to shell out money just to celebrity gawk. Or to support a playwright whose bark is proving to be bigger than her ability to create work with bite. 

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"Poor Behavior" isn't Nearly Good Enough

Ever since she was canned as executive producer of “Smash,” that misbegotten TV series about putting on a Broadway show, Theresa Rebeck has said that she didn’t get the chance to fully realize her vision of what she wanted it to be. I bought her argument because network execs have a bad rep for interfering with creative visions.

It’s different in the theater, where, by tradition, the playwright has the final say. So I’m now wondering what excuse Rebeck has for Poor Behavior, the misbegotten new play that Primary Stages opened last week at its new home at The Duke on 42nd Street.

 

Poor Behavior starts off well enough. Two couples are spending a weekend at a vacation home and after a long boozy dinner, Ella, the wife of the host couple; and Ian, the husband from the visiting pair, have gotten into a shouting match about what it means to be a good person. A few minutes later, Ian’s wife Maureen discovers the erstwhile antagonists in a quieter encounter that leads her to suspect they’re having an affair. 

But having established the premise, Rebeck has no idea where to go with it. Accusations are just lobbed back and forth, with occasional time outs for snappy one liners and puffed-up monologs from Ian. 

 

Rebeck clearly intends the play to be a provocative meditation on morality and infidelity but she paints with such broad cartoonish strokes that the message is no more profound than the slick self-help advice you might get from a TV psychologist.

Poor Behavior might have had a better chance if Rebeck had created believable characters but she doesn’t even make it clear who these folks are (I’ve no idea what any of them do for a living) why they’re friends or even why they’re with their spouses.  

Ella (Katie Kreisler) is supposed to be the most responsible of the group and yet, for the sake of some cheap laughs, Rebeck has her carelessly destroy the only thing they have in the house for breakfast (and who, by the way, invites people for the weekend without stocking up enough food to feed them?).

Ian (Brian Avers), who, for some reason, has been made Irish, is supposed to be the kind of rogue that women find irresistible but seems more like a psychopath. Meanwhile, Maureen (poor Heidi Armbruster) is given little more to do than be hysterical in scene after scene.  And Ella’s husband Paul (Jeff Biehl) is more a prop device than a person.

Director Evan Cabnet and his cast, all of whom have done better work in other shows, seem as frustrated in trying to put this show together as my theatergoing buddy Bill and I were by watching it. 

There was no chemistry between any of the actors. What’s worse, there was no reason, except again for the convenience of the plot, that any of their characters would have stuck around instead of hightailing it back to the city.  

 

Over the last two decades, Rebeck has had 15 new plays produced in New York, three of them on Broadway and she’s already got another one in the pipeline (click here to read about it). I started out a fan but each production of hers that I’ve seen has been less satisfying than the last. 

I don’t begrudge Rebeck her success. It’s so difficult for female playwrights to get their work done that a group of them recently issued the Kilroys’ List, a roster of 46 new plays by women, and a plea that they be put on (click here to read more about their campaign). 

So it's good to see a woman getting so much attention. I just think it may be time for producers and artistic directors to to give some other women a shot and for Rebeck to take some time out so that she can get her act back together and realize whatever vision and talent she may still have.

"First Date" Fails to Sweep Me Off My Feet

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Lots of people seem charmed by First Date, the first musical to open in this new Broadway season.  And I wish I could have been too.  

Because I admire the fact that First Date isn’t based on a movie, TV show, videogame or Baby Boomer songbook but seems to have sprung wholly out of the heads, or dating mishaps, of its creators, Austin Winsberg who wrote the book and Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner who did the music and lyrics (click here to read a piece about the songwriting duo).

 

Maybe First Date didn’t sweep me off my feet because it’s not aimed at old happily married people like me but at those who are still playing the mating game. Or maybe it’s because I didn’t date enough before hooking up with my husband K and so don’t identify with all the awkward moments that so many people in the audience at the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended obviously did.

 

First Date tells the story, from the initial bumbling small talk through the will-they-or-won’t-they kiss, of a blind date between Aaron, an easygoing nice guy who does something in finance and is on the rebound from a bad relationship; and Casey, an edgy artsy gal who has commitment problems and a preference for bad boys.  

 

All the action, which includes flashbacks and fantasy sequences performed by a talented five-member ensemble, takes place in the trendy bar where the mismatched pair have decided to meet for a drink, and maybe dinner if things go well. 

 

Director Bill Berry, producing director of the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle where First Date premiered last year, has concocted lots of clever business and some amusing scenes, although the phone calls from Casey’s gay BFF, flamboyantly portrayed by Kristoffer Cusick, made me wonder if there were a gay equivalent for blackface.  

 

Still, the performances were generally appealing. Even though I wasn’t as wowed as others were by Krysta Rodriguez, who plays Casey and got entrance applause from some folks who apparently recognized her from her breakout role on the now-infamous TV show “Smash” (click here to read a piece about her).   

But I was totally won over by Zachary Levi’s Aaron. Levi is best known for his role as the title character on the NBC series “Chuck” but his Playbill bio says he’s been acting in school and community theater productions since he was six and he seems wonderfully at home on stage.

The songs in the show aren’t as winning or particularly memorable but they were pleasant enough. And I might have enjoyed them even more if the lyrics weren’t so densely packed.

When you add it all up, this 95-minute mini-musical (there are only seven guys in the orchestra) comes off as kind of innocuous. It doesn’t seem quite large enough for a Broadway show—or for Broadway ticket prices. 

On the other hand, judging by the whoops of delight coming from the people seated around Bill and me, the show is clearly a crowd-pleaser. The trick for the producers will be in getting the right crowd in those seats.

Summer Reading for Theater Lovers 2018

Memorial Day came and went a month ago. The Summer Solstice breezed in last week. The Fourth of July is just a few days away. And temperatures here in New York are heading into the high 90s. So no matter what yardstick you use, summer is here. And that means it's time for my annual summer reading list of books theater lovers can savor while at the beach, lazing in the park or, in my case, chilling on the terrace. To be honest, I'm more ambivalent about some of the books below than I have been about those in previous years but each still has its own charms and as my mother used to say, different strokes for different folks so I'm hoping you find at least a few that suit you.

100 Greatest American Plays by Thomas S. Hischak  As the continuing debate over The New York Times list of the most significant plays of the last 25 years shows, people love lists. And we theater lovers are particularly crazy about them. This one by a theater historian who teaches at the State University of New York spans three centuries, starting with The Contrast, a social satire written in 1787 by a former Revolutionary War officer named Royall Tyler, and ending with Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris' 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning sequel to A Raisin in the Sun. The entries are arranged, like this list, alphabetically but each one includes a synopsis, a few lines of dialogue from the play, an analysis of its significance, cast lists from major productions, the author's bio and contemporaneous reviews. Reading one or two at a time is a perfect way to idle away a summer day.

Drama: An Actor's Education by John Lithgow This memoir of Lithgow's coming of age as an actor is the basis for Stories by Heart, the one-man show he's toured around the country, including a stop at the Roundabout Theatre Company earlier this year. But the book is better. While the show focused on Lithgow's recitation of short stories by Ring Lardner and P.G. Wodehouse that his father Arthur Lithgow read to him as a child, the book is a delightful look back at how Lithgow mastered his craft from his days as a teenage spear-carrier in summer Shakespeare festivals to his later successes on both the big and little screen and, of course, onstage. But it is most of all a loving tribute to Arthur, who created those summer festivals but who never achieved the theatrical stature his son has attained.

I'm Glad About You by Theresa Rebeck  There isn't as much theater as I hoped there would be in this romcom about Alison, a New York-based actress from Ohio trying to get back with her high-school sweetheart. But the book is by the frequently produced playwright Theresa Rebeck and she knows the theater world. The demands put on young actresses in the book ring true, as do the audition scenes in which scores of contenders struggle to stand out from the crowd. As fans will know, Rebeck created the behind-the-scenes TV show "Smash" and was then fired from it and she's even tougher on the TV industry.

Macbeth by Jo Nesbø  Filling the slot for this year's entry in the Hogarth Press series of reimaginings of Shakespeare's plays by major contemporary writers is a brooding version of the Bard's tragedy about unbridled ambition. In this update, set in a drug-plagued Scottish town during the 1970s, Macbeth starts his climb when he's the valorous head of the local police department's SWAT team, his wife owns the local casino and the three sisters are drug dealers. All the familiar double crosses are there and most of the famous lines are interpolated into the text but while Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's shortest plays, this version comes in at over 500 pages and some of the additional plot twists struck me as silly. Still, the book is written by the Norwegian crime novelist who has huge followings among both literary readers and thriller lovers and if you count yourself among either of those groups it might be just the thing for you.

Payment in Blood by Elizabeth George   What could be more enjoyable than a British country house mystery on a summer afternoon? This one, originally published in 1989, deals with the murder of a playwright who has gone to a remote town in Scotland with a group of top London actors to rehearse a play backed by a leading West End producer. George's intrepid detective is Inspector Thomas Lynley, who also just happens to be an earl. His loyal No. 2 is Barbara Havers, a female sergeant from a working-class background, which makes for all kinds of gender and class conflicts. A modern master of the genre, the American-born George is a first-class writer and she's deft with all the tricks of her trade. The result, if you know how these books work, is totally predictable but it's also totally delectable.

Playing to the Gods by Peter Rader  Nearly everyone knows the name Sarah Bernhardt (Janet McTeer is set to portray the legendary actress in a new bio-play this fall) and every self-respecting theater aficionado knows who Eleonora Duse is as well. Multiple books have been written about both of these 19th century divas who defined acting in their time and helped create the kind of fanship that still echoes in ours.  But this is their first dual biography and in alternating chapters the book tracks the lives of the French Bernhardt and the Italian Duse, providing a fascinating account of their rivalry, their struggles to balance their personal and professional lives, and theater's transformation from an art form that emphasized the presentational into one that championed the truly emotional. I'm cheating a bit with this book because it won't be available until August but you can already pre-order it on Amazon.

Take You Wherever You Go by Kenny Leon  This autobiography tracks the life of the African-American director whose Broadway revivals of Fences and A Raisin in the Sun won multiple Tonys. Leon's other accomplishments include serving as artistic director of Atlanta's Alliance Theatre Company for 12 years, which made him one of the few black people ever to lead a major regional theater, and directing the TV musicals "Hairspray Live!" and "The Wiz Live!." Along the way, he's worked with an eclectic roster of talent ranging from Sean Puffy Combs to Kristin Chenoweth, Denzel Washington to Arianda Grande. But the memoir, which takes its title from advice Leon's beloved maternal grandmother gave him, is more of an inspirational Ted Talk than a deep look at his life. Leon has loads of good things to say about the people he likes, keeps mum about those he doesn't and is thoroughly self-effacing all the way through. It's easy to see why people like having him around.

Unmasked: A Memoir by Andrew LloydWebber  The New York Times trashed Lloyd Webber's look back at his early years, from his grammar school days to the opening of The Phantom of the Opera. But I was charmed by it. I don't know if Lloyd Webber had help writing the book but its cheeky voice suggests he did it by himself and he turns out to be a totally entertaining writer: witty, gossipy and not above calling out folks who have gotten on his nerves. His accounts of the makings of his signature shows are engaging and instructive. He's especially good at explaining the technical aspects of composing a score and he does it without being boring. If you love musicals, and particularly if you love his, this book is an ideal companion on a lazy afternoon.

Year of the Mad King by Antony Sher  An artistic polymath who is as excellent a writer as he is an actor, Sher (he's also a fine painter) has published a series of books about how he crafts his performances of some of Shakespeare's greatest characters. I loved his earlier "Year of the King" about how he put together his portrayal of Richard III and so I dived into this new one about his Lear as soon as it came out. But, alas, Sher's work on the play got interrupted by the illnesses and deaths of his sister and sister-in-law and so the book spends more time grappling with his familial affairs than it does delving into Lear's. It's understandable but lamentable, particularly because the sections in which he explains his wrestling with Lear are so good.

And finally, there's The World Only Spins Forward by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois.  I can't say enough about this oral history of Angels in America.  In fact, you can read a full review of it I wrote for the National Book Review by clicking here.

Happy reading and happy summer!