"Sunset Blvd." Glows in All the Wrong Ways

You're unlikely to find anyone who doesn't have a strong opinion about Sunset Blvd., the latest revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s musical adaptation of Billy Wilder's classic 1950 movie “Sunset Boulevard,” a dark showbiz satire about a former silent movie star desperate to make a comeback years after her heyday and descending into madness when those dreams are dashed. 

Fans—and there are legions of them—of director Jamie Lloyd's radical spin on that story which recently opened at the St. James Theatre can’t stop gushing about how extraordinary and revelatory this new version is. Meanwhile naysayers can’t stop griping about how this incarnation is all superficial style with no real substance and barely any regard for the story. Alas, as you can probably tell from the title of this post, I belong to the latter group.

Maybe the folks who love this production love it because they don’t like the movie. And maybe I don’t like the production because I so love the film. I also liked the more faithful stage adaptation which won Glenn Close a Tony back in 1995. 

But so many of the current reviews seem to celebrate the fact that Lloyd’s approach is a putdown of the original narrative, now dismissed as too melodramatic. Which raises the following question for me: if you don’t like the show, why revive the show?

The answer I suppose is that Lloyd belongs to the auteur school of theatrical directing, whose members also include Ivo van Hove, Sam Gold and John Doyle. For these guys, their style of storytelling tends to matter more than the stories they’re telling. 

I’ll grant you that some of their reimaginings can be exciting. I still have vivid memories of van Hove’s sensational 2015 revival of A View From the Bridge (click here to read my review of that) and I even kind of appreciate the Gen-Z-inspired machinations of Gold’s recently-opened Romeo + Juliet (click here to read my Quickie review on that one). 

But any one-aesthetic-fits-all approach can also quickly turn into a gimmick. That’s what happened with Doyle’s practice of replacing pit musicians with actors playing instruments onstage for his musicals. It was novel for a while. And then it became silly. 

Similarly, not every show is enhanced by the now-too-common techniques of stripping away scenery and props, putting actors in modern dress (usually black and, for some reason, often barefoot) and moving hand-held cameras around the stage to project close-ups of the actors' faces onto big screens. 

Lloyd’s Sunset checks every one of those boxes and indulges in a few of his own devise. As he did with last year's revival of A Doll’s House, he has an actor literally walk out of the theater. This time, the actor is filmed, accompanied by body guards, while walking down 44th Street and into Shubert Alley before returning to the stage, all the while singing the title song. 

What, I ask, does a Theater District stroll have to do with a story set in Hollywood?  Or anywhere else for that matter? I can’t help wondering if the next Lloyd production will feature an actor walking out of the theater, hailing a pedicab and riding to Central Park.

And while I’m asking questions, why does Sunset’s main character Norma Desmond end up drenched in blood when—70-year-old spoiler alert—she shoots someone else? It may be a stunning image but is blood dripping from this Norma's mouth because she chewed her victim to death? Talk about melodramatic.

There’s no question that Nicole Scherzinger, who plays Norma, is dynamic in the role and can sing the hell out of the musical’s songs. Her already Olivier-award-winning renditions of its signature numbers “With One Look” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye” stop the show (click here to read an interview with her).  

And if this were a traditional opera where performing arias tend to matter more than telling stories I might be cheering this show too. But this is musical theater where I think everything in it should serve the story. That isn’t the case here. If you don't already know the plot, it's quite possible that there are many moments when you won't know what's going on. 

Scherzinger and Lloyd have also come up with a version of Norma that often makes no sense. As originally created, Norma is an eccentric in the grande-dame style. “I am big, it's the pictures that got small,” she tells Joe Gillis, the younger screenwriter she seduces into becoming her reluctant writing partner and paramour and who is nicely played here by Tom Francis.  

But this Norma, outfitted throughout the show in only a slinky black slip, is totally Brat. And Scherzinger, the former lead singer of the pop girl group The Pussycat Dolls, underscores that by twerking and even in one moment mewing like a cat. 

Even their mission to show how badly society treats women as they age gets muddled. Throughout the show Norma is haunted by a younger version of herself played by Hannah Yun Chamberlain. But the 46-year-old Scherzinger is so lithe and gorgeous that when the two finally engage in a showdown pas de deux it's impossible to tell one from the other.

Still, unlike me, Lloyd Webber seems to be solidly in the fan camp. He’s already announced that he’s working on a new musical with Jamie Lloyd and that he hopes that a production of his Evita that Lloyd directed in 2019 will also make it to Broadway. In the meantime, I'll be rewatching—and enjoying a lot more—my DVD of the original version of Norma's story.

Gay Hijinks and Lots of Good Fun in "Drag: the Musical" and "The Big Gay Jamboree"

“RuPaul’s Drag Race” is now in its 16th season and its Emmy-winning celebration of gay and trans culture has spawned a half dozen spin-offs and scores of international versions. And now its influence seems to be hitting New York theater as well. 

Or at least I suspect that its broad-reaching popularity may be one of the reasons that so many different kinds of people have embraced Oh, Mary, the nonbinary playwright Cole Escola’s unapologetically campy and totally hysterical version of Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln’s marriage, which features a barely closeted Abe and the trans actor Bianca Lee as Mary’s chaperone.  

This hasn’t usually been my kind of humor but I had a great time when I saw Oh, Mary before it moved to Broadway, where it’s extended multiple times (click here to read my review). And over the past week, I saw two new shows that turned out to be just as proudly queer, intentionally silly and almost as delightful. Drag: The Musical, which opened this week at New World Stages, is pretty much a direct descendant of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” 

The main creative force behind this goofy feel-good comedy about the rivalry between two drag clubs run by erstwhile lovers is Justin Andrew Honard, who under the drag name Alaska Thunderfuck was the runner-up on the fifth season of “Drag Race” and the winner of the second season of “Drag Race All Stars.” Honard co-wrote the musical's book, music and lyrics and Alaska stars as one of the show's club owners.  

Several other former “Drag Race” contestants also show up in the cast and even though their acting abilities vary, director and choreographer Spencer Liff makes sure that each has an opportunity to show off their special skill, be it hitting high notes or dropping into dramatic splits. 

Broadway vet Nick Adams, who’s appeared in such shows as Priscilla Queen of the Desert and La Cage aux Folles, is totally up to all he’s asked to do and is having great fun playing Alexis, the very buff owner of the rival club. And one-time New Kids on the Block member Joey McIntyre does a very nice job as Alexis’ straight brother Tom who is troubled by Alexis' drag identity (click here to read an interview with him).  

But the true heart of the show is Tom’s 11-year-old son Brendan, who has his own awakening at the club but refuses to be defined by any traditional labels. His anthem “I’m Just Brendan,” not only underscores the show's message of tolerance and acceptance but brought down the house at the performance I attended. And we should all keep an eye out for young Remi Tuckman who alternates the role with Yair Keydar and delivered the song with the polish and confidence you might expect of someone twice his age. 

The second show I saw was The Big Gay Jamboree, which is playing down at the Orpheum Theatre in the East Village.  Jamboree is the brainchild of Marla Mindelle, who was one of the creators and stars of Titanique, the long-running spoof of the movie “Titanic” as filtered through the music of Céline Dion (click here to read more about her). 

This time out, Mindelle and her collaborators—Jonathan Parks-Ramage co-wrote the book and Philip Drennen co-wrote the music and lyrics—have created a kind of original story about a woman who finds herself trapped in a Golden Age Broadway musical. Like Dorothy in Oz, she gathers a trio of also-unhappy inhabitants who try to get back to the real world. 

The show ends up being a cross between the first season of AppleTV’s “Schmigadoon!” and a Forbidden Broadway for millennials. Only a lot raunchier than either. 

Titanique’s success has apparently made it possible for Jamboree to enjoy a bigger budget and it’s spent the money wisely. There are countless costumes changes, many of them laugh-out-loud funny in their own right. Keep an out eye out for the dancing zucchinis.

Meanwhile, the set by the trendy design collective dots makes smart use of both old-fashioned flats and up-to-date video projections. Their set also includes sly refences to the turntable in Les Misérables and the chandelier in Phantom of the Opera. But again, it’s the performances that make the show.

Mindelle is a go-for-broke comedienne and has such an impressive belt that it’s surprising she isn’t already a bigger star. But the entire cast, under the nimble direction of Connor Gallagher, is terrific.  

A special shoutout goes to Paris Nix, who plays Mindelle’s character's love interest and has one of the best baritones I’ve heard in a long time. He delivers a showstopping anti-gospel number that almost justifies the cliché of a Black performer doing a gospel number. And cheers also to “Saturday Night Live” vet Alex Moffat for being a game villain, even though he’s under used. 

It’s unlikely that either of these two shows will make it to Broadway, although I said the same thing about Oh, Mary.  And sitting in the front row at the performance I attended of Drag: The Musical was the Tony-winning producer Tom Kirdahy. So who knows? 

An Insanely Busy Fall Season for Broadway & Me—and For Other Theater Fanatics Too

This October has turned out to be a crazy time for those of us trying to keep up with all the fall show openings. I’m currently scheduled to see more than a dozen of them over just the next two weeks. I’ll only be able to write about a few of them here but I will be chiming in with my thoughts on most of the others on the Broadway & Me Quickies site I started at the beginning of this season and which I hope you’ll check out by clicking here.

I’ve been keeping busy in other ways too. Time Out NY magazine’s Adam Feldman, the New Yorker’s Helen Shaw and I once again joined our pal Patrick Pacheco on his TV show “Theater: All the Moving Parts” to talk about the entire season (you can see that by clicking here).  

And today marks the release of the latest episode of “All the Drama,” my BroadwayRadio podcast about the plays and musicals that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This episode focuses on the 1977 winner The Shadow Box and features an interview with its playwright Michael Christofer. I hope you’ll give it a listen too, which you can do by clicking here.

The Splendors of "The Hills of California"

It kind of makes sense that so many people are drawing comparisons betweenThe Hills of California, the new Jez Butterworth play that opened this week at the Broadhurst Theatre; and Gypsy, the classic Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents musical that will open later this year at the Majestic Theatre with Audra McDonald. Afterall, both are about mothers who have show business dreams for their daughters that end in unanticipated places. 

But Veronica Webb, the mom in Butterworth’s play, doesn’t remind me of Gypsy’s Mama Rose who was trying to live her dreams through her children. Veronica reminds me more of my own single mother who wanted her girls—my sister Joanne and me—to have an easier life than she did and who hid her ambitions for us behind a sometimes tough facade and who also sometimes made difficult—and not always wise—choices to achieve those goals for us.

Butterworth gets at all of that in this beautiful play about the fickleness of dreams and the ineffable bonds that bind mothers, daughters and sisters to one another. When the play opens the adult Webb sisters are gathering in their childhood home, a down-on-its heels hotel in the seaside town of Blackpool, England, because their mother is dying from a painful stomach cancer. 

But as they keep their death watch, the story flashes back to a time 20 years earlier when it seemed that Veronica’s efforts to turn her four girls into a successful singing act like The Andrews Sisters might actually come true. Instead, she assents to a compromise that will haunt all five of them for the next two decades.  

That decision turns the second-born and least talented of the sisters Gloria into a shrew who browbeats her husband (nearly all the men are feckless in the world of Veronica and her girls) and who flares up at the least provocation. Middle sister Ruby professes to have made peace with the ho-hum way her life has turned out but is prone to panic attacks that leave her literally struggling to breathe. And Jill, the baby of the family, hardly has a life at all, never having left home, still a virgin and, by default, the caretaker for their mother as she aged and fell ill. 

Only the eldest Joan, the most beautiful, most talented and most rebellious of the four, seems to have made it. She fled to the U.S. 20 years earlier to pursue a music career and separated herself from the family so completely that her siblings aren’t sure she’ll return even though she’s been told that their mother is on her death bed and holding on in the hope of seeing Joan one last time.  

Butterworth specializes in big shows. And like his previous award-winning plays Jerusalem and The Ferryman, this one runs for close to three hours and boasts a cast of nearly two dozen characters. Some of the actors double in the alternating time periods but the roles of the Webb girls are played by separate quartets of actors. Under the nimble direction of Sam Mendes, they’re all fantastic (even if it may take Americans ears a little time to adjust to their Yorkshire accents) and the young actresses playing the sisters as teenagers are particularly winning when they break into several swing-era songs all deftly performed in close harmony.

But the roles of the mother Veronica, who is never seen in the scenes set in 1977, and her grown-up daughter Joan were written to be played by the same person. Butterworth created this challenge for his real-life partner the Olivier Award-winning actress Laura Donnelly (click here to read more about her).   

Donnelly is excellent in both roles. Her Veronica is a pencil-skirted martinet bristling with both determination and desperation and so focused on her goal that it's quite believable that she wouldn't have noticed that the world around her has changed and the music along with it. She has no idea who Elvis Presley is.  

But Donnelly is just as good as the late-arriving Joan, a hippie dressed like Penny Lane, the groupie in the movie "Almost Famous," speaking with an acquired American accent and—here’s where the doubling really pays off—even more of a survivor than her mother was, brooking no illusions about what life has to offer her.

Despite its size—even designer Rob Howell’s revolving set, beautifully lit by Natasha Chivers, is majestic, dominated by a large staircase that ascends to the hotel’s unseen rooms and seemingly beyond—The Hills of California is an intimate play. It doesn’t have the kind of wallop of an ending that made Jerusalem or Ferryman so memorable and that may disappoint some viewers. Even Butterworth seems to have been uneasy with it because the last act has been substantially rewritten since the show was done on the West End earlier this year (click here to read more about that).  

I didn’t see the show in London and so I can’t compare the endings. But I can say that once again Butterworth has moved me. It was so gratifying to see so many women onstage with so much to do (even if the sole Black character was a servant in both eras) and it was reassuring when, in four-part harmony, the adult sisters finally sing together, tacitly acknowledging that there is a way to forgive the mistakes of the past, even those committed by misguided mothers who were doing the best they knew how to do back then. 

"Our Class" is Still Teaching Valuable Lessons

It somehow slipped my mind that Tuesday night was the opening night for CSC’s presentation of Our Class, the searing saga of a group of Poles and Jews who grew up together in a rural Polish town only to have their bonds savagely broken when the Nazis invaded Poland. But I caught on after spotting all the celebrities in the audience. The director Michael Greif walked by my friend Jessie and me on the way to his seat. The actor Bill Irwin sat in the row right in front of us. And in back of us sat Tony Goldwyn, perhaps still best known for playing the U.S. president in the TV show “Scandal” but playing a supporting role that night as he cheered on his daughter Tess, one of the three women in the play’s 10-member cast.

I saw the show when it played at BAM earlier this year and reviewed it along with some other Holocaust-related shows. This encore presentation has made a few adjustments to fit into a smaller playing space but the entire original cast is back and the play remains just as moving—and sadly relevant—as it was the first time around. So below is an encore of my review: 

Tadeusz Slobodzianek, the Polish author of "Our Class," and his inventive director Igor Golyak have turned their production from what could have been a fairly predictable story into a powerful meditation on how people act when faced with making truly horrendous choices.

At the center of their tale are 10 people who take great pride in being members of the same class in their village school. Half of them are Jewish, half Catholic and although they’re aware of their differences, it doesn’t stop them from developing friendships and crushes across faith lines. Until the outside world intervenes. 

First the Russians occupy the town and then the Germans take over. Locals take sides that break down along ethnic lines and soon they are informing on one another and beating and raping and killing one another. 

The script, adapted into English by Norman Allen, follows these characters over seven decades from their grade school years into their days in nursing homes for the few who survive that long. And yet it manages to make us feel as though we know each of them as real people who are good in some moments, horrible in others and sometimes just trying to make peace with what’s been done to them and what they’ve done to others. 

Most of the action is portrayed in an expressionistic style on a nearly bare stage outfitted with ladders, trap doors and a fateful chalkboard. And Golyak sometimes uses video cameras in the way that Ivo van Hove does to create film-style close-ups of his actors, which can be effective but can also be distracting. However he also creates achingly beautiful stage images as when the actors draw simple faces on white balloons and then send them floating into the rafters to symbolize the deaths in a particularly horrific massacre.  

The cast made up of both fresh and familiar faces is uniformly excellent. But I couldn’t help focusing on Richard Topol. That’s in part because he’s older by several years than most of his castmates. But it’s also because this is the third time I’ve seen Topol appearing in one of these recent Holocaust plays. 

He has a full career doing other things as well, but I suspect that Topol, who traces his family roots back to shtetls in Eastern Europe, keeps taking these parts because he truly believes—as we all should—that unless we acknowledge such history, we are in dire danger of repeating it.

A few people I've talked to since seeing the show at CSC have griped that the stagecraft overwhelms the storytelling, particularly in the smaller space. But my feelings still stand and I still think that if you haven’t yet seen Our Class, you should. And if, like me, you saw it and liked it before, I think you'll appreciate it all over again.

Meanwhile I’m looking forward to seeing what the Ukrainian-born Golyak does with The Merchant of Venice, which is scheduled to open at CSC in November, with Topol as the put-upon Jew Shylock. He'll be joined by some of his current castmates in that production of Shakespeare’s even earlier indictment of racial bigotry.

 

A Labor Day Salute to Set Designers

It’s been a lazy summer.  Only a few shows have opened. I took no trips. No out-of-town guests came to visit. My husband K and I just spent most of our time lolling around on our terrace and occasionally going out to a favorite restaurant with good friends. So once again Labor Day weekend has sneaked up on me, signaling that it’s time to get busy again—and time to post my annual Labor Day tribute to some of the folks who work hard to make the theater we all love. 

To paraphrase the familiar saying, it takes a village to make a show and as longtime readers will know in past Labor Day posts I’ve celebrated actors, playwrights, stage managers, casting directors, drama teachers, musicians, ushers and even dramaturgs. And now this year I want to salute the people who literally build the world in which shows come to life: set designers and their crews.

Designers’ names appear prominently on the Playbill and there are lots of awards—Tonys, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Obies—that celebrate their work but they don’t have the kind of high profiles that actors, directors or composers do. I mean when is the last time you heard someone say "I can’t wait to see the new Scott Pask show" even though Pask's scenic designs have been nominated for 10 Tonys over the past 20 years and won twice. 

But recognition is beginning to pick up. The Cooper Hewitt museum here in New York just completed a nine-month exhibit devoted to the work of the innovative British designer Es Devlin.  And a museum in Tucson is scheduled to begin a tribute to the designer David Korins this September. 

It's about time that set designers get their—ahem—props because they’re among the first people hired for a production. It’s their job to create a show’s physical environment by deciding whether to follow the script directions exactly or to create a more metaphorical representation that reflects the show’s mood and themes. 

And while set designers obviously need to collaborate closely with a show’s director, they also need to work well with the scene shops that build the sets, the scenic painters or video designers who create backdrops for them and the stage crews who move all of it into, out of and around the theater. As I said, a village.

Some designers’ names will be familiar to devout theater lovers. Jo Mielziner whose iconic sets for shows like Death of a Salesman are so revered that some revivals have replicated them wholesale; Boris Aronson who won six Tonys, half of them for his smart spins on the Stephen Sondheim concept musicals Company, Follies and Pacific Overtures; Ming Cho Lee who in addition to designing over 30 productions for the Public Theater, taught generations of future designers during his five decades at the Yale School of Drama; John Lee Beatty whose exquisitely detailed sets regularly draw applause as soon as the curtain opens; Mimi Lien, the MacArthur genius winner who, as she did with Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, has led the way in immersive designs that encompass an entire theater.

Luckily, some of the best designers working today are also as gifted when it comes to words (or at least at choosing co-writers) as they are at creating images and over the past couple of years, three of them have published terrific books that delve into their craft and why they so love what they do.

David Rockwell grew up with a mother who was a dancer and choreographer who often cast her son in community theater productions. He went on to study architecture and now heads an international firm that specializes in hotels and restaurants around the world but Rockwell never lost his love for the theater and over the past two decades, he’s designed the sets for over 30 Broadway shows, transformed the Hayes Theater into Second Stage Theater's Broadway home and curated the artifacts and spaces in the Civilian Hotel, which has become kind of a clubhouse for the Broadway community.  His lavishly illustrated book, “Drama,” explores how his love of the theatrical informs all of his projects.

Beowulf Boritt’s career got a big boost when he met Hal Prince and the legendary director and producer introduced him to his daughter Daisy who was looking for a set designer to work on a show she and Jason Robert Brown were putting together called The Last Five Years. Since then Boritt has worked on dozens of Broadway shows, won two Tony awards and forged close partnerships with some of the leading directors in the business. So it makes sense that his book “Transforming Space Over Time: Set Design and Visual Storytelling with Broadway’s Legendary Directors” should center around his conversations with five of them—James Lapine, Kenny Leon, Hal Prince, Susan Stroman and Jerry Zaks—detailing how he came up with his visions for their shows and the steps he took to bring those ideas to life.

If he had designed nothing else, Derek McLane would probably still be remembered for his extravagant—and Tony-winning—design for the still-running musical Moulin Rouge but McLane has created sets for some 350 other shows around the world and he’s written “Designing Broadway: How Derek McLane and Other Acclaimed Set Designers Create the Visual World of Theatre,” an appreciation of some of the most iconic sets in Broadway history along with case-study examples of the different approaches he and his designer peers have taken to create the look of a show. 

Like a jeweler, a scenic designer provides the setting for the jewels—in this case the story and the actors—to shine. These hard-working creative artists and their books provide an up-close look at the efforts that go into making the jewels glow, which is the kind of work we should all cheer. So Happy Labor Day to them, and to you.

 

 

 

 

Introducing Broadway & Me Quickies

Nearly a month has gone by since I’ve posted here. Summer has a lot to do with that. There are fewer shows opening. And to be honest, the warmer weather makes me lazy.  But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been seeing things and thinking about theater. One of those thoughts has led me to start a new site of mini reviews that can be read in less than a minute. I’d like to think that they'll be useful for folks who are too busy to read longer reviews or for those who just want to get a quick sense of a show. I call it Broadway & Me Quickies and you can check it out by clicking here.