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.

Why "Empire" Failed to Win My Allegiance

Those of us who love musicals root hard for each new one that comes along. And we root extra hard when we know that a new creative team is getting its first big break or that the show is based on an original idea instead of on a movie, a videogame or an internet meme. We really want them to work, for their sake and ours. So it brings me no pleasure to have to report that the new musical Empire, which opened this week at New World Stages, doesn't work at all.  

Newcomers Caroline Sherman and Robert Hull appear to have taken on more than they could handle by doing the book, lyrics and music for this tale about the making of the Empire State Building because they don’t seem to know exactly what story they want to tell or how to tell it. 

The show opens in 1976 with a woman named Sylvie sorting through some family heirlooms that stir up her negative feelings about the Empire State Building because a family tragedy occurred there. But before any empathy can be worked up for Sylvie, another character enters and takes over the narrative. She is Frances Belle Wolodsky, who is known as Wally and is a big fan of the building. 

In fact, it turns out that the time-traveling Wally, who moves between the past and present without explanation, is the prime mover in getting the skyscraper—at 102-stories then the world’s tallest man-made structure—built and opened in 1931. 

But while we’re still trying to sort out our feelings about Wally, the show throws a bunch of other characters at us including Wally’s boss former New York governor Al Smith, an architect named Charles Kinney who also becomes Wally’s love interest and a motley crew of construction workers from Poland, Italy, Ireland and the American Dust Bowl, along with the Mohawk ironworkers, who in real-life were known as “sky walkers” because they were so skilled in working on high-rise structures.

There are so many characters in Empire that it’s hard to keep track of them and their storylines of missing home, falling in love or falling out with one another. The actors, sometimes doubling in these roles, don’t seem to know what to make of them either and so they simply resort to stereotypical accents or gestures (the young Okie is constantly wide-eyed; the immigrant Italian is easily irritated, the Mohawk leader is predictably noble). 

They get little help from their director Cady Huffman, the Tony-winning actress who seems totally out of her depth now that she’s moved to the other side of the proscenium. Her direction is a patchwork of elements from other shows: a solemn parade like the one in the play The Inheritance; a prop-heavy dance number like the inventive ones Susan Stroman so easily pulls off in her shows, although it’s not clear why the construction workers in Empire are dancing with baseball bats.

But even a more experienced director might have had a tough time with this show. Its book wrestles unsuccessfully with how to reveal the mystery of Sylvie’s family’s involvement with the Empire State Building, with what to do with the flirtation between Wally and Charles and with how to resolve the public’s initial unhappiness over the building’s high cost in the midst of the Great Depression. 

On top of all that, Sherman and Hull mix in some revisionist history about the role women played in the project. Wally seems based on Belle Moskowitz, a real-life top aide to Al Smith and the person who orchestrated the campaign to win public support for the Empire State Building. But it’s a stretch to say that Moskowitz was the main player in getting the building up and it’s an insult to suggest that Smith, a wily politician who was the Democrat’s presidential candidate in 1928, was the bumbler he’s portrayed here.  

And there was no romance between the architect who designed the building William Lamb (not the show’s fictional Charles Kinney) and Moskowitz, who at the time had long been happily married to Henry Moskowitz, a civil rights activist and co-founder of the NAACP.  

Similarly, while Mohawk ironworkers were key players in the construction of the building—as they had been for the construction of the George Washington Bridge and would be for the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center—it’s unlikely that any female members of the tribe were included in the construction crew for the Empire State Building. 

I know it’s only a show but Empire also purports to be calling attention to some forgotten part of our history and there’s a responsibility that comes with that.

A musical can sometimes be saved by its score but this one isn’t tethered to any time, place or style—a big mama torch song pops up for no reason that I could discern—and so comes off as generic. The show's lyrics are weak too and fail to move the plot along. So when you add it all up, there’s just not enough here to root for.  

Happy Fourth of July

 Wishing you a thoroughly festive holiday