"Cult of Love" Fails to Keep the Faith

Leslye Headland has developed a following for her acclaimed Netflix series “Russian Doll” and for “The Acolyte,” the Disney Channel’s latest installment of the “Star Wars” saga. And if Cult of Love, her new show that just opened on Broadway, were a multi-episode TV soap like “Succession” or “Yellowstone” it might have worked better for me. 

For Cult of Love certainly has all the elements of those melodramas: a star-studded cast, a large dysfunctional family and clashes over issues like sex, money, drugs, what to do with difficult aging parents and who mom loves more. The problem for me is that Cult of Love doesn’t really dig into any of those subjects. Instead it devotes much of its energy to fooling around with—and making foolish fun of—religion and the people who have faith in it.  

And yet, the audience at the performance I attended was delighted with the show, literally cheering its slaps at religious faith. Headland famously grew up in a strictly religious household and so I suppose she is still working out her feelings about that. Fair enough. I don’t know how closely the Dahls, the family in the play, resemble her own parents and siblings but it’s clear why anyone would have conflicted feelings about being related to them.

Mom Ginny is a passive-aggressive control freak who deals with problems by pretending they don’t exist and downing a cocktail. One of those problems is her husband Bill, who is blithely slipping into dementia. But their grown children aren’t in much better shape.

The eldest son Mark studied at the Yale Divinity School but dropped out to become a lawyer, although he is now restless again even after having clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. And he’s also struggling with a failing marriage to his wife Rachel, a Jewish woman doubting her decision to convert to marry Mark and join a family that years later still regards her as a heathen.  

Evie, the oldest Dahl daughter is successful in her career as a chef but she’s resentful because the family hasn’t fully accepted her recent marriage to a woman. Younger brother Johnny is a heroin addict who’s in such shaky recovery that he’s brought the woman he’s sponsoring with him to the family’s Christmas Eve celebration for moral support (John Lee Beatty designed the Christmas-cardy set).  And then there’s the baby of the family, Diana, who is married to a timid Episcopalian priest and fanatically devout.

Ostensibly, the Dahls love one another but they don’t know how to talk to one another and so when they run out of things to say they pick up instruments and start to sing as though they were refugees from some old John Doyle musical. They sing a lot. I sighed when I realized they were going to go through all 10 verses of the spiritual “Children Go Where I Send Thee.”

Like most families, mine hasn’t been immune from holiday drama but I didn’t believe a bit of this one. That’s not because of the acting. The strong cast lead by Mare Winningham and David Rasche as the elder Dahls, Zachary Quinto as Mark, a scene-stealing Molly Bernard as Rachel and Shailene Woodley making an impressive stage debut as Diana (click here to read an interview with her) all work hard to create a semblance of both the family’s bonds and it fractures.  

But the play’s100-minute running time doesn’t leave enough time for them to do more than state their positions and then move on to the next plot point. A speech in the final moments tries to sum up the play’s themes but it's too late by then. I wanted more show and less tell and I resented that the serious questions about faith hadn't been treated seriously until then.

I also didn’t believe that the spouses and significant others would have stuck around while the Dahls were going at one another. And I really didn’t believe that they would have joined in with the singing. 

 

 

"Shit. Meet. Fan" Just Pretends to Be Bad

There are lots of marquee-names in Shit. Meet. Fan., the naughtily-titled comedy that is currently running at MCC Theater. But the show’s true star may be its set, a duplex apartment that scenic designer Clint Ramos has outfitted with fantastic views, a sleek chef’s kitchen and an incredibly well-stocked bar. I got to my seat early and as they came in, each person in my row turned to me and said something along the lines of “I could move in there right now.”

Of course it’s unlikely that any of us would want to live there if it meant we had to share those digs with the characters who are its occupants. They are Eve and Rodger, a smug therapist and plastic surgeon who are hosting a cocktail party for their longtime friends who include the sleazy lawyer Brett and his boozy wife Claire, a lascivious paramedic named Frank and his new young bride Hannah and Logan, a divorced gym teacher who is supposed to be bringing the new woman he’s dating but shows up stag. Hannah is Asian-American. Logan is black.

It's hard to believe that such a motley crew would have much in common but we're told that the guys were once frat brothers, the couples still take an annual ski vacation together and they’re all so trusting of one another that they agree to Eve’s proposal that they spend the evening playing a game in which all of them put their cellphones on the table and agree to read every incoming text out loud and to put all incoming calls on speakerphone. 

Needless to say secrets are revealed. Lots of secrets. Nearly all of them involving sex. It's a ridiculous premise but the show, which was written and directed by Robert O’Hara, was adapted from the 2016 Italian film “Perfect Strangers” that has also inspired some 20 film remakes in countries ranging from Azerbaijan to Vietnam. Sex jokes clearly sell everywhere.

What sells them in this production is a cast filled with folks who know how to squeeze laughs out of even the loopiest situations. Jane Krakowski and Neil Patrick Harris, who honed their comedic chops in popular TV sitcoms as well as onstage, play Eve and Rodger, who despite the tensions in their marriage relish being the most successful in the friend group. And the gifted Debra Messing knows just how far to push Claire's sloppy drunkenness. 

But O’Hara, who directed Slave Play and who has written such transgressive satires as Bootycandy (click here to read my review of that one) and Barbecue (click here to read my review of this one), likes to make his audiences uncomfortable.  And so his version of this story weaves in some strands designed to reveal the group's problematic attitudes on race, class and homophobia that lie just below the surface of their regular interactions—and maybe those of the people watching them as well. 

Not all of this works. And very little of it is new or as naughty as the play's title suggests. But not every show needs to have a deeper meaning or to break fresh artistic ground. Sometimes people just want to have some easy laughs. Or to see some famous faces up close. Or to look at and dream about living in a great apartment. And Shit. Meet. Fan checks all those boxes.

Some Quick Thoughts on Four Big Musicals

As everyone knows, musicals are the mainstays of Broadway and four big ones opened over the last two weeks. But I’ve been so busy running out to see them—and seeing other shows too (if you have a moment, please click here to listen to an interview I did with playwright Jessica Goldberg about her play Babe, which just opened as part of the New Group's 30th anniversary season)—that I haven’t really had time to do full reviews of those new musicals. But people have been expressing such definite opinions about them that I wanted to have my say too. So I’m plagiarizing the approach I use for the mini reviews I post on my Broadway & Me Quickies site (click here to check it out) so that I can share some brief thoughts on each of those four new shows:  

Death Becomes Her @ the Lunt-Fontanne

The Show: An unabashedly campy and deliciously funny version of the 1992 Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn movie about two frenemies so worried about growing older that they take a mysterious potion that gives them a whole bunch of new problems 

Music and Lyrics by: Julia Mattison and Noel Carey   Book by: Marco Pennette   Directed by: Christopher Gattelli

One good thing: Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard are hilarious as the frenemies but when everything clicks in a show it’s usually because of the director and so I’m giving biggest props to Gattelli who hasn’t shied away from going big in every way, including the outrageous costumes, recreating the movie’s memorable special effects that are how-did-they-do-that harder to pull off onstage and hiring such a great-looking and well-toned ensemble that the production budget must have a separate line for gym memberships

One not-so-great thing: The score isn’t particularly memorable but it doesn’t get in the way of the fun

Maybe Happy Ending @ the Belasco

The Show: A surprisingly sweet and moving tale about two helper robots who fall in love

Music, Lyrics and Book by: Will Aronson and Hue Park   Directed by: Michael Arden

One good thing: There’s so much good stuff about this one that I can't actually pick one thing so instead I’m going to pack in as much as I can about what makes it so special—first off, it’s a refreshingly original idea that isn’t based on a movie or built around familiar pop songs; its set makes smart use of the trendy technology of cameras and screens but does it without sacrificing the storytelling; its score is a lovely and unexpected mix of cool-jazz era tunes and swoony romantic ballads; and its performances by newcomer Helen J Shen and especially by Darren Criss are witty and totally winning

One not-so-great thing: Sorry, but it’s all great

Swept Away @ the Longacre

The Show: Four shipwrecked seamen are faced with a terrible choice about how to save themselves in this dark and sober musical about sacrifice and redemption

Music and Lyrics by: The Avett Brothers   Book by: John Logan   Directed by: Michael Mayer

One good thing: John Gallagher Jr. as a gruff veteran mate and Stark Sands as an unwilling but sensitive recruit are both fine but the show’s real star is Rachel Hauck’s set, which beautifully creates a 19th century whaling ship during the first half of this 90-minute show and then, assisted by Kevin Adams’ muscular lighting and John Shivers’ visceral soundscape, transforms during the shipwreck into a lifeboat stuck in purgatory 

One not-so-great thing:  The Avett Brothers’ folk rock songs, taken from one of their earlier albums about a similar real-life shipwreck, are pretty and fit the story but they sound so much the same that the score became a sonic blur for me

Tammy Faye @ the Palace

The Show: This baffling bio-musical about the rise and fall of the eccentric televangelist Tammy Faye Baker doesn't seem to know what it wants to say about her life

Music by: Elton John   Lyrics by: Jake Shears   Book by: James Graham   Directed by: Rupert Goold

One good thing: In addition to the all-star creative team there’s a lot of talent onstage too, including Katie Brayben who won an Olivier for singing her ass off as Tammy Faye in the London production; Christian Borle who stars as her morally-flawed husband Jim; and Michael Cerveris who plays their nemesis, the holier-than-thou evangelical and conservative activist Jerry Falwell

One not-so-great thing: It’s a shame that a show so confused about what it wants to be was chosen to be the first major production at the refurbished Palace Theatre so it's not really a surprise that the notice that the show will close on Dec. 8 was posted just five days after it opened 

 

"A Wonderful World" isn't Wonderful Enough

People have been trying to put Louis Armstrong’s life onstage ever since that master jazzman died in 1971. My BFF Phil took me to a backers’ audition for one attempt to build a musical around Armstrong back in the ‘80s. That one never got made. Then there was Satchmo: America’s Musical Legend, which played at the Kennedy Center in Washington for two weeks in 1987 but it was described by The Washington Post as “a textbook example of how not to write a musical.”  

Satchmo at the Waldorf, the one-man play by my friend the late theater critic Terry Teachout also used one of Armstrong’s many nicknames in its title but it fared better with a tight dramatic focus on Armstrong’s later years. John Douglas Thompson’s much celebrated dual portrayals of Armstrong and his white manager Joe Glasser ran for four months at the Westside Theatre in 2014 and the play, which Terry drew from his excellent biography “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,” has been produced around the country.  

But no effort has been as ambitious as A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical, which after pre-Broadway stops in Armstrong's early stomping grounds of New Orleans and Chicago, opened at Studio 54 this week, with James Monroe Iglehart in the title role. Yet the reception for this one has been less wonderful than those involved surely hoped it would be.

A Wonderful World tells the story of Armstrong’s life through his marriages to four women who represent the phases of his career as he developed from a young innovator of the new art form of jazz at the beginning of the last century to his role as an established and somewhat old-fashioned entertainment figure by its midpoint. 

That's a lot of territory to cover but the show’s real problem is that it doesn’t say anything about those events. It might have helped if each of the women had been used to reveal a different aspect of Armstrong’s personality, letting us in on something about the man that we didn’t already know. Instead the show just chugs along from one incident to the next. 

That may reflect the fact that there were too many competing ideas for what A Wonderful World should be. For while Aurin Squire gets the credit for the show's book, both Christopher Renshaw and Andrew Delaplaine are credited as its co-conceivers. 

Meanwhile Renshaw also shares co-directing credit with Christina Sajous and the show’s star Iglehart (click here to read more about all of that). There’s no indication of who, if anyone, had what they call in the movie business final cut. So what we get are likely to be the bland compromises that were least objectionable to all of them.

There are a few attempts to add some oomph by noting some of the racism that Armstrong experienced—one of his band members is lynched; he and the actor Lincoln Perry, whose professional alter ego was the slow-witted character Stepin Fetchit, commiserate over the demeaning ways black men had to behave to survive in the Hollywood of their day; Armstrong’s trademark geniality is tested when four girls are killed in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church—but after each incident is cited the show rushes on to squeeze in another song and dance number.

The music presents its own problems. Like most jukebox musicals—this one’s score is composed of more than two dozen tunes Armstrong played and sang throughout his career— A Wonderful World strains to find songs that tap into the inner lives of its characters. And since nearly all of the songs come out of the midcentury American Songbook, it seems unlikely that audience members under 60 are going to receive them the way they do the more recent pop hits in & Juliet, Moulin Rouge or MJ the Musical.

But perhaps the biggest challenge for this show is that like any bio-musical it needs to present its subject in a way that people can easily recognize him while also going beyond simply mimicking him. Iglehart has totally captured Armstrong’s distinctively raspy voice. And he has his mannerisms down too: the rolling eyes, the waving handkerchief and, of course, his big toothy grin. 

What’s missing is the disarming sweetness that Armstrong brought to his public personae. He always seemed so intent on making people happy that it was almost rude to respond any other way. Of course Iglehart, a Tony winner for his ingratiating performance as the Genie in Aladdin, has his own winning ways but they’re more effortful. And here, you can see how hard he’s working. You root for him.  But you, or at least I, worry about him too, so much so—will all that vocal fry hurt his own voice? will all that running around onstage wear him out?—that it took me outside the show itself.

Still, there are pleasures to be had in A Wonderful World. The actors playing the four wives—Dionne Higgins, Jennie Harney-Fleming, Kim Exum and Darlesia Clearcy— are all terrific singers, even if each overindulges in the now-standard practice of holding a note hostage until the audience whoops in support of the feat. 

Meanwhile, Toni-Leslie James’ period-perfect costumes are colorful and plentiful.  And choreographer Rickey Tripp has not only devised more novel variations on the familiar dance moves of the 1920s and ‘30s than I thought possible but has been blessed with a talented and seemingly tireless ensemble that knows how to put those moves over too.

So A Wonderful World isn’t a bad show. In fact, there was a time when loosely-plotted revues built around the songbooks of black musical icons like Fats Waller (Ain’t Misbehavin) and Duke Ellington (Sophisticated Ladies) were hot tickets that enjoyed long runs. But that was now a long time ago.

 

 

"In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot" and "Walden" Wrestle With Climate Change

Hurricanes have wiped out entire communities along the west coast of Florida. Wildfires are burning up over 400,000 acres in northern California. Drought has pushed water levels in the Mississippi River nearly 8 ft. below average in Tennessee. Temperatures regularly rise well over 100 degrees in Arizona. Scary signs of climate change have been popping everywhere this year.

And now they’re beginning to show up with increasing frequency on New York stages. In just the past week, I saw two new plays set in a not too distant future where the coast lines are disappearing and time is running out for humans to exist on this planet at all.  

The first was In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, which is now playing at Playwrights Horizons in a co-production with Breaking the Binary Theatre. It centers around a group of women who migrate from one Amazon fulfillment center to the next trying to eke out a living and to find loved ones missing as floods put vast parts of the U.S. underwater. That's an interesting set-up but playwright Sarah Mantell seems unsure about what to do with it. And some of her decisions don’t make much sense. 

The women look for familiar names on the package labels as they prepare them to ship out because that’s the only way they can track where people are since neither phone service nor the internet work anymore. But if that’s the case, how are customers placing orders with Amazon? And once the women identify the address of their missing person, why don’t they just go to where they are, or at least send a message with one of the delivery people? 

The play sidesteps such logic and tries to focus instead on the relationships between the women. But those don’t really go anywhere either. The women just sit around and drink beer and gripe about their work shifts. And they don’t seem all that upset about the climate crisis either, except for the occasional comment about how far the coasts might have eroded.

In a program note, Mantell, who identifies as non-binary, makes a point of saying that all the women are queer. But that doesn’t seem to matter at all. There is one flirtation but the play moves on before that romance can do more than flicker.

Mantell has also said that she wanted to create characters for older female-identifying actors to play and it is nice to see a stage full of women diverse in terms of age, ethnicity and body size. Alas, their acting abilities also vary. Although in the actors’ defense, Mantell hasn’t created full-fledged characters for them to play. Each gets a monologue about her past life but then just goes back to the general beer drinking and griping.  

And director Sivan Battat seems to have put most of her energy into choreographing the departure of scores of Amazon packages, which zip around on conveyor belts smartly designed by Emmie Finckel. Which raises some other questions for me: how did they get permission from Amazon to use its name and logo?  And if they didn’t, do they have a good lawyer?

Amy Berryman’s Walden takes a more direct approach to climate change. Her play, which borrows its title from Henry David Thoreau’s classic 19th century treatise on living in harmony with nature, tells its story through twin sisters, whose mother died giving birth to them and whose famous astronaut father raised them to be high achievers capable of following in his footsteps and, if need be, of saving the world. 

One sister Cassie has stuck to that plan and as the play opens has just returned from a year-long mission on the moon, where she developed a way to grow food in its barren soil, a vital step in providing an alternative place for earth’s inhabitants to migrate when their planet becomes totally unlivable. 

The other sister Stella was also a rising NASA star but has not only dropped out of the program but fallen in love with a guy named Bryan who believes the government shouldn’t be spending money on developing colonies in space but should be using its resources to figure out ways for humans to stay on earth.  

Bryan and Stella are practicing what they preach in a remote wilderness where the air and the water are relatively clean, animals still roam and the couple grow their own food. When the returning Cassie comes to visit them, they inevitably start bickering over what the best course for the future should be. 

But Berryman doesn’t let those philosophical arguments overwhelm her play. She knows that even the smartest and most dedicated people are just human like the rest of us and that their emotions hold as much weight as the ideas they advocate. And she also knows that no person is just one thing and that few arguments are as one-dimensional as they might seem at first.

Emily Rossum, still most famous to theater folks for playing Christine Daaé in the 2004 movie version of The Phantom of the Opera, plays Stella and stage vet Zoë Winters plays Cassie. They look enough alike that they actually could be twins. And under Whitney White’s sure-handed direction, they are both terrific at portraying siblings who love one another, envy one another but haven’t fully figured out what to do with either emotion. 

Motell Foster, an actor new to me, is just as good as Bryan, the linchpin in this three-hander, who is thoughtful and empathetic, making it easy to see how both sisters might be drawn to him.

The creative team is top-notch too. The retro-futuristic cabin Matt Saunders has created for Bryan and Stella is so cool (and beautifully lit by Adam Honoré) that I wish it were available for vacation rental on Airbnb. And Lee Kinney’s sound design provides a subtle but invaluable aural scape that quietly underscores what might be lost if climate change totally destroys the earth. 

Walden’s ending may not please some theatergoers. But life isn’t simple either. Thoreau is still seen as a paragon of self-reliance because of those years he spent living alone in a cabin on Walden Pond but he regularly took his laundry home for his family to wash. Of course such an option won’t even be available in the future if we don’t figure out what to do about climate change now.

 

 

"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.

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

Theater Books for Summer Reading 2024

Summer has come roaring in this year. Temperatures seem to be setting records everywhere, making many of us (O.K., me) want to kick back and chill out with a cold drink and a cool book. The drink of choice for me this year is champagne (I just stocked up on a whole bunch of those cute half bottles of it) and, as always, the book for me tends to be theater-related. The arrival of summer and the approaching July 4th holiday also mean it's time again for me to share my annual recommendations for books about the theater with those of you who love theater as much as I do. The list below is my usual mix of new books and old ones, fiction and non-fiction all of which I think will keep you in good company right through Labor Day.    

NOVELS

Finding a new novel about the theater is one of my favorite things because it allows me to disappear completely into a world I love.

All the World’s A Stage Fright: Misadventures of a Clandestine Critic: A Novella by Bob Abelman  This humorous roman a clef is about a theater critic who secretly embeds himself in a local company’s production of As You Like It with actors he’s previously panned as his co-stars. It's theater critic Bob Abelman’s sly way of showing his appreciation for the people and the work that go into making theater at every level. It also offers a pretty smart analysis of what makes Shakespeare so special.

Broadway Melody by Jack Viertel  Few people know the inner workings of Broadway better than the producer Jack Viertel, who spent 34 years at the Jujamacyn theater company and 20 years heading up the Encores! series. Now he’s put all that knowledge to work in this novel that covers seven decades in the lives of two Broadway insiders—a musician and a stagehand—and the female singer they both love. The book was inspired, in part, by the career of Viertel’s and my mutual late friend the legendary musical contractor Seymour Red Press. But it’s so readable that I’d be recommending it even if I hadn’t known and loved Red.

The Fury by Alex Michaelides  All of the main characters are connected to London’s West End in this Agatha Christie-style mystery about a murder that occurs when a group of friends and frenemies who have had varying degrees of success in work and love gather for a vacation on a private and isolated Greek island. The narrator is unreliable, the storyline is twisty and both are even more delicious in the audiobook version because it's read by the always deliciously entertaining British actor Alex Jennings. 

The House is On Fire by Rachel Beanland  The devastating fire that killed 72 people after a theater curtain accidentally caught fire during a performance in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811 really happened. But the true drama in this excellent historical novel centers on the aftermath of that tragedy and its effect on four characters whose fates will be determined by their class, their gender and their race.

Once More With Feeling: A Novel by Elissa Sussman  The main character here is a disgraced pop star who tries to revive her career by going back to her first love: Broadway musicals. The show she signs on to do is written and composed by her longtime best friend whom she met when they were girls in theater summer camp. And, of course, it’s directed by the former boy band member who was one third of the love-triangle scandal that destroyed her singing career. There’s more romcom than musical comedy in this one but it’s still a fun and breezy summer read. 

One Good Turn: A Novel by Kate Atkinson   The Edinburgh Festival Fringe provides the backdrop for this whodunnit in which Atkinson's retired detective Jackson Brodie is reluctantly pulled in to help solve a string of murders and attempted murders. And since Atkinson never saw a narrative that she didn’t want to fracture much of the fun—and it is great fun—lies in figuring out how all the suspects and their various larcenies fit together. 

Show Boat by Edna Ferber  I don’t know why it took me so long to read this 1926 novel that inspired Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's genre-defining musical because the book is steeped in its love for the theater, particularly the titular variety that traveled the nation's waterways during the 19th century taking shows to isolated parts of the country. Hammerstein made some tweaks but the familiar characters are here, as well as the themes of romance and racial intolerance. And so is the Mississippi River, which, as every theater lover knows, just keeps rollin' along.

Tom Lake: A Novel by Ann Patchett   While she may be most celebrated as a top literary novelist, Patchett clearly knows her way around the theatrical canon too. She’s set this story in a cherry orchard, albeit one in northern Michigan, where three sisters have come home during the pandemic to help their parents harvest the crop and save the family farm. As they work, their mother regales them with the story of her days as a young actress and how being cast in a summer stock production of Our Town changed her life. It’s a lovely tale about love and art and family. And having Meryl Streep read the audiobook version is, well, the cherry on top of an already very satisfying sundae.

 

MEMOIRS

It’s hard to think of a better way to spend a few hours on a lazy afternoon than peeking into the lives of the people who make the theater we all love.

Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy by Charles Busch  His mother died when he was seven and Busch was raised by an aunt who not only accepted his effeminacy but supported his differentness. So this lovely tribute to her is almost evenly divided between his coming-of-age days imagining himself as such tough-girl movie stars as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis; and his singular career as a camp icon who has won raves for playing female lead roles in such shows as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and The Confessions of Lily Dale.

Making It So: A Memoir by Patrick Stewart  Although he spent 14 years as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stewart sandwichs that experience in between his memories of a hardscrabble childhood in Yorkshire and his glory days as the star of the Star Trek and X-Men franchises on TV and in the movies. Still, his stories about working on stage with British acting greats ranging from his idol Vivien Leigh to his pal Ian McKellen—and his continuing wonder at doing all of it—are a treat for theater lovers. 

My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand   She may not have been on a Broadway stage since 1965 but the theater still claims Streisand as its own. And the very best parts of her 992-page memoir detail her early years in New York struggling to break into the business and to adjust to success when she does. If you can, you really should get the audiobook version of this one because Streisand has spliced in audio clips from her albums, movies and TV specials, plus there’s nothing like hearing her anecdotes, complete with improvised asides, delivered in that inimitable voice.

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea  This delightful book is drawn from a series of conversations in which Dame Judi and her good friend the director Brendan O’Hea discuss each of the Bard’s roles that Dench has played over her seven-decade career. She analyzes the plays, recalls the actors she performed alongside and provides glimpses into what was going on backstage at some legendary performances. The result is a master class in Shakespeare, acting and life. 

The Star Dressing Room: Portrait of An Actor by Alan Shayne  His name may not be as familiar as some of the other memorists on this list but I’m a sucker for stories set in the theater world of the 1950s, and Shayne tells a terrific one in this chronicle of his days taking acting classes alongside Marlon Brando and Elaine Stritch, struggling to make it as a working actor during Broadway's Golden Age and trying to find true love as he wrestles with his identity as a gay man in that homophobic Mad Men era.  

The Street Where I Live: A Memoir by Alan J. Lerner  It should be no surprise that this memoir by the lyricist and book writer of such Golden Age classics as Brigadoon, Camelot and My Fair Lady—and a man who married eight times—is a great read. Lerner goes into nitty-gritty detail about how he and his beloved partner Frederick “Fritz” Loewe put together their shows. And unlike some folks he’s willing to name names when he feels someone got in their way. I think this is the second best showbiz memoir I’ve ever read. The first—included on my 2015 list—remains Moss Hart’s “Act One”.  And I think Lerner, who knew, worked with and greatly loved Hart, wouldn’t mind at all being a runner-up to that one.

Will She Do?; Act One of a Life on Stage by Eileen Atkins   Most actor memoirs focus on the career high points of their authors’ lives but this three-time Olivier Award winner devotes most of her book to the very tough time she had making a name for herself in the business. Her climb from dancing as a seven-year old in British working men’s clubs to her breakout performance at the age of 30 as the dimwitted Childe in The Killing of Sister George is alternately hilarious, infuriating (even she admits she could be a pain in the ass at times) and inspirational. 

SOME OTHER GOOD STUFF

And now for the books that fall into a category all their own.

Carefully Taught: American History through Broadway Musicals  by Cary Ginell   There have been so many books about Broadway musicals that it’s a real treat to find one that looks at them through a different lens. Borrowing its title from the South Pacific song about how racism is passed from one generation to the next, this book looks at how our image of this country has been shaped by what we see on stage.  The usual suspects pop up: 1776, Assassins, Ragtime, Hamilton. But there are some surprises too: Baby Case, a 2012 musical about the Lindbergh kidnapping that never made it much further than the New York Music Theatre Festival made the cut.  But somehow, Titanic didn’t. 

Here’s to the Ladies: Conversations with More of the Great Women of Musical Theater by Eddie Shapiro   I don’t know how he does it but Shapiro is able to get celebrities to open up to him in ways they simply don’t to other journalists and this latest in his series of interviews with Broadway’s leading stars features some oh-wow-I-can't-believe-she-said-that conversations with Judy Kuhn, Mary Beth Piel and Karen Olivo among others.  

A Man of Much Importance: The Art and Life of Terrence McNally by Christopher Byrne   McNally wrote so many now-classic works (The Ritz, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, The Lisbon Traviata, Master Class, Love! Valour! Compassion! not to mention the books for the musicals The Kiss of the Spider Woman, Ragtime, The Full Monty and A Man of No Importance) but because he was so unassuming about all of it he hasn’t really been given his full due and so it’s great to get this tribute which chronicles the life and work of one of the major theater makers of the last 50 years and a pioneer in placing the stories of gay people onstage. 

Song of the Season: Outstanding Broadway Songs Since 1891 by Thomas Hischack   This veteran theater scholar and author of countless books is up to some mischief: he’s daringly selected one song from every Broadway season as representative of musical theater at that particular moment in time. Some of the choices are obvious (“Memory” from 1982's Cats) some head-scratchy (The Lambeth Walk” from Me and My Girl in 1986 instead of something from Les Miserables). Read it straight through or skip to your favorite seasons. Either way, there's plenty of fodder for debates over boozy summer dinners and throughout the rest of the year too. You can hear an interview with Hischack that BroadwayRadio's James Marino and I did (as well as more about some of the other books on this list) by clicking here. 

20 Seasons: Broadway Musicals of the 21st Century by Amy S. Osatinski   Most Broadway histories focus on the Golden Age shows of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s and so it’s refreshing to have a spotlight put on what’s been happening more recently. This survey tracks the rise of the jukebox musical, the growing prominence of screen-to-stage adaptations and the trend of revising old classics. So it gives shows such as Jersey Boys, SpongeBob Square Pants and Daniel Fish’s “sexy” Oklahoma the serious treatment they deserve and that many young fans—and those of any age interested in the future of the art form—are sure to appreciate.

This Insubstantial Pageant by Estha Weiner  Theater is the animating theme of this book of poetry and, full disclosure, the author is one of my oldest friends. Longtime readers of these posts may know her as my ocassional theater companion "Ellie," a one-time actress who, as her poems attests, has never lost her love for the stage.

Finally, as always, if you’re looking for even more to read, here are the links to my now nearly 200 suggestions from previous years:

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2020:

2019

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2015

2014

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2012

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