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.