In Concert: "Everyday Rapture" and "Sondheim on Sondheim"

A medley of pop songs provided the opening number for last Sunday’s Tony Awards show (click here to see it).  And that made perfect sense to me.  Not just because so many of last season’s song-and-dance shows were jukebox musicals that counted on familiar tunes to draw ticket buyers, but because so many of those shows are little more than pop music concerts.  Only at much higher prices.

As I said in my earlier American Idiot review (click here to read it), there’s not much difference between that show, an onstage recreation of the eponymous Green Day album, and a Green Day concert. Except that you get to see the real band members Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool at the concert. And it doesn't cost you as much as seeing John Gallagher and the rest of the Broadway gang at the St. James Theatre.  

But American Idiot isn't the only pseudo-musical around. Lots of theater insiders were pulling for Sheri Rene Scott to win an award for her show, Everyday Rapture.  Several handicappers even predicted that she’d win for Best Book of a Musical.  But there wasn't enough book for me. 

The conceit for this semi-autobiographical show is that Scott, a Broadway belter who has played the comic female part in such musicals as Aida, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and The Little Mermaid and whose mother was Mennonite, grew up, her onstage alter ego says, torn between following Judy (as in Garland) and Jesus (as in Christ).   The show is the story of how she reconciles the two and it wraps in serious subjects like abortion and AIDS along with less weighty ones like Scott’s first starry-eyed visit to New York and her later funny relationship with an online fan.  

Don’t get me wrong. I had a good time at Everyday Rapture. And you probably will too if you make it there before it closes on July 11. It's hard not to like Scott (click here to read an interview she did with Broadway.com) and she works hard to win over the audience.  She sings, supported by two zaftig backup singers who make her look even tinier than she already is.  She cracks self-deprecating jokes. She even does magic tricks. But it all seemed to me more like a cabaret act or one of those TV specials they used to put together for what-do-we-do-with-her-now song-and-dance women like Mitzi Gaynor or Ann-Margret.

And you could say basically the same thing about Sondheim on Sondheim.  Only in this case, the life at the center of the show is Broadway’s reigning composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The master himself appears in a series of video segments that are amusing, if not overly revealing. The music, of course, is great but the connection between what you see and what you hear is tenuous at best. At heart, this show, which is scheduled to close on June 27, is simply another Sondheim revue.  And what musical lover doesn’t already have a bunch of those on LP, CD and iEverything downloads.

The singers performing this time out are all top-shelf and include: Tom Wopat,  Vanessa Williams, Euan Morton, Norm Lewis, and the inestimable Barbara Cook (click here to see a behind-the-scenes photo gallery of the stars) . I’d crawl across broken glass to see a completely new musical showcasing almost any one of them. And I wish the folks who are putting Broadway shows together would give me the chance to do just that.

"American Idiot" Brings Punk to Broadway

Broadway producers have been conducting a secret guerrilla war over the past year.  Their unsuspecting prey: straight guys in their late 20s to early 40s who usually go to see a musical only when their mom is celebrating a birthday or their girlfriends or wives make attendance a prerequisite for post-show nookie. 

The current revival of Hair, the original rock musical, was the first salvo, although it aimed more at Baby Boomers.  It was quickly followed by Rock of Ages, the boisterous but amiable tribute to the big-haired metal bands of the ‘80s.  There have even been a few outlying skirmishes like the emo-musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson that is running at the Public Theater through May 30. 

But last week, they rolled out the heavy artillery: American Idiot, a stage version of the eponymous 2004 concept album by the punk revivalists Green Day opened at the St. James Theatre, where in recent years such Broadway classics as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Gypsy have played.

The guys sitting in the row behind my sister Joanne and me probably think of a forum as an internet site where people exchange gripes, a gypsy as a punch line in a Monty Python routine, and a Broadway musical as something to be avoided at all costs. But there they were, four abreast, bottles of beer in hand (the audience is allowed to carry drinks to their seats) and fists pumping in the air as the guitars in the on-stage band screeched the title song that opens the show.

If you’re a diehard traditionalist, you may not like their being there or the show they’re championing.  For this is really more a concert than a musical. The show is nearly all sung through and the lyrics are hard to follow without the album notes in hand or the words emblazoned in your memory from hours of repeat play.

Nor is there much of a book for American Idiot. The sketchy plot (concocted by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and the show’s director Michael Mayer, who won a Tony for the rock-inspired Spring Awakening) follows the lives of three blue collar guys who make bad choices—one becomes a teen dad, another signs up to fight in Iraq and the third is seduced into drugs by a Mephistophelean dealer known as St. Jimmy. (The bar in the St. James lobby has been temporarily named after the dealer and, clueless as I am, I thought at first that it was a play on the theater’s name). 

But if you’re a more free-thinking fan of Broadway musicals then you may find yourself rooting for American Idiot. Its music isn't my genre of choice but I couldn’t help but respond to the enthusiastism of the young folks in the audience. Just as at the Metropolitan Opera House, the most avid and vocal fans are in the cheap seats up in the rafters. And so while, the greyheads around me in the orchestra sat largely stone-faced, the shaggy-haired ones in the balcony cheered after each number (click here to watch some highlights from the show).     

Even I appreciated how Mayer pulled all kinds of tricks out of his hat (including aerial ballets) to camouflage the missing narrative. Christine Jones’ arresting set design is anchored by three dozen TV screens of different sizes that attempt to supply a storyline with news images from the last decade. 

The energetic 19-member cast, lead by Spring Awakening’s John Gallagher, Jr. and the lovely and affective Rebecca Naomi Jones from Passing Strange, barely stops moving throughout the show’s 90 minutes, although I wish Steven Hoggett’s choreography had been less derivative of the moves Bill T. Jones did for Spring Awakening.  I also wish Mayer had treated the black male characters less stereotypically; if the black guy in one number in the second act had a larger codpiece it might have poked me in the eye and I was sitting in the eighth row.

Green Day’s melodies, including some of the band's other songs interpolated into the score, are catchy enough but, at heart, this is a jukebox musical, which means what book there is has to be gerrymandered around the songs. I wish Armstrong (who has professed to have been a show-tune geek as a kid) and his bandmates had written an original score. But judging from the response of the guys sitting behind me, the show seems well on its way to winning the hearts and minds of its target audience.