In the weeks before the writers' strike shut down TV production, television execs were patting themselves on the back and boasting that, unlike the movies where a woman over 30 is considered long in the tooth, several TV series were giving older actresses a place to show off their talent. But, out of the women they were talking about—Glenn Close (a ball-busting lawyer on FX's "Damages"), Mary Louise Parker (a middle-class drug dealer on Showtime's "Weeds") Holly Hunter (a dysfunctional cop on TNT's "Saving Grace"), Kyra Sedgwick (a quixotic cop on TNT's "The Closer"), and Vanessa Williams (a narcissistic fashion editor on ABC's "Ugly Betty")—only Close is currently eligible for an AARP card.
Theater is different. One of the reasons I love it is that women of all ages (and sizes, shapes and ethnicities) can—and do—strut their stuff on its stages. Right now, Debra Monk and Karen Ziemba are kicking up their heels in Curtains. Sinéad Cusack is giving two kick-ass performances in Rock 'n' Roll. Phylicia Rashad, who has only come into her own in the past decade even winning the Tony in 2004, is in previews in Cymbeline. And, of course, the whole premise of Mamma Mia! pivots around a boomer-age mom and her pals.
I thought about all of this after watching the hands-down best performance I've seen this year: Elizabeth Franz in Julia Cho's The Piano Teacher. Although some theatergoers will remember her as the original unctuous nun in Christopher Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and Franz first knocked me out in her Tony-winning performance as Linda Loman in the 1999 revival of Death of a Salesman, she isn't a big name. But she is a big talent. She's also 66.
And that's fitting because Cho's play tells the story of a retired and widowed piano teacher who, out of loneliness, tries to reconnect with some of her old students to find out why in one particular year so many of them stopped taking lessons. The two who show up—the very good Carmen M. Herlihy and the young and very promising John Boyd—bring with them unsettling answers that force the teacher to confront truths she has spent a lifetime trying to avoid.
Director Kate Whoriskey hits every chord of tension in the piece, which runs just under 90 minutes. She is ably assisted by Derek McLane's cozy, yet slightly creepy, set; and Obadiah Eaves' subtlety unnerving sound design. But it is Franz who makes the show worth a trip down to the Vineyard Theatre on 15th Street, where the run has been extended until Dec. 23. Her Mrs. K, as the piano teacher is called, is a complete person and Franz makes you feel every emotion she experiences.
Many of those feelings are disturbing because the play is intentionally ambiguous, allowing the viewer to bring her or his own nightmares to its mysteries. Cho totters at times on this ambitious tightrope she has set for herself but she is a playwright to be watched and supported. A Korean-American, she includes Asian characters in all of her works and yet race and politics seldom take center stage but, rather, add undertones that accentuate the commonality of human experience. And at just 32, Cho has created a master role that older actresses will treasure for years to come (click here to read an interview in which she discusses the genesis of The Piano Teacher).
Cho isn't the only playwright who has recognized the inherent drama that can be mined from centering plays around such characters. Contemporary writers from Horton Foote to Tom Stoppard have created big, juicy roles for actresses who are mature enough to bring a lifetime’s worth of experience and skill to those parts.The jobs don't pay as well as playing cops and robbers or comic foils on TV but the pay off—for the actors and their audiences—is richer.
If you're reading this blog, I know two things about you: (1) you're interested in Broadway and (2) you feel at least some comfort online. What I wondered was how comfortable Broadway felt not only online but with all the new technology from cellphones to social networking websites that are defining modern life. The big challenge for all the old traditional art forms and institutions—books, museums, opera, theater—is to find new ways to connect to media-savvy audiences, particularly the tweens, teens and twentysomethings who can give them the infusion of fresh blood they'll need to thrive in the 21st century. So I poked around, asked some friends, trolled some sites and found to my delight that Broadway is beginning to get its high-tech act together.
Just this week, the New York Times ran an article on how the folks over at Spring Awakening are inviting audience members to compete for the prize of a backstage tour by sending text messages via their cellphones (click here to read the article). I know some of my fellow bloggers hate this idea because they worry it will lead to more phones going off during the show but I say let's get the kids into the theater and then teach them how to behave once they're there. Avenue Q is trying to lure them in with a series of podcasts that will be downloadable at iTunes. Legally Blonde and the recently departed The Pirate Queen launched extravagant multi-media websites. Rent and other shows offer ringtone versions of their songs. It's all good.
Broadway producers in the past embraced the new technology of their day too—from the first cast album of Oklahoma in 1943 to scores of cast performances on the old Ed Sullivan TV show to D. A. Pennebaker’s now-classic documentary on the cast recording of Company. So I applaud Curtains for joining more obviously youth-friendly shows like Spring Awakening and Legally Blonde and setting up its own page on MySpace. More producers should put video clips on YouTube too. There are already a few, placed there mainly by fans who seem to have sneaked cameras into theaters and made bootleg videos but productions ought to be uploading their own highlights. It's free advertising and costly production values like those for TV spots aren't necessary since the rough, homemade quality of the videos is consider cool on YouTube. But more than anything a MySpace page or a YouTube clip signals that Broadway is up to date and makes the shows seem as though they want the people who are interested in these sites to be interested in them too.
I think it would be really great if Broadway annexed some space on Second Life, the online site that simulates the real world. Companies like Nike have set up shop there. Politicians like Barack Obama are campaigning there (click here to see him in action and to get a sense of how 2nd Life works). The Louvre has opened a virtual branch. Heck, even the country of Sweden set up a virtual embassy "to promote its image and culture." Now doesn't that sound like exactly what Broadway should be doing?
If you go to the theater enough, certain Broadway houses become not only familiar but friends. The Al Hirschfeld, which used to be called the Martin Beck, is an old pal of mine. Not only is it one of the most beautiful theaters in New York, it is also the theater where my husband K was playing in the orchestra when we first started dating. The old-world glamour of the almost 83 year-old theater would seem to be a fitting home for Curtains, the last musical by John Kander and the late Fred Ebb. For although Curtains is clearly striving to be one of those post-modern musicals like The Drowsy Chaperone that pokes loving fun at the musical comedy genre, it is just an old-fashioned show. But, alas, not as good as they used to make them in the old days.
A big Kander and Ebb fan, I was rooting for their swan song to work. And I wasn’t the only one. As the Wall Street Journal’s theater critic Terry Teachout noted in his review (click here to read it), “everybody wanted their last musical to be great.” It’s not a terrible show. Anna Louizos's sets and William Ivey Long’s costumes are appropriately bright and wacky. Rob Ashford’s choreography is lively. Old hands like Debra Monk, Karen Ziemba, Edward Hibbert and Ernie Sabella do their patented terrific stuff. And star David Hyde Pierce as a theater smitten-detective assigned to solve a backstage murder seems to be enjoying himself so much that I couldn’t help enjoying him too. But the music, with the exception of one song that plays almost like a private letter from Kander to Ebb, is pretty much generic and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen all of this before, wanted something more.
After the show, K and I walked over to Sardi’s for a late dinner. For years, the legendary restaurant, its walls famously filled with caricatures of Broadway’s greatest stars, had been the theater community’s unofficial clubhouse. But over the last two decades, theater people have been more apt to go to Orso, Joe Allen and Angus McIndoe. Some made return appearances at Sard’s in the weeks following the January 4 death of the restaurant’s owner, Vincent Sardi, who was known as the mayor of Broadway. My friend Bill went for the first time in years in February and said he was surprised by how good the food was and how many acquaintances he saw there. But the few tables occupied the night K and I went seemed to be taken up mainly by tourists. We overhead a waiter explaining the portraits on the walls to one of them. The restaurant apparently makes an effort to keep up with the times by adding fresh faces. But K and I found that we recognized very few of them. They don’t seem to be making Broadway stars as distinctive as they made them in the old days either.
Many sophisticated theatergoers, including my husband K, don’t like to go on weekends. They think it's the time when theater parties, tourists, and others they consider to be not-quite-as-sophisticated attend. I don’t know if my fellow audience members at a recent Friday night performance of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Prelude to a Kiss were sophisticated or not. I’m just happy that in this era of DVDs, iPods, Tivos and, yes, the Internet, they decided to come out and see a Broadway show. The man sitting behind me was probably one of those outsiders. His wife looked happy to be there; he much less so. Until, flipping through the pages of the Playbill, he recognized the photo of one of the stars. “Hey, it’s the guy from Frasier,” he said to his wife, now bobbing his head at her in approval at what she’d chosen for them to see. And indeed it was John Mahoney, who for 11 years played the down-to-earth dad to the effete sons on the popular, Emmy Award winning sitcom. By coincidence, both of his TV offspring have also recently been on New York stages. Kelsey Grammer played Henry Higgins in the limited four-night run of My Fair Lady with the New York Philharmonic. And David Hyde Pierce is in previews for the Kander and Ebb musical Curtains, which opens March 22.
In Prelude, Mahoney has the pivotal role of the mysterious old man who crashes a wedding and upsets the lives of the just married couple. Hollywood actors who appear on Broadway stages often get as little respect as the tourists who fill the seats in the weekend audiences. And sometimes those theatrical carpetbaggers, trying to trade on their celebrity without having packed sufficient stage technique, don’t deserve any respect. But it’s different for Mahoney. Before his Frasier success, he was an esteemed actor on New York stages, winning a Tony Award as Best Supporting Actor in The House of Blue Leaves; and in Chicago, where he has been a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company since 1979. And the years on Frasier haven’t dulled his theater chops at all. Even critics who weren’t crazy about this Prelude have rightly praised his performance. The guy behind me liked him too. “That was pretty good,” he told his wife as they put on their coats after the curtain call. I was also happy to see Mahoney back on a stage. Prelude, first produced on Broadway in 1990 at the height of the city’s AIDS epidemic, is usually seen as an homage to the power of love but for me Mahoney’s richly nuanced performance turned it into a moving meditation on the meaning of aging. I was equally happy that a performance like his might make the man in the seat behind me feel comfortable enough about returning to Broadway to try some other show, maybe even one with no guy from Frasier.
Everyone who loves theater loves the thrill of seeing something fresh and exciting. So although the musical In the Heights isn’t on Broadway (it’s playing in a now-deserted corner of what used to be Manhattan’s thriving garment district) I agreed to go when my friend Bill, an obsessive reader of theater blogs, websites and chat rooms, said he’d been seeing good things about it. The show, which centers around a group of Hispanic neighbors in the Washington Heights section of the city, isn’t the kind of singular sensation that A Chorus Line or Rent were (although there’s a nice symmetry in the fact that Priscilla Lopez, the original feisty Diana Morales in Chorus Line, plays the feisty mom in Heights). But In the Heights is still exciting because of the way its talented 27 year-old composer and star Lin-Manuel Miranda combines the musical idioms of hip-hop, salsa and traditional Broadway. And even more because it’s an encouraging sign that young people are again bringing fresh energy and contemporary flavors to musical theater.
Bill and I weren’t the only ones making the trek to see the show; the audience last night was speckled with insiders like longtime publicist Carol Fineman, sometime leading man Kevin Anderson and the legendary composer John Kander. Bill, a former actor, has at least a nodding acquaintance with seemingly everyone in the theater community and so we nodded at Kander during intermission. I wanted to ask Kander, who with his late partner Fred Ebb wrote Chicago and Cabaret among other great shows, what he thought of Heights but I’m a native New Yorker and, of course, we’re all too cool to do anything like that. As it turns out, I didn’t have to ask. As soon as the final song ended, Kander leapt to his feet to lead the standing ovation. I still don’t know what he really thought of the show, but I do know that his gesture of support was wonderfully gracious. And that kind of enthusiasm for the future of the art form is one more thing I love about the theater. Kander’s last collaboration with Ebb, Curtains, starts previews next week and is scheduled to open on March 22. I’ve always been a fan of their work but I’m looking forward to seeing this one even more now.
In the weeks before the writers' strike shut down TV production, television execs were patting themselves on the back and boasting that, unlike the movies where a woman over 30 is considered long in the tooth, several TV series were giving older actresses a place to show off their talent. But, out of the women they were talking about—Glenn Close (a ball-busting lawyer on FX's "Damages"), Mary Louise Parker (a middle-class drug dealer on Showtime's "Weeds") Holly Hunter (a dysfunctional cop on TNT's "Saving Grace"), Kyra Sedgwick (a quixotic cop on TNT's "The Closer"), and Vanessa Williams (a narcissistic fashion editor on ABC's "Ugly Betty")—only Close is currently eligible for an AARP card.
