You can still smell the fresh paint when you walk into the Nederlander Theatre. It got a spiffy facelift when Rent closed after playing there for 12 years. There are even fancy new Mitsubishi hand dryers in the ladies restroom that do a terrific job. I wish I could say the theater’s other new occupant, the revival of Guys and Dolls that opened on Sunday, works as well.
My husband K flat out refused to see this new version of the Frank Loesser musical based on the Damon Runyon stories about the small time hustlers and good-time gals who once populated Times Square. K, a pit musician, had played in the acclaimed 1992 revival that starred Nathan Lane, Faith Prince and Peter Gallagher and he was sure it was too soon for a new production to match that one.
My sister Joanne tends to be more open minded. Besides, Guys and Dolls is one of her all-time favorite musicals. So much so that she even loves the slightly embarrassing movie version with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. So after grabbing a quick dinner at Schnipper's Quality Kitchen, the upscale fast food restaurant that just opened on the corner of 41st and Eighth, she and I walked down the block to the Nederlander.
About 15 minutes into the show, right after Oliver Platt, playing Nathan Detroit, the fast-talking scoundrel who runs "the oldest, established, permanent floating, Crap game in New York," has his first exchange with the hapless cop Lt. Brannigan, Joanne turned to me with a look of dismay. “This isn’t working,” she whispered. The man sitting behind us was less euphemistic. “This is horrible,” he hissed to his companion.
Nobody likes to see a show fail. At least I don’t. But there’s not much good I can say about this Guys and Dolls. The original 1950 production played for 1,200 performances and some people consider it the epitome of Broadway musical comedy. It has been revived on Broadway four times before this.
There had been talk that the 2005 British production, directed by Michael Grandage, choreographed by Rob Ashford, starring Ewan McGregor as the beguiling big-time gambler Sky Masterson and Jane Krakowski as Nathan Detroit’s long-suffering fiancée Miss Adelaide, and reportedly grittier than any of its predecessors, might transfer to Broadway as well. When it didn’t, the Jersey Boys team of director Des McAnuff and choreographer Sergio Trujillo put in their bid for it.
That seemed fine. Then they named the cast. Platt, an actor I admire but one who has no musical experience, was tapped to play Nathan Detroit. The character is usually the show’s comic center but Platt seems almost embarrassed to be onstage at all.
Lauren Graham, who made her name as the mom in the cult TV series “The Gilmore Girls” does better with Miss Adelaide. She belts out her songs and looks great in the form-clinging dresses and thongs costume designer Paul Tazewell has designed for her to wear but her performance doesn’t capture the distinctive mix of quirkiness, poignancy and pizzazz that makes the character so lovable. “Not ditzy enough,” sighed Joanne.
Craig Bierko as Sky and Kate Jennings Grant as Sarah Brown, the Salvation Army sister he woos on a bet, do fine with Loesser classics like “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” but lack sufficient sizzle.
The creative team doesn’t fare much better. Trujillo’s dances struck me as generic. The one thing most critics like about the show is Robert Brill’s glitzy set but the space seemed cramped to me and I couldn’t figure out why he built a trench in front of the stage that the actors kept running into and out of for no apparent reason. Similarly, Dustin O’Neill’s projections make the most extensive and cinematic use of the new technology I’ve seen on Broadway since The Woman in White but it’s so busy, swooping here and swooping there, that it made me queasy.
There are a few bright spots. Loesser's score is still unbeatable. Tituss Burgess as the Nathan Detroit sidekick named Nicely-Nicely and the always reliable Mary Testa as a Salvation Army honcho bring down the house with the show’s always reliable showstopper, “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat.” But it’s the 19th song out of 23 and it comes too late to save the show. For, in the end there are no true winners in this game. Except for K, who, when I got home, told me he'd had a very nice evening staying in.
There weren’t a lot of surprises when the Tony nominations were announced earlier this month. Except maybe that Cry-Baby had won a shot at the Best Musical award. It’s not a terrible show and people who see it will probably have a good enough time (click here to see excerpts from the show). But, with one exception (Rob Ashford’s high energy choreography), it isn’t an award-caliber show either. What it is is simply another homage to the Fifties.
Which raises the following question: hasn’t the time come for Broadway to declare a moratorium on plays and musicals about the Fifties? This past season alone, A Catered Affair; Grease; Come Back, Little Sheba; The Country Girl; Thurgood and, of course, Cry-Baby, were all centered around events that took place in the post-War period between 1946 and 1964 and I’m not even counting leftover shows like Jersey Boys. And then there’s Happy Days, a musical version of the old TV series about life during the Eisenhower era that is currently playing at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut.
Why all this looking back? And why to that period? I can’t believe it’s because people feel that the music back then was so great. Is everyone really all that nostalgic for the supposedly more innocent era of ducktailed bad boys and poodle-skirt wearing good girls? Or is Broadway trying to make up for the fact that it overlooked rock and roll when it first arrived on the scene? Whatever the reason, isn’t it time to move on?
And while I’m making suggestions, it probably isn’t such a good idea either for Broadway to pick up the Hollywood bad habit of trying to make sequels to successful shows. The current thinking seems to be if The Producers or Hairspray sell well, let’s see what other Mel Brooks or John Waters movie we can turn into a cash-cow musical. Well, you didn’t see Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein turning to other states after their Oklahoma was a hit.
Cry-Baby suffers in comparison to its predecessors—both the other '50s shows now on stage, and the movie that spawned it. The show’s publicity campaign makes much of the fact that the score is by David Javerbaum, executive producer of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show”, and Adam Schlesinger, a founder of the rock band Fountains of Wayne. And it is great that guys with such hip credentials are interested in working on Broadway but it’s also clear that here, they are simply guns for hire. Even so, several of their songs are clever enough that I’d like to see what they’d do when given free reign.
A more charismatic leading man might have diverted attention away from the show’s shortcomings or given it the kind of edge Johnny Depp did in the movie version. James Snyder, making his Broadway debut, works hard and sings well but his Cry-Baby tends to get lost in the crowd when the ensemble is on stage. I can’t help thinking what someone like Cheyenne Jackson (now starring in Xanadu and in a zillion chatroom complaints about why he didn’t get a Tony nomination for his role as that show’s muse-needy artist Sonny) might have done in the part of Cry-Baby. Although he's probably had his fill of the Fifties too, having already done All Shook Up, the ill-fated juke box musical based on Elvis songs.
In the tortoise and the hare nostalgia derby between the 1950s and the 1960s, the '50s is pulling ahead. At least on Broadway. Memories of the '60s may be flashier but for the past two years, Jersey Boys has been packing in audiences willing to pay up to $350 for a premium ticket to relive the behind-the-music story of the hit '50s group The Four Seasons. Grease, despite so-so reviews, is playing to nearly full houses of people joyously cheering on Danny, Sandy and the rest of the ducktailed and bobby-soxed gang at Rydell High. And now comes A Bronx Tale, Chazz Palminteri’s one-man memory play about growing up under the dual protection, and competing loyalties, of his bus driver father and a local Mafiosi in the outer-borough neighborhood made famous by another boy group, Dion and the Belmonts. To my great surprise, A Bronx Tale turns out to be my favorite.
I say surprise because one-man shows can be tricky. I knew better than to even mention seeing this one to my husband K, who is unabashedly biased against them. My frequent theatergoing buddy Bill agreed to go with me but I wasn't so excited about seeing A Bronx Tale myself. I had seen, and liked well enough, the 1993 movie starring Robert De Niro as the dad and Palminteri as the mobster but I hadn't seen the off-Broadway stage production when it played in 1989 and I couldn't imagine how Palminteri was going to reduce the movie’s 20-plus characters to a cast of one. The answer: with an engaging vivacity that fills the stage.
Palminteri is a gifted raconteur and he switches from character to character with the natural ease of everyone's favorite storyteller at the family reunion confident that he can make his listeners enjoy his tale as much as he does. And he gets just the right amount of support from Jerry Zak's subtle direction and James Noone’s simple but evocative set. The show reminded me at times of Billy Crystal's one-man memoir about his boyhood covering roughly the same time period. During both shows, I could almost hear the audience purring with pleasure. Which made me think about why we've fallen so under the spell of a decade once considered uptight and colorless when compared to the Technicolor pyrotechnics of the next one.
In recent years works like Phillip Roth's "American Pastoral" and Twyla Tharp's Movin' Out have cast a rueful eye on the turbulence of the post-Kennedy assassination era of the1960s and that seems to have deepened our affection for the tortoise-like calm of the earlier decade. We know that the fifties weren't as placid as we now fantasize—there was McCarthyism and racial segregation and blatant sexism and homophobia—but we find some undefined comfort in thinking of it as an idyllic time. A Bronx Tale profits from that longing for the innocence and ignorance of our childhood years. Sure, the jokes are old-fashioned and the storyline familiar but in Palminteri's hands, it's a tale well told and one that I was happy to listen to.
