The power shopping days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us but if you’re still looking for gifts to buy the theater lovers in your life (or to put on a wish list for someone to get you) here are 12 treats, one for each day of Christmas, that I’d love to find under the tree if I hadn’t already caved in and bought most of them for myself:
Tickets. D’uh. The one thing every theater lover wants is to see more shows and this year, the Theatre Development Fund is making it easier to satisfy that longing by offering TKTS Gift Certificates that can be use to buy reduced-price tickets on the day of the show at any one of the three TKTS booths in Manhattan and Brooklyn. They come in $25, $50 and $100 denominations.
Theater Ticket Album. It can be hard to keep track of all your tickets if you see lots of shows but this handy holder from the That’s My Ticket website keeps them all in one place. Or it could double as a keepsake filled with the stubs of all the shows seen in one season. $11.90 at that’smyticket.com
Kristin Chenoweth’s “A Lovely Way to Spend Christmas” CD. I have a weakness for Christmas music (and an embarrassingly large collection of Christmas CDs to prove it) but even if you tend to jingle to fewer of those bells, it’s hard to resist a collection of carols and holiday songs by Broadway’s inimitable cheer-bringer Chenoweth. $10.99 at Amazon.com
The Anton Chekhov Collection. This DVD collection brings together some of the world’s best classical actors (like Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Patrick Stewart) in fully-filmed and beautifully-performed BBC productions of some of the theater’s most beloved plays (such as The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya). What theater junkie could ask for anything more? $53.99 at Amazon.com
The August Wilson Century Cycle. The scripts of all 10 of Wilson’s landmark plays chronicling the experience of African-Americans in each decade of the 20th century are collected together in a gorgeous boxed set, complete with insightful introductions to each work by such commentators as Laurence Fishburne, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, and Frank Rich. It’s pricey but priceless. $129.36 at Amazon.com
On Broadway 2009 Wall Calendar. Palm Pilots and BlackBerries can’t replace the charm of an old-fashioned wall calendar, especially if it’s one that features reproductions of the original posters for classic Broadway shows like The Glass Menagerie and Show Boat. Published by the Library of Congress, this calendar also contains fun facts about each month’s featured show. $13.99 at Amazon.com
How Does the Show Go On: An Introduction to the Theater. What’s Christmas without a pop-up book or an advent calendar? This combo, written by Disney honcho Thomas Schumacher and Jeff Kurtti, is a doozie, even if it only cites Disney musicals. It was created to introduce kids to the theater but is filled with enough great stuff (like swatches for costumes from The Lion King and the stage manager’s cue notes for the now-departed Tarzan) to appeal to the inner child in every theater geek. $17.21 at Amazon.com
Historic Photos of Broadway: New York Theater: 1850-1970. Beginning with a portrait of Junius Brutus Booth and his young son Edwin and ending with a shot of the naked cast from the original production of Hair, this book is filled with rarely seen photos, all drawn from the Billy Rose collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The one of a young and very sexy Arthur Miller suggests that Marilyn Monroe was turned on by more than just his mind and is, all by itself, worth the price of the volume. $31.96 at Amazon.com
The Wicked Music Box. Over 3 million people have seen this mega-musical twist on "The Wizard of Oz" so chances are you know someone who loves it. Or love it yourself. If so, then this official keepsake, which plays the show’s “Defying Gravity” anthem and comes with a seasonally-appropriate snow globe, is for you. $75 at playbillstore.com
Stephen Sondheim The Story So Far. Anyone who loves Sondheim already has the songs on this box set in their collection but there are just enough extra goodies to add some holiday cheer, including a 76-page booklet filled with nifty photos drawn from Sondheim’s own personal photo albums and a few rehearsal songs sung by the master accompanying himself on piano. $35.99 at Amazon.com
Essential Shakespeare Handbook. The folks at DK Publishing, who made their name with lavishly-illustrated travel guides, have brought their distinctive touch to this visually-rich guide to the Bard’s plays. There’s a scene-by-scene summary of each one, a who’s who of the characters, famous quotes, historical and literary analysis and marvelous images ranging from illustrations for 19th century productions to photos for 21st century ones. $24.50 at Amazon.com
The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II. Truth be told, I don’t have this one. But a previous book in the series, "The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter," has been on my bookshelf for years and is one of my great joys. The new book, which just came out, has collected the lyrics of more than 850 songs of arguably the most influential Broadway lyricist ever (and the mentor to Stephen Sondheim). It’s an enchanting gift for anyone who’s obsessive about musicals. $40.95 at Amazon.com
Tweens, that precocious generation between the ages of 8 and 15, have turned “High School Musical” into a cash cow for Disney. They made the Jonas Brothers (ages 17, 16 and 13 when they formed their band in 2005) one of the hottest acts in the music business today. They put 15 year-old Miley Cyrus on the cover of Vanity Fair this year. And they even helped Broadway’s Wicked become the international girl-powerhouse that it is. So as I sat watching the new musical 13 that opened on Sunday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, I found myself wondering “Why didn’t someone think of this before?
This is a musical about 13 year-olds, starring a cast of 13 in which no one is older than 18 and even the onstage band is composed of players who probably just began to shave and wear bras. Unlike most of the shows aimed at this demographic (Wicked, Legally Blonde, The Little Mermaid), 13 has its eye on the boys who feel they’ve outgrown The Lion King. In fact, Broadway seems to be going a bit boy crazy this season because both the upcoming shows Billy Elliot and Shrek are aiming for the same audience.
Thirteen tells the story of Evan Goldman, a New York kid whose mother moves him to Indiana after his parents divorce and just a few months before he’s due to celebrate his bar mitzvah. The plot centers around Evan’s efforts to fit in with the kids at his new school so that they’ll join the festivities marking his entry into manhood. The book is by Dan Elish (who’s written such kid-friendly novels as “Born Too Short: The Confessions of an Eighth-Grade Basket Case”) and TV writer Robert Horn. And the music and lyrics are by Jason Robert Brown, composer of the Tony Award-winning score for Parade and the critically acclaimed The Last Five Years.
The whole idea is so smart and appealing that I really wanted to like 13. But, alas, I didn’t. It’s not the fault of the kids in the cast, who are, for the most part, talented and comfortable onstage, particularly Graham Phillips, who played Evan at the performance my friend Priscilla and I attended (he’s scheduled to take Saturday nights off). Phillips has the kind of bright, easy, and yes seductive, charm that brings to mind a junior version of the “M*A*S*H”-era mensch Alan Alda.
Other standouts include the clarion-voiced Allie Trimm as Patrice, the nice-but-non-cool girl who lives next door to Evan; and Aaron Simon Gross as Archie, a kid who gets around on crutches and a strong sense of humor. And even the young band plays well, although some of the heavy lifting is done by conductor and keyboardist Tom Kitt, whose last spin on Broadway was as the composer of the short-lived High Fidelity.
But aside from Kitt and director Jeremy Sams, who does a good job with such as young cast, I blame the show’s shortcomings on the grown-ups involved in the production. While its tunes are poppy and its lyrics witty (click here to hear a sampling), 13 struck me as the kind of show that adults think kids will find cool rather than a show that kids actually do find cool.
And I was totally turned off by how it fed into stereotypes. Does Indiana really have to be, as one song calls it, “the lamest place in the world” to live? Does the school jock have to be the predictably dumbest kid in the school? Does the blonde girl have to be the one that all the boys want? Does everyone have to be so thoroughly grossed out when two boys accidentally kiss?
Yeah, I know. I’m no where near the demographic 13 is hoping to draw. And I admit the audience the night I attended, heavily sprinkled with kids, seemed to enjoy the show, which runs just over 90 minutes. Even I got a kick out of seeing each young cast member show off in the joyful finale. And Priscilla, whose youngest is 14, said she's going to go back with her daughter and thinks that kids will like it. So what do I know? I don't even own any Jonas Brothers records.
Zillions of people have fallen in love with Broadway musicals before even seeing their first show. Instead, it was a cast recording that won their hearts. And that’s how I first fell for Paul Simon’s The Capeman. I’ve been a Paul Simon fan since seeing “The Graduate” when I was in my teens and over the years, I’ve loved Simon’s musical adventurousness. His 1986 album “Graceland”, an homage to the mbaqanga sounds of South Africa, is one of my all-time favorites. And so I was really intrigued back in 1997, when someone gave me a copy of “Songs from The Capeman,” a concept cast album that served as a kind of aural trailer for the show that was scheduled to open on Broadway a few months later.
As it turned out, The Capeman became a flop of myth-making proportions, and Simon vowed never to write for Broadway again but I continued to love the music and when I got a flyer in the mail saying that the Brooklyn Academy of Music was staging a concert version of Songs from the Capeman as the kickoff to its month-long celebration of Simon’s work, I clicked right on to Telecharge and ordered tickets.
The Capeman tells the story of Salvador Agron, a troubled Puerto Rican kid who joined a street gang in the late ‘50s, stabbed two white boys to death during a rumble and became a tabloid sensation for the dramatic black cape he wore during the fight and the defiant attitude he displayed during later interviews with the press. Agron spent 16 years in prison, became a born-again Christian and accomplished poet before being released in 1979. He died from pneumonia seven years later.
Simon’s wonderful score includes doo-wop, gospel, Latin jazz and his trademark folk-inflected pop. His collaborators on the show included Nobel laureate Derek Walcott who co-wrote the book and lyrics, choreographer Mark Morris as director, and the always innovative set designer Bob Crowley. The cast included Marc Anthony as young Sal, Ruben Blades as the older Sal, and Sara Ramirez, who seven years later would win a Tony for her scene-stealing role as The Lady of the Lake in Spamalot, making her Broadway debut as the pen pal who befriends Sal when he’s in prison.
With the exception of Crowley, they were all Broadway newcomers. And it showed. During the extended preview period, reports leaked out about the weakness of the book, about Simon’s refusal to listen to the advice of Broadway veterans, about Morris’ disappearance from rehearsals and finally about the arrival of show doctor Jerry Zaks. My pit-musician husband K had worked with Zaks on several earlier musicals and I so I approached the director in the lobby a few days before the show opened. “How’s it doing?” I asked after establishing our connection. “Well, it’s better,” I recall him saying. “But we could use some more time.” They didn’t get it. The show open to near universal pans and closed after 68 performances, losing all of its $11 million investment.
Still, the music was terrific. And so my sister Joanne and I trooped out to Brooklyn this past rainy Thursday night and trekked up what seemed like a hundred steep and rickety steps to the balcony of the BAM Harvey Theater. But once we got our breath back, we had a grand time. The legendary doo-wop group Little Anthony & the Imperials, celebrating 50 years together, warmed up the audience and set the mood with three of their classic numbers. Then the Spanish Harlem Orchestra took the stage and swung into the merengue rhythms of The Capeman’s opening number, “Born in Puerto Rico.” A company of nearly two-dozen people sang the entire score without any of the show’s dialog. But the story was fairly easy to follow and the music impossible to resist. By the end, company members were inviting audience members to come up and dance with them. At least one couple I saw didn’t even wait to be asked but just jumped up and joined in the fun.
That kind of easy flow between the worlds of pop and Broadway used to be common. In the Golden Age, from the 1920s right through Hair in 1968, the country’s most popular songwriters wrote Broadway shows and show tunes played on the radio. Everybody hummed Gershwin and knew that some enchanted evening they might see a stranger across a crowded room and that once they’d found her they should never let her go. Then rock came along and for the next three decades, the Broadway musical and mainstream music went their separate ways. Hopes were high for a reconciliation in the late 1990s when, maybe because they were then in their 50s, both Simon and Elton John decided to tackle their first musicals. John wrote the stage version of Disney’s The Lion King but tuned down his sound to fit the Disney aesthetic. Simon was more successful at keeping his voice but The Capeman failed. I’m still hoping that Simon will reconsider and try another musical. In the meantime, the final performances of Songs From The Capeman are playing at BAM tonight and tomorrow. But, of course, if you miss them, there’s always the cast album.
Disney was not a bad word when I was growing up. It meant "The Mickey Mouse Club," which I loved watching. It meant Disney World, which I longed to see. And it meant entering the magical worlds of feature-length cartoons like "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty." So, I'm not really quite sure how Disney became a four letter word on Broadway. Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and the restoration of the venerable New Amsterdam Theatre helped rescue Broadway and the Times Square area from the drug pushers, pimps and sex shops that dominated the neighborhood in the ‘70s. But sophisticated musical lovers complain that Disney's later shows—Aida, Tarzan, Mary Poppins—have been too bland and too mechanical. Broadway insiders gripe that the Disney corporation refuses to play by the rules, throwing its weight around in contract negotiations and its money around to buy up talent. And now, this week, nearly every major theater critic has joined in, harpooning Disney's latest show, The Little Mermaid. “Loved the shoes. Loathed the show,” wrote the New York Times’ Ben Brantley.
Alas, I have to swim with the tide on this last one. I don't think The Little Mermaid is as terrible as Brantley says but there certainly isn't anything magical about it. And it's magic you want from a fairy tale and from the imagineers of Disney. Raised expectations might be part of the problem. There have been few more magical moments on the stage than the opening of The Lion King. The Disney folks hired the experimental theater director Julie Taymor and she transformed that beloved cartoon into a wondrous theatrical experience that set a high bar for other Disney shows. For Mermaid, Disney hired the internationally acclaimed opera director Francesca Zambello, clearly hoping that she would create a similarly transformative production. I've never seen Zambello's work before but if The Little Mermaid is any indication, I don't get what the fuss is about.
The show still tells the story of the mermaid princess Ariel (the pleasant Sierra Boggess) who falls for a human prince (the equally pleasant Sean Palmer), and then defies her father (the very buff and therefore particularly pleasant-to-look-at Norm Lewis) and almost sacrifices her life for love. But the book by Doug Wright (yes, the same award winning creator of I Am My Own Wife and the book for Grey Gardens) pads the tale so much that what was once a brisk 83-minute movie is now a somewhat bloated 2 ½-hour show. All of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman's songs from the original cartoon are still there and they still delight but the new ones by Menken and Glenn Slater aren't up to the same level. Most of the imagination seems to have gone into creating an underwater world, which set designer George Tsypin and costume designer Tatiana Noginova do primarily with lots of plastic to simulate water and by having actors glide around on sneakers with wheels in their heels to affect the movement of swimming.
I went to the show with my niece Jennifer, who is now 28 but who, like me, grew up on Disney cartoons and still has the DVDs of every show that came out during the company’s second golden era of animation, which began with the release of “The Little Mermaid” in 1989. We tried to get into the mood of the evening by stopping for a quick bite before the show at Blue Fin, the seafood restaurant around the corner from the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre where The Little Mermaid is playing. But the service was spotty and the tab was ridiculously high for the salad and appetizers we ordered. Jennifer wasn't any more pleased with the show, perking up only for familiar songs like "Part of Your World," "Kiss the Girl" and, the always-buoyant "Under the Sea." "Well," she said at the end, damning the show with faint praise, "it was better than Tarzan."
The kids in the audience, and there were oodles of them at the performance we attended, seemed to enjoy the show more than we did. But they didn't display the excitement that I saw in the young theatergoers at Wicked or Legally Blonde. Maybe kids today are too jaded for the PG-attractions of a traditional Disney show. But maybe it’s just time for Disney to move on from adaptations of its old animated hits. The company seems to think so too. It is currently developing musicals based on "The Man in the Ceiling," Jules Feiffer's children's book about a boy who yearns to become a cartoonist; and "Peter and the Starcatchers," a prequel to Peter Pan by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. Maybe they can help restore Disney's good name.
See two updates on the stagehands' strike at the end of this entry.
Most kids probably get their first exposure to the theater during the holiday season that runs from the week before Thanksgiving to the week after New Year's. Lots of parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts buy tickets for their little ones to see big Broadway shows like Wicked and The Lion King. But a large part of the seasonal merriment comes from the special limited-run shows that play multiple times a day, offer at least some tickets at family-friendly prices and disappear before all the Christmas tinsel is packed away.
Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, with ticket prices running $25 to $99, was scheduled to do up to seven performances a weekend at the St. James Theatre before the stagehand’s strike shut it down (although settlement talks are underway even as I type this*). A few blocks uptown in a big tent in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center, the Big Apple Circus is celebrating its 30th season with a new show called Celebrate! that, according to its press handout, features "a live, original musical score, a chic British ringmistress, and of course our own lovable Grandma the Clown" and seats starting at $28. This year the Cirque du Soleil folks got into the holiday spirit with Wintuk, a holiday-centered extravaganza at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden with ticket prices of $30 to $110. And then, of course, there's the granddaddy of holiday family shows, the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, where tickets cost $40 to $100 until the end of its run on Dec. 30. Road companies of the Christmas Spectacular are playing across the country this season in places like Fort Lauderdale and Phoenix but, call me provincial if you like, there’s nothing like seeing it in the glorious performance cathedral that Radio City Music Hall is.
I first saw the Christmas Spectacular there when I was about seven and I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. I loved the precision-dancing Rockettes and the pageantry of the show's version of the Nativity story with its parade of live animals, including camels and an elephant. I took my niece Jennifer when she was around the same age back in the mid '80s. But by then the show seemed a little run down and tacky. Jennifer, a veteran theatergoer by the time she was four, wasn't much impressed. And so it's been about 20 years since I've been back to see a Christmas Spectacular but my family is big on traditions and this year Jennifer and I took her four-year old god-brother Max to see it.
The show is celebrating its 75th anniversary and it's undergone a makeover to make it more attractive to kids who even at the earliest ages are more used to being entertained by Jay-Z music videos and CGI-animated cartoons (click here to see a behind-the scenes NYTimes video on the making of the new Spectacular). The result is a mix of the old and the new. The Rockettes, looking great, perform their traditional, and still amazing, "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" routine, which debuted in 1933, but they also do a few numbers that include some hip-hop moves. "The Living Nativity" is still there (albeit with fewer animals than I remember from the old days) but there's also a high-tech, 3-D animated tour of New York (3-D glasses are pasted in the program). They still do an excerpt from "The Nutcracker" with a lovely little girl ballerina but there's also a jazzy number with dancing Santa Clauses. And there's plenty of opportunity for audience participation (or interactive involvement, as we now call it) from carol sing-alongs to, at the finale, the spinning of small pen lights (they came with the programs too at the opening-night performance we attended).
The 90-minute show didn't live up to the memories of the ones I'd seen in my childhood. But I'm going to let four-year Max have the final the word here. "It was," he told his mother when he got home, "a great Christmas show."
[*An update on Nov 19: According to NY1, the local 24-hour news station with good sources in the Broadway community, How the Grinch Stole Christmas has a separate contract with the stagehands' union Local One and its producers, clearly unhappy to see the other kiddie shows thriving while theirs remained dark, made a separate arrangement with the strikers over the weekend so that its shows can go on starting Nov. 20.]
[A later update on Nov 19: the powers that be at the Jujamcyn Theaters are now threatening to lockout the Grinch producers, who, in turn, say they are going to court to fight for the right to put on their show. I got this info from by buddy Steve at Steve on Broadway.com, which has provided the most comprehensive and update coverage of the strike of any media outlet. So, click on to his blog if you want to know the latest on what has become Broadway's most riveting drama.]
The power shopping days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us but if you’re still looking for gifts to buy the theater lovers in your life (or to put on a wish list for someone to get you) here are 12 treats, one for each day of Christmas, that I’d love to find under the tree if I hadn’t already caved in and bought most of them for myself:
