The first thing I wanted to know when my husband K and I walked out of The Public Theater after seeing David Henry Hwang's new play Yellow Face was: what is the New York Times going to say about this? People in the theater world are always asking some variation of that question because the paper wields so much influence over what theatergoers choose to see and which plays get to run. But I had a very specific reason for my question: the New York Times plays a role in Yellow Face and it's not a pretty one.
The Times, as it turns out, gave the show a circumspect review (click here to read it). But K and I loved Yellow Face. I've been a Hwang fan since I saw his second play, The Dance and the Railroad at The Public back in 1981; it told the story of two Chinese laborers working on the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and it was the first time I'd seen Asian-Americans portrayed on a stage as real people. Seven years later, Hwang hit the Broadway big time with M. Butterfly, his wry deconstruction of the "Madama Butterfly" story as refracted through the real-life spy case of a French diplomat and the Chinese transvestite who was his lover. That play won three Tonys, including Best Play, three Drama Desk awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination; it also ran for almost two years. Hwang produced a couple of more plays after that but he's spent most of the last decade working on books for musicals ranging from an update of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song to Disney's adaptations of Aida and Tarzan. So one of the reasons I'm so excited about Yellow Face is that it marks Hwang's return to the subject of racial identity that he does so well and that very few other playwrights do at all.
Yellow Face, which has been extended through Dec. 30, is the somewhat autobiographical story of Hwang's life since the success of M. Butterfly. It starts with the protests he helped lead when the white Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce was cast as the Eurasian pimp in the musical Miss Saigon, a role that Asian-American actors felt should have gone to one of them. It ends with the government investigations of Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwan-born nuclear scientist who was erroneously charged with spying for China, and Hwang's father Henry Y. Hwang, an immigrant who founded the first Asian-American-owned bank in the U.S. and who was unjustly accused of laundering money for his native China. (This is where the New York Times, which aggressively covered both cases, enters the action.) Along the way, Hwang tells the tale of what happened to his infamous flop Face Value and the story of his mentorship of a white actor he mistakenly believed to be Asian.
That's a lot of plot. But Wong handles it deftly, with enough humor to keep you amused during the show (people who know Broadway will particularly enjoy his portrayals of producers Stuart Ostrow and Cameron Mackintosh and actors B.D. Wong and Jane Krakowski) and with enough perspicacity to keep you thinking about it for days afterwards (some critics complained about the serious turn in the play's second half; but it's the serious stuff that's the point). The show is also aided by Leigh Silverman's sharp direction and an agile seven-member cast headed by Hoon Lee, who plays Hwang, Noah Bean as the ambiguous actor, and Francis Jue, who portrays multiple characters including Hwang's father.
After the show, K and I walked to Five Points, our favorite downtown restaurant and a place that was almost a second home for us when K, a pit musician played in the orchestra for The Public's production of Elaine Stritch At Liberty. Our friend Lee, the nicest maitre d in New York, was off but they gave us a nice table and as we sipped two of their specialty cocktails—a pear mimosa for me, something with gin for K—I recalled how I'd once met Hwang during the Miss Saigon controversy and how even in the midst of it, he was ambivalent about taking on the role of spokesman for his race. Yellow Face is simultaneously his declaration of independence and a potent demonstration of what makes his voice so important.
[Update: Yellow Face has been extended through Jan. 13]
How can you not like Mark Twain? His novels, particularly the great “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, were bestsellers in their day and progenitors of the Great American novel, and they're still smart and funny. He was a devoted father, an adoring husband and a great raconteur with a wide circle of friends and an international following. He had an iconic sense of style and an innate sense of decency. Of course, like everyone, he had his faults; his was being notoriously bad at managing money but even then, he was the kind of guy who, when he went bankrupt, paid back all his debts even though it took him years to do it. After reading his biography a couple of years ago, I developed a crush on him.
Still, I had my doubts about seeing the new Broadway production of Is He Dead?, the play that Twain wrote in 1898, but that was never produced and that was pretty much lost until a Stanford English professor discovered it in an archive five years ago. But I was curious too and so last week, I went with my friend Ann, a good sport who is up for any adventure, to see it. Hedging our bet, we had pre-show burgers at Angus McIndoe, the Broadway hangout that almost always guarantees a good time. Then, we crossed over to the east side of Broadway to get to the gorgeous old Lyceum Theatre where Is He Dead? is playing and where, it turns out, we had an even better time.
Is He Dead? isn't a great play but, as adapted by David Ives, directed by Michael Blakemore, and performed by a wonderfully game cast, it is great fun. Twain's tale takes the life of Jean-François Millet, a real-life 19th century French artist, and reimagines what would have happened if the impoverished painter had faked his own death in order to sell his works to a fickle public that only seems to appreciate artists when they're dead. The result is a farce filled with mistaken identities, cross dressing characters, mustachioed villains, clueless foreigners, silly jokes, sight gags and, of course, lots of slamming doors.
Ives, who has retrofitted 19 musicals for the Encores! series, and Blakemore, who directed the original production of the classic Noises Off and knows his way around a farce, whip all of these elements into a delightful confection that deftly captures the Twain aesthetic. There are also terrific performances from Byron Jennings, David Patu and Marylouise Burke. But the show's secret ingredient is its star, Norbert Leo Butz.
The funny thing is I wasn't all that impressed with Butz the first time I saw him, as the cute boy toy both witches wanted in Wicked. But I was knocked out by his Tony-award winning performance as the manic con man in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; and he was even more hilarious when Jonathan Pryce joined the cast and the two seemed to push one another to dizzier heights of do-anything-for-a-laugh zaniness. Like Nathan Lane, whose comic brilliance often improves the roles he plays, Butz seems to work best when there's room for him to let his talents fly without restraints. Ives and Blakemore have cleared the decks for him and Butz is more delightfully antic than he's ever been, the play is better than it should have been and the audience is more entertained than it thought it could have been.
Historians speculate about why Is He Dead? was never produce during Twain's lifetime. Here's my thesis: Twain, a man with a great respect for the power of humor and a popular lecturer who drew thousands to his talks, knew what it took to be a crowd-pleaser and so he simply waited until an actor came along who could make his play one. And, of course, as he knew, death makes no difference, it just makes us appreciate his artistry more.
My husband K was ambivalent about The Farnsworth Invention even before we saw it. On the one hand, the show is about the rivalry over who invented television between Philo T. Farnsworth, a naive, self-educated scientific genius, and David Sarnoff, the shrewd media visionary who ran RCA and founded NBC, and K isn't crazy about watching actors pretend to be famous people. On the other hand, the show is by Aaron Sorkin, who is famous for having written the smart courtroom drama A Few Good Men, the smart movies "Malice" and "The American President" and the smart TV series "Sports Night" and "The West Wing" and K is crazy about smart people. As it turns out, the characters in The Farnsworth Invention aren't famous enough to be distracting and the actors playing them—Jimmi Simpson as Farnsworth and Hank Azaria as Sarnoff—are talented performers but Sorkin may be too smart for his, and the audience's, own good.
Sorkin clearly did a lot of research into the technology behind the creation of television and the intricacies of patent law and he's clearly proud of that because long stretches of the play's dialog sound as though pages of “Popular Science” magazine or "The Journal of Intellectual Property Law" somehow got mixed up with the script. I like learning new stuff but I go to the theater to be entertained as much, if not more, than to be educated. At least half of the action in The Farnsworth Invention is simply narrated by the two main characters as they talk about major events in one another’s lives and the few dramatic scenes that are supposed to show those turning points have far too little drama. In short, there's a whole lot of head in this show but not enough heart.
The man sitting next to me kept sneaking peeks at his watch. K and I were bored too. Watching the show reminded me of Democracy, another play about a complex subject (German politics in the post-war era) and written by a smart playwright (Michael Frayn) that came off, at least in the New York production, as more of a lecture than a drama. Sorkin tries to spice up his work by peppering his speeches with anachronistic asides to the audience and expletives that reminded me of those desperate stand-up comics, who, knowing that their jokes are falling flat, try to prop them up by throwing in a barrage of f-words. Plays about serious subjects can be engaging without that kind of gratuitous pandering. Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon proved that last season. And now, right across 45th Street, Tom Stoppard is proving it as he recounts 30 years of modern Czech history in the winning Rock 'n' Roll.
After The Farnsworth Invention ended, K and I walked over to 46th Street for dinner at Orso, the country Italian restaurant that is such a part of the theater scene that you don't even need to give them a specific time when you're making a reservation for a post-theater dinner but instead can just tell them which show you'll be coming from because they know how long each one runs and how long it should take you to walk from the theater. As usual, the cozy room was filled with people who had just seen various shows. The couple who came in right after us and who were seated at a nearby table had just come from The Farnsworth Invention too and, seeing our Playbills, stopped and chatted for a bit. Former New Yorkers who now live in Colorado, they said they come in at least once a year to see shows. Grateful that the stagehands' strike had ended just before this visit had been scheduled to begin, they'd seen Cyrano de Bergerac, which they enjoyed; August: Osage County, which they loved; and, of course, The Farnsworth Invention. They said they were ambivalent about it.
New York theater lovers are luckier than most. We have regular access to amazingly gifted actors, directors and designers. When a show is a hit somewhere else, it usually makes its way here, often with its stars. But what we don't always get to see are the often-equally talented people who do most of their work in cities outside of New York. And it's even rarer that we get a whole cast of them appearing in a show that was a bonafide hit in another part of the country. That's what makes the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of August: Osage County so wonderful.
People lined up in Chicago last summer to see Tracy Letts's three-act play about a large dysfunctional Oklahoma family. The production dominated the Joseph Jefferson Awards that honor theater in Chicago, winning best play, best director, best actress in a drama, and three other categories including best ensemble (click here to read a wonderful cast blog about the making of the Chicago production). Now, nearly all of the original 13-member cast, sensationally directed by Anna D. Shapiro, are recreating their roles in the production that opened last night at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway. And they're all terrific. But the most terrific is Deanna Dunagan, who plays the clan's pill-popping, sharp-tongued matriarch (she's the one wearing the pearls and seated at the head of the table in the photo above).
Steppenwolf actors aren't total strangers to New York; many of the cast members' Playbill bios lists credits for Broadway and off-Broadway shows and even for the various “Law & Order” TV series that are the bread and butter jobs for New York actors. But Dunagan seems to have done most of her work in what we New Yorkers call the hinterlands—in Chicago, where she's won three Joseph Jefferson Awards including one for August: Osage County, in Madison, Wisconsin and Louisville, Kentucky and Washington D.C. I don't know what took her so long to get to New York but I’m mighty glad she came.
In fact, my friend Ellie, the erstwhile actor and current poetry professor, and I were pretty pleased about the whole evening. I'd worried beforehand about how I would respond to the show because I'd gone into it with such high expectations. Other friends who'd managed to see previews before the stagehands' strike shut down Broadway told me it was not to be missed. Even some people I'd just met at a party over the weekend started singing its praises. I usually find that few shows can live up to that kind of build up. And I also worried about making it through the show's three hour and 20 minute running time. (There are two intermissions and so many people were late getting back to their seats after the first one at the performance Ellie and I attended that the actors had to add some pauses to their dialog so that important lines wouldn’t be missed while the latecomers settled back into their seats.) But after a first act that struck me as a trifle twee, I had a great time. It’s been a while since I’ve laughed out loud as much as I did watching August: Osage County.
And that's something you wouldn’t necessarily expect because August: Osage County is another dysfunctional family play, reminiscent of Eugene O’Neill's Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate, Sam Shepard's Buried Child and dozen of others. Letts, a member of Steppenwolf as both an actor and a writer, has acknowledged the influence of those earlier works but he has also said in interviews that he based the play on his own family. And he finds just the right balance between humor and pathos that brings a freshness to this familiar trope and a renewed recognition of how the pains of one generation are transferred to the next. You might not want to go to the Letts family reunion but the characters it has inspired make for fascinating company on stage and a show that critics are already proclaiming the must-see of the season.
But it’s Letts' other family—his Steppenwolf brothers and sisters—that I left the theater wanting to spend more time with. "It was great to get see those Steppenwolf actors," Ellie remarked as we walked to the subway. Indeed. Watching their wonderful work made me envious of my blogger buddies Steve on Broadway and Terry Teachout who regularly get to visit theater companies around the country. I bet there are other Deanna Dunagans out there. In the meantime, though, I consider myself very lucky to have seen this one.
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.
There are all sorts of reasons we choose to see a particular show. Sometimes it's because of the actors, writers or director involved. Or maybe we're drawn by rave reviews. Or because a friend said it was something that shouldn't be missed. Or, as in my case with The Glorious Ones, because it reminds us of something in our own lives.
The Glorious Ones, the new musical now playing in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, tells the story of a troupe of 16th century Italian actors who helped to create commedia dell'arte, the improvisational form of theater that took a comic view of subjects ranging from jealousy and chivalry to love and the fear of death. I obviously wasn't around then but during my sophomore year in college a group of us started our own commedia troupe. We divided its stock roles—the sexy maid, the innocent maiden, the crotchety old man, the swaggering hero, the clever jester—among us and performed skits for our fellow students, at schools and children’s fairs, wherever they would have us. The following summer, a small group got a tiny grant and took the show around to poor neighborhoods in New York. A scholarship kid, I needed to make more money than the grant could pay so I dropped out but I look back at my commedia days as some of the happiest I spent in school. And the moment I heard about The Glorious Ones, I looked forward to the chance to experience the pleasures I'd enjoyed back then. And when I found myself unexpectedly free one night, I went to see it.
Nothing, of course, could have lived up to the memories of my youth. But I think I would have been disappointed anyway. The Glorious Ones, based on the novel by Francine Prose, isn't a bad show. There are several affecting songs by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, the team that created Ragtime and Once on This Island, among many other shows. The cast, led by the superb Marc Kudisch as the leader of the troupe, is excellent; Julyana Soelistyo was particularly winning as the runt of the group. Graciela Daniele’s direction is lively, Mara Blumefeld’s costumes are eye-catching and Dan Ostling’s set is fittingly simple. But even with all of this going for it (which I grant is quite a bit; click here to see some video clips of the show) The Glorious Ones never achieves the wonderfully manic energy of commedia for me and Ahrens' book fails to make the narrative dramatic, in any sense of the word.
But The Glorious Ones does strive to pay tribute to the transformative power of art and to the particular exhilaration that actors draw from their art form. And even though I attended a performance in the middle of the show’s 12-week run that is scheduled to end on Jan. 6, the audience was still peppered with theater folk: I bumped into a Broadway house manager I know, sat next to a well-known publicist and in front of two men discussing their upcoming meeting with the director David Grindley. The show obviously holds some special meaning for all of them but it seems unlikely to hit with the general public. Even though Lincoln Center has a subscription audience, there were many empty seats at my performance.
I will always love commedia. And I have always loved backstage musicals, even if the stage is just a wooden plank in a 16th century Italian town square. I also have real respect for the people involved in this show and for the ambitious task they set themselves. But, in the end, I found myself wishing that they could take the show back and do it over because there’s a lot of good here and maybe, with some additional tweaking, it could be a truly glorious show.
Seeing a show or listening to an album is usually satisfying enough for most folks. But those of us who are fanatics crave more. We want to know the inside story. We want to peek behind the curtain. We want to get (or at least pretend to get) up close to the process. Which is why instead of sleeping in and recuperating from the rigors of preparing, eating, and cleaning up after our family Thanksgiving dinner, I got up early on Friday morning, finished hand washing our fancy glasses and took the bus down to the Metropolitan Opera for a final dress rehearsal of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, which is scheduled to open on Tuesday night.
My frequent theater companion Bill regularly attends these working rehearsals at the Met and he's invited me in the past but this was the first time I could make it. But, to my great dismay, I didn't make it there on time. I somehow confused the starting time and so got there after the performance had started. Bill left my ticket at the box office but there's no admittance into the hall once the singing starts and the ushers sent me to the late room, a recital space that has a large screen so that latecomers can see (via a static and dimly lit camera) and hear (via poor mics) what's happening on stage. There were five of us, slouching in our seats like the tardy kids in a high school detention room, and we nearly bolted for the door at intermission time. Bill was waiting for me in the lobby. I abjectly apologized for being late; he graciously filled me in on what I had missed. Then we went inside to his marvelous seats in the Grand Tier and watched the second half of the show.
This isn't the familiar tale of the doomed House of Atreus that you probably read in your middle school Greek mythology. That's the one where Iphigenia's father Agamemnon sacrifices her so that the gods will carry his troops safely to Troy, her vengeful mother Clytemnestra eventually kills Agamemnon, and her dutiful brother later helps slay the mom. That version, told in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, was the Greek playwright’s second crack at the story and is perhaps most famous because it was his final work and posthumously won the Tony of its day, first prize at the Athenian Dramatic Festival. But a few years earlier, Euripides had written Iphigenia in Tauris, in which Iphigenia is saved at the last minute by the goddess Diana, carried away to a foreign land and, after much drama, eventually reconciled with her brother. The 18th century opera innovator Christopher Willibald Gluck set both versions to music and Iphigénie en Tauride is considered by many to be his masterpiece.
The production Bill and I saw debuted at the Seattle Opera last month and its New York appearance will mark the first time in 90 years that Gluck’s penultimate opera will be performed at the Met. The direction by Stephen Wadsworth, costumes by Martin Pakledinaz (you may have seen his Tony Award-winning work in Thoroughly Modern Millie and the most recent revival of Kiss Me, Kate), set by Thomas Lynch and choreography by Daniel Pelzig are all the same but the New York cast includes the dazzling mezzo-soprano Susan Graham as Iphigénie, the great tenor Plácido Domingo in the role of her brother Orest (usually sung by a baritone) and rising tenor Paul Groves as Orest’s best friend Pylade.
I'm not a big operagoer and so I'll leave the appraisals to the experts (and to those who arrive early enough to avoid the late room) whose reviews should appear on Wednesday. But I love the theatricality of opera both on stage and off. And I can say that this Iphigenie is certainly theatrical. But what I really loved was watching the musicians play in their street clothes and seeing techies run down the aisles and into the wings to make adjustments on one thing or another. I even liked watching my fellow audience members sit on the lobby floor and eat brown bag sandwiches during intermission. The production played straight through with no stops. But the cast and crew still seemed to be working on the curtain calls. At one point, Groves walked out only to scurry back off. Those of us lucky to be in the audience clapped anyway. After all, we hadn't come for perfection; we'd come to be insiders.
The first thing I wanted to know when my husband K and I walked out of The Public Theater after seeing David Henry Hwang's new play Yellow Face was: what is the New York Times going to say about this? People in the theater world are always asking some variation of that question because the paper wields so much influence over what theatergoers choose to see and which plays get to run. But I had a very specific reason for my question: the New York Times plays a role in Yellow Face and it's not a pretty one. 
