Great ideas don't come along every day. But I found one on the blog Gratuitous Violins. Its blogger writes smartly about the whole range of culture —books, movies, TV and, of course, theater (click here to visit her site)—and last week, she pointed her readers to the movie review podcast Filmspotting whose two hosts listed their Top 5 movies about the theater world. They selected "All About Eve" (which made both their lists) "All That Jazz," "Bullets Over Broadway," "Cradle Will Rock," "The Goodbye Girl," "Moon Over Broadway," "Waiting for Guffman" (another dual choice) and "Yankee Doodle Dandy". (Click here to read more about their choices)
I've seen them all. And loved each one. I actually bought copies of "All That Jazz," "Moon Over Broadway" and "All About Eve," which might be my favorite movie of all time. In fact, I've used it as a kind of litmus test. There have been two great loves of my life; both got "All About Eve" and both got me.
I also love lists and seeing the Filmspotting one got me thinking about what other stage movies I’d add. So here are 10 more, listed alphabetically, that I think should be must-sees for every respectable theater geek:
"BEING JULIA" This is not a great movie but Annette Bening’s portrayal of a London actress in the 1930s is and she gloriously, and hilariously, fulfills every stereotype of the fiercely great stage diva.
"THE DRESSER" Both Gratuitous Violins and I chose this wonderful screen version of Ronald Harwood’s play about the relationship between the actor-manager of a touring Shakespeare company (the sensational Albert Finney) and his dresser (the equally superb Tom Courtenay) whose story comes to resemble that of Lear and his Fool.
"FAME" How can you not love this exuberant musical that follows the lives of four talented kids from their first audition straight through their graduation from New York’s famed High School for the Performing Arts?
"FUNNY GIRL" Whatever you may think about Barbra Streisand’s later career or her politics, there can be no question about the fact that her star-making portrayal of the legendary Ziegfeld comedienne Fanny Brice is a tour de force.
"THE GREAT ZIEGFELD" This great Oscar-winning biopic stars William Powell as the master showman, Luise Rainer and Myrna Loy as his wives, Fanny Brice as herself, Busby Berkeley’s spectacular dance numbers and half the Great American Songbook.
"KISS ME KATE" There’s Cole Porter, there’s Shakespeare, there’s even Bob Fosse in a supporting role in this terrific show-within-a-show version of The Taming of the Shrew, plus there are great showbizzy songs and loads of backstage in-jokes.
"SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE" It’s highly unlikely that there’s any truth in this witty romantic comedy about how the Bard came to write Romeo and Juliet but the script, co-written by Tom Stoppard, and the performances, including Oscar-winning turns by Gwyneth Paltrow as a young noblewoman who yearns to be an actress and Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth I, are all truly entertaining.
"STAGE BEAUTY" If you know this one, then you really are a theater geek. The setting is Restoration-era London and Billy Crudup stars as a fictional version of the real-life actor Ned Kynaston, celebrated for playing female roles when women weren’t allowed on stage; Claire Danes portrays the first woman who breaks the gender barrier; Richard Eyre, the former director of London’s Royal National Theatre, directs and together they create a first-class love letter to the art of acting.
"STAGE DOOR" Who knows how many impressionable young girls over the decades have seen Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers in this still-delightful 1937 classic and then dreamt of coming to New York, moving into a boardinghouse with other stage-struck girls and waiting for their big break on Broadway?
"TOPSY-TURVY" Mike Leigh’s exquisite film about the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership transports you into the world of the theater at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of musical comedy as we know it. The centerpiece of the nearly three-hour film is the making of The Mikado and it alone is worth the DVD rental fee.
O.K. so now, what are your favorites?
If there were a Tony Award for Best Ensemble (and why isn't there one?) it would be the most competitive race this Broadway season. The frontrunner probably would be the Steppenwolf gang from August: Osage County. And not far behind would be the merrymakers of Is He Dead? and the lethal quintet in The Homecoming. But I'd cast my vote for the brilliant band of actors in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer. The cast—Jim Norton, Conleth Hill, Sean Mahon (standing in the photo above), David Morse and Ciarán Hinds—is listed alphabetically in the Playbill, the actors come out together for the curtain call and it's hard to set a hierarchy on their uniformly superb performances. Like the members of a crew team, each man grabs his oars and, working together as a single unit skillfully steered by McPherson who directs his own play, they transport the audience into an engrossing evening of theater.
It's a particularly impressive feat because their vehicle, the play with its fanciful twists, isn't quite as sturdy as one might hope. Like The Weir and last season's Shining City, The Seafarer is another one of McPherson's ghost stories. The Dublin-born playwright has the Irishman's love of a good yarn and he is a great raconteur. But at the end of each of his plays I've seen, I found myself asking, So what was that about? The critics, whose reviews I'd saved and read when I got home, also seemed confused by The Seafarer's meaning and divided on whether or not it was a really good play or just a good time.
At its simplest, The Seafarer is about a ne'er do-well (Morse) who returns home during the Christmas season to take care of his brother (Norton) who was blinded when he got so drunk that he fell into a dumpster. Two local friends (Hill and Mahon) drop by and a mysterious man (Hinds) whom one of them met at a local bar joins the group. There is much drinking, much storytelling some gambling (metaphorical and literal) and inquisitions into the meaning of good and evil, the nature of heaven and hell. Souls are imperiled and salvation is sought. There are also lots and lots of laughs. The great actor Brian Dennehy was sitting in front of my friend Bill and me and he laughed so hard that he doubled over at times, a good thing since he's a huge man who, at times, blocked Bill's view.
You wouldn't know this just from watching the play, unless maybe you were a particularly wonky English major in college, but I learned from the articles and reviews I read afterwards that the title of the play apparently refers to an old English poem of the same name. And even a quick perusal of the poem seems to provide some clues as to what McPherson may be getting at. "Death leaps at the fools who forget their God," goes one line (click here to read the entire poem).
It's odd when you think about it but religious faith isn't often the subject of a Broadway show. A photo of Jesus hangs on the back wall of The Seafarer’s set and right at the start of the play, the returning brother almost absent-mindedly lights a small votive candle in front of it. The flame seemed to flicker on and off throughout the performance Bill and I saw. I don't know if that was intentional or not but right before the final lights dimmed, it glowed.
The title on this blog entry isn't totally honest. I mean who can really say what's the best? Who even had a chance to see all of the hundreds of productions that played on Broadway, off-Broadway and off-off Broadway last year? Over the last week or so, theater critics for the major New York papers and magazines listed at least 39 different shows as the Top 10 of 2007. As you might expect, the much-celebrated August: Osage County made almost everyone's list. But even the lackluster Grease limped into one lineup. As my mother used to say, "One man's meat is another man's poison." So I'm not going to pretend to tell you what was best last year. Instead, here are a few words about the 10 shows that most amused or moved me, the ones, in other words, that I loved best:
1. Journey's End
Because R.C. Sherriff’s drama, first produced in 1929, about a group of soldiers in a frontline trench during WWI, devastated me and because its terrific cast, lead by the inestimable Boyd Gaines, performed valiantly even when playing to undeservedly half-full houses. The show won the Tony for Best Revival of a Play but closed on the very same day. But you can catch Gaines giving another standout performance as the sad sack Herbie who loves Patti LuPone's Mama Rose when the Encores! production of Gypsy that played an acclaimed three-week run at City Center last summer reopens on Broadway in March.
2. The Coast of Utopia trilogy
Because this three-part epic— written by Tom Stoppard, brilliantly directed by Jack O’Brien, beautifully designed by Bob Crowley and Scott Pask and superbly acted by an all-star ensemble — on the 19th century Russian intellectuals who set the scene for their country's 1917 Revolution was, as I wrote when I saw it, one of the most thrillingly theatrical experiences I've ever seen, engaging to the mind, the eye, and the imagination. It's just a memory now for those of us fortunate enough to have seen it but Stoppard is already back on Broadway with Rock 'n' Roll and O'Brien is working on a musical adaptation of the movie Catch Me if You Can, with a book by Terrence McNally and music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, that is planning to open later this year.
3. Frost/Nixon
Because Frank Langella's mesmerizing portrayal of Richard Nixon evaded caricature but captured the agonized soul, and surprising wit, of the man in Peter Morgan's docudrama about the landmark interviews between the disgraced former president and the British interviewer David Frost. Luckily for those of us who love great acting, producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard have had the good sense to cast Langella (and his equally terrific co-star Michael Sheen as Frost) in the movie version that is currently in production.
4. The Piano Teacher
Because the most amazing performance I saw all year was Elizabeth Franz's searing portrayal of a lonely woman struggling to hold on to the genteel world she's worked hard to create for herself in Julia Cho's delicate drama.
5. Yellow Face
Because after nearly a decade of writing books for Disney musicals, David Henry Hwang returned to his artistic roots and once again dealt with issues of race and identity, this time in a semi-autobiographical play that was simultaneously thought provoking and side-splittingly funny. Its run has been extended through Jan. 13.
6. August: Osage County
Because there's a reason this dysfunctional family drama is on so many lists; the show is smart, wickedly funny and showcases an ensemble from Chicago's rightly famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company. The actors are not only all pitch-perfect but also a reminder of that special alchemy that makes repertory companies so invaluable. Its limited run has been extended through March 9.
7. Passing Strange
Because this innovative show—part rock concert, part memory play — about a young black man coming of age in the 1970s is blazingly original and a welcomed sign that, like the Tony-winning Spring Awakening, talented young people are finding ways to incorporate their experiences and their sound into musical theater. It’s scheduled to open on Broadway on Feb. 28.
8. Blackbird
Because Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill stripped themselves emotionally naked in this harrowing drama about the reunion between a man and the young woman he molested when she was a girl, and showed that you don't need big scenery, a big cast or even big names to make a big show.
9. Rock 'n' Roll
Because although it seems silly to have two Tom Stoppard plays on one list, I left the theater feeling as though I had seen a work that could serve as an emblem for the art, culture, and politics of my generation that came of age in the tumultuous and still controversial 1960s.
10. The Encores! productions of Follies and Stairway to Heaven
Because this series proved yet again that it can bring new luster even to classics like Follies whose stellar cast, lead by Victoria Clark and Donna Murphy, had musical lovers panting for an extended run, and because for the first time the Encores! team showed that it can produce an equally sensational original work as it did with Stairway to Paradise, an homage to the grand revues made most famous by the Ziegfeld Follies. Stairway allowed such distinctive talents as Kevin Chamberlin (who was in The Ritz, which closed on Dec. 9) Christopher Fitzgerald (now in the disappointing Young Frankenstein) and Kristin Chenoweth (alas, on TV’s “Pushing Daisies”) to do what they do best.
There are so many holiday-themed shows running between Thanksgiving and New Years that you wouldn't think a play centered around a chubby middle-aged woman who answers telephones for a living would be the choice for a multi-generational family outing during Christmas week. Yet sitting behind me at the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of The Receptionist were a grandmother and her three grandkids, who looked to be between the ages of 12 and 19. And, for the most part, they also looked to be having a pretty good time.
Perhaps they were primed for the show by its seeming similarity to "The Office," the NBC sitcom about an obnoxious boss and the poor saps who work for him. Or maybe they were simply amused, as I was, by Jayne Houdyshell's pitch-perfect performance as the good-natured busybody familiar to every workplace. And I suspect that the now-notorious twist in the play may have appealed to the sense of the macabre that, if the current popularity of horror movies is any indication, seems to excite lots of young people these days. "I wasn't so sure about this at the start," I overheard the grandson say during the curtain call. "But then things started getting interesting." Finally, I imagine that the play's running time may also have played a part in their enjoyment. The Receptionist runs just 70 intermission-less minutes.
I'm a big fan of one-act plays. Unlike the opera, where you get a comfortable 30 minutes or so of intermission, the 10 to 15 minute breaks during plays always strike me as stingy and a waste of time and effort. By the time you shove your way into the lobby, it's time to shove your way back to your seat. Which is why I rarely leave mine. I also like the fact that a short performance gets you out at a decent hour so that you can go somewhere afterwards and linger over dinner talking about the show or, if you choose, find a cab home easily since the other shows haven't yet let out. But 70 minutes kind of startled me.
The brevity of The Receptionist seemed to take the rest of the audience by surprise too. When the stage lights went out, signaling the end of the show, it took a few seconds for the applause to start and even then it was tepid, although people had laughed and, in some cases even gasped, out loud during the performance. I think we all felt cheated.
Going to the theater obviously isn't like renting a car or seeing a shrink, you don’t pay for it by the hour. But the regular ticket price for The Receptionist, which ends its run this weekend, is $75, and that works out to more than a dollar a minute. I don't bear any resentment towards Houydshell and her co-stars—Josh Charles, Robert Foxworth and Kendra Kassebaum—who were all terrific. Or towards playwright Adam Bock, whose play deftly captures these distressing times; or director Joe Mantello, who paced the work perfectly; or sound designer Darron L. West, who created just the right undercurrent of menace. But shouldn't someone at MTC have made the call that asking folks to pay more than a buck a minute for a performance is, well, distressing.
Luckily, other theater companies and producers are looking for ways to make theater more affordable for more people. Playwrights Horizons has a number of programs including Hot Tix, which sells $20 tickets to people who can prove they’re 30 or under; and LIVEforFIVE, an online lottery that offers $5 tickets for first preview performances (click here to see all of its discount programs). And earlier this month, the producers of August: Osage County, The Homecoming, and November announced a package deal to see all three for $199 (click here for more details on that offer).
I don't know how often the young people who sat behind me at The Receptionist go to the theater. But I think seeing it may have persuaded them that a live show can be just as enthralling as a movie at the Cineplex. Alas, it may also have made them think that going to the theater is something that you can only afford to do when an indulgent, well-heeled grandmother takes you.
The big question for me when I'm getting ready to see a play by Shakespeare is whether I should read the play, or at least a summary of it, beforehand. But I knew right from the moment I heard about Lincoln Center's production of Cymbeline that I wasn't going to read it. I'd never seen Cymbeline or studied it in school and the chance to "discover" a work by Shakespeare for the very first time, almost the way that a groundling at the Old Globe might have done in the Bard's day, seemed too good an opportunity to miss.
As you probably know by now, Cymbeline is kind of like a "Shakespeare's Greatest Hits" album. Characters and themes from other plays pop up so much that if you're familiar with just a little bit of Shakespeare, you feel quite at home. There are young lovers who are kept apart by wrongheaded parents (ala Romeo and Juliet), a scheming queen (just like Lady Macbeth), an unjustly jealous husband and the villain who eggs him on (hello, Othello and Iago), rousing battle scenes (all hail Henry V and Richard III), and spunky cross-dressing heroines and long-lost siblings (pick your favorite of his comedies). I've been trying to imagine what might have possessed Shakespeare to cram so many of his favorite tropes into one play. Was he cash-strapped and threw it all together fast to pay off a debt? Had he developed a case of writer's block and decided to treat it with remedies that had worked in the past? Who cares? What matters is that director Mark Lamos has whipped them all together into a delightfully entertaining evening full of pageantry, romance and liberal dollops of good-naturedly over-the-top humor.
Lots of directors these days seem to think that the best way to get a Broadway audience to sit through a Shakespeare play is simply to cast it with a big name star or two, or as many as they can get. Lamos didn't do that. Instead his large, color-blind cast (black Phylicia Rashad plays mom to white Adam Dannheisser) is filled with accomplished stage actors and they return the favor by turning in nicely polished performances, particularly Martha Plimpton as the courageous heroine Imogen, Michael Cerveris as her secret-husband Posthumus and John Pankow as their loyal servant Pisanio. The always-dependable John Cullum makes a regal king and Dannheisser, as a totally hissable villain, provides comic relief and wins big laughs. Lamos doesn’t try to impose any overarching concept on the play either; he just lets it tell its story. And he's ably assisted by Michael Yeargan's simple but elegant set, which evokes the fairy tale that Cymbeline ultimately is, and Jess Goldstein's lavish costumes, which are a little more all over the map but fitting since the play is too.
I squeezed the show in during the pre-Christmas rush and its message of forgiveness and reconciliation fits right into the spirit of the season. Maybe too many other theatergoers had longer shopping lists than mine because there were lots of empty seats at the Vivian Beaumont, where the show is playing through Jan. 6. And that's too bad because although Cymbeline is too much of a grab-bag to be a great play, there’s enough in this production to make a theater-loving groundling like me grateful to have seen it. Plus, there's that extra treat of discovering a work by Shakespeare that hasn't been done to death.
Christmas is a wonderful time to be in New York. From the big glittering tree in Rockefeller Center to the lights strung around lampposts, and from the performances of "The Nutcracker" at the City Ballet to the Nativity pageants in neighborhood churches, the whole city seems to be aglow and putting on a show. Somehow, though, the season usually whirs right by me. But this year when I saw that the Irish Repertory Theatre was putting on a musical adaptation of the Dylan Thomas poem A Child's Christmas in Wales, I emailed my friend Ellie and asked if she wanted to go. I'd never read the poem but I knew that Ellie, a former actress who now writes and teaches poetry, loved it and I thought seeing the show would be a fun way for us to take some time out and celebrate the holidays. As with so much in life, it didn't quite turn out the way I thought it would.
The show, playing in the tiny 44-seat studio space in the basement of the Irish Rep's theater on West 22nd Street, was enthusiastically performed by five twentysomething actors and a pianist but it came off more as a school recital featuring the pluckiest students (right down to the red velvet dresses for the two girls and tuxedos for the three boys) than a professional production with a $35 ticket price. The Rep's artistic director Charlotte Moore has paired the recitation of the Thomas poem with a dramatic reading of Clement Clark Moore's "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" and embellished both with carols and other holiday songs. Ellie, who'd thought there would be Welsh, or at least Irish, music, put her head in her hands and groaned when the two women started singing "Silver Bells." But watching the young actors and listening to both poems transported me back to my own childhood.
Like the Thomas clan, the uncles, aunts and cousins in my family gathered each year and ate and drank and argued and bonded throughout the day. For a few years, my cousins and I even did our own adaptation of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" (I wrote and directed) and performed it for our parents after the big family dinner and before the presents were exchanged. Nearly all of the elders have now passed on and it's been years since the extended family has gotten together. The Rep's 60-minute version of A Child's Christmas in Wales (click here to hear a recording of Thomas reciting his poem) isn't what I'd usually call a good show but, in reminding me of those joyful times, it touched me. So I'm glad, I took the time out to see it. And I hope each of you finds some time during this busy season to think about good holidays past, to make good memories for the ones yet to come and of course, if you can, to see a good show.
Merry Christmas.
Harold Pinter's The Homecoming created a sensation when it opened at the Music Box Theatre in January of 1967, just as it had done during its earlier run in London. People took sides with the kind of passion displayed today only by fans at a World Cup final. In his opening night review, the New York Times critic Walter Kerr declared the play too slight and too slow. But a few weeks later, his colleague Clive Barnes proclaimed it "the most important English play since the war." The New Yorker wasn't impressed. Newsweek, however, thought it redefined drama. Readers heatedly debated the play in letters columns for weeks. Five months later, Tony voters chose it as the year's Best Play and gave it three other awards as well.
I know all of this because I was so befuddled about the meaning of The Homecoming after seeing the new production that opened on Sunday at the Cort Theatre that I started looking things up as soon as I got home. "What you need," said my husband K, who had decided to see it with me because he had never seen a Pinter play and thought he should see one, "is a kind of Cliff Notes." I checked the Cliff Notes website and they didn't have anything but I did find something like it on Amazon.com and was delighted to discover that I could download the PDF to my computer immediately (click here if you want to do the same) although I can't honestly say it helped.
I can say that it's unlikely the new production of The Homecoming will create the kind of commotion it did 40 years ago, even though it is nicely directed by Dan Sullivan and performed by a superb cast that includes Raúl Esparza, Michael McKean, Ian McShane and Eve Best. Back then it arrived after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and in the midst of the burgeoning women’s movement but before the events of 1968 that many people consider the heart of that paradigm-changing period we call The Sixties and the play seemed fittingly emblematic of those disjointed times. But now it is an established classic, considered by many to be Pinter's masterpiece. And Pinter himself has become a revered theater elder who has won the Nobel Prize and been knighted by the Queen.
On its most basic level, The Homecoming tells the story of a philosophy professor, who, after living in the U.S. for nine years, returns with his wife to his native England to visit the all-male household of his widowed father, two brothers and the uncle who lives with them. They are—no surprise—a dysfunctional family (are there any other kind in dramas?) and so the play is also about the sexual dynamics, power plays and betrayals among them. What Pinter brings to all of this is that indefinable feeling of creepy unease that even people who haven't seen his plays refer to as Pinteresque.
Which raises the question, at least for me, of what I would have thought if I'd seen the same show but the playwright had been listed as some other name. Because, dear reader, as much as I wanted to, I couldn't figure out what the play was supposed to be telling me (is it a proto-feminist work? or just the familiar old male fantasy?). Admittedly trying to discern that kept me riveted. And I was equally fascinated by how Best, who played Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten last season, and Esparza, who most recently played Bobby in Company, transformed themselves into such completely different characters. And, of course, I came home and started reading (click here to read a terrific piece that the New Yorker critic John Lahr wrote about how The Homecoming changed his life) and found out lots of interesting things. But the play still hasn't hit home for me. Maybe that's because there’s really no way to turn the clock back and experience a breakthrough work in the same way that people did when it first broke through. Or maybe, it's just me.
Great ideas don't come along every day. But I found one on the blog Gratuitous Violins. Its blogger writes smartly about the whole range of culture —books, movies, TV and, of course, theater (click here to visit her site)—and last week, she pointed her readers to the movie review podcast Filmspotting whose two hosts listed their Top 5 movies about the theater world. They selected "All About Eve" (which made both their lists) "All That Jazz," "Bullets Over Broadway," "Cradle Will Rock," "The Goodbye Girl," "Moon Over Broadway," "Waiting for Guffman" (another dual choice) and "Yankee Doodle Dandy". (Click here to read more about their choices)
