"Family Dinner" is Undercooked

Going to the theater is always a crap shot.  But what you’ll get is even less predictable with the shows, often produced on pocket change, that rent space in the theater complex on 42nd Street known as Theatre Row.  That's because lacking the resources of bigger budget shows that can dazzle with high-tech sets, fancy costumes and other diverting stagecraft, all these show can really count on is the play and the players. 

 A couple of weeks ago my husband K and I went there and hit a small jackpot with the final performance of The Glass House, a smart play about art and ambition as refracted through the uneasy relationship between the great modernist architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Harris Yulin, as van der Rohe, lead an excellent cast that worked magic on a simple but elegant set.  And it was extra fun for us to see them all float into the West Bank Café for their closing night party while we were having an after-show dinner there.

A few days later, however, I rolled snake eyes when I saw another show at Theatre Row that was so poorly done that I did something I almost never do:  I left at intermission.  And then, this week, my friend Jesse and I drew another shaky hand when we went to the opening night performance of Family Dinner, a domestic drama that is playing in the Row's Beckett Theatre space through July 3.

Family Dinner focuses on the archetypal Wells family, whose members include a hard-drinking and domineering dad, his repressed wife and their three kids—a nerdy but sensitive older son, an overindulged athlete and a precocious daughter.  The play opens in 1963, months before the Kennedy assassination, and the second act revisits the Wells in 2002, a few months after the 9/11 attacks.

The challenge, of course, is that the disintegration of the white-bread American family and the lingering aftershocks of the upheavals of the ‘60s are now oft-told tales.  So if you’re going to tell them again, you really need to come up with some fresh insights or to burrow deeper into the emotional resonance of that time.  Alas, playwright Michele Willens does neither. Her Family Dinner is composed entirely of leftovers from the families-drive-each-other-crazy-but-love-one-another-anyway buffet.

Director Jamibeth Margolis doesn’t help either. Scenes just lurch along one after the other. And she gets big demerits for giving set designer Josh Zangen the go-ahead for big awkward sets that tell us nothing about the family.  In this case, less definitely would have been more.

The acting is provided by a pack of wild cards.  The relatively large 10-member cast ranges from newbies making their professional stage debut to veteran barnstormers from the regional circuit, with the old timers coming off best, although Lily Corvo, who plays the teen daughter in both time periods, shows promise.

The audience, which seemed largely composed of family and friends (including the actor Patrick Breen who has worked with Willens in the past and whose own under-appreciated show Next Fall just posted a closing notice for July 4) was supportive.  But I left Family Dinner hungry for something a little more filling.

In Concert: "Everyday Rapture" and "Sondheim on Sondheim"

A medley of pop songs provided the opening number for last Sunday’s Tony Awards show (click here to see it).  And that made perfect sense to me.  Not just because so many of last season’s song-and-dance shows were jukebox musicals that counted on familiar tunes to draw ticket buyers, but because so many of those shows are little more than pop music concerts.  Only at much higher prices.

As I said in my earlier American Idiot review (click here to read it), there’s not much difference between that show, an onstage recreation of the eponymous Green Day album, and a Green Day concert. Except that you get to see the real band members Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool at the concert. And it doesn't cost you as much as seeing John Gallagher and the rest of the Broadway gang at the St. James Theatre.  

But American Idiot isn't the only pseudo-musical around. Lots of theater insiders were pulling for Sheri Rene Scott to win an award for her show, Everyday Rapture.  Several handicappers even predicted that she’d win for Best Book of a Musical.  But there wasn't enough book for me. 

The conceit for this semi-autobiographical show is that Scott, a Broadway belter who has played the comic female part in such musicals as Aida, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and The Little Mermaid and whose mother was Mennonite, grew up, her onstage alter ego says, torn between following Judy (as in Garland) and Jesus (as in Christ).   The show is the story of how she reconciles the two and it wraps in serious subjects like abortion and AIDS along with less weighty ones like Scott’s first starry-eyed visit to New York and her later funny relationship with an online fan.  

Don’t get me wrong. I had a good time at Everyday Rapture. And you probably will too if you make it there before it closes on July 11. It's hard not to like Scott (click here to read an interview she did with Broadway.com) and she works hard to win over the audience.  She sings, supported by two zaftig backup singers who make her look even tinier than she already is.  She cracks self-deprecating jokes. She even does magic tricks. But it all seemed to me more like a cabaret act or one of those TV specials they used to put together for what-do-we-do-with-her-now song-and-dance women like Mitzi Gaynor or Ann-Margret.

And you could say basically the same thing about Sondheim on Sondheim.  Only in this case, the life at the center of the show is Broadway’s reigning composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The master himself appears in a series of video segments that are amusing, if not overly revealing. The music, of course, is great but the connection between what you see and what you hear is tenuous at best. At heart, this show, which is scheduled to close on June 27, is simply another Sondheim revue.  And what musical lover doesn’t already have a bunch of those on LP, CD and iEverything downloads.

The singers performing this time out are all top-shelf and include: Tom Wopat,  Vanessa Williams, Euan Morton, Norm Lewis, and the inestimable Barbara Cook (click here to see a behind-the-scenes photo gallery of the stars) . I’d crawl across broken glass to see a completely new musical showcasing almost any one of them. And I wish the folks who are putting Broadway shows together would give me the chance to do just that.

Prophecy: Passion but Unfulfilled Promise

I had trouble sleeping the night before I saw Prophecy, the new political melodrama that is playing at the Fourth Street Theater through June 20. I tell you this because despite seeing the show at the end of a very long day and on less than four hours of sleep, it held my attention throughout its two and a half hours running time.

It’s not really a good play but I’m always grousing about how few plays deal with contemporary politics and this one jumps in with both feet.  It deals with the legacy of the Holocaust, the lingering wounds from Vietnam, and the more recent damages of the Iraq War; with terrorism and the radicalization of young Muslims; with the redemptive power of art, particularly theater, and the responsibility that Americans bear for the problems in the Middle East.  It also throws in references from the Bible and Greek mythology and invokes Freud and maybe Jung too.

And I haven’t even gotten into its domestic traumas.  The play revolves around a middle-aged woman named Sarah. She’s an acting teacher who is drawn to a gifted but troubled male student recently returned from serving in Iraq. At home, she’s having problems with her longtime husband Alan, who runs an organization for refugees. There is an ill-fated affair, an illegitimate child, domestic abuse and expository flashbacks to the 1970s and 1980s.

It’s all too much, of course. My husband K laughed out loud when he read the plot summary in one of the several negative reviews the show has drawn. Playwright Karen Malpede does herself no favor by serving as her own director. Another set of eyes might have helped focus the piece. As it is, the coincidences in the plot strain credulity, some of the dialog creaks and the set was obviously done on the cheap.

And yet, Malpede and her cast, lead by the always reliable Kathleen Chalfant (does any actor working today have a more mellifluous voice) and the young actress Najla Saïd (whose late father Edward was this country’s leading advocate for the Palestinian cause) throw themselves into this production with the fervency of true believers (click here to listen to them talk about the derivation of the play and what it means to them). 

I applaud that kind of commitment and passion but they can be an unpredictable mix. They may hold your attention, as Prophecy did mine, but, again as in this case, they often don't know what to with it once they've got it. 

The Real Winners and Loser at the Tonys

No, it's not Wednesday or Saturday, my usual posting days, but, like every other theater geek, I want to get in my two cents about last night's Tony ceremony.  So here's who I think came off well last night and, alas, who didn't: 

Winners: The Addams Family may be far from the best show currently playing on Broadway but its stars are the best of what I love about the theater world.  It would have been gracious enough for Bebe Neuwirth and Nathan Lane to show up at the Tony Awards last night since their show was shut out of the Best Musical category.  But troupers that they are, they actually gave out the awards for Best Performance by a Leading Actor (La Cage Aux Folle's Douglas Hodge got it) and Leading Actress in a Musical (Catherine Zeta-Jones for A Little Night Music) even though neither Lane nor Neuwirth had even been nominated.  Plus the repartee between them was actually funny. They’re truly a class act.

Another Winner:  The great Marian Seldes, who won a Lifetime Achievement Award in a pre-show ceremony that was only shown on the local cable channel NY1, gave the most witty acceptance "speech" I've seen on any awards show ever.  It's not up on YouTube yet but keep an eye out for it.

The Loser: I liked Memphis, which won last night’s big prize for Best Musical but I was rooting for Fela! to take home the prize.  Yet I can’t imagine the folks seeing  Fela! for the first time in last night's TV performance would have any idea of what excited me and so many other people about the show.  The musical excerpts on the Tony broadcast are suppose to serve as ads for their productions and Fela!’s—a confusing hodgepodge of moments from the show instead of any one of its terrific show-stopping numbers—sold itself short.  

You can catch up with last night's ceremonies, including photos, videos and, of course, a list of all the winners by clicking here.

iBroadway and Me: Going Mobile

The I's have it. The iPad came out in April.  Steve Jobs introduced the new iPhone 4 this week.  And now, comes iBroadway, a new app that offers access to everything you want to know about shows on and off the Great White Way. I’m particularly excited about the latter because among its features are news and reviews from a selected group of theater bloggers that includes me!

iBroadway has been jointly developed by Art Meets Commerce, the advertising and marketing firm that has done work for shows ranging from the current production of Fela! to last seaon’s acclaimed revival of Finian’s Rainbow; and The Zumobi Network, a mobile publishing company whose clients include Better Homes & Gardens, Iron Man Central and msnbc. 

The new app they’ve put together is kind of one-stop shopping for theater lovers. It has all kinds of information on shows playing in New York, including a synopsis of the plot, rundowns of the actors currently performing in the show and the creative team who originally put it together, a list of the awards and nominations the production has gotten and essential info like where the show is playing (you can Google map it) and its running time. 

There are also photos and videos, links for iTunes so that you can download cast recordings right onto your playlist and all kinds of social media hookups so that you can share all this stuff via email, Facebook or Twitter. Plus there’s a handy button that makes it easy to buy tickets right from your mobile device. I mean really easy: ticket prices and available discounts are listed, as are performance times and box office schedules; there are even seating charts and info about wheelchair accessibility.

If you still want to know more—and what theater lover doesn’t—there are links (just click  the “News” tab) to postings by my fellow bloggers Chris Caggiano of Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals and Aaron Riccio of 'Kül: That Sounds Cool and, of course, by me. It’s all available for free on iTunes or you can download the app by clicking here.
 

As you probably can tell, I was thrilled—and still am—when I got the call asking me if I wanted to be one of the app’s pioneer contributors.  So much so that I decided to celebrate with a new logo that you’ll find at the top of this page.  It was designed for me by a terrific illustrator named Gary Randall and will now appear wherever you find Broadway & Me. 

Which is now a lot of places since I’ve been, as they say, expanding the brand over the last year or so.  You can follow me on Twitter and on Facebook.  You can also read B&Me on your Kindle or you can buy B&Me T-shirts, bags and other goodies at the Broadway & Me store. And now, of course, I’ve gone mobile so you can keep in touch via iBroadway.

In Memoriam: Patrick Lee

There have been many tragic losses in the theater world over the past couple of months but the latest cuts very close to home for those of us in the theater blogging community.  The news came today that our fellow blogger Patrick Lee has died. 

I didn’t know Patrick well. We bloggers tend to communicate mainly through what we write and the occasional get together.  But what I knew of him, I liked immensely. And I'm not alone.  Grieving friends are posting tributes on Patrick's Facebook page and they all confirm that he truly was a kind and generous guy.

Patrick loved theater.  He wrote about shows and showmakers for Theatermania and the Theatre Development Fund among other places. And he was one of the earliest theater bloggers, beginning his blog “Just Shows To Go You” in January, 2006.  The following year, he, Aaron Riccio of That Sounds Cool and their buddy David Bell started an online contest to determine who could see and blog about more shows in a year. They posted their reactions to what they’d seen on Show Showdown, which remains one of the best places to get the lowdown on local theater.

But Patrick didn’t just spout off his opinion, he was also a skilled interviewer (“That’s what I really love to do,” he told me just a few weeks ago) and his exchanges with theater folks are incisive and insightful. He posted the last entry on his site, an interview with Joe Calarco, the director of the new musical The Burnt Part Boys, just a week ago.  

For the past two years, Patrick served as the Awards Director of the Independent Theater Bloggers Association, a thankless job made even more so by all kinds of nitpicking by sideliners like me. But Patrick handled all the second guessing with endless patience and grace.  “Questions like yours are so appreciated and will help us all to make this even better next year,” he replied after a barrage of emails from me during this year’s deliberations.  it's unbelievable to think that he won't be around for next year's.

"Restoration" Puts Claudia Shear Back on Top

It’s been nearly 10 years since Claudia Shear last had a new play in New York. But I hadn’t realized how much I missed her singular voice until seeing her latest, Restoration, which is running through June 13 at the New York Theatre Workshop.

Shear likes to write about strong, charismatic women but she’s no raging polemicist.  Her plays are simultaneously level-headed, warm-hearted and laugh-out-loud funny. So it was a no-brainer when my theatergoing buddy Bill asked me if I wanted to  see Restoration with him. 

Shear made a name for herself back in 1994 with the first play she ever wrote, Blown Sideways Through Life, a lightly fictionalized account of the 64 different day jobs she held while waiting for her big break as an actress. Six years later came Dirty Blonde, a multi-layered piece about Mae West. Giulia, the fiercely independent art restorer who is the main character in the new play, fits perfectly into that sisterhood.

At the beginning of Restoration, Giulia is an outcast in the art world. Her maverick and outspoken views on how to clean and repair rare works of arts have gotten her exiled to a job teaching art appreciation courses at Brooklyn College. She’s rescued when her former art professor and mentor helps her win the plum job of restoring Michelangelo’s David for the statue’s 500th anniversary.

With a title like Restoration, the setting in Florence and the presence of a hunky museum guard, the play falls into the category of one of those familiar middle-aged-woman-get-second-chance-at-life stories.  But as my mother used to say, it’s not what you do but how you do it that counts. And Shear does it with aplomb. As in the past, she plays the main role herself and the line between the two blurs.  Neither suffers fools, as I learned first-hand when I interviewed Shear for the website Women’s Voices for Change. 

As you might expect, I tried to direct the conversation towards comparisons with Giulia’s experience and those of other middle-aged women.  But Shear was having none of it. “You know, I’m not big on the grand statements of, like, women in the workplace,” she said at one point during our phone interview.  “I find people are people... I know this is a site about women but that’s not what the play is about.  The play is about passion, art, beauty.”  (Click here to read what else she said.) 

Restoration isn’t a one-woman, or one-person, operation.  Shear’s frequent collaborator director Christopher Ashley has created a production that is leisurely paced but beautifully showcases the play. Kudos also go to Scott Pask who has recreated the gallery at the Accademia where the real statue sits and devised a clever conceit to keep it covered by scaffolding during most of the play so that only bits of the statue are revealed. (Click here to see a video about the making of the set when the show originally appeared at the La Jolla Playhouse last June.)

But the greatest support comes from Shear’s fellow actors, particularly Jonathan Cake, who is slyly charming as the guard and Tina Benko who gives a lovely performance as the museum’s aristocratic head of publicity who often clashes with Giulia. Both admirably avoid falling into stereotype.

Changes occur over the course of the 90-minutes play, although not quite the ones you expect. I left the theater with a rejuvenated belief in the power of part and prowess of Shear.