Theater Stuff To Make A Theater Lover Smile

After reading some of my recent posts, a friend told me she was looking forward to seeing me write about something I liked.  She has a point.  For a self-avowed theater lover, I’ve been pretty dyspeptic lately.  Bad mouthing lots of shows and stingy with praise for the few I kind of liked. So this post is devoted entirely to three theater-related things that make me smile:

ALL THE GREAT NEW THEATER BOOKS There’s been so much over the past few months to see and do (I do have a life outside the theater) that I haven’t had time to read all the books that are now threatening to topple over the pile by my bed. The latest additions include: “The Girls of Murder City,” the story of the real murdering women who inspired the musical Chicago; “Showtime,” a new history of Broadway musical theater that starts all the way back with a musical version of Macbeth that played the old Astor Place Opera House in 1849 and “Broadway Musicals: The Biggest Hit and the Biggest Flop of the Season - 1959 to 2009,” the brand new book by the theater know-it-all (and I mean that in a good way) Peter Filichia. 

ALL THE TERRIFIC THEATER ACTORS ON TV'S "THE GOOD WIFE" “Law & Order” is no longer around to help Broadway actors pay their rent but this dandy legal drama, now in its second year, has stepped up to fill the gap in a big way.  Just this past week, in the third episode of the season titled “Breaking Fast,” series regular Christine Baranski and Alan Cumming, who has a terrific recurring role as a sly political strategist, were joined by Patrick Breen, Priscilla Lopez, David Pittu, Dallas Roberts, Anika Noni Rose, and Bobby Steggert.  If you recognize at least two of these names, you should definitely put this show in your Tivo queue.

ALL THE FASCINATING MARK BLANKENSHIP COLUMNS FOR TDF STAGES I read a lot of stuff—newspaper and magazine articles, blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, chatroom postings—about theater but the articles Blankenship writes for the Theater Development Fund’s online magazine always manage to tell me something I didn’t know.  I’ve never met the man but I’m a big fan.

"Mrs. Warren's Profession" Doesn't Payoff

The last time Cherry Jones and Doug Hughes worked together, they brought John Patrick Shanley’s Tony-award winning Doubt to the stage.  I saw it twice and each time, nearly moaned out loud from the pleasure of it.

Now, Jones and Hughes are together against as the title character and director of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (click here to listen to an interview they did on New York's public radio station WNYC). But this time, my response is more of a sigh.

I confess that I’m just not that big on Shaw. I admire Shaw’s politics, respect his dedication to the theater and celebrate his constant championing of smart, independent women.  But his plays just don’t do it for me.  They seem in many ways more of their time than Shakespeare’s or even Sophocles’ do of theirs. 

Mrs. Warren’s Profession, set in the waning days of the Victorian era, features two smart and independent women: Vivie, a young Cambridge-educated woman; and her mother Kitty, who, unbeknownst to her daughter, has earned the money for that education and Vivie’s other comforts, as the madame of brothels that serve an elite clientele on the continent. 

That profession was so scandalous when Shaw wrote the play in 1893, that nearly a decade went by before it was performed publicly in 1902. The playwright wrote a long apologia for the printed version of the play. Nowadays, of course, the subject would more likely be fodder for a TV reality show.

Jones, returning to the New York stage for the first time in four years and after her Emmy-winning turn as the first female president of the U.S. on the now-departed TV series "24," commands the stage as Mrs. Warren.  Of course, Jones, arguably the best American stage actress of her generation, would do that in just about any role she chose to play. Her Kitty Warren is unabashed about the choices she’s made and bracingly crude around the edges.

But Jones gets spotty support from the rest of the cast. Edward Hibbert strikes the right note as an Oscar Wildeish artist who is a friend of the family and Michael Siberry looks every inch the part as a hypocritical clergyman.  But British actress Sally Hawkins gives such an idiosyncratic reading of Vivie that it comes off as whiny. Mark Harelik seems too young and debonair as Mrs. Warren’s upper-class partner-in-crime. While, as my friend Jessie observed, Adam Driver, a recent graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, lacks the sexiness that might tempt the prudish Vivie. 

Many of the non-acting choices for this production seemed just as off-kilter.  And that starts with the image on its posters and Playbill.  It's a Victorian-era woman whose eyes are obscured by two giant roses. Well, Mrs. Warren, who views prostitution as the preferable option for women who are prohibited from earning money in other ways, certainly doesn’t look at the world through rose-colored glasses.  And even Vivie’s view of the world turns out to be gimlet-eyed.

The jaunty original music by David Van Tieghem seems equally off-key and more appropriate for a ‘60s sitcom than a social drama set at the turn of the 20th century. Catherine Zuber’s costumes, particularly the ones for Mrs. Warren, stuck me as overly emphatic.  And Scott Pask, a designer whose work often impresses the hell out of me, seems to be trying simultaneously too hard and not enough. 

In fact, everyone here, from Jones and Hughes on down, seems to be trying too hard.  And, as Shaw himself, said, “It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.”

"Brief Encounter": The Second Time Around

Reviews for the production of Brief Encounter that recently opened at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Studio 54 have been mostly rapturous (click here to read the raves—and a few pans too).  The production, which I saw during its sold-out run at St. Ann’s Warehouse last year, was my favorite show of all the ones I saw in 2009 (click here to read my review).  So I don’t know why I wasn’t as thrilled as I expected to be when I saw the show again with my husband K.

I was still charmed by the inventive theatricality (a delightful mashup of vaudeville, videos, puppetry and circus skills) that director Emma Rice and her colleagues at Britain’s Kneehigh Theatre use to retell the classic 1945 movie about two middle-aged married people who meet and fall in love in a British train station. The cast—largely in tact from the run at St. Ann’s—is still wonderful (click here to read about the lone American who has joined them). And there are still moments when the show makes me swoon with pleasure.

Yet, I have to confess that some of the magic was missing.

I know my disillusionment wasn’t caused by any thought that the show mocked  the movie and the original Noel Coward play on which it was based.  Which is what some critics—including John Simon and the guys who do the This Week on Broadway podcast—think.  In fact, I think the naysayers are totally wrong and that the show reveres the movie and the world that inspired it.

Maybe it was the venue that made the show feel less special for me this time. I had worried about that when I heard it was coming to Broadway. Over the years, Kneehigh has presented its shows in abandoned mines, deserted factories, vacant barns and other off-beat locations that showcase the company's unconventionality (click here to read about the company’s past productions).

The funkiness of St. Ann’s' repurposed warehouse provided the perfect environment for this unique show in which the action sometimes flows into the audience. Studio 54 seemed a good choice too.  But the band that plays before the show—and sets the mood for it—got lost in the crowd there. The intimacy suffered too.

Maybe the mild letdown I felt also reflected the fact neither my husband K nor my theatergoing buddy Bill were taken with the show.  “I kept thinking, what’s the point,” Bill told me.

But maybe it’s just that you can’t experience the intensity of that rush of emotion that comes when you first fall in love.  It’s that intensity that Brief Encounter celebrates.  And, despite any reservations I might have, it still does it better than any other show in town.

"The Pitmen Painters" Is a Vivid Display of Art

My husband K declined when I invited him to see The Pitmen Painters, the latest British import that opened last week at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. He said the show sounded too much like Billy Elliot.  And, having seen that musical about the miner’s son who becomes a ballet dancer here and in London, K said he didn’t need to see the same story again.

I got what he was saying. The Pitmen Painters, a stage adaptation of a book about real-life coal miners who were celebrated as artists during the 1930s and ‘40s, isn’t a musical but it was written by Lee Hall, who also did the book for Billy Elliot.  And, once again, Hall takes on the theme of the transformative power of art. 

Hall, who grew up in Britain’s coal country, is, at heart, a cultural populist, set on making the case that art isn’t just an elitist thing but can be appreciated and created by working class people. As one line in the play says, “Art belongs to everyone.”

That message resonates with me.  As does The Pitmen Painters. 

The play divides the miners’ tale into two parts.  The first act sketches out how the men discovered the joy of expressing themselves on canvas after a professor they recruited to tutor them in a continuing-ed style class decided that the best way to teach them about art was to have them make it. The second act focuses on the challenges the miners faced once their work was taken up by the art cognoscenti.

The eight-member cast, brought over intact from a successful run at London’s National Theatre and beautifully directed by Max Roberts, is superb in both acts. But the first is more fun. It’s filled with good-natured humor as the miners make their first forays into the art world.  And there are soul-stirring moments as their understanding and love of art deepens. As an added bonus, copies of the paintings the real miners made are projected on the overhead screens that are a central part of Gary McCann’s understated but effective design. 

The second act gets more serious and, at times, pedantic as Hall repeatedly drives home another of his favorite themes: the breach between Britain’s upper and lower classes.  The succession of soapbox speeches exhausts some listeners. Many of the critics say the play would be a masterpiece if it had ended with the intermission curtain (click here to read some of those reviews). 

Yet I liked a lot of that second act.  Yes, the upbeat energy flags a little but Hall isn’t afraid to use some of that time up on the soapbox to spout off about some less-feel-good—but still important—stuff like the way the people who became the miners’ patrons also patronized them. Or the way the most gifted of the miners wrestled with the fear that his talent would isolate him in a no man’s land between the two classes.  

Maybe it’s because my story—a poor kid whose passport to the wider world was marked by books, art and, of course, theater—isn’t so far from the miners’ story.  But from the first to the last, The Pitmen Painters rang true to me.  I suppose it is what's often dismissed as middlebrow entertainment. But that is pretty much the location of my brow—and those of the intellectually curious and courageous men who inspired The Pitmen Painters. 

"Alphabetical Order" is Much Too Tidy

I don’t know if there are Tony-style awards for stagehands.  But if so, there’s no question that the crew to beat this season is the one handling the set for Alphabetical Order, the Michael Frayn comedy that's playing through Oct. 23 at the Clurman Theater in the Theatre Row complex on 42nd Street.

The show takes place in the clippings library of a down-on-its-luck British newspaper, where the cluttered tables and overcrowded file cabinets match the messy lives of the reporters and editors who drop in to find background info for their stories. 

The time is 1974—long before the internet started committing fratricide on its print siblings—but the paper is teetering on the brink of closing. None of the staffers is paying much attention to that, however.  Everyone is too busy having affairs—or wanting to—with everyone else. The plot kicks off when a junior librarian arrives and sets about putting all of this chaos in order. 

Frayn began his career as a journalist (Frayn fans should click here for a lovely interview he did with the BBC about his recent memoir) and so the play is well steeped in verisimilitude.  The library, a delightfully realistic design by Nathan Heverin,  reminded me so much of ones I’ve known that I could almost smell the paper rot. 

And Frayn gets the types right—the overly cerebral columnist, the maternal features editor, the affable mailroom guy—and the way they all dance around and bounce off one another.  But, of course, this is a comedy, not a remember-the-good-old-days documentary. And that’s where Alphabetical Order falls down for me.

I admit that my humor gene isn't fully developed but that means I appreciate a really good laugh-out-loud comedy even more. This one only made me smile. And not all the time. Alphabetical Order is the first full-length play that Frayn, the author of the classic farce Noises Off, wrote and you can see him working out his kinks, just beginning to test how far he can push the nuttiness that a good farce, or even a smart comedy of manners, requires.

This production of Alphabetical Order, mounted by the Keen Company, might have played better during the ‘70s when all things British seemed cool.  Or in England, where the play recently enjoyed a well-received revival. Or with a British cast.   

The six Americans and one Brit in this cast are all swell and even maintain convincing British accents.  But even so, and director Carl Forsman probably bears some of the responsibility here, this production lacks the devil-may-care flair that the Brits seem to bring to this kind of thing.

The show runs just slightly more than 90 minutes, plus a 15 minute intermission.  The break gives the stage crew time to perform some predictable but still miraculous magic, which I appreciated even more by the end of the play.  Those unseen stagehands don't get a curtain call but my applause was mainly for them. 

    

"Now Circa Then" is an All-Time Charmer

As anyone who has ever watched even a trailer for a Jennifer Aniston movie knows, romantic comedies are an endangered species.  They aren’t in such great shape on the New York stage either. The fact that the dyspeptic Neil LaBute is probably our leading chronicler of modern romance gives you some idea about the state of the genre. Which is why I was initially intrigued—and later charmed—by Now Circa Then, the appealing comedy that opened this week at ArsNova, the theater space way over on 54th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. 

The play is set in a museum much like the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side that has restored modest tenement apartments and celebrates the hardscrabble life of the immigrants who lived in them at the turn of the last century. The sole characters are two contemporary twentysomethings, who work at the museum as historical reenactors, the costumed guides who act out the lives of the former tenants for the sightseers who come to visit.

Gideon is a history fanatic who takes the job very seriously.  Margie is a slacker who’s just trying to earn enough money to pay her rent. She thinks he’s a prig. He’s offended by her lack of commitment and by her inauthenticity: they’re portraying a Jewish couple and she’s Filipina. But both can’t help noticing that the other is awfully cute.  It’s a perfect rom-com set-up and the fun is watching how they fall for one another—and what happens afterward.

Their story is juxtaposed against that of the marriage of the immigrant couple they play and playwright Carly Mensch, who has a day job writing for the TV series “Weeds,” does a nice job of balancing the light comedy and some deeper thoughts about the differences between relationships then and now. (Click here to read a Time Out New York interview with Mensch.)

There are a few missteps. The backstory about Gideon’s dead mother is overworked. Director Jason Eagan is less handy with the play's serious moments than he is with its humorous ones. The play runs close to two hours and that’s too long. But the production has been blessed by two delightfully charismatic actors, Stephen Plunkett and Maureen Sebastian, who turn Gideon and Margie into real people whom you grow to care about during the course of the play. 

Everyone in the audience at the performance I attended—from some beer-drinking frat boy types in the back row (ArsNova offers free drinks) to a grey-haired grandmotherly type in the first—was openly pulling for the pair and having a good time watching as Gideon and Margie tried to make their thing work.

Eagan has directed the play with as much fluidity as he can, given the theater’s small black-box space and Now Circa Then’s huge set demands—over the course of the play the action moves from the formality of the apartment’s sitting room to the domestic comfyness of its kitchen to the bittersweet intimacy of its bedroom. That set, by the way, is so richly detailed and period-perfect that it looks as though designer Lauren Helpern lifted it wholesale from the Tenement Museum.

Succumbing to the current theatrical vogue for augmenting shows with continuing-ed style lectures, the producers have scheduled a series of talkback sessions with demographers, historians and preservationists through the end of the run which ends Oct. 9.  It’s the kind of stuff I usually eat right up but it’s not what this play is really about.  It’s about people and the way history—our own and even that of those we learn about—can shape us. And that doesn’t require any extras. The show is worth the trip to far West 54th Street all by itself.

"Orlando" Both Charms and Confounds

As regular readers of B&Me know, downtown theater is not my natural habitat.  So it’s been an adventurous week for me. In the space of four days, I saw the sensational revival of Angels in America at Signature Theatre, not a downtown company but Tony Kushner’s masterpiece will always be a proud standard bearer of the downtown aesthetic (I’ll say much more about this production after its official opening); and I saw Flemish director Ivo van Hoven’s iconoclastic remix of The Little Foxes at New York Theatre Workshop (click here to read my review of that one); and Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel "Orlando," which opened for a four-week run at Classic Stage Company on Thursday night.

It may have been too much downtown for me. The notes I took while watching Orlando are so badly scribbled that I can’t decipher them. My mental images of the play dissolve into dream-like vapors.  Which, ironically, may be appropriate. 

Woolf’s novel, a tribute to her lover, the aristocrat and poet Vita Sackville-West, is an elusive fabulation.  It recounts the 400-year life of a nobleman born in the 16th century who over the years transforms into a woman but never ages.  The character Orlando has lovers of both sexes, including Queen Elizabeth I. The book is consider a landmark in feminist writing, gender studies and modernist fiction.  All of which makes it an obvious challenge for a playwright.

Ruhl, of course, is no stranger to feminism, gender issues or modernist writing.  She began working on her Orlando 12 years ago and, according to folks far more literate than I, has remained faithful to Woolf's text.  Maybe, some say, too faithful.  Ruhl has employed the story theater approach to tell Orlando’s story, which means there’s a lot of narration, with characters spouting exposition and referring to themselves in the third person (click here to watch an interview in which she talks about the making of the play).

The language is beautiful but, at least for me, also tedious after a while.  The saving grace is that this production, directed by Rebecca Taichman, is gorgeous. Allen Moyer has devised a spare set that is elegant in its understatement and witty in its carefully chosen touches of whimsy: his miniature houses, miniature boats and even miniature tea cups made me smile each time I saw them. As did Anita Yavich’s lovely costumes and Annie-B Parson’s charming choreography. Christopher Akerlind’s supple lighting shows them all off to good effect.

The cast is equally fine, lead by Francesca Faridany, radiant as the title character, and the downtown darling David Greenspan, who brings some much needed humor to the proceedings in a variety of roles including Queen Elizabeth (click here to read an interview with him).

I'm not sure what to make of Orlando.  My mind wandered throughout the two-hour performance. But each time it returned, it saw something it liked.