"That Championship Season" Fails to Score

The rap on the current revival of That Championship Season, which opened at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre last week, is that the play is outdated.  Which seems a silly thing to say.  I mean how up-to-date is The Importance of Being Earnest, which has been averaging 90% capacity at the huge American Airlines Theatre?  (Click here to read critic Peter Filichia's smart take on the datedness debate) Nope, the problem with That Championship Season is simply that this production isn’t as good as it should be.

Jason Miller’s 1972 play tells the contemporaneous story of the reunion of a basketball team and its coach some 20 years after winning their state’s championship, still the highlight of all their lives. Written during the social upheavals of the Vietnam War, the play's theme is the declining hegemony of the white American male. It ran for 700 performances and won both the Tony and the Pulitzer Prize. 

The cast back then included such everyman types as Charles Durning and Paul Sorvino. So when my husband K saw the poster with the GQ-ready cover boys in the current cast—Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric (both of whom once dated Julia Roberts) Chris Noth and Jim Gaffigan with Brian Cox as the coach—he bailed on seeing the show. I went anyway.  As is so often the case, K turned out to be right.

That Championship Season is a show whose success depends, even more than most shows do, on its cast.  Given the economic realities of Broadway, the producers clearly felt they had to opt for celebrity names.  Some of them work well. But at least one doesn’t at all. 

Gaffigan, the stand-up comedian who’s the least known of the bunch and the one who looks as though he would have had the easiest time fitting in with the original 1972 cast, is the best. He brings an authentic eager-to-please quality to the player who winds up being the hapless mayor of the team’s working-class Pennsylvania town. 

Sutherland, probably the biggest draw because of his years on the TV series “24,” gets points for playing against his alpha-male image and turning in a convincing performance as a week-kneed and two-faced 
high school principal.  

Noth plays the team member who has turned out to be the most successful, albeit at sleazy business deals and tacky love affairs, and after years as Mr. Big on "Sex and the City" and now the philandering husband on "The Good Wife," he knows how to play charming rogues.  And stage vet Cox is OK as the coach (click here to read an interview with him).

That leaves Patric, and he is by far the weakest link.  He was supposed to be the MVP. For he is the playwright’s son and plays the character Miller clearly designed to be his own stand-in (click here to listen to a terrific NPR interview in which Patric talk about his dad).   

Patric’s character is the only one of the group who has moved out of town and so has a bit of an outsider’s perspective.  But Patric’s performance is so disconnected from the other actors that his guy seems at times as though he were still in an entirely different state.

Director Gregory Mosher struggles to turn his five actors into a cohesive team but the tone staggers all over the place. What’s prompted the “outdated” talk are the many racist and sexist things the men say. The overt bigotry no doubt shocked audiences back then.  The feminist friend who agreed to see the show with me after K backed out said later, over a post-show dinner at nearby Ça Va, that she would have walked out if she’d seen it back then. 

But the brutish behavior that the team members display is no longer fresh nor revelatory and so the audience isn’t quite sure what to make of it. I heard gasps, laughs, grunts of disgusts and some yawns too. That makes the job harder for the directors and actors who have to dig even deeper into the hollowness of these men.  But this production just skates across the surface. 

Star gazers will no doubt enjoy seeing Patric, Sutherland and Noth onstage but for us theater lovers, there’s less to cheer about.

In Memoriam: Judd Jones

While reading the Times this morning, my husband K discovered that our friend Judd Jones had died.  That means the world is a less fun place.

Judd, who passed on March 9 at the age of 79, fell in love with performing when he participated in USO shows during his stint in the Army right after World War II and he never fell out of love with it. 

He moved to New York in 1954 after leaving the service, modeled for a while (he was one of the first African-Americans to be featured in national ads) studied acting (John Cassavettes was a mentor) and made tons of friends (the walls of his apartment near Lincoln Center were filled with personally-autographed photos of a Who’s Who of Broadway from the last half century).

At the suggestion of his pal Chita Rivera, Judd auditioned to be a replacement in the original production of  West Side Story and won the role of Chino, becoming the first black in the company.

Over the years, Judd performed in other shows on Broadway, off-Broadway and in the regional theaters. He also regularly toured his one-man tributes to his heroes Paul Robeson and Bert Williams.

But Judd was probably proudest of replacing David Carradine as the Incan king Atahuallpa towards the end of the run of The Royal Hunt of the Sun. It makes me smile now to remember his recreating  Atahuallpa's death scene 40 years later in his living room just for K and me.

But Judd loved being in the audience too.  He made a point of turning out—usually with flowers in hand—whenever one of his favorites like Betty Buckley, Audra McDonald or Patti LuPone was on a stage anywhere. One of the most magical nights I’ve ever had was going to Feinstein’s with him to see his buddy Brian Stokes Mitchell perform.

In fact, everything Judd did, he did with great exuberance—be it cooking (sweet potato pies were his specially) or gossiping (he was a great raconteur). He was, as I said, great fun to be around. K and I will miss him.

How Magical is "Peter and the Starcatcher"?

Monday is traditionally a dark night in the theater so performances are rare, which probably explains why the New York Theatre Workshop was filled with theater folks—press and otherwise—when my theatergoing buddy Bill and I went to see Peter and the Starcatcher, the new Disney kind-of-musical. 

I say “kind-of” because this isn’t your typical Disney show.  It’s not big, not brassy and there are few Technicolor costumes.  Instead, Peter and the Starcatcher is a self-conscious attempt to show that Disney can be hip, a little dark and edgy. But that mission is only partially successful. 

The show is a prequel to the Peter Pan story and has been adapted from the popular children’s book series created by the humorist Dave Barry and the mystery writer Ridley Pearson. Their books explain how Peter’s nemesis Captain Hook lost his hand, why the crocodile has a loud-ticking clock inside and, of course, how Peter and his lost boys got to the mystical island of Neverland and why they will never leave or grow up. 

Barry and Pearson added some other characters too, most notably a 14 year-old girl named Molly, who travels around the world with her father who has been commissioned by Queen Victoria to gather up magical stardust before it can fall into evil hands. When you add it all up that’s 

a lot of plot. 

Rick Elice, who co-authored the books for Jersey Boys and The Addams Family, tries to cram in as much of it as he can but the storytelling gets confusing.  Besides, Elice is clearly more interested in cracking anachronistic jokes about beer bongs and Philip Glass operas or tucking 

in up-to-the-minute sly references about the woes of Spider-Man.

Wayne Baker, whose previous biggest credit seems to have been working with Dame Edna, handles the music, which draws its inspiration from the English music hall. I don’t remember being annoyed by the songs but, alas, I don’t remember anything else about them either.

Still, the show is far from a shipwreck. It’s co-directed by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers and each brings his distinctive gifts to the party. 

Rees has done scores of things over the years, including his new gig as Gomez in The Addams Family, but he is still best remembered as the plucky hero in the 1981 production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby, even though he fails to mention it in the Playbill bio for this new show. And Nicholas Nickelby is clearly the inspiration for Peter & The Starcatcher’s whimsical story-theater techniques in which the actors both narrate and perform the story.

Meanwhile, Timbers, who made his bones with last season’s irreverent Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, injects a similarly snarky sensibility into the proceedings. The antics he sets in motion are lively even if you don’t know what the hell is happening half the time.

The cast is game and seemingly up for anything.  Many of the actors play multiple parts, and both genders. They sing. They perform Steven Hoggett’s inventive but rigorous choreography (click here to read a piece about how he put it together).They help change the scenery; and sometimes even are the scenery.

But the standout is Christian Borle as the pirate Black Stache (the Anakin Skywalker to the Darth Vader of Captain Hook). Borle plays Black Stache as though he were the love child of Groucho Marx (complete with the phony moustache and rim shot timing) and the ostentatiously swishy Captain Jack Sparrow from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies.  It’s 

a deliciously over-the-top performance and, following his sensational performance as Prior Walter in Angels in America, makes this as a breakout year for Borle.

The non-animate set and props are purposefully low-tech (lots of ladders, ropes and water buckets) but this is a Disney show and set designer Donyale Werle gets to show off with a witty curio-filled proscenium that transforms the NYTW stage into a period-appropriate frame for the action. Paloma Young’s costumes are equally delightful and Jeff Croiter’s lighting and Darron L. West’s sound design hit their marks too.

So you see, there’s a lot of good stuff here. Its producers clearly envision Peter and the Starcatcher (which is only playing at NYTW through April 3 [update: it's been extended through April 17] but clearly hopes to eventually land on Broadway) as a show that has something for everyone. But the problem with that approach is that it often ends up being not enough for anyone.

Sure, Monday night’s audience seemed delighted by the show. The actor sitting behind me whooped it up big at every joke. And The New York Times, Associated Press and Backstage have now given it rave reviews (click here to see what they and others say on StageGrade). But these are all insiders, people who see lots of shows and are therefore extra grateful when just about anything different comes along.  But what about the average ticket buyer?

Kids, the presumed target audience (click here to see a cool interactive study guide the Disney folks have set up for students and teachers), are likely to be baffled by much of what they see. And I’m not sure how many older folks will want to shell out money to see a kid’s adventure tale.

That leaves the hipsters in their 20s and 30s. The producers are probably hoping that word-of-mouth about what Timbers has done will draw them in.  But, as Bill noted over a post-show dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant, they didn’t turn out in sufficient numbers to keep Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson open.

Saying Happy 65th Birthday to Liza Minnelli

Bill Eppridge/TIME & LIFE Pictures,

Life’s other demands have gotten in the way of my writing here and so I am again missing my regular Saturday morning posting deadline. But I’m hoping to post later this weekend and so instead of turning on the ghost light, I thought it would be fun to put up this mini-post to join in the celebration for Liza Minnelli’s 65th birthday today. 

The picture here is a “never-before-seen” photo that Life magazine has released showing Liza back in 1965 when she was just 19 and rehearsing for her Broadway debut in Flora, The Red Menace, her first collaboration with John Kander and Fred Ebb.  

 As anyone who has followed the star’s career knows, it hasn’t been easy for her to get to 65.  So, Happy Birthday, Liza.  The rest of you can click here to see 15 more Liza pictures in the Life photo gallery.

"Kin" Tells a Familial Tale, and a Familiar One

There’s a   lively debate currently going on within the theater blogosphere.  The subject is whether M.F.A. programs, writers’ workshops   and the need to satisfy subscription audiences have leached the individuality out of the plays that today’s playwrights under-40 are turning out. 

“New wine in old bottles is how I'd sum up the preferred new-play product of most subscription theatres,” writes my always-thoughtful fellow blogger The Playgoer. “Writers who come up through the university system—and, perhaps, are reared on a diet of regional theatre and Broadway, too—are more likely to put out that kind of product.” (Click here to read more of what he has to say.)

The Playgoer’s words came to mind as I tried to sort out my feelings about Kin, the new show that opens at Playwrights Horizons later this month. I usually wait until a show has opened before posting my thoughts about it but the PH folks encourage us bloggers to get the word out early about their shows, so here goes.

There’s no question about the talent of Kin’s playwright Bathsheba Doran. And she's punched all the right tickets on the up-and-coming playwright's circuit.  She has an M.F.A. from Columbia University, was a playwright fellow at Juilliard and has developed work at the O’Neill Playwriting Center and the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab. 

This is the first of Doran’s plays I’ve seen but it clearly shows off her eye for quirky characters and her ear for quippy dialog that makes the audience feel smarter just from hearing it. The thing is, Kin also seems like a lot of other new plays I’ve seen over the last few years.

The characters in these works tend to be smart, talented, good-looking and, while they’re not usually rich, they always seem to have enough money to live in chic homes, wear great-looking clothes, eat out all the time and drink a lot. 

Yet, they’re unhappy.  They want their jobs to be more satisfying; their relationships too.  They don’t seem to care—or even notice—what’s going on in the rest of the world. Except for the chic homes part, you might call it the “Seinfeld” school of dramaturgy.

Kin, as its name suggests, is focused on kinship and the ways we relate to one another.  Its main characters are the unlikely couple of Anna, a poetry scholar; and Sean, an Irish immigrant who works as a personal trainer. 

Like most modern couples they come into their relationship with baggage, including various troublesome friends and relatives, among whom are a distant father (hers), an agoraphobic mother (his), a wacky best friend (hers) and a wisecracking uncle (his).

As tends to be the case at Playwrights Horizons, the show is nicely cast.  Although the supporting characters held my attention more than the central pair. Suzanne Bertish brings a salt-of-the-earth poignancy to the mother.  Cotter Smith once again sensitively plays a reserved man who, similarly to the dad he played in Next Fall, can’t figure out how to show the love he feels for his adult child.

And Laura Heisler is an unabashed scene stealer as the best friend Helena. Doran has said that she originally planned to center the play around Helena but switched to Anna when that character began to interest her more (click here to read a piece she wrote about the genesis and development of the play). 

Heisler seems not to have gotten the memo about the change and she keeps the spotlight on the neurotic Helena, turning her into a person you simultaneously laugh at and care about.

Some of the credit has to go to director Sam Gold, who did equally fine work with Annie Baker’s circle, mirror transformation, the breakout production at Playwrights Horizons last year. Here he almost manages to cover over some of the lapses of logic (during a scene set in North Carolina) and melodramatic turns (during some in Ireland) that occur during the play's 1 hour and 45 intermissionless minutes.

But Gold made a big misstep when he signed off on Paul Steinberg’s set for Kin: a big wooden frame that has to be dragged around the stage by the actors and some stagehands called in for extra muscle. Maybe they’ll get more adept at it with practice but, at the performance I attended, they seemed to have a hard time getting the thing to hit its marks.

Still, if you haven't seen a lot of new plays lately, this isn't a bad one to start with—and seeing it will catch you right up on the main preoccupations of today's young playwrights. But, if you go, do whatever you can to avoid sitting in the first few rows of the theater. Kin has an onstage rainstorm that had people in the first three or four rows shrinking into their seats and clutching their coats around them for protection. Luckily, that's one thing you won't find in every other new play.

Is "Black Tie" Still Fashionable?

One of the best experiences I ever had in the theater was seeing A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters.  Many times.  And that’s a large part of why I so loved it.  The story is told through the letters of its two characters who start writing to one another when they are in grade school and continue to do so for the next 50 years.

The actors playing the roles sit onstage, letters in hand, and read them, which makes it comparatively easy for actors to perform since they don't have to memorize their parts. So the producers of the original 1989 production came up with a brilliant idea: they constantly changed the cast, which gave a succession of fantastic actors the chance to play the parts and people like me the chance to see the play reinterpreted for as many times as we could afford another ticket.

I had seen and enjoyed other Gurney plays before but seeing Love Letters so may times won him a special place in my heart. A lingering affection for the playwright has caused me to make a special effort to keep up with his work since then, including seeing the latest, Black Tie, which Primary Stages is presenting at the 59E59 Theaters through March 27.

Like most Gurney plays, Black Tie deals with members of the privileged white upper middle-class who are struggling to adjust to changing mores. I’d heard it was Gurney’s best in years (click here to read some of the reviews on StageGrade). But while his A-list works like The Dining Room, The Cocktail Hour and, of course, Love Letters embedded real emotions inside their entertaining social satires, this one seems to me to settle for easy laughs. I'm giving it a gentleman's C.

The plot centers around the plight of Curtis, a middle-aged ad exec whose grown son is about to get married. The play opens as the father of the groom is getting ready for the rehearsal dinner. It’s to be a casual affair but he wants to wear the tuxedo (the titular formal wear) his dead father bequeathed him and to give a speech similar to the one his dad gave at the dinner the night before his own wedding. 

Of course, the bride, who just happens to be a multi-culti mix of black, Asian and Eastern European, has other ideas.  And thus, established WASP traditions are once again pitted against the more laissez-faire values of today.

But the battle lines seem false this time out.  The Playbill says that Black Tie is set in the present, which is confirmed by the late appearance of an Obama T shirt. So it’s hard to believe that Curtis, a man in his 50s, would be as shocked by the breaking down of old mid-century customs.  I mean where was he in the '70s? Hell, I doubt even “Mad Man’s” Don Draper would feel so dismayed. 

I’ll confess that it also bothered me that we never get to see the bride.  Instead, we get to see a lot of the dead father's ghost, who in Blithe Spirit-style can only be seen by Curtis and the audience. They have lively and frequently funny discussions when they’re alone and even when Curtis’ wife Mimi or his son Teddy and daughter Elsie, who appear to notice nothing awry, are in the room.

The cast does a nice enough job, as does Gurney’s frequent collaborator director Mark Lamos (click here to read an interview with him).  But there are moments when Gregg Edelman’s Curtis strays into the one-note territory of the befuddled sitcom dad, while Daniel Davis (the audience’s favorite) seems too fond of the laughs his portrayal of the dead dad draws.

The real star of the show may be John Arnone’s spot-on recreation of a room in a less than first-class hotel in the Adirondacks, complete with wood paneling, plaid upholstery, and a tiny moose head over the closet door. In fact, the whole creative team deserves kudos, with another special shout out for sound designer John Gromada.

Black Tie is a comedy and so it's no spoiler to tell you that everything works out in the end, which comes a tidy 90 minutes after its start. Your enjoyment may depend on your nostalgia about the good old days when you could judge a man's character by the jacket he wore. But I’m no longer sure those good old days were all that good. My affection for Gurney continues but seeing Black Tie once was more than enough for me.

Crazy About "Diary of a Madman"

Sign me up for the Geoffrey Rush fan club.  And make that a lifetime membership, please.  Like most people, I discovered the off-beat Australian actor when I saw his breakout—and Oscar-winning—performance in the 1996 movie “Shine.” And over the years, I’ve enjoyed watching Rush in all kinds of movies from “Quills,” in which     
he portrayed the licentious Marquis de Sade, to the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, in which he plays the wicked Captain Barbossa.  

But I really fell—and fell hard—for Rush when I saw him on stage two seasons ago in Exit the King. His final moment in that play is one of the most memorable things I’ve ever witnessed in a theater (click here to read my review). Now Rush is on the boards again in The Diary of a Madman, which is running at BAM’s Harvey Theatre only through March 12.   

The Diary of a Madman is an adaptation of a short story by the 19th century Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol. It tracks the mental disintegration of a low-level government clerk named Poprishchin.  But that description doesn’t even begin to tell you about the extraordinary piece of work that Rush and his collaborators, writer David Holman and director Neil Armfield, have put together. 

Longtime friends Armfield and Rush first began working on The Diary of a Madman back in 1989 and, as Armfield explains in a program note, “it was a show where as young artists we shut the doors of the rehearsal room and worked to please ourselves…we were just doing a show from our own sense of play and love of Daffy Duck and outrageous theatrical gesture.” 

The result was a dazzling coup de théâtre in which an hilarious farce gradually spirals down into almost unbearable tragedy. It launched both their careers (Rush went into the movies and Armfield became artistic director of the Belvoir Street Theatre, one of Australia’s leading companies).  After seeing Rush’s amazing performance in this revival, I now want to see him in everything—Shakespeare, Chekhov, Albee and maybe some Dr. Seuss.  

For Rush is, in the best sense of the term, a theatrical actor, the kind that flourished before Marlon Brando arrived with the Method, naturalism and all the just-like-real-life techniques that we now expect to see on a stage. But in the old days, actors embraced artifice—training their voices to fill a theater even when the script calls for a whisper and disciplining their bodies to convey emotion with the smallest of gestures.

Old masters like Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud had no patience for vanity and no fear of looking like fools. They threw themselves into their roles, be it king or clown. And they rejected the notion of a schism between art and entertainment, believing that both were worthy goals and could be achieved with the same performance.

Rush comes from that school of acting. The old-style techniques can come off as hammy in the wrong hands but he juggles them brilliantly (click here to read a Q&A he did with New York Magazine). And he is ably supported in The Diary of a Madman by Yael Stone, who goes toe-to-toe with Rush in three very different roles that are almost worth the price of the ticket on her own. They are backed up by Paul Cutlan and Erkki Veltheim, the two onstage musicians who speak through their instruments with similarly bravura virtuosity.  

At the start of the play, Poprishchin, aided by Tess Schofield’s deliciously ridiculous costumes, is a pompous fool and all the more funny because he doesn’t know it. Rush turns 60 this year but I dare you to find a more agile actor working today and he uses his limber body to emphasize the character’s self-importance, twisting it and throwing it around Catherine Martin's smartly stylized set with the kind of flamboyant abandon that even a physical comedy genius like Buster Keaton might envy.

But Rush is just as affective at the play’s end, when Poprishchin has been stripped of everything, including the delusions that have buffered him from the prosaic cruelties of life.  “How can he go through that every night,” my theatergoing buddy Bill wondered as the lights came up at the end of the show.  I don’t know.  But I do know how very grateful I am to have gotten the chance to see Rush do it.  I’d urge you to see it too.  But I think the word has already gotten around and the run is sold out.