"Baby Case" Doesn't Fully Make Its Case

There’s a lot that's similar about Bonnie & Clyde, the Frank Wildhorn musical about the Depression-era gangsters that closed in December after just 36 performances, and Baby Case, the musical about the Lindbergh kidnapping that opened at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Monday as part of this year’s New York Musical Theatre Festival.  Maybe they have too much in common.

Both are based on real-life crime stories that made headlines in the '30s.  Both have listenable scores—not perfect scores but ones with songs built on catchy, and sometimes lovely, melodies that stick with you (click here to sample some from the new show). And both are old-fashioned book musicals.  Which I usually like. The problem is that both these books are so wobbly they undermine the resulting show.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: book writing must be the hardest job in show business. A good one should tell a story that makes a point, in addition to providing good set-ups for the songs. And it’s got to be even harder to do when one guy writes the book, composes the music and crafts the lyrics, which is what Michael Ogborn has done for Baby Case. 

My husband K and I attended Monday's performance of Baby Case and we sat near some people who were clearly friends of Ogborn’s and who, even before the show began, marveled to one another about how talented he is. Indeed, he does seem to be so. But it could have helped his show to have had someone else in the room when he was putting it together.

Baby Case tracks the Lindbergh story from Charles Lindbergh’s historic non-stop solo flight over the Atlantic in 1927 to the 1936 execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing the aviator’s 20-month old son. The crime remains, like those of Bonnie and Clyde, a fascinating and oft-told tale. Which poses a question for anyone who decides to tell it again: why do it?

Ogborn attempts to answer that by condemning the media circus that surrounded what was then called “the crime of the century” and by questioning whether Hauptman was really guilty.  Both are valid ideas but without having had anyone else in the room to bat them around with, Ogborn doesn’t develop either fully. 

There are plenty of scenes—and a few song and dance numbers—in which reporters and photographers hound Lindbergh and his wife Anne both before and after the kidnapping. The publisher William Randolph Hearst pops up periodically to push for more sensational coverage and the columnist Walter Winchell to demonstrate some of the worst of it. But Ogborn doesn’t seem to have anything to say about all of this besides, isn’t it a shame?

Similarly, he drops hints that Hauptmann may have been framed but he doesn’t make a clear argument for why he was or who was behind it. The real problem may be that Ogborn was not only trying to do too much but to cram too much into his show. 

Baby Case name checks almost everyone with any connection to the incident—a Lindbergh family maid who committed suicide, an eccentric school teacher who got involved in the ransom negotiations, a celebrity reporter who covered the case and even mobster Al Capone. The show extends their 15 minutes of fame far beyond their expiration date: does the truck driver who discovered the baby’s body really need a song?

Everyone in the hardworking cast plays multiple roles.  Even Will Reynolds who plays Lindbergh doubles as Hauptmann.  Having one actor play both those parts is an interesting conceit but again not enough is done with it to make a point. Is Ogborn saying that both men were victims of the media?  Or is he implying that Lindbergh may have been just as easily culpable as Hauptmann in the child’s death?  Inquiring minds want to know.

The 10 producers listed on the program have given Baby Case a quality production. Most of the cast members have Broadway credits, including Melissa van der Schyff, who was a standout as the sister-in-law Blanche in Bonnie & Clyde and does a fine job of singing one of this show’s most plaintive ballads. 

Martin T. Lopez’s set is simple but his costumes —and there are a lot of them—nicely evoke the period. Meanwhile, K marveled at how the actors could have learned all the choreography that Warren Adams devised in what must have been a short rehearsal period for this six-show run, which ends on Sunday. And Jeremy Dobrish has directed with equal vim.

Still, I’m being so nitpicky about Baby Case because it has so much potential. Unlike so many NYMF shows, it isn’t a goofy spoof and the fact that people remember and continue to debate a crime that was committed 80 years ago underscores the potency of the story. But Ogborn has been working on Baby Case for over a decade now (it won four Barrymore Awards, including Best Musical, in his native Philadelphia back in 2002) and this may be as far as he can go with it.

Late—But Avid—Homage to "Tribes"

Several small off-Broadway shows have come and gone over the past few months while I’ve been preoccupied with all the Broadway openings at the end of the season, the deserved hoopla leading up to and coming out of the Tonys, and putting together perennial posts like my Summer Reading list and July 4th greetings. Luckily, one show that’s stuck around, Tribes, is one of the best of the year. 

Tickets for Tribes are currently on sale at the Barrow Street Theatre through Sept. 2, which gives me a chance to talk a bit about the show but, more importantly, also gives those of you who haven’t already done so, the chance to see it. Which you should do.  Right away.

The young British playwright Nina Raine (this is only her second produced play) tells the very specific story of an intellectual couple—she’s an author, he’s an academic—and their three grown children but, like all the best writers, Raine also speaks to universal truths about the ways in which we define ourselves. Her play is, in other words, about how we determine to which tribes we belong.  

The plot centers around Billy, the youngest in the family, who is also the most even-keeled of the siblings and the one to whom all the others cling.  But because Billy is deaf, he is also something of an outsider among them, unable to follow all the quarrels and quips (although it poses serious questions, the play is often quite funny) of his voluble kin. 

Yet Billy is also an outsider in the deaf community because his parents refused to teach him sign language. He gets along by reading lips. But everything changes when Billy meets Sylvia, the hearing daughter of deaf parents who, now in her 20s, is losing her own ability to hear.  For while the family members want Billy to be happy because they love him, what they want even more is for him to continue making them happy.

Things don’t quite work out as we think they will and that is another thing that I like about this thought-provoking and thoroughly engaging play.  I also liked everyone in its pitch-perfect, six-member cast.

First among equals was Jeff Perry, wickedly good as the un-passively aggressive dad. The  thing I most regret about taking so long to write about the show is that Perry, a co-founder of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company (his co-founder Gary Sinise sat across from me at the performance I attended) left the show last week so that he can get back to work as a regular on the TV series “Scandal."

But the others still there are fierce too.  Especially fine is Russell Harvard, a partially deaf actor who borrows from his own experiences to enrich his portrayal of Billy (click here to read an interview with him) but elevates his performance with the force of sheer talent. It’s tough for actors with disabilities to find parts (just ask Phyllis Frelich, who has only appeared in three New York productions since her Tony-winning performance in 1980's Children of a Lesser God) but I’d love to see Harvard in other shows.

Meanwhile, Susan Pourfar has deservedly won kudos for her nuanced portrayal of Sylvia’s struggles as she moves from the tribe of the abled to that of the disabled (click here to read a Q&A with her). Mare Winningham is, of course, always terrific, which she is again here as Billy's overly protective mother.  And I might as well just go ahead and name Will Brill and Gayle Rankin because they too are excellent as Billy’s emotionally handicapped siblings.  

The production is directed by the energetic David Cromer (he even managed to turn up in the opening scene of HBO's "The Newsroom.") His wonderfully revelatory production of Our Town played at Barrow Street a couple of seasons ago and he works his magic here too.

Cromer has staged the play in the round, which lends a kind of eavesdropping intimacy to the goings on, with the action sometimes spilling right into the audience. Some of what’s being said can be missed when the characters are facing in certain directions but that seems in keeping with the frustration that Billy so often suffers. 

All of the design is similarly integrated into the action. The knowingly shabby set and costumes by Scott Pask and Tristan Raines  speak volumes about the people who live in them. When Billy learns to sign, Jeff Sugg’s elegant video projections beam the translations onto scrims around the theater.

And special recognition has to go to Daniel Kluger, whose sound design is, at just the right moments, eloquent in its depiction of what it must be like to be hard of hearing.

In short, everyone involved in this production has made this show a tribe to which anyone who loves smart theater should want to belong.      

"Harvey's Whimsy Didn't Totally Work on Me

Summertime is tourist time in New York and one of the main things people want to do when they get here is see a Broadway show.  But not just any show.  Most want to take in a big Broadway musical, which is why 19 of the 27 shows now running are song and dance shows and three of the eight straight plays—End of the Rainbow, One Man, Two Guvnors and Peter and the Starcatcher—have so much music that they can pass. Even the soon-to-closed A Streetcar Named Desire has a dance number.

Since the majority of the out-of-towners will only see one or two shows, they want to be sure that they see the right ones. And that usually means shows that are familiar to them in some way. So they queue up for the mega hits their cousins saw (Phantom, War Horse, Wicked) and boasted about when they visited the city.  Or they choose shows whose music they already know (Jersey Boys and Rock of Ages).  Or they seek out ones based on favorite movies (which may be why the critically pilloried Ghost saw its tickets sales levitate 10% during the tourist-heavy July 4th week). 

The tourists are willing to pay up to see familiar faces too.  Which probably explains why Harvey, a fey 68-year-old comedy about a man whose best friend is an imaginary 6 ft. rabbit, has been selling out at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Studio 54.  For the actor playing Harvey’s buddy Elwood P. Dowd is Jim Parsons, the Emmy-winning star of the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”  Audiences, at least the one at the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended, seem to adore Parsons. 

Or maybe the show itself just has an appeal that escapes the rationalist in me. It’s another one of those whimsical stories that make the case that people who seem crazy are actually the most sane because they’re more in touch with what life is truly all about.

Harvey’s plot centers around an attempt by Elwood’s sister Veta to commit him to a mental institution so that his eccentric behavior, exacerbated by long, liquid afternoons at the local bar, will stop embarrassing her and her marriageable-age daughter. Hilarity is supposed to ensue when the commitment plan goes awry.

I’d seen—and been mildly amused by—excerpts from the 1950 movie with Jimmy Stewart as Elwood but I don’t think I ever watched the whole thing through and this was my first encounter with the stage version, which turned out to be too twee for me.

Yet, to my surprise, many of the critics were quite charmed by the production (click here to see a roundup of the reviews on StageGrade).  And their 1944 counterparts were just as enchanted when Harvey, directed by Antoinette Perry for whom the Tonys are named, originally opened with the vaudevillian Frank Fay playing Elwood. 

The New Yorker declared that the production and Fay's performance were “touching, eloquent and lit with a fresh, surprising humor that has nothing to do with standard comedy formulas.” Apparently unable to express fully why he so loved Harvey, the unsigned critic finally resorted to saying, “You’ll just have to take my word for it, you’ll have the time of your life.”

Audiences back then apparently agreed because the show ran for over four years. Its playwright Mary Chase even won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, beating out Tennessee Williams and The Glass Menagerie. I've tried to keep my lingering incredulity over that latter injustice from unduly affecting my response to the current revival.

So I fully acknowledged that director Scott Ellis has put together a handsome production (David Rockwell did the swanky sets and Jane Greenwood the cheeky costumes). And I'm happy that he’s cast it with dependable stage vets including Jessica Hecht as Veta (click here to read a piece about her), Charles Kimbrough as the head of the asylum, Tracee Chimo as the daughter and the always-welcomed Larry Bryggman as the lawyer who oversees Elwood’s financial affairs. 

They all seem to be having a good time. Which is fine but I do wish they’d been willing to make the supporting characters a little less lovable so that the distinction between the world in which they live and the one in which Elwood does was sharper edged. 

But no matter. As I said, the summertime audiences are turning out for Parsons.  And he gives a nicely calibrated performance (click here to read about how he put it together) that is totally pleasing to them and even somewhat appeasing to a jaded New York theatergoer like me.

"The Best Man" is Still a Winning Ticket

In keeping with this week’s red-white-and-blue theme, I’m going to recommend The Best Man (or Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, as it is officially billed) which is turning into a staple of election years—or at least of the most contentious ones. 

Vidal’s unflinching look at the behind-the-scenes maneuvering between two main rivals for their party’s presidential nomination originally debuted right smack in the middle of the primary season for the 1960 campaign that eventually pitted Kennedy against Nixon.  It came back in the fall of 2000, when Bush and Gore were going at it. And now, as we head into the smackdown between Obama and Romney, we’ve got the nicely done revival that’s playing at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.

The grandson of a senator and a relative through marriage of Jackie Kennedy (both their mothers were, at different times, married to the financier Hugh Auchincloss and they shared step-siblings) Vidal has long been a keen wit with pointed ideas about how the political game is played. 

The way we choose a president has changed since the ‘60s but that doesn’t make his show any less engaging and it hasn’t stopped critics and audiences from drawing parallels to the current presidential derby.

The standard bearers in The Best Man are William Russell, a Brahmin with a smug over regard for his principles; Joe Cantwell, an up-and-comer whose surname betrays his willingness to do whatever it takes to get the nomination; and Arthur Hockstader, a former president who’s both a down-to-earth populist and a wily pragmatist.  

The plot pivots around secrets in each candidate’s past that could scuttle his chances for the presidency and the question of whether either will use the dirt to sully the other.

Part of the fun is imagining which real-life politicians match those onstage. Depending on your politics at the time of the original production, you might have seen the characters as the Republicans Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower or the Democrats Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman. 

Today, folks are citing both Obama and Romney as the overly-diffident Russell, Rick Santorum and Romney as Cantwell and, naturally, Bill Clinton as Hockstader.

But what’s really made the current production such a hit (and one of the few non-musicals scheduled to play through the summer season) is that so many of its actors are familiar faces. The opening night cast included  John Larroquette, Candice Bergen and Eric McCormack, all well known from popular TV shows, as well as those masters-of-all-media James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury. 

If you want to see these stars, you should stop reading this and run to the theater right now because, starting next week, several replacements are scheduled to move in. But I don’t think that will affect the show’s playability or popularity since the newbies will include the
famous in their own right Cybill Shepherd, John Stamos, Kristin Davis and Elizabeth Ashley. 

Larroquette is staying on as Russell. He may lack the patrician air 
of his predecessors—Henry Fonda in the 1964 movie, Spalding Gray in the 2000 production
and Melvyn Douglas, who originated the role in 1960 and whose wife Helen was famously smeared by Nixon during his first run for the Senate)—but Larroquette still manages to make Russell believable as a man who might make a good leader if he can only figure out how to stomach the jostling it takes to get to the front of the pack.

And Larroquette’s co-stars were even better at the performance my friend Priscilla and I saw. McCormack who usually plays a nice guy seemed to have great fun as the slick Cantwell (click here to read a Q&A with the actor). And Bergen and Kerry Butler were equally convincing as the candidates’ shrewd and supportive wives. All are now leaving but Stamos, Shepherd and Davis seem like good fill-in choices.

Meanwhile, Lansbury and Jones were so adept at stealing every scene they were in that the non-traditional casting of a black man as a mid-century U.S. president, from the South no less, barely seemed odd at all and Jones’ performance, more supple than I’ve seen him be in a long while, won him a Tony nomination. 

The ever-delightful Lansbury is handing her role as the chairman of the party’s women’s division over to Ashley who played the part in 2000 and was the best thing in that production. But Jones is sticking around through September when the show’s run is scheduled to end.

My personal favorites in the 20-member cast were Jefferson Mays who plays a sad sack who professes to have the lowdown on Cantwell’s past (click here to listen to an interview with him) and Michael McKean as Russell’s exasperated campaign manager (click here to read a piece about him). 

Mays is staying with the production too.  McKean, alas, was struck by a car in May and although he’s recovering has been replaced by the veteran actor Mark Blum.

Director Michael Wilson and his design team have added lots of clever touches—video projections that suggest the media’s growing role in politics, turning the entire theater into a conventional hall, complete with bunting and campaign signs—and I’m willing to bet that even if you think you’re tired of politics, you’ll have a good time at The Best Man. 

At the very least, it will be more enjoyable than the upcoming fall election, in which it's far from certain that the best man will win.

The Best Way to Celebrate Independence Day

 

No post today. Instead I’m kicking back and will be celebrating the birth of our country with my annual viewing of the pretty good movie version of the really great Tony-winning musical 1776. And I urge you to give it a try too (click here to take a peek at its famous opening number, "Sit Down, John") cause it’s hard to think of a happier way for a patriotic theater lover to have a Happy 4th of July.

Theater Books for Summer Reading 2012

Despite what the calendar says, the beginning of summer is a personal choice. Traditionalists probably opted for June 20th, the summer solstice and the longest day of the year. But some folks no doubt jumpstarted things with Memorial Day. Others will pledge their allegiance to the long 4th of July weekend, although that’s more difficult to do this year since the holiday falls right smack in the middle of next week.

But for me, the summer begins on the first sustained sequence of days on which I can sit out on our terrace with a good drink in one hand and a good book (or one loaded on my iPad) in the other. Nine times out of ten, that book will be about theater. And I suspect that kind of reading is a summer ritual for many of you too. So, herewith my annual list of books (novels, bios, memoirs and histories) for theater lovers to enjoy over the next couple of months. As always, happy reading and happy summer:

Dropped Names by Frank Langella.  I can’t think of a better summer—or any time—read than this dazzlingly good memoir in which the great actor Frank Langella looks back at his life in short chapters devoted to his encounters with acquaintances, friends and lovers who include Stella Adler, Anne Bancroft, Noel Coward, Colleen Dewhurst, Raul Julia, Arthur Miller, Laurence Olivier, and Elizabeth Taylor, just to name a few. Langella is as elegant a writer as he is an actor.  He is also brutally honest about the failings and shortcomings of his subjects and himself.  If you've only time for one summer read, make it this one.

 

Lucky Break by Esther Freud.  Good contemporary novels about actors are hard to come by.  So it’s great to have this collection of interlocking stories that follow a group of British actors from their first day in drama school into the mid-career choices of their 30s. The author, who is the daughter of the painter Lucien Freud and the great granddaughter of Sigmund, eschews the psychological explorations that are her patrimony, but having been an actress, and now married to one, she still knows how to plumb the theater world and the result is  a fun beach read.

Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein by Julie Salamon.  Wasserstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Heidi Chronicles, was not only the leading female playwright of her generation, but the BFF of practically everyone in the theater community, including, for starters, her Yale School of Drama classmate Christopher Durang and the former Times theater critic Frank Rich.  But despite her popularity and her success, Wasserstein, who died from complications associated with lymphoma in 2006  at just 55,  was a conflicted person and Salamon is great at tracking the ups and downs of her life. Plus, the book offers an intimate look at the off-Broadway theater world when it was just coming into its own in the ‘70s.

 

Finishing the Hat by Stephen Sondheim.  This first volume of Sondheim’s collected lyrics is filled with details on how the master put together songs for such classic shows as West Side Story, Gypsy, Company, Follies and Sweeney Todd. It’s fascinating to learn about his fondness for writing choral numbers, the private jokes he tucks into his lyrics and why he chooses some rhymes over others. Also included are a few anecdotes about his collaborators and comments on some of the songwriters who came before him; those stories and insights are so terrific that I wish there had been even more of this semi-gossipy stuff.

 

Tempest-Tost by Robertson Davies.  The acclaimed Canadian writer's first novel, written back in 1951, is the droll tale of an amateur theater group’s production of The Tempest.  It’s filled with familiar types from the bossy ex-actress who leads the group to the Walter Mittyish accountant who dreams of a starring role to the dotty old makeup woman who can no longer see. People who love “Slings and Arrows,” the terrific Canadian TV show about a theater festival, should really get a kick out of this book.

 

Great Producers: Visionaries of the American Theater by Iris Dorbian.  Truth be told, this isn’t a truly great read (it’s riddled with typos and grammatical faux pas too) but it is a good introduction to some of the major Broadway showmakers of the last 100 years.  And it’s filled with chatty anecdotes about a dozen or so top producers from David Belasco, the most powerful man on Broadway at the turn of the 20th century, straight through to Barry and Fran Weissler, who’ve not only managed to keep the current revival of Chicago going for 16 years but used some of the profits to finance boundary-busting shows like Enron and The Scottsboro Boys.  It's an easy way to brush up on your theater history.

David Merrick: The Abominable Showman by Howard Kissel.  Probably the last Broadway impresario to be a household name across the country, Merrick also had a reputation among Broadway insiders for being something up a prick.  And, as the subtitle suggests, that’s the part that theater writer Howard Kissel emphasizes in his look at Merrick’s remarkable career, in which he sometimes opened up to nine shows a year, including the original Broadway productions of Look Back in Anger, Gypsy, and Hello Dolly. Kissel, who died earlier this year, packed this bio with Merrick’s feuds, publicity coups (most famously running an ad with raves from regular people who had the same names as New York's top theater critics) and other shenanigans. It’s catnip for theater lovers.

The Season by William Goldman.  As regular B&Me readers know, Goldman’s behind-the-scenes account of the 1967-68 Broadway season has appeared on this list each time I've done it. And I have to confess that I considered leaving if off this year but then I just couldn't make myself do it.  After all, if you haven’t read it, you should.

And for those wanting still more, here are the links to my previous summer reading suggestions:
2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

Why "3C" Barely Rates a Grade of D from Me

Judging by all the honors he’s already racked up, the playwright David Adjmi has plenty of fans and doesn’t need me.  His bio boasts that he’s won a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Whiting Writers’ Award and the Steinberg Playwright Award, among other prizes, and he even made New York Magazine’s "Top Ten in Culture" list for 2011. 

On top of all that, Adjmi is also an alum of my alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College (although we graduated years apart and have never met) and he’s the friend of a good friend of mine, who chided me for not having seen Stunning, Adjmi’s play about Brooklyn’s Syrian-Jewish community, which had a sold-out run back in 2009.  So I was obviously eager to see 3C, Adjmi’s dark comedy which opened last week at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.  

But now, having seen it, I’m at a loss for what to say, except to repeat that it’s a good thing that Adjmi doesn’t need my approbation.  Because 3C doesn’t work for me in any way. 

The play is a riff on the old ‘70s sitcom, “Three’s Company,” in which a guy pretended to be gay so that he could split the rent on an apartment with two female roommates (an airhead blonde and a sensible brunette). The supporting characters here includes their lecherous landlord, his batty wife and a macho-man neighbor. 

What seems to tie them all together are their dysfunctional attitudes toward sex.  The blonde is a nympho who will screw anything in sight. The brunette is a prude who worries that people will think she is a lesbian. The guys seem to be in various stages of the closet.  And the landlord is a dirty-old man whose actions and comments are meant to be unsettling— and really are.

The play made me squirm. Watching a man stick his hand down the pants of an unwilling woman or listening to vile homophobic jokes will do that. But 3C never makes it clear why it's showing these things. It’s certainly no longer a revelation that sitcoms are shallow or that people can have delusional sex lives.

The jokes in 3C (some groaners, some grotesque) aren't funny enough to sustain it as a comedy.  Meanwhile, the perversities in which it traffics suggest that it wants to be taken seriously. What results is a muddle.

Call me old-fashioned but I think a play, even one with absurdist pretensions, should convey some idea of why the themes it deals with matter.  When it doesn’t, it runs the risk of coming off, as this one does, as being merely gratuitous. 

It also leaves very little for the actors, or for director Jackson Gay, to work with, even though everyone works hard. Too hard. Poor Jake Silbermann, who plays the male roommate, makes his entrance in the nude and spends much of the rest of the play being hit in the face.

The design team comes off better.  Scenic designer John McDermott has created an archetypal bland livingroom that would fit on almost any ‘70s sitcom set. Costume designer Oana Botez has lots of fun with the polyester shirts and bell-bottom pants from that period. And sound designer Matt Tierney has put together an amusing mixed tape of disco music from the era.

But the production missteps here too. It brings in Deney Terrio, the guy who taught John Travolta how to dance for “Saturday Night Fever,” to choreograph a series of numbers.  But those dances stop the action cold as the characters flail about the stage for far longer than seems warranted. Afterward, over a far more agreeable dinner at the nearby Waverly Inn, my husband K and I debated whether the actors had been directed to dance badly or were simply bad dancers.

Some audience members at the performance we attended applauded the dancing and laughed uproariously at the other antics as well but the fact that the claqueurs (friends of the actors? family of the playwright? suborned interns?) were seated together in just one part of the small theater only underscored how lame the whole thing was.