“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” Tries Really Hard But isn’t As Successful as It Should Be

My husband K is crazy about Frank Loesser.  The movie version of the composer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning final work, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, sat in our Tivo queue for years so that K could watch a few scenes whenever he wanted a quick pick-me-up.

But K passed on the chance to see the new revival of the show that opened at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on Sunday night.  He simply couldn’t—wouldn’t—imagine anyone besides Robert Morse in the role of the musical’s sly get-ahead guy J. Pierrepont Finch, who finagles his way from humble window washer to the chairman of the board.

And, judging from the reviews that have come out over the past couple of days, that’s the way a lot of people feel.

I get it. There are some performances so iconic, so indelible that it seems almost like sacrilege for anyone else to even attempt the role. (Click here to read Morse and Donna McKechnie’s reminiscences about the 1961 production). But time does pass.  At least some memories fade.  A new generation of theatergoers comes along looking for its own icons. 

Which is why I think people should give Daniel Radcliffe a break.  And, with the notable exception of Ben Brantley in the New York Times, most critics have tried to do that. Now, I’m crawling up on that bandwagon too. 

It’s hard to say mean things about Radcliffe. As has to be obvious to everyone who has been even partially sentient during the past decade, Radcliffe knows how to be successful. Over the past 10 years, he has:

•played the eponymous boy wizard in the Harry Potter series, which will finally end this summer

•managed to go through puberty and into young adulthood without a whiff of scandal

•given scores of interviews in which he routinely comes off as smart, witty and immensely likeable (click here to read an interview he did for Out Magazine)

•earned good notices for his Broadway debut as the troubled stable boy in Equus (click here to see my review)

•won one of this year’s GLADD Awards for the public service announcement he did reassuring gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender kids that it’s perfectly fine to be who they are (click here to see the video)

Clearly, the lad (he’s only 21) could just rest on his laurels, good will and the piles of money he made from the Harry Potter movies. Instead, he’s jumped feet first into the role of Finch. I say “feet first” because Radcliffe has gone on record as saying how hard it’s been for him to learn to dance. But he more than holds his own with the dance pros onstage.

Director and choreographer Rob Ashford hasn’t made it easy on him either.  The dances are intense workouts particularly the rousing 11 o’clock gospel-like number, “Brotherhood of Man.”  But they reminded me of the ones in last season's revival of Promises, Promises, which Ashford also directed, and of the ones in the ill-fated 9 to 5, which he didn’t.  How great it would be to see some fresh notions about how dancers portraying mid-century businessmen and their secretaries might move. 

Despite the high-aerobic dance numbers (Radcliffe is, at times, lifted, flipped and hurled through the air) the performance my niece Jennifer and I saw lacked energy—it ambled along when it should have been strutting. 

The cast also struck me as uneven. As fond as I am of Radcliffe and as much as I admire how hard he's clearly working, his Finch seems too amiable, going along to get along instead of going along only until he can figure out a way to come out on top. And while Radcliffe's singing is pleasant it lacks oomph.

Similarly, both TV funnyman John Larroquette as the head of the company and newcomer Rose Hemingway as the secretary whose ambition is to marry Finch seemed blander than they should have been. In fact, the one person who really popped was Christopher J. Hanke, who plays Finch's foil. Hanke is the only real stage vet among the four main characters and clearly feels the most comfortable there.

But the audience seemed happy with them all.  Particularly the ticket holders under 30.  For them, Robert Morse is just the old guy on TV’s “Mad Men.”  Like my niece (a diehard Harry Potter fan) they had come to see Radcliffe and they cheered him every chance they got. And, in the end, it's their continued support that's going to determine how truly successful this revival will be.

"Ghetto Klown" is Stuck in Familiar Territory

I saw Mambo Mouth, John Leguizamo’s first one-man show when it played at the old American Place Theatre back in 1991.  And I had a really good time—a better time, alas, than I had at Ghetto Klown, Leguizamo’s fifth one-man show, which opened at the Lyceum Theatre this week.

Twenty years ago, Leguizamo’s manic energy and keenly observed stories about his Colombian and Puerto Rican relatives and friends were as fresh and funny as all get out. Plus he brought a Hispanic sensibility to the stage that, if you discount West Side Story, had been missing from mainstream theater and is only rarely seen now. 

Leguizamo, who is now 46, is a very talented guy and an irrepressible charmer so there are still a lot of laughs to be found in Ghetto Klown.  But the show is too long—nearly two and a half hours, when 90 minutes would have been fine.  And it’s self-indulgent in other ways too.

It is entertaining to listen to Leguizamo riff on his career, from his teen days when he’d sneak into the conductor’s booth on the subway and tell jokes over the p.a. system to his roles in movies co-starring with superstars like Al Pacino (“Carlito’s Way”) Sean Penn (“Casualties of War”) and Leonardo DiCaprio (“Romeo + Juliet”) even if, as Leguizamo admits in a program note, he’s changed things around to suit the narrative he’s created for Ghetto Klown. 

Meanwhile director Fisher Stevens has done a nice job of folding in photos, videos and even dance moves from back in the day (click here to reada piece about the collaboration between the director and the star). 

But it’s less fun to have Leguizamo drone on and on about his emotionally stunted father, his overbearing mother, his rocky romances, and botched attempts to keep it real with his homeboys from the old neighborhood (click here to read a Daily News story in which he visits the block where he grew up in Queens) .

The result is a show that turns out to be more for Leguizamo’s good than for the audience's. It’s like a self-help group where only one person is getting most of the catharsis. As he says at one point, he should be paying the ticket buyers for the therapy he’s getting instead of the other way around. Indeed, I haven’t seen anyone feed off the energy of an audience that much since Liza Minnelli was at the Palace two seasons ago.

But Leguizamo has a following—two huge busses were parked outside the theater when my stepdaughter Anika and I left the theater to run across the street for a light supper at Bond 45. And there were more Hispanic faces in the theater than one usually sees. A cheering section up in the balcony expressed its exuberant support throughout the performance.  The 12-week run has already been extended to July 10.

And you don’t have to be Hispanic to appreciate Ghetto Klown.  Like Liza, Leguizamo is tireless—throughout the evening, he cracks jokes, sings, break dances, does imitations, and even declaims some Shakespeare. If you’ve never seen a Leguizamo show before, the comparisons to the previous ones won’t matter.  You might even have as good a time as I did the first time I saw him.

"Good People" is Good Theater

People I know keep asking me what I think about Good People, the new David Lindsay-Abaire play.  They don’t need my opinion to determine whether it’s, well, good because the show, now playing at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, has already scored a B+ on StageGrade, including high marks from the New York Times. 

Those glowing notices plus the movie-star sheen and innate coolness of Frances McDormand are causing the show to sell out.  And just yesterday, the producers added a three-week extension to the run, which will now end on May 29.

I think the real reason my friends and acquaintances are curious about my response is because they know my life story so closely resembles that of the character in the play who was a smart poor kid, won a scholarship to a prep school, went on to a good college (in my case Sarah Lawrence, which, as it happens, is also Lindsay-Abaire’s alma mater) and then moved away from the old neighborhood into a nice middle-class life.

Good People’s plot centers around an unexpected reunion that character, a doctor named Mike, has with an old friend named Margie (McDormand). They grew up together in the working-class and predominantly Irish neighborhood in Boston called Southie and had a brief fling in high school but haven’t seen one another in over 30 years. 

Her life hasn’t turned out nearly as well as his. Her husband ran out on her years ago, she’s got a severely disabled grown daughter and, as the play opens, she’s being fired from her barely-above minimum wage job as a cashier in a dollar store.

Do the one-time friends still have anything in common? Why did he make it out while she didn’t?  Was it luck?  Or hard work? Does he have any obligation to help her out now?  Those are the questions Lindsay-Abaire, who himself grew up in Southie, asks in Good People and they’re ones I’ve also asked myself over the years when I’ve run into people I once knew when we were kids. 

Questions about class differences don’t often make it into the theater nowadays—unless it’s a revival of some ‘20s-era farce about martini-swilling swells and their wisecracking servants—and there seems to be almost a ban against poor people appearing in plays. In fact, most contemporary plays are obsessed with the folks we used to call yuppies. So my hat is off to Lindsay-Abaire.  Even if some of his play doesn’t ring totally true for me.

Lindsay-Abaire clearly knows Southie better than I can ever hope to  (click here to listen to a terrific interview he did about his old neighborhood and his new play on the public radio show “Studio 360”) but in Good People he seems to me to be both patronizing towards and protective of the people he grew up with. 

Maybe Southies are as crude and casually racist as he portrays them but his characterizations of them seemed to veer into stereotype. I found myself wondering what the people who still live in his old neighborhood might think of how he’s portrayed them onstage.

The playwright, who earned a Pulitzer Prize for his last play Rabbit Hole and some nice paychecks for his movie work, also seems more than a little embarrassed by his own success. I’ve been there and I feel for Lindsay-Abaire.  He doesn’t want to penalize Mike for his hard work but he doesn’t want to kick Margie for her hard luck. That leaves the play in a somewhat mushy middle, refusing to take a stand on either side.  

The production, however, is rock solid. Good People has been sensitively staged by Daniel Sullivan, who after his similarly deft work with last year’s Time Stands Still is becoming one of my favorite directors. David Zinn’s costumes are spot-on. And John Lee Beatty outdoes himself with a marvelous turntable set that moves through five entirely different but fully realized and wholly believable settings from the church-basement bingo parlor where Margie and her friends hang out to the well-appointed living room in Mike’s suburban home.

The six-person cast is uniformly superb. McDormand, onstage throughout, makes you care about Margie even when she isn’t being a good person. Tate Donovan captures all the conflicting emotions that  a man like Mike might wrestle with. Becky Ann Baker, as Margie's best friend,  and Estelle Parsons, as her landlady, are a riot, and the source of much of the play’s leavening humor. While Patrick Carroll is sweetly earnest as the boss who fires but still admires Margie.

But the standout for me was Renée Elise Goldsberry, who gives a subtle but nuanced performance as Mike’s wife. In a nice touch, Lindsay-Abaire has made her African-American and, unlike Mike, she's second generation upper middle-class (her father is the doctor who was Mike's mentor).  She’s totally comfortable in her own skin and it’s really nice to see a black character who is affluent, well educated and unashamed of being either.

So this is what I think: Good People may not be a great play.  But it’s certainly good enough.

"Beautiful Burnout" is All Flash With No Fire

Beautiful Burnout, which is playing through March 27 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn Heights, is the textbook definition of style over substance.  But the style is sensational. 

The show was put together by some of the folks involved in Black Watch, the National Theatre of Scotland’s magnificently imaginative meditation on the war in Iraq that was a hit back in 2008 (click here to see my review) and is returning for a three-week run at St. Ann’s starting April 16.

Like Black Watch, Beautiful Burnout uses thumping rock music (the techno band Underworld supplies the recorded soundtrack) CSI-style video projections and stylized choreography to help tell its story. But the tale this time is set on a smaller canvas: the world of amateur boxing.

The fact that the actors have—or affect—thick Scottish burrs makes it difficult to understand much of the dialog. But you don’t really need it. The plot is familiar (working-class kids try to punch their way out of a dead-end existence with the guidance of a gruff but dedicated trainer) and the moral is too (boxing hurts everyone involved). Besides what really matters here is the pumped-up choreography.

Action is a metaphor for emotion in Beautiful Burnout. When its characters want to express their inner thoughts, they break into visceral movement, the way characters in traditional musicals break into song. 

The problem is that there are no real emotions to convey.  The characters are little more than stock figures—the cocky one, the dumb one, the sensitive one—and although the actors look nothing alike, I had a hard time telling them apart because Bryony Lavery’s script gives them so little that’s distinctive to play. 

The only one to stand out for me was the sole female boxer in the group and I can’t tell if that’s because Lavery found it easier to write for a woman (the mother of the main boxer is pretty good too) or because like her character, the actress Vicki Manderson is working extra hard to prove that women can hold their own in a pugilistic environment.

Luckily—and this is where the sensational style comes in—Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett’s dance sequences are terrific.  The synchronized calisthenics and slo-mo fighting routines they've concocted are unbelievably strenuous. (Click here for a quick look at some of it.)  I marveled at how the actors are able to pull it off night after night.

Hogget, who also did the choreography for American Idiot and Peter and the Starcatcher, the new Disney musical that’s playing down at New York Theatre Workshop, is one of the most exciting choreographers to come along in a long time (click here to read a Q&A with him about putting this show together). I want to see more and more of his work.

In fact, seeing it in Beautiful Burnout kept me from going home in what otherwise might have been a grumpy mood. The audience at St. Ann's was sparser and more tepid in its response than I had expected it would be.  And I was hungrier than I wanted to be (I wish there was somewhere to eat near St. Ann’s  besides pizzerias, pub bars, the too-expensive-for-a-pre-or-post-show-bite River Café or the theater's lobby bar where the specialty is microwaved jerked chicken). But I walked out of the old warehouse feeling as though I wanted to dance.  And if a show can do that, it can’t be all bad.

"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.