The Tony Talk Podcast, Episode 4: Too Much of A Good Thing

If you love musicals, this is the season for you. Fourteen new ones will have opened by the time the season officially ends on April 27. And they range from small edgy chamber pieces to big family-friendly spectacles, which means that whatever kind of musical you prefer, there's bound to be at least one show you'll like.

But if you produce musicals, this is a nail-biting season.  At most, only five shows can be nominated for the top Tony prize. And most of the media attention—along with a chunk of the ticket sales—is likely to go to those shows too. Everyone expects Dear Evan Hansen, Natasha Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 and this year's surprise hit Come From Away to get on the ballot so that only leaves two spots for all the other contenders.

There are also nine original plays opening but most of them are doing only so-so at the box office and, again, since there will only be room for five, the nominators will have to do some triage, which means the runs for some shows—including good ones—may end prematurely.

In fact, a few shows have already posted their closing notices and there's a strong chance that others will follow after the nominations are announced on May 2. 

So in this episode of Tony Talk, my pals Chris Caggiano, Patrick Pacheco and I talk about which shows seem most at risk. [Note: today's podcast was recorded before Andy Karl injured himself during a preview performance of Groundhog Day.] Click the orange button below to hear what we have to say or check out all the Tony Talk podcasts on SoundCloud by clicking here 

The Highly Theatrical Hijinks of "Vanity Fair," "The Play That Goes Wrong" and "946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips"

Sometimes you want a little sizzle with your theatrical steak. Or at least I do.  Which is why I'm such a fan of shows that take an imaginative approach to their storytelling, using all kinds of stagecraft from masks and puppets to having actors break out in stylized choreography or engage in loopy physical comedy. But it can be tricky to blend all of those elements into a fully satisfying evening in the theater and three shows I recently saw succeeded only in varying degrees:   

Vanity Fair:  Last year, the Bedlam theater company wowed audiences (and me) with a rollicking adaptation of Jane Austen's "Sense & Sensibility." So I jumped at the chance to see what the same team of playwright Kate Hamill and director Eric Tucker would do with William Makepeace Thackeray's classic tale about the poor but upwardly mobile Becky Sharp and her genteel friend Amelia. But the first act is filled with so much razzle-dazzle—frequent forays into the audience, Monty Pythonesque slapstick, dance interludes set to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)"—that it nearly overwhelms the story.

Luckily, things settle down a bit in the second act, refocusing the spotlight on the limited options open to early 19th century women and to the adroit skills of the production's seven-member cast, most of whom play multiple characters with little regard for gender, age or ethnicity. The ultimately worth-seeing production, which is playing at the Pearl Theatre Co.'s Peter Norton Space, is scheduled to run through May 14. 

The Play That Goes Wrong: The Brits seem to excel at this kind of playful playmaking and the aptly named Mischief Theatre goes for broke with this antic farce about an amateur theater company that can't do anything right. The Play That Goes Wrong was conceived by company members Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, who seem to have nothing more on their minds than delivering a good time—and they take every opportunity to do so.

Funny faux credits for their play-within-a-play "The Murder at Haversham Manor" are listed inside the real Playbill. Onstage, cues are intentionally missed, sets collapse and actors perform pratfalls and spit takes with such manic abandon that I feared they might hurt themselves. The entire cast, under Mark Bell's exquisitely calibrated direction, is superb. Still, Dave Hearn, as a toothy scene-stealing ham, steals every scene he's in. 

I'm not usually that high on lowbrow comedy and this one goes on about half an hour longer than it should but I couldn't stop laughing at this show, which I suspect will appeal to people of all ages and humor inclinations. The production is already packing them in at the Lyceum Theatre, where it's currently scheduled to run until Labor Day.

946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips. Few companies are as adept at magical show making as Britain's Kneehigh Theatre, which has been a frequent visitor to St. Ann's Warehouse over the last few years with such gorgeous productions as Tristan and Yseult and Brief Encounter. This year, Kneehigh brought over a show based on a children's book by Michael Morpurgo, the author of "War Horse." While that book, and the resulting Tony-winning show, centered on a boy trying to find his horse during World War I, the central character in 946 is a girl named Lily, who loses her cat when her family is forced to evacuate their village during World War II.

But the true heart of this story rests with the way African-American soldiers were treated during that war. Adi, a young black soldier who befriends Lily and helps look for her cat, is one of the soldiers assigned to rehearse for the Normandy invasion; 946 is the number of the men killed when that real-life military exercise went tragically awry. 

Emma Rice, Kneehigh's former artistic director, adapted the book with Morpurgo and directed the production, which ended its limited run this past weekend. She embellished it with bluesy songs and Lindy-Hopping dance numbers, both accompanied by an onstage jazz band. And there were other bits of theater business, including puppets and simulated battle scenes in which tiny toy ships floated in big tubs of water. But the show never achieved the wonder of War Horse. And this time out, all the clever stagecraft undermined the emotional gut punch of the deaths of the men it sought to honor.

The Tony Talk Podcast, Episode 3: The Pulitzer Effect

And we're off: the awards season has officially begun. Nominations for the Lucille Lortel Awards, which honor off-Broadway productions, were announced this week. And since lots of shows run off-Broadway before moving onto the Main Stem, three productions now on Broadway—Dear Evan Hansen, Indecent and Oslo—picked up four Lortel nominations each (click here to read the full list of nominees).

Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prizes are scheduled to be announced on Monday. Last year, the winner of the prize for Drama, Hamilton, went on to win the Tony for Best Musical and the first runner-up The Humans took home the trophy for Best Play.  So in this episode of Tony Talk (recorded before Significant Other posted a closing notice for a final performance on April 23) my theatergoing buddy Bill Tynan and I talk about the leading contenders for this year's Pulitzer honor and what effect that win might have on this year's Tony races. Click the orange button below to hear what we have to say or check out all the Tony Talk podcasts on SoundCloud by clicking here

"How to Transcend a Happy Marriage" Gets Bogged Down in the Metaphysics of Love

Happy marriages don't get much love in plays; they don't provide enough dysfunction for drama and there's not enough cutting up in them for comedy. So gratefully ensconced in one myself and wanting to see something like it onstage, I was hoping that the title of Sarah Ruhl's latest play How To Transcend a Happy Marriage wasn't altogether ironic.

And indeed the two main couples in her dramedy, now running at Lincoln Center Theater's Mitzi Newhouse theater through May 7, start off content and end up somewhat that way too. It's what happens in the middle that's problematic for me.

The couples are a Latin teacher named George (short for Georgia) and her architect husband Paul and their best friends, Jane, a legal aid lawyer; and her husband Michael, a musician who writes jingles for a living. As the play opens they're all having drinks and gossiping about a young woman at Jane's office who is in a polyamorous relationship with two men. 

The friends are equally intrigued by the fact that the woman, her name is Pip, is so earthy that she will only eat meat she hunts and kills herself.  Indeed, one of her bloody carcasses is symbolically suspended over the stage when the audience enters the theater.

The couples' fascination leads to a dinner invitation for Pip and her mates. Which in turns leads to a Bacchanalia. Which results in a hunting expedition for George and Pip, an incarceration, a surreal transformation and some realizations about the animalistic instincts that influence our lives and the bonds-—comradely, familial, spousal—that temper those impulses.

The two-hour journey to these epiphanies is less a narrative than a series of vignettes, some more entertaining than others. I found Pip's pretentious companions to be annoying (a riff about Pythagoras seemed not only boring but with, all the allusions to triangles, too on the nose). Meanwhile Jane and Michael's shrill teenage daughter seemed less a character than a plot device.

But the dialog sparkles with Ruhl's trademark wit and lyricism. And director Rebecca Taichman ably juggles Ruhl's abiding interest in female sexuality with her more metaphysical fancies (at one point a character seems to transform into a bird).

The entire cast is excellent (click here to read their take on the show) with Lena Hall (who has played both Yitzhak and Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch) bringing her wild-child energy to Pip, even turning a familiar folk song into a raunchy come-on.

But Marisa Tomei and Robin Weigert are particularly appealing as George and Jane, two fortysomething women happy with their lives but still rueful about the roads not taken and worried that it may be growing too late to explore others. Ruhl does give them a happy ending. Or maybe she's being ironic after all.

The Tony Talk Podcast, Episode 2: The New Generation of Music Men (and Women)

Spring is always kind of a crazy time for me. I'm happy to see the end of winter weather and excited by all the new shows coming in but am inevitably so busy seeing them (and juggling all the other demands in my life) that it's hard to find the time to write here as regularly as I like to. That usually means resorting to posting images of the ghost light that theaters turn on when they're temporarily vacant. But this year, I get to post episodes of my new Tony Talk podcast. This week, my pal Chris Caggiano and I talk about the new generation of composers who are bringing contemporary sounds to Broadway that have made them frontrunners for this year's Tony for Best Musical. Click the orange button below to give us a listen:

Acts of Violence and Meditations on Grief in "When It's You" and "On the Exhale"

Mass shootings are now so commonplace that they've spawned a whole subgenre of theater. Over the past decade I've seen The Columbine Project and The Library, both based on the 1999 massacre at a Colorado high school;The Amish Project about the slaughter of five girls in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse in 2006; The Events, inspired by the 2011 massacre of 77 people at a summer camp in Norway; plus every office worker's nightmare Gloria. And just this past week, I added two more entries to this list of requiems: When It's You and On the Exhale.

Any show that takes on this topic has to walk a narrow line, paying homage to the pain the real-life tragedies caused without exploiting them and attempting to provided insight into the incomprehensible. The Keen Company's production of When It's You, which is playing at the Clurman Theatre in Theatre Row through April 8, fails to meet both tests.

A one-woman show, written by Courtney Baron, a member of Keen's development program for playwrights (click here to read an interview with her) and directed by Keen's artistic director Jonathan Silverstein, it purports to look at one of these incidents through the eyes of a 37-year-old woman named Ginnifer who long ago dated the man who shoots 10 people in a parking lot.

Instead, the show is actually a solipsistic monologue about a woman who can't get her own life together. "I'm not here to talk about Jason Hanley," she tells the audience. And she means it.

The play attempts to add some tension by having her say that everyone keeps asking her about Jason. But Ginnifer's agonizing over what she might have done to prevent the killings seems like a neurotic attempt to push her way into the spotlight that surrounds the traumatic event.

Even that might have made a good story about the obsession society has with fame of any ilk but Baron undercuts it with ramblings about Ginnefer's dying mother and her inability to find love or have a family of her own.

The character actress Ana Reeder does what she can with the part but it's thin gruel and the 70 minutes it took for her to get through it seemed endless.

On the Exhale, running in the Roundabout Theatre Company's tiny Black Box Theatre through April 2, is a one-woman show too but it ties its character directly to a tragedy that evokes the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in which 20 first-graders were killed in 2014. The effect is far more powerful.

Playwright Martín Zimmerman's unnamed protagonist is a college professor and a single mom whose son was conceived by artificial insemination and is the center of her world. The 60-minute play tracks the stages of her grief when he is killed in a school shooting (click here to listen to an interview with the author).

As she ricochets from seeking comfort by lobbying with other grieving parents for gun control to seeking revenge by learning how to shoot herself, the play reminded me of "The Year of Magical Thinking," Joan Didion's marvelous book and play about the near surreal year she had after the loss of her husband.

The mother in On the Exhale is played by the brilliant Marin Ireland, who, under Leigh Silverman's delicate direction, has never been better. Which is saying a lot for an actress who has brought intelligence and immediacy to roles ranging from the insulted girlfriend in Neil LaBute's Reasons to be Pretty to a scene-stealing domestic terrorist in TV's "Homeland" (click here to read an interview with the actress).

Standing on a bare stage sensitively lit by Jen Shriever and speaking directly to the audience, Ireland so persuasively conveys the mother's grief that there were moments when I literally shook with the sorrow and the rage that having a beloved so savagely ripped away would arouse.

It's not that I didn't know intellectually what the horror of such an experience might be but On the Exhale made me feel it, which is what good theater should do.

Introducing B&Me's new Tony Talk Podcast

z

If you read Broadway & Me, then you know how much I love theater. What you may not know is that I also love podcasts and so I've decided to combine the two because this is shaping up to be the most exciting Broadway season in years. In past seasons, I've written about the contests for the Tonys on this blog and collected stories about the contenders on my Tony Talk magazine on Flipboard (click here to read it) but now I'm dying to actually talk about it.

So I've asked a few of my theater-loving friends to join me in a series of Tony Talk podcasts between now and the awarding of the prizes on June 11. We're going to chew over everything from the hottest competitions and the smartest Tony campaigns to who gives the best speeches and wears the fiercest outfits on Tony night.

I hope you'll join us (and chime in with comments). I'll post new episodes here but you can also find, subscribe to and download them on SoundCloud (click here for that). But right now, you can listen to our first episode on what my friends Chris Caggiano of ZealNYC.com and my theatergoing buddy Bill Tynan think will be the hottest categories by clicking the orange button below: