Why Broadway Went Short on "Enron"

I don’t usually write about shows that have already closed but I’m making an exception in this case. Enron, the much anticipated British import about the financial skullduggery that brought down the big Houston-based energy company, closed on Sunday after just 16 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre and its premature departure has set off a grudge match between critics on opposite sides of the Atlantic about why the show energized theatergoers in London but flat lined in New York.

The first punch was thrown when Michael Billington, recently voted the most influential critic in London, posted a column on The Guardian website entitled “Enron's failure shows Broadway's flaws,” which lamented “the aesthetic conservatism of a theatre culture” in the U.S. (click here to read Billington’s column.)  

Some New York critics like Talkin’ Broadway’s Matthew Murray took immediate offense and jumped to the defense of the American theatergoer, declaring that Billington should mind his own business (click here to listen to Murray on Broadway Radio’s “This Week on Broadway.”)

But others took a more measured approach. Jason Zinoman, writing on vanityfair.com, suggested that Enron may have failed on Broadway because the show’s 29 year-old playwright Lucy Prebble misunderstood and oversimplified the financial tanglings at the company (click here to read Zinoman’s argument.) While Bloomberg’s Jeremy Gerard hypothesized that Americans may be too familiar with the story or find the 2000 Enron scandal dated in the light of the current shenanigans at Goldman Sachs (click here to read Gerard’s argument.)

I don’t know why Enron flopped. I liked the show.   Or maybe admired is a better word.  I’m a sucker for imaginative stagecraft (my favorite show in 2009 was the Kneehigh Theatre’s production of Brief Encounters, a delightful mash-up of musical hall numbers, video imagery, puppetry and other spectacular coup d’theatre) and Enron’s director Rupert Goold used every trick in the book, and more.

Puppets and masks turned arcane accounting practices into amusing metaphors—the dummy corporations that Enron execs called raptors because they were supposed to eat up the parent company’s debt were represented onstage by actors wearing dinosaur masks.  The complicitous accounting firm Arthur Andersen was portrayed as a ventriloquist’s dummy. Flashy video projections simulated office settings and a giant stock ticker.  

And although Enron is a play, there were several musical numbers, exuberantly choreographed by Scott Ambler. Adam Cork’s score earned one of the four Tony nominations the show received (although none in the major categories, which is probably what caused the show’s 35 producers to pull the plug on Sunday; but you can see a few scenes from the show by clicking here.)

I hope I don’t come off as some Broadway Benedict Arnold if I say that the Brits do seem more comfortable playing with this kind of stuff than we do here in the U.S.  Inventive shows like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White, a video-projection pioneer that replaced conventional sets with computer-animated scenery of rooms and hallways in a ghost-ridden mansion; and Coram Boy, which mixed narrative recitations, 19th century period dance and Handel choruses, were more successful over there than here. 

The Woman in White ran for a year and a half on the West End but lasted just 109 performance on Broadway.  Coram Boy enjoyed two limited runs at London’s National Theatre but eked out just 30 performances at the Imperial Theatre where Billy Elliot is now playing.

Like Enron, The Woman in White and Coram Boy also fared poorly with the New York critics, who accuse them all of having more sizzle than steak.  Well, I welcome the innovative stylization but I disagree that these shows lack substance.   

Coram Boy dealt with the plight of orphans in the 18th century and the horrors of the slave trade.  While Enron plunged right into one of the major issues of our day: how to bridle the greed of capitalism without crippling the entrepreneurial spirit. 

Still, as noble as these intentions may be, what these shows haven’t figured out is how to involve the audience emotionally.  They are all head and almost no heart. 

The Broadway cast of Enron, lead by Norbert Leo Butz as the company’s ruthless former president Jeffrey Skilling; Gregory Itzin as its good old boy CEO Ken Lay, Stephen Kunken, as the diabolically nerdy chief financial officer Andrew Fastow and Marin Mazzie, playing a fictionalized character based on the sole woman in the corporate hierarchy who got out before things fell apart, are all terrific.  But you don’t want to root for any of them. I wasn’t bored at Enron but I wasn’t moved by it either.

Still, I’m really sorry to see it go.  And not just because I hate to see any show close.  Shows that deal with complicated subjects should have a place on Broadway.  Shows that experiment with innovative storytelling should have a place on Broadway.  And Enron was both. 

True-to-Life Characters in "Collected Stories"

We’ve now opened a branch of the Donald Margulies fan club at my house.  Our admiration for his witty and thought-provoking plays started last fall when my husband K and I saw Time Stands Still, the playwright’s affective drama about war journalists that closed in March but, it’s just been announced, is returning in September with three members—Laura Linney, Brian d’Arcy James, and Eric Bogosian—of its original four-person cast.

Our feelings about Margulies intensified after we rented the film version of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Dinner with Friends. And they blossomed into full-fledged adoration when we went to see the new revival of his Collected Stories, which opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre last week.

Margulies writes what once were revered—but are now too often dismissed—as well-crafted plays. His work is specific and metaphoric at the same time, rooted in individual people but often asking big questions about the role art plays in our lives.  The individuals in Collected Stories are Ruth Steiner, a respected short story writer who lives in Greenwich Village, and Lisa Morrison, the young woman who becomes her protégée. The stories in the play’s title are both the ones the characters write and the ones that we all tell to define who we are.

K had never seen the play before but it was the third time around for me.  I’d seen Collected Stories when it originally played at the Manhattan Theatre Club back in 1997 with Maria Tucci as Ruth and Debra Messing (before her “Will & Grace” days) as Lisa, and then a year later with the legendary actor and acting teacher Uta Hagen, then 79, and her own protégée, the young actress Lorca Simons. 

Now, Linda Lavin and Sarah Paulson have taken over the roles.  It’s been a special treat for me to have had the opportunity to see how each of the older actresses has played Ruth because I suspect the character was based on my first college advisor and writing teacher, the Greenwich Village short story writer Grace Paley. Tucci brought a wounded sensitivity to Ruth. Hagen imbued the part with her own intimidating majesty.  Lavin brings Grace, who died three years ago, vividly back to life for me.

I never visited Grace’s apartment (although I doubt it was as lavish as Santo Loquasto’s gorgeous set) and our relationship was nowhere near as intimate as the one between the characters in the play but we did sit many times in Grace's cozy office at school as she handed out the same mix of tea, tough-love criticism and shrewd advice that Ruth gives to Lisa. The similarities, however, end there.

The plot of Collected Stories was reportedly inspired by the poet Stephen Spender's plagiarism suit against David Leavitt who wrote a novel that echoed incidents in the older writer’s life and memoir. But the plot also resembles the story of the aging actress and the ambitious younger one in the classic Bette Davis film “All About Eve.”  I sided with the younger writer the first two times I saw Collected Stories but this time, I found myself identifying with the older one.

That’s probably a result of my own aging and the fact that I began teaching a couple of years ago and juggling myriad emotions about my own students. But credit also goes to Lavin and director Lynne Meadow who have created a Ruth who is both a maven and a mensch, qualities that are ideal for a mentor.  But they also allow us to see and feel Ruth’s vulnerabilities, the price she has paid for the sake of her art. Lisa has just as much stage time and Paulson holds her own but Ruth is a plum role for an older actress and Lavin, now 73, lets us savor her every bite.

After the show, K and I walked over to Orso for a late supper.  Shortly after our pastas arrived, Lavin came in and joined friends at a nearby table, perhaps to celebrate the Tony nomination she’d gotten that morning. When she was making her way back to the table after a trip to the ladies room, K stopped her. “I don’t usually do this,” he said (and he really doesn’t) “but we just saw the play and I had to thank you because you were wonderful.”  Lavin smiled.  “Stop me anytime for that,” she said, “I always have time to hear that.”

I was uncharacteristically tongue-tied, so let me say it now, Linda Lavin offers such a master class in how an actor should inhabit a part that we’re in danger of starting another fan club in our house.

Bonus Post: The Newest Theater Nominations

Yeah, I know.  I usually only post on Wednesdays and Saturdays.  But awards season is upon us. The Outer Critics Circle announced its nominations last Monday and a few days later, the New York Drama Critics Circle named its top shows. Just this week, the Lucille Lortels were handed out and both the Drama Desk and Tonys named the candidates for their awards (click here for Playbill's handy roundup of all the awards news thus far). 

Now it’s the turn of the Independent Theater Bloggers Association, the group of theater watchers who regularly express themselves online.  This morning, the ITBA, of which I’m proud to be a member, posted its nominations for the best of the season that just ended. Here are our choices:

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL
American Idiot
Everyday Rapture
Fela!

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY
In The Next Room (or the vibrator play)
Next Fall
Red
Superior Donuts
Time Stands Still

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY MUSICAL REVIVAL
Finian’s Rainbow
La Cage Aux Folles
A Little Night Music
Ragtime

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY PLAY REVIVAL
Brighton Beach Memoirs
Fences
Lend Me A Tenor
Oleanna
A View From The Bridge

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY  PLAY
circle mirror transformation
Clybourne Park
Orphans Home Cycle
The Temperamentals

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL
Bloodsong of Love
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson
The Scottsboro Boys
Yank!

OUTSTANDING OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL (PLAY OR MUSICAL)
The Glass Menagerie
A Lie of The Mind
Twelfth Night

OUTSTANDING OFF-OFF-BROADWAY SHOW
Alice in Slasherland
Girls in Trouble
In Fields Where They Lay
Lear
Rescue Me
Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War
The Soup Show
Viral

UNIQUE OFF-OFF-BROADWAY EXPERIENCE
The Lily’s Revenge

CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN OFF-OFF-BROADWAY THEATRE
Company XIV

OUTSTANDING SOLO SHOW/PERFORMANCE (ALL VENUE CATEGORIES)
A Boy and His Soul
Zero Hour

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE (ALL VENUE CATEGORIES) 

circle mirror transformation
A Lie of The Mind
Twelfth Night

Time Out for Tony Talk

As usual, so much has been written in the less than 24 hours since the Tony nominations were announced that there isn’t much left to say (although if you’re still in the market for some smart commentary click here to read the recap by my fellow blogger The Playgoer).  So instead of chiming in my two cents about the slaps in the face to The Addams Family, Enron, Race and Daniel Craig, or the pats on the back for Fela!, In the Next Room, Next Fall and Jan Maxwell, I’m going to talk about just one thing: how very sad it is that there are so few musicals with original scores this season that the nominators had to include music from the straight plays Enron and Fences. 

I’m not trying to diss the work done by Adam Cork for Enron or Branford Marsalis for Fences.  I haven’t even seen either of those shows yet.  But I am lamenting the fact that the Broadway musical is in such a dismal state that it can’t fill out the music part of its own category. You could blame the whole thing on the current obsession with branding.  At least that’s what I’m doing.

Branding has taken over the entire culture.  That’s why we get movie sequels and remakes, novels based on characters from other novels and, in the theater, jukebox musicals.  Producers know that it’s easier to sell shows with built-in name recognition so they build them around movies and TV shows like The Addams Family or repackage a musician’s past hits be they from the Green Day album American Idiot or the Stephen Sondheim songbook that fuels Sondheim on Sondheim.

And speaking of Sondheim, there’s no question that he’s a genius but so were Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers and the theater of their day found a way to nurture their very different talents.  As it did the varying musical styles of Sondheim and his contemporaries Jerry Herman and John Kander and Fred Ebb. 

We need to find a way to do that for a new generation of musical talent today. That means not putting down Elton John or Phil Collins or Paul Simon (I still love his score for The Capeman) when they write shows that don’t sound like Sondheim’s (the schadenfreude when John lost last year’s award for Best Original Score was thicker than the jam on a Linzer torte). 

Instead, we should all welcome the fact that these songwriters, who’ve already made their bones in the pop field, want to write for Broadway and we should encourage them to keep trying their hand at it.  We should champion new talents too.  Which means a few less revivals, a few more original musicals by folks like Next to Normal’s Tom Kitt, In the Heights’ Lin-Manuel Miranda and Passing Strange’s Stew. 

All their shows may not be great ones. But Sondheim, Porter, Herman, Kander & Ebb and Rodgers and Hammerstein flopped at times too.  Maybe Broadway, where musicals now routinely cost eight figures to produce, can’t afford that kind of experimentation any more but isn’t that what nonprofits like Roundabout, Lincoln Center and the Public Theater should be doing?  Which is why, even though I wasn’t crazy about the show, I give the Public Theater props for mounting the emo musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

I love a show tune as much as the next theater geek but I tell you, I’d be delighted if the Best Original Score ballot in 2020 were composed of Lady Antebellum, Radiohead, Jay-Z, Tom Kitt for his fourth or fifth Broadway show and some 25 year-old wunderkind who'd recently come out of the BMI Musical Theater Workshop. 

"Promises, Promises" Doesn't Meet Its Obligations

The first Broadway show my pit musician husband K ever played was the original production of Promises, Promises back in 1968. So, there was no question that we were going to see the show’s first ever Broadway revival, which opened at The Broadway Theatre last Sunday.

The 1968 production drew raves (Clive Barnes opened his New York Times review by saying that he wanted more to “send it a congratulatory telegram than write a review.”)  Audiences agreed and the show went on to play for a then-impressive 1,281 performances.

There was a lot to cheer.  Promises, Promises is an adaptation of the classic 1960 Billy Wilder comedy “The Apartment” with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.  The stage version starred the great Jerry Orbach in Lemmon’s role as Chuck Baxter, a young office worker so eager to get ahead in his company that he lets the firm’s married executives use his apartment for their trysts with the hope that they’ll repay him with a promotion. Complications arise when the object of his own affection, a waitresses in the executive dining room named Fran Kubelik (then played by Jill O’Hara) turns out to be one boss’s mistress. 

Neil Simon, then at the top of his wise-cracking game, wrote the musical’s book.  An up-and-coming young choreographer named Michael Bennett created the dances and the ensemble was filled with dancers—Kelly (then Carole) Bishop, Baayork Lee and Donna McKechnie—who would shortly create iconic roles in A Chorus Line. (Click here to see a YouTube clip of them in the Promises, Promises showstopper “Turkey Lurkey Time”).

But it was the score, composed by that era’s cooler-than-cool music men Burt Bacharach and Hal David, that drew the most attention. Barnes, for one, couldn’t say enough about the show’s “modern pop and delightful” music and its “happily colloquial lyrics.”

It is all, alas, a different song now. Promises, Promises’ sexist premise doesn’t sit all that well with post-feminist audiences.  And yes, I know that “Mad Men” is supposed to have made bed-hopping men and the women who adore them hip again. But this new production of the musical lacks the self-satirical irony that makes such retro behavior an acceptably guilty pleasure on the TV series.

Clever casting might have helped but the leads in this production are off the mark. Sean Hayes, who will probably forever be known as the outrageously gay Jack on the old NBC sitcom “Will & Grace” and who recently came out in “The Advocate” (click here to read that) takes on the Lemmon/Orbach role. Hayes is a charming comedian and sings just well enough but, and I feel bad saying this, he works better as a supporting player than a leading man.

Kristin Chenoweth certainly has leading-lady chops and I get why the producers decided to go with her as Fran. Chenoweth’s teeny physique and Minnie Mouse speaking voice do suggest the character's girlishness and, of course, there’s the hope that the fans who discovered her in Wicked when they were girls will come out to see her in Promises, Promises now that they’re on the threshold of young womanhood.  But her feistiness has always been part of Chenoweth’s appeal and that’s not who Fran is. Plus, director Rob Ashford and costume designer Bruce Pask have done her up to look like a sophisticate (more glamorous Betty Draper than the naive outer borough Peggy Olson from the first season of “Mad Men”) and that’s not who Fran should be either.

Chenoweth distorts the show in another way too. To beef up a smallish role that had only two solo numbers, the revival has interpolated two of Bacharach and David’s biggest hits—“I Say a Little Prayer” and “A House Is Not a Home—into the score, even though their lyrics don’t fit the show’s action or her character’s motivation.  K, who still knows the score by heart after all these years, shook his head and sighed heavily at the conclusion of each of those numbers.

The one bright spot, judging by the cheers at the curtain call, was Katie Finneran’s second-act performance as a woman the jilted Chuck picks up in a bar.  Finneran gives a go-for-broke, physically comedic performance that might have made Lucille Ball proud. And although Finneran was a bit too broad for my taste (Christine Baranski’s world-weary tartness in the 1997 Encores! staging seems more fitting for the role) she did liven things up.

But don’t panic if you’ve already bought tickets for the current production.  It’s fun to see familiar faces like Hayes and Chenoweth's in-person, Ashford has created all kinds of stage business to keep you engaged, and supporting players like Finneran and Dick Latessa as Chuck’s nosey next door neighbor, who fortuitously is also a doctor, are pros who know how to entertain. You’ll probably have a good enough time. Even if not a memorable one.

As we walked down the street for a late supper at the venerable Italian restaurant Remi, K wistfully reminisced about the original production of Promises, Promises.  Finally, over glasses of wine and bowls of pasta that added up to far more than the $86 Chuck sang about paying for his apartment in the show, we acknowledged that sometimes, you just can’t go home again.   

"American Idiot" Brings Punk to Broadway

Broadway producers have been conducting a secret guerrilla war over the past year.  Their unsuspecting prey: straight guys in their late 20s to early 40s who usually go to see a musical only when their mom is celebrating a birthday or their girlfriends or wives make attendance a prerequisite for post-show nookie. 

The current revival of Hair, the original rock musical, was the first salvo, although it aimed more at Baby Boomers.  It was quickly followed by Rock of Ages, the boisterous but amiable tribute to the big-haired metal bands of the ‘80s.  There have even been a few outlying skirmishes like the emo-musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson that is running at the Public Theater through May 30. 

But last week, they rolled out the heavy artillery: American Idiot, a stage version of the eponymous 2004 concept album by the punk revivalists Green Day opened at the St. James Theatre, where in recent years such Broadway classics as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Gypsy have played.

The guys sitting in the row behind my sister Joanne and me probably think of a forum as an internet site where people exchange gripes, a gypsy as a punch line in a Monty Python routine, and a Broadway musical as something to be avoided at all costs. But there they were, four abreast, bottles of beer in hand (the audience is allowed to carry drinks to their seats) and fists pumping in the air as the guitars in the on-stage band screeched the title song that opens the show.

If you’re a diehard traditionalist, you may not like their being there or the show they’re championing.  For this is really more a concert than a musical. The show is nearly all sung through and the lyrics are hard to follow without the album notes in hand or the words emblazoned in your memory from hours of repeat play.

Nor is there much of a book for American Idiot. The sketchy plot (concocted by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and the show’s director Michael Mayer, who won a Tony for the rock-inspired Spring Awakening) follows the lives of three blue collar guys who make bad choices—one becomes a teen dad, another signs up to fight in Iraq and the third is seduced into drugs by a Mephistophelean dealer known as St. Jimmy. (The bar in the St. James lobby has been temporarily named after the dealer and, clueless as I am, I thought at first that it was a play on the theater’s name). 

But if you’re a more free-thinking fan of Broadway musicals then you may find yourself rooting for American Idiot. Its music isn't my genre of choice but I couldn’t help but respond to the enthusiastism of the young folks in the audience. Just as at the Metropolitan Opera House, the most avid and vocal fans are in the cheap seats up in the rafters. And so while, the greyheads around me in the orchestra sat largely stone-faced, the shaggy-haired ones in the balcony cheered after each number (click here to watch some highlights from the show).     

Even I appreciated how Mayer pulled all kinds of tricks out of his hat (including aerial ballets) to camouflage the missing narrative. Christine Jones’ arresting set design is anchored by three dozen TV screens of different sizes that attempt to supply a storyline with news images from the last decade. 

The energetic 19-member cast, lead by Spring Awakening’s John Gallagher, Jr. and the lovely and affective Rebecca Naomi Jones from Passing Strange, barely stops moving throughout the show’s 90 minutes, although I wish Steven Hoggett’s choreography had been less derivative of the moves Bill T. Jones did for Spring Awakening.  I also wish Mayer had treated the black male characters less stereotypically; if the black guy in one number in the second act had a larger codpiece it might have poked me in the eye and I was sitting in the eighth row.

Green Day’s melodies, including some of the band's other songs interpolated into the score, are catchy enough but, at heart, this is a jukebox musical, which means what book there is has to be gerrymandered around the songs. I wish Armstrong (who has professed to have been a show-tune geek as a kid) and his bandmates had written an original score. But judging from the response of the guys sitting behind me, the show seems well on its way to winning the hearts and minds of its target audience. 

Totally Disarmed by "The Aliens"

So many big shows have been opening on Broadway this month in the mad dash before the season officially ends on Friday that lots of smaller ones have opened and closed off-Broadway without my getting a chance to even think about seeing them. But there was no chance that I was going to miss Annie Baker’s new play The Aliens, which opened at the tiny Rattlestick Playwrights Theater down in the Village last week.

This is the third of Baker's plays to be produced in the city in the last two years. I missed the first Body Awareness but the second, circle mirror transformation, a deceptively quiet comedy about an acting class at a community center in rural Vermont, was one of my favorite shows last year. It persuaded me (and a lot of other folks too) that its playwright, who is only 29, is an astonishingly gifted and mature writer and could be one of the most important voices in the American theater for years to come (click here to read a profile about her in The Village Voice).

The new play only confirms the earlier promise. It’s in the tradition of those Sam Shepard plays about sad and angry young men but Baker filters their disaffections through a more ruminative, feminine sensibility that makes this now-familiar story seem almost new.

The Aliens centers around a summer in the lives of three young men—two slackers who have dropped out of college, failed at keeping together a band and now simply hang around the back of a local café and the callow high school student who works at the place and falls in with them.  The older guys smoke dope, fantasize about the songs and novels that will make them famous and attempt to mentor the younger one. The dialogue is often funny but the play seems, at first, like a slice of somewhat dull life. In fact, about a dozen people left at intermission.

Don't make that mistake if you go, and you should. For an event in the second act brings new meaning to the ramblings in the first and an unexpected poignancy to the entire piece.  The director Sam Gold, who also collaborated with Baker on circle mirror transformation, works with a deft subtlety that matches hers.  His production—from Andrew Lieberman’s realistic set and Bobby Tilley’s witty costumes (check out the slogans on the T shirts) to the mood-perfect lighting by Tyler Miocoleau and evocative sound design by Bart Fasbender—is so natural that you feel at times as though you’re eavesdropping on real life.

That may also be because the three actors embody their characters so fully. Erin Gann is all jitters and intensity as Jasper, the slacker who idolizes the blue-collar writer Charles Bukowski.  Dane Dehaan is achingly believable as the gawky teen Evan.  (Deehaan’s bio says he will be one of the patients on Season Three of HBO’s great series “In Treatment,” which is just one more reason to Tivo that show when it returns later this year.) 

And Michael Chernus, who happens to be Baker’s real-life boyfriend, makes the spacey KJ the emotional heart and soul of the play. He has a bravura moment that, like much of circle mirror transformation, is rooted in the acting exercises that actors play to develop their craft.  Their challenge is to make those moments seem real.  Chernus made his heartbreakingly so.

The Aliens is running through May 23.  Try not to miss it.  As for me, I don't intend to miss anything Baker does from now on.