"Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812" Shines Brightly But Illuminates Little

The Oxford Dictionary declared "post-truth" to be 2016's word of the year but in the theater world, I think a better choice would have been the word "immersive." 

Everywhere you looked, folks seemed to be adding some kind of interactive element to their production, be it something as simple as pumping the aroma of pies into the theater (and selling them during intermission) as Broadway's Waitress does or as intricate as staging a James Joyce novella in an actual Fifth Avenue mansion and having audience members join the actors at a dinner inspired by the one in the story as the Irish Rep did with The Dead 1904, which ends a month-long run at The American Irish Historical Society tonight.

But nowhere is the trend more celebrated than it is in Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, Dave Malloy's musical adaptation of a selection from Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace." It has turned all of the Imperial Theatre into its playing space, with seats onstage as well as in the traditional orchestra area, actors scampering up and down the aisles and along specially built catwalks and vendors peddling vodka and giving away aromatic pierogies to some lucky audience members including my theatergoing buddy Bill but not, alas, me.

The production mimics, albeit in a much more lavish way, the experiences of the earlier off-Broadway versions of the show done at Ars Nova, in a tent in the Meatpacking District and in another tent next door to its current home. So if you saw and liked The Great Comet in any of those incarnations, you'll no doubt like it here.

I felt so-so about the show when Bill and I saw it downtown and I still feel that way (click here to read my original review). The Great Comet is an ingratiating show but, despite its source material, it's not really a substantive one.

Malloy and his inventive director Rachel Chavkin (this production's true MVP) throw a great party but they fail to dramatize the complex inner lives of Tolstoy's lovelorn aristocrats or to make it clear why they even wanted to retell Tolstoy. Instead, they've just put a synopsis of the plot and a family tree in the Playbill. And I saw lots of people intensely consulting both during the intermission.

Still, the new leads who have joined the Broadway production do much with the little they've been given. The pop singer Josh Groban, almost unrecognizable in a fat suit, shines as the clumsy and cuckolded Pierre. 

Groban has a marvelous tenor voice but he also started off as an actor and he uses both talents to evoke something of the awkward grace and nobility that have endeared the character to generations of readers (click here to read about how he created his performance).

Although Groban is clearly the show's marquee name, the final curtain call bow is given to newcomer Denée Benton (click here for an interview with her) who now plays the naive Natasha, the role that was originated off-Broadway by Phillipa Soo, who went on to play Elizabeth Schuyler in Hamilton and is scheduled to star as the title character in the upcoming musical Amélie.

It is the tale of Natasha's entry into Russian society and the three very different men who vie for her affections that provides the storyline for The Great Comet and praise should be given to the creative team for casting first an Asian-American woman and, now, an African-African woman in the role.

Benton is lovely, looks wonderful in the Cinderella-like gowns Paloma Young has created and has a delicate soprano that is just right for the character. But its her simple presence that may be most significant.

Set designer Mimi Lien has placed tables around the lip of the stage (click here to read more about her concept) and I saw a little black girl of about eight or nine and her mom sitting at one of them. The little girl, whose dark chocolate skin tone exactly matched Benton's, couldn't take her eyes off the actress and her enchantment was exactly the kind of immersive experience the theater has always offered. And which has always been magic enough for me.

The Top 10 Shows That I Was Happiest to See in 2016...Plus Some Other Looking Back

Most 10 Bests list came out around mid-December so I'm obviously arriving really late to the party with this one.  Which is probably OK because I can't even pretend to say which were the best shows of last year—or any year.

The major critics (and my theatergoing buddy Bill) loved The Band's Visit (Bill even bought tickets for a return visit) but I found it to be only so-so and had far more fun watching its star Tony Shaloub as he graciously worked the table and charmed the guests at a cast member's birthday party at a restaurant around the corner where Bill and I had dinner after the show.

Similarly, the critics roundly dissed A Bronx Tale, while I had a good time (click here to read my review).  What I've learned over the years is that there's no one empirical standard and that the best use of the year-end bests lists is as a guide to which critics' taste line up with mine and can serve as reliable guides when I'm trying to determine whether to see something or not. 

So I invite you to do the same with mine.  I enjoyed a bunch of stuff this past year and my initial list had 20 shows. My final choices (listed alphabetically) may not have drawn the most critical acclaim or earned the most money but they're the ones that I'm happiest to have seen because they didn't just entertain me but helped me see the world around me differently and did it with distinctive flair:

The Effect: British playwright Lucy Prebble and director David Cromer probed the meaning of love and the greed of Big Pharma in this rom-com about a medical study on an experimental anti-depressant and its effect on both the test subjects and the scientists overseeing it. The result was both thought-provoking and heart-gladdening.

Familiar: Her other play Eclipsed about women caught up in the Liberian civil wars drew most of the attention and a run on Broadway but I also enjoyed Danai Gurira's domestic comedy about a Zimbabwean family at Playwrights Horizons, which, under Rebecca Taichman's skillful direction, dug deeper than we usually see into the experiences of affluent blacks and immigrants living in contemporary America.

Hadestown: Anaïs Mitchell's roots-music spin on the Greek myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice was my favorite new score this year. And Rachel Chavkin not only beautifully staged the show  at New York Theatre Workshop but highlighted its allusions to the growing schisms between the haves and have-nots in today's world.

Men on Boats: Just as Hamilton reimagined the Founding Fathers as people of color, Jaclyn Backhaus' witty adventure tale about the 1869 expedition that charted the Grand Canyon cast women as the explorers and she and director Will Davis allowed them to display the kind of swagger and bravado that men—onstage and off—have always enjoyed.

Oslo: The name refers to the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords and playwright J.T. Rogers and director Bartlett Sher have turned the back story about the Norwegian diplomats who brought about that first official agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization into a surprisingly entertaining thriller that Lincoln Center will transfer for a Broadway run at its Vivian Beaumont Theater in April.

Sense & Sensibility: Even if, like me, you're not a big Jane Austen fan, you'll probably still be delighted by the Bedlam theater company's delightful adaptation of her first novel, which uses story-theater techniques and sensational acting to recreate Austen's tale about love among the 18th century British gentry.

Skeleton Crew: Dominique Morisseau's drama about factory workers facing a plant closing shares a concern about the decline of the American working class with Lynn Nottage's Sweat but Ruben Santiago-Hudson's dynamic staging at the Atlantic Theater and a terrific ensemble made this one hit me harder.

Small Mouth Sounds: It seemed that Rachel Chavkin could do no wrong last year and her staging of Beth Wohl's wonderfully original play about a disparate group of people at a silent retreat didn't make as much noise as Hadestown or Chavkin's much-lauded Broadway production of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 but it was one of the season's true treats.

Vietgone: Using rap music, hipster speech and graphic-novel-style video projections, playwright Qui Nguyen and director May Adrales spun a refreshingly different—but ultimately touching—story about the Vietnam War, based on Nguyen's parent's experiences of moving to this country after the fall of Saigon.

The Wolves: The Playwrights Realm focuses on works by "early career playwrights" and it backed a winner with Sarah DeLappe's first-produced play about the members of a girls' soccer team who, under Lila Neugebauer's sharp direction, talk about everything from having their periods to geo-politics.

  

I also had a good time reading other people's lists and here are five of my favorites that I think you might enjoy too; you can check them out by justing click on the title:

The Most Newsworthy Theater Events of 2016

The New York Theater blog put together a month-by-month rundown of all the year's major theater news, from the we-don't-care-if-there's-a-blizzard success of the first BroadwayCon in January to the debate that broke out last month over whether the Rockettes should perform at Donald Trump's inauguration.

The Best LGBT-Inclusive Shows

Plays and musicals about people all along the gender spectrum have begun to move beyond the traditional coming-out story and The Advocate magazine celebrated the best of them.

The Best Celebrate the Best

In the spirit of it takes one to know one, Playbill asked some of the top people in the theater to name their top theater experiences of 2016.

The Worst Theater of the Year

It's traditional for year-end lists to celebrate theater's best but a bit of schadenfreude can also be fun and amNewYork let's it rip with its list of the biggest flops.

The Critical Consensus

Playbill helpfully aggregated the choices of several major critics.

PLUS....

All Things Hamilton

I mean, how can we look back at 2016 without talking about the greatest theater sensation of the year.

Happy New Year from Me to Each of You

Here's a toast to us all: may the next 365 days be filled with love, laughter, fortitude to get through the bad stuff and, of course, the sustaining comfort of good theater. Cheers!

Why "Finian"s Rainbow" Doesn't Glow for Me

Melissa Errico visited the cable news show "On Stage" this past weekend to talk about her latest show, the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival of Finian's Rainbow, which has been extended through Jan. 29. Depending greatly on who's asking the questions, "On Stage" interviews can be a trial. 

But Errico handled hers like the pro she is and was charming, funny and such a terrific advocate for her show that it made me want to see it. Until I remembered that I already had seen it and had been only so-so impressed by it.

Although I have to confess that, once again, I seem to be playing the Scrooge role because judging by the grades on Show-Score, the site that aggregates reviews, most of the critics were quite taken by this musical fable about an Irish man who steals a magical pot of gold from a leprechaun and flees to the fictional American state of Missitucky, where he and his daughter Sharon encounter singing and dancing sharecroppers, a labor organizer with a mute sister and a bunch of crooked politicians, including a racist senator who is eventually transformed into a black man.

Finian, which will celebrate its 70th anniversary next month, was considered an innovative and even daring show when it opened in 1947. It brazenly took on the issue of bigotry by satirizing the white supremacist senator Theodore G. Bilbo and was the first show on Broadway to feature an integrated ensemble of black and white singers and dancers.

The score, with music by Burton Lane and lyrics by Yip Harburg, features such still-beloved  songs as "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" "Look to the Rainbow" and "Old Devil Moon" and is considered by connoisseurs to be one of Broadway's best.

In his opening night review, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson declared that the show put "the American musical stage several steps forward for the imagination with which it is written and for the stunning virtuosity of the performance." And as I said, lots of critics love this current production too (click here to read some of their raves). 

But there's a hokiness about Finian's Rainbow that has never sat right with me (click here to read my review of the 2009 Broadway revival with Kate Baldwin, Cheyenne Jackson and Jim Norton) and in many ways, the Irish Rep's stripped down version (the 1947 original boasted a cast of 56 and even the 2009 revival had 30, while this one makes do with 13) struck me as little more diverting than an average high school production.

The Rep's revival, adapted and directed by its artistic director Charlotte Moore, has condensed the plot, making the story even more difficult to follow than it originally was. And the production is so bare-bones that costume designer David Toser simply put a scarf on Errico's head to indicate a major costume change. 

The entire cast works hard but while they all have great voices, they're a mixed bag when it comes to acting. Ryan Silverman, who usually plays the role of the labor organizer Woody, was out the night my sister and I saw the show and so we gave some leeway to his understudy Matt Gibson.

But we didn't have to make any excuses for Errico, who first played the part of Sharon in another Irish Rep production 12 years ago. She looks great and has a glorious voice that is just right for the show's sweet melodies and it was lovely to hear it in an intimate space with no amplification. Still at 46, Errico really is too old to play the role of a winsome ingénue (click here to read her views about that). 

The best thing about the show is the newcomer Mark Evans, who is making his New York debut in the role of the leprechaun Og. Evans puts such a delightfully novel spin on the character that he comes across like the wunderkind in the high school show whom everyone expects to move on to better things. And I'm betting that he'll do exactly that.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

And may your day be merry and bright, sparkling in whatever way you choose.

"The Babylon Line" Doesn't Go Anywhere

Earlier this year, the playwright Richard Greenberg released a collection of odd little pieces that weren't entirely fiction but not quite memoir either. Instead they unspool like the unanchored ramblings of the guy everyone tries to avoid at the office holiday party. And, alas, The Babylon Line, the new Greenberg play running at Lincoln Center Theater's Mitzi E. Newhouse through Jan. 22, comes off pretty much the same way.

It's framed as the memory of a now-elderly man named Aaron Port who looks back at a time in the late '60s when, needing money, he took the eponymous train line from Manhattan to Long Island to teach a writing class for an adult education program in the Ur-suburb of Levittown.

His students are a group of bored housewives and a couple of emotionally damaged men, most of whom wanted to take some other course but settled for this one when they couldn't get their first choice. But among them is the neighborhood oddball Joan Dellamond, who enthralls the married Aaron with her natural writing talent and earthy sexiness.  

It's a promising enough premise, and it seems ideal for Greenberg who has chronicled midcentury middle-class angst in such plays as The American Plan and The Assembled Parties. But the playwright seems flummoxed by what to do with the Babylon plot once he's set it up.

Instead of dramatizing the story, he lets Aaron narrate its developments in direct address to the audience. Then, the actors, under Terry Kinney's flat direction, perform short scenes that illustrate some of the revelations, read excerpts from their writing assignments and deliver a few decent jokes.

The cast, particularly the supporting players who include such heavyweights as Frank Wood, Randy Graff and Julie Halston, is first-rate. But the characters they're given to play are just thin stereotypes: the angry war vet, the bossy Jewish matron and her ditzy and mousy sidekicks.

The relationship between Aaron and Joan is pretty flat too, although it's hard to fault Josh Radnor and Elizabeth Reaser who do the best with what little they've been given.

The pieces Aaron's students write get better as the course—and the show, which runs 2 hours and 20 minutes—progresses but there's still more telling than showing. And ultimately the individual stories, like the play they're in, go nowhere.

"In Transit" Stalls Due to Stereotypes

It took me awhile to get the double meaning of the title In Transit, the a cappella musical that opened last Sunday at Circle in the Square. The show is set primarily in the subway so I got that transit reference right away. But it also focuses on a supposedly random group of people (although we later discover that they're connected in ways that I suppose I shouldn't spoil) and their lives are in flux, or in transit. Alas, neither meaning worked for me.

For starters, who wants to see a story set in the subway?  Most of us New Yorkers consider the subway a necessary evil and want to spend as little time there as we can. And tourists are unlikely to get jokes that reference things like Dr. Zizmor, the now-retired dermatologist whose ads were a regular fixture in subway cars.

The people populating the show's cars aren't likely to draw ticket buyers either. By coincidence I saw In Transit on the same day I'd listened to an oral history about the making of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee on the Broadway Backstory podcast (which by the way if you aren't listening to, you should be listening to; click here to check it out).

The characters in Spelling Bee are a motley crew too but each has a distinctive personality and set of problems. Plus they all share the common goal of wanting to win the bee, which binds them together and gives the audience a rooting interest in them.

By contrast, the main characters in In Transit are just a bunch of people who all take the subway. But they could just as easily have bumped into one another at a Starbucks.

Primarily white and entirely young and middle class, they include an actress juggling auditions and a day job as an office temp, a laid-off junior exec who can only find work at Staples, a woman trying to get over being ditched by the guy she moved to New York to be with and a gay couple planning to get married although one still isn't out to his mother.

None of them—or anyone else in the show—rises beyond the level of stereotype. When the gay couple goes to Texas to reveal their marriage plans to the closeted one's family, I knew right away what his mother was going to say and what his fire-and-brimstone minister was going to say and they both said exactly those things.

Meanwhile, back in New York, a black subway musician (played at the performance my friend Jessie and I saw by beat-box master Chesney Snow, who alternates the role with Steven "HeaveN" Cantor) provides the rhythmic beats for the instrument-free numbers and fills the role of the Magical Negro who seems to exist only to dispense wise advice—and even free train fares—to the confused yuppies.

The book, music and lyrics for In Transit were written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez, James-Allen Ford, Russ Kaplan and Sara Wordsworth, four friends who sang a cappella together and began developing the show 15 years ago, long before Anderson-Lopez broke out with the song "Let It Go," which she and her husband, Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon composer Robert Lopez, wrote for the movie "Frozen" (click here to read more about her).

In Transit's songs are fine and a few are even better than that, although I found myself wishing that a couple of them had been accompanied by instruments instead of the vocal harmonizing arranged by Deke Sharon, who did the same for the "Pitch Perfect" movies (click here to read moreabout him).

But what In Transit really needed was an experienced book writer or at least a strong dramaturge who might have helped craft a compelling narrative. Director Kathleen Marshall does what she can by keeping the show moving. Donyale Werle's set centers around a treadmill that serves as the train tracks and a conveyor belt for the bits of furniture that move in and out to signal scene changes.

And the top-notch cast, lead by Margot Seibert, James Snyder, Justin Guarini, Telly Leung and Erin Mackey, races on and off and jumps into and out of costumes (kudos to Clint Ramos for one spectacular dress, worn with just the right swag by Moya Angela) as they play the main characters as well as supporting roles, all the while harmonizing.

They're all ingratiating and in terrific voice. If only they'd been given something to sing about.