Dead Man Walking

Ghost the Musical at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater

           If you’ve seen the 1990 film Ghost, starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg, you’ll know something about the West End’s most recent contribution to the Great White Way, Ghost the Musical, a gaudy affair with a book by Ghost’s screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, and music and lyrics by Dave Stewart, one half of the British pop duo the Eurythmics, and “Man in the Mirror” songwriter Glen Ballard.  Both Ghosts have flat and uninteresting story lines, employ flamboyant yet lackluster special effects, and only caught my interest in the scenes employing Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg did it in the movie), a con-woman who poses as a psychic until discovering—to her dismay—that she actually is one.
           If you haven’t seen either Ghost, perhaps a quick orientation to the musical is in order.  Banker Sam Wheat (Richard Fleeshman) is living his dream, fully equipped with a high-paying job, loving girlfriend, Molly (Caissie Levy), and supportive best friend and assistant, Carl (Bryce Pinkham).  Just when everything seems to be going his way, Sam is shot by vigilante Willie Lopez (Michael Balderrama).  However, instead of passing on naturally, Sam is trapped between worlds as a ghost, unable to touch or affect the world around him, and unheard and unseen by regular humans.  In his new ethereal form he learns that, thanks to Lopez, Molly too is in grave danger.  Desperate to communicate with her, he invokes psychic Oda Mae Brown, who can hear but not see him. In a race against time, Sam and Oda Mae rush to keep Molly out of danger and bring Sam’s killer to justice. It’s a story delivered by performers who, somewhat like the dead, are patently uninteresting; people whose side you would disincline to be on even if, among the chaos, it were clear whose side you should be on.
           Not that, if you go to see Ghost the Musical on Broadway, you’ll necessarily notice the plot. That’s because the team that staged Ghost couldn’t get past the fact that it is based on a movie, even if it is a movie that is nearly devoid of embellishments. The result is a musical that is painfully flashy, loud, and equipped with so many lights, explosions, and unnecessary luminosities as to blind the audience. Screens replace set pieces, stage depth, and even dancers.  (Yes, as the ensemble trots behind the main characters, colored outlines do the same dance moves on the monitors behind them, which is excruciatingly redundant. What is the point? Are the show's British producers hoping, like factory owners turning to robot workers, to eventually entirely replace their dancers with images on a display?)
           As if that weren’t enough, the score is so derivative; the lyrics so uninspired that if you listen closely enough, they sound the same number after number.  Even Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s entertaining performance as Brown couldn’t match the soul-numbing repetitiveness and stupidity of her song “I’m Outta Here,” in which she celebrates the acquisition of ten million dollars with such vapid lines as “I’m outta here! I’m off to the Bahamas / I’m outta here! So pack my pink pajamas.”

           Would that something could be done to awaken Ghost the Musical.  Its case is simply hopeless.  It’s a puzzling olio of mostly maladroit actors and actresses and a creative team with no clear compass.  My guess is that, like Sam Wheat, the musical will soon expire, but unlike him, it will not wake up again, supernaturally or otherwise.

Practice, Practice, Practice Improves on Perfection

One night of The Mikado at Carnegie Hall            

            There is not much to say about Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado that has not already been said.  Suffice it to say that there are few teams alive today, or any who have lived during this or the previous century, who had comparable brains, ability, or talent.  W.S. Gilbert was one of the most brilliant librettists ever to walk this earth, and Arthur Sullivan was his perfect complement, a cheery, beautiful composer who note by note unites an orchestra into a living, breathing being designed to output their masterworks.  The Mikado, being one of their later works (in fact, the one that saved their partnership from ruin), was a thinly veiled comment on the incompetence of the English government disguised as a farce set in Japan.

            This idea came to Gilbert’s always-fertile mind when a Japanese sword fell off his wall.  He and Sullivan had disagreed over the premise of their next opera—Gilbert wanted to do fantasy, a tale of a “magic lozenge,” while Sullivan was inclined to write only for the sorts of pieces he and his partner had already written. But with the fateful fall of the sword Gilbert had discovered the solution to their problem.  He could write of ridiculous, fanciful happenings, and justify them by claiming that such goings-on are regular in Japan, while Sullivan could write for a work of realistic fiction, one that plausibly could (in a topsy-turvy world) happen.

            The one-night Collegiate Chorale production of The Mikado at Carnegie Hall, which took place on the night of April the 10^th, is one of the more enjoyable evenings I have spent at the theater in recent memory.  At the end of the performance I could hardly believe what I had just experienced.  Coupled with the unmatched genius of Gilbert and Sullivan was the performance of a cast and chorus of a kind unlikely to meet in one place ever again, a performance that floored me, to say the least, by its unwelcome end.  The cast read their lines from binders, frequently stood at incorrect podiums, and giggled in the middle of lines, and it is hard to find anything I could care less about.  What a mind-blowing and potent combination of the lyrics of an uber-genius and a cast so perfectly matched to their roles as to blow all Hollywood’s casting directors out of the water of their generously heated pools.

            You, of course, know the story of The Mikado (for who doesn’t?), but if I may I will reiterate—the Emperor of Japan’s runaway son, Nanki-Poo (Jason Danieley, Next to Normal) arrives at the small town of Titipu to claim his love, Yum-Yum (Kelli O’Hara, of South Pacific and on leave from Nice Work if You Can Get It), whose intended husband, Ko-Ko (the enormously, fantastically talented Christopher Fitzgerald, who rightly earned a Tony for his turn as Og in Finian’s Rainbow), he had thought had been beheaded for flirting.  However, the townspeople of Titipu thought this rule unfair and so found a loophole in making the man next scheduled to be beheaded, which happened to be Ko-Ko, the new Lord High Executioner.  They reasoned that Ko-Ko could execute no one else until he killed himself.  Therefore, Ko-Ko is still scheduled to marry Yum-Yum but offers her up to Nanki-Poo as a wife for one month if, at the end of that month, he will agree to be executed in Ko-Ko’s place.  All seems to be going according to plan, but, as they inevitably do, complications ensue when Nanki-Poo’s father, the Mikado himself (Chuck Cooper), arrives and insists Nanki-Poo marry his betrothed, a hideous old woman (Victoria Clark) who had claimed him back at the Mikado’s court.  Secrets are kept, mistakes are made and then unsuccessfully rectified with hilarious results, and we hear some of the best songs ever written, including “A wand’ring minstel I,” “Three little maids from school are we,” "Here's a how-de-do," “A more humane Mikado” (from which originally springs the adage “Let the punishment fit the crime”), and, most memorably, a rewritten version of the ingenious “As someday it may happen,” which condemns Twitter, the Kardashians, quoters of early Sondheim, and, especially, Gilbert fans who complain when his lyrics are altered. Mr. Fitzgerald, who sings it, outshone even Broadway’s brightest up on the acoustically perfect Carnegie stage with a rendition of Ko-Ko that (dare I say?) Groucho Marx might find hard to contend with.  

            Meanwhile, Ms. O'Hara maintained her incredible talent with a genuine star turn as Yum-Yum, belting in all the right places.  Chuck Cooper played a nice, very jolly Mikado, and of course you could never write off two very funny if less prominent gentlemen, Steve Rosen, who played the noble Lord Pish-Tush, and Jonathan Freeman, a magnificent Poo-Bah (who holds so many positions that there is no room here to name them all).  The two, along with Fitzgerald's Ko-Ko, deliver exceedingly well in the excellent number, "I Am So Proud," famous for its superb tongue twister referring to the feeling of awaiting execution: "To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock, in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock, awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock, from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block."  Say that fast five times.

            All in all a better time could not have been had by any in New York that night, if such a thing is possible, and there is surely nowhere else I would have rather been.  After all, if there is a perfect night on Broadway, everything will go right, as it did, and if there is a heaven, Gilbert and Sullivan’s greatest work is playing over the loudspeakers.