Where Everyone Goes Mad, Eventually

A Delicate Balance at the Golden Theatre

John Lithgow and Glenn Close in A Delicate Balance.

            The play’s not the thing, exactly, when it comes to the slightly lethargic revival of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance at the Golden Theatre.  Neither is the cast, though the packed houses for the production, which opened on November 20^th, are no doubt drawn by the formidable presences of John Lithgow, Bob Balaban, (to a lesser extent) Martha Plimpton, and, notably, Glenn Close, returning to the New York stage after a 22-year absence.  It’s the execution.  Director Pam McKinnon, who succeeded so enormously with her previous Albee revival, 2012’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, puts a bloodless spin on this play that leaves its already bloated second act seeming even longer and less significant.

            Most of the meatiest dialogue in this, Albee’s tenth play, is delegated to the matriarch and patriarch of a wealthy suburban family, Agnes (Close) and Tobias (Lithgow).  Agnes’s finest hour comes in the play’s opening scene, when she discusses with Tobias—or, rather, talks at him about—the possibility that she may one day go insane, leaving him to fend for himself.  Does the fact that she is speculating about her own possible insanity prove, inherently, that she isn’t?  Agnes backtracks, starts, and rests while her browbeaten husband nods agreeably, perfectly setting up the eventual revelation of her character’s manipulative and imperious nature.  The scene, which lasts for fifteen minutes or so, is glorious.

            Then Lindsay Duncan enters as Agnes’s alcoholic sister, Claire.  Lindsay Duncan is, clearly, talented.  She puts on a not-entirely-vain effort to lift the incredibly morbid script, which, as the resident comic relief, is ostensibly her job.  But for whatever reason, she halts the fire.  From her entrance on, the show is almost entirely dead.  The characters are completely audible, but the spectator feels as if they’re whispering.  The fire that ran through, say the last actress to play Claire, Elaine Stritch (in the 1996 revival), does not run through the actors in this production.  Much of the play is guarded, gloomy, lacking in energy.  Ms. Close’s ice queen act, which has become her trademark, drags on after a while.  Bob Balaban and Clare Higgins, as a couple who come to stay with Agnes and Tobias with no excuse other than that they “got frightened,” are occasionally psychologically terrifying, the way they should be, but mostly unaccountable.  Martha Plimpton, as Agnes and Tobias’s daughter, Julia, is a strident over-actor.  (Her performance as a white-trash grandmother in the Fox sitcom Raising Hope had more subtlety.)  But for occasional flashes of brilliance from these no-doubt experienced performers, the play sometimes flags during the second act, and loses the audience’s attention.  (If Ms. Plimpton can run onstage with a gun and fail to rouse the torpor, I can’t imagine what would have.)

            What swoops in to save this production—and I venture to say that it is saved—is the performance of John Lithgow as Tobias.  I have seen Mr. Lithgow’s every American stage performance over the past four years, and have not once been disappointed for a moment in his phenomenal characterization.  Here, at last, is a man with fire in his veins, and not a moment too soon.  Tobias’s incredible journey, from put-upon retiree to trembling on the outskirts of insanity, is vividly drawn by Mr. Lithgow’s skilled hand.  Though he improves every minute he’s on the stage (his reading of the “I had a cat” speech during the first act is thrilling), where he shines brightest is the third act.  Where Ms. Close made the beginning memorable, Mr. Lithgow makes the ending unforgettable.  Reduced to questioning the meaning of love, friendship, and stability, he rails at Mr. Balaban’s character as, unbeknownst to him, his family looks on.  As a paragon of wisdom and steadiness collapsing gradually into a ruin, Mr. Lithgow becomes the tragic hero of the piece.  It is a triumphant performance—not an astonishing one, because audiences should expect no less from him, but a triumphant one.

            At the end of the day it comes down to the structure of the play.  The first and second acts deal with deep, existential truths (Albee’s bread and butter), while the second deals with petty dinner party jealousies.  (It’s also awkwardly split by the only scene break in the show.)  Ms. McKinnon could have made the slower bits more interesting, the way she did in Virginia Woolf (although, to be fair, that far superior play had many fewer sagging sections).  But, like Santo Loquasto’s weirdly pristine set design, this production is too whole, too undamaged, by play’s end.  And, as Mr. Albee once wrote in The Play About the Baby, “If you have no wounds, how can you know if you’re alive?”

They Might as Well Be Dancing in the Dark

The Band Wagon at City Center

            The Encores production of The Band Wagon, playing at City Center through November 16th, is so close to being a good show it almost hurts.  Boasting a starry cast including Brian Stokes Mitchell, Laura Osnes, and Tracy Ullman, a much-loved score by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, and backstage guidance from director/choreographer Kathleen Marshall and writer Douglas Carter Beane (who has greatly edited the script), it has created much anticipation in the very specific crowd that follow Encores' fall "special events."  But robbed of the blinding Technicolor and magnetic cast of the MGM film on which it's based, the quote-unquote "new and improved" Band Wagon is disappointing in its lethargy.

            The cast is not on its game.  Mr. Mitchell, always entertaining but vainly struggling to fill the enormous tap shoes of Fred Astaire, could use a better torch song than this score has to offer. (He's not much of a dancer, either.)  Ms. Osnes' character is held back so much by her reduced storyline that even her stellar range is not enough to make her performance memorable.  Many other supporting roles (those of Ms. Ullman and Michael McKean as a composing team and Michael Berresse as a modern choreographer come to mind) bring some welcome realism into this cream puff but eventually become tiresome as they strain to stay relevant in the quickly dissolving story.  It is left mostly to the hugely entertaining Australian Tony Sheldon (as British director Jeffery Cordoba) to inject a little excitement into the cast, which he does for most of the show, but there's only so much anyone can do when the overall mood is resignation to the subpar material.

            Mostly, that's due to the score, which, really, is not all that good.  Though Mr. Schwartz is a halfway decent composer, Mr. Dietz is only a sporadically inspired lyricist.  ("That's Entertainment" and "Dancing in the Dark" are arguably the only two professional-level numbers in the piece.) And Mr. Beane's new book suffers from the same ills as did his previous new books for existent musicals, Xanadu and Cinderella.  His librettos are often so blindingly sunny and grinningly self-referential that they desert substance altogether.  Though his most recent straight play, The Nance, was an altogether satisfying backstage story, Mr. Beane does not bring the same subtlety to musicals, and doesn't leave much worthwhile story to work with in his wake.  As always in Beane's work, the most obviously effeminate character (despite being straight in the original material) turns out to be gay and is immediately accepted by everyone, theater in-jokes (permanently soured for me by the atrocious It's Only a Play) are tossed around, and a happy ending is unjustifiably reached, leaving everyone dissatisfied.  Meanwhile, Ms. Marshall's choreography, normally stylish and exciting, doesn't discredit Mr. Astaire's memory so much as it seems to have forgotten it.

            Never in my theatergoing career have I seen a musical that so clearly should be delightful and yet isn't.  The music may be familiar (a smattering of applause erupted at the beginning of "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan" that seemed louder than the applause at the end) and the actors normally sublime, but something is off here; something is rotten, as Jeffery Cordoba might say as Hamlet near the beginning of the show, in the state of Denmark.  The show doesn't leave the audience walking on air, but it doesn't leave them walking out depressed, either.  It just leaves them walking out.

Twenty-Four Hours Gone Too Soon

On the Town at the Lyric Theatre

(L-R): Jay Armstrong Johnson, Tony Yazbeck, and Clyde Alves in On the Town.

            The revival of On the Town at the newly (and elegantly) restored Lyric Theatre, put simply, is a triumph in every sense.  It runs like clockwork; but clockwork is not powerful enough to describe the sheer spectacle of On the Town, so let us say this production is an engine that runs on magic.  Leonard Bernstein, Adolph Green, and Betty Comden’s magnificent score is, of course, robust as ever.  The performances, especially those of the three central characters, are splendiferous.  But perhaps most important, the choreography, by Joshua Bergasse (Smash) in the style of Jerome Robbins, godfather of this musical, flows like water across the Lyric’s expansive stage, filling the room with fire and force, until it finally expels the audience into the streets after two and a half glorious hours, singing and jigging as they go.

            There can be no doubt about it from the first moment those three voices cry “New York, New York!”… Throughout the history of musical theater there has been no musical quite like On the Town—its natural friendliness to the audience, its somehow simultaneously innocent and cosmopolitan tone, and its perfectly intertwined book, score, and dances.  Based on Robbins’ 1944 ballet “Fancy Free,” premiering that same year, and written when the creatives involved were, respectively, 26, 27, and 30, its air of wartime patriotism and intrinsic sense of joy have sustained its following seventy years after its premiere.  I grew up on the movie, as, probably, many others have, and though that 1949 Arthur Freed production included only three songs from the original production, it shared with the musical the sweet earnestness and hard-earned synchronicity that make them both so impressive.  Also, notably, they shared a legitimate New York connection—Gene Kelly insisted that exterior shots be produced on location in the city, at spots ranging from Rockefeller Center to the Museum of Natural History.  Significantly, that film cemented in the minds of the American public the identities of the three sailors who come bounding down into the Brooklyn Navy Yard at exactly 6 A.M.—Mr. Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and the underrated clown Jules Munshin.

            The cast of the new On the Town may not supplant them, but they may well equal them.  Needless to say, they are all fantastic singers, talented performers comic and tragic in equal measure, and absolutely transcendant dancers.  Ozzie is given fresh comic life by the leering Clyde Alves, who brings to mind The Mask-era Jim Carrey.  Jay Armstrong Johnson, who delivered a stunning performance in March’s Philharmonic staging of Sweeney Todd, turns on a dime to capture Chip’s convulsing nervousness with aplomb.  And Tony Yazbeck is marvelously expressive and multitalented as the lovestruck Gabey.  But for certain dance moves which bear a winking resemblance to those of Mr. Kelly, he proudly blazes his own trail through the part.  He is just one of two actors this season who seem to be making audience’s forget Gene Kelly’s name—Robert Fairchild, who is to star in another Kelly role in An American in Paris, inspired Alistair Macaulay to remark in the Times, “I prefer Mr. Fairchild.”

            Speaking of the illustrious Fairchilds, Robert’s wife, Megan Fairchild, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, plays the most notable of the female counterparts to those sailors on one day’s shore leave.  In her Broadway debut as Miss Turnstiles Ivy Smith, Ms. Fairchild not only brings to the show a dancing ability unmatched on the Broadway stage in recent memory (certainly not by a lead) but also a touching innocence as an actress and a voice rivalling that of any actress in the production.  Her presence onstage is a delight.

            The supporting cast is marvelous, too—the illustrious Jackie Hoffman lays waste to so many welcome comic characters you may wonder how she changes her costumes so quickly, and Michael Rupert (the shark-ish law professor in Legally Blonde) tries a different sort of role, the pushover Judge Pitkin, with pleasing results.

            All in all this cast, plus a score chock-full of too many hits to name, adds up to an evening of pleasure the likes of which it’s hard to imagine anyone’s seen since the time of the musical’s original run.  The singing of The Star-Spangled Banner before the curtain rises on the first act is a nice touch—for when the curtain falls, you will never feel prouder to live in a country where native hands have wrought such indelible masterpieces.

Cole Porter Adjacency, With a Few Jolts of Energy

Can-Can at the Paper Mill Playhouse

        The new version of Can-Can, at the Paper Mill Playhouse, directed and significantly edited by the Frasier co-creator David Lee, is buoyed by its near-perfect Cole Porter score but burdened by its lackluster execution.  Indeed, this story of the 1890s Montmarte club owner Pistache (Kate Baldwin) and her former paramour, Judge Aristide Forestier (Jason Danieley), seems to be held up by thin strings for most of the first act.  Ms. Baldwin floats through the production with a smarmy smirk permanently plastered across her face, and Mr. Danieley tries--and fails--to combine the swashbuckling attitudes of Errol Flynn with the lovestruck insecurity of Jimmy Stewart.  Backed by unimaginative sets (by Rob Bissinger), some great, top-of-his-game Porter ("Live and Let Live," "C'est Magnifique") slips by with relatively little fanfare.  It's white-bread, off-the-assembly-line direction by Mr. Lee, and the boring, unfunny book, co-written by Lee and Joel Fields, doesn't help matters.
        That is, until, near the middle of the second act, the cast bursts into the title number, which is not only by far the best song in the production but also one of Cole Porter's best songs ever.  Suddenly, the balanced exuberance that marks the greatest of Porter musicals and numbers is expressed, wildly and well, in the show itself.  The almost insane cleverness of Porter's lyrics is matched by visually inventive choreography by the Tony-winning Patti Colombo (Peter Pan), and the energy level jumps so jarringly it's as if someone has given the show an adrenaline shot.  "Can-Can," the number, seems like a visitor to Can-Can the show from some other, more intelligent production.  Wisely, Mr. Lee has lengthened the song and the dance number for this section of the production, and every second of it is joyous and trascendent.  It was greeted at the performance I attended with a nearly five-minute round of applause, and when, later, a reprise was announced, the theater nearly vibrated off its foundations.  As for me, I would have preferred to see the cast perform "Can-Can" (the song, not the show) continuously for two and a half hours than practically any other conceivable entertainment (including the show itself).  The number alone makes this production worth seeing.
        The phantasmagorical magic of this highlight extends itself over throughout the show, but moments like it are few and far between.  "Come Along With Me," sung by the magnificently sleazy Michael Berresse as villainous critic Hilaire Jussac, is quite a bit of fun, and "Never, Never Be an Artist" is perhaps the one moment of the production in which the comic relief (Greg Hildreth, Mark Price and Justin Robertson as a trio of starving artists) is actually comic.  But one can't escape the fact that the story (and most of Ms. Colombo's non can-can choreography) can sometimes fail to hold the audience's attention.  The most (unfortunately) memorable plot point of the second act comes when Jussac is brought to heel with a calculated reveal that not only makes no sense within the context of the story but also asks the audience to laugh at the character in a way that is summarily uncool.  The fact that this is preceded by one of the most inexpertly choreographed stage fights I've ever seen doesn't help the audience take the contrived happy ending seriously.  When Ms. Baldwin and Mr. Danieley embrace at show's end, the audience isn't interested, the way they should be, in the continuing story of these two lovers.  They're waiting for that final "Can-Can" they've been promised.  And when a single song, however brilliant, is the only thing anchoring a show to plausibility, that show isn't fully formed.  Cole Porter wouldn't be disappointed, but he certainly wouldn't be fascinated either.

A Canine Mystery, Solved with Flair

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at the Barrymore Theatre

Ian Barford (L) and Alex Sharp in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

            It is the especial and sacred responsibility of a critic, particularly this early in the season, to report with great honesty and accuracy of vision after having seen a show so promising and beautiful in its conception that it stands a good chance of becoming a classic.  Now I am faced with just such a situation in that marvelous British transfer, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, based on the equally excellent book by Mark Haddon and a production of the inexhaustibly virtuosic National Theater (and, significantly, their golden girl directress, Marianne Elliot—but more on her later).  This production of the new and noteworthy play (which originally opened on the West End in 2012 and is still going strong there) is something near perfect, a work of art that reminds us that the world, loud and confusing though it may be for some, is full of beautiful, wonderful things.

            In the play, as in the book, young Christopher Francis Boone, a brilliant fifteen-year-old whose unique symptoms fall somewhere on the autism spectrum, discovers his neighbor’s dog dead in her garden and resolves to find the beast’s killer, just as the heroes of his favorite murder mysteries might.  Along the way, we are introduced to the perspective of an infinitely relatable character who makes the rest of the world look like a pack of cruel, coarse fools.  His hopes, dreams, and disillusionments are spilled out across the gorgeous stage (designed by the Olivier Award winner Bunny Christie) by virtue of the magnificent stagecraft of Ms. Elliot, who, as anyone who has seen this production or her equally innovative War Horse can attest, is a genius in her own time.

            Great theatrical minds stand behind Ms. Elliot, including Ms. Christie, lighting designer Paule Constable, video designer Finn Ross, and spectacular choreographers Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett.  Thanks in part to these minds, who have in this point in their careers left in their wake resumes formidable enough to stop the hardiest theater veteran in his tracks, Ms. Elliot achieves perhaps the most important work of theatrical dream-weaving of the past quarter-century.  Her moments of inspiration are innumerable, and are not to be described here for fear of ruining the glimpse of pure stage Nirvana accorded to anyone who visits the Barrymore this season.  Suffice it to say that the world she has created for Christopher is unlike anything I have ever seen, a dream-world where the laws of physics and society do not apply, a world that cements the audience firmly in the surprisingly welcoming environment of Christopher’s inner mind.  It is a world guided by logic that collapses when confronted with the confusing or the unknowable, and populated by eternally mystical characters whose constant shouting and overly emotional doings we see through Christopher’s eyes.  Why are they so loud?  What is the purpose of all the sound and fury?  The audience understands only Christopher, and so grows to love him.

            And I am convinced only now, after having first read Mr. Haddon’s book and reading about Luke Treadaway playing the part in London, that there is only one man who was definitively born to play Christopher Boone, and will find no match in the long and fruitful life this play is sure to enjoy.  His name is Alex Sharp, he is in his fourth year at Julliard, and his is one of the greatest performances I have yet had the deep, redefining pleasure of coming across.  He is Christopher.  His blood is Boone blood; his face and his mind pulsate with the energy of that unstoppable boy genius.  In this still-young season he is a shoo-in for the Best Actor in a Play Tony—I cannot imagine a performance that might surpass his—and for this among many other reasons I will be following his surely-long career with great interest.  If you might see its conception, be aware of the enormity and importance of this play in the history of acting.

            The script, by Simon Stephens, is wisely mostly composed of wide swaths of Mr. Haddon’s captivating prose, but veers occasionally into the absurd or the cruelly disappointing, as in the second act when it becomes painfully self-referential.  When Christopher recounts his story to his refined schoolteacher Siobhan (the adequate Francesca Faridany), and she replies, “I know.  We made it into a play,” it almost made me physically ill.  And, rather than end with the joyfully optimistic and uplifting concluding words of Mr. Haddon’s book, “…and that means I can do anything,” which brought Christopher’s arc to a satisfactory end, Mr. Stephens’ play ends with Christopher asking Siobhan, “I can do anything… Right?” and receiving no response.  This left a bit of an unnecessary pit in my stomach, especially given that the storyline of both the book and the play had led the audience to expect a slightly happier ending.

            Luckily a stellar post-curtain call scene reinvigorates and ends the show right.  I won’t give this away, either, but it involves—no surprise—Mr. Sharp, alone onstage, and some more wonderful work by Ms. Elliot and her team.  When it works, it works.