Dancers, Rock Stars, and Spies in a Musical of His Own Making

My Life is a Musical at the Bay Street Theater

Howie Michael Smith and ensemble in My Life is a Musical.

            A common—and cliché, at this point—complaint about musicals is the implausibility of the characters breaking into song to express their emotions.  In every heavy-handed musical theater parody on sitcoms, in movies, and, less often, in stage shows, there is at least one moment when an actor steps forward into the spotlight, ready to deliver his solo, and a fellow cast member snipes, “Why are you singing?”  So it’s a relief, at least, to see a clever conceit based on this eternal complaint brought to life adequately in Adam Overett’s new musical, My Life is a Musical, running at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor through August 31^st. 

            Parker (Howie Michael Smith) is a mild-mannered accountant (somehow this character has become a musical theater mainstay) who, since childhood, has been plagued by the people around him bursting into song and dance at inopportune moments.  No one but Parker can see or hear the live, 24/7 musical, and Parker learns to cope by avoiding “emotional situations” and “new people, since they usually introduce themselves with a song.”  Through an administrative misstep by his firm, Parker gets sent out on the road as a tour accountant with a band called Zeitgeist, fronted by the egomaniacal Zach (Justin Matthew Sargent) and managed by the ambitious, easily hurt JT (Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone).  Parker falls quickly for JT (as someone who’s been avoiding people his whole life might be wont to do) and, noting the band’s awfulness, quickly finds a solution.  Parker will transcribe the songs he hears Zach singing every day—and Zach, not knowing he’s been singing at all, will have a set-list for his concerts.  (The sequence in which Parker first tries his hand at this fakery, covered by the song “Zach’s Rise to Fame,” is an example of the creative staging and writing that make the good parts of this musical great.)  Cyrano-style, Parker insists that Zach claim authorship of the songs to avoid revealing his perceived weirdness to the world.  But the band is pursued by a self-serious music journalist named, among other things, Randy (the fantastic Robert Cuccioli), who senses that something is rotten in the house of Zeitgeist.  Hilarity, as in most musicals, is bound to ensue.

            The quality of the show varies wildly from scene to scene.  The opening’s exposition—from the curtain’s rise ‘til Parker begins his songwriting scheme—is almost aggressively banal.  But from there on in, the fun increases exponentially, up to a disappointing ending.  Mr. Smith, as the reserved Parker, is mostly generic, fun only in his explosive reactions to the music that won’t stop following him around.  Mr. Sargent, as Zach, is very funny, and his first number, “Zach’s Song,” is a highlight—it’s a pity his character is underexplored.  It’s Robert Cuccioli, playing the faux-mysterious Randy, who steals the show.  The character is written (thanks to Mr. Overett, who’s responsible for book, lyrics, and music) in a malaprop-ridden style that makes him the funniest thing about My Life.  Slapstick seems to follow Randy, as in a scene at his hotel (called On the Corner, but set in the middle of a block) reminiscent of something out of a Howard Hawks film.  It also helps that Randy’s signature song, “What Have You Got to Hide,” is by far the score’s best-written.

            The show’s predicament can be best expressed by its final scene, when Parker finally reveals his secret.  The reaction is immediately accepting—no questions, no requests for elaboration.  This seems odd if only because Parker’s music-driven life is supposed to exist in the real world, a world where people react oddly if he tells them he’s living on, as he puts it “a 1950s MGM soundstage.”  In the world the musical presents during its dreary exposition, if Parker told anyone he heard music and saw dancing someone would institutionalize him, or at least medicate him.  But it’s easy to understand why Mr. Overett went this way.  Rather than being a parody of musicals, My Life is a Musical is trying to be real, old-fashioned musical theater (albeit with an up-tempo rock score in which most of the songs blend together).  Better, Mr. Overett, to stick to and heighten the parody.  A show can’t be constantly self-referential and stand on its own at the same time.

Youth, Reconsidered

This is Our Youth at the Cort Theatre
Kieran Culkin (L) and Michael Cera in This is Our Youth

            This is very important.

            Stop reading this review now.  If you’re at home on the computer, switch to another tab.  If you’re at work, go to the bathroom and do it on your phone.  If you’re lounging on the beach somewhere, get up and go somewhere you have access to a computer.

            You should—no, you must—immediately buy tickets to This is Our Youth at the Cort Theatre.

            The play, for starters, was written in 1996 by Kenneth Lonergan, who later wrote the screenplays to You Can Count on Me and Gangs of New York.  Set in 1982, it covers a two-day period in the life of three twenty-somethings who belong to a subset of yuppie culture—Upper West Side Jewish ne’er-do-wells whose parents fund their drug habits out of pure inertia.  It never feels dated or boring.  It’s red-hot from start to finish, replete with well-deployed comic affectation to match its deep and thought-provoking concepts of young life and death.  Mr. Lonergan is a master of playwriting, and this, the first Broadway production of his masterwork, is an opportunity to watch his words at work, guided by the always-capable director Anna D. Shapiro (August: Osage County) in a near-perfect world created by scenic designer Todd Rosenthal.

            Kieran Culkin is marvelously cast as a hard-living douchebag named Dennis Ziegler, the disappointing son of a cancer-ridden but still world-renowned painter.  Constantly spewing abuse at everyone around him, pausing to apologize, and then berating his companion for accepting his apology, Mr. Culkin’s total embodiment of the character is mesmerizing.  His natural likeability as an actor saves Dennis from veering into full-on villain territory, but his disregard for human frailty and never-ending vanity make him so much fun to hate.

            Relative newcomer Tavi Gevinson, an eighteen-year-old blogger and actress, plays Jessica Goldman, a neurotic anarcho-capitalist with a brash and entertaining sense of self.  Her performance is totally unique and inimitable, one of the best female turns on a Broadway stage in years.  Like the heroines of Hollywood’s classic screwball comedies, nobody in the audience can help but fall slightly in love with her by show’s end, and yet she’s not an empty shell or a viewpoint disguised as a character like many female leads of great recent plays.  She has inner thoughts and a complex ideology that can grate on her peers but always charms them, and in my mind, no one but Ms. Gevinson could have pulled off this two-sided act so masterfully.

            The down-on-his-luck dork head-over-heels for Jessica is Warren Staub, played in a show-stealing and history-making performance by—of all people—Michael Cera.  With this character, Mr. Cera singlehandedly escapes his seemingly unbreakable link to the line of mumbling milquetoasts he’s played throughout his career.  Here Mr. Cera has not just become Warren, he has created him—every tic, every movement, every reading is coordinated to full effect to bring a new version of this oft-attempted character to life.  (Warren has been played by, at various times, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, and Colin Hanks, among others.  After having seen Mr. Cera play the role, it’s near impossible to imagine anyone else.)  His back-and-forth with his two cast-mates is incredible--his rapport with Kieran Culkin is marvelous but expected, given their wonderful work together in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and his chemistry with Ms. Gevinson is potent and real.  Though Warren, the character, starts off a caricature, Mr. Lonergan pulls off one of the great character arcs in modern theater and turns Warren—with Mr. Cera’s help—into a wholly sympathetic character, one we root for and hope to see succeed.  Though he doesn’t, entirely (this is his youth, after all), one emerges from the theater with a sense of satisfaction and optimism that has been absent, at least for me, from much happier stories.  It doesn’t take long to realize why—this incredible cast and illustrious creative team has shown us definitively how to put on a great play.

Who Loses and Who Wins

                    Shakespeare in the Park’s King Lear

 

(L-R): John Lithgow, Glenn Fleshler, Jessica Hecht, Clarke Peters, Slate Holmgren and Jessica Collins in King Lear.

            One of King Lear’s many unpleasant metaphors used to describe his traitorous daughters comes midway through the play, when he and his company have been turned out of the house of his second child, Regan, and into a raging thunderstorm.  Insisting with acrimony that the travails of one befouled beggar must needs have originated with the man’s daughters, Lear pontificates, “Nothing could have subdued nature / To such a lowness but his unkind daughters… ‘Twas… those pelican daughters,” referring to the popular legend in the sixteenth century that infant pelicans fed on their parents’ blood.  In Daniel Sullivan’s production of King Lear at the Delacorte Theatre (it hasn’t been seen there since 1973), running through August 17^th, this venomous aside appears to be more than relevant.  King Lear himself, played with a surfeit of talent by John Lithgow, fills the play up with blood, and the actresses portraying his daughters drain it back out again.

            Jessica Hecht, as Regan, Jessica Collins, as Cordelia, and, shockingly, Annette Bening as Goneril are so flat and listless that they render the A-story of Shakespeare’s celebrated tale of senility rather boring and, occasionally, seemingly endlessly long.  Not only are Ms. Hecht and Ms. Bening noticeably old for their roles (56-year-old Bening and 49-year-old Hecht play the marriageable daughters of the 68-year-old Lithgow) and Ms. Collins ill-suited to the role of Cordelia (managing to conjure only the mystery of the character, and none of what lies beneath), but all three extract much of the drama from this tale of royal espionage and murder.  Goneril and Regan’s partner in crime, Eric Sheffer Stevens as Edmund, bastard son of Gloucester, is not much better—he delivers his lines with the faltering interest of a high school student discovering the Bard for the first time, not the transformative ability of a seasoned actor.  Disappointing—and yet, who knows?  This could be a ploy by Mr. Sullivan to make Lear more appealing—after the hundredth bloodless exchange between Goneril and Regan, I was praying for the King to be set up in their castles and for the two of them to be thrown out into the rain.

            This unfortunate turn of events certainly allows the audience to appreciate what excellent performances we’re given.  The Earl of Gloucester, a Lear loyalist, is embodied entirely by the magnificent Clarke Peters, and his legitimate son, Edward, is well-portrayed by Chukwudi Iwuji, who is barred from equal greatness only by his perennially resurfacing—and slightly distracting—Nigerian accent.  Steven Boyer gives Lear’s Fool a slightly childlike, petulant air that adds significantly to understanding of his frustration.  And, of course, we are lucky to witness the explosive performance of John Lithgow as the old King himself.

            At the beginning of Lear, the King is trustingly—and, as we later find, stupidly—entrusting his lands to his three daughters in a state of ecstasy.  In the middle, he is to be found railing against the elements and going rapidly mad.  In the end, his spirit is broken entirely by the death of the daughter he judged too harshly.  Mr. Lithgow portrays this range of emotion with pitch-perfect attention to detail.  He is slightly young for the role (Lear is, in the play, meant to be eighty), but his hunching posture, slow, deliberate movements, and white beard contribute well to the illusion.  Under even Mr. Sullivan’s rather uninspired direction (the Druidic, imperial theme has been done to death, even in June's Macbeth at the Park Avenue Armory), Mr. Lithgow manages to shine.  While not exactly a tour-de-force (the flaws in the performance can be interpreted either as humanizing or oversights), it is certainly a turn that will be remembered beyond this summer, even if, thanks to the lukewarm results this time, Lear is not performed again at the Delacorte for another forty years.