There's Been a Change in You

Gigi at the Neil Simon Theatre

Vanessa Hudgens in Gigi.

            Why revive Gigi?  It has a ravishing score, certainly, by Lerner and Loewe at their very best, and a sterling reputation—for the original 1958 film more than the 1973 Broadway staging, which ran less than four months—as a beautiful and nuanced look at the courtesan trade in turn-of-the-century Paris.  There is ample space for celebrity casting and new lush orchestrations, and the City of Light brings in theatergoers like nobody’s business (as An American in Paris would attest).  But if you’re not going to do Gigi right, you shouldn’t do it at all.  And the new production at the Neil Simon Theatre, with a revamped book by the confused Heidi Thomas and backwards direction by Eric Schaffer, is all wrong.

            First off, there’s the casting.  Condemning a near-perfect score like this one to the agony of stunt casting is cruel.  Casting Vanessa Hudgens as the groomed, recently-of-age courtesan Gigi Alvarez is downright criminal.  Ms. Hudgens is a fine singer, if you go in for the identical Disney sopranos that seem to be the only voice type available to actresses of a certain age.  But she couldn’t act if you put a gun to her head.  Her borderline robotic line recitation and her inexpert movements, less controlled than those of the most rambunctious child actor, make for a production that’s excruciating whenever the title character is on stage.  That’s a bad start.

            Then there’s the fiddling about with the book.  Heidi Thomas, who created “Call the Midwife” and has an admirable (but, in this case, ill-advised) feminist streak about her, tries to make Gigi a more self-sustaining, stronger character.  The obvious changes are made—Gigi now makes the decisions about her relationship with sugar heir Gaston Lachaille (Corey Cott) instead of letting him make them for her; Gigi’s grandmother (Victoria Clarke) and great-aunt (Dee Hoty) now sing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” instead of the Chevalier character, Honore Lachaille (Howard McGillin) (which completely misses the point of the song, but whatever).  If this worked, it would make for a wonderful change to the show—indeed, even in the film, Leslie Caron’s Gigi was always something of an enigma as far as her motivation went—but Ms. Thomas’s writing is not even significant enough to be obvious.  Her adaptation of Alan Jay Lerner’s ’73 book is about as thrilling as lukewarm water.  With a series of cuts and additions so disastrously dexterous they’re hard to follow, Ms. Thomas carves the heart out of the story and hands over its weakly smiling corpse for us to admire.  The songs are so beautiful they at least keep us watching, but Ms. Thomas’s listless dialogue often seems to be marking time between them.  Mr. Lerner’s legacy deserves so much better.

            But it’s the directorial choices that come off as most confusing.  Mr. Schaffer (he of the most recent Follies revival) throws us off right away with weird staging choices—who plays cards standing up?—then finishes the job by doing his level best to destroy a magnificent score.  His choral arrangements are unintelligible, and, along with the misguided orchestrator, August Eriksmoen, he slows down the faster songs—most notably “I Remember it Well” and “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore”—to something like half their time signature.  I don’t know who told Mr. Schaffer this show’s problem is that it’s not slow enough (it runs two and a half hours) but whoever did so should be immediately sacked, along with most of the creative team.

            There are elements of this show that, painfully, remind us what it could have been.  The set design, by Derek McLane, quite beautifully evokes the Eiffel Tower, even if changes in scenery are sometimes awkwardly incorporated.  But most notably, there’s Corey Cott as the aforementioned Gaston, who, though distractingly young (another masterstroke by Ms. Thomas—making Gigi older and Gaston younger until their romance is completely uninteresting), is extremely talented.  His delivery of Lerner and Loewe’s spoken songs in the style of Rex Harrison like “She is Not Thinking of Me” is masterful, and he’s very funny where the book allows him to be.  He even restrains his incredible dancing ability (he was the original Broadway lead in Newsies) for the sake of the character.  In a few years Mr. Cott would make an excellent Henry Higgins.  But when one watches a performance and can think of nothing but what the performer could do given a better chance, it doesn’t give you hope.  It just depresses you.

What Evil Lurks in the Hands of Men

Hand to God at the Booth Theatre

 

(L-R): Sarah Stiles, Tyrone, and Steven Boyer in Hand to God.

            Robert Askins, the writer of the new dark, terrifying and enormously funny Broadway comedy Hand to God, works as a bartender.

            By day, Mr. Askins might happen by a matinee performance of his new play at the Booth Theatre, where a terrifically talented cast and some deeply disturbed hand puppets are spewing profanities and rattling off off-color jokes before an audience of over 750.  By night he tends bar at a Tex-Mex eatery in Brooklyn, where he walks back and forth to work daily and, he says, still cannot afford a ticket to his own play.

            In the annals of artists cheated by the very hands that grabbed for their work, Mr. Askins’ predicament does not rank up there with that of, say, Van Gogh.  But anyone who sits through Hand to God and emerges, a little under two hours later, with their sides aching from laughter, will certainly think it an injustice.

            Mr. Askins, a native Texan who moved to New York in 2005, uses touches of religious autobiography and the hypocrisy of society to paint a picture of a troubled teenage boy, Jason (the virtuosic Steven Boyer) whose mother, Margery (Geneva Carr), plunges them both into the world of Christian puppetry at the local church after the untimely death of Jason’s father, a depressed binge-eater who six months hence has died of a heart attack.  Margery teaches puppetry classes in the church basement thanks to the patronage of Pastor Greg (Mark Kudisch), who wants in Margery’s pants.  Her students number three—Jason, who is unsure about the situation but surprisingly good with his puppet, Tyrone; Jessica (the nicely peppy Sarah Stiles), a motivated puppetry enthusiast for whom Jason bears a torch; and Timothy (Michael Oberhaltzer), a delinquent who harbors a crush on Margery.  All seems well, if insipid, until Tyrone, he of purple felt and orange tuft of hair, is seemingly possessed by the devil.  A surreal nightmare of vengeance and sin ensues, and every minute of it is funny as hell.

            If this seems unlikely, it’s the cast who pulls it off well enough to be more than viable, especially Mr. Boyer, who essentially gives a dual performance as the nervous Jason and the demonic Tyrone.  Though he performs no ventriloquism, he manages to give each character a distinct life of its own.  Often one can find him poised with Tyrone arched over him like an avenging serpent, divesting invective at whomever is unlucky enough to cross his path, including, most frequently, Jason himself.  His turn is mesmerizing, alternating hysterical bouts between Jason and Tyrone with strenuous battles for control.  One particular bout of puppet sex with Jessica’s hand puppet, in particular, outdoes anything Avenue Q ever had to offer.  (Ms. Stiles is a wonderfully game actress and a pleasant stage presence.)  Mr. Boyer could never steal the show because it was his, or, rather, Tyrone’s to begin with.  The play is never as interesting when he’s not on stage.

            The B-plot, such as it is, deals with the pseudo-love triangle between Margery, Timothy, and Pastor Greg.  Mr. Askins’ writing is weakest here, and can often devolve into moralizing treatises on right and wrong or else treacly declarations of love that are repeatedly rejected, until the action becomes less funny than painful.  But it’s all worth it when Timothy and Margery consummate their mutual attraction with a hell-raising, vandalizing fervor, which raises gale-force laughter from the audience.

            The traps that Mr. Askins fall into are those any playwright, even one as talented as he, might encounter in their early career.  Where he tries to make points about losing oneself in tragedy, he can often seem almost incoherent.  Jokes get the play back on track, but they’re not his only strength—near the end of the play, when Jason’s personality begins to merge with Tyrone’s or vice versa, the complexity of this dark, dark comedy becomes apparent.  Writing like this, that can make us laugh and horrify us and make us think about the less pleasant parts of our nature, is what one might call a one-way ticket out of Brooklyn bartending.

Home is Where the Heart Breaks

Fun Home at Circle in the Square

 

(L-R): Beth Malone, Sydney Lucas, and Michael Cerveris in Fun Home.

            Fun Home, an exquisite little jewel of a musical now playing at the Circle in the Square Theatre, has had a long journey to Broadway.  Workshopped several times from 2009 to 2011, the final, revamped version of the play premiered at the Public Theatre (which, having gifted the world in the past year and a half with both Fun Home and Hamilton, has cemented itself as the centerpiece of a new golden age of the off-Broadway musical) in September of 2013.  Now it has finally made its way to the Great White Way, just under the wire for Tony eligibility, and thanks are due to its incredible cast and creative team for giving this Broadway season what it had sorely lacked—a masterpiece.

            We feel Alison Bechdel, the renowned cartoonist on whose memoir the musical is based, hovering over the show.  Adult Alison (Beth Malone) is plumbing the depths of her childhood memories to discover what could have caused her closeted gay father (Michael Cerveris) to kill himself, only four months after she herself came out as gay in college.  Ms. Malone makes Alison a palpable presence, relatable and totally real.  Expanding on the theme of memory made real are Alison’s visions of her younger selves—college-aged “Middle” Alison (the astonishing Emily Skeggs) and the younger “Small” Alison (the even more astonishing Sydney Lucas, who won an Obie for this part at the age of ten, the youngest ever to do so).  The three Alisons dance around each other in a surreal symbiotic relationship made significant by the tactile direction of Sam Gold.  They are different but somehow the same, always exploring the impossibility that Alison’s father, Bruce, may not be what he seems.

            Michael Cerveris, in a groundbreaking performance, makes real the terrifying prospect that we may not even remotely know our parents.  Bruce Bechdel is a decorator, an English teacher, and, most symbolically significant, a funeral director (the Bechdel family funeral home is nicknamed the “fun home,” thus the title).  His control over his work, however, does not quite translate to his home life.  His genteel delicacy breaks not obviously or campily but gently, cracking the veneer only slightly, which makes the whole thing only more existentially disturbing.  We are not sure what to think of Bruce Bechdel because Alison never was and still isn’t, and therein lies the central issue of the play.  All families try to bury their imperfections behind a façade, as Bruce does with his personal passion, historical preservation—his wife, Helen (Judy Kuhn, lovely) calls their house a “museum”—but nothing hides the kind of repression and angst Bruce, and for that matter Alison, had boiling beneath the surface.  It is a truth reached with a beautiful artistic clarity, rendered in one of the most dramatically significant musicals I’ve ever seen.

            The score, redolent of Yorkey and Kitt’s Next to Normal in its complexity and emotional depth, comes courtesy of a newcomer—Lisa Kron, a playwright who wrote both the book and her first lyrics—and an old hand—Jeanine Tesori, perhaps the greatest female Broadway composer of all time, who is responsible for Violet, Caroline, or Change, Shrek the Musical, and Thoroughly Modern Millie.  The songs form a specific and well-focused backbone for the show, ranging from devastating domestic tragedy (“Telephone Wire,” when Alison and her father find themselves unable to communicate on their last night together, leaves the audience in tears) to fantasy pastiche (“Come to the Fun Home,” a fake Jackson Five-style commercial starring the Bechdel children, is a perfect showcase for the breathtaking Ms. Lucas and the shockingly talented Oscar Williams and Zell Steele Morrow, playing her younger brothers—who knew child actors like these existed?).  When the score starts to hit its stride around the third song, there won’t be a heart in the house that isn’t broken this musical was robbed of a Pulitzer.

            Though the show loses something in its transition to staging in the round, it isn’t enough to distract from the fact that there is not one false note in any of the perfect performances or the deeply felt story, let alone the score (by far Ms. Tesori’s best).   There were two original musicals on Broadway this season of any significance whatsoever—this one and Jason Robert Brown’s Honeymoon in Vegas.  There was one original musical on Broadway that can be called art of the highest order, and that’s Fun Home.  You can see it and learn something about yourself, or miss it and regret it for the rest of your life.

Visitors From Long Ago, Remembering When They Were Young

The Visit at the Lyceum Theatre

The cast of The Visit and Chita Rivera.

            I am growing very tired, in this overstuffed and not especially high-quality theater season, of recommending shows purely based on the exhilaration of spending time in the room with the star.  Fish in the Dark (Larry David’s inexpert play in which he stars) and On the Twentieth Century (which has a lackluster score but features Kristen Chenoweth) are just two of the offerings so far this cycle which don’t have very much to offer on their own but the promise of spending time in the presence of a legend of show business.  So I won’t make that suggestion for The Visit, the new musical by Kander and Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago) at the Lyceum Theatre, which stars Chita Rivera.  If you’re interested in seeing Ms. Rivera, now 82, trod the boards at the end of her career, little will keep you from stampeding to the theater.  But I wouldn’t recommend it.

            The second-to-last musical (before 2010’s The Scottsboro Boys) written by composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb before Ebb’s death in 2004, The Visit only hints at their potential.  The saloon piano and discordant strings that have become trademarks of Kander’s career are there, as are Ebb’s tricky but satisfying lyrics.  But the score is completely forgettable, with not one hummable melody.  Meanwhile the book is clunky and obvious.  No surprise it was written by the talentless Terence McNally, whose catastrophe It’s Only a Play continues to grind on just down 45^th Street and who additionally collaborated with Kander and Ebb on 1984’s The Rink and 1992’s Kiss of the Spider Woman.  Much of McNally’s dialogue is completely unnecessary, and what little of it drives the plot along does so blatantly and without style, in the manner of an inter-scene of an elementary school revue.

            The story, such as it is, is based on the Friedrich Dürrenmatt play Der Besuch der alten Dame and follows Claire Zachanassian (Ms. Rivera), who, we are told over and over and over again until we want to bury our heads in the sand, is the wealthiest woman in the world.  Aging and having recently lost her sixth husband, Claire returns to her broke hometown of Brachen, Switzerland, with a proposition—she’ll gift the town ten billion marks (a sum possessed by no one in the world at the time of the play’s supposed post-World War II setting) if they’ll kill her ex-lover Anton Schell (Roger Rees), who wronged her horribly when she was seventeen.  This concept could have been elevated to the level of creepily seductive horror, but like the warbling eunuchs who make up Claire’s entourage, it isn’t as fully realized as other Kander and Ebb creations in the same vein (most notably the Emcee in Cabaret).  This is partly the fault of the material—McNally’s book doesn’t give any of these contrivances a reason to exist—but also that of the director, John Doyle, and choreographer, Graciela Daniele, who make everything more awkward and wooden than it has any reason to be.  Even among Scott Pask's gorgeous, bleak scenic design and the limited narrative momentum gained by successive revelations that pop up suddenly in the one-act's second half, this show, despite its morality-play intentions, has no real point.

            So the draw, then, would be Ms. Rivera, back on the stage for the first time since the revival of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 2012.  And it is, indeed, great to watch the audience explode into cheers merely for her entrance.  But the fact is that as an octogenarian, Ms. Rivera has remaining only the impression of a singing voice and no dancing ability whatsoever.  (Claire does a lot of flamboyant walking in circles.)  So if your goal is to be in the room with a star, The Visit will do you just fine—though either of the plays mentioned at the beginning of this review are at least more fun than this one.  But if you’re looking for the kind of immersive bliss Ms. Rivera offered audiences in West Side Story or Chicago, keep dreaming.  Like Kander and Ebb, she had her prime, and this is not it.

Not Easy to Live With

Living on Love at the Longacre Theatre

Renee Fleming and Douglas Sills in Living on Love.

            From September through February Kaufman and Hart’s 1936 farce You Can’t Take it With You, directed by the masterful Scott Ellis, ran at the Longacre Theatre.  Now, taking one of its stars along (Anna Chlumsky, who replaced Rose Byrne as Alice Sycamore), author Joe DiPietro and director Kathleen Marshall have produced another play on the same stage, which aspires to the same heights as did Kaufman and Hart but rarely if ever succeeds in its ambitions.

            Despite casting buzz about this production, there’s really only performance worth mentioning—Douglas Sills as the aging opera maestro Vito De Angelis (who insists on being referred to just as the Maestro), who sails into the parlor of his beautiful apartment in an ill-fitting sleeping mask and an orange silk robe.  (Set design is by Derek McLane, costumes by Michael Krass; both do an excellent job of conjuring an era that is never really fleshed out by the material.)  It’s 1957, and De Angelis is driving his memoir’s ghostwriter, Robert Samson (Jerry O’Connell, not trying hard enough) nuts with his habits of arriving late and refusing to discuss any aspects of his life but the (probably inflated) number of women he’s slept with.  Nine weeks in, Samson has written two pages, and he’s had enough.  Pausing only to convey his admiration for the Maestro’s wife, the legendary opera diva Raquel De Angelis (Renee Fleming – more on her later), Samson quits, leaving the Maestro to puff on a cigarette and peer at the paper through his aviator glasses like an anachronistic Hunter S. Thompson. 

As a parting shot, Samson hisses, “You’ve been living in this country for years and you still speak English like Chico Marx!”  And indeed, Mr. Sills does use a deft and brilliantly constructed faux-Italian accent that – depressingly – is the funniest thing about the show.  But accent humor has always been underrated, and Mr. Sills uses it as one of the many weapons in his arsenal to create a fully realized comic character.  He enervates the show as dedicatedly as he can, to no avail.

The news here, though, is not Mr. Sills but Ms. Fleming, the real-life acclaimed opera star, who makes her straight-play debut.  Mr. DiPietro evidently likes giving identical, uninteresting roles to aging divas (he did just that in 2013 with Marlo Thomas and Clever Little Lies at the George Street Playhouse), and this one is no exception.  La Diva (as she insists on being called, in one of the unsubtly emphasized parallels between Raquel and her husband), as a character, talks the talk in terms of high-minded comic snobbery but doesn’t walk the walk, so there’s not much as much here for Ms. Fleming to work with as there would be in, say, Madame Butterfly.  As for her performance, there’s nothing especially egregious to report, but nothing exciting, either.  She does the job, no more, no less.  Funnily enough, her greatest weakness as a straight performer is that she fails to project adequately, perhaps overcompensating for her change of scenery.

Anyway, Samson eventually comes back and starts writing the Diva’s memoir instead, while the Maestro picks up a female writer of his own (the aforementioned Anna Chlumsky, overdoing it), and the competition becomes fierce.  Two butlers (Blake Hammond and Scott Robertson) round out the ensemble, starting off serving purely to sing (hilariously) to fill the interludes between scenes but being let down in the end by (no surprise) Mr. DiPietro’s unapologetically obvious material.  Suffice it to say it turns out this isn’t so much a farce as a lecture.

Again and again Mr. DiPietro sets himself up to succeed in his writing and fails.  His work since the Tony-winning Memphis in 2009 (Nice Work if You Can Get It with Ms. Marshall, Clever Little Lies, and now Living on Love) has been irritatingly on-the-nose.  In these recent plays, there just isn’t enough time to pack in actual intelligence, so Mr. DiPietro has done with a semblance of it; enough of a gloss over the proceedings to make the audience feel smart but not so thick that they won’t leave feeling gutturally disappointed.  Living on Love, should you catch it in the right places, keeps the laughs coming, but they’re empty, they don’t touch on anything true, and they don’t lead anywhere.  Like an obscure aria to the uninitiated, to anyone outside the world of opera Living on Love will seem meaningless, irrelevant and ultimately hollow.

They’re Writing Songs of Love in the City of Light

An American in Paris at the Palace Theater

The ensemble of An American in Paris.

            An American in Paris begins with the stark image of a piano against a black stage, shortly to be played by American expat and serviceman Adam Hochberg (Brandon Uranowitz).  After sustaining a leg injury he’s embarrassed to reveal to his kinsfolk at home, Hochberg has taken up composing in 1945 Paris, and quite a few of his tunes sound a good bit like George Gershwin’s.  Come to think of it, his pal Jerry Mulligan (Robert Fairchild) looks, dances, and sings eerily like Gene Kelly, with a Leslie Caron lookalike, Lise Dassin (Leanne Cope), by his side.  And the astonishingly perfect sets (by Bob Crowley, one of the greats) could have been lifted off an MGM soundstage.  All of this is appropriate, for the stage production of American, which has transferred from a hugely successful run at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, essentially takes the 1951 film of the same name (directed by Vincente Minnelli and one of the triumphs of the Freed Unit) and plumbs its depths, taking the story to its logical conclusion.  It’s fair to say had George Gershwin survived to write a stage version of An American in Paris, it would look like this—which is to say it would be staggeringly beautiful, gratifyingly ambiguous, technically brilliant, and just the slightest bit empty.

            Credit where credit is due: choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, who performs that function here as well as directing for the first time, has created something of immaculate aesthetic value that will survive for generations.  His ballet choreography (which fills the show almost to bursting, but never tediously) is sublime, and his dramatic instincts are perfect.  He and the librettist Craig Lucas have transformed the underdeveloped intertwining storylines of the film into something deep and significant, a story about sacrifice and artistry and the true nature of love. 

Notably and importantly for a crowd-pleasing musical like this one, certain aspects of the story (like the sexuality of one character and the possible Nazi collaboration of others) are left to the audience to discover for themselves, a wonderful display of respect for viewers’ intelligence.  There are just a couple of places where, glaringly, this mission is not successfully carried out, probably the prime example being the treatment of Jews.  Hochberg and other Jews in the show are shown primarily as lapdogs to be protected, laughed at, or generally left out, much the same way that “nerds” were portrayed in John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club—that is, with a modicum of “all are welcome” respect but an undertone of condescending superiority.  The Jews in this libretto are defined by their ethnicity in a way that, say, George Gershwin never was.  Mr. Uranowitz, as Hochberg, walks with a limp and often threatens to break out, Crutchie-from-Newsies-style, into a cutesie routine emphasizing his urban-ness, just so we know he’s different and isn’t really participating in the love story the rest of the characters are, God forbid.  Oscar Levant, who played Mr. Uranowitz’s role in the film, did a much better job of endowing the character with real humanity, mostly because he didn’t put on the ridiculous Brooklyn accent so common to Jewish World War II soldiers in popular culture (see: Inglourious Basterds), and which Mr. Uranowitz chooses to employ here.  The dialogue, too, can sometimes leave a little to be desired, and not just Hochberg’s.  (Jerry: “Art is really important.”  Lise: “I know.  I’m French.”) 

But really, this is all nitpicking.  An American in Paris is clearly, from the very start, a work of art that unfolds before us in real time.  The dancing is exquisite, and never better than when it’s danced by Mr. Fairchild, whom I heretofore move to cast in every role Gene Kelly ever played.  His fluid, insanely perfect movement, as well as his warbling singing voice and even line phrasing, is identical to Mr. Kelly’s, but he brings an ebullience to the role that Kelly, 39 when the film was made, couldn’t quite match at the time.  Max von Essen, as Henri Baurel (the Georges Guétary role), is also phenomenal, especially in the incredibly staged “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” number, the rightful centerpiece of the film and the musical.  

The score, of course, is universally magnificent and magnificently played.  To compliment Gershwin in discussing this musical goes without saying.  He was and is the greatest composer who has ever lived, and his legacy, along with that of his underrated brother and lyricist Ira, is well-represented here.  Just another way for their songs to live on for generations to come.

If some parts of the transition are rocky, so be it.  Mr. Wheeldon has taken a dated if beautiful movie and made from it one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had in a theater.  If any musical has ever managed to replicate the experience of stepping onto an MGM soundstage and watching Gene Kelly dance by, this is it.  And that’s an experience you’re unlikely to have anywhere else but the Palace Theater for the forseeable future.