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 45th 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.
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