A Working Girl Can’t Win

Sweet Charity at the Signature Center

                                     

Shuler Hensley and Sutton Foster in Sweet Charity.

            They don’t make ‘em like Charity Hope Valentine, the feisty, resolutely optimistic dance hall hostess at the center of Sweet Charity, anymore, nor do they make ‘em like Sutton Foster, the complete package of the musical comedy star, so it is perhaps fated that the two should meet at the New Group’s stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, now through January 8^th.  It was equally inevitable given the ingredients – a score that produced at minimum two of the greatest songs in the history of musical theater, and a star who has proven herself the only stage actress alive who can hold a candle to Merman, Ball, and Holliday – that it would be good.  What was by no means expected was how extraordinary it would turn out to be.

            This Sweet Charity, directed by Leigh Silverman and choreographed by Joshua Bergasse in its first off-Broadway outing, is, to be fair, really good for many reasons.  It’s rooted so deeply in the late ‘60s, for one thing, that it feels at least as accurate as Hair (from which it borrows liberally but appropriately in its almost unnecessary “Rhythm of Love” sequence) in its amalgamation of subculture and moral deterioration.  Its male lead, Shuler Hensley, and effective one-man ensemble, Joel Perez, make the near-impossible but imperative leap from ridiculous to pathos that grounds this musical comedy in the darkness that makes it unique.  And it’s pretty enormously goddamned fun, in its shockingly intimate staging in a 200-seat theater that injects the proceedings with immediacy, then jolts the evening into full gear with the triple-whammy to end all triple-whammies: Neil Simon’s book, one of the few of the era to be truly funny and dramatically satisfying, plus Dorothy Fields’ witty lyrics and Cy Coleman’s effortlessly cool score.

            But, then, to be honest: It’s good because of Sutton Foster.  It is perhaps a cliché, leftover from movies of the ‘40s and ‘50s about musicals of the ‘40s and ‘50s, for a well-to-do audience to leave a theater gushing of the leading lady, “Oh, she can do anything.”  This is not actually true of most of the more prominent female stars on today’s Broadway stages.  It is true of Ms. Foster.  She is as good here as it is possible for her to be, and, as with every time she plays a role, she plays it better than it’s ever been played and sings the songs better than they’ve ever been sung and justifies the show’s existence by playing in it.  I’ve heard that this is a role she’s wanted to play for a long time, but it’s impossible to say why retrospectively since it was never big enough for her until she played it.  She leaps, she belts, she leaves the audience in hysterics – in short, she towers.  We are lucky – lucky, do you hear me – to be living at the same time she’s performing.  When I saw her do Anything Goes on Broadway in 2011, I thought definitively that it was the greatest performance she was ever likely to give.  I was wrong.  It’s this one.  Until the next one.

            “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” one of those two best songs I mentioned earlier (the other, incidentally, is “Big Spender”), comes near the middle of the first act, when Charity is left, briefly, alone by her host, a charming Italian film star, in his opulent apartment.  Charity revels, exults, crows – and when Sutton Foster does it, so do you.  There are tap shoes, a hat, a cane, and a practically bare proscenium – and it’s the best stage sequence I’ve seen in a long time, or maybe ever.  The other day, I listened to “If My Friends Could See Me Now” again, not even really thinking about Ms. Foster.  I made it almost until the final few bars, when I recalled, as the triumphant notes sounded, Ms. Foster’s Charity falling ecstatically backward onto a chaise.  I’m not even ashamed to admit that I teared up a little, given that I can build up my masculinity again in the intervening years between now and when Sutton Foster gets back on stage.  When she does, she’ll have me right where she wants me.   

Christmas, Again

Holiday Inn at Studio 54

(L-R: Corbin Bleu, Lora Lee Gayner, and Bryce Pinkham in a promo for Holiday Inn.)

            Let us now – with whatever swallowed gags and underhanded irony that may be necessary – praise Connecticut.  It is a radiantly inoffensive place in almost every sense.  It is small but not too small to be relevant, north of New York City but not too far north to be hick country.  If it had a color, it would be beige.  It’s rural enough to be believable as the location for a rambling, disused parsnip farm, in the new Broadway musical, Holiday Inn (more on why that name sounds familiar later), but sophisticated enough to be believable as the location for the tryout theater that originated this sweet, fun, and largely insignificant musical.

            That’s Goodspeed Opera House, incidentally, in East Haddam, CT.  It’s been a hotbed of Broadway transfers since Man of La Mancha originated there, in 1965, but in the last eight years its only production to move to the Main Stem has been 2015’s Amazing Grace, which by all accounts fell slightly short of its title.  So, children, who do we turn to when new and nuance have both been done to death?  Irving Berlin, naturally, and the 1942 score to the film Holiday Inn, which he basically wrote for a paycheck and thought he could leave behind him, until what he thought was a minor song, “White Christmas,” started selling and wouldn’t stop.

            Bryce Pinkham sings “White Christmas” in this production, and goddamn if he’s not every inch the star he proved himself to be in 2014’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder when he’s singing it – a completely unusual Broadway leading man with the diction and remove of Noel Coward emanating from a man who looks like Bela Lugosi.  The problem with “White Christmas,” however, is that it is, as previously intimated, the best-selling song of all time, and the minute you start playing it the oh-so-self-satisfied sighs of recognition from the audience are going to start drowning out the song.  Pinkham gets a huge laugh when he refers to it as “just a little Christmas song I started working on and put in a drawer,” and I’m not entirely sure it was intended.  But there’s the rub – any musical based on one of the most familiar musicals of the era, one starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, for that matter, has got to be willing to laugh at itself a little. 

If Holiday Inn has a fault, it’s that it won’t do that.  There is nothing original or new about the show whatsoever – aside from the fact that Corbin Bleu, in the Astaire part, is buffer and more of a buffoon than his predecessor’s character ever was.  It is an unapologetically superficial, upbeat, old-fashioned musical; I’m not complaining here, just telling you what the damn thing’s already wearing on its sleeve.  It is, as is its home state and setting, radiantly inoffensive.

But – and watch yourself, this is a big but – that is literally all that’s wrong with it.  Gordon Greenberg’s production is pitch-perfect in every conceivable way, particularly its effervescent choreography, by Denis Jones, which accomplishes things I’ve never seen tap-dancing do before, and the all-around excellent performances.  Bleu, bless his heart, really is an excellent and a natural dancer (take those High School Musical basketballs out of his hands and it turns out the guy can actually move like a human being).  Lora Lee Gayer, as the love interest who comes between Pinkham and Bleu, has a genuinely unique voice and delivery that far outstrips the passable book (by Greenberg and Chad Hodge). 

I could complain about a million things – you never really believe that Pinkham and Bleu, supposedly best friends, could ever stand each other the least bit – but who comes to Holiday Inn to get down and dirty?  You come to be diverted (a perfect word for this show), and smile and clap and very occasionally gasp at a series of interchangeable chorus lines and Berlin numbers.  After all, as Berlin writes in my personal pick for best song of the score, “Happy Holiday,” “If you’re burdened down with trouble / If your nerves are wearing thin / Pack your load down the road / And come to Holiday Inn.”  If you can find one exposed nerve in this Holiday Inn, alert the management, and they’ll be around to sand it down straight away. 

Civil Blood

Troilus and Cressida at the Delacorte Theatre

(L-R: Andrew Burnap, John Glover, and Ismenia Mendes in Troilus and Cressida.)

            Explaining away Shakespearean problem plays is a tough business.  It’s tempting to suggest everything the Bard ever wrote was intentional, that he foresaw trends in theater that had not yet struck the rest of Elizabethan England, that he is without flaw.  The truth is that he was sometimes, if not lazy, a little messy – and Troilus and Cressida, from 1602, reflects that messiness.  It’s unsure whether it wants to be a history, a tragedy, or a romance, and that, naturally, excites veteran theater directors like Daniel Sullivan, who have tired of trying to reinvent the wheel, or, more immediately, figure out what the hell Hamlet is talking about.  Sullivan’s directing a production of Troilus and Cressida at Shakespeare in the Park right now, and it’s shocking how much he succeeds in justifying the thematic schizophrenia of the text (while also justifying a surprisingly fleet three-hour running time).  But one’s well-served to read the play before visiting, before closing on August 14^th, to see how far the production, flawlessly acted, directed, and designed, outstrips the promise of the text itself.

            The atmosphere is thrillingly alive even in its malaise.  In a far-off war zone (presumably Middle Eastern) standing in for the battlefields of Troy, great warriors have been fighting for seven years over an argument they no longer remember, in a war so uncertain they can eat dinners and stage cage matches together in all friendship and go out and slaughter each other the next day.  Sullivan’s battle scenes, supremely staged (if a little loud – Shakespeare would have found it difficult to imagine submachine guns) are as beautifully chaotic as anything out of Apocalypse Now (for which thanks are mostly due to his designers, David Zinn, Robert Wierzel, and Mark Menard).  It’s a world of fear and continual bloodshed, surrounding the stillness of men; fitting, for Troilus and Cressida is really a play about love – that most human of impulses – during war – that least human.  The little, text-bending changes (one involving Corey Stoll’s majestic, battle-scarred Ulysses nearly made me squeal) are pitch-perfect.  It is a production, in light of retrospect, as good as anything I am ever likely to see in the park in my lifetime.  It makes no apologies, only room for its actors to shine.

            It’s rare, incidentally, to describe a Shakespeare in the Park production as “flawlessly acted” and mean it.  A Delacorte production, with its colliding and admirable tendencies both to be devoted to the text and to reinvent it for a new era, doesn’t leave a lot of room for actorly innovation, and even the strongest performers (Judy Gold in this summer’s Taming of the Shrew; Sam Waterston in last summer’s The Tempest) can’t make the language seem real.  It’s a tough hurdle – one this male ensemble, the strongest this side of 2013’s Twelfth Night on Broadway, surpasses with ease.  (There are two women, Tala Ashe as Helen and Andromache and Ismenia Mendes – on whom more later – and both are equally extraordinary.)  I’ve never seen a production where it was so hard to name standouts, perhaps partially because the intertwining storylines – two little sections from the Iliad blown up into a not-quite-larger story – give everyone their time upon the stage.  Goddamnit, everyone is great – Stoll as a military contractor who has lost the will to do anything but win, John Glover as a Pandarus exquisitely rendered from beginning to end, Max Casella as a hysterical Thersites, here a sniping janitor in the Greek camp, and Louis Cancelmi, an extraordinary Caliban in last year’s Tempest, who here makes a frighteningly focused Achilles, whose slurred words and lackadaisical movements somehow make him more frightening.

            Of course, one must be fair even in as talented a group as this and acknowledge that one person out-acts the entire cast without breaking a sweat.  It’s just a bit of a shock he only graduated from the Yale School of Drama this year.  Andrew Burnap as Troilus is a revelation – real, sympathetic, funny, human, in every movement, every word.  Troilus, a thinly sketched character at best, here has his story told as thoroughly as it can be.  And in this production of the play, which for all its sweep reminds us of the love that can be destroyed by conflict, he would be nothing without his Cressida, and Mendes stands alone on stage not only because she is mostly the only woman on it (though this fact makes for some genuinely frightening action in the second act, brilliantly staged by Sullivan and hammering home the amorality and the immediate effects of sustained war).  She is fascinatingly modern even while delivering text written four centuries ago about a conflict which took place eight centuries ago.  It is hard to overstate how well this serves her – whether in Troilus and Cressida’s first scene together, which contains the modern seeds of romantic comedy in their sweetest form, or in her terrors as a prisoner of the Greeks in the second act, a bundle of jangling nerves and a woman destroyed.

            Separately, Burnap and Mendes frame this production; together, they make it.  This staging blends large and small, love and war, pain and ecstasy.  So do they.  They are its microcosm and its epicenter, a small, blooming, bleeding heart that reminds us what we could do if we decided once and for all to wage war no more.

Money For Nothing

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater at City Center Encores! Off-Center

 

Santino Fontana (foreground center) and the company of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

                It’s easy to forget that God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, now at City Center as part of the Encores! Off-Center series through July 30^th, is what Off-Center is supposed to be about.  The past three seasons of its existence have seen shows that are under-produced on Broadway (Little Shop of Horrors in 2015), under-seen generally (Tick… Tick… Boom in 2014), or just in a new stage of development (Violet in 2013).  But we have seen all too few musicals that, like this one, are little-known for just one reason – they are completely and utterly insane.

                The first collaboration of Alan Menken and the hugely underrated lyricist/librettist Howard Ashman, and an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1965 novel of the same name, ran 49 performances Off-Broadway in 1979 before shuttering abruptly (wrote Vonnegut to Ashman later that year: “We concluded that theater people are not supposed to be paid, probably, and that maybe that was OK”).  It is, by any measure, a hot mess – alternately excessively mordant and ahead of its time, and tonally all over the map.  But it is a window not only on the early development of Menken and Ashman (who would go on to write Little Shop and the entire Disney Renaissance catalogue) as songwriters but also into the style – coldly satirical and dismissive of good old Americana in a way only Vonnegut could be – that would inform them on a much deeper level.  Deep in the mulch of Rosewater, Audrey II blooms.

                Which is not to say that Rosewater is bad – it isn’t remotely so.  For one thing, the book – which borrows liberally from Vonnegut’s text, as anyone would – is hysterical and expert.  We follow the travails of the scion of the Rosewater aristocratic family, Eliot (Santino Fontana), as he abandons his family’s foundation and his long-suffering wife (Brynn O’Malley) on a search for spiritual fulfillment – what he wants more than anything else, though he can’t quite figure out how to do it, is to help people.  In a Vonnegut text, that can only mean that he is completely out of his mind.

                He is, and therein lies the rub – as Eliot settles in his hometown of Rosewater County, IN, dispensing liberally both his fortune and advice to the locals (his handmade signs, which he hangs around town, read “Don’t Kill Yourself: Call the Rosewater Foundation"), it is impossible to fully sympathize with him; in fact, we are not meant to do so.  Our antagonist, played magnificently by Skylar Astin as a monstrous cartoon straight out of Dickens, is a lawyer looking for a piece of the Rosewater Foundation’s millions by having Eliot declared legally insane (his villain song, “Mushari’s Waltz (Magical Moment),” is a proto-Disney mini-masterpiece that clearly informed “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and the like).  We feel we shouldn’t agree with him, but we do.  Eliot thinks he’s Hamlet.  He’s obsessed with oxygen and volunteer fire brigades.  He worships a fourth-rate science fiction hack, Kilgore Trout (James Earle Jones in a delightful last-scene cameo).  Eliot Rosewater is completely off the deep end.  And so is this show.  That’s what makes it so much fun.

                In Michael Mayer’s direction, the stage bursts with color and movement from a hundred different directions, choreographed (by Lorin Latarro) almost to appear un-choreographed.  The music jumps from genre to genre – Eliot sings, as in the excellent “Look Who’s Here” and “I, Eliot Rosewater,” in pseudo-gospel to echo his proud philanthropic journey; Mushari’s dastardly waltzes and tangoes lampoon everything from the legal system to that old Menken and Ashman standby, suburbia; and perhaps the best song in the show, “Plain Clean Average Americans,” sung by the full company in American flag vests and very familiar-looking floppy blonde wigs, reminds us that perhaps it is better to be completely removed from reality than to be craven enough to abhor one another.  The script is alternately viciously parodic and deeply poignant in a way that almost brings on whiplash.  (The cast, incidentally, read from scripts disguised as Kilgore Trout novels, a nice touch made awkward only by Clark Johnson as Eliot’s father, a Senator, who on opening night stumbled so many times he must have left five full minutes of dead air.)  This is a totally ridiculous production of a totally ridiculous show.  But I think we might need more ridiculous shows.

                What brings it all together, unsurprisingly, is the phenomenally talented Santino Fontana as Rosewater.  His masterful John Adams in 1776 earlier this year combined with this role, a man whose descent into insanity paradoxically makes him more sympathetic, make him by default a City Center staple, the de facto host and star of Encores!.  He is absolutely transfixing.   Watch as someone calls the fire brigade line at the Rosewater Foundation, desperate for personal advice, and he explodes: “God damn you for calling this number.  You should go to jail and rot.  Stupid sons of bitches who make personal calls on a fire department line should go to hell and fry forever.”  He slams down the phone.  The direct line rings, and he picks it up and answers sweetly, “Rosewater Foundation, Rosewater speaking, how can I help you?”  Fontana is a master at work – he can make any role, even this relatively underwritten one, the heart and soul of a production. 

Rare is the musical that is stopped dead not by an all-out number but by a tearful, terrifying monologue – one that, in its clarity and focus, twists the narrative into something beyond what we’ve expected.  Santino Fontana delivers that monologue.  He is extraordinary.  The show really isn’t, but if he’s not worth watching, then what is?

The Room Where it Happens

Oslo at the Mitzi E. Newhouse           

 

(L-R: Jennifer Ehle and Jefferson Mays as unconventional diplomats in Oslo.)

            For those of us who have gazed despairingly from the sidelines at seemingly endless cock-ups by politicians of levels high and low and thought to ourselves, “Well, I could do better than that!” there is some dramatic vilification, in the midst of a season rife with discord both political and Middle Eastern, in the form of J.T. Rogers’ breakneck new play Oslo, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse.  Those peace accords emblazoned with the name of that Norwegian city, evidently, were not limited to a brief and hugely unconvincing handshake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House Lawn in September 1993, nor were they executed, even remotely, by the jolly Arkansan who oversaw the photo opportunity with the proprietary glee of a P.T. Barnum. 

Actually, a complex Scandinavian endeavor, rife with borderline-illegal cooperation between the public and private sectors, was responsible.  Mr. Rogers, to correct the record, has condensed the nine months of fascinating and strikingly original diplomacy that made at least a semblance of peace in the Middle East for seven glorious years into a three-hour, three-act wonder that never seems overburdened or too cute for its own good.  It’s part comedy of errors, part history lesson, and so far is that atmospheric combination from disjointed that the only places where it falters come when it ventures too far into one or the other.

To begin with – Oslo, directed by the LCT’s patron saint, Bartlett Sher, is near-impossible to summarize.  If I may quote liberally from the foot-long insert I received with my Playbill – Terje Rod-Larsen (the phenomenal Jefferson Mays) is a think-tank president married to Mona Juul (Jennifer Ehle, also excellent), a Norwegian Foreign Ministry official.  Out of what seems, partly, to be a genuine feeling for the people of the region, and partly out of the desire to impose order onto a chaotic world and then take credit for having invented order that is so distinctly Scandinavian, the two initiate a series of clandestine meetings between PLO Finance Minister Ahmed Qurie (Anthony Azizi, deeply felt) and a delegation of Israeli professors from the University of Haifa, that eventually lead to extended talks between the PLO and Israeli Foreign Ministry Director-General Uri Savir (Michael Aronov).  Throughout, those at the top in the Norwegian, Israeli, and Palestinian governments are relegated to strictly need-to-know status.  Rod-Larsen, after all, is trying to impose a policy of personality, of gradualism, onto Middle Eastern diplomacy.  Naturally, the Americans can’t be involved.

The little winks and fourth-wall breaks that come throughout nod to how impossible to follow the whole thing is, but really Rogers’ portrayal is so masterfully done I was never once confused.  The strongest scenes in the piece come in the negotiation sessions between Qurie and Savir, one a strong-willed populist, the other a bespoke-suit-wearing playboy – they have incredible literary personality besides keeping you on the edge of your seat.  You get the sense of a real window into a history-making process.

But the real stars of the proceedings are Rod-Larsen and Juul, played perfectly by Mays and Ehle as teammates in the grandest sense.  In their own, dilettante way, they are trying to do something they know is right – even if their own glory may be an added attraction.  Ehle, sporting a flawless accent and a presence somehow simultaneously steely and maternal, fulfills the promise of the character – beloved by all on both sides because of her ability and willingness to bring people together.  Mays is perfect as the intellectual who thinks – knows – he can do better than the bureaucrats, with all of the well-meaning arrogance that entails.  The actors are just as much of a team – and just as successful, in a different way – as their real-world counterparts.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the surprisingly short-lived Shuffle Along at the conclusion of this thoroughly exemplary play, as we are treated to a laundry list of diplomatic failures and disappointments that followed the accord’s signing in the early ‘90s.  At the end of that musical, the stars and creators of the show-within-the-show make peace with the fact that they will fade into irrelevancy, because their cause and art was righteous.  Climbing the stairs into the audience at the end of Oslo, Rod-Larsen looks up, into the light, and reaches out.  “Look there,” he says, “on the horizon.  A beginning.”  They tried.  And perhaps in this imperfect world, captured in the diamond-perfect gaze of Rogers’ play, that is the best any of us can do.