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.