Watched Pot

1984 at the Hudson Theatre.

 

L-R: Tom Sturridge, Reed Birney, and Olivia Wilde in 1984.

            It is a curious fact that to reveal what makes the new play 1984, based on the eponymous novel, so good probably qualifies as a spoiler.  Given that the production is banking on the renewed popularity of its immortal source text in the wake of an administration that practices many of the tactics discussed in the book, but with less dexterity, one might assume that the audience knows exactly what’s going to happen in this British transfer as soon as they walk into the theater.  Suffice it to say that most of the things that seem bad about the play (by Robert Icke and Duncan MacMillan, also the directors) turn out to be precisely what is good about it.  The beginning of the show, which opens June 22^nd at the Hudson Theatre, is constrained, confused, and simplistic, and then, suddenly, it isn’t – and the reveal is one of the most satisfying, and revolutionary, feats of stagecraft we are likely to see on a Broadway stage any time soon.

            It would be more edifying, then, perhaps, to discuss what isn’t in the play – mostly exposition, as the piece requires, perhaps inevitably, a thorough recollection of the novel.  1984 the play isn’t so much 1984 the novel as a dream of that novel, ethereal and hard to grasp, a shell-shocked haze of a memory of an atrocity.  Big Brother’s face, the defining icon of the book and the Michael Radford film (released in the real 1984), appears not once in the play.  The supposed terrorist Emmanuel Goldstein makes only a momentary appearance on the broad corkboard screen that serves as a platform for the show’s plentiful projections (by Tim Reid, with scenic design by Chloe Lamford).  The novel had a broad supporting cast of alternately trembling and loyal members of the ruling Party.  Most of them make the jump to the play, but they are mostly drowned out by a central trio we can’t take our eyes off.

            Tom Sturridge, the fabled replacement for Shia Lebeouf in 2013’s Orphans, plays the lead, disillusioned Party stooge Winston Smith, as something close to a drooling meth-head, which is a completely legitimate dramatic choice that starts off deeply annoying and ends up connecting on a terrific scale.  Olivia Wilde, as his secret paramour Julia, is more human if also marginally less interesting than Suzanna Hamilton in the film, but she always makes more of a visual impression than anything else, and her slinky, pale Wednesday Addams of a character seems to have snuck into this production from another show, mostly to the good.  Most important is Reed Birney, late of The Humans and Man From Nebraska, whose O’Brien, a master manipulator and unsettlingly sympathetic philosopher, is so quiet, so unassuming, that in his long, bravura scene in the second half of the play, he walks away with a show so technically brilliant that carrying it must do a number on his back.

            The play achieves, mainly by dint of that aforementioned sequence, what the Radford film really never did – it’s terrifying.  Radford warned, before the nationwide art-house screening of 1984 in April, that the film would be hard to watch, but with its glorious Roger Deakins cinematography, gray-and-green fantasias, and a surprisingly calming Richard Burton, it’s actually cinematically pleasant, if not quite reassuring.  Not so the play.  Its sequences of torture (which occupy much of the final half-hour) are so brutal I was momentarily convinced I would have to leave the theater; I am, funnily enough, in a state of doublethink about recommending the play – it is remarkably good in nearly every way but hardly the thing you’d wish on your grandmother.

            The close of the play (it has one 101-minute act), the payoff of an incalculably stupid dramatic framing device that I had foolishly hoped had been abandoned earlier in the runtime, is disappointing if only because, after that Birney-dominated torture sequence, it fails to land exactly as hard as it should.  In their entirely earned confidence in their sense of the theatrical, Icke and MacMillan lean a bit too far into the meta-theatrical (Winston shouts to the audience, while being tortured, “Help me! Why doesn’t anybody do anything?”).  Luckily even that final sequence is as visually well-designed as anything on the stage this last season – only after seeing this show will you understand how one can tremble at the sight of a pink umbrella. 

The show ends with O’Brien’s hand on Winston’s shoulder, as Winston, battered, broken, and beyond reason, mutters his gratitude for being laid low at Big Brother’s feet.  If you see 1984, your reaction will not be gratitude, exactly, nor disgust, exactly, nor, certainly, will you have wasted an evening.  But if you know quite what to feel after being injected with this production in its white-hot, furious purity, you’ve got one on me.

2017 Tony Picks

Kevin Spacey will host the 71st Tony Awards, live from Radio City Music Hall, on June 11th at 8 on CBS.

It’s not a competitive season on Broadway, despite what the critics and pundits would have you believe.  No use pontificating – we’ve got ourselves another Hamilton situation, or at least we should, with the modern masterpiece Dear Evan Hansen.  At the ceremony on June 11^th, which will be hosted by Kevin Spacey (an agreeably unorthodox choice), Hansen should sweep and then we can all go to bed.  Despite the writings of Michael Schulman in the New Yorker, who, in a worryingly misguided turn of phrase, described Hansen as a “musicalized Y.A. novel,” or the hand-wringing of the Statler-and-Waldorf team of Jesse Green and Ben Brantley for the Times, who are trying to frame a predictable year as a horse race between Hansen, the treacly Come From Away, and the musically uninteresting Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, we all know how this is going to end.  Or if we don’t, something’s gone horribly wrong.

Nonetheless, a nominating committee that spread its net just wide enough to appear to be spreading it but not too wide to include any genuinely interesting choices (where’s Oh, Hello on Broadway? The Price? Heisenberg?) has snubbed a vertigo-inducing number of deserving performers and productions, most of whom I’ve tried to include in my comments on my picks for this year.  As always, I quote liberally from my reviews.

Best Musical: Dear Evan Hansen

Steven Levenson and Pasek and Paul’s pop-musical is the best version of itself and the strongest work any of its participants will probably ever do; while not quite flawless (there are tonal inconsistencies in the broad strokes of its morality), it is melodically pure and dramatically relevant, and it’s rare both of these things can be true of a single musical, especially one written in this century.  In a hugely competitive season, one including musicals (like Groundhog Day) that would be equally deserving, Hansen should take the cake – my only fear is that the hero-worship of its fan-base might warp it into a tourist trap from what it is – a truly great piece of art.

Best Play: Oslo

In my review of the Off-Broadway iteration of this historical drama about the organization of the 1993 Oslo accords, I described J.T. Rogers’ play (his Broadway debut) as a “masterfully done,” “thoroughly exemplary play” with a “diamond-perfect gaze.”  Its transfer to Broadway has only broadened its impact – Bartlett Sher’s production of this never-didactic, deeply accessible piece is more relevant now than ever.  It’s only a pity that, in a season strong on absurdism, Nick Kroll and John Mulaney’s genuine theatrical masterwork Oh, Hello on Broadway was robbed of a nomination in this category.

Best Revival of a Musical: Hello, Dolly!

Full disclosure – I have not seen Hello, Dolly!.  In fact, I know of very few people who have.  Demand for Bette Midler’s first Broadway appearance in nearly fifty years is high enough that the production’s TV commercials now smugly declare, “Best availability in September.”  This was, actually, a strong season for musical revivals – Sarna Lapine’s production of Sunday in the Park with George and Lonny Price’s Sunset Boulevard were both excellent.  But the former withdrew from Tony consideration, and the latter wasn’t nominated.  I don’t know for sure if Hello, Dolly! is any good.  I know for sure it will win this category.

Best Revival of a Play: Present Laughter

In a relatively unexciting category – Present Laughter, Jitney, and The Little Foxes being the only nominees of note – this “fully old-fashioned,” “thoroughly entertaining production,” as I called it in March, has a fair chance of winning despite not being a particular world-beater.  Director Moritz von Stuelpnagel has constructed a professional Coward revival that goes beyond being a star vehicle for his leading man, Kevin Kline, and adopted the reverent attitude toward original intent of the author that has proved a success for directors like Jack O’Brien of last fall’s The Front Page revival (which should have been nominated here).  No telling this one for sure, though – if I’m right, call it a lucky guess.

Best Book of a Musical: Steven Levenson, Dear Evan Hansen

Levenson’s book is effectively a great play set to music, a repudiation of the years of post-Kander and Ebb shows when musicals became dramatically impotent melodic showcases.  His “adrenaline shot” of a plot is dizzyingly complex and wounding enough to strike an audience to the heart and scar them, collectively, for life, but unlike some other twenty-first century pieces I could name, he doesn’t scar merely for the sake of scarring.  Rarely has a Broadway librettist displayed such a well-developed sense of dramatic integrity.  He should leapfrog over Danny Rubin’s admirably funny but essentially rehashed book for Groundhog Day to the finish line.  (A note: I am beginning to tire of nominating musicals without books, like the sung-through Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, for Best Book.  Perhaps it’s an after-effect of our collective Hamilton haze, but, American Theater Wing – get your act together.)

Best Original Score: Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Dear Evan Hansen

To the extent that Dear Evan Hansen represents a significant entry in the broader history of musical theater, rather than merely the modern history – which I’m convinced it does – it’s largely because of the breathless melodic experiments Pasek and Paul, late of La La Land, Dogfight, and A Christmas Story, undertake in their score.  While their lyrics are not always flawless, their music is, as I wrote in January, “nearly unclassifiable, completely unique, and gorgeous beyond reasonable expectation.  Everything – everything – is in the service of the story, and not a note” rings false.  Expect to see a lot of these two in the coming years.

 

Best Leading Actor in a Play: Jefferson Mays, Oslo

Mays is “phenomenal,” I wrote of him last summer, “perfect as the intellectual who thinks – knows – he can do better than the bureaucrats, with all of the well-meaning arrogance that entails.”  His Terje Rod-Larsen fits into the same buffoonish sophisticate  category as his supporting role in The Front Page or his Tony-nominated performance in 2013’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.  What really makes him stand out, however, is his pitch-perfect collaboration with his female lead, Jennifer Ehle, who should win in her own category as well.

Best Leading Actress in a Play: Jennifer Ehle, Oslo

As I wrote last year, “Ehle, sporting a flawless accent and a presence somehow simultaneously steely and maternal, fulfills the promise” of her foreign-office maven character, Mona Juul – “beloved by all on both sides” for “her ability and willingness to bring people together.”  She plays Mays’ wife, and her collaboration with him ensures the play will be anchored in the union of “teammates in the grandest sense.”  With a hop, skip, and a jump over Laura Linney for The Little Foxes, she should easily win her third Tony for this performance.

Best Leading Actor in a Musical: Ben Platt, Dear Evan Hansen

Ben Platt’s performance in Dear Evan Hansen could be the greatest feat of acting in the history of musical theater.  If he loses this award there is a nonzero chance that there exists a malevolent God, manipulating the travails of mankind to the benefit of ultimate chaos.  That is all.

Best Leading Actress in a Musical: Bette Midler, Hello, Dolly!

See: Best Revival.  I liked Denée Benton in Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, but not enough to pick her over the obvious winner with a straight face.  In another universe, either the ineligible but magnetic Glenn Close, reprising her role in Sunset Boulevard, might’ve snatched this prize up, or Annaleigh Ashford would have wiped the floor with Bette with her extraordinary performance in Sunday in the Park, but thanks to that inconceivable awards withdrawal, here we are.  Here’s hoping this’ll be a more interesting category next year.

Best Featured Actor in a Play: Nathan Lane, The Front Page

By a long shot the most competitive category of the year, Best Featured Actor pits Danny DeVito’s remarkable Broadway debut in The Price against Nathan Lane’s star turn as Walter Burns in last fall’s The Front Page.  It's a clash of the titans, but in a squeaker, it goes to Lane, if only because it is a joy to find that at 61 his raw comic power on the stage is lessened not one hair.  In a part perhaps smaller than he’s played since pre-Guys and Dolls days, Lane walks away with the show, an explosive force detonating in the middle of this un-explosive revival.  DeVito is as great as ever, but Lane’s the king. 

Best Featured Actress in a Play: Cynthia Nixon, The Little Foxes

Absent Kristine Nielsen in Present Laughter, the finest comic performance of her career despite her snub in this category, Cynthia Nixon, with her impressive role-switching repertory in The Little Foxes, is really the only thing left – the other four nominations go to Sweat and A Doll’s House, Part 2 – neither one an actor-focused play, and certain to split their respective votes.

Best Featured Actor in a Musical: Mike Faist, Dear Evan Hansen

Compared to Ben Platt, with whom he shares most of his scenes, Mike Faist, as the suicidal misanthrope Connor Murphy, is deeply understated.  Actually he spends much of the show (spoiler – kind of) literally dead, popping up here and there as a ghost or memory.  But he’s got a sweet – if greasy – energy that justifies the fuss that’s made over his death, plus a relatively strong voice and a key part in Hansen’s most high-energy number, “Sincerely, Me.”  Any actor in the show who isn’t Ben Platt is unfortunately fated to be overshadowed, but Faist is something of the yin to Platt’s yang – impressive enough, certainly, to best his closest competition, Lucas Steele as a rock-star Russian aristocrat in Natasha.

Best Featured Actress in a Musical: Rachel Bay Jones, Dear Evan Hansen

This category – to be honest – is wide-open, the most uncertain this year, especially minus the bravura performance of Amber Gray in Natasha -- another snub.  I could see any of the nominees winning, particularly Jen Colella for her buzzed-about turn as a pilot in Come From Away, but Jones is my personal choice if only for her wrenching number late in Hansen, “So Big/So Small,” an intimate mother-son ballad that’s one of the more overtly tear-jerking in the show.  Jones has a hippie-type edge about her that you either love or hate, but she’s certainly orders of magnitude better in this role than in her unmemorable performance in the Pippin revival four years ago.

Best Direction of a Play: Bartlett Sher, Oslo

In my review of Oslo, I referred to Bartlett Sher as the Lincoln Center Theatre company’s “patron saint,” and he really is – he spearheaded their productions of South Pacific and The King and I as well as their upcoming My Fair Lady, and his classed-up spectacles are the Vivian Beaumont’s bread and butter.  Chalk another one up for the LCT, then – Oslo is a triumph, “a real window into a history-making process,” and Sher should get his due credit.  This, his third Tony, won’t come easy – he’ll have to get through Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s acclaimed work on Jitney – but it would be well-deserved.

Best Direction of a Musical: Matthew Warchus, Groundhog Day

My only Hansen upset – for a reason.  In any other year Groundhog Day would have a solid shot at the proverbial brass ring of Best Musical, but these aren’t good days for pluralism on Broadway.  Tim Minchin’s intricate score and Danny Rubin’s gut-busting book, not to mention Andy Karl’s near-heroic lead performance, will all go unsung at Radio City this year, but Matthew Warchus’ direction should get the recognition it deserves – especially because Michael Greif’s direction of Hansen, unlike his work on earlier pieces like Rent, doesn’t necessarily transgress any boundaries.  Warchus, on the other hand, creates a carnival of effervescent effects that go way beyond anything traditional stagecraft has done before.  As I wrote in March, “never ostentatious but constantly wondrous, [Warchus] establishes here definitively that the theater is capable of anything film is.”

Best Choreography: Sam Pinkleton, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

I didn’t like Natasha.  I thought it was needlessly amelodic, ostentatiously operatic in a musical landscape moving in just the opposite direction, and lacked lyrical effort on the part of its composer, lyricist, and “librettist,” Dave Malloy.  But if there were a Tony Award for Best Opening Number, this show would win hands-down.  In “Prologue,” one of the greatest openers of the season, and of the last few besides, Malloy, with the help of director Rachel Chavkin and the jittery, roaring choreography of Pinkleton, lays out the basic structure of War and Peace for an audience unfamiliar with his source material – as the lyric puts it, “It’s a complicated Russian novel / Everyone’s got nine different names / So look it up in your program.”  For this number, which spills out from the stage into the bizarre stage/audience hybrid that is currently the Imperial, and for a few blinding and fascinating nightclub numbers, too, Pinkleton should take home this award just barely over Denis Jones’s more traditional work in the moribund Holiday Inn.

Best Orchestrations: Alex Lacamoire, Dear Evan Hansen

Lacamoire orchestrated Hamilton and looks to be on track to work on every musical phenomenon of the next decade; he’s on as much of a roll right now as anyone in his profession can ever expect to be.  His work on Dear Evan Hansen, while not as self-evidently brilliant as his nearest competitor in this category, Dave Malloy, orchestrating his own work on Natasha (an impressive feat -- he could win), is rewarding to repeat listeners.  There’s something about his unapologetically contemporary style, and concern for the smallest details that emerge even from the smallest orchestras, that screams genius.  Listening to Hansen is overwhelming, and Lacamoire is much of the reason why.

Technical Awards (with snubs)

Best Scenic Design of a Play: Douglas W. Schmidt, The Front Page

SNUBS: David Zinn, Present Laughter

Derek McLane, The Price

Best Scenic Design of a Musical: Rob Howell, Groundhog Day

Best Costume Design of a Play: Susan Hilferty, Present Laughter

SNUB: Emily Rebholz, Oh, Hello on Broadway

Best Costume Design of a Musical: Paloma Young, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

Best Lighting Design of a Play: Donald Holder, Oslo

SNUBS: David Weiner, The Price

Austin R. Smith, Heisenberg

Best Lighting Design of a Musical: Japhy Weideman, Dear Evan Hansen

Multiple Awards

Dear Evan Hansen, 8

Oslo, 5

Groundhog Day, 2

Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, 2
The Front Page, 2

Present Laughter, 2

Hello, Dolly!, 2

Still Crazy After All These Years

Sunset Boulevard at the Palace Theatre

Glenn Close and Michael Xavier in Sunset Boulevard.

            It’s been thirty-four years since she broke onto the screen, in The Big Chill, and twenty-two since she won her well-deserved Tony Award for the original production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black & Christopher Hampton’s Sunset Boulevard, and directors still aren’t sure what to do with Glenn Close.  It’s something about those cheekbones, maybe; when Close enters a scene she may as well be slicing it in half. On screen, she’s made everyone from Jeff Goldblum to Chris Pratt look entirely immature, and she enters the revival of this musical, Webber’s most openly melodic and theatrical (at the Palace through June 25^th) like a burst of Gothic smoke.  Sunset was, for Billy Wilder, in his original film, a condemnation of a Hollywood that would warp Norma Desmond, the faded silent screen star played originally by Gloria Swanson.  For Webber, though, it’s really a celebration of Hollywood, each number an ode to the kind of plucky, misguided, multicolored collectivism that makes the town run – from wannabe actors (in “This Time Next Year”) to stylists (“The Lady’s Paying”) to beauty specialists (“A Little Suffering”).  That’s why, in this production’s uneven first act, it sometimes seems as if Close and her co-stars are doing two different shows.

            Close doesn’t announce this, though.  Calling her performance a “star turn” would be reductive.  It is extraordinarily multifaceted, in turns pathetic and monstrous and heart-rending, each aspect coalesced masterfully into an arc; almost a writer’s performance, one that recognizes the character and channels it whole.  The director, Lonny Price (who wrangled another explosive performer, Emma Thompson, in the recent Lincoln Center Sweeney Todd), seems, understandably, almost afraid of Close’s talent, which may be why he doesn’t do as much with her early scenes as he does with those of his leading man, the remarkable Michael Xavier, as the screenwriter Joe Gilles.  Price prefers the hands-off approach.  When Norma sings her showstopper, “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” her co-stars stand staring at her and even clap when she finishes, and with good reason – it’s like lightning ripping through a wet paper bag.

            And that’s what Price’s production is – a wet paper bag – until about three-quarters of the way through the first act, when something mysterious happens.  It's as simple as this -- the aforementioned “The Lady’s Paying” sequence, a sartorial number led by the always welcome Jim Walton (Price’s co-star in the original production of Merrily We Roll Along) blasts the show with a shot of insulin, and suddenly it's a thrill ride, turning a more or less moribund Glenn Close vehicle into an argument that this musical, never before revived on Broadway, is Webber’s best.  I’m inclined to believe it.

            Walton’s efforts, which encompass three or four roles and a succession of unfortunate wigs, are part of the proof that Close or no Close, this is a really good show.  Chief among his assistants in this magic trick is Xavier, whose evolution from vanilla leading male to dissolute, disillusioned, louche leech from the first to the second act is utterly surprising.  Bringing up the rear but no less important is the music supervision of the eminent Kristen Blodgette, whose lush orchestrations set the scene in place of any extensive set design.  (The reduced, and efficient, scenery is by James Noone.)

            But at the Palace, where Liza played and Fanny Brice mugged, you know what you’re getting into.  The evening belongs to Close, and perhaps the most fascinating part of the proceedings is the degree to which the actress overlaps with her part (even more, in some ways, than Gloria Swanson, who actually was a star of silent cinema).  In a lyric Black and Hampton cribbed from the film, Norma sings, “We didn’t need words, we had faces,” and in a key moment in the second act the audience actually does applaud Close’s facial expression – nothing more but a twist of the neck and a widening of the eyes, but they go crazy for it.  Billy Wilder’s thesis was that fame won and lost eventually led to madness, decay, and murder.  At the end of this production, Glenn Close takes not one – not two – not three – but four curtain calls, all by herself.  Go figure.