Love Songs

Carmen Jones at the Classic Stage Company

 Clifton Duncan and Anika Noni Rose in Carmen Jones.

            There isn’t much scenery in John Doyle’s new production of Carmen Jones, opening June 27^th at the Classic Stage Company, but then there doesn’t need to be.  It’s not that the spare, factory-style scenic design necessarily suggests a pavilion, or a boxing ring, or even really a factory – it’s the music, so enormous, substantial, and rewarding it dwarfs everything else.  In 1943 Oscar Hammerstein II adapted Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen to the contemporary American South and populated it with black servicemen and factory workers, thus providing the deftest-yet translation of Bizet’s French lyrics into any language or idiom, and introducing Bizet’s genius to a new generation.  And what genius!  The music is richer than anything on Broadway – perhaps anything that’s ever been on Broadway – and it is, in this incarnation, impeccably sung.

            One’s experience of this Carmen Jones, the first major production in New York since the original, seventy-five years ago, will probably depend on one’s tolerance for opera.  Because, though populated by musical theater performers – notably the smoldering Anika Noni Rose (perfect) and the massively charismatic Clifton Duncan (singing brilliantly but falling just short of his usual acting standards) – the emotions are as heightened and the arias as overwrought as anything at the Met.  For the musical theater audiences who will likely be coming to see it, it will take getting used to – especially in the last half-hour of this ninety-five-minute compression of the opera, when the more familiar tunes (“Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum,” “Stan’ Up and Fight,” and that glorious overture) have passed.

            But that’s because operas are simple – and luckily director Doyle (also the Classic Stage’s artistic director) does simple better than anyone else.  His pared-down productions of Sweeney Todd and The Color Purple did boffo business on Broadway, and his recent Pacific Overtures (also at the Classic Stage) came close to the divine.  Here, with a cast of ten and an orchestra of six, he delineates with a surgeon’s care the fundamental concern of the piece – prophecy.  In Hammerstein’s magnificent translation of the Habanera, “Dat’s Love,” Carmen (Rose) sings, “If I chase you, then you gets caught / And once I got you, I go my way… Don’t say I didn’t tell you true.”  The poor aspiring airman who she chases in this case, Joe (Duncan), proceeds to ignore the warning entirely.  Carmen, on the other hand, sees a tarot card predicting her own death and steels for it with something close to dignity.  This is an opera, that most eminently predictable of genres, and yet, fascinatingly, the ending hinges on which of the characters are able to see it coming.

            This Carmen Jones is slightly wooden and slightly dusty, and succumbs to a few of the plotted oddities that Hammerstein presumably found it difficult to avoid in his transposition.  (Where exactly, in the Chicago of 1943, was there a swanky country club exclusively for black patrons?)  But at its best, like in Rose’s strikingly sensual “Dat’s Love” and Soara-Joye Ross’s infectious, audience-invading “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum,” it’s also fun.  Since the show is done in the round, one can watch the faces of the audience as the tunes that have permeated the world’s collective consciousness begin, and it’s as if an ear-to-ear grin passes over the face of the theater itself.  This production manages to sustain that smile for at least a solid hour, and that’s not nothing.

            The real joy, as always in this 199-seat theater, is the discovery that any production, no matter how high-minded, can be made intimate, and gloriously so.  To use a cliché, one truly feels part of the action: Factory workers call over the audience’s heads.  In dance numbers, the cast members murmuringly and glowingly encourage one another: “Yeah,” “That’s it.”  As the cast were setting up scenery at the performance I saw, Justin Keyes (who plays a boxer’s manager) slipped; Ross called “I saw that,” and he responded, saucily, “Saw what?”  You see more of this ten-person ensemble than you can hope to see of the dozens on a Broadway stage, and just as Doyle made his Pacific Overtures a showcase for New York Asian stage actors, so he does here with superbly talented African-Americans who never miss a note or a cue.  The original Carmen Jones was a haven for black stage talent who weren’t being cast elsewhere; this Carmen Jones is much the same.  Oscar Hammerstein, wherever he is, probably just got a burst of pride; Georges Bizet, rightly so, is probably already proud enough.

2018 Tony Picks

The 72^nd Tony Awards, hosted by Josh Groban and Sara Barielles, air Sunday the 10^th at 8 on CBS.

            Welcome to the age of the revival.

            We get one really good new musical a season, it seems, in this trying day and age, and this year it’s David Yazbek and Itamar Moses’s The Band’s Visit.  All the rest is brand names and intellectual property, noise and block letters, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  In other words, Frozen, Mean Girls, and SpongeBob SquarePants (shudder), the other three nominees, plus Escape to Margaritaville, Rocktopia, and The Donna Summer Musical.  God forgive us.  Well, this year as every year, our chosen few (Yazbek, Moses, and director David Cromer) will make their fated, unobstructed walk to the podium, just as Pasek and Paul, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tesori and Kron, and Lutvak and Freedman did before.  The slate of musical revivals – one perfect and one painfully near-perfect – will dominate the night.  And that is the state of the art.

            Reliance on revivals is nothing new – three out of the last seven winners for Best Revival have been better than their Best Musical counterparts – except that this year it goes for straight plays as well as musicals.  In all likelihood Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, nobody’s Shakespeare, will walk away with Best Play, but, if Tony knows what she’s doing, the perfect Angels in America revival will sweep the rest of the play categories.  Tony Kushner’s a great genius of our age.  But this season would have you believe he’s the only one.

             It’s altogether possible (though unlikely) that the Tonys could prove themselves irrelevant once and for all by doling out the top awards to the yellow sponge mentioned above, plus some of his phony Hollywood friends.  But the end of a season like this one is the time for reflection not just on awards but on the art form they’re meant to celebrate.  If this is how Broadway looks from now on – one Hamilton or Sunday in the Park with George or Clybourne Park or Angels in America every thirty years, and the rest silence – where else can this glorious medium, this majestic old Miss Havisham, this live theater, flourish?  As Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley wrote (and, incidentally, went Tonyless for) in 1964: “Who can I turn to if you turn away?”

Best Musical: The Band’s Visit

The thing about The Band’s Visit is that it isn’t really great.  It’s purposefully small and quiet and less than lavish, which I appreciate, but it can occasionally feel so slight it threatens to fall in on itself.  But it advances the art form – I have no doubt its dismissal of choreography as necessary to storytelling will have its influences – and it’s the best new musical, by far, of this season, on the page and on the stage.  Not that it’s a particularly high bar.

Best Play: The Children

This being as weak a year for new plays as for new musicals, I haven’t seen The Children, nor the play most likely to win this category, the aforementioned Harry Potter.  (Nor have you, most likely, unless you’ve got five hundred dollars handy and the wherewithal to wait a month or six to visit what’s essentially a Broadway play-shaped tourist attraction.)  But I have read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, as written by Jack Thorne, and it’s a mess – shapeless, meandering, and lacking even sparks of the imagination J.K. Rowling lavished on every syllable of the original books.  It’s a hopeless retread, impressive stagecraft or no, and so out of principle The Children gets my vote, if only because, by all accounts, it’s actually a good play.  That’s certainly more than can be said for Harry Potter, or a third, misbegotten competitor in this category, the confused Farinelli and the King.

Best Revival of a Musical: Carousel

It’s been said over and over again – by Chris Jones of the Tribune, who wrote, “God is in Carousel;” by Marilyn Stasio in Variety, who called it “immaculate” and “sheer bliss” – but it bears repeating: Jack O’Brien’s revival of Carousel is diamond-perfect, all the way through.  As powerful and wrenching as anything ever seen on Broadway, O’Brien’s production clears in one fell swoop the naysayers who cast aside the Golden Age as a model, while also (unfortunately) reminding us of the state of musical theater by proving to be the most emotionally resonant show this season.  It’s a piece we should revive once every ten years, at minimum, and this production reminds us why.

Best Revival of a Play: Angels in America

Marianne Elliott’s revival, originally at the National Theatre in London, has got to be the fleetest eight hours anyone could spend in a theater.  One of the biggest surprises about this revival of a very heavy show is how very light it is on its feet.  But what isn’t surprising, given the level of talent involved, is how goddamned great it is, every second of it – and I do mean every second – despite the fact that the enormity of this American masterpiece only really becomes clear at the tail end of that marathon of a runtime.  Normally, stagecraft this good and acting this terrific, when paired, tend to fall into a duel for the audience’s attention.  Not so here.  Faced with stiff competition, wonderful revivals of Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero (which would have won any other year) and Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Angels will win, and win it all.  And why shouldn’t it?  Not only is the play, and the production, superb theater, it also somehow outdoes the very concept of theater itself.  It’s a prophecy, maddening and thrilling and galling all in one.

Best Book of a Musical: Itamar Moses, The Band’s Visit

Itamar Moses’s work on the book for this story of an Egyptian police band stranded in a small Israeli town overnight is minimalistic, and purposefully so, which is stylistically fascinating given that librettos generally tend to wilt when confronted with scores, but not of their own accord.  In his structured retreat from consciously eye-catching moments, Moses creates room for his actors’ and his composer’s work to shine.  It’s what a skilled musical theater writer does, and if the Theater Wing ends up giving this award to Tina Fey, who essentially copy-pasted her 2004 film script for Mean Girls, we’ll know it’s just because they wanted to hang out with her at the after-party.  She’s a genius, but come on.

Best Original Score: David Yazbek, The Band’s Visit

There are two great original songs in David Yazbek’s score to The Band’s Visit, which is more than in the rest of the nominees combined.  (Frozen brings along some of its hits from the movie version, but let’s be adults for a change.)  Yazbek has never been the most purely talented of the cadre of the current elite in musical theater – Jason Robert Brown is more masterful, Miranda more appealing, William Finn wittier – and even Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005), his biggest hit thus far, leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.  But with this score, he brings the Middle Eastern sound into the Broadway mainstream, as impressive in its own way as Miranda’s hip-hop – perhaps more, since Yazbek’s achievement had not a hint of precedent.  Plus those two songs are pretty damn good.

Best Leading Actor in a Play: Andrew Garfield, Angels in America

Andrew Garfield is the leading ham of the season, and that’s a compliment.  His screeching, swooping Prior Walter, half Gloria Swanson and half Jeff Goldblum, is a journey through human life, the gestation of a prophet, and his final, quiet, humble “The great work continues” is colossally moving if only because we’ve seen him do the great work, and eight hours of it.  People have been saying it since his 2010 turn in The Social Network, but let me add to the echoes – keep your eye on this one.

Best Leading Actress in a Play: Glenda Jackson, Three Tall Women

Now and again a performance comes along that reminds one what it is to be a real actor, and everyone else seems to pale by comparison.  Such a performance Glenda Jackson gives in Joe Mantello’s revival of Albee’s Three Tall Women, and she will and should win here, no contest.  It’s a terrifying performance, cold, distant, bent by age, but suffused, too, with the somehow infectious humor of someone who knows she knows better than you do.  Jackson’s character, A, has been reduced to rubble by a profoundly unfair life, but Jackson herself, back in the saddle after three decades as a member of British Parliament, towers.

Best Leading Actor in a Musical: Joshua Henry, Carousel

One of the less-discussed positive ramifications of the Hamilton phenomenon is the increased prominence it’s given to the massively talented black actors who’ve done a tour as Burr.  Brandon Victor Dixon gave a performance in NBC’s Jesus Christ Superstar Live that lends credence to the theory he’s the most talented man alive, and Joshua Henry, who replaced Dixon in Hamilton, offers nothing less than a gift to the theatergoing public with his athletic, wonderful Billy Bigelow.  His “Soliloquy,” a first-act closer to end all first-act closers, forces its way out of him with such emotional heft it actually contorts his body.

Best Leading Actress in a Musical: Jessie Mueller, Carousel

Jessie Mueller should win this award but probably won’t, because Tony voters, blinded by dazzle, probably aren’t trained to recognize and appreciate what she does so perfectly as Julie Jordan in Carousel – stillness.  Since her Tony Award-winning performance in Beautiful, from 2013, she’s cultivated a kind of a quiet dignity as a performer that lends total credence to Julie’s anchoring of the tragically uncontrolled characters with whom she shares the stage.  It’s tough to play utter goodness believably, but Mueller knows what the hell she’s doing, and she knocks it out of the park.

Best Featured Actor in a Play: Nathan Lane, Angels in America

God, but Nathan Lane’s good at everything.  In the ‘90s, he tackled the great roles of musical comedy, and now, older (he’s sixty-two), wiser, and, if anything, better, he’s taking on the whoppers of the straight theater.  After playing Estragon in Waiting for Godot in 2009 and Hickey in The Iceman Cometh in 2012 and 2015, he’s taken on Roy Cohn, and he’s titanic, earth-shattering, flawless – what else is there to say?  If he wants to try Stanley Kowalski next, that’s fine by me.

Best Featured Actress in a Play: Laurie Metcalf, Three Tall Women

Laurie Metcalf just won Best Actress in a Play (for A Doll’s House Part 2) last year, and should have won Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars this year (for Lady Bird).  (Instead, it went to Allison Janney, who was good but not even the best performer in I, Tonya, let alone of the year.)  Her work backing up Jackson in Three Tall Women is more than worthy of another award, if only because, in her role as a caretaker (her first of two roles in the play), she enlivens and expands the first act beyond Albee’s usual played-out cynicism and into the realm of the actual.

Best Featured Actor in a Musical: Norbert Leo Butz, My Fair Lady

In a musical filled with performances almost worthy of Tonys (Lauren Ambrose as Eliza and Harry Hadden-Paton as Higgins come to mind), Butz should grab the brass ring for his third Tony and first as a featured actor.  He is a ball of chaos rampaging through what, in the wrong hands, could easily become a stultified musical; his motions are herky-jerky and his energy is delightfully devilish.  His wild “Get Me to the Church on Time” is the highlight of the production.

Best Featured Actress in a Musical: Lindsay Mendez, Carousel

Carousel is by its nature elevated; the reason it packs such a punch is that its characters and premise seem the distillation of the emotions that inspired them.  Mendez, though, in her bubbly warmth, and with her fascinating and supple voice, is the realest actor in the production.  One gets the urge to watch her work her way through the Golden Age canon and beyond.  She’s a performer best known for her work Off-Broadway (most notably as the female lead in Pasek and Paul’s Dogfight), but she’s got Broadway promise, and I’m excited to see where she goes next.

Best Scenic Design of a Play: Ian MacNeil and Edward Pierce, Angels in America

The best thing about MacNeil and Pierce’s work on Angels is that their scenery actually evolves over the course of the play.  Early in the first part of the two-parter, Millenium Approaches, the stage is occupied mostly by three turntables, each dedicated to one of the three storylines; eventually, as those storylines themselves become disordered, the turntables begin to bleed into each other and eventually disappear by the end of the part.  In part two, Perestroika, their motifs change to horizontal layering – a hospital room that moves back behind an apartment, another apartment that rises from the floor downstage in front of that one.  Then, after Prior’s climactic journey to heaven near the end of the play, the stage empties, leaving behind only the Bethesda Fountain angel, outlined in neon, watching over the detritus of the centuries.  Watching the scenic design in Angels is like watching another feat of acting alongside the ones already present in the play; MacNeil and Pierce’s work itself feels.

Best Scenic Design of a Musical: Michael Yeargan, My Fair Lady

Every Yeargan set for a Sher production at the Vivian Beaumont is a visual experience.  2015’s The King and I was perhaps the ultimate example of the collaboration – making unparalleled use of the Beaumont’s remarkably deep stage with a massive boat in the opener and a palace for the King of Siam that had to be more opulent than the real thing.  But My Fair Lady ain’t far behind – the image of Higgins’ townhouse roaring forward through a black void toward the audience is the most overwhelming image of the season, and the gorgeous azures of the Ascot sequence seem certain to become the standard for future productions.  Yeargan should take this in a walk.

Best Costume Design of a Play: Nicky Gillibrand, Angels in America

If Nicky Gillibrand had only dressed Andrew Garfield’s Prior Walter, she’d deserve the award anyway.  Prior, a former drag performer, spends a good deal of Perestroika dressed as Norma Desmond; his figure, swathed in black, recounting the story of his encounter with the Angel, is instantly iconic.  By the end of the play, Prior’s costume – along with everyone else’s – seems to loosen to allow him room to breathe.  His final lines are, if anything, driven home by his beautiful plaid suit and overcoat, the kind of clothes he would wear on what he describes as a crisp early winter morning – his favorite kind of day.  Gillibrand’s last credit was the dreary Billy Elliot the Musical, for which she was nominated for the Tony.  Here, she makes a triumphant comeback.

Best Costume Design of a Musical: Catherine Zuber, My Fair Lady

There are some beautiful clothes in this My Fair Lady – as there essentially have to be.  It’s a show deeply concerned with clothes as part of its being deeply concerned with appearances, and how they separate us.  Zuber does good work on Eliza’s dresses – shades of green and orange, mostly – and the opulent creams and pinks in the Ascot sequence.  But one can sense she’s more interested in Hadden-Paton’s Higgins, and his sweeping dressing gown, and the stunning checked suit he himself wears to Ascot, offer delicious proof of his arrogance and undercut his professed democratic ambitions.

Best Direction of a Play: Marianne Elliott, Angels in America

Marianne Elliott, director of War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, has long recognized that live theater is more than capable of the cinematic.  With Angels she delivers her greatest achievement, in collaboration with her scenic designers, Ian MacNeil and Edward Pierce, and her lighting designer, Paul Constable, all three of whom should win as well.  Figures fade into darkness and reappear, behind layers of an inchoate set that completely transforms over the course of the play’s two parts.  Many great directors – Brecht among them – become so preoccupied with their technical genius that they leave actors behind them.  Elliott’s never fallen into that trap.  In Alex Sharp’s performance in Curious Incident, from 2014, she coaxed out one of the greatest stage performances in recent years.  In Angels, with Lane and Garfield, she brings us two more.  Give her the Tony.  Let her direct everything.

Best Direction of a Musical: David Cromer, The Band’s Visit

Jack O’Brien deserves this award for Carousel, and why he wasn’t nominated for it will remain forever beyond me.  Bartlett Sher, meanwhile, in his work on My Fair Lady, nearly pulls off a terrific evening of rousing spectacle but undoes it with a stupid and dramaturgically limp choice of ending that undoes much of what came before it.  That leaves Cromer, whose work is strongest in the small, beautiful moments for which Yazbek and Moses’s small musical makes ample room.  So many moments in The Band’s Visit are traced in circles: In lieu of a dance routine, a character spins a plate around on a table and stares at it; a budding love affair develops in every lap around a skating rink; a turntable rotates at what seems like the same rate as gravity drives the residents of Bet Hatikvah, Israel ever further into the ground.  The Band’s Visit was supposed to be directed by Hal Prince, and it’s hard to think of a more polar opposite to Cromer’s style – Prince sells it with a personal style that overrides almost everything else, but Cromer, like Moses, knows when to step back.

Best Choreography: Justin Peck, Carousel

If ever there were a case of a choreographer gunning for a Tony, it’s surely the “Blow High, Blow Low,” sequence in Carousel.  Justin Peck, the Resident Choreographer of the New York City Ballet, makes use of one of his principal dancers, Amar Ramasar (as Jigger Craigin), plus a thrilling male ensemble, in the service of choreography that, described in the abstract, would sound nearly impossible.  Sometimes a Tony is deserved for evident effort, other times for transcending the human.  Peck fits both categories.

Best Orchestrations: Jonathan Tunick, Carousel

Tunick shines in that aforementioned “Blow High, Blow Low,” sequence, too, with spot-on string and brass runs to beat (and show off) the band, but he’s on his game throughout, delivering pitch-perfect interpretations that serve to remind the audience of the perfection of Richard Rodgers’ music.  Tunick exists in the service of the music, but he’s impossible to ignore – that’s how he won his EGOT, and won the first-ever Tony Award for Best Orchestrations in 1997 (for Titanic), the only time he’s ever won it.  He should pick up another Sunday in a dead heat over the equally talented Jamshied Sharifi for The Band’s Visit.

Technical Awards

Sound Design in a Play: Ian Dickinson for Autograph, Angels in America

Sound Design in a Musical: Kai Harada, The Band’s Visit

Best Lighting Design of a Play: Paul Constable, Angels in America

Best Lighting Design of a Musical: Donald Holder, My Fair Lady

Multiple Awards

Angels in America, 8

Carousel, 6

The Band’s Visit, 5

My Fair Lady, 4

Three Tall Women, 2