A Troupe of Candidates Quite Unlike Our Own

Gore Vidal's The Best Man at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater

            One’s first thought upon the end of the first scene of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, playing through July 1^st at the Schoenfeld Theater, is the wish for a presidential candidate like Secretary of State William Russell (the absolutely brilliant John Larroquette).  Russell is intellectual, open-minded, cares about policy first, and gives off the impression of being an all-around good guy.  But perceptions are warped and everything changes throughout our journey through the worlds of the candidates and Vidal’s brilliant expose of American politics.

            Russell, a capable Secretary of State under former president Art Hockstader (James Earl Jones), is cautious yet astute, and, with the help of the superior script, comes off just as smart as Gore Vidal himself.  His opponent, Senator Joseph Cantwell (Eric McCormack), is a classic politician: evasive, smooth, and with just a hint of a Midwestern accent.  Both crave Hockstader’s endorsement at the national convention at which the play takes place, and each has a line of dirt on the other (both of which may or may not be true) so inflammatory that mutually assured destruction seems imminent.

            But aside from Best Man’s captivating plot, it also boasts a script chock-full of beautiful use of the English language coming to us courtesy of its brilliant playwright, a co-writer of the 1959 film version of Ben-Hur.  As the candidates slowly destroy each other, and, eventually, themselves, the audience is drawn in by deep and real interest, and the viewer develops stakes in the happenings and intricate twists and turns of the storyline, until it eventually comes to its deeply satisfying conclusion.

            The play is delivered by what can only be described as a veritable pantheon of a cast.  Besides giants Jones and Larroquette, and Will and Grace star McCormack, Candice Bergen plays Russell’s estranged wife, Alice, who agrees to pose as a devoted wife to help him get elected.  Michael McKean appears as Russell’s campaign manager, Dick Jensen, so desperate for his man to win his party’s nomination that he digs up an nearly blasphemous accusation of Cantwell.  And—for who could not mention her?—Angela Lansbury, in a laudable and exquisite performance, is the Southern belle Chairman of the Women’s Division of the party.  (What party it is exactly is never explicitly stated, and Russell and Cantwell are on such opposite sides of the aisle that it’s difficult to tell.)  These godlike thespians bounce off each other with such perfection that sparks seem to fly, and the stage becomes their own, corrupt world wherein nothing is off limits when the presidency is on the line.  Perhaps this isn’t so different from our own world, but what is changed is human interaction.  That, perfect fodder for a political satirist like Vidal, is transformed into something infinitely more entertaining than our own conversations.  Even if Gore Vidal, in his infinite wisdom, had left the intrigue out of the play, I for one would be satisfied only to watch the characters converse over copious amounts of alcohol in their hotel rooms.  But the intrigue’s still there along with the conversation, and most theatergoers, myself included, could do with a bit of both.

            All in all, The Best Man does not disappoint.  With Tony nominations both for Best Revival of a Play and Best Leading Actor in a Play for James Earl Jones, patrons of the arts in New York will no doubt run, not walk, for seats to this masterpiece of modern theater.  If you’re interested in an evening you won’t soon forget, I’d suggest you do the same.

The Gershwins Drag Some Dead Weight

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess at the Richard Rodgers Theater

George and Ira Gershwin, authors of such theater as Oh, Kay!, Of Thee I Sing, and Lady Be Good, and of such singles  as “Embraceable You” and “I Got Rhythm,” most famously composed, along with playwriting team DuBose and Dorothy Heyward (DuBose wrote the novel Porgy, and he and his wife wrote the straight play that would later be adapted by the Gershwins to the 1935 opera), Porgy and Bess. The non-operatic musical version made its return to Broadway last August.  And why shouldn’t it?  It has always been my firm belief that the appeal of any musical—and, indeed, any show—should be its creative team and not its cast (except on rare occasions when the two work perfectly together), and this production certainly takes that to heart, as the stylized name you’ll  see on the marquee isn’t Porgy and Bess but The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess. 

The Gershwins were that rare phenomenon—a Gilbert and Sullivan; a Kander and Ebb; or any other duo: a match so perfect they would seem to be made in heaven.  And for that team to be brothers is even rarer.  George and Ira worked better with each other than anyone else, and when George Gershwin died of a brain tumor two years after Porgy and Bess’s debut, at the age of 39, Ira and his lyrics were never the same.  That syncopation is evident in this production, where the less than inspiring  cast allows you to look past stage presence and into the heart of the music.  While it would be easy to blame the production for its faults, more easily than the classic show, I have to mention that when DuBose Heyward contributed his lyrics to George’s jazz-inspired score, as he did in songs including “My Man’s Gone Now,” “What You Want With Bess,” and “Oh, Doctor Jesus,” the result is lackluster.  The rhyme scheme, when there is one, is sparse and ill-placed, and you can tell DuBose is much more comfortable writing novels and plays, where he can say whatever he likes without worrying about his cadence.  What you notice are numbers like “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” and especially “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” a song with some of the best lyrics in musical theater, and, it must be noted, the most accurate explanation of religion ever written.  Is it coincidence that these songs had lyrics by Ira Gershwin? I think not.

But the Heywards’ lyrical contributions aren’t my only beef with this opera.  Though I was thoroughly impressed by the performances of most of the male leads, including Norm Lewis as a dedicated Porgy, Joshua Henry as Jake, Philip Boykin as the possessive murderer Crown, and especially David Alan Grier as Sportin’ Life (whose smile brightens and step becomes lighter during “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” as if he too can tell it’ll be the best part), I was less blown away by the females.  Bess (Audra McDonald) and Serena (Bryonha Marie Parham), to name two of the offenders, are more suited to classical opera than they are Broadway, as evidenced by their operatic beltings of some of the Heywards’ more mundane numbers.  Whatever it is they’re saying is unintelligible beneath their doubtlessly beautiful voices.  This is an opera that was written to be heard, not to impress.  The music is most of the story, and McDonald and Parham can’t help but detract from that.  What’s more, McDonald seems nervous and jumpy throughout, as if something more than Crown and the drug dealer Sportin’ Life is stalking her, and we can’t get behind her character because we can’t seem to figure out what she wants.

Don’t misunderstand.  All in all, Porgy and Bess was a success (excuse my rhyme, Mr. Heyward), despite being stripped down by a new trio of editors (director Diane Paulus, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and composer Diedre L. Murray) and losing most of the greatest parts of its score.  But it's only made it so far, and achieved whatever success it has, in my mind or those of the public, because it’s a Gershwin musical, and it can’t help but succeed.  If you’re headed to the Richard Rodgers Theater, do it because of the thing the producers are counting on to bring in sales, the element that’s printed the largest on Porgy and Bess’s monochrome posters: the Gershwins.

Dead Man Walking

Ghost the Musical at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater

           If you’ve seen the 1990 film Ghost, starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg, you’ll know something about the West End’s most recent contribution to the Great White Way, Ghost the Musical, a gaudy affair with a book by Ghost’s screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, and music and lyrics by Dave Stewart, one half of the British pop duo the Eurythmics, and “Man in the Mirror” songwriter Glen Ballard.  Both Ghosts have flat and uninteresting story lines, employ flamboyant yet lackluster special effects, and only caught my interest in the scenes employing Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg did it in the movie), a con-woman who poses as a psychic until discovering—to her dismay—that she actually is one.
           If you haven’t seen either Ghost, perhaps a quick orientation to the musical is in order.  Banker Sam Wheat (Richard Fleeshman) is living his dream, fully equipped with a high-paying job, loving girlfriend, Molly (Caissie Levy), and supportive best friend and assistant, Carl (Bryce Pinkham).  Just when everything seems to be going his way, Sam is shot by vigilante Willie Lopez (Michael Balderrama).  However, instead of passing on naturally, Sam is trapped between worlds as a ghost, unable to touch or affect the world around him, and unheard and unseen by regular humans.  In his new ethereal form he learns that, thanks to Lopez, Molly too is in grave danger.  Desperate to communicate with her, he invokes psychic Oda Mae Brown, who can hear but not see him. In a race against time, Sam and Oda Mae rush to keep Molly out of danger and bring Sam’s killer to justice. It’s a story delivered by performers who, somewhat like the dead, are patently uninteresting; people whose side you would disincline to be on even if, among the chaos, it were clear whose side you should be on.
           Not that, if you go to see Ghost the Musical on Broadway, you’ll necessarily notice the plot. That’s because the team that staged Ghost couldn’t get past the fact that it is based on a movie, even if it is a movie that is nearly devoid of embellishments. The result is a musical that is painfully flashy, loud, and equipped with so many lights, explosions, and unnecessary luminosities as to blind the audience. Screens replace set pieces, stage depth, and even dancers.  (Yes, as the ensemble trots behind the main characters, colored outlines do the same dance moves on the monitors behind them, which is excruciatingly redundant. What is the point? Are the show's British producers hoping, like factory owners turning to robot workers, to eventually entirely replace their dancers with images on a display?)
           As if that weren’t enough, the score is so derivative; the lyrics so uninspired that if you listen closely enough, they sound the same number after number.  Even Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s entertaining performance as Brown couldn’t match the soul-numbing repetitiveness and stupidity of her song “I’m Outta Here,” in which she celebrates the acquisition of ten million dollars with such vapid lines as “I’m outta here! I’m off to the Bahamas / I’m outta here! So pack my pink pajamas.”

           Would that something could be done to awaken Ghost the Musical.  Its case is simply hopeless.  It’s a puzzling olio of mostly maladroit actors and actresses and a creative team with no clear compass.  My guess is that, like Sam Wheat, the musical will soon expire, but unlike him, it will not wake up again, supernaturally or otherwise.

Practice, Practice, Practice Improves on Perfection

One night of The Mikado at Carnegie Hall            

            There is not much to say about Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado that has not already been said.  Suffice it to say that there are few teams alive today, or any who have lived during this or the previous century, who had comparable brains, ability, or talent.  W.S. Gilbert was one of the most brilliant librettists ever to walk this earth, and Arthur Sullivan was his perfect complement, a cheery, beautiful composer who note by note unites an orchestra into a living, breathing being designed to output their masterworks.  The Mikado, being one of their later works (in fact, the one that saved their partnership from ruin), was a thinly veiled comment on the incompetence of the English government disguised as a farce set in Japan.

            This idea came to Gilbert’s always-fertile mind when a Japanese sword fell off his wall.  He and Sullivan had disagreed over the premise of their next opera—Gilbert wanted to do fantasy, a tale of a “magic lozenge,” while Sullivan was inclined to write only for the sorts of pieces he and his partner had already written. But with the fateful fall of the sword Gilbert had discovered the solution to their problem.  He could write of ridiculous, fanciful happenings, and justify them by claiming that such goings-on are regular in Japan, while Sullivan could write for a work of realistic fiction, one that plausibly could (in a topsy-turvy world) happen.

            The one-night Collegiate Chorale production of The Mikado at Carnegie Hall, which took place on the night of April the 10^th, is one of the more enjoyable evenings I have spent at the theater in recent memory.  At the end of the performance I could hardly believe what I had just experienced.  Coupled with the unmatched genius of Gilbert and Sullivan was the performance of a cast and chorus of a kind unlikely to meet in one place ever again, a performance that floored me, to say the least, by its unwelcome end.  The cast read their lines from binders, frequently stood at incorrect podiums, and giggled in the middle of lines, and it is hard to find anything I could care less about.  What a mind-blowing and potent combination of the lyrics of an uber-genius and a cast so perfectly matched to their roles as to blow all Hollywood’s casting directors out of the water of their generously heated pools.

            You, of course, know the story of The Mikado (for who doesn’t?), but if I may I will reiterate—the Emperor of Japan’s runaway son, Nanki-Poo (Jason Danieley, Next to Normal) arrives at the small town of Titipu to claim his love, Yum-Yum (Kelli O’Hara, of South Pacific and on leave from Nice Work if You Can Get It), whose intended husband, Ko-Ko (the enormously, fantastically talented Christopher Fitzgerald, who rightly earned a Tony for his turn as Og in Finian’s Rainbow), he had thought had been beheaded for flirting.  However, the townspeople of Titipu thought this rule unfair and so found a loophole in making the man next scheduled to be beheaded, which happened to be Ko-Ko, the new Lord High Executioner.  They reasoned that Ko-Ko could execute no one else until he killed himself.  Therefore, Ko-Ko is still scheduled to marry Yum-Yum but offers her up to Nanki-Poo as a wife for one month if, at the end of that month, he will agree to be executed in Ko-Ko’s place.  All seems to be going according to plan, but, as they inevitably do, complications ensue when Nanki-Poo’s father, the Mikado himself (Chuck Cooper), arrives and insists Nanki-Poo marry his betrothed, a hideous old woman (Victoria Clark) who had claimed him back at the Mikado’s court.  Secrets are kept, mistakes are made and then unsuccessfully rectified with hilarious results, and we hear some of the best songs ever written, including “A wand’ring minstel I,” “Three little maids from school are we,” "Here's a how-de-do," “A more humane Mikado” (from which originally springs the adage “Let the punishment fit the crime”), and, most memorably, a rewritten version of the ingenious “As someday it may happen,” which condemns Twitter, the Kardashians, quoters of early Sondheim, and, especially, Gilbert fans who complain when his lyrics are altered. Mr. Fitzgerald, who sings it, outshone even Broadway’s brightest up on the acoustically perfect Carnegie stage with a rendition of Ko-Ko that (dare I say?) Groucho Marx might find hard to contend with.  

            Meanwhile, Ms. O'Hara maintained her incredible talent with a genuine star turn as Yum-Yum, belting in all the right places.  Chuck Cooper played a nice, very jolly Mikado, and of course you could never write off two very funny if less prominent gentlemen, Steve Rosen, who played the noble Lord Pish-Tush, and Jonathan Freeman, a magnificent Poo-Bah (who holds so many positions that there is no room here to name them all).  The two, along with Fitzgerald's Ko-Ko, deliver exceedingly well in the excellent number, "I Am So Proud," famous for its superb tongue twister referring to the feeling of awaiting execution: "To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock, in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock, awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock, from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block."  Say that fast five times.

            All in all a better time could not have been had by any in New York that night, if such a thing is possible, and there is surely nowhere else I would have rather been.  After all, if there is a perfect night on Broadway, everything will go right, as it did, and if there is a heaven, Gilbert and Sullivan’s greatest work is playing over the loudspeakers.

Life is a Highway

John Chamberlain: Choices at the Guggenheim Museum

            John Chamberlain, a revolutionary, definition-skirting sculptor who lived and worked on Shelter Island, and the Guggenheim Museum have a special relationship.  For one, in 1966 and 1977 Chamberlain received a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship from the same foundation that funds the family’s numerous art museums.  But the bond is more than direct connection.  Chamberlain’s works seem to have been made for the blinding white walls of the turning, sloping halls of the Guggenheim, and vice versa.  Each writhing medusa of scrap metal Chamberlain has molded into a non-representative visual boasts its own alcove, and each bursts from within like a flower designed to be planted just where it is.  Even if not all of Chamberlain’s sculptures are perfect, or even beautiful per se, their oneness with the Guggenheim more than makes up for it.

            John Chamberlain has described work on his sculptures to be similar to “handling toilet paper,” and the final product to be something akin to “bed sheets after a night of raucous sex.”  Well, however you may choose to look at his work, the truth of it is that the sculptures are nothing more than what they’re made of—discarded, junkyard cars.  Chamberlain takes exclusively the garbage, the dregs of societal life, and crafts them into something exclusively different and indefinable.  There’s something about these explosions of chrome, and also something very familiar; most likely because in one way they are pop art from the boundaries of what pop art really means, and at the same time the purest expression of Americana.  (After all, there are few things Americans love more than cars.) This is what makes them so interesting to look at, because aesthetically they don’t fall into any one category.

            But as the lights reflect marvelously off their multifaceted surfaces they develop a category of their own, one Chamberlain has created for himself.  My personal favorites were the arcing tubes of aluminum foil braided together and curling in unusual and somehow profound positions, balancing on one or two outcrops as the rest aim up to the Guggenheim’s majestic skylight.  A good example is the colossal silver beauty in the museum entryway, which must point up four floors.  However, not all of Chamberlain’s choices turn out for the better.  Early on in his career came a series of compressed garbage cubes containing anchovy packets and cigarette boxes pressed into a frame-thin composition.  These pale in comparison to the three-dimensional efforts of later in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, which the open alcoves of the museum provide ample opportunity to walk all the way around and consider from all angles.

            The pieces themselves aren’t the only art.  To name his pieces Chamberlain often wrote unrelated words and phrases on index cards and shuffled them, using the often humorous results to name his pieces.  Often they have little to do with what the work looks like or even means (which, Chamberlain has tried to emphasize, is always nothing, just expressionism), but they are entertaining, and they contribute to Chamberlain’s artsy and mysterious persona.

            Sadly, Chamberlain isn’t with us to promote that persona and wasn’t even there to view the culmination of his life’s work on display at the Guggenheim.  He died of natural causes at 84 in December.  However, I’m sure he’d be proud of the justice the museum did to him in setting up an exhibition as purely enjoyable as this one was, and one that showed him to be as creative and dynamic as he was.  His work, though not impeccable (but is anyone’s, really?) is excellent, and it made my afternoon brighter to watch the midday sun bounce off his tinfoil and steel creations.

Bread and Circuses

Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope

            We Have a Pope (opening April 6th), director/writer Nanni Moretti’s new film about an elected pontiff (Michael Piccoli) who has a panic attack and refuses to present himself on the balcony of the Vatican, is the work of an admitted “non-believer.” It contains no Catholic caricatures, no references to priest sex scandals, and is as little critical toward the Church as any movie could be.  Even Vatican Radio endorsed it.  That’s all very well, but the movie is rambling, odd, without any obvious point or plot, and is—if I can be blunt—bad.  Catholics are welcomed to see it and would not be offended by its portrayal of cardinals, Vatican spokespeople, or Il Papa himself, but if they’ve ever seen a good movie before and have any powers of comparison, I’d advise them to stay home.

            Moretti, in interviews, is defiantly proud of his film and won’t hear a word against it.  Perhaps this is because he thinks he did something with it that he affirmatively did not.  There were two ways Moretti could have taken We Have a Pope, that is to say comically or dramatically.  The film has endless potential for comedy, concerning a cardinal, referred to only by his last name, Melville, who, when elected Pope as a dark horse candidate, has a panic attack, insisting he can’t do it and then escaping his Vatican retainers and disappearing into Rome.  Moretti could have taken this to the extreme, turning Father Melville into a Mel Brooks-type character, who wanders through the city getting up to mischief a Pope usually skirts.  But there’s potential for drama, too.  Soon after Melville’s difficulties, the Vatican brings in a world-renowned psychoanalyst, Professor Brezzi (Moretti).  Moretti (as a writer, not as Brezzi) could also have leaned toward a King’s Speech-style relationship, a very dramatic and serious situation which ended with an overcoming of Melville’s fears.  The problem, I think, is that the proud Nanni Moretti refused to look to the work of his predecessors and insisted on making a film that had no clear definition, and hovered somewhere in between drama and comedy.  In the right hands this can lead to something great, but in Moretti’s it seems indecisive and strange, and the audience can’t get behind the decisions the characters make.

            For one, Melville says the reason he can’t take the job is because he “can’t remember anything.” I’m no Brezzi, but that doesn’t seem like a valid plot point, considering Melville can remember everything—he doesn’t have amnesia (if he had, the film would have made infinitely more sense) and he spouts information from his past constantly, including some tales that spark a useless story detour wherein he becomes obsessed with a community theater production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.  And that’s not the only deviation from the storyline.  Characters veer back and forth from the three-act method constantly, starting up volleyball tournaments to keep the cardinals, trapped in conclave, occupied, sending out search parties for Melville and then immediately giving up on them, installing a Swiss guard in the papal apartments to fool the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, and various other nonsensical pursuits.  These ridiculous and useless diversions mean nothing to the actual storyline.  As a result they end up detracting from any actual progress, to say nothing of where the story is going, which—spoiler alert—is nowhere.

            I could say that We Have a Pope tried to be funny or dramatic, but it didn’t even make an attempt.  The content creators for the film appeared to wait by the sidelines as Brezzi did in the volleyball games he created, and just stand by to see where it went.  Sorry, Moretti—looks like you bet on the wrong team.

More Realistic Dates for That Space Odyssey

Beyond Planet Earth at the American Museum of Natural History

            There’s a certain enigmatic appeal that comes with deep space—the complete uncertainty of what could possibly be out there beyond the atmosphere, or solar system, or galaxy.  But the reality is space is a very simple thing; and that’s everything else, or, to put it more simply, everything beyond us.  Still, that everything is unbelievably, shockingly vast, and that’s why I’ve always had a special admiration for the people at the world’s space programs.  They are cartographers and explorers not unlike Magellan or Verrazano, instructed to discover and map things no human being can boast to describe in their entirety—the infinite emptiness that is outer space.  How they do it and what their plans are is on display at the beautifully staged and surprisingly in-depth Museum of Natural History Exhibition, Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, running through August.

            Beyond Planet Earth lays bare the details of why our space program is so very necessary.  From the rocky plains of the moon, which, I can accurately report after testing out a blast of its stench from a “Smell the Moon!” booth, smell not unlike pungent cigarette smoke, to the simulated red, rolling hills of Mars, where manikins in skintight space-suits bounce x-rays off the rocks, the future of NASA and its sister organizations around the world is explored.  The space race, the exhibit insists, is not yet over.  There are milestones yet unreached, and we may be the first to reach them. 

            The past is documented as well, and our arrival on the moon is primary among the clear, interesting information laid out near the entrance to the exhibit.  The theme of national triumph, however, continues throughout, inspired by exhibition curator Michael Shara, also a pioneer of the plans for a lunar elevator (which is exactly what it sounds like).  He surely gets his point across.  There is innovation everywhere when it comes to space travel, as this exhibit, in itself innovative, explains quite nicely, and to halt the process of innovation is an intellectual crime.

            But it’s not only the facts and figures Beyond Planet Earth dives into, although those provide nothing but delight to the viewer.  It also looks into public perception of space, as in science fiction or doomsday theories.  Chief among reference in the Mars section is Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds: the radio show, the book, and both movies.   War of the Worlds, of course, documents the Earthly visitation of a malevolent Martian race bent on—you guessed it—war.  Why go this route in a purely scientific exhibition? Maybe because the one thing astronomers have wanted more than anything throughout history is to discover life somewhere else but here, to know that we are not alone in the universe.  And indeed, every mission we have undertaken and every venture described in the exhibition has a final product of finding or introducing life on another planet.  Terraforming Mars, scientists hope, would either help us discover some microbe or—dare I say—fungus that grows in the frozen poles, any probe that studies any planet in the universe is only looking for signs of life, and we’ve even sent out satellites with inscribed and recorded greetings from the humans.  Forgive me if I overstep my boundaries, but might the aliens find us a bit desperate if our little gold-plated machine says “Hello” in 55 different languages?

            Scientists don’t just hope for life in space, of course.  Beyond Planet Earth declares that one day we will mine the asteroids and the moon, set up bases on secondary planet after secondary planet, and be self-declared lords of the solar system, and one day, the galaxy.  But the truth is that all the wonderfully organized data and exquisite dioramas set up in the exhibit are only a hope, and are far from reality.  We can only hope that the space program workers are as good at their jobs as the researchers at the museum are at theirs, and, as the show’s slogan encourages, “Look up.  Above you, the universe.” Hopefully somewhere out there is something we can reach, and achieve the great triumph that the majesty of space deserves.