A Love Story, In—and Out of—Chronological Order

The Last Five Years at the Tony Kiser Theater

            Sweet, sad, and beautiful, the Second Stage Theater production of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years (through May 18^th at the Tony Kiser Theater) is irresistible in every sense of the word.  Mr. Brown’s inventive, gorgeous numbers carry a weight unmatched by most love songs, and the performances of its two cast members—Adam Kantor and Betsy Wolfe—are magnificent.  Love is a gargantuan subject, but more than adequately covered here in this quietly brilliant staging directed by the show’s creator.

            In the show’s bitter opening sequence, the ill-fated marriage of Jamie (Kantor) to Cathy (Wolfe) is coming to a close.  Jamie reveals his marital experience to the welcoming audience from beginning to end; Cathy, in reverse.  They are only on stage together for one song: the great “The Next Ten Minutes,” for their wedding.  During the rest of the show, they sing to their invisible spouses.  (In a good bit of direction, Jamie almost always sings facing stage right, and Cathy facing stage left.)  Occasionally, we recognize scenes and situations Jamie went through chronologically in Cathy’s backwards travel, and vice versa.  The innovative technique of almost universally keeping one character on stage at a time, essentially talking to their respective selves, highlights perhaps the greatest shared flaw of the two characters—their fatal egotism.  Jamie’s intense focus on his career as a novelist overshadows his love for his wife, and Cathy believes so fiercely that being married to Jamie will perfect her life that when it doesn’t, she blames her husband.

            There is, naturally, a great deal of melodrama here, exquisitely played, but some humor as well (in “A Miracle Would Happen” and the deliciously titled “Shiksa Goddess”) and wistful allegory (in the gobsmackingly well-written “The Schmuel Song”), all sung, not—I believe—accidentally, by Mr. Kantor.  His character is far more interesting and relatable than Ms. Wolfe’s, so much so that even when Jamie cheats on his wife near the end of the show, the audience pities him and his (now) ex-wife equally.  (These character choices may have something to do with the fact that Mr. Brown’s musical is autobiographical, documenting his failed relationship with actress Theresa O’Neill.)  This, however, could be due to the inimitable performances Ms. Wolfe and Mr. Kantor put forth in this production, and the beauty and shrouded wonder Mr. Brown creates with his tear-jerking finale, “Goodbye Until Tomorrow/I Could Never Rescue You,” in which Jamie has reached the emotional finale of the relationship, and Cathy her wildly excited, smitten beginning.  As Jamie bids goodbye to the love of his life, her smile remains wide and unchanging, blinded by the glory of an unsullied future relationship.  It’s a blindness of which the audience is painfully aware thanks to her powerful, angry performance in the first half of the show, unable to control her husband’s slipping away.

            The music is radiant, which comes as something of a pleasant surprise to someone whose only exposure to Mr. Brown’s work was 2008’s damningly awful 13.  The lyrics are clever but not unnecessarily so.  Simplicity and pure emotional expression are the themes explored in the intriguingly mysterious score.  It’s a journey anyone would be lucky to go on.  There’s a film version (with Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan) on the way, but the chance to experience the cyclical immersion of such beauty is one not worth losing.  The Last Five Years is, without doubt, the best offering currently on an Off-Broadway stage.  The show explores themes of regret, anger, and betrayal, but the joy it inspires could not be purer.

The Death and Resurrection of Burlesque

The Nance at the Lyceum Theater

            The Nance, a new play by Douglas Carter Beane, is, to put it simply, nothing less than a brilliant, triumphant magnum opus that gives me hope for the future of comedy and of playwriting.  The play benefits most greatly from a seamless cooperation between an absolutely magnificent Nathan Lane in the title role and the fluid, effortless script of Mr. Beane (who updated Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella for Broadway and wrote the book for the absolutely ghastly Lysistrata Jones of December 2011-January 2012).  Both Mr. Lane and Mr. Beane are at their best here, the playwright with a mastery of the language and the humor of the 1930s as well as a delicate but perfect balance between those age-old rivals, comedy and drama; and the actor with a splendorous, breathtakingly flawless performance as a witty and charming yet egotistically defiant burlesque “nance” actor of Depression-era New York.  A nance, for those as yet unaware—though Mr. Beane’s script makes the unfamiliar feel right at home with a razor-sharp sense of limited exposition—was a stereotypically gay character in burlesque shows of the period, usually played by a straight man.  But Mr. Lane’s character, Chauncey Miles, really is gay, and must submit not only to the censorious limits on burlesque brought forth by the LaGuardia administration but also its anti-homosexual laws that allowed police to arrest scores of gay men on charges of  “degenerate disorderly conduct” or “loitering.”

            Nathan Lane is a whirlwind actor.  He delivers Mr. Beane’s tongue-in-cheek witticisms with ease and talent, and practically obliterates any designs the rest of the cast might have toward a star turn.  These (mostly) not unworthy performances come to us by way of a relatively small but perfectly adequate cast.  There’s appealingly grouchy Lewis J. Stadlen, who plays Chauncey’s boss and fellow burlesque comedian Efram.  Jonny Orsini, meanwhile, chose to play Chauncey’s lover, Ned, as something of a pinhead, which is a little misguided given the complexity with which Mr. Beane has endowed this character, but not so much of an impediment as to destroy the value of the relationship within the context of the play.  The burlesque strippers who form the other half of Efram's Irving Place Revue (Cady Huffman, Andréa Burns, and Mylinda Hull) are a little too earnest for the ideal delivery of The Nance’s ‘30s-appropriate lines, many of which are somewhat sickly-sweet already.  Case in point—when Sylvie (Ms. Huffman), a Communist, discusses the freshly minted Social Security policy: “Everyone’s sayin’, ‘Who’s gonna pay for it, who’s gonna pay for it?'  Eighty years from now, no one’s gonna be talkin’ about who’s gonna pay for it.”  (Cue thunderous laughter and a smattering of applause.)  But really, it matters little, if at all.  This production is about the stunning waltz of Mr. Lane’s utter professionalism and precision as an actor with the radiant glory of Mr. Beane’s words.  And oh, what a dance it is!

            The burlesque scenes in The Nance, to begin with, are hysterically funny with not a trace of the historical inaccuracy that might have burdened another playwright with less love for this golden age of comedy than Mr. Beane obviously has in spades.  The jocularity of these sequences carries into the rest of the play, most notably (and predictably, though not unpleasantly) through the effervescence of Nathan Lane.  The sophisticated humor that it’s easy to yearn for on Broadway runs rampant.

            But comic brilliance is not the only thing in store at the Lyceum Theater.  As Chauncey struggles to convince his cast-mates and himself that LaGuardia’s anti-burlesque legislation is just pre-election rhetoric, and that the Irving Place crew will make it through all right, his own insecurities are laid bare against the perceived confidence necessary to be a truly great performer (as both Mr. Lane and Mr. Miles are).  There is no achievement so great as balancing the comedic and the dramatic with the same reverence for each, and this Douglas Carter Beane and Nathan Lane have done.  These are the makings of great art.

Large and In Charge

Whales: Giants of the Deep at the American Museum of Natural History

 

            Whales: Giants of the Deep, the new special exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, which runs through next January, is slightly dense but enormously informative on the always entertaining subject of cetaceans so long memorialized in the museum’s Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.  It may, in fact, be the most enduring image of the museum in many young (and older) minds—that of the swooping blue whale, seemingly diving down into the lowered hall beneath the mezzanine, baleful and silent, forever frozen midway to the ocean floor.

            Whales does tackle the blue version of said aquatic mammal, but not exclusively.  In fact, sperm whales take up much of the special exhibition hall on the fourth floor of the illustrious museum.  The exhibition traces the whale’s evolution from a hulking, hairy land creature into the majestic oceanic behemoth it is today, as well as noting the hundreds of whale and dolphin species, describing the labors of marine biologists who tag the more elusive species, and the history of the Maori population of New Zealand in relation to their mammoth neighbors.

            So there is much to see here.  But the museum, as usual, is professional in not allowing its masses of pure information to overwhelm visitors.  The exhibition hall, cool, dry, and dark, is welcoming and sparsely paneled with informative blurbs on whales’ current status (many are beached, for various reasons including climate change) and their history (a copy of Moby Dick and a scrimshaw whale skull are on hand).  However, the clearest example of the museum’s all-out sensibility in terms of these yearly new installations in this case is skeletons.

            Bones, bones, bones—casts and fossils, real and fake—are everywhere in Whales, case in point being the two gargantuan sperm whale skeletons that hang suspended over the exhibit’s second room.  One’s 58 feet from nose to tail, and it shows.  (The other’s slightly smaller, but you’ll learn it’s not her fault, as she apparently had arthritis.)  These kind of touches are what make this museum what it is.  In this exhibition hall’s history, many shows with an emphasis on “big—” 2011’s The World’s Largest Dinosaurs being a prime example—have passed through.  Whales doesn’t exactly seem final enough to be that series’ culmination, but it’s certainly thorough.

            “Thorough” can sometimes seem a tired term for AMNH, their specialty, what makes them unique or brilliant or worth visiting, but not exactly specific enough to warrant a trip to the Upper West Side.  The fact remains, however that “thorough” is not the sole but certainly the primary attraction to any of the many special exhibitions the museum has hosted over the years.  There have been some, such as Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence or Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, both from 2012, that were visually beautiful, but for these two subject allowed more wiggle room for artistic design.  This exhibition, with its not insubstantial contributions by New Zealander museum Te Papa, is more about the pure information of whale evolution and preservation than about the glamour of lighting and curation.  Still, it can be hard not to miss some of the museum’s other offerings.  All the special exhibitions have common aspects, but something about the atmosphere has changed to make this more of a lesson than an experience.

            However, it remains an informative lesson, and an important one.  Since we still know so little about the largest animals ever to exist, and the annual population growth for some species remains as low as 3%, it must be a primary mission of an institution like AMNH to inform us about such an animal’s characteristics as well as its plight.  This the Natural History Museum does as well as ever.

The American Museum of Natural History is located at West 81st Street and Central Park West.  The exhibition runs through January 5, 2014.

            

Fun With Italians and Tranquilizers

            To a certain extent, bedroom farces are all the same.  Ken Ludwig’s 1986 play Lend Me a Tenor has, over the years and productions, proven no exception.  There are the characteristic slamming of doors, mistaken identity, brash women whose attempts at control leave their men dazed and confused, and, naturally, the eccentric foreigner.  Yet in this modern era of theater, when the respective wells of dramatic and comedic originality have long run dry, the question at hand is whether the public is ready to embrace cliche for the good fun that it is.  The raucous laughs at the production I attended at the Paper Mill Playhouse (which runs through March 10th) can establish that the public must be as ready as they will ever be.

            The innuendo-laden play is set in a 1934 Cleveland hotel room (designed, admirably, by Tony-winner John Lee Beatty) temporarily occupied by the Cleveland Opera Company’s general manager, Saunders (Michael Kostroff, though it might as well have been Jon Lovitz) and his nebbishy assistant, Max (David Josefsberg).   Their fury (in Saunders’ case) and hand-wringing (in Max’s) are well placed--opera superstar Tito Morelli (John Treacy Egan) is late for rehearsal for the Opera Company’s special production of Otello.  When the drunken womanizer arrives, protective wife in tow, hilarity (what else?) is bound to ensue.  What follows is a comedy of mistaken identity, blackface, and music, marked by significant intelligence and mild ridiculousness.

            Josefsberg and Egan (who played Max Bialystock in The Producers on Broadway for a stretch) sing well, and their operatic pipes are put to good use in a few of the scenes in which the formulaic, rigid tradition of the opera is lampooned.  Performances are common in this play, and the female leads—vapid, blonde, and whitewashed—go gaga for them.  Opera, apparently, is the ultimate aphrodisiac for a Clevelander, and Max’s would-be fiancée (Jill Paice), who is also Saunders’ daughter, can’t resist Morelli.  His corpulent frame, which she describes, with a sigh of lust, “dripping with sweat,” seems not even an obstacle that must be overcome, but an added benefit in addition to Morelli’s tenor voice, powerful enough (thanks to Egan) to qualify as a title character.  Voice is key in this production, second only to slapstick comedy.  The comic chops of the actors in Tenor are significant, too, and none who see one of the few remaining performances of this usual slam dunk by the Paper Mill will leave disappointed.  The twists and turns of the story, encompassed by Max and Saunders’ desperate attempts to control Morelli, are joyfully funny if not brilliantly witty, and altogether worth seeing.  There is nothing wrong with heavily physical comedy, and Lend Me A Tenor is among the most hilariously physical pieces of stage comedy written in the past thirty years.

            Such does Lend Me A Tenor function, through playful parody and fast-paced entrance and exit.  This has much in common with the way similar farces such as Marc Camoletti’s Boeing-Boeing—which, incidentally, played at Paper Mill last year—treats an uncomfortable situation which must be rectified through trickery and cunning.  In a way, this format may have been invented by comedians like the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges in the golden age of cinema, but the bedroom farce has no golden age, which is part of its appeal.  One written now might share characteristics with one written fifty years ago, but it would be hard to find a viewer who would care.  Comedy is timeless, and the racy farce is an offshoot guaranteed to remain just as prevalent years from now as it was years ago.

Long Day's Journeys

Walking Drifting Dragging at the New Museum

 

            A small but personable collection of conceptual artworks created on long, winding travels makes up the New Museum’s short-lived, interesting exhibition Walking Drifting Dragging, which closes February 3^rd.  One New York artist, Ellie Ga, tagged along on a research vessel trawling the depths of the Arctic, propelled only by the currents.  Though her artistic introspection at the loneliness of the frozen wastelands could only be imagined, her work was done when the boat stopped—for what reason, we aren’t sure, as the purpose of the mission is not revealed.  Her bird’s-eye-view charcoal sketches all include the same, near-ovoid body of the ship in white, surrounded by the ice in a chilling gray.  The steps the researchers took when dismounting the boat are traced in a dotted line.  The line always seems to follow a circle around the ship, finding nothing but the hard, never-ending floes that blocked their path in the first place.  Who can say what metaphorical relevance this has?  These of Ga’s works, like the Arctic, are cold and cartographic.

            But on her long walks around the craft, Ga was busy with an entirely different project.  Scattering bright, bluish lanterns in the fissures opening around the ship, she took wide-angle pictures of the rusting boat from far away, so that the now illuminated cracks seemed to point home, or at least the possibility of home.  Ga’s series is called The Fortunetellers, and while it’s true the fissures and dotted lines ingrain the ice like lines on a palm, the true fortune that needs to be told seems to be: Where will the ship drift next?  In such a vein does the exhibit display, nearly without comment, artists’ travels through their odd worlds, and the ways they attempt to chart them where it may seem impossible.

            Other highlights include artist Paulo Nazareth’s 4,618-mile walk from his hometown of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to New York City, mostly barefoot but occasionally in a pair of neon green flip-flops, which are on display.  Nazareth played off cultural stereotypes on his way across the border between Mexico and the United States, holding a cardboard sign that read “I Will Clean Your Bathroom for a Fair Price.”  Exploring the cultural welcomes that awaited him in Latin America and beyond is a different kind of map than Ga’s, but a map nonetheless.

            For these artists are all drawing maps of one kind or another, struggling to denote all sorts of new territory, some more successfully than others.  (Some were actually trying for the less successful approach--Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain charted a river in Guwahati, India by asking different local fisherman for their input.  The responses were so dissimilar that on their map, the river branches out in an impossible number of directions and even flows both ways.)  Perhaps that’s why the exhibit (curated by Lauren Cornell) is so stark and simplistic, with the works jutting out like landmasses.  It, too, is a map, but of entirely new lands—those wildly diverging attitudes and ideas of emerging artists.  Artists themselves can be hard to track, hard to define, and sometimes hard to enjoy, but no one could do more on their behalf than the New Museum.

            It would be hard to imagine that anything these artists might do in their respective futures could be more complex or more difficult to execute than the feats they have managed in Walking Drifting Dragging.  The name of the exhibition, with its images of groans of strain, is not far off from what these abstract artists had to go through to present us with their apparently simple final products.  I’m not certain, either, if I would be so interested as to what they might get up to in their strange, underground art world some time in the future.  But here they have presented us with something it took them a great deal of effort to achieve.  We may as well congratulate them.

The Day the South Was Won

Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Richard Rodgers Theatre

 

             In a true sign of the times, the producers, directors, creative types, and even (from beyond the grave) Tennessee Williams himself seem to have ceded the rights to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Scarlett Johansson.  Ms. Johansson plays what can be called the title role in name only, and billboards, advertisements, and marquees are splattered with her voluptuous visage draped in a barely-there slip that is far skimpier than the one she wears on stage—for those of you out there whose reasons for seeing this production don’t extend to the languorous fluidity of Williams’ prose.  The issue with this decision is that, regardless of academic raves on the historical value of this no doubt pivotal play, Maggie the Cat is not exactly the main character.  Therefore, the hype that this play revolves around Ms. Johansson is slightly misplaced.  That is, unless I give Broadway more credit than it deserves, and they are simply taking advantage of the rare Ashkenazi bombshell that is Scarlett Johansson and her rabid, or rather drooling, fans.  Most likely it is the latter.

            It isn’t that Ms. Johansson isn’t good as Maggie.  In fact, she’s great.  She takes to a Southern drawl better than one might expect, and she has a manic energy that follows her around the stage like a small tornado.  Conversely, the production, which has a magnificent set appropriately representing the gild of the Pollitt ranch, relaxes into a Southern drawl of its own, which is a characteristic more of the play than the actors.  Cat is not slow-moving, exactly, it just seems (in an altogether pleasant way) as if the actors are a few mint juleps into a warm evening.  Occasionally, however, they reveal some of the emotion that’s been left boiling underneath, and these moments are where it is revealed, however slowly, that Maggie the Cat is not actually the central cog in these proceedings.  Nor is it Big Daddy Pollitt (Ciarán Hinds), who is second only to Maggie in attention-grabbing antics, if for a less wholesome reason.  It’s actually her frustrated, angry husband, Brick.

            Brick is played by Benjamin Walker, whose most notable Broadway credit is the 2010 emo-rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. While I didn’t see it (for who did?) I can attest that Walker is brilliant in Brick’s role, embodying the simmering anger that the character must slowly bring to light over the course of the play’s three acts.  It is through him that the audience comes to realize that, while the drama and dynamics of the story play out around him, seeming to exclude him, he is actually the most important factor in the story.  There are no star turns here, not even for Ms. Johansson. 

This is the true brilliance of Tennessee Williams—that no matter who plays which part, the characters will stay what they were written to be.  Perhaps the Scarlett Johansson has inserted herself into his world, but even from his current, slightly inopportune position, he pulls the strings.  Is this the mark of a great genius, or just a controlling playwright?  Who’s to say?  But the fact remains that whenever or wherever one might see Cat, the characters will always slowly collapse into their mad power grabs and spiteful hatred.  Maggie will end up unfulfilled but hopeful.  Brick will do his best to keep his hatred for his wife under his belt.  The story is always the same, but it gets more and more relevant and more and more entertaining every day.