Two Paths, Neither Very Interesting

If/Then at the Richard Rodgers Theatre

 

 Idina Menzel and Anthony Rapp in If/Then.

                I wish so badly to have liked If/Then.  Filled with beautiful voices and scenery (by Mark Wendland), the new musical from Next to Normal scribes Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey provides the facade of that intense, realistic rock musical of 2009 starring the electric Alice Ripley.  This time, they have chosen for their leading woman Idina Menzel, who has a magnificent voice and is on something of a hot streak right now.  Her supporting cast, including the clear-voiced James Snyder, the sporadically entertaining LaChanze, and Rent co-star Anthony Rapp, is very talented.  Yet this musical has two fatal weak points--its book and its score.

              The book, by Mr. Yorkey, is excruciatingly boring.  It concerns Elizabeth (Menzel), an aimless urban studies major who has ended her twelve-year marriage at 39 and moved back to New York.  One meaningless decision--whether to spend an afternoon with her former boyfriend, the bisexual housing activist Lucas (Rapp) or her new friend and neighbor, Kate (LaChanze)--lays out two parallel universes.  In one, the newly christened Liz meets a dreamy army doctor (Snyder), has two children, and pursues a teaching career.  In the other, nicknamed Beth, our heroine devotes herself to a career in city planning and starts an on-and-off relationship with Lucas.  It pains me to have to explain these storylines in such detail (though the confusion of the storyline necessitates it), since they are totally uninteresting.  Though the audience at the performance I attended seemed riveted (Menzel fans, no doubt), it barely held my attention.  Unlike Next to Normal, in which the tribulations of a single suburban family became Earth-shattering before our eyes, there is no point in telling this story.  Though at face value the production, admirably, doesn’t seem to be trying too hard, this is because it actually has nothing to say.

               The score, by  Mr. Kitt, is, shockingly, not great.  Next to Normal’s was a pitch-perfect labor of love, each number more creative and telling than the last.  If/Then has perhaps two memorable numbers.  One, “Starting Over,” is momentous only because of Ms. Menzel’s soaring performance--this is her “Defying Gravity” moment of the production.  The other, “Love While You Can,” is legitimately good, a tantalizing taste of what this musical could have been.  The rest of the numbers all sound the same--cool-kid rock, with lots of acoustic instruments and piano, classic Kitt but without the effort.  Backed by meaningless choreography by Larry Keigwin, the numbers ooze by without fanfare, tracking the unimportant story almost uncaringly.  A great score can save a bad story.  Unfortunately, we get no such salvation here.

              The long and the short of it is that If/Then is too clever by half.  The concept of the Butterfly Effect was not meant to be applied to such unimportant decisions as those that Liz and Beth make in the show.  The fact is that both of their storylines end practically the same way, and could have done the same had about 40% of each plot been removed entirely.  It’s a lot of fluff, and not fun fluff, either.  Applying the same angst to 40s shiftlessness as they did to mental illness, Yorkey and Kitt have showed their hand.  They can only tell important stories--really important stories, and if they start off with a premise that won’t lead anywhere, neither will their work.  All the Idina Menzels in the world won’t save the aesthetic value of this show.  It’s a shame that, in this new theater landscape, the commercial value is what counts.

Spoiler Alert--It Explodes

A Raisin in the Sun at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre

 

            The greatest achievement of the modern playwright is a play in which everyone is right.

            Throughout the twentieth century, plays increasingly became moral conversations and arguments, with one character always clearly holding the advantage and—usually—emerging superior.  In Death of a Salesman, the old and the dying are in the wrong and must make way for the new.  In Glengarry Glen Ross, another play about salesmen, those who would succumb to corporate conformity are the villains, and those who would fight for their individuality are our heroes.  The point of view of the hero in any given play is usually that of the playwright, and the villain’s ideals are the ideals of those the playwright wishes to bring down.  As such, many modern plays play out as slow takedowns of an ideology in which one side is obviously misguided and the other guided by wit and intelligence.

            In Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the ideologically diverse Younger family has many points to make.  Mama, the family’s matriarch, believes in pride and godliness, while Ruth, her daughter-in-law, will take the survival of her family over anything else.  Eldest son Walter Lee wants to claw away from the trials of his race to a life of success through a series of well-intentioned but doomed business investments; his sister, Beneatha, a rapid convert to an early wave of Black Power, wants dignity, and to bring her race up with her.  The amazing thing about this play is that, though each Younger is vastly different from the other, each has legitimate points to make, and not one of their belief systems is incomprehensible to the audience. 

I personally have always taken Beneatha’s side—she’s ambitious, intellectual, and beyond petty argument—but the audience at the new Broadway production of the show, which runs through June 15^th, seemed partial to Mama, played by the capable LaTanya Richardson Jackson.  After Beneatha (Anika Noni Rose, magnificent) boldly reveals her atheism to her pious mother, Mama smacks her daughter across the face and demands that she repeat the words, “In my mother’s house there is still God.”  Disturbingly, this was followed by applause from the audience—is lack of belief still as offensive to a 2014 crowd as it would have been to a 1959 one?  Still, it was their right to side with any family member they wished.  This is the magic of A Raisin in the Sun, and any well-produced production—like this one—displays to the world Hansberry’s ability as a playwright to present multiple arguments and sound authoritative in all of them.

Though every Younger’s ideas are legitimate, this is one of the many plays that disproves the common adage, “There are no small parts, only small actors.”  Ruth has always been a relatively boring, underwritten part that seems to exist only to be abused by Walter Lee, and the seemingly wooden Sophie Okonedo can’t do much with what she’s given here.  Same goes for Jason Dirden as the stiff George Murchison and Bryce Clyde Jenkins as Travis Younger.  But Hansberry seems to have written some of the parts to necessitate star turns, and, as usual with productions of this play, Walter Lee walks away with it.

            Denzel Washington is so marvelously good as Walter Lee that every second he is offstage is an emptiness in the room.  His blasé, discontented approach to the character is inspired.  When commanding racist community board member Karl Lindner to “Get out of my house” in the second act, it’s not shouted; in fact, it’s almost a whisper.  But it’s so strained and stressed that the threat comes across much more clearly.  On the other side of the spectrum, his rock-bottom moment comes when he describes to his mother how he plans on selling their newly bought house to Lindner, and he convulses into an impression of a minstrel show Jim Crow, contorting his body in an angry jackknife that lets us know exactly what Walter is feeling.  His performance is a tour-de-force that exists on par with Hansberry’s writing.  Whatever the production’s faults, when Washington works hand-in-hand with this script, the sky is the limit.

A Power Broker at Work

All the Way at the Neil Simon Theatre

Bryan Cranston in All the Way.

            Neil Schenkkan’s All the Way might as well be called The Cranston Show.

            The script is well-written, Brandon J. Dirden, William Jackson Harper, and Michael McKean put in inspired performances, and Bill Rauch’s direction shows promise.  But once Bryan Cranston stalks, in the dark, on stage at the beginning of the show (rarely to leave), he takes command, much as his character might have.

            For five years on AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” Mr. Cranston played a gruff, harried, evil genius, a man who knew how to control people and valued loyalty.  Now he is playing a character with much the same description — Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36^th President of the United States.  (Hubert Humphrey, played exceedingly well by Robert Petkoff, is his Jesse Pinkman — earnest and kind near the beginning of the play, Johnson’s use of him as a glorified errand boy deadens his resolve and morals by the end.)  Mr. Cranston’s range, though, is not in question here.  To play the President, he hunches and walks bowlegged, seeming thirty years older; he adopts a staccato Texan accent that would fool even the oldest Good Old Boy; and he seems to wield so much power that might have scared Johnson himself.  He is an electrifying performer, and every second that he is onstage, calculating wildly the votes he needs and then getting them at any cost, he overwhelms the audience with his pure talent.  He fills the room with heat.  This is a once-in-a-lifetime performance.

            The first act of All the Way traces the period from John F. Kennedy’s assassination (for which Johnson shows a modicum of grief, but not enough to distract him) to the passage of Johnson’s flagship Civil Rights Act, which, as he frequently insists in the play, he needed the country’s grief over Kennedy’s death to do.  The second details the President’s efforts in the 1964 Presidential election, in which he is beset by calamity at every turn but (spoiler alert) wins in the greatest Democratic landslide in the history of the country.  Throughout, the focus is on Johnson’s complex relationship with civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King (Mr. Dirden, in a performance that almost rivals Mr. Cranston’s).  King’s repeated compromise with Johnson on the Civil Rights Act, especially on the removed voting rights section, frustrate him to the point that he agrees to work with SNCC leader Bob Moses (Eric Lenox Abrams) and Stokely Carmichael (the very talented Mr. Harper) on the almost certainly suicidal Freedom Summer project.  (Here some creative license is taken; Carmichael was too low-ranking a member of SNCC at the time to have ever met with Dr. King, and even when Carmichael ascended to its presidency, King always disagreed with and personally disliked him.)  Meanwhile, the conniving J. Edgar Hoover (Mr. McKean, sleekly terrifying) is bugging Dr. King and his associates everywhere they go, at one point even sending Dr. King’s wife recordings of her husband’s adultery.

            The President must deal with all of these problems.  They consume his life — Johnson’s relationship with his wife, Lady Bird (Betsy Aidem), is portrayed as dismissive and harsh in the wake of issues with civil rights.  Equally, they consume the rest of his presidency — Johnson signs off on orders to essentially start the Vietnam War without even seeming to think about it.  This may be because playwright Neil Schenkkan’s Johnson is obsessed with power, and these issues were an exercise in collecting and using it.  But this Johnson — reminiscing sincerely about poor Mexican children in a border town in Texas, about his African-American staff’s inability to enter a public restroom — seems also legitimately desirous of a country where equality for all is the norm.  (Indeed, many of the black characters repeatedly refer to him as “the most sympathetic President since Abraham Lincoln," perhaps a bit optimistically.)  So once again, Mr. Cranston is portraying a character whose innate humanity it is left to the audience to decide.  Moral quandaries aside, though, he is still a whole lot of fun to watch, and that means something, too.

The Bullets Fly Over Different Heads

Bullets Over Broadway at the St. James Theatre

L-R: Vincent Pastore, Heléne York, Nick Cordero, Marin Mazzie, Brooks Ashmankas, Zach Braff, Lenny Wolpe, and Betsy Wolfe in Bullets Over Broadway.

            Woody Allen’s 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway is not the most obvious choice in Allen’s oeuvre for musical adaptation.  It’s an intellectual exploration of what it means to be an artist and to be able to weigh art and love against one another, and its very characters reject the panache and style that characterize Broadway musicals.  (If you were looking for the most obvious choice, Bananas, Sleeper, and Midnight in Paris wouldn’t be bad starts, or, if you were feeling daring, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?.)  But it is the film that he has chosen for his first musical, and, as with everything Mr. Allen does, he has decided that if it absolutely has to be done, it will be done brilliantly and with a heavy dose of nostalgia.

            Bullets Over Broadway: The Musical, which is now in previews and opens April 10, is graced with a book by Mr. Allen, inspired direction and choreography by that great hit-maker, Susan Stroman, and a score made up of 1920s popular music, some more classically popular than others, but all beautiful.  (Glen Kelly deserves a great deal of credit for his almost indistinguishable additional lyrics, which help the songs fit into the plot.)  The production of this show proves another aspect of Mr. Allen’s pop-culture literacy, for the big-band orchestra, the marvelous dance numbers, and the star turn performances recall the musicals of Broadway’s Golden Age—as was clearly Mr. Allen’s intent.

            The musical’s plot hems almost exactly to that of the film: a struggling playwright, David Shayne, is presented with the opportunity to produce his long-incubating play, with the condition that a shrill, untalented mobster’s girlfriend be bestowed with a role.  Shayne, who abhors creative compromise (an obviously autobiographical aspect to Mr. Allen’s writing here rears its head), watches his control over the show slip away as it becomes clear he is not half the artist he thought he was—though, as it turns out, that’s okay.  Here Shayne is portrayed winningly by the endlessly talented Zach Braff, whose musical abilities I had before only guessed at and whose comic abilities, I am glad to see, are still wholly intact.  Mr. Braff arguably plays Woody Allen far more convincingly than John Cusack did in the film.  Rather than Mr. Cusack’s mildly harried, earnest egotist, Mr. Braff plays Shayne as a panicked, neurotic tempest of agitation, which—unsurprisingly—he does without missing a beat.

            Mr. Braff’s performance is only the first of many (or all) in this production pulled off perfectly and with unprecedented talent.  Brooks Ashmankas plays Warner Purcell, the male lead in Shayne’s play, a hammy compulsive eater, with aplomb and incredible dancing skill for one so burdened by a fat suit.  Marin Mazzie, as Helen Sinclair, Shayne’s female lead and muse, is about as good as it gets, though never quite as scene-stealing as Dianne Wiest, who won an Oscar for the role.  (Luckily, Sinclair’s “Don’t speak” routine is intact, and neither over- nor underplayed.)  Heléne York, as the spoiled girlfriend, Olive Neal, is the show-stealer here, just exciting enough to receive ovations for singing “I Want a Hot Dog For My Roll” and just irritating enough for the audience to applaud, too, her eventual unfortunate fate.  And Nick Cordero, as the mobster/ghostwriter Cheech, can’t be counted out either.  He’s a dancer and singer of such impressive caliber that, in a way, he is the glue that binds Bullets together.  (A clever gimmick using “Up a Lazy River,” featured in the film, as his character’s theme song, is intelligently deployed.)

            And it’s the songs, more than anything, that make the show.  From a “Let’s Misbehave” duet between Neal and Purcell to the ridiculous but somehow eminently perfect finale, Bullets Over Broadway is a classic old-school Broadway musical, the kind that, but for people like Mr. Allen, would have disappeared from the stage many a moon ago. 

Indeed, however, but for a few well-placed one-liners (“Is it possible to love two women at once?  Not if one finds out”) and the background creative drive of the musical, the nebbishy, questioning undertone of Mr. Allen’s films—which can actually be quite pleasant under the right circumstances—is mostly absent here.  (The touching finale of the movie, from which stems the classic Allen line “There's two things of which I'm certain.  One is that I love you.  Two is that I'm not an artist” has been replaced with a wonderfully fun musical number that’s actually just as welcome, if not more.)  But this isn’t a criticism.  Because repressing the natural inclination to overwrite is what makes Bullets Over Broadway a great musical that will outlast not just Mr. Allen but probably us all.  So, Woody, here’s to many more.  We on Broadway will be patiently waiting.