Some More Enthusiasm to Curb

Fish in the Dark at the Cort Theatre

Larry David, playwright and star of Fish in the Dark.

            Once again the panic is on here on Broadway as ticket-buyers rush in droves to spur a sold-out run of a straight play still in previews, starring personalities known for their work elsewhere.  But this time the play is not the atrocious It’s Only a Play (still running, by the way, at a new theatre, having conscripted a new source of star power in the person of the unfortunate Martin Short).  It’s far superior fare, Larry David’s first play, Fish in the Dark, in which he also stars, making his Broadway debut.  It’s not exactly where you’d imagine Mr. David going after a twenty-year career in television, a medium of close-ups and quick cuts and turns to camera in which he thrives, and in which he proved himself the king of television comedy.  So how do he, his ensemble, and the phenomenally talented director, Anna D. Shapiro, come off in this experiment?  To paraphrase Mr. David, pretty… Pretty… Well.

            Mr. David’s script, at least in the opening scenes, is not immediately compelling—and who could blame him, he’s not exactly an old hand at playwriting.  But it quickly reveals itself to be a compendium of jokes, setups for further jokes, and an almost shocking number of combative, acidic, and occasionally offensive confrontations.  That is to say, it’s essentially a really good, two-hour episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”  No wonder everyone wants to see it.

            There is one key difference—this is a family comedy, about the Los Angeles-based Drexel clan, of which Normal Drexel (Mr. David), a urinal manufacturer, is the oldest son.  So basically, it’s a “Curb” episode where we meet Larry’s family and, unsurprisingly, they’re all exactly like him—obsessive, angry, and endlessly questioning social mores.  Thus we discover what it would be like if everyone acted like Larry David all the time.  It’s a very different concept for Mr. David given the direction Curb took from the beginning, wherein his insult-spitting disaster machine of a character faced off against the supposedly “normal” denizens of Hollywood.  There’s no straight man—in the very first scene, Norman, his younger brother Arthur (Ben Shenkman), and their father’s notary, Michelle (Jenn Lyon) discuss in exhaustive detail an incident in which the borderline comatose patriarch of the Drexel clan, Sidney (Jerry Adler, Heshie on “The Sopranos”) groped Michelle’s breast from his hospital bed.  This scene goes on for nearly three minutes.

            Needless to say, this world of Larry Davids takes a little while to become satisfying, but when it hits home, it does so with gusto.  Sidney soon passes on, and Norman and Arthur are thrown into conflict when their mother, Gloria (Jane Houdyshell, tolerable) moves in with Norman, much to his chagrin, and a revelation by Norman’s housekeeper, Fabiana (Rosie Perez) leaves him in need of cash.  There is a great deal of secrecy surrounding the plot of the production (in interviews, cast members are forbidden even from describing set designer Todd Rosenthal’s scenery—which is beautiful, by the way).  Therefore, I’ll refrain from discussing it further, but for saying that Mr. David, despite getting off on shaky footing, knows what he’s doing as a writer on the stage just as well as on the screen.

            But the real allure—as usual for Broadway—is not really the script, but the prospect of seeing the Jewish messiah, Larry David, live and in person.  Ms. Shapiro's dramatic flourishes and the antics of the comparatively large cast will entertain, but Mr. David, true to form, will be the most truly memorable part of the production.  His immediacy in presence as a performer is tangible even on television—you can see why he found success as a stand-up comedian—and Fish in the Dark is no exception.  Being in a room with Larry David is uniquely electric.  Even the way he stands (slight lean backward, hands usually in pockets if not gesticulating) is naturally funny.  Mr. David never intended to play the part of Norman Drexel, but as he said, “The older brother character just sounded too much like me.”  The whole play sounds like Mr. David, and its sensibility, especially live in a theater, feels like him too.  If nothing else, Fish is a showcase for a comic who has no equal on the modern scene, and that alone sounds pretty, pretty good to me.

            

Young Geniuses

Hamilton at the Public Theater

 

Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton in Hamilton.

            Try if you may to describe Hamilton, the new musical by and starring Lin-Manuel Miranda now running at the Public Theater through April 5.  To call it perfect is simplistic.  It is sublime, a testament to the supreme creative power of Mr. Miranda and, indeed, the American people.  It exists outside the boundaries of reasonable expectations for musical theater; it is the best offering of this season, of any in recent memory, and, some might argue, of any season at all.  To any embittered malcontent who may find fault with this objectively staggering offering from the man who may well be the greatest musical theater artist working today, I am reminded of Shakespeare’s meter in King John: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, / To throw perfume on the violet… Is ridiculous excess.”  Hamilton cannot be improved.  I loved it so much I feel almost indecent discussing it.

            Our principals are, naturally, Alexander Hamilton (Miranda), a West Indian immigrant who rose by virtue of his own brilliance to the position of our nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury; Hamilton’s loves — his wife Eliza (Philippa Soo) and sister-in-law Angelica (Renée Elise Goldsberry); and Hamilton’s political nemesis and eventual killer, Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom, Jr.).  These are our guides through the ethereal wonderland, some fantastical intersection between the Secretary’s mind and the real world of the eighteenth century from the Revolution to 1804, that Mr. Miranda has built over these past six years.  And what guides!  Mr. Miranda is, as usual, in top form onstage — his actorly integrity combined with a highly intelligent flow contribute jointly to a star turn to match or exceed his winning portrayal of convenience store manager Usnavi in 2008’s In the Heights (which he also composed).  Ms. Soo and Ms. Goldsberry are bewitching and deeply felt, and Ms. Goldsberry especially offers a preview of what is sure to be a long and rewarding career — she sings the hell out of anything she’s given. 

            As for Mr. Odom, I am at a loss for words.  Together he and Mr. Miranda make Burr not a one-dimensional villain but a tragic hero, held back by his own reticence and natural proclivity to play it close to the vest (his first solo number, after all, is a tour de force called “Wait for It”).  This Aaron Burr, like Judas in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, narrates the piece, and the dramaturgical intelligence of this decision is confirmed during a scene where Hamilton trades away the rights to the geographical location of the country’s new capital in exchange for the votes for his new financial plan.  Burr, stuck on the outside looking in once again, snaps, and performs one of the many candidates for the score’s best song, “The Room Where it Happens,” which instills a drive for power which leads, eventually, to the downfalls of both Hamilton and Burr.  Don’t get me wrong — I can’t stop thinking about Mr. Miranda’s performance, either.  But In the Heights could have been a one-man-show without jettisoning any really important numbers or dramatic development.  With Hamilton, Mr. Miranda has written a showcase for the best ensemble on the stage today with the finesse of someone much later in his career than he.

            And first and foremost among this ensemble are two phenomenally talented men who, when this show transfers to Broadway, will be giving Mr. Odom a run for his money in the Best Supporting Actor department. 

            The first — After leaving the Public in a state of semi-dazed exuberance, my first thought was that I wished I could have spent more time with two of Mr. Miranda’s characters—the exquisitely French Marquis de Lafayette and the flamboyant, grandstanding Thomas Jefferson.  How convenient for posterity’s sake that they are both portrayed by rapper Daveed Diggs, whose incredible dedication to his roles and audience-pleasing comic dexterity will ensure his permanent welcome on the stage should he choose to return to it. 

            The second — Oh, the second.  There are certain performers in this world whose mere presence on a stage, even if it should last only a few minutes, guarantees their immediate association with the production.  People like this are called “showstoppers.”  And if this show can be stopped, it is stopped by Bryan D’Arcy James.   Mr. James spends maybe ten minutes on the stage as King George III, the prim, pompous monarch who watches from afar as control of the colonies slips away.  “You’ll Be Back,” his signature number, is written with the assurance of Paul McCartney’s best pop-inflected numbers from the early sixties, and performed with the clear-voiced delivery of, well, Brian D’Arcy James.  You’ll leave the theater humming “You’ll Be Back,” but Mr. James’s brief minutes breezily stopping by the show will stay with you longer than any earworm.

            The theatrical devices employed in this sung-through masterpiece are too numerous to name.  I was particularly partial to cabinet-meeting rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson, the wonderfully staged ten-pace duels (there are several), and especially the cultural references, which are surprisingly many.  I caught lines lifted lovingly from South Pacific, The Pirates of Penzance, The Last Five Years, 1776 (to which this musical’s parade of quirky founding fathers could be endearingly compared), and Mr. Miranda’s own In the Heights.  This is a winking acknowledgement of the unique territory this musical occupies — historically self-referential in a more blatant way than other period pieces have ever been.  (After a dramatic love scene, Jefferson flounces on-stage and complains, “Can we get back to politics?”)

            This is because the musical is all about preparing for your portrayal in the history books.  Hamilton succeeds in preserving his legacy because he is reckless and non-stop in pursuit of his goals, while more reserved characters like Burr end up with their names in the proverbial gutter.  “I am not throwing away my shot,” Hamilton repeatedly mutters.  The knowledge that “History Has Its Eyes on You” (as one of the song titles puts it) is prevalent, too, in 1776; the story is so familiar that we can’t conceive of the founding fathers being unsure that their tales wouldn’t be told hundreds of years later.  But from where I stand, this attitude comes naturally to Mr. Miranda because he is so appealingly aware of his own talent, like Sondheim in his day (and now, frankly).  He knows he’s good because he, like we lucky few, have seen Hamilton, and have no doubt that the advent of a historically important artist is at hand, and that we are witnessing the premiere of what may be his most important work.

Where Everyone Goes Mad, Eventually

A Delicate Balance at the Golden Theatre

John Lithgow and Glenn Close in A Delicate Balance.

            The play’s not the thing, exactly, when it comes to the slightly lethargic revival of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance at the Golden Theatre.  Neither is the cast, though the packed houses for the production, which opened on November 20^th, are no doubt drawn by the formidable presences of John Lithgow, Bob Balaban, (to a lesser extent) Martha Plimpton, and, notably, Glenn Close, returning to the New York stage after a 22-year absence.  It’s the execution.  Director Pam McKinnon, who succeeded so enormously with her previous Albee revival, 2012’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, puts a bloodless spin on this play that leaves its already bloated second act seeming even longer and less significant.

            Most of the meatiest dialogue in this, Albee’s tenth play, is delegated to the matriarch and patriarch of a wealthy suburban family, Agnes (Close) and Tobias (Lithgow).  Agnes’s finest hour comes in the play’s opening scene, when she discusses with Tobias—or, rather, talks at him about—the possibility that she may one day go insane, leaving him to fend for himself.  Does the fact that she is speculating about her own possible insanity prove, inherently, that she isn’t?  Agnes backtracks, starts, and rests while her browbeaten husband nods agreeably, perfectly setting up the eventual revelation of her character’s manipulative and imperious nature.  The scene, which lasts for fifteen minutes or so, is glorious.

            Then Lindsay Duncan enters as Agnes’s alcoholic sister, Claire.  Lindsay Duncan is, clearly, talented.  She puts on a not-entirely-vain effort to lift the incredibly morbid script, which, as the resident comic relief, is ostensibly her job.  But for whatever reason, she halts the fire.  From her entrance on, the show is almost entirely dead.  The characters are completely audible, but the spectator feels as if they’re whispering.  The fire that ran through, say the last actress to play Claire, Elaine Stritch (in the 1996 revival), does not run through the actors in this production.  Much of the play is guarded, gloomy, lacking in energy.  Ms. Close’s ice queen act, which has become her trademark, drags on after a while.  Bob Balaban and Clare Higgins, as a couple who come to stay with Agnes and Tobias with no excuse other than that they “got frightened,” are occasionally psychologically terrifying, the way they should be, but mostly unaccountable.  Martha Plimpton, as Agnes and Tobias’s daughter, Julia, is a strident over-actor.  (Her performance as a white-trash grandmother in the Fox sitcom Raising Hope had more subtlety.)  But for occasional flashes of brilliance from these no-doubt experienced performers, the play sometimes flags during the second act, and loses the audience’s attention.  (If Ms. Plimpton can run onstage with a gun and fail to rouse the torpor, I can’t imagine what would have.)

            What swoops in to save this production—and I venture to say that it is saved—is the performance of John Lithgow as Tobias.  I have seen Mr. Lithgow’s every American stage performance over the past four years, and have not once been disappointed for a moment in his phenomenal characterization.  Here, at last, is a man with fire in his veins, and not a moment too soon.  Tobias’s incredible journey, from put-upon retiree to trembling on the outskirts of insanity, is vividly drawn by Mr. Lithgow’s skilled hand.  Though he improves every minute he’s on the stage (his reading of the “I had a cat” speech during the first act is thrilling), where he shines brightest is the third act.  Where Ms. Close made the beginning memorable, Mr. Lithgow makes the ending unforgettable.  Reduced to questioning the meaning of love, friendship, and stability, he rails at Mr. Balaban’s character as, unbeknownst to him, his family looks on.  As a paragon of wisdom and steadiness collapsing gradually into a ruin, Mr. Lithgow becomes the tragic hero of the piece.  It is a triumphant performance—not an astonishing one, because audiences should expect no less from him, but a triumphant one.

            At the end of the day it comes down to the structure of the play.  The first and second acts deal with deep, existential truths (Albee’s bread and butter), while the second deals with petty dinner party jealousies.  (It’s also awkwardly split by the only scene break in the show.)  Ms. McKinnon could have made the slower bits more interesting, the way she did in Virginia Woolf (although, to be fair, that far superior play had many fewer sagging sections).  But, like Santo Loquasto’s weirdly pristine set design, this production is too whole, too undamaged, by play’s end.  And, as Mr. Albee once wrote in The Play About the Baby, “If you have no wounds, how can you know if you’re alive?”

They Might as Well Be Dancing in the Dark

The Band Wagon at City Center

            The Encores production of The Band Wagon, playing at City Center through November 16th, is so close to being a good show it almost hurts.  Boasting a starry cast including Brian Stokes Mitchell, Laura Osnes, and Tracy Ullman, a much-loved score by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, and backstage guidance from director/choreographer Kathleen Marshall and writer Douglas Carter Beane (who has greatly edited the script), it has created much anticipation in the very specific crowd that follow Encores' fall "special events."  But robbed of the blinding Technicolor and magnetic cast of the MGM film on which it's based, the quote-unquote "new and improved" Band Wagon is disappointing in its lethargy.

            The cast is not on its game.  Mr. Mitchell, always entertaining but vainly struggling to fill the enormous tap shoes of Fred Astaire, could use a better torch song than this score has to offer. (He's not much of a dancer, either.)  Ms. Osnes' character is held back so much by her reduced storyline that even her stellar range is not enough to make her performance memorable.  Many other supporting roles (those of Ms. Ullman and Michael McKean as a composing team and Michael Berresse as a modern choreographer come to mind) bring some welcome realism into this cream puff but eventually become tiresome as they strain to stay relevant in the quickly dissolving story.  It is left mostly to the hugely entertaining Australian Tony Sheldon (as British director Jeffery Cordoba) to inject a little excitement into the cast, which he does for most of the show, but there's only so much anyone can do when the overall mood is resignation to the subpar material.

            Mostly, that's due to the score, which, really, is not all that good.  Though Mr. Schwartz is a halfway decent composer, Mr. Dietz is only a sporadically inspired lyricist.  ("That's Entertainment" and "Dancing in the Dark" are arguably the only two professional-level numbers in the piece.) And Mr. Beane's new book suffers from the same ills as did his previous new books for existent musicals, Xanadu and Cinderella.  His librettos are often so blindingly sunny and grinningly self-referential that they desert substance altogether.  Though his most recent straight play, The Nance, was an altogether satisfying backstage story, Mr. Beane does not bring the same subtlety to musicals, and doesn't leave much worthwhile story to work with in his wake.  As always in Beane's work, the most obviously effeminate character (despite being straight in the original material) turns out to be gay and is immediately accepted by everyone, theater in-jokes (permanently soured for me by the atrocious It's Only a Play) are tossed around, and a happy ending is unjustifiably reached, leaving everyone dissatisfied.  Meanwhile, Ms. Marshall's choreography, normally stylish and exciting, doesn't discredit Mr. Astaire's memory so much as it seems to have forgotten it.

            Never in my theatergoing career have I seen a musical that so clearly should be delightful and yet isn't.  The music may be familiar (a smattering of applause erupted at the beginning of "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan" that seemed louder than the applause at the end) and the actors normally sublime, but something is off here; something is rotten, as Jeffery Cordoba might say as Hamlet near the beginning of the show, in the state of Denmark.  The show doesn't leave the audience walking on air, but it doesn't leave them walking out depressed, either.  It just leaves them walking out.

Twenty-Four Hours Gone Too Soon

On the Town at the Lyric Theatre

(L-R): Jay Armstrong Johnson, Tony Yazbeck, and Clyde Alves in On the Town.

            The revival of On the Town at the newly (and elegantly) restored Lyric Theatre, put simply, is a triumph in every sense.  It runs like clockwork; but clockwork is not powerful enough to describe the sheer spectacle of On the Town, so let us say this production is an engine that runs on magic.  Leonard Bernstein, Adolph Green, and Betty Comden’s magnificent score is, of course, robust as ever.  The performances, especially those of the three central characters, are splendiferous.  But perhaps most important, the choreography, by Joshua Bergasse (Smash) in the style of Jerome Robbins, godfather of this musical, flows like water across the Lyric’s expansive stage, filling the room with fire and force, until it finally expels the audience into the streets after two and a half glorious hours, singing and jigging as they go.

            There can be no doubt about it from the first moment those three voices cry “New York, New York!”… Throughout the history of musical theater there has been no musical quite like On the Town—its natural friendliness to the audience, its somehow simultaneously innocent and cosmopolitan tone, and its perfectly intertwined book, score, and dances.  Based on Robbins’ 1944 ballet “Fancy Free,” premiering that same year, and written when the creatives involved were, respectively, 26, 27, and 30, its air of wartime patriotism and intrinsic sense of joy have sustained its following seventy years after its premiere.  I grew up on the movie, as, probably, many others have, and though that 1949 Arthur Freed production included only three songs from the original production, it shared with the musical the sweet earnestness and hard-earned synchronicity that make them both so impressive.  Also, notably, they shared a legitimate New York connection—Gene Kelly insisted that exterior shots be produced on location in the city, at spots ranging from Rockefeller Center to the Museum of Natural History.  Significantly, that film cemented in the minds of the American public the identities of the three sailors who come bounding down into the Brooklyn Navy Yard at exactly 6 A.M.—Mr. Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and the underrated clown Jules Munshin.

            The cast of the new On the Town may not supplant them, but they may well equal them.  Needless to say, they are all fantastic singers, talented performers comic and tragic in equal measure, and absolutely transcendant dancers.  Ozzie is given fresh comic life by the leering Clyde Alves, who brings to mind The Mask-era Jim Carrey.  Jay Armstrong Johnson, who delivered a stunning performance in March’s Philharmonic staging of Sweeney Todd, turns on a dime to capture Chip’s convulsing nervousness with aplomb.  And Tony Yazbeck is marvelously expressive and multitalented as the lovestruck Gabey.  But for certain dance moves which bear a winking resemblance to those of Mr. Kelly, he proudly blazes his own trail through the part.  He is just one of two actors this season who seem to be making audience’s forget Gene Kelly’s name—Robert Fairchild, who is to star in another Kelly role in An American in Paris, inspired Alistair Macaulay to remark in the Times, “I prefer Mr. Fairchild.”

            Speaking of the illustrious Fairchilds, Robert’s wife, Megan Fairchild, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, plays the most notable of the female counterparts to those sailors on one day’s shore leave.  In her Broadway debut as Miss Turnstiles Ivy Smith, Ms. Fairchild not only brings to the show a dancing ability unmatched on the Broadway stage in recent memory (certainly not by a lead) but also a touching innocence as an actress and a voice rivalling that of any actress in the production.  Her presence onstage is a delight.

            The supporting cast is marvelous, too—the illustrious Jackie Hoffman lays waste to so many welcome comic characters you may wonder how she changes her costumes so quickly, and Michael Rupert (the shark-ish law professor in Legally Blonde) tries a different sort of role, the pushover Judge Pitkin, with pleasing results.

            All in all this cast, plus a score chock-full of too many hits to name, adds up to an evening of pleasure the likes of which it’s hard to imagine anyone’s seen since the time of the musical’s original run.  The singing of The Star-Spangled Banner before the curtain rises on the first act is a nice touch—for when the curtain falls, you will never feel prouder to live in a country where native hands have wrought such indelible masterpieces.

Cole Porter Adjacency, With a Few Jolts of Energy

Can-Can at the Paper Mill Playhouse

        The new version of Can-Can, at the Paper Mill Playhouse, directed and significantly edited by the Frasier co-creator David Lee, is buoyed by its near-perfect Cole Porter score but burdened by its lackluster execution.  Indeed, this story of the 1890s Montmarte club owner Pistache (Kate Baldwin) and her former paramour, Judge Aristide Forestier (Jason Danieley), seems to be held up by thin strings for most of the first act.  Ms. Baldwin floats through the production with a smarmy smirk permanently plastered across her face, and Mr. Danieley tries--and fails--to combine the swashbuckling attitudes of Errol Flynn with the lovestruck insecurity of Jimmy Stewart.  Backed by unimaginative sets (by Rob Bissinger), some great, top-of-his-game Porter ("Live and Let Live," "C'est Magnifique") slips by with relatively little fanfare.  It's white-bread, off-the-assembly-line direction by Mr. Lee, and the boring, unfunny book, co-written by Lee and Joel Fields, doesn't help matters.
        That is, until, near the middle of the second act, the cast bursts into the title number, which is not only by far the best song in the production but also one of Cole Porter's best songs ever.  Suddenly, the balanced exuberance that marks the greatest of Porter musicals and numbers is expressed, wildly and well, in the show itself.  The almost insane cleverness of Porter's lyrics is matched by visually inventive choreography by the Tony-winning Patti Colombo (Peter Pan), and the energy level jumps so jarringly it's as if someone has given the show an adrenaline shot.  "Can-Can," the number, seems like a visitor to Can-Can the show from some other, more intelligent production.  Wisely, Mr. Lee has lengthened the song and the dance number for this section of the production, and every second of it is joyous and trascendent.  It was greeted at the performance I attended with a nearly five-minute round of applause, and when, later, a reprise was announced, the theater nearly vibrated off its foundations.  As for me, I would have preferred to see the cast perform "Can-Can" (the song, not the show) continuously for two and a half hours than practically any other conceivable entertainment (including the show itself).  The number alone makes this production worth seeing.
        The phantasmagorical magic of this highlight extends itself over throughout the show, but moments like it are few and far between.  "Come Along With Me," sung by the magnificently sleazy Michael Berresse as villainous critic Hilaire Jussac, is quite a bit of fun, and "Never, Never Be an Artist" is perhaps the one moment of the production in which the comic relief (Greg Hildreth, Mark Price and Justin Robertson as a trio of starving artists) is actually comic.  But one can't escape the fact that the story (and most of Ms. Colombo's non can-can choreography) can sometimes fail to hold the audience's attention.  The most (unfortunately) memorable plot point of the second act comes when Jussac is brought to heel with a calculated reveal that not only makes no sense within the context of the story but also asks the audience to laugh at the character in a way that is summarily uncool.  The fact that this is preceded by one of the most inexpertly choreographed stage fights I've ever seen doesn't help the audience take the contrived happy ending seriously.  When Ms. Baldwin and Mr. Danieley embrace at show's end, the audience isn't interested, the way they should be, in the continuing story of these two lovers.  They're waiting for that final "Can-Can" they've been promised.  And when a single song, however brilliant, is the only thing anchoring a show to plausibility, that show isn't fully formed.  Cole Porter wouldn't be disappointed, but he certainly wouldn't be fascinated either.