Hello Again, Young Lovers

The King and I at the Vivian Beaumont Theater

Kelli O'Hara and Ken Watanabe in The King and I.

            Director Bartlett Sher’s new staging of The King and I is the kind of production the enormity of which becomes clearer in retrospect.  Upon leaving the theater you will be dazzled.  On your way home you will be thoughtful.  The next morning you will be flabbergasted you could have witnessed something so well-conceived.

            Mr. Sher, also the director of 2008’s South Pacific at the same venue, establishes himself firmly with this King and I as the premier re-interpreter of classic musicals.  (He also helms this fall’s Fiddler on the Roof, thank God.)  He has an unmatchable knack for bringing out the big in the great scores and stories of the Golden Age, and he outdoes himself here.  The stage at the Beaumont Theater is vast, which dealt blows to lesser productions—Jack O’Brien’s 2013 Macbeth was dwarfed by it—but does nothing but good for The King and I.  The glorious sets, by Michael Yeargan evoking a landscape about as close to a real Asian palace as one can get outside of Bangkok, frame extraordinarily well-staged choreography by Christopher Gattelli.  No surprise that Mr. Yeargan and Mr. Gattelli are both veterans of Mr. Sher’s South Pacific.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

            This is a beautiful production, plain and simple.  It is a unique and affecting work of art, made whole, as any King and I should be, by the right choice of King of Siam and, to a lesser extent, Anna (it’s a simpler part).  In casting these indelible parts Mr. Sher has wisely skewed toward the safe.  It is asking too much to imagine any better Anna Leonowens than Kelli O’Hara (another veteran of South Pacific), who has with this production proved herself definitively the best musical stage actress since Julie Andrews.  And it is plainly impossible to conceive of any man living who could play a better King of Siam than the Japanese actor Ken Watanabe.

            Mr. Watanabe and Ms. O’Hara are a match made in heaven.  They play off each other as if they’ve been working together for years (in fact, this is Mr. Watanabe’s first time treading the boards of an American stage, though it will not be the last).  Their chemistry is tangible, their shared comic ability honed, and—to put it bluntly—they are both too damned talented for words.  There is nothing to be said about the almost insane level of energy attained by this pairing during the now-legendary “Shall We Dance?” sequence except to say that you must—must—see it before you die.

            Ms. O’Hara is a singer and actress of astounding talent.  The stage practically glows gold wherever she steps.  But again, Anna, a British teacher who’s spent most of her life in the far East, is a safe part, dramatically rather simple and musically gifted with many of the better numbers in this stellar score (made even more affecting by Robert Russell Bennett's lustrous orchestrations, performed by a full orchestra).  Mr. Watanabe, at least Ms. O’Hara’s equal in pure dramatic ability, achieves something more important here—he reinvents the King of Siam, emblazoned into the collective memory of the theater by Yul Brynner in 4,625 stage performances and a 1956 film (for which he collectively won two Tonys and an Oscar).  Mr. Watanabe’s King is manic, excitable, and imperious, but somehow exceedingly human, and likeable, mostly because Mr. Watanabe is an actor of such phenomenal feeling that he leaves a bit of himself on the stage in every scene, and yet transforms himself totally, so that you never for a second consider that this fictional King is not a living, breathing man sharing his story with the world.  Thus the most appropriate emotion upon leaving the Beaumont is not any I initially listed, but disbelief.  We have never seen anything like this before.

            This production is not perfect—the lighting, by Donald Holder, is distractingly artificial, and at three hours, there are swaths of the show (most significantly the unnecessary ballet sequence, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas”) that could have been cut down to size.  But as far as musical theater goes, it’s pretty much the ideal.  Mr. Sher has created a magnificent self-contained world for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s characters to dance around in, and it’s a snow globe I’d gladly shake again to watch the beautiful little puzzle pieces fall into place.

Buried Gold

Paint Your Wagon at New York City Center

The cast of Paint Your Wagon.

            The Encores! production of Paint Your Wagon is not usual fare for the series—it usually sticks to underappreciated or very short-running musicals, categories under which the 1951 Lerner and Loewe production does not fall—but it is welcome, a brief, refreshing reminder of why we love musical theater itself. It’s also an excuse to enjoy the rollicking score, perhaps not lyricist Alan Jay Lerner’s best work (that was to come in My Fair Lady and Camelot, or past in 1947’s Brigadoon), but certainly up there for composer Fritz Loewe, whose melodies, tinged with Latin and folk influences, are orchestrated and performed extremely satisfactorily by the charismatic Rob Berman’s Encores! Orchestra.

            Paint Your Wagon was an anomaly for Lerner and Loewe, the only original musical they wrote after 1947 and their shortest-running between 1945 and 1973 (only 289 performances despite mostly positive reviews).  They were attempting, clearly, to replicate the success of the similarly optimistic frontier drama Oklahoma, which had taken Broadway by storm eight years earlier, and they did not entirely succeed, financially or creatively.  The puzzle pieces of Paint Your Wagon do make up what a musical should be, the ideal of the Golden Age.  But there are some characters who are underused (more on these later), and others who needn’t be there at all.  As a unified musical, the concept introduced by Show Boat and perfected by Oklahoma, Paint Your Wagon isn’t all the way there.  What does function pretty fantastically on its own is the score, which is wisely featured here.

            The cast of this production (which, as with all Encores! productions, runs only four days, through March 22^nd) is mostly well-chosen.  Keith Carradine delivers a marvelous turn as wandering prospector Ben Rumson, who founds the floundering gold mining town of Rumson Creek.  His voice is redolent of folk singers like Peter Yarrow, an unusual choice for musical theater but in this production, at least, a wonderful one.  It also helps to have an actor of Mr. Carradine’s caliber on hand to make sense of Rumson’s sometimes self-contradictory decisions.

            Alexandra Socha, who plays Rumson’s sixteen-year-old daughter Jennifer and the only girl in a mining camp of 700 men, has a lovely voice but isn’t great with the comic frustration necessary to pull off the part.  (Betty Hutton could have done it, if cornily, or, come to think of it, the young Celeste Holm, who played a character very similar to Jennifer in the aforementioned Oklahoma.)  Ms. Socha is a little awkward and a little under-rehearsed on the stage, and the fact that her underage character is subject to an uncomfortable amount of sexual attention (a predicament Lerner and Loewe approached with a great deal more delicacy in Gigi) doesn’t help matters.

            The focus here, as he should be, is Justin Guarini, who is best known for his stint on American Idol in 2002.  He plays Julio Valvaras, a Mexican miner who must live two miles from camp to avoid those who would steal his claim, and acts additionally as Jennifer’s love interest.  Mr. Guarini’s stage presence is captivating, and his voice even more so.  Only someone with his felicity could deliver so beautifully what is inarguably the best song in the score, “I Talk to the Trees,” which Clint Eastwood so memorably garbled in the 1969 film version.  He is the primary character who could use some more stage time—for one, the racial implications of his dealings with Rumson Creek’s townspeople are never fully explored, besides which he’s just a spectacular performer.

            But the fact remains that this score, delivered by a marvelously earnest ensemble, talents all, is an attraction all by itself.  “Wand’rin Star,” “They Call the Wind Maria,” and the mindworm “I’m On My Way—” all these from a musical un-revived now for nearly 65 years.  Lerner and Loewe, the most underrated songwriting team of the Golden Age (what recognition they have achieved, mostly for My Fair Lady, is not near enough), were masters of their crafts, and in Paint Your Wagon as ever, they deliver a score that reminds us why, cliché as they are beginning to seem, classic musicals in all their deeply felt glory are a necessary stimulant for getting through life.

In the Eaves of the Cathedral, Something New Awaits

The Hunchback of Notre Dame at the Paper Mill Playhouse

Michael Arden (center) as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

    One thing can be said for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the new musical running at the Paper Mill Playhouse through April 5 -- it's not usual.

    Technically speaking, it's based on the original 1831 Victor Hugo novel, the tale of a deformed man named Quasimodo kept captive in the titular cathedral's bell-tower, from which it draws its darker themes, but most of its songs are drawn directly from the 1996 Disney animated film.  But this isn't Disney fare.  Certainly, director Scott Schwartz's brilliant stagecraft could be tangentially connected to the work Julie Taymor did on 1998's Lion King stage musical, but that would perhaps be simplistic given that Hunchback contains no puppetry, few variations in scenic design, and very little color.  It is a beautiful production, set in a magnificent approximation of the Paris cathedral of the title --  designed by Alexander Dodge and lit by Howell Binkley -- but it is as existentially terrifying as it is gorgeous, and one can hardly imagine children begging to attend this production, or buying extravagantly priced Halloween costumes based on it.  That is to say -- it's not a grab at franchise glory, and that alone is worth some admiration for the increasingly cynical Disney theater machine.

    Nor is it usual for its creative team.  The unstoppably prolific Alan Menken and the egregiously-Tonyless Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the score to the original film (as well as another unusually dark Disney Renaissance film, Pocahontas) and add some new numbers here, seem at first to be in their element.  There are clear contributions from Schwartz, lyricist (heavy religious imagery, frequent narration, soaring power ballads) and Menken, composer (clear narrative arc, period-theme music, darkly ambiguous ending).  But these are deeper waters than either has tested before, and neither comes out entirely clean.  As in many Menken scores, there are several truly memorable melodies (none of the newly written ones qualify) and a significant, twinklingly forgettable portion that exist mainly to move the plot along.  Here the latter seems to overwhelm the former.  And as in some of the worse Schwartz musicals (Godspell comes to mind), the religious overtones are frequently so heavy-handed that they impede further understanding of the characters' motivations.  A number of the melodies even from the movie are surprisingly underdeveloped for writers of Menken and Schwartz's talent.  "Rest and Recreation," an ode to fun by a soldier on furlough, is one of these, a number with incredible promise, especially in the chorus, that trails off into nothing almost too quickly.  Many of the songs are hurt, too, by the lackluster orchestrations (by Michael Starobin, who works better with rock scores, as in Next to Normal), which can fail to match the potential the singers  bring to the songs.  

The old classics, however, are all here -- "Out There," Quasimodo's "Part of Your World" moment, "Hellfire," essentially a reinterpretation of "Mea Culpa" from Sweeney Todd, and, most notably, "The Bells of Notre Dame," the beautiful opening number repeated as a musical theme throughout the show.  "Bells" achieves liftoff, as does the show, thanks to the contributions of the Continuo Arts Symphonic Chorus, who sit at the back of the stage during the entirety of the show and sing madrigal-choir support for nearly every song, lending to the score a gravitas and significance that is one of the many brilliant touches lent to the show by Scott Schwartz.

    It's Mr. Schwartz (the lyricist's son), who, as the ingenious director, brings his best work to the production.  A version of Hunchback played in Berlin in the early 2000s, to the same critical acclaim this production received at La Jolla Playhouse last year.  But Schwartz has made the show his own, adding a more intelligent approach to the gargoyles who speak to Quasimodo, jettisoning songs that don't match the dark themes of the show ("A Guy Like You" from the film, which was sung by a mid-"Seinfeld" Jason Alexander, is the primary example), and generally stripping the show down to its most brilliant stagecraft.  Quasimodo (Michael Arden -- more on him in a moment) comes on-stage appearing normal, then straps on a hump and smears his face with makeup in view of the audience, so that his transformation becomes a part of the play.  (Self-referential "troupe of players" motifs are a common touch of the elder Schwartz -- see Pippin.)  Transformations are central to the show, and the younger Schwartz brings them to the fore, making them transparent and letting the audience see the fascinating machinations of the unknown.

    Though the book, by Peter Parnell, is ludicrous, the talented cast does their best with the better parts of the mostly moving and clearly intelligently conceived score.  Mr. Arden, as Quasimodo, deploys one of the most perfect voices I've ever heard on a stage during the hunchback's deeply felt songs, even if the speaking voice he uses for his character is uncomfortably redolent of Ben Stiller's Simple Jack from Tropic Thunder.  ("Never go full retard," advised Robert Downey Jr. in that film, and, absent the insulting language, Mr. Arden might do well to take heed.)  Still, though, his performance is captivating, a perfect match for the play's villain, Quasimodo's uncle and caretaker, Archdeacon Frollo of Notre Dame, astonishingly portrayed by Patrick Page.  Mr. Page has perfected the art of the Disney villain (having played Scar for several years on Broadway in The Lion King), and this performance is no exception.  Like Mr. Arden, he is a beautiful and unique singer, and he is capable enough as an actor to take on the deep, Catholic guilt-tinged anger the part requires.  They make a perfect team.

    Less interesting is the central love story, between Phoebus (Andrew Samonksy), the captain of the Notre Dame guard, and Esmerelda (Ciara Renee), a Gypsy dancer for whom Phoebus, Quasimodo, and Frollo fall.  The characters are cookie-cutter -- Phoebus is a burly jock who magically becomes sensitive upon falling in love without ever becoming interesting, and Esmerelda is an eternally good, sexy, submissive impossibility who exists merely to serve the stories of the male characters.  A sample line from her song, "God Help the Outcasts," the appeal of which I've never understood, in which she prays in Notre Dame: "I ask for nothing / I can get by / But I know so many / Less lucky than I."  Oh, she's selfless, too?  Swoon.  When Mr. Parnell's simplistic, hamfisted writing gets to work on this phony love quadrangle, a certain type of audience member might smile comfortably and think, "Ah.  A Disney musical after all."

    But there is something odd about Scott Schwartz's consistently intelligent direction, the transcendent passages of Menken and Schwartz's score, and that eternally present, beautifully echoing choir that brings to mind the feeling an agnostic might attain upon entering a church -- for like religion, Hunchback is somewhat confusing, a little heavy and not entirely necessary.  But for even the unbaptized, when all the right elements come together -- when the organ echoes, the choir sings and the light comes just right through the stained-glass windows, the agnostic can understand why people are so fervent about this whole setup.  And while he may not be, he can certainly sit back and enjoy the more beautiful parts of the ride.

The Boomers Grow Up

The Heidi Chronicles at the Music Box Theatre 

Elisabeth Moss (far right) in The Heidi Chronicles.

            As deeply felt and occasionally sharply funny as it is sweepingly dated and dull, the first Broadway revival of a Wendy Wasserstein play, the Pam McKinnon-directed The Heidi Chronicles, stars, in a moment of brilliant casting, the phenomenally talented Elisabeth Moss.  Ms. Moss, best known for playing the increasingly self-sufficient woman of the sixties Peggy Olsen on the AMC series Mad Men, plays a very similar character here—a reserved, professional outsider, roused to anger only infrequently and then with very good reason.  Her role this time is the ambitious art historian Heidi Holland, whose life is tracked from a school dance in Chicago in 1965 to an empty loft in Manhattan in 1989.  Heidi’s story is clearly and unapologetically a first-wave feminist allegory, tracing the conformity of the women in Heidi’s life to a system they profess to love and hate, at different periods, with equal alacrity, and the passive oppression of men who seem to be extremely amused by the whole affair. 

            One would think, in the aftermath of two consecutive State of the Union addresses that have placed equal pay for equal work near the top of the list of American priorities to be addressed in the coming year, that this would all feel timely, but Ms. Wasserstein—an only sporadically inspired playwright, despite the fervor that has surrounded her legacy—is strictly a feminist of the old school, and her rhetoric belongs more accurately to the seventies than to the eighties, and definitely not to the now half-over ‘10s. 

            Ms. Moss’s greatest moment of the production, a speech delivered to a gathering of feminist activists at the Plaza Hotel in 1986, is performed with the professionalism of an actress many years older than Ms. Moss herself (she’s 32, playing 17-41).  Her lip quivers, her voice trembles, and she struggles to maintain decorum in an altogether convincing manner, captivating the audience.  The problem is that Heidi’s speech—which discusses the apparently vapid women in an exercise class with whom Heidi, and presumably Wasserstein, fail to identify—is filled with the gross generalizations and elitist pretention that went along with the fiery rhetoric of the first wave, and comes off like she’s talking down to any woman who dares fail to fit the exact mold of a feminist of the era.  As an activist Heidi meets in Ann Arbor in 1970 (played by Tracee Chimo) puts it—“You either shave your legs or you don’t.”  (Ms. Chimo, incidentally, plays several characters in the play, and this is the only one she fails to pull off with phenomenal comic aplomb.)  The problem with The Heidi Chronicles is that it fails to acknowledge that one can be a feminist no matter what one's standards of personal hygiene, which is what makes the play’s sensibility seem so out of place in today’s landscape.

            So the slack is left to the actors to pick up, and pick it up they—mostly—do.  Ms. Moss, naturally, is as stellar as ever, though it may be a struggle to see her Heidi as anything other than a slightly more neurotic Peggy Olsen.  (At one point someone asks Heidi why she’s clutching her handbag, and she responds, incredulously, “I have valuables!”  Somewhere Don Draper just shook his head condescendingly.)  Rounding out the leading triangle are Jason Biggs as Heidi’s on-and-off lover, Scoop Rosenbaum, and Bryce Pinkham (late of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) as her gay best friend (apparently a requisite for feminists in media), Peter Patrone.  Mr. Biggs is game and a good deliverer of Wassersteinian put-downs, but he is noticeably wooden onstage, never changing his posture from mood to mood, and it doesn’t help that his costumes (designed by the apparently short on time Jessica Pabst) are all two sizes too big, a touch which makes no point at all. 

            But Mr. Pinkham, in his role as a sardonic but caring stalwart friend to Heidi, steals the show.  His dexterity as an actor probably exceeds Ms. Moss’s.  He is alternately funny and tragic but always buoyant and brilliant on the stage, and his journey is the most rewarding in the play.  Heidi’s interesting in a sidelong way, sure.  But she’s quiet and mostly non-participatory in history.  In this era of rapidly changing gay rights, maybe what we really need is a Peter Chronicles, which could perhaps pull off the trick, as Wasserstein’s script never quite can, of lifting off without ever seeming anachronistic.