True Lies

Dear Evan Hansen and The Present.

Ben Platt (center) stuns in Dear Evan Hansen.

            Evan Hansen, of the musical Dear Evan Hansen, now playing at the Music Box, is not, as you might originally think, a real person, press-ganged into service in what would be his personal hell, performing in front of thousands of people week after week on a Broadway stage.  In fact, he is portrayed by an actor, the twenty-three-year-old Ben Platt, though you could be forgiven for the mistake given that Mr. Platt delivers what is probably the most naturalistic turn in any Broadway musical, ever, and given the fact that he is, for Broadway, so resolutely unglamorous.  His words escape from his mouth in rat-a-tat barrages, as if he has been trying to keep them hidden but can’t quite manage it.  When seated, he rears back from conversational partners and freezes, almost in terror.  Perhaps most notably, his right hand appears to be beyond his control – it wanders and spasms; it nearly conducts, actually – in the fashion of someone whose life is similarly beyond his grasp.

            Evan’s story, as told by librettist Steven Levenson and composing team Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, is complex, and the work required to establish its premise would be less than worthwhile given that the show is best experienced with as little prior information as possible, pure, like an adrenaline shot.  Suffice it to say that it involves Evan, an anxiety-ridden seventeen-year-old (perhaps a tautology), the object of his affection, the sixteen-year-old Zoe Murphy (Laura Dreyfuss, understated and wonderful), and her misanthropic outcast of a brother, Connor (Mike Faist), as well as assorted well-meaning but misguided parents and schoolmates.  A case of mistaken authorship leads Evan down a path from which he can’t turn back; he acquires a measure of celebrity, achieves personal security, and follows his good intentions – pure but based, fundamentally, on a lie – to the point of no return.  It is wrenching.  It is beautiful.  It is magnificent.

            It is not an overstatement in the least to say that just as Oklahoma can lay claim to being the first fully integrated musical in the basic tradition of jazz and ragtime, so can Dear Evan Hansen be called the first fully integrated pop musical – not to diminish the score, since it’s nearly unclassifiable, completely unique, and gorgeous beyond reasonable expectation.  Everything – everything – is in the service of the story, and not a note nor a word rings false.  Its vision is total.  It never cheats.  It’s pretty near-perfect.  In Platt’s masterful performance, Evan’s loneliness and isolation are all too familiar – but we’ve never seen anything like the musical that bears his name.

            It’s been an odd season for dancing celebrities.  In Sam Gold’s Off-Broadway Othello, at the New York Theatre Workshop, Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo can be seen to cavort joyously to Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” in what must certainly be the happiest prelude to any spousal homicide on the American stage.  And now, in Andrew Upton’s Chekhov adaptation The Present, at the Ethel Barrymore, Cate Blanchett hops up on a dining room table, showers herself with vodka, and grinds on an old man to Haddaway’s “What is Love?”  It’s a bit like an unorthodox Clue solution: “Blanchett in the Australian production of the Russian play with the Eurodance music.”

            The play is really very good, but similarly disjointed.  Sprawling, cynical, and impressive, as directed by John Crowley, Blanchett, Richard Roxburgh, and a company of similarly attractive Aussies (Toby Schmitz is a standout) all act powerfully in this quintessentially Chekhovian work, based on his untitled first play, written when young Anton was just eighteen.  It should come as no surprise given the proclivities of the author who inspired The Present that the pistol Blanchett fondles in the first act goes off by the fourth.  Nor, given the production’s country of origin, should it be unforeseen that the production is phenomenally sexy, passionate, and hot-blooded from tip to toe.  What is unexpected (and disappointing) is the startlingly weak third act, seemingly visiting from another play, and the dialogue, which starts off wonderfully moody and introspective but, after intermission, becomes so dense and impenetrable it nearly crowds the stage.

            Still, by and large the story fascinates, as Roxburgh’s charismatic philanderer and Blanchett’s pyromaniacal widow lay waste to a perfectly pleasant birthday weekend in 1990s Russia – a conscious, and an intelligent, setting adjustment by Upton, who’s fascinated by the era’s conflict between the old and the new.  But generally the production’s theatrical ostentation is not its strongest suit.  The Present works best when it allows its characters to live there.  One can’t help feeling Upton would get better results, given his superb actorly ingredients, by keeping it simple – start with a base of resentments, sexual competitiveness, and class conflict, and stir in the cruel, manipulative Russian gentry of Chekhov’s fetid imagination.  Sprinkle in the Haddaway – conservatively.  Then, let sit – and squirm.

A Working Girl Can’t Win

Sweet Charity at the Signature Center

                                     

Shuler Hensley and Sutton Foster in Sweet Charity.

            They don’t make ‘em like Charity Hope Valentine, the feisty, resolutely optimistic dance hall hostess at the center of Sweet Charity, anymore, nor do they make ‘em like Sutton Foster, the complete package of the musical comedy star, so it is perhaps fated that the two should meet at the New Group’s stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, now through January 8^th.  It was equally inevitable given the ingredients – a score that produced at minimum two of the greatest songs in the history of musical theater, and a star who has proven herself the only stage actress alive who can hold a candle to Merman, Ball, and Holliday – that it would be good.  What was by no means expected was how extraordinary it would turn out to be.

            This Sweet Charity, directed by Leigh Silverman and choreographed by Joshua Bergasse in its first off-Broadway outing, is, to be fair, really good for many reasons.  It’s rooted so deeply in the late ‘60s, for one thing, that it feels at least as accurate as Hair (from which it borrows liberally but appropriately in its almost unnecessary “Rhythm of Love” sequence) in its amalgamation of subculture and moral deterioration.  Its male lead, Shuler Hensley, and effective one-man ensemble, Joel Perez, make the near-impossible but imperative leap from ridiculous to pathos that grounds this musical comedy in the darkness that makes it unique.  And it’s pretty enormously goddamned fun, in its shockingly intimate staging in a 200-seat theater that injects the proceedings with immediacy, then jolts the evening into full gear with the triple-whammy to end all triple-whammies: Neil Simon’s book, one of the few of the era to be truly funny and dramatically satisfying, plus Dorothy Fields’ witty lyrics and Cy Coleman’s effortlessly cool score.

            But, then, to be honest: It’s good because of Sutton Foster.  It is perhaps a cliché, leftover from movies of the ‘40s and ‘50s about musicals of the ‘40s and ‘50s, for a well-to-do audience to leave a theater gushing of the leading lady, “Oh, she can do anything.”  This is not actually true of most of the more prominent female stars on today’s Broadway stages.  It is true of Ms. Foster.  She is as good here as it is possible for her to be, and, as with every time she plays a role, she plays it better than it’s ever been played and sings the songs better than they’ve ever been sung and justifies the show’s existence by playing in it.  I’ve heard that this is a role she’s wanted to play for a long time, but it’s impossible to say why retrospectively since it was never big enough for her until she played it.  She leaps, she belts, she leaves the audience in hysterics – in short, she towers.  We are lucky – lucky, do you hear me – to be living at the same time she’s performing.  When I saw her do Anything Goes on Broadway in 2011, I thought definitively that it was the greatest performance she was ever likely to give.  I was wrong.  It’s this one.  Until the next one.

            “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” one of those two best songs I mentioned earlier (the other, incidentally, is “Big Spender”), comes near the middle of the first act, when Charity is left, briefly, alone by her host, a charming Italian film star, in his opulent apartment.  Charity revels, exults, crows – and when Sutton Foster does it, so do you.  There are tap shoes, a hat, a cane, and a practically bare proscenium – and it’s the best stage sequence I’ve seen in a long time, or maybe ever.  The other day, I listened to “If My Friends Could See Me Now” again, not even really thinking about Ms. Foster.  I made it almost until the final few bars, when I recalled, as the triumphant notes sounded, Ms. Foster’s Charity falling ecstatically backward onto a chaise.  I’m not even ashamed to admit that I teared up a little, given that I can build up my masculinity again in the intervening years between now and when Sutton Foster gets back on stage.  When she does, she’ll have me right where she wants me.   

Christmas, Again

Holiday Inn at Studio 54

(L-R: Corbin Bleu, Lora Lee Gayner, and Bryce Pinkham in a promo for Holiday Inn.)

            Let us now – with whatever swallowed gags and underhanded irony that may be necessary – praise Connecticut.  It is a radiantly inoffensive place in almost every sense.  It is small but not too small to be relevant, north of New York City but not too far north to be hick country.  If it had a color, it would be beige.  It’s rural enough to be believable as the location for a rambling, disused parsnip farm, in the new Broadway musical, Holiday Inn (more on why that name sounds familiar later), but sophisticated enough to be believable as the location for the tryout theater that originated this sweet, fun, and largely insignificant musical.

            That’s Goodspeed Opera House, incidentally, in East Haddam, CT.  It’s been a hotbed of Broadway transfers since Man of La Mancha originated there, in 1965, but in the last eight years its only production to move to the Main Stem has been 2015’s Amazing Grace, which by all accounts fell slightly short of its title.  So, children, who do we turn to when new and nuance have both been done to death?  Irving Berlin, naturally, and the 1942 score to the film Holiday Inn, which he basically wrote for a paycheck and thought he could leave behind him, until what he thought was a minor song, “White Christmas,” started selling and wouldn’t stop.

            Bryce Pinkham sings “White Christmas” in this production, and goddamn if he’s not every inch the star he proved himself to be in 2014’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder when he’s singing it – a completely unusual Broadway leading man with the diction and remove of Noel Coward emanating from a man who looks like Bela Lugosi.  The problem with “White Christmas,” however, is that it is, as previously intimated, the best-selling song of all time, and the minute you start playing it the oh-so-self-satisfied sighs of recognition from the audience are going to start drowning out the song.  Pinkham gets a huge laugh when he refers to it as “just a little Christmas song I started working on and put in a drawer,” and I’m not entirely sure it was intended.  But there’s the rub – any musical based on one of the most familiar musicals of the era, one starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, for that matter, has got to be willing to laugh at itself a little. 

If Holiday Inn has a fault, it’s that it won’t do that.  There is nothing original or new about the show whatsoever – aside from the fact that Corbin Bleu, in the Astaire part, is buffer and more of a buffoon than his predecessor’s character ever was.  It is an unapologetically superficial, upbeat, old-fashioned musical; I’m not complaining here, just telling you what the damn thing’s already wearing on its sleeve.  It is, as is its home state and setting, radiantly inoffensive.

But – and watch yourself, this is a big but – that is literally all that’s wrong with it.  Gordon Greenberg’s production is pitch-perfect in every conceivable way, particularly its effervescent choreography, by Denis Jones, which accomplishes things I’ve never seen tap-dancing do before, and the all-around excellent performances.  Bleu, bless his heart, really is an excellent and a natural dancer (take those High School Musical basketballs out of his hands and it turns out the guy can actually move like a human being).  Lora Lee Gayer, as the love interest who comes between Pinkham and Bleu, has a genuinely unique voice and delivery that far outstrips the passable book (by Greenberg and Chad Hodge). 

I could complain about a million things – you never really believe that Pinkham and Bleu, supposedly best friends, could ever stand each other the least bit – but who comes to Holiday Inn to get down and dirty?  You come to be diverted (a perfect word for this show), and smile and clap and very occasionally gasp at a series of interchangeable chorus lines and Berlin numbers.  After all, as Berlin writes in my personal pick for best song of the score, “Happy Holiday,” “If you’re burdened down with trouble / If your nerves are wearing thin / Pack your load down the road / And come to Holiday Inn.”  If you can find one exposed nerve in this Holiday Inn, alert the management, and they’ll be around to sand it down straight away. 

Civil Blood

Troilus and Cressida at the Delacorte Theatre

(L-R: Andrew Burnap, John Glover, and Ismenia Mendes in Troilus and Cressida.)

            Explaining away Shakespearean problem plays is a tough business.  It’s tempting to suggest everything the Bard ever wrote was intentional, that he foresaw trends in theater that had not yet struck the rest of Elizabethan England, that he is without flaw.  The truth is that he was sometimes, if not lazy, a little messy – and Troilus and Cressida, from 1602, reflects that messiness.  It’s unsure whether it wants to be a history, a tragedy, or a romance, and that, naturally, excites veteran theater directors like Daniel Sullivan, who have tired of trying to reinvent the wheel, or, more immediately, figure out what the hell Hamlet is talking about.  Sullivan’s directing a production of Troilus and Cressida at Shakespeare in the Park right now, and it’s shocking how much he succeeds in justifying the thematic schizophrenia of the text (while also justifying a surprisingly fleet three-hour running time).  But one’s well-served to read the play before visiting, before closing on August 14^th, to see how far the production, flawlessly acted, directed, and designed, outstrips the promise of the text itself.

            The atmosphere is thrillingly alive even in its malaise.  In a far-off war zone (presumably Middle Eastern) standing in for the battlefields of Troy, great warriors have been fighting for seven years over an argument they no longer remember, in a war so uncertain they can eat dinners and stage cage matches together in all friendship and go out and slaughter each other the next day.  Sullivan’s battle scenes, supremely staged (if a little loud – Shakespeare would have found it difficult to imagine submachine guns) are as beautifully chaotic as anything out of Apocalypse Now (for which thanks are mostly due to his designers, David Zinn, Robert Wierzel, and Mark Menard).  It’s a world of fear and continual bloodshed, surrounding the stillness of men; fitting, for Troilus and Cressida is really a play about love – that most human of impulses – during war – that least human.  The little, text-bending changes (one involving Corey Stoll’s majestic, battle-scarred Ulysses nearly made me squeal) are pitch-perfect.  It is a production, in light of retrospect, as good as anything I am ever likely to see in the park in my lifetime.  It makes no apologies, only room for its actors to shine.

            It’s rare, incidentally, to describe a Shakespeare in the Park production as “flawlessly acted” and mean it.  A Delacorte production, with its colliding and admirable tendencies both to be devoted to the text and to reinvent it for a new era, doesn’t leave a lot of room for actorly innovation, and even the strongest performers (Judy Gold in this summer’s Taming of the Shrew; Sam Waterston in last summer’s The Tempest) can’t make the language seem real.  It’s a tough hurdle – one this male ensemble, the strongest this side of 2013’s Twelfth Night on Broadway, surpasses with ease.  (There are two women, Tala Ashe as Helen and Andromache and Ismenia Mendes – on whom more later – and both are equally extraordinary.)  I’ve never seen a production where it was so hard to name standouts, perhaps partially because the intertwining storylines – two little sections from the Iliad blown up into a not-quite-larger story – give everyone their time upon the stage.  Goddamnit, everyone is great – Stoll as a military contractor who has lost the will to do anything but win, John Glover as a Pandarus exquisitely rendered from beginning to end, Max Casella as a hysterical Thersites, here a sniping janitor in the Greek camp, and Louis Cancelmi, an extraordinary Caliban in last year’s Tempest, who here makes a frighteningly focused Achilles, whose slurred words and lackadaisical movements somehow make him more frightening.

            Of course, one must be fair even in as talented a group as this and acknowledge that one person out-acts the entire cast without breaking a sweat.  It’s just a bit of a shock he only graduated from the Yale School of Drama this year.  Andrew Burnap as Troilus is a revelation – real, sympathetic, funny, human, in every movement, every word.  Troilus, a thinly sketched character at best, here has his story told as thoroughly as it can be.  And in this production of the play, which for all its sweep reminds us of the love that can be destroyed by conflict, he would be nothing without his Cressida, and Mendes stands alone on stage not only because she is mostly the only woman on it (though this fact makes for some genuinely frightening action in the second act, brilliantly staged by Sullivan and hammering home the amorality and the immediate effects of sustained war).  She is fascinatingly modern even while delivering text written four centuries ago about a conflict which took place eight centuries ago.  It is hard to overstate how well this serves her – whether in Troilus and Cressida’s first scene together, which contains the modern seeds of romantic comedy in their sweetest form, or in her terrors as a prisoner of the Greeks in the second act, a bundle of jangling nerves and a woman destroyed.

            Separately, Burnap and Mendes frame this production; together, they make it.  This staging blends large and small, love and war, pain and ecstasy.  So do they.  They are its microcosm and its epicenter, a small, blooming, bleeding heart that reminds us what we could do if we decided once and for all to wage war no more.