2018 Tony Picks

The 72^nd Tony Awards, hosted by Josh Groban and Sara Barielles, air Sunday the 10^th at 8 on CBS.

            Welcome to the age of the revival.

            We get one really good new musical a season, it seems, in this trying day and age, and this year it’s David Yazbek and Itamar Moses’s The Band’s Visit.  All the rest is brand names and intellectual property, noise and block letters, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  In other words, Frozen, Mean Girls, and SpongeBob SquarePants (shudder), the other three nominees, plus Escape to Margaritaville, Rocktopia, and The Donna Summer Musical.  God forgive us.  Well, this year as every year, our chosen few (Yazbek, Moses, and director David Cromer) will make their fated, unobstructed walk to the podium, just as Pasek and Paul, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tesori and Kron, and Lutvak and Freedman did before.  The slate of musical revivals – one perfect and one painfully near-perfect – will dominate the night.  And that is the state of the art.

            Reliance on revivals is nothing new – three out of the last seven winners for Best Revival have been better than their Best Musical counterparts – except that this year it goes for straight plays as well as musicals.  In all likelihood Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, nobody’s Shakespeare, will walk away with Best Play, but, if Tony knows what she’s doing, the perfect Angels in America revival will sweep the rest of the play categories.  Tony Kushner’s a great genius of our age.  But this season would have you believe he’s the only one.

             It’s altogether possible (though unlikely) that the Tonys could prove themselves irrelevant once and for all by doling out the top awards to the yellow sponge mentioned above, plus some of his phony Hollywood friends.  But the end of a season like this one is the time for reflection not just on awards but on the art form they’re meant to celebrate.  If this is how Broadway looks from now on – one Hamilton or Sunday in the Park with George or Clybourne Park or Angels in America every thirty years, and the rest silence – where else can this glorious medium, this majestic old Miss Havisham, this live theater, flourish?  As Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley wrote (and, incidentally, went Tonyless for) in 1964: “Who can I turn to if you turn away?”

Best Musical: The Band’s Visit

The thing about The Band’s Visit is that it isn’t really great.  It’s purposefully small and quiet and less than lavish, which I appreciate, but it can occasionally feel so slight it threatens to fall in on itself.  But it advances the art form – I have no doubt its dismissal of choreography as necessary to storytelling will have its influences – and it’s the best new musical, by far, of this season, on the page and on the stage.  Not that it’s a particularly high bar.

Best Play: The Children

This being as weak a year for new plays as for new musicals, I haven’t seen The Children, nor the play most likely to win this category, the aforementioned Harry Potter.  (Nor have you, most likely, unless you’ve got five hundred dollars handy and the wherewithal to wait a month or six to visit what’s essentially a Broadway play-shaped tourist attraction.)  But I have read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, as written by Jack Thorne, and it’s a mess – shapeless, meandering, and lacking even sparks of the imagination J.K. Rowling lavished on every syllable of the original books.  It’s a hopeless retread, impressive stagecraft or no, and so out of principle The Children gets my vote, if only because, by all accounts, it’s actually a good play.  That’s certainly more than can be said for Harry Potter, or a third, misbegotten competitor in this category, the confused Farinelli and the King.

Best Revival of a Musical: Carousel

It’s been said over and over again – by Chris Jones of the Tribune, who wrote, “God is in Carousel;” by Marilyn Stasio in Variety, who called it “immaculate” and “sheer bliss” – but it bears repeating: Jack O’Brien’s revival of Carousel is diamond-perfect, all the way through.  As powerful and wrenching as anything ever seen on Broadway, O’Brien’s production clears in one fell swoop the naysayers who cast aside the Golden Age as a model, while also (unfortunately) reminding us of the state of musical theater by proving to be the most emotionally resonant show this season.  It’s a piece we should revive once every ten years, at minimum, and this production reminds us why.

Best Revival of a Play: Angels in America

Marianne Elliott’s revival, originally at the National Theatre in London, has got to be the fleetest eight hours anyone could spend in a theater.  One of the biggest surprises about this revival of a very heavy show is how very light it is on its feet.  But what isn’t surprising, given the level of talent involved, is how goddamned great it is, every second of it – and I do mean every second – despite the fact that the enormity of this American masterpiece only really becomes clear at the tail end of that marathon of a runtime.  Normally, stagecraft this good and acting this terrific, when paired, tend to fall into a duel for the audience’s attention.  Not so here.  Faced with stiff competition, wonderful revivals of Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero (which would have won any other year) and Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Angels will win, and win it all.  And why shouldn’t it?  Not only is the play, and the production, superb theater, it also somehow outdoes the very concept of theater itself.  It’s a prophecy, maddening and thrilling and galling all in one.

Best Book of a Musical: Itamar Moses, The Band’s Visit

Itamar Moses’s work on the book for this story of an Egyptian police band stranded in a small Israeli town overnight is minimalistic, and purposefully so, which is stylistically fascinating given that librettos generally tend to wilt when confronted with scores, but not of their own accord.  In his structured retreat from consciously eye-catching moments, Moses creates room for his actors’ and his composer’s work to shine.  It’s what a skilled musical theater writer does, and if the Theater Wing ends up giving this award to Tina Fey, who essentially copy-pasted her 2004 film script for Mean Girls, we’ll know it’s just because they wanted to hang out with her at the after-party.  She’s a genius, but come on.

Best Original Score: David Yazbek, The Band’s Visit

There are two great original songs in David Yazbek’s score to The Band’s Visit, which is more than in the rest of the nominees combined.  (Frozen brings along some of its hits from the movie version, but let’s be adults for a change.)  Yazbek has never been the most purely talented of the cadre of the current elite in musical theater – Jason Robert Brown is more masterful, Miranda more appealing, William Finn wittier – and even Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005), his biggest hit thus far, leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.  But with this score, he brings the Middle Eastern sound into the Broadway mainstream, as impressive in its own way as Miranda’s hip-hop – perhaps more, since Yazbek’s achievement had not a hint of precedent.  Plus those two songs are pretty damn good.

Best Leading Actor in a Play: Andrew Garfield, Angels in America

Andrew Garfield is the leading ham of the season, and that’s a compliment.  His screeching, swooping Prior Walter, half Gloria Swanson and half Jeff Goldblum, is a journey through human life, the gestation of a prophet, and his final, quiet, humble “The great work continues” is colossally moving if only because we’ve seen him do the great work, and eight hours of it.  People have been saying it since his 2010 turn in The Social Network, but let me add to the echoes – keep your eye on this one.

Best Leading Actress in a Play: Glenda Jackson, Three Tall Women

Now and again a performance comes along that reminds one what it is to be a real actor, and everyone else seems to pale by comparison.  Such a performance Glenda Jackson gives in Joe Mantello’s revival of Albee’s Three Tall Women, and she will and should win here, no contest.  It’s a terrifying performance, cold, distant, bent by age, but suffused, too, with the somehow infectious humor of someone who knows she knows better than you do.  Jackson’s character, A, has been reduced to rubble by a profoundly unfair life, but Jackson herself, back in the saddle after three decades as a member of British Parliament, towers.

Best Leading Actor in a Musical: Joshua Henry, Carousel

One of the less-discussed positive ramifications of the Hamilton phenomenon is the increased prominence it’s given to the massively talented black actors who’ve done a tour as Burr.  Brandon Victor Dixon gave a performance in NBC’s Jesus Christ Superstar Live that lends credence to the theory he’s the most talented man alive, and Joshua Henry, who replaced Dixon in Hamilton, offers nothing less than a gift to the theatergoing public with his athletic, wonderful Billy Bigelow.  His “Soliloquy,” a first-act closer to end all first-act closers, forces its way out of him with such emotional heft it actually contorts his body.

Best Leading Actress in a Musical: Jessie Mueller, Carousel

Jessie Mueller should win this award but probably won’t, because Tony voters, blinded by dazzle, probably aren’t trained to recognize and appreciate what she does so perfectly as Julie Jordan in Carousel – stillness.  Since her Tony Award-winning performance in Beautiful, from 2013, she’s cultivated a kind of a quiet dignity as a performer that lends total credence to Julie’s anchoring of the tragically uncontrolled characters with whom she shares the stage.  It’s tough to play utter goodness believably, but Mueller knows what the hell she’s doing, and she knocks it out of the park.

Best Featured Actor in a Play: Nathan Lane, Angels in America

God, but Nathan Lane’s good at everything.  In the ‘90s, he tackled the great roles of musical comedy, and now, older (he’s sixty-two), wiser, and, if anything, better, he’s taking on the whoppers of the straight theater.  After playing Estragon in Waiting for Godot in 2009 and Hickey in The Iceman Cometh in 2012 and 2015, he’s taken on Roy Cohn, and he’s titanic, earth-shattering, flawless – what else is there to say?  If he wants to try Stanley Kowalski next, that’s fine by me.

Best Featured Actress in a Play: Laurie Metcalf, Three Tall Women

Laurie Metcalf just won Best Actress in a Play (for A Doll’s House Part 2) last year, and should have won Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars this year (for Lady Bird).  (Instead, it went to Allison Janney, who was good but not even the best performer in I, Tonya, let alone of the year.)  Her work backing up Jackson in Three Tall Women is more than worthy of another award, if only because, in her role as a caretaker (her first of two roles in the play), she enlivens and expands the first act beyond Albee’s usual played-out cynicism and into the realm of the actual.

Best Featured Actor in a Musical: Norbert Leo Butz, My Fair Lady

In a musical filled with performances almost worthy of Tonys (Lauren Ambrose as Eliza and Harry Hadden-Paton as Higgins come to mind), Butz should grab the brass ring for his third Tony and first as a featured actor.  He is a ball of chaos rampaging through what, in the wrong hands, could easily become a stultified musical; his motions are herky-jerky and his energy is delightfully devilish.  His wild “Get Me to the Church on Time” is the highlight of the production.

Best Featured Actress in a Musical: Lindsay Mendez, Carousel

Carousel is by its nature elevated; the reason it packs such a punch is that its characters and premise seem the distillation of the emotions that inspired them.  Mendez, though, in her bubbly warmth, and with her fascinating and supple voice, is the realest actor in the production.  One gets the urge to watch her work her way through the Golden Age canon and beyond.  She’s a performer best known for her work Off-Broadway (most notably as the female lead in Pasek and Paul’s Dogfight), but she’s got Broadway promise, and I’m excited to see where she goes next.

Best Scenic Design of a Play: Ian MacNeil and Edward Pierce, Angels in America

The best thing about MacNeil and Pierce’s work on Angels is that their scenery actually evolves over the course of the play.  Early in the first part of the two-parter, Millenium Approaches, the stage is occupied mostly by three turntables, each dedicated to one of the three storylines; eventually, as those storylines themselves become disordered, the turntables begin to bleed into each other and eventually disappear by the end of the part.  In part two, Perestroika, their motifs change to horizontal layering – a hospital room that moves back behind an apartment, another apartment that rises from the floor downstage in front of that one.  Then, after Prior’s climactic journey to heaven near the end of the play, the stage empties, leaving behind only the Bethesda Fountain angel, outlined in neon, watching over the detritus of the centuries.  Watching the scenic design in Angels is like watching another feat of acting alongside the ones already present in the play; MacNeil and Pierce’s work itself feels.

Best Scenic Design of a Musical: Michael Yeargan, My Fair Lady

Every Yeargan set for a Sher production at the Vivian Beaumont is a visual experience.  2015’s The King and I was perhaps the ultimate example of the collaboration – making unparalleled use of the Beaumont’s remarkably deep stage with a massive boat in the opener and a palace for the King of Siam that had to be more opulent than the real thing.  But My Fair Lady ain’t far behind – the image of Higgins’ townhouse roaring forward through a black void toward the audience is the most overwhelming image of the season, and the gorgeous azures of the Ascot sequence seem certain to become the standard for future productions.  Yeargan should take this in a walk.

Best Costume Design of a Play: Nicky Gillibrand, Angels in America

If Nicky Gillibrand had only dressed Andrew Garfield’s Prior Walter, she’d deserve the award anyway.  Prior, a former drag performer, spends a good deal of Perestroika dressed as Norma Desmond; his figure, swathed in black, recounting the story of his encounter with the Angel, is instantly iconic.  By the end of the play, Prior’s costume – along with everyone else’s – seems to loosen to allow him room to breathe.  His final lines are, if anything, driven home by his beautiful plaid suit and overcoat, the kind of clothes he would wear on what he describes as a crisp early winter morning – his favorite kind of day.  Gillibrand’s last credit was the dreary Billy Elliot the Musical, for which she was nominated for the Tony.  Here, she makes a triumphant comeback.

Best Costume Design of a Musical: Catherine Zuber, My Fair Lady

There are some beautiful clothes in this My Fair Lady – as there essentially have to be.  It’s a show deeply concerned with clothes as part of its being deeply concerned with appearances, and how they separate us.  Zuber does good work on Eliza’s dresses – shades of green and orange, mostly – and the opulent creams and pinks in the Ascot sequence.  But one can sense she’s more interested in Hadden-Paton’s Higgins, and his sweeping dressing gown, and the stunning checked suit he himself wears to Ascot, offer delicious proof of his arrogance and undercut his professed democratic ambitions.

Best Direction of a Play: Marianne Elliott, Angels in America

Marianne Elliott, director of War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, has long recognized that live theater is more than capable of the cinematic.  With Angels she delivers her greatest achievement, in collaboration with her scenic designers, Ian MacNeil and Edward Pierce, and her lighting designer, Paul Constable, all three of whom should win as well.  Figures fade into darkness and reappear, behind layers of an inchoate set that completely transforms over the course of the play’s two parts.  Many great directors – Brecht among them – become so preoccupied with their technical genius that they leave actors behind them.  Elliott’s never fallen into that trap.  In Alex Sharp’s performance in Curious Incident, from 2014, she coaxed out one of the greatest stage performances in recent years.  In Angels, with Lane and Garfield, she brings us two more.  Give her the Tony.  Let her direct everything.

Best Direction of a Musical: David Cromer, The Band’s Visit

Jack O’Brien deserves this award for Carousel, and why he wasn’t nominated for it will remain forever beyond me.  Bartlett Sher, meanwhile, in his work on My Fair Lady, nearly pulls off a terrific evening of rousing spectacle but undoes it with a stupid and dramaturgically limp choice of ending that undoes much of what came before it.  That leaves Cromer, whose work is strongest in the small, beautiful moments for which Yazbek and Moses’s small musical makes ample room.  So many moments in The Band’s Visit are traced in circles: In lieu of a dance routine, a character spins a plate around on a table and stares at it; a budding love affair develops in every lap around a skating rink; a turntable rotates at what seems like the same rate as gravity drives the residents of Bet Hatikvah, Israel ever further into the ground.  The Band’s Visit was supposed to be directed by Hal Prince, and it’s hard to think of a more polar opposite to Cromer’s style – Prince sells it with a personal style that overrides almost everything else, but Cromer, like Moses, knows when to step back.

Best Choreography: Justin Peck, Carousel

If ever there were a case of a choreographer gunning for a Tony, it’s surely the “Blow High, Blow Low,” sequence in Carousel.  Justin Peck, the Resident Choreographer of the New York City Ballet, makes use of one of his principal dancers, Amar Ramasar (as Jigger Craigin), plus a thrilling male ensemble, in the service of choreography that, described in the abstract, would sound nearly impossible.  Sometimes a Tony is deserved for evident effort, other times for transcending the human.  Peck fits both categories.

Best Orchestrations: Jonathan Tunick, Carousel

Tunick shines in that aforementioned “Blow High, Blow Low,” sequence, too, with spot-on string and brass runs to beat (and show off) the band, but he’s on his game throughout, delivering pitch-perfect interpretations that serve to remind the audience of the perfection of Richard Rodgers’ music.  Tunick exists in the service of the music, but he’s impossible to ignore – that’s how he won his EGOT, and won the first-ever Tony Award for Best Orchestrations in 1997 (for Titanic), the only time he’s ever won it.  He should pick up another Sunday in a dead heat over the equally talented Jamshied Sharifi for The Band’s Visit.

Technical Awards

Sound Design in a Play: Ian Dickinson for Autograph, Angels in America

Sound Design in a Musical: Kai Harada, The Band’s Visit

Best Lighting Design of a Play: Paul Constable, Angels in America

Best Lighting Design of a Musical: Donald Holder, My Fair Lady

Multiple Awards

Angels in America, 8

Carousel, 6

The Band’s Visit, 5

My Fair Lady, 4

Three Tall Women, 2

Happy Endings

As You Like It at the Bay Street Theater

 

(L-R: Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Hannah Cabell, and Andre de Shields in Much Ado About Nothing.)

            John Doyle, the director of the new production of As You Like It at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theatre, is a genius at stripping away the clutter to reveal the inner harmony of his chosen pieces – see his Sweeney Todd, Company, or The Color Purple, all Tony winners for Best Revival, or his off-Broadway production, earlier this year, of Pacific Overtures.  It’s confusing, then, that this As You Like It, seemingly fun and seemingly well-cast, is at its weakest when the stripping shows through.  Mr. Doyle, who also designs the set, gives us an effectively bare stage that never feels more than bare, and a reduced text in which any passing aficionado of Shakespeare could note the edits.  It’s a pretty small play as it is to be reduced to a company of ten and a two-hour running time – and it shows.

            The play is a co-production of Classic Stage Company in New York, where it goes after completing its run here on September 3^rd, thus Mr. Doyle, the artistic director at Classic Stage, thus Ellen Burstyn, as Jaques, the depressive courtier, and Andre de Shields, as Touchstone, the clownish sophisticate.  Ms. Burstyn, presumably, was attracted to the part in pursuit of Jaques’ immortal “All the world’s a stage” speech, but it doesn’t stand out in her largely subdued performance.  The biggest reactions go first to her wry observation that she can “suck the melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs” and, second, her delivery of one of Shakespeare’s best jokes, a dismissal of a mooning lover with a trenchant “You speak in blank verse.” 

Mr. de Shields, meanwhile, can’t fully puncture the dated humor to deliver a satisfying buffoon, though he does have a remarkably strong scene near then end, as an audience member is pulled up onstage to play his rival in love, William.  (It’s a lot more satisfying than it sounds.)  As he turns away from the befuddled spectator on his exit, Mr. de Shields gifts us with a warm, almost nostalgic smile, a subtle commentary on the ridiculousness of the conceit.  The issue with our two star turns, I conclude, is that Ms. Burstyn isn’t allowed to be a clown, and Mr. de Shields isn’t allowed to be a sarcastic fly on the wall.  Maybe some recasting is in order.

The story isn’t as impenetrable as in some Shakespeare comedies, merely multilayered, as set after set of misbegotten lovers mistake identities and swoon at distant partners in the court-in-exile of Duke Senior (Bob Stillman, genial) in the Forest of Arden.  The only twist here is that Mr. Doyle has recognized – wisely, in my opinion – the likeness of the play to a musical, dotted as it is with the lyrics to songs Shakespeare himself wrote.  The production puts them front and center, in an arrangement not so much Jazz Age (as the literature at Bay Street suggests) as Dust Bowl.  The eminent Stephen Schwartz is conscripted to write the music, which is promising, but they’re rushed, under-amplified, and under-orchestrated, and the end result is disappointing.  With truly great songs (as Mr. Schwartz, history shows, can write without undue effort), this could be a great show.  It’s not.  It’s nice, but not great.

Where it’s nice, it’s because of earnestness and commitment like that of the two female leads, Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Hannah Cabell as cousins Celia and Rosalind.  Ms. Bernstine’s Celia is a perpetually aghast sidekick out of a romantic comedy, while Ms. Cabell’s Rosalind is a wide-eyed innocent, who plays off her co-star with aplomb. While not revolutionary, they’re at least consistently funny.  The production as a whole could stand to adapt a little of their yin-and-yang interplay, as leaning too far on the side of reduction – as Mr. Doyle does here – leaves us with, to borrow the title of a different comedy, much ado about nothing.

Over the River and Through the Woods

A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Delacorte Theater.

Alex Hernandez and Annaleigh Ashford in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

           The question of whether Annaleigh Ashford is God is at this point open, but an addendum to her rapidly broadening scriptures can be found at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, in Lear deBessonet’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which runs through August 13^th.  Ashford’s Helena doesn’t so much steal the show as much as renders it irrelevant by comparison.  She is one of the world’s great physical comics, and her jerky, Harpo Marx-tinged jilted lover represents a completely different approach to her art than either her fluid Essie Carmichael in 2014’s You Can’t Take it With You or her lusty dog in the 2015 Sylvia; she represents the only convincing reason to see the play.

            Not that deBessonet doesn’t do her best.  Long relegated to the gala productions of new, hastily assembled Shakespeare musicals that play the Delacorte in September, she brings to Midsummer, her Shakespeare in the Park mainstage debut, a taste for agreeably frothy surplus reflected in David Rockwell’s fairy-lit set and Clint Ramos’ remarkably loud costumes.  A band plays New Orleans-inflected swing, and Marcelle Davies-Lashley, a great singer, wails Justin Levine’s new compositions.  The cast is stacked – Ashford, Phylicia Rashad, Danny Burstein, Kristine Nielsen, and more.  The atmosphere is celebratory and in hopeful search of a new approach to the material, but none’s found – the fairy monarchs Oberon (Richard Poe) and Titania (Rashad) are tedious; Burstein’s game as Nick Bottom but doesn’t bring anything new to the character (as he didn’t in the latest Fiddler); Nielsen’s Puck is playful and meta – forever glancing over her shoulder at the audience as Oberon pontificates – but less than worthy of her evident talent.

            Most disappointingly of all, deBessonet cannot salvage the bulky and dramatically inert second act.  The warring couples – Helena and Demetrius (Alex Hernandez), Hermia (Shalita Grant) and Lysander (Kyle Beltran) – are married five minutes in, and the drama resolved, to make way for a play within a play led by Bottom, a wannabe actor, and several attempts at an ending.  (DeBessonet doesn't help matters by making each one – especially the wild dance party fronted, once more, by the remarkable Ashford – feel more final than the last.)  Though it looks gorgeous, it feels something like a waste of time.

            Those lovers are by default the most exciting of the various interlocking storylines, if only because, at the risk of repeating myself, the show makes sense when Ashford is on stage.  Her specificity and precision as an actress cannot be overstated, and her presence makes her fellow actors better, especially Hernandez and Beltran. When Nielsen’s Puck rubs the flower of love in their eyes to cause them to fall for Helena, their energy level, too, seems to magically jump, and one particular scene, a brawl among the four lovers, comes close to theatrical Nirvana.  But it’s over all too soon, and Titania must be given room to drone, Puck to giggle, Bottom to ham.

            And the thing is – it’s nobody’s fault.  From director on down, every participant in this production is professional, polished, and energetic.  But it’s the wrong play.  There’s something appealing about doing Midsummer in the middle of the park, wild and woolly and yet magical in its order and location.  But the text is by and large weak, one of the only plays Shakespeare didn’t crib from some other source, and it shows.  As with The Tempest, the author falls over himself at play’s conclusion to apologize for his own work – the impish fairy Puck tells us "You have but slumber'd here / While these visions did appear / And this weak and idle theme / No more yielding but a dream.”  The haze and color and intermittent glory of deBessonet’s production is rather like a dream, if only a dream that some day, some way, Annaleigh Ashford will find the platform she deserves. 

Active Shooters

Assassins at Encores! Off-Center.

Clifton Duncan (far left), Steven Pasquale (upstage center), and the cast of Assassins.

            The curiously subdued production of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins playing at New York City Center through July 15th as part of Encores! Off-Center is really more like two shows.  The first stars Steven Pasquale as a grandiose, booming John Wilkes Booth, a force of history whose obsession with being understood by future generations drives him to inspire presidential assassinations throughout history.  This show could stand to be shorter.  The second stars Clifton Duncan as the Balladeer, a charming man on the street with his hands in his pockets and his sleeves rolled up who recounts the stories of misguided presidential assassins with a genially shrugging grin on his face.  This one could stand to be much longer.

            Or maybe it’s three shows.  There’s the Pasquale starrer, which is more like an opera, and the Duncan starrer, which is more like a musical, and then there’s another show, about, mostly, Samuel Byck (Danny Wolohan), who tried to kill Nixon, Sara Jane Moore (Victoria Clark), Ford, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (Erin Markey), ditto.  That one’s more like a comic straight play, full of Weidman’s most palpable toxic fear and anger, and it’s great, and they’re all great in it.  But... maybe it’s four shows, because one can’t leave out the entirely separate historical pastiche of revue-inflected one-off numbers like “Unworthy of Your Love” or “Something Just Broke…”

            You get the idea.  The strength of the original productions of Assassins, in 1990 (Off-Broadway) and 2004 (Broadway), was that they provided showcases for craftsmen at the top of their game.  They were invitations for melodic experimentation (Sondheim), pitch-black satire (Weidman), and explosive, transformative performances (Victor Garber as Booth in 1990 and Neil Patrick Harris as the Balladeer in 2004).  Though the show was and is perfectly integrated, it’s delicate, and one element of weakness, one instance of poor casting, one moment of resting on Sondheim’s laurels, and those four or five or six shows don’t coalesce into the perfect, if uncomfortable, evening at the theater that Assassins can be.  Unfortunately, that’s what happens here.

            Let’s talk about that first show to start.  Imperfectly cast, disparate in tone, and practically inaudible (the sound design, by Leon Rothenberg, is not up to his standards), the sections of the show that feature the titular assassins under-serves some remarkable performers (Alex Brightman, as Giuseppe Zangara, and Pasquale first among them) and front-loads some undeserving ones -- like Steven Boyer (as John Hinckley, Jr.), who can’t sing, and Ethan Lipton (as the menacing Proprietor) who can’t sing or act.  Unlike most semi-staged Encores! Concerts, in which scripts are used sparingly and subtly, three-quarters of the way through the production the actors all suddenly emerge with binders, which are never again to leave their hands, almost like they got part of the way through rehearsing and ran out of time.  Boyer, so miraculous in Hand to God, focuses so hard on playing the guitar during “Unworthy of Your Love,” Hinckley and Fromme’s pitch-perfect ode to the objects of their obsession, that he effectively forgets to project.  Everyone involved in this production, up to and including the director, Anne Kauffman, appears to have been studying really hard for something in the lead-up to this production, but it doesn’t appear to have been the text.

            What a breath of fresh air is that second show!  Clifton Duncan, a dynamo who’s long deserved his break, gets it here as the narrator, a relaxed, happy-go-lucky take on the Balladeer.  He’s the best singer in the show by far, and connects with the audience right from the start -- his second sung line, the politically relevant wisecrack “Every now and then the country / Goes a little wrong,” was followed by applause so thunderous it threatened to turn into a standing ovation.  Remarkably, the show, which is by and large sleepy, is worth seeing merely for his performance.  Unluckily, that performance is stunted by another directorial mistake -- the great appeal of Neil Patrick Harris’s turn in the same role on Broadway was the deadening shock of watching our only friend on stage morph into Lee Harvey Oswald, a historical empty vessel at the end of his rope, by show’s end.  In Kauffman’s take, Oswald is played by Cory Michael Smith in what amounts to a cameo, and the Balladeer disappears without warning, without any resolution to a great, sinister character arc.

            This makes the show sound worse than it is mainly because the production makes the show seem worse than it is.  Assassins is a masterpiece, plain and simple, but the trouble with Kauffman’s production is that it doesn’t hit on why that is.  Nobody on stage, from Pasquale to Brightman, is the least bit scary.  If a chorus line of homicidal maniacs can flit through the background of an audience’s world without blinking an eye, then either New York has started to desensitize its citizens or, to quote Sondheim, in this case, “something just broke.”

I Wonder What the King is Doing Tonight

Hamlet at the Public Theater.

 

Oscar Isaac, kneeling, and Peter Friedman, supine, in Hamlet.

            The first casualty in Sam Gold’s production of Hamlet, which opens July 14^th at the Public, is the carpeting.  Over the course of the production, a tray of lasagna, a cup of seltzer water, two large-ish flower pots full of dirt, and water from a hose allowed to run for upwards of five minutes (the latter three items mingling into a caked mud by the end of the play) conduct a frontal assault on the red wall-to-wall that ornaments David Zinn’s otherwise spare set.  This is actually rather fitting, since the production itself is kind of a mess.

            What stops Gold’s direction from being completely self-indulgent is largely his lead, and the reason for most of the hype surrounding the production.  Oscar Isaac is returning to the Public, his launch-pad, after years sneaking into international super-stardom as a chameleonic blend of a character actor and a leading man who stole Inside Llewyn Davis, Ex Machina, and now the Star Wars franchise.  Isaac, a small, shifty-looking figure with hooded eyes, is, far from overwhelmingly charismatic – indeed, his appeal seems not to come so much from the way he acts as the way he is, all the time.  He is not a particularly secretive person, but it is impossible to imagine what he’s like when he isn’t on stage or screen, if only because he is so with us then.

            Accordingly, Isaac doesn’t electrify the production upon his first entrance, which he makes during the live curtain speech, as if to conceal it.  It’s only when he leaves, and is absent for much of the third act, that the audience realizes that the considerable frame Gold has constructed sags without its tentpole.  “It is too long,” complains Polonius (Peter Friedman) at one point during a player’s lengthy speech, but Hamlet is rapt, and we with him; it’s only when he’s gone that the whole thing begins to seem a bit much.

            “Much,” incidentally, refers to the play’s runtime, which is advertised at three and a half hours but is actually closer to four.  This makes room for some great dramaturgy, most relevantly the play’s open dialogue with its existence as a play; all of the monologues are given and directed to the audience, like secrets shared.  It also, unfortunately, leaves space for terrible dramaturgy, like Gold’s apparent belief that the late King Hamlet and his brother, Claudius (both played by Ritchie Coster doing Ben Kingsley) are effectively the same person.  Further, it short-changes the terrific actress Gayle Rankin, whose Ophelia, given no room to play, is confused and unfounded.  It doesn’t help that she has to spend much of that unfortunate third act singing (there are four separate songs in the act, and the actors don’t appear to have any idea how to play them – is this a musical?).

            This is unsurprising for Gold, whose productions continually make choices that are almost self-consciously weird – the first scene of his Hamlet, which is considerable in length, is played in complete darkness; his New York Theater Workshop Othello was interrupted by a dance sequence to “Hotline Bling.”  But this is by no means entirely a bad thing – as evidenced by his decision, bizarre and unconventional, to play the first two acts of this Hamlet as comedy.  It works.  With no apologies, the first two-thirds of the play are hilarious almost from start to finish – and it’s hugely fun to watch.  Isaac, who spends most of the play without pants on, is the ringleader of an effective circus of mistaken identity and pratfalls.  Keegan-Michael Key, late of Key and Peele, plays Horatio as a frazzled second banana, and nearly steals the show.  And it’s great.  Really and truly great. 

Any complaint with this production is likely to deal with what the point of the whole thing is, and indeed, as a piece of drama this version of Hamlet is almost entirely without consequence.  But like all of Gold’s work, it’s so deeply intimate that by its end one can read the actors like friends, and Isaac and his company are probably having more fun doing the play than the audience has watching it.  You are likely to forget, upon leaving the theater, that most of the characters wind up dead, and make a note to invite them all to your next get-together.