The Lower Zoo

Norm Lewis in Sweeney Todd at the Barrow Street Theatre.

Norm Lewis as Sweeney and Carolee Carmello as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

            Norm Lewis’s Sweeney Todd doesn’t need the wild wig Len Cariou wore, when playing the same role in 1979, or Michael Cerveris’s flour-white makeup, from 2005.  He is unforgivingly physical, enormous, a veritable brick wall in himself.  He towers, which is a difficult proposition at the cramped Barrow Street Theatre, where he recently replaced Jeremy Secomb in the long-running production of Sweeney Todd there, and which has been retrofitted as a working pie shop.  Theatergoers chow down on meat pies in the half-hour before show-time, after which Lewis and the ensemble make up the difference by making a meal of the material.

            The most fascinating thing about Lewis’s portrayal is his eyes, which are easily observed since the actors spend most of the show prowling a room that can’t be more than two hundred feet square.  He gives, throughout, a traditional performance, with the requisite steeliness and single-minded resolve, but his eyes angle upward, dreamily – he’s impatient, as we are, for the carnage to begin.

            The director, Bill Buckhurst, hasn’t brought anything to the granular details of his staging that’s all too revolutionary – the shock to the system of this production is the closeness of it all.  The material in Sweeney Todd is so powerful that sitting in the middle of it is like being hit by a tidal wave.  Lewis, in “Epiphany,” the strongest moment in Sweeney’s character arc, clambers onto tables, roars in the faces of some audience members, and menaces others with a razor to the neck.  You can’t let go, even for a minute.  Once you’re in it, you’re in it for the long haul.

            There are downsides to this.  The seating arrangement – long, dining-hall style tables perpendicular to the main staging area – leaves many “diners” in the middle facing away from much of the action, and the actors, who aren’t artificially magnified and don’t make much attempt to compensate for it, can occasionally be hard to hear.  Perhaps it’s unavoidable now, though, that any production of this musical, Stephen Sondheim’s finest and the most dramatically perfect ever written, expects a certain measure of audience familiarity at the door.  If any lyrics are muffled, the average audience member can probably fill in the blanks.

            Same with the story.  In the continuing decades-long backlash to Harold Prince’s overwhelming staging of the original 1979 production, Buckhurst’s is minimalist, with no stage blood or gore (just red light), and one pie counter and a staircase substituting for two floors of the same building, which would be confusing if not for the fact that, like a Shakespeare play, the conventions of the story are so rooted in the tradition and the American consciousness that it gives interpreters room to play.

            It doesn’t really register that Buckhurst doesn’t play, much.  Carolee Carmello, as Mrs. Lovett, goes the safe, Angela Lansbury-tinted route, but with more of an agreeably shaded maternal instinct.  John-Michael Lyles is delightfully over-the-top as a Tobias who might have just emerged from Wonka’s Factory.  (Both are new to the cast as well.)  Otherwise, the rest of the ensemble is basically by-the-numbers.  Sondheim said of Hal Prince’s Industrial Revolution-inspired set for the original production, all done in steam-engine machinery, that Prince’s view was that this was a world that “turns out Sweeney Todds.”  This has proven to be true in more ways than one.  Todd is so flawless that it effectively functions as its own machinery, producing revival after revival, iteration after iteration, and lead performance after lead performance, every one of which is worth seeing, even without any particular innovation.  The pie shop is open for business on Barrow Street.  But, effectively, it’s already been in business, without pause, for almost forty years.

Gold Rush

Lyricst and Lyricists: From Camelot to California: The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe at the 92^nd Street Y.

Frederick Loewe (left) and Alan Jay Lerner.

            There are some evenings at the theater so carefully planned, so perfectly executed, and so designed to be ephemeral that they stick and don’t stick at the same time – the moments that don’t stay with you are replaced by a feeling of knowing the performers, of having lived in the music, and of walking on air.  Monday’s closing night of Lyrics and Lyricists’ Lerner and Loewe program, From Camelot to California, was one of those nights.

            Reviewing the events of such a night runs the risk of merely cataloguing slightly varying instances of unadulterated praise.  If I find it difficult to summarize the feel of the evening broadly, I suppose I can thank Rob Berman, the artistic director of Encores! and guest artistic director, writer, and host for the concert, whose dedication and talent more than earn him the title of the thinking man’s impresario.  His adoration for the music of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe is contagious, as it could hardly avoid being – there are thirty-three songs in the program and each one is perfect.  He also plays four-handed piano, with the conductor and pianist Mark C. Mitchell, like a dream.  For that, I suppose, I owe thanks to orchestrators Joshua Clayton and Larry Moore, who pull the astonishing trick of doing Lerner and Loewe right with only a five-piece band.

            There are five members of the cast, too: Chuck Cooper, Lilli Cooper, Bryce Pinkham, Ryan Silverman, and Lauren Worsham.  Each one could sing the telephone book and pack Radio City.  If I single out Bryce Pinkham, who was designed in a lab to do musical comedy, it’s only because I’ve seen every one of his stage performances over the last five years, and because he effectively sings “On the Street Where You Live” two times in a row and even that’s not enough.  Trying to put into words the collective and individual talent of this group of actors would be a waste of time.  They’re as good as any reasonable person could expect, and more.

            While I admit a personal bias – Lerner and Loewe are the team who made me fall in love with musical theater – there is no denying that this music is consistently profoundly good in a way few other American songbook writers could match.  Choosing highlights would be like picking a favorite child – but Lilli Cooper’s show-stopping “Show Me,” Lauren Worsham and Cooper’s heart-rending and elegant “I Loved You Once in Silence,” Pinkham’s “On the Street Where You Live,” Chuck Cooper’s “Camelot (Reprise),” and Ryan Silverman’s nearly flawless mash-up of “Gigi” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (which are essentially variations on a theme) come to mind.  Perhaps the only imperfect detail in any of the performances is that, after Berman’s rhapsodizing about the perfectly placed rests in “Almost Like Being in Love,” the corresponding rests in “The Parisians” were mysteriously missing.  And Silverman muffed a lyric in “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”  Can you sense I’m nitpicking?

            The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe is over.  You can never see it.  It wasn’t recorded.  As Berman put it late in the show, the impermanence of our worlds, as Lerner and Loewe well knew, is what makes them beautiful.  (Berman’s inter-song narration, incidentally, is the best-written I’ve ever seen at a Lyrics and Lyricists event.)  So, absent the opportunity to recommend the show, I’m left with nothing but to say, simply, thank you, and to hope for more crystalline-perfect evenings, perhaps involving one or more of the participants in this concert, in the near future.

Watched Pot

1984 at the Hudson Theatre.

 

L-R: Tom Sturridge, Reed Birney, and Olivia Wilde in 1984.

            It is a curious fact that to reveal what makes the new play 1984, based on the eponymous novel, so good probably qualifies as a spoiler.  Given that the production is banking on the renewed popularity of its immortal source text in the wake of an administration that practices many of the tactics discussed in the book, but with less dexterity, one might assume that the audience knows exactly what’s going to happen in this British transfer as soon as they walk into the theater.  Suffice it to say that most of the things that seem bad about the play (by Robert Icke and Duncan MacMillan, also the directors) turn out to be precisely what is good about it.  The beginning of the show, which opens June 22^nd at the Hudson Theatre, is constrained, confused, and simplistic, and then, suddenly, it isn’t – and the reveal is one of the most satisfying, and revolutionary, feats of stagecraft we are likely to see on a Broadway stage any time soon.

            It would be more edifying, then, perhaps, to discuss what isn’t in the play – mostly exposition, as the piece requires, perhaps inevitably, a thorough recollection of the novel.  1984 the play isn’t so much 1984 the novel as a dream of that novel, ethereal and hard to grasp, a shell-shocked haze of a memory of an atrocity.  Big Brother’s face, the defining icon of the book and the Michael Radford film (released in the real 1984), appears not once in the play.  The supposed terrorist Emmanuel Goldstein makes only a momentary appearance on the broad corkboard screen that serves as a platform for the show’s plentiful projections (by Tim Reid, with scenic design by Chloe Lamford).  The novel had a broad supporting cast of alternately trembling and loyal members of the ruling Party.  Most of them make the jump to the play, but they are mostly drowned out by a central trio we can’t take our eyes off.

            Tom Sturridge, the fabled replacement for Shia Lebeouf in 2013’s Orphans, plays the lead, disillusioned Party stooge Winston Smith, as something close to a drooling meth-head, which is a completely legitimate dramatic choice that starts off deeply annoying and ends up connecting on a terrific scale.  Olivia Wilde, as his secret paramour Julia, is more human if also marginally less interesting than Suzanna Hamilton in the film, but she always makes more of a visual impression than anything else, and her slinky, pale Wednesday Addams of a character seems to have snuck into this production from another show, mostly to the good.  Most important is Reed Birney, late of The Humans and Man From Nebraska, whose O’Brien, a master manipulator and unsettlingly sympathetic philosopher, is so quiet, so unassuming, that in his long, bravura scene in the second half of the play, he walks away with a show so technically brilliant that carrying it must do a number on his back.

            The play achieves, mainly by dint of that aforementioned sequence, what the Radford film really never did – it’s terrifying.  Radford warned, before the nationwide art-house screening of 1984 in April, that the film would be hard to watch, but with its glorious Roger Deakins cinematography, gray-and-green fantasias, and a surprisingly calming Richard Burton, it’s actually cinematically pleasant, if not quite reassuring.  Not so the play.  Its sequences of torture (which occupy much of the final half-hour) are so brutal I was momentarily convinced I would have to leave the theater; I am, funnily enough, in a state of doublethink about recommending the play – it is remarkably good in nearly every way but hardly the thing you’d wish on your grandmother.

            The close of the play (it has one 101-minute act), the payoff of an incalculably stupid dramatic framing device that I had foolishly hoped had been abandoned earlier in the runtime, is disappointing if only because, after that Birney-dominated torture sequence, it fails to land exactly as hard as it should.  In their entirely earned confidence in their sense of the theatrical, Icke and MacMillan lean a bit too far into the meta-theatrical (Winston shouts to the audience, while being tortured, “Help me! Why doesn’t anybody do anything?”).  Luckily even that final sequence is as visually well-designed as anything on the stage this last season – only after seeing this show will you understand how one can tremble at the sight of a pink umbrella. 

The show ends with O’Brien’s hand on Winston’s shoulder, as Winston, battered, broken, and beyond reason, mutters his gratitude for being laid low at Big Brother’s feet.  If you see 1984, your reaction will not be gratitude, exactly, nor disgust, exactly, nor, certainly, will you have wasted an evening.  But if you know quite what to feel after being injected with this production in its white-hot, furious purity, you’ve got one on me.

2017 Tony Picks

Kevin Spacey will host the 71st Tony Awards, live from Radio City Music Hall, on June 11th at 8 on CBS.

It’s not a competitive season on Broadway, despite what the critics and pundits would have you believe.  No use pontificating – we’ve got ourselves another Hamilton situation, or at least we should, with the modern masterpiece Dear Evan Hansen.  At the ceremony on June 11^th, which will be hosted by Kevin Spacey (an agreeably unorthodox choice), Hansen should sweep and then we can all go to bed.  Despite the writings of Michael Schulman in the New Yorker, who, in a worryingly misguided turn of phrase, described Hansen as a “musicalized Y.A. novel,” or the hand-wringing of the Statler-and-Waldorf team of Jesse Green and Ben Brantley for the Times, who are trying to frame a predictable year as a horse race between Hansen, the treacly Come From Away, and the musically uninteresting Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, we all know how this is going to end.  Or if we don’t, something’s gone horribly wrong.

Nonetheless, a nominating committee that spread its net just wide enough to appear to be spreading it but not too wide to include any genuinely interesting choices (where’s Oh, Hello on Broadway? The Price? Heisenberg?) has snubbed a vertigo-inducing number of deserving performers and productions, most of whom I’ve tried to include in my comments on my picks for this year.  As always, I quote liberally from my reviews.

Best Musical: Dear Evan Hansen

Steven Levenson and Pasek and Paul’s pop-musical is the best version of itself and the strongest work any of its participants will probably ever do; while not quite flawless (there are tonal inconsistencies in the broad strokes of its morality), it is melodically pure and dramatically relevant, and it’s rare both of these things can be true of a single musical, especially one written in this century.  In a hugely competitive season, one including musicals (like Groundhog Day) that would be equally deserving, Hansen should take the cake – my only fear is that the hero-worship of its fan-base might warp it into a tourist trap from what it is – a truly great piece of art.

Best Play: Oslo

In my review of the Off-Broadway iteration of this historical drama about the organization of the 1993 Oslo accords, I described J.T. Rogers’ play (his Broadway debut) as a “masterfully done,” “thoroughly exemplary play” with a “diamond-perfect gaze.”  Its transfer to Broadway has only broadened its impact – Bartlett Sher’s production of this never-didactic, deeply accessible piece is more relevant now than ever.  It’s only a pity that, in a season strong on absurdism, Nick Kroll and John Mulaney’s genuine theatrical masterwork Oh, Hello on Broadway was robbed of a nomination in this category.

Best Revival of a Musical: Hello, Dolly!

Full disclosure – I have not seen Hello, Dolly!.  In fact, I know of very few people who have.  Demand for Bette Midler’s first Broadway appearance in nearly fifty years is high enough that the production’s TV commercials now smugly declare, “Best availability in September.”  This was, actually, a strong season for musical revivals – Sarna Lapine’s production of Sunday in the Park with George and Lonny Price’s Sunset Boulevard were both excellent.  But the former withdrew from Tony consideration, and the latter wasn’t nominated.  I don’t know for sure if Hello, Dolly! is any good.  I know for sure it will win this category.

Best Revival of a Play: Present Laughter

In a relatively unexciting category – Present Laughter, Jitney, and The Little Foxes being the only nominees of note – this “fully old-fashioned,” “thoroughly entertaining production,” as I called it in March, has a fair chance of winning despite not being a particular world-beater.  Director Moritz von Stuelpnagel has constructed a professional Coward revival that goes beyond being a star vehicle for his leading man, Kevin Kline, and adopted the reverent attitude toward original intent of the author that has proved a success for directors like Jack O’Brien of last fall’s The Front Page revival (which should have been nominated here).  No telling this one for sure, though – if I’m right, call it a lucky guess.

Best Book of a Musical: Steven Levenson, Dear Evan Hansen

Levenson’s book is effectively a great play set to music, a repudiation of the years of post-Kander and Ebb shows when musicals became dramatically impotent melodic showcases.  His “adrenaline shot” of a plot is dizzyingly complex and wounding enough to strike an audience to the heart and scar them, collectively, for life, but unlike some other twenty-first century pieces I could name, he doesn’t scar merely for the sake of scarring.  Rarely has a Broadway librettist displayed such a well-developed sense of dramatic integrity.  He should leapfrog over Danny Rubin’s admirably funny but essentially rehashed book for Groundhog Day to the finish line.  (A note: I am beginning to tire of nominating musicals without books, like the sung-through Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, for Best Book.  Perhaps it’s an after-effect of our collective Hamilton haze, but, American Theater Wing – get your act together.)

Best Original Score: Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Dear Evan Hansen

To the extent that Dear Evan Hansen represents a significant entry in the broader history of musical theater, rather than merely the modern history – which I’m convinced it does – it’s largely because of the breathless melodic experiments Pasek and Paul, late of La La Land, Dogfight, and A Christmas Story, undertake in their score.  While their lyrics are not always flawless, their music is, as I wrote in January, “nearly unclassifiable, completely unique, and gorgeous beyond reasonable expectation.  Everything – everything – is in the service of the story, and not a note” rings false.  Expect to see a lot of these two in the coming years.

 

Best Leading Actor in a Play: Jefferson Mays, Oslo

Mays is “phenomenal,” I wrote of him last summer, “perfect as the intellectual who thinks – knows – he can do better than the bureaucrats, with all of the well-meaning arrogance that entails.”  His Terje Rod-Larsen fits into the same buffoonish sophisticate  category as his supporting role in The Front Page or his Tony-nominated performance in 2013’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.  What really makes him stand out, however, is his pitch-perfect collaboration with his female lead, Jennifer Ehle, who should win in her own category as well.

Best Leading Actress in a Play: Jennifer Ehle, Oslo

As I wrote last year, “Ehle, sporting a flawless accent and a presence somehow simultaneously steely and maternal, fulfills the promise” of her foreign-office maven character, Mona Juul – “beloved by all on both sides” for “her ability and willingness to bring people together.”  She plays Mays’ wife, and her collaboration with him ensures the play will be anchored in the union of “teammates in the grandest sense.”  With a hop, skip, and a jump over Laura Linney for The Little Foxes, she should easily win her third Tony for this performance.

Best Leading Actor in a Musical: Ben Platt, Dear Evan Hansen

Ben Platt’s performance in Dear Evan Hansen could be the greatest feat of acting in the history of musical theater.  If he loses this award there is a nonzero chance that there exists a malevolent God, manipulating the travails of mankind to the benefit of ultimate chaos.  That is all.

Best Leading Actress in a Musical: Bette Midler, Hello, Dolly!

See: Best Revival.  I liked Denée Benton in Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, but not enough to pick her over the obvious winner with a straight face.  In another universe, either the ineligible but magnetic Glenn Close, reprising her role in Sunset Boulevard, might’ve snatched this prize up, or Annaleigh Ashford would have wiped the floor with Bette with her extraordinary performance in Sunday in the Park, but thanks to that inconceivable awards withdrawal, here we are.  Here’s hoping this’ll be a more interesting category next year.

Best Featured Actor in a Play: Nathan Lane, The Front Page

By a long shot the most competitive category of the year, Best Featured Actor pits Danny DeVito’s remarkable Broadway debut in The Price against Nathan Lane’s star turn as Walter Burns in last fall’s The Front Page.  It's a clash of the titans, but in a squeaker, it goes to Lane, if only because it is a joy to find that at 61 his raw comic power on the stage is lessened not one hair.  In a part perhaps smaller than he’s played since pre-Guys and Dolls days, Lane walks away with the show, an explosive force detonating in the middle of this un-explosive revival.  DeVito is as great as ever, but Lane’s the king. 

Best Featured Actress in a Play: Cynthia Nixon, The Little Foxes

Absent Kristine Nielsen in Present Laughter, the finest comic performance of her career despite her snub in this category, Cynthia Nixon, with her impressive role-switching repertory in The Little Foxes, is really the only thing left – the other four nominations go to Sweat and A Doll’s House, Part 2 – neither one an actor-focused play, and certain to split their respective votes.

Best Featured Actor in a Musical: Mike Faist, Dear Evan Hansen

Compared to Ben Platt, with whom he shares most of his scenes, Mike Faist, as the suicidal misanthrope Connor Murphy, is deeply understated.  Actually he spends much of the show (spoiler – kind of) literally dead, popping up here and there as a ghost or memory.  But he’s got a sweet – if greasy – energy that justifies the fuss that’s made over his death, plus a relatively strong voice and a key part in Hansen’s most high-energy number, “Sincerely, Me.”  Any actor in the show who isn’t Ben Platt is unfortunately fated to be overshadowed, but Faist is something of the yin to Platt’s yang – impressive enough, certainly, to best his closest competition, Lucas Steele as a rock-star Russian aristocrat in Natasha.

Best Featured Actress in a Musical: Rachel Bay Jones, Dear Evan Hansen

This category – to be honest – is wide-open, the most uncertain this year, especially minus the bravura performance of Amber Gray in Natasha -- another snub.  I could see any of the nominees winning, particularly Jen Colella for her buzzed-about turn as a pilot in Come From Away, but Jones is my personal choice if only for her wrenching number late in Hansen, “So Big/So Small,” an intimate mother-son ballad that’s one of the more overtly tear-jerking in the show.  Jones has a hippie-type edge about her that you either love or hate, but she’s certainly orders of magnitude better in this role than in her unmemorable performance in the Pippin revival four years ago.

Best Direction of a Play: Bartlett Sher, Oslo

In my review of Oslo, I referred to Bartlett Sher as the Lincoln Center Theatre company’s “patron saint,” and he really is – he spearheaded their productions of South Pacific and The King and I as well as their upcoming My Fair Lady, and his classed-up spectacles are the Vivian Beaumont’s bread and butter.  Chalk another one up for the LCT, then – Oslo is a triumph, “a real window into a history-making process,” and Sher should get his due credit.  This, his third Tony, won’t come easy – he’ll have to get through Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s acclaimed work on Jitney – but it would be well-deserved.

Best Direction of a Musical: Matthew Warchus, Groundhog Day

My only Hansen upset – for a reason.  In any other year Groundhog Day would have a solid shot at the proverbial brass ring of Best Musical, but these aren’t good days for pluralism on Broadway.  Tim Minchin’s intricate score and Danny Rubin’s gut-busting book, not to mention Andy Karl’s near-heroic lead performance, will all go unsung at Radio City this year, but Matthew Warchus’ direction should get the recognition it deserves – especially because Michael Greif’s direction of Hansen, unlike his work on earlier pieces like Rent, doesn’t necessarily transgress any boundaries.  Warchus, on the other hand, creates a carnival of effervescent effects that go way beyond anything traditional stagecraft has done before.  As I wrote in March, “never ostentatious but constantly wondrous, [Warchus] establishes here definitively that the theater is capable of anything film is.”

Best Choreography: Sam Pinkleton, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

I didn’t like Natasha.  I thought it was needlessly amelodic, ostentatiously operatic in a musical landscape moving in just the opposite direction, and lacked lyrical effort on the part of its composer, lyricist, and “librettist,” Dave Malloy.  But if there were a Tony Award for Best Opening Number, this show would win hands-down.  In “Prologue,” one of the greatest openers of the season, and of the last few besides, Malloy, with the help of director Rachel Chavkin and the jittery, roaring choreography of Pinkleton, lays out the basic structure of War and Peace for an audience unfamiliar with his source material – as the lyric puts it, “It’s a complicated Russian novel / Everyone’s got nine different names / So look it up in your program.”  For this number, which spills out from the stage into the bizarre stage/audience hybrid that is currently the Imperial, and for a few blinding and fascinating nightclub numbers, too, Pinkleton should take home this award just barely over Denis Jones’s more traditional work in the moribund Holiday Inn.

Best Orchestrations: Alex Lacamoire, Dear Evan Hansen

Lacamoire orchestrated Hamilton and looks to be on track to work on every musical phenomenon of the next decade; he’s on as much of a roll right now as anyone in his profession can ever expect to be.  His work on Dear Evan Hansen, while not as self-evidently brilliant as his nearest competitor in this category, Dave Malloy, orchestrating his own work on Natasha (an impressive feat -- he could win), is rewarding to repeat listeners.  There’s something about his unapologetically contemporary style, and concern for the smallest details that emerge even from the smallest orchestras, that screams genius.  Listening to Hansen is overwhelming, and Lacamoire is much of the reason why.

Technical Awards (with snubs)

Best Scenic Design of a Play: Douglas W. Schmidt, The Front Page

SNUBS: David Zinn, Present Laughter

Derek McLane, The Price

Best Scenic Design of a Musical: Rob Howell, Groundhog Day

Best Costume Design of a Play: Susan Hilferty, Present Laughter

SNUB: Emily Rebholz, Oh, Hello on Broadway

Best Costume Design of a Musical: Paloma Young, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

Best Lighting Design of a Play: Donald Holder, Oslo

SNUBS: David Weiner, The Price

Austin R. Smith, Heisenberg

Best Lighting Design of a Musical: Japhy Weideman, Dear Evan Hansen

Multiple Awards

Dear Evan Hansen, 8

Oslo, 5

Groundhog Day, 2

Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, 2
The Front Page, 2

Present Laughter, 2

Hello, Dolly!, 2