New York Theater, Fall ’23

In Dig, by Theresa Rebeck at 59E59 Theaters, every line of dialogue is a speech, illuminating the speaker or advancing the plot. The actions are often loaded metaphors too: Roger’s repotting a damaged plant in the opening scene, giving it food, attention and room to grow, previews the main course of the play, a repotting of the damaged Megan. A lot is thrown at the viewer over several days in the plant shop, and we don’t always know if the business is failing or coming back. There are possibly more plot twists than the play’s single set can contain; but for the most part the play’s careful construction holds things together. Both leads had multifaceted personalities, to say the least, but were ultimately sympathetic, which left us with a good feeling.

By contrast, the lines in Annie Baker’s Infinite Life could have been taken from real life. There wasn’t much plot to advance, nor were characters hot one moment, cold the next. Lines, in fact, were short and few, but many brought a chuckle or a smile of recognition. With great economy, we felt we knew the characters, and each was a more believable, relatable person than anyone in Dig. If there was a moral or message, I missed it. But none was really needed. Yes, there were thoughts on pain, and even sharper ones on sex; but I mainly found myself entranced by Christina Kirk as Sofi as she spent her week at the spa.

Without any intent, a large majority of our theater-going this fall took us to musicals, of very different stripe. The most traditional by far was a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s  Merrily We Roll Along, which has been better received than it was in 1981. The production is superb, and the leading performances of Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe are excellent; I wasn’t wild about the third, Lindsay Mendez, but that could be due to the role as written. The story is the opposite of uplifting, as it stars a talented songwriter who sells his art for commerce, his wife for glitz, and soul, apparently, to the Hollywood devil. The score, I’m told, is among Sondheim’s best, which for my ear meant the songs were pleasant but not memorable. Ultimately, the whole thing felt dated, like an exquisitely produced Broadway musical of 1981.

In another musical that we enjoyed the action took place in 1976-77, but the feeling was very “now.” Stereophonic recounted the making of a follow-up album by a mixed rock group (three men, two women; three Yanks, two Brits) with two recording engineers as the Greek chorus. We were back in the world of Almost Famous or Spinal Tap, a world I loved in absentia: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. The songs weren’t part of the plot; they were being recorded for release by this band and, written by Will Butler of Arcade Fire, they were all very good. The actors, amazingly, were as convincing in their music-making as their acting. Each performer got to fully develop their character, including the uncool engineer who ultimately held it all together.

I know Gutenberg! The Musical was a musical because it said so in the title. It wasn’t like it had songs listed in the program, though. I’m too young for Vaudeville, but this is my idea of what Vaudeville was like: two hams making funny faces, corny jokes and surprisingly deft moves around the stage. Josh Gad’s performance was worth the price of admission, and the play’s premise–Gutenberg transposed his wine press to a printing press, thereby creating people’s ability to read–was clever enough. For one act, at least. You got the jokes, and they were funny; but when intermission came it wasn’t clear why they needed a second act. To sell expensive tickets, I guess.

Here Lies Love, conversely, felt like all music all the time, with dancers running through the balcony aisles, the DJ getting us on our feet, and a general disco vibe running from start to finish (and there was a dance party after that). The real life story of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos and Ninoy Aquino gave the show historical heft and even offered political parallels to our world today, but it was the creative vision of David Byrne that made this show stand out from anything we’ve seen before. The performers were all great, led by Arielle Jacobs as Imelda.

Poor Yella Rednecks was the weakest of the bunch, the stage equivalent of a comic novel. Maureen Sebastian (Tong) was superb, singing, acting and moving, but the other actors came across as cartoon characters, except for Little Man, who was a puppet.

A Beautiful Noise offered a counterpoint to Merrily: in both a talented songwriter gets a boost from someone in the business, becomes fabulously successful, is carried away by the glamor and glitz, losing wives and children, and ends up in a bad place. Being an authorized biography of Neil Diamond, however, he finds himself at the end: “I Am, I Said.” I’m not a Diamond fan (my 2,500-song playlist contains nothing by him), but the music worked, thanks to exhilarating dance numbers by a marvelously diverse chorus, a little help from the wives, and a cleverly caricaturish Diamond impression by Will Swenson.

 

Broadway 5/23

Ladies ruled the stage for our spring visit to New York, with the Tony going to Jodie Comer in Prima Facie, a legal delicacy and one-woman tour de force. Jessica Chastain was formidable in a necessarily smaller but no less affecting role in A Doll’s House. Jessica Hecht and Laura Linney complemented each other in the David Auburn two-hander, Summer, 1976. As much as I love Linney, I could see why Hecht’s performance garnered the Tony nomination instead. Based on pre-play blurbs, I expected Juliet Stevenson to round out this all-star list of female leads, but I was so turned off by her unmodulated harshness and unpleasant character in The Doctor that I left at intermission. As a footnote I should include Lucy Roslyn’s one-woman performance in the off-Broadway Orlando. She was attractive and good at what she was doing, but the play, which she also wrote, didn’t connect.

Then there were the ensemble productions. Fat Ham was the cleverest, with a slew of hilariously winning characters and winking nods to Shakespeare. Thanksgiving Play carried a not-so-subtle post-woke message but was too unsubtle for my taste. New York, New York was our shot at a good old-fashioned musical, but the trite plot, unmemorable songs and dull characters overcame the excellent choreography and drove us out at halftime.

Take Me Out – A

Three tremendous acting performances anchor this study of friendship, homophobia, team chemistry and baseball. Surprisingly, the baseball references didn’t bother a purist like me. As for the homophobia, it’s sad that there are no more openly gay Major Leaguers now than when the play was first performed twenty years ago. But most intriguing was the question implicit in every relationship: how well do we really know someone, even our best friend? Jesse Tyler Ferguson deserves his Tony for his funny, lovable portrayal of Darren’s business manager, and Bill Heck was  smart and sexy as the shortstop/narrator around whom the action pivoted. But most intriguing was Jesse Williams’s Darren Lemming. I don’t know if the character was modeled on Derek Jeter, but the parallels were obvious: best player, mixed heritage, emotionally distant and just enough attitude to make a Yankee-hater like me dislike him. There was a lot of action, and it all made sense–if you can believe that a team with so little harmony can win a World Series. That’s the team chemistry issue.

Topdog/Underdog – B

My heart sank a bit when I realized I was to spend the next two hours with just these two men–losers, really–on one set where very little was going to happen. Their rapid-fire dialogue and three-card monte dexterity, the theatrical equivalent to the break dancers who had just entertained us in Times Square, made the time pass painlessly and with humor. As for any bigger message, yes, I know that life is unfair and these men had been dealt a bad hand, beyond being Black; but I had a hard time empathizing with characters whose life choices relied on conning strangers and shoplifting. After a lot of mundane badinage, the finale exploded unconvincingly around two dramatic, but unlikely, actions. The comparisons with Downstate all favor the latter.

Downstate – A

Everything we hope to find in the theater, as most commonly found Off-Broadway: thought-provoking subject, great ensemble acting, honest dialogue, gripping story and tragic, but not sad, ending. The subject was how the American justice system treats convicted sex offenders: it presented the raw deal they get, while acknowledging the pain they cause. But regardless of the subject, the play’s strength was the ensemble acting of the four offenders forced to share a home: a white man in a wheelchair, a repressed Latino, a sensitive gay Black and a smooth-talking Black hustler. Each was excellent, and their four-way dynamic made the stage of Leopoldstadt seem that much more crowded. Coming off productions in Chicago (Steppenwolf) and London (National Theatre), they were at the top of their game. I loved every minute.

Almost Famous – C-

Why bother? The original film was memorable, and presumably is still available, and was sharper, more intelligent and, of course, more original. The actors in the musical are appealing, especially when viewed from our seats in the second row, center, but inevitably invite unfavorable comparisons with Billy Crudup, Kate Hudson and Philip Seymour Hoffman, not to mention others I’d forgotten: Frances McDormand, Zooey Deschanel, Jason Lee, Jimmy Fallon (I concede props, though, to Rob Colletti in the Lester Bangs role). If the added attraction was new music, the score is blandly generic; the story plods along, between trite and obvious. Perhaps the show will survive through the holiday season on its name an nostalgia. The actors work hard but deserve better.

Leopoldstadt – B

A deeply personal play–and he wants you to know it–by Tom Stoppard, an apologia for not knowing until late in life that he is (100%) Jewish and most of his family died in and around the Holocaust. By honoring so many of his ancestors he assembles a cast of characters that challenges the audience’s understanding (“Aunt! – Why no, she’s my sister-in-law’s sister-in-law”), at the expense of identifying deeply with anyone. In fact, I found the play a much better read than a performance. Except for the two British imports (Gretl and Fritz/Leo), the actors disappointed. It felt they were reciting their lines, not inhabiting them, and the ensemble never flowed. (The child actors didn’t help.) I wonder if sitting in the third row hurt. There is drama and emotion, but some of it comes from the Holocaust, more than Stoppard.

Cost of Living – B

(Theater). An intimate four-hander about, I think, the human need for companionship, and the agony that can result therefrom. It was beautifully staged and impeccably acted, but I found the story needlessly confusing–i.e., I didn’t understand the husband-wife relationship or when scenes were taking place. The casting of “differently abled” actors turned out to be a plus; but the whole thing would have worked better without advance fanfare on a smaller off-Broadway stage.

The Lehman Trilogy

(Broadway Theater) This was a masterpiece of stagecraft, with three actors and one revolving set telling the 163-year story of the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers, from immigrant purveyors of fabric in Alabama to a bankrupt New York financial giant. The acting was beyond impeccable: Simon Russell Beale could portray anyone, and did, and he was well matched by Adam Godley. (If American actor Adrian Lester was less sensational, that was probably necessary to counter the flamboyance of the two English stage stars.) The play itself was fascinating as history, although in compressing a century-and-a-half into three hours, you felt there must be a lot of oversimplification. The characters also came off more as cameos than real people. What was missing, for me at least, was any emotional pull. Nor did I get any particular moral from the story. I had no rooting interest and didn’t feel any wiser for having watched the play. This all happened, and this is an amazing way to show it all. But it was a bit like those plays, which I haven’t seen, that present all of Shakespeare in 90 minutes.

Hamilton – 7.5

First, let me say I thought the production for the screen was sensational. This was so much better than seeing the play on stage – although I admit when we saw it on Broadway early in its run our seats were far away and we couldn’t distinguish many of the lyrics. On the TV screen, we not only got close-ups of the actors, we used closed-captioning, which solved any problem of unintelligibility. The other big problem, however,  remained: I felt I was being given a history lesson, not a Broadway show. Incidents were included not for the dramatic sense they made, but to check off chapters in Ron Chernow’s biography, which, unfortunately, I had just read before seeing the play. To take one example: we hear of Hamilton’s son Phillip when he is born, then next when he defends his father, has a duel and is killed. We haven’t been made to care about him as we would have in a play about a fictional family, say. Nor is the relationship with the Schuyler sisters developed fully or properly. It is instead always seemingly in conflict with the political drama. The music is what it is: a variety of styles, some of which are more appealing to me than others. But a fair amount is more pounding than melodic; it builds the momentum of the play but is not something you want to hum, or hear again. Finally, and sadly, I confess to being underwhelmed by Lin-Manuel’s acting and singing. His genius is in writing the play, its songs and lyrics, not to mention the concept of having Blacks portraying the Founding Fathers. But he never impressed me as “Hamilton.” Maybe my idea of Hamilton is totally false, coming as it does mainly from the $20 bill, but Miranda didn’t convince me that he could devise, or would even be interested in devising, the nation’s financial system. He was like a frisky puppy, jumping from one thing to the next, lacking the gravitas I wanted at the center of the play. Granted, he took liberties with all the other characterizations – see, e.g., Thomas Jefferson – and there’s no reason Hamilton had to be historically correct, or even close. But I would have liked a central figure that I cared more about, a hero – even a tragic hero – who didn’t just move so effortlessly into the next thing, in this case his legacy. To close on a positive note, I award five stars to the performances of Eliza and Angelica, and Daveed Diggs was an absolute showstopper as Jefferson and, as a warm-up, Lafayette. Everyone’s favorite, mine too, was King George III, who not only got the best melody to sing, the best costume, and the best mug, but even with closed-captioning it was a relief to finally hear clearly enunciated words that you didn’t have to run after.