Our first two shows on Broadway for the spring 2024 season shared sensational staging. For Enemy of the People, lighting by paraffin lamps, spare furniture and drab black costumes at Circle in the Square let us feel we were back in 19th century Norway. Postwar London for The Who’s Tommy wasn’t so much a location as an electric charge: glowing rectangles for doors and mirrors flew across the stage, setting the scenes without distracting from the energy of the music. Both shows delivered. Tommy is the nonpareil rock opera. What was lost in not having Pete Townshend’s guitar was gained in having Broadway singers inhabiting the various roles. Tommy at three ages added charm to the tough story. The second act suffered in comparison to the first, which has the show-stoppers, and as a plot is harder to follow. The score is great and the production of Pinball Wizard brought tears to my eyes.
Ibsen’s play is didactic, and the message resonates as loudly today as it must have in 1882. The downside is that the supporting cast are positions, not real people. Their performances seemed a bit below par; I couldn’t tell if the fault was the casting–with notably an African-American, Asian-American and dwarf standing in for 19th century rural Norwegians–or the play’s architecture. Regardless, the two leads, played by Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli, held the stage and carried the day.
Lincoln Center Theatre’s production of Uncle Vanya was misconceived, miscast and misdirected. Other than that… Taking the play out of 1890s Russia left it floating in a senseless place, with doctors making month-long house calls, Blacks talking jive and Steve Carrell playing Steve Carrell. Alfred Molina was excellent as the professor, but he made the rest of the cast unconvincing. Carrell’s sarcastic stage-hogging didn’t equate, for me, with a long-suffering estate manager, and none of the personal relationships on display made emotional sense. In contrast to the above shows, the set was minimal, contributing to the placelessness of the production, and the thrust stage meant an actor’s back was in our way much of the time.
We also had a sightline problem at Stereophonic: seated third-row center, with the stage raised above us, we frequently had the two studio engineers blocking our view of the actors in the recording studio behind and above them. Whether our proximity exaggerated the bass guitar volume I don’t know, but the music was unpleasantly loud. We had seen the apparently identical Off-Broadway production at Playwrights’ Horizon last May, so the novelty and excitement of discovery were gone on this viewing. The play itself, however, held up. It’s hard to think of another play where there are seven so well defined characters who each get their due. And in stark comparison to everything else we’ve seen this spring, these were “real” people. Eli Gelb, as the schlumpy engineer Grover, has won awards and should win more, but all the others, led by Sarah Pidgeon and Will Brill, were just as memorable. I understand why the Tonys are treating this as a “play,” not a “musical,” but what you hear of the songs made me want to buy the record.
Speaking of musicals, there are two kinds: one where songs are written for the production and “jukebox” musicals where pre-existing hit songs are cobbled together around a plot. And then there are two kinds of jukebox musicals: one where the songs are presented as the hit songs they are (viz., Jersey Boys, A Beautiful Noise, Ain’t Too Proud to Beg) and the other where they are incorporated into the story, a la the more traditional kind of musical (viz., Mamma Mia, Return to Margaritaville, New York, New York). Hell’s Kitchen, the Alicia Keys story, is the latter, and because I didn’t know any of her hit songs I found myself wondering if the story was taking a direction so a song could be shoehorned in. Not that there was anything terribly unusual, or original, in the mad-at-my-mother, falling-foolishly-in-love teenager who discovers-herself-through-music and makes it story. The generally mellower songs in the second act grabbed me more and the earnest and lively production was engaging throughout (when I could see around the head of the gentleman in front of me). The big letdown was the absence of the star whom we had expressly come to see, Maleah Joi Moon. Her understudy played the part and sang the songs flawlessly, but she didn’t have the personal charm needed to win you over.
Patriots felt more like a history lesson than a play, and a pretty intense one at that. Peter Morgan used his tools for dramatizing the British royal family and applied them to Putin’s rise in Russia, as told through the eyes of oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Michael Stuhlbarg did yeoman’s work in the lead, although his acting tics got on my nerves by the end. Will Keen as Putin was commanding. Luke Thallon played Roman Abramovich as a sweetheart, maybe out of concern for British libel laws, and the supporting cast was flawless. There wasn’t much emotion or character development; what we walked out of the theater with was our thoughts on Russia and Putin.
Cabaret at the August Wilson Theater turned Kit Kat Club put us right back into the political world. The second act, when the Nazis appeared, was half as long and twice as good as the first act, which introduced the characters and gave us a lot of louche that became monotonous. Eddie Redmayne was sensational as the twisting, twisted emcee, while Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell created the only genuinely emotional relationship. Gayle Rankin’s Sallie Bowles made me long for Liza Minelli, and the man playing Clifford Bradshaw made me long for a better actor.
In sum, it was a disappointing Broadway season (and, unusually, we didn’t venture Off-Broadway). The only moment I felt transported was during Tommy’s Pinball Wizard. The only play I would wholeheartedly recommend was Stereophonic, and its second time around wasn’t as good for me due to sight and sound issues. And in most of the productions I saw performances that didn’t measure up. As I waited in line at TKTS for Patriots, I realized that we got to see everything I wanted to.
