PART ONE:
End-of-22/23-Season Tie-Up
Reviewed by David Spencer
This season has been such a personally busy time for me—family stuff (mostly positive, but complex); writing, completing, designing, revising a dream project book (publication imminent); and on the heels of that starting another dream project book—that I haven’t had time to review as much as I usually can, and I missed covering number of major openings.
So—Rather than capsule or comprehensive reviews, which wouldn’t do much more than add my own take to the chorus, I’m going to try something a little different, that might be a little more useful, at this later stage:
In this, Part One, I’m going to target some end-of-2022/2023-season productions I missed covering, that will continue running for a while…in Part Two I’m going to target some start-of-2023/2024 productions… (Title links go to the show websites.)
And I’m going to tell you the one or two things I haven’t seen meaningfully particularized that I think you may need to know, either before deciding to purchase your tickets, or to know before attending, so you’re prepared to experience it with maximum enjoyment and minimum disappointment.
What do I mean by that?
Let’s start with New York, New York, at the St. James, the enhanced stage musical adaptation of the film. In case your frame of cultural reference doesn’t include [The] Naked City, that was a kinda-sorta anthology TV series framed as a NYC police drama. The cops were the same, week to week, but the central stories belonged to the guest-star characters. It ran from 1958 through 1963 and there were two iterations (30 minutes, then 60 minutes), narrated respectively by Herbert Leonard and then Lawrence Dobkin, who would tell us, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This is one of them.”
Well, As presented, New York, New York is an ensemble tale in which multiple people come to NY to pursue their artistic goals—sort of like The Naked City of making your way to the top. The problem is…the creative team (director: Susan Stroman, librettist: David Thompson & Sharon Washington, additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda) haven’t cracked how set up permission for us to follow it like that—nor how to frame it so it all tracks along the same line and interrelates. The show starts to coalesce in Act Two when all but one of the stories do directly interrelate, but by then it’s too late to overcome the sprawling focus and WTF-is-this-all-adding-up-to’s of Act One. And the audience simply can’t see the connectives holding the multiple-story architecture together. It needs its version of Leonard/Dobkin.
My nominee: The best friend (Clyde Alves) of the hero, who does nothing for a living (dramatically) and seems the perfect narrator “glue”; properly delineated, he’s the guy who could step out and tell us, in effect, “There are thousands of showbiz stories in musical theatre city; this is eight of them”…and then sing about it, the angle being whatever the creative team want the theme of the show to emphasize. Then he’d bring on the first two people destined to collide, his musician-composer buddy (Colton Ryan) and the girl singer (Anna Uzele). And tell us they’re the hub.
Now we’d know where we’re at.
But since the show doesn’t do that…what you need to know is how it’s meant to function. If you attend with the architectural overview in mind…with this breakdown as a pre-focus …I suspect you’ll start having a better time earlier in the proceedings.
What you need to know about the revival of Sweeney Todd is both simple and complex.
The simple: Notwithstanding Lincoln Center concert stagings and Harold Prince remounting his original production for the New York City Opera, this new production at the Lunt-Fontanne is the first of the Broadway revivals to feature full cast and full original orchestrations.
For many, indeed, I think most—myself included, and I’ve seen way too many productions for one lifetime—it’s thrilling. But there are a vocal minority who are finding it…something else, ranging from startling to diffident. And while I can’t tell you what sensibility path leads to any particular choice of adjective, I can tell you what triggers it:
It’s being performed as if nobody in the cast had any exposure to any previous iteration. Which is of course completely untrue. But somehow—somehow—director Thomas Kail has managed to create an atmosphere in which each role has been literally created anew. In part, this is because he has cast actors who are right for the type of role, but not matching the type of actor previously associated with the role. There are all kinds of new spins on lines, new subtexts, new moments, as if the piece has been reborn for the new millennium. (Among my favorites: I’ve always thought the Beadle’s lyric “Meaning no offense, it / Happens they resents it” was a rare place where Sondheim actually sacrificed the accuracy of the character’s normal locution—the Beadle is perfectly grammatical throughout the show—for the cleverness of a slang rhyme. Well, as the new Beadle, John Rapson uses that moment to briefly, subtly but unmistakably mimic a lower class woman feeling scandalized. It’s a brilliant save; or [come to think of it] perhaps Rapson as brilliantly discovered what Sondheim originally intended.)
But the most important thing is this:
While Josh Groban is chronologically the right age to play Sweeney Todd, he still has a younger energy than the starts previously associated with the role. And as for Annaleigh Ashford as Mrs. Lovett…the energy is not merely younger; it’s sexy. She’s not a semi-delusional slattern with designs on a man who clearly has no meaningful designs on her. We’ve always previously assumed that Lovett and Sweeney were sleeping together because it’s alluded to (“Me rumpled bedding legitimized”), but there is now no doubt whatsoever that they’re Doing the Deed…and though the indication is appropriately low key, there’s also no doubt that Sweeney has been enjoying it. And after having spent 15 years in an Australian prison, now confronted by a woman whose desirability and bawdiness enhance each other…why wouldn’t he?
It’s not that Thomas Kail’s Sweeney Todd isn’t traditional of spirit…it is, very much so…it’s that it’s not living in the shadow of that spirit’s previous delivery. It casts its own shadow. And that’s quite remarkable.
What you need to know about Good Night, Oscar…
…is that star Sean Hayes is remarkable. He has long been an excellent celebrity mimic (it still amazes me that in the 2012 Farrelly Brothers pastiche The Three Stooges, Hayes is such a dead-accurate Larry; I mean, Moe and Curly give you a lot of signature tics, but—Larry!), and he delivers a devastatingly accurate Oscar Levant, down to the piano playing, turning tour de force into a tepid phrase indeed. If familiarity with Levant’s once-conspicuous celebrity personality is not among your reference points, you won’t need it. Hayes’ channeling of Levant provides the grounding.
…is that Hayes is the only actor up there channeling anyone. Ben Rappaport as TV talk show host Jack Paar is not even remotely like Paar. Which may mean nothing to those younger audience members for whom Paar’s name does not conjure the indelible persona—but with Hayes so rivetingly like Levant, audience members who do have Paar-on-video as a reference point may find that jarring to the point of desynchrony. (Though I’ll also acknowledge that Paar was soft-spoken and had a gently subversive sense of humor—which makes him more difficult to channel than Levant and impossible to deliver as a star turn, because his strength as a talk show persona was calm contrast to his guests.)
…is the play by Doug Wright does an admirable job of providing historical, cultural and situational context for Levant, his life and travails…but does so, as the phrase goes, to a fault. Meaning, the provided context is so foursquarely laid out that there’s not enough sense of spontaneity. I was almost always aware that I was watching scenes that were constructed.
…is that Emily Bergl as Levant’s wife—defender, maintainer, push-back foil, exhausted-devoted lifeline—is terrific.
And that, word has it, if you hit a performance where Hayes is out, his standby Max Roll is up to the task.
And finally, what you need to know about the revisal Camelot, winding up its Lincoln Center run months earlier than planned after disappointing reviews and what seems to be a generally lukewarm audience response starts here…
I’m not one of the great fans of the show; I’ve “sort of enjoyed it” a number of times, but I never thought that lyricist-librettist Alan Jay Lerner was fully onboard with the fantasy elements of T.H. White’s novel, or that he even had an affinity for the genre, which is why the show can seem so earthbound and clunky. As a corollary, I also think that he didn’t always know what to sing about—some of the songs focus on side issues (e.g. “What Do the Simple Folk Do?”); and there’s virtually no character truth to songs about secondary characters (“Fie on Goodness” for Mordred, is just embarrassing double entendre; all the actor and his cohorts can do is mustache-twirlingly bite at it like beef jerky.) And as lovely as Frederick Loewe’s music is, I’ve likewise always thought it went hand-in-hand with Lerner’s never quite knowing what he had to work with. The score is spirited and fun and lush where he intends it to be, but yolked to Lerner’s limited vision, it evokes the Arthurian England of legend only as a very polite place to have a medieval epic, with supernatural forces kind of hovering unimportantly.
So it’s not entirely weird to me that revision librettist Aaron Sorkin decided to eliminate the magical elements altogether and focus strictly on the story of a progressive ruler trying to keep a country civilized and together despite external and internal challenges. That’s basically what the original script really gives him to delve into, so why not play to its strengths?
And in that regard, Sorkin has achieved the near-impossible: He has actually managed to fashion a Camelot script in which even the most unlikely songs actually have an integrated, justifiable dramatic context. Thematically he’s right on point, all the way through. Never dull. Lerner’s twee “drawing room” stretches eliminated. Abetted by Bartlett Sher’s typically excellent direction, the story moves along,
But of course there’s been a trade-off. In being politically savvy—Camelot by way of Sorkin’s West Wing sensibility—the visceral impact of the central romantic triangle has been largely diminished…more understood than felt. Coherency swapped in for passion.
I don’t think I blame him for that. Rewriting the book of a classic musical for which the score is basically fixed and unrevisable can never entirely works. No matter what you do, you’re weighted down by obligation to a sensibility you cannot upgrade, even as you retool everything around it.
Nice try. Smart try. Better than that hardly seems possible. It’s the Kobayashi Maru of musical theatre challenges.