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October 22, 2004
TT: Low Rent district
Time once again for my Wall Street Journal drama column. Today I reviewed Brooklyn, a new Broadway musical, and Trying, a new off-Broadway play.Brooklyn was horrible:
Broadway has a new musical with that rarity of rarities, an original score. That's cause for rejoicing, right? Er...no. The fact that its songs were custom-written by Mark Schoenfeld and Barri McPherson is the only "original" thing about "Brooklyn: The Musical," which opened last night at the Plymouth Theatre. Otherwise, it's 100% recycled--from pure garbage.
"Brooklyn" is one of those shows that is better summarized than reviewed. Ray Klausen's set, a graffiti-encrusted street scene, contrives to be both rundown and adorably picturesque. The cast consists of five golden-voiced street singers similarly clad in ever-so-stylish rags and tatters. The leader of the pack (Cleavant Derricks) invites passers-by to pause for a moment and listen to the "sidewalk fairy tale" of Brooklyn (Eden Espinosa), a budding young pop singer from Paris who comes to America to search for her long-lost father (Kevin Anderson), a songwriter turned Vietnam vet turned smack-shooting vagrant. All she knows of him is an unfinished lullaby he wrote for his baby daughter, whose mother (Karen Olivo) taught it to her before committing suicide. This touching story sends her skyrocketing to the top of the charts, from which she dislodges Paradice (Ramona Keller), a you-go-girl ghetto diva who thereupon challenges Brooklyn to a winner-take-all singoff at Madison Square Garden, where--
Is that the sound of gagging I hear? Well, at least let me share with you some of "Brooklyn"'s lyrics, set to the kind of music I think of as Disney Soul: "There's a story behind these empty eyes/That no one wants to know...I used to sing at Christmas/Now Christmas makes me cry...Now once upon a time/Has never felt more right...Life is like a shooting star/And here is where it's falling." The book is of identical quality: "Oh, no, no, don'tchu worry 'bout me none, noooo, I'm just like these here weeds, sprouting right up through this concrete. Yeah, that's me alright...strong as a city weed." (That comes straight from the script, in case you were wondering.)
In short, we're talking "Rent" for the pre-school set, a molasses-coated piece of boob bait whose presence on Broadway, however temporary, is proof that musical-comedy standards never seem to hit rock-bottom--they just sink lower and lower....
(By the way, Ben Brantley of the New York Times is totally on the same page with me about Brooklyn. We even used a couple of closely similar metaphors! Take a look--it's interesting to contrast our approaches.)
Trying wasn't horrible, just trite, and was largely redeemed by a remarkable performance:
If you prefer your clichés spoken instead of sung, you can always go to the Promenade Theatre, where Fritz Weaver is starring in "Trying," a two-person play about the extreme old age of Francis Biddle, an upper-crust WASP from Philadelphia who switched parties and became Franklin Roosevelt's attorney general, thereby earning the perpetual loathing of his fellow Main Liners, for whom rock-ribbed Republicanism was a religion. (Nowadays, they'd have nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.)
Playwright Joanna McClelland Glass has worked long, hard and successfully to leach all traces of freshness out of "Trying," which is the octillionth retread of The One About the Grumpy Old Geezer and His Spunky Young Secretary. Fortunately, Mr. Weaver, who made his Broadway debut before I was born, is in infallibly fine form, and his performance as Judge Biddle should be videotaped and played for acting students as a priceless example of how to make a whole lot out of not much.
He gently caresses each line with an old-gold baritone voice unscarred by years of hard use; he underlines each ominous sign of oncoming senility with the lightest of touches. Above all, he suggests with uncanny specificity what it must feel like to stand at the threshold of eternity. Peering through his glasses at his address book, he says, "All the Bs are dead" (a great line, by the way--I wonder if Biddle really said it), then lifts his head to gaze at the fast-receding horizon of his youth. If that moment doesn't make you catch your breath, you must be watching some other show....
No link, and there's plenty more where that came from. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning's Journal, or subscribe to the online edition (an even better idea) by going here.
Posted October 22, 2004 9:52 AM
