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December 10, 2004
TT: Much more Mr. Nice Guy
I reviewed four plays in this morning's Wall Street Journal, Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays, the Broadway revival of La Cage aux Folles, August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean, and Caryl Churchill's A Number.Rather to my surprise, 700 Sundays was the best of the lot, despite its predictable weaknesses:
Go figure: Billy Crystal, who got his big break playing the first openly gay character on a network TV series, has ended up as a sort of 21st-century Bob Hope, the safe-as-milk middle-aged establishment comic who hosts the Oscars and is now making his Broadway debut with a one-man "play" at the Broadhurst Theatre about his charmed life as a loyal son, husband and father. Small wonder that "700 Sundays," with advance sales of $8 million plus, is on the inside track to be Broadway's uranium-plated smash of the season. And here's the biggest surprise of all: It's actually a pretty good show. Who says nice guys finish last?
I put "play" in quotes because "700 Sundays," like so many one-person shows, occupies an uncertain middle ground between standup routine and full-fledged play. Simply to tell the story of your life in monologue form may or may not be interesting, but it's rarely dramatic in the ordinary understanding of the word, and Mr. Crystal's luck has been too good to give his long string of essentially benign anecdotes the ruthless forward movement one demands from a play....
Mr. Crystal seems to be aware of the need to ratchet up the tension in his tale-telling, and when he recalls such potentially radioactive events as the death of his father, you can all but see him struggling to drag "700 Sundays" onto a higher plane of expressivity. Alas, he is barely capable of talking for more than 30 seconds without slipping in a punchline--a compulsion that is especially jolting whenever he tries to be serious....
La Cage aux Folles, on the other hand, was...well, read for yourself:
Once upon a time, "La Cage aux Folles" was a sweet little French film about a couple of graying gents, one of them a flouncy-to-the-max drag queen, who run a nightclub in St. Tropez. Stripped of the louche details, it turned out to be an unexpectedly touching study of the surmountable absurdities of middle-aged love and became the sleeper hit of 1978. Five years later, Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman got their hot little hands on this hot little property, pumped in several thousand tons of hot air, and thereby turned it into a monstrously inflated tourist trap of a musical that ran for 1,761 performances. Now "La Cage aux Folles" has returned to Broadway's Marquis Theatre, there to titillate a new generation of taste-challenged ticketholders.
Or maybe not. Times, after all, have changed greatly since 1983, and what once seemed ooh-so-risqué to Broadway audiences may well strike their children as dated beyond recall. For one thing, homosexuality has long since become a commonplace of American popular culture, not least on the New York stage, and you no longer get automatic PC points for merely showing two guys holding hands, even if one of them is a drag queen. In addition, the caravan of musical taste has also moved on, and I can't imagine that Mr. Herman's cynically cornball ditties (complete with banjo accompaniment) will have much to offer viewers suckled on "Avenue Q." As for Mr. Fierstein's book, it covers up Jean Poiret's original script with a plywood veneer of applause-sign jokes so thick as to completely obscure the wryness and warmth that made it so winning.
I didn't see the 1983 production, which was directed by Arthur Laurents, a man who knows his theatrical onions, but it must have been better than this glitzmobile. Daniel Davis and Gary Beach make no impression at all in the lead roles; Jerry Zaks's staging and Jerry Mitchell's dance numbers are similarly unmemorable; Scott Pask's sets are week-old cheddar. Even the chorus line gives transvestism a bad name....
Gem of the Ocean just wasn't my thing:
Everybody else in the world seems to think that August Wilson is the Great American Playwright, but I've found his cycle of history plays about the black experience in America to be far too self-consciously poetic, and "Gem of the Ocean," the latest installment, is no exception.
Those who beg to differ will need no urging to see this one, though, and even if you don't much care for Mr. Wilson's style, you'll be thrilled by Phylicia Rashad's queen-size performance as Aunt Ester, the 285-year-old clairvoyant who makes her first onstage appearance in "Gem of the Ocean" after having been talked about in eight previous plays. I didn't know Ms. Rashad could really act until I saw her in "A Raisin in the Sun" last year--I just figured she was the best of all possible Clair Huxtables--but now I'd go see her in anything, no questions asked....
And A Number was plain old disappointing:
Don't believe a word of the ballyhoo about Caryl Churchill's "A Number," running through Jan. 16 at the New York Theatre Workshop. For all Ms. Churchill's deckle-edged standing among the ranks of contemporary English playwrights, her latest effort is nothing more than a bagatelle, a one-act, 65-minute play whose clever premise (a father confronts three of his cloned sons) cannot conceal its slightness. Considered purely as a conversation piece, it starts off strongly, sags in the middle, then picks up speed at the end, not quite in time to save the day....
No link, alas, since there's plenty more where that came from. To read the whole thing, get off your behind and go buy a Journal. (For the lazy man's alternative, click here.)
Posted December 10, 2004 12:04 PM
