Broadway and off-Broadway are roaring to life as the 2009-10 season gets underway. In this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review three newly opened shows, Bye Bye Birdie, Oleanna, and Let Me Down Easy. Here’s an excerpt.
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If you’re looking for light entertainment, you can’t get much lighter than “Bye Bye Birdie,” a flyweight farce about the coming of rock and roll to small-town America….
Vast amounts of money and energy have been poured into this production, for the most part to winning effect. Robert Longbottom’s brisk staging and clever choreography flow together seamlessly. The quick-change space-age sets, designed by Andrew Jackness, look as though they’d been swiped from the warehouse of a late-’60s TV variety show. Jonathan Tunick’s new orchestrations evoke Nelson Riddle and Count Basie with smoothly swinging exactitude. The costumes are colorful, the chorus fabulous, the pit band hip.
So what’s the catch? Just this: Only one of the stars can sing….
Not to put too fine a point on it, the Roundabout’s revival of “Bye Bye Birdie” is the worst-sung musical I’ve ever seen on Broadway. If that prospect doesn’t faze you, or if you’re tone-deaf, then go with my blessing…
The Los Angeles revival of David Mamet’s “Oleanna” that I praised in this space in July has now transferred to Broadway. The big difference is that it’s being acted on a proscenium stage in New York, which diminishes the fist-in-the-face impact that Doug Hughes’ production had when I saw it on the thrust stage of the Mark Taper Forum. I think this may explain why the play seems to get off to a slower start: Bill Pullman has to work harder to fill the space of the John Golden Theatre, and in the first scene it feels as though the play is catching up with his twitchy, hyperactive performance as a college professor charged with sexual harassment. Once Mr. Pullman and the script get into sync, though, “Oleanna” flies to the finish line, and Julia Stiles is terrific throughout…
Anna Deavere Smith’s new one-woman show bills itself as being about health care, but the truth is that “Let Me Down Easy” is mostly about the grimmer subject of death and dying. Not only are the results depressing in the extreme, but Ms. Smith’s latest exercise in theatrical journalism, in which she delivers monologues based on interviews with a dozen real-life characters, is stronger on the journalism than the theater. Her flat-textured “impersonations” of such familiar figures as Lance Armstrong and Lauren Hutton run to caricature…
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Read the whole thing here.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
