Broadway is jumping, and for the rest of the month I’ll be filing two or three drama columns each week for The Wall Street Journal. In today’s paper I review The Motherf**ker With the Hat and Catch Me if You Can. The first–very much to my surprise, by the way–is a knockout, the second a dud. Here’s an excerpt.
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Theatergoers familiar with the work of Stephen Adly Guirgis know that the gigawatt expletive embedded in the title of his latest play is one of his favorite words–on stage, anyway. Whether the public at large will feel comfortable seeing it on a marquee is an open question. Broadway is a scary place to open a straight play, especially one whose name can’t be said out loud on network TV. It stands to reason that “The Motherf**ker With the Hat” (to give the play its official, double-asterisked title) should have done poorly in previews, the buzz-inducing presence of Chris Rock notwithstanding. But even though the title is too clever by half, Mr. Guirgis’ play is buzzworthy in its own right. It’s tight, smart and splendidly well-made, a tough-minded, unromantically romantic comedy that keeps you laughing, then sends you home thinking.
“Hat” (let’s leave it at that) is about two working-class couples who are too close for comfort. Jackie (Bobby Cannavale), a violent hothead who just got out of jail and is now trying to get clean and sober, is crazy about Veronica (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who has an equally short fuse but has yet to discover the joys of sobriety. Ralph D. (Mr. Rock), Jackie’s sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous, is a fast-talking scamster whose long-suffering wife (Annabella Sciorra) knows what he’s up to and has had it up to here. When Jackie finds a strange man’s hat in the grungy apartment that he shares with Veronica, all hell breaks loose. To say more would be to give the game away, but rest assured that you won’t get even a half-step ahead of Mr. Guirgis, who deals a steady stream of surprising cards all evening long….
Time was when musicals got made into movies. Now it’s the other way around. A successful Hollywood film is now seen as one of the safest possible sources for a big-budget Broadway musical, since it brings to the stage–at least in theory–its own built-in audience of fans. Not that that stopped the producers of “9 to 5” from losing their shirts, but generally speaking, the theory is sound. Would that it made for better shows. “Catch Me if You Can” is a case in point, a glossy stage version of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 movie that is musically unmemorable and emotionally dead….
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Read the whole thing here.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
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