TT: Improving on Shaw

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I rave about the New York transfer of A Minister’s Wife and say a few tepid words about the much-ballyhooed King Lear currently playing at Brooklyn’s BAM Harvey Theater. Here’s an excerpt.
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The most important new musical since “The Light in the Piazza” has come to New York. “A Minister’s Wife,” in which Austin Pendleton, Joshua Schmidt and Jan Levy Tranen took a classic play by George Bernard Shaw and made it better, opened two years ago at Chicago’s Writers’ Theatre, one of America’s half-dozen top regional companies. Now this exquisite musical version of “Candida” has transferred to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center Theater’s smaller downstairs house, in a production staged with immaculate grace by Michael Halberstam, who conceived the show and directed its original Chicago production. To say that you mustn’t miss it is to grossly understate the case.
Comparisons with “My Fair Lady,” the other Shaw musical, are interesting but irrelevant: “My Fair Lady” is a Broadway operetta, while “A Minister’s Wife” balances on a knife-edge between post-Sondheim musical comedy and full-fledged opera. A one-act show performed on a single set by five singing actors and accompanied by four virtuoso instrumentalists, it takes one of Shaw’s talkiest plays, a study of what in 1894 would have been called a “modern” marriage, and transfuses it with the hot blood of pure lyricism….
This has been a frightful year for new musicals, which makes the arrival of “A Minister’s Wife” all the more satisfying. Needless to say, it’s not for everyone, and especially not for those who judge a musical solely by its decibel level and sequin tonnage. If you belong in that category, stuff your wallet full of cash and head for Times Square. If, on the other hand, you believe that a musical can be as smart, poignant and provocative as a first-rate play, then “A Minister’s Wife” will thrill you to the marrow….
You can’t get into the Donmar Warehouse’s production of “King Lear,” whose entire run at Brooklyn’s BAM Harvey Theater is sold out. Don’t sweat it, though: This “Lear,” directed by Michael Grandage, is very good but by no means great, and Derek Jacobi’s performance of the towering title role is interesting, which is a polite way of saying odd. Mr. Jacobi’s take on the mad monarch is essentially comic, a now-flamboyant, now-whiny medley of hoots and squeaks such as might be emitted by a gifted character actor trying to play a role that’s two sizes too large for him. The production itself is direct to the point of baldness….
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Read the whole thing here.