Archives for April 27, 2012

In today’s Wall Street Journal I wrap up the current Broadway season with reviews of Nice Work if You Can Get It, Leap of Faith, and Don’t Dress for Dinner. My verdicts are mostly mixed. Here’s an excerpt.
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Your grandmother is coming to New York for her annual visit. You want to take her to a nice, safe Broadway show, and the two of you saw “Anything Goes” last year. What to do? Simple: Head for “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” a jukebox musical in which Kathleen Marshall endeavors to make lightning strike twice, this time with songs by George and Ira Gershwin instead of Cole Porter. While it’s not nearly as good as its predecessor, it’s also not entirely bad. The songs are classic, the dances are dynamite, and everybody loves Kelli O’Hara. So what if the book is relentlessly unamusing and the acting rigidly derivative? You can’t win ’em all, right?
Like “Anything Goes,” “Nice Work” is built inside the husk of an ancient Broadway musical. Joe DiPietro, who wrote the book, has used “Oh, Kay!” as the skeleton for a meta-musical, a brand-new period piece in which the plot of “Arthur” (a rich, likable drunk is forced by his family to propose to the wrong girl, then meets the right one) is transplanted to the Roaring Twenties, tricked out with an assortment of other stock devices and festooned with no less than 21 Gershwin tunes, all but two of which are lifted from other shows. Even the performances are recycled: Ms. O’Hara does Mary Martin, Jennifer Laura Thompson does Madeline Kahn, Michael McGrath does Buddy Hackett, Chris Sullivan does Andy Devine, and Matthew Broderick does Matthew Broderick.
Would that Mr. DiPietro had stolen a few good jokes while he was at it, since “Nice Work” is devoid of them. Fortunately, Ms. O’Hara is her usual sweet self…
“Leap of Faith,” the musical version of the 1992 film in which Steve Martin played a crooked evangelist who has a crisis of faithlessness, is as slick as ice on Teflon. To be sure, Raúl Esparza, the hard-working star, is smooth in the wrong way–he comes across like a talk-show host, not a sequin-spangled faith healer–and none of the other members of the immensely likable cast give the impression of having traveled much farther west than Chelsea. But if you’re looking for pure Broadway razzmatazz, “Leap of Faith” delivers the goods. Robin Wagner’s set turns the interior of the St. James Theatre into a revival tent, and Christopher Ashley and Sergio Trujillo, the director and choreographer, put every square inch of it to effective use. The chorus rocks and rolls. The gospel-style songs, by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, are rousingly lively (though the ballads, as usual with Mr. Menken, sound like ’70s sitcom themes).
What “Leap of Faith” lacks are sweat and heart, the absence of which will only be bothersome if you permit yourself to imagine how this well-oiled applause machine might have run had its creators taken the plot seriously….
Were I ever to teach a course in how to stage farce, I’d show a video of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of “Don’t Dress for Dinner” so that my students would know what not to do. Written by Marc Camoletti, the author of “Boeing-Boeing,” the seven-door farce mounted to diverting effect by the Roundabout four years ago, “Don’t Dress for Dinner” is a comparably complicated comedy about a pair of married philanderers (Adam James and Patricia Kalember), the people with whom they cheat (Jennifer Tilly and Ben Daniels), and a French cook of the utmost avariciousness (Spencer Kayden, who was so good in “Urinetown”). When done well, it’s a hoot, but John Tillinger, the director, has made the amateurish mistake of encouraging his actors to troll aggressively for laughs instead of letting the situation generate them….
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Read the whole thing here.

The Broadway season ended yesterday, and the indefatigable Mrs. T and I will soon be on our way to Chicago, where we plan to see four shows (five if you count the two parts of Angels in America separately) at the Court Theatre, Next Theatre Company, the Goodman Theatre, and Chicago Shakespeare. In between we’ll be hanging out with Our Girl in Chicago, whom we haven’t seen for months and months.
I’ll try to keep you posted, but it’s going to be a hectic week, so be patient, O.K.? More as it happens, or shortly thereafter….

Yesterday I reviewed The Columnist, David Auburn’s new play about Joseph Alsop. In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I fill in some of the blanks about Alsop, who is no longer well known. Here’s an excerpt.
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Nobody remembers Joseph Alsop now, but in his day he was as famous as a journalist could be. A white-shoe-leather political columnist who went from Groton to Harvard to the New York Herald Tribune in three easy steps, he spent the whole of his life rubbing elbows with powerful pols whom he flattered assiduously, then wrote about in his widely read newspaper column. He was also a closeted homosexual who mistakenly supposed that no one knew of his after-hours inclinations. In fact, Alsop’s friends were well aware that he was gay–and so were his enemies.
David Auburn’s “The Columnist,” which opened on Broadway this week, hinges on something that happened to Alsop when he visited Moscow in 1957, at the height of the Cold War. It seems that he picked up a young man at a party and spent the night with him, not knowing that the fellow in question was a KGB operative and that he had inadvertently stumbled into what is known to intelligence agents as a “honey trap.” Alsop and his companion were secretly photographed having sex, and the next day the columnist was informed that if he didn’t agree to serve as an “agent of influence” for the Soviet Union after returning to America, he would be exposed as a homosexual, thrown in jail and left to rot….
That is, needless to say, quite a tale, and it’s easy to see why Mr. Auburn thought that it would make a rattling good play. But unless you know the history of American political journalism, certain parts of “The Columnist” may be a bit confusing, especially since it’s likely to leave uninformed viewers with the impression that Alsop, who was a staunch supporter of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, was a conservative. He was, in fact, a liberal anti-Communist, an FDR-loving New Deal Democrat who was violently opposed to both Joe McCarthy and the Soviet Union….
In addition, I suspect that many of those who see Mr. Auburn’s play will find it understandably hard to believe that a mere newspaper columnist could possibly have wielded the power that Alsop is portrayed as having in “The Columnist.” Today’s columnists derive such influence as they may have not from their writing but from their television appearances, which are the real source of their fame. A columnist who isn’t seen regularly on TV might as well be talking to himself. But in Joe Alsop’s day, it was perfectly possible for an op-ed columnist to win fame solely on the strength of what he wrote….
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Read the whole thing here.

“A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.”
Stewart Alsop, Stay of Execution