TT: Candide goes to Vegas

In today’s Wall Street Journal I wrap up my coverage of the current Broadway season with unenthusiastic reviews of Pippin and I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers. Here’s an excerpt.
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Diane Paulus first made a name for herself on Broadway by exhuming “Hair.” Now she’s back again with another hippy-dippy period piece, Stephen Schwartz’s “Pippin,” whose rock-and-water score was all the rage back in 1972. The original production, directed by Bob Fosse, ran for 1,944 performances, longer than “The Music Man,” “The Sound of Music” or “South Pacific.” Since then “Pippin” has faded from view, but Ms. Paulus’s production, which originated earlier this season at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre, is a knock-’em-dead extravaganza meant to “revive” the show in every sense of the word….
In 1972 Pippin’s tale was told by a ragtag band of commedia dell’arte players, whereas Ms. Paulus’ version is set in a circus tent and performed by a mixture of Broadway gypsies and circus acrobats. At the same time, she’s preserved some of the tone of Mr. Fosse’s universally admired production by having the show choreographed by Chet Walker “in the style of Bob Fosse” (that’s how his credit reads)….
Patina Miller, lately of “Sister Act,” is the Leading Player, a role created four decades ago by Ben Vereen, and her in-your-face performance sets the tone for Ms. Paulus’ relentlessly aggressive staging, which is big, noisy and mostly humorless, a “Pippin” that looks as if it had been born not in Cambridge but Las Vegas….
Bette Midler, like many pop singers, is a good screen actor. She’s never acted in a stage play, though, and somebody should have told her that she’d have been better off making her belated debut in something less demanding than a one-person Broadway show–especially since the show is no good. John Logan’s “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers,” in which Ms. Midler impersonates the late Hollywood superagent, isn’t the worst one-person play to hit Broadway this century (that would be “Ann”). It is, however, more than bad enough, and Ms. Midler’s performance, while not incompetent, is lackluster.
The hardest part of writing a solo show is infusing it with dramatic conflict. Mr. Logan (“Red”) hasn’t even tried to do that. All he does is plop Ms. Mengers down on a couch, on which she remains ensconced until the last half-minute of “I’ll Eat You Last,” and have her tell the story of her life, which consists in the main of a string of foul-mouthed anecdotes about her celebrated ex-clients , among them Gene Hackman, Ali MacGraw and Barbra Streisand. (Ms. Mengers, it seems, never took on a client who didn’t end up firing her.) Outside of a couple of incoming phone calls and an audience-participation bit, nothing else happens….
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Read the whole thing here.
A scene from I’ll Eat You Last: