Archives for April 25, 2014

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the last three shows of the 2013-14 Broadway season, Casa Valentina, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Cabaret. Here’s an excerpt.
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Broadway’s new motto is “All Transvestism, All the Time!” In addition to “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” “Kinky Boots” and “Matilda,” three more shows in which cross-dressing figures prominently have just opened on the Great Sequined Way. Topping the list is “Casa Valentina,” a history play by Harvey Fierstein about the Chevalier d’Eon Resort, a now-defunct Catskills hideaway (yes, it really existed) that catered to straight men who liked to dress up as women.
It’s been a long time since Mr. Fierstein, who now specializes in musical-comedy books, wrote a play, and longer still since he wrote a successful one. Given the subject matter of “Kinky Boots,” his most recent effort, and “Torch Song Trilogy,” the 1982 play about a drag queen that made him kind-of-sort-of famous, it would seem at first glance that he’s well and truly stuck in a velvet-and-tulle rut. But “Casa Valentina” ends up being a lot more interesting than it looks at first glance, for certain of the guests at the Chevalier d’Eon, though they all claim not to be gay, turn out on closer inspection to be something other than straight–a revelation that transforms what started out as a comedy into a full-blown tragedy.
Mr. Fierstein isn’t able to set a clear tone for “Casa Valentina,” which lurches awkwardly from take-my-wife-please one-liners to stilted sermonizing to blackmail-powered melodrama. Nor has he figured out how to bring the play to a convincing close, instead letting it trail off irresolutely. But it’s never boring…
Sixteen years ago, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” a 90-minute musical monologue by a gender-bent East German punk rocker with an iatrogenic microphallus (you can look it up), was an in-your-face piece of cutting-edge downtown theater. Now it’s a period piece, the proof of which is that it has finally opened uptown in a commercial revival that features Neil Patrick Harris, an openly gay, universally liked network sitcom star.
Mr. Harris’ winsome drag act reminded me of Alan Alda’s perfomance as Shelly in the 2005 Broadway revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross”: Though he’s got the moves down pat, you come away suspecting that this Hedwig had to learn some of the four-letter words phonetically, if you catch my drift….
The Roundabout Theatre Company has brought back its sleazed-up 1998 production of “Cabaret,” co-directed by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall and starring Alan Cumming as a more-than-usually-androgynous Master of Ceremonies. Seeing as how the Mendes-Marshall revival of the 1966 John Kander-Fred Ebb musical about love and terror in Weimar Germany closed just 10 years ago, I’d call this re-revival an unabashed attempt by a non-profit theater company to mint some much-needed money. With the second Broadway revival of “Les Misérables” playing to near-full houses nine blocks south, though, why complain? It’s a business.
I don’t share in the general enthusiasm for Mr. Cumming’s overcooked performance, which pales in intensity when compared to the diamond-hard detachment that Joel Grey, who created the role in the original stage production, brought to Bob Fosse’s extraordinary 1972 film version, from which Messrs. Mendes and Marshall borrowed a thing or three. But Michelle Williams plays Sally Bowles, the shopworn diva of the Kit Kat Club, with a poignant blend of vulnerability and desperation…
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Read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I examine two very different events that both relate to the problem of school censorship. Here’s an excerpt.
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Spring is here, which means that it’s time once again for the American Library Association’s annual top-10 list of “most frequently challenged books.” These are the books that have drawn the largest number of formal complaints “requesting that materials be removed [from a library] because of content or appropriateness.” Each time it comes out, enlightened readers hasten to snigger at those benighted members of the booboisie who dare to suggest that “Of Mice and Men” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” both of which have previously appeared on the list, might possibly be thought unsuitable for consumption by youngsters….
These 10 books inspired just 307 challenges last year. That’s chump change in a country of 318 million people, a quarter of whom identify themselves as Republicans.
Furthermore, I’m struck by the fact that these books, as well as the other most frequently challenged titles of the 21st century, are for the most part–if I may say so–rather less than stellar in quality….
Do the classics get censored? Once in a while–but usually with different results. Consider, for example, the passionate protests that were inspired by the recent decision of New Hampshire’s Timberlane Regional School District to cancel a Timberlane High School production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.” The school board, according to Superintendent Earl Metzler, was “uncomfortable with the script…We felt there were parts in there that just weren’t acceptable.” But virtually all of the protesters were opposed to the cancellation….
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Read the whole thing here.

“There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.”
George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical