In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two Broadway shows, Sting’s The Last Ship and a revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. Neither is up to scratch. Here’s an excerpt.
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With “The Last Ship,” Sting becomes the latest sexagenarian rock star to try his hand at writing a Broadway musical—and the latest to blow it. Not that he didn’t have help galore from John Logan and Brian Yorkey, who have weighed him down with a stinker of a book. Nevertheless, his own mistakes merit careful consideration, if only in the hope of preventing other novices from galumphing down the same road to artistic ruin.
First, though, the book. As soon as the phrase “An industry dies” is uttered some 15 seconds into “The Last Ship,” you know everything that will happen for the next two-and-a-half hours: (A) Obsolescent factory (in this case, a shipyard) goes belly-up. (B) Angry workers join hands to reopen it, thereby (C) regaining their manhood. It is, in other words, the Universal British Plot, in this case meaning “Kinky Boots” minus sequins.
When you start out with clichés, you usually end up with them, and Messrs. Logan (“Red”) and Yorkey (“If/Then”) let ‘em fly throughout….
The anodyne pop-rock music of “The Last Ship,” which began life as an album-length song cycle, sounds like an anthology of B-sides—no, better make that C-sides. As for the lyrics, they are, predictably enough, dramatically inert: None of them tells you anything you don’t already know about the characters or the plot, meaning that this “ship” loses its momentum, goes dead in the water and starts to sink whenever anyone strikes up a tune….
The Roundabout Theatre Company is giving “The Real Thing,” Tom Stoppard’s stingingly truthful portrait of modern marriage and its discontents, its third Broadway outing in as many decades. That’s not too often, but only if the revivals are out of the ordinary, and Sam Gold’s lackluster staging fails to rise to the occasion.
It happens that “The Real Thing” was done extraordinarily well at Chicago’s Writers’ Theatre in a standard-setting 2011 production directed by Michael Halberstam and starring Carrie Coon, with whom, thanks to “Gone Girl” and “The Leftovers,” the rest of America is now catching up. Maggie Gyllenhaal is playing the same role in New York—it is, surprisingly, her Broadway debut—but she doesn’t make anything like the same who-is-this-amazing-woman impression as did Ms. Coon. Also in the cast are Ewan McGregor (another Broadway debutant) and Cynthia Nixon, both of whom, like Ms. Gyllenhall, give performances that are forced and over-emphatic. Moreover, the overall pacing of the show is sluggish: “The Real Thing” demands a light, deceptively casual-sounding touch, and doesn’t get it.
Could it be that the production is getting in the way of the actors? Mr. Gold is an intelligent, imaginative interventionist who at his frequent best sheds sharp raking light on the plays that he stages. Here, though, his “innovations,” such as they are, have the meretricious smack of arbitrary cleverness…
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To read my review of The Last Ship, go here.
To read my review of The Real Thing, go here.
A scene from Writers’ Theatre’s 2011 revival of The Real Thing, starring Carrie Coon:
8. The way Nancy LaMott sings the line “New Jersey gives us glue” on her record of 
What struck me most forcibly about Crimes and Misdemeanors on first viewing was the way in which Allen portrays his own character’s relationship with his on-screen niece, a child who is dressed in the style of an adult and whom his character treats as an adult, to the point of making confessions to her about his love life that are—to put it very, very mildly—inappropriate. It would be an understatement to say that I didn’t find these scenes any more palatable in Waco. In fact, I went so far as to refer to the film as “an esoteric confession” in the post-screening discussion, a statement that no one in the room, not even Allen’s avowed admirers, made haste to criticize.
In the evening I saw Horton Foote’s Tender Mercies, which was shot not far from Waco in 1982 and was shown on Saturday at the First Baptist Church, an edifice at once grandiose and homey which was built in 1906 and whose sanctuary, where we saw the film, is big enough to seat three thousand people. After the screening, Bruce Beresford, the director, took questions from the audience, in the process proving himself to be both charming and (as befits an Aussie) thoroughly down to earth.
This is a beautiful and powerful speech, especially as delivered by Duvall, but when parsed it hints rather more than casually at a view of the world not far removed from that of Crimes and Misdemeanors, which is that life is pandemonium. And the only “answer” given by Foote to Mac’s anguished question comes in the next and final scene, in which we watch him playing catch with his stepson while the boy’s mother looks on. Here again Foote appears to be in close concord with Allen in suggesting that the sole meaning of life accessible to human beings is that with which they themselves endow it by choosing to cleave to one another. Yet the denouement of Tender Mercies, unlike that of Crimes and Misdemeanors, is the furthest thing from jejune.