Archives for April 2016

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review the last two Broadway openings of the 2015-16 season, Shuffle Along and Tuck Everlasting. Here’s an excerpt.

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The first half of George C. Wolfe’s “Shuffle Along” is to 2016 what “Hamilton” was to 2015: It’s the musical you’ve got to see, even if you have to hock your Maserati to pay for the ticket. The cast, led by Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Billy Porter, is as charismatic as you’d expect, and Savion Glover’s near-nonstop choreography explodes off the stage with the unrelenting impact of a flamethrower. But then comes intermission, and what had looked like a masterpiece goes flat and stays that way.

What’s wrong with “Shuffle Along”? In order to explain why the show doesn’t work, it’s necessary to start by explaining what it tries to do. The original “Shuffle Along,” which is now forgotten save by theater historians, was one of the very first all-black Broadway musicals to score a major commercial success. It can’t be revived because the book, by F.E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles, is dated beyond hope of revision, but the jazzy Eubie Blake-Noble Sissle score (which is now best remembered for “I’m Just Wild About Harry”) still retains much of its punch and charm. Hence Mr. Wolfe’s show, whose title, “Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,” sums up his approach. He has taken the score and used it as the basis for a “42nd Street”-style backstage musical that not only tells how “Shuffle Along” was made but seeks to explain its historic significance…

Mr. Wolfe, who directed “Shuffle Along” and wrote the book, has thus tried to cram two different but related shows onto the same stage, one of them a flashy, more or less traditional musical-with-a-message and the other a sober-sided play-with-songs about a little-known but nonetheless important episode in the history of black culture in America. The problem is that the first act, in which the emphasis is placed almost exclusively on the production numbers, is so viscerally entertaining that you can’t help but feel disappointed when the dancing stops and the talking starts—especially since the talking, while undeniably interesting, is for the most part undramatic, even bookish….

“Tuck Everlasting,” Natalie Babbitt’s immensely and deservedly successful 1975 children’s novel about immortality and its discontents, has now been turned into a modestly proportioned, low-key Broadway musical about a family whose members wander into an enchanted wood, drink unwittingly from a fountain of youth and live—and live—to regret it. The results aren’t perfect by any means, and the pop-folk score (music by Chris Miller, lyrics by Nathan Tysen) owes far too much to “Into the Woods” for comfort. Still, “Tuck Everlasting” realizes enough of its ambitions to be watchable…

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To read my review of Shuffle Along, go here.

To read my review of Tuck Everlasting, go here.

A CBS Sunday Morning feature about Shuffle Along:

Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert sing “Tonight” on The Ed Sullivan Show. The song, by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, is from the score of West Side Story. This performance, which documents Jerome Robbins’ staging of the number for the original Broadway production, was originally telecast by CBS on November 2, 1958:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“We’re all insecure. We’re all neurotic. We’re all trying so hard to figure our process out. And kindness behooves you, because you’ve got to come back the next day and do it again.”

Gavin Creel (interviewed by Dave Itzkoff in “For the Cast of ‘She Loves Me,’ It’s the Sweet Smell of a Revival,” New York Times, March 2, 2016)

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Eclipsed (drama, PG-13, Broadway remounting of off-Broadway production, closes June 19, original production reviewed here)
• Fully Committed (comedy, PG-13, closes July 24, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, closing Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for bright children capable of enjoying a love story, some performances sold out last week, closes July 10, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:
• Mary Page Marlowe (drama, PG-13, extended through June 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Stupid Fu**ing Bird (serious comedy, PG-13, contains nudity, closes May 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Arcadia (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

“Don’t you read anything but novels, I hear you say. I wish I could say that I really read novels. There are libraries full of novelists who are thought great whose work I have not read, or cannot read. I know some of Henry James, but not much, because I would rather read Powys. With the best will in the world I have never been able to get beyond the first few pages of Moby-Dick. Of the novels of Virginia Woolf I forbear to speak, because although I have read them, nothing can make me read them again; too much acute sensibility affects me as if I were a deep-sea diver—I get the bends. And I have to keep my mouth shut about D.H. Lawrence. I do not deny these delights to those who are able to appreciate them, but I am too old to pretend that they are for me.”

Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books (courtesy of Richard Zuelch)

I flew down to Florida last Friday morning and started rehearsing my Palm Beach Dramaworks production of Satchmo at the Waldorf that same afternoon. We put in two more full days of work on Saturday and Sunday. On Monday I flew back to New York to see Shuffle Along on Broadway, writing Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal drama column on the plane. I returned to West Palm Beach yesterday morning and resumed work on Satchmo promptly at noon, a bit underslept but not too much the worse for wear.

Much of this is par for the course when you’re putting on a show, but not the part where you have to fly to New York for one night to cover a Broadway opening. The problem, if you want to call it that, is my day job with The Wall Street Journal, which I take with the utmost seriousness. Yes, I’m making my professional debut as a stage director, but this is also the last week of the current Broadway season, which means that opening nights are coming fast and furious. Even if I’d wanted to take a month off to work on Satchmo, I couldn’t possibly have left the Journal in the lurch at this crucial time of year. So I decided to use the same mule to pull both carts—me, with my friend and colleague Ed Rothstein pinch-hitting for two shows that I simply couldn’t make it back to New York to see—and it was every bit as grueling as I’d expected.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that I’m having the time of my life anyway. Here’s how good a time I’m having: if I were thirty years younger, I think I might want to spend the rest of my life directing plays. I feel as though I’ve made a very important discovery about myself, just in the nick of time.

Mike Nichols made the same discovery when, at the age of thirty-one, he directed his first play, Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. “In the first fifteen minutes of the first day’s rehearsal,” he later said, “I understood that this was my job, this was what I had been preparing to do without knowing it….I felt happy and confident and I knew exactly what I wanted to do.”

Needless to say, I’m no Mike Nichols, and I’m twice as old as he was when he staged Barefoot in 1963. But I think I have some notion of how he felt that fateful day. No sooner did I walk into Palm Beach Dramaworks’ rehearsal room on Friday morning and say “O.K., let’s get going” than I felt confident of my ability to get Satchmo on its feet and put a personal stamp on the resulting staging, one that extends well beyond the mere fact of my also having written the script. What’s more, my confidence has so far been justified: at the end of two eight-hour rehearsals, the entire show was blocked, a full week ahead of the schedule that I drew up before coming to West Palm Beach.

It goes without saying that I couldn’t have done any of this without the help of my wonderful production team, starting with Jimmy Danford, Satchmo’s virtuoso stage manager, who sits at my right at each rehearsal and makes the impossible easy. On top of that, I have the further advantage of working with a brilliant actor, Barry Shabaka Henley, who just finished doing Satchmo forty times in Chicago and knows it cold. Nevertheless, I’m the one sitting in the driver’s seat, and somehow I seem to have known what I was doing there right from the start. I don’t understand how or why, any more than I understand how I was able to write Satchmo in the first place. Apparently this is how it works with directors: either you can do it or you can’t, and it seems that I can.

I’ve been involved with theater long enough to know that we’re more than likely to hit some fearfully bumpy stretches of road between now and May 13, when Satchmo opens. But I now feel reasonably confident that the show will be ready to go by then, and that I’ll still be having the time of my life. For whatever reason, I’m at home in the director’s chair—and I hope with all my heart that this won’t be the last time that I get to sit there.

Frank Zappa plays music on a pair of bicycles on The Steve Allen Show. This episode was originally telecast on March 4, 1963:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“As it is necessary not to invite robbery by supineness, so it is our duty not to suppress tenderness by suspicion; it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.”

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 79 (December 18, 1750)

Due to the end-of-season crush of Broadway openings, today’s Wall Street Journal contains an extra drama column in which I review Waitress and Fully Committed. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s long past time that Jessie Mueller got to appear in a Broadway musical that makes full use of her formidable talents. While she scored a solid hit in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” she was impersonating a shy, mousy homemaker turned singer-songwriter, not playing the kind of larger-than-life role from which stardom is born. Would that “Waitress” were that show. No such luck: It’s a tourist-trap romcom that has little to offer but Ms. Mueller and her fine supporting cast.

Closely based on Adrienne Shelly’s 2007 film and uninterestingly directed by Diane Paulus, “Waitress” tells the story of Jenna (Ms. Mueller), an unhappily married small-town waitress and virtuoso pie maker. She gets pregnant, falls in love with her handsome-but-married obstetrician, embarks on a torrid-but-doomed affair and is thereby inspired to…but need I go on? Everything that happens in “Waitress” is as familiar as a cafeteria salad—you could write your own synopsis of the chick-flick plot five minutes after the curtain goes up—and the characterizations are just as obvious….

Ms. Mueller, on the other hand, is so good that you’ll actively resent the mediocrity of “Waitress.” She’s an unusual hybrid, a world-class singer with the soul of a character actor who burrows so deeply into her parts as to become all but unrecognizable. Few musical-theater performers seem so real, and fewer still are such gifted actors that you’d be just as glad to see them in a straight play. As dull as “Waitress” is, she ennobles it….

“Fully Committed,” Becky Mode’s 2000 one-man play about a hapless young wannabe actor who takes reservation requests at an ultra-trendy Manhattan restaurant, has been revived on Broadway as a vehicle for Jesse Tyler Ferguson (“Modern Family,” “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”). The conceit of the show, snappily staged by Jason Moore, is that the star also plays 40 other people, most of them callers who are desperate to get a table. The immensely likable Mr. Ferguson doesn’t quite have the vocal flexibility necessary to impersonate so widely varied a gallery of characters, and so the tour-de-force aspect of “Fully Committed” isn’t fully realized. Even so, his acting crackles with physical energy and comic life…

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To read my complete review of Waitress, go here.

To read my complete review of Fully Committed, go here.

Jessie Mueller sings “She Used to Be Mine,” a song from Waitress:

From 2006:

I took a look yesterday at a list of the twelve top-grossing movies in North America. I’d heard of four of them: I read the novel on which Thank You for Smoking is based when it came out a few years ago, and I’ve seen posters for Phat Girlz, Failure to Launch, and She’s the Man while walking to and from the gym. The other eight weren’t even names to me, nor do I plan to seek them out. As I mentioned in this space a few weeks ago, I haven’t been to a movie theater since last October, and it’s been at least a year since I last saw a first-run episode of any TV series (not counting cooking shows, which I regard as a species of soft porn). As for pop music, the only new songs I hear are the ones that happen to be playing on the radios of the cabs that take me to and from the theater district.

I can’t remember when I’ve been so completely out of touch….

Read the whole thing here.