Archives for April 26, 2016

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.

“‘You don’t like buttermilk, or nothing else. You’re like a starving person whose stomach is shrunk up from not having any food. You’re shrunk up from not wanting nothing.’

“‘I want to get to San Francisco,’ Lorena said. ‘It’s cool, they say.’

“‘You’d be better off if you could just enjoy a poke once in a while,’ Augustus said, taking one of her hands in his and smoothing her fingers. ‘Life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.’”

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove