Archives for March 17, 2017

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price. Here’s an excerpt.

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“The Price,” the least frequently revived of Arthur Miller’s major plays, has returned to Broadway after a 17-year absence, this time in a Roundabout Theatre Company production starring a Broadway debutant by the name of Danny DeVito. That’s news right there. Moreover, “The Price” is Miller’s best play—the only one, in my opinion, that is totally successful as a work of theatrical art—and Jessica Hecht, Mark Ruffalo and Tony Shalhoub, Mr. DeVito’s co-stars, are actors of high repute. But big-name productions aren’t always all that they ought to be, especially when they feature movie stars with limited stage experience. While Mr. DeVito got his start off Broadway, it’s been upward of 40 years since he was last seen on a New York stage, and the only play in which he’s acted in recent memory was a 2012 West End revival of Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys.” On top of that, Mr. DeVito, a New Jersey-born Italian-American, has been cast as Gregory Solomon, an 89-year-old used-furniture dealer with a Minsk-Kapinsk Russian-Yiddish accent. He’s 72, so it isn’t that much of a stretch for him to play someone who’s a decade and a half older, but otherwise, as Solomon himself might say, typecast he’s not.

So how’s he doing? We’ll get to that. For now, let’s talk about the play. First performed in 1968, “The Price” is the story of Victor and Walter Franz (Mr. Ruffalo and Mr. Shalhoub), two brothers who haven’t spoken to one another for 16 years. Victor is an angry, frustrated beat cop, Walter a surgeon in a camel’s-hair coat, and Esther (Ms. Hecht), Victor’s status-conscious wife, hates the fact that he isn’t as successful as Walter (though she loves him anyway). The setting is the attic of the Franz family home, which is crammed tight with ancient furniture that Victor and Walter want to sell off….

For reasons of his own, Mr. Miller claimed in 1999 that “The Price” was all about Vietnam. Maybe so, but it’s also—and mainly—a resounding parable of the power of pride to gnaw away at the ties that ought to bind a family….

The highly charged naturalism of Mr. Ruffalo’s acting is terrifically impressive—he’s going to be one of the great Willy Lomans once he gets a little more age on him—and Mr. Shalhoub, whose post-“Monk” stage performances have all been noteworthy, leaves nothing to be desired….

On the debit side, Mr. DeVito is effective enough in an obvious way, but he’s using Solomon as a star turn, wearing him like an ill-fitting suit instead of creating him from the inside out….

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Read the whole thing here.

The cast and director of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of The Price talk about the play:

A complete performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, telecast live by the BBC from London’s Royal Albert Hall on August 4, 1964. The soloists are Heather Harper, Thomas Hemsley, and Peter Pears, accompanied by the Melos Ensemble, the London Philharmonic Choir, the BBC Chorus and Choral Society, and the BBC Symphony. Britten conducts the Melos Ensemble and Meredith Davies conducts the full orchestra:

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

In the online version of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, David Byrne’s new Public Theater musical. Here’s an excerpt.

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Chronologically speaking, David Byrne, who was born in 1952, is by definition a purveyor of what the millennials call “dad rock.” But there’s nothing daddishly old-fashioned about the minimalism-tinged world-music rock of the founder of Talking Heads, who in recent years has discovered the stage and is now presenting his second show, “Joan of Arc: Into the Fire,” at the Public Theater. The Public’s latest musical-theater ventures, “Fun Home” and “Hamilton,” are as unsquare as it gets. As for Mr. Byrne, anything by the man who gave us “Houses in Motion” and “Life During Wartime” is bound to be worth seeing—or hearing—and “Joan of Arc” is no exception. Even so, it isn’t a fully successful theatrical experience, and the reasons why “Joan of Arc” doesn’t quite come off are almost more interesting than the show itself.

The most surprising thing about “Joan of Arc” is its straightforwardness. Mr. Byrne, who has written the book as well as the songs, steers clear of the ironic overlay usually found in contemporary treatments of the story. His Joan of Arc is an innocent young countrywoman who claims to have been visited by angels, believes what they tell her, transforms herself into a warrior, endures hideous tortures at the hands of her inquisitors and goes to the stake secure in her faith….

What gives here? All I know of Mr. Byrne’s religiosity, or lack of it, is his reply when asked by a journalist in 2002 if there is a God: “I would say yes, but in a form so strange and so convoluted and so unusual for us that we will never, ever understand it.” This makes it all the more surprising that “Joan of Arc” is direct to the point of naïveté. The lyrics are singsongy: “Each day we take confession/As the towns they hold all fall/With my banner here beside me/To each village large and small.” As for the dramaturgy, it’s rigidly linear, with event following event in a pageant-like procession that makes “Joan of Arc,” like “Jesus Christ Superstar” before it, feel more like an oratorio—or a double album—than a stage drama.

None of this would matter if Mr. Byrne’s through-composed score were more musically varied, but while it has his stylistic fingerprints all over it, every song in “Joan of Arc” consists of an endless string of four-bar phrases in four-four time. In the near-total absence of extended dialogue scenes, you find yourself longing after a half-hour or so for something to break the sameness—a waltz, a joke, even an intermission….

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Read the whole thing here.

David Byrne, Alex Timbers, and Jo Lampert (who plays the title role) talk about Joan of Arc: Into the Fire:

“Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love.”

Charles Péguy, Basic Verities (trans. Anne and Julien Green)