Archives for 2017

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the first New York revival of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song and the East Coast premiere of the stage version of Shakespeare in Love. Here’s an excerpt.

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In 1982, Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy,” a four-hour autobiographical play about a drag queen who longs for nothing more than to settle down with a regular guy, looked very much like an act of cultural revolution. That it won a best-play Tony, ran for three years on Broadway and was then turned into a movie suggests in retrospect, however, that Mr. Fierstein’s play might not have been quite so radical as it once seemed. So does the first New York revival of what is now called “Torch Song,” from which he’s cut an hour and a half (you won’t miss it) and in which the lead role is being played not by the author but by Michael Urie, formerly of “Ugly Betty.” More than two years after same-sex marriage became the law of the land, “Torch Song” is looking more like a commercial comedy about a nice Jewish boy and his impossible mother—and a pretty good one, too.

The only thing wrong with Second Stage’s off-Broadway revival of “Torch Song,” which has been very effectively directed by Moisés Kaufman, is Mr. Urie, a fine actor who is miscast as Mr. Fierstein (yes, he’s called “Arnold Beckoff” in the play, but we all know who he really is). Whether on stage or screen, Mr. Fierstein was unforgettable, and to see Mr. Urie trying to put his own stamp on the part merely underlines why his predecessor was so good in it….

The most frequently produced play in America is a new stage adaptation of a 19-year-old movie—one that has yet to make it to New York. Lee Hall’s “Shakespeare in Love,” concocted by Disney Theatrical Productions, opened in London in 2014 and is being performed on 15 different U.S. stages this season….

If, like me, you’re dismayed by the rise of what I call “commodity theater,” of which screen-to-stage adaptations of hit movies like “Shakespeare in Love” are exemplary, then you won’t be thrilled by this piece of news. On the other hand, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, which has just brought it to the East Coast, is a dead-serious company that does consistently fine work. If they’re doing “Shakespeare in Love,” there must be something to it, right? So I went out to New Jersey to see for myself, and I’m happy to say that the results are enormous fun.

I suspect this has everything to do with Bonnie J. Monte’s production, which is being performed on a miniature replica of an Elizabethan theater built on the stage of her company’s elegantly proportioned 308-seat proscenium house. Instead of emulating the film’s prettified slickness, Ms. Monte has opted to play “Shakespeare in Love” straight down the middle, trusting Tom Stoppard’s matchlessly witty dialogue to speak for itself….

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To read my review of Torch Song, go here.

To read my review of Shakespeare in Love, go here.

Harvey Fierstein’s opening monologue from Paul Bogart’s screen version of Torch Song Trilogy:

The trailer for the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey production of Shakespeare in Love:

Fred Steiner talks about how he composed “Park Avenue Beat,” the theme for the Perry Mason TV series:

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

“Whether or not your play succeeds is essentially arbitrary.”

Christopher Shinn (interviewed by Jessie Thompson in the Evening Standard, August 10, 2017)

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I report on plans for the first revival of Jerome Robbins’ Broadway since it closed a quarter-century ago. Here’s an excerpt.

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Most people who go to the theater regularly keep a little list of unforgettable shows. Mine is topped by “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” the 1989 revue in which Broadway’s greatest choreographer restaged an evening’s worth of his production numbers from “Billion Dollar Baby,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Gypsy,” “High Button Shoes,” “The King and I,” “Peter Pan,” “On the Town” and “West Side Story.” I’m not old enough to have seen the original productions of any of the 15 musicals that Robbins choreographed between 1944 and 1964, when he left Broadway to concentrate on ballet. I figured I’d never get another chance to see their dances staged by the master himself, so I bought a ticket to the first preview. I went back five more times—all on my own dollar….

One of the reasons why I kept going back was that I took for granted that the show was too complicated and expensive an undertaking to be more than a one-shot event. I was right. After a 633-performance Broadway run, it toured 12 cities, closing in Los Angeles in February of 1991. It has never been performed since then. So I was flabbergasted—no gentler word will suffice—when St. Louis’ Muny, America’s largest and oldest outdoor musical theater, announced last week that it would revive “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” in the summer of 2018 as part of its 100th-anniversary season….

Why does the revival of a quarter-century-old musical-comedy revue matter so much? The answer lies in the evanescent nature of choreography. Unlike music, it isn’t written down (though dance steps can be notated after the fact). Unless a concerted attempt is made to preserve a dance, it vanishes into thin air after its last performance—and surprisingly few attempts have been made to document the great Broadway dance numbers….

“Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” actually began life in 1987 as an attempt by Robbins to resurrect some of the dances from his other shows. “I hated the idea that they were just disappearing,” he said. So he invited a group of aging Broadway gypsies to help him reconstruct the “Bathing Beauty Ballet” dance, an homage to silent-movie slapstick comedy, from “High Button Shoes.” The results were so successful that he decided to put together a full-evening retrospective that would give a new generation of theatergoers “a taste of the years I worked on Broadway.” To revive it now is—quite literally—a historic event….

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Read the whole thing here.

A TV commercial for the original 1989 production of Jerome Robbins’ Broadway:

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:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Prince of Broadway (musical revue, PG-13, some shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Home Place (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Mary Jane (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PHILADELPHIA:
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• A View from the Bridge (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“Apart from needing money, the only reason to write is to face one’s pathologies.”

Christopher Shinn (interviewed by Jessie Thompson in the Evening Standard, August 10, 2017)

Pablo Casals plays Bach’s First Unaccompanied Cello Suite in 1954 at the Abbaye Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa in Prades, France:

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

“There was really nothing to be done about Ronnie, at least that I could do. He would go on turning a dollar in one way or another until he ended up in Folsom or a mortuary or a house with a swimming pool on top of a hill. There were thousands like him in my ten-thousand-square-mile beat: boys who had lost their futures, their parents and themselves in the shallow jerry-built streets of the coastal cities; boys with hot-rod bowels, comic-book imaginations, daring that grew up too late for one war, too early for another.”

Ross Macdonald, The Way Some People Die