Archives for April 25, 2019

I’ve been so horrifically busy throughout the past couple of weeks that I forgot to mention that the twenty-ninth episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

This episode consists of just the three of us, talking about what we’ve seen and thought of late. Here’s an excerpt from American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings. “They” is “us”:

They start this week talking all things Lear, namely the revival currently playing on Broadway starring Glenda Jackson as the embittered monarch. They talk about where the production succeeded, where it failed—and why they’re all sick of the play. They then perform a bittersweet postmortem on The Band’s Visit, which recently closed. Then they go into their mailbag to talk about playwrights getting billing above their own work, when it’s okay to read the book of a play you’re reviewing, and the origins of 3OTA.

Finally, they go around the table to talk about Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie from the Mad Ones at Ars Nova, Life Sucks by Aaron Posner, and Irish Rep’s revival of Juno and the Paycock.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway premiere of Tootsie. Here’s an excerpt.

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It was inevitable that “Tootsie,” Sydney Pollack’s much-loved 1982 romcom about an out-of-work actor who dresses in drag to nail a soap-opera role, would sooner or later be turned into a big-ticket commodity musical. The good news is that the job has been done more competently than anyone had any reason to expect…

Soaps having long since become all but extinct, Michael Dorsey (Santino Fontana) is now trying to get cast as the nurse in an inept musical version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Otherwise, Robert Horn’s book tracks the screenplay fairly closely, with a not-so-surprising pre-intermission surprise (you’ll see it coming a mile off) and a stiff dose of eat-your-kale #MeToo-style feminism stirred in to keep the progressives comfy.

The score is by David Yazbek (lately of “The Band’s Visit”), a craftsman of the top rank whose songs, all of which are adroitly slotted into the book, propel the plot in classic school-of-Hammerstein style….

The catch, of course, is that “Tootsie” doesn’t need to be a musical: Like “Groundhog Day,” it’s perfect as is. In particular, the Larry Gelbart-Murray Schisgal screenplay is unimprovable, a fact driven home every time you hear a punchline spoken onstage that was derived from the movie…

I would absolutely have paid to see Sarah Stiles sing “What’s Gonna Happen,” the show-stopping comic number about her neurotic insecurities (“I know what’s gonna happen/Don’t tell me that I don’t/And don’t say that I’ll rise/To the occasion, cause I won’t”) that is the freshest thing about this new version….

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Read the whole thing here.

Sarah Stiles sings David Yazbek’s “What’s Gonna Happen” (from the stage version of Tootsie) at BroadwayCon 2019:

“Among the calamities of war, may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.”

Samuel Johnson, The Idler (November 11, 1758)