About Last Night

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the off-Broadway premiere of Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling and the new Broadway revival of She Loves Me. Here’s an excerpt.

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Kenneth Lonergan, the most talented American playwright of his generation, has done something unusual—he’s written a play. That makes six in 20 years, not nearly enough from so gifted an author, so I’m glad to report that “Hold On to Me Darling” is as fine as its first four predecessors. It’s also surprising: I wasn’t expecting Mr. Lonergan to return to the stage with a comedy, especially since his last effort, “Medieval Play,” was a too-broad spoof that didn’t quite work. Not so his new play, exceedingly well directed by Neil Pepe, in which he blends satire with strong, straightforward emotion to complex and poignant effect.

With a writer as subtle as Mr. Lonergan, appearances are usually deceiving. “Hold On to Me Darling” initially appears to be a comic retelling of the thrice-told tale of the corrupting effects of celebrity. Strings McCrane (Timothy Olyphant) is a country singer who came from nowhere and now has everything—except for his mother, who has just died, leaving him operatically bereft: “I been dead inside for years, and now Mama’s passin’ away has woke me up and I don’t like it.” So he decides to ditch his career, marry his masseuse (Jenn Lyon), return to his home town, buy the local feed store, go into business with his half-brother (C.J. Wilson) and his fawning personal assistant (Keith Nobbs) and live happily ever after.

All this foolery has a smart, piquant screwball flavor reminiscent of Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels.” But Mr. Lonergan also has a pair of hole cards, Strings’ cousin Essie (Adelaide Clemens) and his long-lost father (Jonathan Hogan), who have not previously been part of his life and so are untouched by his wealth and fame. Accordingly, both characters are played straight—the laughter stops each time they take the stage—and their arrival blasts Strings out of his self-obsession and forces him to see himself as he really is.

If “Hold On to Me Darling” sounds like two unrelated plays that have been uneasily yoked together, that’s how it feels at first. But Mr. Lonergan knows what he’s doing…

Perfection needs no commentary, so I’ll make it short and sweet: The Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of “She Loves Me” is ideal. The show itself, a 1963 stage version of “The Shop Around the Corner,” Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 romcom about two perfume-store clerks who love each other but don’t know it, is the most romantic of all Broadway musicals. Scott Ellis’ fleet, warm-hearted staging and Warren Carlyle’s witty dances do complete justice to Joe Masteroff’s charming book and the delicious Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick score: Every number pays off and every laugh lands with a bang. The sublime cast is led by Zachary Levi and Laura Benanti, who are as good onstage as Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan were in the film….

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To read my review of Hold On to Me Darling, go here.

To read my review of She Loves Me, go here.

Kenneth Lonergan and Timothy Olyphant talk about Hold On to Me Darling:

Highlights from the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of She Loves Me:

Lang Lang plays Bartók’s Piano Sonata at a concert in Japan:

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

“The maxim ‘Nothing avails but perfection’ may be spelt shorter: ‘Paralysis.’”

Winston Churchill, memorandum to General Hastings Lionel Ismay, December 6, 1942

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, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Eclipsed (drama, PG-13, Broadway remounting of off-Broadway production, closes June 19, most performances sold out last week, original production reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, 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, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Sense & Sensibility (serious romantic comedy, G, remounting of 2014 off-Broadway production, closes April 17, then reopens June 17-Oct. 2, original production reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Ah, Wilderness! (comedy, PG-13, closes April 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Prodigal Son (drama, PG-13, closes March 27, reviewed here)

“I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.”

Winston Churchill, “Painting as a Pastime”

I rarely have the luxury of seeing stage shows twice—my crowded reviewing schedule doesn’t allow it—but I did manage in recent days to see Bedlam’s Sense & Sensibility for the second time, and I’ll be doing the same thing tonight with the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of She Loves Me.

In the case of She Loves Me, which figures prominently on my personal list of the greatest pre-Company American musicals, I’m returning to Studio 54 because Laura Benanti, one of the stars of the show, missed the Thursday-night preview that I saw last week. Laura Shoop, her understudy, went on instead and gave a terrific performance, nailing the notorious high C in “Ice Cream” and charming the audience so completely that she received the warmest of ovations at evening’s end. I can’t say more because I’m reviewing She Loves Me in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, but I can assure you that should Shoop ever go on again, you won’t be sorry in the least to see her.

The reason why I went back to the remounting of Eric Tucker’s staging of Sense & Sensibility, whose original production I saw in November of 2014, was that Mrs. T didn’t get to see it with me the first time around. She loves Jane Austen and Bedlam with identical fervor, so when she asked if I’d take her to the Sunday matinée, I unhesitatingly said yes.

My 2014 Wall Street Journal review, although brief, was as enthusiastic as it gets:

Great theater isn’t about fancy sets or famous actors (though it doesn’t necessarily exclude either). It’s about imagination and intimacy. Given enough of both, a band of gifted unknowns can make theatrical magic in an empty room. That’s what Bedlam Theatre Company is doing with its no-budget off-off-Broadway productions of “The Seagull” and “Sense and Sensibility,” which are playing in repertory in a black-box performance space in downtown Manhattan that looks like the inside of a grungy warehouse….

Instead of passively letting the action unfold before your eyes, you have to meet Bedlam halfway in your mind, for no attempt is made at conventional theatrical illusion: Men play women, women play men, people play animals. The décor amounts to a half-dozen cheap-looking chairs and tables, the costumes and lighting are dirt-plain and most of the audience is seated within arm’s length of the playing area. Yet the paradoxical result is a realism so persuasive that rather than viewing a pair of over-familiar “classics” for the umpteenth time, you feel as though you’re witnessing something that really happened, perhaps earlier today….

“Sense and Sensibility,” newly and skillfully dramatized by Bedlam’s Kate Hamill, merits far more attention than I can give it here. Suffice it to say that while Ms. Hamill has left the novel’s early-19th-century setting (and diction) intact, she and Mr. Tucker have steered clear of PBS-style costume-shop gentility, instead giving us a version so full of galloping comic vitality as to suggest a bunch of stupendously clever kids playing dress-up in the nursery. It’s by far the smartest Jane Austen adaptation to come along since Amy Heckerling’s “Clueless,” and at least as much fun.

It happens that I had to see the second preview of Sense & Sensibility, and was warned by the management that much last-minute work remained to be done on the production. You couldn’t have proved it by me. Many of the details of the staging were still vividly clear in my mind a year and a half later, enough so for me to realize that the performance of Sense & Sensibility that I saw on Sunday was significantly different from—and even better than—the one I reviewed in 2014.

The biggest change, though, was in me. When you see a show for the first time, it comes at you as a a cloud of eventfulness, and even a trained observer is bound to have trouble grasping more than a sliver of what is happening on stage at any given moment, much less coming away with anything other than a necessarily fragmentary grasp of the total experience. When you see it for the second time, you’re no longer quite so overwhelmed, and can often think more clearly about what you’re seeing.

As I watched Sense & Sensibility for the second time, I realized that part of its uniqueness comes from the way in which Tucker, who is also Bedlam’s artistic director, has worked with his on- and off-stage collaborators to transplant avant-garde and expressionistic theatrical techniques into a popular, deliberately accessible context. On one level S & S is pure fun, a romp that combines the festive comic ingenuity of a twenty-door farce with the vaulting physicality of a ballet. But it is also, like everything Bedlam does, an extremely modern piece of work, one that uses anti-realistic devices—most notably a constantly shifting, at times quasi-cinematic point of view—to illuminate the inner lives of the principal characters in a deeply poetic way.

All this will make sense to anyone who’s read Bedlam’s mission statement:

Committed to the immediacy of the relationship between the actor and the audience, Bedlam creates theatre in a flexible, raw space and is interested in contemporary reappraisals of the classics, new writing and small-scale musical theatre.

Storytelling is paramount to us and the theatre we make always includes the audience in the story. We believe that innovative use of space can collapse aesthetic distance and bring the audience into direct contact with the dangers and delicacies of life.

But mere words, however eloquent—and I include my own—cannot do more than hint at the overwhelming effect that Bedlam and its leader have had on me since I first reviewed the company four years ago. Now that I’ve seen S & S twice, I’m awestruck by Tucker’s burgeoning creativity, and by the way in which the marvelous actors with whom he now works more or less regularly have coalesced into a true theatrical ensemble, one of a handful to exist in this country. He is, in my opinion, the David Cromer of classical theater, one of the most radically original American stage directors of our time.

I hasten to add that I already felt that way before seeing Sense & Sensibility on Sunday. But seeing the show a second time was more than merely the confirmation of a long-standing feeling. It taught me new things about what theater can do, and inspired me, as Bedlam always does, to try taking more chances in my own theatrical life. That’s the highest compliment I know: seeing Bedlam makes me want to work harder, and be better.

UPDATE: Bedlam announced today that Sense & Sensibility, which is currently set to close April 17, will reopen on June 17 and run through October 2.

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A panel discussion about Bedlam’s stage version of Sense & Sensibility, featuring members of the cast and production team:

Harry James and His Orchestra play Ernie Wilkins’ “Blues for Sale” on The Big Record, followed by a performance of “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You” featuring Helen Forrest, James, and the band. The segment is introduced by Patti Page. It was originally telecast by CBS on May 14, 1958:

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

“A man has his beliefs: his arguments are only his excuses for them.”

George Bernard Shaw (quoted in Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: 1856-1898, The Search for Love)