April 30, 2010
Sondheim Sensibility: Harsh Truth About Life By STEPHEN HOLDEN
A wonderful, little-known song that leaps out of the biographical revue “Sondheim on Sondheim” is a taunting show tune, “Now You Know,” from the 1981 musical “Merrily We Roll Along.” One of that revue’s six numbers from “Merrily,” it encapsulates Stephen Sondheim’s skeptical worldview as tartly as anything the composer has written.
“I mean, big surprise: people love you and tell you lies/Bricks can fall out of clear blue skies,” Leslie Kritzer sings with chipper, smart-aleck zest. Her character from “Merrily,” Mary Flynn, is a tough cookie and best friend of the embattled songwriting team at the show’s center.
“It’s called flowers wilt/It’s called apples rot,/It’s called thieves get rich and saints get shot,” she continues.
Even God, who is seldom glimpsed in the Sondheim universe, makes a fleeting appearance, only to be dismissed as a disappointment who “doesn’t answer prayers a lot.”
That song’s solution to despair is to grit your teeth and soldier on: “It’s called count to 10/It’s called burn your bridges, start again.” The only palliative to the bitterness of experience is a therapeutic imperative: “Now you grow.”
“Now You Know” is a high point of “Sondheim on Sondheim,” the biographical anthology of his songs, conceived and directed by James Lapine for the Roundabout Theater Company at Studio 54. The show, which also stars Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams, Tom Wopat, Norm Lewis, Euan Morton, Erin Mackey and Matthew Scott, blends performances of Sondheim songs, famous and obscure, with interview footage in which the composer, who recently turned 80, discusses his life and creative process.
Mr. Sondheim may be the last great songwriter, in a lineage that runs from Jerome Kern through the Gershwins to Leonard Bernstein, who pushed the Broadway musical from a brash, vaudevillian entertainment into a loftier realm. But of all of them, Mr. Sondheim went the furthest in deconstructing and reinventing a populist art form as a highbrow version of itself.
Mr. Sondheim’s music examines the entire pre-1960s tradition, from Gilbert and Sullivan and Viennese operetta, through the Gershwins’ satires, Cole Porter’s burlesque musicals and beyond. The pastiche songs of “Follies,” particularly, recycle the styles of classic show tunes, matching or outdoing their antecedents in quality while subverting their escapism. His competitive relationship with the past, a kind of serial patricide, culminated with the “murder” of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II.
In this revue’s videotaped interviews, Mr. Sondheim goes out of his way to praise Hammerstein for teaching him the craft of writing lyrics. But if you compare the two, the inescapable fact emerges that Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics programmatically repudiate his mentor’s optimistic, inspirational ideology.
Hammerstein’s lyrics are synonymous with America’s post-World War II “Father Knows Best” ethos of moral rectitude, in which confident breadwinners and their perfect little wives are busy multiplying and building a safe new world of peace and freedom. The basic building block of this sanctuary of hope and optimism is a happily married couple who fall in love at first sight and march blissfully, hand-in-hand, into the sunset.
The climactic song in Mr. Sondheim’s “Company,” “Being Alive,” magnificently sung by Mr. Lewis in this revue, replaces the anticipation of happily ever after voiced in the Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad “Some Enchanted Evening” with fear and trembling. Instead of a cozy, familial bond, intimacy with another person is portrayed as a terrifying prospect that involves:
Someone to need you too much,
Someone to know you too well,
Someone to pull you up short
And put you through hell.
For all his songs’ universality, the Sondheim philosophy is specific and exclusive. Directed toward his own class — an urbane, well-educated, culturally cosmopolitan gentry — his lyrics define what might be called the Manhattan sensibility: humanist, proudly intellectual, psychologically sophisticated, hyper-articulate, liberal, Jewish and disenchanted. The closest Mr. Sondheim has come to being multicultural was in the 1976 musical “Pacific Overtures.” Set in 19th-century Japan, the musical has songs that propose an intriguing East-West hybrid, part Broadway and part Asian.
The Sondheim cynicism didn’t come out of the blue. Expressions of wised-up disillusion, like “Now You Know,” have Broadway ancestors in the lyrics of E. Y. Harburg, Ira Gershwin and even George M. Cohan. But it was Mr. Sondheim’s 1970 show, “Company,” that codified the Manhattan sensibility — a radically unsentimental, emotionally realistic honesty that found its pop-record equivalents in Paul Simon in New York, and in Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman on the West Coast.
The origins of that attitude included confessional poetry and the rise of psychoanalysis as a kind of alternative religion, both of which provided Mr. Sondheim with the self-scrutinizing language to put in the mouths of his introspective characters. Simultaneously, the moon-June-spoon ideal of eternal romantic love began its steady decline as the principal subject of popular songs.
Advancing technology also played a major role in the transition from optimism to ambivalence. The birth-control pill, which helped propel the second wave of feminism, and rock ’n’ roll’s hedonistic ethic and amplification both undermined Hammerstein’s patriarchal sentimentality and toughened the sound of pop. At the same time, the mystique of psychoanalysis superseded the more simplistic self-help doctrine of “The Power of Positive Thinking” as the culture’s spiritual panacea. If you could reach deep enough into your repressed memories, it was argued, you could exorcize your demons.
In his relentless demolition operation, Mr. Sondheim ultimately embraced the Manhattan sensibility’s demonic extreme — murderous, misanthropic rage — with “Sweeney Todd” (1979). But where do you go once you’ve had your anti-hero proclaim, “We all deserve to die!”
After “Merrily,” a summing up of his generation’s growing pains, told in reverse, Mr. Sondheim’s search for meaning and connection to the future began in earnest with “Sunday in the Park With George” (1984) and continued with “Into the Woods” (1987). Both exalted the creation of “children and art” as a refutation of the nihilism of “Sweeney Todd” and as a self-conscious, morally high-minded investment in humanity.
Grudgingly and on his own terms Mr. Sondheim even affirmed Hammerstein’s belief in true love with “Passion” (1994). But as usual with him, there was a catch: the love being conjured might also be described as pathologically obsessed.
The one human connection Mr. Sondheim has always celebrated unambiguously and without strain is friendship. Its most eloquent expression is found in another song from “Merrily,” “Old Friends”:
Time goes by
Everything else keeps changing
You and I
We get continued next week.
The relaxed, swinging tune that evokes a cocktail singalong has the same bittersweet ache as the lyrics that culminate with a toast: “Here’s to us! Who’s like us? Damn few!” This is intimacy without fear.
In most cases, however, the relationship of music and lyrics in Mr. Sondheim’s songs expresses a core ambivalence. As his words explore the complicated, often harsh truths about life and relationships, his swelling ballads convey an unalloyed romantic yearning in the harmonic language of Puccini.
With the Freudian mystique of the 1960s and ’70s on the wane, and the language of psychotherapy reduced to the banal pop scripture of reality television, the Age of Sondheim may be fading. An emerging technological view of humanity and its discontents that largely bypasses the post-Freudian model proposes an unsettling new ideal of the human being as a perfectible machine that through cloning is theoretically immortal.
Antidepressants and performance-enhancing drugs, from steroids to mental stimulants to Viagra, are modifying human behavior. Replaceable body parts, plastic surgery and gender re-assignment are undermining the traditional idea of the individual as a being with a singular identity and destiny. Hand-held devices have turned us into robotic mobile power stations continually transmitting and receiving information in computer language that has seeped into pop songs.
These developments are profoundly antithetical to the dream of sadly civilized enlightenment evoked by Mr. Sondheim’s songs. In this emerging world, the truth of existence is rooted more in quantifiable physical reality than in ideas and emotions. Musically it is embodied in hard digital beats and in performances staged as competitive sports events.
As we lunge into the 21st century, there is no next Stephen Sondheim waiting to step into the master’s shoes and perpetuate the tradition that he carried to its pinnacle. There is only new and different in a largely unimaginable future in which we are simultaneously more and less human than in the pre-digital age. Like it or not, and however we do it, now we grow.
“Sondheim on Sondheim” continues through June 13 at Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, Manhattan; (212) 719-1300, roundabouttheater.org/index.html
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 4, 2010
A music column on Saturday about Stephen Sondheim and the “Sondheim on Sondheim” revue, at Studio 54, misstated part of a lyric from the song “Old Friends.” It is “You and I/We get continued next week,” not “You and I/We can continue next week.”
Showing posts with label Musical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Musical. Show all posts
Saturday, May 01, 2010
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Billy's Gotta Dance. Does He Gotta Fly? By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
December 14, 2008
Billy's Gotta Dance. Does He Gotta Fly? By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
I SENSIBLY plan to keep my Christmas wish list pretty short this year. I'm asking for a return to global prosperity, and socks. I'm looking forward to the socks.
While I'm dreaming of greater blessings, I might add to my list the hope that someone will revoke little Billy Elliot's flying license. Before I'm accused of getting all Grinchy, let me state for the record that I generally share the high regard and warm affection that most critics have expressed for the wonderful new musical named after its dancing hero. Such is the high regard and warm affection most critics have expressed for this smash from London that you may have tired of reading encomiums to its glory. "Billy Elliot" is in danger of becoming so overadored and overrhapsodized that audiences may go in with unrealistic expectations — as if all thoughts of the financial downturn will be cured by the sight of a lad learning to leap — and risk emerging with a feeling of deflation.
You don't need to worry. The purity of feeling in "Billy Elliot" will surprise you into a reaction unpolluted by anything you've heard about it. As performed by a cast with unusual grit and quirkiness for a big show, the musical works with an honesty that few Broadway musicals can match. That's because it keeps its feet on the ground, emotionally if not literally, and pays more attention to the complicated reality of people's lives than the escapist fantasies that can be spun from them.
Which brings me to my Christmas wish. Amid all the moments that set my heart soaring in "Billy Elliot," there was one that caused it to sink into my shoes. It epitomizes the aesthetic conflict running through the production that keeps this very good musical from becoming a wholly great one, at least in my view.
It occurs near the end of the first act. Billy Elliot is the son of a coal miner, as you probably don't need to be reminded, who has chanced upon ballet one day at the gym where he is being taught (not too willingly) to box. An awakening stirs in his heart when he stretches out a leg and lifts an arm just so, under the tutelage of a curt, chain-smoking, tacky-outfit-wearing ballet teacher. In secret Billy returns to ballet class, and the promise of his talent inspires his teacher to seek an audition at the Royal Ballet School in London.
A new vision of life's possibilities takes hold in Billy's imagination. As he learns to dance, he opens his eyes to an enthralling future. And suddenly there sharing the stage with little Billy is a bigger Billy — the grown man and mature artist he has a chance to become.
Their dance together, on a dark stage, is among the most moving things I've seen on Broadway, all the more remarkable for the weight of emotion it evokes through theatrically simple means. There is just the music, the steps, the boy and the man. And yet the moment crystallizes what "Billy Elliot" is all about: the childhood need to dream yourself into a happier place; the exhilaration of self-discovery and self-determination; the scary excitement of the moment when you learn to listen to the truth your heart speaks, even if it is not the truth your parents (or you) necessarily are ready to hear.
But I've left out one participant in the proceedings. It's actually not just the music, the steps and the dancers up there.
There is also a winch.
Just as my tear ducts were ready to let loose, Stephen Hanna, the talented former New York City Ballet dancer who plays Billy's older self, stopped moving at center stage and grabbed a metal clasp that had quietly — but visibly — descended from the fly space. Trent Kowalik, the terrific young performer I saw in the role of Billy, joined him, struck a pose and — presto! — Billy was no longer merely dancing as if caught in a waking dream. He was making like Superman, or to use a more immediate comparison, Mary Poppins. He was flying.
Suddenly a moment of rare theatrical magic became an instance of familiar Broadway mechanics — and, it seemed to me, of cynical manipulation, one that marred a show that has no need to traffic in it. The audience eventually took the cue and began to applaud. But the ovation felt more dutiful than spontaneous. It wasn't until Billy had been lifted almost to the top of the proscenium and began spinning like a human ceiling fan that the audience gave in and performed the ritual that the moment seemed expressly designed to elicit.
I sat on my hands, thoroughly disheartened, resenting being brought down to earth from the emotional lift I'd just experienced. I should add that the flight wasn't manufactured for the Broadway production; I had the same response when I first saw the show a couple of summers ago in London. The musical's director, Stephen Daldry, is a gifted and intelligent man. The overall integrity of "Billy Elliot" attests to his determination not to sanitize or sentimentalize all the rough edges of the material. (There is rather too much about those striking coal miners in the show, which would be even more effective if it didn't stretch almost to three hours.)
But why couldn't Mr. Daldry trust the audience to be moved, even exhilarated by the unspoken feeling in the moment and the beauty of the dance? Why throw in the kind of glib crowd-seducing trick that for the most part the musical avoids?
As a ballet lover, I found the decision particularly aggravating. Here was a chance to awaken audiences to the appeal of a venerable and often marginalized art form, to show how emotionally resonant and theatrically potent the choreography of classical dance could be. But the show's creators decided to hedge their bets, probably assuming that holding the attention of the children in the audience would require the kind of gob-smacking feat that a diet of action movies and video games have programmed them to expect in entertainment.
"Billy Elliot" has a few similar blemishes, when funky dance routines grounded in reality suddenly morph into splashy, synthetically wowing production numbers. You can almost mark the moment when the characters are plainly no longer singing or dancing to lift their own spirits or express some emotional impulse but simply to give a sensation-hungry audience what it has come to expect from a "Broadway show."
The characterization of Billy's best friend, for instance, a flamboyant little fellow who seems to be channeling a disco queen from Studio 54, feels completely ersatz to me. "Sing it, sister!" he yelps absurdly to Billy during their comic duet, "Expressing Yourself." How, I wondered, would a boy from a coal-mining town in the mid-1980s acquire the vocabulary of a tart-tongued gay man more than twice his age, and for that matter from another cultural universe? I cringed, but the audience seemed to delight in this nod to anachronistic political correctness.
Musicals are hugely expensive undertakings these days — the budget of "Billy Elliot" is reputed to be somewhere near $20 million — and aesthetic purity is probably high on the list of expendables when it comes to their creation. Resisting the temptation to indulge in easy spectacle and crowd-seducing muggery is probably nearly impossible. The biggest hits of the last decade or so on Broadway — "The Lion King" and "Wicked" — are hardly small shows that shy away from the allure of deploying all the arsenal of effects the big musical has at its disposal.
With "Billy Elliot" the British finally have a global smash to equal the Broadway-devouring shows of Mr. Daldry's fellow Britons Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh from the 1980s. (The London-born "Mamma Mia!" is a smash too, but it derives its popularity from its familiar Abba tunes.) This show is welcome on a Broadway newly shadowed by the possibility of darkened theaters and plummeting ticket sales. But the musical is infected by the supersized ethos that followed in the wake of megahits like "Cats" and "Les Misérables." "Billy Elliot" is a small, heartfelt and keenly observed musical that intermittently feels the need to act like a loud, splashy, sock-it-to-'em crowd pleaser.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/theater/14ishe.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1229285777-0kSx2JxgxcApB0er/BsDvA&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/84zkj
Billy's Gotta Dance. Does He Gotta Fly? By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
I SENSIBLY plan to keep my Christmas wish list pretty short this year. I'm asking for a return to global prosperity, and socks. I'm looking forward to the socks.
While I'm dreaming of greater blessings, I might add to my list the hope that someone will revoke little Billy Elliot's flying license. Before I'm accused of getting all Grinchy, let me state for the record that I generally share the high regard and warm affection that most critics have expressed for the wonderful new musical named after its dancing hero. Such is the high regard and warm affection most critics have expressed for this smash from London that you may have tired of reading encomiums to its glory. "Billy Elliot" is in danger of becoming so overadored and overrhapsodized that audiences may go in with unrealistic expectations — as if all thoughts of the financial downturn will be cured by the sight of a lad learning to leap — and risk emerging with a feeling of deflation.
You don't need to worry. The purity of feeling in "Billy Elliot" will surprise you into a reaction unpolluted by anything you've heard about it. As performed by a cast with unusual grit and quirkiness for a big show, the musical works with an honesty that few Broadway musicals can match. That's because it keeps its feet on the ground, emotionally if not literally, and pays more attention to the complicated reality of people's lives than the escapist fantasies that can be spun from them.
Which brings me to my Christmas wish. Amid all the moments that set my heart soaring in "Billy Elliot," there was one that caused it to sink into my shoes. It epitomizes the aesthetic conflict running through the production that keeps this very good musical from becoming a wholly great one, at least in my view.
It occurs near the end of the first act. Billy Elliot is the son of a coal miner, as you probably don't need to be reminded, who has chanced upon ballet one day at the gym where he is being taught (not too willingly) to box. An awakening stirs in his heart when he stretches out a leg and lifts an arm just so, under the tutelage of a curt, chain-smoking, tacky-outfit-wearing ballet teacher. In secret Billy returns to ballet class, and the promise of his talent inspires his teacher to seek an audition at the Royal Ballet School in London.
A new vision of life's possibilities takes hold in Billy's imagination. As he learns to dance, he opens his eyes to an enthralling future. And suddenly there sharing the stage with little Billy is a bigger Billy — the grown man and mature artist he has a chance to become.
Their dance together, on a dark stage, is among the most moving things I've seen on Broadway, all the more remarkable for the weight of emotion it evokes through theatrically simple means. There is just the music, the steps, the boy and the man. And yet the moment crystallizes what "Billy Elliot" is all about: the childhood need to dream yourself into a happier place; the exhilaration of self-discovery and self-determination; the scary excitement of the moment when you learn to listen to the truth your heart speaks, even if it is not the truth your parents (or you) necessarily are ready to hear.
But I've left out one participant in the proceedings. It's actually not just the music, the steps and the dancers up there.
There is also a winch.
Just as my tear ducts were ready to let loose, Stephen Hanna, the talented former New York City Ballet dancer who plays Billy's older self, stopped moving at center stage and grabbed a metal clasp that had quietly — but visibly — descended from the fly space. Trent Kowalik, the terrific young performer I saw in the role of Billy, joined him, struck a pose and — presto! — Billy was no longer merely dancing as if caught in a waking dream. He was making like Superman, or to use a more immediate comparison, Mary Poppins. He was flying.
Suddenly a moment of rare theatrical magic became an instance of familiar Broadway mechanics — and, it seemed to me, of cynical manipulation, one that marred a show that has no need to traffic in it. The audience eventually took the cue and began to applaud. But the ovation felt more dutiful than spontaneous. It wasn't until Billy had been lifted almost to the top of the proscenium and began spinning like a human ceiling fan that the audience gave in and performed the ritual that the moment seemed expressly designed to elicit.
I sat on my hands, thoroughly disheartened, resenting being brought down to earth from the emotional lift I'd just experienced. I should add that the flight wasn't manufactured for the Broadway production; I had the same response when I first saw the show a couple of summers ago in London. The musical's director, Stephen Daldry, is a gifted and intelligent man. The overall integrity of "Billy Elliot" attests to his determination not to sanitize or sentimentalize all the rough edges of the material. (There is rather too much about those striking coal miners in the show, which would be even more effective if it didn't stretch almost to three hours.)
But why couldn't Mr. Daldry trust the audience to be moved, even exhilarated by the unspoken feeling in the moment and the beauty of the dance? Why throw in the kind of glib crowd-seducing trick that for the most part the musical avoids?
As a ballet lover, I found the decision particularly aggravating. Here was a chance to awaken audiences to the appeal of a venerable and often marginalized art form, to show how emotionally resonant and theatrically potent the choreography of classical dance could be. But the show's creators decided to hedge their bets, probably assuming that holding the attention of the children in the audience would require the kind of gob-smacking feat that a diet of action movies and video games have programmed them to expect in entertainment.
"Billy Elliot" has a few similar blemishes, when funky dance routines grounded in reality suddenly morph into splashy, synthetically wowing production numbers. You can almost mark the moment when the characters are plainly no longer singing or dancing to lift their own spirits or express some emotional impulse but simply to give a sensation-hungry audience what it has come to expect from a "Broadway show."
The characterization of Billy's best friend, for instance, a flamboyant little fellow who seems to be channeling a disco queen from Studio 54, feels completely ersatz to me. "Sing it, sister!" he yelps absurdly to Billy during their comic duet, "Expressing Yourself." How, I wondered, would a boy from a coal-mining town in the mid-1980s acquire the vocabulary of a tart-tongued gay man more than twice his age, and for that matter from another cultural universe? I cringed, but the audience seemed to delight in this nod to anachronistic political correctness.
Musicals are hugely expensive undertakings these days — the budget of "Billy Elliot" is reputed to be somewhere near $20 million — and aesthetic purity is probably high on the list of expendables when it comes to their creation. Resisting the temptation to indulge in easy spectacle and crowd-seducing muggery is probably nearly impossible. The biggest hits of the last decade or so on Broadway — "The Lion King" and "Wicked" — are hardly small shows that shy away from the allure of deploying all the arsenal of effects the big musical has at its disposal.
With "Billy Elliot" the British finally have a global smash to equal the Broadway-devouring shows of Mr. Daldry's fellow Britons Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh from the 1980s. (The London-born "Mamma Mia!" is a smash too, but it derives its popularity from its familiar Abba tunes.) This show is welcome on a Broadway newly shadowed by the possibility of darkened theaters and plummeting ticket sales. But the musical is infected by the supersized ethos that followed in the wake of megahits like "Cats" and "Les Misérables." "Billy Elliot" is a small, heartfelt and keenly observed musical that intermittently feels the need to act like a loud, splashy, sock-it-to-'em crowd pleaser.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/theater/14ishe.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1229285777-0kSx2JxgxcApB0er/BsDvA&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/84zkj
Friday, December 12, 2008
Song Lyrics and Memoirs for All Seasons By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
December 12, 2008
Song Lyrics and Memoirs for All Seasons By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
The holiday season can be a bit of a bummer for die-hard theater lovers. They have already seen all of the important fall openings — all they care to, anyway — and they tend to turn up their noses at the festive fare aimed at extracting maximum dollars from tourists with children. To help divert your friends during this anxious time, these new books and DVDs — and one actual show guaranteed not to send sophisticated theatergoers into sugar shock — are recommended.
'THE COMPLETE LYRICS OF OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II' Edited by Amy Asch. (Alfred A. Knopf, $65.) Anyone with a glancing interest in theater will be familiar with a few immortal phrases from "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' " or "Some Enchanted Evening." But this hefty, handsome volume reveals anew the breadth, range and sheer fecundity of a central figure — maybe the central figure — in the evolution of the American musical theater. Hammerstein wrote revue songs, operettas, musical comedies and of course the musical plays, with Richard Rodgers, that changed the face of Broadway forever and are so crucial to the musical canon. The book contains 850 lyrics, a quarter previously unpublished, with deeply researched notes and commentary by Ms. Asch that add color and context, although the limpid poetry of Hammerstein's best lyrics needs little of either to shine.
'CHRISTINE PEDI'S HOLLY JOLLY CHRISTMAS FOLLY' (at the Laurie Beechman Theater, various dates in December; tickets, $55). Christine Pedi, the brilliant impressionist who was an invaluable member of the "Forbidden Broadway" ensemble for many years, rides to the rescue of theatergoers who would rather commit seppuku than watch another "Christmas Carol." Her seasonal offering is a funny, festive little shebang that shows off her musical dexterity and precise ability to mimic the big-belters of Broadway and beyond. Liza Minnelli singing "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is priceless, but the pièce de résistance is Ms. Pedi's "Twelve Divas of Christmas," in which she sings each verse in the voice of a different actress, from Elaine Stritch to Patti LuPone to Carol Channing. (Click here for a video of Ms. Pedi in performance.)
'IN SPITE OF MYSELF: A MEMOIR,' by Christopher Plummer (Alfred. A. Knopf, $29.95.) A staggering parade of theater-world luminaries struts, swaggers and, yes, occasionally staggers through this compulsively readable memoir by this Canadian-born actor. Mr. Plummer seems to have worked with just about everyone imaginable— Ruth Chatterton and Katherine Cornell, Jason Robards and Laurence Olivier, Julie Harris and Judith Anderson, Tyrone Guthrie and Edward Everett Horton (!) — and he has a tasty anecdote about onstage, backstage or drinking-hole doings about every single one of them.
'SLINGS AND ARROWS: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION' (Acorn Video DVD, $59.99.) Devoted theater fans are not necessarily familiar with the nether reaches of the cable dial, so it's possible that they never discovered this indisputably brilliant Canadian television series, which was seen on the Sundance Channel and is loosely based on the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Each of the three six-part series depicts the backstage turmoil of a particular season, with special emphasis on productions of "Hamlet," "Macbeth" and "King Lear." The writing is as smart and funny as anything on television in recent years ("30 Rock" included) and the acting may just be better. (Related Article)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/theater/12cgif.html?sq=Song%20Lyrics%20Isherwood&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/83ma4
Song Lyrics and Memoirs for All Seasons By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
The holiday season can be a bit of a bummer for die-hard theater lovers. They have already seen all of the important fall openings — all they care to, anyway — and they tend to turn up their noses at the festive fare aimed at extracting maximum dollars from tourists with children. To help divert your friends during this anxious time, these new books and DVDs — and one actual show guaranteed not to send sophisticated theatergoers into sugar shock — are recommended.
'THE COMPLETE LYRICS OF OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II' Edited by Amy Asch. (Alfred A. Knopf, $65.) Anyone with a glancing interest in theater will be familiar with a few immortal phrases from "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' " or "Some Enchanted Evening." But this hefty, handsome volume reveals anew the breadth, range and sheer fecundity of a central figure — maybe the central figure — in the evolution of the American musical theater. Hammerstein wrote revue songs, operettas, musical comedies and of course the musical plays, with Richard Rodgers, that changed the face of Broadway forever and are so crucial to the musical canon. The book contains 850 lyrics, a quarter previously unpublished, with deeply researched notes and commentary by Ms. Asch that add color and context, although the limpid poetry of Hammerstein's best lyrics needs little of either to shine.
'CHRISTINE PEDI'S HOLLY JOLLY CHRISTMAS FOLLY' (at the Laurie Beechman Theater, various dates in December; tickets, $55). Christine Pedi, the brilliant impressionist who was an invaluable member of the "Forbidden Broadway" ensemble for many years, rides to the rescue of theatergoers who would rather commit seppuku than watch another "Christmas Carol." Her seasonal offering is a funny, festive little shebang that shows off her musical dexterity and precise ability to mimic the big-belters of Broadway and beyond. Liza Minnelli singing "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is priceless, but the pièce de résistance is Ms. Pedi's "Twelve Divas of Christmas," in which she sings each verse in the voice of a different actress, from Elaine Stritch to Patti LuPone to Carol Channing. (Click here for a video of Ms. Pedi in performance.)
'IN SPITE OF MYSELF: A MEMOIR,' by Christopher Plummer (Alfred. A. Knopf, $29.95.) A staggering parade of theater-world luminaries struts, swaggers and, yes, occasionally staggers through this compulsively readable memoir by this Canadian-born actor. Mr. Plummer seems to have worked with just about everyone imaginable— Ruth Chatterton and Katherine Cornell, Jason Robards and Laurence Olivier, Julie Harris and Judith Anderson, Tyrone Guthrie and Edward Everett Horton (!) — and he has a tasty anecdote about onstage, backstage or drinking-hole doings about every single one of them.
'SLINGS AND ARROWS: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION' (Acorn Video DVD, $59.99.) Devoted theater fans are not necessarily familiar with the nether reaches of the cable dial, so it's possible that they never discovered this indisputably brilliant Canadian television series, which was seen on the Sundance Channel and is loosely based on the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Each of the three six-part series depicts the backstage turmoil of a particular season, with special emphasis on productions of "Hamlet," "Macbeth" and "King Lear." The writing is as smart and funny as anything on television in recent years ("30 Rock" included) and the acting may just be better. (Related Article)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/theater/12cgif.html?sq=Song%20Lyrics%20Isherwood&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/83ma4
Holiday Gifts for Devotees of Broadway By BEN BRANTLEY
December 12, 2008
Holiday Gifts for Devotees of Broadway By BEN BRANTLEY
Entering into conversation with those who speak Theater — a language shared by a small, passionate subspecies of humanity known as Regina Dramatica — requires more than peppering your conversation with "darlings" and hyperbole. Speaking Theater starts with a shared mind-set, a collective, aggrandizing and affectionately barbed myth of an institutional art form with its own rituals and gods.
Should there be someone in your life who wishes to pass for Theater-fluent — a sensitive young cousin, perhaps, who fills leisure hours listening to "Gypsy" and looking at bound issues of After Dark instead of playing World of Warcraft — I propose giving him or her the following four-volume Theater Literacy Kit. None of these books are recent, but each is, in its way, a template for a different essential aspect of looking at and understanding the theater.
'ACT ONE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY,' by Moss Hart. (St. Martin's Griffin, 1989, $17.95.) The primal account of falling in love with the theater, and of its powers to transform, written by a man who found a way out of a hard-knock life in a pushcart neighborhood in Upper Manhattan to become one of New York's most sought-after dramatists and directors, in a time when Broadway still glittered like Oz.
'THE SEASON: A CANDID LOOK AT BROADWAY,' by William Goldman. (Limelight Editions, 2004, $20.) A gimlet-eyed counterpoint to the starry-eyed "Act One," this invaluable chronicle of the egos, art and advertising that go into making a single Broadway season was published in 1969, long before the corporate invasion of Disney and Clear Channel. Yet Mr. Goldman's tasty, acerbic narrative of what it takes in dollars, sweat and tears to mount a play suggests that, on Broadway, the fundamental things still apply.
'PETER HALL'S DIARIES: THE STORY OF A DRAMATIC BATTLE,' Edited by John Goodwin. (Oberon Books, 2000, $32.95.) Mr. Hall's take-no-prisoners journal about his years as the director of the National Theater of Great Britain in the 1970s is the ultimate backstage back story, replete with tales of political infighting, artistic love matches and mismatches, and illuminating thumbnail analyses of the elusive greatness of titans like Samuel Beckett, Vanessa Redgrave and Harold Pinter.
'CURTAINS,' by Kenneth Tynan. (Atheneum, 1961) Nearly half a century after he stopped reviewing plays with any regularity, Tynan remains the theater critic's theater critic, a writer who combines surgical skill for dissecting a performance with a fan's drunken enthusiasm. These collected reviews, originally published in British and (later) American newspapers and magazines in the 1950s, present the critic both as a serious force for change (in Tynan's legendary championing of John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger") and a delightful poisoned wordsmith. (Who else would describe "Flower Drum Song" as a "world of woozy song"?) The book may be hard to find at your local bookstore, so shop online instead.
And because those who speak Theater also sing it, at least in their hearts, I suggest completing the package with the boxed CD set 'Sondheim: The Story So Far,' (Sony Classics, 2008, $54.98.) which features 81 tracks spanning the long, fruitful career of the Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the high priest of a tradition of wit, elegance and intelligence in musicals that may well be on its last legs. In addition to highlights from Sondheim classics like "Follies," "Sweeney Todd" and "Company," this compilation also includes lesser-known Sondheim efforts for theater, television and film. Astound your friends by reciting what this lyricist wrote for the television puppet show "Kukla, Fran and Ollie." A perfect opportunity to brush up your Sondheim, which for those fluent in Theater today is even more crucial than quoting Shakespeare. (Click here for an interactive feature on "Stephen Sondheim: The Story So Far.")
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/theater/12bgif.html?sq=Tales%20to%20Enchant%20the%20Starstruck&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/83m3e
Holiday Gifts for Devotees of Broadway By BEN BRANTLEY
Entering into conversation with those who speak Theater — a language shared by a small, passionate subspecies of humanity known as Regina Dramatica — requires more than peppering your conversation with "darlings" and hyperbole. Speaking Theater starts with a shared mind-set, a collective, aggrandizing and affectionately barbed myth of an institutional art form with its own rituals and gods.
Should there be someone in your life who wishes to pass for Theater-fluent — a sensitive young cousin, perhaps, who fills leisure hours listening to "Gypsy" and looking at bound issues of After Dark instead of playing World of Warcraft — I propose giving him or her the following four-volume Theater Literacy Kit. None of these books are recent, but each is, in its way, a template for a different essential aspect of looking at and understanding the theater.
'ACT ONE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY,' by Moss Hart. (St. Martin's Griffin, 1989, $17.95.) The primal account of falling in love with the theater, and of its powers to transform, written by a man who found a way out of a hard-knock life in a pushcart neighborhood in Upper Manhattan to become one of New York's most sought-after dramatists and directors, in a time when Broadway still glittered like Oz.
'THE SEASON: A CANDID LOOK AT BROADWAY,' by William Goldman. (Limelight Editions, 2004, $20.) A gimlet-eyed counterpoint to the starry-eyed "Act One," this invaluable chronicle of the egos, art and advertising that go into making a single Broadway season was published in 1969, long before the corporate invasion of Disney and Clear Channel. Yet Mr. Goldman's tasty, acerbic narrative of what it takes in dollars, sweat and tears to mount a play suggests that, on Broadway, the fundamental things still apply.
'PETER HALL'S DIARIES: THE STORY OF A DRAMATIC BATTLE,' Edited by John Goodwin. (Oberon Books, 2000, $32.95.) Mr. Hall's take-no-prisoners journal about his years as the director of the National Theater of Great Britain in the 1970s is the ultimate backstage back story, replete with tales of political infighting, artistic love matches and mismatches, and illuminating thumbnail analyses of the elusive greatness of titans like Samuel Beckett, Vanessa Redgrave and Harold Pinter.
'CURTAINS,' by Kenneth Tynan. (Atheneum, 1961) Nearly half a century after he stopped reviewing plays with any regularity, Tynan remains the theater critic's theater critic, a writer who combines surgical skill for dissecting a performance with a fan's drunken enthusiasm. These collected reviews, originally published in British and (later) American newspapers and magazines in the 1950s, present the critic both as a serious force for change (in Tynan's legendary championing of John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger") and a delightful poisoned wordsmith. (Who else would describe "Flower Drum Song" as a "world of woozy song"?) The book may be hard to find at your local bookstore, so shop online instead.
And because those who speak Theater also sing it, at least in their hearts, I suggest completing the package with the boxed CD set 'Sondheim: The Story So Far,' (Sony Classics, 2008, $54.98.) which features 81 tracks spanning the long, fruitful career of the Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the high priest of a tradition of wit, elegance and intelligence in musicals that may well be on its last legs. In addition to highlights from Sondheim classics like "Follies," "Sweeney Todd" and "Company," this compilation also includes lesser-known Sondheim efforts for theater, television and film. Astound your friends by reciting what this lyricist wrote for the television puppet show "Kukla, Fran and Ollie." A perfect opportunity to brush up your Sondheim, which for those fluent in Theater today is even more crucial than quoting Shakespeare. (Click here for an interactive feature on "Stephen Sondheim: The Story So Far.")
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/theater/12bgif.html?sq=Tales%20to%20Enchant%20the%20Starstruck&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/83m3e
Sunday, September 21, 2008
525,600 Minutes to Preserve By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
TimesPeople
The New York Times
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September 21, 2008
525,600 Minutes to Preserve By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
“RENT” closed with the usual celebratory brouhaha. Hours before its final curtain on Sept. 7, the sidewalk in front of the Nederlander Theater, where the musical had played for more than a dozen years, was strewn with barricades signaling the potential presence of celebrity — or at least the expensively self-important. Gawkers piled up three or four deep behind the barriers, cellphones in picture-taking mode.
Sure enough, a freshly minted young tabloid star stepped out of a car and splashed into the glare of television cameras, looking at home in the spotlight, her long tresses curling picturesquely across her shoulders, beautiful accessory boyfriend huddled protectively (if a little shortly) at her elbow.
She was Blake Lively, a star of “Gossip Girl.” Or so I was told by the daughter of a colleague. And that Abercrombie boy was no mere human bangle but a star in his own right, Penn Badgley, of the same television series.
“Oh, my God, I’m such a teenager,” my informant added sheepishly, and charmingly, embarrassed by her excitement. She needn’t have been. In the presence of celebrities who cause paparazzi stampedes — even celebrities you’ve only vaguely heard of — most of us regress to jittery teendom just a little. She at least had the excuse of actually being a teenager.
Blake and Penn soon moved onto the red carpet, into the theater and presumably out of my life. (But by the way, when did soap actors begin acquiring the names of soap characters?) Yet as I watched “Rent,” I wondered what these two glittery young stars would make of the world conjured onstage by Jonathan Larson, an urban landscape in which hope and promise were shadowed by disease and despair. It is a milieu far removed from the New York of today — and thank goodness. While rents may be even more dizzyingly out of reach for struggling artists in new-millennium New York, a plague no longer casts a pall over the city’s creative community.
Today’s Blakes and Penns, born in the late 1980s, had not hit puberty when “Rent” opened on Broadway in 1996, after it scorched its way into history at its Off Broadway premiere at the New York Theater Workshop. Would they be perplexed by the frequent allusions to AZT, a problematic if promising early therapy for H.I.V.? Would they have any understanding of the grimmer details of what the characters go through?
For what struck me on my return to the show — which I had not seen on Broadway since shortly after it opened — was how deeply it is saturated in the anxious, dark, embattled mood of the moment in which it was created, when AIDS was ravaging the bohemian enclaves of New York and every other major city.
The passing of time can transform your perceptions of art. When I first saw “Rent,” I found some of its characters flimsy and stereotyped. (I admit I still cringe at the cheesy outfits of the drag-queen character, Angel; drag queens of my acquaintance were and are far more stylish.) At the time I was roughly the age of the East Villagers in the musical, and while I lived in Los Angeles for most of my 20s, I visited New York regularly and certainly moved among people a lot like them: recent college grads with more attitude and artistic aspirations than money.
Perhaps because I lived in a milieu similar to the one depicted onstage, in which the specter of early death seemed to cast its shadow everywhere, the immediacy of the show did not seem particularly remarkable. Maybe because the surface details of the characters’ experience were familiar to me, they seemed shallowly drawn onstage, sketched in shorthand. I suspect I overlooked the depth of feeling with which Larson wrapped a generation of young, ambitious and threatened characters in a musical embrace.
What impressed me most forcibly at the final performance was the empathetic reach of the writing, the generosity of spirit driving both words and music. Larson lived among and loved the people he was writing about, ached for their losses, expressed their fears, dreams and everyday indignities in sharp lyrics and evocative melodies that drew on both Broadway forms and pop and rock sounds.
One of the weaknesses that bothered me a dozen years ago — the ending that finds the doomed Mimi springing back to life after appearing to expire — strikes me today as a flaw that Larson may have recognized but could not bring himself to correct. The integrity of art must have seemed a less urgent priority than the dissemination of hope. The awkward affixing of a happy ending to a fundamentally tragic story was a form of prayer, a plea that life might imitate art. I probably rolled my eyes at this absurd resurrection in 1996; this time I fought back tears.
Larson’s book and lyrics are steeped in references to the physical and psychological struggles faced by people with AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s, before the drug cocktails that have made the disease more manageable. Four of the play’s main characters — the heroin-addicted Mimi; her ex-heroin-addict boyfriend, Roger; the black activist, Tom Collins; and his lover, Angel — are H.I.V.-positive. The musical also includes a sequence set at a support group for people with H.I.V. or AIDS. One of the show’s most moving songs — “Will I?” — consists of just three questions set to a simple, mournful, gently shaped melody, sung not by the principal characters but by the more anonymous members of the support group:
Will I lose my dignity?
Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?
You probably need to have lived among gay men coming of age during the years when AIDS became a global calamity to recognize just how much bone-deep knowledge of the specific terrors of the time is packed into those three little lines.
They conjure the afflictions of the opportunistic infections that made the disease such a dreadful one; the stigma that was attached to it; the fear of dying lonely and abandoned; and the vague, oppressive, almost unbearable anxieties that young people — with the disease or living in terror of contracting it — had to live with every day. The epidemic left a psychic mark on a generation of artists as surely as the Vietnam War did; the difference is that many of the artists responding to AIDS ultimately succumbed to the condition, their mature responses to it never to be shown on gallery walls or in theaters.
Larson himself, of course, did not live to enjoy the global success of “Rent” or to see how, in just a few years, the fates of characters like Mimi, Roger and Angel would have been altered by advances in the treatment of AIDS. In one of the saddest circumstances in theater history he died at 35 of an aortic aneurysm after the final dress rehearsal of the Off Broadway run. (I should add that AIDS continues to claim lives today, in New York and across the globe, and the medical advances have inadvertently led to a disturbing ignorance about the realities of living with H.I.V.)
“Rent” has been a phenomenal success in New York and around the world, and the story does not stop with the end of its first Broadway run. The final performance, filmed in high-definition digital video, will be screened this week at some 500 movie theaters in the United States and Canada. (Details are at thehotticket.net/rent.) A new tour, featuring Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp from the original cast, begins in Cleveland in January.
And while you might expect that a musical grounded so specifically in a historical moment would have a date stamp on its endurance, the surprising resurgence of “Hair” this summer in Central Park provides proof to the contrary. Diane Paulus’s frisky production of that frolicking-hippie musical from 1967 will move to Broadway next year.
Nostalgia for the flower-power era is surely behind much of the enthusiasm for the show, which remains a sweet but rather scattered and shallow exploration of a complex time. But wait a minute — I once thought that was the rap on “Rent.” Whether either musical is perfect seems beside the point. Just a dozen years after its premiere “Rent” has become a vital, even precious document of a tumultuous era — much like “Hair,” in truth.
On the way home from the theater I remained under the spell of the musical’s powerful evocation of a time that is not very distant chronologically but seems eons ago spiritually. “How did we get through it?” I found myself asking, recalling the years of grim statistics and rumored advances in treatment that didn’t pan out, the burdensome sadness, the fear and sense of futility as yet more news came about the illness of a friend or acquaintance or luminary.
Instantly I caught myself. How did we get through it? Too many of us didn’t.
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
September 21, 2008
525,600 Minutes to Preserve By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
“RENT” closed with the usual celebratory brouhaha. Hours before its final curtain on Sept. 7, the sidewalk in front of the Nederlander Theater, where the musical had played for more than a dozen years, was strewn with barricades signaling the potential presence of celebrity — or at least the expensively self-important. Gawkers piled up three or four deep behind the barriers, cellphones in picture-taking mode.
Sure enough, a freshly minted young tabloid star stepped out of a car and splashed into the glare of television cameras, looking at home in the spotlight, her long tresses curling picturesquely across her shoulders, beautiful accessory boyfriend huddled protectively (if a little shortly) at her elbow.
She was Blake Lively, a star of “Gossip Girl.” Or so I was told by the daughter of a colleague. And that Abercrombie boy was no mere human bangle but a star in his own right, Penn Badgley, of the same television series.
“Oh, my God, I’m such a teenager,” my informant added sheepishly, and charmingly, embarrassed by her excitement. She needn’t have been. In the presence of celebrities who cause paparazzi stampedes — even celebrities you’ve only vaguely heard of — most of us regress to jittery teendom just a little. She at least had the excuse of actually being a teenager.
Blake and Penn soon moved onto the red carpet, into the theater and presumably out of my life. (But by the way, when did soap actors begin acquiring the names of soap characters?) Yet as I watched “Rent,” I wondered what these two glittery young stars would make of the world conjured onstage by Jonathan Larson, an urban landscape in which hope and promise were shadowed by disease and despair. It is a milieu far removed from the New York of today — and thank goodness. While rents may be even more dizzyingly out of reach for struggling artists in new-millennium New York, a plague no longer casts a pall over the city’s creative community.
Today’s Blakes and Penns, born in the late 1980s, had not hit puberty when “Rent” opened on Broadway in 1996, after it scorched its way into history at its Off Broadway premiere at the New York Theater Workshop. Would they be perplexed by the frequent allusions to AZT, a problematic if promising early therapy for H.I.V.? Would they have any understanding of the grimmer details of what the characters go through?
For what struck me on my return to the show — which I had not seen on Broadway since shortly after it opened — was how deeply it is saturated in the anxious, dark, embattled mood of the moment in which it was created, when AIDS was ravaging the bohemian enclaves of New York and every other major city.
The passing of time can transform your perceptions of art. When I first saw “Rent,” I found some of its characters flimsy and stereotyped. (I admit I still cringe at the cheesy outfits of the drag-queen character, Angel; drag queens of my acquaintance were and are far more stylish.) At the time I was roughly the age of the East Villagers in the musical, and while I lived in Los Angeles for most of my 20s, I visited New York regularly and certainly moved among people a lot like them: recent college grads with more attitude and artistic aspirations than money.
Perhaps because I lived in a milieu similar to the one depicted onstage, in which the specter of early death seemed to cast its shadow everywhere, the immediacy of the show did not seem particularly remarkable. Maybe because the surface details of the characters’ experience were familiar to me, they seemed shallowly drawn onstage, sketched in shorthand. I suspect I overlooked the depth of feeling with which Larson wrapped a generation of young, ambitious and threatened characters in a musical embrace.
What impressed me most forcibly at the final performance was the empathetic reach of the writing, the generosity of spirit driving both words and music. Larson lived among and loved the people he was writing about, ached for their losses, expressed their fears, dreams and everyday indignities in sharp lyrics and evocative melodies that drew on both Broadway forms and pop and rock sounds.
One of the weaknesses that bothered me a dozen years ago — the ending that finds the doomed Mimi springing back to life after appearing to expire — strikes me today as a flaw that Larson may have recognized but could not bring himself to correct. The integrity of art must have seemed a less urgent priority than the dissemination of hope. The awkward affixing of a happy ending to a fundamentally tragic story was a form of prayer, a plea that life might imitate art. I probably rolled my eyes at this absurd resurrection in 1996; this time I fought back tears.
Larson’s book and lyrics are steeped in references to the physical and psychological struggles faced by people with AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s, before the drug cocktails that have made the disease more manageable. Four of the play’s main characters — the heroin-addicted Mimi; her ex-heroin-addict boyfriend, Roger; the black activist, Tom Collins; and his lover, Angel — are H.I.V.-positive. The musical also includes a sequence set at a support group for people with H.I.V. or AIDS. One of the show’s most moving songs — “Will I?” — consists of just three questions set to a simple, mournful, gently shaped melody, sung not by the principal characters but by the more anonymous members of the support group:
Will I lose my dignity?
Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?
You probably need to have lived among gay men coming of age during the years when AIDS became a global calamity to recognize just how much bone-deep knowledge of the specific terrors of the time is packed into those three little lines.
They conjure the afflictions of the opportunistic infections that made the disease such a dreadful one; the stigma that was attached to it; the fear of dying lonely and abandoned; and the vague, oppressive, almost unbearable anxieties that young people — with the disease or living in terror of contracting it — had to live with every day. The epidemic left a psychic mark on a generation of artists as surely as the Vietnam War did; the difference is that many of the artists responding to AIDS ultimately succumbed to the condition, their mature responses to it never to be shown on gallery walls or in theaters.
Larson himself, of course, did not live to enjoy the global success of “Rent” or to see how, in just a few years, the fates of characters like Mimi, Roger and Angel would have been altered by advances in the treatment of AIDS. In one of the saddest circumstances in theater history he died at 35 of an aortic aneurysm after the final dress rehearsal of the Off Broadway run. (I should add that AIDS continues to claim lives today, in New York and across the globe, and the medical advances have inadvertently led to a disturbing ignorance about the realities of living with H.I.V.)
“Rent” has been a phenomenal success in New York and around the world, and the story does not stop with the end of its first Broadway run. The final performance, filmed in high-definition digital video, will be screened this week at some 500 movie theaters in the United States and Canada. (Details are at thehotticket.net/rent.) A new tour, featuring Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp from the original cast, begins in Cleveland in January.
And while you might expect that a musical grounded so specifically in a historical moment would have a date stamp on its endurance, the surprising resurgence of “Hair” this summer in Central Park provides proof to the contrary. Diane Paulus’s frisky production of that frolicking-hippie musical from 1967 will move to Broadway next year.
Nostalgia for the flower-power era is surely behind much of the enthusiasm for the show, which remains a sweet but rather scattered and shallow exploration of a complex time. But wait a minute — I once thought that was the rap on “Rent.” Whether either musical is perfect seems beside the point. Just a dozen years after its premiere “Rent” has become a vital, even precious document of a tumultuous era — much like “Hair,” in truth.
On the way home from the theater I remained under the spell of the musical’s powerful evocation of a time that is not very distant chronologically but seems eons ago spiritually. “How did we get through it?” I found myself asking, recalling the years of grim statistics and rumored advances in treatment that didn’t pan out, the burdensome sadness, the fear and sense of futility as yet more news came about the illness of a friend or acquaintance or luminary.
Instantly I caught myself. How did we get through it? Too many of us didn’t.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Got tu Have a Primer to Get '[title of show]' By ERIK PIEPENBURG
August 24, 2008
Theater
Got tu Have a Primer to Get '[title of show]' By ERIK PIEPENBURG
Correction Appended
WHEN Tom Stoppard's mammoth trilogy "The Coast of Utopia" played at Lincoln Center Theater in 2006, it was the snob hit of the year. Like many of Mr. Stoppard's plays it required of the viewer substantial intellectual agility; a certain fluency in Russian history, literature and philosophy helped, too. So to aid in understanding the rush of names being thrown around by Mr. Stoppard's historical characters, many sought out "Russian Thinkers," the 1978 collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin, which became so popular during the trilogy's early run that it virtually disappeared from the city's bookstores.
The idiosyncratic, meta-minded musical "[title of show]" may not match "The Coast of Utopia" as a snob hit. But the show, which opened on Broadway last month at the Lyceum Theater, has its own rich lexicon of insider jokes and obscure references — about musical theater lore instead of the 19th-century Russian intelligentsia. Where Mr. Stoppard tossed around names like Turgenev, Herzen and Belinsky, the creators and two of the co-stars of "[title of show]" — Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen — ask of their audiences a familiarity with flopsicals, Broadway gypsies and Gen X miscellany. Mamie Duncan-Gibbs? "Got tu Go Disco"? Shields and Yarnell? Anyone?
To ensure that no reference goes unappreciated, Mr. Bell and Mr. Bowen agreed to sit down and do for "[title of show]" what Isaiah Berlin's book did for "Utopia": create a cheat sheet for audiences not quite so in the know, explaining some of the names and shows that crop up during the musical. A home video of the young Hunter Bell performing a short play called "A Puzzling Obsession" in a relative's basement about 1981 can be found at left, along with links to the original reviews in The New York Times of the shows mentioned. ERIK PIEPENBURG
The People
MARY STOUT
A steadily employed actress who has done dinner theater, Disney voice-overs and practically everything else theatrical; Broadway credits include "Jane Eyre," "Beauty and the Beast" and "My Favorite Year."
Hunter Bell: "I think of her as the consummate Broadway character actress. She came onto the radar because, unfortunately, she was struck by a hot dog cart in the city. ... She was there on our opening night. She's an awesome talent. I like that she's game to be in the show."
DEE HOTY
Starred in the 1994 Broadway flop "The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public" (the sequel to "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas"), which ran for 16 performances. Received a Tony Award nomination for her performance, as well as nominations for her performances in "The Will Rogers Follies" (1991) and "Footloose" (1999).
Mr. Bell: This is an example of "when amazing performances are in shows that may not last very long; Dee Hoty is a rock star."
DINAH MANOFF
Lee Grant's daughter; won a 1980 Tony Award for best featured actress for her performance in Neil Simon's play "I Ought to Be in Pictures." Also played Marty Maraschino in the film version of "Grease" and on television played the roles of Elaine Lefkowitz-Dallas on "Soap" and Carol Weston on "Empty Nest."
ROMA TORRE
News anchor and theater critic on NY1 News, New York City's 24-hour local news channel.
Jeff Bowen: "My character's ambitions are all the way from being in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a big Broadway thing, to meeting Roma Torre, a really specific thing that only Broadway people would get to do. It means something to the character."
MAMIE DUNCAN-GIBBS
Broadway gypsy who has worked with Liza Minnelli in "Steppin' Out at Radio City Music Hall" and Gregory Hines in "Jelly's Last Jam"; Broadway credits include "Kiss Me, Kate," "Chicago" and "Cats." Also works as the executive and artistic director of Youth Theater Interactions, an after-school performing arts group in Westchester County.
Mr. Bell: "That one is kind of intentionally obscure. In the scene, these guys are flying over New York, and they see the Naked Cowboy, Red Lobster, everything that everyone knows. Then Hunter gets excited because he sees Mamie Duncan-Gibbs, and Jeff calls him out on it. But she is beautiful, sassy and super talented."
Mr. Bowen: "If you're going to pick one gypsy that probably everybody on Broadway has either worked with or knows or has respect for, grab Mamie Duncan-Gibbs."
SHIELDS AND YARNELL
Mime/comedy duo best known for their television appearances in the late 1970s; hosted their own television variety show on CBS in 1977. Starred in the Broadway flop "Broadway Follies," which opened and closed on March 15, 1981.
Mr. Bell: "If they went into a pitch meeting at CBS and were like, 'We're two mimes and we do a seven-minute piece in the Oval Office about pouring coffee for the president,' I can't imagine CBS would be like, 'Get the contract out.' Yet they had variety specials, they were on 'The Muppet Show' and on 'The Carol Burnett Show.' [Pause] They were mimes, for god's sake. ...They affected our world. A Shields and Yarnell variety show? That shouldn't happen at all. '[title of show]' shouldn't happen at all, yet here we are."
The Shows
"BAGELS AND YOX" (1951)
Synopsis: A Yiddish-flavored music, comedy and dance revue.
Fact: Ran for more performances than the Broadway revival of "Oklahoma!" the same year.
Times review: " 'Bagels and Yox' maintains an even level of noisy mediocrity."
Number of performances: 208
Mr. Bowen: "It was one of those borscht belt humor revues that were big in the '50s, kind of vaudeville style. 'Borscht Capades' was another one that was around at the time."
"KWAMINA" (1961)
Synopsis: A white American doctor falls in love with a black tribal leader in Africa.
Fact: Richard Adler ("Damn Yankees") wrote the music and lyrics, and Agnes de Mille created the choreography.
Times review: "There is a fiery theatricalism in the deployment of this company made up largely of Negroes."
Number of performances: 32
Mr. Bowen: "It was a biracial coupling, happening in the mid-'60s, which was pretty risqué. 'No Strings' was happening at the same time, but that was a black woman and a white man. I read a lot about those shows and how at the time it was somehow more acceptable for a white man to be with a black woman than it was for a white woman to be with a black man. Not that that's any reason why the show may have closed or not. It has a beautiful score."
"HENRY, SWEET HENRY" (1967)
Synopsis: Two wealthy teenage girls stalk a philandering composer; based on the book and film adaptation of "The World of Henry Orient."
Fact: Bob Merrill ("Carnival!") wrote the music and lyrics, and Michael Bennett was the choreographer.
Times review: "For Mr. Merrill to write a musical like this is tantamount to Karlheinz Stockhausen's trying to compose in the style of Mendelssohn."
Number of performances: 80
Mr. Bowen: "For a lot of people who became big in the '70s, it was their gypsy show of the late '60s."
"GOT TU GO DISCO" (1979)
Synopsis: "It was about disco and having to go do that," Mr. Bowen said. "That's about it."
Fact: Irene Cara made her last Broadway appearance in this show, one year before skyrocketing to "Fame."
Times review: "The dancing, the music and the performances ... may well recreate what is to be found in discos. But that is just the trouble."
Number of performances: 8
Mr. Bowen: "The story I remember is that they couldn't afford to pay to load the set out, so it sat at the Minskoff Theater for a very long time. And I want to say the marquee was up for a really long time. It has a really great logo, like a messy paint thing that's really active. I love that about it."
"RUTHLESS!" (1992)
Synopsis: Spoof about a little girl hellbent on becoming a star.
Fact: The original Off Broadway cast featured Laura Bundy (now Laura Bell Bundy, formerly of "Legally Blonde: The Musical") and, as understudies, Britney Spears and Natalie Portman.
Times review: A "campy musical farce that will do almost anything for a laugh."
Number of performances: 342
Mr. Bell: "I never saw it, but I fully have an opinion about it."
Correction: August 31, 2008
An article last Sunday about Broadway trivia that is referenced in the musical "[title of show]" referred incorrectly to Pia Zadora's appearance in "Henry, Sweet Henry" (1967). It was her third role on Broadway, not her first. (She made her Broadway debut in the short-lived 1961 run of "Midgie Purvis.")
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/theater/24intropiepenburg.html?sq=Got%20tu%20have%20a%20primer&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/7sju4
Theater
Got tu Have a Primer to Get '[title of show]' By ERIK PIEPENBURG
Correction Appended
WHEN Tom Stoppard's mammoth trilogy "The Coast of Utopia" played at Lincoln Center Theater in 2006, it was the snob hit of the year. Like many of Mr. Stoppard's plays it required of the viewer substantial intellectual agility; a certain fluency in Russian history, literature and philosophy helped, too. So to aid in understanding the rush of names being thrown around by Mr. Stoppard's historical characters, many sought out "Russian Thinkers," the 1978 collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin, which became so popular during the trilogy's early run that it virtually disappeared from the city's bookstores.
The idiosyncratic, meta-minded musical "[title of show]" may not match "The Coast of Utopia" as a snob hit. But the show, which opened on Broadway last month at the Lyceum Theater, has its own rich lexicon of insider jokes and obscure references — about musical theater lore instead of the 19th-century Russian intelligentsia. Where Mr. Stoppard tossed around names like Turgenev, Herzen and Belinsky, the creators and two of the co-stars of "[title of show]" — Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen — ask of their audiences a familiarity with flopsicals, Broadway gypsies and Gen X miscellany. Mamie Duncan-Gibbs? "Got tu Go Disco"? Shields and Yarnell? Anyone?
To ensure that no reference goes unappreciated, Mr. Bell and Mr. Bowen agreed to sit down and do for "[title of show]" what Isaiah Berlin's book did for "Utopia": create a cheat sheet for audiences not quite so in the know, explaining some of the names and shows that crop up during the musical. A home video of the young Hunter Bell performing a short play called "A Puzzling Obsession" in a relative's basement about 1981 can be found at left, along with links to the original reviews in The New York Times of the shows mentioned. ERIK PIEPENBURG
The People
MARY STOUT
A steadily employed actress who has done dinner theater, Disney voice-overs and practically everything else theatrical; Broadway credits include "Jane Eyre," "Beauty and the Beast" and "My Favorite Year."
Hunter Bell: "I think of her as the consummate Broadway character actress. She came onto the radar because, unfortunately, she was struck by a hot dog cart in the city. ... She was there on our opening night. She's an awesome talent. I like that she's game to be in the show."
DEE HOTY
Starred in the 1994 Broadway flop "The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public" (the sequel to "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas"), which ran for 16 performances. Received a Tony Award nomination for her performance, as well as nominations for her performances in "The Will Rogers Follies" (1991) and "Footloose" (1999).
Mr. Bell: This is an example of "when amazing performances are in shows that may not last very long; Dee Hoty is a rock star."
DINAH MANOFF
Lee Grant's daughter; won a 1980 Tony Award for best featured actress for her performance in Neil Simon's play "I Ought to Be in Pictures." Also played Marty Maraschino in the film version of "Grease" and on television played the roles of Elaine Lefkowitz-Dallas on "Soap" and Carol Weston on "Empty Nest."
ROMA TORRE
News anchor and theater critic on NY1 News, New York City's 24-hour local news channel.
Jeff Bowen: "My character's ambitions are all the way from being in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a big Broadway thing, to meeting Roma Torre, a really specific thing that only Broadway people would get to do. It means something to the character."
MAMIE DUNCAN-GIBBS
Broadway gypsy who has worked with Liza Minnelli in "Steppin' Out at Radio City Music Hall" and Gregory Hines in "Jelly's Last Jam"; Broadway credits include "Kiss Me, Kate," "Chicago" and "Cats." Also works as the executive and artistic director of Youth Theater Interactions, an after-school performing arts group in Westchester County.
Mr. Bell: "That one is kind of intentionally obscure. In the scene, these guys are flying over New York, and they see the Naked Cowboy, Red Lobster, everything that everyone knows. Then Hunter gets excited because he sees Mamie Duncan-Gibbs, and Jeff calls him out on it. But she is beautiful, sassy and super talented."
Mr. Bowen: "If you're going to pick one gypsy that probably everybody on Broadway has either worked with or knows or has respect for, grab Mamie Duncan-Gibbs."
SHIELDS AND YARNELL
Mime/comedy duo best known for their television appearances in the late 1970s; hosted their own television variety show on CBS in 1977. Starred in the Broadway flop "Broadway Follies," which opened and closed on March 15, 1981.
Mr. Bell: "If they went into a pitch meeting at CBS and were like, 'We're two mimes and we do a seven-minute piece in the Oval Office about pouring coffee for the president,' I can't imagine CBS would be like, 'Get the contract out.' Yet they had variety specials, they were on 'The Muppet Show' and on 'The Carol Burnett Show.' [Pause] They were mimes, for god's sake. ...They affected our world. A Shields and Yarnell variety show? That shouldn't happen at all. '[title of show]' shouldn't happen at all, yet here we are."
The Shows
"BAGELS AND YOX" (1951)
Synopsis: A Yiddish-flavored music, comedy and dance revue.
Fact: Ran for more performances than the Broadway revival of "Oklahoma!" the same year.
Times review: " 'Bagels and Yox' maintains an even level of noisy mediocrity."
Number of performances: 208
Mr. Bowen: "It was one of those borscht belt humor revues that were big in the '50s, kind of vaudeville style. 'Borscht Capades' was another one that was around at the time."
"KWAMINA" (1961)
Synopsis: A white American doctor falls in love with a black tribal leader in Africa.
Fact: Richard Adler ("Damn Yankees") wrote the music and lyrics, and Agnes de Mille created the choreography.
Times review: "There is a fiery theatricalism in the deployment of this company made up largely of Negroes."
Number of performances: 32
Mr. Bowen: "It was a biracial coupling, happening in the mid-'60s, which was pretty risqué. 'No Strings' was happening at the same time, but that was a black woman and a white man. I read a lot about those shows and how at the time it was somehow more acceptable for a white man to be with a black woman than it was for a white woman to be with a black man. Not that that's any reason why the show may have closed or not. It has a beautiful score."
"HENRY, SWEET HENRY" (1967)
Synopsis: Two wealthy teenage girls stalk a philandering composer; based on the book and film adaptation of "The World of Henry Orient."
Fact: Bob Merrill ("Carnival!") wrote the music and lyrics, and Michael Bennett was the choreographer.
Times review: "For Mr. Merrill to write a musical like this is tantamount to Karlheinz Stockhausen's trying to compose in the style of Mendelssohn."
Number of performances: 80
Mr. Bowen: "For a lot of people who became big in the '70s, it was their gypsy show of the late '60s."
"GOT TU GO DISCO" (1979)
Synopsis: "It was about disco and having to go do that," Mr. Bowen said. "That's about it."
Fact: Irene Cara made her last Broadway appearance in this show, one year before skyrocketing to "Fame."
Times review: "The dancing, the music and the performances ... may well recreate what is to be found in discos. But that is just the trouble."
Number of performances: 8
Mr. Bowen: "The story I remember is that they couldn't afford to pay to load the set out, so it sat at the Minskoff Theater for a very long time. And I want to say the marquee was up for a really long time. It has a really great logo, like a messy paint thing that's really active. I love that about it."
"RUTHLESS!" (1992)
Synopsis: Spoof about a little girl hellbent on becoming a star.
Fact: The original Off Broadway cast featured Laura Bundy (now Laura Bell Bundy, formerly of "Legally Blonde: The Musical") and, as understudies, Britney Spears and Natalie Portman.
Times review: A "campy musical farce that will do almost anything for a laugh."
Number of performances: 342
Mr. Bell: "I never saw it, but I fully have an opinion about it."
Correction: August 31, 2008
An article last Sunday about Broadway trivia that is referenced in the musical "[title of show]" referred incorrectly to Pia Zadora's appearance in "Henry, Sweet Henry" (1967). It was her third role on Broadway, not her first. (She made her Broadway debut in the short-lived 1961 run of "Midgie Purvis.")
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/theater/24intropiepenburg.html?sq=Got%20tu%20have%20a%20primer&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/7sju4
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Singing! Dancing! Adapting! Stumbling! By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Singing! Dancing! Adapting! Stumbling!
HOLLYWOOD has a long history of bungling the movie versions of hit Broadway musicals, but believe it or not I held out hope for “Mamma Mia!” In retrospect this seems a little deranged, but let me explain.
The story of my responses to the Abba musical onstage is a strange one, moving through several phases, sort of like those stages of grief famously diagnosed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. I first saw the show shortly after it opened in London in 1999 to giddy reviews from the local critics. My reaction was a mixture of bafflement and dismay as I watched rows and rows of middle-aged Englishwomen — and quite a few mildly embarrassed-looking Englishmen — bouncing to their feet with glee to join in the megamix finale. There was sorrow too at what I immediately perceived as a dubious but obviously popular new genre of musical theater.
A few years later the musical splashed down on Broadway. Perhaps that initial vaccination had inoculated me against continued irritation. I still found it deeply silly, but also tolerable fun. And really, in contrast to the run of karaoke musicals that had by then begun to inundate the stage, “Mamma Mia!” does have a sweet little mother-daughter story nestled inside its iPod shuffle score of Abba tunes.
Still later I saw another production, this time in what I have come to consider the musical’s natural spiritual home, Las Vegas. The third time was the charm. Maybe it was the novelty of the cup holder at my seat, into which I nestled one of those luridly colored frozen drinks they serve you in big, cutely shaped plastic vessels. But at last I succumbed entirely to its ditzy glory, achieving serene acceptance. I saw the light, though I still refused to sing along. So I can honestly say I looked forward to the movie version with at least a happy sense of anticipation, intrigued by the curious casting of Meryl Streep in the leading role.
I really should have known better. Every few years, with depressing regularity, a hit Broadway musical makes the leap to the big screen and goes splat! Or thud. Or zzzzz. “Mamma Mia!” does a little of all three, to a frantic disco beat, becoming yet another milestone in Hollywood’s repertory of enjoyable stage musicals transformed into lumbering messes on screen.
The movie is actually doing strong if not superhero-size business, despite receiving some of the most amusingly awful reviews meted out to any movie this year. Even Ms. Streep, the country’s Greatest Living Actress by the reckoning of many, got knocked around. Many critics seemed to want to avert their eyes from the sorry spectacle of the great Streep cavorting in the Aegean with such frenetic zeal. I share the general mortification. The movie has brought me full circle in my “Mamma Mia!” journey, back to Stage 1: bafflement, dismay and sorrow.
For the uninitiated “Mamma Mia!” is set on an idyllic Greek island that doubles as both a funky resort and a lunatic asylum for people suffering from a distinctive disorder, the compulsive need to sing Abba songs at all hours of the day and night. The movie follows closely the plot and pacing of the original show, but the hard gaze of the camera puts into queasy relief the inanity of people lurching suddenly from natural conversation to leaping around singing lyrics with a mighty tenuous relationship to the situation at hand, as synthesizer chords churn away in the background. (For instance, when Ms. Streep’s character, Donna, evinces clear signs of emotional distress, a girlfriend opens her mouth and sings, “Chiquitita, tell me what’s wrong.” Chiquitita? Who she?)
Leaping isn’t the half of it either. I wouldn’t want to say Ms. Streep gives the worst performance of her career, as some aver, but it has got to be the scariest. When she is called upon to sing the title song — just after stumbling upon three ex-boyfriends she hasn’t seen for years — she flies into a spasmodic frenzy that concludes with her writhing on the roof of a goat house. Later she sings a syrupy ballad, “The Winner Takes It All,” with an operatic intensity that’s unsettling. It’s not exactly “Rose’s Turn,” after all, or even “My Man” from “Funny Girl.”
Staunch fans of the stage musical as an art form regularly have to weather scorn from nonbelievers when the movie versions of Broadway shows go galumphing across the screen. The subtext of many reviews is a smirky disdain for anything with its roots in old-fashioned theater, an unspoken belief that musicals and even plays are quant relics of another era beloved only of octogenarians, nostalgists and the irredeemably unhip.
The problem is, on the evidence of the movie versions of most musicals — and you have to keep in mind that only the most popular musicals warrant attention from Hollywood — their disaffection is hard to refute. If you saw the movie version of Mel Brooks’s musical “The Producers,” you’d have little notion of what a gut-busting joy the Broadway show was. The filmed “Rent” was a blunt, literal-minded translation of material that really had a sizzle onstage. “The Phantom of the Opera” was numbingly dull. Even “Mamma Mia!” — which I can now soberly see was never exactly “South Pacific” on the stage — might have made for a spryer, funnier, more zesty movie.
Theater is a stylized medium. We know that the guys up there fighting with swords are not going to draw real blood, and we don’t flinch when purportedly real people burst spontaneously into song. The great musicals from the glory days of Hollywood — the Fred and Ginger movies, the Arthur Freed classics from MGM — likewise offered up frothier visions of contemporary life. They emerged during an era when movies gussied up reality for purposes of enhancing their escapist appeal.
But since the 1960s film’s ability to capture the sights and sounds of the world more or less as they meet the eye and ear has been its signature aesthetic, at least for mainstream fare. The conventions of musical theater tend to assume a ludicrous aspect in this context; in life as we know it people do not communicate in song, trailed by a personal orchestra. (Those superhero movies are obviously pure fantasy, but they achieve their intense appeal by seeming to take place in a version of the real world.)
Theater is at the same time an intimate art form, allowing actors to make a direct connection to the audience and send complex messages. Watching the stage version of “Mamma Mia!” you often got a sense that the actors were in on the gag, fully aware of how patently ludicrous it was for their characters suddenly to bust out a flimsy but catchy 25-year-old pop song.
That sense of complicity in a collective joke can’t make it easily past the impersonal barrier of the movie screen. Winking at the camera is not really allowed. (Although I’m told there is collective audience participation at some screenings of the movie: When Pierce Brosnan first breaks into “S.O.S.,” his big number with Ms. Streep, viewers explode in mirth.)
A similar give-and-take between performers and audience basted the hoary jokes in “The Producers” in a shared warmth. The performances of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, which fed happily on a live audience’s affection onstage, seemed canned and forced on film. “Rent” would have made a far more effective movie if it were filmed concert style, I expect. (And my hopes are high for Spike Lee’s planned movie of the sadly underappreciated “Passing Strange.”)
In the long history of stage-to-film transcriptions, Hollywood has found all sorts of ways to make mincemeat out of solid successes. On many occasions the decision to shunt aside the magnetic stage performer at the center of a show and cast an established movie star has proved fatal, as when Rosalind Russell replaced Ethel Merman in “Gypsy,” or Lucille Ball took over from Angela Lansbury in “Mame.” Even the great Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra didn’t do much for the movie version of “Guys and Dolls.”
Entrusting musicals to esteemed film directors with no affinity for the material has often been a sure path to disaster. John Huston was all wrong for “Annie.” Ditto Richard Attenborough for “A Chorus Line” and Sidney Lumet on “The Wiz.” On the other hand, stage directors handed a camera to replicate their success on screen have also come a cropper with some regularity, as Harold Prince did on the notoriously awful film version of “A Little Night Music,” and later by Susan Stroman on “The Producers” and now Phyllida Lloyd, the director of “Mamma Mia!” on both stage and screen. Theater and film speak different languages; very few directors are fluent in both. Bob Fosse is one, and his film adaptation of “Cabaret” might top my list of the best stage-to-film translations. (Notably Fosse eliminated the “book” songs in which characters spontaneously sing, retaining only the numbers at the nightclub.)
I also particularly admire Norman Jewison’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” William Wyler’s “Funny Girl” and Carol Reed’s “Oliver!” Stanley Donen, a stage hoofer who became a skilled filmmaker, profitably teamed with the stage vet George Abbott to direct the likable films of “The Pajama Game” and “Damn Yankees.”
In recent years there has been a marked upward trend in the general quality of stage-to-film transcriptions. The more successful recent movie adaptations of popular musicals — “Chicago,” “Dreamgirls,” “Hairspray” and “Sweeney Todd” — only fitfully captured the energy and excitement of the stage versions, but they were respectable as movies, and entertaining.
“Chicago” is probably the best, although the movie was mostly Fosse-derivative and drained away a fair amount of the stage version’s snazzy wit. “Dreamgirls” felt to me like a two-hour montage, a frenzy of scenes and images that never really found a natural rhythm. The stage-size humor of “Hairspray” often clunked on screen, and the charm of Harvey Fierstein’s drag performance as Edna Turnblad lost much of its camp appeal when John Travolta was squeezed into a weirdly porcine fat suit. “Sweeney Todd” turned Mrs. Lovett into the title character’s goth twin, stripping away the contrast that gave their relationship such fizz and the show its variety. But each had its merits, and none was a disaster, suggesting — at least until the advent of “Mamma Mia!” — that an ongoing aesthetic rapprochement was being achieved.
Still, in my view the best movie musicals of the past few decades were not based on stage shows at all, in keeping with history. (“Singin’ in the Rain” is possibly the best movie musical of all time.) Herbert Ross’s “Pennies From Heaven” and Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” both used film’s endless flexibility to enhance the stylized nature of the material, to thrilling results.
And, most promisingly, a small movie coming out of nowhere managed to make the old-school conventions of musical theater bloom naturally in a strictly realistic, indeed even grungy environment. The indie movie “Once,” which ultimately won an Oscar for best original song this year, depicts a romance between two street musicians in Dublin. The scruffy Irish protagonist and his Czech girlfriend glide into their music with the ease of Fred and Ginger wafting onto the dance floor, reminding us that at its best, onstage or at the movies, the marriage of music and drama feels not just natural but inevitable.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Recommended Original Cast Albums
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Not Your Mother’s Original-Cast Albums
Correction Appended
A surge of oxygen pours through the original cast albums of “In the Heights” and “Passing Strange,” two musicals that have shown Broadway how to revitalize a somnolent form this season.
You can also feel that breeze in the cast album of the Off Broadway show “Adding Machine” and a faint puff of fresh air in the quiet cast album of “A Catered Affair.” There are no plans for a “Cry-Baby” recording, but its witty rock ’n’ roll parody lyrics give the last twist of the knife to “Grease”-era nostalgia; it is now irredeemably camp.
An album of the revival of “Gypsy,” with a performance by Patti LuPone for which there is only one word — volcanic — is due in August. It will include several never-before-recorded songs that were cut from the original production, with new orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick.
Until recently I imagined the Broadway musical locked inside a museum, at which a superannuated curator in a seersucker suit, bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses politely welcomed guests to the tea party. But not anymore. Once that curator extended a trembling hand to eager new faces, fresh air wafted in; the tea and cucumber sandwiches were supplanted by beer and pizza, and the music blasted all night.
That doesn’t mean that patriarchs like Rodgers and Hammerstein, haughtily gazing down from the museum walls, no longer speak to us. You can’t listen to the cast album of the Lincoln Center revival of “South Pacific” without becoming misty-eyed for an era of cockeyed postwar optimism when all America sang Rodgers and Hammerstein hits and absorbed the moral instruction in their songs.
Cockeyed optimism may not describe today’s climate. But the giddy euphoria that has always been a hallmark of Broadway musicals explodes on the two-disc cast album of “In the Heights.” Although expressed in a different musical vocabulary, this bilingual show (more English than Spanish) is as secure as “South Pacific” in its faith that a better future lies ahead.
This show’s true believers are not white, middle-class sailors and nurses fighting a just war in the Pacific. They are economically struggling Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and African-American residents of Washington Heights, the melting pot idealized in the show. For “In the Heights,” which just won a Tony Award for best musical, embodies a compelling argument that immigration is the lifeblood of America.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the blazingly talented 28-year-old who wrote the music and lyrics and stars as the Dominican storekeeper Usnavi, respects popular music traditions. Early in the show he interpolates quotations from Duke Ellington (“Take the ‘A’ Train”) and Cole Porter (“Too Darn Hot”) into the partly rapped title song, an ensemble number that introduces most of the characters. Throughout, the score echoes (but doesn’t quote outright) “West Side Story,” especially “America” and the great mambo dance sequence.
But for all its nods to old-school Broadway “In the Heights” is truly an uptown musical. The score is a fluid, authentic mix of salsa, rap and reggaetón. For a show set in a heavily Dominican neighborhood with a Dominican character as its official greeter, the absence of merengue is puzzling. But as a broadly sketched overview of Latin musical cultures that collide and merge in the melting pot, the score is still wildly exhilarating.
The rap lyrics, however sanitized for Broadway, carry pungent streetwise inflections, and Mr. Miranda delivers them with an aggressive swagger that illustrates the power of rap as a storytelling medium.
The influence of rap is the underlying story of the past Broadway musical season. Words, either rapped or sung in variations of the traditional patter song, are loosening the grip of traditional melody on Broadway. Lament it if you will, but stand-alone songs have a way of interrupting the narrative. Even in musicals without hip-hop, recitative and songs flow into each other more smoothly nowadays; the story is the thing, and language the vehicle.
Mr. Manuel and his orchestrators Alex Lacamoire and Bill Sherman twirl various styles of Latin music into a fabric that is continually changing color and pace. The sprawling ensemble numbers, “96,000,” “Blackout” and “Carnaval del Barrio,” in particular, portray a whole community of disparate voices, speaking as one and at the same time as individuals. Words that go by too quickly to be picked up in the theater can be studied while listening to the cast album with the booklet at hand. These virtuosic numbers suggest denser elaborations of the pre-rumble “Tonight” sequence from “West Side Story.”
A binding ingredient of Mr. Miranda’s score is tuneful Broadway pop that coalesces into a plaintive 11 o’clock number, “Everything I Know,” in the second act. Though not a great song, it serves effectively as the show’s emotional grounding wire.
Because “Passing Strange” has no sugar coating, in some ways it is almost anti-Broadway. The songs, with music by Stew and Heidi Rodewald (he plays guitar, and she plays bass onstage) and lyrics by Stew, describe the personal odyssey of a rebellious middle-class African-American musician who goes from Los Angeles to Europe in a search for his identity.
The galumphing rock score in which a song can suddenly change character without warning reflects the character’s uncertainty about who he is. The Narrator (the grown-up Stew) observes the life of his younger self, Youth (Daniel Breaker), with an affectionately critical eye. When Stew riffs on electric guitar and declaims his lyrics in a gruff holler, you hear echoes of Jimi Hendrix. Later on he morphs into a punk rocker. There is a broad, sarcastic parody of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” when the young Stew ingests psychedelics.
The young man’s naïve infatuation with Europe, where he dives into a bohemian paradise of sex and drugs, inspires an amusing rock parody of “A Man and a Woman” and a sarcastic Kander and Ebb spoof, “The Black One,” which is a scathing response to his being fetishized as an angry black militant by a group of German cultural revolutionaries:
“Who lends the club that speak-easy air?/The black one, the black one!/Who dances like a god and has ‘wunderbar’ hair?/Der Schwarze.” In conclusion he wonders if he is “the postmodern lawn jockey sculpture.”
The term postmodern indicates the intellectual seriousness of the show. As the character matures and becomes bored with easy pleasure, his search carries him into a philosophic realm rarely visited by the Broadway musical. “What’s Inside Is Just a Lie/And Now I’m Ready to Explode” describes a psychic earthquake in which Youth decides “our feelings and our dreams have actually been put there by a system.” In desperation he determines to turn his life into a work of art, that work being “Passing Strange.”
The show’s final song, “Love Like That,” offers the closest thing to a comfortable answer to his questions: “Cuz the Real is a construct.../It’s the raw nerve’s private zone/It’s a personal sunset .../You drive off into alone.” “Passing Strange” is too true to its own vision to culminate in an explosion of joyful affirmation. It ends with a sigh.
Joshua Schmidt’s score for “Adding Machine” is just as harsh and darkly funny. The protagonist of this musical adaptation of Elmer Rice’s 1923 expressionistic play is a repressed number-crunching boor, Mr. Zero (Joel Hatch), who hates his job and his shrewish wife.
Mr. Schmidt’s music is percussive, mechanistic and frequently discordant as characters robotically chant lists of numbers, the monotony broken by bursts of rage and frustration. The score, at once hypnotic and corrosive, goes beyond Brecht-Weill in evoking a dystopic world. The one catchy tune, “I’d Rather Watch You,” sung by Daisy (Amy Warren), Zero’s office mate who has a secret crush on him, is a slowed-up 1920s-style barroom waltz.
The fiendish cosmic joke occurs when Zero, executed for the murder of his boss, lands in Elysian fields, where he discovers that freedom in the afterlife is unbearable because there is no morality. A mocking chorus sings, “And we must each/Believe, believe/Our lives will all/Add up to something in the end.”
Although wistfulness and anger crop up in John Bucchino’s music and lyrics for “A Catered Affair,” the kind of nihilism trumpeted by “Adding Machine” is nowhere to be found. The main characters, Aggie (Faith Prince) and her husband, Tom (Tom Wopat), are softened, realistic descendants of the careworn working people in “Adding Machine” and they’re observed tenderly instead of harshly.
“A Catered Affair” is a delicate, 1950s kitchen-sink chamber piece. Mr. Bucchino’s score, his first for Broadway, is true to the mood of the show, which has finely shaded performances by Ms. Prince and Mr. Wopat and an irritatingly outsize one by Harvey Fierstein, who can barely sing. Ms. Prince’s touching big number, “Married,” is delivered with appropriate Shirley Booth-meets-Edith Bunker plainness. The score’s one moment of high drama, Mr. Wopat’s “I Stayed,” is an eloquent swatch of narrative songwriting that breaks the mood of weary resignation at exactly the right moment. It is a modest, touching male answer to “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy,” a perfect moment.
The biggest impediment to falling in love with the new cast album of “South Pacific” is the memory of the 1949 original with Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin. The orchestra for this Lincoln Center Theater production, even beefed up, sounds smaller. That 1949 recording begins with a thunderous overture that sweeps into “Bali Hai” like a tidal wave. The supercharged sense of inevitability that permeates the original is only fleetingly captured in the Lincoln Center production.
Paulo Szot, who looks like a younger Pinza, sings wonderfully but without the same rock-bottom authority. Kelli O’Hara’s Nellie Forbush is irresistible to watch, but less so to hear on the album, because her voice lacks the personality of either a Mary Martin or a Reba McEntire, who sang the role in concert with Brian Stokes Mitchell. Ms. O’Hara is perfectly fine but not definitive.
The wonder is how fresh the score still sounds. “South Pacific” caught a wave of American history at Broadway’s high tide, like no other show has since. The museum that opened it doors to Stew and Mr. Miranda was built around musicals like it.
Correction: June 28, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about cast albums of current Broadway musicals misidentified an award won by
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