It’s Friday, so I’m in The Wall Street Journal, reporting on revivals of two oft-reworked shows. The first is Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, about which I had mostly but not entirely negative things to say:
Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul,” now playing through May 30 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAM Harvey Theater, runs for four hours (with two intermissions) and starts off with an hour-long monologue. That’s too damn long, even for an especially well-made play, which “Homebody/Kabul” isn’t. It is, in fact, three or four plays, none of them well made or mutually compatible, scrambled together into a rambling torrent of verbiage that goes on and on and on.
Would that a machete had been applied to Mr. Kushner’s much-revised script, for somewhere amid the domestic melodrama and arch drawing-room comedy is a strong, serious, intellectually challenging play about Islamic fundamentalism and its discontents, one in which the author of “Angels in America” contrives to steer cleer of the agree-with-me-or-burn-in-hell hysterics that are his number-one dramaturgical vice. Alas, his number-two vice, as “Angels in America” proved and “Homebody/Kabul” demonstrates yet again, is that he has no sense of proportion….
The second was the New York Philharmonic’s semi-staged concert version (now closed, alas) of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, which I loved, not least for its Cunegonde:
I was overjoyed to learn that the New York Philharmonic was presenting a semi-staged concert version directed by Lonny Price (“Master Harold…and the boys”) and featuring a mixed cast of Broadway stars and opera singers. Might this perhaps be the perfectly gauged compromise that hitherto had eluded “Candide” buffs? Not quite–but almost.
Kristin Chenoweth, who took a week off from “Wicked” to appear in “Candide,” was the best of all possible Cunegondes, not excluding Barbara Cook, who created the role. Cunegonde, Candide’s shopworn sweetheart, is far beyond the reach of ordinary musical-comedy singers, for “Glitter and Be Gay,” her big number, is an all-stops-out coloratura aria requiring a rock-solid high E flat. I knew the diminutive Ms. Chenoweth had operatic training, but it never occurred to me that her high notes would have survived years of Broadway belting, much less that she could still nail them with the brilliance and panache of a full-time opera star. Add to that her impish charm and switchblade-sharp timing and…well, let’s just say I’m no longer capable of being surprised by the amazing Ms. Chenoweth. After “Glitter and Be Gay,” I wouldn’t have boggled if she’d picked up the baton and conducted the second act….
No link. To read the whole thing, buy the paper. That’s what I do every Friday!