It’s Friday, this is my Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, and everybody else is wrong about Christina Applegate and Sweet Charity:
Walter Bobbie, director of the Broadway revival of “Chicago” that’s still going strong after nine years, has done a similarly sterling job here. His staging of the scene in which Charity hides in a closet to avoid embarrassing her kindly benefactor Vittorio (Paul Schoeffler, who is just right) should be taught in drama schools. Denis O’Hare is a hoot as Oscar, Charity’s wimpy boyfriend. The sleazy hookers who sing “Big Spender” are so tough, you could strike wet matches off them. Even the pit band catches your ear, in part because of Don Sebesky’s gleaming new orchestrations.
As for Ms. Applegate, she’s a charmer, winsome, witty and alive. Her singing voice is plenty good enough, and though she’s only a so-so hoofer, choreographer Wayne Cilento has done a near-miraculous job of staging her numbers in such a way as to divert your eye from her limitations. Would I have preferred seeing an all-singing-all-dancing Broadway baby like Ms. d’Amboise or Tracy Shayne tear up the stage in “I’m a Brass Band”? Duh, of course–but I really did enjoy watching Ms. Applegate doing her damnedest up there, and I bet this won’t be her last musical….
On the other hand, we’re all right about Glengarry Glen Ross:
David Mamet won the Pulitzer Prize 20 years ago for “Glengarry Glen Ross,” his fathomlessly dark portrait of a group of cutthroat Chicago real-estate salesmen. Now it’s back on Broadway, directed by Joe Mantello and performed on a pair of ultra-realistic sets designed by Santo Loquasto in which every detail is on the nose, all the way down to the sickly green paint on the walls of the fluorescent-lit office in which Mr. Mamet’s characters snap for “leads” like a tankful of starving piranhas. No less convincing is Liev Schreiber, who plays Richard, the flesh-eating sociopath who’ll say anything to close a deal. With his close-cropped hair, sleek bullet head and blowtorch intensity, he looks and sounds positively demonic….
As for the Broadway transfer of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, well, duh, of course:
James Lapine, the director, has rejiggered things slightly but significantly to accommodate the bigger house’s thrust stage and arena seating, with results that left me happily bedazzled. The cast of the original production is unchanged–and rightly so, “Putnam County” being perfect in every possible way, zany and touching and super-smart. I predict it will run forever, and I plan to go back and see it yearly. (I’ve already been three times, once on my own dime.)
(Incidentally, I just got an advance CD of the original-cast album. Too much reverb on the dialogue, but otherwise it’s a lovely souvenir.)
No link. Buy the damn paper already, for God’s sake. Or go here for a lead.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to drive upstate to read a Shakespeare sonnet at an outdoor wedding….