Archives for December 19, 2008

‘Tis the season for new Broadway musicals, and I review two of them in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, Shrek the Musical and Pal Joey, along with a holiday show, Hartford Stage’s production of A Christmas Carol. Here’s an excerpt.
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You’re not going to be able to wiggle out of taking your children to see “Shrek the Musical,” so let me start with some good news: The sets and costumes are dynamite. They ought to be. This production is said to have cost $25 million, and looks it. Tim Hatley, the designer, has somehow contrived to create a real-life counterpart to the high-tech storybook look of the 2001 animated feature on which “Shrek” is based. Not only do the characters bear an uncanny resemblance to their digitally animated counterparts, but the show flies from scene to scene at near-cinematic velocity. The whole thing is downright uncanny, and enormous fun to behold.
The other glad tiding is that Sutton Foster, who plays Fiona, the sweet and lovely princess who falls in love with a stinky, grumpy ogre (Brian d’Arcy James), is her usual adorable self. Sweetness can be exasperating on stage, but Ms. Foster, Broadway’s biggest charmer, is so full of spunk that even the most vinegary of grouches will find her hard to resist. I didn’t even try, though I’d rather have seen Ms. Foster in…oh, “Peter Pan.” Or a revival of “The Drowsy Chaperone.” I’d have even settled for “The Sound of Music.”
Which brings us to the heart of the matter: “Shrek” is for kids, and no one else. If yours liked the movie, they’ll like the musical, which has been cunningly calculated to rope in the present-day pre-teen crowd. The book and lyrics, by David Lindsay-Abaire, mirror the film’s jeering humor with perfect precision: Take your fluffy fun/And shove it where the sun don’t shine! Most of the jokes are of the insult-and-bodily-function genre (“Shrek” is powered less by electricity than by natural gas). Nor are we spared the starchy pro-tolerance agitprop that long ago became compulsory in cartoons…
The best way to appreciate the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of “Pal Joey”–the only way, really–is to approach it not as a revival but as a brand-new show that just happens to have the same score as its predecessor of the same name. Do that and you’ll find it somewhat easier to savor the performances of Stockard Channing, Martha Plimpton and Jenny Fellner. If, on the other hand, you know “Pal Joey” more than casually and love it for its own sour-souled, hard-boiled sake, you’re going to have a tough time sitting through this slicked-up rewrite of one of the best musicals of the 20th century….
The Roundabout, as best as I can figure, has decided to sell “Pal Joey” by selling it out. In this production, directed by Joe Mantello and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, the show is retrofitted as a glossy school-of-Fosse extravaganza. The fancy sets and showy steps, while pleasing enough in their own right, have little to do with the seedy, sordid world that John O’Hara conjured out of thin air in his very first stage direction: “A cheap night club, on the South Side of Chicago. Not cheap in the whorehouse way, but strictly a neighborhood joint.” Richard Greenberg, one of my least favorite contemporary playwrights, has rewritten O’Hara’s book from curtain to curtain, replacing his sharp-eared dialogue with lame, campy punch lines and smoothing out the rough edges of the plot in a way that is alien to the flint-hearted spirit of the real “Pal Joey.”…
Michael Wilson, who directed the Broadway transfer of “Dividing the Estate,” is better known as the artistic director of Hartford Stage, which is currently performing his adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.” I rarely go out of my way to see seasonal fare, which runs to the dutiful, but I’ve been so impressed by Mr. Wilson’s previous work that I decided to make an exception. I’m glad I did: “A Christmas Carol” is outstandingly well-performed and fabulously well-crafted, a merry medley of trap doors, flying ghosts and thunderous sound effects that tickles the senses without insulting the intelligence….
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Read the whole thing here.
Watch my wsj.com video review of Shrek here:

In April Lincoln Center Theater will be presenting a Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the first in more than two decades. The director will be Bartlett Sher–who is white. That fact is, not surprisingly, causing a stink, since the play has an all-black cast. One black stage director, Marion McClinton, has gone so far as to accuse Lincoln Center of “institutional racism.”
Naturally I took an interest in this story, being an admirer (albeit qualified) of Wilson’s plays and a generally enthusiastic but sometimes skeptical supporter of color-blind “non-traditional” casting. Hence my latest “Sightings” column, in which I take a closer look at the decision to hire Sher, along with the wider question of how best to present plays originally written for performance by an ethnically specific ensemble.
Will we be seeing Al Pacino in Fences any time soon? For the answer, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal and give me a read.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“All works of art bear the artist’s signature. If there is no signature, there is no work of art. And by ‘art,’ I don’t mean only paintings, sculpture, films, plays: I mean anything in life that is done well and carefully. In my opinion, our age commits its greatest crime when it kills the author or makes him disappear. Before what we call progress, a man who made dishes was expressing his personality just as much as Picasso does in his paintings. Today this is no longer true.”
Jean Renoir (interviewed in Charles Thomas Samuels, Encountering Directors)