TT: Get thee to New Jersey

This was a good theatergoing week for me, and today’s Wall Street Journal drama column reflects my pleasure. I review two shows, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s production of The Winter’s Tale and the York Theatre Company’s off-Broadway premiere of My Vaudeville Man!. Both are excellent. Here’s an excerpt.
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Some Shakespeare plays are inescapable, others all but invisible. I usually catch two or three “Macbeths” a season, but more than two years have gone by since I last saw “The Winter’s Tale” on stage. Now the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, a troupe that always delivers the goods, has taken up the cause of “The Winter’s Tale” with a production directed by Brian B. Crowe that ranks high on the list of first-class Shakespeare stagings to come my way in recent years. Intimate in scale, unassumingly intelligent in style and acted by an exceptional cast, it makes easy sense out of a play that, like “Cymbeline,” is widely and wrongly thought to be difficult.
What makes “The Winter’s Tale” so tricky is that its two halves don’t seem to fit together, at least not neatly. The first part is a fast-moving tragedy that ends in black disaster, the second a sunny romance in which some (but not all) of the initial horrors are undone by a climactic stroke of magic. How to smooth over the sudden change of tone? Mr. Crowe and his cast operate on the assumption that there’s no problem to be solved. Leontes (Robert Gomes), the Sicilian king whose inexplicable fit of jealous rage brings about the death of his wife (Linda Powell) and young son (Jesse Easterling), behaves exactly like what he is, a man who is first driven mad by suspicion, then redeemed by remorse. Mr. Gomes’ febrile performance is so believable as to make you feel that he’s earned the second chance at happiness that Shakespeare gives him…
Written by Jeff Hochhauser and Bob Johnston, “My Vaudeville Man!” is based on “Letters of a Hoofer to His Ma,” the epistolary autobiography of Jack Donahue, a real-life vaudevillian who ran away from home at the age of 17 to pursue a life on the wicked stage, much to the dismay of his mother, a hard-bitten Irish immigrant who took for granted that her son would go the way of his father, a ne’er-do-well drunkard. She was half right. Donahue became a Broadway star but died of alcoholism in 1930, leaving behind the short, sweet memoir from which Messrs. Hochhauser and Johnston have constructed this musical version of his youthful misadventures on the New England vaudeville circuit. The book is a neat piece of theatrical carpentry, the songs agreeable period pastiches that keep the action moving. Nothing very surprising ever happens, nor does it need to: “My Vaudeville Man!” is an uncomplicated crowd-pleaser that gets the job done with plenty of room to spare.
Shonn Wiley plays Donahue, Karen Murphy his mother, and both are wondrously fine. Mr. Wiley is, in fact, something of a find, a fresh-faced song-and-dance man who tears into his routines with the utmost gusto….
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Read the whole thing here.