Archives for 2008

Three new shows this week, one disappointing, one great, one pretty good. Read all about Road Show, Dividing the Estate, and American Buffalo in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column. Here’s an excerpt.
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Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman got their wish: “Road Show” finally made it to New York. This much-revised musical about two brothers who can’t decide whether to love or hate one another has been under construction for a decade, but only now has the show, which was previously known as “Wise Guys” and “Bounce” and made it as far as a 2003 tryout in Washington, D.C., taken definitive shape as the one-act chamber musical currently being performed downtown at the Public Theater. I wish I could say it was worth the wait, but “Road Show” isn’t up to the high standards of the creators of “Pacific Overtures.” The book is flat, the score fluent but pale, and my reluctant guess is that the Public will be the last stop on its long trip….
[Mr. Sondheim’s] stylistic fingerprints are all over the score–no one else could have written a bar of it–and it may be that closer acquaintance will make its beauties more apparent. Alas, my first impression is that the songs lack the lyrical bite and sharp melodic profile that one takes for granted from the reigning genius of postwar American musical theater.
About the failings of Mr. Weidman’s book I have no doubts, for they’re painfully evident: “Road Show” is all tell and no show, a string of talky, undramatic ensemble numbers that feels more like an oratorio than a musical….
Horton Foote’s “Dividing the Estate,” which had an extravagantly well-received run Off Broadway last fall, has now transferred to Broadway with its original 13-person cast intact. It’s a bitingly macabre comedy about a family of Texans who’ve been sponging off the money of their mother (Elizabeth Ashley) for so long that they’ve forgotten how to live their own lives. No doubt Primary Stages and Lincoln Center Theatre, the co-producers, hope to profit from the protracted hoopla over Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” a similarly dark study of American family life. They deserve to get their wish: “Dividing the Estate” is the best show now playing on Broadway, give or take “Gypsy.” Not only is it at least as good a play as “August: Osage County,” but this production, directed by Michael Wilson, is a stunner, a gorgeous piece of ensemble theater in which nobody puts a foot wrong….
The word is that “American Buffalo,” the second David Mamet revival to open on Broadway this season, will close on Sunday unless ticket sales take an upward turn between now and then. Too bad. This isn’t a perfect production, but it’s worthy and definitely ought to be seen….
Cedric the Entertainer, the comedian-turned-movie-star who made a splash in “Barbershop,” is less a stage actor than a stage presence–but a strong one. He delivers Mamet’s highly stylized dialogue in a too-naturalistic manner, but it’s easy to imagine him making a powerful impression in a more straightforward show, and I very much hope that somebody casts him in an August Wilson play one of these days….
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Read the whole thing here.
Watch my wsj.com video review of American Buffalo here:

Like many another aging baby boomer, I’m fascinated by early television, and in particular by the live telecasts that dominated network TV from its inception at the end of the Forties to the introduction of videotape in the late Fifties. So when Koch Vision sent me a copy of Studio One Anthology, a six-DVD box set containing kinescopes of seventeen dramas that aired between 1948 and 1956 on Studio One, perhaps the best-remembered anthology drama series of the live-TV era, I immediately felt a “Sightings” column coming on.
Studio One Anthology contains, among other interesting things, the original 1954 TV version of Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, which was later turned into a Hollywood film starring Henry Fonda and a stage version that was first performed on Broadway in 2004. I never cared for the movie and had mixed feelings about the play, but I was eager to see what Twelve Angry Men looked like in its original form.
How did it measure up to its better-known successors–and is Studio One as good as its still-formidable reputation? To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal and turn to my “Sightings” column.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“When we imagine what it is like to be a languageless creature, we start, naturally, from our own experience, and most of what then springs to mind has to be adjusted (mainly downward). The sort of consciousness such animals enjoy is dramatically truncated, compared to ours. A bat, for instance, not only can’t wonder whether it’s Friday; it can’t even wonder whether it’s a bat; there is no role for wondering to play in its cognitive structure.”
Daniel Clement Dennett, Consciousness Explained

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)

• Equus (drama, R, nudity and adult subject matter, closes Feb. 8, reviewed here)

• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 1, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• A Man for All Seasons (drama, G, too intellectually demanding for children of any age, closes Dec. 14, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:

• Picnic (drama, PG-13, adult themes, closes Nov. 30, reviewed here)