Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to the Broadway premiere of Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations, starring Jane Fonda. Here’s an excerpt.
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Fifty years ago, Jane Fonda was the most promising ingenue on Broadway. Then she went to Hollywood and became the most promising screen actress of the ’70s. Then she discovered radical politics, made a workout video, married Ted Turner, and metamorphosed into an all-purpose second-tier celebrity who occasionally acts on the side. It’s been a long, long time since she made a halfway serious film, and longer still since she set foot on a stage. So it was with astonishment and a certain amount of trepidation that I went to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre to see her perform in Moisés Kaufman’s “33 Variations.”
Mr. Kaufman’s play, alas, is a sudsy cross between “Amadeus” and “Terms of Endearment,” a sentimental, uplifting family drama in which none other than Ludwig van Beethoven (Zach Grenier) plays a major supporting role. It’s not at all the sort of play with which I would have expected the creator of “The Laramie Project” and “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde” to have made his Broadway debut, and I regret to say that it’s not very good. Nor does Ms. Fonda make a strong impression in it, though she gives a thoroughly competent performance as Katherine Brandt, a brisk, emotionally distant musicologist who comes down with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (the neurological disorder popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), ends up in a wheelchair and discovers en route to the grave that she really, truly loves her brisk, emotionally distant daughter (Samantha Mathis).
And where does Beethoven enter the picture? It seems that Dr. Brandt is obsessed with his “Diabelli” Variations, and has decided to spend her final days examining the composer’s sketchbooks in order to find out what inspired him to write an hour-long set of variations on an ordinary little waltz tune. Beethoven and Anton Diabelli (Don Amendolia), who wrote the waltz, thereupon materialize to supply comic relief, while yet another subplot is introduced when Dr. Brandt’s daughter falls for her male nurse (Colin Hanks).
What we have here, in short, is a good old-fashioned middlebrow play, the kind in which a high-culture icon is made accessible to the masses by turning him into a semiregular guy. I don’t mean for this description to sound quite so dismissive: Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” is that kind of show, more or less, but it is also a perfectly serious work of theatrical art that succeeds in illuminating the creative process and the nature of genius. I think that Mr. Kaufman probably meant to write a show not unlike “Amadeus” or “The Invention of Love,” Tom Stoppard’s play about A.E. Housman, but a funny thing happened on the way to the stage door, and what we got was a 12-hankie weeper with punch lines….
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Read the whole thing here.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
