Archives for November 26, 2009

I review two shows in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Kenneth Lonergan’s The Starry Messenger and the Broadway transfer of Fela! The first is extraordinary, the second very good. Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, the Journal decided to post my Friday column on the paper’s Web site in advance of its appearance in print, so here’s an excerpt.
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Eight years ago, Kenneth Lonergan was an artist of seemingly infinite promise, a writer with three plays and a movie under his belt, all of them memorable. Then Hollywood knocked him off the tracks, and of late his career has been looking more like a cautionary tale. “Margaret,” Mr. Lonergan’s second film, was shot in 2006 but is still stuck in post-production–he was reportedly unable to complete a final cut. Meanwhile, the premiere of his fourth play, “The Starry Messenger,” was announced twice and cancelled twice in the past four seasons, first by San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre and then by the Off-Broadway New Group.
Now “The Starry Messenger” has opened Off Broadway, preceded by a string of alarming reports suggesting that Mr. Lonergan and his cast had a rocky time in rehearsal. No doubt they did, but you wouldn’t know it from seeing the finished product. Like “You Can Count on Me,” the 2000 film that first brought its author-director to the attention of a national audience, “The Starry Messenger” is an engrossing study of the toll that prolonged disappointment exacts on the human spirit, performed with consummate skill by an ensemble cast led by Matthew Broderick and staged with unassuming finesse by Mr. Lonergan himself.
Mr. Broderick plays Mark, a 46-year-old astronomy teacher who dreamed as a young man of “becoming a real astronomer–a practicing astronomer,” then came to the reluctant conclusion that he wasn’t good enough to make the cut. Trapped in the smothering dailiness of family life and an unsatisfying job, he stumbles headlong into an affair with Angela (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a 28-year-old Puerto Rican nurse with a young child whose father refuses to marry her. Anne (J. Smith-Cameron), Mark’s wife, knows nothing of the affair but is all too aware of the reasons for his unhappiness: “You decided that everybody you were working with was more talented than you…You told me that. And I never forgot it. It was the most terrible thing I ever heard anybody say about themselves.”…
Is it really possible to write an interesting play about yet another frustrated family man of a certain age who seeks to plug the hole in his soul by having an affair with a younger woman? That’s like asking whether it’s possible to write yet another interesting symphony in the key of E minor. It says much about the nature of Mr. Lonergan’s gifts that for all the seeming obviousness of the plot of “The Starry Messenger,” you’ll never be able to guess what happens next. He is a theatrical alchemist who transforms the commonplace by portraying it with quiet honesty and charging it with moral complexity….
The designers of the Broadway transfer of “Fela!” have turned the staid interior of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre into a riotous facsimile of a corrugated-iron Nigerian dance hall that appears to have been jointly decorated by Romare Bearden and Paul Klee. The music played inside, a savory stew of big-band jazz, James Brown-style funk and African percussion known to its devotees as “Afrobeat,” is an ideal backdrop for the flat-footed, hip-swiveling dancing of the hottest chorus in town. All that’s missing from this bio-musical about the life of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the Nigerian pop star and political activist, is a plot, and an act and a half goes by before its absence becomes obtrusive….
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Read the whole thing here.

Like most mere mortals, I have the unfortunate habit of grousing about things for which I should by all rights be abjectly grateful. This has been a stressful and exhausting year, far too much of which I’ve had to spend in departure lounges and window seats, and there were a few times along the way when I wondered whether I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Yet I knew perfectly well that anyone who gets to publish his latest book, have his first opera premiered, and celebrate his second wedding anniversary–all in the space of twelve fast-moving months–has no business complaining about anything whatsoever. Today I’m as thankful as it’s possible to be, and I hope I have the good sense to remain so for some time to come.

I love the opening lines of My Favorite Year, Richard Benjamin’s movie about a young writer for a weekly TV series not unlike Your Show of Shows: “Nineteen fifty-four. You don’t get years like that anymore. It was my favorite year.”

I hope I will always feel that way about 2009.

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The last scene of My Favorite Year:

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, closes Jan. 10, reviewed here)

• Finian’s Rainbow (musical, G, suitable for children, dramatically inert but musically sumptuous, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)

• Oleanna (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, violence, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)

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

• Superior Donuts (dark comedy, PG-13, violence, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

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

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

• The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Part 1 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, will be performed in rotating repertory with second and third parts of cycle starting on Dec. 3 and Jan. 7 respectively, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• The Understudy (farce, PG-13, extended through Jan. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• My Wonderful Day (farce, PG-13/R, unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• A Steady Rain * (drama, R, totally unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, closes Dec. 6, then reopens Dec. 15 at the Soho Playhouse, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN MILLBURN, N.J..:

• On the Town (musical, PG-13, comic sexual situations, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical, PG-13, comic sexual situations, reviewed here)

O Lord, that lends me life,

Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness!

For thou hast given me in this beauteous face

A world of earthly blessings to my soul,

If sympathy of love unite our thoughts.

William Shakespeare, Henry VI