TT: Little girl, you’ve had a busy day

I saw five shows this week, all of them important, so The Wall Street Journal was kind enough to give me a bonus column in today’s paper so that I could write at greater length than usual. Today I report on the American premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s My Wonderful Day, a New Jersey revival of On the Town, and the first Broadway revival of Ragtime. All are good, the first two extraordinarily so. Here’s an excerpt.
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Is America finally catching up with Alan Ayckbourn, England’s most popular playwright? I sure hope so. The success of the Broadway revival of “The Norman Conquests” raised Mr. Ayckbourn’s profile by several notches in this country, and the Off-Broadway production of his latest play, “My Wonderful Day,” is bound to benefit from that development–as well it should. Not only is “My Wonderful Day” one of the wittiest and most pristinely crafted of Mr. Ayckbourn’s dark farces, but the Brits Off Broadway festival has wisely imported his own production, which was first seen in October at Mr. Ayckbourn’s home base, Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre. Like the play, it’s a gem, a textbook example of how to stage a comedy effectively, and anyone fortunate enough to see it will wonder why Mr. Ayckbourn’s parallel career as a director is largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
“My Wonderful Day” starts off quietly: Laverne (Petra Letang), a cleaning woman, brings Winnie (Ayesha Antoine), her nine-year-old daughter, to the house of one of her clients, a middle-aged TV pitchman named Kevin (Terence Booth) whose wife (Alexandra Mathie) has just discovered that he’s sleeping with his young secretary (Ruth Gibson). As Winnie looks on in silent amazement–and amusement–things go from bad to worse to absolutely appalling. Yet Mr. Ayckbourn, as is his wont, takes care to make Kevin not just a comic beanbag but an unfeeling brute, thereby turning what in less skilled hands might have been no more than an amusing romp into a poignant, sharp-eyed portrait of a marriage gone sour….
“On the Town,” the 1944 sailor-suit musical that made Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden and Adolph Green somewhat rich and very famous, is a masterpiece that has never gotten the respect it deserves. The original Broadway production was a hit, but the 1971 and 1998 revivals both flopped, and the 1949 film version, whose benighted makers scrapped most of Bernstein’s songs and all of Robbins’ dances, was a travesty. Now, though, New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse has given us a production of “On the Town” staged by Bill Berry that gets everything right, all the way down to the last detail, and the results are lovely and amazing to behold….
Paper Mill’s “On the Town” is better than any musical now playing on Broadway, “South Pacific” included. It belongs there….
If you saw Stafford Arima’s excellent staging of “Ragtime” at Paper Mill four years ago, you won’t be greatly surprised by the new Broadway revival of the musical version of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel about life in turn-of-the-century America. Marcia Milgrom Dodge’s production, which originated last season at Washington’s Kennedy Center, is a slimmed-down, pageant-style rendering of “Ragtime” played on an open stage surrounded by cast-iron catwalks. I don’t know whether Ms. Dodge saw the Paper Mill revival, but she was clearly thinking along similar lines, and the results are just as effective, maybe even more so….
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Read the whole thing here.