TT: Show Boat in a small pond

Because Christmas falls on a Friday this year, my last Wall Street Journal drama column of 2009 is appearing today. In it I review two out-of-town shows, Signature Theatre’s Show Boat in Arlington, Virginia, and Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s Twelfth Night. Here’s an excerpt.
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Everybody loves “Show Boat,” but nobody does it. Why? Because it’s too big for most theater companies to put on without busting their budgets wide open. Indeed, many under-50 musical-comedy buffs now know “Show Boat” from James Whale’s elegant 1936 film version rather than from actually having seen the show on stage. Harold Prince’s mammoth 1994 production, performed in the 2,000-seat Gershwin Theatre, was the last time that it was brought to Broadway. That’s what made Eric Schaeffer’s slimmed-down Signature Theatre revival so potentially significant. From James Kronzer’s ultra-plain set to Jonathan Tunick’s brand-new 14-piece chamber orchestrations, Mr. Schaeffer’s “Show Boat” is designed to bring the pioneering 1927 musical within reach of regional companies that simply can’t afford to present it on a large scale.
Such vest-pocket productions are all the rage, and some, like John Doyle’s “Sweeney Todd,” have been both artistically and financially successful. I wish I could say that Signature’s “Show Boat” was as effective, but it doesn’t quite work, and the main reason, I suspect, is that the show simply doesn’t lend itself to small-scale presentation. “Show Boat” is conceptually big, both in setting and in musical scale. Even though Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II forged the modern language of musical comedy more or less from scratch, “Show Boat” still has much in common with the classical operettas that came before it (“Ol’ Man River,” indeed, is unabashedly operatic in scope). A production that fails to do justice to its expansive aspect is thus likely to feel, as this one does, cramped and ungenerous….
“Twelfth Night” has a way of inspiring the companies that perform it. I’ve yet to review a production of Shakespeare’s most likable comedy that failed to please me, and some, like the whirligig Shakespeare & Company staging that I saw this past summer in Lenox, Mass., have been uncommonly fine. Bonnie J. Monte’s sweet-tempered version, now playing at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, is one of the best to come my way in recent seasons–and, perhaps not coincidentally, one of the few to privilege poetry over slapstick….
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Read the whole thing here.