Archives for 2010

“People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.”
Edmund Burke, letter to Charles James Fox (October 8, 1777)

Today my entire Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to the premiere of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which stars Sherie Rene Scott, Patti LuPone, Laura Benanti, and Brian Stokes Mitchell and which opened cold on Broadway last night without an out-of-town tryout. Too bad–it’s no good. Here’s an excerpt.
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Recipe for a commodity musical: (1) Take an ultra-familiar piece of source material, preferably a hit movie. (2) Adapt it for the stage in the most literal and obvious way imaginable, adding only extra jokes. (3) Stir in a dozen or so innocuous songs that won’t divert the audience’s attention from how closely the stage version resembles its source. If you’re lucky, you get “The Addams Family”; if not, “9 to 5.” Either way, you get the kind of been-there-seen-that musical that has been blighting Broadway for the past decade and more.
So what does this formula have to do with “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” Lincoln Center Theater’s big-budget musical version of Pedro Almodovár’s 1988 screen comedy about three women whom love has driven to the brink of madness? The answer is that Jeffrey Lane and David Yazbek, last seen on the Great White Way as the creators of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” have now sought to commoditize not an off-the-rack Hollywood comedy but one of the most individual and significant Spanish-language films of the postwar era. It’s as if they’d tried to turn “Shoot the Piano Player” or “Wings of Desire” into a Big Mac musical–and the results, not at all surprisingly, are a flavorless mess….
For all its seeming lunacy, “Women on the Verge” is in fact a wholly serious comedy about a macho culture that encourages men to be faithless to the women who love them. The fact that Mr. Almodovár is gay made it easier for him to portray that culture with a sharp-eyed detachment that did nothing to diminish his sympathy for his female characters. That’s part of what makes “Women on the Verge” more than a dizzy sex comedy: You always know whose side it’s on.
To turn so fully realized a work of cinematic art into an equally successful musical demands that it be subjected to a complete and thoroughgoing imaginative transformation. Otherwise, the new version will seem superfluous–which is what’s wrong with the stage version of “Women on the Verge.” Instead of breaking new creative ground, Mr. Lane’s book tracks Mr. Almodovár’s setting and plot slavishly, salting his script with unfunny one- and two-liners that serve only to dilute the crisp, elliptical dialogue of the screenplay. As for Mr. Yazbek’s songs, they’re as forgettable as Muzak in a noisy restaurant…
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Read the whole thing here.

“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

I was wrong when I said the other day that Saturday’s workshop performance of Danse Russe, the new opera that Paul Moravec and I are writing for Philadelphia’s Center City Opera Theater, is an invitation-only affair. In fact, it’s open to the public, so if you happen to be in Philadelphia at three p.m. and want to see what we’re up to, you are hereby officially invited!
Admission is free, but you’ll need a ticket to get in. For more information, go here.

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:

• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Jan. 29, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• A Life in the Theatre (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

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

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 20, reviewed here)

• 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)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

• Night and Day (serious comedy, PG-13, extended through Nov. 14, reviewed here)

“I don’t think in any language. I think in images. I don’t believe that people think in languages. They don’t move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

A rare video of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra playing Jerome Richardson’s “The Groove Merchant” in 1969:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of the freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer, letter to Frank Oppenheimer (March 12, 1932)