Archives for June 7, 2013

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two musicals, one in New York and one in Arlington, Virginia. The first, a stage version of Far From Heaven, is flawed but very interesting. The second, a revival of Company, is first-rate. Here’s an excerpt.
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Is it possible to make a good musical out of a bad movie? In the case of “Far From Heaven,” many people may wonder why I’m even asking, since Todd Haynes’ 2002 cinematic homage to the humid domestic tragedies of Douglas Sirk is much admired by film buffs. But I find it to be at least as preposterous as Sirk’s sudsy tearjerkers, and I came to Playwrights Horizons expecting to file a scorched-earth pan. Nothing doing. “Far From Heaven” is far from perfect, but it’s vastly superior to the film on which it’s based, and Kelli O’Hara’s performance as Cathy Whitaker, an apple-cheeked Connecticut housewife whose all-American husband (Steven Pasquale) dumps her for a male lover, is so persuasive that you’ll gladly overlook most of the residual problems….
What makes the stage version of “Far From Heaven” work is the score. Instead of ersatz Technicolor movie music, Scott Frankel has given us clean, crisp harmonies that drain away the melodrama, making it possible to take the Whitakers’ plight at face value. Michael Korie, Mr. Frankel’s collaborator, studiously avoids archness, and though his lyrics are never memorable in their own right, they articulate the plot efficiently.
Ms. O’Hara is the musical-theater counterpart of Donna Reed, and those who remember Ms. Reed from such wartime films as “From Here to Eternity” and “They Were Expendable” will recognize that as a high compliment….
To call a theatrical production “exemplary” may sound like suspiciously faint praise, but I don’t mean it that way in the case of Signature Theatre’s staging of “Company,” the 1970 musical in which Stephen Sondheim and George Furth cast a cold eye on marital bliss. This is the kind of show in which all the pieces fit together so tightly that you’ll be caught up in the action mere seconds after the conductor throws the downbeat.
Where John Doyle’s 2006 small-scale Broadway revival of “Company” was formidably, almost excessively imaginative, Eric Schaeffer, who knows as much about Mr. Sondheim’s more-bitter-than-sweet musicals as any director in America, has chosen to stick to the center of the road, letting the show make its own dramatic points. The only hint of a high concept is Daniel Conway’s glass-and-metal set, which looks as though it might be meant to suggest the décor of a 70’s TV variety show–a smart touch, since Mr. Furth’s book consists of a string of hard-edged comic sketches….
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Read the whole thing here.
The trailer for Company:

How can a major symphony orchestra survive a crippling work stoppage? In my “Sightings” column for today’s Wall Street Journal, I look at two American orchestras that are both grappling with this critical problem. Here’s an excerpt.
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The Minnesota Orchestra hasn’t given a concert since October. If you’ve been keeping up with the increasingly dire straits into which America’s regional symphony orchestras now find themselves, then the sequence of events in Minneapolis won’t surprise you in the least:
• The orchestra’s management, citing chronic budget deficits, proposed to cut the musicians’ annual base salary from $113,000 to $78,000.
• The musicians said no and refused to make a counteroffer.
• Management locked out the musicians.
The rest–so far–is silence….
Is there an alternative to such high-risk confrontations? I doubt it. Professional musicians who have worked hard to lift themselves into the upper-middle class (the average per capita income in Minneapolis was $29,558 in 2010) are understandably unwilling to see their paychecks slashed, much less to consider the grim possibility that the public at large might put a lower value on their services. They usually blame management for their plight–at times rightly so–and too often it takes a lockout or strike to persuade the players that the money simply isn’t there.
This being the case, it makes more sense to ask: Is it possible to fix things after a debilitating, trust-destroying strike? The good news is that the Detroit Symphony, which went out on strike for six months in 2010-11, seems to have found a way to do so….
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Read the whole thing here.

“You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization.”
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children