Archives for April 2014

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the last three shows of the 2013-14 Broadway season, Casa Valentina, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Cabaret. Here’s an excerpt.
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Broadway’s new motto is “All Transvestism, All the Time!” In addition to “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” “Kinky Boots” and “Matilda,” three more shows in which cross-dressing figures prominently have just opened on the Great Sequined Way. Topping the list is “Casa Valentina,” a history play by Harvey Fierstein about the Chevalier d’Eon Resort, a now-defunct Catskills hideaway (yes, it really existed) that catered to straight men who liked to dress up as women.
It’s been a long time since Mr. Fierstein, who now specializes in musical-comedy books, wrote a play, and longer still since he wrote a successful one. Given the subject matter of “Kinky Boots,” his most recent effort, and “Torch Song Trilogy,” the 1982 play about a drag queen that made him kind-of-sort-of famous, it would seem at first glance that he’s well and truly stuck in a velvet-and-tulle rut. But “Casa Valentina” ends up being a lot more interesting than it looks at first glance, for certain of the guests at the Chevalier d’Eon, though they all claim not to be gay, turn out on closer inspection to be something other than straight–a revelation that transforms what started out as a comedy into a full-blown tragedy.
Mr. Fierstein isn’t able to set a clear tone for “Casa Valentina,” which lurches awkwardly from take-my-wife-please one-liners to stilted sermonizing to blackmail-powered melodrama. Nor has he figured out how to bring the play to a convincing close, instead letting it trail off irresolutely. But it’s never boring…
Sixteen years ago, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” a 90-minute musical monologue by a gender-bent East German punk rocker with an iatrogenic microphallus (you can look it up), was an in-your-face piece of cutting-edge downtown theater. Now it’s a period piece, the proof of which is that it has finally opened uptown in a commercial revival that features Neil Patrick Harris, an openly gay, universally liked network sitcom star.
Mr. Harris’ winsome drag act reminded me of Alan Alda’s perfomance as Shelly in the 2005 Broadway revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross”: Though he’s got the moves down pat, you come away suspecting that this Hedwig had to learn some of the four-letter words phonetically, if you catch my drift….
The Roundabout Theatre Company has brought back its sleazed-up 1998 production of “Cabaret,” co-directed by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall and starring Alan Cumming as a more-than-usually-androgynous Master of Ceremonies. Seeing as how the Mendes-Marshall revival of the 1966 John Kander-Fred Ebb musical about love and terror in Weimar Germany closed just 10 years ago, I’d call this re-revival an unabashed attempt by a non-profit theater company to mint some much-needed money. With the second Broadway revival of “Les Misérables” playing to near-full houses nine blocks south, though, why complain? It’s a business.
I don’t share in the general enthusiasm for Mr. Cumming’s overcooked performance, which pales in intensity when compared to the diamond-hard detachment that Joel Grey, who created the role in the original stage production, brought to Bob Fosse’s extraordinary 1972 film version, from which Messrs. Mendes and Marshall borrowed a thing or three. But Michelle Williams plays Sally Bowles, the shopworn diva of the Kit Kat Club, with a poignant blend of vulnerability and desperation…
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Read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I examine two very different events that both relate to the problem of school censorship. Here’s an excerpt.
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Spring is here, which means that it’s time once again for the American Library Association’s annual top-10 list of “most frequently challenged books.” These are the books that have drawn the largest number of formal complaints “requesting that materials be removed [from a library] because of content or appropriateness.” Each time it comes out, enlightened readers hasten to snigger at those benighted members of the booboisie who dare to suggest that “Of Mice and Men” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” both of which have previously appeared on the list, might possibly be thought unsuitable for consumption by youngsters….
These 10 books inspired just 307 challenges last year. That’s chump change in a country of 318 million people, a quarter of whom identify themselves as Republicans.
Furthermore, I’m struck by the fact that these books, as well as the other most frequently challenged titles of the 21st century, are for the most part–if I may say so–rather less than stellar in quality….
Do the classics get censored? Once in a while–but usually with different results. Consider, for example, the passionate protests that were inspired by the recent decision of New Hampshire’s Timberlane Regional School District to cancel a Timberlane High School production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.” The school board, according to Superintendent Earl Metzler, was “uncomfortable with the script…We felt there were parts in there that just weren’t acceptable.” But virtually all of the protesters were opposed to the cancellation….
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Read the whole thing here.

“There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.”
George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical

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.

BROADWAY:

• Act One (drama, G, too long for children, reviewed here)

• Bullets Over Broadway (musical, PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• The Cripple of Inishmaan (serious comedy, PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Of Mice and Men (drama, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• A Raisin in the Sun (drama, G/PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Rocky (musical, G/PG-13, many performances sold out last week, 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)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Heir Apparent (verse comedy, PG-13, extended through May 11, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• London Wall (serious comedy, PG-13, newly extended through Apr. 26, reviewed here)

“A nickname may be the best record of a success. That’s what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.”
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

New York City Ballet dances Jerome Robbins’ Fancy Free in 1986. The score is by Leonard Bernstein:

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

“In fine, caricature is rough truth.”
George Meredith, The Egoist

With the Broadway season thundering to a close, The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra column this week to cover all of the shows that are opening in time for the Tony Awards eligibility deadline. In today’s paper I review the Broadway premieres of The Cripple of Inishmaan, Violet, and The Velocity of Autumn. Here’s an excerpt.
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Granted that it’s always a pleasure to see one of Martin McDonagh’s plays performed on Broadway, why mount “The Cripple of Inishmaan” there just five years after the Atlantic Theater Company imported a flawless all-Irish staging by Galway’s Druid Theatre that should have moved uptown but didn’t? As the millennials say, because Daniel Radcliffe. In the absence of the presence of the former Harry Potter, this production of Mr. McDonagh’s bitingly black 1996 comedy about the not-so-small cruelties of village life would never have transferred from London’s West End to the Cort Theatre, no matter how good it might be–and it’s very good. But so, too, is Mr. Radcliffe. He is, in fact, that rarest of birds, a child movie star who decided to turn himself into an adult stage actor, worked at his craft with modesty and dead-serious determination and has become an accomplished performer…
If you don’t know “The Cripple of Inishmann,” you won’t have any doubts about Michael Grandage’s production, in which Mr. Radcliffe plays a severely handicapped teenage boy who can no longer stomach the good-humored but thoughtless teasing of his neighbors (it says everything about them that they all casually refer to him as “Cripple Billy”) and so removes himself to Hollywood to seek success in what the Irish call “fillums.” Mr. Radcliffe is so far inside his character that it actually took the audience a few tantalizing seconds to realize who he was when he made his first entrance on Saturday night….
If, on the other hand, you were fortunate enough to watch the Druids at work, you’ll see at once what’s missing this time around. Mr. McDonagh’s play is also a take-no-prisoners satire on the sentimental clichés of stage-Irishness, and Mr. Grandage, instead of emphasizing them (“Oi have me drunkard mammy to look after”) in order to make them self-evidently ludicrous, has mostly chosen to play them straight…
The Roundabout Theatre Company has revived “Violet,” the 1997 Brian Crawley-Jeanine Tesori musical about a North Carolina girl with an axe-scarred face (Sutton Foster) who rides a Greyhound bus to Oklahoma in the hope of being made beautiful by an Oral Roberts-type televangelist. It’s a sweet, unpretentious little show that doesn’t really belong on Broadway, but the wondrous Ms. Foster pours the whole of her soul into it, and her performance is radiant and true in all ways but one: She is the opposite of plain.
Yes, the animating premise is that Violet’s inner beauty makes her outwardly lovely for those with eyes to see, but one grows tired of seeing pretty people cast in stage and screen roles that require them to pretend to be unattractive–especially when the script specifies, as is the case here, that the character’s disfigurement be invisible to the audience. Why not find an ordinary-looking but charismatic performer who can act beautiful?…
Eric Coble breaks the U.S. record for clichés per minute in “The Velocity of Autumn,” his new cranky-codger two-character comedy. Near-senile old lady? Check. Estranged gay son with unfinished emotional business? Check. Hackneyed plot? Check. (Mom wants to go on living in her Brooklyn house, but the kids want to put her in a nursing home, so she barricades the front door, brandishes a Molotov cocktail and tells them to bring it on.) Tap-the-tendon punch lines interspersed with ephiphanic moments of pseudo-poetry? Check, check and octuple check….
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Read the whole thing here.