Archives for April 2016

Due to the end-of-season crush of Broadway openings, today’s Wall Street Journal contains an extra drama column in which I review Waitress and Fully Committed. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s long past time that Jessie Mueller got to appear in a Broadway musical that makes full use of her formidable talents. While she scored a solid hit in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” she was impersonating a shy, mousy homemaker turned singer-songwriter, not playing the kind of larger-than-life role from which stardom is born. Would that “Waitress” were that show. No such luck: It’s a tourist-trap romcom that has little to offer but Ms. Mueller and her fine supporting cast.

Closely based on Adrienne Shelly’s 2007 film and uninterestingly directed by Diane Paulus, “Waitress” tells the story of Jenna (Ms. Mueller), an unhappily married small-town waitress and virtuoso pie maker. She gets pregnant, falls in love with her handsome-but-married obstetrician, embarks on a torrid-but-doomed affair and is thereby inspired to…but need I go on? Everything that happens in “Waitress” is as familiar as a cafeteria salad—you could write your own synopsis of the chick-flick plot five minutes after the curtain goes up—and the characterizations are just as obvious….

Ms. Mueller, on the other hand, is so good that you’ll actively resent the mediocrity of “Waitress.” She’s an unusual hybrid, a world-class singer with the soul of a character actor who burrows so deeply into her parts as to become all but unrecognizable. Few musical-theater performers seem so real, and fewer still are such gifted actors that you’d be just as glad to see them in a straight play. As dull as “Waitress” is, she ennobles it….

“Fully Committed,” Becky Mode’s 2000 one-man play about a hapless young wannabe actor who takes reservation requests at an ultra-trendy Manhattan restaurant, has been revived on Broadway as a vehicle for Jesse Tyler Ferguson (“Modern Family,” “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”). The conceit of the show, snappily staged by Jason Moore, is that the star also plays 40 other people, most of them callers who are desperate to get a table. The immensely likable Mr. Ferguson doesn’t quite have the vocal flexibility necessary to impersonate so widely varied a gallery of characters, and so the tour-de-force aspect of “Fully Committed” isn’t fully realized. Even so, his acting crackles with physical energy and comic life…

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To read my complete review of Waitress, go here.

To read my complete review of Fully Committed, go here.

Jessie Mueller sings “She Used to Be Mine,” a song from Waitress:

From 2006:

I took a look yesterday at a list of the twelve top-grossing movies in North America. I’d heard of four of them: I read the novel on which Thank You for Smoking is based when it came out a few years ago, and I’ve seen posters for Phat Girlz, Failure to Launch, and She’s the Man while walking to and from the gym. The other eight weren’t even names to me, nor do I plan to seek them out. As I mentioned in this space a few weeks ago, I haven’t been to a movie theater since last October, and it’s been at least a year since I last saw a first-run episode of any TV series (not counting cooking shows, which I regard as a species of soft porn). As for pop music, the only new songs I hear are the ones that happen to be playing on the radios of the cabs that take me to and from the theater district.

I can’t remember when I’ve been so completely out of touch….

Read the whole thing here.

“‘You don’t like buttermilk, or nothing else. You’re like a starving person whose stomach is shrunk up from not having any food. You’re shrunk up from not wanting nothing.’

“‘I want to get to San Francisco,’ Lorena said. ‘It’s cool, they say.’

“‘You’d be better off if you could just enjoy a poke once in a while,’ Augustus said, taking one of her hands in his and smoothing her fingers. ‘Life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.’”

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

Jascha Heifetz and Brooks Smith perform Fritz Kreisler’s arrangement of the G Major Rondo from Mozart’s “Haffner” Serenade, K. 250. This performance was originally telecast on NBC’s Bell System Family Theatre in 1971:

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

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring”

I’m en route from New York to West Palm Beach, Florida, where I’ll start rehearsing Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production of Satchmo at the Waldorf at noon today.

Not only is Satchmo my first play, but this is my debut as a professional stage director. While Barry Shabaka Henley, the star of the show, appeared in the Chicago debut of Satchmo earlier this season, every other aspect of Palm Beach Dramaworks’ version is brand-new. I’m working with a talented team of designers who will be giving the West Palm Beach production its own distinctive look and sound, and I’m also hoping to bring to the table some fresh ideas of my own.

It wasn’t my idea to direct Satchmo—Bill Hayes and Sue Ellen Beryl, the company’s producing artistic director and managing director, suggested it to me—but it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’ve been fascinated by the process of directing ever since 2011, when I staged a workshop production of the first half of the play at Rollins College’s Winter Park Institute, which is where I’d written the first draft of Satchmo the preceding year. (I posted some tentative axioms about stage directing while rehearsing that staging. It will be interesting to see whether they hold up this time around.) I figured I’d never get a better chance to see what I could do with the finished play, so I said yes to Bill and Sue Ellen without much hesitation, and since then the production has rarely been far from my mind.

This is the eleventh full-scale staging of Satchmo, which was previously mounted in Orlando, Lenox, New Haven, Philadelphia, Beverly Hills, Chicago, San Francisco, Portsmouth, Colorado Springs, and off Broadway. I have big shoes to fill: Jeremy Abram, Rus Blackwell, Gordon Edelstein, and Charles Newell directed the play before me, and though I wasn’t able to see Abram’s staging, the others were exceedingly, even intimidatingly impressive. Be that as it may, I’ll do all I can do to make my version of Satchmo worthy of its predecessors.

How did I prepare for this improbable adventure? Mostly by watching Rus, Gordon, and Charlie rehearse Satchmo, then asking them questions about what they did and why they did it. But I also read three books about stage directing that I found helpful: Alan Ayckbourn’s The Crafty Art of Playmaking, William Ball’s A Sense of Direction, and Frank Hauser’s Notes on Directing. Ayckbourn’s book was of particular interest because he usually directs the first productions of his own plays (and amazingly well, too). Like those plays, The Crafty Art of Playmaking is funny, straightforward, shrewd, and realistic, and it contains a wholly characteristic piece of advice that I am already doing my very best to take to heart:

Directing for me is largely the art of responding to the needs of others. Or, as my own personal mentor Stephen Joseph put it when I first started my career, directing is about creating an atmosphere in which others can create.

The celebrated director Tyrone Guthrie put it another way: Directing is about filling everyone with the desire to come back at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Same thing, really.

I should add that I don’t think of this production as “my Satchmo.” It is, like all theatrical productions, a collaboration, and I make no claim that it will somehow be “more right” than its predecessors merely because it happens to have been directed by the playwright. To me it feels more like I’m staging a play written by a stranger, albeit one whose script I happen to know unusually well. My goal is to do as well by the play as I possibly can, and to help my colleagues give of their best. It’s not about me: it’s about us.

However things turn out, I’m thrilled to be embarking on this wholly unexpected undertaking. Stage directors rarely make their debuts at the age of sixty, just as playwrights rarely make their debuts at the age of fifty-five. I expect to work hard and have fun, and I hope that those of you who see the show will have fun along with me.

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Satchmo at the Waldorf opens on May 13 and runs through June 12. For more information or to order tickets, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfer of American Psycho: The Musical. Here’s an excerpt.

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Twenty-five years ago, Bret Easton Ellis published a novel about a Wall Street yuppie who killed and dismembered women after hours. “American Psycho” purported to be a satire, but the critics either didn’t get the point or (far more likely) failed to find it funny, and the book got nothing but bad reviews. Nowadays, though, serial murder is all the rage, and “American Psycho: The Musical” has just arrived on Broadway after a critically acclaimed, commercially successful London run. Will it do as well with the New York tourist trade? Beats me, but if it does, then you really can fool some of the people all of the time: “American Psycho” is slick, sleek and empty, a one-joke show that drowns its message, such as it is, in red sauce and fake emotion.

The premise of the novel is that Patrick Bateman, Mr. Ellis’ businessman-butcher, is the Reagan Era incarnate, a soulless materialist who loves only the luxury objects he owns, all of which he identifies by brand name whenever he has occasion to mention them. (You can imagine how old this gets over 399 pages.) The joke is that being soulless, he has no taste, and determines the value of his luxury objects exclusively by what they cost. We are meant to sneer when he describes Whitney Houston as “the most exciting and original black jazz voice of her generation,” which I suppose is the aesthetic equivalent of virtue signaling….

How to turn so unpromising a piece of source material into a Broadway musical? It’s not hard, really. The book sticks fairly faithfully to Mr. Ellis’ original ground plan. Es Devlin’s projection-intensive minimalist sets are 100% white, silver and gray, and Duncan Sheik, lately of “Spring Awakening,” has written a score consisting almost exclusively of faux-’80s technopop songs with parodistic lyrics (“We look expensive/But we’re apprehensive”) that Lynne Page has choreographed in faultless dance-floor style….

All this is supervised by Rupert Goold, the director, with a comparably gelid visual precision that offsets—up to a point—the absence of dramatic content. Not for long, though: I started sneaking looks at my watch a half-hour into “American Psycho,” which was roughly when Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Mr. Sheik, doubtless having realized early on that you have to put some emotion into a full-length musical in order to hold the audience’s attention, started watering down the novel. For it turns out that feelings have been transplanted into “American Psycho”: Not only does Bateman develop an incapacitating case of existential dread, but Jean (Jennifer Damiano), his secretary, becomes a wistful girl-next-door type who falls hard for her boss, going so far as to sing a namby-pamby ballad in which she confesses all…

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Read the whole thing here.

“Selling Out,” the opening number from American Psycho, as performed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:

Vladimir Nabokov talks about the covers of different editions of Lolita on USA: The Novel. This episode was originally telecast on WNET on February 3, 1965:

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