In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I have good things to say about an off-Broadway show, the Irish Rep revival of Donnybrook!, and an out-of-town show, the Asolo Rep revival of You Can’t Take It With You in Sarasota. Here’s an excerpt.
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Turning a classic movie into a stage musical is a risky proposition that usually pays off in grief. When the source material is ultra-familiar and the original film full of top-tier stars, it’s all but impossible to survive the comparison game. Johnny Burke, one of the greatest lyricists of the golden age of Hollywood musicals, tried to bring John Ford’s “The Quiet Man” to Broadway in 1961 and failed dismally. “Donnybrook!” closed after 68 performances and was never seen again–until now. It makes sense that the Irish Repertory Theatre should have taken an interest in a musical set in Innisfree, and Charlotte Moore, the company’s artistic director, has contrived with her usual deftness to paper over the show’s flaws and bring its considerable charms to the fore.
The comparison game always starts with casting. Whom do you put in a musical whose original film version starred John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara and a gaggle of scene-stealing character actors? In Wayne’s case, Ms. Moore has opted for a tall, bluff fellow with a magnificent singing voice. James Barbour, who was last seen on Broadway in “A Tale of Two Cities,” is a sterling-silver musical-comedy baritone, and “Donnybrook!” takes wing whenever he opens his mouth. No, he doesn’t have Wayne’s redwood-like physical presence, but the Duke, on the other hand, couldn’t carry a tune in a holster, so I’d call it a draw….
The main reason for the initial failure of “Donnybrook!” was Mr. Burke’s good-to-middling score, for which he supplied both words and music. While he was a big-league lyricist, Mr. Burke was strictly an amateur composer–it was his longtime collaboration with Jimmy Van Heusen that put him on the map–and “Donnybrook!” contains only one song, “Sad Was the Day,” that is comparable in quality to the songs that he wrote with Mr. Van Heusen. (Stephen Sondheim included it in a list of songs he wished he’d written.) To that end, Ms. Moore has done no small amount of smart musical tinkering, dropping some of the weaker songs and interpolating two blue-chip Burke-Van Heusen ballads, “But Beautiful” and “It Could Happen to You,” plus an assortment of authentic Irish tunes…
Now that regional theaters across the country are feeling the economic bite, they’re increasingly steering clear of large-cast, big-budget plays. Not so Florida’s Asolo Repertory Theatre, which has just revived “You Can’t Take It With You,” the 1936 screwball farce about a loony but lovable Depression-era family that won George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart a Pulitzer Prize and was turned by Frank Capra into an equally popular (if less effective) movie. If you’ve come down with the February blues, this production will return you to the right side of the bed.
“You Can’t Take It With You” calls for a cast of 19, thus putting out of reach of most of today’s professional troupes. Fortunately, Asolo Rep, a regional company that doubles as a drama school, can use student actors to cover smaller roles, as it did last season with “Once in a Lifetime,” the first Kaufman-Hart collaboration, and is doing again now. I know all about lightning not striking twice, but this production, soundly and skillfully directed by Peter Amster, is at least as good as its predecessor….
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Read the whole thing here.
A trailer for Donnybrook!:
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TT: Revolutionary bore
This week I review three shows in my Wall Street Journal drama colum, one on Broadway and two in Cape May, New Jersey. The Broadway premiere of A Tale of Two Cities is an expensive dud, while Cape May Stage’s Doubt and the East Lynne Theatre Company’s To the Ladies are both top-notch. Go figure! Here’s an excerpt.
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If you loved “Les Misérables,” you’ll like “A Tale of Two Cities.” The book is earnest, the décor elaborate, the cast hard-working. I wish I could summon up somewhat more enthusiasm for Jill Santoriello’s musical version of Charles Dickens’ great novel of the French Revolution, but except for Tony Walton’s ingenious quick-change sets and James Barbour’s magnetic performance as Sydney Carton, the first show of the Broadway season is a protracted exercise in plodding mediocrity that’s as sincere as a Sunday sermon and several times longer to boot.
Authorially speaking, “A Tale of Two Cities” is a one-woman show. Ms. Santoriello, a Broadway debutante, wrote the book, an overstuffed digest of Dickens’ eventful novel, and the songs, whose lyrics are gimcrack and whose music consists of dull tunes that have been bulked up in vain with rolling cymbals and thundering timpani….
Cape May Stage performs in a deconsecrated Presbyterian church whose ecclesiastical yet intimate air enhances the effectiveness of its superb production of “Doubt,” John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a Roman Catholic priest (Paul Bernardo) who may or may not have molested a child in his care. I saw “Doubt” at what I took for granted would be a disadvantage, since Brían F. O’Byrne, Cherry Jones, Heather Goldenhersh and Adriane Lenox, the stars of the original New York production, gave bravura performances that still stand out in my memory. Imagine my surprise, then, when Mr. Bernardo, Mary Baird, Abby Royle and Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris, all of whose names are new to me, turned out to be every bit as good as their better-known predecessors….
Unlike Cape May Stage, which offers the usual summer-theater mix of straight plays and small-scale musicals, the East Lynne Theater Company specializes in shows that “deal with the uniquely American experience,” including revivals of forgotten American plays from the first half of the 20th century. This year the company has exhumed “To the Ladies,” a 1922 comedy by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. All Kaufman-Connelly revivals are rare–Kaufman is now remembered solely for his later collaborations with Moss Hart–but “To the Ladies” hasn’t been staged anywhere since 1926, which makes this production significant by definition.
To be sure, I expected that “To the Ladies” would be a historical curiosity, but it turns out to be a thoroughly likable piece of proto-feminist fluff about a pair of bumbling businessmen (John Morton and Ken Glickfeld) and the brainy wives (Tiffany-Leigh Moskow and Suzanne Dawson) who repeatedly pull them out of the holes they dig for themselves.
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Read the whole thing here.