A sequel to the literary sensation Call Me By Your Name? That sounds like a bad idea, I thought. I was wrong. It turns out to be a positively dreadful idea. André Aciman’s new novel Find Me manages to be terrible in its own right and make you question your appreciation of the earlier book.
I saw the film version of Call Me By Your Name, starring Timothée Chalamet as the precocious and fawn-like 17-year-old Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, a supremely handsome 24-year-old grad student. Oliver takes Elio to his bed but is too afraid to take Elio to his heart. Also, Elio has sex with a peach. It’s a bittersweet tale and while I didn’t like it nearly as much as others, I enjoyed it well enough.
Pulitzer finalist Adam Rapp molds his new play out of very familiar clay.
Bella is a lonely academic and writer at Yale just told she has terminal cancer. One novel, many years ago, received acclaim (though not from the New York Times) and Bella has trudged along ever since. Single, quietly sad, artistically dead and now a future of chemotherapy followed by death? What's the point?
Christopher is a lonely student. Wildly opinionated like only college students can be, Christopher has no friends, despises the internet, loves Bella's lone novel, hates to be touched and is working on a book of his own in a frenzy of youthful passion.
You can fill in the rest. However, even the most familiar of stories becomes fresh when told with flair. As it unfolds, those well-worn cliches come to life again and you think, yes, ok, I'm going with it. Then, heartbreakingly, it stumbles in the home stretch, enough to make you rethink some of your earlier appreciation. The fault lies with Rapp. This is an impeccable, beautifully acted production of a flawed work.
A two-hander, it begins on a mostly bare stage with Bella wandering outdoors, pen and paper in hand, working out some ideas for a story. Showing artists at work is always hard. At least painters can slap on some paint or musicians can bring a new song to life. Writers can only scribble away. But Rapp manages the feat nicely, with Bella pausing to reword some idea, add a flourish or scratch one out as the moment demands.
It helps that Bella is played by Mary-Louise Parker, easily one of the best actors working today and a very good writer herself. (Her literary memoir Dear Mr. You is a delight and I trust she's working on a new novel or stories or something else of her own.) Parker exudes intelligence and her Bella is wry, self-aware and utterly convincing on every level.
As Bella shares her story, sets materialize out of the darkness, such as a professor's crammed office, a living room, a park and so on. Every technical element shines here: the scenic design of Alexander Woodward, the lighting of Heather Gilbert, the spot-on costumes of David Hyman and the deft music and sound of Daniel Kluger (hot off his marvelous new arrangements and orchestrations for Oklahoma!).
Overseen by the invisible hand of director David Cromer, the effect is positively magical, with sets floating into vision just when needed and quietly slipping away when their work is done. Without any flash, it feels just like memory or a writer's imagination at work. Everyone is in top form.
So The Sound Inside begins as a person-facing-cancer story until the insecure Christopher shoves his way in. He detours the story into several tantalizing possibilities: a romance beginning just as life is ending, a teacher/student tutorial on life and the craft of writing as Bella's final act, the tortured writer run out of things to say faced with a dazzling protégé handing over the sole copy of his first (brilliant) novel?
Actor Will Hochman plays Christopher, a role Jesse Eisenberg would have gobbled up fifteen years ago. You might say he goes toe to toe with Parker and holds his own, but that misses the teamwork on display. They are wonderfully in sync throughout. Hochman matches Parker but this isn't remotely a contest; their camaraderie at the curtain call says all you need to know. It's an impressive Broadway debut. And for, oh, 80% of the night, it's a very impressive play.
SPOILER ALERTS
It's impossible to discuss the flaws of the play without ruining the plot and the finale. If you have a chance to see the show in New York City, by all means take the time. You'll see Parker in top form and a strong new talent in Hochman. Afterwards you can debate with your friends (or me) about the last "act" of this brisk, entertaining 90 minute evening of drama.
Ok, here we go. Seriously, I'm going to describe every twist of the play right to the end. At one point as Bella and Christopher become friends, colleagues in writing (of a sort) and perhaps more, she invites him out to dinner and then back to her place for a drink and more discussion. Christopher mentions a girl in high school (it didn't work out) and a young woman in college who dumps him for a member of the glee club. "You've been Whiffenpoofed," Bella deadpans. Christopher teeters on the edge of self-absorbed and annoying, but Hochman reins this in with a performance that allows us to empathize with the human emotions roiling underneath Christopher's would-be misanthropy.
He's not an incel (that is, a guy who is misogynistic and self-loathing to a dangerous degree) and heck, he might even be a little asexual. Christopher blurts out at one point that he's about as sexual as your average parking meter. But then he cautiously reaches out and brushes Bella's cheek. She quietly leaves the room, brings back a pillow and sheets so he can crash on her couch and then goes to bed. It's not a rejection so much as an end to the evening. Yet, it's a while before they reconnect.
When Christopher finally comes back to have another dinner with Bella, he brings the only copy of his novella, typed on a manual typewriter and thus the sole copy in the world, as he makes clear. He's eager for Bella's opinion. Instead, she tells Christopher about the terminal cancer, her refusal to punish herself with pointless chemotherapy and asks him to help her commit suicide. She's bought everything needed from the internet but needs Christopher to be her "injection buddy," the essential partner to make it all go smoothly. Oh, and she wants to do it that very night.
Christopher agrees, but insists she read his work first and give a complete and frank assessment. She does and it's a masterpiece. In plays like this, college students always produce masterpieces. Then Bella is injected with the first needle putting her to sleep...and wakes up fifteen or so hours later. Christopher is gone and later discovered dead, facedown in the snow. Bellas' cancer miraculously goes into remission and she's left with his novella, a work she quietly noted earlier has no copyright, no indication that anyone else on the planet even knows it exists. (He had no friends whatsoever and even stopped going to his classes.)
Bella is wandering through the park and keeps thinking of Christopher's body, still working out in her mind how to describe the scene. "Did this park imagine his body?" she asks herself/the audience. "Would that be a better image?"
And so it ends. Why in heaven's name have I detailed every single plot point right up to the finale? Every possible complaint about The Sound Inside involves the final scenes, the moments that make you say, "Wait, what?"
Early on, Christopher insists the only way to become famous today is to commit suicide or be on Twitter. He then dives into a list of famous literary suicides. Never mind the endless list one can make of great writers who didn't commit suicide, it's just the sort of thing excitable college students like to proclaim as fact. But does that mean after creating his undeniable masterpiece Christopher chooses to seal his fame by offing himself? If so, Hochman's nicely modulated performance doesn't work. We don't think for a second that this character he plays is about to kill himself.
Maybe Christopher is lovelorn? Not really. Like Chekhov's gun, the moment where Christopher brushes Bella's cheek is the gun that never goes off. They're both lonely and a romance or at least a physical relationship is clearly a possibility. But Rapp doesn't have Bella reject Christopher in any definitive way. It's just an unexplored, unsatisfying option. And why did Bella invite Christopher to sleep on her couch? Couldn't he have just walked back to his place or Uber'd if it was farther? It's just another confusing signal for him and us.
If he's not aiming for fame or distraught over not becoming her lover, was his death just an accident? That would be deflating and uninteresting. On the night when Bella asks Christopher for help in killing herself ("Will I get extra credit?" I wanted him to ask), surely he could have said, "First, read my novella and then sleep with me. I can kill you tomorrow." And whatever happens as a result of that would surely be more consequential and rooted in who they are then the unresolved suggestions we're given.
The show annoyingly and rather obliquely suggests Bella might publish Christopher's work as her own. Again, either take that Deathtrap of a plot twist or don't. Being coy helps no one. And does her critique of his work have to be that it's an unalloyed masterpiece? Surely, she'd have something constructively helpful to suggest. Or God forbid, it might merely show "promise." Having Bella not rave about its towering brilliance would be reason enough for a weirdly deluded and vulnerable student to kill himself. So there she would be, finding a reason to live while dealing with her guilt and perhaps turning that into some new productive work of her own. How ironic and how far more satisfying than what we're given.
The worst possibility is that the entire evening is just a story being made up on the spot by Bella as she wanders in the night. That would be fine, though the story she's telling has lots of inconsistencies. (See above.) Plus, it would be better if the show gracefully and openly acknowledged that fact; heck a meta ending might be satisfying as we realize this particular story is an act of imagination. Any sense of being "cheated" would be calmed by Rapp reminding us that every play is precisely that and nothing more.
For the many complaints the ending raises, none can be raised about the two actors. Hochman is very good. And Mary-Louise Parker is a joy. Both break the fourth wall, though Parker has the bulk of the work to do here, narrating her own story while guiding us through the ups and downs of her narrow, unhappy life. Deadpan, deadly serious, and deadly funny, Parker is wholly naturalistic throughout, never calling attention to herself. That's why you can't take your eyes off her.
In one scene, Parker is in a bar alone and chatting up a guy. The way she looks at him faux agreeably and then turns back to us is hilarious and speaks volumes. They go back to his miserable hotel to have sex, which she narrates to marvelous effect, including the fact that the TV is on the entire time and showing a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond in which.... Here Parker squints as she struggles to make out the TV screen and tells us they're in the kitchen as Ray's wife announces she's invited both of her divorced parents for Thanksgiving dinner. That squint, that moment in which Parker is so present in the scene she's creating for us by herself on stage, is so typical of her greatness. (Again, the technical team is right there with her every step of the way.)
Another is the scene where Bella joins her students in an exercise and finds herself writing the same sentence over and over again: Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside. Parker repeats it over and over, the words fill up the stage in a beautiful projection by Aaron Rhyne and the effect is hypnotic. When it's over, Bella drolly admits, "I have no idea what it means." Well, I have no idea what it means either. And I have no idea what Rapp was thinking at the end. Out of unpromising stuff, he crafted a thoroughbred of a play that breaks your heart by stumbling just before the finish line. But with this cast and creative team, she's a beauty to watch while she runs.
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
Sometimes a show isn't very good. Sometimes the performances are mostly...enthusiastic. Yet in the right context and with the right crowd, a fine time can be had.
First up: Panama Hattie, a (much) lesser Cole Porter vehicle for Ethel Merman from 1940. It's the final production of the York Theatre's season devoted to "mufti" performances of three Porter shows. That is, staged readings presented casually in street clothes so you can get a sense of what rarely seen shows are actually like.
It's been a good season. The musical Fifty Million Frenchmen has a superior score and clutch of songs they did right by. With a tightened (or new) book, you could put it on commercially. The revue Decline and Fall... is a signal work from the 1960s well worth revisiting. It could and perhaps should have extended -- no changes needed.
And now this military-loving, flag-waving bit of nonsense. It's not good and thus it's precisely the sort of show that should be presented in this way. The movie bears little resemblance to the play and ditched most of the songs. The original score has never been recorded. The stage version will never be revived commercially, so you won't see it any other way
So the York deserves plaudits for putting on this evening, giving people a chance to see the entire book (filled with romance, terrorism, American sailors, British butlers and so on), hear the modest score and get a sense of how rote Broadway could be two years before Oklahoma! upended everything but good.
With about five minutes of rehearsal time and script firmly in hand, the game cast offered it up. Under those circumstances, it's only kind to single out the pluses. As a kid who intimidates the Ethel Merman character, Kylie Kuioka was a teensy bit cute. But what a pro! She knew her every line and probably knew everyone else's as well. Kuikoa might have left her script backstage for all she needed it. In ten years, she'll be directing. As the butler-besotted Florrie, Anita Welch had personality to spare and a strong voice.
But it's an Ethel Merman vehicle and all that mattered was the lead. Klea Blackhurst (who knows from Merman) was more than up to the task. Without her on stage, staging Panama Hattie would felt more like exhuming it. But Blackhurst lifted the evening up. She belted out songs, she charmed everyone and when something went awry (like losing her place in a song or losing her bracelet when it flew into the audience), Blackhurst made the most of it. (My favorite line: when speaking about a villainous woman trying to scuttle her romance, Hattie says, "I'd like to see her surrounded by six silver handles.") Just like Merman all those years ago, Blackhurst took some hoary material and convinced us it was a treat to perform. The audience ate it up.
Then there's NYGASP, more properly known as the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players. For 45 years, they've kept the flame alive for the comic operettas of G&S. Sure, you and I might be able to name the Big Three (The Pirates Of Penzance, H.M.S. Pinafore, The Mikado), but NYGASP and their enthusiastic audience can name them all, plus their plots and the best numbers. Just try them.
I always pictured this troupe as a cross between amateur theatricals and a Met opera production of a war horse -- one of those very traditional and very familiar stagings the Met trots out with newer talent to get some ka-ching at the box office. And what do you know? That's precisely how it seemed to me. The staging is so faithful and traditional you'll think you've slipped back in time.
The large ensemble is filled with very enthusiastic performers and a few ringers in the lead roles. The set is spot-on and could have been lifted from Topsy-Turvy. The one shining exception is the large and very impressive orchestra, which is conducted by Albert Bergeret, the company's founder, artistic director and general manager. The musicianship would do Broadway proud. That aside, if you were stationed in India when the British Empire was in full force and the locals staged G&S, the vibe of this Iolanthe is exactly what you'd expect to see.
You get the strong feeling the audience is revisiting old friends, by which I mean G&S, Iolanthe and the actors on stage, all of whom are undoubtedly familiar to them over the years. That camaraderie and sense of people picking out their favorites extends to the main role of the Lord Chancellor, played by crowd favorite James Mills. He's played every role possible and when not on stage he's stage managing, handling tech and so on. Mills delivered up "Love, unrequited, robs me of my rest" with aplomb...all four times. Just to prove my ignorance, I only knew the song from Mandy Patinkin's solo debut, with not a clue where it came from.
Lifting up proceedings appreciably was Angela Christine Smith as the Fairy Queen and David Macaluso as the romantic lead Strephon. They excelled in both singing and acting, a rarity. But no cavils. Is it any surprise the Executive Director David Wannen both intro'd the show and popped into a small role as the strapping Private Willis? Not at all! (Even less so when you note he has some of the best credits beyond G&S.) Are veterans of NYGASP certain to shed a tear over Laurelyn Watson Chase, giving her final performance as the company's leading soprano? Of course they will.
Mounted for two nights only, Iolanthe and everything presented by NYGASP is a pure labor of love. That's true of anyone working in theater, but doubly so for G&S-ers. While London can boast of multiple companies devoted to their repertoire and at least the possibility of the occasional commercial production, here NYGASP is the only game in town. If, like me, you yearn to actually see these shows rather than just read about them, you'll come with a generous spirit. It's all stuff and nonsense. And sometimes that's exactly what you need.
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
Really, there are no bad ideas. It wasn't a bad idea to make a movie called Scotland, PA, which set Shakespeare's Macbeth at a burger joint in the 1970s. I mean, why not? The movie was a poorly reviewed flop, but with Maura Tierney and Christopher Walken in the cast (not to mention Andy Dick as one of the witches), it inevitably became a "cult" classic. Now, turning a poorly reviewed, flop movie into a musical, well that's certainly not a BAD idea either. Just...unexpected.
The result is Scotland, PA (and not, sadly, Scotland, PA! The Musical!). It's 1975 in Scotland, Pennsylvania where Mac (Ryan McCartan) and his wife Pat (Taylor Iman Jones) are trapped in dead-end jobs at greasy burger joint. Mac's got a ton of ideas to spruce the place up. Plastic tables that are easier to clean! Chicken nuggets! A really colorful sign with a giant "M." And a drive-through window. The guy's a genius. But his boss ignores him and won't even give the kid a try. When Mac proves the current manager is ripping the place off, the boss is mildly grateful...but insists his rebellious son Malcolm (Will Meyers) gets the job.
Modestly goaded on by Pat (mostly, she grumbles that it isn't fair), they plan to rob the place, accidentally kill the boss, buy the joint outright from Malcolm, turn it into a massive hit suspiciously like a fast food chain that also begins with "M" and plan to go nationwide! You might even say Mac is a burger king. (The book by Michael Mitnick is filled with such obvious bits.) If you know Macbeth, you know Mac's meteoric rise comes with an equally meteoric fall, along with ghosts, a wife haunted by her crimes and lots of blood.
The mostly forgettable songs by Adam Gwon serve their function and director Lonny Price does too, whether it's an efficient if anonymous early number like "Drive Thru," a quick transformation from burger dive into gleaming fast food emporium (Anna Louizos, nicely doing what's expected) or the hard-to-stage bloody finale. Apparently, their super-expensive (and pointy!) giant yellow M sits on the ground. Two numbers stand out. "Clairvoyant" is distractingly built up into the show's big number when it might have worked better in a more intimate setting. "Why I Love Football" actually moves the story forward with humor and a little heart, though even that has a filler line like "Russell does pushups."
[Here's a music video for one of the show's big numbers. It features the two stars but does not reflect the staging of the song in the actual musical.]
Worse, the book bends over backwards to make its characters more appealing. Pat, the Lady Macbeth character, hardly goads Mac on at all. Maybe she kvetches a little. And Mac seems about as ruthless as a disgruntled employee who might steal rolls of toilet paper just to stick it to the man.
Kinder characters neuter the relentless ambition which powers the original play. Mac and Pat's first murder isn't a ruthless gambit to seize power. It's an accident! Worse, the musical removes a powerful plot twist from the film. In the movie, the manager actually installs a drive-in window to great success, but still ignores Mac. In the play, he just ignores Mac's ideas, which makes the decision to burglarize the store more random than desperate. In the movie, that's their money from their idea! Hey, if you want to tell a story about pretty decent people who get in over their heads, just don't make Macbeth!
The trappings are still there, including three witches (here seen as three hippies), a ghostly vision during a live TV interview and that bodies-piling-up finale. But the final result is barely Macbeth-adjacent rather than the bloody Macbeth Shakespeare wrote. And that's a hamburger without meat.
Still the plot picks up in the second act and the two leads are appealing. Most everyone has a decent voice, though not always when singing those big notes for that AOR feel. Ironically, Will Meyers as Malcolm has one of the weaker voices, but still pulls off the show's best song with sex appeal and a warm presence.
Megan Lawrence killed in Broadway's The Pajama Game. Here Lawrence does what she can to gin up a role as a suspicious detective looking into this mess. And two veterans of Broadway's recent On The Town revival are together again. Alysha Umphress (who was the cabbie Hildy) has little to sink her teeth into as a hippie/witch. But Jay Armstrong Johnson as the dim but likable Banko steals what little show there is with his comic timing. He makes you think Banko's big number "Kick-Ass Party" is better than it actually is here. On the downside, he's so likable, the show's desire to keep the audience on Mac's side falls flat after he offs the poor dude.
That's a lot of talent and they make this too-harmless show bearable. The actors didn't lack for courage but the creators did. Guys, the next time you want to tackle a power-hungry tale with a villainous protagonist who slaughters everyone in his path until the curse of his greed brings him low, go for it. Screw your courage to the sticking place and you will not fail.
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
Well, that's a relief! After decades of hearing about but never getting a chance to actually see the play For Colored Girls: Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow is Enuf, I assumed it must be a dusty relic. It's not.
Playwright Ntozake Shange's work (last seen in a major NYC revival in 1995, apparently) is certainly of its time, the mid-1970s. But it's hardly dated. Shows devoted to women of color are still needed. Stories of abuse and mistreatment and plain old indifference are still necessary. And the simple brave acts of sharing those hungers and desires, of admitting you fall and get back up, of finding strength in community and sisterhood are still powerful.
Shange calls her combination of movement, dance, music and poems/monologues a choreopoem. When first performing these pieces, Shange simply couldn't stand still the way poets and authors were politely expected to do. She just couldn't. She had to speak up, to speak out, to get in motion. Sitting still was not an option. It still isn't.
Today, For Colored Girls doesn't shock with its structure and style, though it would still be a refreshing presence on Broadway. Decades of poetry slams and spoken word, revues, works of theater built around dance and text quilted into a whole, and a growing if still-too-small body of work by women and people of color all make For Colored Girls more familiar to audiences today. You can see where it came from and what it led to and, happily, you can judge it on its own terms as art, not just for its importance. On those terms, it's still vital if imperfect.
For me, it plays like a revue. Seven women take the stage, each one in a brightly colored dress and identified in the program as the Lady in Blue, the Lady in Brown, the Lady In Orange and Red and so on. Disarmingly, they begin by echoing the chants and poems recited and remembered by little girls in playgrounds and streets for generations. Pretending to jump rope or skip or performing elaborate hand movements (or at least elaborate enough to bewilder any boys like me watching from afar), the actresses cavort about the stage. Then the action slides into more adult concerns with Shange effectively delivering her first and most important message: women find strength and courage with each other from their earliest age and must never give that up.
And they're off, with a monologue or poem gliding into a dance or song and then back into another spoken word piece. The topics range from losing your virginity on the night of your high school graduation (finally!) to being harassed on the street to mocking men's endless need to apologize to a childhood fascination with the hero Toussaint Louverture to worrying you've made too much space for someone in your life and crowded yourself out.
As with any revue, some pieces and performers land better than others. For me, the moments that focused on the men and what they did or didn't do were far less interesting than the ones that focused inwardly on the women themselves. Turning the Lady in Purple into a person with a hearing loss (played with expressive beauty by Alexandria Wailes) worked a treat. As the Lady in Blue, Sasha Allen of The Voice let loose on the biggest vocal numbers. And in the Tony-winning role of the Lady in Red, Jayme Lawson was a magnetic presence. However, her big monologue about an abusive man has been dimmed by decades of seeing that story played out on cheap TV shows and the like. Plus, real drama comes from how the Lady in Red would deal with that pain, not the mere plot twist of what the man does. Still, her transition from a woman to a little girl begging daddy to be nice is beautifully done and Lawson is definitely one to watch.
As the Lady in Brown, Celia Chevalier was the least compelling, but the collective group is strong enough to lift everyone's game up. Still, this particular production has flaws. The staging by director Leah C. Gardiner was a sort of in-the-round compromise. Most of the audience is in traditional stadium seating facing the performance space. But there is also a semi-circle of audience members on stage; it's like watching people who are watching a show being performed in the round. And the performances certainly play to everyone. You feel the show yearns to be done this way completely -- it's a communal experience, after all -- but simply didn't have that as an option.
I also would love to see the musicians visible on stage, rather than tucked away. (Not to get all John Doyle on you, but even the cast might play instruments/percussion as well.) The scenic design of Myung Hee Cho certainly did it no favors. A blurry, mirror-like reflective material encircles the stage and is effective. But clear plastic crystals hanging from the ceiling give the room a chintzy '70s vibe. And revealing about a half dozen disco balls at the finale felt desultory. (They lowered about a foot from the ceiling in underwhelming fashion.) Further, I am allergic to finger snapping as a sign of approval or applause. Even done ironically, it makes me want to flee for the exit. That's one dated element that could be easily lost -- and replaced by the more physical and inspiring raising of hands a-flutter, as one does in appreciation of deaf performers, which appropriately makes an appearance here.
None of that detracted from the exuberance of a cast performing the show the night I caught it, on the anniversary of Shange's birth October 18, 1948. We missed her being in attendance by just one year, since she died on October 27, 2018. Which leads me back to the original mystery. To be blunt, For Colored Girls is a very inexpensive work to put on. It made history by running on Broadway for 742 performances, far longer than A Raisin In The Sun, to make one obvious comparison. So what took them so long to bring it back? Despite my cavils about this particular production, I'm delighted to say, it's not because of the play itself. For Colored Girls still has something to say and it always will.
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
Don't take it for granted. The silly, sly new edition of Forbidden Broadway is comfortably ensconced at The Triad on the Upper West Side. Let's hope it runs and runs so long the show has to toss in new numbers (Mrs Doubtfire, anyone?), bring in new performers and then we can all take it for granted again. Right now, creator Gerard Alessandrini's franchise is as fresh as ever. Sure, you know what to expect and thank god for that.
Clockwise from left Immanuel Houston(standing), Aline Mayagoitia, Jenny Lee Stern, Joshua Turchin and Chris Collins-Pisano
Here's where I run down the list of songs and tell you which spoofs are spot on, which performers do the best at capturing the vocal quirks of such and such a star and maybe which ones are a little wide of the mark. Hey, you can't reinvent the wheel when covering a revue like this.
And Alessandrini doesn't reinvent the wheel when it comes to delivering the goods. After all, it's not the idea of Forbidden Broadway that's so clever. It's the execution. Needless to say, the wigs of Conor Donnelly and the costume of Dustin Cross work overtime (and must be awfully sturdy since they get thrown on and ripped off at a furious pace). The choreography of Gerry McIntyre delivers on a small stage while skewering the big moves of Broadway. Musical director and pianist Fred Barton seamlessly papers over any tiny pauses in action or momentary blips during scene changes. And above all Alessandrini's book and lyrics are up to his usual high standards.
Everyone in the cast has a winning moment, though Joshua Turchin as the juvenile is a modest weak link. It doesn't really matter, not in the context of its "let's put on a show" vibe. Immanuel Houston is especially fun as André De Shields. Chris Collins-Pisano tackles everyone from Beetlejuice to Harold Prince with amusing energy. And Aline Mayagoitia delivers a delicious Bernadette Peters.
But first among equals is Jenny Lee Stuart, with her terrific voice and equally terrific comic timing. She's hilarious as Gwen Verdon in a Fosse/Verdon bit (jumping in to say her name right on top of Collins-Pisnao saying 'Fosse"). She elevates the easy mocking of Renee Zellwegger in the bio-musical Judy by creating a fully realized Garland. Indeed, the lyric "Zellwegger smells in my part" is not Alessandrini's finest internal rhyme. But who cares when Stuart is killing it in every way? And her Mary Poppins was equally splendid and served a much better spoof.
I'd already blocked the godawful movie Mary Poppins Returns from my mind. But I especially disliked the bathos of "The Place Where Lost Things Go," a cloying ballad that seemed to suggest to children that their mother wasn't really dead, just misplaced, perhaps lost in the seat cushions of the couch or buried under a pile of stuff in the attic. Ok, that's not precisely what it tries to say, but it's perfect for satirizing. Alessandrini turns it into a ballad called "The Place Where The Lost Shows Go," an ode to the flops and forgotten musicals of yesteryear. The costumes and wigs capture the practically perfect nanny to a t, the flood of posters from old flops will warm the heart of any theater lover and the number is easily appreciated by casual fans. Plus, Stuart's performance is indeed practically perfect and dry as a martini. Hey, if my praising Stuart causes some backstage tension, they can always write a song about it!
Indeed, Forbidden Broadway always balances between insider dope and tourist-friendly fare. Sometimes it's easy to do. Even casual fans will guess King Kong The Musical was both really expensive and lost a lot of money for its investors, so any jokes about it can kill.
My modest caveats are the spoofs that only work if you've seen the show. It's funny to mock Oklahoma! with "Woke-lahoma!" Actually, the song title alone is a winner. Still, I thought the numerous digs in this number work far better if you've actually seen the current production. (My guest disagreed and since he hasn't seen the current revival but laughed at the spoof, what do I know?) Similarly, I suppose the grim nature of Irish drama is always a rich target and "How Are Things In Irish Drama" is kind of funny. But since The Ferryman closed more than a year ago this number already feels outdated though Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation just opened!
Finally, I think the Harry Potter bit is off target. Alessandrini's spoofs are funny because they come from a great love for musicals and a gossipy awareness of what's happening on stage and behind the scenes. Not here, where he mocks the super-high prices of the two-part play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. But that take on the show is about seven months out of date. Ever since the original cast left, the box office for Harry Potter has dropped in half, from more than $2 million a week to more often $1 million. (It's still sold out and still worth seeing.) Discount ticket offers have been coming fast and furious, as any theater-goer should be aware. So you can find a lot of bargains -- relatively speaking -- to this show. If you were going to mock anything, it should have been that. And if you want to talk high ticket prices, Moulin Rouge! has been charging (and getting) eye-watering premium prices from its first preview, while Hadestown brazenly doubled its prices the day after winning the Tony for Best Musical. I expect Forbidden Broadway to be on the cutting edge of the inside dope and this is one time the show misses the mark.
Not that it matters! Two or three numbers that spoof stuff you haven't seen is probably par for the course for most people attending. Most of the time, you're a big enough fan to get the joke anyway or you can just enjoy the performances and songs in their own right. That's surely the case for this edition. In the Star Trek universe, the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation is arguably the best of all the shows in the franchise. I haven't seen enough of Forbidden Broadway during its illustrious history to make that claim. But Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation sure is fun.
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
In 2015, playwright David Henry Hwang had a very bad November. First, Hillary Clinton was the choice of most Americans, including Hwang. But the antiquated and ill-conceived Electoral College system meant Donald Trump became President of the United States. If that wasn't bad enough for a Tony-winning New York liberal, Hwang was attacked on the street. He was stabbed in the neck, nearly dying from a random hate crime. The assailant took no money and fled after Hwang shouted out in clear, unaccented English "What the fuck?," which apparently threw the bastard for a loop.
These twin assaults on democracy and decency led Hwang to question everything. Is the American experiment reaching an end? Will he always be too Chinese for some Americans and too American for some Chinese? Where does he belong? Where does anyone belong? And why do musicals starring Asians appear on Broadway only once every decade or so? And why is it almost always a revival of The King and I?
Like any real artist, Hwang turned his pain and probing into art. Soft Power is an awkward, ugly duckling of a play that yearns to transform into a swan of a musical. It's a mess but boy is his heart in the right place: on his sleeve.
Actually, I've just described the set-up of the show. In it, the character DHH (a too-earnest Francis Jue) is meeting with a producer from Shanghai named Xūe Xíng (Conrad Ricamora). Xūe company wants to turn Shanghai into the Broadway of Asia (though it kind of already is), starting with a big, fat, American-style musical with a Chinese perspective. And they want DHH to write it!
The movie they want him to adapt into this show? A hugely popular romantic comedy about a husband and wife who are both miserable, explore the idea of dating others but end up staying together for the sake of their vows and their child. It's called Stick With Your Mistake and the very Chinese idea of sacrifice for the greater good (of the marriage, the family, the community, the country) is precisely what appeals to Xūe and turns off Hwang.
Nonetheless, they go to a performance of The King and I, dissect the musical's very problematic attitude towards non-Westerners, acknowledge its emotional power, grab a chance to meet Clinton at a meet-and-greet...and then Hwang is stabbed in the neck.
Hwang slips into a fever dream while recovering from his attack (in which he lost a third of his blood). Hwang's desire to flip The King and I on its head comes to life, with Xūe in the role of Anna coming to the United States to civilize the barbarous Americans. Soft Power turns into a full-on musical through the looking glass, showing how China might see the US, from its obsession with guns to its ethnic prejudices to its absurd system of government where the people choose their leader, rather than an elite group of professionals. In China, Xūe tempts Hillary, she'd already be the leader since Clinton is so clearly qualified and ready. Maybe democracy is over-rated.
None of this captures the loopy nature of the show. It lovingly spoofs and quotes everything from A Chorus Line to The Music Man and of course The King and I, among many other shows. At one point, when Hillary is trying to dumb down her message to appeal to the masses, she belts out a song at a McDonald's and rides rodeo on a giant french fry. My Fair Lady's "The Rain In Spain" is transformed into a number where Xūe genially coaches Hillary on how to pronounce his name and the meaning of fourth tone and so on.
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court even goes all Schoolhouse Rock on us to explain our election system and the glory of the Ballot Box. Remember, this is all from the perspective of a Chinese-funded and mounted show that becomes Asia's seminal idea of what America is really like, just as The King and I symbolized Western attitudes towards Asia. Indeed, there's even a bizarre detour for a 50th anniversary celebration of the musical we're watching, complete with panel discussion and a silly Westerner they can gently mock. (Gently, because they're the one with all the power and America has long since faded from preeminence.)
You might imagine Hwang delivering a scathing take-down of the US or a sly skewering of China's imagined fears about America and democracy. But you'll get neither. Soft Power is indeed soft in every way -- it's gentle, earnest, polite and really not out to offend much of anyone. Are we meant to be amused by China's distorted idea of America or perhaps laugh at ourselves when seeing the US through the eyes of outsiders? Neither happens. McDonald's as a symbol of US consumerism? Well, sure. (And hey, they've got one in Beijing.) An obsession with guns? Duh. If that's how China sees us, well, they're pretty spot on there too, aren't they? So what's the point?
It's a treat to see an almost all-Asian cast in a musical. But that's not enough. Soft Power is too timid to do more. If this is the flip-side of The King and I, why is Xūe talking to Hillary? She lost, Hwang! Hillary is not the leader of the country. Xūe (or really, a Chinese woman) should be civilizing Trump. I can't blame Hwang for not wanting to grapple with Agent Orange, even in his imagination. But if he's going to update The King and I, that's what he needed to do.
Since they kept Clinton, why cast a white woman? Alyse Alann Louis has a lot of fun in dual roles, especially when Hillary is chowing down on ice cream and pizza while singing the blues and surely her casting is there to clarify the gap between East and West. But since Broadway (and Hollywood) has such a long history of casting white people in yellow face, surely it would have been more on point to include, say, the sole Japanese actor in a sea of Chinese faces to play the white woman. (Or at least a woman of color.) This certainly isn't a criticism of Louis, one of the show's bright points.
The cast is game for this grab-bag of a goof, even though Saturday Night Live tries to be more pointed on a weekly basis. (And South Park actually succeeds.) By far the show's best element is Conrad Ricamora as Xūe. He's sexy, charming, magnetic and all on his own rescues the evening.
Ricamora was terrific in David Byrne's Here Lies Love. You can have fun going through the Playbill and spotting how many cast members appeared in that show. It's a testament to the top-notch talent here, but also a comment on how few roles written for Asian actors. Ricamora's Broadway debut after that breakthrough? The King and I. It's enough to make you cry.
In his Broadway debut, Ricamora played Tuptim's lover and I felt he was not up to the task vocally on the duet "I Have Dreamed." Here, his singing demands are quite different. Ricamora shines on the show's one solid number "Happy Enough," a piece illuminating the Chinese idea of sacrificing for the greater good. He is terrific in the serious drama, the romance and the song-and-dance, not to mention smoothly delivering two different accents. Thank goodness his hit TV show How To Get Away With Murder has just begun its sixth and final season. Ricamora should be available for a lot more theater and film work soon.
But this is mostly a musical and I fear the melodies by Jeanine Tesori are akin to her work on Caroline, Or Change and Fun Home. Sometimes her score can be beautiful and the 22-piece orchestra certainly does it justice. Yet she has no interest in melody and it shows. I don't need Jerry Herman, but I need something and Tesori offers it up rarely and grudgingly. You'll find no equivalent to Fun Home's "Ring Of Keys" here, though in its way "Happy Enough" comes close.
That song is also the show's best effort at exploring cultural differences between the US and China. Stereotypically, the US champions the individual, while Chinese culture celebrates the greater good. The song offers a nuanced moment and is worthy of Hwang's best intentions -- here, he's not spoofing or making a point, merely revealing. Otherwise, he can't bring himself to question much about the US any more than he can acknowledge that Trump won and is the real King right now.
If this show were the mirror-image of that Rodgers & Hammerstein show, it would end with the the King being "civilized" by the Chinese interloper who offers a new way of ruling. Instead, Hillary firmly rejects Xūe's idea of a one-party state or anything less than full democracy. If there's anything much to learn from Chinese culture (as opposed to the current Chinese government, of course), Soft Power doesn't grapple with it. No wonder director Leigh Silverman handles traffic nicely but can't bring this muddle into focus.
Hwang's message, his big revelation is the same as that Chinese romantic comedy: "stick with your mistake." In other words, you don't give up on the US just because Trump won an election. You stay and fight for the greater good. Well, I don't know about Hwang, but I had no intention of divorcing the US after the election. I never wanted to trash the American experiment. After 2016, I just wanted to trash the Electoral College.
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the creator of BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day with top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
