THE HARDER THEY COME ** 1/2 out of ****
The Public
MUSEUM OF BROADWAY ** 1/2 out of ****
145 West 45th Street
ARDEN OF FAVERSHAM ** out of ****
Red Bull Theater at Lucille Lortel
LOHENGRIN * 1/2 out of ****
The Metropolitan Opera
DEAR WORLD *** out of **** (this presentation; the show is **)
Encores at City Center
LOVE **** out of ****
Park Armoury
One week in New York, New York. One week to catch as many shows as possible, check out the new Museum of Broadway and meet as many friends as I can. And sadly, one week BEFORE previews begin for the new musical New York, New York (based on the Scorsese film). Hey, that's one more reason to come back soon. Let's get started!
First up, the new musical The Harder They Come at the Public. It's the latest attempt to turn the landmark movie into a theatrical show and no wonder: the film's soundtrack is filled with reggae classics. In many ways, it introduced reggae to the world, just as Black Orpheus made the bossa nova a hot property. Unlike Black Orpheus, the soundtrack dominated by Jimmy Cliff is really the only memorable thing about Jamaica's first feature film. The great Suzan-Lori Parks worked on the book and contributes new songs that fit capably alongside the now-classics peppered throughout. She fleshes out the female characters and deepens the complexity...all of which just reveals the contradictory and confusing narrative even more starkly than before. If the show has a future life -- and the temptation to keep working on it should be great -- she needs to be more ruthless. The mother really serves no purpose. All the supporting players need to be more consistent in their actions and the hero Ivan needs a clearer arc from country rube to righteous warrior. His best friend shakes his head over our hero buying a gun but praises Ivan publicly after a run-in with the police. His love interest chides the hero's friends for turning on him, but then makes a u-turn herself. Major emotional moments flit by without leading into song or leaving an impact. The mother is told in passing that her own mother has died -- two minutes later she's over it and making clear to her son that he can't expect any help from her. (Why not?) They barely see each other again, so why do we meet her in the first place? Our hero yearns to be a recording star, but loses his guitar in the first few minutes of the show...and never gets it back or mentions it again. Doesn't he want to write more songs? A hot-headed fellow, most of his problems seem of his own making; a threat to have him killed is too euphemistic; when he demands more money from a boss, his demand that others be paid more as well feels like an afterthought, not a driving reason. One could go on.
But in a musical, great songs cover a host of sins and The Harder They Come is brimming over with marvelous tunes. In the first minutes the show seems desperate to work in snatches of every song on the soundtrack as quickly as possible. Once they settle down and give each song its due, the show is a treat. The cast is marvelous from top to bottom and sings the songs beautifully. Natey Jones is bursting with charm as the hero Ivan, but one could mention almost everyone on stage with enthusiasm. And my guests were eager to hear the original soundtrack (not to mention the greatest hits of Jimmy Cliff) when we left. What jukebox musical could ask for more than that?
Before a matinee of Arden of Faversham, a guest and I headed to the Museum of Broadway on a late Wednesday morning to check out this long-overdue tribute to New York's greatest draw. It's an easy way for tourists to get in the mood before seeing a show and is what you might expect. You'll sit briefly for a five minute video intro to the history of Broadway and entertainment around Times Square. Then you'll proceed to a series of rooms on a number of floors. Major tributes to iconic shows like Oklahoma and West Side Story fill their own space and offer a photo opp of some sort, like a cornfield or a soda shop where the Jets street gang would hang out. In between, you'll find walls adorned with trivia and timelines stretching from vaudeville and minstrel shows right up to today. And of course, you'll see costumes and scripts and all sorts of treasure, from wigs worn by Patti LuPone to that iconic red footwear from Kinky Boots. The audio playing in every room is very good -- it's not too loud (or quiet) and when you step from one area to another, you quickly hear only the music for that section, even if a few feet away you were hearing something entirely different. The staff is also a plus. Broadway Babies one and all, informed staffers are on hand to answer questions; they also offer up comments unasked but did so unobtrusively and easily. They avoided feeling pushy or over-sharing, which might have been tempting since they're bursting with info on whatever exhibit you're looking at. The grand finale is a large space that pays tribute to all the people who put on a show. A section for stage managers will show a video of several key talents explaining what they do along with some display of their tools of the trade. You can focus on what they're saying, but you're also aware that multiple other monitors are showing other people explaining the role of the costume designer or the publicist or the lighting designer or the writer and so on. That constant hum of voices makes clear how putting on a show is a massive effort involving a host of incredibly talented people. It's very effective. In the last space before exiting into the gift shop, rotating exhibits can be perused, currently a fine tribute to illustrator and caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. (The gift shop, by the way, wasn't wildly over-priced as gift shops often are.)
So, it's fine. Wanting to place it amidst the theater district always meant space would be at a premium, of course. Even with a small weekday crowd brought in on timed entry, it felt...full. But if the Museum lasts and wants to improve, it has many areas to work on. The tight space can't be helped, so this museum involves a lot of walking up and down stairs. I assume elevators are available on every floor, but it's definitely a challenge for those in wheelchairs or with mobility issues. The video at the very beginning is pro forma and not very well done. At least it's brief! But it's displayed on a white wall with jutting out sections clearly there before the museum was set up. At first I thought it was meant to be a skyline or something; it's very distracting. These protrusions break up the images of the video, in some cases distorting people's heads in strange ways. It's thoroughly unnecessary since one could easily drop a screen and display the video on that. The labels identifying the photos and objects on display are disastrously small. My vision is fine and even I had to really squint to read some of the text; eventually I stopped bothering and that's not good. It makes you less willing to peruse the images. Further, many displays feature a "key" mapping out the photos or whatever is featured. One of the keys was literally at floor level and you had to crouch down to even have a hope of reading it. Others were similarly placed in unnecessarily awkward positions. The same was true of items on display. One wall contained those red kinky boots. They're huge but were placed with the heels almost at knee or waist height. Meanwhile, some other display boxes on that wall contained small items down at floor level. Without squatting down (not easy unless you're a Broadway hoofer), you couldn't even see what was in them. Waist high boots? They should be placed dow towards the floor. Small stuff? Higher up! Throughout the museum features original works of art to capture some sense of a show or type of theater -- I guess they'll have to do until actual pieces from actual shows become available. We want actual Broadway stuff, not someone's interpretation of Broadway, however fine the artist. (One example is an exploding script that fills up an entire corner; it's neat to see, actually, but surely it would be better to see something from an actual show? Let's hope these are place-holders, waiting for donations as time goes on and the Museum establishes itself. The final room was really the highlight of the museum. But by the time you reach it, you're probably tired (we'd been there for 90 minutes already) and just not in the mood. Thematically and realistically, it should be at the beginning of the tour when you have more energy. Put it first and the Museum of Broadway will show you who puts on a show and then you can celebrate individual shows. Plus, the hardcore theater lovers will want to savor every section of this display while more casual fans will quickly move on to the flashy displays for major shows, making it a great way to filter each group when it arrives. And where are the critics? They surely are a part of Broadway's history and charting their rise and fall, from the era when Frank Rich of the New York Times was the Butcher of Broadway to today, when fans offer their thoughts on video and TikTok and have more sway than any ink-stained wretch. Heck, if they wanted to be catty, they could have just labeled some bricks on the wall with the names of famous critics or put a pile of tomatoes in the corner and enjoyed some revenge. Famous flops? Scandals? This history isn't nearly as spicy and fun as it might have been. Finally, is there any way to see just the rotating exhibits -- like the fine one for Hirschfeld -- at a lower price without going through the rest of the museum? That seems like a lost opportunity as well, especially if you hope to lure the locals more than once. Plus, it's $40, which is even more than sex! The Museum of Sex, that is. This is a self-funded operation, as far as I know. Still, it's a heavy lift to ask for more money almost any other museums in the city. Here's hoping the show will go on and they'll make improvements as they can to turn the Museum Of Broadway into something as great as the shows it celebrates.
Maybe the noir-ish comedy Arden Of Faversham has an identity crisis. Sometimes, you feel a show just doesn't know what tone it wants to strike. This Elizabethan play may or may not contain some of the earliest writing by Shakespeare (who possibly/probably/maybe but who knows? contributed a chunk in the middle) so even its authorship is a little confused. In any case, it's based on a then-infamous case of a woman and her lover poisoning her husband, an act that shocked everyone and led to this 1592 play, an early case of media cashing in on true crime. Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher & Kathryn Walat, this version reportedly beefs up the female characters and presumably the humor, thanks to numerous failed attempts at offing poor Arden. The technical elements from the handsome and effective set to the lighting and costumes are the strong suit here.
But problems begin right away. Alice (Cara Ricketts) walks onstage wearing a slinky nightgown as noir-ish music plays. She's in Murder, My Sweet. Her husband (the dependable Thomas Jay Ryan), however, is in a Shakespearean drama. Her lover (the square-jawed Tony Roach) is in a Carol Burnett spoof and standing in for Lyle Waggoner. The guns for hire trying and failing to kill Arden are in Monty Python. Best of all is Zachary Fine as an aide to the husband; he simply finds the humor and heart in any scene by being as true to the moment as he can. One must blame director Jesse Berger for failing to get everyone on the same page. Worse, as can happen, at the matinee I caught Ricketts fumbled over her lines multiple times. That sort of thing is catching and therefore so did several others in the show, though her case was by far the worse. Nonetheless, I found Ricketts an appealing talent, wondered what Roach might be like under better circumstances, felt for Thom Sesma given a forced subtext to play with his secondary role, felt even more for Ryan and marveled at how Fine could look good amidst all this. To be clear, it was a painless afternoon at the theater, messy and bloody though it was.
Fans of Red Bull Theater can enjoy a post-show discussion of Arden of Faversham streaming on YouTube March 26 at 7:30 pm EST, with the director, members of the cast and scholar Tonya Pollard.
I went into Arden of Faversham with no expectations, so they couldn't be crushed. Lohengrin is another story. It was overseen by Francois Girard, who helmed the Metropolitan Opera's 2013 Parsifal in a production so moving and beautiful I was overwhelmed. Lohengrin is a sequel of sorts, focusing on the son of Parsifal doing his own holy deeds.
Like so many sequels, this production compares poorly to the original in every way. The choreography is misbegotten. A disastrous costume decision -- the chorus has capes which can digitally change the color they display -- led to a laughable series of tableaux. Essentially, they must stretch out their hands for the effect, making the stage look like it's populated again and again by flying squirrels. And once you think such a thing, you can't un-think it during the near five hour length of the show. While Parsifal had a shimmering, otherworldly atmosphere, Lohengrin is decidedly earthbound. It's my first exposure to this opera, so I'll save judgment until another production. But surely the only fun role is the witchy Ortrud, played here to the hilt by Christine Goerke. At least she was having a good time.
Encores! by all accounts lost its way for a while. It was conceived as a way to showcase musicals that slipped through the cracks. Shows too unwieldy to mount again or shows that were deeply flawed or shows unfairly maligned or ahead of their time that might never get done again if someone didn't make a case for them -- these were the bread and butter of Encores! Then came Chicago, a semi-staged performance so stupendously successful it practically leaped to Broadway, becoming the longest running revival in history and indeed the longest-running U.S. musical in history, full stop. Naturally, that went to Encores!'s head and it seemed many of the later musicals it showcased were auditions for Broadway rather than misfit toys given a showcase they otherwise would lack.
Happily, that isn't the case with Dear World, which most definitely will not be returning to Broadway. Its plot is daft and the chances of this show enjoying a commercial run on the Great White Way are practically nil, even if composer Jerry Herman was the first person to have three musicals running simultaneously on Broadway. Did I say the plot was daft? Yes daft, implausible, silly, barely-there and then it's over.
Yet the score has some gems, including "I Don't Want To Know" and the act one closer "One Person," a song so rat-a-tat emphatic in its cockeyed optimism you hear it once and think, "Now THAT'S a Jerry Herman song!" Others are just fine and fun to hear, like the kooky scene-setter "Through The Bottom Of The Glass," the sweet "And I Was Beautiful" and the tricky, complex interweaving of three songs by the madwomen of Paris in act two. Everyone is having a hoot and it's all presided over by Donna Murphy, script in hand (COVID kept her from many rehearsals), which somehow added to the charm of the evening. This nutty, rarely if ever to be seen show is precisely what Encores! is meant to do. Mind you, I also want to see its two week production of Oliver! which surely deserves to be back on Broadway. So sue me for inconsistency, which is precisely what makes Dear World such a nutty treat.
Finally, I loved Love. We've heard a lot about writer/director Alexander Zeldin for years. He's a major player in the UK, where Zeldin is now an Associate Director at the National. His work is rooted in documentary but deeply theatrical, by which I mean he's not delivering docudrama or turning found text into a drama. In Love, he focuses on a homeless shelter. After a long time immersing himself in that world, Zeldin worked with people caught up in that circumstance, inviting them to workshops and hearing their stories. Then he transmuted all that lived experience into a work of art. How could this 2016 play just be making its New York City debut? And when will we see 2019's Faith, Hope and Charity? And what will he do next? First, Love is set around the holidays in a temporary shelter for people who are homeless and hoping for more permanent lodgings from the government. We see a middle-aged man caring for his elderly mother; a young couple caring for his two children from an earlier relationship, with one more baby on the way; a Syrian refugee just given asylum in the UK and a Sudanese woman who can only speak to her children on the phone. They're all quietly desperate.
Then what happens? Very little, for the play doesn't traffic in melodrama. We get to know all the characters in ways large and small. But no major conflicts arise. No one is screwing up or revealed to be worse or better than we imagine. Everyone is just doing their best, getting by, trying to stay afloat. And that everyday reality is bone deep, thanks to the set, the lighting, the pinpoint direction and the marvelous performances that rarely seem like performances. The play just...happens. But it's so involving, the predicaments so worrisome, the stakes so very high that the 90 minutes feel more like nine minutes or perhaps nine hours. You're wrung out at the end, after an evening in which the audience is focused and as quiet in the face of this humanity as any audience could be. Its attention is riveted and thoroughly rewarded. I described it to someone as "brutal" and yet not to be missed. They knew what I meant, they went to see it and they loved it too. This is what theater strives to be but rarely achieves.
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