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Magic in the air - on Broadway
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Reviewed by: FRAN HELLER, Contributing Writer
It's that time of year when Broadway spruces up for the 2006 Tony Awards.
Dust is brushed off oldies in freshly minted revivals, while premières hang precipitously on the whims of New York critics.
Of the seven plays I saw recently, five were European imports, one of which, "Festen,” fizzled and closed.
The two American plays are revivals. No Pulitzer Prize for drama was awarded this year, giving one pause to reflect upon the scarcity of great new American plays.
The two revivals deal with political and economic distress.
"Awake and Sing,” Clifford Odets's landmark 1935 play, centers on a Jewish-American family at the height of the Depression struggling to survive in New York.
"Pajama Game,” the 1954 musical comedy by George Abbott and Richard Bissell (book) and Jewish songwriters Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (music and lyrics), concerns workers at a pajama factory and their union's struggle to get a 7-1/2¢-an-hour raise.
Both are leftist works that reflected the sympathies of Broadway at the time.
While they are historically dated, in terms of wage stagnation, a working class trying to make ends meet, corporate shenanigans, and the corrosive effects of a capitalist society on the poor and powerless, these shows could not be timelier.
The most political of the plays is David Hare's "Stuff Happens” an unsparing, behind-the-scenes look at events leading up to the Iraq war.
The best of the straight plays I saw is Alan Bennett's "The History Boys,” a quasi-autobiographical look at the English playwright's school days, which becomes a philosophical debate about education.
Nobody spins a yarn like the Irish, and Irish playwrights Brian Friel and Conor McPherson are masters of the form (See "Faith Healer” and Shining City.”).
Here's a closer look.
"The Pajama Game”
I never saw the original production of "The Pajama Game,” but Kathleen Marshall's effervescent direction and dazzling choreography afford us a mesmerizing revival.
The non-stop entertainment bubbles over from one glorious number to another, including such memorable songs as "Hey There,” Hernando's Hideaway” and "Steam Heat.”
Derek McLane's Crayola-colored factory setting features moveable racks of striped and polka-dotted pajama parts, a galaxy of period sewing machines, and gigantic buttons that circle the stage like the gears of an assembly line.
With his prominent pompadour, Elvis swagger, and velveteen voice Harry Connick Jr, melts the audience as Sid Sorokin, the new superintendent who falls head over heels for Babe Williams. As Babe, the gorgeous Kelli O'Hara has a voice that matches her looks.
Babe is union and Sid is management, so, despite their mutual attraction, they lock horns over the union's request for a pay hike.
Bob Fosse made his stunning choreographic debut with this show.
The gamine-like Joyce Chittick and company dancers turn "Steam Heat,” with Fosse's signature moves into a singular sensation.
Michael McKean is uproariously funny as Hines, the time-study man and jealous boyfriend of Gladys (bubbly Megan Lawrence), the company bookkeeper.
A very tipsy Gladys and Sid steal the show in the tango-infused number "Hernando's Hideaway.” The zaftig Roz Ryan is simply fabulous as the boss's secretary Mable.
Every one of "Pajama's” nine Tony nominations is well-deserved.
"Awake and Sing”
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Clifford Odets's birth (1906-1963), Lincoln Center Theater has remounted a revival of his masterwork "Awake and Sing” in the same theater where the play debuted in 1935.
Written when Odets was only 28, the kitchen-sink drama looks at family dysfunction from a Jewish perspective.
Bartlett Sher's innovative direction and a terrific cast make the Depression-era play feel fresh.
The Bergers, a lower-middle-class family living in the Bronx, struggle to make it in America.
"Awake and Sing” is truly an ensemble piece in which all the actors play principal parts.
The excellent Zo' Wanamaker is the overbearing matriarch Bessie, who wears the pants in the family. A bitter woman whose dreams were thwarted by life's cruel circumstances, Bessie is to be pitied as well as hated.
Included among the menfolk are Bessie's spineless husband Myron (Jonathan Hadary), who studied law but settled for haberdashery, and Ben Gazzara as Bessie's philosopher father Jacob, an ineffectual idealist who spouts Marxism and finds solace in his Caruso records.
The young Ralph Berger (Pablo Schreiber) is a dreamer like his grandfather.
One of the play's strengths, which also informs much of its humor, is Odets's unerring ear for the fast-talking, idiosyncratic street vernacular of these New York denizens.
Sparks fly between Mark Ruffalo as the acid-tongued, gimpy boarder Moe Axelrod and the Berger daughter Hennie (Lauren Ambrose).
Michael Yeargan's cramped-apartment setting serves as a metaphor for the family's precarious state. As the play progresses, the walls and roof gradually disappear, which mimics the family's breaking apart.
Odets was the son of a first-generation Russian Jewish émigré who changed the family name from Gorodetsky, which means "urban man.” His plays, writes New Yorker critic John Lahr, "are a quirky blend of Jewish pessimism and a very American desire to shine.”
"The History Boys”
Alan Bennett's "The History Boys” is, hands down, the best new drama of many a season, including this one. It's a play that crackles with ideas and humor in equal doses.
A central theme is defining the purpose of education: Is it to teach to the test, to pass exams, or to encourage a love of learning?
The show, which opened at The National Theatre of Great Britain in 2004 under Nicholas Hytner's direction, has arrived on this side of the Atlantic with its original cast.
The seven Tony nominations this delightful English import has garnered, including best play, are well-warranted.
The setting is a grammar school, the British equivalent of our public high school, in Northern England during the 1980s.
The play focuses on eight boys who are being prepped for entrance examinations to Oxford and Cambridge. All are very bright, but as one of the teachers says, "bright isn't enough.” They need an edge, and that edge focuses on how to take the test.
As educators, Hector and Irwin are a study in contrasts. Hector, in his 60s, is Old School, a teacher who is totally committed to education as preparation for life, not success. (Think "Dead Poets Society” and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips.”)
Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a contract teacher in his 40s, believes that the way to get into the prestigious universities is to dazzle the examiners by doing well on the test.
The dialogue sizzles, and the original British cast makes all the difference.
Bob Crowley's innovative set design includes black and white film footage of the school's everyday life, which creates seamless segues from one scene to the next.
All the "boys” are fantastic, including Samuel Barnett as the insecure Posner, who is Jewish, homosexual and late to mature. The character of Posner most closely mirrors that of the playwright.
Portly Richard Griffiths gives a luminous performance as the impassioned but flawed Hector.
As the sole female instructor, Mrs. Lintott, Frances de la Tour's droll monologue on "teaching five centuries of masculine ineptitude” is the funniest feminist takeoff I've ever heard.
"Stuff Happens”
David Hare's history play, "Stuff Happens” premièred at The National Theatre in London in September 2004. The New York production at The Public Theater has been updated to include more recent factual material.
The docudrama begins in 1975, with the fall of Saigon. It moves with the swiftness of a military offensive to the present, aided by two giant video screens whose changing images mirror the events.
All the major players in these war games, including Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Hans Blix and Tony Blair, are portrayed by actors who not only resemble their real-life counterparts, but capture their personalities with accuracy.
While Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld are drawn as the real villains, the born-again Bush is painted in shades of stupid. As one of the characters says, "After 9/11, America changed; it got stupider.”
The title derives, from Donald Rumsfeld's infamous response to the looting of Baghdad, given at a press conference in 2003.
Clearly, Hare's sympathies lie with Tony Blair. He intimates that Blair was finagled into supporting the war in exchange for a promise from Bush to pressure Israel to follow the road map in creating a Palestinian state.
Even more stupefying is the epilogue, which states that 47% of the American people still believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, while 47% believed the attackers were Iraqis.
As a political playwright, Hare dares to go where others fear to tread.
"Faith Healer”
The Rashamon-like structure of "Faith Healer” by Brian Friel consists of a quartet of interlocking monologues, which recounts the story of an itinerant faith healer through the titular character, his wife and his manager.
Each soliloquy is a stream of consciousness during which the listener has to put the pieces of their narratives together. Despite the star-studded cast, I don't believe this revival, directed by Jonathan Kent, will have any greater success than its short-lived 1979 Broadway debut.
The best of the trio is Ralph Fiennes as con man Frank Hardy. As if haunted by ghosts, is the unkempt and dissipated-looking Hardy, a woebegone charlatan.
Cherry Jones, who won a Tony for her mesmerizing performance as Sister Aloysius in "Doubt,” is totally miscast here as Grace, the unstable, long-suffering wife who defied parents, her class, and her own professional training as a lawyer to marry the abusive faith healer.
When so much hinges upon the lyrical cadences of the language and dialect, Jones's accent, which fluctuates between Irish, English and the Bronx, destroys any credibility of character or setting.
The excellent Ian McDiarmid perfectly suits the role of the flamboyant cockney manager and loyal friend Teddy, used and hurt by others.
I attended an early preview and found the interminable two-and-a-half-hour talky play in which nothing happens, well ... interminable.
"Shining City”
Conor McPherson's "Shining City” concerns an ex-priest named Ian who trades his role as clergyman for that of therapist. Ian's first patient is John, a recently widowed man who keeps seeing the ghost of his dead wife.
Issues about the loss of religion in a changing Dublin, Catholic guilt (which former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once likened to Jewish guilt, only worse!), and the inherent inadequacies of all human relationships come alive in this Manhattan Theatre Club production.
Brian F. O'Byrne is outstanding as the sympathetic therapist Ian, who wrestles with his own demons in an effort to find direction in life.
The playwright's gift for dialogue turns the hesitant way people speak into poetry. In this, his Broadway debut, film-and-television character actor Oliver Platt ("The West Wing,” "Huff”) makes such halting talk and a fusillade of "you knows” sound utterly human.
The play ripples with gallows Irish humor that is dark and funny. "When the wife was alive, we had stopped communicating; now she's dead, we're communicating,” wheezes Platt as teary-eyed widower John.
The play has all the elements of a ghost story, with a shocking ending that remains one of the most brilliant coups de théâtre I have ever experienced.
The 60th annual Tony Awards will be presented Sun., June 11, at 8 p.m. on CBS.
It's that time of year when Broadway spruces up for the 2006 Tony Awards.
Dust is brushed off oldies in freshly minted revivals, while premières hang precipitously on the whims of New York critics.
Of the seven plays I saw recently, five were European imports, one of which, "Festen,” fizzled and closed.
The two American plays are revivals. No Pulitzer Prize for drama was awarded this year, giving one pause to reflect upon the scarcity of great new American plays.
The two revivals deal with political and economic distress.
"Awake and Sing,” Clifford Odets's landmark 1935 play, centers on a Jewish-American family at the height of the Depression struggling to survive in New York.
"Pajama Game,” the 1954 musical comedy by George Abbott and Richard Bissell (book) and Jewish songwriters Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (music and lyrics), concerns workers at a pajama factory and their union's struggle to get a 7-1/2¢-an-hour raise.
Both are leftist works that reflected the sympathies of Broadway at the time.
While they are historically dated, in terms of wage stagnation, a working class trying to make ends meet, corporate shenanigans, and the corrosive effects of a capitalist society on the poor and powerless, these shows could not be timelier.
The most political of the plays is David Hare's "Stuff Happens” an unsparing, behind-the-scenes look at events leading up to the Iraq war.
The best of the straight plays I saw is Alan Bennett's "The History Boys,” a quasi-autobiographical look at the English playwright's school days, which becomes a philosophical debate about education.
Nobody spins a yarn like the Irish, and Irish playwrights Brian Friel and Conor McPherson are masters of the form (See "Faith Healer” and Shining City.”).
Here's a closer look.
"The Pajama Game”
I never saw the original production of "The Pajama Game,” but Kathleen Marshall's effervescent direction and dazzling choreography afford us a mesmerizing revival.
The non-stop entertainment bubbles over from one glorious number to another, including such memorable songs as "Hey There,” Hernando's Hideaway” and "Steam Heat.”
Derek McLane's Crayola-colored factory setting features moveable racks of striped and polka-dotted pajama parts, a galaxy of period sewing machines, and gigantic buttons that circle the stage like the gears of an assembly line.
With his prominent pompadour, Elvis swagger, and velveteen voice Harry Connick Jr, melts the audience as Sid Sorokin, the new superintendent who falls head over heels for Babe Williams. As Babe, the gorgeous Kelli O'Hara has a voice that matches her looks.
Babe is union and Sid is management, so, despite their mutual attraction, they lock horns over the union's request for a pay hike.
Bob Fosse made his stunning choreographic debut with this show.
The gamine-like Joyce Chittick and company dancers turn "Steam Heat,” with Fosse's signature moves into a singular sensation.
Michael McKean is uproariously funny as Hines, the time-study man and jealous boyfriend of Gladys (bubbly Megan Lawrence), the company bookkeeper.
A very tipsy Gladys and Sid steal the show in the tango-infused number "Hernando's Hideaway.” The zaftig Roz Ryan is simply fabulous as the boss's secretary Mable.
Every one of "Pajama's” nine Tony nominations is well-deserved.
"Awake and Sing”
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Clifford Odets's birth (1906-1963), Lincoln Center Theater has remounted a revival of his masterwork "Awake and Sing” in the same theater where the play debuted in 1935.
Written when Odets was only 28, the kitchen-sink drama looks at family dysfunction from a Jewish perspective.
Bartlett Sher's innovative direction and a terrific cast make the Depression-era play feel fresh.
The Bergers, a lower-middle-class family living in the Bronx, struggle to make it in America.
"Awake and Sing” is truly an ensemble piece in which all the actors play principal parts.
The excellent Zo' Wanamaker is the overbearing matriarch Bessie, who wears the pants in the family. A bitter woman whose dreams were thwarted by life's cruel circumstances, Bessie is to be pitied as well as hated.
Included among the menfolk are Bessie's spineless husband Myron (Jonathan Hadary), who studied law but settled for haberdashery, and Ben Gazzara as Bessie's philosopher father Jacob, an ineffectual idealist who spouts Marxism and finds solace in his Caruso records.
The young Ralph Berger (Pablo Schreiber) is a dreamer like his grandfather.
One of the play's strengths, which also informs much of its humor, is Odets's unerring ear for the fast-talking, idiosyncratic street vernacular of these New York denizens.
Sparks fly between Mark Ruffalo as the acid-tongued, gimpy boarder Moe Axelrod and the Berger daughter Hennie (Lauren Ambrose).
Michael Yeargan's cramped-apartment setting serves as a metaphor for the family's precarious state. As the play progresses, the walls and roof gradually disappear, which mimics the family's breaking apart.
Odets was the son of a first-generation Russian Jewish émigré who changed the family name from Gorodetsky, which means "urban man.” His plays, writes New Yorker critic John Lahr, "are a quirky blend of Jewish pessimism and a very American desire to shine.”
"The History Boys”
Alan Bennett's "The History Boys” is, hands down, the best new drama of many a season, including this one. It's a play that crackles with ideas and humor in equal doses.
A central theme is defining the purpose of education: Is it to teach to the test, to pass exams, or to encourage a love of learning?
The show, which opened at The National Theatre of Great Britain in 2004 under Nicholas Hytner's direction, has arrived on this side of the Atlantic with its original cast.
The seven Tony nominations this delightful English import has garnered, including best play, are well-warranted.
The setting is a grammar school, the British equivalent of our public high school, in Northern England during the 1980s.
The play focuses on eight boys who are being prepped for entrance examinations to Oxford and Cambridge. All are very bright, but as one of the teachers says, "bright isn't enough.” They need an edge, and that edge focuses on how to take the test.
As educators, Hector and Irwin are a study in contrasts. Hector, in his 60s, is Old School, a teacher who is totally committed to education as preparation for life, not success. (Think "Dead Poets Society” and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips.”)
Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a contract teacher in his 40s, believes that the way to get into the prestigious universities is to dazzle the examiners by doing well on the test.
The dialogue sizzles, and the original British cast makes all the difference.
Bob Crowley's innovative set design includes black and white film footage of the school's everyday life, which creates seamless segues from one scene to the next.
All the "boys” are fantastic, including Samuel Barnett as the insecure Posner, who is Jewish, homosexual and late to mature. The character of Posner most closely mirrors that of the playwright.
Portly Richard Griffiths gives a luminous performance as the impassioned but flawed Hector.
As the sole female instructor, Mrs. Lintott, Frances de la Tour's droll monologue on "teaching five centuries of masculine ineptitude” is the funniest feminist takeoff I've ever heard.
"Stuff Happens”
David Hare's history play, "Stuff Happens” premièred at The National Theatre in London in September 2004. The New York production at The Public Theater has been updated to include more recent factual material.
The docudrama begins in 1975, with the fall of Saigon. It moves with the swiftness of a military offensive to the present, aided by two giant video screens whose changing images mirror the events.
All the major players in these war games, including Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Hans Blix and Tony Blair, are portrayed by actors who not only resemble their real-life counterparts, but capture their personalities with accuracy.
While Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld are drawn as the real villains, the born-again Bush is painted in shades of stupid. As one of the characters says, "After 9/11, America changed; it got stupider.”
The title derives, from Donald Rumsfeld's infamous response to the looting of Baghdad, given at a press conference in 2003.
Clearly, Hare's sympathies lie with Tony Blair. He intimates that Blair was finagled into supporting the war in exchange for a promise from Bush to pressure Israel to follow the road map in creating a Palestinian state.
Even more stupefying is the epilogue, which states that 47% of the American people still believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, while 47% believed the attackers were Iraqis.
As a political playwright, Hare dares to go where others fear to tread.
"Faith Healer”
The Rashamon-like structure of "Faith Healer” by Brian Friel consists of a quartet of interlocking monologues, which recounts the story of an itinerant faith healer through the titular character, his wife and his manager.
Each soliloquy is a stream of consciousness during which the listener has to put the pieces of their narratives together. Despite the star-studded cast, I don't believe this revival, directed by Jonathan Kent, will have any greater success than its short-lived 1979 Broadway debut.
The best of the trio is Ralph Fiennes as con man Frank Hardy. As if haunted by ghosts, is the unkempt and dissipated-looking Hardy, a woebegone charlatan.
Cherry Jones, who won a Tony for her mesmerizing performance as Sister Aloysius in "Doubt,” is totally miscast here as Grace, the unstable, long-suffering wife who defied parents, her class, and her own professional training as a lawyer to marry the abusive faith healer.
When so much hinges upon the lyrical cadences of the language and dialect, Jones's accent, which fluctuates between Irish, English and the Bronx, destroys any credibility of character or setting.
The excellent Ian McDiarmid perfectly suits the role of the flamboyant cockney manager and loyal friend Teddy, used and hurt by others.
I attended an early preview and found the interminable two-and-a-half-hour talky play in which nothing happens, well ... interminable.
"Shining City”
Conor McPherson's "Shining City” concerns an ex-priest named Ian who trades his role as clergyman for that of therapist. Ian's first patient is John, a recently widowed man who keeps seeing the ghost of his dead wife.
Issues about the loss of religion in a changing Dublin, Catholic guilt (which former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once likened to Jewish guilt, only worse!), and the inherent inadequacies of all human relationships come alive in this Manhattan Theatre Club production.
Brian F. O'Byrne is outstanding as the sympathetic therapist Ian, who wrestles with his own demons in an effort to find direction in life.
The playwright's gift for dialogue turns the hesitant way people speak into poetry. In this, his Broadway debut, film-and-television character actor Oliver Platt ("The West Wing,” "Huff”) makes such halting talk and a fusillade of "you knows” sound utterly human.
The play ripples with gallows Irish humor that is dark and funny. "When the wife was alive, we had stopped communicating; now she's dead, we're communicating,” wheezes Platt as teary-eyed widower John.
The play has all the elements of a ghost story, with a shocking ending that remains one of the most brilliant coups de théâtre I have ever experienced.
The 60th annual Tony Awards will be presented Sun., June 11, at 8 p.m. on CBS.
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