May 24–31, 2001
theater
Curtains!
It’s late in the theater season, but shows are opening up all over: A roundup of reviews.
Candide
Through May 27, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700
Book of Days
Through June 17, People’s Light & Theatre Co., 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, 610-644-3500
The Baker’s Wife
Through June 10, Arden Theatre Company, 40 North Second St., 215-922-1122
A Chorus Line
Through July 8, Walnut Street Theatre, 825 Walnut St., 215-574-3550
The Faggot Museum
Through June 1, Theatre Catalyst, Playground at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330
Candide
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Cause for optimism: Jose Llana and Anna Christy in Candide |
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Within the first ten seconds of the overture, I felt exhilarated. In a month where I’ve seen no fewer than six musicals (including a couple of classics), this is something special. Candide is theatrical champagne, sublimely sui generis.
Of course, the show has always had to fight for commercial success. The 1956 original Broadway version closed after only 73 performances. Critics loved Leonard Bernstein’s music and Richard Wilbur’s lyrics— but they found Lillian Hellman’s book to be bumpy and overlong. And a satirical operetta setting of Voltaire wasn’t exactly big box office.
But the original cast album preserved some of the best aspects of the show (including Barbara Cook’s brilliantly sung Cunegonde), and was a bestseller. The sparkling overture became a concert favorite. Bernstein continued to work on the piece, aided at different times by an imposing array of America’s cultural elite.
Enter Harold Prince. In 1973, the master director mounted a revised production, and this Candide (which also featured some additional lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) became a hit.
There were costs. Much of the show’s subtlety was gone. Prince’s direction was cartoony. A new book (by Hugh Wheeler) told the story more tidily, but substituted one-liners for caustic wit. Prince shortened the Bernstein score, leaving out some superb music. (In the 1973 production, it might have been a blessing — the young cast was vocally inadequate to meet Candide’s operatic demands.)
Still, Prince’s revisions became standard. The director himself returned to the piece several times, most recently in a 1997 Broadway production. While still too crude, this version at least featured good voices, and curbed some of the worst excesses of 1973.
It’s this edition of the show that we see now in his namesake theater. The good news is I doubt if it’s ever been done better.
Ben Levit’s direction still perpetuates a few of Prince’s vulgarisms (e.g. Cunegonde’s silly stage business that distracts from her aria), but for the most part he cleans things up and creates some delightfully droll visual pictures. He’s aided here by Jerome Sirlin’s eye-popping projections— occasionally too much (sometimes the characters seem like foreground for the scenery), but mostly just right.
The cast is without a weak link. Anna Christy (Cunegonde) sings the score with bell-like brilliance and displays abundant comic charm. Jose Llana (as Candide) has a lovely, soft-grained tenor voice. He’s not much of an actor, but has a pleasingly vulnerable quality. Chris Hoch makes a suitably sneering Maximillian (I prefer a drier take on the part, but that’s the fault of Wheeler/Prince). The Old Lady is traditionally played by a heavily accented Mittel-European diva. Joilet Harris is certainly not that, but she’s adorable, reinventing the role in a completely fresh way. Tom Nelis, playing five characters, is physically, vocally and dramatically adroit.
In the best of all possible worlds, a company producing Candide would rethink the edition, jettison Wheeler’s book in favor of something better, and use more of Bernstein/Wilbur’s score. What we have here — a good compromise version, very finely performed— is cause enough for optimism.
Book of Days
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Good Days: Peter DeLaurier and McKey. |
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At first this recent Lanford Wilson play seems like just another Our Town. It opens, as Wilder’s famous play does, with a lot of characters arranged around a stage, bare of furniture or props, who speak to us about their small town, and about themselves, and the lives they lead. There is simplicity, there is tradition, there are plans and hopes and dreams. A cheese-making plant is the economic center of Dublin, Missouri; its creative genius of provolone and cheddar is Len, a sweet, earnest guy married to Ruth, who’s just been cast to play the lead in a local production of Shaw’s play, St. Joan. This adds a layer of theatricality to the drama, since the glamorous director from L.A. stands at the sidelines of the stage and not only directs Shaw’s play, he seems to direct the play he’s in (the one we’re watching).
The cheese plant is owned by Walt, whose basketball-hero son, James, having passed the bar exam on his seventh try, is well on his way to becoming a state representative. Central to the town’s life is the fundamentalist church, run by a smooth-talking preacher. There are an ex-hippie mother, a born-again Christian thug, the sheriff, a variety of long-suffering meek wives— a whole bunch of characters who create the illusion of a fully populated town.
But, by the end of Act I, Their Town is faced with what seems at first to be Walt’s accidental death during a tornado (great sound effects) but which quickly looks a lot like murder. Or at least it does to Ruth, who will discover — as St. Joan did — the true power of the alliance of church and state. Add the power of big business (Kraft, in this case, processing all cheese into what we have learned to call "cheese products"), and Wilson’s indictment of greed and hypocrisy is complete— and much like Shaw’s.
Directed with complex charm by Abigail Adams, the accomplished cast has a few standouts: Pete Pryor as Len, the enthusiastic, kindly guy who’s smarter and stronger than he seems; Susan McKey as the impassioned, defeated Ruth; and Lenny Haas, who plays the reverend with enough subtlety that you finally don’t know if he believes what he’s saying himself.
If some elements of the play and the production don’t quite work (the singing, the town as character, the town as chorus, the thematic drawing of the fine line between hypocrisy and self-delusion), it offers more than enough to make an interesting and substantial evening. If Book of Days seems at first slow-moving and overlong, it ultimately rewards patience and provokes thought — much as Lanford Wilson’s better-known plays, Fifth of July, Hot l Baltimore and Redwood Curtain, do.
The Baker’s Wife
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Sampieri and Teti |
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In 1976, The Baker’s Wife closed before reaching Broadway. But it didn’t go away. Its big song, "Meadowlark," remains a favorite of theater divas, and has been kept alive in nightclub settings by the likes of Patti LuPone (who created the title role) and Betty Buckley (who almost did). Stephen Schwartz (music and lyrics) and Joseph Stein (book) continued work on Baker, and a revised version is now on stage at the Arden.
The show, based on a beloved French film by Marcel Pagnol, is a modern fable. In a small town in Provence, the locals rejoice because they finally have a new baker, an affable older man named Aimable. Things seem perfect— but soon Genevieve, the baker’s much younger wife, runs away with a lover, Dominique. When the problem quite literally threatens the town’s daily bread, its citizens set out to fix things. (I won’t reveal how it ends, but suffice it to say that the French are eminently sensible about this. Sex is one thing, but bread is quite another.)
Pagnol’s movie has the kind of fragile charm that isn’t easily translated. Sure enough, in Stein and Schwartz’s coarser hands, the piece quickly cloys. What we get in the musical Baker’s Wife is provincial France as seen in Chocolat or at EPCOT— picturesque cafés, games of pétanque, everybody guzzling vin ordinaire as if it were water. Even the cranky peasants are cute.
We could buy it all more easily if the emotional core of the story were central, but neither Stein nor Schwartz seems much interested in depth. Schwartz’s tuneful score especially is too facile. A few songs make a stab at finding a specific tone world for the show — Brel-like chansons, accordion accompaniment. But the big numbers are all generic Broadway, and about as French as Jerry Herman. Music here doesn’t do much to build character. In fact, the vaunted "Meadowlark" — too much the self-conscious star turn— works better in a cabaret setting.
Terrence J. Nolen’s production has certainly thrown significant resources behind the show, which looks as tasty as one of the baker’s croissants. But the principal performers are problematic. Tom Teti (Aimable) finesses the Baker’s songs with only intermittent success, and never really finds the heart of the character. And although he’s obviously not a young man, Teti looks vital and attractive. He and Sharon Sampieri (Genevieve) make a handsome couple rather than an unlikely one. Sampieri herself sings prettily, but doesn’t connect to the wife’s discontent and wanderlust. Jeffrey Coon is a vocally resplendent Dominique, but is too boyish to suggest a dangerous sexual allure. There is good supporting work from Mary Martello (who in her demeanor and looks suggests some Frenchness), and others.
So… thanks to Nolen and the Arden for letting us see for ourselves what works — and doesn’t work — in The Baker’s Wife. My hope is that these longtime champions of unfamiliar musical theater next bring us a piece with a bit more substance.
—D.A.F.
A Chorus Line
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Get back in Line: (From left) Venny Carranza, Pamela Jordan and Frankie X. Leusner. |
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A Chorus Line opened in 1975, and even then it was an anachronism. The kind of show it references — where a high-kicking, identically-costumed chorus supports a star— had disappeared from Broadway years before.
That, in a sense, is the point. Chorus Line, as conceived, choreographed and directed by Michael Bennett, is a tribute to the colleagues he loved most: Broadway’s gypsies (the showbiz term for chorus performers). It’s also an elegy for an art form — old-fashioned musical comedy— whose imminent death threatened those gypsies with extinction.
Bennett’s show did a remarkable thing. It gave a group of finely tuned, virtuoso bodies something they’d never had before: a voice. Members of the cast got to tell stories of their lives. For a moment, they were seen as individuals. In this context, at least, the chorus people were stars.
The musical took off like wildfire, but I must admit that I wasn’t completely won over. Chorus Line’s tone is narcissistic and self-congratulatory, and the childhood narratives (of boys coming out and girls who only felt complete in a ballet studio) play like clichés even if they’re true. But the show had a lot going for it. It was a true original— there’s really nothing else quite like it. It was clever of its creators to combine angst-ridden inner drama (the show may be musical theater’s greatest source of overwrought method acting) with snazzy numbers. And in Bennett’s superb choreography and direction, the entire piece was a celebration of Broadway style, polished to an almost blinding level.
The passing years have not been entirely kind to the show. We’re now even further removed from a Broadway of chorus lines. The Marvin Hamlisch/Edward Kleban ballads sound more than ever like generic’70s pop, the stuff of oldies radio, and in our Oprah-fied world, teary personal revelations are the currency of daytime TV.
But Bennett’s choreography remains thrilling, and regional theaters keep Chorus Line alive.
At Walnut Street, director Mitzi Hamilton (herself a veteran of the Broadway show) has mounted a loving but uninspired recreation of Bennett’s original staging. The cast is energetic, though there are no standout performances. The choreography is executed competently, but there’s not much panache. What’s more problematic is the generalized, low-voltage acting. With a few individual exceptions (particularly Wilson Mendieta as Paul), we don’t get much of the characters’ underlying sense of desperation, the pain behind the stories or their exultation.
Even with these problems, A Chorus Line remains a slickly enjoyable piece of theater. But new audiences, introduced to a production where both dancing and acting are routine rather than inspired, may wonder what all the shouting was about.
—D.A.F.
The Faggot Museum
In The Faggot Museum, actor-playwright Michael Whistler offers a series of monologues (all but one performed by Whistler himself) that encapsulate gay archetypes. Here is the buttoned-up, bespectacled stockbroker type who decks himself in gaudy jewelry and offers an ode to Barbara Eden’s Christmas special. Meet the former altar boy who is now a janitor, his life forever changed by an unexpected encounter with a priest. There’s the opera lover for whom Madame Butterfly’s life seems more real than his own. Most of the characters are rooted in a kind of pre-Stonewall culture, but occasionally the reference is more current, as in the Person With AIDS who cloaks himself in power-of-positive-thinking gobbledygook.
The common thread binding the exhibits together is the sense of living on what one calls "the glittery knife’s edge between hope and disappointment." For these men, fantasies take the place of active engagement. Their attachments are to images and objects — a picture, an original cast album, a gaudy porcelain bowl— rather than to other people.
The museum concept gives Whistler full rein to traffic in stereotypes. Fair enough — but for such a show to have theatrical clout, two conditions must be met. The first is that we’re entertained, and on this level Whistler does very well. Most of his perceptions are acute and funny (though a Chita/ Rita sequence plays on a joke that was done first and better in Forbidden Broadway ). Pop cultural references (to the likes of hunky teen fantasy object Robert Conrad of The Wild, Wild West ) will certainly resonate with gay men d’une certaine age. Whistler is an able actor (though Jeb Kreager, in his single solo turn, is even more touching in his simplicity). The play is cleverly directed (by James Haskins) and designed (by Joe Koroly).
But while much of the piece amuses, there is always a dark undertone. For many of us, The Faggot Museum is a stroll down Unhappy Memory Lane.
Which brings us to the second condition — one much harder to fulfill. If the show’s stereotypes are to have a point, we need to see them in a larger context. These men, for the most part, are sad sacks, living on the fringe. Is Whistler saying (again, the "museum" idea) that their world is, happily, now a thing of the past? Or are the characters still part of contemporary gay culture — and if so, how do we banish them? In concept and title, Whistler’s piece pays homage to George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum. But Wolfe’s play was more overtly political, and in its final sequences pointedly brought together old and new. Whistler seems content to simply give us the images.
Faggot Museum’s exhibits engage our attention. But to really make a point, this museum is in need of stronger curatorial insight.
—D.A.F.
