Broadway Diary 5: Sunday in the Park with George at the Hudson Theatre

Our final Broadway outing this New York trip was to a revival of Stephen Sondheim's classic musical Sunday in the Park with George. Richard and I are both huge Sondheim fans and had never seen a live production of this work--though I recall watching on PBS at some point in high school a video taping of the original Broadway production starring Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters. This time it's movie star Jake Gyllenhaal pulling in the crowds as Georges Seurat, struggling in the first act to complete his pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. But it is Annaleigh Ashford, as Georges' aggrieved muse Dot (and later, in the second act, her daughter Marie, grandmother to Gyllenhaal's American postmodern sculptor George, struggling with his latest chromolume commission) who is the real standout here. Ashford has a crystalline soprano and superb comic timing; she commands the stage with her presence, even when disguised in a grey wig and seated in a wheel chair. And while she has perfect pitch and would have no trouble making any of her numbers soar, she also knows that her singing must serve the work's larger context and not her own vanity. Thus, for example, she delivers the poignant Act 2 song "Children and Art" as the elderly character she's playing, not as the young performer inhabiting the role--and, in the process, she made me understand that in this song I have heard countless times before she is actually trying to help her grandson rediscover his artistic passion.

Not that Gyllenhaal isn't entirely credible as a singer: while he sometimes struggles to hit (and hold) the higher notes, he has great facility with Sondheim's complex time signatures and rhymes; his "Putting It Together," which like many of Sondheim's faster numbers (Mrs. Lovett's meat pies song from Sweeney Todd comes to mind) provides very little breathing room, was a standout. It also reminded me of what a savage--and prescient--critique of the global art market is this musical. Gyllenhaal's unique take on the dogs Georges is meant to voice in "The Day Off" also demonstrated that he was not afraid to make himself look ridiculous if it served the staging.

But, really, it is the work itself that most shines in this production. Director Sarna Lapine, niece of book writer and original director James Lapine, wisely understands that in terms of its musical and narrative structure Sunday in the Park is, like the Seurat painting that inspired it, perfectly composed. As such she does not strive for unnecessary dramaturgical or scenographic embellishment. Her stripped down and spare staging--while not above the occasional bit of razzle dazzle, as with the unveiling of George's chromolume in Act 2--allows the music to provide most of the evening's colour and light.

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West Side Story at TUTS

It took us a while, but Richard and I finally made to the venerable Malkin Bowl for this year's iteration of Theatre Under the Stars. Eschewing all things Disney for the classic idiom of American musical theatre, we chose to see West Side Story, and we certainly had beautiful night for it.

I've seen the 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story, but never a live production of the musical, not even the version staged by the Vancouver Opera a few years ago. Leonard Bernstein's score is certainly operatic, not least in the signature numbers Maria and Tonight and Somewhere. But the orchestrations also draw as much, if not more, from jazz, with Bernstein ably distilling that form's polyglot influences into a story about the tragic consequences of a cross-cultural love affair. That said, under musical director Chris D. King (who also, somewhat mysteriously, doubles as the racist detective Schrank, requiring him to vacate his conductor's box for long stretches), the playing last night seemed a little underwhelming, even slow. Many of the jazzier numbers lacked pep to my admittedly untrained ears.

Notwithstanding all the glorious music (supplemented of course by the wonderful lyrics of Stephen Sondheim), it is the dancing that has always set West Side Story apart. The great Jerome Robbins (who also conceived and directed the musical's Broadway premiere) was responsible for the original choreography, which has become so iconic--all those finger snaps and high-flying leaps--that it continues to be quoted everywhere. Local dance artist and choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg was given the unenviable task of creating a completely new movement score for this production (she had to sign a waiver from the Robbins estate attesting to this), while also providing enough of an homage to encourage buy-in from audience members familiar with the musical's choreographic pedigree. She succeeds brilliantly, drawing on period street dance idioms, contemporary acro, and her own take on classic mambo and waltz steps (especially in numbers like America and I Feel Pretty). She is aided immeasurably by her talented cast, especially the boys who make up the rival Jets and Sharks gangs, who are able to get so much air in the opening prologue (a musical theatre movement sequence that, when it first appeared, was as groundbreaking as Agnes de Mille's famous dream ballet in Oklahoma!) that one would think they were experts parkourists (Brian Ball's brilliant set of moveable scaffolding aids immeasurably in this regard). The second act number Gee, Officer Krupke is also a terrific showcase for the movement talents of the Jets half of the male ensemble, with William Edward Hutchinson (as Action) and Kurtis D'Aoust (as Big Deal) demonstrating admirable strength and flexibility respectively. (An interesting side note: for all the progressive social politics regarding the treatment of Puerto Rican immigrants embedded into Arthur Laurents' book to West Side Story, it is noticeable just how much less stage and singing time the Sharks get throughout the production.)

Not that the women in the show are slouches in the dancing department. Friedenberg's update of the shimmying salsa steps and kicks accompanying America requires speed and precision and, above all, abundant personality. The women, led by a terrific Alexandra Lainfiesta as Anita, more than deliver. I also very much appreciated those moments when Friedenberg slowed things down, as when Tony and Maria first spot each other at the school dance, with the rest of the cast swaying in place as the doomed lovers move towards each other from across the room, pulled by a force they are unable to resist. During the dream sequence in Act 2 Friendenberg also features some interesting partnering, suggesting in her same-sex pairings that the right to choose whom one loves extends beyond cultural difference.

I have spent so much time talking about the dancing in this production because, frankly, the singing was only so-so. Jennifer Gillis, as Maria, and Matt Montgomery, as Tony, make a winsome couple, but vocally they failed to impress. Montgomery can hit the high notes, but he needs greater depth and projection in the lower range to make a song like Maria truly soar. Gillis certainly has power, but her soprano often lacks nuance and without the right control comes across as a bit shrill in the upper register. When she is forced to reign things in a bit, as in the delightful I Feel Pretty, the results are quite pleasing. By contrast, Lainfiesta's Anita and Daniel James White's Riff, are standouts in both their singing and their acting, which in turn points to one of the central paradoxes of this work: pace Shakespeare, the secondary characters are far more interesting than the leads.

And speaking of folks in the background making an impression. Director Sarah Rodgers chooses to end the show with a reprise of Somewhere, but this time sung as a solo by Daren Dyhengo, who plays the otherwise mostly anonymous Shark Luis. Dyhengo has a beautiful tenor and his rendition of the song was perhaps the single most electrifying musical moment in the whole production. Which begs the question: why wasn't he front and centre from the beginning?

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Twice...

… on this trip I have experienced the stage work of the English director John Tiffany. I wrote about his sublime remount of The Glass Menagerie on Broadway a few posts ago. And last night, at the Royal Alex in Toronto, my family and I took in Once, the musical adaptation of the indie film starring and featuring the music of The Swell Season’s Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. Tiffany directed this work to acclaim in 2011--also on Broadway, where it is still playing. Now a North American touring production has just landed in Toronto.

While Once frequently trades in as many clichés as it upends (not least regarding ethnicity and gender), what makes it refreshing as a work of romantic musical theatre is how many of that genre’s apparently unassailable conventions it eschews. For the Guy and Girl leads (played here by Stuart Ward and Dani de Waal), there is no star-crossed happy ending (she gets a piano instead). The performers, who remain on stage throughout the two acts, play all their own instruments--which, befitting an Irish folk-infused score, are mostly string- and bellows-heavy (when's the last time you saw a mandolin and a concertina featured in a big-budget musical?). And the movement, by longtime Tiffany collaborator Steve Hoggett, is deliberately low-key and pedestrian, employing a simple yet richly symbolic gestural vocabulary to texture a song, but also knowing when to use stillness in the same context, and combining brief bits of simple group unison with set and scene changes in a completely fluid and organic way. The mostly unsentimental book by Irish playwright Enda Walsh demonstrates a similar plasticity in terms of its relationship to the songs (all of course well-known from the film), and also manages to get in a clever critique of certain ideologies of linguistic translation in its use of surtitles.

All of the performers are ridiculously talented. Unlike at times in John Doyle’s recent Broadway remounts of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Company, here the fact that the singer-performers also play their own instruments never feels like a gimmick. Because of course the whole premise of this story is making beautiful music together--for which everyone involved in this production deserves kudos.

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Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along

When it opened late last year in London, the Menier Chocolate Factory's production of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along was praised for having finally cracked the structural nut of one of the composer's rare flops. Premiering on Broadway in 1981, at the critical height of Sondheim's collaborations with director Harold Prince (Sweeney Todd had debuted to acclaim in 1979), the original version of the musical was panned for its confusing plot and closed after only 16 performances.

Based on the Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman play of the same name, Merrily famously unspools in reverse chronology (much like Harold Pinter's Betrayal, which had opened on Broadway just the year before, perhaps accounting for some audience fatigue with the dramatic conceit). In the first scene, set in 1977, we are introduced to our protagonist, Frank Shepard, a big-time Hollywood film producer who, we learn, has abandoned his earlier aspirations to write musicals and, along with them, his writing partner Charlie and their mutual friend, Mary. Thereafter we gradually learn how Frank "got here" (as Sondheim's opening number repeatedly declaims), moving backwards in time to discover, in turn: the fatal split between Frank and Charlie; the break-up of Frank's first marriage as a result of his affair with his leading lady, Gussie; Frank and Charlie's first big hit; the early days of Frank and Charlie and Mary trying to make a go of their respective careers in New York; and, finally, the initial meeting of our three main characters in 1957 (catching the launch of the satellite Sputnik from an apartment rooftop) and their revelling in how "everything's gonna change" because "it's our time." Though, of course, the musical is based on the earlier Hart and Kaufman play, with the somewhat too talky book adapted by George Furth, it is possible to read Merrily as Sondheim's self-reflexive comment on the state of his own career at the time. Which perhaps explains some of the Schadenfreude the New York critics took in "bringing him down" over the original production.

A more interesting reading to me, having just seen with Richard the Menier production last night in a "live capture" simulcast at the Scotiabank Cinemas, has to do with Sondheim's critique of heteronormativity, and marriage in particular. The trio of friends at the centre of the plot, superbly played by Mark Umbers, Jenna Russell, and Damian Humbley, form an art-life bond that, initially at least, is posited as an aesthetic, economic, and political alternative to conventional relationships. And director Maria Friedman certainly plays up the homosocial elements of Frank and Charlie's partnership, with Mary, unrequitedly in love with Frank, the classically Sedgwickian female pivot through which they filter their affection for each other.

Then, too, as Richard pointed out, Sondheim's score also seems to be doing something interesting, using the reverse chronology of the play to strip the complexity of the orchestrations and tonal structures back to essential core elements that the composer seems to be associating with a classic era of musical production in America. Not that I think Merrily is inherently nostalgic. Rather, I think that what Sondheim is showing us is his own compositional process, a process that is both complexly innovative and richly historical, at once creative and deconstructive. And all of this within a score that has been read as one of his more accessible (and there are witty allusions to Frank and Charlie needing to write more hummable tunes).

A previous London revival of Sunday in the Park (also starring Russell) eventually made its way to Broadway. We'll see if this Menier version of Merrily also crosses the pond and finally gets its due in New York.

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By Stephen Sondheim's Side...

... is where I stood for a few brief, fantabulous minutes last night. It was part of a benefit for APPLAUSE! Musicals Society, which brought in the maestro to talk about his life in the theatre. The talk itself, which was moderated in inestimable fashion by Jerry Wasserman (who had done his research), was at the Vogue, and it was great to see the venue more or less sold out and the audience hanging breathlessly on Sondheim's every word as he traded anecdotes about Oscar and Jerry and Lenny and Arthur and Ethel and Hal; talked about studying Cole Porter lyrics and Mozart symphonies with Milton Babbitt at Princeton; revealed that he is working on a two-volume edition of his complete annotated lyrics for Knopf; and claimed that the greatest American musical of all time remains the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess.

But the talk at the Vogue was actually preceded by an intimate (!) gathering for 75 people or so across the street at Tom Lee Music (a longtime sponsor of APPLAUSE!), each of whom had purchased a premium ticket from APPLAUSE! in order to sip wine and nibble canapes in Steve's presence. And, with the right combination of luck, timing, and hutzpah, actually get a chance to exchange a word or two with him. Which is what Richard and I did at an auspicious moment when the coterie around him momentarily parted and there was a pause in the conversation. Seizing that moment, I thrust my hand forward, introduced myself and Richard, and mentioned that we'd be in New York this weekend (which is true--I'm running the marathon there on Sunday), and did he have any recommendations about what we should see theatre-wise? He seemed to appreciate the question (maybe because it wasn't a query about the rhyme structure and chord changes in "Children Will Listen"?), although he wasn't altogether sanguine about the musical theatre scene in New York at the moment. But he did recommend the revival of Finian's Rainbow, which he's heard very great things about, and which he suspected would be reviewed very strongly when it opens (either today or tomorrow). It is the first time the play is being revived since its Broadway premiere in 1947, so I can imagine the interest (how do they solve the problem of blackface, for instance?).

At any rate, it was only a momentary brush with theatrical greatness, but it was a huge thrill nonetheless. The entire evening will remain a performance high point in my life, without question--even the residue of blood splatter from Evil Dead: The Musical (which is currently playing at the Vogue) that I took home with me on my jacket.

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Like the Weather

You know the climate is fucked when you fly into New York during a rainstorm unlike any you've seen in the Pacific Northwest for quite some time and when you return to Vancouver to find the city blanketed in snow and temperatures well below freezing. We received another 30 centimeters on Sunday night, and more is expected:

Pretty, yes, and no doubt good for Olympics-related optics, but frankly the novelty has long passed. Were it not for my manic neighbour and her visiting, prairie-raised father--who attack snow shoveling like it's a competitive sport--my back would have given out long ago. Of course, rain is now in the long term forecast, which will turn the entire city into one huge puddle.

New York was a great success, starting with the ostensible reason for the visit: research at the New York Public Library's Performing Arts Division at Lincoln Center. I was specifically interested in combing through the extensive video and DVD collection of the Jerome Robbins Dance Archives in connection with an ongoing project on solo performance and sexual citizenship in the United States. I can't tell you how impressed I was with the system they have in place there. Once you negotiate your way through all the construction hoarding around Lincoln Center, find the entrance to the Library, make your way to the third floor, obtain your Access Card, and hand in your viewing requests (up to three at a time) to the librarian at the desk, you are then directed to a nearby television monitor and computer. No waiting for the physical object itself; rather, an unseen technician cues your requests remotely, and when they're ready, a message appears on the computer screen directing you to press play. The video then appears on the adjacent TV screen; you can fast forward, rewind, pause, etc, all via the computer and its mouse, and if for some reason something goes wrong, or the wrong video appears, you can send an instant message to the technician, who will fix the problem almost instantaneously (as was the case with me when the performance of Ron Brown's "Forgiveness" [1988] I was watching was interrupted by a master class on Shakespearean acting). Even this momentary ghost in the machine (no, it wasn't Hamlet) was instructive, and the whole day I spent there left me intellectually re-energized about a project I was considering abandoning.

Then there was the theatre. I list the performances in the order of their viewing:

1. Arias with a Twist (Friday, December 12): Downtown drag diva Joey and master puppeteer Basil in a collaboration that's truly inspired and wonderfully inappropriate (much physical and verbal innuendo around Joey's horse-haired wireless microphone). The show is loosely structured around an alien-in-the-wilderness theme, with an opening number that sees Joey, in Crawfordesque bangs and lipstick, and wearing a fetish corset, probed by space aliens, before being sent back to an especially fecund version of the "garden of earthly delights" (interestingly, a much-praised restaging of Martha Clarke's dance theatre piece of the same name, based on the Hieronymus Bosch painting, was taking place at the nearby Minetta Lane Theatre), and eventually making his way--via mise-en-scène and choreographic references to Godzilla and Busby Berkeley--to New York's gay village and the stage of the Here Arts Center. That stage is notably intimate, and the 6-foot plus Joey looms large in front of the audience; I loved that his in-between show patter was so transparently salacious, and that he performed it with such self-delighting whimsy (there were several moments when he cracked himself up). And then there's the singing voice, from the uncanny channeling of Billie Holiday to the digitally modulated rock opera opening and the power ballads that just wouldn't quit. Twist, who both designed and directed the show, is a genius, conjuring fantastical dreamscapes out of fabric, cardboard, and string, and choreographing a memorable number for Joey and two life-size alien go-go dancers. The production was also notable for its canny use of video projections and a transparent scrim, a feature of a number of other fall NY stagings, according to Joanna, who accompanied Richard and I to the show.

Digression: Joanna completed her MA under my direction several years ago, and is currently writing her Ph.D. thesis on the work of Paula Vogel at CUNY's Graduate Center. Joanna is my lifeline to the New York theatre scene (she sees a show a week, on average), and whenever we travel to the city we try to hook up, either for dinner or a show, or--as in this case--both (great meal beforehand at Smith's on Macdougal Street). Just prior to our visit, Joanna had traveled to New Haven to see the premiere of Vogel's latest play/musical pageant, A Civil War Christmas, at the Long Wharf Theatre, under the direction of Tina Landau. (Vogel recently moved to Yale from Brown--where she had a long and fruitful association with the Trinity Rep Theatre--in order to chair the Playwriting Program at the Yale School of Drama.) By Joanna's account, the play was a great success, and according to Vogel it will ideally be remounted at venues across the country every December for years to come, supplanting Dickens in audiences' imaginations about the ghosts of American Christmases past. (Digression upon digression: Basil Twist also did the traditional bunraku puppetry for Vogel's previous play, A Long Christmas Ride Home [2003]--one senses a bit of an obsession here on the playwright's part.)

2. Road Show (Saturday, December 13): Joanna strongly recommended Sondheim's latest musical--variously known as Wise Guys, Gold!, and Bounce during its long and bumpy creative gestation--and with John Doyle directing (Richard and I had seen and greatly admired both of his recent stripped-down, actors-doubling-as-musicians, productions of Sweeney Todd and Company on Broadway), and the always excellent and eminently watchable Michael Cerveris starring as the less prodigal of the two Mizner brothers, Willy, we needed no further encouragement. I gather from critics who have seen earlier versions of the show that this latest incarnation is darker and less vaudevillian. Given the current economic climate, the collapse of the American housing market, and the almost daily newspaper accounts of financial fraud on Wall Street (the Madoff story broke while we were in NYC), it is certainly hard not to read the play--which begins with the brothers seeking their fortune in the gold mines of Alaska and ends with them losing it through shady real estate speculation in Florida--as a cautionary tale about unbridled greed. This is reinforced in Doyle's staging by the currency-clad ensemble's matching costumes, and by the repeated Brechtian gestus of throwing wads of fake cash into the audience (for an insightful analysis of other Brechtian elements of the play highlighted by Doyle, see Jill Dolan's review on her Feminist Spectator blog). Still, I found the play to be filled with wonderful moments of (black) humour, as well as lots of genuine affection between the two brothers (another Sondheim/Doyle stalwart, Alexander Gemignani, plays the architect, Addison Mizner, to whom we owe many the pleasure palaces in present-day Palm Beach, and whose ambition to turn Boca Raton into the Venice of Florida was thwarted--or abetted?--by brother Willy's innate huksterism--note to self: find reliable biography of these two characters). Even more revelatory to this audience member, however, is that Road Show features the first open same-sex couple in the Sondheim oeuvre, with Addison's relationship with the impressionable young Hollis Bessemer (a charming, and charmingly named, Claybourne Elder) occupying a central part of the narrative. The love song that Addison and Hollis sing to each other, "The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened," is as moving as "Somewhere," from West Side Story, and deserves to become equally classic.

Added bonus: Marian Seldes was sitting in the row in front of us! Richard and I had seen her years ago at the Promenade Theater in Albee's Three Tall Women, and most recently in a small but memorable role in the Richard Jenkins film The Visitor. A thrill to be so close to such an acting legend.

3. August: Osage County (Sunday, December 14): Tracey Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winner was the only Broadway entertainment we indulged in on this trip (not for lack of trying--Richard was keen to see Bartlett Sher's acclaimed remounting of South Pacific, but I couldn't get advance tickets, and didn't want to line up for returns). Though not without its problems, and desperately in need of an edit (we could have done without the incest theme between Ivy and Little Charles, in my opinion), it was nice to see--especially given my comments in recent blog posts--a classic large-cast, three-act play on Broadway, one that for the most part successfully updates (and regenders) O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night for the Prozac/Vicodin age, and that marries sharp writing to split-second physical timing. Estelle Parsons, taking over from Tony-winner Deanna Dunagan was riveting in the central role of the matriarch from hell, Violet Weston. That she has the stamina at her age (she must be over 80, though she certainly doesn't look it) to perform such an emotionally and physically taxing role 8 times a week is simply amazing.

Sidebar comment: we attended a weekend matinee performance, and the theatre (the relatively intimate Music Box on West 45th) was only three-quarters full. While in New York, we read of several prominent Broadway plays (including popular musicals like Gypsy and Hairspray, with Harvey Fierstein newly returned to the cast as Edna Turnblad) announcing plans to close early. Clearly the economic downturn is already having an effect on box office returns.

4. Blasted (Tuesday, December 16): Our final outing was to see the New York premiere of Sarah Kane's debut play at the Soho Rep. This was the hot ticket of the fall theatre season, and it was interesting to see people lined up around the block for possible returns to a play that features explicit and prolonged depictions of rape, extreme physical violence, and multiple forms of cannibalism. Much has been made of how long it has taken the play to get to New York (it premiered in 1995 at the Royal Court), but when one thinks of the baggage that comes with it--its notorious excoriation by outraged London critics, Kane's subsequent suicide in 1999 after cranking out four more eviscerating works of drama, and its critical reevaluation as a moral allegory of contemporary Western responses to reports of atrocities during the Bosnian War--one can perhaps understand why a director or company might start to second guess the reasons it merits staging. Then, too, there are the demands Blasted places upon its actors, with every physical brutality and indignity performed by them or visited upon them demanding a concomitant expenditure of emotional energy and longing. For all Ian's (a devastating and fearless Reed Birney) inherent misogyny and brutish insistence that Cate (Marin Ireland) suck him off, there is a part of him--the part that is actually terrified of the mortality he so casually scoffs at--that desperately needs to believe a deeper, even romantic, connection exists between them. The hotel room, the champagne, in this regard, are at once tawdry and powerfully mournful emblems of his (misplaced?) desire. Likewise, the long and incredibly realistic rape of Ian by the Soldier (Louis Cancelmi) is all the more painful to watch because of what the Soldier's tears betray about his own recognition of the thrall of bodily connection to which what he has witnessed in war has paradoxically reduced him, and about his need to share that corporeal vulnerability with Ian, even at the extreme price of assault. (Again, see Jill Dolan's brilliant assessment of the production over at her Feminist Spectator blog for more on this.)

To say that Kane blasts the lid off bourgeois dramatic realism (quite literally in the case of the explosion at the end of Scene 2 that tears the hotel room apart--kudos to Louisa Thompson for pulling off this incredible feat of design magic) is an understatement. We're deep in Artaud territory here (by way of Sophocles, Beckett, Pinter, Sartre, and others--Kane's first play clearly betrays its dramatic genealogy), and there is no escape from the assault on our senses and psyches. The single-access, tiered row seating at the Soho Rep doesn't make things any easier in this regard. One woman in the row in front of us was clearly desperate to leave, to the point of contemplating, I could tell, whether or not she could squeeze under the balustrade on her right. She couldn't, any more than Ian, in crawling underneath the hotel room's floorboards and in beside the dead baby's body from which he has just eaten, could will himself to die. 

Both had to wait to be cleansed by rain.