Tops of 2014

It's been a spotty year of blogging here, got to admit, and only partly due to the October debut of this. And it's hard not to find it sobering that my two most-read post were essentially obituaries. But here, in order, were my most popular 2014 posts (last year's are here):
  
1. What Happened to StageGrade. The theatre-review-aggregating site I made with Isaac Butler and the chaps from PlayScripts died this year. Read it and weep.

2. The Word Word. I loved the strange, beautiful writing of Dennis Miles, an L.A.-based poet and playwright whose work I first caught at the tiny Theatre of NOTE, and with whom I had a cordial correspondence in the years since (and a few fleeting stabs at collaboration). It's heartening to see that this "In Memoriam" post for Dennis, who died in August, has been so popular.

3. Too Much Freedom to Fail. As L.A.'s "99-seat wars" began to heat up this year, I remembered a speech I gave at a theater conference in 2003, which seemed to sum up my thoughts on the artistic economy of small L.A. theater; I felt it held up pretty well and so I reposted it in this space. It was taken up and linked by the indispensable gadfly Colin Mitchell, and the rest is history.

4. FoS, Bonus Track 1: The Subtle Distinctions. There was too much to say about The Fortress of Solitude, the long-awaited (by some) musical adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's sprawling but intimate coming-of-age-and-beyond novel at the Public Theater. One nugget I mentioned in my NY Times preview piece: that Lethem had made a two-CD compilation of supplementary listening for his pop-music-steeped book. Lethem did not discourage me from seeking out the playlist online, and the rest was linkin'. I'm glad I did it; there are some great, great songs on this list.

5. Once More Into the Breach. In response to a breezy, ill-informed piece in Vanity Fair online, which posited that some kind of celebrity reading series in L.A. could be the savior of the town's moribund theater scene (huh?), I wrote this well-received response, also for VF, based on my erstwhile rovings through what I still consider my theatergoing hometown.

6. Hall Monitor. Speaking of celebrity, I have to chalk up the popularity of this post--essentially just a cue-up to a link of my Times profile of Michael C. Hall, then starring in The Realistic Joneses--to sheer name value. It probably didn't hurt that I dug up of a photo of him as the white-powdered, shirtless Emcee from Cabaret (a role in which I can claim the pleasure of seeing him, alongside Susan Egan, still my favorite Sally Bowles next to Julie Harris).

7. I Could Laugh Out Loud. Happy to see that this non-review of the still-running Broadway revival of a perfect piece of WWII-era fluff has been so popular. I've since revisited it with my wife, and confirmed that 1) I married the right woman (she loved it possibly even more than I), and 2) This exuberant production, flaws and all, is one of my favorite things ever.

8. Newman's Own. On the occasion of Randy Newman bringing back Faust--his sole, quixotic stab at a stage musical, which I saw and admired in its original La Jolla run two decades ago--I sold a piece to Slate musing on the might-have-beens represented by the show's never catching fire (a fate sealed, alas, by its one-night resurrection).

9. Stuck on Hitch. As with No. 6 above, this post's popularity is possibly another case of name recognition trumping all--in this case, the title subject of David Rudkin's play The Love Song of Alfred J. Hitchcock, about which I wrote a Times preview and which gave me the great pleasure of talking/writing about a favorite and formative artist.

10. Fortress Goes Public. My Times preview piece, cited above, generated a lot of positive buzz for a show that divided critics--though I ended up loving it, I could understand some of the misgivings about its odd, lopsided narrative. To bring things full circle, I would love to have seen what StageGrade would have made of it, since alongside Ben Brantley's disappointed review at the Times there were some passionate advocates.

So that's a snapshot of my year online. Not included: the time a review of mine was linked on the Daily Dish (and on my birthday, no less), or my 11th most popular post: a plug for my new Shakespeare-for-kids CD, which is still available and makes a great last-minute gift, if I may say so.

May the NewYear prove as interesting.

The 99-Seat Plan and Its Discontents

Most of the theater I've seen in my lifetime, and much of the best of it, has been in Los Angeles. And the great majority of that great theater was produced under what's now called the 99-Seat Plan; when I was coming up was still often called "Equity Waiver"--essentially, a showcase code that allows union actors to work for no actual wages but for some modest reimbursement and under a certain (modest) list of regulations. While I've had mixed feelings over the years about whether that plan is really a wise or fair one for the artists and institutions of L.A., I can't deny that much of that great theater I saw probably wouldn't exist at all but for the plan's low barrier of entry. (Near the end of my time in L.A., I gave a speech to the theatermakers I love lamenting the mixed blessings of that very freedom.)

Truth be told, I didn't give the 99-Seat Plan or its origins a great deal of rigorous thought until Douglas Clayton, then an editor at the now-defunct L.A. Stage Times, commissioned me to write a two-part history of the plan in 2009 (here's part one, here part two). Now, with revisions to the plan under serious consideration, thanks in large part to a movement spearheaded by Clayton and others, and with Equity putting a new emphasis on serving its West Coast members, the time seemed ripe for me to weigh in about the plan and its future at my day job at American Theatre. Money quote:

The debate over L.A.’s 99-seat plan may seem so stark because it dramatizes a fundamental conflict—one the arts face in every sector in our late-capitalist American moment. One side essentially asks, quite reasonably: Do arts workers deserve better compensation, even middle-class lives? Why is there seemingly only funding for new buildings, for infrastructure, for a handful of committee-approved geniuses, but not for the field’s rank-and-file workers?

The other side responds, passionately, that such talk is inimical to the creative instinct, to freedom of expression and association, and that we need look no further than the cautious programming and piecemeal hiring at major institutional theatres to see how little such bottom-line thinking has done for actors and the field.

RTWT here.

Staged Albums & Ensemble/Bands

When I wrote this cover story for American Theatre, about how the presence of composer/musicians within their own theater pieces showed hope of changing and revivifying musical theater, I was thinking of largely narrative pieces like Passing Strange or Striking 12 or Futurity or even Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812--most of which could be done, and some of which have been done, without their songwriters/creators at the center of them. (I was also thinking about the way Once seemed to blur the exegetic/diegetic musical-theater lines--its creators weren't literally onstage performing the songs, but its actor/musician hybrid was built into the show's DNA, not grafted on a la John Doyle.)

What I didn't foresee was that some of the form's most venturesome songwriters would go even further and deeper into the notion of the rock-album-as-theater, musicians-as-performers. I've just seen two that will stay with me in two very different ways, though their surface similarities are striking. First was Dave Malloy's transporting chamber show at the Bushwick Starr, Ghost Quartet, which confirmed his status as a sui generis--I don't even know what label to apply to him. Event-maker? Music-theater-sound-space artist? Maybe "theater composer" comes close, as what Dave seems to be doing is composing the entire theatrical experience as he would a piece of music--which it also is. Indeed, though I had my quibbles with some of it, Ghost Quartet worked the margins of indie rock and indie theater, of what makes a concert and what makes a play, in a way I've never felt a piece do before--and I emphasize felt, as it was a deeply sensory experience, with the band members arrayed around the space, at one point memorably in total darkness. (The director was Annie Tippe.) Though the work cited Poe and Monk, photojournalism and taxidermy, its unique spectral glow put me in mind of W.G. Sebald's haunted, ruminative novel Austerlitz, in which the present is an endless, unentangle-able palimpsest of past sins and missteps, an accordion of grief wheezing backward and forward. It makes some lovely music as it resonates, but it still squeezes and pinches. (UPDATE: I just learned that Ghost Quartet will return to the McKittrick Hotel, the NY home of Sleep No More, next. Jan. 5-18. Tickets here.)

Then last night I saw Gabriel Kahane's The Ambassador at BAM. The show is based on his album of the same name, although it may be just as accurate to say that the album was shaped to support the show. In any case, like Ghost Quartet, The Ambassador has been staged as a kind of performative meditation for (in this case) seven musicians, not including the impish, barefooted composer/lyricist Kahane, arrayed around a pack-rat set of stacked books, LP records, videocassettes and other 20th-century detritus, as if Krapp's basement exploded. As with Malloy's piece, there wasn't a piece of sheet music in sight--no small feat, given that Kahane's work is complicated, infinitesimally shaded, almost prog-rock-ish neo-classical pop/rock--and all of the musicians were, if not quite equally involved, then universally called on to perform non-musical movement and gestures as well as the daunting score. (The director is John Tiffany, who brought in his usual movement-director sidekick, Steven Hoggett, for an assist.) In all, it's a gorgeous, elegantly humanized piece of music-theater that entirely transcends the notion of concert. It certainly doesn't hurt that it happens to be a piece about the complexities of a city I consider my adult hometown, Los Angeles, and that, eerily, it was the second piece I'd seen on the same Brooklyn block in a week about L.A. that made the shooting death of Latasha Harlins a dramatic centerpiece (the other was Roger Guenveur Smith's beautiful, unsettling Rodney King at BRIC Arts).

Though Kahane's is more lavishly appointed than Malloy's work, both were lovingly crafted, with an eye for detail, sonic as well as visual and mimetic. And both feel entirely of a piece with what looks to me like a newish and entirely welcome trend, even a new form: staged albums, conceived by music-theater artists as full performance pieces rather than simply as adjuncts of recordings (though with albums as their dramaturgical template, if you will), and performed not by jobbed-in hired hands at music stands but by fully committed musician/actors who convincingly straddle the line between theater ensemble and band.

More, please.

What Happened to StageGrade

You may have been wondering what happened to the review-aggregating site I created with Isaac Butler in 2010. I can spell out the saga in relatively simple terms, with links to help you connect the dots.

Step 1: Create blog with fellow theater junkie to aggregate all reviews of all New York plays and musicals, assign them grades, and average said grades, a la Metacritic.

Step 2: Turn blog into an actual consumer website, StageGrade.com, with help and investment from existing company in related theatrical field. Change the grading math to median (more reflective of consensus). Add a consumer-review section, a la Yelp. Do this for a few years on a strictly volunteer basis, until…

Step 3: Company partner, no longer up for hosting the site, decides to look for a buyer. Sells it to a theatrical producer/entrepreneur who ostensibly sees, and can help realize, its potential as a money-making business. One possible red flag: Said producer/entrepreneur already has his own site with a similar aim (but quite a different methodology).

Step 4: Watch site crash and lose years of unique data and sweat equity (a loss shared, it should be noted, with several other volunteer graders). Site’s new owner seems oddly uninterested in fixing it, or in selling it back for non-extortionate terms. Coup de grace: The stagegrade.com url now redirects to his own review-aggregating site.

Step 5: Feel heart break.

The Last Real Thing

I'm not a big fan of the current Broadway revival of Stoppard's Coward-esque romcom, but I had seen and, to my recollection, somewhat enjoyed a production of it about a decade ago in L.A., at International City Theatre. I just dug up my brief review as part of my old Wicked Stage column for Back Stage West, and see that not only did also happen to catch a (lukewarm) production of Cloud 9 around that time featuring Ione Skye (!) but that I actually found The Real Thing somewhat wanting as a play, as again I do on Broadway:

The problem isn't Jules Aaron's direction but, I dare say, the play. This is probably Stoppard's most popular work--with American audiences, at least--and it's easy to see why: It's smart and sexy, and it's teasingly doubtful but ultimately affirmative about the possibility of long-lasting human relationships. I'd say it cheats a bit too much, though, to bring its leads together, finally; Stoppard sloughs off the moral compromise of Henry, a playwright roped into rewriting a terrible political play, a little too easily by having his actress-wife make a confession and then humiliate the play's talentless original author. It's a sour climax that effectively tacks a crude Post-It on all the play's wonderfully pointed exchanges about the high calling of writers. Still, I do love the way Stoppard warmly but unmercifully nails the vulnerabilities of luvvie theatre folk, and these are lushly realized by Laura Wernette, Spencer Garrett, Joseph Sanfelippo, and above all the dusky Michelle Duffy, showing herself a most fetching romantic comedienne. Best of all, the production has Robertson Dean in the lead; Dean perfectly captures the intelligent self-absorption that can make writers simultaneously so attractive and so maddening. Like Chekhov's Professor Serebryakov, he's the sort who always gets the best women but can't relax enough to be satisfied with them. That is, until they beg for his forgiveness.

That sounds about right, though that part of loving the luvvies--maybe not so much anymore. Still, it's nice to recall the performances of Rob Dean and of Michelle Duffy, who I most recently saw as the concerned mom in the Off-Broadway tuner Heathers.

(And at least the Roundabout has one good Stoppard play running now; it's called Indian Ink and I urge you not to miss it.)

I Could Laugh Out Loud

Jay Armstrong Johnson, Tony Yazbeck, Clyde Alves

If I were "officially" reviewing the new Broadway revival of On the Town for hire, I would probably be required to note some of its flaws and excesses; it has both. But I feel bound to record here that I found John Rando and Joshua Bergasse's production glorious top to bottom, and that it captured like no other show I've ever seen on a stage the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed pop fizz of the great mid-period MGM musicals--Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Easter Parade (I don't usually include the just-fine film version of On the Town in my pantheon, though it's worth a spin).

It's all there, from the corny jokes to the tenderly diverted romance, from the anything-for-a-laugh comedy songs to the arguably unnecessary but deliriously sexy 11th-hour dream ballet. Indeed, Leonard Bernstein's score--chock-a-block as it is with fun, tossed-off cabaret novelties--also has his finest collection of sinuous, restless, yearning blues ballets, which provide an emotional undertow that Comden and Green's daffy book doesn't even try for.

In particular, the "Lonely Town" sequence, in which Gaby sings of the acute mutual isolation and anonymity of a crowded, busy city, then dances about it, then is joined by a chorale that director John Rando spreads throughout the Foxwoods Theatre--I won't say I teared up, exactly, but it was a bracing and beautiful moment in the midst of the show's randy comic bustle, like a prayer meeting in a speakeasy. Which pretty much describes my sweet spot.

Don't miss it, in other words.

FoS, Bonus Track 1: The Subtle Distinctions

As I learned in my reporting on the new musical of Jonathan Lethem's novel The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem made a two-CD "mixtape" for supplementary listening when the book was published in 2003, and he "semi-mass-produced" it for interested friends and colleagues (he estimated he made about 500 copies--enough to catch the attention of, and get a formal review from, no less an eminence than Robert Christgau). He handed over a copy to composer Michael Friedman, director Daniel Aukin, and bookwriter Itamar Moses when they embarked on their unlikely adaptation, which opens at the Public Theater in a few weeks.

With Lethem's encouragement, I tracked down the playlist online, and herewith reconstruct the jam titled "The Subtle Distinctions," after the singing group the fictional soul singer Barrett Rude Junior joined, then left for a challenging solo career. As Lethem put it, this isn't necessarily a soundtrack to the novel--some are the selections are "just intuitive." I'll weigh their relevance below.

Disc One
1. David Ruffin, "No Matter Where" (1974)

Ruffin, a former Temptation who went solo with less than spectacular chart results, is specifically name-checked in the "liner notes" chapter of Fortress as one of a "shadow pantheon" of "singers who just fell short" of the ranks of Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, and Al Green--a group of also-rans which were the inspiration for the novel's fictional soul singer Barrett Rude Junior.

2. The Four Tops, "Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I've Got)" (1972)

Like Ruffin, Phillippe Wynne, the lead singer of the Tops, is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest singers of this era you've never heard of. And, like Marvin Gaye, Wynne was raised in a syncretic faith tradition that combined Jewish and Christian practices--a trait that Lethem also gave the Rude family. As he writes in the liner notes chapters, in a parenthetical: "It's odd to consider that Marvin Gaye, Phillippe Wynne, and Barrett Rude Jr. were all, by choice or upbringing, weird black jews.")

3. Bill Withers, "World Keeps Going Around" (1973)

Withers gets at least one name-check in the novel, though not for this song--which is a scorcher.

4. Randy Newman, "Short People" (1977)


5. Syl Johnson, "Anyone But You" (1971)

Syl Johnson gets a mention late in the novel, but for a different track (see below).

6. The Spinners, "One Of A Kind Love Affair" (1973)


7. Marvin Gaye, "I’m Going Home" (1971)

Gaye and his story hovers behind the novel (particularly in the denouement among the Rude generations), but only explicitly in the last track on this two-CD mix (see below).

8. The Prisonaires, "Just Walkin’ in the Rain" (1953)

The third section of Fortress finds its protagonist, Dylan Ebdus, as a rock critic in his mid-30s, pitching a film idea to someone at Dreamworks. The story is compelling enough that it's hard to believe it hasn't been a film yet: The Prisonaires were an a cappella group that formed in prison and recorded this song on furlough--and at Sun Records, no less.

9. Hot Chocolate, "Brother Louie" (1974)


10. The Manhattans, "Shining Star" (1980)

A band name-checked in hindsight in the novel.

11. Gillian Welch, "My First Lover" (2001)

This out-of-left-field and strictly speaking out-of-period choice would seem to be a nod to the folk music favored by Dylan Ebdus' mom, Rachel--though listening to it in the context of the novel, it's hard not to think of Dylan's recurring reference to Mingus, his black childhood bestie, as "the rejected idol of my entire youth, my best friend, my lover."

12. Marvin Gaye, "Time To Get It Together" (1978)



13. Phil Ochs, "City Boy" (unreleased demo, mid-1960s)

Another nod in Rachel's direction.

14. Billy Paul, "Let ‘Em In" (1976)

A slightly kitschy cover of the Wings hit.

15. Howard Tate, "Get It While You Can" (1967)

Another name in Lethem's "shadow pantheon," and an even more direct inspiration for Barrett Rude in one respect: Unlike Wynne and Ruffin, the group Tate was a member, the Enchanters, was pretty unknown, as was Rude's fictional Subtle Distinctions. This song, which Tate wrote, is best known for Janis Joplin's cover.

16. The Spinners, "Sadie" (1974)


17. Pete Wingfield, "18 With a Bullet" (1975)


18. Marvin Gaye, "You're the Man" (1972)


19. The Last Poets, "Two Little Boys" (1970)


20. Maxine Nightingale, "Right Back Where We Started From" (1976)


Disc Two
1. The Spinners, "Games People Play" (1975)

This song's expansive form, Lethem told me, was part of his inspiration for Barrett Rude Jr.'s fictional No. 1 hit, "Bothered Blue."

2. Syl Johnson, "I Hear the Love Chimes" (1972)


3. Marvin Gaye, "Anger" (1978)


4. Slick Rick, "Children’s Story" (1988)

Hip-hop is not a huge part of the novel, but there's a memorable scene of rival DJ crews squaring off at a nearby schoolyard, and a scene in which a bunch of white kids listen giddily to Grandmaster Flash's "The Message."

5. Langley Schools Music Project, "Desperado" (1977)

One interesting footnote: In his review, Christgau takes a moment to diss Ruffin's solo work but lets this one pass--an interesting omission given his flagrant disdain for Irwin Chusid's nostalgia project.

6. The Main Ingredient, "Work to Do" (1973)


7. David Ruffin, "Walk Away From Love" (1975)


8. Timmy Thomas, "Why Can’t We Live Together?" (1972)


9. The O’Jays, "Use Ta Be My Girl" (1978)

Another band name-checked in hindsight in the novel.

10. Syl Johnson, "Is It Because I’m Black?" (1969)

The adult Dylan has a black girlfriend, Abby, who calls him out for his love of "tragic negritude." This is one of the titles she repeats aloud, and askance, while surveying his CD collection.

11. The Marigolds, "Rollin' Stone" (1955)

Another iteration of the aforementioned Prisonaires.

12. The Originals, "Baby, I’m For Real" (1969)


13. War, "Why Can’t We Be Friends?" (1975)

Explicitly name-checked as the background of a scene in the novel; it's playing in a cab during Dylan's high school years, that liminal CBGBs/early hip-hop days, when he's still sorting out his musical tastes and doesn't know what to do with all the black music he absorbed in his childhood and in Brooklyn.

14. Bill Withers, "Better Off Dead" (1973)


15. The Manhattans, "Kiss and Say Goodbye" (1976)


16. Sly Stone, "Remember Who You Are" (1979)


17. Arthur Alexander, "Anna" (1962)


18. Brian Eno, "Golden Hours" (1975)

The crucial soundtrack of the novel's moving final scene between Dylan and his father: "How can moments go so slowly?" Lethem (mis)quotes the song, and "You'd be surprised at my degree of uncertainty."

19. Marvin Gaye, "Got to Give It Up" (1977)

Another key moment: At a key tween moment, Dylan jumps to catch a spaldeen while wearing an apparently magic ring, and flies a little--while the girls on the street sing this song.

Fortress Goes Public

The cast of The Fortress of Solitude at Dallas Theater Center (photo by Karen Almond)

I've been hearing about this Fortress of Solitude musical for nearly as long as it's been in development. I think Itamar Moses told me about it for this LA Times piece, but I'm pretty sure that Isaac Butler--a huge fan of the novel and a friend of all the musical's creators, including Moses, director Daniel Aukin, and composer Michael Friedman--tipped me off about it earlier. Aukin mentioned it when I spoke to him for the NY Times, too.

In any case, this unlikely project has reached fruition and has is playing at the Public Theater, and for my Times preview on it, I talked to all the creators, and to the novel's original author, Jonathan Lethem. The idea to adapt Lethem's sprawling coming-of-age story, set in the crucible of pre-gentrification Brooklyn, came from the director:

The prominence of music in the novel is one reason Mr. Aukin, the show’s director, had a “gut impulse” that it could be turned into a piece of musical theater, and enlisted Mr. Moses (“Bach at Leipzig,” “Nobody Loves You”) to adapt the book and Mr. Friedman to write the music. Mr. Aukin happened to approach Mr. Lethem at a fortuitous moment: at a time when Hollywood was contemplating but not committing to film adaptations of his novels, including “The Fortress of Solitude,” and the author was getting fed up with film companies’ demands for exclusivity.

“I had to insist that it was O.K. to split off the musical rights,” Mr. Lethem said in a phone interview from Pomona College, where he teaches writing. To the film companies, “I said, ‘You’re not even making these movies, so let these little theater people do this thing.’ It was seen as a diversion, a sport.

“So it’s a beautiful irony that long before any film version comes to the screen, they’re the ones who are getting it done. It vindicates every left-field impulse you could have.” 

The Times piece is almost entirely about Friedman's extraordinary, pop-drenched score, and I have to acknowledge Butler--who's seen several readings and heard demos over the years as the show's evolved--for the inside scoop on that. To report this story I went to my first sitzprobe--a musical-theater ritual in which the full orchestration comes to life for the first time--and I sat in awe of the musicianship of, in particular, barefooted music director Kim Grigsby, a legendary figure who has clearly earned that status.

The full Times story is here; I'm planning to have "bonus tracks" in this space soon, so stay tuned.

The Annoying Guy at the Party

I've heard from colleagues that sometimes they don't really know what they think until someone asks them--whether in the context of teaching a course explicating what they do, or just in the context of a pointed interview question. I shouldn't be surprised by the notion; I've often said I don't know exactly what I thought of a show until I've written the review. I recently had the occasion to be interviewed by Matt Windman, a theater critic for am New York, for a book about theater criticism, slated to be published next year by McFarland & Company. One answer he got from me so well encapsulated my thinking on a question I'm often asked, and have frequently written about here and elsewhere, that I thought it was worth sharing.

Is a critic part of the theater community or outside of it?

I would say the critic is part of the theater community, but he is that annoying guy at the party who’s telling everybody, “You look like shit.” He’s the kind of person it might be hard to be friends with all the time, but he’s the kind of person you need. You need the truth teller. The problem is confusing him with an authority. He’s not the authority, but he’s the one who’s going to tell you what he really thinks. And I think there’s value in his subjective opinions. He’s not objective. He’s not standing outside, from some mountain looking down. He’s in the mix of everything. Whether you like him or not, whether you or not you trust him, you can trust him to say what he thinks. I think there’s a huge value in that, and the theater community could definitely use more people like that, who will tell the truth, not just to the people in the room, but to everyone.

Untangling the Web

Today my employer American Theatre joins the 21st century and debuts a fully functioning, up-to-the-minute website, Americantheatre.org (apparently "americantheater.org" also takes you there). This also happens to be our October season preview issue, which means the unveiling of our Top 10 Most-Produced Plays list, as well as our Top 20 Most-Produced Playwrights list, and an extra bonus that's kind of a dream come true for me: As a fan of podcasts like Bloggingheads and the various Slate-casts, I'm proud to inaugurate the new semi-weekly edition of AT Offscript, the debut episode of which features myself and my fellow editors Suzy Evans and Diep Tran, as well as my interview with the year's most-produced playwright, Christopher Durang, and a round table with critics from around the country who've seen his latest comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (you can also find Offscript in iTunes). While the technology of theater remains irreducibly live and human, other communications media haven't stayed so static; I'm happy (relieved, really) to be at an organization that's honoring the latter by responding (relatively) nimbly to the latter. The web, at its best, has its own kind of liveness and immediacy, after all--all it lacks is the in-person contact, and for that, we'll always need theater.

Alive At Last

The New York Philharmonic's live concert staging of Sondheim's masterpiece Sweeney Todd will be broadcast on PBS stations on Sept. 26. I had the privilege of covering the show for current issue of The Sondheim Review. Below is the full text of my review.

If, as Sondheim will remind anyone who asks him, the hard-to-find dividing line between the opera and the musical is in the venue and its attendant audience expectations--if it’s done in a theater, it’s a musical, and if it’s in an opera house, it’s an opera, even if it’s the same text and score--then what do you call it when it’s done in a symphony hall under the aegis of one of the world’s great orchestras? A symphonic drama? A concert-ical? A philharm-opera?

The New York Philharmonic’s five-show staging of Sweeney Todd in March raised this mostly academic question in a new way, if only because the title character was played by the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, in between gigs as Falstaff (with San Francisco Opera) and Mephistopheles (with Royal Opera in London). The rest of the cast was filled with musical-theater pros, with another notable exception that, like Terfel’s casting, threw the work into a new light: Sweeney’s partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, was played the flinty polymath Emma Thompson, whose only prior experience in a bona fide musical was the 1985 West End revival of Me and My Girl. At the helm of this grim but astonishingly full-hearted revengers’ tragedy, then, were a pair of performers from outside the American musical theater mainstream--essentially, from the opera and the music hall (by which I mean the seemingly native British gift for patter, lazzi, and panto, a tradition to which Thompson can lay full claim). How did Sweeney harmonize with these fresh, contrasting voices?

One answer can be found in Terfel’s and Thompson’s shared citizenship; they may hail from different performance worlds, but they are unmistakably from the same isles as their characters, and this gave their scenes together a familiarity, an ease, that helped compensate for the inevitable disconnect between the two. Terfel is one of those impossibly towering, huge-headed operatic basses who loom over the stage more than they occupy it, and opposite the spry, straw-haired, nearly gamine-like Thompson, he occasionally seemed adrift in space, his only center of gravity being his lush, resonant voice, which wrapped lovingly around especially Sweeney’s more tender moments. For her part, Thompson managed Mrs. Lovett’s vocal duties with a valiant faux-warble that faintly but distinctly evoked a Monty Python drag falsetto, and filled all her scenes, sung and otherwise, with a vigorous sense of purpose, even an edge of aggression, that made Hugh Wheeler’s dialogue pop with an almost improvisational sizzle.

Of course, both Terfel’s occasional somnabulance and Thompson’s nerviness might fairly be attributed to the mad-dash rehearsal process by which these semi-staged concert renditions--both at the NY Phil and at the justly beloved Encores! series at City Center, across town--come into being. Director Lonny Price has become a duly celebrated master of this hybrid form, and to his great credit, his stagings haven’t settled into formula; where his Company at the NY Phil in 2011 had an appropriately presentational period gleam, his Sweeney staging was defined by its quasi-unruly chorus and a ghastly splattered-paint design. Price’s opening gambit was a deft bit of rabble-rousing: The company entered in formal evening wear and began reading the prologue from folders on music stands--then quickly ripped down this false front, fraying costumes, tossing music stands, exposing an ugly, wood-paneled back wall, even overturning a fake grand piano to create a stage in front of conductor Alan Gilbert.

The cheers this elicited from the crowd, though infectious, had little to do with Sweeney Todd, unless you see it as a show primarily about upending formality and decorum. But Price understands the entertainment value of such gimmicks, judiciously deployed, and no harm done. When Terfel and Thompson nodded to the respective orchestra sections on a few lines in “A Little Priest” (“fiddle player,” “piccolo player”), it earned little more than an indulgent grin; but when Thompson snatched Gilbert’s baton to primp Terfel’s hair, in a novel bit of staging for “By the Sea” (Mrs. Lovett giving Sweeney a quick trim), it captured perfectly the evening’s irreverent, let’s-try-this spirit.

On the other (bloody) hand, the red handprint by which Price signposted every murder--both with a looming projection and with the victims’ self-application of stage blood--had the benefit of consistency but little else; these handprints also turned up as a kind of brand label on the chorus’s otherwise tattered costumes, an odd fashion statement more than a binding design conceit. But it is to Price’s credit that somehow the awkwardness of Sweeney’s barber-chair victims having to rise, post-throat-slashing, and see themselves discreetly out the back door, came off with admirable fluidity.

Elsewhere the staging was nothing if not ambitious, with Josh Rhodes’ choreography expertly shaping the oversized crowd in “God That’s Good,” and action often spilling down the aisles and even into the balcony. Certainly the biggest challenge of the NY Phil’s “stage” for such events is the long egress on either side of the upstage platform, leading to breathless running entrances and exits across a pair of raked ramps, but Price and his cast--Thompson in particular--managed this acting/singing/dashing triathlon with aplomb.

Apart from the leads, the cast ranged from excellent to adequate. Philip Quast’s Judge Turpin suggested a superannuated leading man who still, to his doom, sees himself as dashing as ever. As Johanna, Erin Mackey largely bypassed the role’s chirpy ingenue brilliance for a more subdued and ultimately substantial reading, while Jay Armstrong Johnson’s Anthony largely offered the inverse: big vocals and bland affect. As Tobias, Kyle Brenn was similarly callow, and a tad soft-voiced for the part, but at least he comes by the youthfulness convincingly (he’s 16). And as if Jeff Blumenkrantz’s Beadle and Christian Borle’s Pirelli weren’t already perfectly slippery old-school villains, they capped their performances with a chilling blast of falsetto harmony in the finale.

It should be noted for the record that audiences at earlier performances were treated to Audra McDonald, in an unbilled performance, as the Beggar Woman, but on the night I saw it the role was played by Bryonha Marie Parham. And aficionados will want to know that while this rendition made some of the usual cuts--the tooth-pulling contest, the Beadle’s organ singalong--it did reinstate the Beggar Woman’s climactic lullaby, to a tune resembling “Poor Thing,” to fine if negligible effect.

McDonald also played the Beggar Woman in Price’s 2000 staging of Sweeney at the NY Phil, for which Terfel was originally slated opposite Patti LuPone (he bowed out due to a back injury, and George Hearn dutifully stepped in). I didn’t see that rendition, but on the reliable evidence of YouTube, it appears to have been a relatively formal, monochrome affair, with musical theater veterans who either had played or would play the leads on Broadway. The best that can be said for the new NY Phil rendition is that its two beyond-Broadway leads inspired similarly bold, out-of-the-box thinking among its creative team, from Price to the extremely game Gilbert and his world-beating band. Whatever we happen to call it--opera, musical, or just bloody good theater--this Sweeney was alive at last and full of joy.

From the Review Vaults: The Color Purple, 2005

I felt pretty lonely back in 2005, when as the critic for Broadway.com I raved about the musical version of The Color Purple. My colleagues were largely unimpressed, as you can see here. So I felt a tad vindicated when Ben Brantley all but recanted his earlier review after seeing John Doyle's stripped-down staging last year in London; all of a sudden the show's virtues shone through. I recently stumbled upon a copy of my review (some industrious chatboard poster had preserved it, as Broadway.com not only made sure I was the last theater critic in their employ, they also deleted all previous reviews), and I stand by every word. Here it is in full, from Dec. 1, 2005:

Jukebox musicals and chamber pieces are fine and well. Ditto theme-park spectacles and ironic lampoons. But the new musical The Color Purple reminds us what Broadway's for, and all that Broadway can be: big-hearted, broad-stroked storytelling, with the epic emotional sweep only music can conjure. On its own terms, this deft, moving adaptation of Alice Walker's seminal feminist novel works like gangbusters; that's cause for rejoicing enough. We should also save some hallelujahs for what it represents: another alive-and-kicking incarnation of that seemingly endangered species, the straightfacedly serious book musical. A breed born with Show Boat, nurtured to adulthood by Rodgers & Hammerstein, and most recently invoked by Ragtime and Caroline, or Change, it has miraculously survived generations of deconstruction, mockery and, worst of all, indifference.

Maybe it takes outsiders and first-timers to ignore the steep odds against such a leap of faith. Though the book is by seasoned librettist Marsha Norman, the inventive, infectious score and lyrics were fashioned by an unlikely triumvirate of pop tunesmiths, Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray. And director Gary Griffin, though no musical-theater neophyte, is making his Broadway debut here. They've made some choices we can quibble with, and, given the show's incendiary subject matter, even squabble over. But you'd have to have ice water in your veins not to be stirred by this unabashed paean to human resilience, and impressed by a production as masterfully executed as it is soulfully intended.

Make no mistake: It's a "serious" musical but not a dour one. Indeed, by compressing the book's early chapters, Norman has emphasized the positive life lessons learned by Celie (Kenita R. Miller on the night reviewed), a poor, reticent girl in the sharecropper South, rather than dwelling on her numerous defeats and humiliations. The horrifying plot points get hit: her predatory father (JC Montgomery) impregnates her, twice, and promptly spirits her babies away; her proud, cruel husband Mister (Kingsley Leggs) violently separates her from beloved sister Nettie (Renée Elise Goldberry), and generally treats her like a pack mule, only with less affection. But the everyday sense of Celie's bleak, slavish lot in life, which makes her openly long for a merciful death, is taken for granted rather than hammered home. This Celie smiles--with bursting hope, with shy flirtation, with the joy of being alive--more than she cries or rages at the God she thinks has abandoned her.

Still, that smile is irresistible and heart-rending. (Miller tore up the role on the night I saw it; I can only imagine that the transcendent LaChanze, out sick for a pre-opening preview, will do the same, and more.) Celie's slow bloom from doormat to self-sufficient woman is authentically inspiring: When this stiff, retiring figure eventually throws herself into a dance step or two, even waggles her tush triumphantly in our direction, we feel her interior awakening with visceral force. Donald Byrd's choreography has a number of offhandedly jiggy high points, even if it often feels crammed onto John Lee Beatty's imposing, woodsy, storybook set, which includes a busy turntable and sparingly used dock-like runway over the orchestra pit. The arrival of the dissipated sexpot singer Shug Avery (Elisabeth Withers-Mendes) inspires one such orgy of seemingly spontaneous movement, which is effectively topped by the jitterbugging around her steamy blues number, "Push Da Button."

If the show occasionally threatens to acquire a get-happy gloss, the cast brings it back to earth with admirable grit and conviction. Withers-Mendes lends a marvelously icy sheen to the self-centered Shug, which makes her warmth all the more touching. While the role of Mister feels slightly defanged from the book, Leggs effectively clouds the character's villainy with a haunting despair. Special credit should go to comic trio of busybodies, Kimberly Ann Harris, Virginia Ann Woodruff, and Maia Nkenge Wilson, who could walk away with the show given the chance. Stealing every moment they get are the bickering couple Sofia (Felicia P. Fields) and Harpo (Brandon Victor Dixon), who nail a playfully randy duet, "Any Little Thing," late in the show.

It's so late in the show, in fact, that we can only marvel at the supreme storytelling confidence of this adaptation. After hurtling forward decades, encompassing huge character turns, and taking a somewhat risible side trip to a fancifully decorative Africa, The Color Purple settles into a sweet, autumnal rhythm as it builds to its unabashedly life-affirming climax. And, miracle of miracles, we don't feel any of this as second-act slack; we hang on every word.

If that's not musical theater magic, I don't know what is. Can I get an amen?

Too Much Freedom to Fail

There's been a fair amount of rumbling from L.A. theater folks I know and/or follow via the indispensable site Bitter Lemons about a coming "war" over the long-contested Equity 99-Seat Plan. I'm not sure if the martial metaphor is really helpful, but suffice to say: What I've heard and read so far makes me very interested to see where the discussion goes.

And it made me think, unavoidably, of things I've written about this seemingly undisentangle-able Gordian knot before; this two-part history of the Equity "Waiver" agreement, for one, but also a speech I was invited to give at the L.A. Stage Alliance's SRO conference in the spring of 2003. I remember it as being a speech that essentially told L.A. theatermakers, to their faces, to STOP MAKING SO MUCH THEATER; and I remember it getting some confused pushback from artists and colleagues I really admired. But I had my reasons, and I laid them out in the speech. I just found the complete text online today at my old employer, and I still stand by every word.

Indeed, I've decided to post the whole thing today to lay my cards on the table and declare my rooting interests in the brawl that may or may not be about to break out. No, I don't just write glowing encomiums to how great L.A. theater has been. I also say things like this:

I saw "avoiding burnout" on the roster of topics for this second annual SRO event, and it got me thinking. I assume that panel will address ways to combat feelings of helplessness and insignificance, and the danger of sheer work overload, among theatre artists. But what about the feelings of confusion, disappointment, and disillusion among longtime observers and boosters of Los Angeles theatre, like myself? How can we who try to keep track of and make sense of this sprawling scene avoid feeling overwhelmed by, well, to put it positively, its awesome diversity and creative fertility and stunning resilience and…

Sorry, I can't go on in that vein. Too often, truth be told, L.A. theatre's awesome diversity feels like utter incoherence; its creative fertility can feel like rampant self-indulgence; its stunning resilience sometimes looks more like the sheer Sisyphean persistence of folks who feel they've got to keep putting on show after show after show or their doors will close because the dues money or the rent will stop coming in. To put it brutally, week in week out, I've begun to feel in my gut that there are just too many goddamn plays in Los Angeles. And that rather than creating a vibrant marketplace of theatrical artistry, or offering that many more exciting consumer options for the region's eager theatregoers, the sheer glut of productions on Los Angeles area stages creates a kind of white noise, a traffic jam through which established theatre companies of quality must navigate to compete for audiences, reviews, editorial attention, grants, and awards.

I never thought I'd say this, but I feel like something must be done to thin the ranks. Darwinian economics alone can't do it; the popular 99-Seat Plan is still such a cheap way to produce shows that not only is it nearly impossible for producers or artists to make any money at it; it's hard for them to lose enough to learn. The cost of failure is often too small to be instructive at all. The freedom to fail is intrinsic to the artistic process, but for failure to have its proper value, artists must feel some of its sting—they must have some sense that they've failed, whether it's from an instructor in the safety of a classroom, or a director, or a critic—or they will have no incentive to improve. The late great actor David Dukes once told me that the interesting difference between working in L.A. theatre and New York theatre, especially on Broadway, was that the economics of the situation focused one's attention; you had to do everything you could to make the play as good as it could be or it would close and you'd be out of a job. That's not the case with any L.A. shows I can think of, apart from the occasional sitdown of a Broadway show, like that one, what's-it-called, at the Pantages right now. For too many L.A. theatres, the 99-Seat Plan's cheap labor and its built-in freedom to fail provide an incentive to keep failing, and when they do succeed, its economics prevent them from building on that success.

As the editor of an actors trade paper, I understand all too well why there's too much theatre here, and why actors can't get paid for it. There are simply too many actors in L.A. who want and need to get up on a stage to act, both as an exercise and as a showcase. It's the same kind of talent glut that fills the town's hundreds of acting classes, and which has created the phenomenon of cold reading workshops, in which actors essentially pay to audition for casting directors. These are all essentially byproducts of an economic bind: The supply of acting talent and the demand for it are so out of kilter that it's a miracle there are still any union jobs on offer in L.A. at all.

If you look at the theatres that do offer union gigs, I think you'll see a common thread: They have a reason to exist other than their actors' need to get on a stage. They have boards to answer to; grants to fulfill; they often have a civic mandate, or at least a good relationship with the city they're in; they have a constituency other than their own company and its self-selecting clique, or they've expanded their clique. They have a mission which matches a demonstrated audience demand.

And I understand that in essence I'm preaching to the choir: You are all gathered here to learn from each other's success, to learn the best practices to build viable theatre companies that sustain themselves and pay their way. That's why Back Stage West is proud to be a sponsor of this event—in fact, it's the only outside event to which our paper actually contributes cash rather than simply advertising space, because it seems to represent a real movement toward making this theatre community more cohesive, and to support its future as an industry rather than as a hobby. And because I think Back Stage West's role is to lift up those theatres which are committed to making great theatre in and for L.A. over the long haul—to lift them up not only because they deserve it but so that they can be recognized above the fray.

I for one look forward to a day when theatre artists will come to L.A. to work in the theatre and will be able to afford to stay here to work in the theatre. I look forward to the day when it will be just a little easier for those of us who love the good theatre we've seen here as much or more than we deplore the mediocre and the terrible theatre we've seen here, to reel off a list of the top professional L.A. theatre companies that could stand with the best theatres in the country, from the Guthrie to Oregon Shakespeare Festival, from the Wooster Group to Lookingglass to Actors Theatre of Louisville. I believe that there are some in our present company who could proudly stand in those ranks, or who are well on their way in that direction. Are there enough of these shining examples to call L.A. a truly great theatre town? I think the jury is still out—literally, the jury is out, combing the wide boulevards of L.A., trying to find that little hole-in-the-wall theatre their friends told them did really interesting plays. I hope they can find it."

Play On

I've mentioned it a few times in this space, but it's official now: Today is the release of a CD I helped make with my old film-school and campus newspaper colleague Susan Lambert: O Baby Mine: Sing a Song of Shakespeare, a collection of songs based on and/or inspired by Will's works and words, geared toward kids but (we hope) also bearable listening for their whole family. I can quote from an actual press release from Ken Werther:

O Baby Mine: Sing A Song of Shakespeare is for anyone who wants to share their love of theatre, music, and the Bard and his language with their families. Featuring eight songwriters and 14 tracks, Shakespeare plays represented include Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Macbeth, and King Lear. The composers are (in alphabetical order) Raymond Bokhour, Sean Galuszka, Rob Kendt, Susan Lambert, Cinco Paul, Madison Scheckel, and David Tobocman. The project was conceived by Susan Lambert, who also acts as executive producer.

I was happy to contribute a number of originals and semi-originals (a Dixieland take on Shubert's "Who Is Sylvia?" would be in the latter category), but I have to give special props to the versatile, dulcet-voiced Madison Scheckel, who also contributed some lovely originals and played all over a bunch of the tunes; to my old friend Cinco Paul (yes, that Cinco Paul), who came in to play trombone on "Sylvia," and then sat down and played this sparkling new song about the Bard's contributions to the language; to crack drummer/producer Matt North, who added parts from his Nashville studio; and to Raymond Bokhour, who lent his guitar to a couple of his own originals, culled from productions he's appeared in over the years. I'm particularly happy with this expansive take on the closer of As You Like It, "In Springtime":

You can buy the CD here, and you will soon be able to download tracks here. Let the music play on.

The Word Word

My first exposure to Dennis Miles' work was inauspicious: His one-act Rosa Mundy, about a strange young woman who alternately lusted for and killed visitors to her lonely home, was staged as part of a one-act festival at, if memory serves, Theatre Geo on Highland Ave. It was simpering and soapy, as I recall. But then I happened to see it again at the far edgier Theatre of NOTE on Cahuenga, in a production by director Diane Robinson that brought out the work's odd intensity and intense oddness; I remember in particular the sight of blowzy Elaina McBroom riding dementedly on a tricycle, a dangerous but weirdly endearing girl-child. It was like a work reborn, and I never took Miles--or my first impressions--for granted again.

His plays were not always so outre, but the full range of his work seemed to find an extremely sympathetic home at NOTE, where the actors and directors had (and still do, by most accounts) a shared interpretive nimbleness, and the space itself seems to encourage open-ended experimentation (I wrote roughly as much here). I regret that I didn't see more of Dennis' work, but I remember quite fondly the last play of his I saw, Destronelli, and not simply as an acting vehicle for the late, great Pamela Gordon in all her gritty-pixie glory. In a column for Back Stage West at the time, I called it Miles' "most accessible work yet," and said that its "combination of provocation, puzzlement, perversity, and unsentimental tenderness reminded me of Albee."

I only spoke with Dennis a few times, and he seemed a dear, sweet man. I believe he made his living working at an AIDS research project at UCLA. In the years since I left L.A., we corresponded by email, and he sent me some lovely homemade postcards from his travels. More significantly, he asked me to write music for songs in two of his shows. One was for a song called "Roosterfish" in a play called Sona Tera Roman Hess ("my unintentional version of Phaedra," as he put it to me). Here's my demo of the song, which I sent to the production with sheet music, though I never heard how it sounded sung by the cast:

The other tune was for a show, never produced as far as I know, called Tivoli Tsadik, for which Dennis had written a bitter, digressive song called "Ballad of the Squanderer." He was expressly looking for a Kurt Weill sound, and I was happy to oblige:

Dennis died from lung cancer on Sunday, and with his passing the world lost a truly original voice, a weird and dark and stubbornly lyrical poet/playwright whose work was known by all too few; such are the rewards of playwriting in a film capital. This quote from Dennis' interview at Adam Szymowicz's blog captures his independence, and his utterly unpretentious sense of artistic calling:

Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A: I don't have any. I don't listen to advice myself, so I do my best not to tell people what might work for them. Artistic writing is an organic endeavor, it is one's life, there's no advice for living out your life, artistic writing is a natural emanation of one's experiences and one's singular mind.

In one of our back-and-forths about his lyrics, in which I tried to steer him to imitate more standard meters and forms, he confessed, "I really don't think looking at/listening to songs will teach me to write you a good lyric...I don't think that's how I learn. What I do, for whatever it's worth, comes out of some unschooled, unlearned, automatic place, and if I set out to write a sonnet, let's say, I would bollocks it for sure."

And in this quote from a feature on his play Von Lutz, he said this of his work: "I am appalled by the plays I write...I like to blame Antonin Artaud, but no one forced me to read him. There is beauty at that edge between what's funny and what's horrendous." I'd like to celebrate Dennis and his vision with a poem he emailed me in January of 2006, with the subject line, "My version of a happy poem."

WORD

by Dennis Miles

To write just to write.
To write the word word. To write a few words.
To wr.. right a mistake, righten a mistake.
To engage in a rite of writing.
To turn from my right to my
left
right away.
Write away, swift over the page.
To wright a smith over the hearth of earth.
Wratten, wretten, written, wrotten, wrutten
A game hen and a wren.
To write a caged bird to liberate,
To deliberate over the written word.
To be the writer of a word. Of the word word.
To have a written word for supper any day.
Across the room, across the page.
You can’t tell anymore who among us talks alone to himself.
You have never been able to tell who among us writes alone to himself.
A written word spoken as it is said.
It. Word. The written word. It. They. Two words.
To write just to write, because I’m human and I can…
No more meaningless than…
Right now some one plots to obliterate
the innocence that, amidst the deviltry, lives naively in the West.
And don’t forget wrest, which does not rest. An action verb.
Writ of habeas corpus. Written on the wind which is this page.
Written for the future. Written on a carousel.
Who is the king of nothingness: obliterate, literate, liberate, deliberate.
I write the word I wrote. I wrote the word I’ve written. I’ve written the word wrote. I wrote it. I wrought it. I brought it forth like a birth---
Oh, celebrate, I celebrate the word word

Iceland Follies

I spent a fascinating afternoon a few weeks ago at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village talking to some unfailingly gracious Icelanders, and a few slightly baffled American actors, about a strange new musical they're working on called Revolution in the Elbow of Ragnar Agnarsson Furniture Painter. I learned a bit more about Iceland's acute economic crisis (parallel to ours and everybody's in 2008, but much worse) than I'd known before, and I learned that there are very good reasons Icelanders' names often seem to be interchangeable (patronyms is one reason, a rigorously tight naming regimen is another). And I'm happy with the piece I wrote up for the paper of record. A highlight:

Conceived by Ivar Pall Jonsson, a tall, taciturn former journalist from Reykjavik, the show is unmistakably his take on his nation’s rocky financial fortunes.

"It’s a story about love and deception, and how people get caught in something that’s superficial,” Mr. Jonsson said, perched in the theater’s upstairs lobby on a kidney-shaped couch that had been tried out as part of the show’s set but discarded. “They get carried away, until one day, reality knocks on the door, and they wake up. That’s the story I wanted to tell.”

Why, though, set it inside a man’s elbow? In a conception that suggests “Horton Hears a Who” meets “Fantastic Voyage,” Mr. Jonsson’s musical concerns an apparently tiny race of people living in Elbowville, who dine on lobster fished from their host’s lymphatic channels and keep viruses as household pets.

He chose a “surreal setting,” Mr. Jonsson said, so he could tell the story without reference to “specific details and persons.”

Mr. Jonsson’s brother, Gunnlaugur Jonsson, who is credited with Ivar for the show’s story and serves as its executive producer, added: “If you have a play about something in the financial world, honestly it can become very boring, because you have to explain complicated things. Doing it abstractly in a world that doesn’t exist, you can just get rid of all of that and get to the heart of the story.”

But one thing I didn't talk enough about in the Times piece was Ivar Pall Jonsson's music, which really is quite lovely; a key track is embedded above.

Hope at NOTE

Ballinger and Nithapalan

I had the pleasure of breaking bread (larb, actually) with Erik Patterson yesterday. He's an L.A.-based playwright whose work I admired more than a decade ago at Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood (loved his Yellow Flesh Alabaster Rose, was more mixed on the sequel, Red Light Green Light); he was in town to soak up some N.Y. theater in advance of his birthday (which is today, if memory serves; so happy birthday, Erik!). His newest play at NOTE, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, is not about the Beatles but is based on a personal tragedy I've written about in this space twice before: the brain aneurysm and stroke suffered by the marvelous young L.A. actress Uma Nithapalan in January of 2007. Uma was Erik's best friend and longtime roommate; she was at the time engaged to the composer John Ballinger, and they subsequently were married as soon as Uma was well enough.

That she is indeed relatively well, even seven years later, is something of a miracle. And that she and John came to the opening of Erik's new play roughly based on their harrowing experiences in the ICU is another kind of miracle:

After opening night, both Uma and John told me it had been painful to watch – but painful in a good way, because it reminded them of how far they’ve come. Uma said she’s never seen her struggle with aphasia reflected in a piece of entertainment before. As hard as it was for her to watch, she was grateful that people would leave the play with a better understanding of what she’s been through.

Chalk up another title in the wish-I-was-in-L.A.-to-see-it file. Erik also told me about a group of playwrights he meets with regularly to keep up their chops—including folks like Bridget Carpenter, Jessica Goldberg, Diane Rodriguez, and the indispensable Michael Sargent—and it gave me both a pang of nostalgia and a burst of hope. If those writers are still making plays in L.A.—a place where the relative indifference of the media and audiences, let alone the rest of the theater world (let alone "the industry"), ever threatens the persistence of even the good and great theater that gets done there—then something is still right with the world. As Erik has one his characters say: “The doctors are always warning you not to have false hope. But you’ve gotta have hope.” Amen.

Tough Deal

My heart sank early and often last week at the City Center concert rendition of Randy Newman’s Faust, but never so low as when Newman muffed one of his own best lines. That he was onstage at all, half-playing the piano, half-playing the role of the Devil, and generally serving as the evening’s impish emcee, was the evening’s signature mistake. While his droll presence is usually entirely welcome--his solo live shows are some of my favorites in memory--having him at the piano to guide us through the alternately brilliant and flimsy score, and even more flimsy book, of his 1995 musical Faust, while some over-qualified actor/singers did their thing around and opposite him, leached the show of any drama.

Or rather, musical comedy, which is what the show was when I saw it in La Jolla. There, having David Garrison’s Devil slither about in a sharkskin suit opposite Ken Page’s cuddly God made all the difference; and Michael Greif’s staging for some of the slighter, stuntier songs (“Damn Fine Day,” “Bless the Children,” “March of the Protestants”) at least gave them a theatrical point. At City Center, there was very little book to speak of, and almost zero staging; the result was that too many of the show’s songs, unable to stand alone, just sat there, well performed but unmoored from any frame of reference.

A few songs in the score really do have dramaturgical heft, though; one is the achingly beautiful “Gainesville,” whose old-time harmonies and sweetly insistent, clear-eyed innocence found an ideal match in Laura Osnes. But perhaps the most striking sequence in the original show--one that sharply summarizes the critique of pure faith that was clearly Newman’s main interest in writing the show in the first place, certainly moreso than the central Faustian bargain--comes when the Devil, down in the dumps, stops by Heaven to kvetch about the thankless challenges of his job. God takes a break from leading a swarm of child angels on a nature hike to offer the Devil a saccharine entreaty to “Relax, Enjoy Yourself”:


Then a little angel breaks from the crowd and approaches the Devil; she wonders aloud if he’s gone bad because of a lack of love in his childhood. At City Center, this part was sung by Brooklyn Shuck of Annie fame; her exchange with a quizzical Newman was one of the evening’s high points.


ANGEL CHILD:
It must be very trying to be bad all the time
Vicious and cruel and mean
When there's so much beauty
All around us to be seen
And so very little time in which to see it all
And feel it all
So little time
Perhaps when you were little
No one held you in their arms
And told you that they loved you very much
Perhaps you were embittered
By your fall from grace

DEVIL:
How long have you been dead?

ANGEL CHILD:
Two months.

DEVIL:
Do you miss your friends?

ANGEL CHILD:
Yes, I miss them,
I've tried to make friends here, but it's hard

DEVIL:
You were a good girl
Cut down in your prime

ANGEL CHILD:
Yes.

Newman, trading the mike with Shuck, pulled off that exchange just fine. But then comes maybe the most scalding moment in the show, and I have to wonder if the concert’s director, Thomas Kail, lost his nerve here--he didn’t want the Devil to sing these harsh words directly to a sweet little girl, and let Shuck run to join the angel choir. When Newman turned back to the piano, he got a little lost and didn’t punch his pickup to the next section. And while last week’s concertgoers more-or-less heard much of the following, I’d be surprised if anyone who didn’t already know the original score actually took in the first three lines, and hence the entire import, of this clarifying bit of theodicy in song:


DEVIL:
The man who shot you in the head
In that Burger King in Tucson
Well, he never will be punished, you know
He will move to Big Pine, California
Become the richest man in Inyo County
While that may not be much, it's enough
When he dies
Sixty-five years from today
With his loved ones all around him
He'll be whisked right up to heaven
He won't pass go or have to wait
He'll just march right through the Goddamned gate
And why, you may ask yourself why
For thousands and thousands of years
I have asked myself why

LORD:
Faith. Contrition. Sincere contrition.
Confession. Sincere confession.

ANGELS:
Yes, Lord! Yes, Lord!

LORD:
Redemption. Absolution.
Those who seek Me shall find Me
In the case of this man,
Predestination.

My ways are mysterious
Sometimes even to myself
My ways are mysterious

DEVIL:
Relax, old chum, relax
It's only a glorious game that we're playing
And in a few more years
When I move up here
Things will never be the same

Even at its best, Faust has too few truly theatrical turns like that. But in its weird hybrid of Randy Newman concert and fully acted reading, last week’s Faust didn’t even present the best of Faust all that well. If, as I wrote for Slate, the failure of Faust and Newman to be Broadway contenders 20 years ago represents a great missed opportunity, last week’s concert only served to seal that fate.

Familiar Strangers

One challenge of my job trying to cover theater with a national perspective, both at American Theatre and, to a certain degree, at the NY Times, is how to keep tabs on work I can't actually see. With few exceptions (On the Boards, or this amazing Einstein on the Beach video, available for free viewing only through July 7, I've been informed), I can't look at a screener of plays outside the boroughs of New York, and my professional travel budget--well, let's just say it's non-lavish. So I do a lot of play reading and review reading, relying on buzz I hear around the halls of TCG; from the folks on the American Theatre play selection committee (whose ranks I only recently joined); and from contacts in the field, many of which I made in my long time on the West Coast, others here in New York, and some at the annual TCG conferences.

The conference in Chicago a few years back was a particularly fertile one on that score, leading me to discover two Windy City-bred talents in particular, both of whom I wrote features on: Tanya Saracho and Laura Eason. Both writers were more or less immediately snatched up by TV (Eason by House of Cards, where she's written some of the juiciest Claire Underwood material, and Saracho by a slate of shows including Devious Maids, Looking, and now Girls), and both writers have continued their theatrical careers apace. Now, this summer happily marks the Off-Broadway debuts of two of their signature works. Saracho's Mala Hierba, a thorny, steamy play about class and sex that bowled me over on the page, and has reportedly been a great calling card for Saracho's TV career but has never gotten a full staging, starts previews on July 14 at Second Stage's uptown space.

Meanwhile, at Second Stage's midtown space, Eason's prickly two-hander Sex With Strangers marks the splashy Gotham bow of a play that, as I learned in a recent interview with her for the paper of record, also opened doors for Eason, including landing her the House of Cards gig. SWS was staged before, in 2011 at Steppenwolf, in a production I thought didn't live up to the play's promise on the page (and my happening to catch that show onstage was a fluke--I've literally seen about three shows in Chicago in my life). Here's hoping that the new SWS, which has an inspired cast in Anna Gunn and Billy Magnussen, does better by the play.

In my Times piece on Eason, I went further into a theme she'd mentioned to me before: that she has an easier time writing male characters than female ones. The one exception she's found has been House of Cards's leading lady:

“Claire has been very exciting to me and felt very easy to write, which is a little strange,” said Ms. Eason, who was quick to credit [Robin] Wright and the creator of the series, Beau Willimon, for the character’s essence. “It’s been thrilling to work on a female character so unapologetically strong, bold, ambitious. We’ve never, ever had a conversation about, ‘Is she likable?’”

You can read the whole piece here.