American (and L.A.) Revolutions

The rest of 2015 will have a lot to live up to: In quick succession, I've already seen/written about/considered two of the best productions I'll probably see in years, let alone this calendar year. First was Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's great new musical--which today is apparently likely to announce a transfer to Broadway, though whether before the Tony deadline or after is anyone's guess (smart money seems to be on the former; I'm holding out hope for the latter, because I think the Public, and the public, deserves the rest of that Off-Broadway run). I chatted with Miranda and fellow founding-father players at the Fraunces Tavern for the Times, then had the good fortune to review the show for America:

As surehanded a piece of musical storytelling as has been seen onstage in many a season, “Hamilton” is all the more impressive for tackling a supremely unlikely subject: the founding of the United States as seen through the eventful life of one its less lionized figures, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. But creator Lin-Manuel Miranda—who wrote the music, lyrics and book, and stars in the title role—makes a convincing case for Hamilton, the “ten-dollar founding father without a father,” as the first of a distinctly American type: the immigrant outsider of humble beginnings who remakes, and ultimately undoes, himself with sheer chutzpah and hustle.

It is an angle on the nation’s creation myth that, like Hamilton’s, is both expansive and pragmatic: This is a country where freedom would have a chance to reign like never before, but only if the heavy lifting of governance was met with the same fervor as revolution had been. “Dying is easy, young man/ Living is harder,” Gen. George Washington (Christopher Jackson) tells the impetuous, battle-hungry Hamilton when he enlists him as his wartime consigliere. Later, amid the squabbling of his cabinet, President Washington echoes the line: “Fighting is easy/ Governing is harder.” It is a timely message for our age of gridlock and retrenchment, in which debates over the size and role of government have if anything only intensified.

Then cameth Iceman, in a definitive production from the Goodman Theatre. I had the rare privilege of watching an entire run-through at the Goodman's Chicago rehearsal space for this Times preview; I worried that seeing the show onstage at BAM couldn't possibly live up to the intimacy of that run-through. It more than did. Again, for America:

Alternately affectionate and withering about its characters’ fatal insignificance, “Iceman” is unmistakably infused with O’Neill’s native emotion, which is a sort of existential survivor’s guilt; and here, amid the play’s toasts and revels, he goes well beyond callow thoughts of suicide to the bleak, Sophoclean notion that it would have been better never to have been born at all. That cheery takeaway message, in addition to the play’s nearly-five-hour length and large cast size, are among the reasons the play is seldom done; though considered a masterwork, “Iceman” has cometh to New York only four times since its 1946 debut.

The play has just returned in a rousingly thoughtful new production from Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, encamped through Mar. 15 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The musical association is apropos, for what director Robert Falls’s production demonstrates, among many other things, is that “Iceman” works best as a kind of symphony, with both its large-scaled form and its multi-vocal parts given orchestral heft and balance. Perhaps not coincidentally, at the helm of the cast is a musical theater pro, Nathan Lane, who plays the glad-handing salesman Hickey with his full range of cockeyed charm, sardonic wit and little-boy-lost pathos.

In other recent writing, I ventured back into the fray of the L.A. 99-seat wars for American Theatre, and this time it got personal. If it is a curse to live in interesting times, then I can count myself very cursed of late. (There's more of my thinking/arguing on the topic here.)