Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals

Review - Bring It On: The Musical on Broadway

Like many of you, I'm sure, I was skeptical when I first heard that Bring It On: The Musical was to become a musical. "Great," I thought. "Another movie-to-musical franchise show." And we're not even talking a Steven Spielberg film or a Reese Witherspoon vehicle, but rather a middle-of-the-road teen flick that has since spawned seemingly countless straight-to-video sequels that aptly encapsulate the law of diminishing returns.

But then I heard about the creative staff that Bring It On was amassing, and I became increasingly intrigued: Jeff Whitty of Avenue Q on book, Tom Kitt (Next to Normal) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (In the Heights) on music, and Miranda and Amanda Green on lyrics. Plus, direction and choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler, also of In The Heights fame. That's some pretty high-powered creative right there, although as we know there are certainly no guarantees when it comes to musical theater.

Bring It On was initially announced as a touring production, with no specified plans for a Broadway run, but when the St. James Theater became available after the premature (IMHO) demise of Leap of Faith, the producers of Bring It On saw an opportunity and grabbed it. The show was originally scheduled for a three-month run, which has since been extended through the end of the year. The extension was no doubt a product of the enthusiastic audience response to the show, plus slowly building weekly grosses. 

And here's the thing: for once, I'm siding with the throng. Bring It On is an infectious joy of a show, well-crafted and ably performed. True, it has nothing on its mind that's any more complex than "Who's going to win the big cheer-leading competition?", but what's wrong with that? Youth-focused shows don't have to be dumb, or poorly crafted. Bring It On doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is, but the stagecraft, lyric writing, character development, and musical composition put the show head and shoulders above such uninspired movie adaptations as Sister Act and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. 

The show starts a bit slowly, at least in terms of moving the story beyond the central female teen, Campbell, the new captain of the cheer-leading squad at Truman High School. Campbell, played with a winning and winsome charm by newcomer Taylor Louderman, begins the show with what are essentially two "I want" songs ("What I Was Born to Do" and "One Perfect Moment"), both of which get reprises within the first 15 minutes. OK, we get it. The kid wants to lead her squad into becoming the national champions. Do we need to say it four times?

But the show quickly broadens its focus to an appealing array of vivid characters. Bring It On is the show that Lysistrata Jones wished it could be: Lysistrata Jones was clever, Bring It On is smart. Both the story and the people who inhabit Bring It On have a fairly stock feel to them, but the creators have given them both depth and heart. Even the villain in the story (played by the marvelously perky and nuanced Elle McLemore) has a certain comic charm to her, although Whitty very wisely keeps us guessing until the middle of act 2 as to whether she's really plotting against our heroine or whether it's all in Campbell's mind. (Not unlike what Roman Polanski does in "Rosemary's Baby," if I may be so bold as to make such a seemingly bizarre comparison.) 

Bring It On also has a rousingly infectious score. From what I can surmise it appears that Kitt and Green have provided the pop songs, while Miranda has supplied songs reflecting his own particular brand of accessible hip-hop. It's a canny choice: the vastly different styles help differentiate the separate student populations therein, and emphasize the culture clash between the competing high schools. Among the most appealing of the songs are "Do Your Own Thing," which introduces the lead character, as well as the audience, to the culture shock that is Campbell's new high school.

And then there's the crowd-pleaser "Ain't No Thing," in which a transgender teen and his/her sassy friend instruct the spunky, hefty girl (the delightfully animated Ryann Redmond) on the joys of accepting who you are. It's really remarkable how off-handedly the show portrays the transgender character, acknowledging the difficulties, and yet allowing him/her to blend comfortably into the fabric of the school. Performer Gregory Haney adds immeasurably to this process by giving the character a fierce individuality that gets the entire audience rooting for this no-nonsense tiger of a teen.

One of the most pleasant surprises of Bring It On is director/choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. His thrilling work on In the Heights was beginning to look like a one-time thing, after the ignominious misfire that was 9 to 5. Blankenbuehler's ebullient and idiomatic hip-hop style, which was so woefully out of place in 9 to 5, suits Bring It On to a T, and gives the production a joyous sense of effervescence. What's more, Blankenbuehler reveals himself as a sensitive and sharp director, helping the young cast craft indelible characterizations, bringing an exuberant theatricality to the show's presentation, and demonstrating a lively flare for dramatically effective stagecraft. Blankenbuehler may just be one of those choreographers who makes a successful transition to the elite club of theatrical auteurs.

Bring It On will doubtless enter the canon of shows performed regularly at the high school and college level, but you'd be a fool to wait. The Broadway cast and production, plus the fact that the show is still heavily discounting its tickets, make this particular production a must-see. Also, you're unlikely to see a subsequent production with cheering routines that are this athletic and genuinely exciting.

Review - The Hills Are Alive at the New York Fringe Festival

Because I spent so much time at NYMF this summer, I didn't really have plans to take in any shows at the NY Fringe Festival. I think it's partly because I'm kind of over the four-hour bus ride to NYC, but also there's just too much choice at the Fringe: nearly 200 shows this year. What's a theater blogger with ADD to do? Last year I had my first Fringe experience, but only because two shows really stuck out for me last year: Yeast Nation and The Legend of Julie.

But last weekend I was going down to catch New Girl in Town and Bring It On (read my review of the former here, and watch for my review of the latter early next week), and I didn't have anything to see on Sunday. I happened to notice an invitation in my inbox for a Fringe show called The Hills Are Alive, which claimed to be a darkly comic sequel to "The Sound of Music." Hey, what the hell, right? I figured, good or bad, the show would be something my readers would be interested in hearing about.

The Hills Are Alive asks the pressing question: "What happened to the Von Trapp family members after they escaped from the Nazis and set out on their hike to Switzerland?" The show has book and lyrics by Frankie Johnson, music by Eric Thomas Johnson, and it essentially wants to be a perversely madcap romp across the Alps, with shades of the Donner Party and a heavy dose of And Then There Were None. What it winds up being, at least in the current production, is a reasonably good idea trapped inside a book, score, and production that don't fully do that idea justice, at least not at present. 

The songs represent a series of pastiches of the songs from The Sound of Music, including "Do Re Mi," "So Long, Farewell," "The Lonely Goatherd," and the title song, complete with the female lead twirling with her arms in the air. There's also the Captain von Trapp counterpart singing an "Edelweiss"-like song by the campfire, complete with guitar accompaniment. The ideas for the songs are sound; it's just that too many of them are unappealing, featuring strange dissonant intervals and a droning, dirge-like pace. (You can listen to some of the songs from the show here and judge for yourself.) Also, the lyrics fall victim to far too many of the traps of the lazy lyricist, including poor scansion, slant rhyme, and unnecessary melisma.

Much of the humor from The Hills Are Alive, which is fairly abundant, comes from the recognition of various people and elements from "The Sound of Music," the movie version in particular. Props to the game cast members who give these iconic characters their own particular sardonic spin, including Ashley Ball as Fraulein Mathilde (the Julie Andrews part), Skylar Saltz as the snotty Ludwiga, and Frankie Johnson herself as Gerdy, the youngest child.

The story to The Hills Are Alive could use some clarification and some trimming. The plot features a number of devices that are never fully explained, including an anthropomorphic tree that haunts one of the characters throughout the show, only to meet with a rather underdeveloped payoff at the end. Also, the show feels overly long at present: parodies rarely have any business being longer than 90 minutes, and The Hills Are Alive is about two hours, with intermission. Some of my perception of excess length might be attributable to the rather glacial pace with which author Frankie Johnson has directed the current production, complete with enervating pauses between scenes and dialog.

But, in sum, there's a decent amount of comic potential in the idea for The Hills Are Alive. With stronger comic direction, faster pace, and a few more tuneful songs, the show might have a future.

Review - Into the Woods in Central Park - The Public Theatre

The idea of setting by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Into the Woods in the actual woods may seem, at first, to be a stroke of genius, or at the very least an obvious but cool idea. It certainly seemed to work two years ago in England when the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre presented Into the Woods al fresco to considerable acclaim. This summer, the Public Theater is presenting a transplanted version of that London production at its Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The directors are the same: Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel, the latter of whom also choreographs. So there was every reason to believe the magic would make the leap across the pond with them.

As reports came out of the cast members that this American version of Into the Woods was amounting, excitement among theater cognoscenti, and Sondheim aficionados in particular, rose to a feverish pitch: Donna Murphy as The Witch; Denis O'Hare as the Baker; Jessie Mueller as Cinderella; Gideon Glick as Jack; Johnny Newcomb in the ensemble. (Sorry, that last one was mostly exciting to those of us at the Boston Conservatory, of which Johnny is a recent grad. BoCo, represent!) And then, perhaps most exciting of all, came the announcement that Oscar-nominee Amy Adams would play the Baker's Wife. Suddenly, Into the Woods became the absolute must-see show of the summer.

The resulting show, however, was a pretty significant disappointment. I saw one of the previews, toward the end of the first week of performances, and at that point there was very little magic happening on stage. In fairness, there were still quite a few technical glitches in evidence, in particular with the sound system, the lighting cues, and vocal entrances during quite a few on the numbers, so I made allowances for the fact that the production probably needed some time to gel. But based on the critical response now that the show has officially opened, it would appear that, although the technical glitches may have cleared up, the main problems with the production itself remain: uneven casting and a decided lack of emotional power.

From where I sat (which was row P, considerably far away from the action), a huge part of the problem with respect to the show's emotional impact was the elaborate jungle gym of a set, designed by John Lee Beatty and Soutra Gilmour. The set comprises a visually impressive but somewhat imposing series of walkways, staircases, and balconies reaching 50 feet into the air. Directors Sheader and Steel spend so much time trying to utilize all the different playing areas that very little of this highly emotive show took place downstage center. Also, because of the breadth and height of the set, it often took a second or two to figure out where to focus, and the lighting and sound design didn't much help in this matter. In total, the production design had a distancing quality, which works against the very concept of the show.

The casting choices at the center of the show served to exacerbate this affective disconnect. The emotional core of Into the Woods should ideally come from the Baker and his Wife. However, Denis O'Hare and Amy Adams displayed very little chemistry, as if they barely knew each other. Their "It Takes Two" was all mechanical movement and forced conviviality. Of course, Adams is primarily a movie actress, but what works for the camera doesn't always play in a 1,900-seat amphitheater. Vocally she seemed to hold her own, despite sharping on some of her high notes, but she seemed to be constantly distracted throughout the show. (Perhaps it was the hideously exaggerated wig she was forced to wear in this production. Yeesh.)

As for O'Hare, it's beginning to seem as though he won that Tony for Take Me Out basically for playing himself; he really hasn't deviated much since from that mannered, quirky sprite that brought him so much acclaim. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to cast Chip Zien, who originated the part of the Baker, as the Mysterious Man. Zien is laser sharp, with a radiating warmth that only serves to emphasize what was missing from O'Hare's performance.

As for the rest of the cast, the usually sensational Donna Murphy had at least three very noticeable lyric flubs, two in "Last Midnight" alone, but from other reports it would seem that Murphy gained her footing as previews progressed. Two major standouts were Sarah Stiles as Little Red Riding and Gideon Glick as Jack, both exhibiting strong voices, clear focus, and a wonderful sense of individual character. Ivan Hernandez is also strong as Cinderella’s Prince and the Wolf, playing each role with clear choices and a firm sense of the inherent comedy. Jessie Mueller, who was such a knockout in last season's unfortunate On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, has a decidedly individual take on Cinderella, playing her with much more of an earthy, grounded countenance than others who've played the role.

Another factor in the overall emotional disconnect of the show may have come from the fact that the directors seemed more focused on being clever than in bringing out the richness of the characters. Admittedly there's some pretty fantastic stagecraft on display here. The way the creative staff handle Granny's bed in the scene with Little Red Riding Hood and the Wold is pretty frickin' cool. Jack's beanstalk magically appears through the use of a spiral staircase and a bunch of green umbrellas. And the manifestation of the giant is nothing less than a coup de theatre. It's funny, though, all the clever stagecraft in Peter and the Starcatcher doesn't seem to impede the audience connecting with the characters, but with Into the Woods, I walked away admiring the production elements while not being particularly moved.

And then there's what seems to have become obligatory in modern musicals: the framing device. The show starts with a young boy screaming at his parents and being sent to his room. The boy enters the stage fulminating, and eventually he starts to tell the story of the show, seemingly making it up by cobbling together stories he's heard before.

Two problems here: first, the moral that comes at the end of the show ("Careful the things you say. Children will listen.") is rather sophisticated, and is even stated from a presumably adult point of view. (Note the word "children" in the lyric.) This makes it unlikely that the boy would come up with this notion on his own. Also, there's quite a bit of sexual innuendo and outright lewdness in this staging of Into the Woods, and I don't recall being quite that salacious when I was ten. (I must say that when we discover the true identity of the boy at the end of the show, it makes for a really nice surprise. But it would have been even sweeter if the proceedings leading up to it were more emotionally charged.)

We've recently heard reports of a possible Broadway transfer for Into the Woods. Perhaps in redesigning the show to fit in a Broadway house, the production staff could minimize or eliminate the distancing factor of the set design. Perhaps they could also bring in James Lapine to do some table work with the cast and help them find the heart of the show. I have to wonder if Amy Adams would transfer with the show; most likely she has movie offers awaiting her. But if she didn't make the transfer, would anyone outside the theater community want to attend?

Reviews - Nymph Errant and New Girl in Town - Off-Broadway Revivals

One of the great things about getting down to New York City as frequently as I do now is having the opportunity to catch revivals of obscure shows at some of the Off-Broadway non-profit theaters. We really don't get many chances to see Knickerbocker Holiday or Strike Up the Band, so it's a real treat when the York Theatre Company or Musicals Tonight trots one of them out for public airing.

Recently, I was able to see Nymph Errant at the Prospect Theater Company, as well as New Girl in Town at the Irish Repertory Theatre. Although neither production was particularly satisfying, that doesn't detract in the least from the fact that these companies are doing musical-theater fans a tremendous service by bringing these works back to New York City for the first time in 30 years and 50 years, respectively. 

Nymph Errant is a Cole Porter show that to date has never played Broadway. It premiered in London in 1933, starring Gertrude Lawrence and featuring choreography by a young Agnes de Mille. The show didn't make it to New York until 1982, and the score wasn't recorded until 1989. The Prospect Theater mounted the production in question in conjunction with the New York Music Theater Festival (Nymph, NYMF - get it?). This production features a new libretto by Rob Urbinati, based on the original by Romney Brent. Most of the songs are from the original show, although there are a few interpolations from Fifty Million Frenchmen ("The Boyfriend Back Home," "Paree, What You Did to Me") and Paris ("Dizzy Baby"), as well as the title number from Red, Hot and Blue. 

The plot of Nymph Errant is fairly scandalous, particularly for 1933, and concerns a young English woman who graduates from finishing school in France and, rather than heading home to her fiancé, heads off on a trans-continental trek, looking for opportunities to misbehave. It's clear that Urbinati is aiming for something madcap and deliciously naughty, but many of his jokes have the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and the whole affair comes off as alternately grating and tame. The Cole Porter score has some nifty little numbers in it, particularly "You're Too Far Away" and "Experiment," but nothing with the nimble tunefulness for which he would later become rightly celebrated.

The direction and choreography by Will Pomerantz is a bit of a conundrum. Pomerantz makes some seemingly smart choices, including a modular set comprising a series of travel trunks, and a neat device in which the juvenile - played with a charming, knowing smile by Andrew Brewer - seemingly follows his ingenue throughout her travels and travails. But Pomerantz also includes some genuinely inscrutable business, including having the female chorus members strip down to their underclothes after the opening number and playing most of the rest of the show in their scanties. At the end of the show, during the inevitable wedding, the bride and groom take their vows in their underwear as well. As to what this was supposed to mean, I can only speculate. Or rather, I've tried, to no avail.

Despite Urbinati's new book and Pomerantz's directorial concept - or, perhaps, because of them - Nymph Errant never bubbles up into the frothy production that the team no doubt was aiming for. Which left in the lurch a cast of mostly talented performers, including Jennifer Blood as the titular nymph, and Tony-winner Cady Huffman in a variety of roles, not all entirely suited to her charm and talent.

Faring only slightly better on the rediscovered-works front is New Girl in Town at the Irish Repertory Theatre. The show was originally little more than a star vehicle for Gwen Verdon, and an opportunity for Bob Fosse to showcase Verdon in as many show-stopping numbers as possible. (One number, a ballet in which the Verdon character recalls her past as a prostitute, was famously cut by the producers after the number caused a scandal out of town.) 

Also, New Girl in Town is a bit of an odd duck, and never really seems to find its central tone. The show is a musical adaptation of Anna Christie by Eugene O'Neill. As you can imagine, a musical based on an O'Neill play is unlikely to make for a lighthearted musical comedy. (Although O'Neill's one upbeat work, Ah, Wilderness!, would become Take Me Along a few years after New Girl in Town premiered.) But New Girl in Town, at least in the slightly altered form in which the Irish Rep is performing the piece, doesn't have enough gravitas to really qualify as a musical play, along the lines of Show Boat or Carousel.

Under the direction of Charlotte Moore, this production of New Girl in Town comes off forced. There's not a genuinely believable performance to be found here, although there are certainly some top-notch performers, including Margaret Loesser Robinson as Anna, and Danielle Ferland as Marthy, a role originated by Thelma Ritter. But even Robinson and Ferland come off affected, although flashes of verisimilitude occasionally break though. In the role of Anna's suitor, Patrick Cummings seems especially artificial, though he does come off far better when he's singing. Cummings' Irish accent sounded particularly false, as did the Swedish accent of Cliff Bemis as Anna's father.

On the plus side, the production design (sets by James Morgan, costumes by China Lee, ligfhting by Mary Jo Dondlinger) features some rather effective atmospheric elements, particularly during the scenes at sea. And the score by first-time Broadway composer/lyricist Bob Merrill has tremendous melodic appeal, particularly in the lovely "Did You Close Your Eyes?," which features elements that seem to presage Merrill's finest score, that of Carnival!. 

But, again, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the Prospect Theater Company and the Irish Rep for giving us a chance to see these historic but mostly forgotten shows. Perversely, they've also given us the opportunity to see why the shows have been forgotten in the first place.

Reviews - New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) - Part 4

Here's the fourth and final installment of my capsule reviews from this year's New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). Click here to read my first, second, and third installments. My sincere thanks to the good folks at NYMF for allowing me such open and ready access to all of the NYMF shows.

It's thanks to NYMF and the other new-works projects around the country that so many people who are interested in writing new musicals are able to find the support they need to bring their ideas to the stage. Whenever someone trots out that tired old bit about musical theater being dead, or on its last legs, I think of the hundreds upon hundreds of submissions to NYMF, the National Music Theater Conference at the O'Neill Theater Center, the New York International Fringe Festival, the Festival of New Artists at the Goodspeed, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT), not to mention the numerous regional and nonprofit companies that actively seek and nurture new works. The economic model may have changed since the "golden age" of musicals, but there's still plenty of interest not only in creating musical theater, but in attending it as well.

Sure, most of these shows won't make it to Broadway, or even anywhere close to it. But if it weren't for these programs, we might never have seen such interesting and entertaining new works as Urinetown, Next to Normal, [title of show], Altar Boyz, The Great American Trailer Park Musical, Gutenberg! The Musical, Yank!, Avenue Q, Nine, In the Heights, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Children of Eden, The Drowsy Chaperone, Songs for a New World, I Love You Because, and Striking 12.

I can't wait until next year's festival.

Zapata is a rather curious concoction with music and lyrics by Peter Edwards, book by Peter and Ana Edwards. The show attempts to draw a parallel between the revolutionary activities of Emiliano Zapata and the Occupy Wall Street movement. The result, while well-meaning, is strident, clumsy, and forced. It feels as though the show had been in development long before the Occupy protests, and then the authors, spying an opportunity to give the show modern resonance, tacked on a present-day prologue and epilogue. The connection seems tenuous: Zapata's story is one of violent uprising against brutal oppressors. At one point in the show, one of the characters says, "Violence is unavoidable. It's the only language these dogs understand." So, how exactly is the Occupy movement supposed to use Zapata's story as inspiration? The best that the writers can seem to come up with is the lame blandishment to "keep on fighting." The show even gives one of the characters a ludicrous "vision" of a future righteous struggle (i.e. Occupy), along with the exhortation that "our fight made it possible." Beyond the questionable nature of the message, the show itself is a bit of a mess. The story itself is compelling, but it gets mired in clunky expository dialog, manufactured drama, contrived resolutions, and plot threads that seemingly appear out of nowhere. The characters are mostly two-dimensional, and frequently make choices that have scant justification in the events as described. The lyrics are rife with cliches ("I'd rather die a thousand deaths than let my people down") and uninspired proclamations ("Children make this life worth living"). The show's music is not without merit, reflecting a stirring sense of the Mexican musical idiom, and the movement and battle sequences (choreographed by Luis Salgado) have a certain dramatic effectiveness, including the neat theatrical device of a rhythmic dancer who appears to portend significant moments of violence and death. But Zapata has quite a few rewrites ahead of it if the show is going to have any sort of commercial future.

Another NYMF show that has a rewrite or two ahead of it is The Groove Factory, with book by Chad Kessler and David James Boyd, music and lyrics by David James Boyd. The story involves a sort of Willy Wonka-inspired quest to win tickets to the big 1999 New Year's Eve party at the titular Groove Factory, a New York City dance club. The show's central character is Chazz Goodhart (groan), a young gay man who wants to escape from the trailer park and find fame and success as a club DJ. What really kills the buzz of The Groove Factory is the whiplash-inducing change of tone at the end of the show. The first 70 minutes or so seems to celebrate the drug-fueled, superficial club lifestyle, but then, as if to expiate its hedonistic sins, the show tries to shoehorn in a tragic, cautionary tale at the end. The Groove Factory wants to have its crystal meth and eat it, too. It starts as a sort of campy romp, which is not completely without humor or appeal, and there are some interesting characterizations along the way. But once we get to the club, the show degrades considerably. We then witness a tiresome parade of songs celebrating various drugs: ecstasy, methamphetamine, Special K, etc. The show then concludes with its baleful twist and some bland moralizing ("Music is the only drug I need"), followed by an artificially upbeat final number about this being the "best of times," despite the dire proceedings we've just witnessed. Let me be clear here: I'm not objecting to the apparent message of the show. I'm taking issue with the way the show is currently executed, which doesn't come near to doing its let's-get-high-on-life credo any justice.

One of the most powerful and promising shows to emerge from NYMF this year was Shelter, with book and lyrics by Brittany Bullen, music by Brittany Bullen and Newell Bullen. As the name might suggest, the show takes place in a women's homeless shelter and weaves together the stories of a number of different women, both those who populate the shelter and those who work there. At this stage in the show's development, its key assets are the passion and power of these women and their stories, and some dynamite character ballads. The story is strong and the characters are compelling, and there's a great deal of very real, very raw writing at the center of the show. Shelter definitely needs some shaping and streamlining: there are a few too many characters for the show to adequately develop, the dramatic intent of some of the songs is unclear, and the character motivations don't always make sense. There were also some significant tone problems in the NYMF version of the show, including the character of the shelter's cook, who seemed like an artificial attempt at comic relief. Also, the number that opened act two, in which a trio of two-dimensionally perky saleswomen try to recruit the shelter women into selling Avon-like cosmetics, wasn't working at all. (The authors tell me that both the cook character and the cosmetics song have been cut.) But there's a really powerful piece at the core of Shelter, and I'm very eager to see not only how the show develops, but also how the Bullens continue to develop as musical-theater artists.

 

Reviews - New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) - Part 3

Here's my third of what will be four installments of capsule reviews from the 2012 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). Click here for my first and second installments.

One of the break-out hits of NYMF this year, at least in terms of attendance, was Re-Animator: The Musical. The show's festival popularity was likely based on the name recognition of the H.P Lovecraft title, the 1985 cult film based on the book, and the presence in the cast of "Cheers" alum George Wendt. Re-Animator is yet another in a line of intentionally campy musicals trying to recapture the magic of Little Shop of Horrors or Bat Boy. Instead, we get something a bit closer to Evil Dead: The Musical or The Toxic Avenger, at least in terms of the quality of the writing (i.e. low). Re-Animator got off to a shaky start with an opening number of which I wasn't able to understand a word. Perhaps this was a sound-level issue, or the loud, lifeless synthesizer accompaniment, but the dull drone of the tuneless music itself wasn't helping. The score by one Mark Nutter exhibits little if any compositional flare, although some of the songs did occasionally approach something resembling a melody. There were a few numbers that exhibited periodic flashes of wit and tunefulness, for instance one involving a medical student accusing his professor of plagiarism, and another involving an autopsy. But, as the show stands, its main assets lie in some reasonably funny set pieces and in the potential for special effects, some of which were already quite impressive, in particular a zombified mad scientist carrying his own severed head. One final note of irritation, there were clear and obvious shills in the audience emitting painfully obvious forced laughter. (Note to once and future writers: Please don't do this. If your show works, the audience will provide the approbation. If it doesn't, you're only embarrassing yourself when the one person laughing is your Aunt Marie.)

Foreverman, with book, music and lyrics by Brett M. Bolles, was among the more sweepingly ambitious NYMF shows this year: a gothic romance with a heavy dose of science fiction, involving two doctors who discover an elixir that grants immortality and the cautionary tale that results. The story has merit, and the show holds a decent amount of promise, particularly in terms of the pleasant, melodic score. But the libretto is full of holes, particularly with respect to the time frame. The show bounces back and forth between the 17th and 19th centuries, relying on supertitle projections to keep the audience temporally oriented. Much of the dialog is of the ploddingly expository kind, but perhaps in most need of fixing are the character motivations, which are downright inscrutable at times. It's not always clear who knows what, about whom, and how they found out about it. For instance, the two central central doctors have a falling out at the end of act one, which is supposed to drive the rest of the story. But it's not entirely clear why they're mad at each other. At various times, characters catch on to what's going on with the whole immortality thing, and the explanations often strain credulity. In fact, there are so many unexplained coincidences and unmotivated character choices that the name of the show could be Wait, What!? The lyrics are bland at best, at worst inscrutable, with an overabundance of clichés and tortured metaphors. One of the doctors sings about his lady love, "I would trade it all for a vial of her name...I'd give up everything for a single drop of her." I guess this has something to do with the elixir at the center of the plot, but I'll be damned if I can parse that sentence. If Foreverman has any future, it's going to need a fairly significant rewrite. Perhaps Mr. Bolles should stick to the music, which again is fairly strong, and bring someone else in to help with the words.

 

A Letter to Harvey Milk was one of the big winners this year of the 2012 NYMF Awards for Excellence, including the award for best book, a shared award for best lyrics, and performance awards for stars Leslie Kritzer and Jeff Keller. For the most part, the show deserved these awards. The show has a book by Jerry James, music by Laura l. Kramer, lyrics by Ellen M. Schwartz, and is based on a short story by Lesléa Newman. The story involves a retired kosher butcher (Keller) who takes up a writing class and the relationship that he develops with his writing teacher (Kritzer). In the course of the show, we discover things about both characters in a way that draws a profound parallel between the gay-rights struggle of the 1970s and the Jewish experience in the Holocaust. This may sound ponderous, but Harvey Milk is extraordinarily moving, if a tad flawed in its current form. The characters are charming and sympathetic, and the show works really well when it's heartfelt. It's during the moments of abundant hoary humor that the show sometimes falters, although in this production the masterful performers usually find ways to make even the clumsiest material work. Keller is simply outstanding as Harry Weinberg, the butcher, particularly at the very end of the show when all the story threads come together and we witness a devastating episode from Harry's past. Leslie Kritzer makes for a wonderfully understated but emotionally rich foil for Harry. The score features some remarkably lovely songs, including "Frannie's Hands," in which Harry describes the charms of his late wife. The score goes a tad awry in some of the comic numbers, particularly "Turning the Tables," a number in a Jewish deli, complete with an overdose of hoary Yiddish jokes. Some of the dramatic moments in the show need better setup, and one crucial reveal at the end of the show was met with unintended laughter from the audience the day I saw the show. But, overall, A Letter to Harvey Milk is one of two shows from this year's NYMF (the other being He's Not Himself) that I'm most eager to see advance to the next stage, wherever that might be.

Review - Carousel at the Goodspeed Opera House

Here's the latest of my reviews for TheaterMania. This time it's a production of Carousel at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn.

There are those who think, in terms of the innovations that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein brought together to create the undisputed watershed that was Oklahoma, that Carousel was even better. Stronger emotional content. More ambitious and successful integration of scene, song and dance. In general, just an overall better show. I happen to be one of these people.

Does the current Goodspeed production do Carousel justice? Click through here to find out.