“Master Harold...and the Boys” (through December 4, 2016) Signature Center, at 480 W. 42nd Street.

---

L-R:Sahr Ngaujah, LeonAddison Brown, Noah Robbins (photo: Monique Carboni)

“Master Harold...and the Boys” may not be the best of the many plays that South African playwright Athol Fugard has written over the past fifty years, but it is the first one that I saw when it opened on Broadway in 1982. Since then I can rate such gems as “A Lesson From Aloes,” “Sizwe Banzi is Dead,” and “The Road to Mecca” more highly in his canon. But that doesn’t make “Master Harold...and the Boys” any less a memorable play worthy of revival. And this one at the Signature Theater stands high with a fine cast and under the knowing direction of the playwright (who also directed the original production).

The tragedy of South Africa’s embrace of apartheid and its effect on a people who needed a good deal of consciousness raising and love to bridge those ridiculous man made boundaries is the theme but not the story of this impassioned play. As are many of Fugard’s plays, this one is a particularly courageous attempt to expose the root cause of hate among men ten years before a new government would officially end apartheid.

The play’s setting is South Africa in 1950 and it brings together universal truths through the interaction of three characters who discover painfully and irrevocably how seeds planted in childhood bear fruit in maturity. The loves and emotions of these three sensitive human beings are entwined in a relationship that is destined to become a stage on which are exposed the weeds of bigotry. But it is a place in which we also see a blossoming of understanding and tolerance.

Mostly free of pompous platitudes but rich with metaphor, “Master Harold...and the Boys” is a powerful and compassionate story of Hally (Noah Robbins) a seventeen year Afrikaner who finds himself at the crossroads of childhood and manhood unable to make a comfortable adjustment in his relationship with two black middle-aged waiters he has grown up with in his parents’ tea room in Port Elizabeth and for which set designer Christopher H. Barreca has created the realistic ambiance.

Sam (Leon Addison Brown) and Willie (Sahr Ngaujah) have been Hally’s second family since he was an infant. The delicately balanced relationship between them has been kept more or less subliminal until a crises occurs that detail the crumbling of Hally’s character, . Unable to cope with the knowledge that the Boys have mentored him through the years and nurtured a kinship that their society is not able to tolerate, Hally stupidly and irrationally regresses to a state of despair and more regrettably ignorance when he is forced to deal with the unexpected return from the hospital of his disabled and alcoholic father (unseen).

As the story’s provocateur, Hally is a complex mixture of immaturity and intelligence. Noah Robbins’ stature is on the small side but it works as an intriguing center of politicized and social power particularly in contrast to the hefty bodies and subservient positions of his co-stars. Robbins, who made a terrific impression in the excellent but short-lived revival of “Brighten Beach Memoirs,” is perfect as the conflicted Hally. His emotional outbursts and humiliating attack on Sam are painful and as stunning to see as were hearing the audible gasps of the audience at the performance I saw.

Brown, a fine actor whose performances were notable in two other Fugard plays previously presented at the Signature - “The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek” and “The Train Driver” - brings a restrained sense of dignity to his role as he recoils from Hally’s taunts. At first devastated, then as if strengthened by some inner self awareness, he rallies and becomes a man in possession of his soul.  

Ngauhah, who wowed audiences with his performance in the title role of “Fela!,” is especially interesting to watch as Willie, a man whose tempered vulnerability becomes painful to witness as he sees the ones he loves the most sever the ties that have bound them. I may have some quibbles about the amount of expositional information that Fugard offers to set the stage for the explosive denouement in his ninety minute play. Overall this is a play of hope written with extraordinary power and insight by a playwright who has brought true distinction to the Broadway and Off Broadway stage for over fifty years.

“Master Harold...and the Boys”

The Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, at 480 W. 42nd Street.

"Holiday Inn" at the Roundabout Theatre Company Studio 54

---

 
Corbin Bleu, Lora Lee Gayer, Bryce Pinkham and Ensemble (Photo: Joan Marcus)

It is safe to assume that there is always a little trepidation, some anxiety and perhaps even worry that a stage adaptation of a modest classic film musical will run the risk of being not only patently quaint but also seriously out-of-touch with life as we know it. Put aside your fears as the 1942 film musical “Holiday Inn,” with its wondrously melodic score by Irving Berlin, has been beautifully restored/re-envisioned by director Gordon Greenberg and co-writer Chad Hodge for the Roundabout Theatre Company. To be sure, there is a quaintness to the basic and barely credible story that has been updated to post World War II. But there are just enough infusions and inferences with a contemporary resonance that will appeal to young audiences who may not be bringing along the nostalgia that will inevitably come with older audience members.

The plot follows the travails of singer Jim (Bryce Pinkham) after he has a parting of the ways with dancer Ted (Corbin Bleu) his b.f. and professional partner. Jim decides to give up showbiz for a less stressful life buying and maintaining a working farm (really?) So what is a smart but desperate guy to do when the crops fail and the mortgage is due? Of course, he turns to his terping and chirping Broadway pals for help in transforming the dilapidated homestead into a snazzy retreat with entertainment....but only on the holidays (really?) Jim gets a little help and more than a little romance from former farm owner and school teacher Linda (Lora Lee Gayer) whose former aspirations of a career in the theater are suddenly re-kindled.

Pinkham sings beautifully and is again displaying the disarming and attractive qualities that made us root for him in “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.” Bleu is a real find for those of us who don’t know him from “High School Musical” and “Dancing with the Stars.” As the sweetly rakish Ted, Bleu rips up the stage with his exuberantly stylish dancing to “You’re Easy to Dance with” and literally creating fireworks with “Let’s Say it with Fireworks.” The absolutely beguiling, multi-talented Gayer is a delight as Linda. Her silvery soprano and lovely presence is deftly deployed in song and dance throughout the show.

The best part of this sunny feel-good show is the abundance of tuneful Berlin songs, some of which are not in the original film. “Easter Parade,” “Happy Holiday,” and “White Christmas” are now joined by “Blue Skies,” “Heat Wave,” “Shaking the Blues Away,” “It’s a Lovely Day Today” and more treasures from the Berlin songbook.

With all those great songs, also be prepared for some great and inventive dancing. Choreographer Denis Jones is full of surprises using an assortment props and special effects (they should be surprises) that bring to mind some of the imaginative dance numbers created by filmdom’s Busby Berkeley. It won’t be long into the show before you are shaking your blues away with a splendid cast that has captured the era, the time and place with the same panache as has set designer Anna Louizos and costume designer Alejo Vietti. . .oh, those Easter bonnets! 

Standout among the supporting cast are Megan Lawrence as the smart-alecky resident handywoman, Megan Sikora as Ted’s sassy and brassy blonde fiance and dancing partner, and the terrific young Morgan Gao who is making his Broadway debut as the delivery boy. But it’s director Greenberg and choreographer Jones who have delivered the real goods. "Holiday Inn" is undoubtedly the most gloriously gift-wrapped holiday treat on Broadway. 

"Holiday Inn" 

Roundabout Theatre Company Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street 

Through January 15, 2017

"Falsettos" at the Walter Kerr Theatre

Christian Borle and Adnrew Rannells  photo: Joan Marcus

Time and space shouldn’t make all that difference in how we respond to a highly regarded show like “Falsettos,” the laudable composite of William Finn’s two one-act musicals “March of the Falsettos” and “Falsettoland.” that played on Broadway in 1992. Here we are almost a quarter century later and the Lincoln Center Theater revival now at the Walter Kerr Theatre is a commendable if not appreciably more satisfying than was the previous production.  Perhaps it is the casting - all fine performers, or maybe the direction by James Lapine - he knows what he’s doing. But  there is something remote and plastic about what is on stage and what is also happening on the stage within the somewhat gimmicky unit setting of large movable play-blocks that are set against the cut-out silhouette of N.Y.C. skyline as designed by David Rockwell.

Praised at the time for contributing to the continuing sophistication of the American musical, “Falsettos” reveals a libretto (co-authored by Lapine) that is brittle and witty as it also addresses some pretty complicated dramatic issues. However, for some strange and inexplicable reason, I never found myself becoming as involved as I had before even in regional productions with the plight of the show’s rather unremarkable, if also voracious, characters. Despite their individual paths through a plot being filled to the brim with varying doses of desperation, duty, romance and, of course the pursuit of happiness, we tend to see them in this staging more as representative rather than specific.

So the question remains as to why was I never involved in their lives and their loving? Lapine’s direction is brisk and nicely enhanced by the lively choreography by Spencer Liff as we are taken back to that benign pre 1980s of recklessly ego-indulged sexual preference, as well as to the beginning of a tremulous, death- harboring new decade. If “Falsettos” is no somber message musical, what is it? It is often funny and more often a frenetic fusion of one unorthodox urban family’s life. It is also a musical of life-styles and life cycles.

At the center of the story is Marvin, a married homosexual whose extra-marital romantic indulgences involve his wife, his son, his psychiatrist, his lover and even the nice lesbians who live down the hall. It is, however, not so complicated or convoluted to make you scratch your head or lose your place in the action. And let’s praise Finn’s savvy score for defining every one of idiosyncratic characters and they are jet propelled through the harangue-filled terrain.

While attempting to fully understand the behavior  the egocentric and not especially likable Marvin (Christian Borle) who wants out in order to live in with his equally egotistical male lover Whizzer (Andrew Rannells), we are asked to consider the actions of the neurotic psychiatrist Mendel (Brandon Uranowitz) who discovers he has suddenly fallen in love with Marvin’s wife Trina (Stephanie J. Block). Noticeably disturbed by the sudden change in partners is Marvin and Trina’s son Jason (Anthony Rosenthal), an otherwise wise and resilient 11 year-old. Jason finds himself hurtled into analysis himself and into a situation he must face with a hastened maturity.

Just as Act I whizzes along its wacky course, a sobering mist envelops Act II. We first hear about the AIDS epidemic  from the family friend and lesbian doctor (Tracie Thoms). We get the first tremor of things to come as shares her fears about the disease (“something bad is happening”) with her lover (Betsy Wolfe), a ditsy caterer at work perfecting nouvelle Bar Mitzvah cuisine. The year is 1981. Marvin has broken up with Whizzer, Mendel is living with Trina, Jason is preparing for his Bar Mitzvah and an epidemic touches their lives.

“Falsettos” has its time of sadness but it has a bright, easy-on-the-ears score that supplies the show’s dramatic weight. In fact, it remains for the songs to keep the characters from being simply types and somewhat one-dimensional. Borle, who just recently won a Tony for his role in “Something Rotten” is, as he is meant to be, mainly unassuming as the conflicted Marvin, whose ideas of a happily extended family are not immediately shared by the others. As Trina, Block, deploys the obligatory gamut of emotions singing the angst-driven singspiel “I’m Breaking Down” in which she does just that. Rannells, who deserved his Tony nomination as the Elder  Price in “The Book of Mormon,” struts and sings with assurance until he succumbs as the ill-fated Whizzer.

Although young Mr. Rosenthal is making his Broadway debut, he was in the national tours of “Newsies” and was impressive last season in “A Christmas Story” at the Paper Mill Playhouse, has no difficulty holding center stage with two of the show’s most complex arias “My Father’s a Homo” and “Miracle of Judaism.” The character of Mendel, the by-love-possessed psychoanalyst is earmarked for neurotic shtick and gets it from Uranowitz. It’s the overall neurotic shtick, however, that eventually takes its toll on the overwhelming sadness at the heart of “Falsettos.”

“Falsettos”

Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 West 48th Street

"The Front Page" at Broadhurst Theatre

---

John Slattery and Nathan Lane
Photo: Julieta Cervantes

I suspect it will be very hard for anyone not to have a good time at the terrific revival of “The Front Page” now at the Broadhurst Theatre. And that’s the opinion of someone who has seen it perhaps too many times in one version or another. Maybe in 1928 when Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote their frenetic farce about a bunch of scurrilous, cutthroat newspaper men, audiences and critics alike were eager to respond to the play’s steady stream of improbable, implausible action and it calculatingly rough language.

In today’s world, half the dialogue would be considered either offensive, off-limits or politically incorrect. Today, however, audiences (and I include myself) are more apt to simply marvel at the sheer mechanics of a play that can juggle almost two dozen characters in a circus of melodramatic skirmishes without shortchanging their purpose, identity or personality.

And when you consider that director Jack O’Brien has also brought together some of the best characters actors in the business you can just sit back in awe while you laugh your head off for two and one-half rip-roaring hours. I’ve seen two film versions (one, a distaff variation “His Girl Friday” with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant ) and a number of stage revivals including a splendid musical adaptation “Windy City” that played the Paper Mill Playhouse in 1984. As intended, they were all grating, over emphatic and absolutely sensational in their own way.

So what is it that continues to make “The Front Page” a wonderful show? I don’t really know except to start with what we’ve got right now. O’Brien has found the perfect balance between outright lunacy and lampooned life, as he permits the play to speed along on its brakeless, often reckless course to who-cares-where. We are suddenly in an unscrupulous journalistic world that comes alive with paradoxical insidiousness.

True, the slam-bang comings and goings in the seedy newsroom within a Chicago criminal court building more often suggests the antics in a Feydeau farce than the scenario for a quasi-realistic peek into the fourth estate. But in each sharply drawn character there is a natural pulse that never betrays the comedy nor compromises the darker reality of the play.

One amazing achievement is that John Slattery, as big shot reporter Hildy Johnson, gives us a cynical mercenary character with whom to empathize. No cheap laughs with Slattery as he plies his matured arrogance and expertise against a roomful of disarmingly self-serving vultures. As Johnson’s on-again, off-again boss Walter Burns, Nathan Lane virtually dominates the second and third acts (yes three and you need them to slow down your increasing pulse rate) with a towering, comical portrayal of a hungry managing editor whose insincerity is second to his almost barbarous ethics.

In spite of the play’s impenetrable convolutions, nothing could be less important than the plot which toys with the traumas of an escaped murdered, a hooker with a heart of gold, a pair of crooked politicians (What?????), a distressed fiancee and her mother and a policeman who theorizes naively on criminal psychology.

The memorable scene between the mayor (Dann Florek) and the sheriff (John Goodman) which shifts the balance of powers of officialdom from one to the other is a classic depiction of moronic incompetency. And when the mayor tries to buy the loyalty of a feather-brained messenger (as punctuated with hilarious spurts of vacuous responsiveness by the sublime Robert Morse) with a job offer of dubious distinction, you can hardly hear the dialogue over the laughter.

Halley Feiffer and Holland Taylor are splendid respectively as the nonplused fiancee and her mother who unwittingly becomes embroiled in the chaos. Standout among the otherwise hard-as-nails reporters is Jefferson Mays, who, as the effete, hypochondriacal columnist garners plenty of howls spraying his phone with antiseptic and stoically bearing the brunt of his colleagues derisions. We happily bear the brunt of a comedy that takes no prisoners...and makes no excuses for laughing at a world that was once clearly black and white and (fill in the blank) all over.

"The Front Page" (through February 5, 2017) 

Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th Street

"Les Liaisons Dangereuses" at the Booth Theatre

Janet McTerr and Liev Shreiber
Photo: Joan Marcus

When La Marquise de Merteuil (Janet McTeer) greets her niece Cecile (Elena Kampouris) with “Well , my dear, so you’ve left the convent for good,” at the beginning of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” one can only guess from McTeer’s faint smirk what she has in store for the young innocent. The stage of the Booth Theater has been drably dressed to evoke various salons and bedrooms and the countryside in 18th century Paris in conspicuous states of decay by set designer Tom Scutt.

It is in those venues that wild sexual abandon, amoral deception and carnal intrigue are designated to run more than a few of the characters, aside from the niece, into a climactic state of rack and ruin. The Donmar Warehouse production of Christopher Hampton’s play, based on the 1782 epistolary novel by Chonderlos de Laclos, makes no bones about its desire to titillate, tantalize and torment its audience (voyeurs). The sexual exploits of a vengeful Marquise, aided by her equally depraved ex-lover, the Vicomte de Valmont (Liev Scheiber) are so sinister and compulsively dramatized that the entertainment’s effect is close to revulsion as to pleasure.

If the Marquise herself is quick to admit near the end of the play that “pleasure without love lead to revulsion” the revelation cannot, nor is it intended to, prevent a denouement of insanity, death and irreversible moral decay. Unfortunately, under the egregiously listless direction of Josie Rourke, these decadent aristocrats, with their voracious sexual appetites and unconscionable motivations, seem less like the archetypes of today’s power-possessed and manipulative movers and shakers than appear as a robotic company of mannequins that has been set in motion to get from one conquest to the next.

As the liaisons moved from the settee to the lounge to the bed, I sat back in comfort  knowing I was in for three hours of what may be called safe sex. If I can admit that I found the play repellent, I have to also admit that the performances did nothing to change my response  to it. Liev Shreiber is one of our great American actors as he proved with his most recent performances in “A View from the Bridge,” “Talk Radio,” and “Glenngarry Glen Ross,” not to ignore his brilliant work in the film “Spotlight.”  So let me simply say about his seemingly distant and distracted performance that it regrettably suits Le Vicomte’s remark “It’s beyond my control.”

The Marquise, consumed with jaded amorality, self-described as a “virtuoso of deceit” in these crimes of the heart is played with only a very few indications of it by the otherwise superb British actress Janet McTeer, whose also indifferent work here happily does not erase the memory of her sublime performances on Broadway in “Mary Stuart,” and “A Doll’s House.”

Sorry to report that the encounters and calculated plotting between these two are likely to leave you more bored than involved. And their involvement with their prey is likely to inspire just about anything but arousal or even interest. With all due respect for the Hampton’s dialogue which is neither too arch nor too classically remote, I found his literary effort, as I did in the far superior 1987 production with Lindsay Duncan and the late Alan Rickman, to make every epigram, innuendo, double entendre and nuance of speech resonate with contemporary immediacy just a bit too obvious.

While the Vicomte admits, “It’s only the best swimmer who drown,” the innocent victims who drown in this lugubrious cesspool are legion. Elena Kampouris, as Cecil, is one of the more curious characters to watch as she evolves from a naive convent girl to eager disciple d’amour. Birgitte Hjort Sorensen, as Madame de Tourvel is neurotic enough as the disturbed and infatuated woman of unwavering morals and religious fervor.

The parallels of human exploitation in our own society are unmistakable. I especially liked La Marquise’s arrogant pronouncement to the Vicomte, “I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.” A few noteworthy supporting performances include Ora Jones as Cecile’s gullible mother and Mary Beth Pell as the Vicomte’s world-weary aunt. Even as the Marquise states, in a rare moment of insightful ennui that, “the century is drawing to a close,” we can sense that it really an entire epoch, if most specifically this production, that is imploding. 

"Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (through January 22, 2017)

Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th Street