"Miss Saigon" Opened March 23, 2017 at the Broadway Theater

               
Alistair Brammer and Eva Noblezada

Jon Jon Briones
Photos: (Matthew Murphy)

It’s back and just as heart-wrenching, spectacular and exciting as ever this time cast with respect for its pivotal Asian character - The Engineer - played by a terrifically talented Philippine Jon Jon Briones. Playing the title character is the absolutely radiant Eva Noblezada. But first: About a century ago writer John Luther Long wrote a short story that playwright David Belasco turned into a play that composer Puccini turned into an opera that has been going on ever since. Although a flop when it first appeared in opera form in1904 (Cameron Mackintosh where were you then?) “Madama Butterfly” has proven, over the long haul, to be one of the most enduring and best loved operas.

Its story of a Japanese geisha who falls in love with an American lieutenant has his child and commits suicide when he returns years later with his American bride is a sure-fire tear-jerker. Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg (the composers of “Les Miserables”) revived the tragic story and called it “Miss Saigon.” Yes, this is a revival of the mainly sung-through production that caused such a brouhaha at its American premiere in 1991. This, when American Actor’s Equity and an Asian-American Actors’ Alliance feuded and fussed over the casting of a Britisher Jonathan Price as an Asian.

Bravo to the creative and artistic team for stepping up and supporting the inherent racial integrity of this pop-opera and for bringing to our shores the recent London-originated revival.  With its lush and melodic score, “Miss Saigon” remains an ambitious and stunningly effective musical even as it also borders on the overwhelming. It has been seamlessly and extravagantly directed for all its sentimental worth by Laurence Connor. And that helicopter has landed once again in the Broadway Theatre where it may very well be grounded for at least ten years, as was the original production.

As you may already know, the updated plot takes place during events surrounding the fall of Saigon in1975. The story involves us in the ill-fated love affair between a young Vietnamese girl and an American soldier who are caught up in the corrupted society of a city torn apart by war. As with “Les Miz,” “Miss Saigon” is sung with the prescribed resonance and power by its stars and a large company. And in keeping with operatic tradition, there is plenty of pompously circumstantial parading by hordes of marching soldiers and acrobatic dancers called upon to celebrate the third anniversary of the re-unification of the renamed Ho chi Minh City. Credit this to the stirring staging and athletic choreography by Bob Avian.

If “Miss Saigon” seems musically more mature, its lyrics as translated by Richard Maltby Jr. and by Michael Mahler from the French, are simply okay and happily not given to destroying the rarely compromised dramatic structure. They certainly support the principals in their ongoing angst.

Briones, as the Engineer, the entrepreneurial Saigon to Bangkok pimp, is brilliantly sleazy, slippery and oozing with decadently cultivated panache. We almost root for him to get that American visa he dreams of. Through the artistry of production designers Totie Driver and Matt Kinley and lighting designer Bruno Poet, the Engineer’s extravagant dreams become chilling and thrilling fantasies as do the more intimate and real war-torn settings created for the lovers.

It can’t be overstated how beautifully the petite Noblezada, as the doomed Kim, touches us with her sensitive performance and her clearly spun, octave-vaulting  soprano voice. Although the good-looking Alistair Brammer has light tenor voice, he gives a heavy-weight performance as her soldier lover Chris. In support, Nicholas Christopher, as his unsentimental army buddy, Katie Rose Clarke, as the American wife, and Devin Haw as Kim’s rejected Vietnamese  suitor are each terrific as they become poignantly caught up in the emotional and political turbulence that comprises this admirable and affecting musical.

Reviewed March 28, 2017

"The Price" at the American Airlines Theatre through May 7, 2017

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                                             Mark Ruffalo and Danny DeVito
                                             photo: Joan Marcus

                                              

Like a long overdue rematch between two heavy-weight contenders, the resurrected conflict between two estranged brothers in “Arthur Miller’s The Crucible” remains, as always, an entertaining but also long-winded slice of life. A good cast - Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shalhoub, Jessica Hecht and a sensational Danny DeVito - are undoubtedly giving their all to director Terry Kinney for the Roundabout Theatre Company.

Faced by family circumstance to come to grips with the past as well as the future, one brother - an unmotivated and discouraged 50 year-old policeman about to be retired - and the other - a hyper-motivated and successful surgeon reconnecting with life after a breakdown - are thrown into a memory-filled arena as real as it is theatrical.

And although theatrical realism, so as not to be boring is often seen as an intensification of life, it is to Miller’s credit, as well as to the credit of director Kinney, that this very human but agonizing play succeeds not so much with crafty intensifications but more with its subjective implications.

The implications in “The Price” are quite simple. it is that whatever personal motives we have and whatever choices we make in life are first and lastly not blamable. Having forfeited his college career in order to care for a father who had been both emotionally and financially crippled by the Depression, the cop finds himself, 16 years after the father’s death, bargaining in the attic of a soon-to-be-demolished Manhattan brownstone with a 90 year-old second hand furniture dealer.

Left alone by his anxious wife to negotiate with this “ethical” wheeler-dealer on a price for all the furnishings and nostalgic bric-a-brac, the cop is suddenly confronted with the appearance of his brother. The play - a series of circuitous and largely veiled excuses and other reasons for their estrangement - implies more than it discloses. As we discover from the verbal jousting, the truth of the past is generally clouded by their emotions.

There is no lack of humor. Until he is relegated to a back room, the old appraiser referees the opening rounds with his philosophically profound grab bag of New York-styled Jewishisms. As the repressed skeletons in the attic begin their dance, the age old ritual of fraternal misunderstandings is played out with great theatricality. It is difficult not to respond as our sympathies change from one brother to another.

There is an ever increasing poignancy in Ruffalo’s performance as the cop as he brings us deeper in his reasons for his personal and career-altering sacrifices. Shalhoub keeps us glued to the other brother’s sometimes condescending but always pragmatic sense of self righteousness. But it remains for the absolutely dynamite DeVito to earn our total affection as the appraiser who can still find time to sit down and eat a hard-boiled egg. It probably the role itself that keeps Hecht from being able to unlock the true feelings within her complicated character.

Kinney has invested this soul-searching play with the patience that it probably deserves even when our patience with its issues wears a bit thin. The usually brilliant set designer Derek Malone placed a unnecessary y burden on the play by hanging pristine-looking furniture from the rafters and compromising the play’s stake in reality. Perhaps a little dust and few cobwebs would have helped.  

"The Glass Menagerie" at the Belasco Theatre. Opened March 9, 2017

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Joe Mantello, Sally Fields, Finn Wittrock
Photo: Julieta Cervantes

There is greatness on the stage of the Belasco Theatre, but it isn’t what has been done to Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece “The Glass Menagerie.” I’ve come to the conclusion having now seen this new consideration directed by the otherwise adventurous director Sam Gold, that you can’t kill this 72 year-old play written by the greatest playwright that America ever produced. You can turn it inside out, flip it upside down, strip it bare, or deconstruct it (to use contemporary lingo) but the words linger on. They resonate as a delicate, luminescent and loving work of sculpture just like the miniature glass menagerie that absorbs the fantasizing and soulful mind of the crippled Laura.

If ever a Williams play needed honesty truth and an earthy reality to enhance and balance Williams’ unabashedly poetic and lyrical indulgences, “The Glass Menagerie” is it. Unlike the only other truly great memory play Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” which is steeped in a masculine consciousness    the fate of “Menagerie” is sealed by an Amanda who can exist in a timeless feminine consciousness that grittily survives a world and its problems without any loss of romantic illusion.

As she has proved in the film “Steel Magnolias” Academy Award-winner Sally Field is quite capable of being a realistic daughter of the confederacy. That Field was able to remove from my imagining for the time that she was on stage (based also on what I have read about Laurette Taylor’s original performance in 1945) and of other interpreters of the role of Amanda says a lot. She does, without a false note, embodies it with enough of the reality and essence of Williams’ own suggestion - “A little woman of great but confused vitality, clinging frantically to another time and place. She is not paranoiac, but her life is paranoia.”

Fields allows the character’s pathetic foolishness to bloom even as she sashays about in her let-out pink cotillion gown and as she slips into the shadows in a staging in which shadows are about as much theatrical enhancement, especially when her daughter’s gentleman caller arrives. Field’s unquestionably captures and combines the almost heroic stoicism of the Southern ex-belle with that inbred antebellum belief in gentility and charm to the bitter end.

Although the physically challenged by muscular dystrophy Madison Ferris spends most of her scenes in a wheel chair and has to deal with some problematic, but not insurmountable activities, she performs reasonably well as a decidedly non-ethereal Laura. This is a Laura who is physically sturdy and basically secure in her own illusions, but also somewhat of a contradiction in that Laura should presumably in a Williams’ reality, as fragile as her glass sculptures.

Williams’ “memory play” needs a narrator that can convey the poet’s twin worlds of fact and dream. Joe Mantello is fine enough, if cast a bit older than we are used to seeing, as the spokesman for melancholy illusion and an adventurer filled with passionate longings. Finn Wittrock is better than good  as the very ordinary gentleman caller. His Dale Carnegie-styled confidence shows us just how far self-assurance , a pack of chewing gum and smile can take you. A quibble among many:  I doubt if any young man would show up as a guest for dinner in the 1940s wearing blue jeans, something only farmers wore at that time.

The lack of scenic design by Andrew Lieberman probably deserves the lack of lighting credited to Adam Silverman. You may surmise that I am less than impressed with the pretentious minimalism that Gold decided to burden a play that needs to float in a sea of clouds and memories and not look like an informal first reading/walkthrough of a play that had never seen the light of day. Presumably it was not Gold’s intention to be disrespectful to this sublime play but rather to implant an abstracted existentialism on it in the style that is favored by the contemporary European modernist director Ivo Van Hove (“The Crucible” and “A View from the Bridge.”) Whatever was Gold’s motivation, “The Glass Menagerie” will glow forever in the light of its own eternal flame.

“The Glass Menagerie” (through July 11, 2017)

Belasco Theatre, 111 West 44th Street  

“Sweeney Todd” at the Barrow Street Theater through December 31, 2017

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The Cast: Photo by Joan Marcus

It doesn’t seem to matter if you are seeing Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” for the first or, like me, the sixth time, it remains a spellbinder. Certainly the gasps of approval that filled the reconfigured Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village will attest to the musical’s ability to shock. Most audible was the scream from my companion in her too-close-for-comfort encounter with that infamous barber. But perhaps the shock value is heightened because the theater has been turned into a ye olde pie shop and where the audience is given the option to dine on meat (or chicken) pies and mash before the performance. It’s a gimmick to be sure and yet another venture into trendy immersive theater. But this production by London’s Totting arts Club also reaches the heights of horror that some other productions rarely achieve.  

The director Bill Buckhurst abetted by his two terrific leads and an excellent supporting cast knows how to keep their audience (seated at long tables that are cleared of food before the performance) shivering with delight. No table or bench or aisle is safe from the performers who are literally at your side or in your face for much of the action. Less invasive (not complaining) is the modest setting created by designer Simon Kenny that effectively suggests the streets of London, a pie shop and a stairway to the barber’s loft.

Based on the old English horror story “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” with a book by Hugh Wheeler from an adaptation by Christopher Bond, is a prime example of classical Grand-Guignol-styled theater. It’s the eerie tale of a London barber who goes bonkers after escaping from an unjust imprisonment imposed by a lecherous judge with a covetous eye for the barber’s wife and daughter.

Todd (Jeremy Secomb) is an avenge-seeking character who does a bit of slicing while his culinary associate Mrs. Lovett (Siobhan McCarthy) does the dicing in this delectably unwholesome story of an unholy partnership. Don’t be concerned that Sondheim’s grandiose score is now being played by only three musicians (piano, violin and clarinet), the effectively reduced orchestration/arrangements still fill our senses with haunting musical treats.

As the title character, Secomb looks down on us with the most menacing eyes you may ever have to encounter in real life while his fine baritone voice does more than bring full justice to the score. McCarthy is a bubbly Mrs. Lovett and while delectably wicked she is more gregarious  than grotesque, in keeping with the generally high-spirited tone of the blood-curdling episodes. Amidst the mayhem we get a breather rooting for the young lovers Anthony (Matt Doyle), a sailor and Johanna (Alex Finke) Todd’s daughter whose wholesome ardor is contrasted against the grimy apprentice Tobias (Joseph Taylor), a vulgar beggar woman (Betsy Morgan, who doubles as the black-mailing barber Adolpho), the lecherous Judge Turpin (Duncan Smith), and the unctuous “Beadle” (Brad Oscar), all of whom have their hair-raising moments in a splendid production that will undoubtedly leave you craving for another helping of meat pie and mash. 

As for those pies, they are pricey at $20, but very tasty, indeed. But, you do have to order them in advance with your tickets. Also be aware that an American cast featuring Norm Lewis and Carolee Carmello takes over the pie shop April 11. Let’s assume that the new cast will be as yummy as the pies. Oh right, it’s Passover. Ask for a side of matzoh. 

     

“The Skin of Our Teeth” at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center

revival.

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David Rasche and Kecia Lewis as Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, Reynaldo Piniella and Kimber Monroe as their children Henry and Gladys.

Mankind’s ability to survive a confluence of horrific disasters, mass destruction and uncontrollable mayhem caused by wars and climate change is the subject of Thornton Wilder’s 1942 comedy “The Skin of Our Teeth.” This comical allegory has both delighted and distressed audiences (and critics) since its premiere and its subsequently checkered production history. As the world turns, with its volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and floods and its people contending with holocausts, plagues and basic survival, we can look at Wilder’s cartoonish view of life as unending turmoil as a sign (believe it or not) of hope.

We are now getting a impressive view of Wilder’s durable American family in their home in Excelsior N.J. in a terrific production by Theatre for a New City at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus and their son and daughter are viewed over a mere five thousand years in this play that won a Pulitzer Prize and preceded future expressionistic drama known as “theatre of the absurd” and “black comedy.”

In 2017, the play still seems clever and given its wordiness is often pretentious. But it also retains its timeless perspective. However it is its unique structure and its zany comic spirit that survives best. As directed by Arin Arbus, the play is enhanced with an edgy comical verve as well as some whimsically interpolated musical numbers that makes it both playable and palatable. Giving a lilt to the inherently bizarre doings, Arbus keeps the action exuberant even in its darkest moments and there are plenty in the third act. And there is more than just a prescient and poignant chill in the air with the advance of an ice flow as scores of refugees are given shelter by the Antrobus family.

One of Wilder’s novelties is a theatrical conceit that allows the characters to fall out of character to remind us what a flimsy piece of theatrical satire we are witnessing. There are also occasional interruptions by the stage manager who is experiencing his own crisis. Lily Sabina is one of the great roles in the American theater (Tallulah Bankhead originated it to great acclaim.) It’s a showy role that serves as a kind of spacey chorus, as well as doubles as a housemaid and seductive femme fatale. Sabina is both the author’s trumpet and strumpet ; the eternal temptress. She is acted quite irresistibly by Mary Wiseman who delivers the right touch of bubble-headed sassiness.

An impressive company of seventeen, many playing multiple roles, move about the spectacular often in motion unit setting designed by Riccardo Hernandez and through the centuries with determined aplomb. Notable performances are by David Rasche as a stolidly determined Mr. Antrobus, the inventor of the wheel and the alphabet and Kecia Lewis as the long-suffering , steadfast wife. Mary Lou Rosato had a good time filling us with terror as with the Fortune Teller. Also excellent are Kimber Monroe and Reynaldo Piniella as the Antrobus children who grow up for better and worse. There were a few instances of updating the text but the core of Wilder’s play remains undated and unsullied by times and tides.

“The Skin of Our Teeth”

Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; 866 - 811 - 4111

Running Time: 2 hours 30 minutes.