Classic American Musicals: Porgy & Bess and Show Boat

Porgy and Bess

Diane Paulus’s production of Porgy and Bess, which is running at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge (where she’s artistic director) before heading for Broadway, came encumbered with controversy. Shortly before it opened Paulus, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (who revised the DuBose Heyward script), and star Audra McDonald gave interviews to The New York Times and The Boston Globe trumpeting their mission to render the classic 1935 American opera accessible to twenty-first-century audiences and made a lot of other fatuous comments in addition.

Stephen Sondheim answered with a furious and brilliantly argued editorial in The Times that took apart their remarks one by one. Evidently Sondheim’s objections had some effect on the production – Paulus, Parks and the composer Diedre L. Murray, who had reworked the final scene of the show to make it more uplifting, restored the original ending. Sondheim was careful to separate out the hype from the work itself, expressing the hope that Paulus’s Porgy would turn out to be as exciting as the cast promised – in addition to McDonald, it stars Norm Lewis as Porgy and David Alan Grier as Sportin’ Life – while reiterating the importance of acknowledging the magnificence of the opera that George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward had fashioned from Heyward’s 1925 novella. Among other corrections, he pointed out the iniquity of renaming the show The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, when Heyward and not Ira Gershwin made the most substantial contribution to the libretto – a fact that anyone familiar with Ira Gershwin’s lyrics can spot ample evidence of, whatever he or she may think of them. (Sondheim is not an Ira Gershwin enthusiast; I am.) 

The White Card: Be White, Baby

Patricia Kalember and Karen Pittman in The White Card. (Photo: Gretjen Helene Photography)

For the production of Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card, about race in contemporary America – a co-production of American Repertory Theater and Arts Emerson – scenic designer Riccardo Hernandez has built a black-box space inside the stage of Boston’s downtown Emerson Paramount Center. Except that it’s a white box, with the audience seated on painful white chairs, tennis-court style, on either side above the narrow cream-colored playing area (with matching furniture). The symbolism is painfully obvious. Moreover, having wriggled back and forth on those goddamn chairs for eighty intermissionless minutes, perhaps I may be permitted to advance the theory that the level of discomfort, too, is deliberate. Could this be director Diane Paulus’s take on Brechtian theatre – keeping the audience alert at what amounts to a droning lecture on white privilege by literally making us squirm?

Never, Never: Finding Neverland

Under Diane Paulus’ leadership, Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater – once a bastion of the avant-garde – has become a clearing house for Broadway-bound shows. In the two years since she took over as artistic director, Paulus has sent five plays on to New York: her own revivals of Porgy and Bess and Pippin; Once (which began as a workshop at A.R.T.); the latest revival of The Glass Menagerie, starring Cherry Jones; and the first part of Robert Schenkkan’s LBJ biography, All the Way (which began its journey across the country at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival). I saw all of them in their A.R.T. incarnations except for Once, and they were all sell-outs; Boston is evidently thrilled to be a tryout town once again, as it was for most of the last century. But even though I didn’t care for most of the productions I saw at A.R.T. in its old form, Paulus’ blatant commercialism is a little unsettling, especially since two of the shows bore her name as director.

Her latest is Finding Neverland, a musical adaptation of the 2004 movie that covers the period during which J.M. Barrie conceived his 1904 stage play Peter Pan. If you watched the Tony Awards this year you already know about the show, because – in that benighted telecast’s most bizarre moment – we were treated to a preview of the musical, which opens on Broadway next season: Jennifer Hudson sang one of the tunes to four little boys standing in for the Llewelyn-Davies brothers for whom Barrie becomes a surrogate father. Appearances notwithstanding, Hudson is not expected to take over the role of James Barrie, which is being played by Newsies star Jeremy Jordan.

Waitress: Lowest Common Denominator

Jessie Mueller (right) & Dakin Matthews in Waitress, at the American Repertory Theatre. (All photos by Evgenia Eliseeva)

Waitress is the latest in a series of new musicals and revivals that American Repertory Theatre’s artistic director, Diane Paulus, has been shepherding through the tryout phase in Cambridge with an eye on opening them in New York, and nearly all of them have made the move successfully. I have decidedly mixed feelings about Paulus’ using A.R.T. as a clearing house for New York-bound projects – it’s not as if A.R.T. was such a great place in the days when it housed allegedly cutting-edge productions by prestigious guest directors – but I might feel less ornery about these shows if they seemed to be working toward some balance of art and commerce. But last season’s Finding Neverland was a bald attempt (mostly on the part of hands-on producer Harvey Weinstein) to home in on the audience for Disney stage musicals, and Waitress is aimed at the crowd that goes wild at down-home musicals like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and 9 to 5.

Back to the 70s: Pippin and Annie

Patina Miller as Leading Player in Pippin

Pippin opened on Broadway in the fall of 1972, toward the end of what was unmistakably the Year of Bob Fosse. His film of Cabaret rethought the syntax of the movie musical, both stylistically (the numbers were Brechtian commentaries on theme, character and historical setting rather than expressions of emotion) and visually (he was the first director of film musicals to employ editing as a rhythmic element). On television he collaborated with his Cabaret star, Liza Minnelli, on an inventive, highly theatrical one-woman revue called Liza with a ‘Z’. And he returned to Broadway, where he’d received his training as a choreographer and then as a director, with Pippin. I saw it a few months after graduating from college and I recall it as the first truly schizoid experience I ever had at the theatre. The staging was mesmerizing, exactly the feat of wizardry that the opening number, “Magic to Do,” set the audience up to expect, but the material itself – Roger O. Hirson’s book and Stephen Schwartz’s songs – was threadbare. And since Fosse’s trademark theme, which he imposed on everything he worked on, was the discrepancy between the razzle-dazzle surface and the shoddy, corrupt underneath, the show seemed constantly to be commenting on its own inadequacies, reminding us that what we were watching was merely trompe l’oeil executed by a seasoned (and cynical) magician. It was a hell of a spectacle, and it wasn’t much fun.

No Lessons Learned: Witness Uganda

Photo by Gretjen Helene Photography

In the American Repertory Theatre’s latest musical production, Witness Uganda, a twenty-three-year-old black kid from New York named Griffin travels to Uganda as a volunteer to help a local known as Pastor Jim build a school for the poor in a small village. Griffin sings in the choir of his church and aspires to an acting career, but he feels alienated – he senses that his homosexuality makes him persona non grata in the choir – and undefined, and he hopes that being committed to something beyond himself will change all that. But when he gets to the village he doesn’t like the rules that restrict him to Pastor Jim’s compound, and the more he sees of the operation the more suspicious it looks. So he ends up breaking away from Pastor Jim and setting up a classroom in an abandoned library for some teenagers who aren’t being educated at all because the schools aren’t free.

Celebration: Twelfth Night on Broadway

Stephen Fry and Mark Rylance in Twelfth Night 

Twelfth Night was first performed in Queen Elizabeth’s court, and Shakespeare wrote it for the end of the twelve days of Christmas. Tim Carroll’s all-male production, which originated at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, conveys the celebratory mood. Carroll and his actors imported it to Broadway for the holiday season, in repertory with Richard III, showcasing Mark Rylance’s performances as Richard and as Olivia. (The title cards for the two shows borrow the Renaissance spellings: Twelfe Night, or What You Will and The Tragedie of King Richard the Third.) I saw Richard III in November but I didn’t write about it because I’d already reviewed both Kevin Spacey’s Richard at the Old Vic and the brilliant production by Propeller Theatre, and I found the Globe version – also with a completely male cast that overlaps with that of Twelfth Night – uninteresting. Even Rylance’s depiction of Shakespeare’s busy, self-amused villain-king felt recycled, a compendium of tricks he’d pulled from his voluminous sleeves on other occasions. But Twelfth Night is something else again – a splendiferous entertainment in which Rylance’s hilarious, love-addled Countess Olivia is just one member of a grand ensemble.

You get into the spirit as soon as you walk into the house. The actors are still getting into costume, so those audience members who have purchased tickets to sit on the stage above the playing area become part of the general bustle as ushers escort them to their places. Once strove for a companionable cross-over between actors and audience, inviting viewers to hang out in the pub at the top of the show, and Diane Paulus’s revival of Hair encouraged dancing on the stage after the curtain call, but both these efforts felt forced. At Twelfth Night the immediacy of the actors from the start doesn’t pretend that we have some relationship with them, but it does get us excited about the treats in store.

More Sounds of Music: Hair, Oliver!, & On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

The company of Hair. (Photo: Emma Rothenberg-Ware)

Daisy Walker’s production of Hair at Berkshire Theatre Group begins badly, with rather mechanical by-the-numbers choreography (by Lisa Shriver) on an ugly, perplexing set (designed by Jason Simms) that consists of a wall with opaque windows and a double-tiered wooden platform. Where is the action supposed to be taking place? This isn’t a question you’d ask with an abstract, open unit set, but the wall tells us we’re inside a building, so we want to know what kind of building. And why a building at all? Hair is about hippies interacting with each other and with the straight world, presumably on the streets of New York or (in the first half of the 1979 movie version) Central Park; it hardly makes sense to place them inside some room – especially this one, which looks like a recreation hall in a summer camp. The young actors, a mixture of professionals and others just out of actor training programs working toward earning their Equity cards, generate a lot of good energy, but they’re restricted by the space and the staging.

That is, until after intermission. The second act of this Hair is exponentially better than the first, despite the fact that it’s act two of the musical that is classically problematic because a long acid-trip sequence weighs it down. Unexpectedly, the choreography loosens up and showcases the performers more effectively, and the ensemble comes together – you start to believe in them as a “tribe,” to use the term the book writers, Gerome Ragni and James Rado, adopt for them.

Come from Away: Forging a Temporary Community

Jenn Colella (left) in Come From Away at Broadway's Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

The enormously likable Canadian musical Come from Away, which recently opened on Broadway, dramatizes the role played by the citizens of Gander, Newfoundland, when American air space was locked down in the aftermath of 9/11 and nearly forty planes were rerouted to Gander’s small airport. (In the old days, we’re told, it had been a frequent refueling spot; airport personnel can recall crossing paths with Sinatra and The Beatles when their planes made pit stops there.) The locals reached out to seven thousand stranded strangers from all over the world – whose presence nearly doubled the population for five days – providing food and shelter and devising ways to communicate with those who couldn’t speak English. The most inventive, perhaps, is that of the bus driver (Chad Kimball) who notices that a distressed African couple are carrying a Bible. Though he can’t read the words, he has an intricate knowledge of scripture and he figures that chapter and verse are the same in all editions, so he finds an inspiriting passage to convey to them that they’ll be fine.

Irene Sankoff and David Hein, who supplied book, (folk) music and lyrics, are banal writers, but banality isn’t the worst of theatrical sins; emotional fakery is, and I didn’t detect any of it in Come from Away. The project itself may be sentimental in nature but the production, which was directed by Christopher Ashley, mutes the sentimentality as much as possible; it’s remarkably dry-eyed and its humor is wry and observational. When an Orthodox rabbi can’t eat any of the proffered food, and there’s no local synagogue to help him out, he’s set up in his own kitchen and invited to produce kosher meals – not only for himself and other Jews, but, as it turns out, for some Muslims and a gay vegetarian couple from L.A. The gay men, both named Kevin (Kimball and Caesar Samayoa), are hesitant to admit they’re a couple; they have no idea how redneck a small Maritime Canadian town might be. But when a few too many beers at a bar make them incautious, they’re amused to discover that half their fellow drinkers have gay relatives or friends and use that connection ingenuously to make the Kevins feel more at ease. Bob (Rodney Hicks), an African-American New Yorker, gets over his urban-bred paranoia when his host, the mayor of one of the nearby towns, encourages him to go from yard to yard borrowing his neighbors’ grills and finds that their owners are more than willing to part with them; in Bob’s words, they help him steal their own barbecues.

Sing Street and Porgy and Bess: Birthing a New Stage Musical and Burying a Classic

Sam Poon, Anthony Genovesi, Jakeim Hart and Gian Perez in Sing Street. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

I caught the sold-out final performance of Sing Street, the stage transcription of John Carney’s infectious 2016 teen movie musical, at New York Theatre Workshop a week ago, but fortunately it’s far from dead; it reopens on Broadway in the spring. This is a lovable show with an energy level that bounces up into the stratosphere, and there isn’t a performer on stage you don’t want to toss a bouquet at. Adapted from the third of Carney’s minimalist musical films, with their distinctive balance of the wised-up and the joyous – the other two are Once (2007) and Begin Again (2013) – Sing Street is set in the economically deflated Dublin of the 1980s. The hero is Conor (Brenock O’Connor), whose parents, Robert (Billy Carter) and Penny (Amy Warren), have decided, in the light of Robert’s recent unemployment, to downsize by taking Conor out of a private academy and enrolling him in a Christian Brothers free state school. His sister Anne (Skyler Volpe) is finishing university; his brother Brendan (Gus Halper), a witty stoner with a close relationship to Conor, has long since bothering even to venture out of the house. (Conor is the youngest.) Their parents’ marriage, never stable, is on the verge of coming apart. Conor’s relocation to Synge Street School, where he immediately runs afoul of the autocratic, sometimes brutal headmaster, Brother Baxter (Martin Moran), might be the last straw, but as it happens he makes musical friends. Conor plays guitar, and Brendan has taken a hand in his rock ‘n’ roll education, so when he becomes entranced by a young woman named Raphina (Zara Devlin), an aspiring model who lives in a home for adolescents from broken families across the street from the school, he pretends he has his own band and invites her to appear in a music video. And then he sets out to put that fictive band together, with his new pal Darren (Max William Bartos) as manager. They rehearse in the home of a boy named Eamon (Sam Poon) whose mother, Sandra (Anne L. Nathan), a local piano teacher, encourages them.