Moulin Rouge! Really Leans Into its Exclamation Point

Danny Burstein in Alex Timbers' 2018 staging of Moulin Rouge! (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

The “new” musical Moulin Rouge! is very keen for you to know what an exuberant, exciting show it is! From the moment you walk into the theatre, there is a lot going on! You get a whole bunch of set (courtesy of scenic designer Derek McLane) for your money! There’s a large, lightbulb-studded windmill! An enormous elephant looms from one of the boxes! Below that, a scantily-clad performer dances on a pole! Two other dancers come down front and center to swallow swords! And the show hasn’t even technically started yet!

If you were hoping the show would include the cover version of “Lady Marmalade” from the original 2001 Baz Luhrmann movie, good news: it starts out with that number! It goes on for a very long time! Sonya Tayeh’s choreography is very intense and fun to watch, and it’s performed by a diverse, energetic cast of performers! Catherine Zuber has designed lots of bright costumes, including a dazzling array of multicolored can-can dresses!

Coming to an End: Recent Series and Season Finales

Lakeith Stanfield, Donald Glover, and Brian Tyree Henry in FX's Atlanta, whose second season ended May 10. (Photo: FX)

Note: This review contains spoilers for the recent series and season finales of Barry, Atlanta, and The Americans.

Late spring has always been an important time for television. Broadcast networks have traditionally timed their season finales to coincide with the crucial May “sweeps” period, when Nielsen collects data on viewership that help to determine ratings. More recently, the finish of the eligibility period for the Emmys, which comes at the end of May, has become a major milestone: the profusion of shows on every conceivable channel and platform means that a nomination can help raise a program’s profile, and those nominations often evince a bias towards whatever’s been airing most recently. It’s impossible to keep up with everything on television these days, but a number of recent season finales – and one major series-ending episode – offer a snapshot of what’s going on in the world of premium and cable shows.

Origin Story: The Legacy of King Solomon's Mines

Author H. Rider Haggard, often credited as a pioneer of the "lost world" fiction genre. (Photo: Getty)

A group of men take off on a quest into the unknown, seeking a potentially mythical MacGuffin and using their unique skills to get into and out of scrapes, with a few good-natured comic interludes thrown in along the way. That’s a setup of many popular films, and that’s part of why I found my recent experience reading H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines so interesting. Combined with a rediscovery of George Stevens’s 1939 film Gunga Din, which I hadn’t seen since childhood, catching up with Haggard’s classic adventure novel has provided some perspective on the origins of tropes that have begun to feel overly familiar after appearing in one franchise film after another.

Making a Killing in Hollywood: HBO's Barry

Bill Hader as the title character in HBO's Barry. (Photo: HBO)

The star-struck gangster isn’t exactly a new trope – think Cole Porter’s classic Kiss Me Kate or Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty – but there’s still something different about HBO’s new dark comedy Barry, which follows the title character (played by Bill Hader) as he becomes obsessed with dreams of stardom while trying to shed his former identity as a ruthlessly effective hit man. Perhaps that’s because it’s one of the first attempts (that I can think of, at any rate) to translate this idea to the medium of television.

Somebody Needs a Hygge: ABC's Splitting Up Together

Jenna Fischer and Oliver Hudson in Splitting Up Together. (Photo: Eric McCandless)

“When did comedies become half-hour dramas?” complains Billy Eichner in the second season of Julie Klausner’s recently-canceled Hulu show Difficult People . It’s a question that tends to come up more often in the context of half-hour-long shows on cable and streaming services, which have long been outlets for writers and showrunners to test how much serious material, in terms of both content and tone, they can get away with incorporating into a format that’s traditionally skewed towards delivering relatively uncomplicated laughs. I’ve found myself thinking of that question a lot as I watch the early episodes of ABC’s new sitcom Splitting Up Together, a comedy (ostensibly) with a decidedly downbeat premise and some baffling tonal issues.

Falling Flat: NBC’s Rise

Rosie Perez and Josh Radnor in Rise. (Photo: Peter Kramer/NBC)

Towards the end of the third episode of NBC’s new high-school theatre drama Rise, an anxious mother (Stephanie J. Block), desperate for assurance that teacher Lou Mazzuchelli (Josh Radnor) is taking risks with her son’s future for the right reasons, asks him what he believes in. Before Radnor’s character could answer, my wife leaned over to me on the couch and deadpanned, “He believes in the kids.”

Three guesses what Lou says next.

Class Clown: NBC’s A.P. Bio

Glenn Howerton as high school teacher, Jack Griffin, in A.P. Bio.

There’s a forced wholesomeness to some network television that’s enough to make you want to puke. The commercially motivated impulse to create entertainment that appeals to some imaginary Middle-American audience easily suckered by anodyne content and blatant moralizing can often lead to a product that feels cynically calculated, rather than the genuine result of a sincere outlook.

That’s part of why I’ve found NBC’s A.P. Bio so refreshing, at least insofar as its early episodes have proven willing to buck that trend. Created by Saturday Night Live alum Mike O’Brien, the comedy follows Jack Griffin (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton), a former Harvard philosophy professor who’s been forced to retreat in ignominy to Toledo, Ohio, where his old friend Ralph Durbin uses his role as principal at a local high school to get Jack a sinecure teaching Advanced Placement Biology. The concept is fairly straightforward but nevertheless promising: O’Brien is obviously reversing the well-worn trope of the enthusiastic teacher who takes a group of apathetic and often underprivileged kids and gets through to them, inspiring them to achieve their full potential. Instead, the kids are all nerdy, straight-arrow overachievers and the teacher’s an unrepentant asshole (there’s a running gag in which Jack will finish whatever he’s eating as he enters the classroom and then carelessly hurls the remnants in the general direction of the garbage can, which he misses every time).

Make Politics Boring Again: Political Podcasts and the Trump Era

The NPR Politics Podcast

On February 28, Matt House, Communications Director for Senator Chuck Schumer, pointed to a correction in The New York Times regarding a meeting between Donald Trump and Congressional leaders: “An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of a similar televised meeting. It was in January, not last year.” “The media pace of this presidency is captured perfectly” by the correction, he commented, and it’s hard to disagree. The relatively staid pace of normal politics has been swept aside and replaced by what feels like a bad plot from a later season of 24. Sickening though such developments might be for those of us who are living through them and wondering how they might turn out, they have at least been fodder for a host of podcasts that aim to combine the compelling narrative drive of non-fiction hits like Serial with analysis of the constant torrent of disturbing new headlines.

Given that the presidency has been debased to the level of a cut-rate reality-TV series, it’s fitting that attempts to recount and make sense of developments in Washington have themselves often come to resemble shows that recap something like Big Brother or The Apprentice. Some, like FiveThirtyEight’s Politics Podcast or The NPR Politics Podcast, tend to focus primarily on summarizing recent events. FiveThirtyEight’s emphasis on analyzing the news via a data-driven approach tends to make it rather drier, and at times it gets bogged down by founder Nate Silver’s tendency to focus on criticizing media organizations who adopt a less quantitative approach to politics than his own outfit. By contrast, NPR’s podcast plays it straight and earnest, particularly in their weekly episode, typically produced on a Thursday, in which they summarize the past week’s events and offer additional analysis for listeners who might need additional context for some of the discussion. The latter approach is more effective, allowing the rotating cast of reporters and editors who host the show a chance to delve into important stories without alienating those whose knowledge of politics might be somewhat more superficial.

A Familiar Formula: Fox’s The Resident

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a doctor on a network drama seems like he’s kind of an asshole, but his unconventional approach ends up getting results that no one else can achieve. He’s also sexy and brooding, clearly haunted by a past that he won’t open up about, but which has turned him into the person he is today. If that sounds familiar, you’ve hit on the central problem with The Resident, Fox’s new medical drama. In an era of so-called “Peak TV,” where there’s a show for virtually every taste, this one (co-created by Amy Holden Jones, Hayley Schore, and Roshan Sethi) feels too generic to stand out and merit the requisite investment of time and attention.

That’s too bad, because in this case the asshole doctor in question is played by Matt Czuchry, who’s distinguished himself through his work in supporting roles on Gilmore Girls and The Good Wife. Cary Agos, his character on the latter show, was a fascinating combination of conflicting impulses, someone whose aggressive ambition concealed unexpected complexity and humanity. He brings much of the same charisma to his role here as Dr. Conrad Hawkins, the titular resident. When new hire Devon (Manish Dayal) arrives for his first day on the job, Conrad’s predictably awful to him, but Czuchry lets us see how he’s testing this inexperienced and overconfident naif (Devon’s straight out of Harvard) to make sure he’s not going to get someone killed.

Joke-Delivery Systems: Checking in on Some Network Comedies

Dylan McDermott in L.A. to Vegas

The Fox sitcom L.A. to Vegas is a lot like the titular flight that it chronicles: it’s quick, it’s fun without offering much of substance, and it doesn’t ask much of you in terms of investment (financial in the case of the flight, emotional in the case of the show). There something disarmingly straightforward about the title card that appears before each episode: “There are people who fly every weekend from L.A. to Vegas. This is their story.” As that introduction wryly suggests, this is a comedy with very little on its mind other than providing its cast with a vehicle to deliver zingy one-liners.

Beyond Raisin: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart

playwright Lorraine Hansberry

Any attempt to assess the entirety of Lorraine Hansberry’s career quickly runs into the inescapable fact of her untimely death. Since she was only 34 when she died, Hansberry’s entire legacy has become identified with her first play, A Raisin in the Sun. Although the play will always retain a firm place in the American theatrical canon, not least because it was the first on Broadway to be written by an African-American woman as well as the first to be staged by an African-American director, that status has also made it a target for a range of criticism, from Pauline Kael’s dismissal of its filmed version as proof “that a Negro family can be as dreary as a white family” to attacks on its perceived political and social complacency by George C. Wolfe, who mercilessly mocked it in a section of his play The Colored Museum.

A new documentary, Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, attempts to reorient our understanding of Hansberry by placing the success of Raisin in the context of Hansberry’s overall life and career. Written and directed by Tracy Heather Strain, the film airs on PBS on January 19. (I should disclose that I viewed the film as preparation for an interview that I conducted with Strain for my podcast on theatre history.)

Activism and Art: Looking Back on the Free Southern Theater with Seret Scott

Seret Scott

Political activism and art have always had a complicated relationship: art can enhance the power of an activist message, while the sense of purpose imparted by a political message can elevate a work of art. However, the imperatives of creating great art and serving an activist agenda often conflict, diluting the political themes of a given work or rendering it painfully didactic.

In normal times, the task of reconciling these contradictory impulses might not feel as urgent. However, as virtually anyone who’s vaguely familiar with contemporary politics in the United States is aware, these aren’t normal times. The election of Donald Trump and the emergence of a distinctly fascist strain of politics in the world’s most powerful democracy has led to the politicization of nearly everything, from late-night talk shows to professional sports leagues.

Raising the Stakes: Tone, Comedy, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Andre Braugher, Andy Samberg and Melissa Fumero in Brooklyn Nine-Nine (photo: Jordin Althaus/Fox) 

From the moment it premiered on Fox in the fall of 2013, Dan Goor and Mike Schur’s comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine has always been something of a low-key high-wire act. In many respects, it’s a conventional workplace sitcom, which is standard fare for a network like Fox and familiar territory for both of its creators (Schur wrote for The Office and created Parks & Recreation, and Goor wrote for the latter show). However, it’s set in a precinct office of the New York Police Department, which complicates some of the usual conventions of a workplace comedy. Much of The Office’s humor was based on the tediousness and unimportance of the work the titular location’s occupants performed, while Parks & Recreation slyly used the seemingly petty and inconsequential concerns of local government officials to push an optimistic message about the potential for civic engagement to lead to positive change.

All in the Direction: Once on This Island on Broadway

Alex Newell as Asaka and Hailey Kilgore as Ti Moune in Once on This Island. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

A play isn’t just words on a page: a lot depends on how a particular production of a given work succeeds or fails in bringing it to life onstage. That’s one of the fundamental lessons I’m charged with getting across to my students in my introductory theatre courses, and it’s been reinforced for me by the Broadway revival of Once on This Island, which opens this week at Circle in the Square. It’s a textbook example of how a talented director and cast can elevate mediocre material. I’m doubly glad I saw it, because this is probably as good a production of this show as will ever exist, so I don’t think I’ll ever feel the need to see another revival.

Temporal Things and a Creeping Sense of Dread: The Fiction of John Darnielle

Author and musician John Darnielle

Paper-based role-playing games and video rental stores in rural Iowa might seem unlikely subjects for a 21st-century novel. Both provide amusements rooted in a past that is simultaneously too recent to have yet become a part of history and too distant to be clearly remembered by just about anyone under 40. Yet the obscurity of these subjects lends them to Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester, two novels by John Darnielle.

Darnielle is best known as the founding and primary member of the indie rock band The Mountain Goats, a group which has effectively consisted of him and a changing cast of musicians with whom he collaborates (when he doesn’t simply play solo). Darnielle’s garnered a well-deserved reputation for crafting off-kilter but deeply absorbing songs about everything from his troubled childhood to small-time professional wrestling. Those songs have gradually become more lavish in terms of their instrumentation, but Darnielle’s keen eye for characterization and narrative remains.

Running On: This Is Us and the Demands of Network Drama

When I wrote about This Is Us last year, I noted that the NBC drama, along with creator Dan Fogelman’s now-defunct Fox baseball show Pitch, represented a more adventurous approach to storytelling, at least for traditionally risk-averse network television. To a large degree, that’s just the nature of the medium; it’s hard to achieve the sort of narrative freshness and surprise that the most popular cable shows rely upon, because a network show’s season is almost always considerably longer. The typical network drama produces over 20 episodes, as opposed to approximately 13 for a cable drama like FX’s The Americans. At their best, shows like The Good Wife or Buffy the Vampire Slayer have made a virtue of necessity, employing a case-of-the-week format that allowed them to create compelling self-contained episodes, such as Buffy’s “Hush” and “Once More With Feeling,” or entries in the series that unexpectedly become launching points for major arcs, such as Good Wife‘s “Red Team/Blue Team,” which kick-started one of that show’s creative high points.

Wait and See: Fox’s Ghosted and ABC’s The Mayor

Adam Scott and Craig Robinson in Fox's Ghosted.

I think I like Ghosted –  though, to be honest, I’m not sure. Even though I’ve watched roughly 22 minutes of Fox’s new paranormal comedy, I have no idea if I’ve seen anything that will be representative of the kind of show that it will eventually become. It’s a dilemma that’s inherent to any attempt to critically evaluate the sort of serial storytelling that’s central to how television currently functions, and one that initially put me off shows that would later become favorites of mine, most notably Parks and Recreation. For a number of reasons, this problem seems particularly acute in the case of Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten’s sitcom version of The X-Files.

One Hell of a Show: NBC’s The Good Place Returns

Ted Danson and Kristen Bell

Warning: This review covers the entire first season of The Good Place, as well as the premiere of Season Two. It contains extensive discussion of plot points from throughout the show’s run thus far.

Setting a television comedy in the afterlife seems like an excellent way to set yourself up for failure. Since there is, by its very nature, a distinct sense of finality about the place, it’s hard to see how you might tell a long-running story that’s set there. Furthermore, since most religious traditions view existence after death as primarily a matter of receiving one’s just reward or punishment for their actions on the mortal plane, it’s not clear how you might develop a sense of character, or achieve any sort of narrative progression or tension. However, that’s just what Michael Schur and the creative team of NBC’s The Good Place achieved on the first season of the show.

As Mark Clamen noted in his initial review of The Good Place’s premiere, Schur’s metaphysical comedy had a rather tentative beginning. I found myself watching the first few episodes primarily out of curiosity as to how – or if – the show’s premise would develop, as well as for the performances by Ted Danson and Kristen Bell. However, as the larger scheme behind Schur’s premise began to reveal itself, and as the characters who inhabit this decidedly off-kilter version of heaven became more fully realized, The Good Place became far more than a pleasant-enough entertainment with a veneer of philosophical sophistication.

Fizzling Out: Burn All Night at Club Oberon

As I walked out of Burn All Night, a new musical running at the American Repertory Theater’s Club Oberon, I found myself feeling oddly upbeat about the fact that I’d just seen a thoroughly average piece of immersive mainstream theatre. As I’ve written before with regards to the ART’s production of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, this increasingly popular style of staging plays in such a way as to draw the audience into the dramatic action offers at least one potential answer to the question of how theatre can distinguish itself as it competes with a myriad of entertainment options for audiences’ attention. Contrary to the title, this latest offering won’t set the world on fire, but there are elements of its music and staging that partially counteract its glaring weaknesses as a play.

Burn All Night ultimately tries to make a statement about the impending global cataclysm that, thanks to our poisonous politics and abuse of the environment, seems at times almost inevitable. However, the real disaster here is Andy Mientus’s book, which follows the romantic entanglements and personal conflicts of four young people. The main character, Bobby (Lincoln Clauss), is a stereotype, the wide-eyed naif who ditches the stifling atmosphere of Real America for the boundless possibilities of New York City. The backward, provincial hellhole from which he escapes? Pittsburgh. I’m no Steelers fan, but I’m still not clear on what’s so awful about this metropolis of western Pennsylvania, and Mientus doesn’t help matters by giving Bobby a series of phone conversations with his widowed mother that mostly make you feel bad for the poor woman, who’s stuck worrying about her absent son while the world ends.

A Lighter Company at Barrington Stage

Aaron Tveit (right) and the cast of Company at Barrington Stage. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

To say that a production of a Stephen Sondheim musical treats the material like sketch comedy would normally constitute an insult towards that production and its creative team. However, in the case of Barrington Stage’s version of Company (1970), which stars Aaron Tveit as the only single man among his group of married couples, it’s a savvy move that undercuts the over-the-top reverence that threatens to turn this flawed but often enjoyable show into an unbearable slog.