My Best Friend’s Wedding and Stereophonic: Too Much Music and Not Enough

Matt Doyle and Krystal Joy Brown in My Best Friend's Wedding. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios)

The notion of a jukebox stage musical based on the 1997 romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding, featuring the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David and directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall (who has helmed ace Broadway revivals of Kiss Me, Kate, Wonderful Town and Anything Goes), sounded promising. (The movie uses Bacharach-David tunes in key moments.) But the show, which is premiering at Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine, is both synthetic and clunky. The movie, written by Ron Bass and directed by P.J. Hogan, is an unconventional romantic comedy in which the heroine, Julianne, a magazine food critic, plays every dirty trick she can think of to stop her best friend and one-time lover Michael from walking down the aisle with Kimmy, the woman he’s fallen head over heels in love with, but her schemes keep backfiring. It’s a tricky proposition, because we fall in love with Kimmy too, yet Julianne is the heroine and the movie won’t work if we end up disliking her. The movie pulls it off because Julia Roberts, in a wonderful comic-neurotic performance, plays Julianne.

Two New Musicals: Big Fish and The Landing

Norbert Leo Butz and Kate Baldwin in Big Fish

The new musical adaptation of Big Fish has a deluxe, hyper-bright look and some of the niftiest stagecraft I’ve seen on a Broadway stage. The characters who will pop up later in the stories spun by the hero, Edward Bloom (Norbert Leo Butz), are projected onto witches’ cloaks; a field of daisies – Edward’s gift to the girl of his dreams, Sandra (Kate Baldwin) – is transformed into a 3D backdrop; the set designer (Julian Crouch), the costume designer (William Ivey Long) and the projection designer ( Benjamin Pearcy) assemble witty trompe l’oeil collages. The director-choreographer, Susan Stroman, comes up with fresh ideas for one number after another; her work is a compendium of dance styles. The problem is the uninspired musical at the center of all this visual magic.

The Untimely Demise of Leap of Faith

Raúl Esparza and the cast of Leap of Faith (Photos by Joan Marcus)

On Sunday afternoon May 13th I saw what turned out to be the final performance of a vibrant new musical called Leap of Faith. Upon receiving a baffling (but hardly unprecedented) review by Ben Brantley in The New York Times that referred to it in the opening sentence as a black hole that sucks up everything that gets near it, the production began to bleed money. It did receive a nomination for the Best Musical Tony – normally a stopgap for failing shows; producers keep them open until after the awards in the hope that a prize or two might generate some activity at the box office. Here, though, there was no chance of that, since Leap of Faith received no other nominations -- not for the vivid Alan Mencken-Glenn Slater score, or Christopher Ashley’s direction, or Sergio Trujillo’s terrific choreography, or Robin Wagner’s handsome, ingenious set, or Donald Holder’s lighting or William Ivey Long’s costumes, and, most remarkably, not one single nomination for anyone in the amazingly talented cast. The Best Musical nod, then, was a slap in the face:  the subtext was “We don’t think there’s a single distinguished quality in this musical but there were only half a dozen new musicals this season and you’re not as bad as Bonnie and Clyde.” One wonders if the Tony voters actually went to see Leap of Faith at all or if they read Brantley and opted to stay home. If so, they missed a hell of a show.

Janus Cercone and Warren Leight adapted Leap of Faith from Cercone’s screenplay for the 1992 movie, starring Steve Martin and Debra Winger as a nickel-plated revivalist preacher and his partner in crime, the equally cynical young woman who manages his traveling Jesus circus. In both versions, the Reverend Jonas Nightingale (“Nightengale” in the movie), who’s on the run in other parts of Bible country for passing bad checks and other forms of fraud, decides to pitch his tent in a small Kansas town in the midst of a long drought that has devastated farms and – in the present-day stage edition – exacerbated an already woeful economy. Jonas’s agenda is to take advantage of the locals’ desperation and their need for some, any, brand of hope.  They expect him to heal their various kinds of wounds and to make it rain.  “The beauty part,” as Jonas (Raúl Esparza) explains to us at the beginning of act two, is that if no miracle transpires, “it’s on them:  they didn’t believe enough.”  The material is related to N. Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker, where a charismatic young man not only promises rain but enchants a spinster who’s given up on the possibility of romance.  (Memorably, Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn played those roles in the 1955 movie version of The Rainmaker, and Woody Harrelson and Jayne Atkinson brought new vitality to them in the 1999 Broadway revival.)  It’s even more closely linked to Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, where a con-man itinerant drummer named Harold Hill plans to rook the citizens of an Iowa town out of their money by convincing them that their children can only be saved from moral decrepitude by playing in a marching band – until the combination of a stiff-backed librarian and her lonely kid brother locate the heart he didn’t know he had.  The idea is the same in all three:  behind the phony show-biz hype lurks a touch of authenticity that hornswaggles even the hardest case. That would be Jonas, who is so unsettled when he manages to heal someone for real that his immediate response is anger, as if he’d been conned. The Rainmaker’s Starbuck, Harold Hill and Jonas are all variants on a classic American type, the magnetic swindler that Melville invented in The Confidence Man. These softer versions allow for a happy ending; if you wanted to take them into darker waters you’d end up with a tragic figure like O’Neill’s Hickey in The Iceman Cometh or an ironic one like Paul in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, whose belief in his own con is a kind of schizophrenia.

Steve: Merrily We Roll Along and Here We Are

Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez in Merrily We Roll Along. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

Every time there’s a new edition of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical Merrily We Roll Along critics proclaim that this notorious 1981 failure has finally been fixed or that it was misunderstood in its time but now we can see clearly the gem that was always hiding under the unjust hype. I didn’t like the show from the first and none of the productions I’ve seen has changed my mind. But since I’ve written about two of them on Critics At Large, I’ll be brief here about my objections. I think that, like its source material, a 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, it’s disastrously misconceived: a play about a messed-up three-way friendship that begins when the three main characters – a composer and playwright-lyricist who were once collaborators and a novelist-turned-drama critic – are already middle-aged and moves backwards to their hopeful youth, by which time we dislike them so much that we have no sympathy left for the people they used to be. Furth’s book is as thin as rice paper and as phony as plastic, and only a few of the songs are worth much (mainly the two ballads, “Not a Day Goes By” and “Good Thing Going”). Ironically, the 2016 documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, directed by the original Charlie, Lonny Price, in which (among other things) he listens to the resurfaced interview tape Harold Prince had him make when he auditioned for the part, works in precisely the way the musical doesn’t: it truly is about a man in middle age looking back on the naïve, hopeful kid he once was. It made me cry as Merrily We Roll Along had never come close to doing.