Musicals Round-up Part II: New York

Corey Cott and Laura Osnes star in Bandstand. (Photo: Nathan Johnson)

This article contains reviews of Bandstand (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre), War Paint (Nederlander Theatre), and Pacific Overtures (Classic Stage Company).

Ben Platt’s Tony Award for his portrayal of the anxiety-ridden teen hero of Dear Evan Hansen was no surprise, and he deserves all the recognition he’s received. But the fact that Corey Cott didn’t even receive a nomination for Bandstand constitutes highway robbery. Cott played the Louis Jourdan role in the Broadway retread of Gigi two seasons ago, and he was so callow and insipid that the character barely made sense. But when you see him as Danny Novitski, Bandstand’s haunted hero, who returns from WW2 and puts together a jazz band made up of fellow vets – responding to a competition for the best song honoring the contributions of the military, the prize for which is an appearance in a new M-G-M musical – you can hardly believe it’s the same performer. He brings the role a late-forties, early-fifties-style hard-edged sensitivity – part Dana Andrews, part Frank Sinatra. He gets you by the throat and the heart in his first, self-defining number (called “Donny Novitski”) and you’re right there with him for the next two and a half hours.

Newfangled, Old-Fashioned: Hamilton and Funny Girl, Streaming

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Philippa Sooi n Hamilton.

Like at least half of my friends, I bought a subscription to Disney+ so I could watch Hamilton. Thomas Kail, who staged it on Broadway (and, in its earlier incarnation, downtown at the Public Theatre), filmed it in 2016, and the original plan was to release it to theatres. When Covid put paid to those plans, Disney picked it up, and though one misses the effect of the big screen – and though the handful of fucks are muted – it seems like a reasonable trade-off. I caught Hamilton with the London cast two years ago, and they were admirable. But, captured just before they dispersed, the original ensemble, headed by book writer-composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton and Leslie Odom, Jr. as Aaron Burr, is so electric that I actually found the show even more exciting and affecting on my home screen.

Not Throwing Away Its Shot: Hamilton on Broadway

Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theatre (photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times).

It’s hard to separate the new Broadway musical Hamilton from the hype surrounding it. Its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, has been performing versions of its songs since early 2009, when he presented an early draft of the show’s opening number at the White House. It has garnered breathless praise since it opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater at the beginning of this year. On August 6, it officially opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway.

It’s not hard to see where the hype comes from: Hamilton is one of the freshest, most energetic productions I can remember seeing on Broadway. It’s especially surprising that this should be the case, because its plot is a fairly comprehensive chronicle of Alexander Hamilton’s (played by Lin-Manuel Miranda) life, adapted from Ron Chernow’s approximately 800-page biography. The plot hits every major episode of Hamilton’s life: his brutal early childhood in the Caribbean, his service as George Washington’s (Christopher Jackson) right-hand man during the Revolutionary War, his marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler (Phillipa Soo), his role in shaping the Constitution and the nation’s financial system, the sex scandal that ruined his career, and ultimately his death at the hands of Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom, Jr.). It doesn’t exactly sound like a blockbuster premise for a musical.

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.

Musical Revivals II: Sweeney Todd and Camelot

Annaleigh Ashford and Josh Groban in Sweeney Todd.

Despite the intermittently brilliant Stephen Sondheim score and a superb cast headed by Len Cariou and an unforgettable Angela Lansbury, I had a medium cool experience with the original 1979 Broadway production of Sweeney Todd. It felt inflated, overproduced (a response I have had to a few other Prince shows), and determined to make a statement competitive with that of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which was the obvious inspiration for Sondheim, book writer Hugh Wheeler and Prince. But the material, a grisly horror derived from Christopher Bond’s 1973 rewrite of a mid-Victorian melodrama, is thin. At the end of the first act, thinking he’s missed his chance to murder the  corrupt Judge Turpin, who trumped up a charge against him and had him transported so he could get his mitts on Sweeney’s innocent wife Lucy, Sweeney, “the demon barber of Fleet Street,” sings “Epiphany,” in which he decides that he’s going to visit his frustrated revenge on his customers because “they all deserve to die.” And Mrs. Lovett, his landlady, who runs a pathetic pie shop with the only stringy meat she can afford, comes up with the scheme of using the corpses to make her wares sweeter and juicier.  Todd loves the idea, so they become business partners. In the first-act finale, “A Little Priest,” he argues that since society is built on men devouring each other, he and Mrs. Lovett might as well make the metaphor literal. “A Little Priest” is a wonderful burlesque-style novelty number constructed on a series of increasingly funny puns about their imagined victims. But it’s not exactly “The Second Threepenny Finale” (“What keeps a man alive? He lives on others”). Sweeney Todd is a cleverly devised penny dreadful, not a social satire.

What turned me around about the musical was the 2005 Broadway revival, directed by John Doyle, which had begun life in the West End. Starring Michael Cerveris as Sweeney and Patti LuPone as Mrs. Lovett, it was leaner and tighter than the original, with ingenious Brechtian effects – and it made no attempt to sell itself as profound social commentary. The new Sweeney Todd, directed by Thomas Kail, with musical direction by Alec Lacamoire – both Hamilton alumni – is almost as good as Doyle’s. And it has an even better Mrs. Lovett than LuPone, Annaleigh Ashford, whom I loved in Dogfight and the 2014 revival of You Can’t Take It with You (with James Earl Jones) and the 2017 revival of Sunday in the Park with George (where she played opposite Jake Gyllenhaal). She’s amazing. Slighter and more kinetic than her predecessors, Ashford looks like a devilish rag doll, and every physical choice she makes – and many of her vocal ones (like switching keys twice in the middle of her show-stopping first song, “The Worst Pies in London”) – is inspired. When she played this role Lansbury embodied the play’s music-hall origins, while LuPone’s numbers were like Brecht and Weill done as punk rock. Ashford is lighter on her feet and loonier, and her performance harks back to revue comedy – specifically to Imogene Coca, who partnered Sid Caesar so sublimely in the live TV days.

Kitty Litter: Cats

Dame Judi Dench in Cats.

For the last few days, my Facebook feed has been inundated with memes and tweets and hot takes and quips and hit pieces all commenting on the single biggest scandal ever to hit the English-speaking world: Cats, the movie. Director Tom Hooper’s hallucinogenic, CGI-fueled take on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mammoth musical success is apparently an impeachable offense, and the country is united in proclaiming it so. There are so many cat puns floating around the Internet that I’m sure the one I’ve used for my title has already gone viral for someone else, but as I’ve done my best to ignore the raging interwebs, I use it here with pride.

When Cats the stage musical first came out about 5,000 years and 2.45 billion performances ago, there were apparently millions of folks who thought, People singing and dancing dressed up as cats!? Sign me up for a couple hundred tickets! I wasn’t one of them, as the thought of people dancing and singing dressed up as cats makes me wonder if life is worth living. Besides, I’ve seen Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express, which is basically the same thing as Cats, but the people are singing and dancing dressed up as train cars, zooming around on roller skates. (Reader, I have suffered.)