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.

Brother's Keeper: Netflix's Bloodline

Ben Mendelsohn and Kyle Chandler in Bloodline.

A number of years back, I had people consistently recommending that I watch Damages (2007-2012), a television procedural thriller about a ruthless high-powered attorney (Glenn Close) and her young protégée (Rose Byrne) that she was both tutoring and perhaps trying to murder. After all that praise, I couldn't wait to catch up with it. When I finally did, though, I couldn't believe how ridiculous it was. With barely a shred of dramatic believability, Damages kept the audience in total suspense by withholding plot points, using flashforwards and flashbacks while offering up one outrageous red herring after another. Damages wasn't neo-noir. It was inadvertent high camp. Watching Glenn Close grandstanding in the manner of Joan Crawford in her gargoyle roles, and glaring into the camera in an endless series of frozen close-ups, became a hilarious parody of malevolent evil. Created by brothers Glenn and Todd A. Kessler, Damages streamlined a dramatic formula that had already been successful for a number of other hit shows that liked to define themselves as 'dark' by employing what a friend of mine cleverly calls "cozy cynicism."

Musical Comedy Revivals: My Fair Lady and The Will Rogers Follies

Harry Haddon-Paton, Lauren Ambrose, and Allan Corduner in Bartlett Sher's My Fair Lady. (Photo: WNYC)

In Bartlett Sher’s lush, rewarding revival of My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center, Lauren Ambrose gives the best portrayal I’ve ever seen of Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower seller transformed into an Edwardian lady. Ambrose, best known as one of the co-stars of TV’s Six Feet Under, has only a smattering of theatrical experience (which includes a fine performance in Sher’s production of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! in 2006) and no background at all in musicals, but she turns out to have a pellucid lyric soprano voice and an unerring sense of musical-comedy style.

In Secret: Lovers in Hell

Oscar Isaac and Elizabeth Olsen in In Secret

The new film In Secret has had a limited release and drawn very little notice, but it’s tense and intelligent and beautifully acted. The only generic thing about it, really, is its title. The writer-director, Charlie Stratton, has based it on Émile Zola’s harrowing 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin. Zola’s Thérèse is a young woman brought up by her aunt, who marries her off to her weak, fever-prone son Camille, whose bed the girl shared when they were children. Having relocated to Paris from the country to please Camille, they live above Mme. Raquin’s shop in a glum alley. Thérèse helps out behind the counter during the day; in the evenings she has nothing to do but cook dinner and take care of Camille when he comes home from his shipping-office job. The only distraction in her dull life is the games of dominos they play with some friends one night a week. Mme. Raquin is contented by this bourgeois existence, but Thérèse is so bored that she generally sits in defeated silence as the others play. Then one evening Camille brings one of his co-workers, Laurent – who knew the family as a boy in the provinces – home for supper. He’s an aspiring painter who speaks openly of the free-spirited world of the artist – of the women who model nude – as he executes Camille’s portrait (really a way of endearing himself to the Raquins so that he can enjoy their hospitality on a daily basis). And though at first his sensuality unsettles Thérèse and makes him dislikable to her, when she finds herself alone with him for an hour and he scoops her up in a kiss, she allows him to make her his mistress. The affair transforms her from a virtual sleepwalker to an alert, voracious young animal who finds it surprisingly easy to deceive both her husband and her mother-in-law. Eventually she and Laurent both grow impatient with the restrictions on their life together – especially Laurent, a soft, indolent character who gave up studying the law because he found it too rigorous and would like someone to take care of him so that he could quit his job and go back to the studio (out of laziness, not out of dedication to art). So he takes Thérèse and Camille rowing and drowns his friend while she watches, horrified yet paralyzed by the recognition that he’s acting on their mutual desire. Both the lovers believe that this murder will liberate them, but instead it dooms them: the image of Camille’s sodden corpse haunts their dreams when they’re apart and even after they marry – after a respectable mourning period, and with the blessing of the ignorant Mme. Raquin, who thinks of Laurent as a second son – they see that image in their bed like a ghost. It drives a stake between them and inevitably causes them to turn on each other.

Song and Dance, Part IV: King of Jazz and Miscast

A scene from King of Jazz (1930).

In their efforts to find ways to showcase talkie performers, in the early days of sound film most of the major studios produced elaborate musical revues featuring their leading contract players. MGM released Hollywood Revue of 1929 (for which Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown furnished the song “Singin’ in the Rain”), Warner Brothers had Show of Shows (which included a speech from Richard III by John Barrymore), and Fox came up with Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 – all decidedly mixed bags, as one might imagine. The only one with an actual concept was Universal’s King of Jazz: it was a loving though tongue-in-cheek tribute to Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra staged and shot by the extravagant stage director John Murray Anderson. Anderson sent it flying madly over budget, and after it opened to terrible reviews, it sank quickly at the box office – and neither Anderson nor Whiteman wound up with a movie career. (Whiteman made sporadic appearances in movie musicals over the next two decades, most memorably in Strike Up the Band with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.) But Criterion’s lovingly restored DVD reveals a charming, inventive early musical in stunning two-tone Technicolor. The palette – pink and carmine and orange, silver and pearly white, eggshell blue bordering on turquoise (true blue wasn’t possible until three-tone Technicolor was developed) – is elegant, Gatsby-ish; Herman Rosse designed both sets and costumes. And the lighting by Hal Mohr, Jerry Ash and Ray Rennahan adds a touch of expressionism, with purplish shadows deepening the images.

Toil and Trouble: Wicked, Part I

Bowen Yang, Ariana Grande, and Bronwyn James in Wicked, Part I.

Unbelievably, I have seen the stage musical Wicked three times. I saw the pre-Broadway tryout in San Francisco, with Idina Menzel, Kristen Chenoweth, a young Norbert Leo Butz, and Robert Morse (replaced by Joel Grey on Broadway). At more than three hours, it was bloated and unfocused, but I liked two of composer Stephen Schwartz’s songs, “Popular,” which does everything a musical comedy song should do, and the pretty and affecting “I’m Not That Girl.” And Chenoweth was hilarious. (I didn’t much care for Menzel; of course she won the Tony.) I saw it again several years later on tour in SF, when I took a friend’s daughter to see it for her birthday. Dramaturgically (we’ll get into more about dramaturgy later), it was fascinating to see how they had tightened the show up and how solid its construction now was. It still didn’t make it a great show, but there are any number of far worse musicals out there that have become hits, The Outsiders among the latest. The third time a friend, the talented Jason Graae, played the Wizard, charmingly.

Chekhov Vaudeville

As its name suggests, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is a parody of Chekhov. It’s been a while since Durang has written one of these delirious literary/dramatic-literary burlesques; this one harks back to The Idiots Karamazov (which reimagines Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers as the Tyrone family from Long Day’s Journey into Night) and his one-act take-offs of The Glass Menagerie and Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind (titled, hilariously, A Sty in the Eye). Vanya and Sonia is messy and overextended and it seems to stall in the middle of the second act. But it’s a vaudeville, so its structural problems don’t matter all that much – especially when it has so many funny lines and Sigourney Weaver, Kristine Nielsen and David Hyde Pierce in the leads. Fitted out in a deluxe production staged by Nicholas Martin at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse space, it made me laugh louder than any other recent comedy.

Song and Dance, Part II: Fosse/Verdon

Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams in Fosse/Verdon.

Sam Rockwell’s portrait of Bob Fosse – the legendary director-choreographer whose body finally succumbed to drugs, alcohol, nicotine and workaholism at the age of sixty, in 1987 – in the eight-part F/X miniseries Fosse/Verdon is one of those rare dramatic reincarnations of a celebrity that you feel, as you watch, you will retain forever in your mind alongside the work of the real one. (Some other examples: Judy Davis as Judy Garland and Geoffrey Rush as Peter Sellers, both also in TV dramatizations, and Annette Bening as Gloria Grahame in the 2017 movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.) I saw Rockwell was at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2000 in the supporting role of the desk clerk in a production of Lanford Wilson’s The Hot L Baltimore, which is set in the lobby of a low-rent residential New York hotel. The director, Joe Mantello, staged a pre-show during which some of the members of the ensemble wandered on and improvised behavior that sketched in their characters before we heard any of the dialogue Wilson had scripted for them. I can’t remember what any of the other actors did because Rockwell made his simple tasks so interesting – so detailed and so quirky – that my companion and I kept our eyes on him the whole time. And nearly twenty years later, his performance, in the margins of the show, is the only one I still recall. I had already started spotting him in movies like Galaxy Quest and Michael Hoffman’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where he exhibited the same distinctive combination of focus, precision and humor, all guided by an unpredictable perspective, as if his character occupied some space in the world that no one else had ever noticed before. Both those movies came out in 1999; Rockwell has played dozens of roles since, many of them in bad or forgettable movies, and I haven’t always liked him. (I hated his Oscar-winning performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, but it would be unfair to pin the blame on Rockwell, since nothing in that repellent movie made an iota of sense.) But I think his gifts are both outsize and off-kilter, and when he’s good he can be sensational. He was the best thing about Vice, for instance, drawing on impressive resources for satirical impersonation to play George Bush Jr. But what he does as Bob Fosse goes way beyond impersonation, though he gets down the man’s slouching grace and his sexy slightness and the way the cigarette tucked insouciantly in the corner of his mouth completed him as definitively as it completed Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart. Rockwell gets inside Fosse – his compulsions about work and sex, his ambition and unsatisfiable perfectionism, his cynicism about show business and about his own talents, the erotic charm that was generated as much by his world-weariness as by his persistence and the appeal of being around his genius.

Summer Musicals

Mary Antonini as Reno Sweeney and the cast of Anything Goes. (Photo: David Cooper.)

This article includes reviews of musicals at the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival as well as at Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine.

Anything Goes opened on Broadway in 1934 and proved to be Cole Porter’s biggest hit until Kiss Me, Kate nearly a decade and a half later; it ran for 420 performances, hefty for the time. But it just escaped turning into a fiasco because the book Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, writing from different cities, cobbled together was so scattershot that the producer, Vinton Freedley, asked the director, Howard Lindsay, to rewrite it. With the collaboration of Russel Crouse he did so in three weeks, while the show was in tryouts out of town, and that’s the version audiences saw whenever it was produced over the next half-century. Lewis Milestone made a sweet movie of it in 1936 with Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman, (the leading lady of the Broadway production), though I suspect even many Porter devotees don’t know it. (The 1956 M-G-M movie with Crosby, Donald O’Connor and Mitzi Gaynor, has nothing in common with the show except the title and, in the opening section, a shipboard setting.) There was only one major revival, off-Broadway in 1962, which cut a few of the songs and interpolated others from the Porter archive, like “It’s De-Lovely” from Red, Hot and Blue (which has become a permanent addition) and “Take Me Back to Manhattan” from The New Yorkers. When it finally returned to Broadway in 1987, with Patti LuPone in the Merman role, Crouse’s son Timothy and John Weidman rewrote it, staying faithful to the spirit of the original but making their own emendations to the score. This is the Anything Goes that Kathleen Marshall directed triumphantly in a 2011 Broadway revival starring Sutton Foster and Joel Grey, and it’s the one graced by an ebullient production at the Shaw Festival this season (in their Festival Theatre) directed and choreographed by Kimberley Rampersad.

To Kill a Mockingbird: Atticus Finch on Broadway

Jeff Daniels and Gbenga Akinnagbe in To Kill a Mockingbird. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird, now on Broadway in a production expertly helmed by Bartlett Sher, is only the latest of several stage adaptations of Harper Lee’s well-loved 1960 novel, but it may be the first one by a distinguished dramatic writer with a distinctive style. That turns out to be both a good thing and a bad thing. Sorkin has done a fine job of shaping the material dramatically. Instead of leaving it in the emotional point of view of the little girl, Scout Finch, he’s divided the narrative voice among the three children – Scout, her older brother Jem, and their summertime companion Dill (who is Jem’s best friend) – who witness the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping and beating a young white woman, and defended by Scout and Jem’s father Atticus. It’s effective because it operates simultaneously as a reminder that we’re watching the tale unfold through the eyes of impressionable kids – that it’s a coming-of-age story – and as a Brechtian device. The children take turns relaying the information to the audience as the play moves back and forth between Tom’s trial, which they view as spectators, and their lives in and around the Finch household, including their fascination with their reclusive, never-seen neighbor, Boo Radley. (In the book, Boo is also a source of terror, but Sorkin downplays that element in the service of dramatic economy.) Courtroom settings are notoriously static for stage plays; here the continual shift of focus solves the problem while the narrative jumping around feels right for a story related by young kids. Sorkin, who has an acute ear, extends the dialogue – much of it is straight from the novel – to translate Lee’s wry southern humor and folksiness, which can be as dry as a corn husk and as tart and stinging as bourbon. And he’s toughened up Atticus Finch (played by Jeff Daniels), who now has a surprising forcefulness when he’s cross-examining the alleged rape victim, Mayella Ewell (Erin Wilhelmi), and an even more surprising temper when he’s dealing with her vindictive father Bob (Frederick Weller).