The Bridges of Madison County: Indistinct

Elena Shaddow and Steven Pasquale in The Bridges of Madison County

Last year the Williamstown Theatre Festival premiered a new musical based on Todd Haynes’s movie Far from Heaven – a perplexing choice, since the material (whatever one thinks of it) is so rarefied and dependent on cinematic reference points that transposing it could only alter the meaning, or at least reduce it to a series of social-problem-melodrama clichés. This year WTF mounted another new musical, based on Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County, and that’s puzzling too, though for a different reason. Waller’s novel about a short-lived affair between a married Iowa farm woman who’s an Italian émigré and an itinerant photographer is basically a Harlequin romance for the women’s-book-club set, with sufficiently self-conscious style to make readers believe that it should be taken seriously. It’s a suffocatingly bland volume, with characters who are barely more than ciphers, and the only thing that makes the 1995 movie version more distinctive is the miscasting of Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood in the two principal roles. (Eastwood directed the picture.) So why bother turn this story into a musical?

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.

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."

You Want to Make a Musical Out of That? Far from Heaven, New Girl in Town

Charlie Plummer, Alexa Niziak, and Kelli O’Hara in Far From Heaven (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The biggest deal at the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer is a new musical of the 2002 Todd Haynes movie Far from Heaven starring Kelli O’Hara, who has taken a couple of weeks off from her Broadway show Nice Work If You Can Get It to perform in the Berkshires. Any chance to see O’Hara, a pure-voiced, remarkably expressive singer who is also a first-rate actress, is worth taking, and in the role of Cathy Whitaker – played on film by Julianne Moore – she sings superbly and conveys affectingly the bafflement of a quietly elegant, optimistic 1950s New England housewife who suddenly discovers that all of her assumptions about her life and her community are false. Moore, whose beauty is somehow touching and remote at the same time, brought to the part a sense of profound alienation; O’Hara, who has a gift for plumbing the depths of conventional characters, comes at it from a different perspective.

Composer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie are drawn to unusual projects, to say the least. They wrote the score for Grey Gardens, which was based on the Maysles Brothers’ documentary about those cousins of Jackie Kennedy’s, mother and daughter, who lived in poverty in a dilapidated Long Island mansion with dozens of cats; and in Happiness, which had a limited run at Lincoln Center, all the characters are dead people, the victims of a bus crash, who each have to dig into their memories for a moment of perfect happiness before they’re permitted to proceed to their eternal rest. It seems almost superfluous to point out that neither of these musicals works, though Happiness, which was directed and choreographed by the resourceful Susan Stroman, had a knockout of an opening number, and the flashback section of Grey Gardens that took up all of act one – the part of the narrative that the writers (Doug Wright supplied the book) had to invent – seemed grounded in some kind of playable narrative, unlike the ghoulish, inscrutable second act.

Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert in Far from Heaven (2002)

Possibly Far from Heaven, a collaboration with playwright Richard Greenberg, is even more of a head-scratcher. Why would anyone want to turn Haynes’s movie into a musical? It’s about a Hartford, Connecticut Mattron who discovers that her husband is gay and then falls in love with her African-American gardener. Haynes intended it as a corrective to the Technicolor soap operas of the fifties that tamped down homoerotic subplots and relegated black characters to demeaning subsidiary roles, and its ideal audience seemed to be made up of academics with a fondness for post-modern deconstruction and serious admirers of Douglas Sirk’s glossy hothouse melodramas, who have often claimed that Sirk rebelled against the social constrictions of his era in histrionic pictures like Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows. I don’t think much of Sirk, but his movies are seldom boring; Far from Heaven, by contrast, is arid and theoretical – though no less preposterous. Haynes creates an alternative version of the fifties that borders on the Martian. Raymond, the gardener (played by Dennis Haysbert), is highly cultivated and can speak articulately on a variety of subjects; the only thing he doesn’t seem to know anything about is gardening, and we never see him do any. Yet despite his intelligence, he’s shocked when his squiring a white woman around draws unpleasant attention, as if he’d never heard of racism. Haynes is so eager to show us how superior this black man is that he draws him as if he’d been dropped into New England from some sociologically advanced planet. The movie is so fanatically bent on pushing through its thesis that it winds up looking idiotic. The point of casting Dennis Quaid, an almost iconically straight actor, as a closeted homosexual is that we’d never imagine he might be. But instead we don’t believe he could be, which isn’t the same thing. Haynes’s strategies run to making the Whitakers’ little boy effeminate and their little girl a tomboy, to show us that children can sometimes elude gender stereotypes.

Rescue Me: Flawed But Arresting

The following blog contains spoilers.

Is Rescue Me the best flawed show on television? I’d argue it is, but ever since its debut in the summer of 2004, the FX series (from the same cable network that brought you The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Damages) has divided audiences, who either like its incisive drama and outrageous humour or decry its juvenile tendencies and perpetually adolescent characters. Actually, they’re both right as this maddeningly uneven TV series can be as frustrating as it is engrossing.

Centering on the actions of the firefighters of Ladder Company 62 (aka 62 Truck), a Harlem-based firehouse, post 9/11, Rescue Me is an ambitious show that tries, and often succeeds, in capturing a specific moment in time: that of the slowly recovering shell-shocked New York City and the attendant worries, fears and attitudes held by those brave heroes who paid such a high price during the September 11 terrorist attacks. (An estimated and unprecedented 343 firefighters lost their lives in the collapse of the Twin Towers.) But this is no reverent show, extolling people only at their heroic best. The firemen, led by Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) are a profane, womanizing and, in the case of Gavin, an alcoholic lot, as apt to cheat on their partners as they are to risk their lives by running into a burning building.

All That Jazz: Paradise Blue and The Wild Party

Kristolyn Lloyd and Blair Underwood in Paradise Blue. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Paradise Blue, a new play by Dominique Morisseau at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, is set in the African-American community of Blackbottom in Detroit in 1949, during the heyday of bop. Its protagonist, Blue (Blair Underwood), is a jazz trumpeter who owns a club, the Paradise, and headlines the combo that plays there. He’s struggling to attain the zenith of his creative powers while battling the ghosts of his childhood: he saw his father murder his mother. Morisseau intends Blue to embody the musicians in the bop movement, gifted and intellectually self-challenging, restless and haunted. It’s a great subject, but she’s also working with black archetypes that limit the play imaginatively. The quintet of hard-working actors in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s production strive to bring a vibrancy to the play but they’re stuck playing caricatures.