Theater Reviews

Scramble!

Susan Granger’s review of “Scramble!” (Westport Country Playhouse)

The Westport Country Playhouse’s choice of David Wiltse as playwright-in-residence has given Fairfield County audiences world premieres of “Triangles for Two,” “The Good German” and “Sedition,” along with “A Marriage Minuet” and “Temporary Help.” Both a playwright and a novelist, David Wiltse has a distinctive point-of-view that’s both perceptive and provocative.
“Scramble!” is a concept he’s been tinkering with – on and off – for years. Under the title “Hatchetman,” it was originally developed at the Theater Artists Workshop and then produced at Florida Stage. As directed by Tracy Brigden, it’s a farce that goes awry.
In a stilted series of loosely connected, madly incoherent scenes, the inept staff of a golf periodical discovers that their magazine has been sold and there’s a spy in their midst, reporting to management about who’s qualified to stay and who isn’t. Suspicions fall on a nerdy newcomer, Johnson (Tom Beckett), who persistently scribbles in a tiny notebook that he locks in a desk drawer. So he’s feted and fawned over by the resident sex symbol (Jennifer Mudge), frenzied writer (Matthew Rauch), unintelligible misfit (Rebecca Harris), dominatrix editor-in-chief (Candy Buckley) and bumbling, memory-challenged son (Colin McPhillamy) of the magazine’s founder.
At the core of Wiltse’s zany, satiric thrust is his pungent observation that the insecure dilettantes who comprise the staff cannot even play golf, the sport about which they’re supposed to write. That’s a clever premise – rooted in his brief sojourn writing for a tennis magazine which led to his hit Broadway play “Doubles” – but it doesn’t mesh with the physical comedy necessary for farce. On scenic designer Jeff Cowie’s clever set, doors slam, chaos reigns in the storage closet and mistaken identity bits abound. It’s frenetic but not very funny.
“Scramble” plays at the Westport Country Playhouse through July 26th.

Scramble! Read More »

All My Sons

Theater Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger reviews “All My Sons” (Gerald Schoenfeld Theater’08-’09 season)

It’s hard to imagine a time and place where Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” – about selfishness, greed and morality – would be more profoundly moving and relevant than the present. Inspired by a true story about a successful businessman who knowingly defective airplane parts to the government during World War II, resulting in the deaths of 21 American flyers, it’s a classic Greek tragedy – and is treated as such in British director Simon McBurney’s stunning revival.
Set in a backyard somewhere in the Midwest, it begins as prosperous Joe Keller (John Lithgow) and his wife Kate (Dianne Wiest) uneasily prepare to welcome back Joe’s incarcerated partner’s daughter, Ann Deever (Katie Holmes), who grew up next-door and was engaged to their older son, Larry, who has been MIA for three years. Now she’s being courted by their younger son, Chris (Patrick Wilson) – at least until her volatile lawyer/brother George (Christian Camargo) barges in with unwelcome truths.
For today’s cinematically-oriented audience, McBurney includes Finn Ross’ unconventional yet surprisingly effective newsreel clips and multi-dimensional projections, sometimes unobtrusively relegating peripheral actors to chairs visible in the background and moving scenery on Tom Pye’s minimalist set. This effectively stylish, ominous atmosphere is emphasized by Paul Anderson’s lighting, along with Christopher Shutt and Carolyn Dowling’s underscoring.
Wrestling with guilt, John Lithgow delivers a heartbreaking performance, attempting to deny and then to justify his duplicitous behavior, while Dianne Wiest’s stalwart maternal fortitude disguises her grief. Patrick Wilson exudes wholesome principles and Katie Holmes’ exuberance is tempered with suspicion.
This is the first Broadway revival of an Arthur Miller play since his death in 2005 – and has the blessing of his daughter, film-maker Rebecca Miller who is married to Daniel Day-Lewis. And the 1948 film adaptation, starring Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster, is available on video and dvd.

All My Sons Read More »

Sunday in the Park With George

Theater Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Sunday in the Park With George” (Studio 54: ’07-’08 season)

“Sunday in the Park With George” has been called Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s most cerebral, coldly calculated and certainly most challenging musical – and this is its first major New York revival since its 1984 Broadway and Pulitzer Prize-winning debut with Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin.
Centering on post-impressionist painter George Seurat’s pointillist masterwork, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte,” it’s a visually glorious rumination on the creative process. “Art isn’t easy” is thematic, punctuated with the exuberance of a musical score that includes “Color and Light,” “Finishing the Hat,” “Putting It Together” and “Move On.”
Set in Paris in 1884, the first act examines the troubled relationship between the obsessive, self-absorbed painter (Daniel Evans) and his model/muse/mistress Dot (Jenna Russell), who becomes pregnant with his child and leaves him for another man. The second act details Seurat’s American great-grandson’s (Evans) pretentious struggle with sophisticated patrons in the contemporary art world, exhibiting whirling lights which he calls “Chromolume No. 7” – with the encouragement of his great-grandmother (Russell).
The Roundabout Theater Company has imported this production from London’s West End, cleverly replacing the three-dimensional, pop-up cardboard cutouts and laser beams with high-tech still and animated digital projections to convey Seurat’s complex painting process, focusing on subtly changing perspective and harmonious flecks of color.
Fortunately, director Sam Buntrock, who is also an animator, and his creative team – David Farley (set and costumes), Ken Billington (lighting), Timothy Bird and the Knifedge Creative Network (projection design) – makes the most of this glorious 21st century gadgetry. While neither Daniel Evans nor Jenna Russell has the star quality of their predecessors, they’re excellent singers, and the supporting cast – Michael Cumpsty, Jessica Malskey, Mary Beth Peil, Alexander Gemignani, Santino Fontana – is superb.

Sunday in the Park With George Read More »

Cry-Baby: The Musical

Theater Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Cry-Baby: The Musical” (Marriott Marquis Theater 2007-2008 season)

Following the astounding success of “Hairspray,” another John Waters movie has become a bouncy Broadway musical.
Set in Baltimore, it epitomizes a 1950s high-school culture-clash. Much to her dismay, virginal Alison Vernon-Williams (Elizabeth Stanley) is a well-bred, ‘good girl.’ So when – at a ‘get-your-polio-shot’ picnic – she’s suddenly confronted by greasy-haired, swivel-hipped Elvis clone named Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker (James Snyder), whose parents were framed as Communists and executed for arson, an unexpected, inappropriate match is made.
Naturally, Cry-Baby doesn’t find favor with her snotty classmates and prim ‘n’ proper grandmother (Harriet Harris), and Alison hardly fits in with his grungy gang from the wrong side of town, including an ugly duckling called Hatchet-Face (Tory Ross), an arrogantly pregnant teen (Carly Jibson) and a crazy stalker (Alli Mauzey). Think of it as “Grease” without the memorable songs.
Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan have adapted the popular 1990 cult cinema classic about the social divide, while David Javerbaum (writer on “The Daily Show”) and Adam Schlesinger (bassist for the pop group Fountains of Wayne) provide the subversive music and satirical lyrics. Although the comedic dialogue begs for better timing, director Mark Brokaw keeps the pace moving, aided in no small part by Rob Ashford’s imaginatively aerobic choreography, Catherine Zuber’s class-conscious costumes and Scott Pask’s flexible, minimalist set.
While it’s immediately obvious that James Snyder is no dangerously smoldering Johnny Depp (who created the motorcycle-riding screen role), he’s appealing enough, as is Elizabeth Stanley, even if she appears far too mature for the ‘sweet, innocent’ part. But the biggest laughs emerge from scene-stealing Harriet Harris.
Will “Cry Baby: The Musical” ever make its way into an anthology of Broadway’s Best? I doubt it. But it does offer a rollicking good time.

Cry-Baby: The Musical Read More »

The New Century

Theater Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The New Century” (Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, 2007-2008 season)

In the four short monologues that comprise “The New Century,” prolific Paul Rudnick, who has written plays like “Regrets Only,” “Jeffrey,” “Valhalla,” “I Hate Hamlet” and “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told I” and whose screenplays include “In & Out,” “Jeffrey” and “Addams Family Values,” focuses on gay-themed angst.
We’re first introduced to Helen Nadler, a stoically supportive, yet acerbic Long Island mother (Linda Lavin) whose children constantly ‘surprise’ her with their sexual preferences; as a result, she proclaims herself “the most tolerant mother of them all.”
Then along comes Mr. Charles, a flamboyantly swishy Palm Beach public-access television personality (Peter Bartlett) with his buff boy-toy Shane (Mike Doyle) and a confused receptionist (Christy Pusz) who wants to be sure her baby grows up to be gay.
After the intermission, there’s Barbara Ellen Diggs (Jayne Houdyshell), an accomplished Decatur, Illinois, craftswoman who, somehow, connects her life’s work with the AIDS death of her grown son in the Big Apple, shortly before 9/11.
The episodic quartet concludes with the titular segment, as the various, cliché-ridden characters collide and consider their futures in a Manhattan maternity ward where Nadler’s granddaughter has just been born.
Paul Rudnick’s greatest asset is his dialogue; he gives adroit actors some very amusing one-liners. But the flimsy, often forced and contrived concept – that “The New Century” is about acceptance – seems not only dated but somewhat monotonous, despite director Nicholas Martin’s crisp pacing, William Ivey Long’s eye-candy costumes and Doyle’s full-frontal nudity.
Homosexuality has been out of the closet for some time now – and there’s not much new here. As a result, “The New Century” comes across as loosely connected, decidedly underwhelming “Saturday Night Live” skits that never made it to prime time.

The New Century Read More »

Mary Stuart

Theater Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Mary Stuart” (Broadhurst Theater: ’08-’09 season)

Imagine the battle of wits of “Frost/Nixon” – but between two British Queens.
In Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 play, adapted by Peter Oswald, Protestant Queen Elizabeth I (Harriet Walter) must decide the fate of her Roman Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scotland (Janet McTeer), whom many believe, by right of royal blood, should be on the throne of England. (If you’ve been following TV’s “The Tudors,” you already realize the dramatic potential in the genealogy here, since Elizabeth was the bastard child of Henry VIII with Anne Boleyn.)
After an unsuccessful attempt at a coup, volatile, rebellious Mary, tended by her loyal nurse Hanna (Maria Tucci), is being held prisoner by icy, wary Elizabeth in the dungeon of Fotheringhay Castle. As the courtiers jockey for position, trying to influence one Queen or another, a confrontation is inevitable. Elizabeth is well aware that her throne is at risk as long as Mary lives, yet she can’t quite bring herself to sign the death warrant. But one has to wait until Act II for that – and it’s worth it – as director Phyllida Lloyd (“Mamma Mia!”) gradually builds the crackling suspense and sinister tension to a crescendo as their rivalry explodes – not just for political power but also for male sexual attention, epitomized by John Benjamin Hickey as the deceitful Earl of Leicester.
Janet McTeer, who won at Tony for “A Doll’s House” in 1997, is nothing less than electrifying as she pleads for her life, and she’s matched step-by-step by Harriet Walter, last seen on Broadway with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1983.
While Anthony Ward’s sets are impressive, his costuming concept is striking: while the women wear proper Elizabethan garb, the men (Brian Murray, Chandler Williams, Nicholas Woodeson Michael Countryman) wear dark, contemporary Westminster suits, appearing interchangeable in their timeless duplicity, except for Robert Stanton as a fatefully naïve courtier.
For brilliant theater, don’t miss this classic battle of divas.

Mary Stuart Read More »

Macbeth

Theater Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Macbeth” (Lyceum Theater 2007-2008 season)

Having made the journey from England’s Chichester Festival Theater, to London’s West End, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and now to Broadway, Patrick Stewart’s stunning production of William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is awesome.
Instead of the usual beginning with three weird hags singing their riddling runes on a dark, lonely moor, the three ‘witches’ appear on-stage as hospital nurses, lethally tending to the Bloody Sergeant, before they deliver their prophecy to the esteemed nobleman, Macbeth (Stewart), who will subsequently fall prey to ambition, despite warnings from his friend Banquo (Martin Turner). Macbeth is egged on to usurping the Scottish throne by his young, strong-willed, even-more-ambitious, trophy wife (Kate Fleetwood), who realizes that an overnight visit from King Duncan (Byron Jennings) is the perfect opportunity for murder. But anguished Macduff (Michael Feast) suspects their sinister plot and, eventually, assembles a hostile army, bringing the forests of Birnam to Dunsinane Hill.
One of the finest actors of his generation, Patrick Stewart commands the stage, delivering a nuanced, surprisingly complex performance, including casually making and eating a sandwich while plotting the upcoming slaughter.
Director Rupert Goold sets this contemporary production in what appears to be Stalinist-era Russia. Set designer Anthony Ward has created a stark, industrial kitchen-like setting in which people arrive and leave by an ominously creaking elevator. Adding to the effectiveness is Howard Harrison’s lighting, Adam Cork’s sound and Lorna Heavey’s inventive video projections.
One of the most impressive moments, the arrival of Banquo’s blood-drenched ghost, comes not once – but twice; once in reality, the second time haunting Macbeth’s conscience-stricken mind. However, that is the highlight of the second act which is far too long. “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” one of Shakespeare’s shortest dramas, now tortuously drags on nearly three hours.

Macbeth Read More »

Xanadu

Theater Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Xanadu” (Helen Hayes Theater…’07-’08 season)

Back in 1980, “Xanadu” was a colossal flop on the big screen, despite the best efforts of Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly. It won six Razzies and prompted one reviewer to caution: “Xana-don’t.” Few remember that its derivation was the 1947 musical, “Down to Earth” with Rita Hayworth as the Greek goddess Terpsichore.
Nevertheless, “Xanadu” developed a cult following, and its pop songs – “Have You Never Been Mellow,” “Magic” and “Physical” – remain popular. So now it’s morphed onto Broadway as a lavish confection adapted by Douglas Carter Beane and directed by Christopher Ashley, who deftly juggles the disco balls.
Fresh from “Beauty and the Beast,” “Hairspray” and “Little Shop of Horrors,” Kerry Butler embodies the ethereal Greek demi-goddess Clio, who appears as a perky mortal named Kira in Venice Beach, California. Her mission is to inspire a frustrated artist, Sonny (Cheyenne Jackson), who draws chalk murals of a woman who looks just like her on the sidewalk by the shore. This riles Clio’s ugly sisters, Calliope (Jackie Hoffman) and Melpomene (Mary Yesta), who provide great amusement, singing “Evil Woman.” Nevertheless, Kira inspires Sonny to quit his day job as a commercial artist in order to follow his passion, joining forces with an entrepreneur (Tony Roberts) to launch a roller disco called Xanadu.
That leads to the much-heralded roller-skating gimmick. Initially, the entire cast was supposed to roll around in the finale. But, at the first day of rehearsals, the over’40s – Tony Roberts and Jackie Hoffman, among them – were declared exempt, a wise decision since the original leading man, James Carpinello, broke his ankle in two places in tryouts.
“This is like children’s theater for 40 year-old gay people!” quips Ms. Hoffman’s Calliope – and I’ll certainly go along with that frothy evaluation.

Xanadu Read More »

August: Osage County

Theater Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “August: Osage County” (Imperial Theater ’07-’08 season)

Tracy Letts’ gloriously massive, dysfunctional family drama dominates the Broadway season so far – after making its debut at Chicago’s renowned Steppenwolf Theater.
“Life is very long,” says poet/patriarch Beverly Weston (Dennis Letts, the playwright’s father), quoting T.S. Eliot in the prologue, adding “The world is gradually becoming a place where I do not care to be anymore,” courtesy of John Berryman.
Left behind is the emotional baggage carried by his cantankerous, fractured family. There’s his resentful, venomous, pill-popping wife, Violet (Deanna Dunagan), and their three grown daughters: exasperated, menopausal Barbara (Amy Morton), whose husband (Jeff Perry…a.k.a. Meredith’s estranged dad on “Grey’s Anatomy”) has left her and their precocious, pot-smoking 14 year-old Jean (Madeleine Martin) for the affections of one of his students; Karen (Mariann Mayberry), who is ostensibly engaged to Steve (Brian Kerwin); and Ivy (Sally Murphy) who has a new lover. There’s also Violet’s vulgar younger sister Mattie Fae (Rondi Reed), her henpecked husband Charlie (Francis Guinan) and their slow-witted adult son, called Little Charles (Ian Barford). Eventually, Sheriff Deon Gilbeau (Troy West) appears and it’s no surprise that he was once Barbara’s high-school beau.
“This is the Plains…some spiritual affliction, like the Blues,” we’re told. Secrets (incest, adultery, etc.) are revealed and relationships are ruined, as the three-story, rural Oklahoma homestead – with a Cheyenne Indian housekeeper (Kimberly Guerrero) ensconced in the attic – in which the fast-paced drama unfolds, is brought to life by energetic director Anna D. Shapiro and inventive production designer Todd Rosenthal.
Tracy Letts’ characters are psychologically believable and his acerbic dialogue is top-notch. The performances are flawless, obviously having been honed by the actors having worked together in repertory, making the three-hour and 20-minute running time fly by.

August: Osage County Read More »

Vigil

Theater Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Vigil” (Westport Country Playhouse, March ’08)

With Joanne Woodward and Anne Keefe back at the helm, the Westport Country Playhouse is back on track with this morbidly dark, existential comedy about loneliness and death.
Summoned by his elderly, dying Aunt Grace (Helen Stenborg) to whom he hasn’t spoken in 30 years, Kemp (Timothy Busfield) dutifully leaves his bank job and travels cross-country to be at her bedside. When he arrives, however, the silent woman doesn’t seem to be as ailing as he’d frankly hoped. Indeed, as months pass, the self-absorbed, misanthropic fellow grows increasingly desperate and agitated.
“I’m concerned about your health,” he tells Grace after more than a year of serving as her nursemaid and companion, preparing endless batches of butterscotch pudding and funeral plans. “It seems to be improving.”
Canadian playwright Morris Panych has crafted a bizarre, gimmicky concept that doesn’t truly reveal itself until the second act – after Kemp has delivered a seemingly endless, often redundant series of short monologues, recounting his wretched, dysfunctional childhood with emotionally abusive parents and rebuking Grace for her inattentiveness to his paranoid needs and inexplicable lack of interest in his welfare.
While director Stephen DiMenna maximizes the crisp amusement of the strange, campy vignettes, it’s a tour-de-force for Timothy Busfield (TV’s “thirtysomething,” “The West Wing.”), who delicately balances the dry, cynical humor with neurotic pathos. And Helen Stenborg (Broadway’s “The Crucible,” “A Month in the Country”) gleefully steals scene after scene with her bemused, often bewildered facial expressions. She is the dramatic foil and she underplays the crucial role to wondrous perfection.
Credit the team of set designer Andromache Chalifant, costumer Ilona Somogyi, lighting designer Ben Stanton and sound designer Daniel Baker for the effectiveness of the decrepit, threadbare, high-windowed old house.

Vigil Read More »