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2006 at the (New York) Theater

I saw 71 shows in 2006—24 on Broadway, 36 other shows in New York, 10 shows in London, and one in Manchester, England. 59 were plays, 11 musicals, and one could probably best be described as a play with music (the wonderful Nights at the Circus, which I saw at the Lyric, Hammersmith). Looking back on the letter grade I assigned to the shows when I got home from seeing them (I’ve made only slight tweaks to the original grades on the list I posted), a lot of them seem off. Partly it’s a comparison thing—I said Bridge & Tunnel was better than Awake and Sing!?—and partly I notice that I’m stingier with ratings when I’m seeing a lot of shows in a short period; but theater being a fleeting medium, perhaps the shows and performances that linger are the “best.”

Rather than a Top 10 list, this is more of a list of the shows that I saw in the 2006 calendar year that stuck with me most. For the moment, I’ll stick to New York shows.

TWELFTH NIGHT (Chekhov International Theatre Festival at BAM, dir. Declan Donnellan). This Russian troupe gave a master class in acting technique.

THE BOGUS WOMAN (by Kay Adshead, seen at 59E59 in the Brits Off-Broadway series). Some critics found this play over-the-top and unbelievable; I found it all too credible. In a year of outstanding one-woman performances, Sarah Niles’ tour-de-force was shiver-inducing.

DRUID/SYNGE (Lincoln Center Festival). The marathon aspect didn’t bother me one bit; in fact, I’m sure I got a lot more out of the plays by seeing them in succession. The outstanding elements were Riders to the Sea and, especially, The Playboy of the Western World. (Yes, of course I'm seeing The Coast of Utopia in a marathon—I'm a Wagenerian!)

IN THE CONTINUUM (Danai Gurira & Nikkole Salter, seen at the Perry Street Theater, RIP). Beautifully subtle acting and writing from two young artists on a subject that tends to repel subtlety.

SATELLITES (by Diana Son at the Public Theater). Yes, this play took on a LOT of topics—gentrification, “mixed” marriages, the difficulty of finding a nanny (recently the subject of a smart story in the NYT), how children affect marriages and work dynamics, just to name a few—many more than it could satisfactorily resolve, but I regularly find myself thinking back to moments in the play. A ton of smart ideas and difficult dilemmas in a short work.

WELL (by Lisa Kron, seen at the Longacre). It depresses me no end that Broadway wasn’t the right spot for this play.

HISTORY BOYS (Alan Bennett, Broadhurst). I’d’ve trimmed a little at the top and the tail, but there were moments of such transcendence that I almost forgot my reservations.

THE DROWSY CHAPERONE (for simplicity's sake, let's say the folks behind Slings and Arrows, at the Marquis)—Obviously, I’m more drawn to plays than to musicals, but I loved this goofy story. Great music, clever script, talented cast … I found it wonderfully entertaining.

CHRISTINE JORGENSON REVEALS (performed by Bradford Louryk, seen at what was then Dodger Stages). Who knew lip-synching could be so entertaining and thought-provoking?

THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE—I don’t think I want to see that much blood on a stage ever again, but shock value can be very refreshing. And, of course, it wasn’t just shock value. Up there with the blood and gore were some serious discussions of the often skimpy motivations for acts of hideous violence.

Special Mentions:

I can’t quite bring myself to put them on the main list, but I loved both KIKI & HERB ON BROADWAY and JAY JOHNSON: MY TWO AND ONLY. Kiki & Herb’s Broadway show would’ve been on my list, but then I went to their Christmas show at the Bowery Ballroom—one-fifth the price and nearly twice as long (which was kind of annoying, quite honestly; don’t folks who go to downtown clubs have jobs to go to the next mornings?), and suddenly those “This show doesn’t belong on Broadway” complaints took on a new light—it’s not that Broadway’s too good for them, it’s that seeing them there costs way too much. I think My Two and Only was the only Broadway show I saw this year that made me cry!

Outstanding Performances Not Mentioned Above:

Logan Marshall-Green in Dog Sees God and Pig Farm
Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens (No, really, how do you sing so beautifully with tears and snot streaming down your face?)
Lee Pace in Guardians
Cate Blanchett in Hedda Gabler (she overpowered the other players, but …)
Megan Dodds in My Name Is Rachel Corrie
Ian McDiarmid in Faith Healer (Cherry Jones got a bum rap, but it’s hard to win plaudits for underplaying a character; McDiarmid chewed the scenery, but entertainingly)
Zoe Wanamaker in Awake and Sing!
Sandra Oh in Satellites
Liev Schreiber in Macbeth
The cast of High Fidelity once the closing notice was up—irrepressible high-energy enthusiasm. I liked the show!

Least Liked:
STUFF HAPPENS (I like David Hare, but I’d already seen that show on the news and in the newspapers, thanks)

FESTEN—Great reviews from the London version, so I don’t know what happened over the Atlantic, but the New York production was dreadful.

CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL—Inert and utterly lifeless even though the actors were apparently told to EMOTE!! at all times. I’ve seen better high-school shows.

BURLEIGH GRIME$ (more like Burleigh Grimezzzz)—When people talk about cynical shows, this should be the prime example.

LOSING LOUIE—Just after seeing this, I wrote somewhere that this mess “wasn’t as bad as people are saying.” That thought has changed with time. It was awful, and MTC was crazy to put it on their schedule.

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’—A lot of critics gave Twyla Tharp all kinds of credit for being a “serious artist.” She undoubtedly is, but this show was misconceived and misplayed from start to finish. I rate it worse that the bad-in-almost-exactly-the-same-way Ring of Fire, because it attempted to tart things up with MEANING. Tharp’s biggest mistake was taking Dylan at his word.

Final Whine:
I’ve ranted before about how the appalling British accents in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Abigail’s Party ruined the shows for me. Well, I must add a couple of other horrors to dialect coach Stephen Gabis’ record: I realized that he was also responsible for Stuff Happens (where working-class Jack Straw sounded totally plummy and, for some inexplicable reason Scot Robin Cook sounded like an Ulsterman—and yes it does matter in a show that is trumpeting its verisimilitude) and Butley, where Nathan Lane’s normal accent was fine, but his impersonations of Northern Britons were laughable. (OK, not to harp on this too much, but … I know the role probably called for an imperfect impression, but when a Northern accent is written as “goin’ to’t’ dogs” you don’t pronounce it “going to T dogs.” It’s “goin tuht dogs.” I don’t know why the English actor in the cast didn’t say something about this.)

Labels: bam, butley, david hare, diana son, drowsy chaperone, druid/synge, in the continuum, jay johnson, kiki and herb, new york, sandra oh, sarah niles, satellites, stephen gabis, stuff happens, theater

I Blame Scott Elliott

Who should I trust: trophy cabinets or my own lying eyes and ears? Since I moved to New York 18 months ago, I’ve seen two shows directed by Jerry Zaks—a man with a good reputation and four Tonys—and both were dreadful. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial and Losing Louie were inert, old-fashioned, and badly cast. So, it’s hard for me to have a terribly high opinion of Mr. Zaks.

Similarly, Scott Elliott seems to be a downtown hero, the artistic director of the New Group and Mike Leigh’s anointed American interpreter (though their relationship was stealthily undermined in a New York Observer profile). And yet, the two plays of his that I’ve seen—Abigail’s Party and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—have been extremely disappointing.

John Doyle isn’t the only director who has a “thing.” In his negative review of Brodie, the Times’ Ben Brantley called Elliott “a director known for eliciting (or forcing) the perversity in chestnuts as conventional as Present Laughter and The Women.”

His productions of Abigail and Brodie have even more in common—both are period pieces with a well-regarded indie actress cast in a huge part around which the entire play constellates. And in both cases, there’s an easily available, much-loved video version of the work—the magnificent original 1977 TV version of Abigail’s Party with Leigh’s ex-partner Alison Steadman as Beverly, and Maggie Smith’s Oscar-winning turn in the movie version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (though my own favorite version is the late-‘70s TV series with Geraldine McEwan as MJB). They’re also both full of lines that devotees love to quote—“Like Feliciano, Ange? Yeah, he’s good, isn’t he? Sexy!” or “My gerrils are the crème de la crème,” etc.

Elliott seems to be good at physical direction—Jennifer Jason Leigh, who played Beverly in his Abigail’s Party, had the look and the movements down just right—the pantherian swagger, the lust for cigarettes and drinks, her utter exasperation with her stupid yet snobbish, uptight, estate-agent husband, Laurence. If Jennifer Jason Leigh had kept her trap shut and just smoked and danced and tortured the guests, the show would’ve been wonderful—but instead she opened her mouth and out came that unbearable braying. The braying gave no indication that Leigh understood Beverly. Why Beverly took such pleasure in taunting her husband and her neighbors. Why she wanted to humiliate Susan, the upper-middle-class remnant of the sort of people who used to live in the neighborhood before oiks like Laurence and Beverly moved in. Leigh gave no clue why Beverly was so desperate to act like Lady Bountiful in front of Angie and her inarticulate but sexy former-footballer husband. Why was she hee-hawing like a donkey? Alison Steadman brayed to express the pain and rage and shattering disappointment inside the character. Jennifer Jason Leigh brayed because Alison Steadman had brayed. And that’s Scott Elliott’s fault.

When it comes to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Cynthia Nixon looks right for the part—graceful and glamorous enough to shine like a spot of brilliant color in a gray Northern world. Her passion for the south, for beauty and adventure is alluring. But then she opens her mouth.

The play itself is a bit of a clunker—the flashback structure (essentially the action of the play is the recollection of an aging nun who was once part of the Brodie set) is heavy-handed and clumsy, and it has the most discomfiting nude scene I’ve ever seen. But Miss Jean Brodie, a woman in her prime, an educator, a leader of young women—and a crazy, romantic (in the worst sense), manipulative bitch—is a great character that even the most cack-handed director and the most uncomfortable actress can’t totally fuck up. They came pretty close, though.

Stephen Gabis is credited as the dialect coach (for both shows), and if I were Mr. Gabis, I’d leave the business, because the accents were absolutely, totally, and utterly preposterous. Bourgeois Edinburgh is probably the easiest Scottish accent to assume, and yet the female cast members (the one male actor who had to adopt a brogue did so quite convincingly) were all New Zealand vowels, pinched faces, and strangled sounds. At the intermission, the older couple behind me complained that they couldn’t hear the dialogue. I could barely restrain myself from turning around and yelling, “You lucky bastards!”

So, instead of embodying the characters, the actresses seemed to expend all their efforts on delivering their lines in “the accent.” Consequently, not a single one of them was remotely convincing. Consequently, Miss Brodie was neither charismatic nor demonic; the headmistress of Marcia Blane School for Girls was neither sincere nor scheming, and the girls were likable but very far from the crème de la crème. And, for my money, that’s Scott Elliott’s fault.

Update, Oct. 22: I must quote a lovely line from Maud Newton's take on this Brodie: "Nixon is slight rather than imposing, flirtatious rather than steely, and, were it not for the cast of Brigadoon, she might very well take the award for most ridiculous Scottish accent ever to be affected in the theater district."

Update, Jan. 1, 2007: Thanks to Mark for pointing out an error (now removed) in the original version of this post. Scott Elliott didn't direct Avenue Q, he was a co-producer of the show.

Labels: abigail's party, accents, cynthia nixon, new york, scott elliott, stephen gabis, the prime of miss jean brodie, theater

Machado and Nicola Sitting on a Stage ...

In the light of the speech by Eduardo Machado that was the talk of the theaterblogosphere this week, I got a weird frisson when I watched this weekend’s repeat of a 2005 American Theater Wing seminar about “Off-Broadway,” and discovered that two of the panelists were Eduardo Machado, representing INTAR, and James C. Nicola, representing the New York Theatre Workshop. (The others were Tisa Chang of the Pan Asian Repertory Company, Loretta Greco of Women’s Project and Productions, Virginia Louloudes of ART-NY, and Neil Pepe of Atlantic Theater Co.)

It started off well: The various artistic directors all seemed willing, keen even, to talk about money (I was particularly fascinated by Greco’s mention of the theater community’s unquenchable thirst for comps damaging companies' ability to plan), but that talk never really went anywhere. Instead, there were a lot of generalizations about passion and theater being about people getting together in the dark—and I have to say I blame Nicola for the move toward speechifying.

I’d never seen Nicola before, and I must preface the coming judgmental statements with the obvious proviso that I know I shouldn’t judge people from a 90-minute taped seminar. Yeah, right. He freaked me out! It seemed to me that either consciously or unconsciously he ignored any “real” conversation about money or the challenges of working with other professionals and instead launched into a series of odd set-piece statements that came across as anodyne up-with-people manifesto pledges. Worse almost, despite all the histrionic body language, he was depressingly inarticulate (and one thing you can usually say for artistic directors, especially ones who’ve held onto their jobs for a number of years, is that they’re indisputably articulate).

Take, for example, his speech after the moderator asked for panelists’ views on nontraditional casting (I urge you to check this out on tape, it starts around the 1:00:43 mark). He said:

Well, I think … I think [clears throat, shuffles in seat as though his piles are acting up] ... It’s interesting, in our process [another throat-clear] of casting in my time doing this, erm, what has emerged, is that every, almost every, with the exceptions you [Tisa Chang, who’d just spoken] talk about, where there are specific things [massive hand gestures] things to be achieved in a script … but in general we start with “any actors can play these roles,” and we bring in actors of all different … [pauses for so long, looking for the safe word, that the moderator takes pity and offers “backgrounds?”] yep, and erm, that has happened, and there’s often a lot of discussion around that, and I think this is an interesting reflection of contemporary life, that this is where we are and that we do find with our audiences that we are learning a new etiquette that will become unconscious, about when we’re supposed to notice the race of the person or not. Erm [clears throat] and it’s been very interesting to work with directors from other countries who have different ethnic and cultural situations and their perception of American culture, and for the most part, even the most enlightened and progressive people are very retrograde about this issue. [Swings head, triumphantly slaps thighs.]

Now, if you can tell me what the hell he was talking about there—except perhaps, “We’re really right on and a lot of foreigners aren’t”—good work!

In fairness, I should also add that later in the show, Machado made an unprompted tribute to the NYTW in which he praised the warm and respectful way they have treated him and other playwrights.

Labels: eduardo machado, james nicola, new york, theater