Jude Law Plays It Smart in "Hamlet"

I’d told myself that I was done with Hamlet. As anyone who paid even the slightest attention in high school English knows, the play tells the tale of the young Danish prince who seeks revenge against an uncle whom he believes has killed his father, married his widowed mother and taken the throne that should have been his. For centuries now, every actor who can pull on a pair of tights has yearned to play the title part. I’ve seen more than my fair share of them and I told myself I didn’t need to see any more.

But that, of course, was before I heard that Jude Law was playing Shakespeare’s moody Dane. I’ve been an unabashed Jude Law fan since seeing him in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and despite his spotty record in movies since then, I’ve remained convinced that he’s more than just a pretty face.  So I was eager to see what he would bring to Hamlet.

Although not apparently as eager as the woman I spotted in the eighth row of the orchestra who hauled out her binoculars as soon as she sat down.  There was a great deal to see.  Law, although, as movie stars tend to be, smaller than one expects, gives a big performance.  His Hamlet is vigorously nimble—both his body and his mind constantly moving.  And Law delivers his speeches—even the well known soliloquies—with a naturalness that makes the goings on totally accessible. He also finds bits of humor in the prince and he’s terrific in the fencing scene with Laertes. 

No fight director is listed in the Playbill so I suppose director Michael Grandage should get part of the credit for the fine swordplay.  Grandage also gets credit for moving the proceedings along at a nice clip that suffers few languors despite the play’s three hour and 10 minute running time.  As its chic dark modern-dress costumes, stark set and dance-club lighting suggest, this is a Hamlet for contemporary times.  And yet, at least for me, this production, which started out in London last spring and played at the real Kronberg Castle in Elsinore, Denmark before opening at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre last month, fails to achieve greatness.

The supporting cast is part of the problem.  No one really stands out. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is pretty but pallid as Ophelia. Ron Cook is too prissy even for the prissy counselor Polonius.  And Kevin R. McNally is far too avuncular for the duplicitous uncle Claudius.  I kind of liked Geraldine James as Hamlet’s mother Gertrude.  But my friend Ellie, the one-time actress-turned professor who’s just finished teaching Hamlet in her class, found James too bland.

But the main problem with the production is that it’s too smart for it’s own good. Law is wonderfully charismatic and he doesn’t set a wrong foot during the time he’s on stage but I could see him thinking the whole time about exactly where he should step.  Still, it’s a treat, with or without binoculars, to watch him figure it out. Which you can do until the limited run ends on Dec. 6.

There's True Value in "Broke-ology"

The folks at Lincoln Center aren’t selling a cast album for Broke-ology, the new family drama by Nathan Louis Jackson, but maybe they should.  The show isn’t a musical but disco-era tunes by Stevie Wonder, Kool & the Gang and McFadden & Whitehead are playing when you walk into The Mitzi E. Newhouse theater where the show is running through the end of the month.  The twentysomething woman in the seat next to me mouthed all the lyrics.  “Aren’t you too young to know these songs?” I asked.  She laughed.  “It’s good stuff,” she said. 

And it is.  Disco music often gets dismissed as superficial but hearing those songs took me back to the ‘late ‘70s and early ‘80s when disco anthems like McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now” expressed an against-the-odds optimism about the future of black people in this country.  The play took me back too.  And not just because the opening scene is set in 1982.  The entire play reminded me of the shows I used to see at the Negro Ensemble Company during those years. Edgier shows by playwrights like Tarell Alvin McCraney and Suzan-Lori Parks are now more popular than the black family dramas that were the NEC’s specialty but there was good stuff in those old shows and there’s some good stuff in Broke-ology too. 

The play tells the story of the working-class King family. The Kings are a loving, not dysfunctional, family but internal fractures and outside pressures strain their bonds. The show’s title is drawn from the eldest son’s joking suggestion that there should be an academic field devoted to “the study of being broke.”

When the play opens, parents-to-be William and Sonia are awaiting the birth of their first child and dreaming about making a better life beyond the Kansas City ghetto where they live. The next scene takes place 27 years later.  Sonia has been dead for 10 years, William is battling multiple sclerosis, the eldest son Ennis is trapped in a dead-end job and expecting his first child, and the youngest son Malcolm is returning home from college with a master’s degree and ambitions of his own.

The conflicts develop quickly and predictably but the show’s 30 year-old playwright, who admits that the play is partly autobiographical (click here to read his story) knows that love and resentment exist in equal measure in most families and that envy and encouragement stand side-by-side in poor families where one member has the chance of making it out but only at the expense of the equally-deserving others.  Broke-ology is at its best when it clicks into those moments. 

It’s also blessed with a fine cast.  Wendell Pierce and Crystal A. Dickinson are wonderfully touching as the parents.  Alano Miller captures the awkward self-consciousness of a young man simultaneously eager and reluctant to enter a middle-class life that means leaving his family behind. And Francois Battiste, who was terrific in last season’s production of The Good Negro at the Public Theater, is just as dynamic as the brother who knows that he will be the collateral damage of his younger sibling’s success.

This isn’t a great play. It veers into melodrama and indulges in some heavy-handed symbolism.  But it also portrays contemporary working-class people with an authenticity and respect too seldom seen on stage.  And, in my book, that makes it good stuff.

What's the Play That Changed Your Life?

If you love theater, there’s some play way back at the beginning that sparked your obsession, that really got to you, that changed your life.  That’s why people go to the theater.  That’s why they make it. And that's why the American Theatre Wing is publishing a new book called “The Play That Changed My Life: America’s Foremost Playwrights on the Plays that Influenced Them.” In it, 19 of the best playwrights working today share their stories about the shows that made that all important difference to them.

The book will be out in December but, in the meantime, the Wing is holding an online essay contest that will give other theater lovers a chance to speak up about the shows that changed their lives.  It could have been your grade school play, your first Broadway musical, a magical touring production or a terrific one at a regional theater.  Whatever it is, ATW wants to hear from you about that theatrical experience and why it meant so much. The contest started Monday and closes at midnight on Sunday, Nov. 29. Entries of up to 350 words will be accepted.

The final judging panel includes Ted Chapin, the president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization who is also chairman of ATW's Board of Directors; Carol Flannery, the editorial director of Applause Books; the award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang; and me (really, I’m one of the judges). We’ll be evaluating the entries on creativity, clarity, and most importantly, passion. Prizes include a copy of “The Play That Changed My Life” signed by some of the contributing playwrights and other you-ought-to-have-in-your-library books from Applause Books.  Submissions will be posted online and additional prizes will be given based on voting by the public; you can cast your vote through Dec. 11.

In the meantime, the Wing has asked the same question of other people who make shows on and off-Broadway because, of course, just like the rest of us there was a first time for them too. Here’s the answer Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, gave: 

“I have to say, Hair had an enormous influence on me.  When I was fourteen years old, I had run away from home, I was in England hitchhiking through- I had been hitchhiking through Europe, and I went to the Shaftesbury Theatre in London to see Hair.  And at the end of the production I got up on stage and I danced with the tribe.  And it had this huge impact on me, because I was a very alienated young man and angry and disaffected, and dancing onstage there with that tribe both gave me the feeling that the theatre was a place where I might find a home and I might belong, but it also gave me a sense that America was a country that might have a place for me, that I might be able to find a home in.”

Now, I’m looking forward to reading yours.  You can enter it at http://americantheatrewing.org/contest

Renewing My Fealty to "The Royal Family"

For some reason I can’t remember, I became obsessed with the Algonquin Round Table during my 20s.  Dorothy Parker—the only woman among the 10 witty journalists and theater folk who lunched, drank and cracked jokes there every day during the 1920s—was, of course, my favorite.  But I read everything I could find about the whole bunch.  Which meant that I kept coming across references to The Royal Family, charter Round Table member George S. Kaufman and frequent guest Edna Ferber’s affectionate satire about the Barrymores, America’s then-leading theatrical dynasty. 

The more I read about it, the more I wanted to see the play. I missed the now-legendary production that opened in 1975 with Rosemary Harris and George Grizzard as siblings Ethel and John Barrymore because I was living in San Francisco at the time. (There's a Broadway Theatre Archives DVD but this show is a love letter to stage life and should be seen there.)  And with three acts, 16 characters, two greyhounds, and a full three-minute fencing scene, this is not the kind of show that gets revived often. So hats off to Manhattan Theatre Club for stepping up and putting on the charming revival of The Royal Family, currently playing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

Be warned that the play starts slowly as all the characters are introduced in the first act.  It probably played better when the show first opened in 1927 and the Barrymores were famous enough that theatergoers could pick up on all the inside digs at them.  But stick with it because the plot gets rolling in the second act and there’s lingering resonance in the play’s underlying theme about the choices women have to make between the families they love and the work they love. 

The women in the play’s Cavendish family—matriarch Fanny, daughter Julie and granddaughter Gwen—are all brilliant actresses and each finds her own solution to the problem.  Their men folk—movie-star idol Tony, journeyman actor uncle Bert and various suitors—provide the comic relief. It’s a surprisingly feminist message for the time.

Kaufman and Ferber originally hoped that Ethel Barrymore and her brother John would play the characters based on themselves.  Or at least so says Margot Peters, who wrote “The House of Barrymore,” the gossipy 1990 biography of the clan.  But, according to Peters, Ethel not only turned down the role but tried to sue the playwrights.  (The book is out of print but click here for the Audible.com download).

The suit fizzled when John refused to cooperate but Ethel took some satisfaction from the difficulty the producer Jed Harris had in finding someone dynamic enough to play her.  Harris finally settled on the journeywoman actress Ann Andrews.  “One can admire Ann Andrew’s conscientious, thorough acting of Julie Cavendish—without considering her supremely well cast in the part,” wrote New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, damning poor Andrews with faint praise in his otherwise rave review. 

Jan Maxwell, who plays Julie in the current production, isn’t as grand as Ethel herself might have been but she fares far better than “conscientious,” particularly in her show-stopping breakdown in the second act. Reg Rogers is appropriately manic as Tony. Tony Roberts is somewhat halting as the family manager Oscar Wolfe but it’s just good to see him following the minor seizure he suffered on stage a few days before the play opened. And Rosemary Harris now makes an elegant and touching Fanny (click here to red a lovely piece she wrote for Broadway Buzz about appearing in both productions). But best for me was John Glover, sleek and amusingly pompous as the under-talented Bert. 

Doug Hughes clearly had a good time directing them all. Alas, I found Catherine Zuber’s costumes a little too obvious—did all the Cavendish women have to wear the royal color purple?  But John Lee Beatty’s lavish set, nicely lit by Kenneth Posner, seems just the kind of flamboyantly theatrical apartment the Cavendishes would call home. The fight director might have called a few more fencing rehearsals but kudos to the dog wrangler and to Maury Yeston for the jaunty incidental music.

Of course it's unlikely that any production could live up to my long-gestating fantasies about The Royal Family. But both my husband K and I ended up having a good time.  I do, wonder, though, what Dorothy Parker might have said about it. 

The Good Old Days of "Brighton Beach Memoirs"

My grandmother was one of nine southern farm kids and the first to move to New York City.  Over the years, three of her siblings and nearly all her nieces and nephews followed her here and although that was during the Great Depression and she was struggling to raise her own three children, Grandma took her relatives in and shared what she had until they could afford to support themselves.

Such Depression-era survival stories and the familial loyalty that helped people get through those days are common to many families, inspiring as we struggle to pull ourselves out of the current economic morass and the reason that the new revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs, Neil Simon’s comedy about coming of age during the ‘30s that opened at the Nederlander Theatre on Sunday night, may win over theatergoers as it did my theatergoing buddy Bill and me.

For over 30 years, starting with Come Blow Your Horn in 1962, a new Simon play opened on Broadway every season but it was Brighton Beach Memoirs, the first of the autobiographical works now known as the Eugene Trilogy, that established Simon as more than just a guy who knew how to write jokey dialog. (Click here to read a New York Magazine appraisal of his career.)  Simon is now 82 and his trademark mix of comedy and sentimentality seemed to have gone out of style.  He hasn’t had a new show on Broadway since 45 Seconds from Broadway closed after just 73 performances in 2002.  And recent revivals of three of his other works—Sweet Charity, The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park—performed only slightly better. 

It may prove different for Bright Beach Memoirs.  For starters, David Cromer has been brought in to direct the show.  Cromer, who helmed the brilliantly revisionist production of Our Town that is still playing down at the Barrow Street Theatre, establishes a naturalistic tone that cares less about hitting the punch lines (although there are still plenty of laughs) than mining the emotional bonds that connects the extended Jewish family in the play. The result is that the audience doesn’t so much laugh at the characters as smile with them.  And wistfully wonders why more families today aren’t as loving and forgiving of one another.  Or at least that’s what I found myself thinking.

The play’s household consists of Jack Jerome, who works two jobs to support the six other family members who live in his Brooklyn home and still finds the time and sensitivity to counsel all of them, his world-wary wife Kate, their two sons Stanley and Eugene, Kate’s widowed sister Blanche and her two daughters.  Things in the real Simon household (and in my grandmother’s) probably weren’t as rhapsodic as memory or this play would have it but Dennis Boutsikaris and Laurie Metcalf give the elder Jeromes an unaffected sexiness that undercuts Jack and Kate’s saintliness. Jessica Hecht perfectly captures the passive-aggressiveness of the destitute relative forced to take handouts. And Santino Fontana brings real brio to the role of the eldest son and big brother every kid longs to have (click here to see scenes from the show). 

But the central character and narrator is 15-year-old Eugene, the stand-in for Simon’s younger self, and the weight of the show rests on his pubescent shoulders.  Matthew Broderick made his Broadway debut and won a Tony for his portrayal of Eugene in the original 1983 production. Now, the character is brought to vivid life by Noah Robbins, a gifted 19 year-old whose Playbill bio charmingly lists his most recent previous credit as appearing “Off- Off- Off- Off- Off-Broadway as Max Bialystock in his high school’s production of The Producers.” (Click here to read a Washington Post profile of him.)

I’m more ambivalent about the production design.  John Lee Beatty has created a terrific-looking two-story set but it seemed pretty roomy and comfortable for a family struggling to make ends meet. The sound design by Josh Schmidt and Fitz Patton has its problems too. Instead of body mics, they’ve placed 23 mics around the set (click here to read a Wall Street Journal article about how and why they did it) and since actors don’t project the way they once did what you hear is uneven. The entire production is overseen by Simon’s longtime producer Emanuel Azenberg (click here to listen to a Downstage Center interview with him) and at the performance Bill and I attended, he stood at the back of the theater making sure that everything was right. 

And, for the most part, it is.  Starting in December, Brighton Beach Memoirs will play in repertory with Broadway Bound, the final part of the trilogy.  Robbins is too young-looking to play an older Eugene so the part will be taken over by Josh Grisetti who was terrific last year when he played Carl Reiner’s alter-ego in the revival of the coming-of age play based on Reiner’s novel  "Enter Laughing." Advances for the two Simons plays are reportedly low and there’s been some nervousness about whether they will survive but I’m already looking forward to a return visit to the Jerome’s.   

Update: Unable to sell tickets, despite generally good reviews, the producers canceled Broadway Bound and closed Brighton Beach Memoirs a week after it opened.

"Avenue Q" is at Home in Its New Address

The cheeky little musical Avenue Q ran for six years on Broadway, arm wrestled the Tony for Best Musical away from the bigger and glitzier Wicked, and convinced legions of twentysomethings that Broadway could be a fun place for them to go. But somehow my twentysomething niece Jennifer managed to miss it.  So she was delighted to hear that just five weeks after Avenue Q closed on Broadway, the show was reopening at New World Stages. Judging by the response at the performance we attended, it could enjoy an even longer run off-Broadway. 

The show is, famously, a parody of "Sesame Street", complete with a multi-ethnic cast of characters, puppets, and cheery message songs.  Except that Avenue Q’s characters are potty-mouthed, the puppets sexually active, and the songs about the dilemmas twentysomethings face like finding meaningful jobs, committing to relationships and coming out of the closet.  Jennifer kept nodding and sighing in recognition as the things she and her friends are experiencing unfolded on stage. She loved the show.

I had a good time too.  I saw the show back in 2003 and so I already knew all the jokes but I still laughed at most of them anyway.  And I didn’t even notice the new production’s smaller set or even the smaller orchestra. I even found myself liking some members of the cast more than the originals. It can’t be easy to act with a sock puppet on your hand but Anika Larsen is thoroughly engaging as both good-girl Kate Monster and the Miss Piggyesque vamp Lucy

The laid-back atmosphere at New World Stages, the one-time cineplex that was converted to a theater complex a few years ago, is a perfect venue for Avenue Q.  People queued up at the bar before the show to order drinks, including a fruity sangria, that could be taken to their seats. In another part of the lobby, people milled around chatting about shows they were going to see that night and might see some other night (The Toxic Avenger was playing in the theater next door to Avenue Q's, Altar Boyz down the hall.)  Inside the Avenue Q theater, waiters worked the aisles hawking drinks and CDs. Later as we left after the show, a singing duo serenaded a group in the bar area.  It all made going to the theater seem like a fun thing to do.  But you don’t have to be in your 20s to enjoy it, or to enjoy Avenue Q.

Race, Rock & Romance in Amiable "Memphis"

If they gave Miss Congeniality awards on Broadway the way they do in the Miss America Pageant, the new musical Memphis, which opened at the Shubert Theatre on Monday night, would win hands down.  It’s not the best show on Broadway but it’s hard working, audience-friendly and eager to please. Even my notoriously picky husband K liked it.

Memphis also gets points, at least from me, for being a truly original musical—one that isn’t based on a movie or a comic book or a record album. In fact, the veteran producer George W. George, who died two years ago, is prominently credited in the Playbill for the story concept.  

The tale George came up with is loosely based on the life of Dewey Phillips, the white Memphis DJ who was one of the first to introduce white audiences to black music on his show back in the ‘50s and the very first to play Elvis Presley on the radio.  Phillips was a local celebrity for nearly a decade and even hosted a local teen dance show but he fell on hard times when most radio stations switched to a Top 40 format.  He died at just 42 after a life of heavy drinking and drug use. 

The show embroiders those basic facts with an interracial love story.  The Phillips-inspired character, who's called Huey Calhoun in the show, falls for a beautiful singer he meets while prowling the black blues clubs on the city’s famous Beale Street. In traditional showbiz-story fashion, he promises to make her a star and it’s no spoiler to say that he does. But their love is tested by disapproving relatives (her brother, his mother) racist goons, and their conflicting ambitions (he wants to stay in the south where he’s a big man, she wants to go north where it’s easier for a black woman to make the big time).  Along the way there’s lots of singing and dancing. 

The producers—all 30 of them—have poured money into the show. The production, overseen by director Christopher Ashley, looks great. David Gallo’s sets are fluid and clever without calling too much attention to themselves (even the video projections that he co-designed with Shawn Sagady are smartly done).  Same goes for Howell Binkley’s felicitous lighting. And the only word for Paul Tazewell’s period costumes is fabulous.

Alas, the show’s weak links are its book, lyrics and music.  Joe DePietro did the book and co-wrote the lyrics and both kind of resemble a scrapbook of favorite moments from Dreamgirls and Hairspray.  There’s an attempt to add some serious social commentary but there's also a simultaneous reluctance to scare audiences away and that creates lapses and bumpy transitions in the narrative.

The music by David Bryan, of Bon Jovi fame, isn't bad (in fact, the guy sitting in front of me got so into the show’s rousing R&B tunes that he could barely stay in his seat) but there’s nothing distinguishing about the songs either. Not one of them has stuck in my head. And that’s a shame in a musical that’s about music, particularly this paradigm-shattering music. 

But all the main characters get their power ballads or character numbers and they all do well by them, especially Chad Kimball who plays Huey and Montego Glover who plays his lady love Felicia (click here to read a Wall Street Journal interview with her).  And the dance numbers, choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, are energetically performed by a large ensemble of talented dancers, although a shout out has to be given to Vivian Nixon, who looks just like her mother Debbie Allen and may be even a better dancer.

So Memphis may not walk away with the crown but it’s got a winning personality. And that counts for a lot. It will also give theatergoers a really good time. And, when all is said and done, that's what really counts most.