Revise, Revive, Recycle: A Season in Theater, So Far

Broadway openings are like yellow-rumped warblers.

Follies
Photo: Joan Marcus

Broadway openings are like yellow-rumped warblers. They avoid the city in winter and summer, come swooping back at the start of spring—and they feather their nests with debris. Putting an ear to this theatrical season, one hears—over the occasional chirp of a distinctive voice—the producers’ incessant call to revise, revive, recycle. Thirty or so productions are looking to land on New York stages before May. Most are based on old material. In preparation, it’s only fitting to look back at the season so far. We’ll see how the clutter of the past can either stifle life or, like our flying friends’ housekeeping habits, help sustain it.

The best of the fall offerings was Follies, which moves to Los Angeles next month. The third revival in a decade proved the charm by lucidly exposing the derangement of, ironically enough, revivalism. Eric Schaeffer’s production, like star Bernadette Peters’s performance, lacked buoyancy. But their laser-like focus cut to the quick of the show’s hard truths.

The setting is the farewell party for an old theater palace on the eve of its demolition. From her entrance, Peters’s former chorus girl Sally makes it clear she’s come to win back her old flame, Ben (the hearty Ron Raines), and she doesn’t care who knows it—not his wife, fellow ex-chorine, Phyllis (a blistering Jan Maxwell), nor Sally’s husband, Buddy (Danny Burstein, so ingratiating you want to bring him home to mama). The blinding obviousness of her mania—“I’m going to live forever with the man I love”—spotlights the insanity in every character’s illusions.

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Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 score recycles song styles from the period between the World Wars—paying homage, deconstructing them, then boomeranging us back to the present blissed-out and wised-up. Director Schaeffer takes his cue from one of its most obscure songs “One More Kiss”: “Dreams are a sweet mistake/All dreamers must awake/Never look back/All things beautiful must die/One more kiss and goodbye.” No wonder this masterwork keeps flopping financially. It tells us we’re staring at the stage because we refuse to examine our own lives. And we’re doing that because we can’t face the fact we’re going to die. Bring on the chorus girls!

Follies’s first revival flatlined with musical numbers as deflating as the characters’ lives. Regional productions, like the famed Paper Mill edition with Ann Miller, usually swaddle the misery in nostalgia. Schaeffer’s revival works because its leads can land a musical number as well as an emotional punch to the gut.

He builds the show beautifully. The final sequence’s fantasy follies revue offers catharsis to most of the leads. Peters’s Sally, though, sings the classic 11 o’clock number “Losing My Mind” as if trapped. Only in the coda’s final moments does she exhale, for what seems like the first time all night. “There’s no Ben for me.” Even then, we’re left without any false illusions. When Burstein reaches his hand out in comfort, she tenses and he retracts it. Schaeffer’s exhilarating staging binds the material’s twin polarities in a transfixing surrealism—and then slaps us with the cold light of day.

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The show’s companion piece, the 1981 Merrily We Roll Along, played an expanded run at City Center’s Encores series just weeks after Follies put its set in storage. Featuring many of Sondheim’s most hummable melodies, Merrily We Roll Along looks back by its very structure. Each scene moves farther back in time than the one prior. The central trio of Frank, Mary, and Charlie move from being a middle-aged sell-out, drunk, and scold to young idealists. Dashed dreams are its subject and, alas, its effect.

The musical’s book still tickles the mind by tackling the biggest challenges to audience identification. It fumbles, not necessarily by introducing characters at their most unlikeable, but by making them initially uninteresting. On its third major New York production, Merrily We Roll Along is becoming more and more like its central figure. Frank’s friends spend most of their lives pushing him, in vain, to live up to his enormous potential. James Lapine, Sondheim’s frequent collaborator, has reworked George Furth’s book and directed, first in 1985 and again here. And like Mary and Charley, he hasn’t entirely succeeded.

Lapine’s revisions provide new moments that seize the heart and choke the throat. But he ignores what the original showed with stunning subtlety; the biggest turning points are often in the most casual exchanges. As with the revised Follies, the dialogue now leans on ham-fisted plot points and pronouncements. Even Sondheim’s own revisions cloud the issues. He’s changed the title number’s insistently repeated refrain “Never look back” to “Better look back” before returning to “Never look back.”

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Still, it’s a show that bears repeating. In “Old Friends,” their first song together, Frank complains that Charley keeps making lofty demands of him that can’t be met. Charley thinks aiming for something unachievable helps you grow: “Well what’s the point of demands you can meet?” Sondheim and his cohorts set the bar unreachably high for themselves with Merrily We Roll Along. True to its structure, it gets the crashing out of the way first and leaves you with the heartbreaking high of watching their glorious ascent.

The season’s most popular revisal, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, calls to mind one of Merrily We Roll Along’s most pungent exchanges: “Which comes first generally, the words or the music?” “Generally, the contract.” The Gershwin estate has added the family name to the title while overseeing a reduction in the amount of Gershwin actually in the show. The goal here is a version that can sustain a long commercial run on Broadway and on tour—plus create a property they can license to other theater companies and schools.

The result is neither a devil’s bargain nor heaven-sent. An hour of material has been removed, to their credit, judiciously. The unkind cut is the replacement of George’s own orchestrations. They could have been reduced if the issue were just economics. The producers and the estate want a more contemporary “Broadway” sound. What they’ve drummed up is maddeningly mediocre. The most satisfying group number is sung a cappella.

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The problem here isn’t the very concept of streamlining. For example, a highlight of this season’s Lincoln Center Festival was director Peter Brook’s lovely distillation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, respectfully retitled A Magic Flute. Like other master interpreters, Brook immerses himself in the work so he can better speak its language. The Porgy and Bess team have instead sounded out the original, decided it doesn’t work, then translated it into their own language. In program notes, musical adapter Diedre Murray discusses listening to Clara’s lullaby “Summertime” and asking herself, “’Why is she singing so high? That would wake the baby up.’ So I took the whole thing down.” She also made it a duet with Clara’s husband, Jake. Nowhere does she express any interest in what the Gershwins had in mind.

Radical changes to the writer’s intention can work if the interpreter has a strong independent voice that takes its cues from the original. Calixto Bieito’s new version of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, currently running at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, goes even further than the Porgy and Bess team by deleting scenes and interpolating Williams’s poetry. Bieito, the Catalan theater and opera director, audaciously aims to evoke Williams’s imagination without the constraints imposed by the time of its creation in the early ’50s. The graphically sexual and violent production is as much Bieito as Williams, but feels all of a piece. One feels it’s meant neither to supplant nor improve on the original, but to honor the inspiration one artist has given another.

By contrast, Diane Paulus’s production of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess suffers from aiming too low. The creative team talked a confident talk, but they aren’t walking a decisive walk. The staging and design are dismayingly generic. Only star Audra McDonald and choreographer Ronald K. Brown are at the top of their game. Still, months of playing may have helped the talented cast bring the production’s disparate elements together. Most importantly, when a virtuoso performer brings everything she can to a classic character, you bear witness as often as possible.

The year’s other revisals similarly took a big stick to a well-known property with changes that spoke way too softly. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, a fast flop, jettisoned most of the original’s ramshackle plot specifics but also junked its high-octane engine. The show’s core idea—that most of us are capable of much more than we realize—was originally embodied by Barbara Harris’s rangy performance as both kooky contemporary Daisy and her past-life incarnation, the posh 18th-century Melinda. Now Daisy’s been replaced by David (David Turner), who was 1940s jazz singer Melinda (Jessie Mueller) in his past life. Psychiatrist Paul Brucker (Harry Connick Jr.) falls in love with Melinda, whom he awakens accidentally when hypnotizing David.

Divvying up the two roles between separate actors destroys the simplicity of the conceit. Having them be different sexes makes a promising setup for provocation or farce. The production ignores both, soft-pedaling in place for most of its duration. The act break comes with a swift blackout when Bruckner leans in to Melinda/David for a kiss—and then the production skips over the moment, without a hint of swish. Director Michael Mayer, whose work on American Idiot was electrically precise, spent almost a decade developing the new concept. But he seems to have checked out for the actual production. Connick Jr. is the kind of performer who needs to have some activity to put him at ease. Mayer blocks him throughout to stand stock-still in what amounts to directorial misconduct.

There are ample compensations. The expanded song list piles pleasure upon treasure. Connick Jr.’s creamy crooning, Mueller’s swinging singing, and the ardor of Drew Gehling as David’s significant other (the one character improved from the original) shine through the production’s dimmed potential. While watching, one’s mind is free to wonder whether the casting of a star like Connick Jr., whose constituency is presumed to lean more to the tried and true, pushed Mayer to trim the sails of his conceit. Perhaps doing so made him drop his compass. If the show had started Off Broadway as originally intended, a stripped-down version may have let the inner freak of its new conceit fly.

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That said, no-frills productions aren’t always what the show doctor should order. Sometimes bells and whistles help orient us to a work’s natural beauty. Just look at poor Carrie, who’s never been seen at her theatrical best. For the 1988 Broadway production, the British director and designer perhaps felt little connection to the small-town American high school setting, so they drove it closer to their classical wheelhouse. The results were tragic in the best way whenever Betty Buckley was on stage as Margaret White. The high school scenes, set to Debbie Allen’s stunningly awful choreography, were camp. I’m not convinced that wasn’t the director’s choice. (Brian De Palma’s film uses camp elements with good results.) But the toga-inspired duds and Plexiglass setting offered no frame of reference and made everything seem ludicrous.

The critical lambasting seems to have had a long-term effect on its writers. In the new version, Carrie and the production around her behave as if victims of PTSD. Most damagingly, Marin Mazzie’s Margaret also seems broken and bowed. How can you have horror without danger? The only fright to be found here is director Stafford Arima’s fear of the audience’s laughter. His tamped-down revamp is bloodless in every way. Perhaps, like Porgy and Bess, a licensable property will result. I hope so, because in the right hands, Carrie could kill.

About as far away as you can get from Off Broadway in scope, sensibility, and cost, Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark supersizes all the elements under discussion. The spectacle is a revisal of last year’s incarnation, which itself recycled the plot from the film version of the original comic books. Original director and co-book writer Julie Taymor’s unique vision compensated somewhat for her revolutionary disinterest in telling a story.

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Taymor seemed to have in mind a Cirque de Soleil kind of event wherein a basic organizing theme (instead of water or the Beatles, here it’s your friendly neighborhood superhero) serves mainly as the jumping-off point for a series of dazzling variations. The U2 score functions fine as a Cirque kind of soundtrack, bolstering the visuals rather than taking focus.

Unfortunately Taymor lost her spidey sense of how to balance fulfilling and upending audience expectations. In her defense, Cirque de Soleil also hasn’t had much success trying to bring story elements more firmly into its mix. Like too many of her performers, Taymor wasn’t adequately tethered to the ground. Of course, bodily injury is more serious; nonetheless, it’s sad to see a true theater artist lose her bearings, reputation, and accessibility to the vast resources that were once at her disposal.

With the production put on pause and Taymor given the boot, director Philip William McKinley was entrusted to pick up the pieces for its official opening. He and his fellow fixers have stitched together a production that flows relatively smoothly on the first Spider-Man movie’s plot and the design elements’ brilliance. McKinley unfortunately allows feckless camp to fill the void left by the dismantling of the female spider subplot.

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These Arachne scenes—the only ones which engaged Taymor’s emotions—had tapped into her talent for crafting theatrical moments of sublime mystery. McKinley’s kept the best of them and smartly moved it to the top of the show. It’s unforgettable, as often happens when a writer, director, or performer connects with something elemental in themselves.

The season has been held aloft by a smattering of similar moments of fearlessness unbound by convention. It’s sadly telling that almost all were in the noncommercial arena. Composer/lyricist/librettist Michael John LaChiusa, after more than a dozen earlier efforts that showed prodigious talent but a limiting coolness, bared his creative soul in Queen of the Mist’s transcendent finale. Its cast album should be snatched up when it arrives.

Another Off Broadway musical, Jim and Ruth Bauer’s long-gestating The Blue Flower intriguingly blended movement, music, and film to evoke the expressionist and Dadaist movements during the first third of the 20th century. Schematically drawn relationships, some miscasting, and an avoidance of downstage too often kept the show at a figurative and literal distance. One sequence broke through. Veteran performer Mark Kudisch’s explosion of frustration and grief was a career high in the most unlikely of circumstances, as it was performed in Maxperanto, his character’s made-up language.

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Monologuist Mike Daisey’s been brought low by bothersome things called facts, but his The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs featured one untarnishable sequence. Daisey described accurately the use of 430,000 workers at Foxconn, the Chinese factory where Apple products are made. “That can be a difficult number to conceptualize. Instead think about how there are twenty-five cafeterias at the plant. Now you just need to visualize a cafeteria that seats thousands and thousands of people. I’ll wait.”

Daisey’s righteous condescension has its prickly pleasures. Sensing many, like me, had figured they’d gotten the point without bothering to visualize, he prodded, “You can do it. Try visualizing a cafeteria from your youth. Really, I’ll wait.” And again, sensing slackers, he reprimanded us, like daddy in the driver’s seat, with “I will turn this show around.” Duly warned, I got the picture in my head. “Okay. Now. What I want you to do now is push the walls outward…over and over and over until it holds thousands of people. Now, imagine 25 rooms, all that size, all next to each other.”

The communal realization was a rare rush. I fear moments like this will now be even harder to come by. Leaping to a new idea requires trust. I hope the price of Daisey’s theatrical fabrications is just the hiring of fact-checkers and, one can hope, a reality check on his own ego.

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New plays without box-office names require such eureka moments to sustain long Broadway runs. The three accomplished and accessible attempts—Chinglish, Stick Fly, and Sons of the Prophet—didn’t have them. The first two premiered to acclaim in regional theaters and, after quick Broadway runs, will have success again—once they return to the regions. The third and best, by Stephen Karam, is an endearing family play that wisely opted not to transfer after its justifiably extended run at the Roundabout’s Off Broadway house. Not every show needs to play Broadway to have their say in the cultural conversation.

David Ives’s sex comedy Venus in Fur is succeeding in a larger house because it sizzles, less from carnality than the thrill of discovering a blazing new star in Nina Arianda. She didn’t quite shake the shadow of Judy Holliday in last year’s short-running revival of Born Yesterday. By carrying this two-hander inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 19th-century novella, Arianda proves herself the city’s first new stage star in years. From her entrance to the curtain call, she holds Hugh Dancy’s Thomas, and the audience, in her thrall. Not your typical siren, which will probably hold her to character parts on film, Arianda makes the stage space her playpen to be whomever she chooses. In Avatar-like fashion wherein bonds are created for life, this performance is her way of imprinting herself on the audience. Now we’ll follow her anywhere.

New Off Broadway plays made their mark with bolder inventions. The polymorphous sexuality graphically enacted in Thomas Bradshaw’s Burning may have shocked audiences, but the New Group production’s unwaveringly affectless tone unmoored them even further. Many laughed at what they presumed to be ineptitude. I swear it was supposed to be funny and admire most how this satire on the hollowness of high-mindedness held its intentions so close to the vest—especially when unbuttoning that vest for a quick shag.

Blood and Gifts proved that clarity can be as bracing as more sensational shocks. J. T. Rogers’s history play admirably attempted to separate out the thicket of layers comprising the recent history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Director Bartlett Sher’s production for Lincoln Center Theater polished those clean lines until they shined bright. This most constructive use of looking back brings us finally to what has made the season most memorable: an engagement with the outside world.

Spider-Man made news, but mostly ensnared Broadway in global tabloids’ sticky web. On a much higher plane, Daisey’s show didn’t just report on current events; it affected them. The play inspired attention from The New York Times and others, which helped push the richest company on the planet to pledge greater responsibility for working conditions where its artful products are made. Of course, the press for Daisey’s show soon turned south.

The controversy surrounding The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess made similarly rare waves in the broader culture but again, it wasn’t all to the good. Members of the creative team averred in production notes and interviews that textual changes were necessary to “excise the more racist material” because the Caucasian Gershwins and co-writer DuBose Heyward suffered from a “shortcoming of understanding” when it came to giving the characters of Catfish Row an “authentic black voice.”

Academicians, celebrities, and commentators dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s by saying the writers were inherently incapable of depicting African-American characters with dignity. On a recent episode of The Colbert Report, star Audra McDonald explained that because the characters were “written from an outside vantage point,” this production has “eliminated as much of the racial sort of things that would make them more archetypes and stereotypes as we possibly can.”

It would be one thing to say these particular men tried but failed to depict their characters without condescension. But to claim their supposed failure was inevitable undermines art’s highest calling: identifying with someone different. Other beliefs that would deny our ability to embody another way of being have been bubbling up with troubling frequency. Shakespeare deniers persist, and make mediocre movies like this winter’s Anonymous, because they doubt a lowly actor with little education could understand the mind of a monarch. A Newsweek article asserted last year that gay actor Jonathan Groff, by being out, could never again believably play a straight character.

Art puts us in someone else’s shoes. This isn’t a lofty abstraction. It’s a necessity. Lack of empathy isn’t just a moral crime. It’s the basis for every crime. Live theater sears the thrill of empathy into our souls. Of course, there should be some delicacy when there’s a power differential between the portrayer and portrayed, but there also has to be a leaping embrace. McDonald herself is of a different class from Bess. Her performance doesn’t entirely bridge the gap, but I sensed no condescension. Her fierce connection to Bess’s emotions transcended any meaningful differences.

The best and worst moments of the season derive their power, or failure, from either the leap to another point of view or a fear of flying. The producers’ call to reduce, reuse, recycle already threatens to lay the theater low. To heed the political call to stay caged within our own perspective would clip its wings.

Jon Magaril

Jon Shear directed, co-wrote, and produced Urbania, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He teaches at New York University and Columbia University.

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