The Theater Blog

Ever hear someone talk about a theater actor “playing to the back row?” Last night, playing to the back row only reached the front row on Broadway.

Almost exactly three months after having visited Mel Brooks’ new musical of an old movie, Young Frankenstein, in Seattle, we returned to the show on Broadway to see what changes had or had not been made. Expectations were that there would be minimal adjusting, given that a few who have seen it in both venues indicated that Mr. Brooks, Mr. Meehan (his co-writer on the book), and director Susan Stroman had not changed much from Seattle. More striking were the pans of the show coming from various corners of erudite New York.

The rough reality is… the critics are not insane or recklessly brutal. The show, which I thought was at about 80%/85% in Seattle has actually been improved in some areas. But what critics in NY could not have known, having not been to Seattle, is that the problem with Young Frankenstein is not so much the show… it’s the theater.

I could understand harsh reviews in light of the ubiquitousness of The Producers and the inevitability of backlash. But the harshness was overwhelming. And now I know… the stage is overwhelming.

There was talk about the Hilton Theater being a frickin’ barn when Brooks & Co decided to book that theater instead of the St James, where The Producers played so well. But you can’t begin to understand just how delicate the balance of a show and a theater unless you have witnessed this abuse to one of the great physical stage productions I have ever witnessed… reduced to a wailing infant in the massive bosom of this hall. It was stunning.

I don’t know the actual dimensions, but it seemed that the stage was 30 feet wider, 20 feet deeper, that the front of the set was set 10 feet further away from the front row of the theater, and that the proscenium was at least 15 feet higher than in Seattle. The gut feeling was like watching The Tonys set in Radio City Music Hall, which is so much bigger than any stage for most any show on Broadway… or like a touring company of a Broadway show, which play multi-purpose venues that hold over 2000 people so that they can make a mint when a show comes to town for a week or two. (I grew up with the Theater of Performing Arts in Miami Beach, which was so huge that it became a real problem and they had to design ways to cut off large portions of the theater when straight plays came to town.)

It is also not unlike watching a wide-screen movie on a 15” television.

As a result, the one performance that I really felt was too big and unsophisticated for the Seattle run, Andrea Martin’s, is now the absolute showstopper… because she is the only one big enough – and that includes The Monster – to play to the back row effectively. Everyone else, as the reviews keep saying, is lost on that damned stage. Beautiful subtle bits that the audience – and I – loved in Seattle have that touring company hackneyed feel now… not because of the performances, but because of the stage swallowing the subtleties. And the modern convention of amplifying everything makes it worse, because now everyone sounds like they are in this giant television and we are hearing the audio from speakers.

There were some positive changes. Megan Mullally stopped trying quite so hard with the through-the-nose accent and lets loose while belting… to great effect. The first act curtain is much stronger than it was. Some of the chorus stuff was cut down. And most effectively, the narrowed the “Join The Family Business” number and, it seems, hired a stronger performer – or at least gave him more room to be a fuller character – to Victor Frankenstein, played her by Kevin Ligon. It makes a big difference.

But the pain of watching stuff that worked so well get lost on that stage… agony. Please, please, please Mr. Brooks… spend whatever it costs and move the show to another house that won’t swallow it whole! You will be paid back with extra years – really, years – of patronage.

And though I hate experiential journalism, I will offer my sister, who lives in the Washington, D.C. area and comes to New York on package tours a few times a year. Her tastes are not terribly sophisticated… this show is PERFECT for her. But she is already wondering, based on the reviews, if it is a good choice. And I have to say, if I didn’t know what I had seen, I would be questioning whether it was worth seeing. When Fredrick and Inga roll, roll, roll in the hay, the moment is true Broadway magic. But not anymore. It is a great song, great performance, great choreography down to the horses, a great visual… and lost on the massive stage of the Hilton. (One cannot be redundant on this point.)

Even the curtain for the show, which is the image from the film of the Frankenstein castle on the hill… it was beautiful in Seattle and looks like crap here. Why? Well, one of the functional problems of a space that large is lighting needs to be brighter. And you see it all through the show. You are looking at big lights trying to do their work… work you are only supposed to see subconsciously. And it’s like filling a cavern.

I have to admit… at first I thought the actors were bored already, which would be shocking so early in a run. But what they were trying to do is to connect… in any way, connect, like they did in Seattle. So Roger Bart really is SCREAMING all of the time… Christopher Fitzgerald lovely vaudeville stuff becomes him jumping up and down to get your attention, Sutton Foster, lanky and lusty, is barely a prop now, and Shuler Hensley as The Monster is shockingly unimposing.

Move the show. Or it will not be alive, alive half as long as audiences would like it to be. In fact, it may be a better road show than a Broadway show… and it deserves better. It’s not the best show ever. But it’s a lot better than this.

Posted by poland at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Things We Want is the new show from Jonathan Marc Sherman, author of more than a half dozen off-Broadway shows. Having not seen any of the other work, it is hard to put this work into context, other than to say that you can feel from the play that it is a direct descendent of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly… for better and for worse.

The 4-person show, directed by Ethan Hawke, screams out for 4 tour de force performances, the depth of story and subtext no deeper than the individual turns of each character. This show will be very popular in acting classes, since each actor gets a big speech or two that is built to bring down the house. Unfortunately, only one performance has that effect, Peter Dinklage’s. He is stellar.

The show presents three brothers. There is Dinklage, Paul Dano (of Little Miss Sunshine and breaking out for many critics in There Will Be Blood), and Josh Hamilton, who is probably best known for his turn in Kicking & Screaming (the indie one) and for various other indie turns. The conceit is that Dano, as Charlie, returns home to the apartment he owns with his brothers… inherited when their mother followed their father (a few years later) out of the very same window that still dominates the living room. He is distraught over a lost love… or lust… or whatever. One brother (Sty, played by Dinklage) is a funny drunk, spending great effort to find and re-find his blanket and his Jack Daniels bottle (or are they the same?). The third (Teddy, played by Hamilton) is Mr. Positivity, caught up to his intestines with a self-help money-making guru.

Eventually joining this trio, rounding out the cast, is Zoe Kazan, as Stella, who Sty happens to know from his much misused 12 step group.

The big turn – and I don’t want to be too specific – is that in the second act, all three roles have changed in the dynamic of these brothers. You get the feeling, thanks to some very clever writing, that they have been flipping positions for all of their lives. But this also becomes one of the major – and kinda obvious – flaws of the show. Where is the third act, where they all flip again? The play is like a toy that Santa forgot to finish… a toy with a trick that doesn’t announce itself for a while, but then chooses not to reveal itself entirely.

That said, while Dinklage is spectacular playing both sides of his character, the other three all seem better at one side than the other… and clearly out of their depth in the weak one.

SPOILERS

Hamilton is much better playing the facile jackass of a drunk in the second act than he was as the Greg Kinnear in Little Miss Sunshine of the first act. The problem is, one relies on the other for weight. You need someone who is equally convincing in both sides of that personality, the extremes of high and low. Dano makes an excellent post-pubescent schlub. He mopes as well as anyone. But he is still in the habit – in TWBB as well – of raising his voice to show emotion. It was a wonderful play in LMS because he is supposed to be an inarticulate kid… he is a silent actor until he cracks. And even after that first speech, he really doesn’t talk much. Here, his character is really the center of the show. And he’s okay. But the words by Sherman are, it feels, meant to be loaded to the brim with angst and subtext. And as spoken by Dano, they aren’t. And Ms. Kazan feels, especially in the second act, as though the script is resurrecting Judith Ivey’s character from the original production of Hurlyburly, Bonnie… full of pain and broken resolve and piss and vinegar. But Kazan is not quite the spitfire needed. She is game. But the part calls for, as the character defines her, a woman who might not stop a particularly hot sexual moment if she was told right before the moment it would take that she would get AIDS from continuing. Those are some dark, dark demons. And this young actress, stripped of her skirt and asked to simulate a initiation of fellatio on stage, is clearly concerned about how much of her ass is showing and not milking the oral sex beat (pun kinda intended). I’m sure it didn’t help that her parents were watching the performance I attended. But when a character who turns this raw is written, the performance must be at least near historic to be right.

END SPOILERS

I could almost imagine as cast, with Dinklage, as powerful as (all younger incarnations) Judith Ivey as The Girl, Harvey Keitel as the Big Brother, and Bill Hurt as the pained brother seeking solace – all from that first cast of Hurlyburly – and this show being an off-Broadway legend. It’s like a good musical with GREAT performance. And really, with GREAT performances, it might feel like a great play… especially if Sherman cut the first two acts down to 100 minutes and wrote the much-needed third act.

And my third act – SOME NOTION OF SPOILERS HERE for the non-existent act – would be Dano drunk, Hamilton stuck with a kid and maybe a wife, and Dinklage truly on top of the world, in a worldly way. In other words, the third rotation of the wheel.

END SPOILERS

Don’t get me wrong. All four actors in this are good actors and bring some strong moments. But this script, to work, demands titans. And that, except for P.D., they are not. Is that a weakness or a strength? Hard to say.

In the end, Things We Want is not wasted time. It won’t hurt. But it won’t dazzle as it constantly promises to either.

Posted by poland at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)