this week in broadway

BLACKBIRD

Una (Michelle Williams) and Ray (Jeff Daniels) revisit a past traumatic event in very different ways in BLACKBIRD (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Belasco Theatre
111 West 44th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Monday – Saturday through June 11, $39 – $145
blackbirdbroadway.com

In 2007, Jeff Daniels starred with Alison Pill in the off-Broadway premiere of David Harrower’s Olivier Award–winning play, Blackbird, directed by Joe Mantello at Manhattan Theatre Club. Nine years later, Daniels is revisiting the incendiary work by digging even deeper into his controversial character in the show’s must-see Broadway debut, running at the Belasco through June 11. Daniels plays Peter, a man suddenly forced to confront his past when Una (Michelle Williams) surprises him at his office late one afternoon. Fifteen years earlier, Peter, then forty years old and known by his given name, Ray, had an inappropriate and illegal relationship with Una, who was twelve at the time. “What cinched the decision to return was that Ray still terrified me,” Daniels wrote in a recent column in the New York Times. “Every actor knows you can’t run from the ones that scare you. It’s not the acting of the character, nor is it the dark imagination it takes to put yourself through all of his guilt, regret, and shame. To truly become someone else, you have to hear him in your head, thinking, justifying, defending, wanting, needing, desiring. The more I looked back at the first production, the more I saw what I hadn’t done, where I hadn’t gone. I’d pulled up short. Found ways around what was necessary. When it came time to truly become Ray, I’d protected myself. He’d hit bottom. I hadn’t.” Daniels indeed hits rock bottom in his remarkable, and terrifying, portrayal of Ray, humanizing a man who committed a horrible crime and tries to escape its consequences and get on with his life, changing his identity and moving away. But as Una, Williams is Daniels’s equal, fully inhabiting the difficult role of a young woman who, on the cusp of adolescence, had her future shut down by Ray’s actions. Tiny, wearing giant heels, and wrapped in a red puffer coat, Williams suggests both a fully adult woman and a sexualized child, delivering a character who never had opportunities to figure out who she is and potentially live a normal life. Their confrontation takes place in a small employee cafeteria in Ray’s office, where he at first denies even knowing who she is, although his head looks like it is about to explode. “This was pointless. Absolutely pointless. Can you see that?” Ray asks her, adding, “You’re a / some kind of ghost / turning up from nowhere to / Go home. / Please. / Leave me alone.” Una responds, “I do feel like a ghost. / I do. / I feel like a ghost. / Everywhere I go. . . . / You made me into a ghost.”

Una (Michelle Williams) considers where life has brought her in BLACKBIRD (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Williams and Daniels go at it in real time during the play’s ninety minutes, as details of past and present slowly emerge. Their words come in fits and starts, with incomplete sentences and several long monologues that are filled with emotion. While Una is often coy, Ray is angry, afraid not only of Una but of being discovered; as they play a vicious game of cat and mouse, switching between roles of attacker and prey, figures occasionally walk past in the hall or a colleague of Ray’s knocks on the door and asks for him. (These extras are seen only in silhouette through frosted doors and windows.) But even though we know in our hearts that what Ray did to Una was completely wrong, Daniels is able to elicit compassion for Ray, while Williams sometimes makes us feel like Una is taking advantage of the situation in unfair ways. I hated myself for thinking that, but that’s part of the beauty of Harrower’s (Knives in Hens) piercing dialogue and Mantello’s (The Humans, Other Desert Cities) astute, no holds-barred direction. “I am entitled to something. / To live,” Ray says. “I lost more than you ever did,” Una replies. “I lost / because I never had / had time to to to begin.” Scott Pask’s set is cold and unfeeling, almost antiseptic except for the mess of food wrappers and garbage left behind by employees. Trash becomes an integral part of the proceedings. Una tells a story about getting upset when she saw a man drop a can of beer and a cigarette on the sidewalk. “It’s not the litter / it wasn’t the litter / the dirtying,” she says. “It was the man, the person doing that. / Because he hasn’t been, been / schooled / educated / civilized enough / and I thought, / I just thought you are a beast.” She’s of course not talking only about the stranger but about Ray as well. But Ray refuses to see himself as a beast, and Una refuses to regard herself as garbage.

Ray (Jeff Daniels) tries to avoid a meltdown when part of his past comes rushing back in BLACKBIRD (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Watching Blackbird is as uneasy and uncomfortable as it is captivating and physically and mentally exhausting. I found myself leaning forward in my seat, mesmerized by every word and every nuance and movement by three-time Oscar nominee Williams (Cabaret, My Week with Marilyn) and Emmy, Drama Desk, and Obie winner Daniels (The Newsroom, The Squid and the Whale) as they worked their magic. They both give dynamic, unrelenting performances that are brave and bold. It’s more than just a battle of wits and power, or an argument about the nature of love, or an exploration of the very different responsibilities of adults and children. The production, which includes excellent sound design by Fitz Patton and lighting by Brian MacDevitt, masterfully challenges the viewer to disregard extremes and do some genuine soul searching of their own. Of course, just by calling the woman “Una” sets herself off by herself, as if she is alone in the world. (The film version, the debut feature by Australian theater director Benedict Andrews, is called Una; Rooney Mara plays Una, with Ben Mendelsohn as Ray.) On the way out of the Belasco, you’re likely to find yourself in a heated discussion with your companion over whether the show was honest and truthful about pedophilia, whether it was more of a glorified rape apology, whether it was a love story, or whether it treated both characters equally. You’re also likely to find yourself wanting a thorough shower.

ECLIPSED

Danai Gurira’s ECLIPSED follows a group of women just trying to survive during Liberia’s second civil war (photo by Joan Marcus)

Golden Theatre
252 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 19, $45-$149
eclipsedbroadway.com

When Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o was invited to star in a play at the Public by artistic director Oskar Eustis, she immediately chose Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, and it’s easy to see why. Eclipsed is a searing look at five women trying to find ways to survive during the second Liberian civil war, a memorably written, directed, and acted story filled with surprising dark humor among horrific abuse and violence. The play was initially staged by Woolly Mammoth and then at Yale Rep in 2009, where Nyong’o served as an understudy and never got the opportunity to go on. It was such a success at the Public last fall that it has since transferred to Broadway, where it’s running at the Golden Theatre through June 19. Set in 2003, the play explores the terrifying situation of five women, three of whom live together in a ramshackle cement hut riddled with bullet holes and are sex slaves to a local commanding officer. They are known merely as wife Number One (Saycon Sengbloh), who has been there the longest and manages the household; pregnant wife Number Three (Pascale Armand), who likes to complain and is rather scattershot; and the new girl, wife Number Four (Nyong’o), who is determined to hold on to her identity despite what is happening to her and the others. When Number Four asks Number One about her age and Number One doesn’t seem to care, Number Four says, “Don’t you want to know? I don’ know, I just tink we should know who we are, whot year we got, where we come from. Dis war not forever.” Number One responds, “Dat whot it feel like,” to which Number Four replies, “Ya, but it not. I want to keep doing tings. I fifteen years, I know dat. I want to do sometin’ wit’ myself, be a doctor or member of Parliament or sometin’.”

Despite such dreams, their value as objects rather than humans is made clear; every so often, they suddenly line up in a row as the unseen CO walks by and chooses which one he wants to have sex with. When they return, they go straight to a basin, grab a washcloth, and clean themselves. Soon Number Two (Zainab Jah) returns, a revolutionary carrying a rifle and bringing rice, which Number One refuses. Number Two, who has joined the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) against corrupt President Charles Taylor, wants to recruit Number Four, but Number Four is too immersed in a book she is reading out loud, about a U.S. leader named Bill Clinton. “A white man?” Number One asks. “Ya, he white. He from America,” Number Four answers. “You sho he white? Dere lots of Liberians in America. Maybe he American from Liberia or Liberian from America,” Number Three adds. “No, I tink he American from America,” Number Four, who wears Rugrats and Tweety Bird T-shirts, says. Later, Number Three claims, “He see me, he gon’ forget dat white wife. She betta not let him come ’ere.” In her fantasy of release, she’s still a concubine, only to a white U.S. president rather than a Liberian warlord, perhaps a sly dig at the “liberation” of first-world women. The whole conversation about Bill and Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky is much-needed comic relief as things heat up and Rita (Akosua Busia), a peace worker dressed in white like an angel, comes to the compound to meet with the CO and try to help end the civil war.

Lupita Nyong’o considers joining the fighting at the behest of Zainab Jah (photo by Joan Marcus)

Eclipsed is the second of four plays about Africa and African Americans written by Gurira, a Zimbabwean American who plays zombie killer Michonne on The Walking Dead; she won an Obie for 2005’s In the Continuum, was nominated for an L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award for 2012’s The Convert, and Familiar has been extended at Playwrights Horizon. In her return to the stage — and her Broadway debut — following her Oscar-winning performance in 12 Years a Slave, Mexican Kenyan Nyong’o is mesmerizing as a young woman bright beyond her years, prepared to do whatever it takes to maintain her identity and, ultimately, regain her freedom without sacrificing her humanity, something that the brutal, fierce Number Two no longer worries about. “We gon’ restore Liberia to its rightful people,” Number Two tells Number Four. “You understand, de enemy, de enemy is no longer human being. Okay?” Reprising their roles from the Yale Rep production, Jah (Ruined, The Convert), who was born in England and partly raised in Sierra Leone, fully inhabits her role as the freedom warrior, inspired by real women who took up arms to fight against Taylor’s rule, while Armand (The Trip to Bountiful, An Octoroon), who was born in Brooklyn and whose parents are from Haiti, is charming as a woman who never quite learned how to take care of herself. Sengbloh (Marley, Hurt Village), who is of Liberian heritage, is bold yet tender-hearted as the strong-willed but perhaps misguided ersatz leader of the sex slaves, and Ghanaian Busia (Mule Bone, The Talented Tenth) lends a touching vulnerability to the peace worker who has a personal agenda in her mission. Together they form a kind of alternate family of parents and children attempting to deal with an impossible situation, their performances ringing true with realistic and rhythmic movement and dialogue, beautifully directed by South Africa native Tommy (Ruined, The Good Negro), who has been with the show from the start. The set and costumes by Clint Ramos and music and sound design by Broken Chord add to the mood, which is fraught with danger yet resilient with hope, giving balance to this extraordinary story by and about women and power. Coincidentally, the Playbill front cover features a close-up of Nyong’o’s very serious face, while the back cover shows her bursting with happiness in an elegant advertisement for a high-end makeup company, providing quite a contrast that is, in some ways, metaphorically echoed in this very special production.

DISASTER!

The audience and the cast have a swinging good time in DISASTER! (Jeremy Daniel Photography)

Nederlander Theatre
208 West 41st St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 3, $65-$179
877-250-2929
www.disastermusical.com

There has been many a disaster on Broadway; Disaster! is definitely not one of them. The delightful musical comedy, which began life as a one-night charity benefit in 2011 and then had off-Broadway runs at the Triad Theater in 2012 and St. Luke’s in 2013-14, has made a simply fabulous transition to the Great White Way, where it runs through July 3 at the Nederlander Theatre. The show has kept growing since initially conceived by Seth Rudetsky and Drew Geraci, with bigger and bigger stars and significant changes to the script and music; the Broadway version is by cowriter, music supervisor, song arranger, and costar Rudetsky and his best friend, cowriter and director Jack Plotnick, a longtime character actor in film and television. It’s 1979, and Tony Delvecchio (Roger Bart channeling Jack Black) is celebrating the opening of Barracuda, his floating casino and discotheque moored in New York Harbor. A chintzy showman and businessman, Tony has cut just about every corner possible, worrying journalist Marianne (Kerry Butler) and Professor Ted Schneider (Rudetsky), who is concerned that the ship could not survive a natural disaster, which is likely to occur shortly. Among those on deck are Sister Mary Downy (Jennifer Simard), who is protesting against the casino and its debauchery; Shirley (Faith Prince) and Maury (Kevin Chamberlin), an older couple with a fierce love of life; Levora (Lacretta Nicole), a down-on-her-luck former disco diva who goes everywhere with her beloved dog in her handbag; Chad (Adam Pascal), whom Marianne left at the altar and his now working as a waiter on the ship, and his goofy buddy, Scott (Max Crumm); and elegant but not-too-bright lounge singer Jackie (Rachel York) and her young twins, Ben and Lisa (both played in hilarious fashion by Baylee Littrell). The show pays tribute to the great, and not-so-great, disaster movies of the 1970s, ingeniously coupled with beloved, and not-so-beloved, pop songs from that era.

Jackie (Rachel York) prays for a morning after as Ted (Rudetsky) and Ben (Baylee Littrell) look on (Jeremy Daniel Photography)

The main target is The Poseidon Adventure, but there are also references galore to the Airport films, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Rollercoaster, Tidal Wave, Piranha, and even Airplane! Simard’s nun character, speaking in a killer deadpan voice, is pulled directly from Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker’s classic 1980 spoof, while Prince excels in her homage to Shelley Winters in Poseidon. Meanwhile, the melodrama involving Marianne and Chad feels like a terrifically nerdy subplot from The Love Boat. The score features more than three dozen period favorites, delivered with extremely firm tongues-in-cheek, including Mary MacGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers,” Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend,” England Dan and John Ford Coley’s “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight,” Orleans’s “Still the One,” Carly Simon’s “Mockingbird,” and Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff,” many of which become riotous set pieces, especially as things start looking more and more bleak and Tobin Obst’s (Newsies, Jekyll & Hyde) set begins falling apart with deliciously low-budget panache. The cast, superbly dressed by William Ivey Long (Chicago, On the Twentieth Century), does an amazing job keeping a straight face while the audience explodes in pure glee over each new reference or song snippet, which Rudetsky and Plotnick nail again and again. Littrell, the son of former Backstreet Boy Brian Littrell, nearly steals the show playing the twin siblings, going back and forth between Ben and Lisa in side-splitting, nearly impossible ways. The fun choreography is by JoAnn M. Hunter (School of Rock, Broadway Bound), who has a blast with the fab soundtrack. No mere jukebox musical, Disaster! is hot stuff indeed, a love letter to a simpler time and place; about the only thing missing is Sensurround.

HUGHIE

Frank Wood and Forest Whitaker star in revival of Eugene O’Neill’s HUGHIE (photo by Marc Brenner)

Booth Theatre
222 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Wednesday – Sunday (and some Tuesday nights) through March 27, $25- $149
hughiebroadway.com

Written in 1941 but not staged until 1958, five years after his death, Eugene O’Neill’s one-act Hughie features a main character who seems to have walked right out of The Iceman Cometh. In the sixty-minute show’s fourth trip to Broadway, Forest Whitaker portrays Erie Smith, a role previously played by Jason Robards, Ben Gazzara, Brian Dennehy, Al Pacino, Richard Schiff, and Burgess Meredith, who originated the part in English in 1963. Erie is an alcoholic gambler who has returned to the ratty, formerly grand Broadway hotel where he lives following an extended bender, mourning the death of his beloved night clerk and sounding board, Hughie. As embodied by Whitaker, who is taking the stage for the first time since shortly after college, Erie is a hulking presence who speaks in fits and starts, sharing his hopes and dreams, failures and memories with the new clerk, Charlie Hughes (Frank Wood), who is not exactly thrilled at being bothered in the middle of the night. Erie rambles on about whatever comes into his head while Hughes barely says a word. Set in 1928 on the cusp of the Great Depression, Hughie is more a character study than a fully realized play; in fact, it was meant to be part of a cycle of one-acts, called By Way of Obit, that were essentially monologues about a dead person. In a letter to critic George Jean Nathan, O’Neill explained, “Via this monologue you get a complete picture of the person who died — his or her whole life story — but just as complete a picture of the life and character of the narrator.” O’Neill ultimately destroyed all of the other in-process one-acts but saved Hughie.

Forest Whitaker makes his return to the stage in HUGHIE (photo by Marc Brenner)

Oscar winner and UNESCO special envoy Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) was rumored to have had trouble remembering his lines during previews (which has also been said of other recent Hollywood stars on Broadway, including Pacino and Bruce Willis), but he has settled into the role, taking command of the lovable loser, who represents an America about to hit free fall. Tony winner Wood (Side Man, Clybourne Park) is a fine foil for Erie, already onstage when the theater doors open, staring emptily into an abyss. Costume and set designer Christopher Oram, who has won Tonys for Red and Wolf Hall: Parts One & Two, has created a sensational hotel lobby, huge and dim, creaky and musty, its former splendor, perhaps like Erie’s, hovering in the dankness, enhanced by Neil Austin’s lighting and Adam Cork’s original music. Tony-winning director Michael Grandage (The Cripple of Inishmaan, King Lear) keeps it all from becoming boring, although even at a mere sixty minutes it feels repetitive and a little too long. Hughie was scheduled to run into July but recently posted an early closing notice of March 27 because of low advance ticket sales. Perhaps theatergoers were expecting more fireworks, or they were turned off by the preview problems, or maybe they don’t want to spend upwards of $149 on an hour-long show. Of course, we don’t pay to see movies by the minute, nor do we buy art by the yard, to paraphrase Max von Sydow’s character in Hannah and Her Sisters.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF is back on Broadway in a toned-down yet still rousing version from Bartlett Sher (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Broadway Theatre
1681 Broadway at 53rd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 4, $35 – $157
fiddlermusical.com

One of Broadway’s genuine treasures is back where it belongs, on the Great White Way, in a wonderful production that breathes new life into the old chestnut. Based on stories by Sholem Aleichem, the musical version of Fiddler on the Roof debuted on Broadway in September 1964, where it ran for 3,242 performances through July 1972. The show was directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with a cast that included Bea Arthur, Bert Convy, Austin Pendleton, Maria Karnilova, and, of course, Zero Mostel as Tevye the milkman, an honest, hardworking husband and father who is balancing his religious beliefs and Jewish tradition with raising five daughters who are developing modern minds of their own in the small village of Anatevka in early-twentieth-century imperialist Russia. Over the years, Tevye has been portrayed as a larger-than-life figure with a special relationship with the Almighty; in addition to Mostel, the dairyman has been portrayed by Herschel Bernardi, Topol (onstage and in the Oscar-winning film), Alfred Molina, Paul Michael Glaser (who was Perchik in the movie), and even Harvey Fierstein. Taking the reins this time around is the terrific Danny Burstein, the fifty-one-year-old Mount Kisco native and five-time Tony nominee (Cabaret, Follies), who walks onto the stage from the audience, immediately announcing that Tevye is one of us, just another human being facing life’s adversities. Burstein’s scaled-down Tevye allows six-time Tony nominated director Bartlett Sher (The King and I, South Pacific with Burstein) to let Joseph Stein’s sterling book shine. The people of Anatevka are struggling to make ends meet, always fearful that the next pogrom could be waiting right around the corner. Tevye’s horse is lame, so he is pulling his cart by himself, adding to his stress and strain. Yente the matchmaker comes by to tell Tevye’s wife, Golde (Jessica Hecht), that she has chosen the much older butcher and wealthy widower Lazar Wolf (Adam Dannheisser) to marry their oldest daughter, Tzeitel (usually played by Alexandra Silber, but we saw a fine Tess Primack in her stead), who is madly in love with the poor tailor, Motel (Adam Kantor). Soon two more of Tevye and Golde’s daughters are trying to bypass the traditional arranged marriage: Hodel (Samantha Massell) falls for Bolshevik revolutionary and teacher Perchik (Ben Rappaport), while Chava (Melanie Moore) is courted by non-Jewish Russian officer Fyedka (Nick Rehberger). Through it all, Tevye looks to the heavens, continuing his ongoing conversation with God, wondering when things are going to get better.

Golde (Jessica Hecht) and Tevye (Danny Burstein) discuss a dark “dream” as Grandma Tzeitel (Lori Wilner) looks on in FIDDLER (photo by Joan Marcus)

Sher’s heartwarming version of Fiddler takes place on Michael Yeargan’s relatively spare sets, which drop down from above and roll in from the sides, facades of houses and storefronts and a local bar in brown wood palettes. Israeli-born, UK-based choreographer Hofesh Shechter adds modern-dance flourishes to Robbins’s original choreography that keep things fresh and moving. Despite Ted Sperling’s overly standard and uninventive musical orchestrations, the songs, with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, hold up marvelously, boasting such rousing set pieces as “Tradition,” “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “To Life,” and “Tevye’s Dream,” the last an always delightful moment that lets the creative team sparkle and show off as Grandma Tzeitel (Lori Wilner) and Fruma-Sarah (Jessica Vosk) share their thoughts on Tzeitel’s upcoming nuptials to Lazar Wolf. “Sunrise, Sunset,” which can easily become treacly, is tender and beautiful here, and Sher and Burstein tone down “If I Were a Rich Man” into a more solemn musing than a bold demand. And we dare you not to shed a tear when Burstein and Hecht ask the deeply touching question: “Do You Love Me?” They could address the same question to the audience, which would answer back with an enthusiastic yes. Every decade has its Fiddler, which has previously been revived on Broadway in 1981, 1990, and 2004, and now the 2010s has one it can call its own. Sher, Burstein, and the rest of the cast and crew have done a fantastic job of delivering a thrilling Fiddler on the Roof that upholds tradition — while celebrating life and love in the face of dark times that are as relevant today as they were way back when.

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

Phoebe Fox, Mark Strong, and Nicola Walker star as a family about to face some ugly truths in A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE (photo by Jan Versweyveld)

Lyceum Theatre
149 West 45th St. between Broadway & Sixth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 21, $30-$135
www.aviewfromthebridgebroadway.com

As you enter the Lyceum Theatre to see Belgium-born, Amsterdam-based director Ivo van Hove’s gripping, Olivier Award–winning transformation of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, the curtain is up, and on the stage is a giant rectangular gray cube. It doesn’t quite reach the bottom, so you can get a teasing glimpse of the floor through a translucent border. On either side of the cube are six rows of rising pews, where some of the audience sits, like a jury waiting to hear the evidence. As if unveiling a magic trick, the cube slowly rises to the rafters, and onstage are Eddie Carbone (Mark Strong) and Louis (Richard Hansell), two Red Hook longshoremen furiously scrubbing their mostly bare bodies like they’re trying to cleanse their inner souls. “Justice is very important here,” a suited observer notes, strolling outside the two-foot-high bench that encircles three sides of the stage, with a nondescript door on the back wall. The easygoing man is Alfieri (Michael Gould), a neighborhood lawyer who is part Greek chorus, part Our Town–like narrator of this twentieth-century tragedy about misguided love, immigration, honor, morality, and, yes, justice. Eddie is the conscience of the play, a hardworking man who holds tight to his convictions, determined to make a better life for his orphaned niece, Catherine (Phoebe Fox), whom he is raising with his wife, Beatrice (Nicola Walker), a stabling influence. When Catherine is offered a job as a stenographer, the overprotective Eddie prefers that she finish school first. “That ain’t what I had in mind,” he says. Eddie and Beatrice take in two of Beatrice’s cousins from Sicily, Marco (Michael Zegen) and Rodolpho (Russell Tovey), illegal immigrants who have snuck into New York on a boat. While Marco is looking to work hard for several years, sending money back home to his wife and kids before making enough to return to Sicily and be with them again, Rodolpho wants to remain in New York and become a performer. When the light-hearted, flashy Rodolpho starts displaying what Eddie considers questionable tendencies — “The guy ain’t right,” Eddie says again and again — while also showing interest in Catherine, Eddie decides to step in between them, setting off a series of battles that have grave consequences.

Passions ignite in Ivo van Hove’s staging of Arthur Miller’s A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE (photo by Jan Versweyveld)

Originally staged as a one-act in 1955 and then turned into a two-act show the next year directed by Peter Brook and starring Richard Harris and Anthony Quayle, A View from the Bridge is a stark examination of the American dream in mid-twentieth-century Brooklyn. Van Hove, who over his twenty-five-year career has created unique interpretations of works by Ingmar Bergman (Scenes from a Marriage, Persona), Luchino Visconti (Ludwig II), John Cassavetes (Faces, Husbands), Henrik Ibsen (Hedda Gabler), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema), Tony Kushner (Angels in America), Eugene O’Neill (Mourning Becomes Electra, Long Day’s Journey into Night), and many others, in addition to helming the recent world premiere of Lazarus, his New York Theatre Workshop collaboration with David Bowie and Enda Walsh, gets to the gritty heart of A View from the Bridge, his first Miller adaptation, to be immediately followed by his version of The Crucible, which begins previews on Broadway at the end of February. Van Hove, who has also directed numerous operas, focuses on the operatic aspects of Miller’s narrative in this Young Vic production, highlighting oversized emotions, sexual jealousy, and fierce power struggles as the characters seem in the grip of psychological forces sometimes beyond their control, playing out to their inexorable conclusion. The stage, designed by van Hove’s longtime partner, Jan Versweyveld, is set up like a boxing ring, as the characters go at one another both verbally and physically; even Alfieri eventually becomes more than just a narrator, getting involved in the action as he steps through the door and into the middle of it all. Inside the “ring,” everyone is barefoot as raw passion bubbles to the surface and ugly truths are spat out. In his Broadway debut, the tall, bald Strong (The Imitation Game, Low Winter Sun) is a sensation, giving a brutally honest performance that has him barely able to stand up for his curtain call at the end, the exhaustion palpable all over his face and body. Fox is sweetly vulnerable as the tough-talking young woman caught between childhood and becoming an adult, still wanting to be that little girl while also exploring her burgeoning sexuality. Tom Gibbons’s sound design features a cinematic score that will not be to everyone’s taste, while the controversial ending will thrill some and disappoint others. And then, after two complex, intense, intermissionless hours, the gray cube comes back down, and the magic is put away until the next performance.

CHINA DOLL

Christopher Denham and Al Pacino star in David Mamet’s latest Broadway show, the critically reviled CHINA DOLL (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre
236 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Through January 31, $92-$149.50
www.chinadollbroadway.com

Is China Doll really as bad as all that? “If you can abide it / let the hurdy-gurdy play / Stranger ones have come by here / before they flew away,” Jerry Garcia sings in the 1973 Grateful Dead song “China Doll,” adding, “Take up your china doll / It’s only fractured / and just a little nervous / from the fall.” Robert Hunter’s lyrics are rather apt for David Mamet’s new Broadway play, which closes January 31 after a critically battered run. Reports during previews claimed that audience members were leaving in droves during intermission, that star Al Pacino, who has appeared in such previous Mamet works as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, needed help remembering his lines, and that Mamet was still tinkering with the script, resulting in a delayed official opening. The two-hour play eventually opened on December 4 to scathing reviews. In the New York Times, Ben Brantley called it “saggy,” decrying, “Now please cue sound effects of chalk scratching on countless blackboards and the ping, ping, ping of an endlessly dripping faucet, and you have some idea of what Mr. Denham must be going through night after night after night,” referring to Pacino’s costar, Christopher Denham. In New York magazine, Jesse Green declared, “Al Pacino is not an actor of much breadth but he stakes a narrow territory deeply, and that can be brilliant to watch onstage. China Doll, his shaky new Broadway vehicle, by David Mamet, offers flashes of that brilliance between long mucky passages in which he appears to be hunting for the narrative, if not the next line.” In the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz chimed in, “Some actors can make reading the white pages fascinating. Pacino fails to make phone calls anything but drudgery.” Rex Reed was rather unkind in the New York Observer, proclaiming, “David Mamet’s ghastly China Doll is the worst thing I’ve seen on a professional New York stage since the ill-fated Moose Murders. On the disaster meter, it might be even worse. Al Pacino walks like an anchovy and looks like an unmade bunk bed.” And the West Coast added its thoughts as well, with Charles McNulty noting in the Los Angeles Times, “The Anarchist, Mamet’s last original play to debut on Broadway, sounded like two typewriters clacking at each other. China Doll is more of a drone.” So it was with bated breath that we attended one of the show’s final performances, hoping that maybe by this time, the play, and Pacino himself, had found its groove. Of course, the reviews had little effect on the box office, as theater lovers and tourists continued to pour in to see one of the best actors in Hollywood history, the beloved Oscar-, Tony-, and Emmy-winning star of The Godfather, Scent of a Woman, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Scarface, and Glengarry Glen Ross.

Entering the theater lobby, we were greeted with large photos of George Soros, the Koch brothers, Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, and other real-life billionaires, alongside Mickey Ross, the character Pacino plays in China Doll. Ross is an aging, self-obsessed, disheveled mess of a man who is in the midst of negotiating a way out of having to pay five million dollars in taxes for a new private plane, which he is purchasing primarily for his trophy fiancée, the never-seen Francine Pierson. He has no illusions about who he is and what he is doing; he is fully aware that he is an aging, self-obsessed, disheveled mess of a man with a trophy fiancée. Ross spends most of the play on his Bluetooth, arguing about taxes, legal and political shenanigans, and airplane registration numbers, while both chastising and teaching his assistant, Carson (Denham), who sees Ross as a mentor. The first act is not so bad; Pacino’s stumbling, slow-talking style seems fitting for his character, Denham (The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin, The Lieutenant of Inishmore) is a solid sounding board for Pacino, and the plot, about a nasty, greedy one-percenter essentially looking to die in the arms of a beautiful young woman, is not quite wholly annoying yet. But yes, it does indeed get there in the woeful second act, during which you just want to run onstage, grab Pacino’s earpiece, stomp on it, and tell him to shut the hell up already. It’s hard not to cringe when Ross is on the phone with Francine, placating her no matter what. In many ways, Ross is exactly what’s wrong today with America; Mamet might not have been creating a sympathetic character with the bombastic billionaire, but we don’t completely despise him either. Instead, we don’t care about Mickey Ross and his ridiculous dilemma, which is much, much worse. Not even Tony-winning director Pam MacKinnon (Clybourne Park, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and Tony- and Emmy-winning set designer Derek McLane (The Pajama Game, Anything Goes) can bring any level of warmth to this cold, unfeeling drama. China Doll might actually work in a condensed one-act version; but as it is, it grows ever-more intolerable as it goes on. But again, critical reviews have had no impact on this very popular show, as evidenced by curtain-opening applause for Mr. Pacino in both the first and second acts as well as a rapturous standing ovation at the end. “I will not condemn you / nor yet would I deny / I would ask the same of you / but failing will not die,” Garcia sings in “China Doll.” If only we could say the same for Mamet and Pacino’s latest collaboration.