this week in broadway

BEN HECHT AND CHARLES MacARTHUR’S THE FRONT PAGE

Journalist Hildy Johnson (John Slattery) and editor Walter Burns (Nathan Lane) go after a big story in revival of THE FRONT PAGE (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Broadhurst Theatre
235 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 29, $67-$167
thefrontpagebroadway.com

Since its stage debut eighty-eight years ago, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page has been celebrated for its witty, rapid-fire dialogue and madcap pace, but the latest Broadway revival, running at the Broadhurst Theatre, doesn’t quite merit front-page headlines. In the press room in the Chicago Criminal Courts Building, a group of cynical, jaded newspaper reporters are awaiting the execution of Earl Williams
(John Magaro), who was convicted of killing a police officer. As men do, they sit around the dank room, playing cards, insulting one another, making sexist and racist jokes, and downing burgers in between filing reports. The motley cast of characters includes hard-boiled know-it-all Murphy (Christopher McDonald), the constantly complaining Endicott (Lewis J. Stadlen), the banjo-playing Kruger (Clarke Thorell), and the poetic germophobe Bensinger (Jefferson Mays), along with McCue (Dylan Baker), Schwartz (David Pittu) and Wilson (Joey Slotnick). In addition to the hanging, it’s also the last day on the job for star journalist Hildy Johnson (John Slattery), who is leaving for New York City to marry his fiancée, Peggy Grant (Halley Feiffer). But when Williams suddenly escapes, Hildy can’t stop himself from pursuing the story, especially when Williams essentially ends up in his lap and his longtime editor, Walter Burns (Nathan Lane), preys on his journalistic sensibilities. (The Oscar-winning duo of Hecht and MacArthur, who also collaborated on Wuthering Heights and Twentieth Century, know what of they write; they were both former Chicago journalists.)

Sheriff Hartman (John Goodman) finds himself in the middle of a mess in madcap revival of classic play (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Told in three acts with two intermissions, the 165-minute production, directed by estimable three-time Tony winner Jack O’Brien (who has previously directed Lane in the riotous ensemble comedy It’s Only a Play and the much more serious The Nance), never hits its stride; it needs to move like the rat-a-tat-tat of the machine-gun fire heard as Williams heads out on the lam, but instead it seems a little too cocksure as it waits for Lane to make his grand appearance more than halfway through. Lane does inject a much-needed shot of life into the proceedings, although he plays Burns with familiar Lane-ian smarm and vigor. The play, which takes place in Douglas W. Schmidt’s appropriately dim and dusty surroundings, also features Holland Taylor as Mrs. Grant, Hildy’s future mother-in-law; Sherie Rene Scott as Mollie Malloy, a close friend of Williams’s; Dann Florek as the opportunistic mayor, who is up for reelection; Danny Mastrogiorgio as Diamond Louie, Burns’s underground operative; John Goodman as the bumbling Sheriff Hartman; Patricia Conolly as cleaning woman Jennie; and Micah Stock as goofy cop Woodenshoes Eichhorn. Although it’s virtually impossible to steal any show away from Lane, particularly when he’s in full-throated, scenery-chewing form, eighty-five-year-old Tony and Emmy winner Robert Morse does just that in his small but pivotal role as Mr. Pincus, who has a special delivery for the mayor. Morse’s Mad Men castmate, Slattery, does not fare as well as Hildy, a terrific actor who seems out of place here. The chemistry between Hildy and Burns is the key to the play; over the years, the dynamic duo has been portrayed on Broadway by Lee Tracy and Osgood Perkins in 1948, Bert Convy and Robert Ryan in 1969, and Richard Thomas and John Lithgow in 1986 and on film by Pat O’Brien and Adolphe Menjou in 1931, Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday in 1940, and Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in 1974. It’s as if Slattery and Lane, and O’Brien and the rest of the cast, were relying on the show’s vaunted history, but in these days of the electronic 24/7 news cycle and political correctness, The Front Page — which includes racist language that has been toned down but not eliminated — feels more outdated than ever as opposed to a thrilling look at the way things used to be. It has its share of very funny and insightful moments, but it doesn’t hold up to the promise its headlines blast out.

THE CHERRY ORCHARD

John Glover, Joel Grey, Diane Lane, and Chuck Cooper squeeze into new Broadway adaptation of THE CHERRY ORCHARD (photo by Joan Marcus 2016)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 4, $59-$149
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Rising Roundabout scribe Stephen Karam takes a curious pause in his soaring career with a misbegotten adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s classic comic drama, The Cherry Orchard. Karam’s two previous plays, 2011’s Sons of the Prophet and 2014’s The Humans, were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and the latter won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play when it was off Broadway and then the Tony for Best Play after transferring to the Great White Way. But his new version of The Cherry Orchard, in an exasperating production helmed by National Theatre associate director Simon Goodwin (The Beaux’ Stratagem, Routes), is sour from the very start. Chekhov’s plot is familiar to most theatergoers: After living in Paris for five years following the death of her husband and the tragic drowning of her seven-year-old-son, Grisha, Madame Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya (Diane Lane) returns to the family home with her entourage, only to find that the entire estate, including her beloved cherry orchard, is going to be sold at auction because of failure to pay off massive debts. Yermolai Alekseyevich Lopakhin (Harold Perrineau), a successful businessman whose father and grandfather worked as serfs on the estate, offers a plan to save the house by cutting down the orchard and replacing it with vacation villas, but Lyubov and her arrogant brother, Leonid Andreyevich Gaev (John Glover), will have none of it, acting like spoiled children, refusing to face the direness of their situation. Also refusing to accept reality is Lyubov’s daughter, Anya (Tavi Gevinson), and her adopted daughter, Varya (Celia Keenan-Bolger). The family circle is filled out by governess and magician Charlotta Ivanovna (Tina Benko), family friend and landowner Boris Borisovich Simeonov-Pischik (Chuck Cooper), local clerk Semyon Panteleyevich Yepikhodov (Quinn Mattfeld), Grisha’s former teacher and current student Pyotr Sergeyevich Trofimov (Kyle Beltran), maid (Dunyasha), young servant Yasha (Maurice Jones), and doddering old servant Firs (Joel Grey). In addition, violinist Bryan Hernandez-Luch, clarinetist Liam Burke, and percussionist Chihiro Shibayama add cinematic music first from the sidelines, then from the back of the stage. But it’s all for naught.

Lopakhin (Harold Perrineau) tries to convince Madame Lyubov (Diane Lane) of the fate of the cherry orchard in Roundabout revival (photo by Joan Marcus 2016)

Chekhov’s plays are ripe for reinterpretation. This year alone has brought the Pearl’s Stupid Fucking Bird and Peter Pan Theatre’s The Seagull and Other Birds, two wildly inventive reimaginings of The Seagull, while the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg’s production of The Cherry Orchard at BAM was a brilliant, immersive take on the tragicomedy. But Karam and Godwin throw too much into the mix, getting trapped in a no-man’s land between traditional and experimental, classical and contemporary, realistic and metaphorical. Michael Krass’s costumes are all over the place, from sharp, modern-day suits to old-fashioned Eastern European garb, as is Karam’s dialogue. “What is it you’d say . . . ?” Madame Lyubov asks Gaev early on. “What’s the lingo?” And stage directions such as “Varya and Anya share a moment of ‘What the hell was that?!’” certainly don’t help. Karam also shifts the idea of serfdom into slavery, which Godwin overdoes by casting black actors as Lopakhin, Trofimov, and Pischik. Most of the play takes place in the nursery, which set designer Scott Pask has outfitted with tiny chairs and tables, Alexander Calder-like mobiles hanging from the ceiling, a toy village, and a mobile of small hot-air balloons hovering over a child’s bed. Yes, we get it; virtually all of the characters are acting like children. And it turns out to be more cringe-worthy than funny when the rather large Cooper wiggles into one of the chairs. The floor is an enormous trunk of a tree that has been chopped down, its myriad rings representing the changing times and generations, evoking the eventual fate of the cherry orchard and the Russian aristocracy — as well as this production itself.

OH, HELLO

George St. Geegland (John Mulaney) and Gil Faizon (Nick Kroll) make their Broadway debut in OH, HELLO (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lyceum Theatre
149 West 45th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 22, $59- $159
ohhellobroadway.com

It’s no mean feat to turn brief comedy sketches into feature-length productions; just ask Saturday Night Live, which has produced such critical flops as It’s Pat, A Night at the Roxbury, Superstar, The Ladies Man, and MacGruber. Yet somehow, Upright Citizens Brigade regular Nick Kroll and former SNL writer John Mulaney, who started performing as opinionated aging showbiz hangers-on Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland, respectively, in the East Village club Rififi in 2005 and later at the Cherry Lane Theatre and on the Comedy Central series Kroll Show from January 2013 to March 2015, have transformed their absurdist two-minute bits into the Broadway smash Oh, Hello, an uproarious send-up of celebrity culture and the Great White Way itself. The goofy, sloppy Faizon and the eccentric, possible serial killer St. Geegland, the hosts of the cable access show Too Much Tuna, have finally reached the big time, making it to Broadway with a play about themselves, a pair of old Upper West Side vaudeville types whose rent is suddenly going up from $75 to thousands a month. Desperate to keep their longtime abode, Faizon, who still hurts from losing a CBS announcing gig decades before, and St. Geegland, the author of the seminal works Next Stop, Ronkonkoma and Rifkin’s Dilemma, try to score a gig on NY1, as if that will make everything right. Amid self-deprecating riffs and a deep, abiding love for the music of Steely Dan, the two old guys manage to put on quite a show.

Septuagenarian Upper West Side pranksters prepare for entrance of F. Murray Abraham in OH, HELLO (photo by Joan Marcus)

Oh, Hello, named after the two men’s trademark greeting, is a clever and inventive one hundred nonstop minutes of hilarity, as fellow Georgetown grads Mulaney and Kroll — who were inspired to create the characters after seeing a pair of elderly men, attached at the hip, both purchasing a copy of Alan Alda’s autobiography Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, at the Strand — try to crack each other up as much as the audience, particularly in their offbeat, offhanded pronunciations of various words and phrases that just make no sense. Scott Pask’s ramshackle set matches Faizon and St. Geegland’s dishevelment to a T, made up of leftover detritus from other shows, including family photos from an August Wilson play. Inside references abound, some that you will get, and some that you won’t, but little does that matter. There are even jokes about Alda, Bobby Cannavale, Aziz Ansari, and Griffin Dunne — Griffin Dunne? — but it turns out that each of those actors have made surprise guest appearances on the prank show Too Much Tuna. (We got John Oliver the night we went, and the Last Week Tonight host couldn’t stop laughing, which was infectious.) Kroll and Mulaney never miss a chance at a visual gag or a ridiculous pun, from the bit of shirt peeking through Faizon’s zipper, to both of them ripping unseen tech intern Ruvi Nandan, to John Slattery and Jon Hamm supposedly serving as their understudies. Two-time Tony nominee Alex Timbers, who has directed such elaborate productions as Here Lies Love, Rocky, and Peter and the Starcatcher in addition to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, goes with the flow, relishing all of the shabby DIY madness. And yes, there is definitely too much tuna. It genuinely doesn’t matter whether you like Mulaney or Kroll individually or whether you were a fan of Kroll Show; everyone is welcome to say Oh, Hello.

HEISENBERG

Butcher Alex Priest (Denis Arndt) and quirky Georgie Burns (Mary-Louise Parker) meet in a London tube station in HEISENBERG (photo © Joan Marcus 2016)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 11, $70-$150
heisenbergbroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Simon Stephens’s Heisenberg, which transferred to Broadway last month shortly after his extraordinary The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ended a two-year run at the Ethel Barrymore, might reference the quantum theory uncertainty principle that proves the impossibility of precisely measuring position and momentum at the same time, but there’s no uncertainty that the British playwright is an exceptional storyteller bursting with both position and momentum. Stephens’s Tony-winning adaptation of Mark Haddon’s children’s book was turned into a multimedia marvel by Marianne Elliott. Heisenberg explores some of the same territory, the nature of establishing connections and communication between people, but could not otherwise be more different; it’s a spare, minimal tale directed with a graceful simplicity by Mark Brokaw (The Lyons, After Miss Julie). Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt are magnetic as Georgie Burns and Alex Priest, respectively, two loners who meet one afternoon in a London tube station. Georgie is a forty-two-year-old fast-talking American with a tenuous grasp on the truth, while Alex is a seventy-five-year-old Irish butcher who just wants to be left alone. As the play opens, she kisses the back of his neck, mistaking him for someone else, then starts babbling to him. “Why are you talking to me?” he asks sternly. “I’m sorry. I’m really weird. I know. You don’t need to tell me. I’ll go,” she replies. But she can’t leave; she is drawn to him, sharing intimate details of her life that might or might not be true. When she shows up at his shop five days later, tracking him down through Google, he coldly declares, “My privacy has been violated.” She responds, “‘Violated’ is a bit strong. ‘Violated’ is a bit hyperbolic.” “Nice word,” he says. “Thank you. Ha. ‘Nice word.’ Patronizing fucker,” she answers. As these two extremely particular and rather odd strangers get to know each other, they attempt to fill in the missing parts of their lives.

heisenberg-2

The awe-inspiring technology behind Curious Incident is completely absent in Heisenberg, a streamlined production that relies on basic, almost workshoplike elements. Mark Wendland’s (Next to Normal, The Merchant of Venice) sparse stage features two chairs and two tables that the actors occasionally move around as the scenes change; there is a riser of seats behind the stage, placing the characters in the middle of the audience. Despite the show’s title, Stephens’s script does not delve deeply into physics, although at one point Georgie explains, “If you watch something closely enough you realize you have no possible way of telling where it’s going or how fast it’s getting there. Did you know that? That’s actually the truth. That’s actually scientifically been proven as the truth. By scientists. They all got together and they completely agreed on that. If you pay attention to where it’s going or how fast it’s moving, you stop watching it properly.” Those words also apply to how one can experience theater, including this Manhattan Theatre Club production. There’s no need to pay special attention to where this charming two-actor character sketch is going, or how fast it will get there; just watch it properly, immersed in the moment and the flow, in the lightning-quick pace and dizzying spectacle of Parker’s (Proof, Weeds) splendidly quirky performance or the subtle, sly, sublimely powerful work of Oregon Shakespeare Festival veteran Arndt (The Ballad of Soapy Smith, Basic Instinct) as he almost imperceptibly builds the quietly heartbreaking figure of Alex. “You need to follow it. The melody,” Alex tells Georgie when teaching her how to listen to a Bach sonata. “Try to predict what will happen to it next. It will completely take you by surprise.” The same can be said for this beautifully constructed show.

HOLIDAY INN: THE NEW IRVING BERLIN MUSICAL

Corbin Bleu, Lora Lee Gayer, and Bryce Pinkham star in Broadway debut of HOLIDAY INN (photo by Joan Marcus, 2016)

Studio 54
254 West 54th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 15, $47-$167
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Sitting in the lobby in any of several theater district Holiday Inn hotels, watching people come and go, is likely to be more pleasurable than sitting in Studio 54, watching the Roundabout production of the Goodspeed musical Holiday Inn. Mark Sandrich’s 1942 movie was nominated for Best Original Score and Best Original Story, but music director-conductor Andy Einhorn and orchestrator Larry Blank sap all of the charm and rhythm from Irving Berlin’s songs, while director Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge’s book makes all the wrong changes to the plot, aside from wisely dropping the infamous “Abraham” minstrel scene. Singer-composer Jim Hardy (Bryce Pinkham), dancer Ted Hanover (Corbin Bleu), and chanteuse Lila Dixon (Megan Sikora) are a moderately successful song-and-dance team seeking their big break. Immediately after Jim proposes to Linda, he proposes that they give up show business and move to the farm he just bought in Midville, Connecticut; their manager, Danny (Lee Wilkof), then scores the trio a major gig in Chicago. Jim is heartbroken when Lila says she’d rather go out on the road with Ted. “But Lila, we promised each other that when the gigs dried up we’d get out of show business and live a normal life,” Jim implores. “I’ve always wanted to be normal. After I’m famous,” Lila replies. Jim sticks to his guns, deciding to go to the farm, where he will wait for Lila to join him after she and Ted finish their shows. Arriving at his new home, Jim meets the downtrodden Linda Mason (Lora Lee Gayer), the previous owner of her family’s farm who had defaulted on the mortgage, allowing Jim to buy it.

HOLIDAY INN gobble-gobbles its way to Studio 54 (photo by Joan Marcus, 2016)

It takes about three seconds to figure exactly where the story is going, and lo and behold, that is precisely where it ends up. The songs, which were taken from the film as well as other sources, are staged by Greenberg (Guys and Dolls, Working) and choreographer Denis Jones (Honeymoon in Vegas, Pieces of My Heart: The Bert Berns Story) in either overly silly or melodramatic ways, zapping the spirit from “White Christmas,” “Blue Skies,” “Steppin’ Out with My Baby,” “Heat Wave,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and “Easter Parade,” while the costumes, by Alejo Vietti (Beautiful: The Carol King Musical, Allegiance), are either too mundane or too over-the-top. Pinkham (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, The Heidi Chronicles) and Gayer (Doctor Zhivago, Follies) are pleasant enough in the roles performed in the film by Bing Crosby and Marjorie Reynolds, respectively, but Bleu (High School Musical, Godspell) doesn’t have enough vocal range or pizzazz as Ted, played in the film by Fred Astaire, and Sikora (Under My Skin, Curtains) is miscast in the Virginia Dale part; it’s as if she is in a different show. And Megan Lawrence (The Pajama Game, Urinetown) just plain tries too hard in the thankless role of Louise, who has been added for comic relief but quickly grows tedious, as does Morgan Gao as Charlie Winslow, a ten-year-old Midville banker. (Don’t ask.) Aside from a couple of funny Connecticut jokes, this Holiday Inn is not a place where anyone should stay.

TICKET ALERT: BROADWAY WEEK SUMMER 2016

THE COLOR PURPLE is one of nineteen shows participating in this summer’s two-for one Broadway Week deal (photo by Matthew Murphy, 2015)

Multiple venues on Broadway
September 5-18, buy one ticket, get one free
Tickets on sale August 18 at 10:30 am
www.nycgo.com/broadwayweek

Tickets go on sale August 18 at 10:30 am for the summer edition of Broadway Week, which runs September 5-18 and offers theater lovers a chance to see new and long-running shows for half-price. Nineteen shows are participating, but tickets will go fast, so don’t hesitate or you’ll lose out on your chance to get two-for-one seats for such musicals as Aladdin, The Lion King, Beautiful, Cats, Chicago, Paramour, Jersey Boys, Kinky Boots, On Your Feet, The Phantom of the Opera, School of Rock, Wicked, and the new Holiday Inn. We highly recommend An American in Paris, The Color Purple, Fiddler on the Roof, Matilda, and Something Rotten! In addition, squeezing in among all those musicals is one play, the outstanding Tony-winning drama The Humans.

PARAMOUR

Atherton brothers Andrew and Kevin perform spectacular aerial feats in PARAMOUR (photo by David Gordon)

Lyric Theatre
214 West 43rd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Thursday – Tuesday through February 19, $55-$139
www.cirquedusoleil.com
www.lyricbroadway.com

For more than thirty years, the Canada-based Cirque du Soleil has been wowing audiences with its unique reinvention of the circus, concentrating on stupendous feats of acrobatics with live music and an all-human cast. For its Broadway debut, however, it has bitten off more than it can chew with Paramour, running at the Lyric Theatre through February 19. Instead of concentrating on what the troupe does best, director and conceiver Philippe Decouflé and creative guide and creative director Jean-François Bouchard decided to frame the thrilling acrobatics within the confines of traditional musical theater, obscuring both in the process. Jeremy Kushner is the ersatz ringmaster as AJ Golden, a famous film director — don’t call them movies! — who thinks he has found his next superstar (and personal and professional muse) in local ingénue Indigo (Ruby Lewis) during the Golden Age of Hollywood. But standing in between them is Indigo’s partner, pianist and composer Joey (Ryan Vona), who is in love with her. As success comes to Indigo, she must make difficult decisions that will forever change her life and career.

Jeremy Kushner is film director and ersatz circus ringleader in PARAMOUR (photo by Richard Termine)

Jeremy Kushner is film director and ersatz circus ringleader AJ Golden in Cirque du Soleil’s PARAMOUR (photo by Richard Termine)

The book is as standard as they come, as are the music (by Guy Dubuc and Marc Lessard) and lyrics (by co-composer Andreas Carlsson). As expected, the show looks terrific, with ecstatic sets by Philippe Guillotel, glittering costumes by Daphné Mauger, and choreography by Raffaello D’Andrea, but what’s wrong with Paramour can be summarized by one set piece that focuses on the central love triangle. A trio of aerialists, dressed in the same colors as AJ, Indigo, and Joey, beautifully reenact their troublesome situation, avatars performing remarkable feats in the air, but then AJ, Indigo, and Joey start singing a song that essentially retells everything we have just seen, as if the audience can’t be trusted to understand what the flying dance was all about. Indeed, the acrobatics usually occur in the background, forming no bond with the main story, as if they are two separate entities. Even when they do come together, as in a Calamity Jane scene involving a teeterboard, we are left scratching our heads, wondering why. The performers, who include artistic gymnasts Tom Ammirati, Martin Charrat, and Amber Fulljames, aerial strap artists Andrew and Kevin Atherton, trampolinist Lee Brearley, dancer Yanelis Brooks, martial artist Sam Charlton, contortionist Myriam Deraiche, juggler Kyle Driggs, Chinese pole and Cyr wheel specialist Jeremias Faganel, and clown Nate Cooper (who wanders through the audience before the show starts), exhibit extraordinary talent, but director West Hyler (the Big Apple Circus, Jersey Boys) puts too little of it front and center. It all feels too gimmicky; in fact, in front of each theatergoer, Velcroed to a seat, is a menu of merchandise that you can order and have delivered right there as you sit. That might work in Vegas, but it’s far too cheesy for Broadway.