this week in broadway

LOVE LETTERS

Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy are first pair to star in Broadway revival of A. R. Gurney’s Pulitzer Prize finalist LOVE LETTERS (photo © Carol Rosegg)

Brooks Atkinson Theatre
256 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through February 15, $27-$137
877-250-2929
www.lovelettersbroadway.com
www.brooksatkinsontheater.com

A. R. Gurney’s 1988 play, Love Letters, is a joyous celebration of the written word that might look deceptively simple but is instead a complex and thrilling examination of life and love. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama, the ninety-minute show features a pair of actors sitting at a long rectangular table, with no bells or whistles; Tony-winning designer John Lee Beatty’s set is about as basic as can be. The epistolary play is told through decades of letters written between childhood friends Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III as they grow up together, head off to boarding school and college, experience romances, and choose very different life and career paths. While the privileged Melissa is a quirky free spirit interested in art, Andrew comes from a slightly less-moneyed family, maturing into a down-to-earth man seeking worldly achievement. Through the letters, they share their hopes and dreams, successes and disappointments, encapsulating two lives that don’t turn out quite as planned.

For more than a quarter century, Love Letters, in which the actors read directly from the script, has been performed around the world, with spectacular pairings as well as productions with stunt casting, including Gurney and Holland Taylor, Sigourney Weaver and Jeff Daniels, Kathleen Turner and John Rubinstein, Larry Hagman and Linda Gray (Dallas), Hagman and Barbara Eden (I Dream of Jeannie), Robert Wagner and Jill St. John, Wagner and Stefanie Powers (Hart to Hart), Jerry Hall and David Soul, Elizabeth Taylor and James Earl Jones, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones (The Daily Show), and, in Stanley Donen’s fleshed-out 1999 TV movie, Laura Linney and Steven Weber. For its current Broadway revival, directed by two-time Tony winner Gregory Mosher, five duos will be playing the roles through February 15. Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy open the run, and they are mesmerizing. Farrow brings a beguiling eccentricity to the capricious, unpredictable, and often self-defeating Melissa, who travels the world but can’t find happiness. Farrow delivers her lines looking out at the audience, adding emotive physical flourishes, while Dennehy steadfastly reads from the script with appropriate earnestness. Farrow and Dennehy make a wonderful team, particularly when one writes multiple letters to the other without a response, their disappointment and pain palpable. The play stumbles as it approaches the end, with the events that befall each character way too over the top, but Andrew’s soliloquy on the glory of handwritten letters trumps all minor quibbles. And thankfully the play has not been updated; there are no mentions of cell phones or the internet, which have changed forever the way people communicate. Farrow and Dennehy will be followed by Dennehy and Carol Burnett, then Candice Bergen and Alan Alda, Stacy Keach and Diana Rigg, and Anjelica Huston and Martin Sheen, with more pairings to be announced.

BROADWAY WEEK SUMMER 2014

Tony winner A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE AND MURDER is among those shows selling half-price tickets during Broadway week

Multiple venues
September 1-14, buy one ticket, get one free
www.nycgo.com/broadwayweek

Tickets are now on sale for the summer edition of Broadway Week, which runs September 1-14 and offers theater lovers a chance to see new and long-running shows for half-price as well as have an opportunity to pay a $20 fee to upgrade to better seats. Twenty-one shows are participating, but they’re already starting to sell out, with the most popular selections being Cabaret and The Lion King. Among the other choices are Pippin, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Kinky Boots, If/Then, the rebooted Les Misérables, Matilda the Musical, Motown the Musical, and such longtime mainstays as Wicked, Jersey Boys, Chicago, The Phantom of the Opera, and Mamma Mia! In addition, tickets are available for a few promising shows in preview, the Broadway debut of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, starring Michael Cera and Tavi Gevinson, Donald Margulies’s The Country House with Blythe Danner, and a revival of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It with You, featuring James Earl Jones, Rose Byrne, and Elizabeth Ashley. You can look all you want, but the two-for-one list does not include The Book of Mormon, unfortunately.

HOLLER IF YA HEAR ME: AN ORIGINAL MUSICAL

New musical uses Tupac Shakur’s lyrics to tell contemporary tale of hard life (photo by Joan Marcus)

Palace Theatre
1654 Broadway at West 47th St.
Thursday – Tuesday through January 4, $67.75 – $184.25
www.hollerifyahearme.com

The new musical Holler If Ya Hear Me might be based on the songs of Tupac Shakur, but it does not tell the life story of the controversial West Coast rapper who was shot and killed in a Las Vegas drive-by in 1996 at the age of twenty-five. Instead, book writer Todd Kreidler — introduced to Shakur’s music by friend and mentor August Wilson — uses Shakur’s lyrics to share a contemporary tale about life in a ghetto in an unnamed Midwestern industrial city. As the play opens, John (Slam star Saul Williams) descends from the heavens in a jail cell, evoking Shakur’s several stints in prison, while delivering the East Harlem native’s “My Block,” soon joined by the company, setting the mood with the posthumously released song about guns, crack, black-on-black crime, unemployment, economic hardship, and racism. After his innocent brother, Benny (Donald Webber Jr.), is shot and killed, Vertus (Christopher Jackson) is determined to get even with the members of the 4-5 gang who took out Benny, angering his mother (Tonya Weston), alienating his girlfriend, Corinne (Saycon Sengbloh), and energizing young Anthony (Dyllon Burnside), who wants revenge as well. Meanwhile, the moody, humorless John is looking to go straight, getting a job working in Griffy’s (Ben Thompson) car-salvage business, where Benny used to work, planning with the white Griffy to get out of the neighborhood together. Through it all, a decrepit old man (John Earl Jelks) calls for peace by writing on walls and preaching through a megaphone.

John (Saul Williams) and Darius (Joshua Boone) get down to serious business as Anthony (Dyllon Burnside) looks on in HOLLER IF YA HEAR ME (photo by Joan Marcus)

The first act of Holler If Ya Hear Me is a mess, with a confusing narrative and point of view, a kind of mishmash of West Side Story and In the Heights, but director Kenny Leon (A Raisin in the Sun, Stick Fly) brings things together in act two, focusing more on the individual stories of John, Griffy, and especially Vertus, with stand-out performances by Williams, Thompson, and Jackson. Daryl Waters’s orchestrations too often emphasize Shakur’s background use of R&B elements, Broadway-fying such songs as “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” “Me Against the World,” “Dear Mama,” and “Unconditional Love”; Wayne Cilento’s (Wicked, Jersey Girls) choreography is almost nonexistent; and Edward Pierce’s set design is essentially a bare stage with stoops and a fenced-in salvage show occasionally, sometimes randomly, wheeled in, but Leon and the company still manage to pull it all off in the end while setting a new high for the use of the N-bomb on the Great White Way. The Palace Theatre itself has been transformed for the show, with stadium seating in the front of the tiny orchestra, while the rear has been turned into an interactive exhibition curated by the National Museum of Hip-Hop.

BROADWAY IN HD: THE NANCE

Stagecast of THE NANCE starring Nathan Lane comes to Symphony Space as part of Broadway in HD series (photo by Joan Marcus)

Symphony Space, Leonard Nimoy Thalia
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
June 25 & 30, July 14 & 20, $23, 7:00
212-864-5400
www.symphonyspace.org
www.screenvision.com

Miss a big show because tickets were too expensive or too hard to get or the production took place overseas? Screenvision is now offering a second chance to check out select Broadway, Canadian, and British plays by showing them in movie theaters across the country. Earlier this month, the company, which specializes in movie-theater advertising, presented a filmed version of the Australian production of Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, starring Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones. Now, in conjunction with Gay Pride Week, Screenvision and Broadway on Screen have teamed up with Lincoln Center Theater to present a stagecast of last year’s Broadway hit The Nance, Douglas Carter Beane’s poignant and engaging tale of a police clampdown on gay subculture in 1930s New York City. In the play, directed by Jack O’Brien (The Coast of Utopia, Much Ado About Nothing), Tony nominee Nathan Lane stars as Chauncey, a closeted burlesque performer who is trying to avoid getting arrested while picking up younger men in specific meeting points. The show also stars Andréa Burns, Jenni Barber, and Cady Huffman as a trio of strippers, Lewis J. Stadlen as Chauncey’s onstage partner, and Jonny Orsini as a one-night stand who turns into something more. The Nance will be screening June 25 & 30 and July 14 & 20 at 7:00 at Symphony Space as part of the Broadway in HD series, which also includes a June 24 showing of Christopher Plummer and Nikki M. James (The Book of Mormon, Les Misérables) in the 2008 Stratford Festival production of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar & Cleopatra. In addition, Symphony Space will be screening the current revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s A Small Family Business on June 26 & 29 and July 9 & 17 as part of its ongoing National Theatre Live series.

ACT ONE

Tony Shalhoub, Andrea Martin, and Santino Fontana star in Lincoln Center adaptation of Moss Hart’s ACT ONE memoir (photo by Joan Marcus)

Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through June 15, $77-$137
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

“These annals are not for those unsentimental about the theatre or untouched by its idiocies as well as its glories,” Moss Hart wrote in his beloved, highly influential 1959 memoir, Act One. “The theatre is not so much a profession as a disease, and my first look at Broadway was the beginning of a lifelong infection.” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer-director James Lapine (Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods) has adoringly adapted the theatrical bible into a superb new play, running through June 15 at the Vivian Beaumont. The play looks back at Hart’s theatrical education as the older Moss (Tony Shalhoub, in one of three roles) watches earlier versions of himself (Matthew Schechter as a boy, Santino Fontana as a naive young man) as his love of theater develops. When Hart was a child, he would sneak off to shows with his aunt Kate (Andrea Martin), much to the chagrin of his English-immigrant father (Shalhoub), who found it a waste of time and money, especially as the family struggled to pay the rent. Hart’s fascination continues through his teenage years, when he gets a job working for jaded old theatrical manager Augustus Pitou (Will LeBow).

Aunt Kate (Andrea Martin) helps foster her nephew’s love of the theater (photo by Joan Marcus)

Following a series of coincidences and luck, Hart is soon collaborating with the famous Broadway playwright and director George S. Kaufman (Shalhoub), writing Once in a Lifetime upstairs in Kaufman’s ritzy home, where the literati come to celebrate themselves. While Hart is a bundle of nerves, worried that his good fortune could come crashing down at any moment, Kaufman is a whole different kind of bundle of nerves, an obsessive-compulsive man who is afraid of germs, washes his hands constantly, and lies on his back on the floor to think. These scenes between Hart and Kaufman are simply rapturous, the heart of the play — and they are also not from the book. Lapine tracked down the first draft of Once in a Lifetime, compared it to the produced version, and imagined what Hart and Kaufman’s collaboration might have been like. The relationship is handled masterfully as their creative process unfurls, continuing with an out-of-town tryout prior to the highly anticipated Broadway opening, fear of failure hovering over their every move.

George S. Kaufman (Tony Shalhoub) and Moss Hart (Santino Fontana) collaborate on their first play together, ONCE IN A LIFETIME (photo by Joan Marcus)

Shalhoub (Golden Boy, Conversations with My Father) is ever stalwart in his multiple roles, transforming from the overheated Barnett Hart to the dapper Kaufman to the mature Moss with simplicity and grace. Fontana (Cinderella, Sons of the Prophet) has the appropriate stars-in-his-eyes look as Moss tries to establish the career of his dreams, sharing his news with such theater friends as Dore Schary (Will Brill) — who would go on to direct the all-star 1963 film adaptation starring George Hamilton as Hart and Jason Robards as Kaufman. Beowulf Boritt’s breathtaking, airy, multilevel rotating set seemingly has a life of its own as it travels from 1914 to 1930, depicting poverty and wealth, success and disappointment. Just as Hart’s memoir was a love letter to the theater, so is this estimable Lincoln Center adaptation, a warmhearted production that steers well clear of the kind of sentimentality that Hart and Kaufman so consciously avoided. “It is hard to realize now in these days of television, movies, radio, and organized play groups what all this meant to a child of those days,” Hart wrote in his memoir, which was always meant to be a single volume despite its title. “It was not only the one available source of pleasure and wonder, it was all of them rolled into one.” Such is the joy of this stage version of Act One as well.

LES MISÉRABLES

Javert (Will Swenson) is obsessed with Jean Valjean (Ramin Karimloo) in LES MISÉRABLES (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Imperial Theatre
249 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 19, $57-$285
www.lesmis.com/broadway

Let me preface this by publicly admitting that I have never read Victor Hugo’s massive 1820 novel, nor have I seen Richard Boleslawski’s 1935 film (starring Fredric March and Charles Laughton) or any previous stage production, many of which were met by tepid reviews at best. (The show debuted on Broadway in 1987, running for sixteen years, then was revived briefly in 2006.) My introduction to the world of Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert, Cosette and Éponine was via Tom Hooper’s tedious, overblown, yet Oscar-nominated 2012 movie. So my expectations were pretty low when I entered the Imperial Theatre to see this reboot of Cameron Mackintosh’s Broadway phenomenon. I can now understand the mania that surrounds the lavish musical, though I’m not quite part of the cult yet. Les Miz follows the endless pain and anguish of Valjean (Ramin Karimloo), prisoner 24601, who is released after spending nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to help feed his sister’s family. As he tries to make something of his life in early-nineteenth-century France, he is hounded by Javert (Will Swenson), who wants him back behind bars. Over the course of seventeen years (1815-32), Valjean meets Fantine (Caissie Levy), a young woman forced into prostitution; raises her daughter, Cosette (Angeli Negron or McKayla Twiggs as a girl, Samantha Hill as a grown woman); and allies himself with a group of revolutionaries that include Éponine (Nikki M. James), Marius (Andy Mientus), Enjoiras (Kyle Scatliffe), and the brave boy Gavroche (Joshua Colley or Gaten Matarazzo).

LES MISÉRABLES makes another triumphant return to the Great White Way (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Directors James Powell and Laurence Connor have subdued the staging somewhat while including fabulous projections that enhance several scenes, replacing the famed rotating set with a series of dark, wood-based constructions (designed by Matt Kinley) that put the performers front and center. Indeed, as each one takes the stage, the audience cheers the character, who then breaks into familiar songs under the spotlight. There’s more a feeling of competition than usual with musical revivals as the crowd waits with bated breath to see how this new cast handles the beloved score, written by composer Claude-Michel Schönberg with English lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer. (The book is by Alain Boublil.) Karimloo makes an impressive Broadway debut as Valjean, establishing his admirable chops with his early “Soliloquy” and later nailing the epic “Bring Him Home.” (The role is played by Aaron Walpole or Nathaniel Hackmann on Thursdays so Karimloo can rest his voice.) Swenson (Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Hair) plays Javert with just the right boldness, making him a great foil for Valjean. Cliff Saunders and Keala Settle have the requisite amount of fun as the Thénardiers, chewing the scenery with “Master of the House,” Tony winner Nikki M. James (The Book of Mormon) gives a heartfelt performance as Éponine, leading the second act with a stirring “On My Own,” and Andy Mientus offers up a fine “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” as Marius. Is this Les Misérables still over the top, at times bombastic, with treacly religious sentiment and sappy melodrama? Absolutely. But that’s also part of the charm, which it has in abundance.

THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN

Cripple Billy (Daniel Radcliffe) and Helen McCormick (Sarah Greene) both dream of becoming Hollywood stars in THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN (photo © Johan Persson)

Cort Theatre
138 West 48th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 14, $27 – $142
www.crippleofinishmaan.com

Daniel Radcliffe continues to show his range and distance himself from Harry Potter — if that’s really possible — in the Broadway premiere of Martin McDonagh’s splendid little comedy The Cripple of Inishmaan. Radcliffe, who previously on the Great White Way had a thing for a horse (Equus) and sang and danced his way up the corporate ladder (How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying), stars in McDonagh’s 1996 play as Cripple Billy, an unfortunate orphan with a twisted arm and a near-debilitating limp who spends an inordinate amount of his time looking at cows on the close-knit Irish island of Inishmaan. When gossipmonger Johnnypateenmike (Pat Shortt) arrives at Eileen (Gillian Hanna) and Kate’s (Ingrid Craigie) food shop with news about Hollywood coming to the nearby island of Inishmore, where Robert Flaherty is filming Man of Aran, Billy instantly wants to go and be part of the movie, seeing it as his opportunity to get away from all the abuse heaped upon him and make something of his life. But first he must convince boat owner Babbybobby (Pádraic Delaney) to take him across the water. Also desperate to get out is tough-talking flirtatious redhead Helen McCormick (Sarah Greene), who is sure she will become a star as soon as Hollywood sets its eyes on her. Of course, nothing goes quite as planned in this bittersweet tale.

A production of the new Michael Grandage Company led by Tony-winning director Michael Grandage (Frost/Nixon, King Lear), The Cripple of Inishmaan is a wickedly delightful slice of Irish life, complete with eccentric characters, poetic dialogue, and wacky situations that are firmly entrenched in the tradition of Irish storytelling. Hanna and Craigie are a hoot as the aunties who raised Billy after his parents drowned, Shortt is a riot as the town crier who shares news for food and just might be poisoning his alcoholic mother (June Watson), and Conor MacNeill does a fine turn as Bartley McCormick, Helen’s brother who is obsessed with sweets and telescopes. Greene is sensational as Helen, fiery and sexy whether insulting others or smashing eggs over their head, nearly stealing the show from Radcliffe, who plays Billy with a heartwarming and endearing sensitivity. At its heart, The Cripple of Inishmaan is about overcoming the obstacles one is born with, rising above setbacks while finding one’s place in life, and in a way that applies to Radcliffe’s career as well. At intermission, the security guards start putting up the barricades as fans already begin lining up at the stage door, preparing to wait another hour and a half to get his autograph and snap his picture; it would be a shame if they do so without actually having seen The Cripple of Inishmaan, which will have many saying, “Harry who?”