this week in broadway

ANN

Holland Taylor stars as Ann Richards in one-woman show she also wrote

Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through June 9, $75-$125
212-362-7600
www.lct.org
www.theannrichardsplay.com

Fiery politician Ann Richards was a true star, giving a memorable keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention and later serving as governor of Texas. Emmy-winning actress Holland Taylor (The Practice, Two and a Half Men) embodies the dedicated reformer in the one-woman show Ann, which she also wrote. Based on six years of intensive research, Ann opens with Taylor, wearing an eye-catching white suit and Richards’s trademark white coiffure, as Ann delivering an address at a fictional college, the audience standing in for the student body. She depicts Richards as an engaging, entertaining, very smart, and open and honest woman not afraid to speak her mind about her professional and personal life, including discussing her severe alcoholism and painful divorce. The play, directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein (resident director of War Horse), slows down considerably when Richards is in her gubernatorial office, answering multiple phone calls, yelling for her assistant, and shuffling through papers. Although it’s meant to show her as a bold and brash administrator fighting for the little person, it’s repetitive and not nearly as interesting as when she’s reflecting on her life and career directly with the audience. The play comes alive again when she returns to the podium, discussing her battle with cancer and hope for the future of America. Taylor is dazzling as Richards, capturing the spirit and dedication of a sharp, brave woman who was determined to make a difference and did. In an author’s note, Taylor writes that Richards is “someone I do think of now as a friend I know pretty well, and love”; after two hours, the audience is bound to feel the same.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

Brick (Benjamin Walker) and Maggie (Scarlett Johansson) smell the odor of mendacity in Broadway revival of CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (photo by Joan Marcus)

Richard Rodgers Theatre
226 West 46th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Through March 30, $27-$132
877-250-2929
www.catonahottinroofbroadway.com

Over the last two years, there has been a plethora of Tennessee Williams revivals on and off Broadway in celebration of the centennial of the Mississippi-born playwright’s birth in 1911, including In Masks Outrageous and Austere, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Vieux Carré, and A Streetcar Named Desire. The latest is a new Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which initially debuted on the Great White Way in 1955 and was last seen on Broadway in an all-black version in 2008. The problems with this current revival, directed by Rob Ashford (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), are evident from the very start, as the audience applauds over the opening lines spoken by Scarlett Johansson as Maggie the Cat and continues with Ciarán Hinds’s understated Big Daddy, Debra Monk’s goofy Big Mama, and Benjamin Walker’s barely there Brick. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof demands big, over-the-top performances to hide its relatively basic story line of a family hunkering for a big inheritance when they believe their patriarch to be seriously ill, in addition to a classic Williams subplot of a character having trouble facing his possible homosexuality. It’s not so much that the actors have to deal with the memories of such previous Cat stage and film superstars as Burl Ives, George Grizzard, Charles Durning, and James Earl Jones as Big Daddy, Ben Gazzara, Paul Newman, and Terrence Howard as Brick, and Elizabeth Taylor, Kathleen Turner, and Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie. Instead, Ashford presents the play as a subdued tale lacking nuance; the audience keeps waiting for electricity and explosions that never happen. Christopher Oram’s set, a large, wide-open bedroom, turns into Grand Central Terminal as characters keep traipsing through, denying Maggie and Brick any privacy as the odor of mendacity increases. This production of Williams’s second Pulitzer Prize winner — Streetcar also garnered the honor — would have been better served in a smaller off-Broadway house than under the glaring lights of the Great White Way.

PICNIC

Pulitzer Prize–winning PICNIC looks at a day in the life of small-town America (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through February 24, $42-$127
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

It’s been nearly sixty years since William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Picnic debuted on Broadway, with Ralph Meeker’s Hal and Paul Newman’s Alan battling over Janice Rule’s Madge; in the 1955 film, it was William Holden and Cliff Robertson with more than just their eyes on Kim Novak. So while the Roundabout’s current revival of Picnic at the American Airlines Theatre doesn’t boast quite the star power of those versions, it is still a charming and fun frolic through a bygone era. The two-hour play takes place in a small Kansas town in 1950s America that is preparing for the annual Labor Day picnic. Local beauty queen Madge Owens (Lost’s Maggie Grace) assumes she’ll be going to the picnic with Alan Seymour (Ben Rappaport), a relatively boring and self-satisfied college student from a wealthy family, along with her younger sister, the tomboy Millie (Californication’s Madeleine Martin), and their somewhat dowdy mother, Flo (Emmy winner Mare Winningham), whose husband walked out on her many years before, leaving her to raise her children on her own. The Owens family lives next door to Helen Potts (Oscar, Emmy, and Tony winner Ellen Burstyn), an older woman who has given up whatever life she could have had in order to care for her ailing mother. To get a cheap thrill, Helen hires a stranger, Hal Carter (Gossip Girl’s Sebastian Stan), to do some yard work for her, barely able to control herself when the Adonis-like man rips off his shirt, revealing his taut, sweaty chest. All of the other women notice as well, including spinster schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney (four-time Obie winner Elizabeth Marvel), who has been dating dull but reliable businessman Howard Bevans (two-time Obie winner Reed Birney). It turns out that Hal is a down-on-his-luck former fraternity brother of Alan’s who has come to town to get back on his feet, but after he is instantly attracted to Madge — and perhaps vice versa — things don’t exactly end up as planned.

Madge (Maggie Grace) shares her hopes and dreams with her mother, Flo (Mare Winningham), in Roundabout revival of William Inge’s PICNIC (photo by Joan Marcus)

In Picnic, Inge, who also wrote such plays as Bus Stop and Come Back, Little Sheba and won an Oscar for his screenplay for Splendor in the Grass, cleverly deals with people’s hopes, dreams, and expectations in this funny, tender, and tense drama that explores the soft underbelly lying beneath the old-fashioned values of small-town America. Surprisingly, the acting is a mixed bag, with Marvel overplaying her part, Winningham underplaying hers, and Burstyn at times seeming to be lost while Grace, Birney, and Martin are more effective. Director Sam Gold (Look Back in Anger, Seminar) makes excellent use of Andrew Lieberman’s charming set, a shared backyard that firmly sets the action in America’s heartland. When Madge is up in her room, applying her makeup in front of a window that looks out on the backyard, the audience is sneaking a peek at her just as several characters are doing, everyone dreaming of the possibilities life holds for us all. In a season dominated by revivals of long-ago Broadway classics, including Golden Boy, The Heiress, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Picnic is a fine addition.

THE OTHER PLACE

Real-life mother and daughter Laurie Metcalf and Zoe Perry star in Sharr White’s fascinating THE OTHER PLACE (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 3, $67-$120
www.theotherplacebroadway.com

Three-time Emmy winner Laurie Metcalf won both an Obie and a Lucille Lortel Award for her 2011 off-Broadway portrayal of neurologist Juliana Smithson in Sharr White’s The Other Place, and now she has a strong shot at a Tony as the play moves to Broadway in the gripping MTC production at the Samuel J. Friedman. Metcalf stars as Juliana, a pharmaceutical pitch-woman who suffers an “episode” while on the road touting a new wonder drug. Long estranged from her daughter (Zoe Perry, Metcalf’s real-life daughter, in her Broadway debut) and accusing her doctor-husband, Ian (Daniel Stern), of having an affair with her much-younger doctor (Perry again), Juliana is trying to hold herself together even as she believes she has brain cancer. But as the complex, highly cinematic play continues, it becomes evident that she is suffering from something very different, and in many ways far more frightening. White and Tony-winning director Joe Mantello (Other Desert Cities, Wicked, Love! Valour! Compassion!) tell Juliana’s harrowing story by going back and forth between the past and the present, as Justin Townsend’s lighting signals the time shifts. The action takes place within set designers Eugene Lee and Edward Pierce’s semicircular web of bleak gray frames (hiding lights and speakers) that serve as doors, windows, and mirrors while also evoking the misfiring synapses of Juliana’s brain. Metcalf (Rosanne, November) gives a dazzling performance as Juliana, an intelligent, scientific woman who doesn’t understand — and is unwilling to accept — what is happening to her. As the audience filters into the theater, she is already onstage, sitting in a chair, fiddling with her cell phone, helping the incoming crowd instantly identify with her. But soon it’s Ian, strongly portrayed by Stern, who is standing in for the audience as the truth is slowly revealed. Despite a few missteps — primarily a somewhat baffling finale that takes things much too far — The Other Place is an involving eighty minutes of fascinating theater, expertly told and brilliantly acted.

BROADWAY WEEK 2013

broadway week

January 22 – February 7
www.nycgo.com/broadwayweek

Ticket prices on the Great White Way getting you down? During Broadway Week, which is actually seventeen days long (January 22 to February 7), you can get two-for-one tickets to nineteen shows, from such long-running musicals as Jersey Boys, Chicago, The Phantom of the Opera, and Wicked to such outstanding plays as Picnic, The Other Place, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and such newer musicals as The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Once, and Newsies. And for an extra twenty bucks, you can upgrade your seats. The only Broadway Week participant that is currently sold out is The Lion King, but you better act fast if you want to score some tickets to any of the other eighteen productions, which also include Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Rock of Ages, and The Heiress, starring Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS

Shelley “the Machine” Levene (Al Pacino) talks shop with Ricky Roma (Bobby Cannavale) in Mamet revival (photo by Scott Landis)

Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre
236 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Through January 20, $82-$162
www.glengarrybroadway.com

This was supposed to be the season of David Mamet on Broadway, with the premiere of The Anarchist, starring Patti LuPone and Debra Winger, at the Golden Theatre and an all-star revival of the playwright’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross two houses down at the Gerald Schoenfeld on West 45th St. The former was a critical and popular disaster, closing after twenty-three previews and seventeen regular performances, and the opening of the latter was pushed back from November 11 to December 8, rarely a good sign, even if Hurricane Sandy was given as at least part of the reason. Glengarry Glen Ross made its debut on the Great White Way in 1984, was a popular movie directed by James Foley in 1992, and won Tony Awards for Best Revival and Best Featured Actor (Liev Schreiber) in Joe Mantello’s 2005 version, but it feels surprisingly dated today. Al Pacino, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor as hotshot Ricky Roma in the film, now stars as Shelley “the Machine” Levene, a has-been salesman seemingly on his last legs, no longer able to sell the pieces of land owned by the company he has worked for for so long. The shockingly short first act takes place in a cheesy Chinese restaurant set, introducing the six protagonists: Levene, who is begging his boss, John Williamson (David Harbour), to give him the primo leads so he can recapture his mojo; angry, foul-mouthed salesman Dave Moss (Scrubs’s John C. McGinley), who tries to convince the much milder George Aaronow (The West Wing’s Richard Schiff) to help him steal the treasured leads and sell them to a competitor; and finally, “Always be closing” Richard Roma (Tony nominee Bobby Cannavale of Boardwalk Empire, Nurse Jackie, and The Motherfucker with the Hat), who spots an easy mark in James Lingk (Clybourne Park Tony nominee Jeremy Shamos). Before the audience can barely get comfortable in their seats, intermission arrives, severing whatever connections were being made with the story.

Dave Moss (John C. McGinley) shares his master plan with George Aaronow (Richard Schiff) in revival of GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (photo by Scott Landis)

The second act is much stronger, and thankfully longer, set in the real-estate office that has been ransacked. Here the actors really get to shine and the characters are allowed to develop, with Pacino chewing bits of scenery here and there but taking few big gulps, Schiff being appropriately wormy as the worried Aaronow, McGinley getting very loud as Moss, Harbour giving nuance to Williamson, and Cannavale playing it big and loud as the leader in the Cadillac contest, as the salesman with the most money on the board. But the production, directed by Daniel Sullivan (The Columnist, Prelude to a Kiss), feels old and tired, like we’ve seen it all before. And that might be the problem — that it has returned to Broadway too soon after the previous revival. In addition, with Netflix and iTunes, it is easier to watch the film whenever one wants, and Foley’s movie features additional characters and scenes and the hard-to-beat cast of Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, and Jonathan Pryce, making the current revival seem like it’s missing something in comparison. Recent revivals of much older fare, including Death of a Salesman, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Golden Boy, have been successful at least partly because their main stories and characters have timeless qualities, but this Glengarry Glen Ross feels like it’s still stuck in the Reagan ’80s, a relic of another age. It’s still an enjoyable show with solid performances, but it lacks the power that helped previous productions establish its big-time reputation.

GOLDEN BOY

Tom Moody (Danny Mastrogiorgio) doesn’t like the way Joe Bonaparte (Seth Numrich) talks to him but likes the way he fights in GOLDEN BOY (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Belasco Theatre
111 West 44th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through January 20, $37 – $122
www.lct.org

For its seventy-fifth anniversary, Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy has returned home, in a triumphant Lincoln Center production at the Belasco Theatre, where the show made its Broadway debut in November 1937. Seth Numrich (War Horse) comes on like a house on fire as Joe Bonaparte, a young classical violinist determined to make it in the fight game. He implores boxing promoter Tom Moody (Danny Mastrogiorgio) to put him in the ring against Chocolate Drop, sure that he has what it takes to become a champion. But in that first match, Joe is fearful of hurting his valuable hands, something that his trainer, Tokio (Boardwalk Empire’s Danny Burstein), has to cure him of if he is to become successful in the sweet science. The married Moody also involves his girlfriend, Lorna Moon (Dexter’s Yvonne Strahovski), a self-proclaimed floozy from Newark, in his plan to nurture Joe, but that strategy threatens to backfire when Joe and Lorna take a liking to each other. Meanwhile, Joe’s Italian immigrant father (Monk’s Tony Shalhoub) worries whether his son will ever play the violin again or make enough money as a fighter to support himself.

Joe risks a promising career as a violinist by putting on the gloves and getting in the ring in GOLDEN BOY (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Directed by Bartlett Sher, who also helmed Lincoln Center’s 2006 revival of Odets’s Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy still packs quite a wallop, performed by a talented ensemble, with creative period sets by Michael Yeargan (highlighted by vertical doors that come down from the ceiling). It tells the timeless story of the never-ending battle between artistic and financial success, as Joe understands he must give up the violin for good if he is to pursue a career in boxing. Odets was inspired to write Golden Boy after he headed to Hollywood and the company that he was part of, Lee Strasberg’s Group Theatre, disbanded, representing his own struggle between artistic integrity and wealth and fame. The original production of Golden Boy was directed by Harold Clurman and featured the legendary cast of Luther Adler (as Joe), Frances Farmer (as Lorna), Lee J. Cobb, Elia Kazan, Harry Morgan, Howard Da Silva, Karl Malden, and John Garfield. (Garfield, who played a troubled violinist in the 1946 film Humoresque, took on the role of Joe in a short-lived 1952 Broadway revival, while William Holden made his film debut in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1939 film.) The current cast also includes Ned Eisenberg as Roxy Gottlieb, Anthony Crivello as Eddie Fuseli, Jonathan Hadary as Mr. Carp, Michael Aronov as Joe’s brother-in-law, Siggie, and Dagmara Dominczyk as Joe’s sister, Anna. Golden Boy is like an old boxer getting back into the ring after a lengthy retirement but still showing there’s plenty of fight left in his game, ready to go twelve rounds with the best of them.