this week in theater

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.

A FABLE

Luke (Gordon Joseph Weiss) and Angela (Samantha Soule) strike a deal in David Van Asselt’s very adult fairy tale (photo by Paula Court)

Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 28, $66
212-989-2020
www.rattlestick.org
www.cherrylanetheatre.org

On the way out of A Fable, Rattlestick artistic director and cofounder David Van Asselt’s very adult fairy tale running at the Cherry Lane, my companion could barely even look at me, muttering, “The less said about this the better.” A Fable is a bewildering fiasco, an antiwar romance complete with the pre-advertised “extreme acts of violence including rape, gunshots, stabbing, and poisoning” as well as a touch of perplexing burlesque. Director Daniel Talbott (Scarcity, Slipping) and the cast seem lost as the fractured narrative attempts to mix Homer, Sophocles, and Shakespeare with the Brothers Grimm in a kitchen-sink approach that even includes a few mind-numbing songs by Liz Swados (Runaways, Trilogy). The story involves a soldier named Jonny (Hubert Point-Du Jour) whose army unit has raped and beaten a young woman named Chandra (Dawn-Lyen Gardner), along with her mother (Liza Fernandez) and father (Alok Tewari), and left them for dead. Of course, Jonny instantly falls for Chandra. Soon Jonny is off on a downward-spiraling journey trying to reunite his true love with her father, each scene more baffling than the previous one. Meanwhile, the proceedings are sort of being manipulated by Angela the angel (Samantha Soule) and Luke the devil (Gordon Joseph Weiss). It’s impossible to tell if this multigenre exercise is supposed to be camp, serious, tongue-in-cheek, or all three, resulting in a confounding mess that digs an early hole it can’t get out of. Indeed, the less said the better, and we’ve already said too much.

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?”

IN THE PARK

The rather eccentric Edgar Oliver examines seminal moments from his childhood in latest monologue (photo by Dixie Sheridan)

Axis Company
One Sheridan Sq. between West Fourth & Washington Sts.
Thursday – Saturday through June 7, $30-$40, 8:00
212-352-3101
www.axiscompany.org

Cliché be damned — we really could listen to Edgar Oliver read the phone book, if there was such a thing as a phone book anymore. Oliver’s affected yet elegant and luxurious voice is part Shakespearean thespian, part late-night horror-film host; just the way he pronounces “ar” is an aural wonder, sounding enchantingly otherworldly. He has honed his craft at the Moth, sharing personal stories told with a literary flourish. In his latest monologue, In the Park, running through June 7 at the Axis Theatre in Sheridan Square, Oliver (East 10th Street, Helen and Edgar) takes the audience through his favorite place, Prospect Park, as he revisits seminal childhood moments that helped shape the man he has become. “All throughout my life — when I think of myself and what I have done — what I hope to do — when I look in the mirror — I am measuring myself against that boy,” he says, relating a story about riding the train from his family home in Savannah to Baltimore, where he, his sister, and his mother vacationed in the summers. He had just recalled falling instantly in love with a young man he saw for only a few seconds, evoking Mr. Bernstein’s (Everett Sloane) remembrance in Citizen Kane of seeing a young woman with a white parasol on a ferry. “I would like to go back to that fatal second before love takes place and suffer the transformation over and over,” Oliver says. “What a sweet and terrible wounding it was!”

His poignant, poetic journey through Prospect Park and his past includes such lush phrases as “the green-gold grass,” “the magic of the rain,” “the distant landscape of the sky,” “the silent song of solitude,” and “my own young, murderable beauty.” The sixty-minute show, directed by Axis artistic director Randy Sharp (East 10th Street, Last Man Club), is set on a bare stage, where Oliver generally stands still, inflecting with his arms and head, occasionally walking a few steps to his right and left and then, rather oddly, moving like Frankenstein’s monster. On opening night, Oliver, who hosts the Science Channel’s Odd Folks Home, stumbled a few times and appeared to lose his place at one point, but those slight missteps were forgivable given his otherwise intricate and intimate performance, during which he makes extended eye contact with members of the audience. “My heart was seized with melancholy and with longing,” he says, recalling a car trip to a store when he was six or seven. “It was as though the sky were sorrow — and I longed to go away forever into it. And I realized that I loved sorrow and that I loved melancholy and that I loved life.” Those sentences, delivered with an eerie majesty, encapsulate what In the Park is about as a rather eccentric man with unusual speech habits explores who he was, who he is, and who he might have been — or perhaps still could be.

TICKET ALERT: JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR ARENA SPECTACULAR

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR ARENA SPECTACULAR
Madison Square Garden
Seventh Ave. at 33rd St.
Tuesday, August 5, $64.10 – $304, 8:00
www.jesuschristsuperstar.com
www.thegarden.com

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar will be treading on hallowed ground when it comes to Madison Square Garden for a one-night-only performance on August 5. Pope John Paul II visited the World’s Most Famous Arena in 1979, and the Messiah himself, Mark Messier, lifted the Holy Grail — er, the Stanley Cup — on Garden ice twenty years ago next month. The rock opera, which opened on Broadway in October 1971, was made into a film in 1973, and was resurrected by Des McAnuff on the Great White Way in a rousing revival in 2012, will start touring the U.S. in a massive version billed as an “Arena Spectacular,” a traveling road show with a cast and crew of 150 that will arrive in 12 articulated buses and 7 sleeper buses. And what a cast, reaching near-biblical proportions with Sex Pistols and PiL punk legend Johnny Rotten playing King Herod; instead of screaming “God save the queen / She ain’t no human being” or “I am an antichrist / Don’t know what I want,” Mr. Lydon will be belting out to the King of the Jews: “So You are the Christ / You’re the great Jesus Christ / Prove to me that You’re divine / Change my water into wine.” The production, directed by Laurence Connor (Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera) and choreographed by Kevan Allen, also features Incubus lead vocalist Brandon Boyd as Judas Iscariot, former *NSYNC star and appropriately initialed JC Chasez as Pontius Pilate, Former Destiny’s Child member Michelle Williams as Mary Magdalene, and British actor-singer Ben Forster (no, not the dude who plays Driver Perkins on Thomas the Tank Engine) returning to the title role he won on a reality TV show. (Seriously, we didn’t make any of this up, not a single word.) Ticket prices range from $64.10 for the cheap seats to $304 for the Superstar Premium VIP Experience, which comes with a photo-op meet-and-greet with at least two lead cast members, a preshow party, a dedicated concierge, and more. Everybody, now: “Hosanna Heysanna Sanna Sanna Ho / Sanna Hey Sanna Ho Sanna….”

THE FEW / ANNAPURNA

Tasha Lawrence, Gideon Glick, and Michael Laurence star in Rattlestick production of Samuel D. Hunter’s THE FEW

THE FEW
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl. between Eleventh & Perry Sts.
Wednesday – Monday through June 22 (extended), $55
866-811-4111
www.rattlestick.org

Quite by coincidence, we saw The Few and Annapurna on successive nights last week, and we couldn’t have been more struck by how oddly similar the two New York premieres were. Each work is a ninety-five-minute one-act contemporary drama written by an award-winning playwright and is set in a cluttered trailer, where a character unexpectedly returns to a former love after having been away for years. And in each case, letters play a key role in the plot. However, whereas one play is exciting and gripping, with surprise twists, the other drags on repetitively, with a late shock that comes out of nowhere and deflates the story. Writer Samuel D. Hunter (A Bright New Boise), director Davis McCallum (London Wall), and actress Tasha Lawrence (Wilder Wilder Wilder), who worked together on the widely hailed Playwrights Horizon hit The Whale, reunite for The Few, a sharply incisive tale running at the Rattlestick. The tale begins a few months before Y2K, as a down-and-out Bryan (Michael Laurence) suddenly shows up at his old trailer, where his abandoned love, QZ (Lawrence), has heroically kept the small paper they founded, The Few, going for four years. But she’s turned the idealistic journal about connecting lonely interstate truckers into a venue for personal ads and hired their unseen third partner’s nerdy nephew, Matthew (Gideon Glick), who pushes a reluctant Bryan to return The Few to its original lofty purpose. (We know, we know; just how interesting can a small paper for and about interstate truckers be? It turns out that it can be quite fascinating.) Glick (Spring Awakening) is a jittery marvel as Matthew, his tentative, stuttering delivery an excellent foil to the raw tension brought out by Lawrence and Laurence. McCallum’s aggressive, unpredictable direction prepares the audience for an explosion, and when it comes, just watch out.

Real-life husband and wife Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally play former spouses reunited after twenty years in the New Group production of Sharr White’s ANNAPURNA (photo by Monique Carboni)

ANNAPURNA
The Acorn Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 1, $75
212-560-2183
www.thenewgroup.org
www.theatrerow.org

In the New Group production of Annapurna, written by Sharr White (The Other Place, The Snow Geese) and directed by Bart DeLorenzo (Passion Play, Fast Company), Emma (Megan Mullally) suddenly shows up at Ulysses’s (Nick Offerman) run-down trailer in the mountains of Colorado. The former spouses haven’t seen each other in twenty years, since she walked out on him, taking their son with her. Emma arrives lugging several suitcases, apparently planning on staying a while, but Ulysses, wearing a butt-revealing apron and a life-sustaining backpack with an oxygen tube, wants no part of her, preferring to remain a hermit. They battle over the past, leading to a reveal that is like a reverse deus ex machina, draining the drama of any subtlety and making it about something else in a manipulative way. Real-life husband and wife Offerman (Parks and Recreation) and Mullally (Will & Grace) certainly have a familiarity with each other, but their characters’ affectations, especially Emma’s whininess, grow tiresome quickly. The conflict dries up long before the lights go out for the final time — DeLorenzo and lighting designer Michael Gend like to flip the switch like a kid with a new toy — so the last darkness comes as a relief. Annapurna lacks the energy and passion that drives The Few, the latter a far more successful exploration of responsibility, lost love, past misdeeds, and being a part of something that is bigger than oneself.