this week in theater

ONE MAN, TWO GUVNORS

James Corden tries to get ahold of himself in uproarious ONE MAN, TWO GUVNORS

Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Through September 2, $66.50 – $196.50
onemantwoguvnorsbroadway.com

In the uproarious British farce One Man, Two Guvnors, James Corden stars as Francis Henshall, a simple, extremely hungry young man who gets himself into the complicated situation of serving as guvnor to two people at the same time in 1963 Brighton. But it’s Corden who has Broadway audiences eating out of the palm of his hand, delivering a riotous, unforgettable performance filled with wild improvisation, wickedly funny pratfalls, glorious wordplay, and slapstick galore. Desperate for some money — and for something to eat — Francis is soon working as a personal manservant to the demanding, upper-crust Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris) and local gangster Roscoe/Rachel Brabbe (Jemima Rooper). He gets caught up in some heavy drama as Pauline (Claire Lams) wants to marry her true love, ambitious (over)actor Alan (Daniel Rigby), but her father, Charlie the Duck (Fred Ridgeway), has promised her to Roscoe Crabbe to settle a large debt. Meanwhile, Francis just wants something to eat. Corden (The History Boys, Gavin and Stacey) is masterful as Francis, whether directly addressing the audience (and pulling some members onstage to participate in the frantic madness), devouring a letter, or running between two private rooms, trying to serve meals to both of his guvnors at the same time without them finding out about each other. He displays a good-natured charm and a rapid-fire comedic wit that makes Francis eminently likable no matter how much he screws up, which is a lot. As spectacular as Corden is, Tom Edden nearly steals the show as Alfie, an old, hunched-over waiter who takes quite a licking but somehow keeps on ticking. The first act is one of the funniest on Broadway in quite some time, a nonstop parade of belly laughs that might very well have you falling out of your seat; things are significantly slower in the shorter second act, which concentrates more on the silly plot. The festivities are accompanied by live music by the Craze, a skiffle band that plays original music starting ten minutes before showtime as well as during scene changes and intermission. Written by Richard Bean (Harvest) and directed by Nicholas Hytner (The History Boys, The Madness of King George) of the National Theatre and based on the 1743 commedia dell’arte farce The Servant of Two Masters by Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni, One Man, Two Guvnors is outrageous British farce of the highest order.

GORE VIDAL’S THE BEST MAN

Dirty politics is the name of the game in Broadway revival of Gore Vidal’s THE BEST MAN

Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre
236 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Through July 8, $66.50-$226.50
thebestmanonbroadway.com

The second revival of Gore Vidal’s 1960 Tony-nominated The Best Man arrives in an election year that has witnessed a bizarre race for the Republican presidential nomination, as a series of candidates kept leap-frogging one another for the opportunity to take on an incumbent president whose popularity is highly tenuous and whose grasp on the White House might be extremely vulnerable. Inspired by Adlai Stevenson and the Kennedy-Nixon campaign of 1960, Vidal’s drama is still filled with relevance more than fifty years later as a Clintonesque figure battles a Santorum-like up-and-comer for the presidential nomination at an unnamed party convention in Philadelphia in 1960. John Larroquette is phenomenal as William Russell, a former secretary of state who is intelligent, charismatic, and honest to a fault, as well as a womanizer who recently suffered a secret nervous breakdown. His main competition is Senator Joseph Cantwell (Eric McCormack), a firebrand who is ready, willing, and able to play as dirty as is necessary in order to win.

John Larroquette, Angela Lansbury, and Candice Bergen get down to business in THE BEST MAN

Although not as acerbic and darkly cynical as one might expect, The Best Man is a well-acted, splendidly paced, thoroughly entertaining evening of theater and politics. Built for a star-studded cast — past versions have featured such stalwarts as Melvyn Douglas and Frank Lovejoy in the original 1960 production, Elizabeth Ashley, Charles Durning, Christine Ebersole, Spalding Gray, and Chris Noth in the 2000 revival, and Henry Fonda, Cliff Robertson, Ann Sothern, and Shelley Berman in the 1964 film — the 2012 edition too is jam-packed with big names. In addition to Emmy and Tony winner Larroquette and Emmy winner McCormack, the show boasts five-time Tony winner Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Sue-Ellen Gamadge, who controls the female vote and so is courted by Alice Russell (a wry Candice Bergen, who also teamed up with Larroquette on Boston Legal) and Mabel Cantwell (a bubbly Kerry Butler); an appropriately blustery James Earl Jones, who played the first black president in the 1972 film The Man, as former president Arthur Hockstader, whose endorsement both candidates are after; Grammy winner and Oscar nominee Michael McKean as Russell’s press secretary, Dick Jensen; and Tony winner Jefferson Mays, who is wonderfully jumpy as Sheldon Marcus, a quirky man who claims to have some interesting information about Cantwell’s past. Director Michael Wilson and set designer Derek McLane have turned the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre into a bustling convention, with banners hanging from the rafters and old-fashioned black-and-white monitors following the action inside the main hall as the backroom wheeling and dealing unfolds onstage in Cantwell’s and Russell’s hotel rooms. And at a mere two and a half hours with two intermissions, The Best Man goes down a lot more easily than the ridiculously prolonged campaigns and conventions of the current era. (On Monday, April 30, at 8:00, Jones, Larroquette, McCormack, McKean, Mays, and Wilson will convene at the 92nd St. Y for a panel discussion moderated by Caryn James about the play and the state of contemporary American politics.)

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR has been resurrected at the Neil Simon Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Neil Simon Theater
250 West 52nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tickets: $79-$142
www.superstaronbroadway.com

Des McAnuff’s revival of Jesus Christ Superstar is a rousing resurrection of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice flower-power rock opera. McAnuff, who cowrote and directed The Who’s Tommy, imbues this Superstar with a keen balance of over-the-top glitz and salt-of-the-earth drama that serves the bumpy musical well, as it’s always been more a series of set pieces than a character-driven narrative. A digital news ticker counts down the days to Passover as Judas (a powerful Josh Young) considers betraying Jesus (a solid if unexceptional Paul Nolan) because he believes that things have gotten way out of control — and he is jealous of his friend and master’s extremely close relationship with Mary Magdalene (an alluring Chilina Kennedy). As the seder/last supper approaches, Caiaphas (the deep-voiced Marcus Nance) and his council plot to arrest Jesus while Pontius Pilate (a regal Tom Hewitt) prepares to wash his hands of it all. Music coordinator John Miller and orchestra conductor Rick Fox don’t mess too much with the music, updating it a bit but primarily letting such familiar songs as “What’s the Buzz,” “Hosanna,” and “Everything’s Alright” stand on their own. Kennedy delivers a beautiful “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” Tony nominee Hewitt (The Rocky Horror Show) nobly talk-sings his way through a brutally violent “Trial by Pilate/39 Lashes,” and Nolan is gloriously lifted to the heavens in “Crucifixion,” but it’s Bruce Dow who steals the show as the wonderfully campy King Herod, his signature song exploding in a bevy of bright lights and kitschy glamour. “So, you are the Christ / You’re the great Jesus Christ,” he declares in the production’s biggest dance number, “Prove to me that you’re no fool / Walk across my swimming pool.” McAnuff and choreographer Lisa Shriver place the action on Robert Brill’s two-story set built around a pair of multipurpose movable metallic bleachers that tend to get overused, with cast members continually climbing up and down, and some of the songs fall flat, but this is still a very welcome return for one of Broadway’s most unusual period pieces.

ONCE: A NEW MUSICAL

Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre
242 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tickets: $59.50 – $186.50
oncemusical.com

In 2006, writer-director John Carney had a surprise hit with his intimate low-budget drama Once, the touching story of an Irish vacuum repairman (musician Glen Hansard of the Frames) and a Czech flower seller (singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová) who meet in Dublin and make beautiful music together. Hansard and Irglová won the Oscar for Best Original Song for the ballad “Falling Slowly,” and the duo went on to form the band the Swell Season. The film has now been turned into a Broadway musical directed by John Tiffany (Black Watch) and with a book by playwright Enda Walsh (The Walworth Farce), but in expanding the eighty-five-minute movie into a two-and-a-half-hour show, they have stretched the story way too thin. Once actually begins twenty minutes before curtain time, when ticket holders are invited to buy a drink onstage as the house band plays traditional tunes amid Bob Crowley’s set, the interior of a pub shaped like a half-moon with more than seventy mirrors hanging on the walls, centered by a large rectangular one right in the middle. Steve Kazee (Spamalot) and Cristin Milioti (The Lieutenant of Inishmore) play the Guy and the Girl, two lonely souls, he a shy guitarist who works in his father’s shop, she a very direct pianist surrounded by family and friends but missing something in her life. Girl instantly becomes Guy’s muse, encouraging him to not give up on his music, which she thinks can make him a success in New York. As they spend more and more time together, their unrequited love begins to overwhelm them.

Kazee and Milioti are terrific in the lead roles, forming a believable team that audiences will pull for not only as a musical pair but hopefully as a romantic one as well. The staging is also excellent, with everything taking place on the same set with small furniture changes signaling such other locations as a piano shop, a recording studio, and Guy’s and Girl’s apartments. Whenever the Girl speaks in Czech, she actually says the words in English, with the Czech translation projected onto the top of the bar, which leads to a memorable moment when she discusses love with the Guy. The members of the house band double as the show’s minor characters, sitting on chairs on either side of the stage until their participation is required. But while some of these characters offer fine support, particularly David Patrick Kelly as the Guy’s father and Elizabeth A. Davis as the Girl’s sexy friend Réza, others drain the show of its subtle intimacy, , with silly, repetitive, over-the-top comic relief from Paul Whitty as the owner of the piano store and Andy Taylor as a bank manager. In addition, much of the second act feels added on and repetitive, including reprises of songs. The score features such familiar tunes from the film as “Falling Slowly,” “If You Want Me,” “Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy,” “Gold,” and “The Hill” as well as several new ones; the production admirably doesn’t Broadway-fy the music or lapse into over-choreographed dance numbers, keeping things relatively simply for the most part. There’s a lot to like about Once, and fans of the film are likely to be charmed. But there’s also a lot that could have been trimmed, paying heed to the more personal warmth and honesty of the original.

DEATH OF A SALESMAN

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Linda Emond hope for better days in DEATH OF A SALESMAN (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 West 47th St.
February 13 – June 2
deathofasalesmanbroadway.com

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman stakes its claim once again as the Great American Play in Mike Nichols’s poignant new version, running at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre through June 2. Winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize, Death of a Salesman is about nothing less than the death of the American dream. Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a traveling salesman who has just returned to his New York City home after an aborted attempt at a sales trip to New England. A sixty-three-year-old man who has worked for the same company for thirty-six years, Loman has been beaten down, left out of the booming post-WWII economy and lagging behind changing times. He is consoled by his gentle, stalwart wife, Linda (Linda Emond), who reminds him that both of his grown sons are back in their room upstairs, sleeping soundly. The older Biff (Andrew Garfield) has yet to find himself, having recently spent time on a farm in Texas despite grand hopes, while the younger Hap (Finn Wittrock) is a ladies’ man with big dreams of going into business with his brother. Over the course of a single day, the Lomans are forced to face some hard, cold truths about themselves and their uncertain future. Hoffman is magnificent as Loman, his barren eyes haunted by his lack of success, his body hunched over, dragging around a briefcase filled with meaningless items he has been hawking for decades — items that are never specified, because it doesn’t matter; they could be anything. All he wants is to be able to complete the payments on an appliance before it breaks, to have at least one of his sons make something of his life, to own something of value. Willy is overwhelmed by flashbacks and memories that remind him of what could have been, drifting in and out of conversations with his brother Ben (John Glover), an adventurer who struck it rich in Alaska, and with a younger Biff as he prepares for the football game that will likely earn him a college scholarship.

Father and son search for common ground in Miller masterpiece (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Hoffman — who played a theater director staging a unique version of Death of a Salesman in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York — is not made up to look much older than he actually is, yet he embodies the wear and tear that has ravaged Loman’s body, mind, and spirit. At forty-four, Hoffman is not the youngest actor to take on the iconic role; Loman originator Lee J. Cobb was a mere thirty-seven, while Dustin Hoffman was forty-six, George C. Scott forty-seven, Brian Dennehy sixty, and Fredric March fifty-three in the 1951 film. But Hoffman plays old marvelously, his Loman an everyman for whom age is not the central problem. Nichols has brought back Death of a Salesman at a critical juncture in American history, when the separation between the haves and the have-nots keeps widening amid mortgage failures and bank bailouts, ripping an ever-widening hole in the fabric of the nation. But Hoffman’s Loman (low man) is no mere victim seeking sympathy; he has been complicit in his family’s downfall, making bad choices that has thwarted them every step of the way. Filled with complexity, depth, and sparkling dialogue, Miller’s masterpiece feels as fresh and relevant as ever.

VENUS IN FUR

Nina Arianda and Hugh Dancy are electrifying in David Ives’s VENUS IN FUR (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lyceum Theatre
149 West 45ht St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through June 17, $76.50- $141.50
www.venusinfurbroadway.com

“Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather / Whiplash girlchild in the dark / Severin, your servant, comes in bells, please don’t forsake him / Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart,” Lou Reed sang on the Velvet Underground’s 1967 S&M classic, “Venus in Furs.” The song was inspired by the 1870 novella of the same name by Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, which also serves as the basis for David Ives’s wickedly funny play, Venus in Fur. Following its recent run at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, the sizzling-hot two-character Manhattan Theatre Club production is back on Broadway, thrilling audiences at the Lyceum through June 17. In a small New York basement studio, Thomas (British actor Hugh Dancy) has just finished auditioning actors for his next play, Venus in Fur, when Vanda (breakout star Nina Arianda) suddenly storms into his life, a whirlwind of crazy energy who has come to try out for the role of Wanda von Dunajew in Thomas’s theatrical adaptation of Sacher-Masoch’s story-within-a-story about gender, sexuality, and degradation. Thomas tries to get rid of Vanda, but the two of them are soon reading the play, with Ives cleverly creating a developing story-within-a-story of his own as Thomas and Vanda start mimicking what is going on between Wanda and Severin von Kusiemski. What begins as a classic battle of the sexes turns into so much more as they seductively fight over power and dominance. Tony nominee Arianda (Born Yesterday) is a marvel as Vanda, effortlessly going back and forth between the nasal-voiced wacky ingénue and the strong, defiant characters she is portraying. Dancy, in a role originally performed by Wes Bentley in the show’s January 2010 Classic Stage Company debut, does an excellent job of keeping up with Arianda’s boundless energy as he plays both Thomas and the subservient Severin. Anita Yavich’s costumes are sensational, with Vanda continually reaching into her bag of tricks, pulling out erotically charged items, including to-die-for thigh-high leather boots. With Vanda and Thomas continually fighting over where to stand as they read the play-within-a-play, it is easy to forget that the show is actually directed by Walter Bobbie (Chicago, Footloose), who seamlessly weaves everything together. Venus in Fur is a breathless, electrifying drama that should not be forsaken; you’d have to be a masochist not to see it.

SHATNER’S WORLD: WE JUST LIVE IN IT…

William Shatner welcomes audiences into his world in Broadway one-man show

Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Through March 4, $61.50 – $126.50 (VIP $251.50 with meet & greet)
www.shatnersworld.com

Canadian actor and pitchman extraordinaire William Shatner, who has been entertaining audiences for more than sixty years in his own rather unique style, discusses his life and nearly inexplicable career in the fun one-man show Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It . . . The stout octogenarian, who turns eighty-one on March 22, ambles about the stage at the Music Box Theatre for nearly two hours showing vintage clips and photographs and telling anecdotes from his glorious past, from understudying for Christopher Plummer in Tyrone Guthrie’s production of Henry V at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada to doing live television with Lon Chaney Jr. in the 1950s to starring on Broadway in 1959 in The World of Suzie Wong with France Nuyen. He also talks about this sci-fi thing called Star Trek, playing Denny Crane on Boston Legal, and his unexpected golden-throated recording career. (The night we went, he was joined onstage for a special encore with Brad Paisley, who wrote the song “Real” for Shatner’s 2007 album, Has Been.) He shares tales of his mother and father, drops in mentions of his wives and daughter, and tears up when discussing his beloved stallion. Just as Shatner roams around the stage, his tales roam as well, going back and forth through time, often with only the thinnest of threads linking them together. While there are many touching and revealing moments, especially if you haven’t read any of his books, there are also plenty that fall flat and feel forced. Curiously, the Playbill includes no credit for the writing of the show, which is not surprising. Shatner also can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants to sit down on the rolling chair at the center of the stage, continually sitting and standing in a sometimes awkward manner. But hey, those are just minor tribbles, er, quibbles, for indeed, this is Shatner’s world, and we just live in it. There has never been a performer quite like William Shatner, and likely never will be another; throughout his robust career, his signature pauses, intoxicating smile, sheer confidence, and innate ability to laugh at himself have made us forget about his shortcomings. A must-see for Shatner fans, Shatner’s World continues at the Music Box through March 4 before heading out on a U.S. tour.