Tag Archives: Christian Borle

THE WRONG KIND OF FAITH: TAMMY FAYE ON BROADWAY

Katie Brayben’s prayers for Broadway musical go unanswered (photo by Matthew Murphy)

TAMMY FAYE
Palace Theatre
1564 Broadway at Forty-Seventh St.
Through December 8, $59.75-$119
tammyfayebway.com

It’s extremely rare for a professional critic to see and review a new Broadway show that has already posted its closing notice. Two years ago, I saw KPOP at Circle in the Square; it announced it was closing a few days later, right before my review went up.

But I ended up seeing Tammy Faye — the much-heralded British import that had been nominated for four Olivier Awards across the pond, including Best New Musical, and won for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor — shortly after the news came that it would be cutting its run frightfully short, following twenty-four previews and only twenty-nine regular performances. I was determined to not let that information impact my experience, but it was nearly impossible to avoid the sad truth.

Tammy Faye is the first fully fledged show in the beautifully renovated Palace Theatre, which was built in 1913; it is well worth a walk up to the top to get a bird’s-eye view of its grandiose splendor. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the less-than-heavenly production on the stage, which bills itself as “the story of a traveling preacher’s wife who beamed into homes with a message of hope . . . and stole the country’s heart.”

Perhaps British audiences and critics were not as familiar with the lurid story of televangelist couple Jim Bakker (Christian Borle) and Tammy Faye LaValley (Katie Brayben), who rose to stardom in the 1970s and ’80s through their satellite network, The PTL Club (Praise the Lord), backed by Ted Turner (Andy Taylor) and also featuring Trinity Broadcasting Network founders Paul Crouch (Nick Bailey) and his wife, Jan (Allison Guinn). The premise of the musical is misguided from the start, attempting to literally and figuratively raise Tammy Faye high on a pedestal and celebrate her as a feminist icon even though much of America considers her and Jim a key part of the intrusion of Christian fundamentalism into politics. The show — and the intrusion — also involves such Electric Church preachers as Jerry Falwell (Michael Cerveris), Billy Graham (Mark Evans), Marvin Gorman (Max Gordon Moore), Pat Robertson (Taylor), and Jimmy Swaggart (Ian Lassiter).

One plot point revolves around California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan’s (Lassiter) appearance on The PTL Club; when Jim and Tammy Faye do not officially endorse him, their rival Falwell, who is determined to bring the Bakkers down by any means necessary, informs Reagan, “Sir, it’s time to put G-d in the White House.” Reagan replies, “Isn’t that against the Founding Father’s intentions,” to which Falwell responds, “There is only One True Founding Father, sir.” The two men then talk about returning America to “greatness again,” a reference to Donald Trump that falls with a thud.

Jerry Falwell (Michael Cerveris) is out to stop Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and The PTL Club (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The book, by James Graham (Dear England, Finding Neverland), is a paint-by-numbers retelling of Jim and Tammy Faye’s personal and professional relationship, from their meet cute at an event led by Graham — “My brothers and sisters, I cannot do this alone! So, who will join this new Christian army? Stand up and be counted!” — to Jim’s sexual misconduct with church secretary Jessica Hahn (Alana Pollard) and allegations of fraud with his right-hand man, John Fletcher (Raymond J. Lee). Tammy Faye is portrayed as an innocent throughout as well as a free-thinking conservative, especially when, on live television, she hugs Steve Pieters (Charl Brown), a gay pastor who has AIDS, sending Robertson and Falwell into a tizzy and running to Reagan for help.

Elton John’s (The Lion King, Billy Elliot) music is surprisingly bland and uninspired, while the lyrics, by Jake Shears (Tales of the City) of the Scissor Sisters, make excuses for Tammy Faye. “Now that I hear angels calling me home / What’s left of the debt to be paid / Could I have done better / Is the blame mine alone / Will I be forgiven / Or should I be afraid?” she sings in a hospital after being told she has cancer. “You’ve shown me where to find my wings / But I don’t know if they fly / Heavy is the weight of my shame / Questions run like rivers / In the tears that I cry / Will you make me answer for my name?”

Two-time Olivier winner Brayben (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Girl from the North Country) has been widely hailed for her performance as Tammy Faye, and it can be electrifying, but there’s a disingenuousness to it; Tammy Faye was a Christian music favorite, releasing such albums as Love Never Gives Up, We’re Blest, and Enough Is Enough, but Brayben plays her as a superstar, as if she were a pop goddess with Janis Joplin talent. There would have been no show at all if director Rupert Goold (American Psycho, Enron) had Brayben sing more like Tammy Faye, but it would have been more honest. Two-time Tony winner Borle (Some Like It Hot!, Something Rotten!) is miscast yet again, failing to capture Bakker’s boring nature, while two-time Tony winner Cerveris (Assassins, Fun Home) can’t get out from under his bad wig.

The set, by Bunny Christie, resembles a 1960s game show, with a large board of squares, like television screens, that occasionally open up to reveal characters; if only Goldie Hawn, Ruth Buzzi, Arte Johnson, or other stalwarts of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In could appear to provide a good laugh.

The night I went, the most exciting moment was when two-time Tony nominee Andrew Rannells (The Book of Mormon, The Boys in the Band) held court during intermission from his tenth-row-center seat; Rannells was nominated for an Olivier for playing Jim Bakker in the London production, but he opted not to continue the role on Broadway, citing a contract dispute, although perhaps he also saw the writing on the wall.

Meanwhile, the temperature in the theater never rose past lukewarm. Audience response was tepid at best, and not just because there were a lot of empty seats. It was embarrassing when the actors asked for applause, as if we were watching a broadcast of The PTL Club, and not much came. And Finn Ross’s video design is hectic and inconsistent — and downright annoying when live projections reveal Tammy Faye getting ready in her dressing room, applying makeup and singing, her voice not synched exactly to the video, a prime example of how off-kilter everything is.

It’s always sad when a show closes early, leaving many hardworking and talented people out of a job. But just as the Bakkers accepted millions of dollars from their true believers and were busted for fraud, it would be hard to justify spending any of your money on this all-around-disappointing musical.

“Just reach out and open your hands,” Tammy Faye sings in “Open Hands — Right Kind of Faith.” In “If Only Love,” she promises, “We all possess the strength we need / If you believe, then you’ll succeed.” But it takes much more than just open hands and faith.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SOME LIKE IT HOT

Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee star in Some Like It Hot on Broadway (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

SOME LIKE IT HOT
Shubert Theatre
225 West Forty-Fourth St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave
Tuesday – Sunday through September 3, $94-$278
somelikeithotmusical.com

Call it “Some Like a Plot.”

Fifty years ago, Tony-winning composer Jule Styne, five-time Tony-nominated lyricist Bob Merrill, and two-time Tony-winning book writer Peter Stone turned Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning 1959 comedy, Some Like It Hot, into the Broadway musical Sugar, which ran for more than a year and was nominated for four Tonys. In 2002, Tony Curtis, who played Joe in the film, portrayed Osgood Fielding III in a national road tour revival.

Lighting does not strike thrice with the latest Broadway adaptation, titled Some Like It Hot, a lukewarm show scheduled to run at the Shubert into September. Among other things, book writers Matthew López and Amber Ruffin fiddle with the original plot so much that it ends up insulting the film as well as the audience, updating the story to supposedly make it more palatable for modern times.

The basic narrative is still intact. It’s 1933, and saxophonist Joe (Christian Borle) and stand-up bassist Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee) are having a difficult time making ends meet in Depression-era Chicago. After witnessing a gangland killing, they need to get out of town fast, and they disguise themselves as women — Joe as Josephine, Jerry as Daphne — to get jobs with Sweet Sue’s all-woman Society Syncopators, who are on a train trip heading to a big gig. Spats Columbo (Mark Lotito) and his goons are on the two men’s trail, with Detective Mulligan (Adam Heller) not far behind, tracking down Spats for racketeering, loan sharking, bootlegging, and now murder. Meanwhile, Joe has fallen madly in love with the lead singer of the Society Syncopators, Sugar Kane (Adrianna Hicks), and creates a fake male character in order to win her affections, while an older millionaire, the goofy but charming Osgood Fielding III (Kevin del Aguila), has taken an immediate shine to Daphne. Mistaken identity, slapstick comedy, clever dialogue, and more than a touch of misogyny ensue in the film, but the musical shoehorns in themes of race and gender identity that are as inconsistent as they are disrespectful to the original and the themes themselves.

Auditioning for a nightclub manager, Joe is furious when the man rejects Jerry because he’s Black, leading into the song “You Can’t Have Me (If You Don’t Have Him),” in which Joe actually sings, “Yes, he’s my brother through and through / Like the Marx, the Wrights, the Grimm! / Yeah, you can’t have ‘tea’ without the ‘two’ / And you can’t have me if you don’t have him.” Jerry: “You can’t break up a winning team.” Joe: “Like that crutch and Tiny Tim.” Jerry: “And you can’t have ‘ah’ without the” — Joe: “‘choo!’” It’s not exactly Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier on the run, shackled together in The Defiant Ones. Meanwhile, most people won’t get the inside joke when the manager and Jerry refer to Jerry as Houdini, a role Curtis played in a 1953 biopic.

The big show that Sweet Sue believes will make or break the band is in California instead of Florida as in the film, perhaps because California is a more liberal state and Florida is no favorite of the LBGTQIA+ community and allies. The casting is not race-blind; sometimes it’s important that a character is Black, and sometimes it’s not, which left me scratching my head more than once. Meanwhile, instead of Joe impersonating an oil scion who sounds like Cary Grant in order to woo Sugar, as in the film, in the musical Joe pretends to be screenwriter Kiplinger Von Der Plotz, who speaks in an insensitive fake-German accent (referencing the Austrian Wilder), saying such things as “Ah! Break a leg! Or, as we say in Vienna, ‘Brekken . . . ein lekken . . . gedorf.’”

Classic Hollywood film is transformed into a lukewarm musical at the Shubert (photo by Matthew Murphy)

One major new twist does work, and that involves Jerry’s transformation into Daphne, a change that the character embraces, even if it does screw around with the finale, one of the most famous final lines in Hollywood history, delivered by Joe E. Brown.

Faced with movie roles created by Curtis as Joe/Josephine, Jack Lemmon as Jerry/Daphne, Marilyn Monroe as Sugar, George Raft as Spats, Joan Shawlee as Sweet Sue, and Pat O’Brien as Agent Mulligan, the cast tries its best to make us forget about those actors, but it’s a mountainous task. Ghee (Mrs. Doubtfire, Kinky Boots) is wonderful as Jerry/Daphne, using his long, lithe body to challenge preconceptions and prejudices about race and gender. Unfortunately, Borle (Little Shop of Horrors, Something Rotten!) appears to be in a completely different show, lost in vaudeville shtick that even he doesn’t understand. In addition, while Ghee’s transformation into Daphne is both delightful and believable, Borle always looks like himself as Josephine, with nary an adjustment of voice or movement.

Hicks (Six) gives more agency to Sugar, famously played by Monroe as a dumb blond with a heart of gold, but she still has to sing such lines as “Tell the boys in the band Sugar’s giving up sax / I’m California bound / Cause I’m safer in the long run with an all-girl band / And it’s time to say adieu to every one night stand.” NaTasha Yvette Williams (Chicken & Biscuits, Porgy and Bess) nearly brings the house down whenever Sweet Sue McGinty belts one out, but a surprise revelation diminishes what was previously an intelligent, dedicated character. Lotito is hamstrung as Spats, but Del Aguila (Frozen, Rocky) has fun as Osgood.

Director and choreographer Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon, Mean Girls) cannot leave well enough alone, turning nearly part of Scott Pask’s set into a prop for a dance, no matter how improbable; a late scene with rows of doors drones on and on and on and was better done in Bugs Bunny cartoons. There’s also an inordinate amount of tap-dancing by Joe and Jerry as the Tip Tap Twins, which sent my tap-dancing-fan friends into paroxysms of joy but brought the narrative to a screeching halt every time for me. The music, by Marc Shaiman, and the lyrics, by Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who have previously collaborated on such Broadway musicals as Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, are unmemorable.

Turning movies into Broadway musicals is often problematic, especially when adapting a beloved, star-studded Hollywood classic. While changes and updates are often necessary and welcome, they are ideally done within the spirit of the original, or at least make sense and don’t feel haphazard. As Sue says in the musical, “Our entire future depends on this show being perfect.” But as we know from the film, “nobody’s perfect.”

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS

Seymour Krelborn (Jonathan Groff) suddenly discovers the bloody secret of Audrey Two in Little Shop of Horrors (photo © Emilio Madrid-Kuser)

Westside Theatre
407 West 43rd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 19, $69-$179
littleshopnyc.com

Little Shop of Horrors is back where it belongs, off Broadway, in Michael Mayer’s exhilarating adaptation continuing at the Westside Theatre through January 19. The 1982 satire of “science fiction, ‘B’ movies, musical comedy itself, and even the Faust legend,” as noted by book writer, lyricist, and original director Howard Ashman, debuted in 1982 at the WPA Theatre and soon moved to the Orpheum in the East Village, where it ran for more than five years. A smash hit that became one of the most-produced shows around the country, it was based on Roger Corman’s 1960 black-and-white comedy about a milquetoast floral assistant on Skid Row who is raising a rather odd plant. It was turned into a successful film by Frank Oz in 1986 and made it to Broadway — something Ashman, who died of AIDS complications in 1991 at the age of forty, was against — in 2003. But Mayer returns it to its roots (I know that phrase is part of the ad campaign, but it’s a darn good one), playing to sold-out houses in the Westside Theatre’s 270-seat upstairs space even though the star-studded musical easily could have done big business on the Great White Way.

Jonathan Groff is sweetly endearing as Seymour Krelborn, a schlemiel working in a failing flower shop on Skid Row owned by the gruff Mr. Mushnik (Tom Alan Robbins), who has raised the orphan Seymour since he was a child, although not with much love. Seymour pines for his coworker, Audrey (Tammy Blanchard), a squeaky redheaded bombshell who has an abusive boyfriend, black-leather-jacketed sadistic dentist Orin Scrivello (Christian Borle). The trio of Ronnette (Ari Groover), Crystal (Salome Smith), and Chiffon (Joy Woods) — yes, they are named for three popular 1960s girl groups, and they sing in that style — serve as a kind of Greek chorus, participating in some of the action as they hang out on a pair of grimy stoops. Mushnik is about to shut down the shop when a strange, unidentifiable plant that Seymour is nursing, which he calls Audrey Two (or Twoey), quickly becomes a local sensation; the store starts doing extremely well, and Seymour and Audrey’s drab existence is reinvigorated. The only problem is that Audrey Two, which is growing at an absurd rate, needs special food to survive: human blood. “Feed me,” Audrey Two, voiced by Kingsley Leggs, demands, not sounding at all like a destitute denizen of Skid Row.

Orin Scrivello, DDS (Christian Borle) thinks he has Seymour (Jonathan Groff) just where he wants him in Michael Mayer adaptation (photo © Emilio Madrid-Kuser)

A riotous take on movies about monsters, aliens, and serial killers in addition to romantic comedies, Little Shop of Horrors is also a trenchant look at class and capitalism in post-depression America. The play is set on Skid Row, where bums sprawl out next to garbage cans and kids never finish school. When Mushnik asks the three girls how they intend to better themselves, they sing about their lack of hope: “You go downtown / Where the folks are broke / You go downtown / Where your life’s a joke / You go downtown / When you buy your token, you go — / Home to Skid Row . . . / Where the cabs don’t stop . . . / Where the food is slop . . . / Where the hop-heads flop in the snow!” It’s a far cry from the downtown lovingly portrayed by Petula Clark in 1965 (“The lights are much brighter there / You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares . . . / Downtown, everything’s waiting for you.”)

Audrey desperately wants a traditional suburban life where she’s not poor and beaten down, physically and psychologically. “A matchbox of our own / A fence of real chain link / A grill out on the patio / Disposal in the sink,” she sings. “I’m his December bride / He’s father, he knows best / Our kids play Howdy Doody / As the sun sets in the West / A picture out of Better Homes / and Gardens magazine / Far from Skid Row / I dream we’ll go / Somewhere that’s . . . / Green.” It’s no coincidence that Audrey Two is green, offering them all a way out, although not the one they pray for.

Seymour (Jonathan Groff) pines for Audrey (Tammy Blanchard) in Little Shop of Horrors (photo © Emilio Madrid-Kuser)

Two-time Tony nominee and Obie winner Groff (Spring Awakening, Hamilton) and Emmy winner and two-time Tony nominee Blanchard (Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, Gypsy) are adorable in roles originated onstage by Lee Wilkoff and Ellen Greene and onscreen by Rick Moranis and Greene. (The always terrific Gideon Glick will step in as Seymour from November 5 to 17.) It might not appear that Seymour and Audrey belong together at first, but then comes the beloved “Suddenly Seymour” and their love blossoms. Two-time Tony winner Borle (Peter and the Starcatcher, Something Rotten!) plays Orin and a bunch of other smaller roles with ketchup, mustard, and relish, devouring them with a sly wit, including several in just a few minutes, featuring hysterical, super-fast costume changes (the duds are by Tom Broecker) as Seymour and Audrey Two go viral the old-fashioned way, eons before social media and the 24/7 news cycle.

Tony winner Mayer (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Spring Awakening) maintains a sweet intimacy, even as Audrey Two threatens to overtake Julian Crouch’s period set and the small theater itself. Ellenore Scott adds fun choreography harking back to 1960s pop; the puppet design is by Nicholas Mahon based on Martin P. Robinson’s original. The score, performed by an offstage four-piece band led by conductor and keyboardist Will Van Dyke, is chock full of nuggets, from the impossibly catchy title song and previously mentioned tunes to “Dentist” and “Da-Doo,” many of which will have you singing and dancing down the street afterward, which doesn’t happen often nowadays. “There will be a temptation to play it for camp and low-comedy,” Ashman, who also collaborated with Menken on Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and the Disney animated films The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, explains in his author’s note in the script, adding, “When Little Shop of Horrors is at its most honest, it is also at its funniest and most enjoyable.” It’s hard to get rid of all the camp, but this Shop is nothing if not honest, funny, and most enjoyable.

FALSETTOS

Marvin (Christian Borle) and Whizzer (Andrew Rannells) fall in love and become part of an unusual extended family in FALSETTOS (photo by Joan Marcus)

Walter Kerr Theatre
219 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 8, $42-$149
www.lct.org

I saw Falsettos, James Lapine’s new revival of his and William Finn’s beloved musical, during the Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS curtain-call appeal season, when cast members across the Great White Way ask audiences to donate to the nonprofit organization that has been helping those with HIV/AIDS for nearly thirty years. Andrew Rannells made the heartfelt announcement, and people gave money as they left the Walter Kerr Theatre. Although it’s always a poignant moment, it was especially powerful after this show, which came together in the 1980s and 1990s, featuring a heartbreaking plot in which Rannells’s character, Whizzer, contracts a mysterious, deadly disease in 1981. The first act, March of the Falsettos, debuted in 1981 and takes place two years earlier, when the “gay plague” was just beginning; the second act, Falsettoland, premiered in 1990 and is set in 1981. The acts merged into Falsettos in 1992, earning seven Tony nominations and winning two awards, for Best Book and Best Original Score. (There was also an earlier one-act musical about some of the same characters, Trousers, that ran in 1979 and then was revamped in 1985.) So this Lincoln Center revival of Falsettos arrived on Broadway with quite a history; you could feel the excitement before the show started, as the theater was abuzz with friends hugging and chatting so much that the ushers had a hard time convincing everyone to take their seat. At last it got under way, with Marvin (Christian Borle), Whizzer, Jason (Anthony Rosenthal), Mendel (Brandon Uranowitz), and Trina (Stephanie J. Block) singing “Four Jews in a Room Bitching.” And from that moment on, the legend of Falsettos escaped me.

Jason (Anthony Rosenthal) swings for the fences in Lincoln Center revival of FALSETTOS on Broadway (photo by Joan Marcus)

Directed by Lapine (Act One, Finn’s The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee), who wrote the book with composer and lyricist Finn, Falsettos is a groundbreaking show about a new kind of extended, dysfunctional family. Marvin has left his wife, Trina, and their eleven-year-old son, Jason, for his new love, Whizzer, but he still thinks everyone can be together. “I want a tight-knit family / I want a group that harmonizes / I want my wife and kid and friend / To pretend / Time will mend / Our pain,” Marvin sings. Trina has a session with Marvin’s psychiatrist, Mendel, who instantly falls in love with her. “It’s so upsetting when I found / That what’s rectangular is round / I mean, it stinks / I mean, he’s queer / And me, I’m just a freak,” Trina explains in “I’m Breaking Down,” a showstopping number by Block that brings down the house. Two years later, lesbian couple Charlotte (Tracie Thoms) and Cordelia (Betsy Wolfe) have moved in next door and Jason is preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, beset by adolescent worries about girls and more. “Would they come, though, / If they were invited, / And not laugh / At my Hebrew / And not laugh / At my father and his friends,” he opines while displaying poor baseball skills. But when Whizzer gets sick, the characters all take a new look at their lives. “Something bad is happening / Something very bad is happening / Something stinks, something immoral / Something so bad that words have lost their meaning,” Charlotte, a doctor, declares. “Rumors fly and tales abound / Stories echo underground! / Something bad / Is spreading, spreading, spreading / ’Round!”

For most of the show, David Rockwell’s set consists of a gray Rubik’s Cube-like square that the cast can take apart and put back together, creating all kinds of furniture and objects, a clever metaphor for the makeshift family they form. The music was revolutionary for its time, with unexpected starts and stops, rises and falls, and multiple pitch changes as various characters chime in and conversationally sing on top of one another (the complex orchestrations are by Michael Starobin); the lyrics, however, are now dated, and the subplot of Jason’s Bar Mitzvah is an awkward device leading to the teary conclusion. Tony nominee Block (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 9 to 5: The Musical) is sensational, giving a don’t-miss performance as a strong woman whose life is turned upside down and inside out. Tony nominee Rannells (The Book of Mormon, Girls) is superb as the beautifully sly and sweetly vain Whizzer; together Block and Rannells overwhelm two-time Tony winner Borle (Peter and the Starcatcher, Something Rotten!). Tony nominee Uranowitz (An American in Paris) and Rosenthal (Newsies, A Christmas Story) provide fine support. Falsettos is a uniquely situated coming-of-age story as characters try to find their place in a difficult life, and in an extended family that was unusual for its time. Even if it’s not quite as earth-shaking today, the show’s emotional landscape remains sadly relevant.

TWI-NY TALK: SOPHIA ANNE CARUSO

Actress, singer, and dancer Sophia Anne Caruso is taking New York City by storm (photo courtesy Sophia Anne Caruso)

Multidimensional actress Sophia Anne Caruso might be just fourteen years old, but she already displays the confidence and demeanor of a seasoned pro — which she essentially is, having acted professionally nonstop for the last five years. Born and raised in Spokane and now living with her parents in New Jersey, Caruso came to New York for a project when she was eleven and decided to stay. In her brief but busy career, she has played Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, in a production directed by Patty Duke, who originated the role on Broadway in 1959; starred as Birgitta in NBC’s The Sound of Music Live! opposite Carrie Underwood, Christian Borle, and Audra McDonald; appeared at the Kennedy Center with Boyd Gaines, Rebecca Luker, and Tiler Peck in the Susan Stroman-directed Little Dancer a musical about Edgar Degas and Marie van Goethem, the ballerina who posed for his famous “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” painting; and played AnnaSophia Robb’s little sister in the Lifetime movie Jack of the Red Hearts.

Here in New York City, she earned a Lucille Lortel nomination as Best Featured Actress in a Play for her performance as a young virtual reality fantasy figure for men in The Nether and a Lortel nod for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Musical and an Outer Critics Circle nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical for Lazarus, playing the Girl in the New York Theatre Workshop world premiere by David Bowie and Enda Walsh, directed by Ivo van Hove. Currently she is on Broadway in a show that cannot be named, as a surprise character not listed in the Playbill and which cannot be mentioned in reviews. Sophia also just teamed with opera singer, ballet dancer, photographer, and musician Kenneth Edwards on a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” in the Elizabeth Street Garden. Homeschooled by her parents, Sophia likes ghost stories, has never been to a concert, and is hypercritical of herself, intent on mastering her craft. She is also charming, thoughtfully positive, and wise beyond her years; as she notes, “I was a morbid little child.” On a recent early weekday evening shortly before her call time, Sophia and I met in a Theater District hotel lounge and talked about vintage clothing, cast albums, stalkers, the freedom her parents give her, and how much she loves what she does.

twi-ny: You were born and raised in Spokane, Washington. Are you still partly based there?

Sophia Anne Caruso: My dad moved out here. He was still living in Spokane in our old house, but he finally sold it and moved here.

twi-ny: That must be great.

SAC: It’s a relief to have everyone together again. Long distance was hard for us, especially for me and my dad, because I’m a daddy’s girl.

twi-ny: What did you think of New York City when you first got here?

SAC: In Spokane, I got bored all the time, and it didn’t quite feel like home. But when I came here, I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t overwhelmed; it felt like home. Broadway, the theater area — the first show that I saw, when I was nine, was Billy Elliot, and I fell in love with theater. That’s when I knew, I want to move to New York and be on Broadway.

twi-ny: Around that time, in Seattle, you played Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, directed by Patty Duke, who just passed away. What did you learn from her?

SAC: She gave me my very first real acting job; that’s when I fell in love with acting and I knew that I wanted to be an actress. Acting is my favorite thing to do, and she helped me realize that. She mentored me a little bit; at the time, I didn’t understand why she was sometimes harsh on me, but now, as an older me, I’m looking back, I’m thinking, that’s why. She taught me that I have to stay consistent, that when you’re doing a professional job, it’s to the centimeter. You have to be exact; it has to be perfect. She taught me that it’s not all fun and games, although a lot of it is. But it’s also my job.

twi-ny: Not to concentrate too much on death, but you were also in Lazarus, and while you were in the midst of the run, David Bowie died. What was that experience like?

SAC: I got to work with him directly; he came into rehearsals often, he gave me notes, we talked. I like to say that I knew him and that I collaborated with him, for sure. I was not aware of his illness; none of the cast was. His death came as a very big surprise to us, and the hard part, but also the good part, of the day after was that we were all together. We were recording our cast album, which was hard because our voices were in shock because of crying and the strain, but being there was bonding. Nothing would have been worse than staying home alone during that day, but we decided to do the cast album. We listened to the recording, and I think that there’s something so special about it.

Sophia Anne Caruso earned several award nominations for her role in LAZARUS opposite Michael C. Hall (photo by Jan Versweyveld)

twi-ny: In the show you sing “No Plan” and “Life on Mars.”

SAC: It’s an honor to sing his music. I’ve always been inspired by his music, and I’ve always loved it. My mom owned vintage stores, and she always had funky seventies stuff. She was always playing Bowie.

twi-ny: Your parents are clearly bringing you up with a certain amount of freedom to develop your own identity.

SAC: Yes, my family is sort of exceptional. My mom is not religious; she’s very free, she likes to travel. My dad is on the more right-wing side, but he has given me freedom to choose what I want, who hasn’t ever pushed me to go towards religion or anything else. They’ve really let me become who I am, who I want to be. They have let me have a lot of freedom, with my choices and my style. Like, I love vintage fashion, and maybe I don’t choose the most attractive clothes or what they would consider appropriate, but it’s me, and it’s what I love, and they support me. It’s a hard business to get through, and they have been there through everything. Nothing is better than having parents like that.

twi-ny: Regarding your choices, your last three plays in New York City were The Nether, about virtual reality and child abuse; Lazarus, in which you play a very complicated character who is no mere child; and now you’re on Broadway in a heavy play that we cannot mention by name because you play a surprise character. What draws you to those roles? And why do your parents let you do them? A lot of parents would say, “Uh-uh, no way.”

SAC: I personally think blondes make the best victims, in my opinion. [laughs] I have sort of become the go-to girl for those things, so they come to me. I chose to do The Nether because I think it’s a very important topic. I didn’t just do it because it’s edgy. I love that it was edgy and that it was out there, but what was most important to me was getting that message out there. If you look around [referring to other people in the lounge], he’s on a computer, he’s on his phone. There was this revealing moment: I was on the train, underground, and nobody was on their phone. We came aboveground, got service, and everybody got their phone out, and I was, like, “Oh my God, what has this world come to?” And that is what made me leap at The Nether. I was, like, I gotta do this show now.

twi-ny: You also played a scary part on Celebrity Ghost Stories.

SAC: I loved doing that! I thought it was so fun. They put me in these sort of seventies clothes, and they had this old haunted house in this very old neighborhood, and that was really fun for me. I try not to let the work affect me; I don’t think it does. I have a certain anxiety about it. Like with The Nether, a question that I ask myself now is, Did that inspire people to act those things, or did that prevent things? And that’s something that scares me as I get older; I think I didn’t have that problem as much when I was younger.

twi-ny: Have there been incidents?

SAC: Yeah, I’ve had stalkers.

twi-ny: Pre-Nether or post?

SAC: Both. I’ve had stalkers after The Sound of Music Live!, because that was very big, and I had a couple of strange stalkers after The Nether, but I ignore it. I just don’t respond to anything creepy and delete it immediately.

twi-ny: Does it affect your decision in what plays to do?

SAC: No, it doesn’t. That’s something that comes with being an actor or somebody who’s in the public eye. People become obsessed with your image, not who you are.

twi-ny: Did it scare you when it first happened?

SAC: I was never a sheltered kid, so it absolutely scared me a little bit. Because sheltered kids, they don’t know what happens, they don’t understand how bad the world is, and I always knew those things; my parents have always informed me on things. I watched the news as a kid, and I was never stupid; I knew how serious stalkers could be. And I now have people who protect me from that.

twi-ny: How does it feel to be making your Broadway debut in a show where you’re not in the main Playbill and you’re not allowed to be mentioned in reviews?

SAC: Does it bug me?

twi-ny: Right. You can’t tell people what you’re doing.

SAC: It doesn’t bother me. I’m part of creating a great piece of art, and that’s all that really matters to me. And the fact that I get to go out on the stage and do something, that I’m in the theater. It’s just when I’m not in the theater that I’m miserable. When I’m not working, I’m miserable. But I’m honored to be working with fantastic actors. All that really matters to me is I’m part of telling an important story.

twi-ny: You posted a very interesting picture on Instagram recently in which you’re holding up a bunch of very adult plays that you were getting ready to read, including Equus, This Is Our Youth, and Killer Joe, and you even mentioned in the comments that Sarah Kane is your favorite playwright. Obviously, you’re drawn to this type of material.

SAC: Yes, I am drawn to it. People say that I have a dark sense of humor and I have deep thoughts, and I do, but I like to challenge my mind too. So Sarah Kane is something . . . At first, it takes me a minute to wrap my mind around it. When I finish reading the play, it’s one of those things where it makes me think as an actor. So I like to read those plays because I think it helps make me become a better actor. I don’t ever use them for auditions, but I do a couple of Sarah Kane monologues. . . . . For me, at least, I go to the theater to feel, not to be entertained all the time.

twi-ny: You did Little Dancer, about Degas, at the Kennedy Center. Did you become interested in his work at all, or is that separate?

SAC: When I was doing it, in the rehearsal room we always had prints of his pictures on the wall, and it really inspired the piece. There would be certain moments in the show where there would be a beat in the music and [director Susan Stroman] would say, “Hit the Degas pose.” So we would look at the dancers [in the paintings] and we would make that exact pose.

twi-ny: You’re fourteen, and you’ve already worked with Audra McDonald, Carrie Underwood, Michael C. Hall, Bernadette Peters, Famke Janssen, David Bowie, Susan Stroman, Ivo van Hove, Karen Ziemba, John Oliver, Anne Kauffman; that’s a pretty impressive list for anyone, but especially for a young teenager.

SAC: Age is just a number. I don’t really see myself as my age. I feel very special to have worked with them, but I think of them as equals; I don’t think of them as stars. I think of them as brilliant minds and things, but I don’t think much of it, to be frank, and I try not to make too much of it because then I psyche myself out and get all weird about it, and I get anxious when I’m around someone like that.

twi-ny: You can’t be a fan; you’re a colleague.

SAC: Yeah. That’s the thing that was hard for me with Michael Hall. I was such a fan, ’cause I watched his work on Dexter and Six Feet Under and I loved that stuff. I had so many questions to ask him, and I was ready to talk, because he inspires me as an actor, but I had to not picture him as Dexter anymore; I had to picture him as [his Lazarus character] Thomas Newton and Michael, my friend. I mean, that wasn’t really a struggle, but it was interesting to navigate through that.

twi-ny: What is it like working with van Hove?

SAC: One of my very favorite directors. He taught me this thing that I’ve used from then on, which was, the first day, you go in memorized. It’s so smart, too. Because then you can just focus on the acting and what you want to do. You don’t have to worry about holding a paper or looking down at your notes on the paper. That was one of my bad habits. [In the past] I would have all my notes on the paper and I would look at them. Between every scene I would be like, I have to remember this, I have to remember that. But on the first day of rehearsals [for Lazarus], I had my notes on all my papers, and Ivo goes, “You don’t need this,” and I never got my papers back.

twi-ny: He took them away from you?

SAC: Yeah. I got rid of the papers and he let my instincts fly and that was it.

twi-ny: What else is coming up?

SAC: I’m scheduled to do Runaways by Elizabeth Swados for Encores. I actually was looking through records today and I found this vinyl of the original cast album and I was like, “I need this!”

SOMETHING ROTTEN!

St. James Theatre
246 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 3, $37 – $177
rottenbroadway.com

Nearly five hundred years after William Shakespeare’s death, the author is still challenging modern dramatists around the world for theater space while influencing story lines and inspiring alternate takes on his thirty-six works. In their first stage production, brothers Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick anachronistically take audiences back to the Renaissance in Something Rotten!, a rousing musical farce that pays tribute to the Bard and Broadway by playfully skewering both. Two-time Tony nominee Brian d’Arcy James stars as Nick Bottom, who runs a local theater troupe with his brother, Nigel (John Cariani), that can’t escape Shakespeare’s (Christian Borle) shadow. Desperate to beat the Bard at his own game — and determined to show his feminist wife, Bea (Heidi Blickenstaff), that he can be the family’s main breadwinner — Nick takes advice from a vagrant soothsayer named Thomas Nostradamus (Brad Oscar), leading him to attempt the first-ever full-fledged musical, Omelette. But Nigel wants to write something more meaningful than a show about breakfast, while also becoming interested in Portia (Kate Reinders), the chaste daughter of Puritan leader Brother Jeremiah (Brooks Ashmanskas). Meanwhile, Shakespeare prances about like a rock star, prepared to take on all comers to his literary throne, ready, willing, and able to do whatever it takes to preserve his lofty status. “Yo! — He’s the bomb, the soul of the age / The wiz of the Elizabethan stage,” the crowd sings about Shakespeare in the opening number, “Welcome to the Renaissance,” continuing, “He’s incredible, unforgettable / He’s just so freakin’ awesome!”

Shakespeare (Christian Borle) rocks out to his adoring fans in the park in SOMETHING ROTTEN! (Christian Borle)

Karey, who cowrote the book with British novelist and script writer John O’Farrell (the two previously collaborated on the hit animated film Chicken Run), and Wayne, with whom Karey cowrote the music and lyrics, fill Something Rotten! with an endless array of references to Shakespeare and the Great White Way, from direct quotes, character names, and Gregg Barnes’s (Follies, The Drowsy Chaperone) costumes to Scott Pask’s (The Book of Mormon, The Coast of Utopia) high-school-like painted-cardboard sets and director Casey Nicholaw’s (The Book of Mormon, Spamalot) choreography. Part of the fun of Something Rotten! is trying to recognize all the references (be on the lookout for homages to Jesus Christ Superstar, Chicago, A Chorus Line, The Lion King, Hair, The Book of Mormon, The Producers, Gypsy, and countless others), which also saves you from not getting too caught up in the silly plot twists and several of the numbers that are precisely what is being made fun of. “Who talks like this?” Nick asks, referring to Shakespeare’s use of Olde English and iambic pentameter. “Nigel, why can’t we just write like we speak?” Among the most effective production numbers are “God, I Hate Shakespeare,” led by Nick and Nigel (Nick: “That little turd, he / has no sense about the audience / He makes them feel so dumb / The bastard doesn’t care / that my poor ass is getting numb”) and Nick and Nostradamus’s “A Musical” (Nick: “Well, that is the stupidest thing that I have ever heard / You’re doing a play, got something to say / so you sing it? It’s absurd / Who on earth is going to sit there / while an actor breaks into song / What possible thought can the audience think / other than this is horribly — wrong?”), while “Right Hand Man” is standard fluff, and “Will Power” and “Hard to Be the Bard” are overplayed and repetitive. But it’s all still great fun, with particularly fine turns by d’Arcy James (Shrek the Musical, Sweet Smell of Success), the Kristen Chenoweth-like Reinders (Wicked, Into the Woods), and Ashmanskas (Bullets over Broadway, Present Laughter), but Oscar (The Producers, Spamalot) steals the show as the clairvoyant bum who sums up what a musical is quite succinctly: “It appears to be a play where the dialogue stops and the plot is conveyed through song.” And in this case, it’s a celebration of the art form that will leave you giddy with delight, whether you are a lover or hater of Shakespeare — and Broadway musicals.