Danny Burstein | This Week in New York

Matt Friedman (Danny Burstein) please his case to Sally Talley (Sarah Paulson) in revival of TALLEY’S FOLLY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Matt Friedman (Danny Burstein) pleads his case to Sally Talley (Sarah Paulson) in new production of TALLEY’S FOLLY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 12, $91
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Danny Burstein gives one of the best performances of the season in the first-ever New York revival of Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Talley’s Folly. Burstein (Company, Golden Boy) stars as Matt Friedman, a Jewish accountant from St. Louis who has come to Lebanon, Missouri (Wilson’s hometown), in 1944 to declare his love for southern belle Sally Talley (Sarah Paulson), with whom he had a brief flirtation the previous summer. As the show starts, Friedman bursts down the aisle and onto the stage, directly addressing the audience. “If everything goes well for me tonight,” he says in a Jewish accent, “this should be a waltz, one-two-three, one-two-three; a no-holds-barred romantic story, and since I’m not a romantic type, I’m going to need the whole valentine here to help me: the woods, the willows, the vines, the moonlight, the band — there’s a band that plays tonight, over in the park. The trees, the berries, the breeze, the sounds: water and crickets, frogs, dogs, the light, the bees, working all night.” The crowd instantly on his side — he even promises that it will all take place within a brisk ninety-seven minutes — Matt is soon joined by Sally, a nurse’s aide who is helping take care of wounded soldiers at a local hospital. More than a decade younger than Matt, Sally is not thrilled to see him, begging him to leave before her anti-Semitic Ozark family does something bad to him, but Matt is not about to take off without speaking his mind — and trying to convince Sally that she feels the same way he does, which clearly won’t be easy. “You do not have the perception God gave lettuce,” she tells him. “I did not answer but one letter and in that one short note I tried to say in no uncertain terms that I didn’t want you to write to me. You have sent me an almost daily chronicle of your life in your office. The most mundane details of your accounting life. Why did you come back here?”

Matt experiences a bump in the road while wooing Sally in Roundabout revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

As he continues to woo Sally despite her protestations, Matt makes full use of designer Jeff Cowie’s dilapidated Victorian boathouse set, which has a nostalgic charm to it while also representing the changing of the Old South and the new America that will arise out of World War II. Little by little, the repressed Sally begins to open up and the captivating waltz grows ever-more complex, one-two-three, one-two-three, as it heads to its beautiful conclusion, exactly ninety-seven minutes after it started. Director Michael Wilson (Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, Enchanted April) keeps things moving at an engaging pace, with just the right balance of humor, warmth, and conflict, bringing a vibrancy and freshness to the thirty-three-year-old play, the middle part of a trilogy that began with Talley & Son and concludes with Fifth of July. Paulson (American Horror Story, Collected Stories) is excellent as Burstein’s shiksa dance partner, standing appropriately stiff and tall in her yellow dress and blonde hair, the prim-and-proper polar opposite of the dark-suited, thickly bearded, no-holds-barred Burstein, the two claiming as their own roles originated by Trish Hawkins and Judd Hirsch. This Roundabout Theatre production, immersed in a sweet, contagious innocence, is a fitting tribute to Wilson, who passed away in 2011 at the age of seventy-four, leaving behind a legacy that also includes The Hot l Baltimore and Burn This. (Wilson’s 1975 play, The Mound Builders, is currently being revived at the Signature Theatre, where it has been extended through April 14.)

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.