Tag Archives: Scott Ellis

YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU

Daily life at the Sycamore house is always an adventure, filled with madness and mayhem (photo by Joan Marcus)

Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday (and some Mondays) through January 4, $37 – $152
www.youcanttakeitwithyoubroadway.com

Earlier this year, Lincoln Center presented the world premiere of Act One, James Lapine’s engaging Broadway adaptation of Moss Hart’s 1959 memoir detailing his beginnings in theater, focusing on his first collaboration with writer-director George S. Kaufman. One of the many fruits of that partnership is now back on the Great White Way, a rousing revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can’t Take It with You. Set in Depression-era New York City, the three-act madcap farce follows the trials and tribulations of the eccentric Sycamore family, led by patriarch and grandfather Martin Vanderhof (James Earl Jones), who has enjoyed the simple pleasures of life ever since he suddenly walked out on his job more than three decades earlier and now lives contentedly, refusing to pay income tax and raising snakes. His daughter, Penny Sycamore (Kristine Nielsen), a quirky, perpetually pleasant would-be playwright and painter, is married to Paul Sycamore (Mark Linn-Baker), a goofy, unemployed tinkerer who spends most of his time in the basement inventing different kinds of fireworks with the oddball Mr. DePinna (Patrick Kerr) and playing with his Erector set. Penny and Paul’s younger daughter, Essie Carmichael (Annaleigh Ashford), is a wannabe dancer in endless motion, pirouetting her way through the day in tutus and making candies that her amateur printer husband, Ed Carmichael (Will Brill), goes out and sells when he’s not playing Beethoven on the xylophone for her to dance to. Essie’s ballet teacher, Boris Kolenkhov (Reg Rogers), is a blustery Russian émigré obsessed with Stalin and the revolution. Despite having little money — the Sycamores regularly eat corn flakes for dinner — the family has a well-treated maid, Rheba (Crystal Dickinson), who really runs things around the house; Rheba is dating Donald (Marc Damon Johnson), who hangs around doing odd jobs. Finally, there’s older daughter Alice Sycamore (Rose Byrne), a prim and proper young lady who is desperate to have a normal life despite her crazy, mixed-up family. (Think Marilyn in The Munsters, for example.) Alice is in love with Tony Kirby (Fran Kranz), her very wealthy boss at the Wall Street firm started by his mogul father (Byron Jennings), who raises extremely expensive orchids in his spare time. When the two families are brought together to celebrate Alice and Tony’s engagement, mayhem erupts, jeopardizing the lovebirds’ future.

Things don’t go quite as planned when the Kirbys and the Sycamores get together (photo by Joan Marcus)

You Can’t Take It with You, which was first produced on Broadway in 1936 and turned into an Oscar-winning film in 1938 by Frank Capra (with Jean Arthur, Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, Eddie Anderson, Ann Miller, and others), is a lovable romp about 1930s New York City, a fun and fanciful riff on the very serious growing gap between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. David Rockwell’s living-room set is breathtaking, every nook and cranny occupied by paintings, photographs, masks, sculptures, trinkets, tchotchkes, toys, and other, often loony, paraphernalia. Director Scott Ellis (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Harvey) keeps it all moving at a wickedly funny pace, a nonstop barrage of wacky high jinks, rapid-fire non sequiturs and double entendres, and over-the-top physical comedy, while never letting the audience forget that these are very hard times indeed for families such as the Sycamores, who live in the shadow of such tycoons as Mr. Kirby and his stuffy, genteel wife (Johanna Day.) The cast is superb, led by the humble Jones (who actually makes mention of the “dark side,” eliciting titters from Star Wars fans in the audience), the always welcome Nielsen (Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, The Killer), the ever-dapper and pristine Jennings (Ten Chimneys, Arcadia), and theater doyenne Elizabeth Ashley as the hash-slinging Grand Duchess Olga Katrina. Some of the physical comedy does grow stale, particularly Brill’s (Tribes, Not Fade Away) twisting mannerisms, Ashford’s (Kinky Boots, Masters of Sex) never-ending spins and twirls, and an unnecessary appearance by Julie Halston (The Tribute Artist) as a drunk actress, but those excesses can be forgiven amid all the boisterous merriment to be had in a play that combines an obviously old-fashioned sensibility with some social, political, and economic observations that are still relevant today, more than seventy-five years after its debut.

THE UNAVOIDABLE DISAPPEARANCE OF TOM DURNIN

Father (David Morse, r.) and son (Christopher Denham) have a serious chat in THE UNAVOIDABLE DISAPPEARANCE OF TOM DURNIN (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 August 25, $71-$81
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

After serving five years in prison for Madoff-like financial wrongdoings, disbarred lawyer Tom Durnin (David Morse) thinks he can just walk right back into his family’s life, but his wife, Karen (Lisa Emery), has left him, his daughter wants nothing to do with him, and his son, James (Christopher Denham), is torn when his father suddenly shows up in his ramshackle house, in a dilapidated would-be neighborhood that was also a victim of the mortgage crisis. His father’s fall from grace has shattered James, who had to leave Yale and now is studying fiction writing at a local college, where he meets the emotionally injured Katie (Sarah Goldberg), who has family issues of her own. Tom, who is working as a barista at a Borders bookstore — which itself would go out of business shortly — tries to find out from James where Karen is, but he’s not telling. Meanwhile, Tom meets with his son-in-law, Chris (Rich Sommer), whom he helped set up in the law firm where he was once a partner, trying to convince him to get him any job with the company, but the meek Chris, who has been told by his wife not to talk to Tom, is not about to risk his career by endorsing Tom’s return to the firm where he committed his dirty dealings.

James (Christopher Denham) and Katie (Sarah Goldberg) deal with difficult family issues in play about financial crisis (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin takes place in June 2009 in “the American exurbs, Sam’s Clubs and SUVs and Caribou Coffee and the eerie, shuttered windows of foreclosed strip malls,” representing the America that was devastated by the financial meltdown. Morse is excellent as the determined title character, who believes that he has done his time and can now get back on the path he was on, both personally and professionally, unable to recognize the continuing results of his actions. The play, written by Steven Levenson (The Language of Trees, Core Values) and directed by Scott Ellis (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Harvey), works best when Morse is onstage, his steely gaze and solid posture revealing a man who firmly believes he has paid his price and can’t understand why everyone has turned their back on him. The scenes in which James and Katie read their writings come off as gimmicky, a too-easy way to show these characters’ twisted emotions. The country is still recovering from the financial crisis brought on by men like Tom, and Levenson’s play does a good job using the Durnin family as a microcosm of the ongoing fall-out — in which very few people have actually gone to prison for what they have wrought. (There will be free talkbacks with members of the cast following the 2:00 performance on July 13 and 21 and August 4, 10, and 17.)

THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD

The audience gets to choose the ending and more in Roundabout revival of THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD (photo by Joan Marcus)

Studio 54
254 West 54th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 10, $42-$147
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is back on Broadway for the first time since the original production won five Tonys and nine Drama Desk Awards, and it’s as bawdylicious as ever. Featuring book, music, and lyrics by Rupert Holmes — yes, the man behind “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” — Drood is a brilliantly imagined take on Charles Dickens’s final novel, half of which was serialized in 1870 before the British writer died at the age of fifty-eight. Dickens’s Victorian tale is set in a frame story, told as if it were being performed by a troupe in London’s Music Hall Royale in 1895. The Drood story itself is regularly interrupted by the master of ceremonies, Mr. William Cartwright (a wonderful Jim Norton), who tries to keep order while directing the wild shenanigans, introducing the characters and their actors and speaking directly to the audience. (Almost everyone interacts with the crowd; be sure to arrive before curtain time, as the actors walk around the theater in character and chat with theatergoers.) Will Chase (Smash) stars as music hall actor Mr. Clive Paget, who plays John Jasper, the mustachioed villain of the show-within-a-show. Church choirmaster Jasper is in love with his student, young buxom blonde Rosa Bud (Betsy Wolfe as Miss Deirdre Peregrine), who is engaged to marry Edwin Drood (Stephanie J. Block as “famous male impersonator” Miss Alice Nutting; Drood is always played by a woman, including, in the past, Betty Buckley and Donna Murphy). Intrigue abounds when a pair of adult orphan siblings from Ceylon, Neville and Helena Landless (Andy Karl and Jessie Mueller as Mr. Victor Grinstead and Miss Janet Conover), are brought to the town by the Reverend Mr. Crisparkle (Gregg Edelman as Mr. Cedric Moncrieffe); the local drunk, Durdles (Robert Creighton as Mr. Nick Cricker), finishes a tomb for the mayor’s dead wife; and Jasper spends the night in an opium den run by the haughty Princess Puffer (Chita Rivera as Miss Angela Prysock, the role originated by Cleo Laine).

Chita Rivera, Stephanie J. Block, and Will Chase star in DROOD revival at Studio 54 (photo by Joan Marcus)

The story unfolds through such terrific production numbers as “There You Are,” “A Man Could Go Quite Mad,” “No Good Can Come from Bad,” and the music-hall troupe’s classic, non-Drood song, “Off to the Races,” but the Drood plot comes to a screeching halt when they reach the part where Dickens died. At that point, it all becomes even more fun as the audience votes on various aspects of the tale, including the identity of the strange detective who has been seen around town and, even more important, the murderer of Edwin Drood, who has disappeared. The plot proceeds from there, potentially different every night. (Try to show some compassion for poor Phillip Bax, amiably played by Peter Benson, who has little to do as Bazzard in the Drood retelling.) Director Scott Ellis (Harvey) and choreographer Warren Carlyle (Chaplin) keep things appropriately light and frothy, filled with playful humor and plenty of double entendres, making for an extraordinarily delightful night of theater.

HARVEY

Jim Parsons might just have you asking, “Jimmy who?” in Roundabout revival of HARVEY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Studio 54
254 West 54th St.
Through August 5, $47-$140
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Although the role of Elwood P. Dowd, a rather eccentric, happy fellow whose best friend is a six-foot, three-and-a-half-inch-tall invisible pooka, is most closely associated with Jimmy Stewart, who was nominated for an Oscar for Henry Koster’s 1950 film adaptation and played the part in a 1970 Broadway revival with Helen Hayes, not many others have attempted to take on Dowd, the central figure in Mary Chase’s 1944 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Harvey. The role was created by vaudevillian Frank Fay, and it has been played on the small screen by Art Carney and Harry Anderson. Now comes Emmy-winning actor Jim Parsons, the thirty-nine-year-old star of television’s The Big Bang Theory. Well, it might sound like blasphemy, but Parsons pulls off Dowd in a very big way, bringing a charm and gallantry that outshines even that of Stewart. The play as a whole, which famously topped Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie for the Pulitzer, does not hold up particularly well in Scott Ellis’s current Roundabout revival at Studio 54; it’s an old-fashioned piece of Americana fluff, its WWII-era sensibilities seriously out-of-date with the times (as opposed to Mike Nichols’s recent restaging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which was powerfully relevant). But Parsons is absolutely mesmerizing as Dowd, a well-mannered gentleman who is always accompanied by a large white rabbit that only he sees — but by the end of the play, you might think you’ve seen Harvey as well.

Elwood P. Dowd (Jim Parsons) has a special message for Betty Chumley (Carol Kane) in HARVEY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Elwood is an embarrassment to his sister, the society-obsessed Veta (Jessica Hecht, displaying a fine comic physicality), and her daughter, the socialite-in-training Myrtle Mae (Tracee Chimo). The ditzy Veta conspires to lock her brother away in a sanitarium run by Dr. William R. Chumley (Charles Kimbrough), but a misunderstanding between Veta, Dr. Lyman Sanderson (Morgan Spector), and nurse Ruth Kelly (Holley Fain) leads to some major foul-ups, some funnier than others. The relationship between Sanderson and Kelly falls particularly flat, as does a passionless attraction between Myrtle Mae and sanitarium worker Duane Wilson (Rich Sommer). Kimbrough is appropriately blustery as the exasperated Chumley, Carol Kane delivers a scene-stealing turn as his wife, Betty, and Larry Bryggman is stalwart as Judge Omar Gaffney. But the play takes off whenever Parsons is onstage, as Elwood makes friends with everyone he meets, including telephone solicitors, hands out his card to strangers, and is always quick to at least try to introduce his best friend, which doesn’t always work out quite as he plans. He has a penchant for reaching out and touching people in an engaging way, both physically and verbally, a supremely gentle man who also likes his drink. But whereas Stewart played Elwood as a wide-eyed, melodramatic dreamer, Parson’s Elwood is a more down-to-earth character, although still lost in his own alternate reality. Yet it’s a welcoming alternate reality that is a pleasure to be a part of in these often maddening, fast-paced times.