What A View From the Bridge Taught Me (and Re-Taught Me)

Prior to attending Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge at the Cort, I had seen the first two Broadway revivals of the play, and I directed a community theater production on Staten Island in 1988. So I guess I went into the current View thinking I knew pretty much all there was to know about the play, and -- human nature being what it is -- I had certain expectations regarding this production, based on the personnel involved. As it turned out, my experience taught or re-taught me a lot about this work in particular and theater in general:

1) A View From the Bridge is a great play

Not a flawless play -- but really, how many works of art are flawless? In case you aren't familiar with View, it's a slice-of-life drama set in Red Hook, Brooklyn in the 1950s. The central character is a guy named Eddie Carbone, who lives with his wife, Beatrice, and his niece, Catherine. Trouble ensues when Eddie agrees to harbor Beatrice's cousins Marco and Rodolpho, illegal immigrants from Sicily. Catherine and Rodolpho quickly fall in love -- a huge problem, since Eddie has a deep-seated passion for the girl, though he can't bring himself to admit it. As the weeks and months pass, Eddie's jealousy reaches the boiling point, with deadly consequences.

Some critics rate View among Miller's lesser works, coming down on its purportedly melodramatic aspects and considering it a noble but failed attempt at writing the modern-day equivalent of a Greek tragedy. But the way I see it, the play's great strength -- Miller's wholehearted understanding of exactly how these poor, decent people would behave in such a fraught situation -- far outweighs any weaknesses. The very fact that the current production marks View's fourth time on Broadway indicates that its power to move audiences is undiminished.

2) Liev Schreiber is one of the finest stage actors of his generation.

The best compliment I can give to Schreiber's performance as Eddie Carbone is that I was riveted from start to finish even though I disagree with with many of his acting choices. When I directed View, I thought it was important for Eddie to appear very happy in the first couple of scenes -- almost jovial at moments, and with a great sense of humor -- in order to give the character a major arc and make his eventual deterioration into a desperate, rage-filled shell of a man all the more heartbreaking. Under the direction of Gregory Mosher, Schreiber takes another approach: He plays Eddie as almost taciturn, with bottled-up emotions that bubble to the surface only in extremis. It's not the choice I would make as an actor or endorse as a director, and it may sound like it wouldn't work at all -- but, somehow, Schreiber makes it work through sheer commitment and laser-sharp focus.

3) When a hot young movie star with little or no stage experience is tapped to play a major role on Broadway, the results aren't always disastrous -- and, sometimes they're fabulous.

Scarlett Johansson gives a wonderfully touching and skillful performance in the tricky role of Eddie's niece, Catherine. De-glamorized with a dark, '50s-style brunette wig and light makeup, she's entirely credible as a 17 year old, mid-20th-century Italian-American girl who grew up in Red Hook, complete with a flawless Brooklyn accent. My theater companion remarked that she disappears into the role in the best sense possible; not having read the Playbill in advance, he didn't even realize the young lady playing Catherine was Johansson until several scenes had gone by and it dawned on him that it must be her, because it was getting way too late in the show for another major character to appear. So brava, Ms. J., and welcome to Broadway.

4) An excellent actor can play a problematic role so well that it doesn't seem problematic at all.

Another element of A View From the Bridge that has often been criticized is the role of Alfieri, a lawyer who also functions as a sort of one-man Greek chorus. Looking back at the first two Broadway revivals, Robert Prosky was terrific as Alfieri in 1983, but the part defeated Stephen Spinella in 1997. (I didn't see his successor, Robert LuPone.) When I directed View, the actor who played Alfieri got away from me, falling into the trap of speaking his lines with ripe classical tone and heavy tragic import. At the Cort, Michael Cristofer succeeds by going in the opposite direction; his Alfieri is a fellow who was smart enough to earn a law degree but whose articulate speech nevertheless retains the rhythms, cadences, and accent of a Brooklyn street kid. As a result, even the purplest lines of the character's monologues sound quite natural coming from his lips, and don't seem like they were swiped from a 1950s adaptation of Oedipus Rex.

5) With any luck at all, a talented and well-respected actress will never be out of a job for long.

Earlier this season, Jessica Hecht did beautiful work as Blanche in the short-lived Broadway revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs. Happily, she was snapped up by Mosher and company for View, in which she's perfection as Beatrice. If you see the show and you can manage to tear your eyes off of Schreiber and Johansson while they're speaking, note how much Hecht communicates with her eyes and body language alone. An outstanding performance.

Richard Thomas Joins the Wall of Fame

Richard Thomas (above), one of the stars of David Mamet's Race, had his portrait by artist Dan May unveiled on Tuesday night, January 19 at Tony's DiNapoli on West 43rd Street, for addition to the restaurant's Wall of Fame. Thomas made his Broadway debut in 1958 at age seven in Sunrise at Campobello, and his credits also include Strange Interlude, Fifth of July, The Front Page, Democracy, and A Naked Girl on the Appian Way.

Here's Thomas with one of his Race co-stars, David Alan Grier...

...and here he is again with radio personality Valerie Smaldone.

Among the other notables on hand for the unveiling: Barry Wood (TV's Trading Spaces and Hidden Potential).

The great playwright Michael Weller with director Drew DeCorleto.

Oscar E. Moore (TalkEntertainment.com) with actor Bill Coyne (Superhero Celebrity Rehab).

The Richard Thomas portrait, by Dan May.

Giving Carmen the Eyre

In a program note for the new Metropolitan Opera production of Carmen, director Richard Eyre writes: "Coming late to opera, I heard [this] score for the first time in a re-orchestrated version in the film of Carmen Jones." Taking a cue from Oscar Hammerstein's Broadway musical adaptation of Georges Bizet's immortal opera, Eyre has moved the action of the piece forward in time roughly 100 years, from the mid 19th-century to the mid 20th -- although he has kept the setting in Spain, now in the 1930s, rather than placing it in WW-II era America. As it turns out, this is the least damaging conceit of the production.

That Eyre is very confused as to how to deal with Carmen is evident in the edition (if that's the correct word!) of the work that he has concocted for this production. According to the program, "This version of Carmen uses, in part, the critical edition by Fritz Oeser." In part? Over the course of two hours and 45 minutes of music, I noticed only one 50-second passage taken from Oeser: Carmen's taunting repeat of Don José's "Il souffre de partir..." in Act II. Throughout the rest of the evening, Eyre frequently uses the recitatives that Ernest Guiraud composed for the opera after Bizet's untimely death; but he sometimes replaces the recits with a line or two of spoken dialogue drawn from the sung dialogue, and other times he completely eliminates the recits, replacing them with nothing at all. Never do we hear any of the spoken dialogue that was used in the original, "opera comique" version Carmen. In short, to call this "edition" an unsatisfying hodge-podge would be to put it mildly.

The production, with sets and costumes by Richard Howell, and lighting by Peter Mumford, makes much use of a huge turntable. This allows for set changes within each act, which can be annoyingly intrusive if overdone, as here. The shifts back and forth from the inside of the guardhouse to the plaza in Act I are all well and good; but when, in the last 30 seconds of the opera, Eyre and Howell rotate the brutally murdered Carmen and the murderer Don José offstage to show us the interior of the bullring, with the animal lying dead and bloodied in the foreground and the crowd gathered in tableau around it, the only natural response is to let out with an expletive that conveniently begins with the word "bull."

In confronting Carmen, one of the greatest artistic masterpiece of all time, Eyre seems to have said to himself: "I'm going to put my own stamp on this thing, even if that means I have to contradict the intentions of the authors." For every moment of intelligence or clarity in his direction, there's a moment of nonsense. To give only two more examples of many: The can be little doubt that, in real life, the soldiers' teasing of Micaëla in the first scene of the opera would more closely resemble sexual harassment than harmless flirtation, and that Carmen's smuggler cohorts Dancaïre and Remendado would be rough customers, not jovial comic figures. But Bizet and his librettists chose to present these scenes and characters as light and amusing rather than menacing, so Eyre's insistence on a grittier interpretation is counterproductive.

On the plus side of the ledger, this production boasts a strong cast. Elina Garanca surely ranks as one of the sexiest, most physically beautiful Carmens in history -- not an unimportant attribute in the role of a woman whose allure is supposed to be off the charts. She is further blessed with a gorgeous voice that's perfectly equalized throughout its wide range; when she filled the auditorium with sound in the climactic section of the card aria and in the final duet, the sound was so powerful that I feared some more of that gold leaf on the Met ceiling was going to peel off.

Although Roberto Alagna rather distractingly continues to employ various different techniques of vocal production, especially in his upper register, the basic sound is impressive -- and, as befits his Carmen, Alagna is one of the handsomest Josés you're ever likely to see. Barbara Frittoli's pretty, effortless soprano perfectly suits the role of Micaëla, and Mariusz Kwiecen is dashing as the bullfighter Escamillo. In the performance I attended, Ashley Tuttle and Keith Roberts danced beautifully at the top of Act I and Act II (choreography by Christopher Wheeldon), but whether or not dances by two nameless, symbolic figures should have been included as these junctures is another question entirely. Yannick Nézet-Sé conducts Bizet's masterpiece of a score with great élan. It's a pity that Eyre's direction so frequently works against, rather than with, the piece and the performers.

The Altar Boyz Have Left the Building

Much has happened since Altar Boyz opened at New World Stages in 2005. This terrifically entertaining Off-Broadway musical about a fictional Christian boy band has garnered multitudes of fans (known as "Altarholics") and has launched or boosted the careers of the scores of triple-threat young men who have appeared in the roles of Matthew, Mark, Luke, Juan, and Abraham. And the theater complex on West 50th Street, once thought to be something of a white elephant, is now thriving. Here are some pix from last night's 2,032nd and final New York performance of the show, and from the after-party at (where else?) Hooters, where members of the current company were joined by alums and friends for a rousing farewell.

The finale of Altar Boyz, "I Believe," as performed by the final Off-Broadway cast: (l-r) Travis Nesbitt, Mauricio Perez, Ravi Roth, Lee Markham, and Michael Kadin Craig.

Post-curtain-call remarks were offered by the show's lead producers, Ken Davenport (second from left in foreground) and Robyn Goodman.

Among the dozens of former Altar Boyz who took stage for the curtain call were Tyler Maynard, Cheyenne Jackson, and Andy Karl.

At Hooters: Kevin Kern and David Josefsberg.

Ann Harada (of Avenue Q fame) with Michael Patrick Walker, one of the Altar Boyz songwriters.

Corey Boardman, Kyle Dean Massey (now co-starring in Next to Normal on Broadway), and Eric Schneider.

Landon Beard and James Royce Edwards.

Ryan Duncan, the original Juan, flanked by Altarholics Michelle and Lynette Michalos.

Michael Kadin Craig with the show's director, Stafford Arima.

Andrew C. Call, a former Luke, with Michelle Marmolejo.

Producer Kevin McCollum with Tyler Maynard.

One More Week of Musical Theater Heaven

It was quite an emotional scene at Ragtime this past Sunday afternoon. The January 3 performance was to have marked the show's sadly premature closing -- until a one-week extension to the 10th was announced -- so the fans were out in force. Heartfelt cheers and applause were the rule throughout the show. At intermission, I saw André De Shields in the audience, with tears in his eyes. And I ran into a fellow journalist who said, "This is the first time in my life that I've paid for a theater ticket. I just had to be here."

One could go on and on attempting to analyze exactly why this magnificent revival was unable to find an audience, with reasons ranging from a lack of star names to the argument that this production came too soon after the original. Of course, the generally high price of Broadway tickets enters into the equation, especially in the current economy.

Whatever, I'm very sorry to see Ragtime go. I myself teared up at several points during the performance, and I can't honestly say how much of that was due to the emotional impact of the show itself and how much to my knowledge that it will be gone after this coming weekend. But I'm grateful that I got to see this production three times: once during its initial engagement at the Kennedy Center in D.C., and twice at Broadway's Neil Simon Theatre.

Based on the epic novel by E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime has a gorgeous, sweeping score by Stephen Flaherty (music) and Lynn Ahrens (lyrics), and an exemplary book by Terrence McNally -- in my opinion, far and away that writer's best work of the past quarter century. Directed by Marcia Milgrom Dodge, the current production is a must-see for its grand, three-level unit set (love that cyclorama!), it's sumptuously huge orchestra (more than three times the size of the instrumental complement you'll hear if you attend the present Broadway revival of A Little Night Music), and a superb cast headed by Ron Bohmer, Quentin Earl Darrington, Christiane Noll, Robert Petkoff, Bobby Steggert, and Stephanie Umoh.

I've previously extolled several of these performers, but I don't want to let Ragtime go without a special nod to Darrington and Umoh (pictured above), both of whom are doing brilliant work in roles previously thought to be owned by Brian Stokes Mitchell and Audra McDonald. Darrington's Coalhouse Walker is a triumph, and I'm going to say without a moment of hesitation that Umoh's Sunday afternoon performance of the vocally and emotionally exhausting Act I aria "Your Daddy's Son" represented three of the most thrilling minutes I've ever experienced in a theater.

Yes, the swift closing of this show is very sad, but something I noticed after Sunday's performance gave me hope for the future. While I was waiting at the stage door with friends, we noticed that the crowd of well-wishers and autograph seekers included lots of young people. It does my heart good to see theatergoers of that generation are able to appreciate Ragtime with its beautiful, traditional-style score. After all, there should be room on Broadway for every conceivable type of musical, as long as they're done well.

If you haven't yet caught Ragtime, please do yourself a favor and get yourself to the Neil Simon before the closing this Sunday. It doesn't get much better than this.