December 2010 Archives

BEST MUSICAL ON OR OFF BROADWAY:
The Scottsboro Boys. In fact, this breathtaking work with music by John Kander, lyrics by the late Fred Ebb, book by David Thompson, and direction and choreography by Susan Stroman is one of the best musicals of the first decade of the 21st century, despite its lamentably short Broadway run. Sadly, Scottsboro will most likely not receive proper recognition in the Tony Awards race, unless it bucks the odds and reopens in the spring, because shows that have already closed by Tony time rarely receive nominations and almost never win. Bad timing for a truly great musical.

BEST BROADWAY PLAY:
Relatively slim pickings, but Brief Encounter would have been a standout even in a far more competitive year. I'm going to choose it as the best Broadway play of 2010 even though it's an adaptation of a very old work by the great Noël Coward -- a tremendously creative, bracingly theatrical, soul-stirring adaptation. Honorable Mention: John Logan's Red, which won the Tony.

FUNNIEST BROADWAY SHOW:
The Pee Wee Herman Show -- a joyous reunion of Pee Wee, Jambi, Miss Yvonne, Cowboy Curtis, and all the other beloved characters that so many of us grew up with. I don't think I've ever experienced such roof-raising audience reaction to any other show.

FUNNIEST OFF-BROADWAY SHOW:
The Divine Sister. Put Charles Busch on stage alongside Julie Halston and Alison Fraser, and you're already more than halfway towards hilarity. Give them one of Busch's best-written hommages/parodies to play and you're sure the hit the comedy bulls-eye.

BEST OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL OF A PLAY:
The Signature Theatre Company production of Angels in America. Michael Greif's direction leaves something to be desired, but Tony Kushner's play and the excellent performances of a top-shelf company including Zachary Quinto, Christian Borle, Frank Wood, and Billy Porter make for an extraordinary theatrical event. Runner-Up: The Mint Theater Company's exquisite resurrection of Teresa Deevy's Wife to James Whelan, an extremely obscure but beautiful play from the 1930s.

BEST SHOW THAT I DIDN'T EXPECT TO LIKE VERY MUCH AT ALL:
Lombardi. Somehow, author Eric Simonson deftly managed to avoid cliché in crafting this bio-play about the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi. Add skillful direction by Thomas Kail and wonderful performances by Dan Lauria, Judith Light, Keith Nobbs, et al., and the result was a thoroughly satisfying evening of entertainment that apparently brought a whole new audience to Broadway.

MOST ENJOYABLE VANITY PRODUCTION:
It Must Be Him, by Kenny Solms. An unabashedly over-the-top showbiz comedy that managed to encompass the talents of Peter Scolari, Liz Torres, Edward Staudenmayer, Jonathan C. Kaplan, Bob Ari, Stephanie D'Abruzzo, Harris Doran, John Treacy Egan, and others. I've never seen anything like it -- and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

THEATER BOOK OF THE YEAR:
Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes, by Stephen Sondheim. You'll probably find yourself disagreeing with many of Sondheim's opinions, especially his assessment of other lyricists, and you may feel as I do that he effectively contradicts himself on several occasions. Still, this is one of the most brilliant, enjoyable reads I've had in a long time.

HOTTEST GUY ON BROADWAY:
Charlie Williams, late of Memphis and soon to be seen in the revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, won the 2010 Broadway Beauty Pageant, an all-male competition that benefits the Ali Forney Center. Recently, you may have noticed him dancing up a storm in the Jerry Herman segment of the Kennedy Center Honors. Runner-up Hottie: Benjamin Walker, star of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

SEXIEST LADY ON BROADWAY:
Laura Benanti in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Honorable Mention: Montego Glover in Memphis.

GAYEST SHOW OF THE YEAR:
Tie: Devil Boys From Beyond and The Divine Sister .

BEST DRAG PERFORMANCE:
Tie: Douglas Hodge in La Cage aux Folles and Charles Busch in The Divine Sister.

BEST COSTUMES:
Ann Hould-Ward, A Free Man of Color. If only John Guare's play had been worthy of her efforts...

BEST REPLACEMENT PERFORMERS:
As Diana in Next to Normal, Marin Mazzie is giving one of the greatest performances I've seen in 40 years of theatergoing. Honorable Mention: Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch in A Little Night Music. These honored Broadway vets helped bring new life to Trevor Nunn's moribund staging of this Sondheim classic, so I'm very sorry to hear that Stritch's work at certain performances has been marred by major memory lapses. I was lucky to have caught her on a very good night.

MOST IMPRESSIVE TOUR-DE-FORCE:
Mark Rylance in La Bête. Very Honorable Mention: Jan Maxwell in Wings at Second Stage; Michael Shannon in Mistakes Were Made at the Barrow Street Theatre.

SUPER TROUPER AWARD:
To Lily Rabe, who returned to her role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice just a couple of days after the death of her mother, the luminous actress Jill Clayburgh.

MOST ENJOYABLE CHRISTMAS-THEMED SHOW:
Elf. I loved it. But I should note for the record that I didn't see Donny and Marie on Broadway, because I wasn't invited...

MOST UNFORGETTABLE SPECIAL EVENT:
The memorial celebration for John Willis, longtime editor of the Theatre World and Screen World series of yearbooks, at the National Arts Club. There were remembrances from the likes of Cliff Robertson, Patricia Elliott, Bernadette Peters, and Brian Stokes Mitchell, plus a time-stopping rendition of "I'll Be Seeing You" by Karen Akers. A worthy tribute to a great man.

It was the greatest comeback since Dolly Levi strutted down the stairs of the Harmonia Gardens. Broadway icon Carol Channing was feted in the opening number of this year's Gypsy of the Year show at the New Amsterdam Theater, which celebrated the culmination of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS' fall fundraising drive. Here are my pics of this unforgettable event.

Hello, Carol...

...well, hello, Carol...

...it's so nice to have you back where you belong!

After the opening number, which of course brought the house down, Channing was brought back on stage by Lee Roy Reams and Tyne Daly.

She was then presented with a huge cake, and the audience sang to her in celebration of her upcoming 90th birthday.

Here's a moment from a skit by the cast of Off-Broadway's My Big Gay Italian Wedding.

Julie Nelson and Rudi Maccagi, from the company of Rock of Ages, earned an ovation for their stunningly acrobatic dance routine.

Adam Riegler, who plays Pugsley in The Addams Family, offered some hilarious words of encouragement to the casts of shows that have been "bullied" by the critics: "It Gets Better!

A celebration of The Gypsy Robe featured the courageous Adrian Bailey.

The company of Billy Elliott anticipated the next Broadway revival of Annie...

...and presented Tony Award winner Douglas Hodge as a highly sloshed Miss Hannigan.

The company of The Lion King offered a moving tribute to their castmate Shannon Tavares, the young girl who lost her battle with leukemia earlier this year.

Molly Shannon recreated her famous Sally O'Malley character and led the cast of Promises, Promises in a screamingly funny sketch.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, co-creator and original star of In the Heights, rejoined the company of that show for their final appearance in a Gypsy of the Year competition.

At the end of the show, Bernadette Peters, Kristin Chenoweth, and Sean Hayes took the stage to announce the winners in the individual categories and to tell the audience that the combined efforts of the companies of all the Broadway, Off-Broadway, and touring shows who participated had raised nearly $3.8 million for BC/EFA.

When the very title of an opera sets some people to giggling, and the opera is not a comedy, that's quite a hump to get over in terms of audience acceptance. When the name of the primo tenore character in the same opera pairs two slang terms for "penis," that's an even bigger hump. Giacomo Puccin's La Fanciulla del West certainly has a few moments of unintentional humor. But in much the same way that its hero, the bandit Ramerrez (alias "Dick Johnson"), is redeemed by the love of a good woman, the work itself is ennobled by its ravishing melodies, its brilliant orchestrations, and Puccini's unerring skill as a musical dramatist.

Fanciulla turns 100 years young this coming Friday, having premiered at the Metropolitan Opera on December 10, 1910, and the centenary is causing a flurry of renewed interest. The San Francisco Opera just recently revived the work with the great Deborah Voigt starring, and now the Met has brought back its excellent Giancarlo del Monaco production, this time with Voigt, Marcello Giordani, and Lucio Gallo in the leads.

Based on the play The Girl of the Golden West by theater impresario David Belasco, whose Madame Butterfly had previously inspired Puccini, Fanciulla was a daring endeavor on the composer's part -- perhaps most daring of all in that it premiered in America, at the Met, rather than in Italy. (Can you imagine the reception Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I might have received if it had opened in Thailand?) Fanciulla was a boffo box-office success at the Met in 1910, but that was due in no small part to its starry lead cast (Emmy Destinn, Enrico Caruso, Pasquale Amato), its proto-legendary conductor (Arturo Toscanini), and a knock-your-socks-off production supervised by Belasco himself. The reviews of the work itself were mixed, to put it mildly.

The opera is often cited half-jokingly as the world's first Spaghetti Western, having been written more than half a century before the name Sergio Leone meant anything to anyone. The setting is a mining camp in California circa 1849-50, at the height of the Gold Rush. We're introduced to life at the Polka saloon, owned by a gal named Minnie, who serves as a combination mother/sister/schoolmarm/crush for the miners. Our heroine is pursued by the local sheriff, Jack Rance -- but he's married, so she's not interested. Besides, she finds herself falling in love with Dick Johnson, a stranger who has just come to town and who eventually turns out to be the notorious bandit Ramerrez. When Minnie discovers his true identify, she's horrified at first, but then she has a change of heart. Just as the men prepare to hang Johnson in the forest, Minnie arrives on horseback and talks them out of it, claiming him as her own. They walk off into the California sunrise together, presumably to live happily ever after.

Though Fanciulla got off to a bang-up start at the Met, revivals have been relatively few and far between. One possible reason is the incongruity of all them rough-hewn, forty-niner-miners knockin' around in an Italian opera. This construct has always presented a special challenge for American audiences; some folks who aren't bothered in the least by the suggestion of Spanish, Egyptian, and Japanese music and culture in Bizet's Carmen, Verdi's Aida, and Puccini's own Madama Butterfly have trouble accepting the characters in Fanciulla singing "doo-dah, doo-dah-day," referring to "Soledad" and "Wells-Fargo," and letting out with shouts of "hello!" and "wiskey!"

But there's another reason why the opera is still something of a rarity: The roles of Minnie and Johnson are extremely challenging to sing. In 1961, Leontyne Price experienced a rare debacle when she lost her voice in the middle of a Met performance of Fanciulla and Dorothy Kirsten had to step in -- or, rather, ride on -- to sing the third act. At New York City Opera in the 1980s, a tenor who will remain nameless was unable to deal with the climactic phrase of Johnson's Act II aria "Or son sei mesi" one evening and ended up shouting rather than singing the notes. Although Renata Tebaldi made a much-admired recording of the opera in 1958, she didn't tackle the role on stage until she tried it at the Met in 1970, at the tail end of her career -- and, according to one longtime fan who attended, she did "a lot of screaming."

Despite its difficulties, Fanciulla will always be with us because it plays like gangbusters, and because the music is so gorgeous. Though Puccini was Italian to the core, he endowed the opera with a credibly Wild Western sound -- so much so that this work, rather than Rossini's William Tell, might as well have been raided to provide the theme music for the old-time radio and early TV series The Lone Ranger. Of course, Rossini's music had already fallen into the public domain by then, whereas Puccini was still under copyright.

While we're on that subject: According to some reports, Andrew Lloyd Webber was sued by the Puccini estate for appropriating a melody from Fanciulla for use in The Phantom of the Opera, and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. The tune in question is first heard during the brief, tender dance between Minnie and Johnson in Act I of the opera and, not long thereafter, is sung full out in Johnson's arioso "Quello che tacete." Listen to the lovely, yearning melody that accompanies the words "e provai una gioia strana," and if you think it sounds an awful lot like the "silently the senses abandon their defenses" section of "Music of the Night" from Phantom, you're not alone.

Considering that Fanciulla was composed 100 years ago and is set in a Wild West far more mythical than historical, it's not surprising that much of the opera strikes 21st century audiences as quaint. Some of the plot devices inherited from Belasco are enough to make us groan or, at least, smile in superiority. One of the supporting roles, the minstrel Jake Wallace, was originally intended to be played in blackface (though this never happens in modern stagings), and the opera's two Native American characters, Wowkle and Billy, are written in a way that rankles present-day sensibilities. (Librettists Guelfo Civinini and Carlo Zangarini actually have them exclaim "Ugh!" on several occasions, another holdover from Belasco.)

Yet there are many poignant moments in the opera, most notably the hushed ending of Act I and the stunning Act III scene in which Minnie pleads for Johnson's life. There are also some passages of real wit, as in an early exchange between Minnie and the Polka's bartender in reference to the newly arrived Johnson. (NICK: There's a stranger outside. MINNIE: Who is it? NICK: I've never seen him before. Seems like he's from San Francisco; he ordered whiskey and water. MINNIE: Whiskey and water? What sort of concoction is that? NICK: That's what I said. "At the Polka, we drink our whiskey straight." MINNIE: Well, let him come in. We'll curl his hair for him!)

If many commentators in 1910 underrated Fanciulla, its composer did not. On the contrary, Puccini declared it to be "my strongest opera, and the most full of color, the most picturesque, particularly in orchestration." As we see Minnie and her beloved go off to begin a new life at the end of the opera, we can only be grateful that Puccini chose to apply his genius to this perishable melodrama of the Wild West and turn it into something immortal. Be sure to catch it at the Met, where it first came to life 100 years ago this week. For more information, click here.