Was that a farce?

I've accepted that the Tony Awards broadcast is primarily an advertisement for Broadway -- it's not really about honoring excellence in theatre, although that may happen, if there's time. I don't like it, and I still complain about it, but I understand that's how it works. But can't it at least be a good advertisement for theatre?

When you're putting on a big, live show in a world-famous theatre and, right off the bat, you have major microphone issues, that's a turn-off. I can't remember a Tony broadcast that wasn't marred by sound issues, but this year was a particularly bad one, especially since they were coupled with obvious lip-synching. I can remember many painful instances of off-key singing in the past (I guess it's hard to hear the band?), but prerecorded vocals are not an ideal fix when you are trying to convince people that live theatre in New York City is worth their time and money.

I did like Sean Hayes at the piano. Fun, and much less obnoxious than the song-and-dance numbers Hugh Jackman used to do. But when the opening number turned into a full-on Green Day concert, I wanted to say, You know, you don't actually get to see Green Day when you buy a ticket for American Idiot. The show does not have Green Day the band in it. Ostensibly it is still worth paying lots of money for. I have my doubts, of course, but that's the idea. And yet here we are, hoping an appearance from Green Day will give Broadway some television cred. It's that old, familiar note of desperation: Please give theatre a chance! Some famous people like it! So the whole thing feels like fundraising time on PBS. Here is some guy from the football Jets, generously agreeing to say that he likes musicals! Won't you please give?

I just don't think the motto of the Tonys should be "Broadway: It's Not So Bad!"

More on Fences and August Wilson

I passed on my recommendation of the current Broadway revival of Fences a few weeks ago. A much longer review is in the June 4 issue of Commonweal, and subscribers can read it online here. (An online-only subscription is just $29, by the way.)

Before getting to the play under review, I devote a lot of space to explaining who August Wilson was and why he's important. Here's a sample of what I had to say about Kenny Leon's "splendid" production:

As Troy, film star Denzel Washington puts his considerable Hollywood charm to use in bringing out the character’s endearing qualities along with his flaws. He expertly locates the vulnerability beneath Troy’s bravado. Viola Davis (Oscar-nominated for the 2008 film Doubt, and a veteran of several cycle plays) is a restrained but powerful presence as Rose. The fence around the yard that Troy is building throughout the play is Rose’s idea—an expression of her desire to define and protect what she values. She is a reconciler, determined to hold her family together; she stays on the margins of the men’s conversation in the yard and changes the subject whenever she senses danger or discord. She looks out for the son from a previous marriage whom Troy neglects, and for Gabe, Troy’s brother, brain-damaged in the war. Rose knows Troy’s faults better than he does, and when she finally explodes in anger, the scene is heartrending: “You take,” she tells him, “and don’t even know nobody’s giving!”

Like so many of Wilson’s characters, Rose finds her strength in religion; she turns to the church when her marriage lets her down. But the prophet of Fences is Troy’s disabled brother, who “believes with every fiber of his being that he is the Archangel Gabriel.” Gabe predicts that Troy’s story will end in glory—“St. Peter got your name in the book,” he insists. “I seen it.” And Gabe’s advocacy bears fruit in the play’s final moments, when—according to the stage directions, beautifully interpreted here—“the gates of heaven stand open as wide as God’s closet.”

Even if you don't subscribe, you can visit dotCommonweal for more thoughts from me on August Wilson.

So many people in the world don't know what they've missed

The program for Sondheim on Sondheim, a revue now playing at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Studio 54, includes a "musical chronology" listing all of Stephen Sondheim's shows and the songs from each that the audience is about to hear. As she waited for the show to begin, the woman behind me perused this list. "Wait a minute," she said to her companion, "It says here 'Children Will Listen' is from Into the Woods. Is that right? Because it's also in Ragtime."

If reading that caused you to snort derisively, then you, like me, are probably an insufferable musical-theatre geek and/or snob. If you didn't react that way (and are wondering what the joke is), you must belong to the vast majority of humankind that isn't entirely sure who Stephen Sondheim is, or why you should care. There are two kinds of people in the world, in other words. Some of us are keenly aware that Mr. Stephen Sondheim celebrated his eightieth birthday this year and have been wondering whether we personally are doing enough to mark the occasion. And the rest of you are more like the woman behind me, who at intermission turned to her friend and said, "So, I guess this Stephen Sondheim must still be alive."

Sondheim on Sondheim tries, quixotically, to satisfy both groups at once.

Insert naughty pun here

As someone who always sort of hated Sex and the City, I am really enjoying looking on as the critics trash this new movie. My impression -- and I absolutely will not see the film to confirm this, as I can't even make it through a TV ad without hitting "mute" -- is that the movie does away with any and all of the series' laudable traits and leaves just the stuff I always found so irritating: the shallowness; the superficiality; the dreadful puns; the empty-headed social "commentary"; the total unlikability of the main character; the insistence that I should care about shoes when I so, so don't. So the things the critics pick on in their (hilarious) reviews sound to me like backward-looking critiques of the whole enterprise, even when they're prefaced by lamentations that this once-great franchise is going out on such a low note. Take this, from Boston Globe critic Ty Burr:

A very brief review of the revival of 'Fences' by August Wilson

It's great! Denzel is great! Viola Davis is great! Go see it!

(Longer review forthcoming.)

Go back to Galway

While we're catching up: I reviewed Martin McDonagh's new play, A Behanding in Spokane, for Commonweal last month. It took me this long to mention it here because (a) the review is subscribers-only online, and (b) the play was a big fat disappointment. Most of what I wrote is an introduction to McDonagh, whose Irish plays I love and admire. (Did you know online-only subscriptions to Commonweal are just $29?) Here's a sample of what I had to say about Behanding:

Time to start getting the nets out

I always assumed that Anyone Can Whistle made some kind of sense. I knew it was whimsical and wacky and all that, but I figured, if I saw the whole thing intact, it would have some discernible throughline. Not so much, as it turns out!

This is too bad for me, because I've been staging imaginary productions of Anyone Can Whistle in my head for years, based on the 1994 Carnegie Hall concert version starring Madeline Kahn, Scott Bakula and Bernadette Peters. I was excited when I found out the show was slated for Encores! in this, the Year of Sondheim: at last I would see the whole show, book intact, and at last I would know what goes between the songs to hold the whole nutty thing together. But unless the version I saw at City Center was seriously truncated (and it sure didn't seem edited), the fact is, the book isn't so much quirky or cutting-edge or experimental as it is half-assed and terrible. (The reviews I saw tiptoed around saying that outright: another case of Arthur Laurents getting off the hook?) The show makes even less sense than it did when I had only the recording to work with. Who knew.

So there's no way to make Anyone Can Whistle "work." I was still surprised that Casey Nicholaw -- whose Follies for Encores! I admired very much -- didn't come a little closer.

Happy Triduum!

My wonderful friend Stephen is the brains behind The Lazy Scholar, a blog that explores and exposes the Internet's many archival treasures. He was kind enough to invite me to do a guest post for Easter, and you can read the results right here. Consider it an early Easter-egg hunt.

Image: "Best Easter Wishes," Newton Owen Postcard Collection, University of Louisville Archives and Records Center, Louisville, Kentucky.

And all that noise

Just looking at this picture makes my ears hurt.

Speaking of which: have you seen ads for the Roundabout's upcoming Sondheim on Sondheim season-padder? I live a block away from the theatre where it will be playing through June, and I still can't quite be bothered to put it on my calendar. New arrangements of Sondheim tunes, performed by...Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat! You know what, I will pass! Thanks though!

I know, Barbara Cook. But still. Does this lack of enthusiasm mean my Sondheim geekitude has totally deserted me? Nope; my inner 14-year-old enjoyed the NYT slide show from "the birthday concert" way too much. (I mean, this! Now that I would pay for.)

UPDATE: I saw Sondheim on Sondheim after all.

Winter and rough weather

I was excited about the return of The Bridge Project, after last year's productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale (which I reviewed for Commonweal). I got tickets months in advance, and I thought I would write up this year's plays too. But I reconsidered on the way home from As You Like It. There just wasn't enough to write about.

Sam Mendes is your man when you want to create a mood or establish atmosphere. He knows how to make a pretty picture onstage, one that looks ethereal but still appropriately theatrical. But interpreting texts in a consistent manner is just not one of his strengths. I got the impression he had read through As You Like It and highlighted a couple of details that intrigued him, and then and then mounted his production without paying any attention to the whole picture. (For example -- "How merry are my spirits" is probably not what Rosalind says at the top of Act Two, Scene Four, but Mendes not only went with "merry" where most would agree that she should say "weary"; he built the entire scene around her unaccountable merriment.) Michael Feingold put it this way: "Mendes's besetting sin as a director is that he seems to fuss over scenes rather than think them through." Exactly right. Mendes came up with some novel ways to present disposable, short scenes -- a little torture here, a random nightmare-vision there -- when he ought to have been focusing on how the long, pivotal scenes were playing out. The result is all trees and no forest.