Ohio State Murders

Adrienne Kennedy is currently making her Broadway debut with Ohio State Murders, thanks to the star power of Audra McDonald, who plays the lead in this not-quite-one-person play.

McDonald also helped another great American playwright, Lanie Robertson, make it to Broadway when she starred in another not-quite-one-person play, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill. It's a reminder of how consequential stars can be, and how McDonald has used her influence to bring deserving plays to the boards.

Ohio State Murders also benefits from the direction of Kenny Leon, who has scored hits recently with his productions of Much Ado About Nothing and A Soldier's Play. Leon thrives when given quirky characters who behave in odd ways. He gives us just enough to have a glimpse at a character's hidden turmoil without having his performers rant and rail.

That approach is necessary for Ohio State Murders, which portrays a writer names Suzanne Alexander returning to her alma mater of Ohio State to give a speech about why there is so much violent imagery in her work. The reason, it turns out, has to do with certain events that happened on campus decades ago when she was a student. McDonald plays Alexander both as the idealistic young student and as the wary older author, but in both the past and present scenes, she holds everything together, and doesn't give way to waves of pain, grief, or vengeance.

Leon's directing approach also works for Bryce Pinkham, famous for his comic role in A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, but playing a much more somber part in Kennedy's play. As Robert Hampshire, a lecturer at Ohio State who barely speaks when he's not lecturing, he is a constant enigma. Never at ease, either with others or with himself, he keeps both Alexander and the audience guessing as to his true intentions.

The production also boasts a magnificent set designed by Beowulf Boritt, showing suspended library bookcases, a deep chasm, and whirls of snow that all contribute to the play's effect. This is a production you won't want to miss, so go see it now!

Top Musicals of the Teens

To close out 2019, I'm making a list of the best new American musicals of the teens. I'm only including new American musicals (so no Matilda) that premiered in New York between 2013 and 2019.

No doubt many people will take issue with some of my choices, and wonder why some shows were left off the list. (Sorry, Allegiance and Amazing Grace! There was only so much room. And I never saw The Band's Visit.) Here they are:

10. Something Rotten - Okay, the egg joke runs a little too long, but this musical send-up of Shakespeare practically had me rolling in the aisle.

9. Fun Home - I honestly hated this show when I first saw it, but that was due to Sam Gold's horrible direction. The more I think about it, though, the more I think it might be Jeanine Tesori's best score yet.

8. Dear Evan Hansen - I have reservations about this show as well, but I still think it's far more clever than the critics who praised it blindly. Plus, it's hard to get "You Will Be Found" out of your head.

7.  A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder - This musical managed to escape from development and copyright-law hell in order to win the Tony in 2014. It remains one of my favorite shows of the decade.

6. Desperate Measures - This Off-Broadway gem in one of the smartest shows of the decade, and it deserves to have a long life on the regional circuit. I never would have thought of turning Measure for Measure into a Wild West musical comedy... but it works!

5. Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 - I saw the Off-Broadway incarnation of this play in 2013, and loved it just as much when I saw in on Broadway four years later. Dave Malloy's music is enchanting, and the show manages to craft a small portion of Tolstoy's novel into a stage show that packs a major punch.

4. Unlock'd - Like Desperate Measures, this show had a brief Off-Broadway run, but needs to be seen by far more people. Its source material, Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, was equally unpromising for a musical comedy, but in addition to being as witty as Pope, it also manages to find adventure, pathos, and even wisdom.

3. Tamar of the River - This epic piece by Marisa Michelson and Joshua H. Cohen is one of the most ambitious shows to premiere in New York during the teens. Nothing else sounds quite like it, and if you don't believe me, buy the cast album. The story, taken very loosely from the book of Genesis, remains as important today as it was when the show premiered Off-Broadway in 2013.

2. Hadestown - Though I've yet to see the Broadway version of Hadestown, and the London production left me rather cold, when I saw the show at New York Theatre Workshop it blew me away. The cast recording of that production remains a frequently visited place on my iPod, and not just because of Patrick Page's amazing performance of "Why We Build the Wall." Anais Mitchell's play is one of the best explorations of tragedy the American theater has produced in recent years.

1. Hamilton - This choice should come as no surprise. Lin-Manuel Miranda came into his own with this show, crafting both music and lyrics that resonate on multiple levels. Sometimes the show has to play a little fast and loose with history, but rather than being simply a glorification of Alexander Hamilton, it recognizes his flaws, and even pays tribute to the musical's villain, Aaron Burr. Perhaps most movingly, it rescues Eliza Hamilton from the dustbin of history, writing her back into the narrative.

Who will write the top musicals of the '20s? Miranda? Mitchell? Michelson and Cohen? Maybe all of the above.

A Stage Within a Stage

Meta-theatricality is wonderful on stage... when it works.

In Leonid Andreyev's short play Requiem, for instance, the set is described as "The replica of a small theatre." On one side is a stage, and on the other are puppets set up like an audience. The acton takes place on the stage within a stage, and at the end of the play the character of "Theatre Manager" has a long monologue, seen only by the puppets in the audience, and of course by the real audience watching the whole thing.

Requiem is a symbolist drama from 1916, very earnest and very dark. Yet a similar set-up is used by a play of a very different sort: Broadway's A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder. Set designer Alexander Dodge placed upon the stage at the Walter Kerr Theatre another stage, an elaborate Victorian proscenium stage in fact, complete with footlights and a lush, velvet curtain. Since all musicals are highly theatrical, and since the play's imaginative Edwardian setting has its own sense of heightened realism, the meta-theatricality works wonderfully.

Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak's A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder is based on Roy Horniman's 1907 novel Israel Rank, about a young man who murders a number of people in line to inherit a title, finally inheriting it himself. That novel was also the subject of a film with Alec Guinness called Kind Hearts and Coronets. The play was in development for years, and eventually made it to Broadway, no thanks to the holding company that owns the rights to the 1949 film. In spite of the fact the story is in the public domain, the company filed a baseless copyright suit against the show's creators. Thankfully, a judge threw out the frivolous suit, paving the way for countless audiences to enjoy the show.

Though I've been wanting to see the play for a while, it was only this afternoon that I finally got to watch it. I was certainly not disappointed. Freedman and Lutvak's songs are delightful, especially the opening number, "A Warning to the Audience," as well as "I Don't Know What I'd Do," a song sung by one of the protagonist's two love interests. That role, Sibella, was taken by Scarlett Strallen, an actor who impressed me greatly last year as Lady MacDuff in Kenneth Branagh's production of Macbeth.

What really struck me about this production, however, was Dodge's beautiful set. By lowering and raising the curtain on the stage within a stage, the crew can seamlessly perform set changes while the play continues in front of the false proscenium. Plus, while tables and chairs to the sides of the stage are basically realistic, the set pieces on the stage within a stage can look like painted flats. The more stylized set pieces fit right in, and they add immensely to the humor of the play.

Upon occasion the proscenium itself is used, as arms and faces pop out of openings, or the protagonist is forced to climb up its side. Even the show's finale manages to make use of the proscenium arch.

Broadway might be worlds away from Andreyev's symbolist drama, but it certainly has learned a thing or two about how to make meta-theatricality work.

A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Copyright

Many thanks to magnificent musical theater writer James Harris for pointing out the topic for today's blog post. It's a story of art, greed, and the legal system finally doing the right thing.

So you've seen those ads for A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, and you watched that wonderful number on the Tony's. You might also have seen an old Alec Guinness film called Kind Hearts and Coronets that looked kind of similar. Hey, is the musical based on that movie?

The answer, after much litigation, is no. If you want the full opinion of District Judge Richard J. Holwell, you can read it here:

OPINION

However, I'll spare you the legalese, and summarize the judge's findings.

It all started in 1907 when Roy Horniman wrote the novel Israel Rank about a vengeful young man who murders a number of people in line for a noble title so he can inherit it himself. In 1949 Ealing Studios made a film, Kind Hearts and Coronets, which turned the story into a comedy and had Guinness play all of the murder victims, male and female.

Songwriters Steven Lutvak and Robert L. Freedman thought the story would make a great musical. (Opinion of the Tony Awards voters: They were right.) They entered into an agreement with the copyright owners of the film, a company called Canal+ Image UK Ltd., allowing Lutvak and Freedman to develop the piece and then pitch it to Canal+ for a possible production.

The dynamic duo did their thing, showed the show to Canal+, and the company passed. Why? Well, clearly these guys were a couple of hacks. Their show was never going to go anywhere. These yahoos couldn't write their way out of a paper bag. (Here the Tony Award voters, and legions of ecstatic Broadway audiences, respectfully dissent.) What were Lutvak and Freedman to do? They had a great show on their hands, which anyone but a bunch of corporate suits at Canal+ could see, but they didn't have the rights to the film.

Not a problem! What Canal+ seems to have forgotten was that they didn't have the rights to the story, just to the film. Horniman's novel is in the public domain, and anyone in the world had the right to adapt that. They just couldn't adapt the film. The team went about making changes to the show. According to the court's findings, when the film made minor adjustments, such as switching a character's name from Phoebe to Edith, the musical went back to the original version in the novel. In some cases, such as the ending of the story, which is different in the film, the musical came up with something entirely different, in that case providing a third ending to the story (and probably the best one, anyway).

Once the musical was poised for a pre-Broadway run, however, Canal+ got sour grapes. They had passed on a great property, and now lots of investors were about to make lots of money, and Canal+ wasn't one of them! They sued. Though the musical had not used the changes that the film had made to the novel, the play did have two things in common with the movie. The first was that they were both comedic, and gruesome murders had been turned into comic romps. The second was that the multiple roles of the different murder victims were all played by the same actor. Those are copyrightable changes, right?

Well, um, no. At least not according to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Basically, Canal+ was arguing that you can copyright tone and theatrical devices. You simply can't copyright the idea that something's a comedy, otherwise, once someone, say, spoofed Hamlet, no one else would ever be able to spoof it again. Furthermore, as Judge Holwell pointed out, Kind Hearts and Coronets is a dark comedy/drama, getting quite serious in some places, while A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder is a slapstick farce. The tones are similar, but certainly not the same.

The one area where Canal+ might have had some hope was in the device of having one actor play multiple roles. However, Judge Holwell ruled that this was a common dramatic device and not something that can be copyrighted. He compared an actor playing multiple roles to such common devices as a character talking directly to the audience or men disguising themselves as women. Sorry, Canal+, but you can't copyright an idea that goes back to the Greeks. Case dismissed.

Lutvak and Freeman won, but more importantly, Broadway audiences won, as now they get to see a great show that otherwise would never have seen the light of day. As for Canal+, they could be sitting on top of a Tony Award-winning Broadway hit. Instead, they're just sitting on a pile of legal fees.