Passion

The first Stephen Sondheim musical I ever saw on Broadway was Passion, his 1994 collaboration with director and book writer James Lapine.

In spite of winning the Tony Award for Best Musical, the play closed at the beginning of the next year, earning it a less-than-stellar reputation. Lately, however, I've found multiple students talking about the piece, having seen the filmed version of the original staging that aired on PBS and has subsequently become more widely available.

Recently, I picked up a used copy of the DVD of this version, which I watched today. It was my first time seeing Passion since 1994, though I've listened to the cast recording countless times. As some of the original artists mention on the commentary track of the DVD, the recording is one of the best ever done of a stage musical, in part because it was shot on film in an empty theatre after the show closed, so it was possible to get very high-quality close-up shots.

Passion famously opened with a nude scene.  The audience got to see the characters Giorgio and Clara in bed making love, with no attempt to cover up the woman's breasts with one of those odd, L-shaped sheets that seem only to exist on network television. For the filmed version, however, up comes the sheet, sparing the viewer the sight of Marin Mazzie's breasts. Mazzie went on to greater fame, playing Mother in Ragtime and appearing in a revival of Kiss Me Kate, but she was also stunning in Passion.

The more interesting part in the show, however, is Fosca, a role originated by Donna Murphy. I loved her when I first saw her in Passion, and was greatly impressed by her range when I later saw her in Wonderful Town. (Younger fans probably know her as the voice of Mother Gothel in Tangled.) The production also boasted Sondheim veteran Tom Aldridge, who had previously played the Narrator and Mysterious Old Man in the original production of Into the Woods. In Passion he plays a doctor who induces Giorgio to take an interest in the sickly Fosca, with some disastrous results.

Sondheim wanted to write the piece after seeing the Italian film Passione d'amore directed by Ettore Scola. The film was itself based on an 1869 novel called Fosca by the Gothic writer Iginio Ugo Tarchetti. The character of Fosca is remarkable both in how repulsive she is and how fascinating at the same time. In a pivotal scene, she shows up on a train in which Giorgio is trying to flee from her. I remember how when I saw the play on Broadway, she asked Giorgio if he wanted her to leave his compartment on the train, and the man behind me uttered under his breath, "YES."

It's the play's ability to elicit that kind of gut-level reaction that makes me really admire the piece. The good news is, a whole new generation is getting to experience it now, thanks to the availability of the filmed version.

Sunday in the Park with George

I’ve been visiting friends in Pittsburgh, and last night I had the opportunity to see Front Porch Theatricals’ production of Sunday in the Park with George at the New Hazlett Center for Performing Arts.

The New Hazlett doesn’t have the fly space to make set pieces entirely disappear like in the original production of this classic musical. The theatre also didn’t have the high-resolution projections used for technical wizardry in the more recent Broadway revival. However, director Rob James came up with some creative solutions to perform theatrical magic with the resources he had available.

Much of the credit probably belongs to scenic designer Johnmichael Bohach. In his versatile set, the tree frequently alluded to in the first act becomes part of the 20th-century art installation in the second before transforming back into a tree, all with help from an illuminating lighting design provided by Forrest Trimble. The costumes designed by Michelle Nowakowski elegantly evoke both the 1880s and the 1980s without feeling forced. (This was a welcome change from the Broadway revival which telegraphed the 1980s rather than portraying them authentically.)

All in all, I actually preferred this production to the Broadway revival with all its technical marvels. Saige Smith found a way to play Dot with charm and originality, but without constantly reminding us of Bernadette Peters, who not only originated the role but made it almost fully her own. Aaron Galligan-Stierle gave a colorful performance as George, making the artist fascinating to watch even as he makes questionable choices.

Stephen Sondheim deservedly receives credit for his magnificent music and lyrics in the piece, but James Lapine’s book is also a model for dialogue that’s both deeply emotional and surprisingly economical. Just a few lines can make a character come to life when played by a skilled actor, as Ben Nadler showed with the small role of Dennis, and Adelyne Anderson showed with the even smaller role of Elaine.

This production is running until August 24th. Many performances are selling out, so see it if you can. It’s a reminder that some of the best theatre in America is being done far outside of New York City.

Into the Woods

When I was younger, I saw a touring production of Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. I adored the show and bought the cast album on audio cassette. I listened to it so much, I eventually wore out the tape. I later got another copy. I think I wore out that one, too.

So it's safe to say that I'm fairly familiar with the music in the show. I missed the sold-out run at Encores, but the play is on Broadway again, this time at the St. James Theatre, so of course I had to go. The production is minimalistic, as one would expect for a transfer from an Encores reading, so the real draw for the production is the dream-team cast.

Last night I saw understudies Delphi Borich and Paul Kreppel as Little Red Ridinghood and the Narrator. Both were brilliant, so I've no complaints there. Nor can I complain about other replacement cast members who have now taken over for the performers who opened the show this summer. Patina Miller was no doubt an excellent Witch, but I got to see Joaquina Kalukango, who I loved in Paradise Square.

Sara Bareilles opened as the Baker's Wife, but that role is currently being played by Stephanie J. Block, one of the hardest-working performers on Broadway and my favorite singer in the show. She plays opposite Brian d'Arcy James, who was brilliant in Something Rotten, but was somewhat outshone last night by Block, whose emotional interpretation of songs like "Moments in the Woods" made him seem almost cold by comparison.

The opening-night cast for this production included Phillipa Soo as Cinderella. She was brilliant both in The Great Comet of 1812 and Hamilton, so I'm sorry I missed her, but I was glad I got to see Denée Benton in the role instead. (Benton also performed the part for Encores.) This isn't the first time Benton and Soo have swapped a role. After Soo originated the role of Natasha in Great Comet off-Broadway, Benton stepped in as the new Natasha in the Broadway version. I missed her when I saw the show on Broadway, as the understudy went on that night, so this was my first time seeing Benton live on stage.

Last night's audience went wild for the the two princes, played by Gavin Creel and Joshua Henry. They've been with the show since its opening night, as have been Sondheim veterans Annie Golden and Nancy Opal, who played Cinderella's Mother and Stepmother respectively. Making their Broadway debuts with the opening of this production were Cole Thompson as Jack and Alysia Velez as Rapunzel. They're still with the show as well, and both performed admirably, but the star is really Jack's cow, Milky White, a magnificent puppet operated by Kennedy Kanagawa.

Lear deBessonet, who has staged some dreamy Shakespeare in Central Park, directed the production. If you want to see it, Into the Woods is still playing until January 8th.

Best Productions of 2021

New York City theatre isn't completely back yet, especially with omicron scares cancelling shows right and left, but at least things are better than last year, when I had to write a list of the top 10 shows I did NOT get to see.

So now I'm back to my annual tradition of coming up with a list of the top shows I saw that opened this year in New York City. Obviously, my own adaptation of A Christmas Carol doesn't count, since it was in Trenton, and neither do virtual performances, though some of them were quite fun.

Here are my picks, in reverse order:

10. The Alcestiad - Magis Theatre Company lived up to its name with this magical outdoor production on Roosevelt Island this summer. Thornton Wilder's take on a Greek myth involving death and plague came alive with the ruins of a smallpox hospital providing the backdrop. It was a joy to behold.

9. King Lear - New York Classical Theatre decided to do William Shakespeare's most depressing tragedy this year, but with the happy ending rewritten by Nahum Tate. Once again, the outdoor setting added to the experience, though it also meant that my first two attempts to see the show were cancelled due to rain. The third time was a charm, and this show was nothing if not charming.

8. The Book of Moron - Robert Dubac's one-man show was closer to a stand-up comedy routine than your typical Off-Broadway fare, but it rose beyond simple jokes to become an engaging and thought-provoking piece of theatre. This was in part due to flawless direction by comedy legend Garry Shandling and a surprisingly innovative set designed by Melissa Burkhardt Moore. I'm glad I saw it.

7. Trouble in Mind - Alice Childress at last made it (posthumously) to Broadway with Roundabout's production of her most famous play, a backstage drama about actors rehearsing a dreadful script by a conveniently absent playwright. During intermission, I overheard one audience member say, "Chuck Cooper makes everything he's in even better." How true! Cooper's performance in the play is not to be missed, so if you haven't seen it yet, get your tickets. It's still playing, but only through January 9th!

6. Merry Wives - Jocelyn Bioh's adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor was the Public Theater's sole offering at the Delacorte this summer, but it was worth seeing, if for no reason other than Jacob Ming-Trent, who played the larger-than-life character of Falstaff. Bioh appropriately adjusted the text to make Shakespeare's comedy of rural life in England work when reset among African immigrants in contemporary Harlem. The sight of Ming-Trent as an overgrown man-child playing video games was not only a witty sight gag--it was amazingly appropriate for the character of Sir John Falstaff.

5. Flying Over Sunset - When James Lapine has a new play, it's usually worth seeing, and when it's got music by Tom Kitt and lyrics by Michael Korie, you definitely want to be there. This imagined meeting of Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce, and Carey Grant at a rented Malibu beach house where they go on LSD trips together delivers both soaring melodies and beautiful stage pictures. It also features innovative choreography by tap master Michelle Dorrance. Harry Hadden-Paton, Carmen Cusack, and Tony Yazbeck all provide stellar performances that go beyond mere impressions of celebrities. This show is still playing at Lincoln Center, so get your tickets while you can!

4. Mrs. Warren's Profession - Gingold Theatrical Group scored again with their production of Bernard Shaw's devastating comedy about capitalism and prostitution, which turn out to be pretty much the same thing in this play. Karen Ziemba was able to shine in the title role, even when sharing the stage with other acting stalwarts like Raphael Nash Thompson and Robert Cuccioli. The more challenging roles in the play, however, go to the younger performers playing Vivie and Frank. Nicole King made her Off-Broadway debut as Vivie Warren, a "New Woman" whose enigmatic intelligence Shaw explored but thankfully never tried to solve. She was complimented by David Lee Huynh as Vivie's caddish love interest, Frank. Director David Staller made certain this production was just as charming as GTG's 2019 offering, Caesar and Cleopatra.

3. The Disciple - Thirdwing is a relative newcomer to NYC theatre. Their productions--which are sometimes live, sometimes virtual, and sometimes both--can be hit or miss. The Female Genius, a series of filmed shorts by Rachel Carey, provided the basis for this full-length play about author and philosopher Ayn Rand and her devoted much younger lover, Nathaniel Branden. Unlike some other plays about sexual exploitation by the famous and powerful, The Disciple finds nuance, in part by flipping traditional gender politics on their head, and showing a woman who is willing to be just as selfish and brutal as any man. Maja Wampuszyc is perfect as Rand, and Cameron Darwin Bossert plays Branden with both humanity and humor. Alas, the in-person show came and went without much fanfare, but fortunately, you can still see a filmed scene from it streamed through Thirdwing's website.

2. The Alchemist - The funniest new play of 2021 was Ben Jonson's old Jacobean comedy The Alchemist, made new again in a brilliant adaptation by contemporary dramatist Jeffrey Hatcher. Red Bull Theater Company, which has been remarkably active online during the pandemic, thankfully returned to the live stage with this side-splitting production directed by Jesse Berger. The cast featured Jacob Ming-Trent--who was so hilarious as Falstaff in this summer's Merry Wives--as well as Manoel Feliciano, Reg Rogers, Teresa Avia Lim, Nathan Christopher, Carson Elrod, Allen Tedder, Louis Mustillo, and Jennifer Sanchez (who literally shimmered in a costume designed by Tilly Grimes). Jonson's play is hysterical, but its cast of 12 (plus assorted extras) makes it difficult to produce for a professional company. Hatcher did a great job getting to the core of the humor while also reducing the cast size and making the play feel topical for those of us living through the plague of the 21st century.

1. The Streets of New York - Of all the New York companies that took their work to the virtual world to keep theatre alive during the pandemic, none were more prolific and innovative than Irish Repertory Theatre, which experimented boldly with the online format, and frequently with great success. I intensely looked forward to their return to the live stage, though, and was greatly pleased when they announced that they would be performing Dion Boucicault's The Streets of New York, especially after they had done such a magnificent revival of the same author's comedy London Assurance. What I was not expecting was for the show to be a musical! Director Charlotte Moore provided a number of delightful songs to transform Boucicault's classic melodrama into a holiday treat. She couldn't have done it, however, without a delightful cast that includes Ben Jacoby, David Hess, Justin Keyes, Jordan Tyson, Ryan Vona, Delaney Westfall, and (most winningly) Amanda Jane Cooper. It's still playing until January 30th, so be sure to grab tickets.

That's my list! Honorable mentions go to Blackbird, Radium Girls, and The Overcoat. Let's hope the virus recedes soon, and we can have a more robust season in 2022!

Flying Over Sunset

Before our entire society shut down in 2020, I had been looking forward to seeing James Lapine's new musical Flying Over Sunset.

I mean Lapine, who had collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Passion had a new musical? Sign me up!

With music by Tom Kitt, who wrote Next to Normal? Of course I'm coming. You don't have to tell me what it's about! Wait, it's about Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce, and Carey Grant on an acid trip? Seriously? As they say, take my money, already!

Huxley has been a fascination of mine ever since I read Brave New World when I was in high school. I even wrote a play called The Four Doctors Huxley that was produced by a theatre in Jersey City. As for Luce, it's hard not to admire the technical brilliance of her play The Women, even if her right-wing politics tended to be revolting. And Grant? Who doesn't love Carey Grant, perhaps the greatest leading man Hollywood ever produced?

Well, the collapse of civilization as we knew it prevented the show from opening in 2020, but it's back now at Lincoln Center, and I finally got a chance to see it last night. The audience was sparse, due to the twin disasters of an omicron spike and bad reviews, but I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Choreographer Michelle Dorrance provides percussive movements that supplement Kitt's score, and the set by Beowulf Boritt works magic on stage.

What we're really here to see, though, is this trio of celebrities--so very different, yet so alike in many ways--interact with each other while tripping on a psychedelic drug. The problem is, people on psychedelic drugs don't necessarily interact. The journeys they go on are journeys within, which doesn't always lend itself to interpersonal connections. This means that Flying Over Sunset is about three individuals, not about finding community, which might make it an appropriate show for an individualistic society where community is considered suspect unless modified by the word online.

The first act in fact presents our three protagonists separately. First we meet Huxley, played by Harry Hadden-Paton, experiencing LSD for the first time while on a mundane trip to an L.A. drug store. He spots an art book being displayed alongside a plethora of other objects on sale, and his gaze at Botticelli's Judith with the Head of Holofernes becomes the operatic musical number "Bella Donna Di Agonia." Instead of dropping us immediately into a surreal hallucination, the show slowly builds to stranger and stranger visions, then gradually brings us back, much like the effects of a drug that build, peak, and fade.

Grant is the next to trip, taking the drug in a psychiatrist's office at the behest of his wife, Betsy Drake. This provides Dorrance with the opportunity to choreograph her most compelling tap number of the show, "Funny Money," in which Grant, played by Tony Yazbeck, dances with his younger self, played by Atticus Ware. Yazbeck has a particular challenge, playing the iconic Grant, since we all know the face of the man he is playing, but his dancing chops encourage us to suspend our disbelief and indulge in the fantasy. In real life, Grant famously described an acid trip he once had in which he imagined he was a giant penis launching into space. Naturally, the musical later stages this moment in the song "Rocket Ship."

The real star of the show, though, is Carmen Cusack, who plays Luce. We see Luce, by then a former congresswoman as well as the former ambassador to Italy, as she faces hearings in the U.S. Senate to be confirmed as ambassador to Brazil. No longer exuding the confidence she once had, though, Luce turns down the ambassadorship. At her estate in Connecticut, she takes LSD under the guidance of the writer and guru Gerald Heard (played by Robert Sella) and stops the show with her rendition of the title song "Flying Over Sunset."

At the end of the first act, the three protagonists meet up at the legendary Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles and decide to have an experience together at Luce's Malibu beach house. It is there, in a psychedelic garden, that Luce encounters her dead mother and daughter, both in "heaven" but different heavens, since her virginal daughter and not-so-virginal mother could never occupy the same astral plane in Luce's mind.

Flying Over Sunset, for all its pyrotechnics, is ultimately a quiet, simple show, about simple moments rather than grand gestures. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the moments of true connection between the characters happen only after the effects of LSD have abated. In our own world, fragmented and isolated by politics, disease, and other traumas, those moments of connection are more important than ever.

Spelling Bee in A-S-T-O-R-I-A

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is one of those delightful shows that you just can't see too many times, which is why when I found out that the Astoria Performing Arts Center would be doing the show in Queens, directed by the incomparable Dev Bondarin, I knew I wanted to go.

What I wasn't prepared for, though, was that the play would be even more affecting than it was on Broadway. It isn't that the multiple-Tony-Award-winning production wasn't brilliantly directed by James Lapine when it played at Circle in the Square. It was. Somehow, however, what APAC has managed to do with the piece in a small venue in Queens is truly magical.

Part of the magic is the space. The play takes place in a gymnasium, and APAC's theater really is in a converted gymnasium, which had to be marginally less converted for this production. That didn't mean the company skimped on the set, though, as Tim McMath's set design definitely works some theatrical magic in the second act. Still, the small, intimate setting does a lot to bring home the message of the play.

As do the performers! While all of them are professionals (and most of them Equity members), none of the actors have struck gold on Broadway (yet). Lindsie VanWinkle, who memorably played Eliza Poe in Nevermore Off-Broadway, gives a stand-out performance as spelling bee host Rona Lisa Peretti. She is accompanied by Matt Welsh (seen last year in APAC's Merrily We Roll Along) as Vice Principal Douglas Panch, an assistant administrator in need of anger-management training. Billy Lowrimore also has some hysterical moments at Mitch Mahoney, the "Comfort Counselor" doing community service.

It is the spellers, though, that really break your heart. There's Chip (Stephen Mark), who painfully learns how unfair life can be, the home-schooled Leaf (Lee Slobotkin), who is thrilled just to participate, the overachiever Marcy (Emily Borromeo), who discovers the joy of not living up to expectations, the precocious Logainne (Heslens Estevez), who is president of the LGBT-Straight Alliance at her elementary school, the shy Olive (Becca Andrews), who waits patiently for her absent father to finally arrive, and the magic-footed William (Patrick Halley), who gradually learns to care for a world that never cared much for him.

All of the actors are people to watch in the future. But why wait until then? Head out to see them now in an intimate space in Astoria. APAC's production is running until May 28th. For more information, go to:

Astoria Performing Arts Center