Paradise Square

The first time I tried to see Paradise Square on Broadway, I received an e-mail the afternoon before the performance. The show had been suspended due to Covid protocols, and my money would be refunded.

It was disappointing, to say the least, especially since while Broadway has been taking public health measures extremely seriously, others in our society have been doing just the opposite. It seems no matter how responsible we try to be, someone else's irresponsibility always ends up ruining things for everyone.

Interestingly enough, the same is true for the world of Paradise Square, which I finally got to see last night. The main characters in the play go out of their way to show compassion, love indiscriminately, and build community, but in the end, others motivated by selfishness, hatred, and greed just burn it all down.

Set in the old Five Points neighborhood during the U.S. Civil War and the New York City draft riots, Paradise Square engages with an important moment in the history of this city and of our nation. It was originally conceived by Larry Kirwan, whose play Hard Times told the same story in an Off-Off-Broadway production in 2012.

As former frontman for the rock band Black 47, Kirwan is no stranger to fame, but he is dwarfed by some of the other names in the artistic team, including director Moises Kaufman (perhaps best known for The Laramie Project) and choreographer Bill T. Jones (Fela!, Spring Awakening, etc., etc., etc.) who are given top billing. The biggest name in the show, though, is Stephen Foster, the 19th-century composer whose songs are adapted for the musical's score.

Jason Howland is credited with providing the music, and Nathan Tysen and Masi Asare with the lyrics, but just as Foster borrowed from and adapted numerous traditional ditties, Paradise Square borrows and adapts heavily from Foster, who even appears as a character in the play. Ironically, Foster is accused in the second act of appropriating other people's music for his own purposes, which is precisely what Paradise Square does as well.

The musical quotes briefly from Foster's "Old Folks at Home" before going into an extended sequence of his hit "Camptown Races." Later, Foster's song "Gentle Annie" is applied to the character of Annie Lewis, played by Chilina Kennedy. The song "Why Should I Die in Springtime" draws upon Foster's "I Would Not Die in Springtime" and "I'd Be a Soldier" reimagines another Foster Song, "I'll Be a Soldier." My favorite song in the show, though, is Foster's "Angelina Baker" (sometimes known as "Angeline the Baker"), which gets reprised twice.

This isn't to say that all of the music is based on Stephen Foster. Toward the end of the show, Joaquina Kalukango brings down the house as the character Nelly O'Brien, singing "Let It Burn." If this typical Broadway showstopper is based on anything from the 19th century, I missed what it was. In any case, Kalukango performs it brilliantly, and it's perfect for the moment it provides.

If you get a chance to see Paradise Square on Broadway, I heartily recommend it. Though set in 1863, it is quite timely for our current political moment in 2022.

The Time's Plague

Last night I finally saw Sam Gold's production of King Lear starring theatre legend Glenda Jackson. One might think that the defining issue of this production would be the casting of a female Lear, but that was not the case. Not by a long shot.

Sure, Jackson is undeniably female in appearance, as is Jayne Houdyshell, who plays the Earl of Gloucester. However, both characters wear male attire and are referred to as "he" throughout the piece. Similarly, the Fool is played by Ruth Wilson, who also portrays Cordelia, but in all three cases we quickly accept the characters as male, regardless of voice or appearance.

No, Sam Gold, who has caused previous stirs on Broadway directing such plays as Fun Home and A Doll's House, Part 2, has made gender-bending one of the less remarkable aspects of this production. Perhaps the most remarkable, for good or ill, surrounds the use of Russell Harvard to play the Duke of Cornwall as deaf, with Michael Arden playing the "Aide to Cornwall" who serves as an interpreter, providing sign language for the Duke and translating the Duke's signing into spoken English.

Notice that the Aide is interpreting for the Duke, not for the audience. While many shows these days offer interpreted performances for the deaf and advertise them on their websites, that does not seem to be the case with King Lear. If the production does offer interpreted performances, the producers seem to have kept them a secret. And what a great opportunity that could have been! Deaf audience members could have come to see King Lear with a deaf performer playing Cornwall and with much of the dialogue interpreted from the center of the stage, not just from one or two interpreters at the edge of the action.

Instead of providing accessibility for the deaf, the Broadway production provides the illusion of accessibility, and all for the benefit of hearing audiences who get to pat themselves on the back and imagine themselves as open-minded and inclusive while they are actually continuing to shut out deaf audience members. At worst, the casting of Harvard (an actor who according to his Wikipedia biography has residual hearing but identifies as deaf) has uncomfortable echoes of staging practices in Shakespeare's own time of using physically or mentally disabled performers for the entertainment of "normal" audiences.

Readers of this blog know I have little patience for theatre artists who trumpet their own horn about accessibility while hypocritically producing ridiculously inaccessible pieces of garbage. If producers want to truly put on shows accessible for the deaf, we know how to do it. A beautiful example of such a show was the Deaf West production of Spring Awakening, which not only had Harvard in the cast, but was actually directed by Arden, who plays Cornwall's Aide in King Lear. Clearly, these two champions of inclusive theatre were on board with Gold's concept, but then why couldn't the producers have made the performances accessible to deaf audiences--at least at select shows they could have advertised on the play's website?

While still inaccessible for deaf audiences, the performance was arguably made accessible for a deaf actor, but that position is rendered ridiculous by the fact that Harvard also plays the minor role of Curan (though he is not credited as such) and in that role vocalizes his lines without a trace of an accent. (The same could not be said of Cornwall's wife Regan, played by Irish actress Aisling O'Sullivan, whose accent was nearly unintelligible to my American ears.) Harvard is talented enough that he could have appeared on stage as Cornwall, speaking all of his lines and never needing a translator. Thus, the use of signing had nothing to do with accessibility in this case, and everything to do with creating a spectacle for hearing audiences.

Now that we have dispensed with the idea that the use of signing had the slightest thing to do with accessibility (unless there were some secret, unadvertised performances that provided additional interpretation for deaf audience members) we can proceed to judge it as spectacle. Though the production appears to have completely shunned actual deaf audience members, was its appropriation of deaf culture for a hearing audience at least dramatically effective? The answer is--for the most part--yes, it was. Shakespeare fans know that Cornwall has a loyal servant who refuses to stand idly by while the Duke blinds the Earl of Gloucester, and with the Aide's presence in every scene involving Cornwall, it was not difficult to guess who that loyal servant would be.

My big reservation artistically involves Harvard's dual role as Cornwall and Curan. There were plenty of people in the ensemble who could have played that minor role, but instead Harvard played it, seemingly in the exact same costume, only instead of wearing the kilt he wore as Cornwall, wearing trousers as Curan. Presumably, the audience was supposed to know that he was a different character because he wasn't signing and wasn't in a kilt, but the rest of his costume was the same, and Harvard's beard makes him unmistakable.

Later, when Cornwall is angry, he does vocalize some lines, but with a heavy accent that emphasizes the character's deafness. After he dispatches his Aide, he vocalizes many if not all of his lines. (This is again done for the audience. The production has already established that Cornwall's wife is fluent in sign language.) While his first few vocalized lines come out as impassioned roars, by the end of the scene, he seems to have dropped his accent entirely and is speaking quite clearly, in spite of the character having just received a mortal wound.

Overall, the concept could have worked, but Gold's direction muddies it. I felt the same way about the doubling of Cordelia and the Fool. Many Shakespeare scholars believe these two parts were written to be performed by the same actor, so the double casting makes sense. However, Gold's staging then implies that the Fool is actually Cordelia in disguise... or is he? The production seems to want to have it both ways, just like it wants to appear to be inclusive of deaf audiences even while it rejects their actual presence.

While I have mixed feelings about Wilson's Cordelia, her Fool was to me the heart and soul of the show. It is the job of the Fool to point out the obvious, and Wilson's Fool pointed out the parallels of a story about a mad king with power-crazed yet incompetent hangers-on and our country's present political situation. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Prophesy of Merlin:

     When usurers tell their gold i' th' field,

     And bawds and whores do churches build,

     Then shall the realm of Albion

     Come to great confusion...

This production substitutes "this realm" for "the realm of Albion" with a special allusion to the Stars and Stripes, as if we needed it. As Gloucester says, "'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind."

Hadestown

Last night I saw Anais Mitchell's Hadestown at New York Theatre Workshop. The play gets off to somewhat of a slow start, but it builds to become an emotionally moving reimagining of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.

Rachel Chavkin, who previously directed Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, helms this production, starring Damon Daunno and Nabiyah Be as the ill-fated lovers. And just so we know they're ill-fated, the fates themselves appear on stage, as a trio of women who provide the role of the chorus.

The burly, bearded Chris Sullivan seems on odd choice to play the god Hermes, but he is surprisingly effective as the show's narrator, guiding us down into the underworld and back again. Make no mistake about it, though--the heart of this show is the immortal power couple of hell, Hades (played by Patrick Page) and Persephone (played by Amber Gray).

I loved Page as the titular king in The Public Theatre's production of Cymbeline in Central Park, and it was great to see him again on stage in the recent revival of Spring Awakening. While I had heard him sing before, never had I heard him like this, dipping down into the lower reaches of a gravelly bass voice. His rendition of "Why We Build the Wall" is nightmarish, and when he later softens at the song of Orpheus, the world itself seems to be changing.

Having a song that can make stones weep is a tall order, but Daunno's trilling falsetto voice works on you like nothing you're likely to hear in a traditional Broadway score. And as Persephone, the magnificent Gray champions the young lovers, both during her spring revels above the earth and throughout her marital strife with Hades below. Gray, who was a replacement for the role of Helene in the original production of The Great Comet, will be reprising that part on Broadway this fall.

But don't wait until then to see her! Hadestown is playing until the end of the month. Catch it while you can!

Allegiance

Last night, I saw Allegiance, the new Broadway musical that tells the story of the Japanese internment camps during World War II. As the play shows, these camps sometimes split apart families, as some people resisted the government on principle, and others went off to fight in the Japanese-American 442nd Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army.

It's difficult for me to imagine someone having the U.S. government take away everything they have and force their entire family behind barbed wire, and then that person turning around and saying, "I love America so much I'm willing to fight for it." The men who did so both honor the American democratic system and perpetually shame it for its abominable failures. Much like the African-American regiments during World War II, the 442nd was composed of men fighting for a country that treated them as second-class citizens.

Allegiance honors such men, but it also recognizes the heroism of those who chose not to go. In the play, Sammy Kimura (played by Telly Leung) tries to enlist after Pearl Harbor, is rejected because he is Japanese, and then gets sent off to an internment camp in Wyoming. In spite of the barbaric (and blatantly unconstitutional) treatment of his family, he still longs to serve, and when the 442nd is created, he jumps at the chance to serve. Meanwhile, however, his father (played by Christopheren Nomura) refuses to swear allegiance to the U.S. government on principal, and is shipped off for even harsher treatment. Both men are stubborn in their own ways, but both earn our respect.

Perhaps even more interesting is the character of Frankie Suzuki (played by Michael K. Lee) who organizes resistance to the draft after the government decides to start forcing internees to join the military. Frankie and company have the best song in the show, "Paradise," which comments bitterly on government's assertions that the camps are safe, clean, and humane. The polar opposite of Frankie is Mike Masaoka (played by Greg Watanabe), the spokesman for the Japanese American Citizens League. Historically, Masaoka and the JACL cooperated with the government in hopes that the internment process would be as humane as possible. Understandably, Masaoka became the focus of a great deal of criticism, but Allegiance portrays him, too, trying to do the right thing as best he can.

One of the show's two biggest stars is George Takei, who plays an older Sam Kimura, as well as that character's grandfather, Ojii-chan. The Star Trek actor, who was himself interned in the camps as a young boy, has been a major force in bringing the show to Broadway. The other big star is Lea Salonga, who plays Kei, Sammy's big sister who falls in love with the anti-authoritarian Frankie. Best known as the original Kim in Miss Saigon, Salonga has an amazing voice that composer Jay Kuo's music tries to highlight.

Sometimes the patriotic thing to do is fight, and sometimes it is to refuse. Allegiance makes us consider whether both sides might indeed be right. The play tells an important American story, and in a Broadway season already populated by other great shows like Hamilton and Spring Awakening, it deserves to be seen.

Spring Awakening

Last night, I saw Deaf West's wonderful production of Spring Awakening. While I was excited to see this revival, the original musical opened on Broadway less than a decade ago. This begged the question: Why is Deaf West doing this play now?

I found my question answered as soon as I opened the Playbill and found this director's note:

In 1891, Frank Wedekind's highly controversial and socially indicting play, Fruhlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), was published in Germany and subsequently banned. Eleven years prior, the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf (known as the Milan Conference) passed a resolution banning sign language in schools across Europe and the United States, declaring Oralism (lip reading, speech and mimicking mouth shapes) superior. The term given to Deaf students unable to succeed with the abusive oral method was "Failure," the same word that sends young Moritz Stiefel down his destructive path. 

Deaf West's production makes Spring Awakening not just about the educational system of a hundred years ago or so, but specifically about the educational system for the Deaf at that time. Moritz, generally considered the most sympathetic character in the play, is played by a Deaf actor (Daniel N. Durant) and voiced by a hearing actor (Alex Boniello) who also plays guitar. This pairing of two different performers is used for a number of parts, though other roles, such as the central figure of Melchior (Austin P. McKenzie), are played by actors who both speak and sign.

While I was prepared for that, I was not prepared for the brilliant use of supertitles in the production. We first get a taste of the supertitles during a scene where the male students are getting a Latin lesson. At first, Latin appears on a blackboard, with hearing students dutifully reciting it and Deaf students trying to spell it out. Quickly, however, we get the supertitles used in even more creative ways. Best of all, they are used for the benefit of both Deaf and hearing audiences. Sometimes, an actor might speak without signing, but the words will appear in a projection. Other times, an actor will sign without a spoken voice, but with supertitles for those who don't know ASL.

As a hearing member of the audience, I greatly appreciated the moments when the Deaf actors were allowed to perform without being voiced (and the voice actors had some pretty incredible pipes, so that's saying something). In the first act, Moritz has a scene with his father (Russell Harvard) that is performed nearly entirely in silence. The contrast with the very loud rock score creates an added intensity that is perfect for the moment. Even more powerful is the moment in Act II when Wendla (Sandra Mae Frank), who is normally voiced by musician Katie Boeck, vocalizes for herself as she confronts her mother.

The musical version of Spring Awakening takes liberties with Wedekind's original text, including changing the ending, but while this is a very different show from the play, it succeeds on its own merits. The songs by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater (with frequently indecent lyrics) hit just the right tone for certain moments.

This revival also features some incredibly gifted performers, including Marlee Matlin, Camryn Manheim, and Patrick Page (who was brilliant in this summer's production of Cymbeline), as well as some younger performers to watch for in the future, including Krysta Rodriguez and Ali Stroker.

If you want to see the show, hurry, since it's a limited run ending January 24. You can get more information here:

Spring Awakening

Thoughts on Wedekind

In my last post, I mentioned that Carl Sternheim married Frank Wedekind's daughter Pamela. Literally, he was the older playwright's son-in-law. Spiritually, Sternheim also saw himself as the artistic son of Wedekind.

Well, Frank Wedekind, it so happens, ran off with August Strindberg's second wife, Frida Uhl. Literally, he slept with Strindberg's wife. By extension, we might say that Wedekind took Strindberg's artistic legacy, grabbed it, ran off with it to the nearest hotel room, and....

Okay, it's not a perfect metaphor, but Strindberg's ideas do seem to come back in the plays of Wedekind in a new and rougher form. Strindberg's frank discussion of sexuality, his problematic view of male-female relations, his testing of the limits of patriarchal authority, all these return in Spring Awakening, Earth Spirit, and Pandora's Box. With Wedekind, however, caution is thrown to the wind, and the drama is more raw, exciting, and for many people (perhaps even most), downright offensive. (Or does the average theatre-goer think it's perfectly acceptable to portray a circle-jerk onstage?)

After deciding to drop out of law school, Wedekind had an argument with his father in which he physically struck the old man, an act of rebellion against the older generation that the playwright never quite left. Still, when Spring Awakening premiered in Berlin in 1906, Wedekind literally put himself onstage as a representative of the older generation, playing the Masked Man.

Who was that Masked Man? Well, when Melchior, the protagonist in Spring Awakening, asks that very question, the man responds, "That will become clear." He makes it clear he is not Melchior's father, but that he wants the boy to get out of the graveyard, escaping a potential death. If Melchior is a semi-autobiographical character, the Masked Man, played by the author himself, might be seen as an adult version of Melchior, warning his younger self away from a possible suicide.

The stranger's warning, that suicide will seem ridiculous to Melchior once he has a warm dinner under his belt, is the advice of an adult. It is an instruction given by someone no longer subject to the vast and violent emotions of adolescence. It works, however, and it works perhaps because it does not come from the father. Like Christian in Sternheim's The Snob, Melchior can become a truly self-made man. His salvation comes not from his society, but from the moral courage he finds within himself.