50th Anniversary of 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'

Theatre critic Bob Mondello noted an anniversary today on NPR's All Things Considered:

Fifty years ago Thursday [March 24], Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway. The Tennessee Williams drama was a big hit in 1955, but the playwright didn't like the way Elia Kazan framed his drama. It was Williams' last big stage hit.

The original cast of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof included Ben Gazzara as Brick, Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie, and Burl Ives as Big Daddy (who repeated the role in the movie). The first production played for 694 performances.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been revived three times on Broadway, in 1974 (160 performances), 1990 (149 performances), and 2004 (145 performances). The revivals tended to be star vehicles for the actresses playing Maggie. In 1974, it was Elizabeth Ashley; in 1990, Kathleen Turner; and in 2004, Ashley Judd. I find this strange, because the play is really about Brick and Big Daddy -- though the actors playing Big Daddy in the revivals have also been stars in their own right as character actors (Fred Gwynne in 1974, Charles Durning in 1990, and Ned Beatty last year).

Besides the 1958 film starring Paul Newman as Brick and Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie, there was a 1984 teleplay with Jessica Lange as Maggie, Tommie Lee Jones as Brick, Kim Stanley as Big Mama, and Rip Torn as Big Daddy. (Lange is currently starring on Broadway as Amanda Wingfield with Christian Slater, Josh Lucas, and Sarah Paulson in a revival of The Glass Menagerie that opened March 22.)

I have seen productions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof three times in recent years and have written two reviews. (I unfortunately failed to write a review of the 2002 production at Live Arts in Charlottesville.) Here is my review of the play as it was presented at the Arena Stage in Washington in 1998, in an essay that includes comments on two other plays about "family" relationships.

(This review appeared originally in The Metro Herald in September 1998.)

Twentieth Century Dysfunctions:
Plays by Beckett, Williams, and Freed
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Two mid-century classics and a new play with fin-de-siecle sensibility have recently opened on Washington stages. All three, for different reasons, deserve to be seen. All three provide both an evening's entertainment and considerable food for thought.

The three plays are Samuel Beckett's 1948 Waiting for Godot, at the Studio Theatre; Tennessee Williams' 1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, at the Arena Stage; and Amy Freed's 1998 Freedomland, at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.

Starting with the most recent first, Freedomland, which had its East Coast premiere at the Woolly Mammoth on September 19, is a hilarious comedy with a serious theme. It brings us into the lives of retired professor Noah Underfinger and his three adult children, Sigrid (a well-paid painter of clown portraits), Polly (a frustrated graduate student), and Seth (a brooding loner), during one weekend of unexpected reunion at Noah's rural home. Added to the mix are Noah's second wife, who is a therapist named Claude; Seth's pregnant (but not necessarily by him) girlfriend, Lori; and an unassuming art critic accompanying Sig, Titus.

Whether it is Amy Freed's spot-on dialogue or Howard Shalwitz's manic but controlled direction, something about this play brings out the best in each of the cast members. No one stands out because all are terrific. Rhea Seehorn, as Lori, creates a far more successful character here than she did in Signature Theatre's Shooting in Madrid last season, although her accent sometimes wobbles between southern trailer trash and Connecticut debutante. Jason Gilbert, as the outsider Titus, ranges from quiet observation to over-the-top Greek tragedy (quite literally -- this must be seen to be believed). Nancy Robinette is simply amazing as Claude, who has to be far more crazy than any of her patients on the therapist's couch. Deb Gottesman's Polly is talkative, neurotic, and funny. Christopher Lane, as Seth, provides an imposing physical presence. Kimberly Schraf's Sig, the most outwardly "successful" of the bunch, exposes her own demons. And Noah, played by John Dow, is philosophical, introspective, and "normal" in his own way -- at peace with himself despite the tumult around him.

Freedomland pokes fun at pretentious art criticism (and artists, for that matter), at "back to nature" fanatics, at the militia movement, at ridiculous dissertation topics, and at foolish psychotherapeutic practices -- to name just a few contemporary topics assailed by Amy Freed. Every arrow hits its target.

Moving back 43 years, a comparison of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Freedomland proves that Leo Tolstoy was right when he wrote in Anna Karenina that "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." At least in drama, this must be true. Conflict and dysfunction are critical to successful drama. Even so syrupy a family as The Brady Bunch has to have a conflict, no matter how trivial, in order to keep our attention for 23 minutes of situation comedy.

Granted, the problems of the Underfingers in Freedomland and Big Daddy's clan in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are much larger than the question of whether Marcia's new braces will keep her from going to the school dance. This may be why Tennessee Williams and Amy Freed are considered to be serious dramatists, despite the apparent humor of their plays, while Sherwood Schwartz and his writers are considered to be anything but.

All that aside, Arena's new artistic director, Molly Smith, has mounted a stunning production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Returning to the original script, as Williams intended it to be performed, without the changes thought necessary to make it more commercial by its first director, Elia Kazan, and without the bowdlerization of the movie made necessary by Hollywood's now-defunct (thankfully) production code, Smith has made an old and familiar play fresh and new.

The show has two stars, the lighting and sets by Pavel Dobrusky and a larger-than-life performance by Dion Anderson as Big Daddy (in a role that, a few years back, might have been performed by Arena's own Robert Prosky, who was in the audience on opening night, before Hollywood stole him away from us and cast him in such dreck as Veronica's Closet). Although he does not appear until more than halfway through the first act, Anderson's Big Daddy dominates this play just has he dominates his 28,000-acre plantation in the Mississippi Delta. In a role that could be both lugubrious and overbearing, Anderson performs with remarkable subtlety and nuance. Big Daddy is a detestable person, but Anderson humanizes him almost to the point of admiration.

To compliment Dobrusky and Anderson for their efforts should not diminish the contributions of others in the cast and production staff. Megan Gallagher slinks around with self-righteous anger (and greed) as Margaret ("Maggie the Cat") while her husband, Brick (Peter Hermann) drinks himself into a stupor over the guilt he feels because of a better-left-forgotten homosexual affair with his now-deceased best friend, Skipper (who also slept with Brick's wife, Maggie, in an effort to prove his masculinity, and later drank himself to death). Much of the first act is devoted to what is essentially a monologue in which Maggie muses about the brokenness of her marriage and inquires as to why her studly husband refuses to sleep with her. (Confused about the connections? This play may require chalkboard diagrams to understand them.)

Brick's older brother, Gooper, a corporate attorney who by all normal standards would be the "successful sibling," is played stolidly by Lawrence Redmond. Why does the family so admire the ne'er-do-well Brick while ignoring the substantial accomplishments of Gooper? This is so emphasized that Big Mama at one point even refers to Brick as her "only son." No wonder that Gooper's fecund wife, Mae (Sarah Marshall, with remarkable restraint and understatement) is so properly concerned about her family's place in Big Daddy's still-unwritten will. Unfortunately, this obvious question is never answered -- except to leave the audience with the sense that Big Daddy's family has a misplaced sense of values.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a shining beginning to a promising new season at the Arena Stage.

The last play in this trio has nothing to do with families, but it does address our common humanity and asks questions about the brotherhood of man.

Long before Jerry Seinfeld and friends brought their "show about nothing" to NBC, Samuel Beckett wrote the ultimate "show about nothing" for the stage. Waiting for Godot, in fact, begins with the classic line, "Nothing to be done," and, indeed, nothing really happens. There is action, yes; but is there conflict? There is humor and there is pathos, but there is no movement, at least not in the sense of forward or linear direction with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Things happen, but we cannot be sure what these things are. And, once we get into the minds of the protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, we cannot even be sure whether these things happened at all.

Waiting for Godot was originally conceived in minimalist terms, with four actors and a set consisting of nothing more than a barren tree. The set at the Studio Theatre by Russell Metheny is somewhat more complicated, but still pretty bare -- we are at a roadside, under a long-abandoned billboard, next to a pile of ashes. Old friends Vladimir and Estragon -- are they hoboes? slaves? escaped convicts? -- meet to discuss their (we soon learn) perpetual wait for the mysterious Godot, who may or may not rescue them from this oblivion. Godot must exist, because he sends messengers (a young boy played by Jonathan P. LeFlore) with word that he will come "tomorrow." But who is he?

In the course of this waiting, Vladimir (Thomas W. Jones II) and Estragon (Donald Griffin) encounter Pozzo (Michael Tolaydo, looking like a cross between Rod Steiger and Dennis Hopper) and his slave/servant/pet Lucky (Hugh Nees). Through these encounters, they begin to question their own existence and their relationships -- if any -- with other people.

Because Jones and Griffin are black and Tolaydo and Nees are white, it is possible to infer racial undertones in this production, ably directed by Joy Zinoman. But such an inference, or interpretation, is not necessary to understand either the play itself or these actors' rendering of it.

Waiting for Godot is the first in a series of plays celebrating each decade of the twentieth century, to be presented by the Studio Theatre over the next two seasons. It is a noble beginning to a fine effort.

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Sondheim at 75 (Part Seven)

This review originally appeared in The Metro Herald in August 2002:

Passion: The Thin Line Between Love and Obsession
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

In lesser hands, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1994 musical play, Passion, might have looked like this:

Setting: A suburban high school in the present day.

Characters: A homely, sickly freshman girl who has a crush on the captain of the basketball team, who is dating the head cheerleader.

Plot: Homely girl follows the basketball captain everywhere, sends him e-mail messages dozens of times a day. Jock complains to his cheerleader girlfriend, who starts to doubt his sanity. Homely girl, meanwhile, has recorded wholly imagined, lurid stories about her and the basketball captain in her diary, which is discovered by her father. Father takes diary to the basketball coach, who benches the captain, denying him the scholarship he desires to go to Duke. Cheerleader abandons him for a football player, he ends up in a backwater junior college, and homely girl finds happiness among her collection of hand-blown glass animals.

Luckily for us, this musical was written not by the creative team that gave us Grease but by the team that gave us Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods. Instead of a mediocre romp among the nightmarish social milieu of the modern American high school, we have a profound and an intense psychological drama made by and for adults.

It is this adult drama we have now at the Kennedy Center, directed by Eric Schaeffer and starring Judy Kuhn, Rebecca Luker, and Michael Cerveris. It is an astounding production that shatters conventions.

For some reason, it is said that even Sondheim fans dislike Passion. This is incredible. No, better, it is incroyable (the French say it with so much more, well, passion). Austere in its way, yet highly complex both musically and lyrically, its plot and its individual musical numbers are built on a foundation that defies expectations. Still, its characters are built on recognizable “types” that could, as indicated, be transplanted to another, more mundane setting with little difficulty. It has soaring melodies, intense emotions, comic relief, colorful costumes, a stylized yet stark and naturalistic set design. I have to ask: What’s not to like?

Yes, Passion is a challenging show. If you come to the theatre to see a musical with expectations of being merely entertained, this is not the show for you. There are no song hits to whistle on your way back to the lobby. But the words and the music will nag at you for hours and days after the final curtain.

In its essence, Passion is a play about how emotions—in particular, love—are beyond our control, certainly beyond our reason. The song "Loving You (is not a choice)" expresses this most directly.

In a nutshell, Giorgio (Cerveris) is a decorated army captain in Italy in the 1860s. He is having an affair with the married Clara (Luker), whose name translates as “clear.” Ordered to a remote provincial base, Giorgio encounters Fosca (Kuhn), whose name translates as “foggy” or “dark.” Fosca is gaunt, thin, pallid, and asocial, literally a bundle of exposed nerve endings. The cousin of the commanding officer, she is the object of jokes for the other officers. She also falls obsessively in love with Giorgio, who, being the outsider, has shown some polite attention to her. She follows him everywhere, demanding that he love her with the same intensity as she loves him. He rejects her advances but eventually, without full comprehension of why, he succumbs.

On the surface, this could look like a message of hope to the obsessives among us: If you just stalk hard enough, the object of your desire will come around. But such a message does not hold up, because Fosca’s obsession, well-intentioned as it might be, holds the destructive force of a tornado.

Passion is an intimate show. The auditorium at the Eisenhower Theatre may be too large for it. (A companion who sat in the balcony at the same performance that I attended described the show to me in such a way that it seemed we saw two entirely different shows. People around him tittered and giggled at the kabuki-like grand gestures that, from a distance, looked comic and overdrawn. Those of us in the orchestra, closer to the stage, observed the earnest intensity of the players. There was no irony apparent, and we laughed only at those moments that were meant to be funny.)

Passion focuses on the minds and lives of three people; the other characters exist only to provide explanations, color, or commentary on the central action.

Schaeffer has succeeded in balancing the three sides of this triangle. There is no “stand-out” performance because the three principals are so evenly matched. This is so even though the character of Fosca has the potential of dominating the show, just as she comes to dominate the lives of Giorgio and Clara. Schaeffer has been careful to adjust Passion’s textures so that Giorgio, Clara, and Fosca are more-or-less equals in the final execution.

One way in which he does this is through the lighting design of Howell Binkley, who uses pinpoint spots to keep our attention focused on the principals, but in such a way that we recognize them as atomized individuals, who wish to be part of a larger (societal?) whole but whose lives are ultimately isolated.

Similarly, Derek McLane’s set design gives us plenty of space and air. Light flows through it in distinct shafts. The spaciousness creates a sense of aridity, intensifying the isolation the characters feel. (There is so much symbolism in the lighting and set design that it might require a college seminar to discuss it all. Let’s start with the ruins of the castle on the hill. . . .)

Two hours without intermission might seem like a long time to spend watching a musical play with no dancing girls, no comic secondary romantic duo, no crashing chandeliers or Marine helicopters. But the time goes by imperceptibly, so caught up are we in the story.

Passion is one of the few shows in the Kennedy Center’s Sondheim Celebration that has not been nearly sold-out from the time the box office opened. Take advantage of this lapse of judgment by other theatre lovers and get tickets to the next available performance.

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Sondheim at 75 (Part Six)

This review appeared originally in The Metro Herald in August 2002:

Sondheim’s RSV:
Merrily We Roll Along at the Kennedy Center
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

In the early part of the last century, church leaders and theologians concluded that the venerable King James Version (KJV) of the Bible had become increasingly difficult to understand in the wake of changes in the English language since the sixteenth century. In addition, increased scholarship in biblical languages, archeology, history, and anthropology had provided insights necessary to produce a better translation from the original texts.

The effort to make such a translation resulted in what is now called the Revised Standard Version, or RSV. Never entirely accepted by some Christians, who continue to (literally) swear by the KJV, and not the only modern translation available (the New International Version, the Jerusalem Bible, and others have been published over the past 50 years), the RSV is, nonetheless, the standard reference Bible for scholars when they are not dealing in the original languages.

We have a similar situation facing us at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theatre, in the form of Merrily We Roll Along, a 1981 musical by Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and George Furth (book). While the essence of the show remains the same as it was at the time of the Broadway premiere, tinkering over the years has made it sufficiently different that we can call this production Merrily We Roll Along: The Revised Standard Version.

More than 20 years on, it is hard to believe that the original production of Merrily We Roll Along was met with catcalls and mass walkouts between the acts, leading to a meager Broadway run of just 16 performances (preceded by six weeks of previews).

So few of us were able to see that first production that most of our familiarity with the show comes from the original cast album, recorded the day after the show closed, with its Hirschfeld artwork and photo of Stephen Sondheim on the cover. That recording reveals a rich score of, ironically, some of Sondheim’s most hummable melodies. The OCR quickly became a cult favorite, overtaking Anyone Can Whistle (Sondheim’s nine-performance, 1964 Broadway flop) as the most popular such recording among Sondheim fans.

I have seen various productions of Merrily over the years, starting with the first college production at The Catholic University in 1982, then the Arena Stage version in 1990 (twice, at the beginning and end of the run), followed by the Donmar Warehouse in February 2001, to the version here. I am led to one conclusion: The original Broadway production had to have failed because of Harold Prince’s direction.

I say this because the show works well with the changes wrought by Sondheim and Furth, which began at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse in 1985 (under the direction of James Lapine) and continuing through the aforementioned Arena Stage production (under the direction of Douglas Wager and featuring, among others in the cast, Victor Garber and David Garrison), adding further refinements for the Leicester Haymarket production of 1992, to the current production at the Kennedy Center (now directed by Christopher Ashley). Yet it also works when the script is closer to the original text and the staging is closer to Prince’s original conception, such as the 2000–2001 Donmar Warehouse version (directed by Michael Grandage), which won multiple Olivier awards (the London equivalent of the Tony®), including “best musical” and acting awards for Samantha Spiro and Daniel Evans.

Now Sondheim (I’m told) didn’t like that Donmar production. That’s his privilege, after all, especially since Donmar did not incorporate most of the changes that he sees as improvements. For my money, however, I’ll take that version over the substantially rewritten one we have this summer at the Kennedy Center.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For those not familiar with Merrily We Roll Along, the musical is based on a 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. That play follows, in reverse chronological order, the lives and careers of two friends, a playwright and a painter, starting with them cynical and corrupt, ending with them starry-eyed and unsullied. Thematically, the idea of a protagonist whose ideals are corrupted over time can be found in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Allegro (1948), which—it is said—is the show that Sondheim has been trying to rewrite and perfect his entire career.

That property was brought to Sondheim by producer-director Harold Prince, whose producing partner, Robert Griffith, had been in the cast of the Kaufman and Hart play as a young actor and whose wife, Judy, thought it would be a good vehicle for a youthful cast of actors and singers (including, potentially, the Princes’ teenage daughter).

Converting Kaufman and Hart’s playwright and painter into a composer and lyricist, Sondheim and librettist Furth (who also wrote Company) followed the conceit closely. Sondheim wrote the score “backwards” so that, for instance, reprises of numbers are heard first, before the full song is “introduced” and echoes and motifs precede our hearing of the main themes on which they are based.

The play focuses on the relationship of three friends—Franklin Shepard, a composer who has become a successful movie producer (Michael Hayden); his lyricist, Charley Kringas, who has become a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (Raúl Esparza, fresh from Sunday in the Park with George); and Mary Flynn (Miriam Shor), a struggling writer who becomes a best-selling author (of one book) and then a drama critic who is also a fat lush (don’t blame me; it’s in the script).

One of the flaws in the current, “official” version of Merrily is that it drops the framing device of two high-school graduation ceremonies.

In the original version, Franklin Shepard, age 43, has returned to his alma mater, Lake Forest High School, to deliver a commencement speech. As he addresses the graduates, his life begins to unfold before him in a series of flashbacks. The play ends with Frank and Charley’s own graduation 25 years earlier. Musically, the anthem “The Hills of Tomorrow” (now excised from the score) was sung with loose dissonance in the first scene and more tightly harmonized in the last scene, signifying Frank’s (and the world’s) corruption. (It helps to note, too, that “The Hills of Tomorrow” is harmonically related to “Good Thing Going”—but more about that song later.)

The play now begins with the “transition” music of the title song (asking, “How did you get there from here?”), and we’re thrown immediately into a party scene in the Hollywood Hills, featuring “That Frank,” which has replaced “Rich and Happy.” The difference between the songs is that “Rich and Happy” portrays the Hollywood crowd as hypocritical sycophants, while in “That Frank” they are mere sycophants. A loss of texture, no?

The next two scenes from the original have been compressed—one might say streamlined—into one. Whereas originally Mary had tricked Charley and Frank into meeting at a tony Beverly Hills restaurant in 1976 (four years “after” the opening scene in 1980), in hopes that they might reconcile after a disastrous 1973 TV interview, that scene disappears and we are thrown directly into that TV studio.

The problem with eliminating that intervening scene is that it diminishes the process of Frank and Charley’s feud. It cheats us from seeing the long(er) deterioration of their relationship. By 1981, Charley should have been a distant memory, albeit a former “old friend,” of Frank’s, if they have not, indeed, seen or talked to each other in all that time (almost a decade).

That TV interview is key, in many ways. First of all, it gives us the best musical nervous breakdown seen on stage since “Rose’s Turn” in Gypsy. And Raúl Esparza sings “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” magnificently. He is a pressure-cooker at work, a contained explosion staying rooted to his chair, while a lesser performer might give in to the temptation of sputtering and flailing his arms. A fine line between genius and madness, indeed. (A footnote: Esparza’s understudy is Washington-based actor Jason Gilbert, who was born to play the role of Charley. Given his previous performances in Freedomland at Woolly Mammoth and Lady in the Dark at American Century Theatre, Gilbert has the acting chops necessary to pull off controlled mania. Not to wish Raúl Esparza ill, but we deserve a chance to see Jason Gilbert as Charley Kringas someday—soon, if possible.)

And yet—and yet, despite Frank’s violent reaction to Charley’s public outburst about their professional and personal relationship, eight years “later” there are no visible signs that Frank’s public life or professional career have been adversely affected. In fact, if anything has caused Frank to suffer, it has been his second wife, Gussie, the Yoko Ono who broke up the Frank-Charley-Mary little band.

Gussie (Emily Skinner) is unadulterated ambition—lustful, cynical from the get-go, selfish, and boorish. She knocks people down and climbs over them to get to the top.

Many have thought that Frank is the villain in this piece, because he allows himself to be corrupted. Frank is no villain; he is the hero, a flawed protagonist who acknowledges and takes responsibility for his mistakes (or, as he puts it, his single mistake, repeated over and over, “never saying no”). Charley and Mary try to stand in Frank’s way as he decides to forge a path different from the one he—they—started out on. They are not heroes, but the hero’s misguided (and well-intentioned) friends. But Gussie—Gussie is the villainess, the one who would eat her own child if it meant a starring role in the movies. She is the seducer, the corruptor—perhaps not so much Yoko Ono as Lady Macbeth.

In any case, Gussie had precipitated Frank’s divorce from Beth (Anastasia Barzee), whom he had met while auditioning girl singers for a Greenwich Village revue in 1960. The wedding—and divorce—are accompanied by one of Sondheim’s loveliest love songs, the hauntingly lyrical “Not a Day Goes By.” Incredibly, however, the new version transfers the divorce reprise of the song from Frank to Beth, eliminating the poignancy of the moment and replacing it with banality.

Beth is “introduced” during what is perhaps Sondheim’s best musical scene, the “Opening Doors” sequence, which rivals the Bench Scene in Carousel (“If I Loved You”) as the best, most compact, not-a-word-wasted musical scenes in the history of theatre. It compresses into seven minutes two years of triple biography—tight exposition made all the more remarkable because it comes near the end of the show. (And now that “Our Time” has become the finale, “Opening Doors” is the 11 o’clock number that “Our Time” was meant to be in . . . oh, never mind.)

A word about “Good Thing Going”: This song is sung completely only once during the show, as an audition piece at a Manhattan cocktail party (where some of the guests are—gasp!—smoking marijuana! in 1962!). The song is a précis of the entire show. Lyrically, although it is meant to be a “love song,” it sums up the zeniths and nadirs of Frank and Charley’s friendship. Musically, its theme infests the entire score. It is “Frank’s theme” and, judging by it, it seems Frank made a good choice in becoming a film producer, because apparently he was able to write only one song. The melody of “Good Thing Going” is the basis of “The Hills of Tomorrow” (or is it the other way around?); it’s the arpeggio the orchestra plays when Charley is describing how Frank “goes” in “Franklin Shepard Inc.” It punctuates the “Opening Doors” sequence, and even has alternative lyrics as a novelty song: “Who wants to live in New York? . . . garbage cans clanging in the street,” etc. A quotation from Frank Sinatra’s recording of the song is played on the infamous TV show. It seems to be the “big hit” from Musical Husbands, Frank and Charley’s first Broadway musical (starring Gussie, in a cheesy “finale” that makes us wonder, “How did this awful show—Musical Husbands—become a hit?”). The effect is subtle, but becomes plain when one listens to the score frequently enough.

It needs to be said that, standing alone, at some other theatre in some other time, this Merrily would be seen as the apex of any season. Its performances are uniformly excellent. The set design by Derek McLane is creative and highly effective. Director Christopher Ashley has added some clever touches, such as having 10-year-old Justin Pereira (playing “Frank, Jr.”) sing the last transition number solo. Every element—casting, costumes, choreography, lighting, musical direction—is praiseworthy. Still, in comparison to the first three Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration shows—Sweeney Todd, Company, and Sunday in the Park with George—it falls short. Yet artistic director Eric Schaeffer and his creative team have raised the bar abnormally high. Could we really expect, as has been the case so far, that each show would be incrementally better than the others? No, no, we couldn’t.

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Sondheim at 75 (Part Five)

This review ran originally in The Metro Herald in June 2002. An earlier review of the same show, which I wrote in 1997, can be found here.

Catharsis in the Park With George
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Practice makes perfect? Third time’s the charm?

However you put it, with Eric Schaeffer’s third attempt at directing Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1984 musical, Sunday in the Park with George, he accomplishes the near-impossible: He has completely re-imagined the play, transforming Sondheim’s most static, most dated—dare I say it?—most sterile musical into an emotionally wrenching masterpiece. Schaeffer has rediscovered the dynamics of what had become a tepid work. It is a stunning achievement.

Forgive me for confessing, but in the past the only musical play ever to move me to tears was The King & I. That last scene, when the King dies and his son takes his place, always opens the waterworks for me, whether in live performance or on film—even listening to the cast recording. That reaction was mawkish sentimentality compared to what happened after Sunday in the Park with George.

Eschewing, as he should, cheap sentiment, Schaeffer renders a true emotional catharsis in the Kennedy Center’s Sunday. I am not much given to hyperbole, but mark this, readers: On Sunday afternoon, June 2, 2002, the Platonic Form of Beauty graced the stage at the Eisenhower Theater. Only by great forbearance did I avoid bawling like a baby in the lobby—the full impact of what I had seen did not hit until after the exit music ended. Even now, some 10 hours later as I write this, temblors shake my body, my hands trembling, and my teeth clattering. Live performance being so ephemeral, I grieve that the Form of Beauty eludes our permanent grasp. But we can witness it, alive but fleeting, in Washington for the next few weeks. (Keep in mind that beauty need not be pretty, nor even pleasant. True beauty transcends the superficial to metamorphose into the sublime. As George sings in “Beautiful,” in Act I: “Pretty isn’t beautiful, Mother,/Pretty is what changes./What the eye arranges/Is what is beautiful.”)

Sunday is a musical play about “the art of making art.” Sondheim denies it, of course, but it is a highly personal and autobiographical work. (Sondheim claims the only autobiographical thing he’s written is the “Opening Doors” sequence in Merrily We Roll Along.)

For those unfamiliar with this Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the first act focuses on French artist Georges Seurat, whose pointillist painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. Sunday in the Park with George shows us Seurat’s creative process, his relationships with his lover, Dot, and other people (his mother, fellow artists, Parisians). Act II focuses on Seurat’s fictional great-grandson, George, who uses new technology to create art but, like his ancestor, fails to “connect” . . . with people, with himself.

Both halves of the play also reflect on how the “arts establishment” deals with challenging and original works. Seurat was rejected by the establishment in his short lifetime (he died at age 31) and never sold a painting. Act II’s George has to engage in politics to get the commissions he needs to create his own art, a process he finds undignified at best and slimy at worst.
Seurat was said, by his critics, to be “inaccessible” (the word is in the script) and “cold,” that there was “no life in his art,” charges also leveled against Sondheim, whose intellectually rigorous and challenging music contrasts with the melodism of Richard Rodgers or Jerome Kern, for instance. (Not to denigrate those composers; they are different, not better or worse.)

Sondheim says that of the three elements of music—melody, rhythm, and harmony —it is harmony that defines music for him, with rhythm and melody being secondary. That should come as no surprise, since Sondheim was a mathematical prodigy whose chief avocation even today is puzzles and brain-teasers. Harmony is built with mathematical precision. (By the way, Sondheim says the richest and most inventive harmonics he has encountered are those of George Gershwin and Harold Arlen.) So obsessed was Sondheim with mathematics that, when he entered Williams College, he conscientiously chose to major in music rather than math because, with math, he would be too self-absorbed and lose himself in the subject. (“I chose, and my world was shaken–/So what?,” sings Dot in “Move On”; “The choice may have been mistaken,/The choosing was not.”)

There is also, Sondheim says, a tension between music and lyrics. Poetry (lyrics), he says, “is about concision,” while music is “about explosion.” Fitting words to music is much like creating a crossword puzzle, where each choice impinges on all the others.

These comments were delivered on the Kennedy Center Concert Hall stage on April 28, when Sondheim told interviewer Frank Rich of The New York Times and an appreciative, knowledgeable audience that a major part of his creative process is “getting inside characters” created by his collaborating librettist “like an actor does.” Asserting that he knows the books of his musicals better than the librettist himself, he said, “I really act well when I’m writing”—not so well, apparently, when he’s performing.

Similarly, Act I’s George immerses himself in the models he uses for his painting. He does not hide behind his painting, he says, “I am living in it.” He voices the thoughts of the otherwise mute dogs that he paints.

We know, too, from published biographies (notably Meryle Secrest’s) that, like Sunday’s Seurat, Sondheim had a tense, distant relationship with his mother and difficulty forming other, significant close human bonds until late in life. (Seurat did not have the benefit of living long and prosperously.) The song “Beautiful,” a duet between George and his mother, is as much a statement of personal perpendicularities as it is about disagreement over art, form, and beauty.

What is it that, given this background, makes this particular production of Sunday in the Park with George so spectacularly successful? One element that must be taken into account is director Schaeffer’s earlier career as a graphic artist. He understands what George seeks: order, design, tension, composition, balance, light, harmony. He has himself faced a blank page or canvas and brought it to life.

Schaeffer, with his collaborators, is able to combine all these with movement, words, music, emotion, meaning, costumes, set design, props. There are so many details that deserve attention (and praise) that a review like this cannot do justice to them. The monochromatic design of the “Putting It Together” sequence in Act II is amazing in itself, but just one element that calls out for notice.

The fact is, Eric Schaeffer has completely reexamined the material in Sunday. He has reached down to the foundations, rebuilt the exoskeleton of the play, creating something new yet familiar.

The new can be challenging, it can be tough for audiences. (American theatregoers are unlikely to tear down an auditorium as Parisians did when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiered early in the last century. But they won’t buy tickets for shows they don’t like, either.)

Schaeffer’s direction—assemblage of the various elements of theatrical performance—produces a meditation on how artists try “to get through to something new, something that is mine,” as George says. Work, another character relates, is what you do for others; art is what you do for yourself. “I do not paint for your approval,” George tells the establishment’s Jules.

George is driven by his art, which is also his science. He is excited by his discoveries of how the human eye mixes colors together to produce a new color. That intensity is seen by others as dehumanized eccentricity. Failing at relationships, George creates not love but art. Uncaring for his biological progeny, the product of his loins, he is drawn only to the product of his intellect.

Act II’s song, “Children and Art,” reflects this apparent dichotomy. We only leave behind two things in this world, says Marie (George and Dot’s daughter, George II’s grandmother): children and art. Children or art. All else is barren.

In the end, Act II’s George realizes that connection and creativity are not at odds. He can do both, he can “move on” to create something new and unexpected. What he creates, we do not know.

Philosophy aside, the physical presence of the actors on stage was a major factor in this production’s achievement. Melissa Errico as Dot/Marie and Raúl Esparza as George/George are cast well. Errico is smooth and shimmering, while Esparza distinguishes the two Georges smartly. He adds a youthful spark to the dual role.

Washington audiences will recognize Signature Theatre regulars Donna Migliaccio, Sherri Edelen, Daniel Felton, and Jason Gilbert, among others, in this cast. Accomplished Broadway actors like Cris Groenendaal (who was in Sunday’s original Broadway cast) and Florence Lacey shore up the ensemble as well. As highly competent as their performances are, however—and it is hard to identify any flaws—they are subsidiary to Errico and Esparza, satellites to their sun.

I spent the second act of Sunday in the Park with George with my eyes wide and my mouth agape. I only wish more tickets were available, that more performances would be added to this run, since the Sondheim Celebration is of limited duration, not open-ended like a Broadway show. It is a crime that so few theatre lovers will see this production.

Each show so far—Sweeney Todd, Company, and now Sunday—has been great on its own merits, but successive productions have each been better than the preceding. Where can the Sondheim Celebration go from here? Three more major productions —Passion, Merrily We Roll Along, and A Little Night Music—are planned. What’s in store for us there?

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Sondheim at 75 (Part Four)

This article originally appeared in The Metro Herald (Alexandria, Virginia) on March 26, 1999:

A Too-Brief Review of London Theatre
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Last month, the Metro Herald's Rick Sincere went to London to check out the theatre scene there. In one week, he was able to see five plays -- four musicals and one non-musical. Here Rick reports on what he saw.

(LONDON) --- For most American tourists, their experience of London theatre is the West End -- London's equivalent of Broadway. A wide array of non-West End (off-Broadway) plays and musicals is also available, but the West End theatres are the most convenient for short-term visitors to Central London.

The best way to find out what is playing, and at what price, is to pick up a copy of Time Out, a weekly magazine that includes a comprehensive entertainment guide -- it covers theatre, film, music, television, and radio, as well as current events. Time Out features capsule reviews of all shows playing in the West End and beyond. It should be the first purchase for any tourist arriving in London (along with the necessary A-Z London Street Guide). Time Out also notes the location of each theatre, including the nearest Underground ("Tube") station.

Ticket prices in London are cheaper than they are in New York. (Prices for almost everything else in London, however, are substantially more than they are here -- there seems to be a one-to-one correspondence of the pound to the dollar, even though a pound is worth about $1.65. That is, if a Big Mac costs $2.99 in Washington, it will cost £2.99 in London, or about $4.93. This price inflation is not the case outside of London, in the rest of Britain, however.) Half-price, same-day tickets are available at a kiosk in Leicester Square, near the center of the theatre district. Most of the more popular shows will have half-price tickets available, but if there is something in particular that you absolutely must see, it is best to pay full price in advance at the theatre box office itself, or to reserve tickets by telephone. Some theatres also offer discounts to students and senior citizens ("OAPs," or old-age pensioners); as a student in London in 1986-87, I was able to take in at least one play or musical per week on a very limited budget.

London theatres tend to be more intimate -- that is, smaller -- than American venues. They are closer in size to the National Theatre than to the Kennedy Center Opera House. While this has advantages in terms of seeing and hearing better, one should be alert to the more constricted seats and narrower aisles. One should also be aware that programs, which are given away free in American theatres, must be purchased in London, usually for one pound but sometimes as little as 50 pence. Glossy, souvenir programs cost extra. At the same time, during the interval ("intermission" on this side of the Atlantic), ice cream and other refreshments are sold in the auditorium itself by itinerant concessionaires. And every theatre includes a bar where wine, beer, and spirits are available before the show and between acts.

In London, one can see long-running musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber -- Cats, Starlight Express, The Phantom of the Opera -- as well as his new musical, Whistle Down the Wind, which failed miserably when it played in Washington but has been extended through the year 2000 at the Aldwych Theatre here. There are also productions of classic plays in repertory by the Royal Shakespeare Company, new plays mostly of interest to British audiences, plays that cater to tourists (like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, almost 50 years into its continuous run), and American imports like Grease and Chicago.

In seven days, I was able to see five popular and highly-acclaimed shows: revivals of West Side Story, Oklahoma!, and Into the Woods, the West End production of Rent, and a new play by Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love.

West Side Story

My friend, Nigel Ashford, who teaches at the University of Staffordshire in England, joined me for a matinee performance of a revival of West Side Story at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Coventry Street, near Soho and Piccadilly Circus. This revival is designed to be a re-creation of the original 1957 production of West Side Story, and in this it succeeds. The production includes the original set design by Oliver Smith, costume design by Irene Sharaff, and orchestrations by Leonard Bernstein, Sid Ramin, and Irwin Kostal. Jerome Robbins' original direction and choreography is reproduced by Alan Johnson.

Looking at West Side Story like this is like looking at an artifact in a museum: it is interesting, it is instructive, but it is ultimately lifeless. Dr. Ashford's reaction to the production was that it is "old-fashioned," and, indeed, it seems that way. The cast was talented, delivered the songs and dances competently and with energy, and the story is as compelling as ever. But something seemed vaguely "off" about this production -- it lacked the cutting edge, the shocking sharpness, that West Side Story presented to audiences more than 40 years ago.

My own reaction was that the show seemed much like any high school production of West Side Story. It had an amateurish quality to it, despite the clear professionalism of the cast and production staff. The reason is, I suppose, that over the past 40 years we have become accustomed to higher gloss productions that take advantage of modern technology.

Moreover, the decision of playwright Arthur Laurents and lyricist Stephen Sondheim to use made-up slang, rather than real slang, in the dialogue no longer works. They decided to do this because they were afraid that by using current (1950s) slang, the show would become dated too quickly. The opposite is the case; their made-up slang sounds more dated than ever, and as a result the show loses some authenticity.

During the first act, it seemed that Katie Knight-Adams, who was playing Maria, was having trouble with her voice. This turned out to be the case, and during the interval it was announced that she would be replaced in the second act by her understudy, Celia Graham. An amusing moment took place about two minutes into the second act when Rosalia says of Maria: "She looks somehow different." Laughter rumbled through the audience, which evoked puzzlement at first, then barely constrained smiles from the actors -- that line had been delivered hundreds of times in the past, and never before got a laugh. But that day it had a special meaning. As it turned out, Graham sparkled for the rest of the performance.

Among the rest of the cast, David Habbin was a strong Tony. Alex Harkins stood out as Baby John and Jennifer Ashton was an excellent Anybodys.

West Side Story opened on January 22, 1999, and is in an unlimited run.

Into the Woods

In Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's fairy-tale world, happy endings are only the beginning of misery. Into the Woods is their highly intellectual look at what goes on behind the scenes at familiar fairy stories like Jack and the Beanstalk, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Rapunzel.

The folk tales gathered by the Brothers Grimm were much more violent than the bowdlerized versions that most of us grew up with. Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim explored their deeper meaning a generation ago, and Sondheim and Lapine have taken over where Bettelheim left off.

A new production of Into the Woods at the Donmar Warehouse -- a small theatre comparable to the Signature Theatre in Arlington, except that it has a balcony and can seat about 100 more audience members -- does not do much to update the 1987 Sondheim-Lapine work. Director John Crowley and designer Bob Crowley, along with lighting designer Paul Pyant, have been able to accomplish much, however, in the small space available to them. The "woods" themselves have a remarkable depth, but it is all an illusion, almost a trompe d'oeil effect.

The musical itself asks profound questions about our ability to tell the difference between good and evil and our ability to act on that discernment. Faithfulness, naivete, faithlessness, and cynicism all play a part.

A few of the performances are worth noting: Sheridan Smith is, quite literally, a scream as Little Red Riding Hood. Christopher Pizzey delivers a touching, if simple, Jack (the one with the Beanstalk). And there is genuine affection between the Baker (Nick Holder) and his Wife (Sophie Thompson). Clare Burt plays the key role of the Witch with appropriate malice, but her singing voice does not reach the heights it should.

Unfortunately, for the most part, the actors do not sing their roles as well as they act them. Sondheim's music and lyrics are difficult, to be sure, but there seems to be a tendency of British companies to be less competent in bringing Sondheim to the stage than Americans. I don't have an explanation for this odd phenomenon, it just seems to be the case. (An example can be found in the new British cast recording of A Little Night Music from 1997.)

It was difficult to get tickets for Into the Woods, because the Donmar Warehouse has such an excellent reputation for delivering strong products. (Donmar originated the current production of Cabaret, which will be coming on tour to Washington this summer, and hosted the world premiere of The Fix, which had its American premiere at Signature Theatre last year.) The production closed shortly after my colleague, Anthony McCall-Judson, and I saw it, but it was well worth the effort to obtain the seats.

Oklahoma!

Someone told me recently that there has been a performance of Oklahoma! at least once each day since the play premiered on March 31, 1943, almost 60 years ago. Right now the production to see is at the Lyceum Theatre in London, transferred from the Royal National Theatre on the South Bank. Run, don't walk, to the nearest airport and catch the next flight to London. This Oklahoma! will only be on stage until late July, and you do not want to miss it. Director Trevor Nunn and choreographer Susan Stroman have reinvented this classic American musical, and without a doubt it is the truest manifestation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's vision in decades.

True, this is a darker vision of Oklahoma! than we are used to seeing. (An earlier Royal National Theatre version of Carousel did much the same to R&H's second collaboration.) But the darkness, the sense of foreboding, the infestation is all there in the script and in the music. Not a line has been changed, yet because the tone is different, the musical feels brand new.

A couple of obvious changes may illustrate the genius behind this production. When Laurey appears on stage, and through most of the first act, she is dressed in blue-denim overalls, not the frilly dress of the sort worn by Shirley Jones in the familiar movie version. This gives her a tom-boyish appearance, but also marks her independence, her inner strength. At first it is puzzling why Curly would be attracted to this boyish girl, but it soon become clear that he likes her for her mind and spirit, rather than just her purported girlishness.

The second stroke of ingenuity belongs largely to Stroman (I'd guess). In the second act, the famous title song -- an eleven o'clock number usually characterized by lots of movement and vitality -- is staged at the wedding dinner of Curly and Laurey, as it usually is, with the whole cast (minus Jud Fry), as expected. What is unexpected is that almost the entire number is performed while sitting down. The understatement is sublime.

Moreover, as the second act continues, Nunn puts more emphasis on Jud's death -- was it murder? suicide? -- and the impromptu trial of Curly than we are used to. It is hard to tell precisely what makes up this new emphasis. It might be pacing, it might be staging -- but whatever it is, it is clear that most productions of Oklahoma! like to gloss over this whole episode so that they can hurry along to the finale, when we get to see Curly and Laurey wander off, happily ever after, in their "surrey with the fringe on top." Under Nunn's direction, we cannot forget or ignore the violence that is key to this play.

Maureen Lipman, a veteran West End actress who has earlier starred in Bernstein's Wonderful Town, among other shows, is a delightful Aunt Eller. Hugh Jackman, an Australian, offers a strong Curly with a voice that reaches into the farthest rows of seats in the theatre -- and apparently without amplification and without straining. Josefina Gabrielle plays Laurey perfectly, with balance and energy. One American in the cast is Vicki Simon, who plays Ado Annie with comic authenticity, and is a perfect foil for Jimmy Johnston's Will Parker.

The set design by Anthony Ward and the lighting design by David Hersey are, in a word, magnificent. No, make that two words: They are breathtaking. Magnificent and breathtaking. Who could imagine an Oklahoma! where the orchestra is on stage, behind a scrim (though hidden through most of the show)? Or with authentic looking cornfields, windmills, barns, and sheds? Or with a moving railroad train and a horseless-carriage surrey that put-puts across the stage?

We can only hope that producer Cameron Mackintosh brings this production of Oklahoma! back to the United States, so that we can see how it should be done. In case he doesn't, however, see it now before it's too late.

Rent

Rent is offensive. Now playing at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London's West End, and continuing to be performed in New York, Rent is the least-deserving recipient of the Tony Award for best new musical and the Pulitzer Prize for drama that I have ever seen.

Rent is offensive because its basic message -- you should expect to get whatever you want without working for it, that "success" and "selling out" are synonymous -- is abhorrent. Rent is a story about squatters and "artists" who take advantage of hard-working property owners and productive members of society in order to feed their own egos and wallow in their own self-pity.

Rent is offensive because it rejects an ethic of personal responsibility.

Rent is offensive because its music and lyrics are loud, raucous, and decidedly non-musical.

It is clear that Rent achieved its fame -- no, notoriety -- largely on the basis that its primary creator, composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson, died on the night of the final dress rehearsal. This gave Rent a plethora of undeserved publicity followed quickly by sympathy for a "fallen artist." Just as his character, Mimi, dies for her "art" -- What? Heroin addiction and promiscuity? -- so did Larson die for his.

While some of the young actors in this production show some promise -- Andy Señor as Angel, Peter Eldridge as Roger -- they need to find another vehicle. And Krysten Cummings (Mimi) should worry about being typecast -- she also played a drug-addled prostitute in The Fix.

If you go to London, don't bother with Rent. It's not even worth the half-price of a ticket that I paid.

The Invention of Love

Luckily for me, I followed up a matinee performance of Rent with an evening performance of The Invention of Love, a brilliant new play by Tom Stoppard, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Stoppard has, without a doubt, the nimblest mind of any playwright working today. He is inventive, imaginative, creative, and intellectual. The career that got its start with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead more than 30 years ago and recently got a boost with an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love is in full bloom and shows no sign of fading away.

The Invention of Love is definitely not a play for those seeking light-hearted, unchallenging entertainment. Because it is a play about a keen intellect -- poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman -- it requires concentration and reflection to appreciate its intricacies. The Invention of Love is not just a biographical play, however -- it is a fantasy, a mind-game, a well-crafted character study. Who but Stoppard could create compelling drama out of arcane debates about ancient Latin poetry among the intellectual elite of Victorian and Edwardian England? And who but Stoppard could tie this all in to contemporary political events, such as the Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill that passed Parliament in 1885, which led to the downfall of Oscar Wilde 10 years later?

The characters in this play are real people, including Wilde, John Ruskin, and Benjamin Jowett. Housman is portrayed as a young man by Ben Porter, in a stunning performance, and as an old man about to die (or is he already dead?) by the incomparable John Wood, who is movingly profound, witty, and romantic all at the same time.

I have encouraged at least one local theatre to consider producing the American premiere of The Invention of Love, but I would not be surprised if some smart New York producer beats them to it. Unfortunately, the play has closed in London. I feel privileged -- and enlightened -- to have seen its original production just a few days before it closed.

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Oh, And It's Andrew Lloyd Webber's Birthday, Too

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Sondheim at 75 (Part Three)

This review originally appeared in The Metro Herald in September 1998:

A Late Summer Night's Dream:
Signature's A Little Night Music Sings
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

How does one approach a dream deferred? With considerable creativity and verve, it would seem, if Signature Theatre's new production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's A Little Night Music is any guide.

Originally announced for last season [spring 1998], Signature had to delay staging A Little Night Music for budgetary reasons. Yet the delay paid off, both because the replacement last season (A Stephen Sondheim Evening) was a low-budget delight, and because the extra time permitted artistic director Eric D. Schaeffer to uncover new orchestrations for A Little Night Music that had been performed just once before, in England, which allow a rich, 14-piece sound to resonate through Signature's intimate space instead of the smaller sound of a quartet that the producers had initially expected to use.

A Little Night Music is a visual stunner. Lou Stancari's sets and Anne Kennedy's costumes remind one of Jonathan Miller's 1987 production of The Mikado for the English National Opera, in which sets and costumes were all done in shades of white, with splashes of color serving only as punctuation. So, too, here at Signature: Stancari's basic set, an outdoor garden, is shaded in the grey-white of cement and unpainted plaster. Kennedy's sumptuous costumes range from bright white to ecru to eggshell to light beige, punctuated with occasional color splashes. Exceptions are the costumes for the quintet that serves as a kind of "Greek chorus," who are clothed in black, which has the psychological effect of rendering them invisible. (But why put Jean Cantrell into a knee-length black cocktail dress when the rest of the adult females wear floor-length gowns appropriate to the turn-of-the-century setting?) Young Fredrika's angel's wings in the second act, while curious, are not out of place for a playful adolescent, and make her into something of a Cupid for previously mismatched lovers.

Complementing and elevating these visual elements is the lighting design by Jonathan Blandin. Through subtle shading and coloring, through gobo projections, Blandin transports us to the "perpetual sunset" of a Nordic summer. If anything other than acting itself can wrench emotion out of an audience, it is lighting such as this.

And then there is the music itself. This play is called, after all, "A Little Night Music." (In a subtle musical pun, Fredrik whistles the opening bars of Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.") This is perhaps Sondheim's most tuneful score, as difficult as that may be to judge. It produced his only Top Ten single, Judy Collins' recording of "Send in the Clowns." That song alone has been recorded at least 700 times by artists as diverse as Acker Bilk, Mabel Mercer, and Frank Sinatra.

What's not well-known about "Send in the Clowns" is that it was a late addition to the score. Sensing something missing from a key scene in the second act, director Harold Prince consulted with Glynis Johns, the original Desiree Armfeldt, and Len Cariou, the original Fredrik Egerman, about the underlying emotions of the scene. From their conversations, Sondheim wrote a new song that was inserted into the score just two days before the show opened in Boston on its pre-Broadway tryout. Earlier this year, Johns told the quarterly Sondheim Review her feelings about other singers and actresses performing the song that she introduced 25 years ago:

"When it comes out of context of the play, it's acceptable when you have a lovely singer like Judy Collins doing it. She does it in the most acceptable way for me. One singer, who shall be nameless, said to me, ‘I've never known what that lyric meant!' And I nearly said, ‘That's pretty obvious, dear!'"

In context, the song itself flows seamlessly from the libretto and the delicate conversation between Desiree and Fredrik as they discuss their fates. Its reprise in the finale links the two characters together charmingly and endearingly.

This is not to say that A Little Night Music is a one-song show. The eleven o'clock number, "The Miller's Son," is handed to a rather minor character, Petra the maid. Yet this lusty song, in the style of an English folk song, sums up the carpe diem, "gather ye rosebuds while ye may" philosophy that animates the entire play. Sherri L. Edelen delivers it randily.

Then there is "Liaisons," a bolero sung by the aged Madame Armfeldt, who reminisces about her own youth while reflecting on her daughter's current life and future. Interestingly, this song bears echoes of both "Maria" and "Quintet" from West Side Story (Sondheim's collaboration with composer Leonard Bernstein), which might be Sondheim's nuanced way of drawing comparisons between headstrong youth and wiser, more deliberate grown-ups.

But how to choose? The trio of "Now," "Later," and "Soon" (sung, respectively, by Fredrik, his son Henrik, and his child bride Anne) is woven together ingeniously. "You Must Meet My Wife" is a darkly comic musical conversation between Fredrik and Desiree, while "Every Day a Little Death" is a biting commentary on love and faithlessness by Charlotte and Anne.

There is not a wasted musical moment in this play.

Still, the magnificent score would go nowhere were it not for a remarkably talented cast. Stephanie Waters is simply delightful as Anne, whose youthful enthusiasm delays her sexual and romantic awakening. Robb McKindles is Henrik, the theology student and personification of Kierkegardian angst, whose dark night of the soul leads the way not only to his own spiritual and physical redemption, but that of his father and stepmother as well.

Christopher Flint portrays a pompous and slightly dense Count Carl-Magnus, and Donna Migliaccio deftly handles him as his long-suffering wife, Charlotte.

Ilona Dulaski sparkles as Madame Armfeldt, whose pithy, aphoristic comments on life and love frame the play. John Herrera gives us a Fredrik who is lawyerly and stuffy on the outside, but clearly yearning for something deeper on the inside. Similarly, Patricia Pearce Gentry takes a character, Desiree Armfeldt, who could be dismissed as a flighty celebrity, and infuses her with depth and maturity.

Director Frank Lombardi has assembled a remarkable collection of talent both on stage and behind it. He has created a breathtaking Night Music that deserves to be seen by every Sondheim aficionado within driving distance of Arlington.

A Little Night Music runs through September 27 at the Signature Theatre, 3806 S. Four Mile Run Drive in Arlington.

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Sondheim at 75 (Part Two)

This review originally appeared in The Metro Herald in June 1998:

From Show Boat to Sondheim
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Last year, Oxford University Press published a new book by Professor Geoffrey Block entitled Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim. In an interesting blend of theatre history and musicology, Block traces the changes and the commonalities that occur in the uniquely American art form, the musical play. On the surface, the differences between Show Boat and any Sondheim musical seem to predominate. The fact is, however, that Stephen Sondheim represents the best of a 70-plus year tradition even as he massages the form and takes it to a new level of both intellect and entertainment.

The tradition was literally handed down personally to Sondheim. Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyricist of Show Boat, served as a mentor to the teenage Sondheim, guiding him as he learned the tasks of playwriting, musical composition, and lyric writing. When Sondheim was 15 years old, Hammerstein -- who was a neighbor of Sondheim's family in rural Pennsylvania -- gave the ambitious youngster a three-tiered assignment to help him learn the craft: first, write a musical based upon a previously produced play; second, write a musical based upon a novel or short story not previously dramatized; and third, write an original musical play based upon nothing but the imagination. Hammerstein then took a brutal but fair editing pencil to each work, teaching Sondheim the art of concise writing that is necessary to any creation that has both passion and wit. Later, Sondheim served as a gofer for the production company during the creation of Allegro, the original 1948 musical that became Rodgers and Hammerstein's first Broadway flop. (Nothing teaches the principles of success better than a magnificent failure.)

Washington area audiences have the opportunity this summer to observe both the beginnings of the American musical theatre tradition and its culmination in the early works of Stephen Sondheim. Show Boat, in the form of Harold Prince's award-winning 1994 Broadway revival, is playing at the Kennedy Center Opera House through July 19. At the same time, Arlington's Signature Theatre is presenting a revue of Sondheim songs originally performed at New York's Whitney Museum in 1983, You're Gonna Love Tomorrow: A Stephen Sondheim Evening, playing through July 5.

The contrasts are most striking. Show Boat is a big musical of cinematic proportions. It has a cast of 61 actors, singers, and dancers, who together wear about 500 costumes and 300 pairs of shoes and boots (not to mention 402 hats, caps, bandannas, and hair bows). There is a 20-person orchestra. The main set, the Cotton Blossom show boat itself, measures 25 feet tall, 5 feet wide, and 40 feet long. Eight computers control the scenery and lighting changes through 22 miles of steel cable, 17.5 miles of electric cable, and 2 miles of computer cable. The performers are amplified by 83 microphones and 120 sound speakers.

At Signature, the cast of seven performs on a set consisting of three small platforms and seven matched chairs. They are accompanied by four musicians (including the musical director on piano) and sing without amplification devices. Except for a few novelty accessories, the performers wear the same simple, dark-and-earth-tone costumes throughout the 90-minute show. Lighting is simple, stark, and dramatic.

Even though Signature's production is a revue -- covering Sondheim's first 25 years as a professional composer and lyricist -- it is typical of Sondheim musicals. Only Follies (1971) approaches Show Boat in sheer size, and that should come as no surprise. After all, Follies was meant as a (serious) pastiche of the kind of spectacles produced by legendary impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, who produced the original Show Boat in 1927. In historical scope, the closest comparison to Show Boat's 40-year time period might be Sondheim's Pacific Overtures (1976), but even that comparison would be strained. More generally, Sondheim musicals rely on a much smaller cast within the constraints of a more manageable time period. (Exceptions can be found, of course. Sunday in the Park with George [1984] sets its first act and second act 100 years apart. Merrily We Roll Along [1981] traces the lives of three close friends over a 25-year period.)

The seven actors in A Stephen Sondheim Evening are perfectly suited to sing Sondheim's difficult music and intelligent lyrics. Each of them -- Jean Cantrell, Donna Migliaccio, Judy Simmons, Daniel Felton, Gregg Glaviano, Lawrence Redmond, and Matthew Shepard -- has extensive experience performing in previous Sondheim shows (as well as other musicals, operas, and non-musical plays). Signature's black-box theatre possesses a special intimacy that permits tremendous nuance in delivery -- from the sotto voce "Being Alive" sung by Simmons to a bombastic medley of songs (both used and discarded) from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962).

Show Boat is a different animal entirely. Director Harold Prince -- who was also a longtime collaborator of Stephen Sondheim's -- has consolidated a wide variety of different versions of Show Boat, from the original production of 1927 through the second movie version of 1936 to the 1946 Broadway revival as well as London productions and music and lyrics set aside by the creators during tryouts in Washington in the late autumn of 1927. Drawing upon scholarly research that in the late 1970s and early 1980s followed the discovery of the original scripts and scores (which were presumed lost) in Warner Brothers' New Jersey warehouse in 1977, Prince has been able to recreate what will long be known as the definitive Show Boat.

With a 1990s sensibility, Prince has been true to the intentions of the creators -- not only lyricist Hammerstein and composer Jerome Kern, but also Edna Ferber, the novelist who wrote the story upon which the play is based -- while eliminating some awkward and unnecessary moments. He has renewed an emphasis on the sorry state of race relations in the years between 1880 and 1930. At the same time, he has failed to eliminate (or at least soften the improbability of) several remarkable -- almost Dickensian -- coincidences that take place in the second act and drive the plot forward. Perhaps he tried but gave up because, despite the unbelievability of five major characters "accidentally" running into each other in Chicago on New Year's Eve 1899-1900, to change this facet of the play would require a wholesale reworking of the plot.

Show Boat benefits from a tremendously talented ensemble, including Dean Jones (another Sondheim connection, the original Robert in Company [1970]) as Cap'n Andy, Oscar-winning actress Cloris Leachman as his shrewish wife, Parthy (spelling the role recreated on Broadway in 1994 by Elaine Stritch, who also played Joanne with Jones in the original Company). Stand-outs include Gay Willis and Keith Buterbaugh as the lovers Magnolia and Gaylord Ravenal, Karen-Angela Bishop as the doomed mulatto Julie, and Jo Ann Hawkins White as Queenie. The entire production is undergirded by Kenneth Nichols' continuo as Joe, singing "Ol' Man River" in whole and in part several times during the show, linking the plot and the characters to the power and the glory of the troublesome but lifegiving Mississippi River, which despite everything "jes keeps rollin' along."

It is worth mentioning that five local youngsters -- Jeremiah West Ford, Samantha Glass, Brent Hudson, Nina Hudson, and Samantha Zavras -- supplement the ensemble of the Washington company of Show Boat in juvenile roles.

Show Boat represents the most successful venture so far by Canadian impresario Garth Drabinsky, who may be filling the role left empty by Florenz Ziegfeld's death almost sixty years ago. Together with his production of Ragtime (now playing at the National Theatre and the winner of four Tony Awards on June 7), his Livent (U.S.) Inc. demonstrates a unique capacity to present historically ambitious, spectacular musical plays.

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Sondheim at 75 (Part One)

Broadway's top composer-lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, was born on March 22, 1930. That means he celebrates his 75th birthday today.

National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Saturday ran a terrific story marking the occasion, and NPR's web site has a collection of additional materials (songs and interviews) that expand on that report.

I am trying to track down a copy of an interview I did in May 2002 with several critics and theatre professionals, in anticipation of that year's Sondheim Celebration at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (My original was lost in a computer crash last year.) Once that text is found, I will be posting it here.

In the meantime, I have dug into the archives to reproduce several reviews I have written about Sondheim shows: West Side Story, A Little Night Music, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Passion, and You're Gonna Love Tomorrow: A Stephen Sondheim Evening (the revue originally presented at the Whitney Museum). (Click on each title to see the referenced review.)

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Truth about Truth

Tonight on the TV Land Awards, while accepting the best singing siblings award with his brother, Dick, Tom Smothers gave a definition of truth that is exceptionally apt in this new Age of Information:

"Truth is what you can get others to believe it is."

Get Virginia Government Out of the Arts Business

My post on the LPVA and the Virginia Fine Arts Museum brought to mind a piece I published in early 2003 in The Metro Herald and other newspapers. (Someone told me it appeared in the Northern Virginia Journal -- now the Washington Examiner -- but I was unable to access the newspaper's web site without a subscription, so I never saw it there.)

In this article, I argue that the arts are better off without government funding.

Read and enjoy. This article ran in The Metro Herald (Alexandria, Virginia), on Friday, January 10, 2003:

Get Virginia Government Out of the Arts Business
Richard E. Sincere

(Charlottesville) — Virginia arts organizations have raised the alarm about Governor Mark Warner's proposed budget cuts.

The January 5 Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that most such organizations face "at least 15 percent cuts to their operating budgets, while the Virginia Commission for the Arts, which funds nonprofit arts groups, could lose as much as 45 percent. Some institutions were proposed for mergers, such as the Virginia Museum of Natural History and the Science Museum of Virginia." Roger Neathawk, executive director of the lobbying group Virginians for the Arts, predicted that the Virginia Commission for the Arts "could have its budget slashed from $4.9 million to $2.7 million if the General Assembly approves Warner's budget proposals."

The General Assembly should stand firm and support the Governor's proposed cuts. The situation provides an excellent, bipartisan opportunity for the majority-Republican state Senate and House of Delegates and the Democratic Governor to demonstrate that arts funding is not a necessary or proper function of government. State funding of the arts simply politicizes art, theatre, and music, which should succeed or fail on their own merits.

Virginia boasts a number of noteworthy arts organizations. In theatre alone, we have the internationally renowned Signature Theatre in Arlington County, the Shenandoah Shakespeare Company in Staunton, Charlottesville's cutting-edge Live Arts, and Abingdon's famous Barter Theatre, just to mention a few examples.

There is no question that the arts deserve to thrive. Whether painting and sculpture, music and drama, or literature and folk art, humanistic pursuits contribute to our larger culture and make our lives richer and more challenging. But acknowledging this is not the same as admitting that the arts deserve to be underwritten by taxpayers rather than by private, voluntary donors.

In his 1998 book, In Praise of Commercial Culture, economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University in Fairfax notes that "art and democratic politics, although both beneficial activities, operate on conflicting principles. In the field of art new masterpieces usually bring aesthetic revolutions, which tend to offend majority opinion or go over its head. In the field of politics we seek stability, compromise, and consensus. This same conservatism, so valuable in politics, stifles beauty and innovation in art."

Cowen goes on to say that "government involvement in cultural preservation involves costs beyond the immediate tax burden – state support makes the arts more bureaucratic and less dynamic."

The marketplace is inherently flexible; government is inherently sclerotic. Just as markets for food, furniture, and fashion adjust readily to the needs and wants of consumers, so too do markets for the arts. Arts organizations that rely on government funding find themselves either stultified by the slow pace of political decisionmaking, or they end up paying obeisance to their political masters -- or both. "He that pays the piper, calls the tune," applies precisely here. Government funding always comes with strings attached.

Although it is more difficult to finance an arts organization through private contributions alone, it is worth the extra effort – and it can be done. In Charlottesville, for instance, Live Arts and two other organizations – Second Street Gallery, a graphic arts group, and Light House, which teaches film and video techniques to young people – are constructing a new building without any government assistance.

This fundraising effort is led by civic activist and artist Thane Kerner, who has designed album covers for the Dave Matthews Band. Under his leadership, the groups' umbrella organization, Charlottesville Contemporary Arts, has eschewed government funding in favor of the independence that private funding provides. The community benefits both artistically and financially. At a Charlottesville City Council meeting last February, Kerner testified that a cultural facility of this type can bring $650,000 in revenues a year to the city based on the current size of the participating organizations.

Private financing reduces the complacency that comes with government dependence. It forces arts organizations to be disciplined, cost-conscious, resourceful, innovative, and adaptable.

The prospect of cuts in state funding under Governor Warner is already having this desirable effect on several Virginia institutions.

Dr. Walter R.T. Witschey, director of the Science Museum of Virginia, told the Associated Press: "We have cranked up our creative energies to take advantage of every possibility to generate revenue from [non-state] sources." Executive Director G. John Avoli of the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton added that the budget proposals have "made us leaner and meaner. We have a team writing grants now. We're putting people together and coming up with creative ideas and moving forward."

Republicans and Democrats in state government have an unprecedented opportunity this year to free the arts from government funding and associated control. With freedom comes energy, creativity, new chances to take risks, and previously unpredictable avenues for success.

Governor Warner's proposed budget cuts deserve our support. They are fiscally, politically, and morally responsible.

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Richard Sincere. a former member of the Arlington County Arts Commission, is a Charlottesville-based theatre critic as well as entertainment editor for The Metro Herald in Alexandria.