Theatre
Broadway 2001
Sheridan Morley reviews the new shows on the block
Ayear ago at this time, there was only one straight play running on the whole of the Great White Way. Currently there are half a dozen, with many more to come before the Tony awards in June, while such now-and-forever musicals as Cats and Miss Saigon are closing up. Quite what this means in the long term is unclear; there is certainly a demand still for musicals, as proved by the hit revivals of The Music Man and Kiss Me Kate, not to mention a triumphant musical staging of The Full Monty which, joyously, is even better than the movie.
Sure, there have been some changes: the setting is now a rough section of Buffalo in upstate New York, and when the lads break into their dance routine they are not in the dole queue but at the funeral of the old mother. But elsewhere the writer Terrence McNally has stuck faithfully to the screenplay, and the even better news is of David Yazbek, a new, young American
composer-lyricist who has come up with a grainy, edgy score precisely in tune with the original bittersweet mood of dejection and eventual triumph.
The Full Monty is perfectly suited to a stage setting, precisely because it builds to a theatrical climax with the lads' strip-off, still achieved in a tactful blackout; if they have any sense, the McNally/Yazbek team will now move on to a staging of Billy Elliot, about the lad from the wrong side of the tracks finally achieving dancing fame, since that plot, too, reaches its climax in front of a live audience and also aches to be made into a theatrical musical. The Full Monty is just wonderful, funny and sad and true and touching; after years in which we have sent our London musicals to Broadway, here's one they can send us back, repackaged in love and laughter.
The other new musical is Jane Eyre, which they have now mercifully stopped advertising as 'from the makers of Les Miserables' since only the joint director John Caird and the designer John Napier are again involved. This has been a five-year project for Caird, and while it is never as bad as his Children of Eden, it sorely lacks charisma. Not so much through-sung as through-spoken, the score by Paul Gordon lacks variety; James Barbour is a sombre Rochester, while in the title role Marla Heath is dangerously low-key.
Caird himself has co-directed with Scott Schwartz, and although there's nothing here that couldn't be fixed by Trevor Nunn, 13oublil and Schonberg, I rather doubt that in its present shape this one will survive an Atlantic crossing. What's needed is a little of the energy and invention that Adrian Noble and Gillian Lynne have brought to another 19th-century tale of an unloved girl in The Secret Garden, due shortly at the Aldwych in London from Stratford.
As for the plays, the best by far is Wendy Wasserstein's Old Money; I have never been as much of a fan of hers as many critics here and in New York, but it does seem strange that this brilliantly nostalgic and infinitely charming drawing-room comedy should have been so savaged locally that when I went to a Lincoln Center matinee (admittedly there were mountains of snow on the sidewalks) the house was rather less than a quarter full. Like Stoppard's Arcadia, though infinitely more accessible, Old Money tells the story of a house through two time-zones; we are at the end of the 19th century and the end of the 20th, in one of those Manhattan mansions where you forever expect Scott Fitzgerald or at least Citizen Kane. But Wasserstein's point is that without a centuries-old class structure based on family inheritance, wealthy Americans have always tried to define themselves through instantly acquired property; but it is not enough, and what's more (as one of the 1900 characters chides a man from 2000) whereas the robber barons of 100 years ago at least built a nation with iron and steel and coal, their descendants merely juggle figures on computer screens. Manhattan may still be for the rich, but their money no longer achieves anything tangible, and meantime the mansions are beginning to fall apart. Had Scott Fitzgerald, or even the late Brendan Gill of the New Yorker, been dramatists, this is the play they would have written: rich, evocative, moody, elegant, and peopled by a magical cast headed by John Cullum and Mary Beth Hurt.
The other strong new play of the season thus far is David Auburn's Proof, in which Mary-Louise Parker wonderfully plays the grieving daughter of a newly deceased mathematician who just may have cracked a crucial theorem. Like Frayn's Copenhagen this is a brain game, but one with characters easier to care about, and Daniel Sullivan's production, on a brilliant set by John Lee Beatty, heralds the arrival of a major new, young Broadway dramatist, not a moment too soon.
Off-Broadway, down in Greenwich Village, the first couple of the American theatre, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, are starring with their daughter Roberta in a quirky little family drama by Anne Meara, Down the Garden Paths, which (not unlike Yasmina Reza's current Life x 3) plays around with time so that we get the same family gathering repeated with slightly different emphases and consequences. Not as good as any of the old Priestley Time Plays from the 1930s, David Saint's production at least lets us spend a couple of hours with a deeply lovable real-life family.
And finally, in cabaret at the Algonquin Hotel, Andrea Marcovicci has a wondrous celebration of Kurt Weill in his all-American years, from Lady in the Dark to Lost in the Stars. Marcovicci is now unquestionably the greatest and most subtly thoughtful and intelligent cabaret singer of her American generation: but although she has made occasional appearances here at the Pizza on the Park in Knightsbridge, she has unaccountably not yet become one of the Divas at the Donmar, They should fix that this summer.
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