REVIEW – THEATER: Side Man (1999 Broadway)

SIDE MAN

***1/4

((c) 1999 David Lefkowitz. reviewed Jan. 1999 on Broadway.)

 

The first half of the pallid 1998-99 Broadway season clogged the stages with such negligible entertainments as Getting and Spending and The Blue Room. Part two offered a slew of revivals and British plays. Now we have to step back and recall fondly that the very first play of last season—a new American drama by Warren Leight—is the altogether touching and marvelous Side Man. Sweetness, humor, and a loving respect for jazz music keep Leight’s Tony-winning play from being another dreary, kitchen-sink look at a poor family whose mad mother despairs and whose dad might as well hang a “vacancy” sign on his forehead. Instead, Side Man is both a very funny, and a very, very sad look at lives in decline.

Terry, the mother (Angelica Torn) goes from foul-mouthed but virginal newlywed to manic, alcoholic shrew. Father Gene’s mellow self-confidence eventually renders him a zombie, coming alive only when he blows his trumpet. Just as important are the side men who play with Gene, all of whom live from paycheck to paycheck (and take great pride in their “work ethic”—each week without fail, they wait on a line to collect unemployment benefits), all of whom sacrifice a more comfortable life for the music to which they’re addicted.

First ensconced at the CSC space downtown, Side Man then had the feel of something intimate, lived-in. Now, in a commercial run at Broadway’s John Golden Theater, the play has to behave more like a Show. Therefore, early scenes find the audience forcing itself to laugh too hard at quiet jokes, while a great later scene, in which the four aging musicians listen to a tape made on the last night of a fallen comrade, proves less moving now that the music is played over the loudspeakers rather than from what truly sounds like a homemade audio cassette. These commercial concessions aside, the work as a whole is even more melancholy now, with Angelica Torn in some ways an improvement over her fine predecessor, Edie Falco, in that Terry’s descent now feels more modulated and inevitable. (Two things that don’t convince: her middle-aged makeup, and her talking-a-blue-streak jags that sound like a riff for the audience rather than an amusing-but-troubling character trait.)

Kevin Geer continues to give one of the season’s most memorable performances as Jonesy, a jazzman sadly robbed of his greatness. A special nod, too, to Brian MacDevitt’s lighting, which heightens the moods and mood-changes of each scene.

*

Side Man ran June 25-Sept. 13, 1998 at Broadway’s Criterion Center and then moved to the John Golden Theater where it ended Oct. 31, 1999

 

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REVIEW – THEATER: Summer and Smoke (1996 Broadway)

SUMMER AND SMOKE

**¾

((c)1996 David Lefkowitz. Reviewed 1996 on Broadway. This review was first published as part of my recurring This Month ON BROADWAY section of This Month ON STAGE.)

For an avowed homosexual, Tennessee Williams had an almost obsessive need to deflower — emotionally, if not physically, as well — a host of frail, prudish Southern ladies. Blanche DuBois’s struggle between flesh and spirit leads to her downfall, lonely Myrtle has to choose between her effete, bloodless husband and his macho brother; virginal Hannah Jelkes steps out of the battleground altogether rather than get mortally wounded. Terrified of sex, Alma Winemiller, of Summer and Smoke, can’t even look at an anatomy chart — especially the one that hangs in the office of John Buchanan, the handsome doctor next door. 

Rakish, dissipated, yet sparked by a kernel of decency, Dr. John pursues Alma, seeing in her the same purity The Night of the Iguana’s Rev. Shannon so desired from Hannah. But Alma and John’s astrological charts never quite mesh, so instead of a romance, they suffer a tragedy and — even worse in Williams’s world — a missed connection. 

With its episodic second act and intrusive minor characters, the two hour and forty-five minute play simply takes too long to reach its ironic finale. Mary McDonnell makes Alma an interesting, even pitiable figure, but not a gripping or majestic one. Other critics have called Harry Hamlin wooden and not up to the play’s demands, but I find his doctor convincing when he broods and irresistible when he woos (he’s tremendously handsome — more so than television has been able to capture). 

Derek McLane’s set, all blue clouds and white sky with a rising and descending angel (every 1990s play must have one — that’s the law) offers a nice change from spending three hours in Williams’s usual seedy milieu. 

*

(Staged by and at the Roundabout Theater by David Warren, Summer and Smoke ran Sept. 5-Oct. 20, 1996 at Broadway’s Criterion Center Stage Right.)

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Mary McDonnell, Harry Hamlin

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REVIEW – THEATER: Grace & Glorie (1996 off-Broadway)

GRACE & GLORIE

***

((c)1996 David Lefkowitz. Reviewed off-Broadway July 1996. This review was first published in the October 1996 issue of This Month On Stage magazine)

Here’s the set-up of Tom Ziegler’s comedy-drama: a well-meaning volunteer, Gloria, comes to check up on a 90-year-old woman, Grace, living alone in a semi-isolated cottage. Gloria is a big-city lawyer, unused to coping with pre-electric appliances and backwoods living. The ailing but feisty Grace wants no help from anyone. 

Okay, easy quiz: guess what happens. 

Did you guess that the flustered lawyer would warm to Grace and end up being of great help to her? Did you further guess that Grace would develop a motherly affection for Gloria? Oh, and extra credit if you surmised that both Grace and Gloria would confront the specter of death in their lives.

This is old-fashioned playwriting the way it was in the 50s and 60s — lots of character comedy, with an underside just a dad more serious than we expect. Calling Grace & Glorie formulaic, however, is not the same as saying we should junk the formula. Characters may be types, but they’re entertaining, their problems have substance, and the playwright gives them a focused path.

Because it’s tough to maintain energy in a two-character play, director Gloria Muzio can be forgiven for overdoing the physical moments, as when hapless Gloria turns boiling an egg into a calamity. Besides, Gloria’s played by Lucie Arnaz, so any slapstick moment is an automatic homage to her legendary mom. Arnaz also does nicely with her character’s suppressed desperation, as when she tells of losing her son in a car accident. 

Best known as the obnoxious grandmother on TV’s Rosanne, here Estelle Parsons has a long white wig but the same wry crackle. Without playing to the audience, the actress nevertheless makes Grace a congenial presence, much spunkier than, say, the equally stubborn old lady in Three Tall Women. 

If we forgive Lucie Arnaz, Estelle Parsons, director Gloria Muzio, and playwright Tom Ziegler for falling into a very slick, predictable pattern, Grace & Glorie makes a thoroughly pleasing evening at the theater. I’m told we used to have a lot of those thirty years ago.

*

(Staged by Gloria Muzio, Tom Ziegler’s Grace and Glorie ran July 16-Nov. 10, 1996 at off-Broadway’s Laura Pels Theater)

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NOTES & BACKSTORY:

[Oct. 2021]: When my wife, gerontologist and tenured professor Joyce Weil, and I were planning on writing a scholarly article about the way older people are depicted onstage, one of the first plays that occurred to me was Grace & Glorie, since its focus is on a senior character aging in place. The article, The Seventh Age on Stage: Representation of Older Adults and Aging in US Broadway and Off-Broadway Theater, was published in the November 2019 edition of Educational Gerontology. Here’s the abstract: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03601277.2019.1685736

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REVIEW – THEATER: A Month in the Country (1995 Broadway)

A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY

***

((c)1995 David Lefkowitz. Reviewed on Broadway in May 1995. This review was first published in the Summer 1995 issue of Stages magazine)

Much as Chekhov is the acknowledged master of this kind of playwriting — what with a half-dozen main characters all locked in mutual romantic intrigue and a half-dozen others observing and affected by the entanglements — sometimes it’s nice to get away from the good doctor, where everything is subtext, and find a playwright working similar themes as urtext.

Ivan Turgenev’s idle classnicks in A Month in the Country have the same unfulfilled longings and dashed dreams as Chekhov’s, but their hearts are open books — to us and usually to the characters around them. Thus Natalya Petrovna can fall head over heels for the same young tutor her daughter begins to pine for, and everybody knows it. Thus, it is also accepted in this circle that madame’s friend and confidante, Rakitin (Ron Rifkin), is also her lover. In fact, husband Arkady (Byron Jennings) is more concerned about losing his friend than being cuckolded.

These intimacies take their time unwinding, especially since Roundabout Theater’s production, staged by Scott Ellis, stays resolutely light until the mother-and-stepdaughter rift in the final act, but the piece always holds our interest. Helen Mirren, unforgettable as Prime Suspect’s Inspector Tennyson, strikes me as somewhat actressy here, a little too conscious of her effects and her character’s attitude of gay unconcern. She plays Natalya beautifully, but she doesn’t become her.

Comic relief comes by way of F. Murray Abraham, turning his handkerchief into a classic theater prop and creating a minor character who is obnoxious — yet we happily await his entrances. Standing handsomely in his boots, the stage lights framing his wavy hair, talented Alessandro Nivola, in his Broadway debut, makes a well-formed tutor, indeed. Kathryn Erbe and Byron Jennings do good work, as well, though it’s Ron Rifkin’s Rakitin, the eternally frustrated best friend, who plays most naturally (and whose voice carries most securely in the acoustically problematic Criterion Center space). 

Santo Loquasto’s wooden set has charm, though its steep incline seems an effect not quite worth the actors’ effort.

*

(staged by Scott Ellis for the Roundabout Theater Company at their Criterion Center Broadway venue, Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country ran April 25-June 10, 1995)

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REVIEW – THEATER: Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1994 Broadway)

PHILADELPHIA! HERE I COME

***1/4

(©1994 David Lefkowitz. Reviewed Sept. 1994 on Broadway. This review was first published in the Fall 1994 issue of Stages magazine.)

Someone evicted the Mundy sisters from their rustic Ballybeg kitchen and brought the original tenants back in: 25-year-old Gar O’Donnell, his phlegmatic father S. B. (whom Gar not-so-affectionately nicknames “Screw Balls”), and Madge, the bustling housekeeper. Nearly 30 years before Brian Friel envisioned five Irish sisters dancing like pagans around a kitchen radio to escape their hopelessness, he created the same environment of quiet woe. But in Philadelphia, Here I Come! there is hope. Hope that young Gar can leave his bedraggled, beloved Ireland; his non-communicative father, his lost teen sweetheart, his useless drinking buddies, and move to America to start fresh.

Friel makes nothing easy, though. The very banalities that push Gar out of Ballybeg keep tugging at his heart, and the married couple who promise to raise Gar as their own son are every bit as pathetic as the tenants of the O’Donnell house. Giving the piece comic drive and setting it apart from other dysfunctional family plays is Friel’s conceit of splitting Gar into his public front and private thoughts, the former played with wrenching inner torment by Jim True, the latter with much charm, though slightly overmuch showmanship, by Robert Sean Leonard.

Though this quite capable Roundabout mounting reminds us how beautiful Friel’s text is, it doesn’t quite sink under our skins, maybe because, with two intermissions, the play runs nearly three hours (a seemingly uncut version at the Irish Repertory Theater several years ago came in at just over two). Also, subtler manifestations of drunkenness might make both Aideen O’Kelly, as the American mom, and Jarlath Conroy, as the man who might have been Da, more effective. Priceless, though, is the hurt on Miriam Healy-Louie’s face when she realizes the extent of Gar’s cowardice.

Where (at Irish Rep) W.B. Brydon’s S.B. was gruff and impenetrable, Milo O’Shea seems more the set-in-his-ways, Willy Loman type, which is more watchable but ultimately less moving. This time, S.B. holds out the olive branch a couple of times, and it is the son who swats it away as if to say, too little, too late. Script notwithstanding, this S.B. would cry in front of Gar, so his sobbing over Gar’s suitcase doesn’t shake us to the core.

Still, to crab further at Joe Dowling’s staging would be to underestimate its solid workmanship. No Broadway play this year is likely to have so much to savor unless Friel writes it himself.

*
(Staged by Joe Dowling for the Roundabout Theater Company, Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! ran at the Criterion Center – Stage Right.)

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REVIEW – THEATER: Hedda Gabler (1994 Broadway)

HEDDA GABLER

**½

(© 1994 David Lefkowitz. Reviewed on Broadway July 1994. This review was first published in This Week ON STAGE magazine)

I guess we’re supposed to wonder whether Hedda Gabler is simply mentally ill and possibly evil, or if she’s those things plus the ultimate portrait of a pure soul who refuses to sell out to social conventions. Unfortunately, after re-reading the play and then seeing Roundabout Theater’s current revival, it’s hard to get worked up over anything General Gabler’s daughter sets in motion.

Critics have picked on Sarah Pia Anderson’s production for turning a psychological horror tale into a languid drawing-room piece punctuated by unintentional laughter, but to my mind, time has done far more damage to Ibsen’s drama than Anderson’s mostly watchable staging.l Perhaps this is simply the wrong era for us to care about a little rich girl kvetching endlessly about how bored she is; Tesman may be a nerd, but at least he has real problems. 

Admittedly, so does Kelly McGillis, who can neither keep still nor deliver a line without seeming on the point of tears. Portraying Hedda as a shark-toothed manic depressive isn’t disturbing, just distracting. 

Jeffrey DeMunn doesn’t need to shamble so much, but he does make clear that hubby Tesman, though thick and self-absorbed (except where Hedda is concerned) can be a decent sort. Laura Linney’s just fine as Thea, manipulated by Hedda yet ironically the bravest character onstage. Jim Abele makes a strong impression as the soon-to-dissipate Eilert. As for Keith David’s disastrously cartoonish Judge Brack, he’d be better suited to torment Olive Oyl than Ibsen’s strangest heroine.

*

(Staged by Sarah Pia Anderson, for the Roundabout Theater Company, Frank McGuinness’s translation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler ran July 10, 1994-Aug. 7, 1994 at the Roundabout’s Criterion Center Stage Right space)

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Jeffrey DeMunn, Laura Linney, Kelly McGillis in Hedda Gabler.

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REVIEW – THEATER: Starmites (1989 Broadway)

STARMITES

**¾

(© 1989 David Lefkowitz. Reviewed on Broadway in May 1989. This capsuled review was first published as part of my recurring “Examining Entertainment” column in the Long Island Examiner, 1989-90)

Well-meaning kitsch that walks a thin line between campy fun and awfulness. A young girl retreats into a fantasy world of her favorite comic books where she encounters the Starmites, fighters for truth and goodness. Their encounters with the bitchy Banshees and the evil Shak-Graa lead to bad puns, cute touches, a climactic battle that just doesn’t work, and mostly unmemorable songs. However, Liz Larson is ingratiating in her dual role as the young girl and her nerdy space twin, as leader of the Mites, Brian Lane Green sings well and has the right comic-book bravado, and Sharon McKnight carries the show as a dynamic diva. Still, though Starmites has its moments, it’s nothing to Marvel at.

*

(Staged by Larry Carpenter, Starmites ran April 27-June 18, 1989 at Broadway’s Criterion Center – Stage Right)

REVIEW – THEATER: Starmites (1989 Broadway)

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