There’s a new Gypsy on Broadway, with a stripped down set and a spruced up emotional kick.

Gypsy has been one of my favorite musicals since I first saw the 1963 film starring Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood. I have seen most of its revivals on Broadway, my favorite being the Patti Lupone revival directed by its book writer Arthur Laruents.

This Gypsy has a predominantly Black cast, but there is no reference to the race of the cast - and no real changes in the script. Open casting is a great idea and there is no reason why any of the characters have to be a particular race.

The set is very spare, with flying flats that suggest more than present a location. 

The costumes, likewise, are spare, with coats and dresses made from curtain-like cloth - of course, Rose comments on how certain drapes would make nice coats.

The emphasis on this Gypsy is on family. While Audra McDonald plays the uber-stage mother, she does so with an emphasis on being a mother. Danny Burstein and she have a real relationship, even with hints of a close physical attraction - they have real chemistry. Joy Woods as Louise/Gypsy makes an effortless transition from gawky child to burlesque diva. Jordan Tyson is an effervescent June.

The real star of the show is the music. Jule Styne has commented on how working with Stephen Sondheim was the delight of his career. Working with a partner who was as knowledgeable as he was about music forms, Styne said that Sondheim always knew exactly what he was trying to do with a song and always shaped the lyric perfectly to his music.

The beginning is a little rocky. McDonald's voice is ill suited to B'way tunes of the type in Gypsy and it shows in the classic anti-home-is-where-the-heart-is powerhouse, Some People. It's done here a little too slow, a little too from the head and not the heart. It doesn't ever hit the high point of 'well they can stay and rot, but not Rose!' It loses that exclamation point.

The Rose - Herbie duets are enhanced by the relationship built up between them in this version. Small World and You'll Never get Away From Me are done as well as they have ever been done. Together is better performed than I have ever seen.

Once again, another song, Have an Eggroll Mr. Goldstone , that calls for mayhem is a little too precise -it should be like the Kentucky Derby in sport - the most exciting two minutes in theater. It's OK, just not that exciting.

The bits with the kids and all that vaudeville stuff is done very well. But with If Mama Were Married, we are back again in problem territory - the song has to be as funny as it is smart and these lyrics are as smart as any:

Momma, we'll buy you the rice

If only this once

You wouldn't think twice

It could be so nice

If Momma got married to stay.

But Momma gets married

And...

Married

And...

Married

And never gets carried away

This Gypsy’s ode to burlesque, You Gotta Get a Gimmick , is both hot and funny. I have never seen a production of Gypsy in which this showstopper doesn't stop the show. Lesli Margherita , Lili Thomas and Mylinga Hull pull out all the stops. It's funny, it's sad ('Take a look how different we are') and mostly it's great theater.

And now we come to the two BIG closings, Gypsy's and Rose's.

For Let Me Entertain You, Gypsy starts with the usual shy dance that any 10 year old could perform. Then, this production inserts a Josephine Baker-like erotic Garden of Eve scene with male dancers who have less on than Gypsy. It works.

Rose's Turn is more problematic. McDonald has played the role more motherly than any other Rose I have seen which is all good. But transferring from Lady Madonna to Lady Godiva during the course of one song  is a bit of a problem, especially with her operatic chops. She has to say a lot of the big emotional lines in the song because she can't sing them in her own style. It's powerful but I sense that McDonald is not close to reaching her peak and finding her way to do that turn as her own. It will be interesting to see how it evolves over what I assume will be a long run. 

So I would suggest seeing this show a few months from now - I’m sure it will still be playing.

All in all, it is VERY worth seeing in-spite of my reservations. George C. Wolfe does an excellent job in creating a Gypsy that is unique.

SONDHEIM - A COMPOSER FOR ALL FEELINGS

By Armen Pandola

In 1961, I was ten when my older sister came home, very excited. She saw a movie that was the best movie she had ever seen. I asked what it was. She said she didn’t think I would like it because it was a love story, a great love story about two people from different worlds. What is it called? West Side Story.

Of course, I went to see it - and have seen it more times than I can count. And I fell in love with Natalie Wood. The next year, another movie came out starring Natalie Wood and so I went to see it. It, also, was a musical, but very unlike West Side Story. Not about a romance, but instead about ambition, a soul-pounding, relentless ambition to become somebody. It was called Gypsy.

These two musicals had more in common than Natalie Wood. Each of these musicals had lyrics by Stephan Sondheim - lyrics like no other lyrics you ever heard.

Here is end of the love duet from WSS:

Today the world was just an address

A place for me to live in

No better than alright

But here you are

And what was just a world is a star

And this is the lyric sung by the blindly ambitious mother in Gypsy:

Some people can thrive and bloom

Living life in the living room.

That's perfect for some people

Of one hundred and five.

That mother had two daughters who wanted her to marry a nice guy so they could live a normal life and this is how they put it - or how Sondheim did:

Momma, we'll buy you the rice

If only this once

You wouldn't think twice

It could be so nice

If Momma got married to stay

Nobody wrote lyrics like that - conversational and yet packed with nuance and subtlety.

Sondheim went on to write 16 more musicals, but this time writing both the words and music, as only a very few, like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, have done. Time and again, he tackled the tough subjects and his lyrics seem to say so much more than the individual words do:

Marriage:

It's the little things you share together

Swear together

Wear together

That make perfect relationships.

The concerts you enjoy together

Neighbors you annoy together

Children you destroy together

That keep marriage intact.

Ladies of a certain age and income:

So here's to the girls on the go

Everybody tries

Look into their eyes and you'll see what they know

Everybody dies.

A toast to that invincible bunch

The dinosaurs surviving the crunch

Let's hear it for the ladies who lunch

Everybody rise!

That last lyric must have come from that pain in Sondheim he spoke of often - his hatred for his mother and her’s for him. Yes, this incredible musical genius had a very sad personal life from which he was rescued by another genius of the American Musical - Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist part of that duo that created the modern musical, Rodgers & Hammerstein.

After writing the lyrics for one of the most romantic musicals ever written - WSS - he wrote this about romance a decade later:

I've got those

"God-why-don't-you-love-me-oh-you-do-I'll-see-ya-later" blues

That "Long-as-you-ignore-me-you're-the-only-thing-that-matters" feeling

That "If-I'm-good-enough-for-you-you're-not-good-enough,"

And "Thank-you-for-the-present-but-what's-wrong-with-it" stuff

That "Don't-come-any-closer-cause-you-know-how-much-I-love-you" feeling

Those "Tell-me-that-you-love-me-oh-you-did-I-gotta-run-now" blues.

And then he wrote this about love:

Loving you

Is not a choice

It's who I am.

Loving you is not a choice

And not much reason to rejoice

But it gives me purpose

Gives me voice to say to the world:

This is why I live

You are why I live

I don’t know a simpler, more complete statement of what it feels like to be in love - and it’s feeling that Sondheim was a master of. Whether he was telling the story of an actress who has seen better days:

I've gotten through, "Hey, lady, aren't you whoozis?

Wow, what a looker you were"

Or better yet, "Sorry, I thought you were whoozis

Whatever happened to her?"

Or an artist who has lost his way:

I want to move on

I want to explore the light

I want to know how to get through,

Through to something new,

Something of my own-

And the response of his Muse:

Move on, move on

Stop worrying it your vision

Is new

Let others make that decision-

They usually do

You keep moving on

And through seven decades that is what Sondheim did - he moved on, writing musicals about slaves in ancient Rome, showgirls thirty years later, mad killer barbers, Japanese emperors, Presidential assassins, Viennese lovers, 49ers searching for gold - it’s a list of over twenty musicals that he has worked on and that are as varied as any output by any other composer of the 20th century.

Sondheim’s most successful musicals will be produced in regular revivals and his less successful works will keep on being re-discovered. His songs are not as well known as those written when songs from musicals became major pop hits. And there is another reason - he wrote songs for very defined characters in a particular situation. Not many songs like that are sung apart from the musical they are in. His most famous song, according to Sondheim, became that only because Frank Sinatra recorded it, twice in fact.

Don't you love a farce?

My fault, I fear

I thought that you'd want what I want

Sorry my dear

But where are the clowns?

Send in the clowns

Don't bother

They're here

ALL MY SONS

by armen pandola

Every great play speaks to its time, then transcends it.

Arthur Miller's All My Sons was written just after WWII as many soldier/sons were returning from the war - and many weren't. The play is about the Keller family. The father, Joe Keller (Tracy Letts), owned an airplane parts manufacturing plant during the War. His youngest son, Chris (Benjamin Walker), fought in it and his older son, Larry, a pilot, died in it. Their mother, Kate Keller (Annette Bening), refuses to acknowledge Larry's death since his body was never found.

During the War, Joe and his partner, Frank Deever, were arrested for providing the Army Air Corps with defective parts that caused the death of twenty-one pilots. Deever was convicted but Keller was exonerated because, he claims, he was sick and not at the plant the day the defective parts were shipped out.

Ann Deever (Francesca Carpanini) was engaged to marry Larry but after Larry's death and her father's conviction, she left the town. Now, three years later, she returns. Chris is in love with her and wants to marry her. His mother, Kate, can never accept this marriage because she would have to admit that her son, Larry, is dead. Ann's return brings to the surface all the the townspeople's feelings about Joe and his involvement in the scandal that killed so many pilots.

All My Sons is plotted with the deftness and complexity of an airplane engine. The happy story of the Keller family starts out smoothly but, by the second act, begins to spin out of control and, comes crashing down when Ann's brother, George Deever (Hampton Fluker) comes to town after visiting his father in jail.

The creative team does an amazing job of placing the audience into the world of the play. Director, Jack O'Brien, keeps the play moving, often using humor to contrast with the deadly seriousness at the play's core. The scenes flow by growing with tension like a bolero.

It is the cast that sets this production apart from previous versions. Letts is perfect as the patriarch/magician who gets the whole town to accept him back from the brink of Hades, accused of the worse crime imaginable, war profiteering causing the death of soldiers. Walker, as the surviving son who believes in all that the War was fought for - a better world - gives a riveting performance as he tries to win the heart of Ann while appeasing his mother's intractable belief in Larry's survival. Carpanini and Fluker pull off the difficult task of playing characters who, at heart, are only marionettes in the play's deadly waltz to the truth.  

But the play's heart and soul is Kate Keller and Bening gives one of the great performances of the season in making her come alive. Loving, tender, a nurturer, Kate desperately tries to keep the Keller family from exploding. She refuses to accept her son, Larry's, death, not, as it first seems, out of an insane belief in his survival, but, rather, because Larry must be alive if the Keller family is to survive. As her world slowly begins to unravel, so does she.

In the end, All My Sons is a play about us - how our beliefs always trump the truth no matter what the facts. When the truth can no longer be ignored, it explodes not only our beliefs, but our world.

American Airlines Theater

227 W. 42nd St, NYC, NY

Website

Play Runtime 2 hrs. and 15 min.

Credits Written by Arthur Miller; Directed by Jack O'Brien

Cast Tracy Letts, Annette Bening, Benjamin Walker, Francesca Carpanini, Hampton Fluker, Michael Hayden, Jenni Barber, Nehal Joshi and Chinasa Ogbuagu

THREE TALL MOTHERS 

Three Tall Women is Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize winning play about the stages of a woman's life. From optimistic youth to jaded middle age to controlling senior dowager, it takes three actresses at the top of their game to portray Albee's mosaic of female evolution.

Those critics who find it necessary to connect a great writer's work to his life have written that the women in Three Tall Womenare all Albee's mother - Albee was adopted as a baby and later was rejected by his mother when he told her that he was gay.  But the women in Three Tall Women are more like Martha  (Albee's portrait of a wife on the brink of madness in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) than any real person could be.

Before we delve further into the play, let's get the magic out of the way. As the curtain rises, we see three women whom Albee has given the names A, B and C in the script but who have no names in the play. "A," played by  Glenda Jackson, is a 90-something (she claims 91 but "C" insists that she is 92), rich old lady. Sitting in the splendor of her opulent bedroom, she is a mother not easy to like as she complains about everything and spews forth racist comments. "B" is the middle-aged caretaker played by Laurie Metcalf who makes light of A's tart comments. "C" is a young attorney, played by Alison Pill, who is there to straighten out A's tangled finances. The play seems to be about a woman at the end-stage of her life when everyone is waiting for her to die. Suddenly, A has a stroke and becomes incapacitated as the lights black out.

When the lights come back up (no intermission) we are in a world where even what we see is hard to explain. The elegant bedroom of the previous Act is now mirrored by an upstage bedroom whose upstage wall is all mirrors reflecting the identical twin sets. It appears that "A" is lying motionless in the mirrored bedroom while a young man comes to visit her.  He is identified as A's son whom she has rejected for unstated reasons.

Now, the three woman return but they have been transformed.  They are the same woman but at different stages of her life - young, middle-aged and old.  They (or she) has married a man whom they belittle by claiming that he has a small penis. But, he is rich and so they put up with hubbie's petite penis and seek pleasure elsewhere. "C" cannot believe that her future is to be the eye-candy on the arm of short, ugly, stupid man, but "B" explains that it's worse - hubbie's a short, ugly, stupid man who cheats, as all men do because .... they are men.

Three Tall Women was Albee's second most revered play, but it was rarely staged well and rarely less than very confusing - until now. Director Joe Mantello has created a world in which Three Tall Women can finally be seen for what it is - Albee's crowning achievement as America's finest playwright of the second half of the 20th Century. Miriam Buether has designed the perfect set for this look into the kaleidoscopic life of a modern woman. Each woman thinks that she is living in the best of times for a woman: young and optimistic, middle-aged and experienced or old and wise. Ann Roth has clothed each actress so as to reveal her character - in the case of Jackson's "A" in regal purple throughout. Paul Gallo and Fitz Patton have echoed the magical set in their respective light and sound designs.  

The end of the play brings to mind the scene in Orson Welles' Lady In Shanghai when the protagonists shoot it out in a House of Mirrors. What is real or perceived or true, is constantly changing in this slippery world of dying hopes and troubled dreams.

Glenda Jackson won 2 Oscars before 'retiring' to become a Member of the British Parliament. Unlike in America where movie and TV stars become politicians, Jackson is now a politician who has returned to acting. She commands the stage like few have done - except for Laurie Metcalf who keeps up with Jackson in an amazing pas de deux. Alison Pill is as good as she has ever been. But all three do something that Three Tall Women  demands of its actresses if it is to be a successful production - balancing the multiple lives of a real woman on the slender thread of a theatrical performance, a thread like life itself that disappears as it happens into memory. It is a play that rivals the great portraits of women in movies such as Sunset Boulevard in ballets such as John Cranko's Eugene Onegin or in art such as Picasso's portraits of women. Albee's Three Tall Women lives, to paraphrase  "A" , in the here and now. And that is the best place to experience a play - and to live a life.
 

John Golden Theater 252 W. 45th St. NY, NY 212-239-6200

Runtime 1 hr. and 30 min

Written by Edward Albee; Directed by Joe Mantello

Cast: Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill
 

MACBETH

Performed by the National Theatre of Great Britain

⭐️⭐

National Theatre Live in conjunction with Fathom Events brings filmed plays to movie theatres.  Later this year, you can see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night and Frankenstein (with Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch each playing the monster and Victor Frankenstein on alternate nights).  Its most recent offering is Macbeth.

Is a play that is filmed, a play or a film?

In the waning days of Judy Garland's career, in 1967, she appeared on Broadway in a show entitled, At Home at The Palace.  She was in poor voice, with little of the phenomenal vocal pyrotechnics displayed on her 1961 album, Judy at Carnegie Hall.  In William Goldman's excellent book, The Season, he looks at the 1967-68 Broadway season. Concerning the Garland show, he heard critics wondering if it was just a singing engagement or really theatre. Goldman concluded that it must be theatre because it sure as hell wasn't singing.

And so I conclude that The National Theatre's Macbeth must be theatre because it sure as hell isn't a movie.  There is something about filming a theatrical performance that rarely brings out the best in a play or the actors in it.  I have only seen one play filmed as a play that was successful, Vanya on 42nd Street, but it was not really a filmed play. Vanya was filmed by Louis Malle (Pretty Baby, Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre) from a translation of the Chekhov play by David Mamet and the screenplay by Andre Gregory. It was filmed without an audience and as a 'rehearsal.' It worked mainly because it tried to be as simple as possible.

Macbeth has been filmed more times than, as people use to say, Carter has little liver pills. Not only has the play been made into many movies and TV shows, but it has been adapted so many times that the variations are as numerous as the murders in the original play (among my favorite Macbeth-inspired films is the 1955 Joe Macbeth directed by Ken Hughes and starring Paul Douglas and Ruth Roman as the deadly couple).

In this National Theatre version, the setting is a post-civil war country where people struggle to stay alive. The 'costumes' are all patched together odds and ends, some body armour is held together with shipping tape. The set is dominated by a large ramp and many of the entrances and exits are made on this ramp. Visually, the ramp serves to break up the action and to add a dangerous, sweeping element to the bombed out world depicted by the other set elements.

While it is an excellent idea to set this political play in a post-civil-war modern country, the execution falls short because of many unwise choices. For example, King Duncan (Stephen Boxer) is dressed in a red suit and shoes which make him stand out (the intention I assume) but not in a good way.  He looks like a pimp who suddenly fell into this dark world from a 1970's drug dealers' convention. After Macbeth kills him (are there spoilers in Shakespeare?), Macbeth starts wearing red but not as a complete ensemble as Duncan did (maybe the war left only a limited amount of red cloth in the country and two complete red suits were not available).

Various kinds of blades sans hilts are on display as killing devices along with a variety of knives (there are no guns presumably because this is Great Britain and not Florida - ok, just a joke, but there really are no weapons other than swords and knives in this production) but the killing that takes place is about as real as the killing in a Lone Ranger episode. Again, back to the killing of Duncan, when Macbeth, after the foul deed, hands the bloody knives to Lady Macbeth and she drops them to the ground, these knives that killed three men make the sound of one hand clapping. Worse, some murders are committed with what appear to be pen knives. While blood and gore do not a great battle scene make, there has to be some attempt to make the violence palpable.

All of this is to say - the performances did not distract me from noticing the botched incidentals. It is never easy to make a filmed play come alive, but it is impossible when the actors are DOA. Macbeth (Rory Kinnear, not to be confused with his father Roy Kinnear who died in an accident while making a film in 1988 - Rory is best known for playing Bill Tanner in the James Bond films Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, and Spectre,) is portrayed as a hail-fellow-well-met who nervously laughs when the three Witches tell him of his soon-to-be-announced promotion and eventual crown. He alternates between being aghast at the idea of murder and aghast at the idea of being a coward, giving us a poster performance of OCD as, everywhere he goes,  he sees people he has murdered or ordered murdered. Lady Macbeth (Anne-Marie Duff) starts out with assassination anxiety and ends with her own OCD symptoms (those bloody hands!). Both leave themselves nowhere to go but into a full Don Knotts mode.

When, at the end, Macbeth is confronted by Macduff whose family he has had all murdered, they engage in the kind of fighting that professional wrestlers would be ashamed to perform. He disarms Macduff and appears invincible based on the three Witches' promise that no man of woman born can kill him.  Then (another spoiler alert!), Macduff reveals he was 'untimely ripped' from his mother's womb. Macbeth shows courage in spite of this news that 'palter with us in a double sense; That keep the word of promise to our ear, And break it to our hope.'  He  is done in by that pen knife that so many of these warriors carry with them.

And back we go again to Judy. When she did Meet Me In St. Louis, the songwriters wrote her a great song to sing to a sad Margaret O'Brien.  The only problem was that it was so sad and maudlin that it made Judy cry whenever she sang it. She told the writers she needed another song and they said, 'why, it makes you cry it's so good' and Judy replied - it's not me who is supposed to cry, it's the people in the audience. And I would say to the National Theatre - it's not the actors who are supposed to shake in their boots, it's the audience.

'Macbeth' Starring Rory Kinnear

Olivier, National Theatre, London; 1200 seats; £50 ($70) top. Opened, reviewed, March 6, 2018. Running time: 2 HOURS, 35 MIN.

PRODUCTION: A National Theatre production of a play in two acts by William Shakespeare.

CREATIVE: Directed by Rufus Norris; Design, Rae Smith; lighting, James Farmcombe; sound, Paul Arditti; costumes, Moritz Junge; music, Orlando Gough; movement, Imogen Knight.

CAST: Nadia Albina, Michael Balogun, Stephen Boxer, Anne-Marie Duff, Trevor Fox, Andrew Frame, Kevin Harvey, Sarah Homer, Hannah Hutch, Nicholas Karimi, Rory Kinnear, Joshua Lacey, Penny Lacey, Anna-Maria Nabirye, Patrick O'Kane, Amaka Okafor, Hauk Pattison, Alana Ramsey, Beatrice Scirocchi, Rakhee Shamar, Laetitia Stott, Parth Thakerar.