Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about RED, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, THE COCKTAIL PARTY, I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, and MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET.

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Before I tell you about my reaction to Red, by John Logan, an import from London now playing at the Golden Theatre, I must admit my prejudice against almost all of “modern art,” and most especially abstract expressionism. I believe that hundreds of years from now, when people look back on our era, they’ll be dumbfounded that we actually thought the work created by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko was great art; indeed, art at all. So, that’s the frame of mind I had when I went in to see Red, a play about Rothko starring Alfred Molina.

 Red takes place in Rothko’s Manhattan studio in the late1950s. Rothko has received a huge commission to paint murals for a new restaurant, to be called The Four Seasons. He’s getting $35,000, which we are given to understand was a lot of money at that time.

Anyway, it’s such a big job that he needs an assistant, and the play begins on said assistant’s first day on the job, at the start of which he is informed by the imperious Rothko that he is an employee. Rothko is not his teacher, his mentor, his confidant – he’s his employer. That said, Rothko proceeds over the course of the next two years to browbeat this young man and to pontificate on a variety of subjects as they relate to the most important subject of all – Art; particularly his art. He’s particularly big on Nietsche. 

Finally, when the young assistant takes him on, assailing his boss for being a blowhard, ungenerous to the point of paranoia about any art by anyone else, Red becomes dramatically interesting. This takes place near the end of the 90-minute evening. Up until then, it’s all talk, talk, talk – much of it interesting, but little of it dramatic. 

What sustains the evening are the performances by Molina and by Eddie Redmayne as the assistant who, like Molina, has come over with the play from London. Both actors are great in their roles. Redmayne’s performance is “A star is born.” 

If you actually like “modern art,” this play might appeal to you. You’ll certainly learn a lot (maybe, more than you care to know) about one of its titans. 

Speaking of London imports, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES is back, at the Longacre Theatre, in a new production directed by Terry Johnson last season at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a hot hot hot venue in Southwark from which also sprang this season’s revival of A Little Night Music and last season’s (or was it the season before?) of Sunday in the Park with George. When it does musicals, Menier scales them down; hence, they cost much less; hence, commercial producers start salivating. 

This new version of the Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical features British classical actor Douglas Hodge as Albin, in a performance which won Hodge the Olivier Award last season. The rest of the cast is American, led by Kelsey Grammer as Georges. 

La Cage aux Folles (the club) is short on glam and long on grunge. I have to confess, I missed the glam. Grammer is charming as Georges. Reportedly, when Hodge has to go back to London in six months, Grammer is switching over to play Albin. I might go back and see this – he might be good in the role. As for Hodge, I appeare to be the lone dissenter in the chorus of praise for his performance. I found his high-pitched, nasal intonations to be more than a little annoying. What can I say? I just didn’t like him. As they say in Britain, he got on my tits. 

Critical opprobrium has made this La Cage aux Folles a hit hit hit, and the leading contenda for this year’s Tony Award for best musical revival. Frankly, I enjoyed Bye Bye Birdie more. 

There are two interesting revivals of rarely-performed plays on view at the Theatre Row multiplex. The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) has a superb revival of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, which has closed at the Beckett Theatre, and Keen Co.’s I Never Sang for My Father is at the Clurman. Of the two, I much preferred The Cocktail Party. 

Eliot straddles the world of the classic drawing room comedy and the much darker, more oblique world of Pinter. In the first act the play’s central character, Edward, is hosting a cocktail party for a bunch of his wife’s friends. His wife is off visiting a sick aunt. There is a mysterious uninvited guest, and in the second act we find out who he is. We also find out that in fact Edward’s marriage is on the rocks. What seems to be a deliberately superficial play about marriage becomes much more about salvation and redemption, with haunting overtones of Eliot’s own rocky marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. 

TACT’s Artistic Director Scott Alan Evans’ production is subtle and superb, and there are wonderful performances all around from his cast. The Cocktail Party is one of those Famous Plays more talked about than seen. I hope you had a chance to see it. It might not come this way again. 

Robert Anderson’s I Never Sang for My Father is a memory play, a la The Glass Menagerie, wherein a middle aged man tells us of his rocky relationship with his father, a crusty old coot who is not going gently into that good night. When we meet the parents, they are returning from Florida, where they winter. Mom is suffering from a range of health problems. Dad is physically fine but starting to fail mentally. Of course, he is in extreme denial about this. 

Aside from the annoying use of narrative to tell (rather than dramatize) the story, I Never Sang for My Father can be a tough sit, because we, too, are in denial about the inevitable decline of our parents. If we are geezers like the father in the play, Anderson exposes uncomfortable truths about the inevitability of The End which we’d rather not face. 

That said, Keen’s production, while extremely bare-bones, is pretty good. Marsha Mason and Keir Dullea are excellent as the parents. Ms. Mason exits the play after the first act (guess why?). I missed her. Dullea is infuriating/heartrending as he fights his son every step of the way, refusing to accept his fate, insisting that he’s fine, everything’s fine. 

Keen doesn’t make the case for I Never Sang for my Father as a Lost Classic, but it’s still worth seeing if you don’t mind being bummed out. 

By now, you must have heard all about how The Addams Family, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, is a turkey. Well, it’s not. It’s a perfectly enjoyable light entertainment which, uncannily, employs basically the same plot as does La Cage aux Folles: grown child (Wednesday, now 18) is getting married, to a nice young man whose parents are conservative, straight-laced mid-westerners (in the snobby world of New York, is there any other kind of mid-westerner?) who want to meet their future in-laws, so much of the plot concerns the Addams family’s mostly futile attempts to appear “normal.” 

Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth star as Gomez and Morticia, and they are both a hoot, as is Jackie Hoffman as a Grandma rather deranged from too many drugs in the 60s, and Kevin Chamberlin as a jolly Uncle Fester, in love with the moon. 

Critics have excoriated the show for being too cute, too sentimental. These are, by definition, bad bad bad, apparently. The Addams Family looks like it will succeed anyway. It’s selling tickets like it’s another Wicked – because of strong word of mouth. So: poo on you, Broadway critics! 

MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET, at the Nederlander Theatre, is an import from Chicago. It uses an actual event, a jam session in Memphis’ Sun Records’ studio which included Roy Perkins, Johnny Cash, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. The first three are already big stars; Jerry Lee is a wannabe who shows up to try and get an audition with Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records. The other three drift in. Perkins has been overshadowed by Elvis, who shot to stardom after he performed Perkin’s “Blue Suede Shoes” on the Ed Sullivan Show, and is fiercely determined to climb back on top of the charts. Elvis, in tow with his girlfriend of the week, wants Phillips to join him at RCA, to whom Phillips sold his contract in order to save his label, because he believes only Sam understands that rock and roll is not a fad. Sam, meanwhile, is anxious about Cash, whose contract is expiring. Can he re-sign him? 

Million Dollar Quartet is rather thin dramatically but wonderful musically. The actors who portray the rockers look and sound amazingly like the originals, and are kick-ass musicians to boot. Robert Britton Lyons seethes with anger and determination as the de-throned King of Rockabilly, Carl Perkins, and you might think that you are actually watching Elvis, Cash and Lewis in the superb incarnations of, respectively, Eddie Lendenning, Lance Guest and Levi Kreis. My only quibble: what the heck is Hunter Foster doing in this show? He’s a gifted musical comedy performer in his own right. Here, he has no songs. Well, that’s all right, Ma – but imagine, say, his sister Sutton in a show in which everyone sings but her. Ridiculous.

“Who is this guy?”

For over thirty years Lawrence Harbison was in charge of new play acquisition for Samuel French, Inc., during which time his work on behalf of playwrights resulted in the first publication of such subsequent luminaries as Jane Martin, Don Nigro, Tina Howe, Theresa Rebeck, José Rivera, William Mastrosimone, Charles Fuller, and Ken Ludwig, among many others; and the acquisition of musicals such as Smoke of the Mountain, A…My Name Is Alice, Little Shop of Horrors and Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down.  He is a now a free-lance editor, primarily for Smith and Kraus, Inc., for whom he edits annual anthologies of best plays by new playwrights and women playwrights, best ten-minute plays and best monologues and scenes for men and for women. For many years he wrote a weekly column on his adventures in the theater for two Manhattan Newspapers, the Chelsea Clinton News and The Westsider. His new column, “On the Aisle with Larry,” is a weekly feature at www.smithandkraus.com.

He works with individual playwrights to help them develop their plays (see his website, www.playfixer.com). He has also served as literary manager or literary consultant for several theatres, such as Urban Stages and American Jewish Theatre. He is a member of both the Outer Critics Circle and the Drama Desk. He has served many times over the years as a judge and commentator for various national play contests and lectures regularly at colleges and universities. He holds a B.A. from Kenyon College and an M.A. from the University of Michigan.

He is currently working on a book, Masters of the Contemporary American Drama.

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

                             —– George F. Will