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 ELF, ANGELS IN AMERICA, COLIN QUINN: LONG STORY SHORT, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, ELLING, AFTER THE REVOLUTION, THAT HOPEY CHANGEY THING, THERE ARE NO MORE BIG SECRETS, TIGERS BE STILL, SPIRIT CONTROL and MIDDLETOWN.
I didn’t see the movie Elf when it first came out but I caught up with it recently on DVD on the recommendation of my son. It’s a charming film, brimming with droll wit and Christmas good cheer. The musical version of Elf, at the Hirschfeld Theatre, keeps all of the cheer but excises most of the drollery. It’s good family fun as long as you don’t go expecting it to be like the movie.
The story concerns one Buddy, a human who’s raised at the North Pole to think he’s one of Santa’s elves. When he realizes he’s human, he decides to travel to New York to find his father, a man named Walter Hobbs who is an executive with a children’s book publisher, whose office is in the Empire State Building and who doesn’t know he exists. Dad is a workaholic sourpuss, but this does not deter our hero from trying to win his love. Nobody believes in The Meaning of Christmas in NYC (can you believe it?); but gradually, Our Hero changes all of that, and finds romance as well.
The book writers, Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin, follow the plot of the film pretty much, though two favorite characters have been cut – Papa Elf, who supplies most of the exposition in the film, and the vile children’s book author who it is hoped by Hobbs will save his skin by letting his company publish his new book. I missed them both. The songs (music by Matthew Sklar, lyrics by Chad Beguelin) are cheerful and fun.
As for the performers, Sebastian Arcelus makes a fine Buddy, and there is excellent work from Matthew Gumley, as Buddy’s half brother Michael, and from Mark Jacoby as Buddy’s Dad. Jacoby looks and sounds astonishingly like James Caan in the film. Beth Leavel is rather wasted in the role of Buddy’s step-mom Emily. She’s a wonderfully quirky actress who doesn’t get much chance to break out into quirkiness. Don’t get me wrong, though, she’s fine in this rather generic role.
Elf is a charming, feel-good show. If you’re in the mood for this kind of thing, by all means go.
Signature Theatre Company is celebrating the work of Tony Kushner this season, with revivals of Angels in America and Kushner’s translation of Corneille’s The Illusion. Angels in America is running now, but good luck scoring a ticket as the entire limited run is sold out.
Kushner’s epic drama about America in the throes of the AIDS crisis still packs a punch, particularly as we suffer through the re-ascendancy of Reaganite conservativism. I was glad to have the chance to see the play again, though Michael Greif’s production didn’t make me forget George C. Woolf’s original on Broadway.
All of the actors are good, but two crucial roles seemed to me to be miscast. Bill Heck plays Joe Pitt, the conservative Mormon who’s a protégé of the evil Roy Cohn, and Zoe Kazan plays his wife Harper. Heck is a tall handsome hunk who reads mid-30s; Kazan, a sprite who reads about 16. In this production, Harper looks more like Joe’s daughter than his wife. Also, I had a hard time believing that Joe is gay, because Heck is so straight in his manner, unlike David Marshall Grant in the Broadway production. Robin Bartlett is even better than was Kathleen Chalfant in her several roles, the most important of which are Hannah (Joe’s mother) and Ethel Rosenberg. The real surprise for me was Frank Wood’s Roy Cohn. I’ve usually seen him in mild-mannered roles; here, he’s maniacally demonic. I do wish he had better diction, though. He barks out his lines like he’s a machine gun, and too much of them are unintelligible. Still, he’s fantastic – if you can understand what he’s saying. Christian Borle is terrific as Prior Walter, as is Zachary Quinto as Louis. Borle looks astonishingly like Joe Mantello, who played Louis in the Broadway production. I was startled when I saw him for the first time, and assumed they had cast a Mantello lookalike as Louis, only to realize that in fact he was playing Prior.
Most of Greif’s staging is wonderful; but he botches the climax of the first part, Millenium Approaches. The Angel is rolled in looking like the dry cleaning, and this climactic scene is played stage left, when it certainly should be center stage. I don’t usually tell an artist what he should have done; but this was just terrible.
If this extends, maybe you’ll be able to score a ticket. With all its flaws, this is overall a fine production of one of the greatest American plays.
Colin Quinn: Long Story Short started out last summer Off Broadway, where it was a sold-out hit, and has transferred to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre. It’s basically about 80 minutes of stand-up comedy in which Quinn comments caustically on the history of ideas. I was unfamiliar with Quinn, so I had no preconceptions. He’s essentially a working class bloke, the sort of guy you might meet at a bar. He’s pretty funny; but, like Frank Wood he has terrible diction and speaks in machine gun bursts, so all too much of his act is unintelligible. And he’s miked!
My main problem with this show was that I just don’t think it belongs in a Broadway theatre, even one as small as the Helen Hayes, at Broadway prices. But if you’re a Quinn fan, by all means go. If you’re not, you could skip this one.
Don’t, however, miss Daniel Sullivan’s wonderful production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino as Shylock. This is one of the greatest Shakespearean productions I’ve ever seen, and Pacino is, truly, the Jew which Shakespeare drew. He’s unforgettable, as is Lily Rabe as Portia.
Elling, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, is an import from London, where it won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. Brendan Fraser and Denis O’Hare star as two lunatics who first share a bedroom in an asylum, and later a flat in the outside world.
Fraser and O’Hare are hilarious, as is Jennifer Coolidge is various roles; but it’s not enough to save this loopy, terribly thin play, which is basically just a plotless series of episodes.
You could give this one a miss, unless you just can’t bear to miss Fraser and O’Hare.
This seems to be Open Season on lefties, for some reason. Amy Herzog’s After the Revolution, at Playwrights Horizons, is a terrific drama about the adult children and grandchildren of a man who was blacklisted in the 1950s. His granddaughter, Emma, has established a foundation is his name to fight government oppression. She’s the last to know, though, that Grandpa actually was a spy for the Soviets, which means everything she has been brought up to believe is a lie.
Carolyn Cantor’s production is excellent overall, but the set just doesn’t work. It’s basically a living room which is supposed to represent different living rooms. No good. The actors, however, are great. My faves were Katherine Powell as Emma and Peter Friedman as her father, Ben. Friedman is one of our greatest stage actors, and is here seen in one of his finest roles.
My only quibble with the play is the anticlimactic last scene, wherein Emma tells her step-grandmother what she has decided to do about her foundation. The climax of the play is her confrontation with her father in the preceding scene, and it is here that her decision should have been revealed.
Aside from these quibbles, After the Revolution is a don’t-miss.
Richard Nelson’s That Hopey Changey Thing, which has just closed at the Public Theater, took a hard look at knee-jerk liberalism. It was about a family of liberal ideologues. The brother, played with his usual flair by Jay O. Sanders, is starting to veer to the right, and when he takes on his sisters’ liberal views, the sparks begin to fly.
Essentially, this was more extended debate than real play; but the debate was engaging and all the actors were terrific. I hope you saw it; but if you didn’t, you missed a humdinger.
Heidi Schreck’s There Are No More Big Secrets, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, is a gripping drama about a Russian journalist and her American husband who come to visit old friends. She’s on the lam from mysterious forces which want to kill her. He’s the ex-lover of his host’s wife.
Like That Hopey Changey Thing, this play is long on talk; but there’s enough action to keep you engaged, and the performers are terrific. There’s even a possibly supernatural mystery thrown into the mix, which I found fascinating.
Definitely check this one out.
Kim Rosenstock’s Tigers Be Still, which has just closed at the Roundabout Underground, was a compelling comic drama about a young woman who’s a tutor for a surly teenaged boy. She lives with her sister, who’s dreadfully depressed about her breakup with her boyfriend, and who spends all day sitting on the sofa drinking Jack Daniels and watching Top Gun.
Rosenstock’s writing was fresh and witty, and Sam Gold’s production captured her quirky style perfectly. All the actors were wonderful. I hope you had the chance to see this. Rosenstock is a real comer.
Spirit Control, at Manhattan Theatre Club, is strangely compelling play by Beau Willimon about an air traffic controller named Adam who tries but fails to help a distraught women land a plane whose pilot has died of a heart attack. This is so traumatic for him that he winds up losing his family after having an affair with a woman he meets in a bar. Or does he? This is one of those plays which seems like its central character is in the funhouse, gazing at endless reflections of himself. What’s real, and what’s fantasy? As it gets cleverer and cleverer, it gets weirder and weirder.
What sustains the evening is the brilliant performance by Jeremy Sisto as Adam. Mia Barron, as the mysterious Woman in the Bar, is also great. This one is definitely worth seeing.
Middletown, at the Vineyard Theatre, is a full length play by Will Eno, whose one-man play Thom Paine (About Nothing – as it certainly was) pretty much annoyed everyone to death excerpt The Times’ Charles Isherwood, who has raved about this new Eno play. I have to admit, it’s not nearly as annoying as Thom Paine, but that’s about the best I can say for it.
Eno sets his play in Middletown, sort of a generic small town in Middle America, and makes it a kind of contemporary Grovers Corners. His writing, a snarky imitation of Thornton Wilder with none of Wilder’s compassion and empathy for his characters, posits that the denizens of this “typical American town” are all either loopy or suffering from alienation and despair. Imagine Grovers Corners peopled with nothing but Simon Stimsons.
You could skip Middletown.
ELF. Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 W. 45th St.
TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200
ANGELS IN AMERICA. Signature Theatre Co., 555 W. 42nd St.
TICKETS: 212-244-7529 (good luck …)
COLIN QUINN: LONG STORY SHORT. Helen Hayes Theatre, 240 W.44th St.
TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St.
TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200
ELLING. Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St.
TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200
AFTER THE REVOLUTION. Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St.
TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200
THAT HOPEY CHANGEY THING. Public Theater. Alas, closed
THERE ARE NO MORE BIG SECRETS. Rattlestick Theatre, 224 Waverly Pl.
TICKETS: www.smarttix.xom or 212-868-4444
TIGERS BE STILL. Roundabout Underground. Alas, closed
SPIRIT CONTROL. Manhattan Theatre Club. City Center, 131 W. 55th St.
TICKETS: 212-581-1212
MIDDLETOWN. Vineyard Theatre, 109 E. 15th St.
TICKETS: 212-353-0303
“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