Just Shows To Go You

Psst.
Here’s the thing. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post a (cough RAVE cough) review of Bruce Norris’ new dark-ish comedy Clybourne Park based on the early preview I saw. If I was allowed, you can be sure the play would go right on my Recently Recommended list in the sidebar. (Come to think of it, I’m going to put it there anyhow!)

I know I am allowed at this point to post the discount code and to urge you to use it soon.

Use code “CPGR”
Limit 4 tickets per order. Subject to availability.

Order by February 21 with code CPGR and tickets are only
· $40 (reg. $65) for all performances Jan 29-Feb 14
· $50 (reg. $65) for all performances Feb 16-March 7

HOW TO ORDER:
Order online at www.playwrightshorizons.org. Use code CPGR.
Call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily)

By now you’ve heard the drill: Betty Buckley’s new cabaret show (at Feinstein’s for a month-long stay) eschews her usual forays into jazz and pop and consists almost exclusively of songs from the Broadway catalog. Except for the encore of “Memory” from Cats (complete with extended arm and finger) Buckley steers clear of the Broadway songs that she has been previously associated with. That’s a gutsy move that yields some real treasures, such as her beautifully delicate take on “Lazy Afternoon” from The Golden Apple and a world-wise read on “Hey There” from The Pajama Game. While the set showcases Buckley’s interpretive skills as a singing actress, the pace of the evening would benefit from one or two more well-placed uptempo numbers. (Note however that the set seems to have been built for some variation – reports from Tuesday indicate numbers from Nine but they weren’t among the 20 or so songs in the set when I attended on Wednesday.) One of the nice surprises about the song selection is that Buckley hasn’t confined herself to only American Songbook standards; she’s dug deeper for material that is newer (”Fine Fine Line” from Avenue Q), special (”When I Belt”, written for the set) or decidedly more cult-ish than universally known (”I Never Know When To Say When” from Goldilocks). Backed by her accomplished trio (headed by Kenny Werner) Buckley deserves bonus intimacy points for working the space so well: rather than fixing herself front and center she makes sure to connect to the entire room. (And in a delightful bit she plucks an audience member to serenade on stage with “You’ve Got Possibilities” from It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane, It’s Superman. You may think of Buckley as a Broadway diva, but in a bit like this one she’s down-to-earth endearing.)

photo: Joan Marcus

Some spoilers below, but not any major ones…..

I scrolled through almost all the reviews of Donald Margulies’ Time Stands Still and find myself in the curious position of having taken a different meaning from it than others I’ve read. I saw the play as an affirmation of the social consciousness of the artist. Not that anyone in the play calls noted war photojournalist Sarah Goodwin (Laura Linney) an artist although they come close and not that there’s a halo drawn over her head. As the play opens she returns home to her Williamsburg loft physically scarred and weakened after a car bomb explosion. She soon makes it known that she intends to be back on the job documenting war as soon as she is strong enough, but her near-death experience has put other ideas in everyone else’s heads. Her partner on and off the job James (Brian D’Arcy James) just wants to be “comfortable” at home rather than go back to work yet again in a war zone. Her good friend and editor Richard (Eric Bogosian) may profit from her work, but he just wants her safe and sound and tries to tempt her into assignments close to home, a sentiment echoed by his new younger girlfriend Mandy (Alicia Silverstone) whose social consciousness doesn’t extend far beyond her own occupation as an event planner. What can she do as a regular person except feel bad when she sees war images, she asks rhetorically, evading any identity as a citizen of the world. At the top of the second act James has some lively business damning the “manufactured experience” of some unnamed piece of socially conscious war-themed theatre he recently attended: it’s a rich irony considering that he’s begun filling up his days writing articles about horror movies. At the core of it, he’s saying he’s given up on art (just as he will later give up on journalism) affecting any change in the world. The people all around Sarah aren’t selfish monsters – they’re fundamentally good people we recognize who just want to take care of themselves and their own happiness. It’s no wonder that she begins to doubt her calling and to struggle with whether she is doing social good in her work or is just a “ghoul with a camera” turning a profit on suffering. I found the play consistently thought-provoking to a thrilling degree and the production (directed by Dan Sullivan) to be pitch-perfect. All the performances are excellent – Linney especially is revelatory, fully believable at every moment and giving a compelling performance by dint of its constant truthfulness. I can’t imagine there’s going to be a richer, more riveting performance on Broadway anytime soon.

photo: Eduardo Placer

Despite the title and the come-on, the focus of Daddy is less on the middle-aged stud (Gerald McCullouch) and his intergenerational relationship with an office intern (Bjorn DuPaty) than on the one with his longtime best bud (Dan Via, also the playwright). The early scenes lead you to expect a story about the challenge to a longterm friendship when one gets into a serious relationship, and maybe that’s what the playwright thinks he has written, but whatever might be uncomfortable and ugly in the dynamic between the friends is glossed over. The playwright has written himself a saint to play, wise and selfless and good to the core. There are some solid one-liners (”Anyone who says opposites attract has never been to a gay bar”) and McCullouch sounds some notes of honesty, but the plot finally takes a melodramatic, groanworthy turn that manages to conveniently dismiss the older-younger affair and further sanctify the best friend.

Before I went to see this production (at Manhattan Theatre Source) of Arthur Miller’s classic I tried to determine how many times I’d already seen the play performed in my lifetime. I lost count around 20. I’ll confess, I was skeptical that I’d get much out of seeing it again in a small 50-seat black box, but there I was fighting tears along with most everyone else during that final scene. The tiny-budget production doesn’t have any directorial gimmick and makes do with a few white boxes and a cross in the way of scenery, but it turns out that seeing an intelligent presentation of the play in a super intimate space is all that is needed to give the story fresh urgency. That, and a powerful central performance by Seth Duerr who understands, unlike so many others I’ve seen in the role, that the more vital and flawed the character the more compelling his story. His Proctor is hot-tempered and formidable, miles away from Daniel Day Lewis’ milquetoast performance in the misguided film which turned the play into nothing more than a pageant of victimhood. Other very strong performances include Sarah E. Mathews as Proctor’s wife, Naomi McDougall Jones as Abigail, Amy Bohaker as Mary Warren, and Angus Hepburn as Danforth.

Joe writes music, David the book and lyrics. I talked with the Zellnik brothers as rehearsals began for their brilliant 40’s-style musical Yank!, which will open off-Broadway later this month at The York.

photo: Adrian Miranda

How do two brothers grow up to both work in theatre?

JOE: I think it’s mostly genetic but you can blame our mom. She raised us on musicals and took us to shows at a very young age and that was the most often played music in our house.

DAVID: We had the only Jewish mom who would have been sad if we’d come home and said we wanted to be doctors. She really wanted us in the theatre. I think I was like 5 when Annie came out. We listened to it all the time and tried to memorize the lyrics. Then we saw the revival of Oklahoma! and that made us want to learn the scores for all the musicals and have little competitions about who knew them better.

JOE: We did a lot of little skits. We started writing songs together before we were teenagers. I would play the piano and David would sing and we did that pretty much every day after school for a couple of hours. That was our youth.

Is Yank! the first full length musical you’ve written together?

DAVID: No, it’s not. We wrote bad musicals together when I was 11 and Joe was 13. We’ve written real musicals together really our whole adult lives. We wrote one called City of Dreams which did the festival circuit in the early 00’s, and we wrote a childen’s musical for Theaterworks USA called First In Flight. This is the most personal show we’ve written.

In what way is it personal?

DAVID: I think it feels very personal because we decided very early on that we wouldn’t approach it with a detached sense of irony or by making fun of the fact that it’s a 40’s-style musical. At the time we started writing Yank! it seemed like so many musicals around us, even great ones, had a joke that they were musicals and the audience was supposed to be in on it. We decided to take this story, these characters and this form to heart. To take it seriously. To love it on its own terms.

JOE: We often forget this reason, because it seems so obvious to us, but it’s also personal because it’s the first musical we’ve written that has gay content. Both of us are gay so to tell a gay love story in a sentimental old fashioned way is meaningful for us.

DAVID: I’m not a tremendously spiritual person but it seems like the universe is aligning in a really beautiful way with this production and with the cast that we’ve managed, against all odds, to assemble. At this particular moment, both with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell potentially ending this year and the several-year journey of gay marriage, it does feel like Yank!, while not a very political show, feeds into a larger political and historical moment.

One of the most exciting things about Yank! for me is that it is both culturally relevant right now and yet is old-fashioned. Did you ever catch yourselves veering out of the style of 40’s musicals?

JOE: I think we did intentionally go outside the 40’s idiom. Some of the early decisions we made, while avoiding irony, were to make it a modern musical. It’s not structured with long book scenes and 3 or 4 numbers. We wrote it cinematically like a modern play. The opening sequence has interior monologues and covers about three weeks – that’s not the way they wrote musicals in the 1940’s. What there isn’t is any influence of rock music but there is modern music theatre writing.

DAVID: But there’s tremendous attention to where people’s heads were at. We did feel we had to be true to how people understood sexuality and masculinity, and how they understood the world. Definitely there are many moments in Yank! that are deeply true to a 40’s aesthetic. The tension is that we don’t have any popular culture record of gay life in the 40’s. So to see two men singing a love song to each other in the style of a universal Rodgers and Hammerstein song is, while being incredibly true to the aesthetic of the period, actually being very modern on some level.

Without a popular culture record of gay life in the 40’s, how did you construct the world?

DAVID: The beginning and the end of the show take place in the present and are about someone who found a journal that make him try to imagine the past. That echoes what Joe and I are doing: how do you construct a past that you weren’t there for? There’s two broad answers. For the history, the key work was “Coming Out Under Fire” by Allan Berube, which blew the lid off what WW2 was for gay people both in terms of gay history within the war and what the war did for the larger gay movement. The other part of the history has nothing to do with gay stuff, it was Studs Terkel’s “The Good War” and a lot of old movies and plays written at the time.

Tell me about the orchestrations, Joe. How many pieces do you get to play with?

JOE: This time I’m doing new orchestrations for the show. There will be 5 pieces. We will be using a synthesizer for the first time and that will allow us to bring in some colors we couldn’t before. It’s an exceptional group of musicians. We have a new song in the show for this production, and the music for the dream ballet is substantially new.

DAVID: You can’t have a 40’s musical without a dream ballet!

photo: Bobby Steggert, Nancy Anderson and Jeffry Denman in the 2007 production of Yank! at Gallery Players. credit: Jennifer Maufrais Kelly

Are there plans to record a cast album?

JOE: There has been talk about a recording with this cast, but we can’t say anything officially right now. We’ve managed to assemble our dream cast. Our four principals have all done the show before. We’ve managed to get them all here at the same time and couldn’t be more thrilled about that. Both of us feel we have an amazing support cast of mostly new people.

DAVID: I don’t always allow myself feelings of pride but when I do it’s in moments when I look around a room and see these amazing people who I love and respect so much and they’re here because of what Joe and I wrote. Jeffry Denman, Bobby Steggert, Nancy Anderson – they did the show when it was in a basement in Brooklyn, getting next to no money.

JOE: It was amazingly moving at the meet and greet the other day to see the number of people who have lined up behind this show and who really want to see it succeed. For so long it was just us trying to push this boulder up a hill.

Why does it take so long to put together a musical?

DAVID: Musicals take a lot of people, and a musical like this that is unapologetically gay takes time to find the people to trust and love it enough to give it a chance to live in the world. Also, Joe and I are perfectionists.

Good collaborations have some friction. How do your tastes differ?

JOE: I have much more of an old fashioned musical theatre queen sensibility. David is more politically and historically aware. On this show we were able to bring both of those things together in an interesting way.

DAVID: As we’re writing I tend to like the weird and non-linear where Joe tends to be more nuts and bolts about what will hold up.

JOE: Most of the disagreements we have are in the theoretical stage. Once something is up both of us are pretty much in agreement about whether something is working.

DAVID: In our collaboration, the reason doors don’t get slammed is that I’m very musical on my own and Joe writes lyrics on his own and they’re dramaturgically savvy for a composer. At the end of the day we both have veto power over each other’s work. If the other person doesn’t like something then that has to be the end of the discussion.

When was the moment, if there was a specific moment, when each of you realized that Yank! was worth fighting for?

JOE: I feel like we had a very early reading of the first act in late 2003 or 2004 and it was immediately clear that people were excited by it. We didn’t know how it was going to go or how the story would work out but it was just clear that people were loving it. In terms of when we realized it would really live and breathe, I feel that was as recent as last December. There’s an army of people who want it to happen now.

DAVID: I still can’t quite believe it, what the last two years have taken to get us here. For me, the moment I knew this was special and the musical that we were born to write was in Brooklyn. In between the version at NYMF in 2005 and the version at the Gallery Players in 2007, the show was ripped apart and got an entirely different structure and framing device. We weren’t sure if it would work and be moving. Somehow when it did work, and worked more beautifully than the NYMF version ever did, it was as good as anything as I could ever hope to write. I hope to write things as good but I think Yank! for me represents what we can do and what I love in theatre.

photo: Jim Baldassare

Poor unemployed Semyon (Paco Tolson) has never been so popular as when he decides to shoot himself. Suddenly several strata of Russian society are beating down his door to lay claim as the inspiration for his upcoming suicide. That’s about the gist of this slice of dark (often existential) humor adapted from Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide by director Robert Ross Parker. The original play had enough political criticism to get its playwright banished to Siberia during Stalin’s reign and you can certainly still see why, but as presented here the tone is more zany than heavy – one can greatly enjoy the production either for the intelligent sting of its text, for the contagious joy with which this distinct brand of comedy is put over by a game cast of 6, or (preferably) for both at the same time. Cast standout: William Jackson Harper, an actor I’ve admired in several dramas who here displays dead-on comic timing.