PLAY: "Pygmalion"

Photo/Joan Marcus

David Grindley is following on the heels of Journey's End with another excellent revival, Pygmalion. And while the focus has changed from crass war to high etiquette, the shows have much in common: save for a wide-open scene that's inaudibly set in the middle of a rainstorm, Jonathan Fensom's sliding shoebox sets are as claustrophobic as ever and, thanks to Jason Taylor's lighting, either dimly lit (in Mr. Higgins's study) or blindingly bright (his mother's drawing room). Not to mention returning stars Jefferson Mays and Boyd Gaines, who play the intellectual naifs who tamper so unwittingly with a young woman's character and soul. Mays is the ideal choice to play this dialectic and didactic dialect coach, given his strong TONY winning performance in I Am My Own Wife, and Gaines (as in Gypsy, earlier this year) provides an upright balance for that petulant youth. Claire Daines is in tough company, but she acquits herself well -- I only wish that her accents didn't seem to stifle her physical freedom. The far better example of cockney transformation comes from Doolittle's moralizing father, played here by Jay O. Sanders (the exaggeratedly straight man, as he was in A Midsummer Night's Dream). The production really makes the most of Shaw's use of language, especially given such hummers of lines like "What is life but a series of inspired follies?" or "Do any of us understand what we're doing? If we did, would we do it?" Grindley's direction makes for a realized life that is inspired (but not folly), and one need only look closely at Mays's flash of realization at the close of the play to see how true it is that we never truly understand ourselves.

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For more information about HIPTIX (how I saw this show), check my side site, metaDRAMA.

PLAY: "Gypsy"

Photo/Ari Mintz

After hearing all the praise for Gypsy, I was expecting to drop dead of excitement watching LuPone channel all of her estimable skill into the role of Rose. Maybe I suffered from a case of overexpectations. Maybe there were too many fawning fans in the audience--a celebratory praise party--for me to enjoy the oft-interrupted performance. Maybe I was sitting too far away from the stage to appreciate the phenomenon happening on it. But I don't like to make excuses: maybe the show just wasn't as good as it was hyped up to be.

There are certainly many good things about Gypsy: the story is sharp (especially for the time), the script is explosive, and the lyrics give a glimpse of Sondheim's growing ferocious playfulness. And there are certainly good things to be said for this production: Arthur Laurents, having written the book, understands how to hit the running jokes as a director, and Boyd Gaines manages to simmer more than simper, which gives a nice humanity and complexity to his opposite, Patti LuPone. And I like LuPone in this role: she doesn't try to be technically perfect with the lines (though she can, puttering and pattering through "Some People" and "Mr. Goldstone"). She sings with heart first, cracking with emotion, and then raising her voice even higher to fill those cracks with pure soul.

But, and this is the big, diplomatic but: Gypsy is a repetitive musical, trapped in vaudevillian rhythms and one-off tunes. Based on a memoir, the focus is tangential at best (see how June disappears, look how undeveloped Tulsa is). Nor does the intimate staging play to the rafters: this is not a big, razzle-dazzle show (as the lame "You Gotta Get a Gimmick" proves). Lousie's corrupted blossoming (in "The Strip") is pretty tame in today's world, and Laura Benanti's best moments in this role are her far subtler pleas to be noticed in "All I Need Is the Girl." After all that, "Everything's Coming Up Roses" winds up being a better song for LuPone than "Rose's Turn": the second act strains and bucks with attempts to stretch the story. And while I'm glad to see a full orchestra right there with a set and a memorized script, there were so many gaps -- such emptiness on the stage -- that this might as well have been the "normal" concert version of the Encores! series.

Did LuPone fill that stage? No. She tried. And perhaps if the audience hadn't been quite so supportive, she might have found that extra spark in Rose's personality that would have truly blown me away.

PLAY: "Journey's End"

Photo: Paul Kolnik

When R.C. Sherriff wrote Journey's End in 1928, he meant for it to be an honest, celebratory depiction of what he and his comrades went through, fighting for Britain in World War I. Regardless of how we much of an anti-war play it comes across as now (and it's impossible not to see the futility of war in this drama, set in an underground bunker over the course of four, terse 1918 days), the fact that Sherriff wrote the play with such open-minded wit makes it that much stronger as a stunning theatrical work. The simple truth of real, fleshed out characters--not the overdone proselytizing of The Vertical Hour or other "modern" pieces of propaganda--camaraderie does more to evoke emotions than intellectual discussions of such important matters.

Films like Saving Private Ryan and the HBO limited series, Band of Brothers, knew this and were the stronger for it, crafting silent scenes that spoke as much as the action. Journey's End, which is live and on a Broadway stage, can't do the same special effects, so instead the play focuses simply on the characters, with the war taking place just a few feet aboveground, an ominous presence brought to life by Gregory Clarke's spectacular sound effects. As for the bunker (designed by Jonathan Fensom), it's a dank, rat-infested mess, barely lit by candles (kudos to Jason Taylor's dim lighting), and the cramped quarters--wooden walls and poles pressing in from all sides--exacerbate the tension of the piece.

I've spent so much time establishing place (before even mentioning the excellent ensemble or the dashing director) because the world itself of this play is as much a character as anyone else, and because things like that too often go overlooked. But they're important to note; one of the reasons Journey's End is such a great play is that the pieces all work together--even the curtain call is gloriously rigged to continue the emotional toll of the show, and I'm glad that a director (David Grindley) finally had the balls to carry the reality of the theater past the threshold of the curtain. Within the show itself, he manages to carry more tension on a bare stage (the characters are all presumed to be fighting in the trenches) than many directors accomplish in their whole careers. One pivotal scene, filled with heartbreaking subtext, involves the fifteen minutes of preparation before what is essentially a suicide mission: the two officers deliberately keep switching the topic in order to clear their minds of their impending deaths (it's no surprise that another officer cracks) and their casual conversation about the English countryside is painfully oblique.

What I like most about the play's execution is that Sherriff's characters avoid the all-too-easy trap of stereotype. Though there are comic characters, like the rotund and mustached Trotter (John Ahlin), they are not just so. In Trotter's case, he is just a man coping with the constant pressure as best he can: "War is bad enough already, but war without pepper--it's bloody awful." In the case of our whiskey-addled protagonist, Captain Stanhope (Hugh Dancy), it takes a bottle to keep the demons at bay, and his wizened, gentle second-in-command, Osborne (Boyd Gaines) to keep him sane (and to tuck him in at night). Our heroes are the characters like Raleigh (Stark Sands), a newly minted officer who is perfect for leading nighttime raids through mortar-ripped holes in the enemy lines on account of his naivety about suicide. In this case, Raleigh also doubles as a connection to Stanhope's former life, which bolsters the awful truth that men must reinvent themselves in war: in order to survive, they must kill who they once were.

Journey's End, whether Sherriff meant it or not, makes for a relevant revival (at last!) on the Broadway stage, and is a far tighter production than last year's Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (perhaps because the play enlists theater veterans rather than television plebes). It's gripping, and utterly immersing: to the usher who recommended I bring a handkerchief: you were right.