42. CULT OF LOVE (seen December 19, 2024)

 

For my review of Cult of Love please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

41. EUREKA DAY (seen December 14, 2024)

 

Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day had its New York premiere in 2019 at Walkerspace, Soho Rep’s former haunt, where I reviewed it. This clever play has returned in a completely new Manhattan Theatre Company production at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. It continues to excel as a bitingly topical dramedy, one that reminds me of the immortal words of Sean O’Casey’s bibulous “paycock,” Captain Jack Boyle: “The world’s in a terrible state of chassis.” (The following adapts some material from my original review.)

Bill Irwin, Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Jessica Hecht, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz. All photos: Jeremy Daniels.

 

Unless we live in a bubble (and many do), it’s a wonder how we navigate the “chassis” of daily life when we’re besieged by more nerve-jangling issues clamoring for our attention than ever before: presidential politics, terrorism, climate change, drug addiction, health care, abortion, white nationalism, gun control, the Middle East, the environment, sexual assault, transgenderism, racism, antisemitism, massive hurricanes, a free press, privacy, identity, unidentified drones, vaccinations . .

Amber Gray, Jessica Hecht. 

Each of these (and others) could be the spur that drives writers to create topically pertinent dramas, comedies, and musicals. Aside from the endless stream of works dealing with identity issues (ethnic, racial, or sexual), however, those dealing in potent ways with the others come more as single spies than as battalions. Fortunately, one such spy is Eureka Day, set mostly in the child-friendly library—perfectly designed by Todd Rosenthal and lit by Jen Schriever—of the eponymous Berkeley private school.

 

Bill Irwin, Jessica Hecht. 

 Eureka Day—originally done by the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley—gives the winter season, with its paucity of straight plays dominated by a succession of musicals, a well-needed shot in the arm with its clever way of exploring the ramifications of compulsory vaccinations. With anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr., up for a major federal health care position, the subject could not be riper.

Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Bill Irwin.

 Spector carefully develops his discussion drama around Eureka Day’s four continuing board members and their “floating” member, whose child is a new enrollee. The continuing ones are Don (Bill Irwin, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), the school head, and the parents, Suzanne (Jessica Hecht, Summer, 1976), Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, making her Broadway debut), and Eli (Thomas Middleditch, TV’s “Silicon Valley”). Joining them is Carina (Amber Gray, Hadestown). Clint Ramos’s perfectly considered costumes for these well-off, well-educated, California parents help make them all seem real.

 

Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Bill Irwin, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, Jessica Hecht.

The board prides itself on the school’s emphasis on social justice and non-confrontational attitudes toward controversial issues. Spector masterfully satirizes this by putting them through linguistic hoops as they struggle to articulate their thoughts without giving offense. That, however, doesn’t prevent the occasional, unintentional, mildly racist sling sent by the embarrassingly apologetic Suzanne in the direction of the African American Carina.

 

Eureka Day, craftily directed by Steppenwolf’s Anna D. Shapiro (August: Osage County), covers a lot of ground (even squeezing in an affair between Eli and Meiko) in its now smartly trimmed 95-minute version (it ran over two hours in 2019). Although it has fun poking fun at how concerns for diversity lead to micro-labeling ethnicities, its chief mission is to show what happens when the board is forced to deal with an outbreak of mumps leading to a health department directive requiring all the non-vaccinated students to get shots. Just because this school is in the liberal enclave of Berkeley is no reason to believe the well-read parents all accept the scientific support for the importance of vaccines, whether for mumps or a host of other ailments.

 

Spector does an exquisite job of making fun of the stranglehold forcing the board to consider everyone’s ideas as equally valid, demonstrating the emotional and psychological tubes through which the board members—overseen by the always placating Don—must squeeze themselves to show how fair and open they are to all opinions. The word “woke” is never spoken but you’d have to be asleep to miss its presence. Politesse in the name of political correctness has rarely been so finely shaded, creating a situation where no one can take a position because to do so would be to express advocacy rather than seek consensus, as if consensus is even possible. Spector’s demonstration of the conflict between the relative value of individual needs and community ones is one of the play’s strongest features.

Of enormous help is the playwright’s capturing the hesitant rhythms of dialogue in which the otherwise articulate characters struggle to avoid offending by backtracking at any sign of disagreement or by speaking in partial sentences and ellipses. Feelings and opinions are repressed in the interest of “community” values, often creating time-burning digressions when they should be confronting concrete problems. Don, especially, is unable to stand up for his beliefs, claiming he’s just a “facilitator.”

 

There is one particularly brilliant comic scene revealing both the board’s suppression of its own disparate views and the far freer ones of the school’s parents as demonstrated during an online livestream meeting held between the board and the parents. As Don and the board talk about the issues, a plethora of parental comments are projected (projection design by David Bengali) on a large upstage screen.

If you’ve ever engaged in an online discussion, you can imagine the vitriol that pecking at a keyboard can inspire, even when your name is attached to your remarks. Mixed with the “thumbs up” emojis that keep popping up at regular intervals, and, as tempers rise, getting ever bigger laughs, are one hilarious insult and riposte after the other. It’s sometimes impossible to follow what the actors are saying while simultaneously reading the online comments, which require constant attention. You may not even be able to tell if the bursts of raucous laughter are inspired by something someone said (and that you missed) or something someone wrote. I wonder if the actors themselves, who do their energetic best to get their points across, know just how much they’re being upstaged by all the trolling.

Although I’d like to see the cast take it down a notch in the opening scene, when they display a tendency to push, as if they feel a need to grab us before we know who they are. Each actor eventually deserves a shout-out, but I’ll choose Jessica Hecht’s overexplaining, vaccine-questioning Suzanne as the standout. The role itself, of course, is a juicy plum with many dimensions; I pointed to Tina Benko in the same role five years ago. Hecht retains her distinctive vocal inflections, a sort of breathless, placating tone, mingled with tremulous urgency, although modulated here more than in some other of her performances. The more you see this star, the more you recognize her special uniqueness.

Spector manages to avoid injecting the play with overt polemics, allowing his characters to show what happens when both-sideism is the order of the day. Much as he needs to cloud the discussions with disclaimers, though, there’s no doubt where he stands. And the tag line he’s added to this new production could not be improved.

 

I wished in 2019 that Eureka Day would prove contagious and be quarantined somewhere for a longer run. I’m happy to say that wish came true.

 

Eureka Day

Samuel J. Friedman Theatre

261 W. 47th Street, NYC

Through January 19

 

 

 

LEITER LOOKS AT BOOKS (40th edition): Ron Fassler. THE SHOW GOES ON: BROADWAY HIRINGS, FIRINGS & REPLACEMENTS

 

For my review of Ron Fassler's The Show Goes On: Broadway Hirings, Firings & Replacements please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

LEITER LOOKS AT BOOKS (39th edition): Shauna Vey. CHILDHOOD AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN THEATRE

 For my review of Shauna Vey's Childhood and Nineteenth-Century Theatre please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

LEITER LOOKS AT BOOKS (38th ed.): Ken Bloom. SHOW & TELL: THE NEW BOOK OF BROADWAY ANECDOTES

 

For my review of Ken Bloom's Show & Tell: The New Book of Broadway Anecdotes please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

40. THE BLOOD QUILT (seen November 24, 2024)

 

Lauren E. Banks, Mirirai, Adrienne C. Moore, Susan Kelechi Watson, Crystal Dickinson. All photos: Julieta Cervantes.

Pulitzer-winning Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt (which premiered in 2015 at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage) focuses on four cyclonic African American half-sisters, the Jernigans, their varying hues signaling that each is by a different father. In the play, the siblings gather several months after their mother’s death at the rickety family homesite on fictional Kwemera Island (Kwemera means “to withstand, to endure”), off the Georgia coast. As the winds blow and thunder crashes, these Gullah Geechee women—and one’s teen daughter—unite and disunite, their increasingly ferocious squabbles mirroring the roiling storm outside.

Adrienne C. Moore, Crystal Dickinson, Susan Kelechi Watson.

They slice fabric and sew a quilt together, much as they slice each other apart emotionally only to join again in blood-signed ties that bind. Secrets emerge in a cascading shower of increasingly acrimonious recriminations revelations, touching, among other things, on HIV, rape, and, as in so many similar plays, the contents of a will. Finally, the tempest inside and out is resolved through the power of a showery ritual.

c

Cast of The Blood Quilt.

While much seems familiar from other plays, interest is sustained by Hall’s richly fashioned, lyrical language—albeit often unclear by its mingling of thick Black and Geechee dialect—and the strikingly intense acting. Director Lileana Blain-Cruz has drawn first-class work from each gifted performer, their costuming by Montana Levi Blanco helping greatly to illuminate their vividly disparate personalities.

Susan Kelechi Watson, Crystal Dickinson, Lauren E. Banks, Adrienne C. Moore.

Crystal Dickinson is the stable, head-on-her-shoulders Clementine, who lived with and cared for the Jernigan family’s late matriarch, a demanding, overwhelming woman. herself almost as much a character as those we see. Cassan, played by Susan Kelechi Watson), is the mother of the precociously wise 15-year-old Zambia (Mirirai). She could have been a nurse but chose work as an army nurse because her military husband, Chad, was always being deployed to distant warzones, forcing her, in essence, to be a single mom.

Mirirai, Adrienne C. Moore.

Adrienne C. Moore plays Gio, the oldest sibling, a profane, bitterly angry, beer-guzzling, Mississippi cop in a toxic relationship with Red, the man she’s divorcing. She’s especially nasty toward her youngest sister, the beautiful, Armani-wearing Amber (Lauren E. Banks), her $500 weave displaying her outward success as a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer. Although she’s the family’s golden girl (and Mama’s favorite)—one reason for Gio’s jealous antagonism—she, too, is in a failing relationship, with a man named Zander.

Lauren E. Banks, Susan Kelechi Watson, Mirirai.

Zambia, whose thick, ungrammatical dialect sometimes disguises comments that sound too mature for a 15-year-old, is the kind of kid who tries on identities like masks: one week a vampire, the next a Goth, then a hijab-wearing Muslim, and now a lesbian. She idolizes Amber but, for all her smarts, is too much of a slacker to match her aunt’s ambition and lifelong determination to succeed. Still, beginning as a complete innocent to the world of quilting, allowing her to serve as a receptacle for cultural exposition, she ultimately proves a worthy successor to a family tradition in danger of vanishing. 

When such plays have plots involving wills, lawyers are rarely far behind. Despite her lack of familiarity with legal issues outside of her specialty, Amber can cut through knots brought up by the will’s disposal of the quilts and the family's financial decline--a huge amount in unpaid taxes—that now face the siblings. The future of the quilts, which have significant financial value, triggers violent disagreements rooted in the family’s fabled historical commitment to their making and possession. Family quilt-making, a craft in which Amber is the least proficient but for which Zambia shows a surprising knack, is the lifeblood, the spiritual sustenance of the Jernigans.

 

Crystal Dickinson, Susan Kelechi Watson. 

Hall combines naturalism with folktale qualities, using the craft of quilting to evoke feelings of mysticism, ritualism, and symbolism that artfully perpetuate the family’s spiritual history.  Several beautiful, borrowed quilts are carefully woven into Adam Rigg’s attractive set design—with its watery frontage—on the Mitzi E. Newhouse stage, including their placement on the house’s upper story where they hang over a balcony railing. Jiyoun Chang creates lovely lighting effects that help us focus on them, and Jeannette Oi-Suk Yew’s projections add an other-worldly dimension to the atmosphere. 

The Blood Quilt, unfortunately, at two and three-quarter hours, is vastly overlong. It seems intent on making sure each sister gets as much acting time as the others, especially when it becomes someone’s turn to reveal some crisis they’re experiencing or to expose a secret, including some that don’t shine nicely on Mama. 

The fierceness and frequency of people blowing their tops makes a mockery of family unity, such that one wonders why, if their mother’s death can trigger such sibling anger, what were things like at previous get-togethers? Each time the group quiets down, something else comes along to detonate emotional fireworks. For all the terrific acting this precipitates, it’s not the post-ritual peace and feeling of reconciliation with which you leave the theatre, but the ringing force of all that shouting.

 

The Blood Quilt

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse

150 W. 65^th Street, NYC

Through December 29

39. DEATH BECOMES HER (seen November 23, 2024)

 

On November 21, the Broadway musical version of the 1992 movie Death Becomes Her opened, followed a day later by the movie version of the 2003 Broadway musical Wicked, both to widespread (if not universal) acclaim. Wicked and Death Becomes Her are classics of the female frenemy genre, described by Jennifer Weiner in a Sunday New York Times op-ed of November 24, “‘Wicked’ and the Glory of Frenemies”

 

Megan Hilty and company. Photos: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

However, while Weiner lists several other frenemy-themed movies, like Legally Blonde, Clueless, and so forth, she never mentions Death Becomes Her, which surely fits her description of works whose endings are secondary to their journeys: “The main characters draw each other out and learn from each other not in order to achieve the cliché of happily ever after but for the experience of friendship in its own right.” (Incidentally, Robert Zemeckis’s Death Becomes Her, despite its cult status—especially in the gay community—has never been considered a first-class film. It rates, in fact, only a squashed green tomato score of 57% on Rotten Tomatoes.)

 

Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard, Josh Lamon, Christopher Sieber.

She adds, “The stories are powered by the shifting dynamics between love and hate, gratitude and resentment, and admiration and contempt, and that’s what makes them so resonant.” These and other insights are as applicable to Wicked as to Death Becomes Her, whose Broadway incarnation, bubbling with both the joie de vivre and the joie de mort.

 

It presents the sensational Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard in the farcically overcharged roles of, respectively, ultra-vain stage and screen diva Madeline Ashton, and the initially plain-Jane novelist Helen Sharp, played on film by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn at the peak of their lissome appeal. Like them, Hilty and Simard excel as satirical avatars of narcissistic women afraid of losing their looks as they creep ever more closely to the grave.

 

Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard, Christopher Sieber.

In the works since 2017, when a different cast (including Kristin Chenowith) and creative team were involved, the show comes to Broadway following a successful Chicago tryout earlier this year. Naturally, its book, by Marco Pennette, takes some liberties—both legitimate and questionable—with Martin Donovan and David Koepp’s screenplay, although sticking to its essential plot. Its music and lyrics, by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, is persistently upbeat, preferring laughter to sentiment.  

 

Christopher Sieber.

Madeline, starring in a Broadway musical, is visited backstage by her old friend, Helen, accompanied by her fiancée, plastic surgeon Dr, Ernest Menville, played by the excellent Christpher Sieber in the straight-man role that even Bruce Willis had a hard time making funny in the movie. The possessively selfish Madeline steals Ernest for herself, not least because of his ability to help preserve her looks.

 

Jennifer Simard, Christopher Siebert.

Years go by and Helen, so obsessed with Madeline’s betrayal that she’s institutionalized, snaps out of it when her counselor says she must “eliminate [Madeline] once and for all.” (In the movie, Helen’s depression leads her to pig out over seven years and—before she trims off the pounds—become as bloated as Jiminy Glick. The show, with stars lacking the sleekness of the originals, cancels any suggestions of weight-related humor.)

 

Jennifer Simard, Megan Hilty, Christopher Siebert.

Helen, now glammed up, and the author of a hit book, arrives in Hollywood to take her revenge on Madeline, who—though her career hasn’t gone beyond a sci-fantasy called Dogstronaut—lives in a fabulous mansion, grand staircase included, with Ernest. Their income seems derived from his plastic surgery practice, not reconstructive mortician, as in the film. The women’s enmity climaxes with Madeline, pushed, tumbling down that winding staircase, albeit via a plot device different from that on screen.

 

Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard.

However, because she drank from a magical potion for both rejuvenation and eternal life, provided at great expense by a flamboyant Hollywood sorceress, Viola Van Horn (Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child)—called in the movie Lisle von Ruhman and played by a more than half-naked Isabella Rossellini—not only is she not dead, her head—for the moment, at any rate—is facing backward. Soon, Helen becomes Madeline’s shooting target, the result being a huge hole where her stomach used to be. The hapless Ernest nearly goes nuts trying to cover up the women’s deaths and physical deterioration, while they decide to live on, using his skills used to disguise the condition of their already deteriorating bodies.

 

Michelle Williams.

These and similar moments of grand guignol comic horror are among the movie’s most well-loved contributions, the CGI effects used to produce them having won an Academy Award. Unfortunately, much as Tim Clothier’s “illusions”—which includes the obvious use of doubles—are clever, they can’t help but seem cheesy (and insufficient) compared with what’s on screen. Since the quality of the special effects are so integral to the movie, some might believe the lack of anything short of equaling or bettering them should have been enough to short circuit the production.

 

Michelle Williams, Megan Hilty.

In fact, one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, its conclusion, has been radically altered, not for the better. In the original, 37 years after the main events, the women leave Ernest’s funeral, fall down some stairs, and break into pieces. A close-up shows their severed heads lying on the ground, their grotesquely painted faces rotting, chatting with casual insouciance, their friendship alive even when there’s practically nothing left of them. In the show, the scene is 50 years later, Ernest is still alive, and what we see of the women’s fate is both a dramatic and theatrical copout.

 

Taurean Everett and company.

As a show, Death Becomes Her gives audiences over two and a half hours of campy, fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek musical action, directed by Christopher Gattelli (who also choreographed) to not let a minute pass without trying for a laugh, at least when Simard and Hilty are onstage. This often leads to wink-wink mugging and line readings, saved from seeming self-indulgent by the performer’s ineffable charm and obvious awareness of the dialogue and situations’ extremes.

 

The film itself is so over-the-top that much of the enjoyment it provides comes from witnessing how hard Streep, Hawn, Willis, and Rossellini work to play broadly while remaining (relatively) believable human beings. Too often, though, the already exaggerated material is further exaggerated when done live, nuance be damned. Which isn’t to deny that many audience members respond with perpetual whooping and shouts of laughter.

 

Company of Death Becomes Her.

While none of the individual songs seem destined to be standards, they’re all pleasantly listenable and their lyrics can be amusing. One number, for example, that gets a rousing reception is “For the Gaze,” sung by Hilty in a deliberately old-fashioned Broadway-style number spiffed up by chorus boys, where the words say that everything the singer does to look beautiful is “for the gaze,” which, of course, is meant to sound like “for the gays,” receiving, in turn, roof-shaking approval from a significant segment of the audience. Sieber’s two numbers include a clever patter song, “The Plan,” sung as the items in his workshop suddenly become animated. Michelle Williams’s singing, as in “If You Want Perfection,” is as magnificent as her glittery appearance, but she doesn’t get the comic acting opportunities granted Isabella Rossellini in the film.

 

The 11 o’clock number, “Alive Forever,” shared by Hilty and Simard, is another roof shaker, as they launch vocal rockets. Madeline’s lyrics, as per Weiner’s thesis, insists that Helen, her longtime frenemy, actually likes her, and vice versa, with Helen agreeing to forgive and forget. It’s about as close to human warmth as the show ever gets, even as the stars vie to outdo each other with their musical pyrotechnics.

 

At a reported cost of $31.5 million, Death Becomes Her provides lots of traditional Broadway spectacle, with often elaborately glitzy costumes by Paul Tazewell, including an array of black and flesh-colored tights for the androgynous chorus of “Immortals” that surrounds Viola Van Horn. (No use searching for the movie’s Jim Morrison, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, or Elvis Presley lookalikes, though). Charles LaPointe’s fantastic wigs are another visual delight, as are the flashy scenic backgrounds designed by Derek McLane, excitingly lit by Justin Townsend.

 

Does the show improve on the movie, or is the movie superior? In some ways, each is better than the other. On the other hand, though, each is far from perfect; then again, what isn’t?

 

Death Becomes Her

Lunt-Fontanne Theatre

205 W. 46^th Street, NYC

Open run