162 (2019-2020): Review: STEW (seen February 10, 2020)

"Stirring the Pot"

In life, they say, the best way to someone’s heart is through their stomach. Judging from all the plays about food-making (recent examples being Seared and Richard Nelson’s Apple Family series), some writers think it’s also the best way to an audience’s heart.  Even if we don’t get to eat anything (which does sometimes happen!), just watching a meal being prepared can be fulfilling.

Nikkole Salter (rear), Portia. All photos: Jeremy Daniel.

Add to the recipe tasty characters, season it with spicy dialogue, wash it down with a satisfying narrative, and top it off with a superb ensemble and you have Stew, Zora Howard’s zesty dramedy, in what Michelin might rate a three-star production, at Tribeca’s Walkerspace.

Kristin Dodson.

                                                                                               

Even the best meals sometimes have a little gristle, however, and Stew has a bit of its own. Everything else is so appetizing, though, that few theatregoers are going to leave this 90-minute repast with growling stomachs.

Toni Lachelle Pollitt, Portia, Kristin Dodson, Nikkole Salter.

The main dish being prepared is the eponymous one, created as we watch by a lower-middle-class black family, the Tuckers, in Mount Vernon, New York. Ruled by the imperious matriarch, Mama (Portia), the feisty Tuckers include Mama’s two daughters, the mid-30s Lillian (Nikkole Salter) and the not-yet-18-year-old Nelly (Tony Lachelle Pollitt), along with Lillian’s 14-year-old daughter, Lil’ Mama (Kristin Dodson).

Toni Lachelle Pollitt, Nikkole Salter, Kristin Dodson.

Lawrence E. Moten III’s realistically detailed set places us in Mama’s kitchen, which has a small upstage staircase leading to the upstairs bedrooms. It’s early in the morning and Mama, dressed in a turban-like headscarf and a floor-length house dress (costumes by Dominique Fawn Hill), is tending to the stew she’s preparing for the 50 people who’ll be attending an unspecified church event. Suddenly, a loud pop is heard outside, but Mama dismisses as probably from a tire blowout. 

Toni Lachelle Pollitt, Kristin Dodson, Nikkole Salter, Portia.

The noise brings into view Mama’s sleepy family, each wearing a similar headscarf, who soon enough begin to contribute to helping—with different levels of enthusiasm and ability—prepare the meal, while bickering mightily with one another. Personal details seep out slowly, many instigated by conversations on the wall phone, the time being in the pre-cellphone days.

Toni Lachelle Pollitt.

Mama’s having dizziness issues: “It’s nothing. It comes and goes.” Lillian’s in a difficult relationship with her husband, J.R. Her young son, Junior, is hanging out with a neighbor whose mother, claims the disgusted Mama, once opened her bag to offer her a mint only for roaches to come crawling out. Nelly is going hot and heavy with a boy she calls her “man,” not her boyfriend: “A boyfriend is temporary. A man is forever.” Lil’ Mama is auditioning for a school production of Richard III.

Toni Lachelle Pollitt, Nikkole Salter.

This last inspires a memorable scene, since each family member has participated in local theatricals. Mama, in fact, never tires of reminding everyone that she was “the founder and director emeritus of the Mt. Vernon High Dramatic League as well as the lead soprano at the Greater Centennial A.M.E. Zion Church.” Lil’ Mama becomes the reluctant subject of Mama’s coaching her in a speech mistakenly attributed to Queen Elizabeth, when it’s actually Queen Margaret who speaks it. It's surprising no one's caught this.

Portia.

The speech, in which a mother refers to her baby’s death, is used for comic effect but will later reverberate within the play’s thematic stew, like much of what we’re watching. Stew may seem like a conventional family sitcom—even with its outbursts of interfamilial vituperation—but it’s actually much darker, as represented by Avi Amon’s unsettling inter-scene music, and the hints dropped (too) subtly throughout, suggesting that perhaps the drama, for all its external specificity, is more metaphorical than naturalistic.

Portia.

One senses this in the way the characters all seem to be reflections of one another, sometimes expressing themselves with phrases we’ve heard someone else use, the ways their personal stories mirror those of others, or even how their names intersect, as if they’re part of an unending cycle.

Unusually for a play about contemporary black characters, racial issues are not overtly foregrounded, but are embedded in the dialogue’s DNA. Everyone speaks in black dialect, even the self-aware Mama who nevertheless assumes grammar police authority when others misuse the language, such as saying “lay” when it should be “lie.”

On the other hand, her own words can be as colloquially ungrammatical as anyone else’s: “Lil’ Mama, that hair ain’t coming out them pins by itself.” So it’s sure to come as a surprise when, to cap the Shakespearean coaching scene, she delivers the speech in question with the piercing intelligence and sensitivity you’d expect from a seasoned classical actor. 

Most surprising, though, is the play’s ending, which subverts what we’ve been watching into a playwright’s head game. To say more would probably be unfair but this viewer was forced to return to the script to search for the clues that led to Howard’s conclusion.

Putting that stringy morsel aside, Stew offers an exceptional group of actors whose contributions are stirred by the masterful direction of Colette Robert. Taking full advantage of Zora Howard’s deliciously articulated sequences of overlapping speeches and simultaneous conversations, she has cooked up one of the season’s most nourishing thespian concoctions.

Portia, with a voice that could bring any stew to a boil, simmers with maternal power, compassion, sarcasm, and vulnerability as Mama. Pollitt’s salty Nelly, Salter’s bitter Lillian, and Dodson’s sweet Lil’ Mama are scrumptious portraits that, combined, create as close to an authentic family feeling as you’re likely to see on any local stage. You might want to taste this one while it’s still on the stove.

Stew

Walkerspace

46 Walker St., NYC

Through February 22

161 (2019-2020): Review: CHEKHOV/TOLSTOY: LOVE STORIES (seen February 5, 2020)

"From Russia with Love"

For my review of Chekhov/Tolstoy: Love Stories please click on THEATER LIFE.

160 (2019-2020): Review: BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE (seen February 7, 2020)

“Sex, Drugs, but No Rock and Roll”

Nineteen sixty-nine. Woodstock. The Miracle Mets. The first artificial heart implant. Barbara Streisand ties Katharine Hepburn for the Academy Award. The Stonewall riots. Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. Apollo 11. My Lai. “Abbey Road.” Path-breaking Hollywood films like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, and one, nominated for four Academy Awards, in which two married couples test the boundaries of friendship and love by jumping into bed together. Its name: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (hereafter BCTA).

Jennifer Damiano, Jose Perez. All photos: Monique Carboni.

Once considered daring, but, half-a-century later, a dated reflection of then rapidly evolving social mores, BCTA, for some reason, has been adapted by book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman, composer Duncan Sheik, and lyricists Sheik and Amanda Green into a sluggish, uninspired, unevenly cast, insufficiently funny, chamber musical. Scott Elliott has staged it smoothly for the New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center, with “musical staging” (the choreography being very limited) by Kelly Devine. 

Jose Perez, Jennifer Damiano.

Like those other events of 1969, BCTA, written by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker, and directed by the former, was pretty hot news in the swinging 60s, when all sorts of conventional sexual, cultural, scientific, and political borders were boldly being crossed. Its titillating publicity shot of four attractive Hollywood actors—left to right, Elliot Gould as Ted, Natalie Wood as Carol, Robert Culp as Bob, and Dyan Cannon as Alice—sitting up in bed, ambivalence writ large across their faces, was about as representative of the time as was, for instance, the album cover of “Abbey Road.”

Ana Noguieria, Michael Zegen.

In 1973, a bowdlerized TV sitcom adaptation of BCTA—mildly racy but too timid to dive into the film’s raunchy territory of group sex, spouse swapping, and open marriage—came and went in a heartbeat. Mazursky, who died in 2014, was reportedly excited about the notion of making a musical from the material. I suspect he would have been less thrilled if he’d lived long enough to see it. 

Jennifer Damiano, Jose Perez, Ana Nogueria, Michael Zegen.

When a musical is made from a movie blessed with a score by someone like Quincy Jones and an evergreen tune like Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love” the composer has to bring his A game. However, the prolific, Grammy-winning Sheik (Spring Awakening) offers a series of only passably pleasing, easy-listening, jazz-inflected pastiches, none of them showstoppers or anywhere nearly as memorable as the Bacharach-David song. Oddly, given the great rock and roll of the period, you won’t hear anything like it in Sheik’s mild-mannered compositions.

Ana Nogueria, Jennifer Damiano.

As woven into the plot, the songs almost seem afterthoughts—whaddaya say we put one in here?—rather than organic expressions of thoughts and emotions. For most of them, one or more characters will simply lift a hand mic or use a standing one, delivering the songs as songs, not as necessary outgrowths of dynamic confrontations.

Jennifer Damiano.

Elliot’s concept, in fact, suggests that the script is being enacted in a nightclub, Derek McLane’s set—surrounded by the audience on three sides—being little more than a sort of crushed velvet, sectional sofa. Uniquely adaptable to multiple configurations, including a bed, it morphs into each new one with the aid of the actors. 

Upstage, where the four-piece band of keyboard (Jason Hart), guitars/sitar/bass (Simon Kafka), reeds (Noelle Rueschman), and bass/drums (Jamie Mohamdein) is lined up, the space is dominated by two-layers of glittering bead curtains, basking prettily in the colorations of lighting designer Jeff Croiter.

Ana Nogueira, Suzanne Vega.

Furthering the nightclub ambience is the presence of a sort of compere, the Band Leader, well-played with low-key sophistication by folksy singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega. Without changing her simple outfit of black slacks and blouse, she sings, narrates, and portrays minor roles. Going one step further in this life-is-a-cabaret conception is the occasional bringing onstage of ringside spectators, who may actually dance or briefly converse with the stars. I mentally thanked the press rep who arranged my tickets for not having given me a front-row seat.

Suzanne Vega. 

Sherman’s book essentializes the film script, about a documentary filmmaker, Bob (Joél Pérez), who goes with his wife, Carol (Jennifer Damiano), to an Esalen-like retreat in California, where, as per the touchy-feely, New Age, consciousness-raising practices of the day, the couple learns to put their feelings before their intellects. So open does Bob feel that he confesses to having had sex with another woman, explaining that it was only physical, not emotional. Carol is cool with it, even revealing it to their more conservative friends, Ted (Michael Zegen) and Alice (Ana Noguera), who are uncomfortable with Bob and Carol’s newfound liberation. Ted, though, declares to Bob that he’s struggled with similar inclinations.

Jose Perez, Ana Nogueira, Jennifer Damiano, Michael Zegen.

Eventually, Bob finds Carol having sex with a man. After an initial outbreak of double standardism, he accepts her behavior. One thing leads to another, Ted and Alice board the sexual liberation train, and the couples awkwardly attempt an orgy (the kind of thing that now often calls for an “intimacy consultant,” although none is credited) before realizing it may not be what the world needs now. 

Michael Zegen, Jennifer Damiano, Jose Perez, Ana Nogueiro.

Although everyone gets down to their undies, and these are removed from beneath the covers, no full nudity is exposed. Despite what we’re supposed to imagine under the sheets, the cast does  the usual contortions to hide their privates from both us and each other. Such propriety, of course, only underlines the ersatz puerility driving the action in this sexually flaccid sex comedy. 

Ersatz, in fact, defines much of the 90-minute, intermissionless show, from its pseudo-period music to its clichéd pot smoking scene, to designer Jeff Mahshie’s costume missteps for Ted (Elliot Gould’s clothes were classier), to the disparity between the movie’s charismatic male stars and those on view here. If I never again have to see José Pérez endlessly cavort in his BVDS, I promise to be a much better person.

Jose Perez, Jennifer Damiano.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear how nicely Zegen (Joel Maisel on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) sings, and enjoyed the work of all three women. But, despite the show’s occasional pluses, it fails to sustain interest, to convincingly convey its period, or to satisfactorily justify its existence. As years go, 1969 was a great one. It’s too bad Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice didn’t stay there.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

Pershing Square Signature Center/Linney Courtyard Theatre

480 W. 42^nd St., NYC

Through March 22

159 (2019-2020): Review: THE CONFESSION OF LILY DARE (seen February 6, 2020)

“They Had Faces Then”

Without the brief program note accompanying The Confession of Lily Dare, Charles Busch’s campily pitch-perfect, affectionately nostalgic spoof of pre-Code movies of the early 1930s, it’s unlikely that anyone other than hardcore film buffs would be able to identify such influences on it as The Sin of Madelon Claudet, Frisco Jenny, and Madame X. One might also toss the 1936 post-Code San Francisco into the blender, as well as a passel of women’s films from those bygone days. 

What emerges captures the sentimental contrivances of those largely forgotten black and white weepies and somehow, while making hilarious mockery of their histrionic extravagances, actually manages to tug at our cynical tear ducts. 

Kendal Sparks, Nancy Anderson. All photos: Carol Rosegg.

Busch (Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, The Allergist’s Wife), of course, is the master drag artist cum playwright, who has done this kind of thing before (just check out the vivid program covers of the plays on his website), if not always quite as effectively. The multi-scened play, crammed onto the Cherry Lane Theatre’s intimate stage, deploys a decorative yet neutral set designed by B.T. Whitehall to capture San Francisco’s old-time ambiance.

Bookending the script are scenes at the grave of Lily Dare (Busch), to whose resting place, located beside the Golden Gate Bridge—illuminated on the upstage wall—come her best friends, Emmy Lou (Nancy Anderson), a blonde former hooker with a heart of gold, and Mickey (Kendal Sparks), Lily's faithful gay accompanist. Hence the setup for the flashback of her life that occupies the bulk of the two-hour, two-act comedy.

Kendal Sparks, Charles Busch, Christopher Borg, Nancy Anderson, Howard McGillin.

As the episodic action speeds by, displaying the arc of Lily’s flamboyant career, we watch her arrival in San Francisco as a Swiss convent-raised, operatically talented, innocent teen orphan. Taken in by her loud, ostentatiously brassy Aunt Rosalie (Jennifer Van Dyck), madam of a flourishing Barbary Coast brothel, she meets the aforesaid Emmy Lou and Mickey. Also there are Blackie Lambert (Howard McGillin), a silver-haired, rich, elegant, but admittedly shady dude, and the sweet young bookkeeper, Louis (Christopher Borg), by whom she becomes pregnant before he loses his head, literally, in the great earthquake of 1906.

There follow Lily’s travails as an unwed mother, forced to give up her baby daughter to the wealthy Dr. Carlton (Borg) and his wife (Van Dyck). Then there’s the frame-up that sends her to prison, as well as her two careers, one as Mandalay, a swaggering, smoky-voiced cabaret singer in the Marlene Dietrich/Mae West mold, the other as Treasure Jones, a tough brothel madam.

Jennifer Van Dyck, Christopher Borg, Charles Busch.

When the Depression crashes and things get rough, she commits a murder for which she’s sentenced to be hanged. Meanwhile, her daughter, Louise (Van Dyck), becomes a famous opera singer, obsessed with finding her birth mother. Lily, however, is too ashamed to let her know the truth. Naturally, this precipitates a visit to Lily’s prison cell only minutes before she’s scheduled to meet the hangman. 

Like its celluloid origins, the material is egregiously corny but, played by these terrific thespians with a matchless mixture of comedy and compassion, you actually feel something stirring beneath the laughter.

Howard McGillin, Charles Busch.

Longtime Busch collaborator Carl Andress has put together a delectable production for Primary Stages, with fine period costumes by Rachel Townsend. Responsibility for Busch’s own, often over-the-top, creations, though, is in the talented hands of Jessica Jahn, complemented by the marvelous wigs of Katherine Carr. Busch warbles an original torch song, “Pirate Joe,” in the pseudo-Kurt Weil mode, by Tom Judson, who also arranged Busch’s throaty, more spoken-than-sung approach to the old Ted Lewis standby, “In a Shanty in Old Shantytown.”

Nancy Anderson, Charles Busch.

But what really weaves the heavily plotted yet often sketch-like fabric into theatrical spun gold are the insanely apt performances, each a comically priceless contribution. It starts with Sparks’s grounded, and thankfully, not effete Mickey; moves on to the colorfully upbeat rhythms of Anderson’s sweet-natured Emmy Lou; and steps higher into a perfectly limned caricature of McGillin’s sybaritic—and, later, down-beaten—Blackie.

Jennifer Van Dyck.

It then goes through the roof with the wildly diverse portraits of Van Dyck (behold another Tracey Ullman) and Borg, both displaying devilishly clownish versatility. Finally, soaring into humor heaven is Busch, with his trunkful of facial and eye-batting tics, drop-dead funny inflections, artificial Hollywood diction, leading lady attitudinizing, and subterranean emotionality. Watch closely and you’ll see traces of one cinematic femme icon after the other—from Crawford to Davis to Stanwyck to Dietrich and so on—in his cornucopia of filmic mannerisms.

Charles Busch.

I confess to having had a great time at The Confession of Lily Dare. I daresay you probably will, too.

The Confession of Lily Dare

Cherry Lane Theatre

38 Commerce St. NYC

Through March 5

158 (2019-2020): Review: GRAND HORIZONS (seen February 4, 2020)

“Divorce Geriatric Style”

There’s a line in Henry Roth’s 1934 novel, Call It Sleep, where someone says of a play showing the suffering of Samson: “I go to theater to laugh. Shall I go there and be tormented when life itself is a plague? No, give me rather a mad jester or the antics of a spry wench.”

Jane Alexander. All photos: Joan Marcus.

There are no mad jesters in it but spry certainly describes the stars of Bess Wohl’s (Small Mouth Sounds) comedy Grand Horizons, which premiered last summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and is now getting a Broadway showing at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater. Seeing it at the same time as a certain speech was being delivered made me realize how fortunate I was to be laughing at the theatre instead of shouting at my TV.

Grand Horizons isn’t really that funny—even with all the geriatric jokes, including a bit about Alzheimer’s!—but many will find its blend of laughter and schmaltz, lightheartedly directed by Leigh Silverman (The Lifespan of a Fact), diverting enough to reduce the stress from the daily political and viral plagues surrounding us.

Grand Horizons is an old-fashioned, two-hour, two-act throwback to the kind of family sitcoms in which Broadway audiences long indulged: a mildly provocative subject; one-liners and more substantial jokes, the determinedly risqué ones springing from the most unexpected mouths; dysfunctional relationships that propel heartwarming pieties about the need for better human communication and the meanings of love; a surprising, physical coup de théâtre; and a cast composed of charismatic actors, junior and senior, portraying a situation and circumstances just recognizable enough from the audience’s own actual or imagined lives to grab and hold its interest.

Ashley Park, Michael Urie, Jane Alexander, James Cromwell.

The subject is quickly established in the brief opening scene as retired librarian Nancy (Jane Alexander, The Great White Hope) and her husband of 50 years, retired pharmacist Bill (James Cromwell, Babe: Pig in the City), prepare to share a meal in their neat, little bungalow (precisely captured in Clint Ramos’s design, efficiently lit by Jen Schriever). As Bryce Cutler’s aerial view projection on the show curtain reveals, it’s one of many cookie-cutter homes just like it in their “independent living community” of Grand Horizons.

They sit across from one another, pecking at their food, their wordless, ritualistic behavior based on countless previous iterations. Finally, Nancy speaks up: “I think I would like a divorce,” to which the complacent Bill says, simply, “All right.” Blackout.

Jane Alexander, James Cromwell.

Cue the family angst as their adult children arrive to supervise the fallout and contemplate its effect on their own lives. Older son Ben (Ben McKenzie, TV’s “Gotham”), a stressed-out lawyer, is married to super-pregnant Jess (Ashley Park, Mean Girls), a therapist. Younger son Brian (Michael Urie, The Government Inspector), is an overtly gay theatre teacher so emotionally fragile and anxious to make his students happy that he’s adapted The Crucible to accommodate 200 actors. That concept, while amusing at first hearing, is one of several comic exaggerations reminding us that, no matter how plausible her premise, the playwright sometimes chooses the big yuck over dramatic plausibility.

Michael Urie.

Naturally, the presence of the children in the midst of Bill and Nancy’s late-life crisis allows Wohl to let various cats (or, in this play, pussies) out of the bag, as Ben and Brian’s sibling rivalry mingles with the revelation of long-held marital secrets (or what were thought secrets), involving romantic dalliances. We even meet the object of Bill’s affections in the person of the colorfully outspoken Carla (Priscilla Lopez, A Chorus Line). 

Ben McKenzie, James Cromwell.

Wohl provides her elders a full complement of naughtily comedic talk about things like sexting, vibrators, and oral sex that strain the laugh meter’s capacity when spouted, unexpectedly, by Equity members of septuagenarian and octogenarian distinction.

Priscilla Lopez, Jane Alexander.

As is wont to happen in such situations, the children feel the pressure on their own lives. Ben and Jess are forced to engage in their own minor marital skirmishes, while Brian finds himself incapable of following through with a pickup named Tommy (Maulik Pancholy).

Michael Urie, Maulik Pancholy.

Desperate as he is for affection, bringing this guy to his parents’ home, with its paper-thin walls, for some penis to penis activity, is a bit of a stretch. The same is true of another full-voiced, middle-of-the-night, living-room convo, with all the lights on.

While the reason Nancy offers for why, despite loving someone else, she married Bill is reasonable enough, it’s questionable whether, with all their suppressed resentments, they really never bickered during their half-century marriage. Most marriages don’t work like that. More common, even in the most stable marriages, are, at the very least, minor disagreements. Take for example, the one my wife and I, who celebrated our 57th anniversary only the day before, had regarding just how Bill and Nancy’s garage is situated so as to account for the show’s big visual joke (my lips are sealed).

James Cromwell.

There’s also an iffy sequence in which Bill, who thinks he has potential as a standup comic, delivers a routine directly to us as if breaking the fourth wall, although it gradually looks more like he’s simply trying out his material for his own benefit, not ours. Still, the bit is confusing since, if it’s just a rehearsal, in real life he’d be nose to nose with a wall.

Much as Grand Horizons is escapist fare, it has its occasionally valuable emotional and psychological insights into the ups and downs of long-term relationships. For example, there’s talk of things like the necessity for compromise, how the bonds of mutual dependence become an unconscious part of a couple’s DNA, and how, even in their dotage, people can still feel the need to define themselves. Thus we get Nancy’s preoccupation with salvaging used clothes for refugees, and Bill’s perception of himself as a comedian. In fact, what may be the show’s funniest moment springs—not organically out of a discussion—but from Bill’s telling a standard joke you can actually find online about a group of nuns seeking entry to heaven.

Ashley Park, Ben McKenzie.

The ensemble generally delivers the goods. Park is brightly appealing as Jess; McKenzie is acceptably distressed as Ben; Lopez is a delicious live-wire as the other woman; Pancholy has comic spark as the one-night stand; Alexander brings intelligence and humor to her not always believable role; Cromwell tempers Bill’s dyed-in-the-wool crankiness with quality comic chops; and Urie, as usual, is energetically expressive, although his mannerisms are becoming increasingly routine.

James Cromwell, Jane Alexander.

Laugh-worthy as much of Wohl’s comedy is, one thing definitely not is the multiple appearances of illusion-busting, black-clad stagehands, all their electronic gear in place, who barge in periodically to make prop shifts. Why, in our technologically advanced day and age, this antediluvian convention can’t be avoided is a question I’ve asked over and over. If even this production of Grand Horizons hasn’t figured out a solution, then maybe Broadway’s horizons aren’t as grand as one might think.

Grand Horizons

Second Stage Theater/The Helen Hayes Theater

220 W. 44^th St., NYC

Through March 1

157 (2019-2020): Review: BORDER PEOPLE (seen January 30, 2020)

"They Move in Darkness"

For my review of Border People please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.