192 (2018-2019): Review: FLEABAG (seen March 25, 2019)

"Sex and the Single Girl"

For my review of Fleabag please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

191 (2018-2019): Review: NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE (seen March 22, 2019)

“The One that Got Away”

 Edmund Gowery, the playwright character at the heart of Nantucket Sleigh Ride, John Guare’s energetically performed but comically jumbled, thinly entertaining new memory play at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, has only one play to his credit, The Internal Structure of Stars, now forgotten. 

Stacy Sargent, John Larroquette. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

Thus, as the play starts, he’s surprised to learn he’s earned the 57 across spot in the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, decades after the once widely performed play was first produced. Unlike Gowery (nicknamed Mundie), Guare himself—Mundie’s apparent inspiration—has established a place as one of our most respected dramatists with his multiple contributions, including such standards as The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.

In Nantucket Sleigh Ride, set in 2010, Mundie (John Larroquette), following fateful events on the eponymous New England island in the summer of ‘75, was never struck again by creative lightning; he’s given up playwriting and become a successful Wall Streeter. He was only 30 at the time but he’s expunged what happened from his memory.

However, the arrival in his office, one hot summer day, of a zombie-like brother and sister named Poe (Adam Chanler-Beret) and Lilac (Grace Rex), demonstrates that you can’t forget your past. Poe and Lilac, preadolescents in 1975 who’ve gone completely blank on what happened that summer, have searched Mundie out to help restore their memories. Bewildered and disturbed, he locks himself in the toilet as thoughts of 35 years earlier come flooding back.

John Larroquette. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

Thus are we thrust back to that fateful August within the framework of a tale narrated by Mundie, who also plays himself as a young man, although, to our eyes, he remains the tall, pudgy, white-haired fellow we first met. What we see is an absurdist farce in which, it being the summer of ’75, not only is everybody reading Jaws and seeing the movie but Roy Scheider (Will Swenson) himself gets some stage time.

Guare also provides so many references to The Internal Structure of Stars, including quotes, that—given its autobiographical nature as a memory play about an 11-year-old boy named Edmund—it practically becomes a play within the play. Moreover, all the Nantucket folks we meet have some connection to a recent amateur production, the real motivating factor in the action.

This extends to the African-American policewoman, Aubrey Coffin (Stacy Sargent), who played Edmund’s fatally ill mother in the local staging. It’s she who Mundie recalls having summoned him to Nantucket to answer questions about a child porn scheme allegedly being run by the tenants of the house he bought as an investment but never visited.

The porn thread fades as various nutty characters appear in a string-of-pearls plot circling around Mundie’s having angered the star of the town's production, Elsie Spooner (Clea Alsip), and everyone else, by rudely refusing her invitation to attend. 

John Larroquette, Will Swenson. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

Elsie, who grew up in the house Mundie owns, is not only the mother of Poe and Lilac, but is also the daughter of a famous children’s author, which thus connects to our seeing the deceased Walt Disney (Will Swenson) in the guise of a cryonically frozen, icicle-covered golem. In one of the play’s satirical deflections, it allows Mundie to rail against how reprehensibly Disney films adapt the stories on which they’re based.

And so on, with curious situations including rivalries between Elsie’s child psychoanalyst husband, Schuyler (Douglas Sills), and her lobster-bearing lover, MacPhee (Will Swenson); the lobster’s death by electrocution; Mundie’s affair with Antonia (Tina Benko), the gorgeous, flamenco-dancing, multilingual wife of his lawyer, Gilbert (Jordan Gelber); a chance to write a screenplay for a remake by Roman Polanski of Hitchcock’s Suspicion, with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, and similar screwy infusions.

Oh yes, we mustn’t forget Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges (Germán Jaramillo), blind and elderly, who taps his walking stick while wandering through the action, with frequent references to his book, Labyrinths, and a string of elusive aphorisms.

Clea Alsip, Will Swenson, Germán Jaramillo, John Larroquette, Tina Benko. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

Perhaps we’re meant to see Nantucket Sleigh Ride—a title inspired by what happens to whalers after they’ve harpooned their prey and get taken for a possibly fatal ride—as a near-surrealistic labyrinth through which we’re taken for a theatrical jaunt. (In 2012, Princeton’s McCarter Theatre presented an earlier version under the title Are You There, McPhee.)

Wild as the trip sounds, the whale it’s chasing is laughter, and, despite a highly qualified cast, the response is rarely more than mild amusement, not hilarity. Even under the direction of Guare-master Jerry Zaks, who helped make several earlier Guare works click, his knack for fast-paced staging fails to ignite the kind of comic reaction needed. Too often, the actors are forced to go overboard for laughs, and there's an insufficient supply of real wit on board. A significant problem is that having the affable, generally impressive, 71-year-old Larroquette play his much younger self, while shifting back and forth from his senior persona, is an obstacle to buying Mundie’s shtick. There's simply too wide a disconnect between the dude in his time that the characters see and the old guy past his prime we're looking at.

Adam Chanler-Beret, Grace Rex. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

I enjoyed the work of Sills and Benko, in particular, but the takeaway kudos go to Sargent, playing not only the cop but Mundie’s New York temporary secretary. Sargent, a black actress, uses sharply different but always authentic accents for both, and then adds a third, Nu Yawky one, for Edmund’s mother in a scene she recites from Mundie’s play, which she did in high school. Her scene is the show’s unsung highlight. 

Above: Germán Jaramillo, Clea Alsip, Douglas Sill, Will Swenson, Tina Benko. Below: Adam Chanler-Beret, John Larroqquete, Grace Rex. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

This idea of using different accents—not mentioned in the script—would seem the brainstorm of  Zaks, who exercises his craft on David Gallo's interesting set of a shiny marble floor fronting a wall consisting of 30 dark-wood doors, each with a brass handle, lined up across the background in three tiered rows of ten each. 

Instead of opening like doors, though, they slide like panels in multiple units to either side. This provides a high space for partial exteriors, like a house’s gable; a central space, midway up, on which characters appear in rapid succession to talk with Mundie, who faces us and away from them; and a floor-level part, through which a Magritte-inspired living room rolls on and off. The show’s physical attractiveness is further heightened by the vivid lighting of Howell Binkley and the charming costumes of Emily Rebholz.

Nantucket Sleigh Ride gets a polished production but it carries too much absurdist blubber to make its pursuit more than momentarily worthwhile. This is a big one that got away.

Nantucket Sleigh Ride

Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre/Lincoln Center

10 Lincoln Center Plaza, NYC

Through May 5

OTHER VIEWPOINTS:

Show-Score.com

190 (2018-2019): PERP (seen March 21, 2019)

“A Conundrum”

When a dramatic character is obsessed with an old but well-known song and sings it to a fake tune that has nothing to do with the real one, you know a play’s got trouble. That happens in Perp, The Barrow Group’s new play, although its flaws become clear well before we hear the song.

 

Tricia Alexandro. Photo: Edward T. Morris.

Even if the director and actors failed to do due diligence by learning the actual melody, you’d imagine the playwright, in this case Lyle Kessler of Orphans fame, would have stepped in, since he put the song there in the first place. I’m referring, by the way, to the schmaltzy oldie, “Mother” (“‘M’ is for the million things she gave me . . .”), and the feeble drama in which they’re heard. Did anyone, I wonder, mention this in the post-show talk-back I hadn’t the time to stay for?

Even without this musical stumble, Perp is an unconvincing, preachy, borderline surreal attempt to examine issues of good and evil within the context of a man wrongfully convicted of murder. Its attack on the criminal justice system has a certain satirical quality but far from enough to warrant all the laughs when I attended; let’s just chalk it up to chacun à son gout (or a passel of friends). I chuckled once, more from duty than necessity.

TBG’s little stage, its brick walls exposed on either side, is backed by Edward T. Morris’s set of what looks like a wall of rusty metal. With the help of Marika Kent’s versatile lighting, revolving a central section on a small turntable allows for swift changes of locale. We thus go from a police interrogation room to a jail cell, a forest, a shack, a bar, and so on, as we witness the fate of our chunky, hapless hero, Douglass (Ali Arkane).

Ali Arkane. Photo: Edward T. Morris.

A young jogger has been slain and raped in the woods, Douglass has been arrested, and two callously snarky detectives, Harvey (Paul Ben-Victor) and Jack (Tricia Alexandro, in a role originally written for a man) are questioning him. Hungry for a conviction (another notch on their belts, someone says), they banter with Douglass and each other, playing cruelly subtle mind games as part of their practiced routine.

Paul Ben-Victor, Ali Arkane, Tricia Alexandro. Photo: Edward T. Morris.

Their manipulations easily convince the likable dope that, even though they know he’s innocent, he should confess, because his incarceration will lead to finding the real killer, with Douglass celebrated as a hero.

Ali Arkane, Javier Molina. Photo: Edward T. Morris.

We see in Douglass a goodhearted naïf, a poor schnook who sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t seem to have a mental deficiency, and who no lawyer would ever allow to be treated like this. But nary a legal representative is seen nor heard of, the conviction is a fait accompli, and Douglass is thrown in the clink. Despite a crime with widespread TV notoriety, the kind that would have people protesting in the streets, no one seems to care about it.

Javier Molina. Photo: Edward T. Morris.

Making it even more impossible to accept is that, for all his sweet, childlike innocence, Douglass is actually very smart, at least when it serves the playwright’s purposes. He has a scientific interest in insects and earthworms, has no problem understanding words like the frequently used “conundrum,” pronounces Schuylkill better than I, makes a sermon-like public speech on being given an award, and consistently beats his eccentric, African-American cellmate, Myron (Craig Mums Grant), a checkers expert, at the game. 

Craig Mums Gran, Ali Arkane. Photo: Edward T. Morris.

On the other hand, he’s thick enough to let the cops send him to prison, needs the concept of “notches” explained, and is confused by the word “mitigating.” He, of course, constitutes the play’s conundrum.

Craig Mums Grant (below), Ali Arkane. Photo: Edward T. Morris.

Because you can’t trust a single thing that follows, including his escape, you realize it’s all a setup allowing the characters to wax philosophical about mortality, good and evil, the concept of time, and to quote the Bible. You may even begin to feel you’re here more for a sermon than a play, although the point of the sermon is pretty vague.

Much of this comes out in the draggiest scene of an already draggy play when Douglass finds himself in the abode of the actual killer, Harry (Javier Molina). The events here are so unlikely that, if an intermission came when it ended, it’s where I would have fled had I not the steely discipline of a professional reviewer, forged in the heat of so many other dramatic misfires.

Tricia Alexandro, Ali Arkane, Paul Ben-Victor. Photo: Edward T. Morris.

The staging by TBG artistic director Lee Brock heightens the play’s weaknesses more than it helps them. Tedious pacing, especially in Harry’s scene, and a tendency to place one character upstage and another down, forcing the latter (usually Douglass) to try speaking upstage and down at the same time, are particular drawbacks.

Craig Mums Grant. Photo: Edward T. Morris.

Arkane struggles to find the right tone for Douglass, his essential approach being to keep a goofy half-smile on his face. Grant brings the right grizzled wisdom to Myron and Molina can do nothing with Harry. Ben-Victor and Alexandro as the smarmy cops offer the strongest performances, she especially, making the most of the sardonic repartee that provides the play’s most effective scenes.

Craig Mums Grant, Ali Arkane. Photo: Edward T. Morris.

Otherwise, Perp could be summed up, to the tune of M-O-T-H-E-R, in the song I cited earlier:

“P” is for the pressure to confess crime

“E” is for Doug’s earthworms and his bugs

“R” is for his readiness to do time  

“P” is for police who act like thugs

Put them all together they spell PE—RP

A play I can’t give many hugs.

Perp

The Barrow Group Mainstage

312 W. 36^th St., NYC

Through April 11

OTHER VIEWPOINTS:

Show-Score.com

189 (2018-2019): Review: KISS ME, KATE (seen March 20, 2019)

“Brush up Your Shrewspeare”

(Note: this review is followed by an entry on Kiss Me, Kate from my Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1940-1950.)

Kiss Me, Kate, widely considered composer-lyricist Cole Porter’s masterpiece, is one of the most beloved products of Broadway’s golden age of musicals. This winner of four Tonys, including the first ever for Best Musical, has had only three Broadway revivals since the original of 1948: a brief one in 1952, not long after the original closed; an outstanding one in 1999, starring Brian Stokes Mitchell as Fred Graham and the late Marin Mazzie as Lilli Vanessi; and the current Roundabout production at Studio 54.

With the 1999 production still fresh in many theatregoers’ minds, filling Mazzie’s shoes was not going to be an easy task for whoever followed her, even so formidable a presence as musical theatre superstar Kelli O’Hara. Thus the expected critical brouhaha over O’Hara’s performance, some celebrating its brilliance, others weeping over how badly miscast she is, alleging that she lacks both comic chops and a sufficiently defiant streak.

The same split carries over into the reception of the show itself, which you can check out here. In brief, though, of the 40 critics’ reviews thus far aggregated on Show-Score (and there will be more, including this one), 83% are in the positive range of 100-70, 15% in the meh range of 69-50, and 2% (a hydrogen bomb from the Wall Street Journal) in the turkey section for 49% and down.

 

Moi? I loved it. Or enough of it, at any rate, to keep my frequently sleepy eyes wide open throughout its two and a half hours. My wife? Not so much, I’m afraid. It wasn’t easy but I mustered all my might not to test the show’s carryover effect as we walked to the subway afterward.

That, of course, is because Kiss Me, Kate is about the romantic discord between a couple of emotional spitfires—Fred Graham (Will Chase), actor and all-around man of the theatre, and Lilli Vanessi, musical theatre star—who are divorced (but still in love, despite their protestations) and co-starring in an out-of-town musical version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. The inspiration behind them? Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the greatest American acting couple of their day.

The show weaves their personal conflicts into Shakespeare’s farcical plot, with scenes both on and backstage, showing how alike Fred is to Petruchio and Lilli to Kate (“They call me Katharine that do talk of me”). More on the plot will be found in the material that follows these comments.

Digression: Maybe I enjoyed the show as much as I did because I’ve felt a connection to its story ever since my junior high graduation ceremony in 1955 at the Pitkin Theatre, a movie palace in Brooklyn’s Brownsville section, where I and a blonde beauty (be still, my septuagenarian heart) played the Bard’s “Kiss me, Kate, for that’s your name I hear” scene. For my pains, my English teacher gave me a Modern Library copy of Charles Reade’s 19th-century novel, The Cloister and the Hearth, a tome I never could get through. At least I got to command Myra Schneider to kiss me, and to put her over my knee. (You didn’t hear that, #MeToo people.)

Director Scott Ellis’s rambunctious (or perhaps ram-butt-kick) revival adapts the original, with new material by Amanda Green, to current feminist concerns by mildly updating Sam and Bella Spewack’s book, making Lilli/Kate a more imposing opponent to Fred/Petruchio’s overbearing chauvinism. The plot’s outdated male-female dynamics are something even revivals of The Taming of the Shrew must constantly deal with. There are also other alterations, like some repartee about gun ownership (“Guns don’t kill people,” announces Lilli’s fiancé, Harrison Howell (Terence Archie), the Spewacks’ wealthy Washingtonian power player transformed here into an army general. 

For my money, O’Hara can sing the phone book and I’ll be entranced. Looking as lovely as ever in Jeff Mahshie’s luscious costumes, she does spellbinding things with a voice that moves from register to register as easily as eating ice cream, showing off operatic chops on one number, comic abandon on “I Hate Men,” torch song heat on “So In Love,” the memory of which sears my memory as I write this. Whatever some of her critics say, O’Hara won my heart both for her singing and acting, comedy and all.

This is one of those shows with song after song whose unforgettable musicality and scintillating lyrics are so much a part of the American songbook that most people (especially those of a certain age) can practically sing along with them. Even if you find the book foolish, the characters thin, and the jokes corny, you get that special thrill of recognition when you hear “Another Opening, Another Show,” “Why Can’t You Behave,” “Wunderbar,” “We Open in Venice,” “I’ve Come to Wive it Wealthily in Padua,” “Were Thine that Special Face,” “Too Darn Hot,” “From this Moment On,” “Always True to You in My Fashion,” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” to cite what are probably the best known. 

And they’re all splendidly performed. Will Chase makes a suitably fatuous but handsomely romantic lead, providing talents that make the most of numbers like “Where Is the Life that Late I Led?” His physical confrontations with a Kate who won’t stand for his crap are highlights, although I could have done with a few less punts to the rear. 

As the second lead male, dancing wizard Corbin Bleu (as Bill Calhoun/Lucentio), who can also sing, shows off his rat-a-tap-tap (even upside down!) and other terpsichorean skills in routine after routine, particularly in “Too Darn Hot,” excitingly choreographed by Warren Carlyle with moves that display the sensational ensemble, especially James T, Lane, to sizzling effect. Carlyle’s dances are eye-catching, and even hilarious, as naughtily noted in the “Dick” part of “Tom, Dick, or Harry.” Dance masters Will Burton and Rick Faugno join Bleu in this sensational number, as they compete in wooing Bianca.

Playing Bleu's girlfriend, Lois Lane (Bianca in the Shrew scenes), the night I went, was exquisite understudy Christine Cornish Smith, who took over for the ailing Stephanie Styles. She demonstrated, once again, the incredible Broadway talent we too rarely get to see. Smith's “Always True to You in My Fashion” was a knockout.

As the two thugs who eventually get to do the comic gem, “Brush up Your Shakespeare,” John Panko and Lance Coadie Williams make the most of their gangsterish qualities but never quite make these pistol packers as funny as the should be. Their famous number, though, has been shifted from actual soft-shoe territory, presumably because the men don’t have the necessary dance skills, and is instead choreographed in faux-soft-shoe style with appropriate movements and accessorizing hats. Somehow, though, its humorous charms seem diminished, and the built-in encores seem more forced than necessary. 

The show has been rather extensively cast with a racially mixed company, which is now taken for granted in Broadway musicals of every period. It works perfectly well here, for the most part, but  there are several choices that test not only the idea of the color-blind policy but just how much blindness is expected of audiences. 

David Rockwell’s sets, mingling a substantial, three-storied backstage area, with dressing rooms that slide on and multiple backgrounds for the Shakespeare scenes, is sufficiently colorful and swift-moving, all of it dexterously lit by Donald Holder, with satisfactory sound design by Brian Ronan.

Kiss Me, Kate could easily be given a museum-piece revival but, even with its 1948 setting, this production seems very much of today. My wife disagrees but, since we’re still so in love after 56 years, always true to one another in our fashion, and the subject is too darn hot, I’ll avoid being asked why I can’t behave and say no more from this moment on.

Kiss Me, KateStudio 54

254 W. 54^th St., NYC

Through June 30

OTHER VIEWPOINTS:

Show-Score.com

The following is an abbreviated essay on Kiss Me, Kate from my Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1940-1950. The plot summary shows small differences from the current production, already noted.

Kiss Me, Kate Book: Bella and Samuel Spewack; Music/lyrics: Cole Porter; Director: John C. Wilson; Choreography: Hanya Holm; Design: Lemuel Ayers; Producers Arnold Saint-Subber and Lemuel Ayers; Theatre: New Century Theatre; opening: December 30, 1948; performances: 1,077.

Kiss Me, Kate was one of the great musicals of the 1940s. It succeeded in almost every department, including score, lyrics, book, performers, direction, choreography, and design. Comedy and sentiment mingled exhilaratingly with now-classic songs to keep audiences enthralled throughout. It represented a triumphant return to his former brilliance of painfully crippled composer-lyricist Cole {porter, whose score some thought the best of his life.

“It’s solidly enjoyable,” wrote Variety, “with one hummable tune after another, many of them with slyly music lyrics.” Some of the lyrics were lifted directly from the Bard of Avon, and nearly every song had a tight relationship to the development of the action. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times observed, “Porter has written a remarkable melodious score with an occasional suggestion of Puccini, who was a good composer, too. . . . All his lyrics are literate, and as usual some of them would shock the editorial staff of The Police Gazette.”

One of the songs that was usually encored was “I Hate Men,” soloed by Patricia Morison. The encore had special lyrics written for it. One performance was given for an audience made up largely of benefit subscribers, normally considered a deadly group to play for. On this occasion they were especially unresponsive and showed little sign of life after this song was sung. The nettled musical director thereupon turned to the spectators and spoke: “Well, you’re going to get an encore whether you want it or not,” and get it they did. (Quoted in Jack Gaver, Curtain Calls.)

The idea of taking a cure from Shakespeare to create a musical comedy was still relatively novel, having been begun only a dozen years earlier with The Boys from Syracuse. Here, the idea was given a novel twist by framing the plot of The Taming of the Shrew within a story of a battling pair of divorced but still-in-love stars, the egomaniacal actor-director Fred Graham (Alfred Drake) and the tempestuous Lillie Vanessi (Patricia Morison), who are engaged in a tryout of Shakespeare’s farce in Ford’s Theatre, Baltimore. All the action occurs between 5 P.M. and midnight, from the moments after a run-through to the period after the first performance.

A great deal is made of the parallels between Kate and Petruchio and Fred and Lilli in what follows. Lilli turns jealous when she learns that flowers she thought Fred intended for her were meant for Lois Lane (Lisa Kirk), the actress playing Bianca. During their performance of Shakespeare’s play, Lilli, professing that she is a realistic actress, gives Fred’s ribs the brunt of her elbow, whereupon Fred whacks Lilli’s behind with enormous vigor, which only makes Lilli respond with slaphappy results.

Mixed into all of this is the subplot about the affair of Lois and actor Bill Calhoun (Harold Lang), cast as Lucentio in the Shrew, and whose gambling debts lead a pair of dopey thugs (Harry Clark and Jack Diamond) to seek collection of the $10,000 owed. A further complication stems from Bill’s having signed Fred’s name to the IOU. By the end of the musical, the IOU has become meaningless because the hoodlums’ boss has been killed, and Fred and Lilli—like Petruchio and Kate, whose story dovetails with their own—have reached a romantic truce, she having abandoned her engagement to wealthy Washingtonian Harrison Howell (Denis Green).

The conception for the show (called Shrew during its developmental stages) had come from producer Saint-Subber’s experiences working backstage during the Lunts’ Taming of the Shrew for the Theatre Guild in 1935, when he observed them bickering offstage as well as on. Saint-Subber years later suggested the idea to Samuel Spewack, who agreed to do a show on the topic if Porter would do the music and lyrics. 

The musical comedy inexperience of the Spewacks, the mediocre Porter track record the last few times out, the failure of Alfred Drake to find a hit since Oklahoma!, and the decade-long absence from Broadway of Patricia Morison (cast only after bigger stars, such as Mary Martin, turned the show down), made financing a major obstacle. Twenty-four auditions over a year’s time were required to raise the $180,000 nut, and it took 70 backers to compile the sum. In what may have been record time, the investment was paid off in 16 weeks.

Drake moved even higher on the ladder as Broadway’s leading musical comedy actor, and Morison, lately of Hollywood, made a striking impression in her first major Broadway role. As the second leads, Kirk and Lang were extremely impressive, Lang making waves with his exceptional dancing (especially in “Too Darn Hot,” shared with Eddie Sledge and Fred Davis).

Thomas Dash of Women’s Wear Daily declared the show to be “one of the merriest, wittiest, most frolicsome and most talented musical carnivals that” he had seen in many months. Richard Watts, Jr., of the New York Post reported that this “smash hit of epic proportions” was “beautiful, tuneful, witty, gay, high-spirited and delightfully sung, acted, and danced.”

Hanya Holm’s imaginative, eclectic choreography embraced such diverse styles as “classic ballet, modern dance, jitterbugging, soft-shoe, acrobatics, court, and folk dance,” according to Walter Sorell’s Hanya Holm. Holm, a believer in Labanotation, had her choreography preserved in this fashion and registered under a copyright. This was the first Broadway musical to employ this practice.

188 (2018-2019): Review: VILNA (seen March 20, 2019)

 "Grave Business"

For my review of Vilna please click on THEATER LIFE.

187 (2018-2019): Review: ALICE BY HEART (seen March 19, 2019)

“Curiouser and Curiouser”

I find it curiouser and curiouser that some theatre artists continue to believe that what the theatre needs now is yet another adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s mid-19th-century books about a girl named Alice. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass have been dramatized, cinematized, musicalized, pornographied, and adapted into or retold in every kind of performance and literature.

Colton Ryan, Molly Gordon. Photo: Deen van Meer.

Why, I wonder, do we need yet another version, especially if, like Alice by Heart—the 90-minute musical that inaugurates the Newman Mills Theater in the MCC’s new Robert W. Wilson Theater Space—it’s set (for no discernible reason) in a bomb shelter cum London Underground during World War II?

Molly Gordon, Colton Ryan. Photo: Deen van Meer.

Surely not because it updates the material with modern profanity, sexual humor, and drug use, all of which have been done before. Nor do the few minor Trumpian digs (“Lock her up,” for example) justify the adaptation. (On the other hand, I can imagine a madhouse satire devoted to the administration, perhaps called Ivanka in Trumpland, with the president as the King of Tarts.)

Molly Gordon, Grace McLean, and company. Photo: Deen van Meer.

While I recognize the literary significance of Alice’s nonsensical but symbolic adventures, I’ve never seen what makes them so persistently seductive for theatre people, aside from the opportunities they offer imaginative set, costume, and lighting designers, or inventive directors and choreographers. In the present case, those functions are marvelously handled by Edward Pierce (set), Paloma Young (costumes), Bradley King (lights), co-librettist Jessie Nelson (direction), and Rick and Jeff Kuperman (choreography).

Company of Alice by Heart. Photo: Deen van Meer.

Alice by Heart is yet another in a long line of stage adaptations, some good, some bad, going back at least as far as an 1886 West End musical pantomime, with notable later American examples being offered by creative notables as diverse as Eva Le Gallienne, whose Tenniel-inspired version was first seen in 1932, and, among many others, Andre Gregory, whose Grotowski-influenced rendering reflected the experimental trends of the early 1970s.

Molly Gordon, Colton Ryan, and company. Photo: Deen van Meer.

Which isn’t to say Alice by Heart doesn’t have its pleasures. The premise of its book, by Steven Sater (Spring Awakening), doubling as lyricist, and the aforementioned Nelson (book for Waitress), is that, during the Blitz of 1941, an Underground station—designed with a huge overhead clock to emphasize the theme of time’s passing (the show itself was developed over seven years!)—has been converted into a ward for wounded or ill young people.  

Molly Gordon. Photo: Deen van Meer.

This is an assorted bunch of eccentrics who are just one step away from transmogrifying into the creatures and characters of Alice Spencer’s (Molly Gordon) imagination. Their general youthfulness allows for the occasional bit about blossoming sexuality, including Alice’s suddenly blooming bosom, emphasized in one of the show’s several uses of shadow-play.

Noah Galvin. Photo: Deen van Meer.

One is Alfred Hallam (Colton Ryan, who also plays the White Rabbit and the March Hare), Alice’s “dearest friend”—and incipient love interest. Dying of tuberculosis, he's quarantined by the officious Red Cross doctor (Andrew Kober, also the King of Hearts, Jabberwocky, and Mock Turtle) and nasty nurse (Grace McLean, also the Queen of Hearts and Magpie). With the world outside being blasted to smithereens, Alice wants to soothe Alfred by reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Molly Gordon and company. Photo: Deen van Meer.

Prevented by the nurse from doing so, Alice begins reciting the story by heart, which inspires the show to morph into Alfred’s fever dream of what he’s hearing. The dynamic cast of 12 (all but Gordon playing more than one role) achieves this by using supposedly found objects, like a ladder, crates, cots, sheets, tables, and chests, to offer a creatively vibrant performance.

 Colton Ryan, Wesley Taylor, Zachary Infante, Molly Gordon. Photo: Deen van Meer.

Thus do we meet iconic figures like the Mad Hatter (Wesley Taylor), the Caterpillar (Heath Saunders), the Duchess (Noah Galvin), and, among others, the Cheshire Cat (Kim Blanck). Familiar as they are, the fast-moving script is nonetheless confusing, there’s little sense of plot progress, and the lyrics accompanying Duncan Sheik’s driving, quickly forgotten, pop/rock-tuned, 17-song score often muddled.

Noah Galvin, Zachary Infante, Mia DiLena, Wesley Taylor, Heath Saunders, Nkeki Obi Melekwe, Molly Gordon, Colton Ryan. Photo: Deen van Meer. 

There are several very clever visual moments, one being the Caterpillar scene (there are two such creatures here) in which Alice gets a hookah-high with the help of the ensemble formed into a multi-limbed creepy crawler, thanks to their hands and forearms being encased in colorful, knitted sleeves. Another is the Mock Turtle number, when the ensemble appears in khaki British military uniforms with green metal helmets, creating a shell-like encasement.

Molly Gordon, Andrew Kober, and company. Photo: Deen van Meer.

All the performers—each of whom can dance and sing, some with acrobatic skills—are highly talented (although their British accents come and go, being especially gone during the songs). Gordon and Ryan have a nice chemistry as the leads and the supporting company works very hard to bring their offbeat roles to life.

Molly Gordon, Andrew Kober, Noah Galvin, Grace McLean, and company. Photo: Deen van Meer.

The trouble is that they’ve been directed to play everything in the broadest way, with lots of mugging, shouting, and even screaming. Some theatregoers find this kind of histrionics funny—as if anything over the top is, by definition, laugh-worthy. Others, though, when witnessing some of the more egregiously exaggerated examples, may begin looking to escape via the nearest rabbit hole.

Molly Gordon. Photo: Deen van Meer.

A final note: the Newman Mills is an expansive venue, much wider than it is deep. This allows for a quite impressive setting. A consequence, however, is that it doesn’t provide full visibility for those in the closer aisle seats, where the view is rather skewed, except for scenes directly in front of you. So, if you have a choice, sit further back, since you’re never going to be that far away from the stage in this relatively shallow space.

Alice by Heart

Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space/Newman Mills Theater

511 W. 52^nd St., NYC

Through April 7

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