3. A COMMERCIAL JINGLE FOR REGINA COMET (seen September 25, 2021)

 "'No Laughing Matter"

For my review of A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet, please click on THEATER LIFE.

2. SANCTUARY CITY (seen September 18, 2021)

Sharlene Cruz, Jasai Chase-Owens. Photos: Joan Marcus.

 

For my review of Sanctuary City, please click on Theater Life. 

1. (2021-2021). Review: PASS OVER (seen September 11, 2021)

 "Black Lives Shattered"

On Saturday afternoon, September 11, 2021, I saw Pass Over, my first show since March 10, 2020, eighteen months earlier, when I saw The Girl from the North Country just before the pandemic closed down New York’s theatres. (I’ll get to Pass Over in a minute.) I was as nervous at entering a crowded theatre as I was taking the subway from South Queens. I even wore two masks on the train (where a handful of jerks were unmasked) and in the theatre.

Namir Smallwood, John Michael Hill.

I was cautiously early, so, with the weather as beautiful as it was twenty years ago on that more fateful 9/11, I exited the subway at 34th Street and walked to the August Wilson Theatre on 52nd. Having visited Manhattan only once during the lockdown, this was my chance to reunite, unmasked, with the midtown I’d missed for so long, and, with traffic considerably lighter than before, breathing what felt like cleaner city air.

The cityscape had changed a bit. Scaffolding, still ubiquitous, covered different facades, familiar storefronts were shuttered, new businesses had opened, and excavations, like the one at 34th and 8th, replaced landmark buildings. But most eye-catching was how slender the 8th Avenue crowds were, especially after I crossed the nearly deserted 42nd Street.

Those fabulous side-streets in the forties, with their marquees blaring the names of prior and coming shows, were nearly empty. Back in the pre-Covid days you needed a bulldozer to clear your way at matinee time in the theatre district. On Saturday, you could have roller-skated or scootered between the pedestrians and still kept your social distance.

Namir Smallwood, John Michael Hill.

Further, the surprisingly small queue showing its IDs and vaccination proof outside the Wilson was echoed by the ghost town gloom pervading the theatre's auditorium. The recently reopened musicals, Hadestown and Waitress, are said to be doing boffo business (Waitress even broke a single-performance record), but Broadway audiences seem to be giving Pass Over a pass over of their own, at least at the performance I attended.

John Michael Hill.

Perhaps that’s because Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s provocative, but ultimately disappointing, avant-garde comedy-drama, which opened three weeks ago, itself feels so forlorn on Broadway. This may have something to do with its being available in a Spike Lee-directed streaming version on Amazon Prime. Pass Over has a solid pedigree, of course, including a premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and a highly praised staging with this very same cast and director at New York’s LCT3, Off Broadway at Lincoln Center, before the pandemic descended. I saw neither although I’m aware that there have been various revisions—especially of the ending—among the several productions the show has received. Not being qualified to comment on these, I’ll let them pass.

However, even a rave by Jesse Green in the Times hasn’t been able to overcome the box office lassitude toward what I assume—in spite of the favorable reviews—to be less than favorable word-of-mouth about a play that would surely work more potently on an Off-Broadway stage, like the LCT3’s. At the Wilson, at least most of the time, it looks undernourished.

Namir Smallwood, John Michael Hill.

Lots of people obviously favor Pass Over, Broadway’s first new play since it closed up shop. It has a very decent 78 on the Show-Score review aggregating website. And sixteen individual and institutional producers are designated at the top of the Playbill credits. It deploys socially relevant themes, including the urge to escape from economic oppression, the curse of plagues, and, most ferociously, American race relations, particularly the monstrous problem of white on Black police brutality. Nwandu’s distinctive approach blends gritty realism with dreamlike surrealism in a script with obvious reflections of Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece, Waiting for Godot.

But, despite its woke goals, its superb three-man, four-character performance (one actor plays two roles), and Danya Taymor’s inventive staging, it fails to be more than momentarily engaging, and makes more of a cerebral than an emotional impact.  

Jon  Michael Hill, Gabriel Ebert, Namir Smallwood.

Moses (Jon Michael Hill) and Fitch (Namir Smallwood) are the Didi and Gogo avatars, two Black street dudes on a generic ghetto street corner designated as such by designer Wilson Chin’s placement, against a dead black backdrop, of a milk crate, a tire rim, a tire, and, looming like a gallows, and a street lamp. (Near the end, the background undergoes a mystical transformation.)

Moses, whose name fits his leader-like aspirations, and Fitch, his follower, fill their time with petty preoccupations (including Fitch often working away at a foot problem), role-playing, games (as per the vaudeville-like shtick in Godot), and lamenting the sorry state of Black men in a world where fear of the police (the “po-po”) haunts their every thought. Moses wants to lead Fitch out of this miasma by leaving the block—a stand-in, it’s implied, for the plantation—to which conditions have enslaved them. In other words, to “pass over,” as in the Biblical tale of the Jews fleeing to the Promised Land. Toying endlessly with their baseball caps, like Didi and Gogo with their bowlers, they speak in artfully heightened, crude street dialect, riddling their dialogue with countless repetitions of the n-word.

Perhaps some will argue that this insistent usage has some higher literary and sociological value that I’m unable to appreciate, but hearing it so often on the stage (as on the subway) becomes increasingly uncomfortable, regardless of whatever point it’s intended to make. There is even a scene in which a third character, a lily-white man named Mister (Gabriel Ebert), who has entered some time before, confronts Fitch and Moses about it, in the usual debate about why is it okay for Black people to call one another niggers while a white person isn’t even allowed to use it in a non-offensive way.

Mister, by the way, is the name in the program, but what I kept hearing was “Master,” which fell on Moses and Fitch’s ears like the explosive crack of a slave-driver’s whip. [See my note on the name, below.] One might say that if Fitch and Moses are ultimate archetypes of smack-talking street guys, Mister/Master (it’s not explained if this is his last name or his first), nattily dressed by Sarafina Bush in an off-white suit, is perhaps the ultimate stereotype of the well-meaning, effete, polite, educated, goofy, gee whiz kind of white man, the kind who would never knowingly say something inappropriate. In fact, his carefully articulate vocabulary is peppered with gollies, goshes, and similar vacuities. Benign as he is, it's impossible not to feel an undercurrent of tension in his presence. (Interestingly, Ebert’s understudy is actress Andrea Syglowski, whose mere appearance would likely open the play up to gender-related nuances.)

[Note: In the script, which I received after this was posted, the character is listed as "Mister," just as in the program, but he does indeed pronounce it as "Master." When--in the playwright's lowercase style, Moses says, "yo mister," Mister answers that it's "master," repeating, "master, my name is master." Just because I heard correctly doesn't mean I'm not still confused.]

Mister (or whatever) encounters Moses and Fitch when he gets lost on his way to his ailing mother’s home, carrying an endlessly giving basket of food, like Red Riding Hood on her way to grandma’s. He is as exaggerated a symbol as the other character Ebert plays, a cop named Ossifer (a cross, perhaps between Officer and Lucifer?), who soon betrays his true, blue colors as the representative of police oppression.

Gradually the play moves ever further into the realm of fantasy, mingling images of violence (fight direction by J. David Brimmer), religion, and death (passing over, get it?). Posterior male nudity makes two unnecessarily distracting intrusions as well.

Hill and Smallwood offer vivid, engaged performances, shifting deftly from their street personas to affected “white” speech during several satirical routines. Ebert, a gifted musical theatre actor who gets to warble ironically intended songs like “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” and “What a Wonderful World” (which latter the others join in on as Mister strums a ukulele), is delightfully versatile in portraying both the effete visitor and the ruthless cop. And Taymor (good genes, obviously; Julie Taymor is her aunt) comes through with her handling of the play’s rhythms and the choreographic way she has with her actors.

But these are not enough to lift this earnest effort out of the head-scratching doldrums into which it sinks before its ninety minutes are concluded. Pass Over is here for only a limited run and, since there’s presently no competition from any straight play on Broadway (the one-man Lackawanna Blues is soon to open), you might want to read some other responses before deciding whether or not to give it a pass.

Pass Over

August Wilson Theatre

245 W. 52^nd Street, NYC

Closes October 10

 

609. YOU'RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN. From my (unpublished) ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW YORK STAGE, 1970-195

Liz O'Neal, Carter Cole, Dean Stolber, Lee Wilson, Stephen Fenning, Grant Cowan. (Photos: Martha Swope.) 

YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN [Musical Revival] B/M/LY: Clark Gesner; D: Joseph Hardy; CH: Patricia Birch; S/L: Alan Kimmel; L: Jules Fisher; P: Arthur Whitelaw and Gene Persson; T: John Golden Theatre; 6/1/71-6/27/71 (32)

Stephen Fenning, Liz O'Neal.

The enormously successful, 1,597-performance, Off-Broadway production of Charles Schultz’s widely popular “Peanuts” comic strip closed in February 1971. Several months later it was revived on Broadway. The cast was not up to the original, wrote Mel Gussow, but Clive Barnes, reviewing it on the radio, said it had “neither suffered nor been changed.” Other reviews were similarly positive. Still, it failed to click in its larger quarters and closed in a month.

Lee Wilson, Grant Cowan.

The cast members were Stephen Fenning, Dean Stolber, Lee Wilson, Carter Cole, Grant Cowan, and Liz O’Neal.

 Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know, since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of the New York Stage series, which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately, the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the project beyond 1950.

Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012 through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The 2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was 72, I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New York show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can find these collections on Amazon.com by clicking here. 

608. YOU NEVER KNOW. From my (unpublished) ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW YORK STAGE, 1970-1975

Jamie Thomas, Dan Held, Lynn Fitzpatrick, Esteban Chalbaud, Grace Theveny, Rod Loomis. (Photo: Kenn Duncan.)

YOU NEVER KNOW [Musical Revival] B: Rowland Leigh; M/LY: Cole Porter; D/DS: Robert Troie; P: Stanley H. Handman; T: Eastside Playhouse (OB) 3/12/73-3/18/73 (8)

Cole Porter’s 1938 drawing-room musical is based on a Viennese play, Candle Light, by Siegfried Geyer and Robert Katscher, which had starred Gertrude Lawrence and Leslie Howard on Broadway in 1929, following its London production (as By Candle-Light), starring Yvonne Arnaud. Candle Light was a mild success, running for 129 performances, but Porter's musical was a 78-performance flop. so the reasons for this 1973 Off-Broadway revival are unclear. Porter himself famously disliked his work.

Pared down from the original’s cast of 12, among which were Libby Holman, Clifton Webb, and Lupe Velez, this six-actor version made many changes in the script and characters, and there were also adjustments to the score. These included the insertion of “Ridin’ High” from Red, Hot and Blue. The hit numbers “At Long Last Love” and “From Alpha to Omega” were intact, but there were too few graces present to keep the show from repeating the fate of the first production.

Clive Barnes reported that “it revolves around—and around and around—a master and servant, and mistress and maid, exchanging roles. The possibilities for such humor, easily dampened are quickly extinguished by the quality of the writing.”

The performers, none of them considered up to the task, were Dan Held, Esteban Chaband, Grace Theveny, Lynn Fitzpatrick, Rod Loomis, and Jamie Thomas.

Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know, since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of the New York Stage series, which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately, the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the project beyond 1950.

Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012 through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The 2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was 72, I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New York show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can find these collections on Amazon.com by clicking here.

 Next up: You're a Good Man Charlie Brown.

607. YERMA. From my (unpublished) ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW YORK STAGE, 1970-1975

Nuria Espert (left), Jose Luis Pellicena. 

YERMA [Dramatic Revival/Spanish Language] A: Federico Garcia Lorca; D: Victor Garcia; S/C: Victor Garcia, Fabian Puigserver; L: Polo Villasenor; P: Brooklyn Academy of Music ad Nino T. Karlweis in the Nuria Exert Company Production; T: Brooklyn Academy of Music (OB); 10/17/72-10/29/72 (16)

Victor Garcia, a renowned Spanish director, achieved a universally acclaimed masterpiece of theatrical innovation in this Spanish-language production of Lorca’s tragedy starring Nuria Espert of the Madrid company that bore her name. It came to BAM following its great success with Madrid and London critics. Simultaneous translations were available with rented headsets.

Lorca’s poetic study of a barren village woman and her frustration at being unable to bear her husband children, normally staged in a realistically designed setting, was here put forth on a giant trampoline that could, by the attachment of ropes to eyelets by actor-stagehands, be converted at need into a myriad of highly imaginative locales. It was as much an actor as anyone in the play as it took shape as a cave, a floor, a wall, a female breast, hills, the sky, a plain, and so forth. The ritualistically choreographic staging, employing actors both on the trampoline and on platforms running around and beneath the canvas, established visual metaphors that brilliantly suggested the internal images Garcia discerned in Lorca’s people and situations.

Nothing about the staging was literal or illusionistic—all the techniques were exposed, not hidden—yet the emotional and intellectual impact of the production had an overwhelming effect, even on those with no Spanish. Striking sensuality was evident in several scenes, including those employing nudity and sexual embraces, to underline the longing of the central figure after whom the play is named (Yerma means “barren”).

Henry Hewes said the drama’s story “now emerges not only as the tragedy of a wife doomed to accept her marriage to a man who cannot and does not wish to make her pregnant, but also as a poetic and surrealistic metaphor of the needs and frustration of the female condition.” Clive Barnes saw the conception as on a level with Greek tragedy in the intensity of its power. Harold Clurman considered this Yerma “one of the outstanding successes in the effort during the last decade to enlarge the scope of the contemporary theatre.” A surprising factor was that Garcia, apparently, had accomplished his goals without “distortion of the text.”

Garcia and Fabian Puigserver won a Drama Desk Award for their scenic design.

Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know, since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of the New York Stage series, which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately, the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the project beyond 1950.

Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012 through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The 2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was 72, I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New York show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can find these collections on Amazon.com by clicking here. 

Next up: You Never Know.

606. YENTL, THE YESHIVAH BOY. From my (unpublished) ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW YORK STAGE, 1970-1975

John V. Shea, Tovah Feldshuh. (Photo: Thomas Victor.)

YENTL, THE YESHIVAH BOY [Comedy-Drama/Education/Jews/Religion/Romance/Period] A: Isaac Bashevis Singer and Leah Napolin; SC: a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer; D: Robert Kalfin; S: Karl Eigsti; C: Carrie F. Robbins; L: William Mintzer; M: Mel Marvin; CH: Patricia Birch; P: Chelsea Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music (OB); 12/17/74-1/26/75 (48); P: Cheryl Crawford, Moe Septee, and the Chelsea Theatre Center with Mrs. Victor H. Potamkin; T: Eugene O’Neill Theatre; 10/23/75-5/2/76 (224): total: 262

Center: Tovah Feldshuh. (Photo: Laura Pettibone.)

Isaac Bashevis Singer was already an elderly man, widely recognized for his Yiddish-language short stories, when he turned to playwriting. Yentl, his third play (adapted with Leah Napolin from one of his stories), was his first dramatic success, and remains a popular work, partly because of the movie version starring Barbra Streisand in the title role; on stage, the character proved a career breakthrough for Tovah Feldshuh. The play received strong enough notices in its Off-Broadway showing at Brooklyn’s Chelsea Theatre Center that, 10 months after it closed, it received a commercial Broadway run at the O’Neill, albeit with one major ans several minor cast changes.

Leland Moss, Bernie Passeltiner, Tovah Feldshuh. (Photo: Laura W. Pettibone.)

Yentl is a Jewish girl living in a Polish shtetl in 1873 with her widowed father (Bernie Passeltiner). She greatly hungers for the traditional education that Judaic law restricts to men (as it still does in ultra-orthodox communities). Her father secretly teaches her from the Torah and Talmud himself. When he dies she resolves to attend the forbidden yeshivah by dressing as a boy named Anshel. She develops a very close friendship with another student, the handsome Avigdor (John W. Shea), and soon finds herself betrothed to Avigdor’s former fiancée Hadass (Neva Small, Chelsea; Lynn Ann Leveridge, O’Neill), whom she ends up marrying. Eventually, Yentl reveals her deception, Avigdor (whom she still loves) marries Hadass, and the fruit of their union is named Yentl.

The ramblingly structured play is far from perfect, being highly episodic, containing some awkwardly phrased dialogue, and an excessively anecdotal, literary style. It also bears the weight of an intriguing folk tale that, for some, simply asked too much suspension of disbelief. “Not a word of this strikes me as playable on a stage,” wrote Brendan Gill.

Lynn Ann Leveridge, John V. Shea. (Photo: Laura Pettibone.)

Nevertheless, the gorgeously designed production, making excellent use of a revolve and an artless, village style using minimal props and sets, was brimful of the period feeling emanating from the world of 19th-century peasant life. What Gill called Robert Kalfin’s “immaculate” direction made ample use of orthodox rituals. The characters were ably etched by the well-cast ensemble, and the thematic implications were intriguing, albeit anathema to potential audiences from the contemporary descendants of the community it depicts.

John Simon’s opinion was fairly typical. “Yentl is all theatre and no play.” He called the production “a whirring, whizzing marvel,” and none disputed the assertion. Singer’s views on traditional Jewish attitudes were provocative in a decade rent by feminist activity. The play’s sexual ambivalences were likewise much discussed.

The Broadway staging shaved nearly an hour off the Brooklyn version, tightening the focus on the central love triangle, but not eradicating the essential problem of the play’s non-dramatic personality. A major cause for celebration, as noted, was the presence of Tovah Feldshuh, whose characterization of Yentl caused T.E. Kalem to hail her as “an actress of imponderable scope and stature. . . . Tovah Feldshuh has the delicacy of a Tanagra figurine. She is kinetic in presence, graceful in gesture and capable of igniting, as well as displaying, passion.”

John V. Shea was also highly approved, Howard Kissel commenting on his “remarkably graceful, affecting performance.” Others in the large cast included Leland Moss, Hy Anzell, Robin Bartlett (O'Neill Theatre), and Blanche Dee.

Feldshuh won an OBIE, a Drama Desk Award, and an Outer Critics Circle Award, but the Tonys ignored her. She would, of course, have been up that season against Ellen Burstyn, Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg, Elizabeth Ashley, and Liv Ullman, not a one of them small potato latkes.

Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know, since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of the New York Stage series, which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately, the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the project beyond 1950.

Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012 through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The 2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was 72, I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New York show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can find these collections on Amazon.com by clicking here. 

Next up: Yerma.