2009–2010 Season

A Steady Rain
Daniel Craig (James Bond 007) and Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) have abandoned their glorified Hollywood identities to star as Chicago cops in Keith Huff’s new Broadway play A Steady Rain. The gritty world of policemen and criminals, a far cry from the glamorized locations of their film adventures, is emphazied by the costume and scenic design of Scott Pask which reflects the blackness and distress underlying the play. The two men, friends from childhood, police partners, are the antithesis of each other. Daniel Craig is Joey, an Irish alcoholic bachelor who lives alone in barren surroundings, unable to relate to women. Hugh Jackman is Denny, a loud and foul mouthed Italian, married to Connie, father of two children who prides himself on being a protective family man, albeit a corrupt one.

Denny is consistently trying to introduce Joey to available women but his choices appear limited to prostitutes, one of whom appears to titillate Denny more than Joey. Joey on the other hand is constantly consoling Connie over Denny’s misfortunes. Both have been passed over for promotion three times and are currently defending themselves from charges of of misbehavior and corruption. The play consists of each man telling the audience his version of the harrowing events that changed their lives and their relationship forever.

Both Craig and Jackman are consumate actors and they do their best to bring these disparate men to life. Unfortunately the script in no way measures up to their abilities with revelations that are overly hysterically dramatic, implausible and senseless, concocted to make an effect rather than to rivet one’s attention realistically. John Crowley’s direction is limited by the lack of interaction between the two men as each is relating primarily to the audience. It’s a good try but it should have been much much better considering the vast talent and scope of the protagonists.

Wishful Drinking
Carrie Fisher has a delicious sense of humor. She is in turn bombastic, caustic, witty, sly and ironic as she races through the significant aspects of her very turbulent life. She has been a daughter, a wife and a mother, a movie star, a stage star and an author, an alcoholic, a drug addict and a manic-depressive (updated to bipolar disorder). She has been slim and adorable in her 20’s as Princess Leia in Star Wars and overweight and dumpy at her current age of 52—probably due to her medication. She divulges her life story in bits and pieces titilating all and providing a wonderful evening's entertainment.

The daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher (who ran off with Elizabeth Taylor when Carrie was two), Fisher has been the wife of singer Paul Simon in a 12-year merry go round and the wife of Bryan Lourd, a Hollywood superagent who fathered her now 17-year-old daughter before running off with a man.

She has been portrayed by Meryl Streep in the movie version of her book Postcards From The Edge. She has woken up in bed to find a dead friend at her side. She has lived through her mother’s and father’s serial marriages and the various siblings they produced with equanimity and aplomb. She even has a huge chart called Hollywood 101 explaining it all. In short she is adorable and well worth the trip to the Roundabout Theater to visit her latest creation.

Oleanna
David Mamet’s play, originally staged in 1992, remains as explosive and provocative as ever. In a short three-act, intermissionless evening we meet a college professor (Bill Pullman) who is expecting tenure, buying a new house, considering where to send his child to school—in other words preoccupied with his own concerns—and his student (Julia Stiles) who comes to seek a better grade on her paper, professing to have understood nothing in his class. She has read his book and still does not understand his course. He offers to help her and suggests they meet several more times for private tutoring. He appears concerned but is often interrupted by his wife on the telephone with reference to the purchase of their new house.

In the next act the student is making a case for sexual harrassment, totally misreading the professor’s intention, reading his words back to him but with a complete reversal of his meaning. By the last act she has cried rape, caused the loss of the professor’s job and provoked him to violence.

What does all this mean? Although no longer being played in the time of the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings, the outcome of miscommunication and lack of connection is clear. And so it remains regardless of the era involved. Both Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles are excellent, he as the nervous, uncomprehending “man” and she with the icy rage of the humiliated “woman.” Doug Hughes directs with Neil Patel providing the elegant office and Catherin Zuber the appropriate costumes.

Bye Bye Birdie
This gentle 1960 spoof of rock and roll a la Elvis Presley is a happy combination of dance and music played in its natural state without the electronic amplification so prevalent today. My grateful ears thank Jonathan Tunick and David Chase for this as well as director Robert Longbottom for the cheery choreography and youthful exhuberance.

For those who do not know the show concerns the teen age idol rock star Conrad Birdie (Nolan Gerard Funk), who having been drafted into the army, is being setup to kiss a typical fan, Kim Mac Afee, (Allie Trimm) goodbye on the Ed Sullivan show. His agent, Albert Peterson (John Stamos) and his secretary Rose (Gina Gershon) have gone to great lengths to set this publicity stunt in motion as it will be their last hurrah before they close the agency, get married and retire to a small town university, but of course everything goes haywire as the agent’s mother (Jane Houdyshell) and the teenagers family have plans of their own. The hilarious send off turns out to be one disaster after another, particularly as Harry MacAfee (Bill Irwin in his own inimitable style) upsets every direction and plan in sight.

All the cast perform well and the familiar songs: “Put on a Happy Face,” “One Boy,” “A Lot of Living to Do,” etc., as well as the exhuberant teenage chorus make this a very lovely revival.

Superior Donuts
Superior Donuts is the name of an old run-down coffee shop in a poor Chicago neighborhood owned and operated by a crusty old Polish American named Arthur (Michael McKean) who inherited the place from his father many years ago. Arthur is a bit of a slob wearing torn jeans, old sweat shirts and a ridiculous grey pony-tail—the mark of an aging hippie who is mainly indifferent to the world about him. He has a few regular customers but barely notices that one of them, a lonely policewoman (Kate Buddeke) is drawn to him and wants a more substantial relationship. Arthur’s ex-wife is dead, his daughter is somewhere in another state and his contact with the world is basically superficial and evasive.

Yet he refuses to give up and will not sell his store to his neighbor Max (Yasen Peyankov) who wants to expand his DVD business. Into this dreary set-up walks Franco Wicks (Jon Michael Hill), a young, energetic black boy looking for a job. He gets the job, sets about enlivening everyone and confides in Arthur that he has written a great American novel. Of course there is the little matter of a $16,000 debt he owes to gamblers who are threatening him with serious bodily harm. And then—

This is a beautifully written and performed play with everyone perfectly in character. Written by Tracy Letts, produced by Chicago's famous Steppenwolf Theatre Company and directed by Tina Landau it is one of Broadway's best offerings this season.

After Miss Julie
Patrick Marber has updated August Strindberg’s 1888 Swedish play Miss Julie to London in 1945, the night of the British Labour Party’s famous landslide election victory over Churchill’s Conservative Party. Supposedly this move to a promising new era of radical change and reform supplies a new understanding of the dynamics of the characters in this play; that is the daughter of upper class privilege, Julie; John, the chauffeur servant of her father; and John’s sometime fiancé Christine, the cook in the large country estate in which they all reside.

But the relationship between Julie and John remains as vitriolic as ever, the poisonous and passionate destruction of each other is villianous and no more explicable in 1945 than it was in 1888. Yes, there is always a class struggle—and a powerful driving force in male/female relationships as well—but rarely is it as bloody awful as this play insists. Or is it?

Sienna Miller is a marvel as Miss Julie, the daughter of privilege and pride as well as the possesser of raging hormones and baser feelings. Jonny Lee Miller is an equally effective torturer as the member of the underclass with longings and rage and Marin Ireland is a blessed relief as the realistic and untortured cook with her feet on the ground. Allen Moyer has designed a fantastic kitchen set and Mark Brokaw directs with a vengeance.

Brighton Beach Memoirs
After a series of hit comedies Neil Simon entered a period of self doubt in the early ’80s and reverted to autobiographical material for his next play. It opened in 1983 and ran for years. It is not a comedy although there are clearly many funny lines. It is a serious depiction of Jewish people in the 1930s struggling through a severe economic depression, an approaching world war and a holocaust in the making. The Jerome family is living in Brighton Beach in a rundown rented house (thanks to John Lee Beatty) with barely enough room to breathe as they have taken in Kate Jerome’s (Laurie Metcalf) widowed sister Blanche (Jessica Hecht) and her two daughters (Gracie Bea Lawrence and Alexandra Socha).

Jack Jerome (Dennis Boutsikaris), working two jobs to feed everyone, loses one job when the firm goes out of business and is on the way to a heart attack. Blanche Morton is asthmatic, unable to work and focused on her younger daughter who she is convinced has a weak heart. Her older daughter wants to leave high school to work on Broadway. Stanley Jerome (Santino Fontana) is working at a job he may lose and younger brother Eugene (Noah Robbins)—the Neil Simon character—is busy trying to be a writer and preoccupied with his awakening sexuality. There is tension galore as well as concern about their relatives still in grave danger in Poland. Everyone in the cast is superb. Laurie Metcalf again proves she is more than “Roseanne’s” sister and Noah Robbins makes an auspicious Broadway debut as young Eugene. This play is to be followed by the sequel Broadway Bound, both directed with a sure hand by David Cromer.

In The Next Room—Or The Vibrator Play
Sarah Ruhl has written a very funny and totally original play which will warm the cockles of the heart as well as other areas of the body in a somewhat lower position. It seems that Dr. Givings (Michael Cerveris), a very modern 1880 physician, has discovered a wonderful new way of curing the female malaise of “hysteria,” a disease he describes as “congestion in the womb.” It is a vibrator which will induce a paroxysm, or a release of the entrapped fluids and thereby return the patient to health. And it works!

Unfortunately his office is next door to his living room where his wife (Laura Benanti) sits in total rage and frustration, unable to nurse her newborn baby due to a lack of milk. She is forced to hire a wet nurse (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) who is also the servant of her husband’s latest patient, Mrs. Daldry (Maria Dizzia), who appears to be making all sorts of noises in the next room arousing Mrs. Givings intense interest. She wants to see what is happening. She wants to be treated. Her husband refuses. After all she is not a “hysteric”—she is a well woman who happens to talk too much and too foolishly. But when he is not around she manages to sneak into the room with Mrs. Daldry and the two discover they don't need the doctor at all!

There are other characters and complications as the abysmal ignorance of sexuality abounds and an absolutely lovely ending. The cast is all perfect enacting every manuever representing orgasm they can muster. Les Waters directs with delicacy and the perfomance is a total joy.

Finian’s Rainbow
Finian’s Rainbow was a hit in 1947. It is still a hit in 2009. This is a musical where every song is a beautiful melody one can remember after leaving the theatre and keep hearing again and again in the head and heart. It is a charming show where things happen “by magic,” where whimsical, comical and threatening things occur and resolve all the while the beautiful music carries the events along. It is a show in which a delightful Irishman Finian (Jim Norton) steals a pot of gold from a leprechaun Og (Christopher Fitzgerald) hoping to bury it near Fort Knox where it will grow and grow. He brings his daughter Sharon (Kate Baldwin) with him to Rainbow Valley in Missitucky looking for the fertile soil. Rainbow Valley has its problems and its villians but it also has Woody (Cheyenne Jackson), a perfect mate for Sharon as well as his deaf mute sister Susan (Alina Faye) who dances her speechlessness and is a perfect mate for Og who having followed Finian to America is becoming more human each day with the loss of his pot of gold. Then there is the scheming racist Senator Rawkins (David Schramm) who is inadvertently turned into a black man (Chuck Cooper) by Kate when she unknowingly speaks a wish near the pot of gold. And there is Mr. Shears and Mr. Robust who offer credit to the valley people after hearing rumors of gold being found in the land of tobacco sharecroppers, and so it goes. Everyone is excellent. Kate Baldwin has the clear pure tone of a diva lyric soprano, Cheyenne Jackson the naive sexiness of the town hero and Jim Norton the charm of the wily Irishman. Christopher Fitzgerald is a comic Og and Alina Faye dances up a storm. Burton Lane wrote the glorious music and Yip Harburg the witty lyrics. When you have “How Are Things In Glocca Morra,” “Look To The Rainbow,” “Old Devil Moon,” “If This Isn't Love”" and “Something Sort of Grandish,” as well as several others, you cannot go wrong.

Race
David Mamet has done it again. In his own inimitable style he attacks the problems of race and sex with all the sophistry and cynicism he can muster. Here we have four talented actors, two white and two black, attacking every misperception possible within a framework of a griping, intriguing play. A white millionaire (Richard Thomas), accused of raping a black woman, comes to the office of two successful lawyers claiming he is innocent and wants to retain their services. The white lawyer Jack Lawson (James Spader) and the black lawyer Henry Brown (David Alan Grier) along with their black assistant Susan (Kerry Washington) then enter a dialogue, not as much about his innocence as about his defense possibilities. Truth is irrelevant, believable defense is predominant and what about the racial implications? Is the victim a loved girl friend who consented to sexual relations or a black whore? Is the millionaire a roving husband having an affair or a rapacious attacker? Is Susan capable of seeing a white man as anything other than a predator? Can Jack and Henry actually work through the contradictions and reach a successful conclusion? The play sparkles with witty dialogue and scatological comments as well as a stunning surprise at the end. The actors are superb, particularly James Spader who has been playing a cynical lawyer to perfection for the last ten years on TV. David Mamet directs. David Mamet is riveting.

A Little Night Music
Stephen Sondheim’s tribute to Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s film Smiles of a Summer Night remains as beautiful as ever although the 1973 version was a lush production while this one is more of a chamber music rendition. Stripped to bare bones scenery it depends more heavily on its stars to deliver the full impact of the beautiful music and convoluted plot. And they deliver! Catherine Zeta-Jones is gorgeous and totally believable as the no longer young actress Desiree Armfeldt who feels it is time to stabilize her life, stop touring and taking married lovers, and return to her true love, her former lover who is probably the father of her 14 year old daughter. This daughter lives with her mother, the former courtesan of the past, who has acquired riches, a touch of acerbity and a nostalgic wisdom she wants to impart to her offspring. This role is played by Angela Lansbury to perfection! The erstwhile lover, Fredrik Egerman, (Alexander Hanson) although drawn to Desiree has been married for 11 months to an 18 year old still virginal Anne (Ramona Mallory) he is determined to bed no matter how long it takes. But his son Henrik (Hunter Ryan Herdlicka) is also in love with his stepmother although he lacks the courage to tell her and resorts to a dalliance with their servant Petra (Leigh Ann Larkin). And there is also interference from Count Malcolm (Aaron Lazar) who is Desiree's current lover despite being married to Charlotte (Erin Davie—who is perfect in this role) who wants nothing more than to regain her husband’s love. With all these plot complications thank heaven for Stephen Sondheim's glorious music, Hugh Wheeler’s witty lyrics and two perfect stars to carry the evening smoothly and beautifully.