Live Design: The scoop on Newsies

Extra! Extra! The new Disney musical isn't bad at all. In fact it's quite enjoyable. A surprise.

New York Theater News: Last of the year

The first half of the 2011-2012 Broadway season has ended, and it's been blah. Adding a little zing: the family melodrama Stick Fly and the intriguing revisal of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, with Jessie Mueller and Harry Connick, Jr.

Tonys time

My Twitter feed (look to the right) shows what I was feeling in the moment, but doesn't tell the whole story. Trying to avoid the chatters, who tend to trend catty, I thought the show made what it could from a fairly dry season; the star power came in handy, and winners Catherine Zeta-Jones and Scarlett Johansson threw off some heat. Alas, the evening's best moment, Marian Seldes' delightful "speechless" reaction to winning her lifetime achievement award, was relegated to the first hour; if you don't have NY1, which telecast it, you didn't see it, nor much of the design winners, which always irritates me. The musical numbers always come off as somewhat canned, particularly when the sound system is faltering, and solo performers like Zeta-Jones are better off performing their songs rather than acting them in a vacuum. (On the other hand, non-nominee Kristin Chenoweth was much sunnier and more relaxed here than onstage in Promises, Promises.) No one has ever solved what to do with the plays, twas ever thus. So, a New York "whatever," not bad, some nice moments (Douglas Hodge's La Cage vamp of a game Matthew Morrison and a Will Smith)--and hopes for a jazzier 09-10 season that gives the show more to work with. The Tony-winning Memphis is pictured.

Drama Desk winners announced

Two ties highlighted this year's awards, as Outstanding Play Revival and Outstanding Actress (Musical) deadlocked. Me? I was most happy to see Alex Timbers' book for Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson win, to see the Tony-ineligible Brighton Beach Memoirs get a bit of recognition, and that the ensemble cast of The Temperamentals had something to celebrate as the show closed. Can't argue with the rest, not doing cartwheels, either; it was that kind of season. The award-winning import Red, which struck gold, is pictured.

Green Night

And I was there as Green Day took to the stage at the St. James last night to perform a couple of songs following American Idiot, the musical based on their album. It seems they're often there enjoying the show but this was the first time they'd become a part of it. The contrast between the show and the live performance was fascinating--if you think the show is loud, you ain't heard nothing yet--but they didn't upstage the adaptation, and rather complemented the piece with their own particular dynamism. That's star Spring Awakening Tony winner John Gallagher, Jr., a guy born to suffer in contemporary rock musicals, behaving himself in a relatively quiet moment from the production. Top that, Barbara Cook, I say, as I downshift into traditional musical theater mode for tonight's performance of Sondheim on Sondheim.

Shows: Frank, Tony, and the Boys

Come Fly Away with Sinatra, Lend Me a Tenor, and The Scottsboro Boys as I pick it up again after spring break. Tenor stars Justin Bartha and Tony Shalhoub approximate how I feel to be back after a week on the Florida coast.

Popdose: Passing Strange on DVD

Spike Lee's fine film of the groundbreaking Broadway show bows on DVD. If you can't wait to order or Netflix it, it also airs tonight on PBS' Great Performances.

Top 10 Theater in 09

In alphabetical order:

The Cherry Orchard (Bridge Project/BAM)
The Cripple of Inishmaan
The Emperor Jones (at the Soho Playhouse through Jan. 31)
Finian's Rainbow (closing Jan. 17 at the St. James)
God of Carnage
The Late Christopher Bean
Mary Stuart
Next Fall (reopens on Broadway March 11)
Ruined
A Streetcar Named Desire (BAM, pictured)

Of note: The American Plan, Blithe Spirit, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Distracted, In the Next Room or the vibrator play (closing Jan.10 at the Lyceum), The Royal Family, Superior Donuts (closing Sunday at the Music Box), and the one-third of The Norman Conquests I was able to see.

Welcome mat: A Broadway hello to Catherine Zeta-Jones (A Little Night Music) and Daniel Craig (A Steady Rain). Good to see you again, Jude Law (Hamlet).

Flop house: Three of the worst shows I saw last year were at the American Airlines, which is enduring heavy turbulence: After Miss Julie, Hedda Gabler, and The Philanthropist. Further dishonorable mention to Killers and Other Family and Race.

The month in theater

From Live Design: Finian's Rainbow and Superior Donuts on Broadway, and The Age of Iron and Wolves at the Window Off. Pictured are Finian's stars Kate Baldwin and Cheyenne Jackson.

Tonys for Billy(s)

By this time of the year theater watchers are prostrate with award-itis, but the Tonys get us to rally. Despite the best efforts of the sound and cameramen to sabotage the evening on TV the show looked pretty good from my sofa, which this year I was on and off running various errands during the show. (Life with children.) It had to be OK, given the utter predictability of the winners. Except maybe for the Next to Normal writers beating the Billy Elliot juggernaut (which included the showbizzy win for all three performers playing Billy, one of whom is pictured), everything was pretty much in lockstep with expectations. It was fun seeing Elton and Liza rock out with the cast of the Hair revival at the top of the show, and host Neil Patrick Harris cap it with a delightful 11 o'clock number. The one bit of excitement, a Normal/Billy tie for orchestrations, happened in the phantom zone where the design awards and best book of a musical were exiled.

The memories of Broadway 2008-2009 will have to last a little longer than usual this year; there are no summer openings for the first time in some time, so the 2009-2010 season doesn't kick off until October. The acclaimed West End revival of La Cage Aux Folles, from newly minted Tony Lifetime Achievement winner Jerry Herman, caused the only real stir of the evening (backstage) when Harvey Fierstein mentioned the possibility of a Broadway transfer, so (relatively) soon after the show's Tony- and Drama Desk-winning revival in the 2004-2005 season. If it's the best of times, look for it to be making the awards rounds next spring.

The annual Tonys torment

In a column that could have been written in the Clinton era, the New York Post's Michael Riedel gets exercised over a Tonys telecast (this Sunday) brimming with music but low on drama, with Best Play Revival and other categories booted. Twas ever thus; it used to be that the exiled designers at least got some exposure on PBS, but that hasn't been the case for at least a couple of seasons now. I'm not happy about it, but Blanche, you are in that chair. Perhaps the Obamas, who enjoyed the revival of Joe Turner's Come and Gone (pictured) last Saturday, could intervene--or maybe that part could be webcast?

The other part of this annual scourging is happening at All That Chat, where the sanctimony with which the nominations are treated gives way to bitterness over the unfairness of the telecast. Folks, that's showbiz: in exchange for a network berth, you get aging musical numbers stuffed down your throat, like the after-effects of gypsy curses from Drag Me to Hell. Maybe Ovation or a cable network could take it on, but that wouldn't please anyone without access--or, more to the point, the show producers looking to get some national exposure. Ratings-wise the Tonys don't do too bad for summer programming, but they aren't the Oscars, either. If the numbers were up maybe everyone could get the turn they deserve in the winner's circle. But, to quote from another movie, deserve's got nothing to do with it.

Live Design: Year-end Broadway

Seen and Heard wraps another year with Matthew Risch and Stockard Channing (pictured) in Pal Joey, the Piven-less Speed-the-Plow, and a White Christmas that comes in just under the wire.

Grounding Billy Elliot

I liked Billy Elliot, now playing at Broadway's Imperial Theatre. I can't say I was enraptured with it, however. And this morning I read two articles that shared my dissatisfaction: One, by Roger Kimball, in The Wall Street Journal, and the other, by Charles Isherwood, in The New York Times.

The Journal piece, "A Clumsy Mix of Art and Politics," tells you exactly where it stands, and pretty much continues WSJ critic Terry Teachout's pan, a blot on a landscape of otherwise good-to-ecstatic reviews of the show, which has been doing brisk business. Right-wingers at the Journal and the New Criterion, where Kimball hails from, were never going to approve of a Thatcher-bashing show. Nor did I--not because of the politics, but because of the obvious, crowd-pleasing, West End way in which the politics are presented. The movie, which Kimball likes, is more subtle, and makes the same points without resorting to inflatables, dress-ups, unmemorable music, and all that stage jazz. On film, the director, Stephen Daldry, and the screenwriter/book writeer/lyricist, Lee Hall, work in a naturalist vein; on stage, the two have been infected by razzle-dazzle, changing, with a thud, Billy Elliot to Billy Elliot: The Musical. (As so often happens when modest movies become immodest musicals, they pretty much run out of movie story by the close of Act I, and vamp for Act II to bring the show up to a butt-tugging three hours.)

Kimball has one beef in particular: "Billy soars to the ceiling courtesy of a line tethered to his belt. It's a pointless episode, rendered all the more pointless by the quantities of colored dry-ice fog that is wafted across the stage. It was the release not of the human spirit but of stage pyrotechnics." Isherwood's piece is about nothing but the climax of that dream ballet staging, which is one of the high points of the show. A desire to fly, to soar, to transcend is an important part of the piece, but the literalization of the act is clumsily achieved; in our dreams, we don't have someone attach ourselves to a hoist, even our imagined older self, and if the stage technicians couldn't figure out a way to get him into harness less clunkily I would have cut it. Moreover, it's the spectacle of the flying itself, a tacky button to an otherwise inspiring sequence. Even in the cheap seats at the back of the mezzanine, we get it, well before we're obliged to see it: Billy wants to fly. "It epitomizes the aesthetic conflict running through the production that keeps this very good musical from becoming a wholly great one, at least in my view," Isherwood writes.

With questions of art and politics emerging in the same weekend, in two important papers (two of the few important papers left), the Billy backlash is on. I liked the show, within reason, and have no need to pile it. "My" Billy, Trent Kowalik, was terrific. (One of the other two who share the role, David Alvarez, is pictured.) But I agree with Isherwood's conclusion: "Billy Elliot is a small, heartfelt and keenly observed musical that intermittently feels the need to act like a loud, splashy, sock-it-to-’em crowd pleaser." It forgets the simple lesson of the 2000 movie, which held up well when I caught it on cable recently: Less is more.