I thought a lot about that as I watched two ambitious musicals—Lempicka and Suffs—that opened this week to middling reviews. Although both shows are inspired by the lives of real people, neither is based on pre-existing material like a book, movie or superhero comic. So it was up to their book writers to determine exactly what story they wanted to tell and how to tell it.
Alas, neither Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould who collaborated on the book for Lempicka; nor Shaina Taub, who not only wrote the book for Suffs but also composed its score, wrote its lyrics and performs as the show’s main character, manage to do this as successfully as I’d hoped.
Lempicka tells the story of the Polish-Jewish artist Tamara Lempicka who rose to fame between the World Wars for the bold art deco nudes she painted. She also had a colorful personal life that included escapes from both the Russian Revolution and the Nazi invasion of Paris as well as a string of affairs with both men and women.
So Kreitzer and Gould had a lot to work with. The problem is that they worked so hard to cram all of it into two-and-a-half hours that they forgot to include a reason to make us care about any of it. Maybe things got lost in rewrites during the show’s 16-year gestation period. For example, a too-expensive-not-to-use car that resembles the Batmobile sits on the stage but no longer serves any real purpose in the storytelling.
The current book just slides from one scene in Lempicka’s life to the next, without taking time to develop her character or those of the people around her. And while Eden Espinosa who has been with the show through most of its long development process (click here to read an interview with her) brings the rattle-the-rafters intensity to Lempicka's songs that she honed as an Elphaba in Wicked, she isn’t able to flesh out this character.
And her castmates are similarly hobbled. One minute Lempicka’s husband (played by Andrew Samonsky) is incensed that she’s spending so much time in her studio and the next he’s boasting about her accomplishments. Similarly a female lover quickly switches from being a woman who doesn’t want to be tied down to one who is clingy and can’t bear to be apart from Lempicka.
That lover, called Rafaela in the play, is supposed to have inspired the painter’s most iconic works but that presents another problem for this production, which clearly wants to use reproductions of those images but is constrained because they all feature white women and Rafaela is played by the black actress Amber Iman. The script calls for viewers to make the instant connection between the paintings and their subject but whenever someone did that it took me right out of Lempicka’s already too-thinly-realized world.
By comparison Suffs has clear stakes and a fairly straight-forward storyline: the campaign in the early part of the 20th century to get American women the right to vote. Its main character is Alice Paul, the real-life feminist who was one of the main strategist in the suffrage movement, from which the show takes its title.
But sensitive to the politics of our day, Taub tries to be inclusive, telling the stories of a range of women, including the African-American activists Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell and the working-class labor organizer Ruza Wenclawska. However as good as it is to celebrate these women, we don’t truly to get to know any of them well. And we get to know Paul, who lived to be 92 and a fierce advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment, least of all.
Still, the production has improved considerably since its run at the Public Theater two years ago (click here to read my review of that). Taub and director Leigh Silverman have replaced half of the songs, hired a new choreographer, brought in new costume, set and lighting designers and enlisted two high-profile producers: almost-President Hillary Clinton and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.
They’ve also shuffled around the cast, moving some actors into different roles and getting rid of the well-meaning but confusing colorblind casting that made it difficult to tell if actors of color were playing African-American feminists or white characters.
But what they didn’t do was deepen their characters, give them motivations that made us understand why they were the ones willing to risk so much to empower all women. Instead the characters justify their actions by occasionally breaking the fourth wall to tell the audience “this really happened.”
That may be so but what we want—OK, what I want—from shows like this one is an emotional truth, an understanding of why people do things instead of just an accounting of what they did.
Suffs may now be an entertaining history lesson (it's chocked full of memorable anthems and the row of women seated behind me cheered them all) but I'm not so sure that the show will make it into the musical theater history books.
The memoir topped The New York Times nonfiction list for nearly half a year and, like millions of others, I read it and was deeply moved by the mutually-sustaining friendship between the two men as the older man figured out how to die with grace and the younger how to live with purpose.
The book was turned into a TV movie in 1999 with Hank Azaria as Mitch and Jack Lemmon as Morrie. A few years later, Albom teamed up with playwright Jeffrey Hatcher for a stage version that ran at the Minetta Lane Theatre for 112 performances with Jon Tenney as Mitch and Alvin Epstein as Morrie.
I didn’t see either of those versions. But a new company called Sea Dog Theater revived the show last month and I finally caught up with it last week. This time around Mitch is played by Sea Dog's co-founder and artistic director Christopher J. Domig and Morrie is played by the invaluable Broadway vet Len Cariou.
Their production is a bare bones affair. It’s staged in a chapel room at St. George’s Episcopal Church, a lovely old 19th century Romanesque building on East 16th Street. The set consists primarily of a piano (Albom initially set out to be a jazz pianist) and a wheelchair. There isn't much drama; even if you don’t know the book or movie, it’s obvious that Morrie is going to die. Yet, to my surprise, I found myself deeply moved all over again.
That response wasn't a sure thing because I had all kinds of worries going in to see the show. The first is that although the chapel at St. George’s is beautiful, its acoustics aren’t great, particularly during the early exchanges between the actors. But as they drew nearer to the audience and my ear adjusted that proved less of a problem.
I also wondered if Cariou was strong enough to make it through such an arduous role. He entered the chapel slowly, leaning heavily on a cane on one side and the arm of a young assistant on the other before grabbing onto the piano for support before the show began. But although Carious, who is now 84, may no longer be as spry as he was when he won the Tony for playing the title character in the original 1979 production of Sweeney Todd, his acting chops are still supple.
Under Erwin Maas’ deft direction, Cariou sidesteps the story's innate sentimentality and makes Morrie a real person, portraying him as cranky sometimes, fearful at others but always determined to live whatever life remains to the fullest. It’s an impressive performance and it’s nicely balanced by Domig's. (click here to read more about their collaboration).
But frankly what I worried about most was seeing re-created the sections in the book that deal in graphic detail with Morrie’s declining physical abilities. But Albom and Hatcher’s text focuses more on the metaphysical: the beauties of love and friendship and art. What I feared might be depressing turned out to be totally uplifting. Tuesdays with Morrie is only running for one more week. Seek it out if you can.
Wishing you all the joy and drama and empathy that good theater always brings
It may have started with A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond jukebox musical that opens with a character called “Neil Now” sitting in a therapist’s office and looking back at the pop singer’s life. His memories unspool in flashback scenes punctuated by musical numbers and occasional observations from the old guy that lead up to an epiphany at the end.
A similar framing device is used in two new shows that opened this month: The Notebook and Water for Elephants. Both are based on bestselling novels that were turned into movies that leaned into feel-good nostalgia about the supposedly simpler times of the Great Depression and War years. And now both stories are on Broadway in big productions set to scores soaked in roots music and giving some old Broadway vets another moment in the spotlight.
This is a smart conceit because it gives Baby Boomers, an aging but still reliable audience for Broadway shows, characters to identify with. But at the same time, it keeps the old-timers on the edges of these stories, freeing the main narratives to focus on the young people that usually populate Broadway stages.
Each of the shows also tries to navigate the challenge of reproducing iconic moments from the book or film (Notebook's embrace in the rain, Elephant's animal stampede) while offering something extra that will lure those fans into the theater instead of their re-reading the book or re-watching the movie at home.
Playwright Bekah Brunstetter has written a smart book for The Notebook that adds some bits of much need humor to author Nicholas Sparks’ somewhat sappy story. But the primary way that The Notebook sets itself apart from its predecessors is to have three, instead of two, sets of actors play its main characters: the working-class Noah and his great love Allie, a rich girl who in old age has developed dementia that is erasing the memories of their love and the life that, against the odds, they built together.
It is great to see actors of color being given such centerstage roles but all the color swapping can also be a little confusing. “Wait,” said the guy sitting behind me during intermission. “You mean that young white guy is now that old black guy?”
The veteran book writer Rick Elice tackles the adaptation of novelist Sara Gruen’s “Water for Elephants,” a story about a young guy named Jacob Jankowski who hooks up with a down-on-its-heels traveling circus and falls in love with the ringmaster's wife.
Elice has gotten rid of a couple of the book’s characters, sanitized others and streamlined the narrative. All of this leaves a lot of plot holes for the audience to fill in. But that may be, at least in part, because Elice had to make room for not only the show’s musical numbers but for its many circus stunts.
For director Jessica Stone (click here to read about her), aided by circus choreographer Shana Carroll, has mixed together traditional stage actors and circus performers. All of them gamely—and fairly competently—take on the skills of the other, with acrobats singing and dancing and actors swinging on trapezes (click here see some of how that's done).
It could just be me but there are moments when there is so much happening onstage that it’s hard to know where to look and too often the meaning of lyrics are missed because you’re too busy gaping at some acrobat doing a handstand on the head of another.
Which brings us to the music. Both shows have brought in composers who are Broadway novices. The singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, hoping to follow in the footsteps of her friend Waitress composer Sara Bareilles, has written a tuneful score for The Notebook but it’s so heavy on ballads that the production is selling souvenir Kleenex (click here to read about that).
Meanwhile the Pigpen Theatre Company, a collective of seven singer-songwriters, has come up with a patchwork of songs for Water for Elephants that range from slinky Kander & Ebb-style vamps to hoedown knee-slappers, with a couple of plaintive ballads thrown in for good measure. Some of the tunes are pleasant and they’re all well sung but they don’t add up to a truly cohesive score.
Still, both The Notebook and Water for Elephants have drawn surprisingly positive reviews, with the critics somewhat divided on which of the shows is better. Although Water for Elephants may hold a slight advantage. It’s got a happier ending. And it’s got puppets (the full-sized one for the titular floppy-eared pachyderm really delights the crowd). And it’s got all of that circus stuff.
As I said earlier, I’m not big on juggling and acrobatics. I’m just too nervous that something or someone will fall. Still even I have to admit that a number in which the aerial artist Antoine Boissereau brings to life the final moments of a dying horse in Water for Elephants was one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen in the theater. Plus it was nice to see those old guys again too.
To be honest, I had a hunch that this might be a good one even before I got to the theater because the creative team—composer David Yazbek, book writer Itamar Moses and director David Cromer—had also put together the Tony-winning musical The Band’s Visit; plus, each of these guys is a show-making ace in his own right.
But I had also been a little skeptical because the premise of their new show is totally bonkers. It’s the story of a ne’er-do-well outlaw named Elmer McCurdy, who was killed in a shoot-out after a bungled train robbery in 1911. He probably would have been forgotten except that a local undertaker embalmed his corpse until someone claimed it and when no one did the mummified McCurdy was put on display for a nickel a peek and eventually passed from one sleazy sideshow venue to another until his remains were finally buried in 1977 (click here to read his full story).
You can imagine that turning such an unlikely tale into a musical is the kind of thing that Stephen Sondheim would have relished. But the Dead Outlaw crew—including Erik Della Penna, who collaborated with Yazbek on the music and lyrics and plays in the show's onstage band—more than meets the challenge.
They’ve turned this macabre saga into a nuanced commentary on the fascination with death and violence that fuels today’s obsession with true crime stories. At the same time, they remind us that we should be more respectful of these narratives because death is the one thing that we’re all eventually going to experience first-hand. And then, they’ve set all of this to some terrific toe-tapping music.
A six-person band plays country tunes and roots music, with occasional foray into hard rock and jazz. The lyrics throughout are wickedly funny but chilling too:
And so you fail with failures and you confront your rivals
Who stand there armed with Bibles pointing at you
And you plot, you scheme, you had a chance, you had a dream
You couldn’t get a witness so you stand here today
Your mama’s dead
John Gotti’s dead
Dillinger’s dead
And so are you
Each of the eight cast members, most of whom play multiple roles, gets at least one moment to shine and they all glow. In fact, they’re all so good that it’s unfair to single out any one of them but I can’t resist shouting out a few of my favorites.
Andrew Durand, last seen in Shucked, is amazing as McCurdy; he sings the hell out of the songs he’s given when McCurdy is alive and then somehow is just as charismatic when he spends half the show standing deathly-still in a coffin as the dead man’s corpse.
Jeb Brown, who as a kid made his debut as one of the no-necked monsters in the 1974 revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and has knocked around Broadway in small parts ever since, has finally gotten the role he's no doubt been waiting for and now totally nails: as the show’s guitar-playing and pork-pie-hat-wearing narrator he is folksy, funny and sexy.
Meanwhile, the veteran character actor Thom Sesma almost steals the entire show in a cabaret-style number as the famed L.A. coroner-to-the-stars Thomas Noguchi.
Much of this has to be credited to the nimble direction of David Cromer, who not only keeps everyone on the same page but somehow manages to keep the show simultaneously light and dark. It’s a deft dance with death that you’re bound to enjoy.
But just as so many musicals have done, the staged version of "The Hunt" has failed to capture the very qualities that made the film special and worth adapting in the first place.
Directed and co-written by the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, the film tells the story of a recently-divorced kindergarten teacher named Lucas whose life unravels when he’s falsely accused of exposing himself to one of his little students.
Almost everyone in the rural town where he lives turns on Lucas to the point that he begins to fear for his life. It’s such an affecting morality tale about the dangers of mass hysteria that the film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2013.
The stage adaption by David Farr hews fairly closely to that storyline. But its effectiveness is undermined by the ways in which the story is told. The film is subtle in its storytelling but right from the start, director Rupert Goold amps up the onstge fireworks.
The film opens with a scene that establishes Lucas’ role as an integral part of the community. A group of his friends are showing off their manliness by skinny dipping in the frigid waters of the local lake but when one of them cramps up, it’s Lucas who, fully dressed, dives in and saves him.
The St. Ann's production starts off with the local men literally beating their bare chests, stomping their feet and chanting in a ritualistic fashion that's not only supposed to display their manliness but foreshadows their coming barbarism. Meanwhile Lucas is nowhere to be seen. It's as though he's already an outsider before he's even been accused of doing anything wrong.
Goold seems more interested in the look of his production than its content. And to be fair, some of the images he and his team have created are hauntingly beautiful.
The trendy set designer Es Devlin (click here to read about her) has created one of those glass boxes that have become the way that British productions (Yerma, The Lehmann Trilogy) now signal that they are really cool.
Shaped like a kid’s drawing of a house, Devlin's box stands in for the school, the town church, various homes, and the local lodge where the menfolk hangout, drink and talk about guns.
But the box is especially effective when the lighting by designer Neil Austin turns its walls opaque and the structure becomes a physical manifestation of how shortsighted the townspeople are.
The British actor Tobias Menzies plays Lucas (click here to read a piece about him). Menzies, perhaps best known as Prince Phillip to Olivia Colman’s Queen Elizabeth in the middle seasons of the Netflix series “The Crown,” is too good an actor to fail to elicit sympathy for Lucas. But the show’s ending, which varies in a significant way from the film’s and even from the play's printed script, renders his plight less poignant.
There’s also something a bit unsettling about watching this show in 2024. The film came out five years before the revelations about the movie producer Harvey Weinstein's sexually predatory behavior sparked the #MeToo movement. The environment is different now.
Throughout the film, the girl’s parents say they believe their child. But even though her accusations aren’t malicious but rather a product of childish anger prompted by Lucas’ rejection of a present she made for him, they still ruin a good man's life.
The events of the past few years, including the recent verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s suit against Donald Trump, have reminded us that accusers in these situations are usually telling the truth. So I found myself wondering why I was sitting in a theater watching a story centered around the opposite point of view.
