Hats off to On the Town

Phil Tayler, Zach Eisenstat and John Ambrosino go  . .. well, On the Town.  Photos: Mark S. Howard

The original musical On the Town has been so overshadowed by its 1949 film treatment (an Oscar-winner that starred Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller and Vera-Ellen) that the current Lyric Stage production (through this weekend only) almost feels like a discovery. The movie is a monument in Hollywood history (not only was it the first musical shot on location, but it also marks the first time Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen co-directed a full film); but the MGM suits yanked most of Leonard Bernstein's subtler songs (they found them "complex" and "operatic"), and replaced them with broader numbers by producer Roger Edens - a talented mainstay of the Freed Unit, but there's a reason why you've never heard of him.

Happily, however, Bernstein's original melodies survive in the score of the stage show, which was a spin-off of Jerome Robbins' ballet Fancy Free (which Boston Ballet staged just last year) - itself a spin-off of Paul Cadmus's sardonically homo-erotic The Fleet's In! (below- a WPA commission, believe it or not, that caught the eye of the closeted choreographer).

In Fancy Free, Robbins largely dropped Cadmus's gay subtext (let alone the suggestion of marijuana use), but still conjured a surprisingly dark look at a trio of sailors on leave, whose lonely, frustrated aggression eventually thwarts their sexual impulses (their girls wind up fleeing their brawling). The musical sweetened things even further, keeping the sex but deep-sixing the violence; and just as the jump from Robbins to Bernstein marked another step into the closet, so On the Town all but reversed the content of the original Cadmus source (as often happens in the long arcs that cultural material charts through the pop firmament).

Paul Cadmus' The Fleet's In! of 1934 - the source inspiration for On the Town

Indeed, in the musical version, it's the women who are most often amusingly on the make: one of the leading ladies, for instance, primly explains that she gets "carried away" with prime specimens of homo erectus (her words, not mine), while another simply suggests to sailors, "Why don't we go up to my place?," and the third, we learn, earns her living as an exotic dancer (even though she has won the title of "Miss Turnstiles").  Meanwhile the sailors, though horny, hardly seem worldly - indeed, one of them is probably a virgin, while another dreams of finding true love during a 24-hour leave; only one of them has his eye on the main chance, and even he's a softie.

So don't worry, On the Town reliably diverts its erotic undercurrents into proper romantic yearnings - but only barely; make no mistake, it's about sex, and in a refreshingly honest way. But then it bloomed during a brief period (roughly the war years) in which nice girls were allowed to have sex lives onstage, at least with virginal servicemen; and of course its lyrics and book were penned by Adolph Green and the irrepressible Betty Comden (née Basya Cohen), who more than anyone since Fanny Brice imprinted our musical theatre with the perspective of the smart, snappy Jewish-American girl who has been around the block and seen a thing or two.

Not that Comden, Green and Bernstein (who once were a variety act!) ignored the emotional subtexts of their story - indeed, the loneliness of Fancy Free haunts On the Town - it's essentially what the Freed Unit left out of their happy, back-slapping slab of Americana. At the Lyric, however, the piece's wistfulness often comes center stage, in such forgotten Bernstein classics as "Lonely Town" and particularly the poignant "Some Other Time," which has always seemed to hover on the verge of becoming a standard (which it deserves to be).

Michele A. DeLuca knows where she'd like to take Phil Tayler.

Of course balancing these winsome touches are the bold strokes of "Carried Away," "I Can Cook, Too," (lyrics by Bernstein himself) and the classic "New York, New York" - surely one of the catchiest numbers ever concocted. The Lyric version actually gives full  weight to both sides of the musical's emotional coin - although I have to say that on opening night, it hadn't quite coalesced.  I have a hunch it has found its groove by now - this is one of those cases in which artistic director Spiro Veloudos has attempted to shoehorn a big show into an intimate space, and while I can't really fault him for that (who doesn't have a soft spot for On the Town?) a few of the dance numbers feel slightly cramped, and some of his stars are pushed beyond their musical comfort zone (one untrained singer, for instance, often lands about a quarter-step south of where he should be when he's singing harmony).

None of these flaws prove fatal, however, and if a few performers seemed to be operating on technical cues  - well, again,  I'm guessing the emotional essence of what they're doing has sunk in by now. The standouts of the cast are Aimee Doherty and Phil Tayler, by now Boston's go-to duo for musical theatre; Doherty as usual looks like a million bucks, and sounds like a million more; she actually doesn't have too much chemistry with her assigned sailor, the effervescent Zach Eisenstat (who  in general feels like a force of nature, and can pull off a mean back flip to boot), but maybe she doesn't have to when she's got the comic timing she displays here (intriguingly, Doherty actually connects more with the fiancé she throws over in the script, a highly amusing J.T. Turner).  Tayler, like Doherty, was born to do musical comedy, and nails all his bits, even if (again) he hadn't quite found his inner shrinking violet on opening night, nor learned how to open up to the demanding advances of the talented Michele A. DeLuca, whom we really don't see enough of on our local stages, and who brought some real fire to "I Can Cook, Too."

But wait, there's more.  Sometimes local light John Ambrosino strikes me as a little distant, but here his melancholy worked well for the lovestruck Gabey (and his vocal chops were quite welcome on numbers like "Lonely Town"), while radiant newcomer Lauren Gemelli made me forget all about silly old Vera-Ellen as Miss Turnstiles. Local legend Sarah deLima likewise eclipsed the Hollywood incarnation of her character, a daffy artiste who keeps the plot (such as it is) in motion. 

There was even more talent around the edges of the production - Maurice Emmanuel Parent, usually a headliner, essayed a number of supporting and dance-oriented roles, while bass baritone Rishi Basu brought a welcome heft to the vocal lines. Choreographer Ilyse Robbins had clearly studied the dance style of that other Robbins, and often triumphed against the limits of the Lyric's space; Kathleen Doyle's costume design was period-perfect; and Seághan McKay's projections went a long way toward giving the show something of the film version's fluidity and scope (particularly when a subway rumbled by).  All in all, Veloudos has assembled a startling array of talent on the Lyric stage, and we're unlikely to see any local cast do better by the full emotional range of On the Town.

By the way, Vera Stark isn't a very good play

The talented women of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. Photos: Johnathan Carr

I've long maintained that the celebrated Lynn Nottage is more pedagogue than playwright - and I think that after seeing By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (at the Lyric Stage through April 27), few could disagree. For this time the author is quite openly at the lecture podium, laser pointer in hand.  It's true she ribs her lesson plan a little (or rather the academics from whom she's cribbing), but this cannot disguise the fact that Vera Stark is full of familiar, self-indulgent conceits - and as a dramatic construction it's pretty rudimentary.  Still, you could argue that as PowerPoint, it sometimes sings.

What's too bad about Nottage's failure is that she's actually on to a resonant theme - the plight of generations of African-American actors and actresses locked into stereotypic roles on the silver screen (just as their brothers and sisters were locked into subservient roles in society at large).  And at first the author seems to be exploring an intriguing angle on this embedded racism; we meet her heroine, the "forgotten" Vera Stark, while she's running lines for a fictitious Jezebel mash-up called The Belle of New Orleans with her employer, the (likewise fictitious) Hollywood actress Gloria Mitchell.

Gloria, of course, is playing the southern belle; Vera's her sassy maid.  When the line readings end, however, we realize Vera is actually Gloria's maid, in real life; indeed, they're a team - Gloria's got the looks, Vera's got the brains.  Or rather the mixed-race Gloria has the white looks, while Vera has the talent; they're related (cousins, perhaps?), and started out in show business as a single vaudeville act.  But Gloria's "high yaller" skin tone allowed her to slip under the color bar  - so now she is essentially auditioning for the role of Scarlett O'Hara, with her darker, more capable cousin tagging along, hoping to play the maid!  Or actually hoping to play anything - as one of Vera's buddies puts it when she hears of the impending screen tests, "Are there any slaves?  With lines?"

The real Vera Stark? An uncredited Theresa Harris sings "St. Louis Blues" to Barbara Stanwyck in the 1936 Banjo on My Knee.

Again - this is a solid set-up, and it's hardly far-fetched; Hollywood star Merle Oberon, for instance, passed off her Indian mother as her maid for years.  Nottage herself has acknowledged the great actress Theresa Harris, who played Bette Davis' maid in Jezebel, as the inspiration for Vera (although a different, more complicated parallel could be found in the career of Fredi Washington, who in 1934's Imitation of Life played a mixed-race woman "passing" for white). Indeed, Nottage's concept is so rich that for a while she can coast on it, with witty cameos of other black girls just a shade darker than Gloria working the "Lena Horne/Brazilian" angle, even as clueless Hollywood producers wax poetic about "authentic Negroes" (while all the African-Americans around them helplessly "audition" to play these racist caricatures).

As I said, this is all good satiric fun - but it's not actually drama, it's sketch comedy.  And, like the academic colloquy that concludes the play, it all feels recycled (indeed SNL and "In Living Color" covered all this territory decades ago). The real drama here would lie in Vera and Gloria's relationship; but Nottage's sense of sisterly solidarity prevents her from digging into this with anything deeper than a few sarcastic jabs.  Rather obviously her first act should climax with Vera self-demeaningly keeping Gloria's secret under duress - in order to win a crack at the big time, in however low a role (with her internal conflict setting up the second act in turn).  But as usual for Ms. Nottage, nothing like a climax ever comes close to occurring in either act (indeed, as in Ruined and Intimate Apparel, this dramatist seems unconcerned with even the basics of dramatic development).

Bette Davis suffers in white before a crowd of racial stereotypes in Jezebel, the movie Vera Stark lampoons.

Still, the witty surface of Nottage's dialogue (and she is often funny) disguises for most people the structural problems lurking in her play. (Sigh; why does "development" always polish a play without actually improving it?)  It's not until the second act, in which Vera's slow career collapse - and eventual disappearance - is documented with free-floating postmodern tropes (films within films within television shows, and an academic discussion group deconstructing it all) that things fall apart, because there's no through-line, no actual dramatic connection with Vera.  Nottage tries to cover her tracks here by having her talking (egg)heads insist the key to Vera's crack-up lies in "what was unspoken" - but again, as Nottage never actually dramatizes this struggle to remain silent, these lines read more as excuse than explication.

I will say, however, in Nottage's defense, that under Summer L. Williams' direction, Vera is hardly given its due at the Lyric.  Full disclosure here - Williams, a leading force at Company One, has long campaigned against me and my blog, and been vociferous in claiming that I'm racist. I disagree, needless to say, but if what I've written so far - or what I'm about to write - disturbs you in so far as it reflects a white male critic assessing black female artists, by all means, tell yourself (as Ms. Williams does) that I'm racist, and you'll feel more comfortable about everything.  Frankly, by now I almost don't mind that particular slur, I've written part of the theatrical community off in this regard, and they've done the same to me. So we kind of co-exist on parallel planes - I continue to pursue dramatic criticism, they continue to claim that's racist when it comes to them.

Still keeping secrets in the 70's.

With that said, let's move on to Williams' direction - which is not all it could, or should, be.  To her credit, Williams has brought a number of exciting new faces to the Lyric - I hope to see the wonderfully knowing Lindsay Allyn Cox, the brashly sweet Terrell Donnell Sledge, the smartly exotic Kris Sidberry, and the hilariously gonzo Gregory Balla on this stage again sometime soon.  But at the same time, Williams has miscast (and misdirected) Lyric mainstay Kelby T. Akin, and more importantly, under-directed star Kami Rushell Smith (Vera) and Hannah Husband (Gloria).  

Husband paints in broad strokes throughout, suggesting little sense of private conspiracy with Vera; but it's Smith who's most at sea.  Her beaming intelligence (and lovely voice) serve her well in the first act, but she flails in the second, which attempts to limn her metastasizing bitterness as her career crashes into further racial roadblocks (while Gloria, indemnified by now as whiter than white, soars into the arms of some British cultural scion).  Here costume designer Tyler Kinney must shoulder some blame (David Towlun does much better by the set, and Johnathan Carr's screen simulations of Jezebel are witty); my inner drag queen tells me that poor Vera should look like a train-wreck by the time she appears at the end of her career on a Merv-Griffin-like talk show (soon she will strip naked on a Vegas stage before vanishing for good).  But neither Vera's outfit, nor her outlook, suggests she's inches from the precipice (or that Gloria's final betrayal will push her over it).  Smith simply hasn't found within herself the conflicts that, yes, go unspoken, but should still be informing her performance every minute. The bottom line is that there's brilliant work on the edges of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark - so it's really too bad its center doesn't hold.

The Lyric pockets a small miracle

Phil Tayler and Daniel Berger-Jones.  Photos: Timothy Dunn.

Perhaps I was simply in the mood for any type of theatre done well by the end of last weekend (after I had suffered through three misfires in a row), but the Lyric Stage's Stones in His Pockets struck me as something of a small miracle.  I don't want to make any large claims for Marie Jones' sturdy two-hander - which has become something of a warhorse since its premiere in 1996 - although to be fair, it has affecting emotional and political dimensions; it's a worthy, fully-crafted play.  

But above all, it works, and Jones lavishes her two actors with cameos to die for as they impersonate virtually an entire Irish village (and the Hollywood film crew that invades it).  And luckily, the Lyric has cast two of Boston's smartest and most charming young performers, Phil Tayler and Daniel Berger-Jones, in these demanding roles; and they basically go to town with the show as only bright young talents can.

I admit that by now I have something of a man-crush (and a girl-crush too, who am I kidding?) on both these handsome thesps, who are among the most reliable actors in town.  Over the past year, Tayler, who is at heart a musical-theatre man, seems to have suddenly been in everything, everywhere, after lighting up the caverns of Floyd Collins last spring.  In contrast, Berger-Jones is more of an actor's actor, and made a huge impression in such demanding roles as Jimmy in Look Back in Anger with the Orfeo Group (which he co-founded); but Orfeo has disbanded, and we haven't seen him that much of late (somehow, despite being a born Shakespearean, we've never seen him in a leading classical role).

I'm happy to report that these two are naturals together, even though their instincts and approaches are often opposed.  Tayler likes to go big, while Berger-Jones values precision; but both are clearly committed to nailing the multitude of accents in Pockets, and at least to these American ears, they come through with flying colors.  Berger-Jones even carries off the daunting task of conjuring a Hollywood actress struggling (and hilariously failing) to muster an Irish brogue - surely a master-class acting-accent challenge.

Triumph 'n tragedy on the Irish set.

Indeed, the vocal smorgasbord served here (along with our ability to discern every separate spice) is reason enough to see the show.  Beyond that, even though much of Courtney O'Connor's production is painted in bold colors, the dynamic duo at its center do often manage to limn the underside of Jones' comedy, which basically depicts the destruction of a beleaguered Irish community by not only the temptations of the Hollywood dream machine, but larger global and market forces as well.  (The title, unexpectedly enough, refers to a suicide.)  

I admit that if you claimed the Lyric company doesn't quite pull off the playwright's intended mix of satire of Gaelic woe (the extras for the flick in question, The Quiet Valley, are directed to "Look dispossessed!") with a potent dose of the real thing, I wouldn't really argue.  Still, the production is often a good deal more complex than you expect - as the author, and these actors, inflect even their on-the-make Hollywood types with unexpectedly sympathetic motives and impulses.  Then again, both lead performances aren't entirely perfect: Tayler could dial back the barking here and there, and one of his female characters is all but indistinguishable from a swishy gay stereotype (he needs to come up with a little opening signal for her, as Berger-Jones does with his lead actress, "Caroline Giovanni," who is always sweeping a stray tress behind her ear).  Meanwhile Berger-Jones, for his part, could attend to a subtler problem: we learn a sad secret about his lead character toward the close of the show - and looking back, we realize how much more resonant his performance would be if a vulnerable desperation had subtly tugged at his character's hopes from the start.

But these are only quibbles about a production that more often than not simply carries you along with its own exuberant theatricality.  The bottom line is that the Lyric has another hit on its hands, and Tayler and Berger-Jones have earned a matched set of acting laurels.

A variable "33 Variations"

Paula Plum faces the infinite in 33 Variations.

Sigh!  The Vanya on 42nd Street Effect has struck again!

What's that effect, you may ask? Well actually, that's just my shorthand for the perceptual gap that persists between those theatre-goers who simply "want to see a show" and those for whom the theatre has become a kind of lifestyle.

In a word, the kind of people who might be quite familiar with plays like Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, or Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, or Margaret Edson's Wit - of which Moisés Kaufman's 33 Variations (at the Lyric Stage through Feb. 2) often feels like a muddled variation.

If you haven't seen those plays, of course, then Kaufman's concoction will go down easy.  It will seem, well, funny and sad, as they say - if a little vague, but never actually confusing or incompetent.  You may not be able to tell quiiite what Kaufman is getting at, but if you're the trusting type, you'll remain confident that he must be getting at something.

And you'll certainly notice that the production in general is quite fine. The leading lady (at left) is often superb, in fact, as is most of the supporting cast.  And the design is elegant - even sleek; and a sharp set of projections gives everything a clean, high-tech sheen.

But on the other hand, if you ARE familiar with plays like Arcadia or Amadeus or Wit, then 33 Variations may feel like - well - a clumsy stab into a kind of dramatic Bermuda triangle defined by those earlier Broadway hits.

Moisés Kaufman is famous, of course, for brilliant documentary pastiches like The Laramie Project and Gross Indecency, in which he shaped mountains of testimony into gripping theatrical landscapes. So his ambition to write a play based on dialogue rather than documentation is entirely understandable. It just doesn't justify a first attempt that flirts constantly with conceptual plagiarism.

Kaufman's central conceit is to track a mystery - not about Mozart or Lord Byron (they've been done!) - but about Beethoven, in particular the genesis of the great composer's "Diabelli Variations," a late suite of 33 variations (often called the greatest ever written) drawn from a sturdy but unremarkable waltz by one Anton Diabelli, a music publisher and friend of the grand Ludwig van.  At first rejected by the composer, the project eventually came to absorb him; indeed, he spent four years teasing out 33 different pieces from seemingly every aspect of Diabelli's quotidian theme.  Why?

(That's the Amadeus part.)

But Kaufman also wants to focus on the declining health of one Dr. Katherine Brandt (Paula Plum), a driven musicologist who's bent on solving that particular musical mystery, even at the expense of ignoring her gentle, directionless daughter.  And even though her health is in a nosedive as she succumbs to the ravages of ALS (what many still call "Lou Gehrig's Disease").

(That's the Wit part.)

AND there's Katherine's research itself - an intriguing journey through stained scores and lost letters and the dungeons of a music library in Bonn, guarded by an arch Germanic dragon-lady (Maureen Keiller). This musicological Smaug turns out to have a heart as well as a hoard of gold, of course, and as Katherine draws closer and closer to her goal, we can perceive poignant parallels between her lonely struggles and Beethoven's battle against encroaching deafness.

(That's the Arcadia part.)

Okay, you could maybe argue that the play succeeds as a Venn diagram; but alas, as Kaufman shows little actual dramatic ability, I'm afraid that minute-to-minute it remains a puzzlement.  The seeming harmonies between Brandt and Beethoven never coalesce into anything like a theme - perhaps because the historical parallels really aren't that close (and Kaufman paints a cartoonish Beethoven anyway).  Beyond that, the playwright seems ham-strung by his own documentarian nature. The play comes most to life when it visits that music library - but this only reminds us that the Laramie Project and its ilk succeeded because we understood the actual drama buried within their documentation. Here there's a kind of void, however, that the playwright must fill; yet we get very few solid scenes, much less anything like a rising action or climax.

Will McGarrahan, Victor Shopov, Maureen Keiller and Paula Plum - Photo(s): Mark S. Howard.

Of course we do get to hear some Beethoven (from the talented pianist Catherine Stornetta, who tickles the ivories center stage), and Kaufman offers a nice warm bath in sweet, life-lesson clichés like "Lighten up!" and "Stop and smell the roses!"  Which is all well and good.  I get the impression, however, that Kaufman thinks he has actually written a set of "variations" (he has penned 33 scenes, of course), which is a little confusing.  Does he understand what a variation really is?  The "Diabelli Variations," for instance, are great because they almost ruthlessly dig into every aspect of Diabelli's banal little melody; Beethoven plays with the rhythm or the harmonic structure or the dynamic of just about every measure.  It's a brilliant work of sustained musical archaeology; it's no mystery why it held his interest for four years.

But Kaufman pulls almost nothing from beneath the obviously tragic surface of Ms. Brandt's plight.  He seems to think that simply interlacing modern scenes with period ones can count as a form of "variation" - or at least as a form of dance.  This does make for pretty stage images (see masthead) - if only it were also true!

Luckily, at the Lyric, the cast is often so strong that they sustain a sensitive mood without much actual dramatic support. No, Ms. Plum can't really supply the lines to illuminate her relationship with her daughter - but she does give the brittle Ms. Brandt a subtly poignant bravery.  Indeed, her no-nonsense portrayal of the devastating facts of ALS is quite heartbreaking; you just feel she could do it all by herself, sans Kaufman.  And as her closest companion in her last days, that German dragon-lady, Maureen Keiller is perhaps even better; wryly hilarious and subtly moving - and with an accent that's gloriously extended without ever quite tipping into parody - she expertly dodges the clichés that pothole the part.

There's strong work elsewhere in the cast as well - Will McGarrahan makes a devilishly genial Diabelli, and local hottie Kelby T. Akin once again struts his technically-accomplished stuff as, well, the play's goofy hottie. I didn't feel newcomer Dakota Shepard had quite enough oomph as Brandt's long-suffering daughter, but she had the right kind of presence, and the obviously talented Victor Shopov did what he could with the underwritten part of Beethoven's secretary.  The one gap in the cast, I'm afraid, proved to be the great man himself; the playwright hasn't done actor James Andreassi any favors with this blowsy portrait of Beethoven, but unlike his fellow performers, Andreassi seemed unable to find any way to redeem the weak writing.

Oh, well! I'm happy to add that the rest of the production was generally first-class.  Director Spiro Veloudos did some of his subtlest work in recent memory with Plum and Keiller, and clearly knew to keep things moving elsewhere.  Meanwhile Cristina Todesco's nearly-abstract scenic design was among the most sophisticated I've seen at the Lyric - and served as a striking frame for Shawn Boyle's intriguing projections - while Charles Schoonmaker's elegant costumes were always appropriate.  The high level of craft almost made you wonder - how far could this talented team go with a truly great play?

East sleeps with West at the Lyric

Barlow Adamson and Celeste Oliva in Chinglish.  Photos: Mark S. Howard.

It's amusing (to me, at any rate) that so many critics have misinterpreted David Henry Hwang's Ch'inglish, which is itself a play about misinterpretation - on the surface, that is. But ah, there's the rub; at its core, Hwang's text is about something else entirely: like his best-known script, M. Butterfly, it's about the chasm between public and private identity, and how negotiation of that gap is always fraught, particularly for the lonely self forced to wear two faces.

Of course, as with Butterfly (and much of Hwang's work), that conflict comes in a clever, politically-correct wrapper: once more this playwright pirouettes around the long cultural negotiation between "East" and "West" (or specifically, China and the U.S.).  As Hwang was born in L.A. of Chinese parents, you can understand his addiction to this particular gambit - and it always gets him past the multicultural police, of course; but it does mean his work has been persistently misinterpreted.

With Ch'inglish, that misunderstanding runs right from the top of the critical pyramid (Ben Brantley, in the New York Times) to the many local responses to the current, solid production at the Lyric Stage (through Dec. 23).  The trouble is that, you know, as Charlie Chan might say, Ben Brantley - he no review so good.  Brantley seems to have been both dazzled and disgruntled by the layer of translation jokes that Hwang (who always has one eye on the box office) has sprinkled copiously over his show.  And the gaffes that bedevil the lead character, an American businessman on the make in the provincial capital of Guiyang, are distractingly funny (in the fast-and furious supertitles, for instance, we discover that "I love you" in Mandarin is easily garbled into "Frogs like to pee!").

But Hwang never really looks very far into the conceptual canyons between Mandarin and English (which I know a bit about these days, as I'm often editing scientific research by Asians).  As a playwright, he's just not all that interested in the "lost-in-translation" box-office bait he has strung over his text (perhaps because he doesn't even speak Mandarin himself).

Unexpected fans of Enron.

What he is intrigued by is the parallel mis-understandings (of both "self" and "other") by his leads, Daniel Cavanaugh (Barlow Adamson), an Ohio signage entrepreneur ( a kind of semiotician, no less!), and Xi Yan (Celeste Oliva), a government official with whom he tangles  - in more ways than one - in Guiyang.

Both parties, of course, entertain received ideas about the other - Cavanaugh, for instance, has drunk and digested all the Wall Street Journal Kool-aid about China: to him it's a land where the law means nothing, and relationships mean everything.  Needless to say, however, Hwang drolly reveals that the same could be said about America - indeed, Daniel's past includes a stint at Enron, the vast McKinsey-driven boondoggle that stayed afloat twice as long as it should have because of its network of Republican connections.  (Tellingly, it's only when the Chinese learn this fact about Daniel, and then see him as a "high-roller" in a celebrity scandal with which they can relate, that they want to do business with him.)

Meanwhile, on the Chinese side of the mirror, Xi Yang has begun to pine for Daniel because, poignantly, he has 'an honest face,' apparently unlike those around her (if only he did!).  So their tryst has its tragic side - particularly when we learn that it is doomed for an intriguingly Chinese reason: an untranslatable concept - perhaps roughly corresponding to "sacrifice-commitment" - which Xi Yang feels for the public role of the husband she is privately betraying.

You can sense in that strange twist of double-identity the very essence of Hwang's constant theme - although to be fair, he renders it somewhat schematically here; he's often in a hurry to get to his next joke, and he's prone to odd stylistic jumps and bumps (not always smoothly negotiated by Lyric director Larry Coen) that sometimes blur the focus of his play.

Still, there's more to Ch'inglish than to most New York hits, and it's generally well-served by the Lyric production, which showcases several local actors - mostly Asian - who have had little chance to flourish on the Boston theatre scene (where the diversity discussions don't always include too much diversity).  Director Coen goes more for laughs than character (as he usually does), but fortunately he has cast the extraordinary Celeste Oliva, who has long been hidden away in Shear Madness, as Xi Yan; and she all but single-handedly deepens what could otherwise play as farce into something much more haunting.  And amazingly, although she admitted in a talkback that she is not Chinese, like most of the cast she carries off large swaths of dialogue in (to these ears) credible Mandarin. Alas, as her American paramour, the amiable Barlow Adamson, who has been so reliable elsewhere, isn't nearly in her league; he seems to have no idea how to complicate the superficial American boyishness of his hero.  But frankly, Ms. Oliva acts enough for both of them.

Elsewhere, the performances tend to be broad but clever: Tiffany Chen scores as a blithely blunt translator, while Michael Tow and Chen Tang make strong impressions as members of the Party who don't always toe the party line.   And there's another find on the edge of the production - Alexander Platt does a deft (if not quite complex enough) turn as a British "consultant" who like everyone else is hardly what he seems to be. With his lightly diabolical air, and a smoother than smooth way with Oxbridge chatter, Mr. Platt is a natural for Shaw or any number of other playwrights.  Let's hope we hear from him, the talented Ms. Oliva, and all their co-stars sometime soon - in any language.

Blue-state Mikado at the Lyric

Bob Jolly cuts up as the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado.  Photos: Mark S. Howard.

I've no doubt The Mikado will be a joy forever; and right now at the Lyric Stage, where Spiro Veloudos has once more shoehorned an epic into his intimate space, the Gilbert and Sullivan classic is indeed a joy - well, off and on.  Much of this production is wonderful - either beautifully sung, or hilarious; but unfortunately there are frustrating gaps on both the musical and comic counts that ultimately compromise its success.  I left glad that I'd once more visited this evergreen garden of silliness; but at the same time, I can't pretend it's in full bloom.

G&S purists, however, should have no fear - strange as that may sound, given that the Lyric cast is defiantly non-traditional, the score is oft streamlined, and Veloudos has updated almost all the jokes to the current election cycle (on the poster, Yum-Yum even sports an "Occupy Titipu!" button).  Still, somehow his production feels comfortably traditional, and roughly true to the spirit of D'Oyly Carte, despite all the jabs at Romney, Republicans, and other blue-state bête noires; somehow there's a deep consonance between Veloudos' sense of humor and the Victorians' humorous nonsense (and their faith in masculine prerogatives) that makes everything hang together.


And despite the paucity of Asians onstage, Japan seems no further removed from The Mikado in the Lyric version than it does generally (so the program's apology for the operetta's supposed insensitivities seems - well, a little beside the point by now).  I mean of course I bow, bow, not only to the Daughter-in-Law Elect but also to the Politically Correct - still The Mikado might as well be set in Oz, or Lilliput, rather than Titipu; its "Japan" is simply a fancified gloss on certain familiar districts along the Thames.

Or the Charles, I guess (the backdrop features a bald eagle flapping over Mt. Fuji, and we can just make out a Citgo sign down in Titipu).  At any rate, the point is that Democrats and independents need not fear this production; those partisans of Sullivan's music, however, may have a more divided opinion.  Alas, the score is presented in a highly reduced keyboards-woodwinds-and-percussion version, which is even further compromised for being piped in (somehow this kind of thing always works better when you can actually see the musicians, and at least hear their original acoustic).  Sigh.

Erica Spyres as Yum-Yum, with her famous little maids from school.

Meanwhile the vocals are all over the place - even if most of them are admittedly terrific.  The reliable Erica Spyres sings like a lark as Yum-Yum, and soars brilliantly through "The sun, whose rays are all ablaze" (probably the greatest theme Sullivan ever penned), while opera star David Kravitz likewise takes home vocal (and comic) laurels as the hilariously versatile Pooh-Bah.  Other local lights come through musically but for some reason are a bit at sea theatrically: the wonderful Leigh Barrett, for instance, misses the drollery of Katisha (she gets no help from her Asian-horror fright wig, perhaps the only visual misstep in the show), and Timothy John Smith deploys his booming baritone aptly as the Mikado, but seems to be going for some gonzo (perhaps ground-breaking?) interpretation that I just couldn't figure out.

Both the men's and women's choruses sounded great, too (and newcomer Teresa Winner Blume caught my eye as Pitti-Sing).  Davron S. Monroe, however, made a generally appealing and sweet Nanki-Poo, but was a bit strained vocally the night I attended, while as Ko-Ko, Titipu's harmless Lord High Executioner, Bob Jolly wobbled all over the place.  Now Ko-Ko's are often chosen for their comic timing rather than their musical chops - and Jolly usually has the right comic stuff up his sleeve in spades; but sometimes on this occasion he even seemed unable to hit his marks comically.  Maybe he was just having a bad night, but the performance kept moving frustratingly in and out of focus.

But can The Mikado survive a few bumps in performance?  Yes, it generally can, and the Lyric version does deliver many pleasures, not least among them Janie Howland's elegant set and Rafael Jaen's gorgeous costumes.  G&S fans who are voting a straight Democratic ticket have until October 13th to see it.

Leigh Barrett pines away as Katisha.

Life on the Street with Avenue Q

John Ambrosino, Davron S. Monroe, and Erica Spyres with Princeton and Kate Monster. Photos: Mark S. Howard

People are always asking me, "So what's the best show in town, Mr. Hub Review?" And sometimes the answer is hard, but sometimes it's easy - as it is right now: the best show in town is Avenue Q at the Lyric Stage (through June 24).

There are other fun musicals up at rival houses, I admit, but the source material of Avenue Q is probably a bit stronger than that of those other contenders - plus there's a tight match between its demands and the Lyric Stage's particular strengths.  For artistic director Spiro Veloudos has always been at his best in knowing, wise-acre comedy, and he's basically in clover - or at least yards and yards of felt - with Avenue Q, the cute/raunchy spoof-tribute to Sesame Street, in which sweet Muppet knock-offs teach us a few more (ahem) adult lessons about, well, life on the actual street.

For the millennials who land on Avenue Q discover that life, love, and everything else is a whole lot more complicated than Grover and Big Bird made it sound back in the day (even if at the Lyric, designer Kathryn Kawecki's "Avenue Q" is a dead ringer for their old PBS hangout) .  Indeed, these twenty-somethings wonder aloud (in song), "What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?," and after taking a few hard knocks (poor "Princeton" gets downsized before he's even hired) move on to such even-harder truths as "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist."  A few slowly edge out of the closet; others take the big step toward real commitment; still others come to terms with their "otherness" in a variety of ways.

John Ambrosino and Phil Tayler as Rod and Nicky

In short, they grow up, just as they did on that other Street - indeed, the show is essentially a sweet meditation on living and learning during those oft-troubled years of postgraduate funk, when everyone sometimes thinks "It Sucks to be Me," but slowly learns the importance of (yes) sharing. And if it's occasionally kinda raunchy, that's also part of the joke (but don't take the kids, unless you want to find yourself explaining just what, precisely, those puppets were doing doggie-style).

And the Lyric gets it all exactly right, with confidently bold (but not too broad) puppetry, strong voices, heartfelt performances, and a breezy tone and pace that map perfectly to the patter songs of Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, and the clever book by the oh-so-appropriately-named Jeff Whitty.

The stand-outs of the cast are probably the sweet, poised Erica Spyres (who voices both the lovelorn Kate Monster and the love-addicted Lucy the Slut) and the versatile Phil Tayler, who as the Trekkie Monster is as incandescent here as he was in Floyd Collins just a few weeks ago.  But frankly the cast is bursting with talent: John Ambrosino makes both a wry Princeton and a believably conflicted Rod (who kicks his best friend Nicky out of the apartment just because he can tell Rod's gay).  And there are even more sparkling performances rounding out the cast - Jenna Lea Scott made an amusingly gonzo Christmas Eve (the local therapist who can't hang onto a client), while Davron S. Monroe gave just the right knowing spin to "Gary Coleman," who in one of the show's meta-flourishes, is still hanging out on a kiddie show (just now as the building super).  Meanwhile, in supporting roles, Elise Arsenault and Harry McEnerny V did their best to steal the limelight whenever they got the chance.  Not that there were many chances; for whether built of flesh and blood or felt and fur, the denizens of Avenue Q proved one of the tightest ensembles of the season.

The Temperamentals fails to make Hay

Do they look temperamental?  Not really.

Sigh.  I admire the Lyric Stage for taking chances on scripts with a political dimension - really I do - and I wish I could back that admiration with warmer reviews.  But I'm afraid these well-intentioned folks keep bumping into the unfortunate fact that - well, they're just not political people, and they don't know any political people, and they don't understand political people, either.

Which may be why in Jon Marans' The Temperamentals, they've  chosen a fascinating political subject but a very weak political script, whose obvious faults director Jeremy Johnson unintentionally underscores at every turn.  As a result, even the actors (some of the area's best) don't really connect here - and that's rare in Boston theatre.

But first, how to explain Marans' failure, given his play treats some of the most flaming queens in gay American history?  It is a puzzlement; how could such blazing characters have inspired such a wet blanket of a play?

Clearly the dramatist's (worthy) intent was to bring back to our cultural consciousness the pre-Stonewall struggles of the Mattachine Society, America's first political group with, yes, a homosexual agenda.  But Marans adopts precisely the wrong tone toward the Mattachines and their era.  He seems to imagine the knowing irony of our current parlance can somehow give us entrée to the paranoid birth of the gay nation; but I ask you - does that make any sense? Honestly - I don't think so.  Nevertheless, the cloak-and-dagger tactics of the Mattachines - their oaths of silence, their clandestine meetings - are here given the Spy-vs.-Spy treatment; guys in fedoras lurk in dark corners of the sleek set, taking career-destroying notes before vanishing into the night (to the tinklings of noir-style lounge music, no less).

From this stance of bemused detachment, you take it that everyone involved really should just have known how things would eventually turn out, and realized they were all being a wee bit silly!  But of course they didn't, and the bravery of the Mattachines really should not be underestimated - even if their secret society fizzled, and today their baby-steps toward gay identity look quaint (or sometimes plain weird).

I will admit that this play reminded me, however, of the political dimensions that gayness has lost as it has converted itself into a commercial niche in our ever-burgeoning consumer culture.  Simply being gay - or simply having sex (any sex)- used to have political and intellectual resonance; intimacy of the kind epitomized by, say, Winston and Julia in 1984, was thought to be of a different order of experience from the machinations of the market or the coercions of the police.  Sex was not a product but a truth, and thus a statement of individuality, even resistance.

So it's not surprising that the Mattachines resisted the political order in all kinds of ways - many were Communists, in fact, so their political lives were perhaps even more dangerous than their sex lives.  They were rebels, in the old sense of the term - frightened rebels, perhaps, but still rebels.  Indeed, Mattachine founder Harry Hay was a kind of scruffy radical drifter - a Stanford drop-out, a rancher obsessed with Native American culture, a Hollywood stunt rider and a folk singer and a devoted cross-dresser, Hay floated between the upper and lower classes as well as just about every facet of both the gay and straight experience -  he even married and fathered children, though he ended up (in one final, controversial stand) voicing support for NAMBLA, largely because he resisted gay assimilation into straight sexual norms as a matter of principle.

That NAMBLA stand, though, gives you a glimpse into Hay's eventual quandary, I think; resisting everything turned him into a kind of incoherent self-parody.  And anyway, resistance is so passé today; for what (beyond the obvious crimes of pedophilia) is there left to resist?  Winston and Julia's secret trysts were illegal  in 1984, but now Big Brother would be happy to rent them a room, and livestream their coupling, too. O'Brien has won without resorting to his rats - which may be why the real Harry Hay can't be found in a play that has supposedly been designed to honor him.

Harry Hay in the 90's.

But if you want to better appreciate the cultural contradiction at the core of  The Temperamentals, consider the photograph of Hay at left, in what he called his "Radical Faery" look (note the cowboy hat, the flowered skirt, AND the Native American beads).  Then check out the publicity photo for the Lyric production at top.  Do you sense a fundamental disconnect?  I do; a buttoned-down fashion statement  was anathema to Hay - it was instead the natural metier of Rudi Gernreich, his lover in the heyday of the Mattachines (prior to becoming Gernreich's ex, Hay had sex with Will Geer - yes, Grandpa Walton!). The elegantly pompous Gernreich was then a minor, though rising, fashion star in Hollywood - he'd go on to brief notoriety as a designer of topless looks in the 60's (before designing the campy jumpsuits of Space:1999 in the 70's) - and The Temperamentals roughly aligns with his long dalliance with Hay.

Now there's certainly a solid dramatic conflict to be found in the push-pull between Hay's burgeoning radicalism and Gernreich's conservative chic.  But playwright Marans seems unable to tap into this; indeed, I'm not sure he realizes it should be his real theme - it's too politically complicated!  Instead, Marans makes his play all Gernreich, and no Hay;  when he should be conjuring the closeted gay world's temptation to join Hay's brand of crazy, he instead encases everything in so much camp alienation that the motor of the Mattachine's short-lived success (and eventual collapse) never coughs to life.  Oh, well; Marans does at least nod to Hay's transvestitism (which was probably the safest of his many predilections).

Given this void at the heart of the drama, I suppose it's no shock that Jeremy Johnson's production wanders all over Sarah Lee Brown's stylish set without really going anywhere.  It briefly gets traction as a superficial history lesson (when the Mattachines win a court case involving entrapment).  But beyond that it simply has no heat, no drive.  As Hay, Will McGarrahan repeats the wry, knowing  performance he has perfected in his past few shows - and it's still amusing, it just has nothing to do with Harry Hay.  Meanwhile Nael Nacer takes Gernreich's Eurotrash cool so much to heart that he seems to be having an out-of-body experience; he nails his Viennese accent, and looks great in his designer duds, but he has no chemistry with McGarrahan, and in their love scenes you get the impression he's somehow manipulating his body from somewhere offstage.  As their associates in the Mattachines, Shelley Bolman and Steve Kidd strike a few sparks here and there, but hardly enough to build a fire under the damp material.  I left thinking that someday we'll see a great play, and a great production, devoted to Harry Hay and the Mattachines.  Maybe when Big Brother isn't watching.

Time Stands Still at the Lyric Stage

Laura Latreille and Barlow Adamson.

I'm torn over the current production of Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still at the Lyric Stage, because basically it's worth seeing, even though it's a disappointment - it simply isn't as good as it could (or should) be.  Actually, that goes for the play itself, as well as the production.  This playwright has been incrementally, but steadily, pulling ahead of the Off-Broadway pack over the past few years, if only because since his Pulitzer-winning Dinner with Friends, he has produced no real embarrassments, and nothing even as questionable in quality as, say, Superior Donuts.  You can count on a Margulies script to be thoughtful, highly crafted, lean enough to be producible, and cleverly built around chewy, personality-driven roles that will attract TV and movie stars.  (The initial New York production was memorable for a radiant turn in the lead role by Laura Linney.)

At the same time, despite his commitment to quality maintenance, Margulies never quite breaks through to true greatness, and Time Stands Still gives you a pretty good idea of why.  The script takes on what we used to call an "issue" - in this case, the role of the war photographer, in particular the role of the war photographer in Iraq, from whence photojournalist "Sarah Goodwin" (Laura Latreille) has retreated, sprayed with shrapnel, to nurse her wounds.  She does so in the arms of her long-time lover, James (Barlow Adamson), who likewise retreated from the same battle shortly before her injury (and after a de-stabilizing psychological break).

That's a lot to chew on, of course, right there - particularly given that James, though riven with guilt, has decided that it's time for him to leave the world's war zones behind for good - preferably with Sarah by his side - even as Sarah herself struggles with the fact that she may actually be addicted to the kind of intense moral rush that only the killing fields can provide.  The temperature of this embedded conflict (sorry) rises to a simmer when they're visited by an old mentor of Sarah's, Richard (Jeremiah Kissel) who has taken up with a sweet-natured, twenty-something bimbette, Mandy (Erica Spyres).   Having heard that Sarah is recovering from shrapnel wounds, Mandy has brought her some bright silver balloons, which float like clueless consumerist blips in the hipster cave of Sarah's loft.  "I've been praying for you," Mandy says earnestly.  "Which is weird, because it's not like I believe in God or anything!"

Yessss.  Clearly Margulies has at least two targets in his dramatic sights here; Richard and Mandy are almost too emblematic of the self-absorbed America that went to the mall after 9/11 and never came back; to them, the war in Iraq was "Operation Freedom," and - well, it's just so sad what happened over there, but it's not like it's anybody's fault, you know?  Margulies's portrait of Richard is perhaps even more pointed than his hatchet job on Mandy - for what kind of old hand worth his press pass would be happy to cuddle at home while his protégée risks her neck?

But all this is complicated by the deeper question - risks her neck for what?  The press has been in more personal danger than ever during our recent Middle East conflicts, of course, but those risks have perhaps counted for less than they ever have before.  For their Iraq coverage was hopelessly (and notoriously) biased - although Margulies never mentions this - and what honest reporting they did do was often ignored at home.  In short, the media failed utterly in the Iraqi debacle, and things have only gotten worse since then; the collusion of even such high profile outlets as the New York Times with the lies of the Bush administration set up a situation in which the press's abandonment of its constitutional duty became the new popular baseline for its function, which only facilitated Roger Ailes' ongoing corrosion of the American body politic via Fox News and its ilk.

Seen in this light, are Sarah's political ideals, her hope of bearing witness for the world to the horrors of war, a hopelessly self-indulgent political dream?  Is she, in the end, just an atrocity junkie?  It's a highly charged question, but alas, Margulies never really asks it in political terms; indeed, he redacts almost all political specificity from his drama, and casts Sarah's and James' dilemma - should they return to the front, or make their garden grow at home, now that they're past their first youth? - as purely a personal case study.  There is never any suggestion, for instance, that Sarah's commitment to honest photojournalism is needed now more than ever (we need fewer Judith Millers, and more Sarah Goodwins!) - and that such political considerations might be what should tip the balance in her career decisions.  Instead, ironically enough, we get a long, slightly forced critique of Sarah's commitment to a profession which, in the end, the free world requires.

So let me be blunt - I feel that Margulies is being politically, intellectually, and artistically dishonest in this play, and that colors it for me as drama, despite my appreciation of the playwright's technical subtlety.  For Time Stand Still is indeed a rewarding actor's exercise, and it's cannily constructed (although it often turns on abrupt, unspoken epiphanies and emotional shifts).  I even appreciate the partial validity - partial - of the politically "mature"(if essentially consumerist) mindset that Margulies imagines he is conjuring - that is, one in which every moral issue has been re-cast as a personality issue.

Still, sometimes Margulies has to edit himself pretty severely to keep the political surround off-stage during his debates (particularly given the profiles he has constructed for Sarah and Richard). When Mandy wails "What am I supposed to do with this?" when confronted by one of Sarah's terrible images,  or when she asks Sarah how she can take a picture of an atrocity without putting down her camera and helping out instead, we sympathize with her reaction, of course (naïve as it may be). But we also wonder why Sarah is so slow on the ball that she can't simply retort, "But aren't you, Mandy, also turning away from these people?  And aren't these things being done in your name?  Aren't your taxes paying for them?   So isn't it up to you, not me, to decide how to take action?"

But Margulies never goes there - even though he sketches enough moral awareness into Mandy to make the questions dramatically viable - and thus Time Stands Still slides into high-end soap opera; hey, the United States may have political issues - but Sarah's got issues, if you know what I mean, and that's more important!  It doesn't help that at the Lyric, Margulies' drama has been helmed by Scott Edmiston, who may be the most apolitical director in the city (if not the world).  I can't deny that Edmiston's "Get a pedicure, sister, and you'll feel better!" mentality isn't somewhat in alignment with Margulies', but this is one of those cases when some directorial opposition would go a long way toward expanding the seeming profile of a text.

And unfortunately, the talented Laura Latreille has styled her performance to Edmiston's usual specs, and thus has made Sarah a good deal less likable than she should be.  On Broadway, of course, Laura Linney saved the playwright from himself by bringing her own radiant sense of decency to the fore, which cut against the bitterness latent in his script.  Latreille, however, is more naturally drawn toward the dark side, and thus we never believe in Sarah's idealistic commitment to her profession - or her idealistic commitment to James, either, which leaves Barlow Adamson sometimes spinning his wheels (although he does it pretty well).  Jeremiah Kissel and Erica Spyres manage better by Richard and Mandy - partly, you feel, because they've got the playwright and director on their side.  Indeed, this could be a breakout performance for Spyres, whom we've only occasionally seen in the limelight since she won an IRNE for The Light in the Piazza.  Here, more often than not, the play belongs to her, which I'm afraid I have to say is a sad state of affairs; if only Mandy were indeed the kind of character who counted as a "stretch" for this talented young actress!

Superior cast, not-so superior Donuts

Will LeBow and Omar Robinson plot their next move against Starbucks.  Photo by Mark S. Howard.

The Lyric Stage definitely has a superior cast to serve up Superior Donuts; they just don't have a superior play (I know, I'm sorry - you've heard, or are going to hear, a variation on that line in just about every review of this show you read).  BUT, Tracy Letts's follow-up to his expansively caustic August: Osage County is, I admit, a bit like a donut itself (and I think the author knows it): it's sugar-coated, warm and kinda sticky, and you're happy to gobble it up even though you know it has no nutritional value.

Indeed, the sticky-sweet Donuts sticks out of Letts's oeuvre like - well, like a Dunkin' honey-dipped on a bed of sour grapes; for this author's past work has reliably charted the dark side of American life - from the paranoia of Bug to the internecine generational warfare of Osage County.  Donuts, however, taps into the self-forgiving mood of the "social conscience" sitcoms of the 70s - and then crosses it with a big fat kiss laid on the working-class melting pot of Chicago.  Which all works pretty well, for the most part, until you begin to sense that Letts himself is uncomfortable with the Good Times vibe he has crafted (in fact he seems more troubled by it than we are).  So he interlards his punchlines with sudden appearances by gangsters and goons, and a subplot about bookies that you never quite believe, and a few awkward swipes at big themes (racial tension, the Vietnam War).  Thus Superior Donuts slowly morphs into Pulp Fiction Meets Chico and the Man, with a Special Guest Appearance by Langston Hughes; in attempting a play with issues, Letts ends up with a play with issues.  But hey, he gives pretty good Tarantino, and definitely could handle an episode of Chico, so scene by scene, the playwright keeps you fairly happy - as long as you don't think about the whole play all at once, you're good.

I realize that wasn't exactly high praise.  But then I'm guessing, or hoping, that this has just been an experiment for Letts - or maybe (as I suspect) it's an older, less-polished play that he dusted off once Osage made him so marketable.  Either way, the dialogue is generally tight, and there's a poignant undercurrent of feeling to some of the action - and that's all good actors need, really, to keep the theatrical ball rolling.  And luckily the Lyric has rounded up a surprisingly strong cast - maybe their best large ensemble since Nicholas Nickleby, in fact (even the bit parts pop nicely).

At the center of Donuts is Will LeBow's Arthur Przybyszewski (this is Chicago, remember), proprietor of, yes, "Superior Donuts," and a gentle, pony-tailed boomer lost in creeping despair and self-blame - so lost he can't even manage to connect with a nice lady cop who has her eye on him (Karen MacDonald).  Arthur is given a shove in her direction, however, by Inspiring Young Person Franco Wicks (Omar Robinson), a "self-starter" who thinks he can revive Arthur's fading business and maybe even fight back against Starbucks with natural ingredients and poetry readings.  When he's not being inspiring, btw, Franco is busy writing the Great American Novel (which, come to think of it, is also pretty inspiring), but he's also got a gambling debt trailing him, and two nasty thugs along with it.

As I said, there aren't too many surprises in this plot, although there are some head-scratchers - including a sudden fist-fight that seems to emerge from nowhere.  Or rather it emerges from Arthur's back-story, which Letts mostly divulges in awkward monologues (with Arthur literally haloed in a spotlight).  The brilliant LeBow delivers an exquisitely subtle performance, but he hasn't figured out how to make this dynamic work, and I'm afraid director Spiro Veloudos hasn't been much help.  Still, moment to moment, LeBow charms.  And luckily he is playing against the radiant Omar Robinson, who caught my eye in Twelfth Night a month or two ago, and here easily steals scenes from some of the sharpest pros in town.  Again, I wouldn't say he actually limns the neediness - or maybe instability - that must be moving inside his character (otherwise how has Franco's crushing debt materialized?), but his easy star power makes it easy to forget that.

But then again, almost every performance in this show is a fine turn unto itself; the supporting cast - Steven Barkhimer, De'Lon Grant, Beth Gotha, Christopher James Webb, Zachary Eisenstat and Steven James DeMarco, all bring welcome detail, believable accents, and an admirable level of craft to their roles (which sometimes only amount to a line or two).  It seemed to me that only Karen MacDonald, surprisingly enough, didn't quite find her feet; she's appealing but a little forced, as if she didn't trust that we were getting it.  Or perhaps she's simply itching to make the part more than it really is.  Elsewhere, however, everything was appropriately scaled; the nicely detailed set was by Matthew Whiton, and the accurate costumes by Mallory Frers.  With all this talent on the stage, you often wished that Tracy Letts had fried up something more substantial, something that could stick to your ribs; but even if Superior Donuts (like its namesake) is mostly sugar and hot air, I admit it's pretty sweet going down.

Ain't quite Misbehavin'

Robin Long, Lovely Hoffman, Davron S. Monroe, Lori Tishfield, and Calvin Braxton in Ain't Misbehavin'. Photo: Mark S. Howard.

You've probably already heard the news about the Lyric Stage's Ain't Misbehavin'; this edition of the venerable revue tries a little too hard for its own good, and so never achieves the happy, ribald ease of earlier versions seen at the North Shore and Trinity Rep.  The cast is certainly talented, but most of them read as a little young - and while Fats Waller wrote his wicked, knowing hits when he was in his twenties and thirties (he died at 39!), his best numbers go down best when sung by performers who exude a certain experience and maturity - and let's be honest, are of a certain size, too; a Fats Waller revue is one of those rare forums where a plus-size power mama can get as down and dirty as she wants to be, and half this cast is just too skinny, eager and cute!  It doesn't help that director/choreographer Josie Bray has removed the revue's traditional piano from the stage (okay, I guess it's still there - in a way - in David Towlun's elegant backdrop), and tried to fill the resulting void with lots of high-energy dance routines.  (Indeed, at times you half-expect Ben Vereen to jump in from the wings and make with the "jazz hands" - and that's just wrong!)

Still, what can I say; the cast is talented, and of course the material is great - Waller aficionados won't be satisfied with this version, but I think virgins will find it fun.  And the band is tight, the musical direction strong, and the cast is well-trained - they manage an exquisite five-part harmony, for instance, even though they're spread across the stage, in the mournful Black and Blue (at top) - probably this production's highlight.  There are other good moments, too - the show seems to warm up (and loosen up) as it goes along. Lovely Hoffman, who's most often at home in the material, brings a genuine broken heart to Mean to Me, for instance, and the versatile Davron S. Monroe slinks sleazily, if somewhat calculatedly, through The Viper's Drag/The Reefer Song.  And Robin Long brings a witty edge to Squeeze Me, while Lori Tishfield definitely gives Your Feet's Too Big everything she's got.  Meanwhile the effervescent Calvin Braxton does manage to sell every number - just by being a tireless dancer (he's surprisingly light on his feet) and an utterly determined entertainer.  Braxton's a bit innocently blank to conjure Fats himself, however - whose arched eyebrows and gleaming eyes always hinted at a brainy, bemused critique of the sated appetites his songs so often celebrated. There's just something too squeaky-clean about Braxton - and about the whole revue, in fact. Which may be why, though often diverting, this show ain't quite Misbehavin.'

Visualize this

Papa, can you hear me?  (Guess not.)

I had the strangest feeling at My Name is Asher Lev (left, at the Lyric Stage through March 12); as both a lapsed Catholic and an admirer of Judaism, I felt I was being insulted at one remove- twice. Let me explain: Asher Lev - drawn from Rabbi Chaim Potok's novel of the same name - treats the world of the Hasidim, the mystical, revivalist branch of Orthodox Judaism. In the book (which I haven't read), it seems Potok explores the conflict between Hasidic precepts and the world of art - young Asher is portrayed as a brilliant artist, an idealist whose obsession with the visual flies in the face of his spiritual tradition (which has long viewed all artistic representation as a form of the "graven images" forbidden by "HaShem").

So far, so good; I'm all for critique of everything, including Judaism; and obviously I'm greatly concerned with the visual arts.  And at first glance, you might imagine that My Name is Asher Lev engages with the flowering of Jewish art that occurred with the triumph of modernism.  Indeed, Jews are all but absent from the Western artistic tradition until the twentieth century (the only one I can think of offhand from the earlier century is Camille Pissarro - and nobody comes to mind before him).

Once modernism - a sensibility largely forged in a Jewish salon in Paris - had established itself as a cultural force, Jewish artists began to make themselves known.  And tellingly, the more abstract modern art became, the more Jews dominated the scene - indeed, almost every major follower of abstract expressionism (which flowered during the period of Asher Lev) was Jewish: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston and Morris Louis were all Jewish, as were later artists Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Julian Schnabel - the list goes on and on.  Surprisingly, however, Jews dominated figurative art of the period as well, at least in pop form: Jerome Siegel and Joe Schuster, the creators of Superman, were Jewish, as was Bob Kane (creator of Batman), and both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, et. al.); American comics are essentially a Jewish tradition.

So a huge cultural shift occurred in Judaism in the twentieth century - one which, it's safe to assume, the Orthodox opposed (and perhaps still do).  But if you're looking for a sensitive treatment of the tensions between Reform Judaism and its more conservative (and perhaps anti-sensualist) brethren, look elsewhere than My Name is Asher Lev.  For Aaron Posner's dramatization strips all historical and religious context from the novel's central conflict.  I have to imagine Potok was more sensitive in this regard - even though in the end, Asher Lev becomes obsessed with painting not just naked ladies (a constant trope of middlebrow theatre!) but crucifixions.  That's right, for some reason this young Hasid feels it's his calling to revitalize a Catholic artistic tradition - even though Catholics were a central force in the attempted genocide of his people just a few years before.  And why? Because, Asher sputters, the crucifixion is the greatest image of suffering he can think of.

Hmmm.  Now it seems to me a few scenes from Auschwitz or Treblinka could give even the Grünewald Altarpiece a run for its money.  But what do I know, I'm just a goy.  Maybe the Jews don't really know from suffering!  Yet when the play climaxed with young Asher painting his mother dying on the cross, I had to wince just about every which way it's possible to wince - I was insulted for both the Jews and the Catholics, as well as for poor old Mama!

Okay, I know this very silly adaptation of Chaim Potok's novel means no harm; it's merely meant to operate in a kind of TV-movie-of-the-week mode, like Herman Wouk's The Winds of War, in which real history and real spirituality (and real art) don't really exist. Hence, perhaps, the utter seriousness with which it's being presented; director Scott Edmiston approaches it on his knees (which only makes this overrated director look more superficial than ever), and actors Joel Colodner, Anne Gottlieb, and Jason Schuchman give it their all. Indeed, whenever Colodner's onstage, his passion almost makes you believe in this schmaltz. (Almost.)  Janie E. Howland's set - seemingly a chunk of Brandeis has landed in the Lyric - is likewise superb, and Karen Perlow's reverent lighting leans heavily on candles flickering in shadow. Sometimes, watching all this serious professionalism devoted to such hokum, I felt myself about to cry out, "Yes, yes! Papa, please - can't you see cute Jewish boys should be free to paint crucifixions?" But then inwardly I'd find myself snickering. I mean, Jesus Christ. Or do I mean oy vey?

Rebeck reboots Kafka - kind of

One morning Gregor Samsa awoke from restless dreams to find himself transformed into a successful playwright and screenwriter. He lay on his brittle back and, raising his head a little, gazed out at his Park Slope condo and thought to himself, "What has happened to me?? How unfair that I'm not more successful! This is, you know, an existential dilemma - just like I read about in college!!!"

No, this is not how the famous Franz Kafka story "The Metamorphosis" actually begins - but you get the impression, from her irritating play The Understudy (now at the Lyric Stage), that this is how Theresa Rebeck would handle the rewrite.

But wait, let's back up a bit.  As you may recall, Rebeck is one of the most successful whiners - oh, sorry, I meant writers - of the New York stage. She has been produced all over, been published many times, written several movies, and landed gigs on TV shows like Law and Order. She lives a comfortable - very comfortable - life for a playwright. Still, she's not happy. She should have done better!, she lets everyone know. Why hasn't she been on Broadway?  Why hasn't she won a Pulitzer? (Hell, why hasn't she won the Nobel?)

At first her widely-reported rationale was: "Because I'm a woman, that's why!" Only eventually she got to Broadway (her show closed quickly), and then was short-listed for the Pulitzer (but didn't win). Meanwhile other, more talented female writers (Lydia Diamond, Annie Baker) began to appear on the scene, and Rebeck sensed it was time to upgrade the foundation of her whining from sexism to something - well, bigger, more pervasive; something that could withstand a rebuke like "Oh, but we did give the Pulitzer to a woman - only it was Lynn Nottage!"

Hence, you get the impression, The Understudy, in which a sad-sack stage actor understudies a "talent-free" action star in - get this - a newly-discovered drama by Franz Kafka (that's the big guy himself on the poster at top, behind actor Christopher James Webb). Now it seems life on the fringes of Broadway isn't just embarrassing, status-wise, for a relentless social climber like Rebeck, it's actually - no, literally - Kafkaesque.  Rehearsing for a hit show, she seems to think, is somehow like being transformed into a giant cockroach, or being executed for an unknown crime.

Hmmm.  Somehow I find this whole premise just ridiculous.  We should all be so lucky as to be understudies on Broadway shows, it seems to me, but as for Gregor Samsa's gig - well . . .

BUT, that's what the lady wrote.  And do I have a development deal with Drew Barrymore?  No, I do not. And at least Rebeck half-develops an interesting idea at the top of her three-hander, in which she hints that our new, collective-libertarian consensus about the free market may be driving us to a very dark place indeed, culturally speaking.  (Seen from the stage, the free market looks a LOT like the bureaucracy in Prague.)  To which I say: Hear, hear!  The playwright soon drops this worthy theme, however, and begins taking up other, less-interesting ones (only to quickly drop them, too).  Slowly her script becomes a series of contrived comic dialogues, in which the author airs her familiar grievances (bad boyfriends, sexism) through various permutations of her trio of characters - that sweet, not-so-very-dumb hunk of an action star, his capable, but frazzled, stage manager, and the rather self-impressedly depressed understudy.  Just to hammer home the Kafkaesque-ness of the situation, Rebeck pencils in a few other, unseen characters, like the stoned technical director, just to screw with our onstage friends every now and then.  Because, you know, that's what happens in Kafka.

Only try as hard as Rebeck may, she can't really convince us that her set-up is Kafkaesque.  Because - dare I say it? - she doesn't understand Kafka.  Of course her audience doesn't understand Kafka either - they just know vaguely that he's weird and depressing - so she figures she's safe.

But here's the  important thing to understand about Franz Kafka, just so you'll know where Rebeck goes wrong - the master of Prague is considered "existential" because his characters participate in their own predicaments.  Their travails are not merely thrust upon them, like Stalinism (or libertarianism) - they are, instead, something they are responsible for, that perversely enough, they actually support.  Gregor Samsa's physical metamorphosis, for instance, only mirrors his moral condition - he "becomes" a cockroach because spiritually he long ago became a kind of pathetic vermin.  (Indeed, in a literal translation from the German, he's not specifically a roach at all, but instead "an unclean animal.")  And in The Trial, Herr K. is so persuaded of his own guilt that he comes to believe his execution is "inevitable;" it's only at the last minute, with his dying words, "Like a dog!," that he realizes what he has allowed himself to become.

But for Theresa Rebeck to make any of her characters truly existential would throw a wrench into her upper-middlebrow commercial appeal (she'd never write a career woman who realizes she's morally "like a dog," for instance).  So instead she writes a kind of long-form sitcom with pretentious, NPR-audience allusions and in-jokes - jokes designed for people who've heard something of Kafka, but have never actually read him.

Even this would be okay, I suppose, if The Understudy were simply more entertaining - or even just shorter.  Or if its inevitable romantic triangle weren't so ineptly rendered.  Indeed, the unhappy trio of The Understudy remind you more of the damned souls in No Exit than anything in Kafka - only the problem is that this time there's no exit for us, the audience.   The only real "development" is our slowly-dawning awareness, as the play grinds on, and as Rebeck runs through the various chips, and quips, on her shoulders, of how little she understands of her supposed inspiration.  One scene is actually devoted to the idea that Kafka would be more effective if he were sexier, for example.  And if more of his faceless bureaucrats happened to be hot babes.  (No, I'm not making this up.  This clever play really gets that stupid - which is when you realize Rebeck is actually a part of, rather than opposed to, the pop milieu she pretends to condemn.)

Luckily, the Lyric cast is quite strong, and they're wittily directed by Larry Coen, so they keep the laughs coming, and the script going (despite itself), for about two-thirds of its length.  Laura Latreille is the stand-out as the harried stage manager (although she enters with a tad too much bitterness, I think - the acid should rise in her performance when she realizes, in a standard Rebeck trope, that her understudy is also her ex).  And luckily Latreille is well-matched by hottie Kelby T. Akin as that action star - who, improbably enough, has not just the requisite killer abs, but also a real jones for Kafka (which only means he understands the author about as well as Rebeck does).

The slightly weak link in the trio is Christopher James Webb, who's actually fine in his snarky soliloquies and asides, but who can't conjure much chemistry (even fizzled chemistry) with Latreille, and who hasn't figured out how to put over his supposed awesome renditions of that weird new Kafka script.  Not that can I can blame him; Rebeck seems to want to play Herr K strictly for laughs, and yet at the same time make some sort of existential pit yawn before us.  She succeeds intermittently in the first aim (she's helped along by Arshan Gailus's witty sound design) but needless to say pretty much fails at the second.

And slowly the one-liners begin to land with more and more of a thud, and as they lose steam, so does the whole play (because let's face it, one-liners are what Theresa Rebeck does). By the finish, I can't tell you how often I had checked my watch, hoping each scene of The Understudy would prove its last.  Indeed, as the curtain finally fell, I was more than willing to admit one thing about Rebeck's script:

For the audience, it was almost Kafkaesque.