Daring ventures
KANFER, ETHAN
On Stage Daring Ventures By Ethan Kanfer After A surfeit of predictable adaptations and glossy extravaganzas culled from old pop radio hits, theater for grownups is making a comeback....
...O'Keefe shades his portrayal of Lloyd with the inner rage and one-day-at-a-time stoicism of a recovering alcoholic...
...Even when he waxes introspective, he talks of his youth in exile, his self-doubt, his weakness for extramarital affairs, but never of his sense of duty to the German people or his dream of a better world...
...In the manner of its modernist forebears, the show repeatedly stops to remind the audience it is being told a story...
...She poses as Lloyd's wife on a game show, and later becomes betrothed to him in earnest...
...Whenever the story wanders down Mawkish Avenue and threatens to cross Schmaltz Street, though, its powerhouse cast guides it back to safety...
...What could be wrong...
...Reconciliation, if still possible, will take guts and compassion...
...Descriptions are supplied even where the action is self-explanatory ("And there I am fetching Willy's speech...
...But as the street singers declare, "there's a heart behind these hands...
...Brokaw and Lucas, regrettably, did not heed his advice...
...Like its searching chanteuse, Brooklyn the Musical could easily have gotten lost in a bad neighborhood...
...Ultimately, warmth and distrust intermingle with tragic results...
...she does a memorable turn as the fragile Faith but is otherwise relegated to bit parts...
...Departing from the illusionism common to more lavish musicals, Brooklyn is careful not to overtax our willing suspension of disbelief...
...most notably as a manic game show host whose blend of showmanship and selfdisgust is as motley as his attire...
...Luminous Mary-Louise Parker does her best to render Rachel more appealing than she is cloying...
...It turns out that Vietnam, not commirmentphobia, is what took him away from his family...
...Whether lovably good or winningly wicked, each of these charismatic performers can sell a song...
...In a potentially poignant scene, Rachel tries to reach a withdrawn Lloyd who has fallen off the wagon...
...thinks Rachel can guide him in his search for life's answers...
...THE revival of Craig Lucas' l988 farce Reckless by Manhattan Theater Club is a more dyspeptic take on American culture...
...While Paradice trains for the big night, Brooklyn hits the streets in search of Taylor...
...The cast consists of only five actors...
...In these moments Frayn's dialogue is at its best, capturing Cold War tension in the intimate exchanges between the two men...
...The only aspect of Brooklyn that disappoints is the score...
...True to form, Brooklyn plans to give it all to charity should she win, whereas Paradice flatly declares that she will "keep every last dime...
...The action becomes multilayered: We see Guillaume simultaneously securing a labor liaison post in the Brandt administration and describing his experiences to Kretschmann...
...In slippers and a chaste flannel nighty Rachel flees into the night, never to return to her suburban Eden...
...It's all so perfect that housewife Rachel (Mary-Louise Parker) is having one of her over-the-top "euphoria attacks...
...Cleavant Derricks, as a street singer, and Eden Espinosa are the group's star vocal athletes, and Ramona Keller prowls the stage with a predator's lethal grace...
...Then he begins to weep...
...The one cast member who gets the short shrift is Karen Olivo...
...The device supplies just enough of an armature to turn a series of ballads into a 21 st-century fairy tale...
...Olga Merediz shows us both the mundane exterior and lethal inner ambitions of a larcenous office drone...
...The irony, of course, was that the East German ploy accomplished little save the ouster of its strongest Western ally...
...Similarly, Ray Klausen confines his utilitarian set design to the graffitied exterior of an abandoned building, and Tobin Ost's inventive costumes use ordinary trash to fashion everything from an angel's wings to a diva's "salvation Armani" evening gown...
...As if that were not a daunting enough task, Brooklyn must further contend with the evil machinations of Miss Paradice (Ramona Keller...
...That helps fill in the historical background, but occasionally Guillaume sounds like a baseball announcer giving us the starting lineup of the Berlin Bombers...
...Standouts in the supporting cast include Robert Prosky as a skeptical veteran of German politics, Richard Masur as Brandt's commonsensical chief of staff, and Julian Gamble as the quiet bodyguard who obeys orders but disapproves of the chief's indulgent lifestyle...
...His lack of a unifying vision contributes to the script's choppy pace, and chemistry between performers is given lower priority than pausing for laughs that never come...
...The story begins in Paris, where a young American songwriter called Taylor (Kevin Anderson) falls for a French peasant girl named Faith (Karen Olivo), who waits tables in a bohemian caf...
...Elected chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1969, Brandt sought to initiate the reunification process with the East by reaching across the Berlin Wall to the Communist German Democratic Republic with his Ostpolitik policy...
...The final reckoning is to take place in Madison Square Garden, where the two singers will square off...
...Democracy opens with Willy (James Naughton) announcing his acceptance of the chancellorship amid thunderous applause, while Guillaume (Richard Thomas) sits in a shadowy café reporting to his East German controller, Arno Kretschmann (Michael Cumpsty...
...Overcome with sadness, Faith succumbs to depression and eventually commits suicide...
...Meanwhile, both are using intimacy to glean information and gain advantage...
...Be that as it may, the good news is that "the Fabulous Invalid," as George S. Kaufman famously dubbed Broadway, seems to have been infused with a newburst of seriousness and enthusiasm...
...Still, it affords a thought-provoking evening...
...In one startling, mercurial scene, he rapidly evolves from an idealistic youth to a shellshocked GI to a homeless junkie, and finally a remorseful father...
...Jeremy Shamos dazzles in multiple roles...
...they feared that Ostpolitik would translate into domination by the West...
...The men in the cast fare better...
...But, as always, music saves the day and Taylor has his aria...
...Even so, the production is well orchestrated...
...Finally he tells her, "I've taken a contract out on your life," and exhorts her to run before the hit man shows up...
...If she can learn the words, she believes, her heart will be unbroken...
...The curtain rises on a cozy Christmas Eve, replete with falling snow and a backdrop of gingerbread houses...
...The dramatic core of the piece, however, belongs to Kevin Anderson...
...Act Two is far stronger...
...The large ensemble is essentially a Greek chorus, commenting on the chancellor's maneuvers...
...Isolate any 15 minutes, and you might have a good wacky one-acter...
...Rachel is good at having fun, but discards intimacy as casually as Christmas wrapping paper...
...Nonetheless, it meticulously portrays the climactic event in the remarkable career of German Socialist leader Willy Brandt, and to a lesser degree the trials of public life...
...What we don't see is Brandt hammering out treaties, negotiating with world leaders, pushing difficult reforms uphill...
...Perez brings silent eloquence to her portrayal of Pooty...
...The British import, re-created with an American cast at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, is not flawless...
...Guillaume grows to love and admire Brandt, who for his part has become dependent on his right-hand aide...
...It is a powerful gesture that encapsulates their relationship, yet Frayn feels compelled to tell us what we are witnessing...
...SchoenfeldandMcPherson's sensibility is refreshingly free of Broadway convention, yet they seem to have difficulty shaping their sound...
...Film director Sidney Lumet defines the challenge of both farce and melodrama as "making the implausible plausible...
...Their house is downscale, but their yuletide glee is authentic and they are happy to share it...
...Love is in the air, life is a poem...
...Shattered by the war, he took to booze and drugs, forgetting both his music and his family...
...Of the three, the most substantive morally and philosophically is Michael Frayn's Democracy...
...The real Willy Brandt was a visionary and a Nobel Laureate...
...She seems to have no sexual attraction to anyone, and vice versa...
...The overall effect is of a handsomely crafted frame in search of a portrait...
...The convoluted plot is finally tripped up by its own string of devices, and whenever character arcs become difficult to shape the playwright starts killing people off...
...By framing the whole evening as a performance within a performance, director Jeff Calhoun exploits the material's strengths while minimizing its limitations...
...In David Auburn's Proof she earned a Tony by drawing us into the world of a solitary genius who may have inherited her father's mental illness along with his mathematical gifts...
...over the course of a full-length work the joke grows redundant...
...Murder and mayhem ensue and Rachel must move on, reinventing herself in town after pitiless town...
...When Rachel's catharsis does come, she simply drops to the floor writhing and bellowing...
...Democracy treats him largely as a cipher, with an emphasis on his personal rather than his political identity...
...Taylor vanishes, leaving Faith to rear little Brooklyn on her own...
...Her real reason for visiting New York, though, is a burning desire to find the father she never knew...
...Lucas' script, too, oversells its dark whimsy...
...They encourage Rachel to stay as long as she wants to, help her get ajob, and voil...
...Three early Broadway openings suggest this season is likely to favor works that are lean, daring, and rife with both social criticism and psychological exploration...
...Not an unwelcome message in 2004...
...His many letters from the foxhole were intercepted by Faith's disapproving Papa...
...Street singers all, they take us on a magical journey, resourcefully employing discarded objects to transform themselves into a cavalcade of characters...
...Alas, shrinks are an easy target, and humor that may have seemed edgy 16 years ago falls flat in today's post-Frasier atmosphere...
...Whoever prevails will walk away with a whopping stash of prize money...
...A different kind of German influence is on display at the Plymouth Theater...
...Sadoski does a heartbreaking turn as Rachel's reluctantly villainous husband, and another as a callow, fragile youth who (God help him...
...Despite having left two very young sons back home, she appears to feel no remorse or sense of loss, and makes no effort to reunite the family...
...Others there suspected a Trojan horse...
...Director Michael Blakemore, who also did the London staging, keeps the multiple narrative threads tied tightly and easy to follow...
...To certify Brandt's sincerity, the East German secret police planted a spy, Günter Guillaume, in his inner circle...
...Although the hands that created Brooklyn are a bit soft with inexperience, at least the soul behind them is happily untainted by show biz cynicism...
...Any one song, on its own, could (and may well) crack the radio charts...
...Many in the East saw the potential advantage of normalizing relations between the two states...
...It also enables Frayn to use him as a narrator, dispensing information as much to the audience as to his Eastern contact...
...By the time Guillaume was discovered he was the chancellor's personal assistant, and the resulting scandal prompted Brandt to resign...
...Official functions, such as Brandt commemorating the Holocaust victims, are carefully reproduced...
...The cinematic device of switching locations rapidly is greatly aided by Peter J. Davison's clear, appealing set design, and Mark Henderson's versatile lighting...
...But the two do not connect...
...But the script fails to exploit Parker's remarkable capacity for nuance and her unf iltered spontaneity...
...Guillaume, now Brandt's personal assistant, accompanies him on long train rides and even family outings...
...Taylor begins writing a song for the baby they are expecting...
...Nearly every number is delivered concert style, straight to the audience, and most are midtempo and built around rock-hymnal chord clusters...
...If this fable has a moral, it is that there is still a heart beneath the disposable glitter of our fameobsessed society...
...The one thing she knows about him is the incomplete tune her mother sang to her at bedtime...
...Straight from the projects of Brooklyn, she has clawed her way to stardom and isn't about to let our heroine usurp her status as pop music's Fairest of Them All...
...Even her newfound happiness will prove highly destructible, as Lloyd and Pooty reveal their own ugly secrets...
...Luckily, she is soon taken in by physical therapist Lloyd (Michael O'Keefe) and his wheelchair-bound deaf-mute wife Pooty (Rosie Perez...
...In spite of Parker's winsome efforts, Rachel's antics elicit neither our curiosity nor our sympathy...
...Guillaume's dashing back and forth from one side of the stage to the other is an effective visual metaphor for his split allegiance...
...In Reckless, however, we mostly see psychotic detachment...
...But the wildest pyrotechnics are reserved for Debra Monk, a virtuoso quick-change artist who plays a series of colorful psychotherapists ranging from Freudian to New Age...
...He doesn't have the pipes of his costars, but as the play's only truly complex character he brings a much needed dose of realism to the tale...
...Without his tour de force, Brooklyn might have merely been an enjoyable romp rather than the bittersweet parable it is...
...Indeed, had someone given Bertolt Brecht a big hug and let him cry it all out, he might have written something akin to Brooklyn the Musical...
...The gifts have been wrapped, the decorations hung, the kids tucked in...
...But the lullaby goes unfinished...
...But their relationship is reduced to her futile attempt to spoon-feed him as he lies drunkenly in bed in a Santa suit...
...This gets to be particularly distracting during the play's subtler moments...
...She finds him strung out on heroin and alcohol, uninterested in the daughter he abandoned so many years ago...
...Soon Willy is informed that there may be a "mole" in his organization, and a kind of counterespionage begins...
...The excellent supporting cast is saddled with difficult material too...
...Cocreators Mark Schoenfeld and Barri McPherson, new to the Great White Way, keep the book minimal and the numbers big, bold and brassy...
...Naughton and Thomas have a strong rapport...
...over the course of the evening, the effect is dulled by repetition...
...The fine acting ensemble notwithstanding, director Mark Brokaw—who in the past fluidly handled Kenneth Lonergan's slacker Odysseys, Lobby Hero and This Is Our Youth—is out of his depths in the realm of the absurd...
...Instead, in Reckless the classic tradition of Laughing through the Pain deteriorates into Never Really Encountering the Pain—and the spectacle of an Alice without a conscience lost in a Wonderland of disparaging caricatures is neither convincing nor edifying...
...At the end of Act One, for instance, when staff cuts must be made by the newly reelected Brandt, he indicates to an astonished Guillaume that his job is safe by silently handing him his attaché case...
...With its dotty protagonist, picaresque plot and Allen Moyer's picture book sets, this wild ride at the Biltmore Theater offers a multitude ofbright colors but surprisingly little narrative thrust...
...their gesticulations seem less a function of the characters' frustrations than a director's urgency to get on with the story...
...But her husband, Tom (Thomas Sadoski), seems oblivious to her rhapsodizing...
...Democracy would have benefited from saying more about democracy...
...every rueful smile and awkward silence is fraught with multiple meanings...
...Prodigiously talented, she grows up to become a world-famous chanteuse and is invited to perform at Carnegie Hall...
...She is able to begin again...
...Equal parts Madonna, Tina Turner and Brothers Grimm Wicked Queen, Paradice is America's reigning rock diva...
...Brooklyn (Eden Espinosa) is taken in by a Catholic orphanage, where her only true friend is music...
Vol. 87 • November 2004 • No. 6
