Baby, It's Who?

Beth Leavel (center) and, from left, Crystal Starr, Christina Sajous, Erica Ash and Kyra Da Costa.

 

A friend had a spare ticket to Baby It's You at the Broadhurst Theatre and invited me along. Heck, a Broadway show for free, and the music of the Shirelles, the girl-group hit machine of the late 1950s and early 1960s - how could I lose, I thought. The evening wasn't a total loss, by any means, despite the somewhat savage reviews the show earned when it opened in April (it closes Sept. 4).

Since I was a little kid when the events in the show took place, some of this was new to me, nevertheless the bare elements of the story (which is where one should always start) were pretty close to jaw-dropping. New Jersey housewife Florence Greenberg (white and Jewish) discovers four young black female singers. She thinks they're terrific and manages to muscle into the male-dominated Manhattan music business. She starts a record label, Scepter Records (in the end, she will found three), and propels the girls, now called The Shirelles, to enormous success. Back in the suburbs, her relationship with her husband, daughter and son (who is blind) grows shaky. In the city, she has a deeply-felt affair with the black songwriter and producer Luther Dixon. Wow!

With such great material, it's a shame the creators -- Floyd Mutrux, Colin Escott and Sheldon Epps, sharing various author and directing roles -- didn't trust the story but opted for a commercial decision to wedge it between the hit songs.

With 31 numbers (not including reprises), the show has more of a revue feel, and the jukebox nature of the proceedings are underlined with a projection of -- a jukebox on a scrim at the beginning. After the third song, I wrote in my notes, "When story start?"

The most enjoyable aspect of Baby It's You, for me, was the top-notch talent of the performers - Beth Leavel as Florence, four wonderful young women (see caption above) as The Shirelles, the smooth and elegant Allan Louis as Luther and a candidate for the hardest-working man in show business, Geno Henderson, who plays narrator Jocko and channels Ron Isley and Gene Chandler.

The songs - "Mama Said," "Dedicated to the One I Love," "Tonight's the Night," "He's So Fine," "Soldier Boy," "Baby It's You" (with the electrifying cry "don't want nobody, nobody") - can't help but bring a smile and for the target market crowd, memories of younger days. I'm not quite the target market. For me, the Beatles and all the 1960s music that followed blew away everything from Elvis to The Shirelles. How ironic, when one realized that the Beatles covered them. It was only later that I discovered all that wonderful 1950s and early 60s pop and rock 'n' roll. 

But as the show continued, it began to seem like an assembly line, with sets slid on and off, characters walking on, saying a few lines, doing a number, then leaving. The costumes were terrific, but the budget must have been awesome, there were so many - and eventually, one started to think, "another outfit, why?"

The performers were winning me over until a concert scene reeled off "Shout," "Mama Said," "Duke of Earl" and "Foolish Little Girl." Next, actress Kelli Barrett (another fine actress and singer) strolled out as Lesley Gore to sing "It's My Party" and I thought, "OK, enough. Is this about the Shirelles or just an excuse to trot out lots of hits for the 55+ demographic?"

The real loss in Baby It's You is the lack of story involving the women who were the four Shirelles. There are only a couple of brief scenes where we see real people behind the smiling, perfectly dressed and coiffed girl group, but otherwise they're little more than puppets. How did Shirley, Doris, Micki and Beverly really feel about Florence Greenberg and her "discovery" and management of their career? Did any of them object, rebel, want to do something different, have artistic disagreements? The story of The Shirelles isn't only their hits. Maybe the real story is yet to be written.   

 



 

Bring "Enemies" to New York!

I traveled to Pittsfield, Mass. this past weekend to catch one of the last performances of Mark St. Germain's The Best of Enemies at the Barrington Stage Company - an amazing tale of friendship overcoming entrenched racial barriers.

I interviewed Mark last fall for a Religion News Service feature on his play Freud's Last Session, which has been running for more than a year off-Broadway. At the same time, I attended a staged reading of The Best of Enemies in Pittsfield and thought "St Germain's done it again" - found a compelling story featuring real people and created a brilliant piece of theater.

This summer, Barrington presented Enemies in a fully staged production and it has lost none of its power.

Producers, bring this play to New York soon!

The book of the same name by Osha Gray Davidson told the story of 1970s Durham, N.C., where schools were still segregated 20 years after Brown vs. the Board of Education and where two unwilling citizens were brought together to address the issue.

"Community organizer" Bill Riddick came to town and convinced black activist Ann Atwater and local Ku Klux Klan leader C.P. Ellis to co-chair a process called a "charrette," where citizens gather and discuss a local problem and search for solutions. There was just one little catch to this plan: Atwater and Ellis virulently despised each other. According to Ellis, "whites and niggers will never get along because they shouldn't!" The play doesn't shy away from the viciously racist language used by some at the time, but always in context.

The play opens with Ellis, played by John Bedford Lloyd, telling his (unseen) Klan meeting that it's too bad that Martin "Lucifer" King got assassinated in Memphis because he would have liked to have done the job in Durham. Atwater, played by Aisha Hinds, for her part, is yelling at a town hall receptionist, asking what the city is going to do to commemorate Dr. King, and threatening to toss her out a window if she calls the police.

As Riddick, Clifton Duncan is smooth and persuasive, convincing the antagonists that they'd better take part in the process if only to keep an eye on what the other group is doing. St. Germain keeps the suspense up, as Atwater and Ellis begin to work together but still don't seem to recognize any kind of common humanity in the other. Gradually, though, they connect as parents (Ellis has three kids, one disabled, and Ann has two) and as members of Durham's working class, realizing that poor whites and poor blacks may occupy similar rungs of society.

In a very affecting scene, Ellis realizes he joined the Klan for a sense of belonging, to connect with the better-off guys in town. But as he works for the betterment of Durham's schools, a process that will inevitably lead to integration, his so-called friends snub him and his gas station business suffers. This shock, coupled with his wife's health crisis, brings him to the point of despair.

Atwater begins to see Ellis as a person who has paid a brutal price for his work with her and the hard knot of hatred and resentment in her heart begins to relax. Astonishingly, Ellis went on to work as an organizer for a labor union whose membership was 90 percent black - and Atwater, referring to him as "my brother," spoke at his funeral. The last line of the play - which I won't reveal - brought tears.

Hinds and Lloyd did marvelous work, but occasionally I felt they could have moderated the anger a bit, that the performances were becoming a little one-note, with most of the richness revealed at the end. (At last year's reading, Dan Butler and Starla Benford modulated the characters a bit better.) Duncan nicely shows us Riddick's discomfort when the charette process jumps his careful plan: Ellis wants to post an exhibit in the school about the KKK and Atwater agrees to it, telling her people that they need to know how people think in order to "fight with your brain." As Ellis' wife Mary, Susan Wands creates a portrait of a woman struggling to love her husband despite his sometimes-unfathomable behavior. In general, however, for all the actors, the North Carolina accent could have been on a firmer footing.

If my recall is accurate, a couple of elements have been added: sound snippets from Sen. Jesse Helms' campaigns that help give context to the events and a speech from Ellis to the black trade union that was originally a voiceover. I didn't mind the voiceover. When Ellis entered to give his speech, it looked as if we were entering a new aspect of the play, whereas the voiceover lowered the emotional temperature, preparing us for the final scene - Atwater's eulogy.

David Barber's scene designs smartly used projections (including historic photos of downtown Durham) and playing areas, although I could have used a pew onstage for the funeral scenes, rather than the table and folding chairs from previous scenes.

This is an important play for our times, as much for what it subtly says about economic status in America as for its illumination of an inspiring story. Beyond the always-emotional story of enemies who become friends, it's important, too, to shine a light on such groups as the KKK and on events and attitudes that aren't so far in the past - just 40 years, in the case of The Best of Enemies. Today, with a black President and a working class devastated by recession, we need to hear this play. 

Vroom, vroom in Fredericton, New Brunswick

It's amazing sometimes how the universe majestically falls into alignment.

No sooner do I roll into Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick, Canada, in a brand new milk-white General Motors Chevrolet Equinox SUV crossover, which I have owned less than 48 hours and which has super modern bells and whistles such as SM Sirius Satellite Radio and GM OnStar digital navigation ... than I find myself at the opening night of a musical about - a car!

The Fredericton Playhouse is across the street from my hotel, the historic Lord Beaverbrook, now the Crowne Plaza Lord Beaverbrook, so I wandered over to see what the show advertised outside, The Bricklin, An Automotive Fantasy was all about. During my two decades in Ontario, and 15 or 16 summer trips to PEI that took us through New Brunswick, I remember hearing vaguely of a 1970s gull-wing-door car that was built (shades of the later DeLorean car) in the province by an entrepreneur named Malcolm Bricklin.


The show poster




A 1975 Bricklin in front of the Fredericton Playhouse on opening night of The Bricklin, An Automotive Fantasy





My 2011 GM Chevy Equinox



The protagonists of the real story, and of the show, are Bricklin, a cowboy-hatted go-getter from Arizona, and Richard Hatfield, then the premier of the province. With such cyclical economic sectors as farming, fishing and tourism, Canada's Atlantic provinces perennially fall on hard times and the idea of building a unique product in his New Brunswick appealed to Hatfield.

Although the gull-wing door and plastic body were revolutionary, it was beset by engineering and manufacturing problems. Only about 2800 Bricklins were produced between 1974 and 1976 and the venture ended up $23 million in the red including millions in provincial taxpayers' money.

The show doesn't flinch from the project's failures, but characterizes it as an ambitious reach for a dream by two men who saw larger horizons than most. The musical itself represents a leap of faith, as it was commissioned by the Fredericton Playhouse in 2009 - ironically with financing from the city and from the federal government - and co-produced with Theatre New Brunswick, which is also in Fredericton.

With a four-piece band on stage and an orange-red patterned backdrop, the set resembles a 70s TV show, and the action plays out in front of the band. Allen Cole's vigorous score rhythmically refers to 70s songs, but doesn't really contain strong melodies, although my favorite song was "Driftin,'" in which Hatfield sings wistfully of the ordinary government tasks he does and his desire for a really big way to make his mark. The book was co-written by Cole and Paul Ledoux and the show's structure - desire, dream, failure and the importance of maintaining hope - is rock-solid. 

The characters are rounded out by a working-class couple, Gerrard and Michelle, who labor in different ways on the production of the Bricklin. The five-member cast are all very strong: Shawn Wright as the driven Hatfield, Jason Chesworth as glad-handing Bricklin, Tania Breen as Michelle, Cameron MacDuffee as Gerrard and Kevin Dennis. The last three also play various demonstrating workers, political party members, journalists, etc.

The real Malcolm Bricklin, a very handsome and dapper 72, was at the performance and was called up on stage. "It's exactly how I remember it," he said, to great applause. 

Well, tomorrow I will be getting on the road for a four-hour drive to Prince Edward Island. I'm glad it won't be in a Bricklin, no matter how much we may need dreamers. I believe I can depend on my Equinox to start, its doors to open, its body not to leak. But that Bricklin sure is one sexy beast.  

P.S. After writing this blog post, I attended a reception at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery - right next to my hotel - for the opening-night audience. I learned that Richard Hatfield was gay and used to travel regularly outside New Brunswick, obviously to lead a life he couldn't lead in the province. There's a brief, puzzling mention of Truman Capote in the show and I wish the writers could have referred to his double life a little more clearly because he obviously had a creative soul and it was that characteristic that caused him to link up with Malcolm Bricklin.

Loved the party and meeting Tim, Cameron, Dennis, etc. Thank you, forces of the universe.

No Person Left Behind

There's a modest little show called No Child ... currently playing in Greenwich Village -- modest in its production values, which consist of a stage, a gloriously talented actress, three chairs and a mop. It's anything but modest in its eloquence, passion, insight and reach: this edition of the show has just been extended and it's toured all over the country since its premiere in 2007.

The actress (and writer) in question is Nilaja Sun and she has created a classic teacher tale from her own experience as a visiting teaching artist in New York City schools. There is the initial idealism and apprehension, the difficulty getting through to the kids at the tough high school, the despair, the perseverance and at the end, hard redemption won by the kids themselves and their teacher.

The story is framed by the school janitor, played by Sun, who also plays herself as the visiting teacher hired for six weeks to involve the students at Malcolm X High School in the Bronx in the theater arts on the principle, of course, that this will make them better students and better people. "Ms. Sun" has decided to cast the students in a production of Our Country's Good, a play by Timberlake Wertenbaker based on Thomas Keneally's novel about a group of 18th century convicts in Australia who stage a play.

Sun, a wiry, exuberant rocket of energy, also gives us the anxious Asian teacher who begins the school year, the stentorian Russian teacher who takes over halfway through and all the students - the girls with attitude, the Hispanic kid, the kid who says his lines as if he has marbles in his mouth, the African-American boy who gives Ms. Sun nothing but trouble until he turns up with his part memorized.

Sun's portrayal of the teaching artist's low point is very effective. She questions why she, an African-American teacher, chose a play about convicts and laments, "I can't even help my own people. We are getting these kids ready for jail." Opening night arrives, the show isn't perfect, but the janitor comments, "I never seen them kids shine like they did tonight."

The play's title refers to the No Child Left Behind education law, with its emphasis on testing and accountability, and gently makes the point that that arts produce results that are deep and lasting, but can't necessarily  be reduced to a score or a number. This is theater for life.  

Beautiful song, not so beautiful play

The song is "Jerusalem" and it doesn't have much to do with the Middle East, nor does the play of the same name by Jez Butterworth  currently gracing Broadway's Music Box Theater. Perhaps "gracing" is the wrong word for the play's protagonist, a ne'er-do-well named Johnny "Rooster" Byron living in an Airstream trailer on the outskirts of Flintock, Wiltshire.

Johnny, played by the awe-inspiring Mark Rylance, walks with a ferocious limp, the result of an Evel Knievel-like daredevil career, regularly gets drunk, plays loud music, ingests various substances, tells tall tales and is of course a magnet for various town characters, including a dotty professor (bit of a cliche alert here), a marvelously comic Morris dancer and disaffected teenagers, to whom he deals some weed and occasionally boffs (the female ones).

He is, like his poet namesake, "mad, bad and dangerous to know," and a general nuisance to the citizens of Flintock, which is expanding its housing developments and sends the police to evict him. Johnny, hearkening back to the mythical England of King Arthur and Stonehenge, which isn't far from the real Flintock, vows to make a last stand.

Rylance, who won the Tony Award for best actor in a play, opens his giant steamer trunk of acting skills - there is a physical sequence at the beginning of the play that is nearly a Dance of One Who Is Hung Over - and almost made this viewer care about a man who is actually rather a creep. (To digress for a moment, I wasn't quite as hot under the collar as the Times' Brantley, who said we would respond with "glassy-eyed rapture" to Rylance's performance. I can get more wound up about theater than anybody, but at that point, felt like responding, "dude, it's just a play.")

I also have to muse at the conceit of male writers who seem to think attractive women are just dying to go to bed with dirty men. This phenomenon occurred also in the film "Crazy Heart," where lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal gets into it with Jeff Bridges' chain-smoking, drinking, sweaty, beer-bellied country singer. Sheesh, I'd at least ask him to take a shower and brush his teeth. But this is fantasy, isn't it!?

Back to Jerusalem, a two-hour play wandering around a three-hour evening. It's hard for an American to realize how potent the song by Charles Parry, set to a poem by William Blake, is for Britons. It evokes the England of St. George and the dragon - but is that England really now in the hands of Johnny Byron, who is hardly an attractive free spirit but who has abandoned a young son and has no problem screwing a 15-year-old girl. Her relatives come looking for satisfaction. As a parent of a 14-year-old girl, I can't condone what they do, but I can't see Byron as a hero, either.

And if he isn't a hero - if this is who now represents the "green and pleasant land" -  then Butterworth is making a very dark comment on contemporary England, indeed.   

The Devil Made Me Do It

Forget "The Book of Mormon." The funniest play about faith, hands down, on the contemporary stage, one that had the audience (including me) screaming with laughter, stamping feet, wiping eyes, crying out with incredulity, is Robert Askins' Hand to God, which tonight was presented at the Southampton Writers Conference in a staged reading by The Ensemble Studio Theatre.

Ensemble Studio Theatre actors, from left, Scott Sowers, Haskell King, Geneva Carr, Steve Boyer and Megan Hill (and one puppet) present Hand to God by Robert Askins at the Southampton Writers' Conference in Southampton, L.I., NY

There was no program and I didn't take notes - I was too busy holding my stomach with laughter - so I hope Mr. Askins and Billy Carden, artistic director of Ensemble Studio Theatre, will excuse any inaccuracies, which I'll clean up later anyway.

The action takes place in what seems to be an anonymous Southern town where an attractive 40ish widow named Margery copes with a son, Jason, who has a sock puppet seemingly permanently attached to his arm, plus an intense 16-year-old who has the hots for her, local girl Jessica who can't seem to get near to Jason, and Pastor Greg, who would also like a relationship with Margery.

Things are getting a little tense since Margery is in charge of staging a religious puppet show for Sunday and things aren't quite coming together as planned ...

The humor comes from the fast, feverish pitch of the action - and the masterful work of these actors - and the constant dark absurdity of the situations with which the hapless characters attempt to cope, even as they attempt to do the right, the good, the holy thing. Possibly the apex of the whole thing comes when Jessica decides if you can't fight 'em, join 'em, and shows up at the son's place with a female sock puppet on her arm.

The scene that practically had me on my knees with helpless laughter had the son's evil puppet, Tyrone, and the female puppet engage in a series of, shall we say, carnal acts, while the son and Jessica are carrying on a conversation on an entirely different level.

Playwright Askins, whose photo is at left, was at the performance and I wish I'd known then what he looked like so I could have stayed and congratulated him. I hope Hand to God gets a fully-staged performance so more people can discover this fresh, original voice.

I have subsequently discovered that his mother actually did start a Christian puppet ministry and that he was a star choir boy. It is a great truth that you have to know what you are talking about in order to make fun of it and he has done this with great love. Well done, Mr. Askins.

In New York, the Royal Shakespeare Company creates space within a space

During the Lincoln Center Festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company will perform from July 6 through August 14 in this custom-built theater space at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Michael Boyd, RSC artistic director, led a tour of the Park Avenue Armory space, obviously keeping a weather eye on developments.

This year's Lincoln Center Festival in New York (July 5-August 14) contains a particularly exciting theater component - or perhaps it should be spelled theatre, in honor of the Royal Shakespeare Company's soaringly ambitious plans for a six-week residency. On June 30, news media were given a tour of the theater the RSC is building within the giant space of the Park Avenue Armory's main hall, where its five productions will be staged.

At a (donated) cost of $1 million, the RSC has recreated its playing space at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. The thrust stage is designed to create an intimate experience for the audience - an idea that aligns with what artistic director Michael Boyd has created in the past three years, keeping an ensemble of actors together to explore and grow through the Shakespearean canon. The New York performances will spell the end of their time together, he said.

"It is all about collaboration ... the ensemble is reflected in the auditorium. Theater is what happens in the space between me [an actor], the other actor and you the audience. Here, we hope to bring the delights of an audience aware of itself, which is something the cinema can never do," he said, adding that at Stratford, audience members often to wave during the breaks to folks on the other side of the theater and he hopes that will happen in New York, also.

As one who saw the RSC's King Lear with Greg Hicks last summer in Stratford, I can testify that the space has been reproduced quite faithfully, although head of construction Alan Bartlett told us that at 975 seats, there are 100 fewer than in Stratford, due to technical issues. Ingeniously, the stage has been built atop some of the 46 containers used to transport all the gear needed, with acoustic sails and drapes deployed to improve the sound in the 55,000-square-foot hall. For Lear, which I thought had a few too many directorial concepts, they'll need falling scenery, a rain shower on stage and flying light fixtures.

"It is ludicrously ambitious," said Boyd, when asked if the RSC had considered simply using an existing New York theater. The donation from the Wexner family - truly extraordinary in a time of economic constraint - made it possible. "Why did we do it? Because we could," said Boyd - and because "the audience will have a better time."

In addition to Lear, the RSC will also be staging As You Like It, The Winter's Tale (a play I have come to love after I saw it at Shakespeare's Globe theater in London), Julius Caesar (oddly, my favorite Shakespeare play when I was a teenager), and Romeo and Juliet.

The temporary theater will be called the Scarlet and Gray Theater, the colors of Ohio State University, which is supporting the RSC's residency and partnering with the Park Avenue Armory in education initiatives. (The 130-year-old armory has been transformed in recent years into a thrilling space for the arts.) They will bring young people from underserved communities in New York to experience Shakespeare and run workshops for teachers and teaching artists. Another program introduces Shakespeare to autistic students.

Having just graduated from New York University with a master's degree in educational theater, I can attest to the extraordinary effect of Shakespeare upon young people. It is truly life-changing. Just a taste:

-- In Stratford, Ontario, home of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, elementary school children - as young as eight and nine - who are exposed to Shakespeare show incredible improvement in their writing over the course of a school year.

-- In my town of Mamaroneck, N.Y., just north of Manhattan, a beloved program at Mamaroneck High School is called The Semi-Royal Shakespeare Company (!) and stages two productions per school year. The director, Dee O'Brien, has been leading it for nearly three decades. From the viewpoint of an experienced theater critic, the shows are not just "good for high school;" they are good by any standard.

-- In an NYU course last year, our class worked with middle school and high school students on Shakespearean monologues. The passion and maturity of these students as they joyfully made discoveries in the text was inspiring.

Welcome, RSC. May New York treat you well and thanks for coming.