Season of surprises on Broadway

By Misha Berson
Seattle Times theater critic

HUGO GLENDINNING Essie Davis as Dorothy Simon in the Broadway play "Jumpers."

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As the New York theater season wound down this spring, was the proverbial glass half full? Or half empty?

"Empty!" grumbled some Gotham producers and critics, wringing their hands over a 2003-2004 Broadway season that ushered in 39 new shows — including many flops (such as the musicals "Never Gonna Dance" and "Taboo," the plays "Prymate" and "Sixteen Wounded") but few big hits.

Off Broadway, the ratio of artistic success was higher. But even in that largely nonprofit sector, rising costs and limited seating have kept short some runs of critically validated shows.

So how does all this affect the culturally alert visitor to New York, who drops into town to take theatrical potluck?

For those whose taste extends beyond extravagant musicals and star-driven revivals, right now the goblet is at least half-full.

In Times Square and vicinity, one is struck by the variety and intensity of the best current offerings — from the broodingly original musical "Caroline, or Change" to the National Theatre revival of Tom Stoppard's loquacious brain-teaser, "Jumpers," and the Pulitzer Prize-winning rumination on history and heroism, "I Am My Own Wife."

What is going on here?

Show info The shows reviewed are now running in Broadway and Off Broadway theaters. For information and tickets, you can go to many Web sites including www.playbill.com; or www.nyc.com/theatre or call Telecharge at 800-432-7250 or Ticketmaster at 800-755-4000. For details about New York's two half-price ticket booths: www.tdf.org or 212-768-1818.

Natural attrition, for starters. With "Gypsy," "Thoroughly Modern Millie" and Disney's "Aida" set to close, and only one BBB (Big British Blockbuster) left on the Great White Way ("The Phantom of the Opera"), more theaters are vacant.

Given the scarcity of glitzy hit musicals with long-term prospects (the girl-power-in-Oz show "Wicked" is the rare one that took off), star-stunt revivals are filling the vacuum. But there's also more room (if not always full houses) for intriguing new chamber musicals and offbeat plays.

With many choices this spring (summer pickings get slimmer), I passed on tepidly received revivals ("Sly Fox" with Richard Dreyfuss, Alfred Molina in "Fiddler on the Roof") and dubious fluff like the Bollywood-styled "Bombay Dreams" (which one critic called a "sari excuse for a musical").

Here's the low-down on what I did see, on and near Broadway, and what may later reach Seattle:

New, and highly recommended

"Caroline, or Change" (Eugene O'Neill Theatre). This bravely sober, bluesy operatic work by dramatist Tony Kushner ("Angels in America") and composer Jeanine Tesori ("Violet") considers lives and cultural interactions rarely explored in Broadway musicals.

	MICHAL DANIEL Background from left, Ramona Keller, Tracy Nicole Chapman and Marva Hicks are a girl group come to life from a radio, and Tonya Pinkins, in foreground, is the isolated mother of three who imagines them, in a scene from "Caroline, or Change."

Set in 1963 Louisiana, Kushner's semi-autobiographical tale focuses on Caroline, a bitterly disappointed, divorced African-American mother of three (played with scorching power by Tonya Pinkins) and on a white Jewish boy, Noah (gifted Harrison Chad). The latter projects a yearning for his recently deceased mother onto aloof, resistant Caroline, the family maid. And wrapped in Tesori's vibrant score (meshing gospel, R&B and klezmer idioms), their parallel attempts to face personal and social change are downbeat and stirring, comic and sad.

In whimsical, Maurice Sendak-like touches, Caroline's isolation is eased by familiar objects that come to life, and soulfully sing out her frustrations — a girl-group radio, a blues-shouting dryer, a wailing washing machine.

More realistically, the complexities of families and finances are explored in two households, as are the tensions between liberal, middle-class Jews and working-class blacks. There are no heroes here: just decent people, trying (and at times failing) to act honorably.

"Caroline" has won Obie and other awards for its quiet daring, grand score and terrific cast (including dynamic Anika Noni Rose as Caroline's daughter). It's also been castigated as schematic and dour, with a lead figure who doesn't evolve or brighten up.

The show gets a bit static and repetitive, yes. But I see "Caroline" as a step forward, a compelling fusion of folk opera and topical drama, rich in big concerns and deep emotions.

"Intimate Apparel" (Laura Pels Theatre). Some of the themes in "Caroline" also bolster Lynn Nottage's sensitive, well-tailored Off Broadway drama. Staged with his usual astute clarity by former Seattle Repertory Theatre artistic director Daniel Sullivan, it also depicts a proud black woman facing isolation and loss.

Here, however, the setting is 1905 Manhattan. And the seamstress Esther (riveting Viola Davis), a marker of elegant and seductive women's lingerie, is still chasing her dreams — of marrying for love, and having her own shop.

The dreams shatter before us. Yet like Kushner, Nottage (whose play has won several big prizes) does not demonize or blame her characters — not Esther's rich, careless client Mrs. Dickson (Linda Gravátt), or prostitute friend Mayme (Lauren Velez) or even her faithless beau and husband, George (Russell Hornsby).

Along with the losses it marks, "Intimate Apparel" honors the artistry of unsung craftswomen, the fragile love that can develop between people of different worlds, and the fortitude it takes to keep rising up, and pushing on.

This show, with its original cast, transfers to Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum July 5-Sept. 12.

"I Am My Own Wife" (Lyceum Theatre). Doug Wright's gripping Pulitzer-winning play is a tour de force for a sole male actor, playing a full slate of characters.

Chief among them is Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an elderly German transvestite antique dealer whose strange-but-true life story forms the basis of this docu-drama.

Woven from Wright's chats with Charlotte, and others who knew her, "I Am My Own Wife" gives an enigmatic account of a person who was never quite what he/she seemed to be. The author also questions his own impulse to turn Charlotte into a gay hero, when her real survival strategy may have included lying, espionage (for Communist East Germany) and illegal furniture trafficking.

Staged by Moisés Kaufman ("The Laramie Project"), and acted superbly by versatile Jefferson Mays, this is an odd and thoroughly absorbing odyssey.

Kinky Muppets, quirky bugs

"Avenue Q" (Golden Theatre). An underdog Broadway hit by Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty, this new musical snatches TV's "Sesame Street" off the tube and refashions it into a bouncy comic soap opera about Gen-X'er underachievers in Manhattan.

The characters are Muppet-like hand puppets, manipulated by visible (and very adroit) singer-actors. And some of the satirical tunes are irresistible: the cheerily self-deprecating anthem "It Sucks to Be Me"; the hilariously frank ditty, "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist"; the slacker ode, "I Wish I Could Go Back to College."

The humor can be crude and sophomoric, the tone is ironic-narcissistic — which, given the 30-ish crowd the show draws, seems intentional. A musical for all ages (and eras), it's not. But it's filling a benign new socio-niche on Broadway, so let it rip.

"Bug" (Barrow Street Theatre). Tracy Letts' new Off Broadway thriller is a favorite of New York critics. But why? Is it an urbanite fascination with the cliché of hinterlands White Trash — in this case, alcoholic Oklahoma motel-dwellers with drawls and low-rent, screwed-up lives? Is it the paranoid fantasy of a conspiracy involving blood-sucking insects? (Not roaches, but just as creepy.)

Whatever the allure is, not everyone will succumb to this contrived horror tale, which didn't keep me guessing but did make me squirm over its lurid, stereotypical vision of hard-living Okies and mental illness. "Noir" it's not, despite Michael Shannon's eerie turn as a guy with a killer pest problem.

A batch of revivals

"A Raisin in the Sun" (Royale Theatre). One of very few new Broadway commercial hits, the limited-run revival of the classic Lorraine Hansberry play has a major box-office magnet in rap mogul Sean Combs (aka P. Diddy).

Combs (whose fans shout out endearments at his first entrance) stars as Walter Lee Younger, a 1950s chauffeur desperate to parlay a family inheritance into a ticket out of Chicago's black ghetto.

Walter Lee is a time bomb of rage, guilt, hunger — as brilliantly originated by young Sidney Poitier.

In Kenny Leon's straightforward staging, Combs comes to the juicy part with little acting training or experience. It shows. He doesn't have the vocal or visceral tools to ride Walter's crescendos of pain and remorse. He's likable — but a stage featherweight.

Thanks to Hansberry, though, a weak Walter Lee doesn't shrivel "Raisin." The play just tilts toward the weary but hard-striving Younger women, enacted with gusto and nuance by Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald and Sanaa Lathan.

Would I prefer a "Raisin in the Sun" starring, say, Denzel Washington? You bet. Combs' Broadway debut is glaringly premature. But at least he's drawing kids to live theater, and to Hansberry's vision of a dream no longer deferred.

"Jumpers" (Brooks Atkinson Theatre). A time-trip back to Tom Stoppard's 1970s phase of antic, hyper-verbal brain-teasing comedy-fantasias this is a note-perfect realization of a sometimes inscrutable brief on modern morality.

Here we do have the perfect leading man: the great English thesp Simon Russell Beale, who under David Leveaux's direction plays a cuckolded philosopher trying to prove the existence of God — as corpses pile up in the bedroom of his glamorous wife (the woozily fine Essie Davis).

Both Stoppard, and Beale's character George Moore, are trying to do something devilishly difficult: legitimize a moral yet non-parochial Supreme Deity, while managing domestic chaos.

"Jumpers" (which Seattle's ACT Theatre will stage this year), can easily come off as an uppity stunt, filled with linguistic acrobatics and actual gymnastic displays.

But Beale's searching, pun-laden monologues are so beautifully spoken, his lovelorn mien so touching, you feel a heartbeat here — and a sorrow for a world bespoiled by the loss of grace.

"Assassins" (Studio 54). The Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman blackly comic sideshow musical, depicting nine assassins (and would-be assassins) of American presidents, finally reaches Broadway in Joe Mantello's glossy new production. (It originated Off Broadway in 1991.)

Once again, John Wilkes Booth flashes his handsome smile and brags about killing Abe Lincoln. John Hinckley works himself into a lather over Jody Foster and Ronald Reagan. Lee Harvey Oswald aims a rifle out the window at JFK.

Sondheim's songs are dagger-sharp and rousing, the staging doesn't pull any punches, and Michael Cerveris (as Booth) leads a strong cast. But the linkage made here between "apple pie" American violence and publicity-seeking megalomania is no longer a revelation. And the grouping of these avengers — all crazed, but in different ways — gets more questionable the more you ponder it. mberson@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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