the times | Monday May 2 2022 9arts
JOAN MARCUSmeta-musical A Strange Loop
({{((() represents a great leap
forward for black and gay theatre? Not
really. Jackson boldly takes us inside
the hyperactive mind of an overweight
young man who is trying to write
a show while looking for love in the
ruthless arena of dating apps and
earning a crust as an usher at The
Lion King. The piece is driven by
a startlingly mature performance by
Jaquel Spivey, who graduated from
college last year. But even his talents
aren’t enough to salvage a piece
weighted down with the kind of camp
in-jokes that prompt overloud laughter
from hipsters desperate to show off
their insider status.
Birthday Candles ({{{(() is
another near-miss. Debra Messing (of
Will and Grace fame) plays Ernestine,
a woman whose journey from her
teens to decrepit old age is measured
out in birthday cakes. The director
Vivienne Benesch gives the dialogue
an overly bright, sitcom aura. I still
wanted to follow Ernestine’s journey,
but the ovation that Messing received
when she made her first entrance
made it harder to suspend belief.
And I’ll admit I struggled to cling to
the idea that David Mamet’s American
Buffalo ({{{(() lives up to all the
claims that everyone has been making
for 40 years or more. Laurence
Fishburne, the star of Neil Pepe’s
revival at Circle in the Square, missed
the performance due to Covid, but
understudy Ray Anthony Thomas
rose to the challenge. Still, the play,
performed on a thrust stage full of
junk shop detritus, is frustrating: as
much as you admire the verbal agility
of the three actors, you also wonder, in
an old-fashioned way, when something
will actually happen. What’s more, the
profanities that must have shocked
audiences back in the day have
become routine now. In The Music
Man, a young man using the word
“swell” is seen as morally suspect.
Mamet has a much larger and earthier
arsenal at his disposal, but the words
become an anaesthetic.first Great White Way revival of Funny
Girl ({{(((), which I reviewed last
week, seems to be solidly sold out,
even though most New York critics
have been less than enthusiastic about
the show’s star, Beanie Feldstein (sadly,
they’re right to be underwhelmed).
Still, New York’s theatre owners
know they’re not out of the woods yet.
The city, battered by the pandemic,
still hasn’t recovered all of its old
swagger. Crime levels have surged,
and the subway is once again a place
where you have to watch your step;
there’s been a spate of random attacks
on passengers, and some of the city’s
homeless have been using carriages
as dormitories.
I briefly lived in Manhattan in the
mid-1990s, when the big clean-up of
the streets around Times Square was
just beginning. So it’s more than a little
worrying to see signs of things going
into reverse. Many of the side streets
in the theatre district look grubby and
charmless, and while the Big Apple is
a million miles from the rubbish-
infested wasteland depicted in that old
Neil Simon film comedy The Out-of-
Towners, the number of drugged-up
and mentally unstable folk strolling
around ought to be a wake-up call.
On a balmy Friday afternoon in
Greenwich Village I watched a
middle-aged man ranting to nobody
in particular as he crossed the road
while urinating on the tarmac. It
was another glimpse of the New York
of yesteryear.
In the meantime, the theatre
industry has been scrambling to get
ready for this year’s Tony awards.
With Covid still causing cancellations,
it was decided to defer the deadline
for nominations to catch up with
the flurry of openings. The list of
hopefuls will now be revealed
next Monday.
Jackman will surely be among
those making the running. Some
of the reviews of the Winter
Garden revival of The Music Man
({{{{() have been less than
adulatory (“overly cautious” wasT
he cash flowed at the
end of Friday’s
performance of The
Music Man. After
Hugh Jackman had
acknowledged the
well-deserved storm of
applause, he and fellow
cast members launched into a
fundraising auction for Broadway
Cares/Equity Fights Aids. The prize on
offer? Jackman’s white gloves, signed
by him and his co-star Sutton Foster.
The bids were soon rolling in and by
the time the figure had reached
$13,000, Jackman announced that the
two bidders left in the contest would
get a signed pair each for a combined
total of $25,000.
Was this a sign that Broadway is
back to business as usual? Well, up to
a point. As the theatre district inches
back to normality, the crowds are
returning to Times Square and its
environs, albeit with masks and
vaccine passes at the ready. While the
West End of London has lapsed into
a haphazard laissez-faire regime, New
York is playing safe. Punters are
subjected to strict checks on entry.
Inside, ushers cruise the aisles to make
sure nobody is tempted to let their
mask slip beneath their nose. Yet it
didn’t, as far as I could see, dampen
the atmosphere at any of the shows
I attended. People are just happy to
be back in the stalls.
As summer approaches, the visitor
figures are edging upwards again. The
trade organisation the Broadway
League reports that most shows are
playing to 80 per cent capacity. TheIs Broadway back in business?
Theatre is cleaning
up its act again in
an increasingly
dirty New York,
says Clive Davis
the New York Times’s verdict), but
I thought his partnership with Foster
yielded genuine electricity. As a slick
salesman-cum-conman who tricks
gullible Midwesterners and eventually
wins the heart of Foster’s disapproving
piano teacher, Jackman was droll,
puckish and debonair, delivering
Meredith Willson’s intricate lyrics and
patter without missing a beat. If Jerry
Zaks’s production has a flaw, it’s that
the extraordinary energy generated in
the first half begins to fade before the
neat happy ending.
Still, the show has all the vim and
colour that Funny Girl so grievously
lacks. The vibrant opening Rock Island
sequence, where salesmen on a train
argue and bicker, their words flowing
in time to the locomotive, will remain
in my memory for a very long time.
What were the other highlights of
the week? Well, reading the reviews of
Daniel Craig’s Macbeth ({{{{(, also
already reviewed), was a lesson in how
a production can provoke radically
different reactions. Some reviewers
loathed it; I found it thoroughly
intriguing, even if Sam Gold’s
directorial flourishes
sometimes got out of hand.
And all the publicity
surrounding it helped to put
Broadway back at the centre
of the cultural conversation.
Was it really true that
Michael R Jackson’s
Pulitzer prizewinningUshers
patrol the
aisles to
make sure
no one’s
mask slips
Top: Hugh Jackman
and Sutton Foster
in The Music Man.
Above: Daniel Craig
in Macbeth. Below:
Enrico Colantoni and
Debra Messing in
Birthday Candles