"...something new, something of my own..."

In a single week of vacation in New York City I saw so much theater that I began to feel saturated by it. There were a couple of shows I missed that I would have liked to see, including the Public Theater Hamlet in Central Park and South Pacific, but I can’t complain.

Though Spring Awakening has been around for a couple of years, I wasn’t able to see it until last Tuesday. It’s a rarity, a rock musical with lyricism. The show reminded me of the marvelous Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I would have liked to have seen the original leads, but the new cast was just fine. I was very much on board with Rent and its bittersweet triumph on the way from New York Theater Workshop to Broadway, but the show is loud and the material dated. Bringing a punk-rock rebel spirit to an 1891 play by Franz Wedekind Spring gives the aches and urges and joys of adolescence something simultaneously anachronistic and timeless. You feel that had the characters known anything about a punk sensibility they would have grabbed hold of it. Incidentally, Duncan Sheik was an occasional client at a couple of the restaurants I used to manage in Manhattan, while the show’s costume designer was an almost-daily regular at The Red Cat. If Susan Hilferty called or walked in, we always made room for her. One of the show’s early champions, Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, was another regular there.

August: Osage County is a masterpiece of black-on-black comedy. Though the secret that lies under the deepest generational layers of dysfunction seemed one major plot twist too many, it was also of a piece with the script and the characters and their world; perhaps the play would not have been the same without it. Though the Steppenwolf cast had changed, and I got to see the new players (including Oscar-winner Estelle Parsons), the acting and direction were seamless from the get-go. And what a ride this play is! If anyone told me I’d be riveted by three-plus hours of Oklahoma family dysfunction that included active addiction, death, divorce, molestation, and incest, I would have rolled my eyes. But I couldn’t stop laughing. In a corner of my head I kept looking for cracks in the surface of the production, trying to see where the actors were acting, or where the director had had to work harder, but couldn’t find any. Smooth as water.

The Gypsy revival was not my original choice. I am not a big fan of Patti LuPone per se, and would have preferred to see the Hamlet even if it was as weak as others said, but to see her as Mama Rose was a treat. She really did justice to the part; in fact, there were times when it seemed like she was originating the role herself. I’d forgotten that this production (like the long-running Chicago) was one of the City Center Encores! transfers and therefore only semi-staged, but the show wasn’t overly pared down. In fact, the series has lucked out with three shows that have been about showbiz and desperation and that seem to benefit from being only half-staged: Chicago, Follies (the Encores! production might have made it to Broadway if not for the less-than-successful 2001 revival), and now Gypsy. Perhaps those connections (showbiz, despair, revivals) might be worth thinking about further. I wonder if and how the Sam Mendes/Aaron Sorkin film adaptation is coming along.

There used to be a piano bar called Eighty-Eights in the West Village and a barmaid named Rachel whose specialty was a parodic medley called “(Not) Singing Sondheim” to the tune of “(Not) Getting Married” from Company. I miss the bar and Rachel and the parody. I grew up with Judy Collins’s Grammy-winning version of “Send in the Clowns” but it wasn’t until my friendship with Dan, a bookstore colleague who now lives in Seattle with his partner Angel, that I began to appreciate and cultivate my Sondheim sense. I’ve come to understand why some don’t “get” his musicals or his songs; I don’t feel that “getting” Sondheim is necessary or an imprimatur for a poseurish kind of cultural intelligence. But I do love his work, and think there’s more poetry and delicacy than it gets credit for. The recent winning streak of revivals that included John Doyle’s productions of Sweeney Todd and Company, the Encores! Follies, and the Tim Burton movie of Sweeney with Johnny Depp has been extended by the Menier Chocolate Factory production of Sunday in the Park with George. This production got a lot of attention for the technological staging of the representation of Seurat’s painting process and results, and deservedly. But the leads were also Tony nominees (in a tight year), and deservedly. The accumulating minimalism in Sondheim’s music and lyrics here came through in a beautiful way. And had anyone ever commented on the fact that the first and second act mirror each other with the intermission like a kind of hinge? The plot (not conventional turns or twists of action so much as gentle shifts in the characters’ understanding and perception) reflect each other almost point for point as opposites. The first act begins with George teaching Dot to stand still; the second ends with the roles and the teaching vector reversed. The first act ends with the tableau of Seurat’s painting coming together; the second ends with it coming apart. “Move On” has become one of my favorite Sondheim pieces ever. I didn’t know it before, now I feel like I’ll be humming it the rest of my life. I owe the foundations for this appreciation to Dan, with whom I spent many a California drive listening to Side by Side by Sondheim. I owe him in many ways for my first trip to New York and my first Broadway show ever, Into the Woods, with Bernadette Peters, Chip Zien, Joanna Gleason, and others. And Sondheim was right: children will listen...