Photo: Joan Marcus
Compared to the last couple of years, there wasn’t as much on in New York to entice me this time around. I’ve seen the musicals worth seeing and there were numerous London transfers I saw in May (Jude Law as Hamlet) or earlier (39 Steps and Billy Elliot is still running, the wonderful Mary Poppins has only now arrived in the US). I’ve heard good things about Next To Normal but I was out of time.
God of Carnage (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)
The production of Christopher Hampton’s translation of French playwright Yasmina Reza’s play cleaned up at the Tony Awards this year: Best Play, Best Actress in a Play (Marcia Gay Harden); Best Direction of a Play (Matthew Warchus), and every other member of the cast was nominated: Hope Davis, Jeff Daniels and James Gandolfini. They are a brilliant ensemble, a real treat to watch; all of them across the board.
With shades of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, two couples meet after the son of one couple (Daniels and Davis) beats up and knocks out the teeth of the other’s (Gandolfini and Harden) son. As upper middle class, educated people they decide to settle the matter in a civilized manner (no law suits), to do the right thing by one another (talk to the children, reconcile them, pay the medical bills). However, in the course of the discussion implications about each other’s parenting, about each other, and their sense of entitlement and fault, quickly strip off any civilizing veneer. The evening soon descends into a Walpurgisnacht chaos.
It’s a very clever piece of writing. And although the audience collapse with laughter around one, it is also deeply disturbing because underneath it all the satire is devastating.
I’m very pleased to see it is coming to Theatre on the Bay and South African audiences will be exposed to the work, though I admit I’m a little nervous that it will be played too hard for laughs.
West Side Story (Palace Theatre)
This was a little disappointing. Not that on the night I saw it I had a mix of A and B casts, but that the work has dated. One concession was to have the songs that would have naturally been sung in Spanish, sung in Spanish. But this turned out unpopular, so they went back into English, except for Me Siento Hermosa (I Feel Pretty). I noticed not a single Hispanic audience member; the Latin community has not taken ownership of this ‘white’ work, groundbreaking as it was in its day, and this is after all Broadway and tourist mecca.
Arthur Laurents, who is 91 this year, directs. I saw his revival last year of Gypsy with Patti LuPone. He recreated the original production and it was far better from a direction point of view than the Bernadette Peters version I saw a few years ago. So I was looking forward to his West Side, not least as Joey McKneely has recreated the original Jerome Robbins choreography.
Unfortunately, it has become a bit of a boy band version. They’re all in designer jeans and T-shirts. Yet, the Sondheim lyrics stand, and it is after all West Side Story.
Wishful Drinking (at the old Studio 54)
This was indeed a surprise. Carrie Fisher puts her life under a microscope and gives us a blow by blow account her travails as the daughter of entertainment legends and her inescapable iconification as the Star Wars’ princess. Somewhere between Whoopy Goldberg and Elaine Stritch. It is hilarious, and she has the gift of the gab, keeping her star studded audience in stitches for close to two hours.
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