Tweet of the Day (Laura Benanti, on Fantasy Football)

“If I ever say the words ‘my fantasy football team,’ just know it is code for ‘I've been kidnapped please help me.’"—American singer-actress Laura Benanti, tweet of Aug. 29, 2013

The image accompanying this post shows Ms. Benanti during the curtain call for the Radio City Music Hall New York Spring Spectacular. It was taken Mar. 22, 2015, by slgckgc.

Theater Review: ‘My Fair Lady,’ at Lincoln Center

My Fair Lady may well be my favorite Broadway-originated musical. (For musicals that began life on the big screen, I reserve top honors for Singing in the Rain.) It’s not just that the “book” borrows heavily and appropriately from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, but that its songs—most of which entered the Great American Songbook long ago—long ago seeped into my memory. Seldom have wit and heart become so conjoined in the entire history of musical theater.

Those two qualities are what I have come back to, again and again, in thinking of how much I enjoyed the revival of this great musical—with the passage of time, still one of the half-dozen greatest in the history of that art form, in my opinion—now taking place at Lincoln Center. The show had already been running there since spring, and I counted myself lucky it was still around for me to enjoy it. 

As I write this review, it’s still open, but even the best things in life don’t last forever, so I urge anyone who hasn’t seen it yet—heck, anyone who has one of those days when they feel down at the mouth—to run out and buy a ticket.

Not unlike the 1964 Oscar-winning film adaptation starring Rex Harrison (repeating his Broadway triumph) and Audrey Hepburn, the show at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater is handsome, even highly stylized. The costumes by Catherine Zuber are beautiful (especially in the scenes at the Embassy and the Ascot races), and the sets by Michael Yeargan, which move the action rapidly from scene to scene (particularly in Henry Higgins’ house on Wimpole Street), are a marvel of economy in stagecraft. 

But it is in fidelity to the book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and the music by Frederic Loewe that this show is best served. Over the past few decades, changing attitudes toward sexual roles, race and ethnicity have led a number of producers to embark on ill-advised “revisals,” in which playwrights are commissioned to perform drastic surgery on shows’ “books” (the spoken, non-sung portions, often called the “librettos”). 

More often than not, these changes, rather than enhancing the value of the songs that drew backers to the show in the first place, call unnecessary attention to themselves through their anachronistic interpretations.  

But director Bartlett Sher sidestepped that danger. He left the libretto, from what I could see, almost entirely intact. But, without changing a single word, he has changed the interpretation of its famous ending (“"Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?"). In his non-traditional way, he has adhered closer to Shaw’s original, almost perversely non-conformist spirit than any prior production.

The cast differed somewhat at this performance from the start of its run last April. Not having seen the show when it first settled in at Lincoln Center, I can’t say whether the replacements constituted an improvement, but the actors certainly filled their roles ably.

Michael Williams stepped in for Mark Aldrich as Lord Boxington, and, in a role with far greater visibility—and greater potential for triumph or disaster—Adam Grupper—the understudy for Norbert Leo Butz (Alfred P. Doolittle) and Allan Cordenur (Col. Pickering)—subbed capably for the latter.

Other cast changes were longer lasting. At this performance, Becca Ayers took on the multiple roles of Mrs. Hopkins, Henry Higgins’ maid, as well as understudy for Mrs. Parsee and an ensemble member. I would have loved to have seen Diana Rigg as Mrs. Higgins, but how could I complain about my longtime stage favorite Rosemary Harris (perhaps best known as Aunt May in the Tobey Maguire Spiderman film trilogy) in the role?

The most significant cast change involved Laura Benanti, who took over the role of Eliza Doolittle from the acclaimed Lauren Ambrose. From having seen her in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s terrific revival of the musical She Loves Me (see my review here), I knew Ms. Benanti was a performer with considerable vocal prowess and acting range. 

True, in her late 30s, she is a full two decades older than the Cockney flower girl she’s portraying (as well as the actress who made her reputation in the original musical, Julie Andrews). She’s even a couple of years older than co-star Harry Hadden-Paton. 

But producers have found a way forever to make audiences forget about age-appropriate casting for Eliza. The first Eliza, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, was 49 years old when she originated the role in the original 1913 production of Pygmalion. Even on the big screen, where age is harder to disguise, Audrey Hepburn was 35 when she won the coveted role. It helps that musical-theater enthusiasts (especially opera fans) have long been asked to engage in far more startling suspensions of disbelief.

What this production has, in Ms. Benanti, is an artist with the maturity to understand and convey Eliza’s struggle for autonomy; of her pride in not simply passing for a “lady” but also learning a new language to help her do so; and of her fury in being bullied and dismissed not just by her no-account father but by the conniving bully like Higgins and even the seemingly thoughtful Col. Pickering.

In other words, this is more than a show where attention is more balanced than before between Eliza and Higgins; this is a production which, like never before, belongs to Eliza and the actress bringing her to life in the 21^st century. 

In its fall 2007 production of Pygmalion starring Jefferson Mays as Higgins and Claire Danes as Eliza, the Roundabout opened my eyes to what had long seemed preposterous: that a happily-ever-after ending for the professor and his pupil would not only have been a stretch, but even preposterous. 

The Lincoln Center production pushes that notion even further. Hadden-Paton’s Higgins could be an Edwardian counterpart to Dr. Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory: an intellectual man-child with nearly zero emotional intelligence—and, thus, a long-term indifference to how he might sound to others. This Higgins might be missing a good deal of the charm that Harrison brought to the role, but it does underscore that the professor’s emotional journey will take longer than Eliza’s.

More than a decade ago, I took special delight in the Tony Award-winning performance of Norbert Leo Butz in the Broadway musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. But he may have exceeded that here as Alfred P. Doolittle. The actor (who has now turned the role over to the equally estimable Broadway veteran Danny Burstein) made of Eliza’s father a role to behold. Leading his bar mates in his two big numbers, “With a Little Bit of Luck” and “Get Me to the Church on Time,” he is as irresponsible a scamp who ever lived. But you can’t help loving his brio—and chuckling on his predicament after an unexpected windfall leaves him sputtering about the dangers of “middle-class morality.”

With his majestic voice, Jordan Donica demonstrated with the big number given to the young aristocrat Freddy Eynsford-Hill, “On the Street Where You Live,” the great, beating unconditional love that has been missing from Eliza all this time under the thumb of her father and Higgins. Donica’s unabashed joy is enough to convince the audience that, with all his faults (as someone who’s never worked a day in his life, how can be expected to provide for her, let alone himself, if they marry?), he presents Eliza with a credible alternative to life with Higgins.

Sophisticated and hilarious, My Fair Lady continues to repay musical theater lovers’ attention. Even as Eliza delivers a curtain response to Higgins that leaves the linguistics professor uncharacteristically speechless, Benanti and Co. leave the audience walking on air.

Theater Review: Roundabout Ends Milestone Season With 2 Tony Winners

The Roundabout Theatre Co., one of the real gems of the New York theater scene, closed out the 50^th season of its long and illustrious run with two estimable revivals. The two productions could not differ more in tone from each other, but they spotlighted what the company does best.

Long Day's Journey Into Night ended its run in late June, not long after Jessica Lange won a well-deserved Tony for Best Actress in a Play. I have seen several fine versions of this posthumously produced masterpiece by Eugene O’Neill—the 1962 film adaptation by Sidney Lumet, a British production shown on American TV in the mid-1970s starring Laurence Olivier, and a PBS telecast of the 1994 Stratford Festival production starring the great Canadian actor William Hutt. 

But in none of these did matriarch Mary Tyrone appear so central to the tragedy enveloping her family, as her deep but frustrated love for her husband and two sons pull them close even as it pulls them down into a whirlpool of substance-abuse co-dependency.

Lange masterfully depicted the progressive stages of Mary’s descent: seeming good health masking fragility, mounting anxiety (signaled by fluttering hands), paranoia, desperation, and a childlike reversion to teen innocence that, with enough morphine, settles on her like the fog off the coast of the family’s Connecticut cottage. The two-time Oscar winner was especially effective in a scene with the tragedy’s comic relief, the family maid Cathleen (played by Colby Minifie), when several minutes of joking reminiscence about her husband abruptly end, as it undoubtedly has countless times before, with the vehement (and self-contradictory) denial of any health problem of hers.

Two of the three male actors provided excellent support for Lange. The best of the trio, Michael Shannon, as the older son, alcoholic Jamie Tyrone, stalked the stage with his 6-ft.-three-in. frame like a mad stork. With his unblinking, sorrowfully accusative squint, he rendered wordlessly the character’s aching love for his mother at the heart of his guilt-ridden self-laceration.

Gabriel Byrne wisely ignored the temptation that undercut Ralph Richardson onscreen: to play hammy matinee idol James Tyrone like—well, like a  hammy matinee idol offstage, too. Byrne focused instead on James’ miserliness (residue of his grim childhood as a Potato Famine immigrant) and deepening anguish, as he watched everyone around him seemingly collapse—a wife relapsing into morphine addiction, an older son into cynicism, indolence and drink, and a younger son contracting tuberculosis.

The weak link in the quartet playing the doomed Tyrones was John Gallagher, Jr. Despite a mustache meant to suggest the young Eugene O’Neill, he did not adequately convey younger son Edmund’s sickliness nor his emotional slide into the family maelstrom.

Director Jonathan Kent did not attempt a radical reinterpretation of the drama, as was done elsewhere on Broadway this past season with two other 1950s classic tragedies, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and A View From the Bridge. But he understood, as did O’Neill, that raw honesty was enough to compensate for the lack of pyrotechnics. In respecting his source material, he also respected the intelligence of his audience.

If anything, She Loves Me, which closed this past weekend, might have even longer antecedents than O’Neill’s tragedy. Its premise—two clerks, Amalia and Georg, who argue constantly with each other in their store, unaware that they are romantic pen pals—was based on the play Perfumerie by Miklos Laszlo, later to furnish the same essential plot onscreen in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), the Judy Garland-Van Johnson musical In the Good Old Summertime (1949), and Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998).

In the year of its original production, She Loves Me—created by lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock—was wiped out at the Tonys by bold, brassy Hello, Dolly!, with only Jack Cassidy coming away with Best Featured Actor in a Musical for playing the charming, duplicitous clerk Kodaly. 

With the passage of a half century, however, as well as the broad acceptance of even more challenging fare by Stephen Sondheim, it’s easier to appreciate the manifold small pleasures of this character-driven musical. Scott Ellis, who directed the Roundabout’s far bigger, busier On the Twentieth Century, demonstrated his versatility and reliability in this much more intimate show.

In the original production, the role of Amalia provided Barbara Cook with one of her signature roles, but it’s hard to imagine it being done much better than Laura Benanti did here. She met the multiple challenges of “Vanilla Ice Cream” square on, both dramatically (the number marks the hinge moment when Amalia softens toward Georg) and vocally (the tune is a showstopper—and Mt. Everest—for Broadway sopranos).

Zachary Levi invested Georg with the requisite amount of longing to balance the revelations in his character’s big songs, notably through romantic longing (“Tonight at Eight”) or swooning love (the title tune).

The remarkable thing about this musical that concentrates on two young people in love is that so many others in the cast got their moment to shine. First among equals was Jane Krakowski, who was nominated for a Tony for best featured actress in a musical for this show—and no wonder.

Fans of 30 Rock on TV may have chuckled over her character Jenna Maroney’s musical aspirations, but in real life her musical-comedy resume is extensive and accomplished. Her prior turn at the Roundabout, in Nine, won her a Tony, but her big number from that, the lascivious “A Call to the Vatican,” is a far cry from her wide-eyed unlucky-in-love, can’t-I-find-a nice-guy Ilona’s here, “A Trip to the Library” (“A trip to the library has made a new girl of me/For suddenly, I can see the magic of books”).

Another Roundabout veteran, Michael McGrath, previously in On the Twentieth Century, lent a great wry tone to Georg’s friend Sipos in his extended musical advice (“Perspective”). Byron Jennings made cuckolded store owner Maraczek a figure of sympathy. And, as the oily Kodaly, Gavin Creel limned a master portrait of a first-class heel.

The 1993 Roundabout revival of She Loves Me not only was the organization’s first musical, but helped kick off its most recent golden era. This new production introduced this small-scale show with a big heart to a new generation of theatergoers, and maintained the Roundabout itself as a vital venue.