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.

This Day in Theater History (“Fiddler on the Roof,” Musical of a Lost World, Opens)

September 22, 1964—Fiddler on the Roof arrived at a watershed moment in American culture and swept all before it when it premiered on this date at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre.

Set in a Jewish shtetl in Czarist Russia, it came toward the end of the Golden Age of the Broadway musical and the Great American Songbook. 

But it also served as a leading indicator of both the generation gap of the Sixties and Americans’ rediscovery of their immigrant heritage in the following decade.

From commercials for Broadway greatest-hits soundtracks to the hilarious All in the Family episode in which Edith Bunker poses a key question from the musical to husband Archie—“Do You Love Me?”—I felt like I knew Fiddler long before I actually saw it nine years ago at the Stratford Festival of Canada.

As it happened, I was only half right. After the Stratford production, I came to look at the show in a new way—partly because of the unconventional but absolutely appropriate casting of Brent Carver as Tevye, but also because, oddly enough, my Irish-American Catholic background helped me identify with the Russian Jewish milk vendor.

The creators of that unique artform, the American Musical, were disproportionately Jewish: Berlin, Kern, the Gershwin brothers, Weill, Fields, Arlen, Bernstein, Loesser, Comden, Green, Rodgers, Hart and Hammerstein (and I’ve probably missed a few!). 

They had been largely concerned with erasing their ethnic distinctiveness, however, or at least merging it into the larger American consciousness, with subject matter such as the settling of the West.

By 1964, the day of the Great American Songbook had reached its glorious twilight, though nobody knew this at the time. At this very moment, two more recent Broadway tunesmiths, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, chose to look back—and outside American shores, at that.

A decade before Alex Haley’s Roots ignited Americans’ interest in their forebears, and before critic Irving Howe examined the passage of East European Jews to the U.S. in World of Our Fathers, the creators of Fiddler considered the joys and turbulence of life in a changing Old World. 

By the time they conceived the project, American Jews—now, by any standard, among the most successful of American religious-ethnic groups—were in the throes of wrestling with issues of identity, particularly in the novels of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth.

In molding the show, director-choreographer Jerome Robbins put his finger quickly on its central theme, expressed in the title of one tune: “Tradition.” Everything then coalesced around that concept.

Joseph Stein’s book used as its source material the stories of Sholom Aleichem, sometimes described as a “Jewish Mark Twain.” 

Stein focused especially on two forces impinging on the milkman of Anatevka: the shift from arranged marriages to ones based on love, and the expulsion of Jews from their village by the Czar’s troops—and violence in the form of pogroms that this portended.

Harnick and Bock, having already created the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello and the highly regarded She Loves Me, reached the zenith of their songcraft with tunes such as “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” and “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.” 

The audience response was overwhelmingly favorable, as the show not only settled in for a long run but the original cast album reached platinum status.

Fiddler closed in 1972 after 3,242 performances that made it the longest-running musical of all time. (That mark has since been eclipsed, of course, by, among others, the wonderful A Chorus Line and the egregious Cats and Phantom of the Opera.)

The run coincided with the period of the most intense clashes in American history between the older and younger generations. 

As Tevye and wife Golde came to terms with the new social norms of their five daughters (Aleichem had a more Biblical-resonant but theatrically-daunting seven in his tales), middle-aged fans glimpsed a suddenly not-so-distant mirror of their own struggles.

Unfortunately, the first Tevye, Zero Mostel, thought the success was all about him. His constant improvisations, which had previously driven crazy the creators of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, had the same effect on his new creative partners.

Eventually, all the eye-rolling, all the ad-libs became so outrageous that, despite winning another Tony as Best Actor, Mostel was stunned when his nine-month contract was not renewed.

Faster than he knew it, Mostel went from ZERO!!!! to zer-r-r-o-o-o…--and he continued not to feel the love when Norman Jewison cast, in the movie version, Topol, hoping for a more realistic, less vaudevillian interpretation of the role.

(Mostel enjoyed a revenge of sorts on his 1976 national tour, when he received an extremely healthy $30,000 a week. Of course, the repetition of his old antics—this time, the turn-of-the-century Tevye joked about candidate Jimmy Carter—just proved the original makers of the show had been right in not renewing his contract.)

Four years ago, a “revisal” (a revival featuring altered elements, usually in the book) of Fiddler was mounted on Broadway. 

Too bad the producers made the same mistake committed four decades before in hiring an over-the-top lead as Tevye: Harvey Fierstein, the replacement for the noticeably restrained Alfred Molina.

The New York Times’ Ben Brantley spoke for many in noting, “it would seem that this ‘Fiddler’ has gone from having too little of a personality at its center to having too much of one.” (Naturally, the producers compounded their problem by casting Rosie O’Donnell as Golde.)

The more recent producers would have been far better off if they had secured the services of Carver. 

When I saw the show at Stratford’s Festival Theatre nine summers ago, the difference in physicality between Mostel and Carver struck me as forcefully as when I compared Lee J. Cobb’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman with Dustin Hoffman’s. 

It made eminent sense to have Tevye as a small(er) man beset—sometimes comically, sometimes not—by forces outside his control.

This production also left me, toward the end of the play, gasping at its sudden but necessary lurch into more serious territory. 

The Russian troops’ brutalization of Tevye and the resulting tearful scattering of the family reminded me more than a little of how Irish tenant farmers were driven off their land because of discrimination, confiscatory land practices, and British troops during the Great Famine of the 19th century.

I suspect that members of other ethnic groups had similar experiences—making the show unexpectedly relevant to an America grown suddenly more introspective in the 1960s.