Theater Review: ‘Mean Girls’ (The Musical), From the Pittsburgh CLO

It’s hard to believe that the film comedy Mean Girls is two decades old now. Somehow, it had escaped my attention that screenwriter Tina Fey had also written the “book” for a musical adaptation that premiered on Broadway in 2018.

Maybe because it came out in January 2024, when audience attention traditionally turns to Oscar hopefuls, but not many people paid much mind when the musical itself became a big-screen vehicle. It did decent but not great business. 

Critics noted sourly that Fey’s original tart observations were now more likely to become lost in the musical collaborators’ heavy-handed moralizing about wicked high-school cliques.

I wasn’t really prepared, then, when earlier this month, I saw the high-energy production mounted by the Pittsburgh CLO as part of its summer season. (The other Broadway imports were Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, and Snuffs.)

It’s not necessarily remarkable that, Mean Girls, like the other two shows, was put together in only about a week. But it is astounding that a production with roughly 20 speaking parts and vigorous choreography was produced with none of the seams showing. So much credit goes to director Mara Newbery Greer.

The main character, Cady (adeptly played by Abigail Isom), is a home-schooled transfer from Kenya, but nothing she has seen in Africa with her parents prepares her for the jungle that is American high-school life. (One of the show’s tongue-in-cheek props is a lion’s head, a stand-in for the school’s athletic nickname.)

A fish out of water, Cady is initially courted by a pair of school misfits, Damian (Jack Haroutunian) and Janis (Lyda Jade Harlan), but at their urging begins spying on a clique of popular girls, the Plastics—until she becomes every bit as bad as this trio of “shiny, fake, and hard” teen tormenters.

As Regina, the “Apex Predator” of the Plastics, Landry Champlin was a formidable presence, lording it over her hangers-on and seething with resentment—at the parent who desperately styles herself a “cool mom,” at a boyfriend whose affection she squandered, and at the clique kingdom from which she finds herself exiled through an embarrassing incident aired on social media. She turned her big solo, “World Burn,” into a sizzling revenge tale.

Sydni Moon endowed Regina acolyte Gretchen with an aching desire to belong and matter in her number, “What’s Wrong With Me?” Rounding out the original Plastics trio, Kaley Bender took Karen from mere shallowness to an avatar of the Blonde Bimbo.

Harlan and Haroutunian may have played characters who didn’t fit into the school’s fabric, but this show certainly provided the actors with multiple opportunities to shine, with the show’s intro number, “Mean,” and Janis’ defiant assertion of self-respect, “I’d Rather Be Me”—and Haroutunian, under the guidance of choreographer Dana Solimando, displaying quite a talent for tap.

The show I attended featured a post-show “talk-back” with cast members and other creative talent. One highlight was cast member Jennifer Lybarger, who, though she took on three adult adult roles in the show—Mrs. George, Mrs. Herron, and Ms. Norbury—could have been forgiven for identifying the most with the last of these figures, the teacher who serves in effect as Ms. Fey’s mouthpiece.

Ms. Lybarger, it turns out, spent the last several years directing at the Pittsburgh CLO Academy—and was justifiably proud that five of her former students found spots on this expertly executed production.

Theater Review: ‘David Copperfield,’ at 59E59 Theaters, NYC

Contemporary readers recognize Charles Dickens as a novelist of astonishing productivity, but Victorians also knew him as an enthusiastic theater amateur—writing and directing his own productions among friends, and acting the roles of his major characters in hugely profitable author readings.

He would surely have been delighted in the dramatic possibilities realized of the most autobiographical of his fictions, David Copperfield, in this Guildford Shakespeare Company import for the current “Brits Off Broadway” series.

Abigail Pickard Price, who directed the show and wrote it with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches, has magically compressed the novelist’s sprawling doorstopper into two hours and 15 minutes of nonstop action in 59E59 Theaters’ Upper East Side venue, sidelining subsidiary figures to focus on Copperfield’s growth from fatherless child to husband and famous writer.

Even so, 19 characters appear onstage, brought to life by a talented trio of actors who won Best Ensemble Performance Award at the London Fringe Theatre Awards 25/26. Eddy Payne ably anchors the show as David, skillfully evoking his boy-to-man transition.

Even more extraordinary are Luke Barton and Louise Beresford, handle nine roles each, including both sexes. The transformations are always startling and sometimes hilarious.

As David’s devoted childhood nurse Peggotty, the rangy, long-faced Barton suggests John Lithgow in drag from The World According to Garp, and he’s not afraid to burlesque Mr. Micawber’s melodramatic denunciation of Uriah Heep.

Beresford, having proven her comic skills in Britain in plays like Noises Off and Bedroom Farce, wrings every laugh possible here as Miss Betsey Trottwood and David’s annoyingly childlike first wife Dora.

The actors accomplish this feat of invention and endurance through a whirlwind of quick-change costumes, puppets, and accents, supported by set/costume designer Neil Irish and movement/associate director Amy Lawrence. Props do double duty, including:

*a set of trunks morph into a stagecoach and a portable bar;
* a tall hat and long coat on a coatrack represent the unbending Murdstone;
*a baby blanket unwraps in a later scene to become David’s jacket;
*Emily’s dress unfurls to suggest the sea just off the coast of Great Yarmouth.

At the matinee I attended, another theatergoer told me she wanted to see this clever show because she had caught the Guildford troupe’s similarly delightful adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice last year. Now, with this affectionate adaptation of Dickens (running through June 28), this immensely talented British theater company has built an eager audience for its next stateside visit.

Theater Review: The Musical ‘Ragtime,’ at Lincoln Center

The musical Ragtime has been playing at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater since October (with its engagement there extended through August 2), but I finally got around to seeing it last week. 

Now in its third Broadway run since it premiered in 1997, it is not a musical comedy (the humor relieves the overall tone of tragedy) so much as something quite different: a musical protest epic.

When the E. L. Doctorow novel was published in 1975, its unusual premise—real-life characters interacting with each other and with fictional ones, in ways they were never recorded to have done—brought acclaim as well as debate about its fidelity to history.

These days, whatever stir it creates comes from our current moment: a national atmosphere that takes its cues from a President spewing inflammatory anti-minority rhetoric and policies.

In moving from its prior acclaimed "Encores" concert, the production, under director Lear deBessonet and set designer David Korins, has taken full advantage of its greater resources. A sprawling, multicultural group of characters, whose fates are spelled out over nearly three hours, is matched by startling stage effects, including:

*A trap door that yields the entire cast rising for the opening number, “Prologue: Ragtime”;

*Harry Houdini dropping down to the stage from a fly space;

*A steamship carrying a New Rochelle patriarch on one of Robert Peary’s polar expeditions, while simultaneously the Jewish immigrant Tateh arrives in a “rag ship”; and,

*Other Jewish immigrants walking in a circle around the stage turntable.

Surprisingly, the score by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens includes without concentrating on the musical genre of the title, while also mixing elements of Harlem jazz, gospel, Jewish klezmer/folk music, Sousa-style marches, even impassioned operatic ballads.

All of this, along with the early 20^th-century costuming, might encourage the unwary to think they will be seeing a piece of nostalgic Americana—except that, as we find in following the fortunes of the three families in pursuit of the American Dream in this pageant, the good ol’ days were marked by media sensationalism, racial divisions, and violence.

Arriving penniless on the Lower East Side, desperate to keep his young daughter from want, Tateh uses a moving picture book he creates as a foothold into the fledgling silent film era, restyling himself as Baron Ashkenazy. In New Rochelle, an African-American baby boy left on their doorstep rocks the once stable relationship between Father and Mother. The child’s biological father, aspiring African-American musician Coalhouse Walker Jr., is maddened into domestic terrorism when his attempt to seek redress for the destruction of his new car is repeatedly frustrated by a white establishment that is at best indifferent and at worst hostile.

The soundtrack to the musical traces these characters’ transformation and, sometimes, dislocation: 

*Ben Levi Ross expertly voices the pivot by Mother’s Younger Brother from purposelessness to committed radicalism in "The Night That [Emma] Goldman Spoke at Union Square." 

*Tateh (played by Brandon Uranowitz) segues from protective father in “Gliding” to early motion-picture impresario in “Buffalo Nickel Photoplay, Inc.” 

*The exquisite mezzo-soprano Caissie Levy delineates Mother’s progression from dutiful wife (“Goodbye My Love”) to outright questioning of her society and marriage (“Back to Before”), while 

*Colin Donnell makes plain Father’s rigidity and unease with changing times and marginalized people with “New Music.”

But the greatest alteration of any character—and the steepest vocal demands made on any of the talented cast—comes in the form of Coalhouse.

Joshua Henry, previously Tony-nominated for Carousel, makes him first a powerhouse of optimism and pride in his work as a pianist (“Wheels of a Dream”) that dramatically turns into all-consuming rage (“Coalhouse's Soliloquy”) at a Progressive Era America oblivious to the grinding daily humiliations inflicted on African-Americans. And his baritone rings with righteous power in the musical’s finale, the protest song “Make Them Hear You.”

I came to the musical partly because my curiosity had been aroused by watching the 1981 film adaptation directed by Milos Forman.

I was surprised, then, by the greater presence onstage of anarchist agitator Emma Goldman and the total disappearance of police commissioner Rhinelander Waldo (played onscreen by James Cagney), whose function in the plot is assigned to DA Charles Whitman.

But Terrence McNally, author of the musical’s “book” (non-musical elements), was in both cases sticking closer to the novel.

Too bad that he and the other creators of the musical didn’t add nuance to another element of the book that they carried over: its stereotypical treatment of Irish-Americans. 

Unlike the musical’s white Protestants, Jewish immigrants, and African-American families, they are depicted as holders of service jobs—and almost singularly ignorant, resentful, and bigoted in a country where such personality traits crossed ethnic, sectional, and sectarian lines.

Mother upbraids her servant Kathleen for not moving faster to help the baby left outside, like Scarlett O’Hara bossing around Prissy in Gone With the Wind. And, lest we be in any doubt about the ethnicity of the cretins who destroy Coalhouse’s beautiful car, not only is their leader named Willie Conklin but they operate out of the “Emerald Isle Firehouse.”

In the last decade, New York’s theater community has made a laudable effort to foster inclusiveness and avoid offending particular groups. With a couple of short text edits, the Vivian Beaumont could have done so again in this case. The fact that it didn’t doesn’t speak well of their judgment.

The practice of “revisal” has arisen in recent years to clean up older, worthy musicals by removing outdated or stereotypical elements. Future companies that mount Ragtime should consider doing so to burnish an already fine musical.

Theater Review: ‘Bull Durham’ the Musical, at the Paper Mill Playhouse

Bull Durham, released 37 years ago, is not only one of my favorite baseball movies but one of my favorite rom-coms.

The screenplay, originating from Ron Shelton’s experience as a minor-leaguer, is filled from first to last with quirky characters and consistently hilarious dialogue that have made it a classic beyond the confines of "the summer game."

Yet, when I heard the news that the Paper Mill Playhouse had turned it into a musical comedy, I wasn’t only curious about how well it had been adapted to the stage.

I also wanted to see if Susan Werner, a singer-songwriter who has adeptly explored multiple musical genres and is a delightfully spontaneous concert performer, could work similar magic with this most difficult of theatrical forms.

And I wanted to see another show, after an interval of a couple of decades, at the Paper Mill Playhouse, New Jersey’s primary performing space for musical comedy.

I managed to catch the musical just before it closed last weekend—poetic justice, as the baseball season concluded at the same time with the Los Angeles Dodgers’ epic Game 7 victory in the World Series.

Except for minor tinkering, the plot of the musical remains the same as the movie. Baseball groupie Annie Savoy, who each season takes one minor leaguer from the Durham Bulls under her wing, as it were, forms the apex of a romantic triangle with Ebie Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, a wild young pitcher with “a million-dollar arm and a five-cent head,” and Crash Davis, a cerebral catcher on the downslope of his career, hoping for a last chance to make it back to the major leagues (“The Show”) where he had once spent 24 days.

Shelton has written the “book” (the non-musical portions) of the show, and it scores laughs almost as often as the film. The subplot, though—the romance between devout Christian Jimmy and the more uninhibited Millie—remains largely tangential to the main Annie-Crash-Nuke complications, and a song featuring Annie and the other female characters (“Every Woman Deserves to Wear White”) does little to help.

One of the pleasures of the movie is the way it punctures cliches of the baseball film and the rom-com. The musical, particularly near the end, settles for conventionality rather than the shaggy, sexy charm that sustained the movie. It should have heeded Crash’s advice to LaLoosh: don’t always serve up what is expected.

Werner’s songs begin with the appropriately gospel-tinged “Church of Baseball,” before seguing into more country textures--all in her wheelhouse as a composer who has dabbled in multiple musical genres.

Songs are, with good reason, considered the toughest element to manage in musicals. Although the best are memorable (for instance, “Whatever Lola Wants” and “You Gotta Have Heart” from the one great baseball musical, Damn Yankees), all should be character-based. Considering the decade in which the show has been gestating, with earlier versions premiering in Atlanta and Raleigh, N.C., the lulls in Bull Durham (notably, “A Little Time to Myself”) should have been eliminated.

Luckily, other songs fare better. Although “Pensacola”—with reflections by Bulls manager Skip, coach Larry, and announcer Uncle Roy on their brief road flings—does nothing to advance the plot, for instance, it injects a terrific jolt of comic energy into the show.

In Carmen Cusack, this production has an ideal Annie. She not only has the requisite comic seductiveness and underlying wistfulness of this superfan down pat, but a voice that can convey all kinds of emotions (not surprising, considering her stellar resume featuring roles in musicals like Call Me Madam and South Pacific).

Will Savarese brings an electric comic spirit to Nuke that exceeds even what Tim Ribbons brought to the role onscreen. In his big number, “She’s Mine,” he hilariously suggests nothing so much as a hyper-caffeinated Elvis.

As Crash Davis, Nik Walker doesn’t have the kind of showy roles that Cusack and Savarese possess. But he is every bit the strong, solid presence required in this catcher acquired by the Bulls because he’s smart enough to tutor Nuke but too self-conscious to survive for long in the major leagues—or, as Annie says in the film, implicitly contrasting him with Nuke, “The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.” Annie and Crash are two souls who find in each other a refuge amid the midlife perplexity of facing an uncertain future.

As a musical, Bull Durham is not what it could be. But, while no grand slam, neither is it a strikeout. Call it a solid double.

Theater Review: A Prescient, and Newly Relevant, Warning About Fascism

For 30 years, the Mint Theater has specialized in rediscovering plays often unfairly confined to the dustbin of history. In my experience attending nearly 20 of these shows, I’ve found them lovingly and shrewdly presented.

But no production of this Off-Broadway company has struck me so powerfully as Crooked Cross, which has not been revived in the UK since its 1937 premiere at London’s Westminster Theatre—and not produced at all in the US till now.

This drama by British author Sally Carson about the rise of Nazism in the critical December 1932-summer 1933 period only runs through today, so many readers will not be able to see it before it closes.

Even so, I urge you to buy the 1934 novel that she herself expertly adapted, which Persephone Books republished this past April. And while you’re at it, buy another copy for friends still open to understanding its message for today—and, if Persephone gets around to reissuing them, its two sequels: The Prisoner (1936) and A Traveller Came By (1938).

The drama has turned up again at a time when, like Germany transitioning from the Weimar Republic, Americans are unsettled by economic dislocation and a relative loss of power in the world—and decide to embrace a nationalist leader willing to break norms and laws at lightning speed.

A publisher’s reader and dance teacher when the novel and play of Crooked Cross were created, Carson had little time to establish herself in the literary world. Starting a family in 1938, she died of breast cancer only three years later, only aged 38.

By that time, the world was so caught up in maelstrom of fighting the Axis powers that it forgot about the English Cassandra whose warnings were disregarded by a war-weary electorate and appeasers in Whitehall.

Crooked Cross starts like a Christmas romantic comedy, with Lexa Kluger, a vibrant twentysomething woman hanging ornaments with her parents, two brothers and her fiancée, Moritz Weissmann, in their Bavarian home.

Over nine scenes, the tone becomes more like a thriller or horror film, with lives at stake and darkness spreading over their picturesque mountain community of Kranach and their country.

Carson outlines, step by step, how large national events shatter this harmony. Moritz loses his promising job as a doctor in a prestigious hospital because of his Jewish background and teaching first aid to a Marxist audience. Moritz’s father is not only dismissed from his university job because of his religion but is seized and disappeared by the newly empowered Nazi regime.

The trends highlighted by Carson will seem all too familiar to many today:

*A suddenly restrictive border policy meant to punish a minority;
*A new government that uses the slenderest of pretexts to reduce opposition;
*Nationalist right-wing groups willing to overthrow the government;
*Universities that cravenly yield to government pressure.

But what will especially strike a chord with modern audiences is Carson’s psychological understanding of what gives rise to authoritarianism, and the divisions it causes in families.

The Klugers react differently over how to deal with the ascendant Nazi Party. Frau Kluger (played by Katie Firth) nags her husband into joining it. Their son Erich (played with chilling authority by Jakob Winter) embraces Hitler’s principles and strategies with fanatical devotion, while second brother Helmy (Gavin Michaels), though closer to Lexa and Mauritz, swallows his ambivalence in the hope that the party will provide income and a purpose that’s been missing from his life.

Lexa will have none of this. She struggles to make her family grasp the dangers posed by Nazism to the man she loves—and when they urge her to transfer her affection to a nice Aryan youth, Otto, she moves from tense, even barbed, remarks (e.g., telling Erich, a former ski instructor whose work with aging female customers involved more than athletics, “I don’t imagine the Storm Troopers are immune to your charms”) to an outbreak break with them all.

Crooked Cross now plays to audiences passing an awareness of outcomes that British theatergoers of the prewar period could not have possessed, and it is staged now without imposing such retrospective historical knowledge.

In light of that, Carson’s insights are all the more prophetic and prescient, particularly in the damage caused by a nihilistic rejection of imperfect but irreplaceable representative government. Lexa’s question to her siblings reverberates as much now as in the 1930s: “When you’ve broken everything you can touch, all of you — what do you think you’ll do then?”

Theater Review: Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid,” Presented by the Red Bull Theater

Argan, the title character in the Red Bull Theater’s The Imaginary Invalid, gives a whole different dimension to the term “health nut”—a hypochondriac whose ailments require three physicians and so many magic elixirs of dubious benefit that he’s lucky any one of these doesn’t kill him.

Fortunately, this Off-Broadway adaptation of the uproarious 1673 comedy by the French genius actor-playwright Moliere—playing at New World Stages at 340 West 50th Street through Sunday—will relieve the symptoms of any audience member who’s badly in need of laughs.

The Red Bull, in existence for roughly two decades, takes its name from a leading playhouse of Shakespeare’s time that sorely tested the patience of the Stuart monarchy—and, while delving into the Bard and his contemporaries through fully mounted plays as well as staged readings, will also venture elsewhere in the realm of classical theater, as, to great effect, here.

Working from a new translation by Mirabelle Ordinaire, Red Bull artistic director Jeffrey Hatcher has streamlined Moliere’s three-act structure to 80 minutes without an intermission, rendered in colloquial English.

At the same time, Red Bull artistic director Jesse Berger has put together a show that remains true to the spirit of the original, including elements that appear repeatedly in Moliere’s work: a screen where characters hide and eavesdrop; doors opened and slammed as characters chase each other on and off stage; a saucy maid far smarter than her deluded employer; a daughter and her boyfriend who must convince her father not to give her away to a loathsome suitor; and, presiding over the madcap household, a paterfamilias not only cuckolded (and about to be swindled) by his much younger wife, but in the grip of an absolutely unreasoning obsession.

Moliere used his last farce to poke at a longtime bugaboo: quack doctors. (He suffered his fatal illness mid-performance in the lead role, leaving many in his audience, much like Redd Foxx, thinking that coughing blood was part of his act.)

Creating a massive opening for such medical mountebanks is the aging Argan (with veteran stage, film, and TV comic actor Mark Linn-Baker as masterful with dialogue as with demanding physical comedy). So convinced is Argan that lack of feeling in his buttocks foretells worsening health that he requires the strenuous ministrations of a trio of doctors (all played, hilariously, by Arnie Burton, who deftly differentiates each).

Argan’s plan: marry his daughter Angelique to a doctor so he’ll have free healthcare for the rest of his life. The problem is that the lucky fellow (played with panache by Russell Daniels), the son of one of Argan’s current physicians, is an unprepossessing specimen—dressed in a child’s sailor uniform barely able to contain his porky physique, and even less skilled (and far more squeamish) than his father about the healing arts.

The cast not only maintains a breathless pace but obviously delights in feeding off each other’s energy while playing this assembly of deceivers, both well-intentioned and, in the case of the doctors and lawyer on hand, out-and-out charlatans—sometimes even breaking character by dissolving in laughter onstage at another character’s antics. In addition to the above-named actors, also worthy of note are:

*Sarah Stiles, stealing scene after scene with merely a sly grin as the servant Toinette;

*John Yi, lending musical accompaniment as well as generating chuckles as Angelique’s handsome but dim-witted suitor, Cleante; and,

*Emily Swallow as Argan’s gold-digging second wife.

In the enormous enemy dispenser brandished in this farce, properties designer Laura Page Russell has fashioned the New York theater world’s most explosive weapon of mass eruption.

I have favorably reviewed other Red Bull productions before, notably Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, and Ben Jonson’s Volpone. But none were as rollicking from start to finish as this one.

I was thrilled to watch this theater group for the first time since the pandemic. Argan is the type who today would be gulled by Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, not to mention new medications approved by Robert Kennedy Jr.’s FDA.

Rather than sink into dismay over the fools and frauds who are multiplying in the current political environment, the Red Bull has adeptly supplied appropriate therapy in the form of Moliere’s boisterous mockery.

Theater Review: Harold Brighouse’s Witty ‘Garside’s Career,’ at the Mint Theater

Nearly 50 years ago, Alan Alda’s screen debut as writer, director, and star was entitled The Seduction of Joe Tynan, a step-by-step examination of how a liberal politician becomes caught up in the Washington vortex of ambition, playing to the crowd, and sex. Except for the public niceties still observed in pre-WWI Britain, Harold Brighouse might just as easily have called his anatomy of the same wayward instincts in London “The Seduction of Peter Garside.”

Garside's Career, like other plays mounted at the Off-Broadway venue the Mint Theater, is a lost and neglected play. After premiering at London’s West End in 1914, it enjoyed a successful run on the other side of the Atlantic in Boston five years later.

For some reason, plans to bring it immediately to Broadway were scuttled, and it seems to have disappeared from British stages too, even though Brighouse lived until 1958. So New York audiences are getting their first look at a clever, century-old send-up of a different form of inflation: a young striver’s sudden burst of ego.

If you’re an American TCM fan, you probably know just a little of his work, through David Lean’s 1954 film adaptation of his most successful play, Hobson’s Choice. (An interesting bit of trivia, from the Mint’s playbill for Garside’s Career: Hobson’s Choice was also adapted in 1966 as a Sammy Cahn-Jimmy Van Heusen Broadway musical, Walking Happy. Maybe that one will be revived someday by Encores!? Please?)

But Brighouse wrote more than 30 plays, as well as fiction, journalism, and memoirs. His output is well worth sampling if this production is any indication.

His title character, “silver-tongued” Peter Garside (played by Daniel Marconi) thinks his “genius” for oratory will take him to a station that his newly acquired license as a skilled mechanic (or, in the phrase of the time, “engineer”) can’t even remotely match.

But fiancée Margaret Shawcross, noticing that his gift for public speaking is dangerously intoxicating, warns him against depending on it.

None of this can stand in the face of the irresistible temptation presented by Garside’s Socialist labor group: a chance at a Parliamentary seat in a by-election. Seizing it gives him the opportunity he craves but at the price of his engagement.

Before long, as an MP, he has a comfortable apartment in London, with aspirations for more money, political power—and a permanent end to living in the dingy northern England town of Midlanton. He even makes advances on Gladys Mottram, a provincial siren as bored with her status as the daughter of the most influential family in town as Garside is with his distinctly lower standing.

Garside’s oratorical quelling of rioters about to break into the Mottram home only hardens belief in his political wizardry. But his neglect of meetings and votes that matter to constituents back home trigger a dizzying fall from power.

American audiences of the 21^st century might not be able to identify with the class tensions of pre-WWI Britain, which found their ultimate expression in social welfare legislation passed by the Liberals and the eventual rise of the Labour Party.

But the underlying conflict that Brighouse depicted retains its transatlantic relevance: At what point does the desire to better one’s self involve forgetting your working-class roots and the people who recognized your potential in the first place?

In the battle between capital and labor, Brighouse’s sympathies were decidedly with the latter—a point underscored here when Margaret refuses to back down from her Socialist activism, even when threatened with the loss of her teaching job by the formidable Lady Mottram, wife of the mayor of Midlanton.

Nevertheless, he dispensed with propaganda—one of the group supporting and then bringing down Peter is archly called “Karl Marx Jones,” and he was far more interested in the countervailing emotional and ethical instincts of politicians than their policy considerations.

In one sense, contemporary audiences may find dated the notion that an indiscretion will spell the end of a politician’s career. Nowadays, he (and more often than not, it is a “he”) will try again for public office, after a year or two biding his time—as former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is doing now.

But Brighouse exposed in the modern political animal a trait that remains intact: egotism that swells with even the slightest audience and deflates with none.

The cast (largely veterans of past Mint productions) play their roles adeptly, starting with Marconi, who expertly navigates Garside’s transition from earnest laborer to pompous MP to political has-been.

Madeline Seidman endows faithful Margaret with appropriate steely love, able to endure in turn Peter’s growing appetite for power, narcissism, brush with scandal, self-pity, and even a gorgon of a mother (with Amelia White making the most of the play’s most hilarious lines). And Sara Haider and Avery Whitted offer a nice contrast as the to-the-manor-born Gladys and her cheerfully superficial brother Freddie.

In the three decades of its existence, I have managed to see more than a dozen productions by the Mint. It has approached each with the kind of attention and loving care that these stepchildren of modern theater have deserved. Harold Brighouse’s play is no different. I urge you to see it before it closes on Theater Row on Saturday, March 15.

Directed adeptly and confidently by Matt Dickson, Garside's Career nicely complements Hindle Wakes, another dramedy by Brighouse’s friend and fellow Northern England playwright, Stanley Houghton. The Mint is offering on-demand screenings of a three-camera HD recording of their 2018 production through Sunday, March 16. Viewing is free after providing your email address and zip code; donations are welcome.

Theater Review: Elizabeth Baker’s ‘Partnership,’ at New York’s Mint Theater

Like many New York area theatergoers, I have been slow getting back to Broadway and Off-Broadway shows even as the dangers of COVID-19 have receded without fully disappearing. Before March 2020, I had sometimes taken in a couple of shows a month. 

What a difference the pandemic made! This past spring’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain was the first I had attended in three years, and it satisfied my curiosity about this much-discussed show without making me entirely glad I had spent so much for a small-scale production.

I felt much better after seeing the latest Off-Broadway production by the Mint Theater. The third and last installment in a trilogy by English playwright Elizabeth Baker (1876-1962), Partnership, which closed this weekend, accomplished what the company has done so successfully so often throughout its nearly 30 years of existence: bring to light past dramas and comedies that have slipped, often unjustly, into the mists of history.

Superficially, Baker delivered what audiences in the WWI era (and, actually, ours) craved: a wry, gentle romantic comedy. But not for her the drawing-room comedy genre that made Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham, and Noel Coward the toast of the West End.

Instead, in class-conscious Britain, in 13 plays over two decades, she limned the aspirations of middle-class strivers—especially women who, against all odds, were trying to gain a foothold in a male-dominated business world. 

Even as the government was confronting the challenge of suffragettes, Baker was posing questions even more fundamental than politics to women: without men, how they could expect to survive on their own, and what might they have to sacrifice to achieve a life without want? And, looking beyond that, what constituted a fulfilled life?

Herself a member of the aspiring class (a stenographer and typist who imbibed dramatic construction by typing the works of fashionable playwrights of the day), Baker was a realist rather than a romantic. She found little poetic in the lives of characters wholly invested in the struggle for personal autonomy.  But she was honest in depicting characters too little seen on the stages of her time.

Partnership, first staged in England in 1917 (with future film great Ronald Colman playing a bit part), is a good example of her stagecraft and concerns, and it gets a second wind here in the United States under the direction of Jackson Grace Gay.

Kate Rolling, along with her sharp and saucy friend and second-in-command Maisie Glow, is making a go of it in her small fashionable milliner’s shop in Brighton, even for a demanding clientele. The attractive and successful young women are also getting attention from male suitors, with the two received a combined four marriage proposals in the past four weeks.

Then Kate receives, from the owner of the largest store in town, yet another, but this time with a twist a business and personal merger proposal: a suggestion, from an especially acquisitive businessman who’s just bought the property next door, that the two combine forces in a partnership that would allow Kate to expand. 

Part of the arrangement—already spelled out in a formal contract by the enterprising George Pillatt—is that Kate marry him.

Pillatt can’t imagine how anything could matter more to a businessperson than the slightest opportunity to make another sale. Any woman accepting his hand in marriage could be assured of a financially secure future, but hardly a warm and happy one.

For a while, it seems that this marriage of convenience is enough for Kate. But when she accepts an invitation to visit the nearby “Downs” or hills from free-spirited investor Lawrence Fawcett, she becomes of the possibility of a different lifestyle and different life companion.

All of this occurs in the face of an incredulous Pillatt and a frustrated Maisie, who advises her friend that if it’s romance and excitement she craves, she should have a man on the side.

Sara Haider has made her Off-Broadway debut an auspicious one. In accentuating how the intelligent, driven Kate Rolling finds herself unexpectedly intoxicated by the spirit of freedom and love, she has put herself on track for a future role as a self-possessed Shakespeare comic heroine like Rosalind and Portia. 

I wasn’t able to see Olivia Gilliatt’s performance in the Mint’s production last year of Baker’s Chains, but judging by her work here she appears to have a real affinity for the playwright, lending a winning spice and joie de vivre to a character who, in less capable hands, might have sounded simply dour and cynical.

The men fare less well, in admittedly more constricted roles. Gene Gillette at least heightens the stakes by depicting Pillatt as a businessman that one disappoints only at one’s peril, but Joshua Echebiri cannot achieve a natural evolution from the reticent Fawcett of early scenes to the more unbuttoned down at the Downs.

It should also be stated here that, though confined to a small space in New York’s Theater Row, the Mint has consistently used its limited resources imaginatively. In the current production, that is owing to scenic designer Alexander Woodward, who has adapted a James Hart Dyke painting into a beguiling backdrop suggesting the rolling green coastal landscape of the Downs that turns Kate’s head around.

Though it has also run less well-known plays by famous authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Noel Coward, D.H. Lawrence, and Leo Tolstoy, the Mint Theater has performed a particular service by mounting several productions by once-acclaimed dramatists who’ve fallen into obscurity (e.g., George Kelly) or who have never really enjoyed their moment in the sun (Teresa Deavy, N.C. Hunter).

 Elizabeth Baker belongs to the latter category, and it was good to see her Partnership receive its American premiere more than a century after it captivated London audiences got their first, fleeting glimpses of it.

Theater Review: Kate Hamill’s ‘Dracula,’ Presented by the Classic Stage Company, NYC

Kate Hamill has carved out an interesting niche among today’s playwrights: adapting classic novels (Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility) with a feminist bent. I enjoyed one of these, Vanity Fair, produced for the late, great Pearl Theater Co., while taking issue with her view that Becky Sharp was less the anti-heroic schemer of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Victorian novel than a disadvantaged woman using any means necessary to succeed in a patriarchal society.

Ms. Hamill took even more liberties with source material in her new take on Dracula, which closed two weekends ago at New York City’s Classic Stage Company. Not that that’s unusual: Filmmakers, for instance, have used Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel as a series of suggestions rather than as sacred writ not to be tampered with. I’m not entirely sure that her central conceit—that the Transylvanian count is, above all, a “toxic predator”—works, even in a current environment in which rogue males are being confronted like the famous bloodsucker in his crypt.

Dracula has been presented in repertory with Frankenstein. I did not see the latter, but the pairing is natural enough: the two, which bookended the 19^th century as landmarks in horror fiction, also launched the careers of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in their classic 1931 Universal Pictures films.

Over the years, Stoker’s novel has been interpreted in several ways: religious (the count, a kind of anti-Christ, retreats from the crucifix), political (Dracula comes from authoritarian Eastern Europe, while his pursuers represent the transatlantic democracies), and Freudian (he overpowers—i.e., seduces—men and women without regard to marriage vows, in a direct challenge to Victorian morals). (It’s possible, especially within the last week or so, dominated by news of the coronavirus, to see Dracula in another light: as a source of contagion and fear.)

Ms. Hamill’s might be the first interpretation I have encountered that looks at Dracula from a feminist point of view. It requires serious gender-bending to accomplish this. Notably, the playwright herself has turned Renfield, the middle-aged male lunatic asylum patient who eats flies and spiders for their blood, into Mrs. Renfield, a poet whose trust in the protective men in her life (father and husband) has come to naught now that she is under the spell of Dracula.

Mina Harker—traditionally one of the count’s intended victims—is transformed, in Ms. Hamill’s telling, into a pregnant avenger of her (un)dead friend Lucy and of her husband Jonathan, who stumbles home stark-raving mad after a visit to the Count’s Transylvania lair. As if Mina as a counterpart to Sigourney Weaver’s intrepid Alien monster slayer weren’t enough, she makes common cause with vampire hunter Van Helsing, an African-American female who swaggers onstage wearing a cowboy hat. (“You were expecting an old Dutchman?” she asks.)

In other words, literary purists and traditionalists are best advised to look elsewhere.

But this “bit of a feminist revenge fantasy, really,” as it is called on the title page of the script, had its own compensations, and Van Helsing’s wisecrack points to one of them: a refusal to take convention (literary or masculine) too seriously. Hamill gives herself one of the most gruesomely funny lines when Renfield requests a “plump, juicy, crunchy little kitten”—for purposes of consumption rather than companionship. And Mina becomes rightly suspicious when she keeps getting only short notes from her long-absent husband, invariably reassuring her that his Transylvanian host is “charming.”

All of this, however, serves a deadly purpose: satirizing a patriarchy as dangerous to the female soul as to its body. Lucy, for instance, offers little evidence of love in her explanation to Mina on why she is agreeing to marry the stuffy head of the lunatic asylum where Renfield is kept, Dr. George Seward:

“I have no family, and while I am comfortable enough—without a husband, I have no future, no prospects; I cannot even dictate how my money is spent, it’s all held in trust. But our whole destinies are wrapped up in the men we marry; once we are wed we are—little better than their chattel, according to the law, and I just—wish I could be absolutely sure of his character.”

Hamill’s skill with dialogue is demonstrated with that neat segue from large social context to Seward’s “character.” In short order, he will prove Lucy correct in her uneasiness, as his arrogance exposes her to Dracula. His post-mortem lament that she was “an angel” provokes a memorable retort from Mina that her friend was “vulgar—and funny—and clever—and complicated—she was not some porcelain idol for you to worship!”

As an Off-Broadway troupe, Classic Stage doesn’t have the same resources as larger houses, but the group’s artistic director, John Doyle—doubling here as scenic designer—used what it had to simple but telling effect. (All characters are dressed in white except for the outsider, Van Helsing.) Director Sarna Lapine drew out the talents of her cast, especially Matthew Saldivar as priggish Seward, Kelley Curran as indomitable Mina, and Jessica Frances Dukes as the irreverent Van Helsing.

Having seen a couple of past Classic Stage productions (including David Ives' Moliere adaptation The School for Lies, which I reviewed favorably here), and this original take on Dracula had me looking forward to the company’s next production, Stephen Sondheim’s controversial Assassins.  

But the coronavirus crisis has put rehearsals on that on hold for now. One can only hope, as a message on the company’s Web site assures patrons, that it will eventually mount the musical “in the coming months.” 

One hates to think of its season—like that of so many others in New York—laid waste by a disease as horrifying, in a far different manner, than the double bill it may have unexpectedly finished its season with.