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 ("Maggie Flynn," NYC Draft Riots Musical, Opens—and Flops)

October 23, 1968 – In a decade when the Broadway musical depicted decadence and Nazism (Cabaret), Russian anti-Semitism (Fiddler on the Roof), and contemporary youth in all its pot-smoking, anti-war glory (Hair), the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 might not have seemed so unpleasant.

But screenwriter William Goldman's complaint about the forecasting powers of Tinseltown—"Nobody knows anything"—might just as easily apply to the Great White Way. The talented real-life husband-and-wife team of Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones did little to smooth the way for Maggie Flynn when it premiered at the ANTA Playhouse. Even in times more forgiving of lackluster box office than ours, the musical was lucky to make it through six previews and 82 performances before its January 5, 1969 closing.

In recent years, interest in the inherent dramatic possibilities of the Draft Riots--a disturbance at the height of the Civil War that became one of the most convulsive urban uprisings in American history--has increased proportionately with historians’ highlighting of the tangled class and ethnic components of the event. Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York) depicted the deadly donnybrook on the big screen (with only intermittent success, as far as I’m concerned), while Peter Quinn and Kevin Baker have done so more successfully in the novel (Banished Children of Eve and Paradise Alley, respectively).

Why did Maggie Flynn tank? It didn’t help matters that critics saw too many similarities between that musical and The Sound of Music, another show about a young woman helping to raise orphans amid a background of prejudice and war. But shows have survived critical pans before.

One problem might have been that even musicals with challenging or even grim subject matter usually have something that lightens the mood. South Pacific, with its scathing denunciation of racial prejudice (“Carefully Taught”), included plenty of comedy and never seriously questioned that American servicemen and their nurses were engaged in a necessary war. Hair possessed novelty, and plenty of it—not only rock ‘n’ roll tunes but nudity.

In contrast, Maggie Flynn possessed no radio-friendly tunes and, despite the presence of a clown, not much in the way of humor; its subject matter darkly mirrored concerns about war and racism that many playgoers were dying to escape; and, unlike the young cast of Hair, Ms. Jones kept her clothes on, hewing closer to her wholesome Laurie character in Oklahoma than to her Oscar-winning turn as the prostitute Lulu Baines in Elmer Gantry.

Maggie Flynn not only didn’t become a hit, but it didn’t even achieve the status of a Sondheimesque success d’estime. Not only has it never been revived on Broadway, but the Internet Broadway Database only lists one other production associated with it: an off-off-off Broadway production at the Equity Library Theater in1976. Even the Goodspeed Opera House of East Haddam, Conn., long famed for bringing to renewed life long-ago shows (and certainly one of my favorite places to catch a musical), hasn’t gone near this one. Set in an orphanage, Maggie Flynn is itself something of an orphan among musicals of yesteryear.

But the factor that makes any show such a crapshoot—the many, many people who may or may not cohere in making it succeed—also offers the opportunity for at least some solitary golden moments. Despite its box-office and critical misfortune, Maggie Flynn was not without these.

Her backup singing behind stepson David Cassidy on The Partridge Family has inevitably colored baby boomers’ perception of Shirley Jones’ musical talents, but they’d be better advised to seek out her work on film in Oklahoma, Carousel and The Music Man (as problematic as those motion picture adaptations could be). What may come as a surprise nowadays, however, is how good the work of her co-star and then-husband, Jack Cassidy, could be.

As I pointed out in a prior post on a more successful musical, She Loves Me, Cassidy was associated with 13 original-cast soundtracks. That might at first only indicate how rich that period was with new musicals, except for the fact that the actor’s work was constantly recognized by his peers. During his lifetime, he was nominated four times for a Tony Award (winning once for She Loves Me). One of those nominations was for his role as Phineas the Clown in Maggie Flynn.

(Cassidy’s stage and TV persona was as a preening narcissist. As I contemplated this, I thought he might have made an interesting Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d actually been considered for the role. It’s probably just as well that he didn’t end up on the show. Had he played the part instead of Ted Knight, we would have seen the egotistical anchorman constantly lose not because he was an insecure yet lovable idiot, but because he was too clever by half, thereby diluting the warmth of one of the all-time great ensemble comedies in the history of television.)

I should also mention that Maggie Flynn added to the resumes of three young actors who would go on to greater prominence in the late ‘70s and ‘80s: Stephanie Mills (The Wiz), Irene Cara (Fame), and Giancarlo Esposito (“Bugging Out” in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing). Mills especially showed quite a bit of spunk in landing her role as Pansie, the orphaned child of a runaway slave, auditioning three times before she won it.

Quote of the Day (Judith Crist, on Being “A Movie Nut”)

“If you’re not a passionate devotee of film—or, in plainer language, a movie nut—you can’t really function as a critic. Why bother to criticize if you don’t care? The analogy is simple if carried on to human relations. When as children we’d accuse our mother of ‘picking’ on us, she’d say, ‘Of course a stranger wouldn’t. Only someone who loves you would.’ It is, after all, only the person who cares, who demands an adherence to standards, who dreams of the perfectibility of the beloved—and who refuses the easy out, who won’t settle for cheap and who will recognize sincerity and integrity, and cherish these, while scorning the specious and denouncing the cheap-jack.”—Judith Crist, “Honest—She Loves the Movies,” TV Guide, August 1970, collected in TV Guide: The First 25 Years, compiled and edited by Jay S. Harris in association with the editors of TV Guide (1978).

I guess I’m the type of “passionate devotee of film” that Ms. Crist had in mind—except that this year, I can only recall three new releases that I’ve managed to see. Filmmakers have just left me increasingly angry with either hopelessly crass or nihilistic offerings, and I have better things to do with my time—like watch old movies.

Her contemporary Pauline Kael got the cult fans (the “Paulettes”) and certainly the more high-prestige gig (The New Yorker), but if you wanted someone who didn’t brandish attitude or fixations so much like gun on the hip, then Judith Crist was the one for you.

Or for me, anyway, growing up. In her heyday in the Sixties and Seventies, she delivered verdicts on new releases for The Today Show, where she became network television’s first theater and film critic, and in such print publications as The New York Herald Tribune, New York and TV Guide.

Kael could be waspish, but she could go oddly gooey over pulp violence from the likes of Sam Peckinpah and Brian DePalma if she felt their reflected an individual vision.

Crist didn’t even have those moments. Otto Preminger referred to her as “Judas Christ” (maybe it had something to do with her verdict on his overheated Sixties flick Hurry Sundown: “For to say that Hurry Sundown is the worst film of the still-young year is to belittle it. It stands with the worst films of any number of years.”) Billy Wilder, far more imaginative, said that inviting her to review a film was “like asking the Boston Stranger for a neck message.”

In the mid-Seventies, I saw Crist deliver an address to high-school journalists at Columbia University, where she served as an adjunct professor at the J-School. She was marvelously droll. I bet she was as smart, funny, and infectious about movies and writing with her regular students as she was with younger kids like myself.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Margaret Sullavan, Golden-Age Star Gone “Haywire“)

May 16, 1911—Margaret Sullavan, who glittered briefly as one of golden-age Hollywood’s finest actresses, then became one of the victims in a family as cursed as any in a Greek tragedy, was born on this date in Norfolk, Va.—or so she would claim.

(I wrote “claimed” in the above partly because several Internet references I came across gave her year of birth as 1909. Since a gentleman never asks a lady her age, we’ll take the actress’ word for it.)

There’s a good chance many reading this won’t recall Sullavan’s name—or, if they do, might confuse it with Maureen O’Sullivan (yes, Jane to Tarzan, not to mention Mia Farrow’s mom), who not only possessed a surname that sounded like hers but also was almost exactly the same age (born a day later); labored at the same studio, MGM, in the 1930s as an ingénue; and left in the 1940s to devote herself to her family. Talk about doppelgangers!

If you can distinguish between the two ladies, here’s what you’re likely to know about Margaret:
1) She starred in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), a sparkling Ernst Lubitsch comedy whose plot was copied by, among other films, the Judy Garland vehicle In the Good Old Summertime, the Broadway musical She Loves Me, and Nora Ephron’s too-clever-by-half Internet-age version, You’ve Got Mail.

2) Offscreen, her seemingly blessed family life—marriage to magnetic theatrical agent and producer Leland Hayward, three bright, attractive kids—collapsed due to her divorce, the children’s mounting depression, and her own suicide—a story recounted in eldest daughter Brooke Heyward’s 1977 bestseller, Haywire.

It’s a measure of the greatness of the Hollywood studio system that, though she worked in it for less than a decade, Sullivan had 16 films to her credit. But it’s a measure of the triviality of the same system that the actress, despairing of “this bizarre place,” refused to sign a long-term contract and left the studio as soon as she could. We do not, then, have the kind of vast, multi-decade filmography left by her MGM rival for roles and men, Katharine Hepburn.

I first became aware of Sullavan through a series held in the 1980s at New York’s late, lamented film revival house, the Regency: “Screen Teams.” I wasn’t surprised at other teams in this series—Tracy and Hepburn, Powell and Loy—but I was to find the immortal Jimmy Stewart paired with Sullavan, whom I hadn’t heard of up to that point.

As it happened, Stewart and Sullavan might have made for the most natural team of them all. After all, the two of them, along with Henry Fonda (Stewart’s great friend and Sullavan’s first husband), started out as part of the repertory University Players in Falmouth, Mass.

Sullavan pushed for Stewart to be her co-star after he joined MGM. In all, they made four films together. As for Fonda: though his marriage to Sullavan foundered after only two months, the two stayed on good terms thereafter, and their children became friends.

Children…this might be as good a point as any to deal with the tragedies that finally overwhelmed Sullavan and her family.

The first thing people would want to know is: how could it all go so wrong? How could children--and their parents--who seemed to have everything--a father’s personal plane that he flew everywhere, nannies, Jimmy Stewart for a babysitter, parties with Hollywood’s finest among the invited guests, with the children receiving invitations to pose for the cover of Life Magazine (Brooke) or join the famous Williamstown Theater Festival (younger sister Bridget)--have seen it all fall down?

It started with the parents’ tendencies--a wandering eye (Leland’s) that led to infidelity and divorce; a high-strung temperament (Margaret’s) that had already made most of her directors regard her as a pill and a half, and that only worsened in time. As Margaret advanced into middle age, her hearing difficulties radically worsened. Now that she had pretty much abandoned Hollywood for Broadway (she originated the role of “Sabrina” that went to Audrey Hepburn on the screen), this latter problem was disastrous--she would miss cues.

It all came to an end for Sullavan on New Year’s Day 1960, when she died of a drug overdose. It was eventually ruled accidental, but the coroner’s report was widely understood as a heavily hedged act of mercy to a heartbroken family.

Nor was that the end of the Heywards' problems. Bridget and Bill, each in a mental-health institution at the time of their mother’s death, would also kill themselves: Bridget, 21 years old, only eight months later, and Bill, in 2008, at age 66, with a shot to the heart.

Following Bridget‘s funeral, Brooke Heyward poured out her anguish to family friend Tom Mankiewicz: "I'm the daughter of a father who's been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I'm 23 and divorced with two kids."

Mankiewicz, looking down from the 10th-floor apartment where the reception was held, laid out her choice in the starkest possible terms: "Brooke, either you've got to open the window right now and jump out, or say, 'I'm going to live,' because you're right, it's the worst family history that anybody ever had. Either you jump out the window or you live."

Hayward’s memoir, a #1 bestseller on its initial appearance, was released again this year, having gained additional poignancy because of the recent death of her brother.

As overwhelmingly sad as the offscreen life of her mother was, I can’t end this post with that tragedy. Had Margaret Sullavan lived the happiest of lives, she still would have been worth writing about because of her shining, if all too briefly glimpsed, talent.

Her fans (notably including Stephen Sondheim), though not quite a cult, note that she had only one indisputable classic, The Shop Around the Corner. But, as Orson Welles (who would certainly know about such things) once noted, “Sometimes one is all you need.” I would argue, though, that there is another unfairly neglected film of hers: Three Comrades (1938), the only film of hers that garnered her an Oscar nomination (also the only screenwriting credit for F. Scott Fitzgerald).

Sullavan was attractive enough to have become a silent-film actress, but the talkies were ready- made for her. It’s not so much her petite frame that everyone always remarked about her, but that voice--husky but supple. Critic Dan Callahan describes its range, with remarkable precision, in a film-by-film assessment in the online film journal Bright Lights:

“When you first hear it, it sounds limited and ephemeral, like Billie Holiday's singing voice. But Lady Day could do just about anything with her voice, and Sullavan's vocal range is limitless too, not hamstrung by particularity, but freed to roam wherever she chooses. She could bring it down low for a big booming growl; she could lift it up high, higher, oh higher!; or she could keep it in a middle register and break it into a thousand tingling laryngitis pieces.”

Shorter--but, like Sullavan herself, more magical--was the description of the same voice provided by the silent film actress turned shrewd observer of the place where she once worked, Louise Brooks: “That wonderful voice of hers. Strange, fey, mysterious — like a voice singing in the snow."

Theater Review: Cole Porter’s ‘Kiss Me, Kate,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

All hail Kelli O'Hara. With Bernadette Peters and Donna Murphy now aging out of the leading female roles of Broadway musicals of the Golden Age, she is now the reigning queen of the genre. The best way to appreciate Her Majesty is to catch her Tony-nominated performance in Kiss Me, Kate, the glorious production of Cole Porter’s 1948 musical that finished its run this past weekend at Studio 54.

The Roundabout Theatre Co. had to preserve a delicate balance in this “revisal”: how to mitigate or delete the obvious sexism in that original show without losing the sense of fun that has made it an audience favorite over the years. Some changes might make purists break out in hives (e.g., the late-show number “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple” has been retitled to “I Am Ashamed That People Are So Simple”).

But for the most point, the changes worked, because the bickering but bewitched pair at the heart of the show—egocentric actor/director/producer Fred Graham and his temperamental star and estranged wife, Lilli Vanessi—gave as good as they get, fully an off-stage match William Shakespeare’s quintessential battle-of-the-sexes couple, Petruchio and Kate from The Taming of the Shrew.

Ms. O’Hara took a while to find her footing as temperamental Lilli, but found her groove midway through Act I, as William Shakespeare’s fictional counterpart to Lilli, Kate of The Taming of the Shrew. In “I Hate Men,” she displays the full extent of her considerable vocal prowess—and a comic ferocity to match.

This production also featured the smooth hand of Scott Ellis, who has directed some of the best musicals of the Roundabout, including Holiday Inn, She Loves Me, and Anything Goes. Even for someone with a great track record, this past season was particularly stellar for him, as he also directed the new Tony-nominated adaptation of Tootsie. One sure touch of his clever hand comes in the scene that sets Kate roaring—when she finds not one, but a whole group of peeping toms hidden in a room, leering at her.

Will Chase, though perfectly serviceable in the double role of strutting Petruchio and egotistical producer Fred Graham, was no match for Brian Stokes Mitchell’s Tony-winning turn in the part. On the other hand, Corbin Bleu, who triumphed in the Roundabout’s well-received Holiday Inn a few years ago, is back to perform similar dance magic as Shakespeare’s Lucentio and Bill Calhoun, the hoofer and gambler who draws the unwelcome attention of the underworld.  And Stephanie Styles shines sweetly, whether as Shakespeare’s Bianca and Porter’s somewhat less innocent Lois Lane/Bianca, in “Always True to You in My Fashion.”

I couldn’t let this opportunity pass behind without expressing my appreciation for the brio exhibited by John Pankow and Tom McGowan in one of the wittiest songs in the Porter catalog, “Brush Up Yer Shakespeare.” It is hard to imagine the mix of iambic pentameter and swinging gangster patois rendered more winningly.

I never saw the 1953 screen adaptation starring Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson in its entirety, so the only point of reference I have for this production is the 1999 revival starring Mitchell and the late, marvelous Marin Mazzie. Despite the fact that Amanda Green was brought in this time to revise the Spewacks’ dialogue, no radical differences exist between the two productions like, say, earlier bouncy versions of Oklahoma and the far darker current one.

Longtime fans of the Roundabout have gotten used to its stagecraft marvels, and this production was no exception. Set designer David Rockwell and his crew conjured up efficiently such varying locales as a hotel, a dressing room, as well as the Padua of Fred’s Bard.

As a Roundabout subscriber, I enjoy their “Celebrity” series of post-performance talk-backs. The series title is a bit exaggerated. (I have seldom seen real celebrity leads come up afterward—indeed, I wonder if their contracts stipulate they’re too big to be obligated to do so!). But from performers who have shown up—along with the Roundabout’s Education Dramaturge, Ted Sod—I have learned a great deal about particular productions and the challenges and exhilaration associated with them, and this talk was very much in that tradition.

For instance, I found out that:

*Bella and Sam Spevack were the husband-and-wife team who wrote the “book”—i.e., a musical’s “libretto” or narrative structure—for Kiss Me, Kate, becoming the first Tony Award winners in this category. Though they based the backstage shenanigans of this musical-within-a-musical on a real theatrical “royal couple,” Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, it also mirrored their own situation: though separated as they began work, working on the show brought them together again. (For more on that original production, see my blog post from 11 years ago.)

*The placement of the musicians differed in this production from most other musicals. Music director Paul Gemignani had definite ideas about where the musicians should play. For instance, by being split in two boxes over the stage, they faced the players without being (literally) looked down on. Second, clarinetist Greg Thymius actually appeared onstage with the company as part of the rousing second-half opener, “Too Darn Hot.”

*Bleu spoke candidly but without self-pity about the physical toll the action can take on players—and what they do to counter this. In his case, it involved ice packs, ibuprofen and eating regularly. The night before this performance, he had tweaked his neck, so he and choreographer Warren Carlyle had to work out what he could and couldn’t do this time. The best thing for him, Bleu noted, was, simply, sleep, with Mondays sacrosanct as rest days, not even involving talking, let alone strenuous moving.

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.

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.