The Stage

New York Notebook

Published Thursday 3 June 2004 at 13:30 by Clive Barnes

As usual, the frantic run up to the Tony Awards descended upon us like an all too predictable hurricane. Two efforts careening in to meet the Tony deadline in early May originated in Britain - and had varied receptions. The more splashy, of course, was the Bollywood extravaganza Bombay Dreams but the generally rather better received was the subtle play, Frozen.

So far as Bombay Dreams goes is, the response has been mixed, very mixed. Very few, if any, Bollywood movies have gone mainstream in the US, so the hopes for a Bollywood musical on Broadway waver between the slim and the slender. This London-imported musical spectacle - and, yes, it really is spectacular - needs all the luck it can get, the more so as it did extraordinarily poorly in the Tony Award nominations. The show is actually much changed, fancier and less muddled but also less original than it was in London. All the same, there is a lot more glitz than glory here, more sequins than truth. London got a simpler and more authentic show.

Bryony Lavery’s bizarre but compelling Frozen, the story of a serial paedophile/killer, the mother of one of his victims and a visiting American professor of psychiatry, seems to have fared a lot better, especially with its brilliant cast of three - Swoosie Kurtz, Brian F O’Byrne and Laila Robins. The three are entangled in this tragic dance of death, the mother Nancy (Kurtz) broken with loss, the killer Ralph (O’Byrne) uncomprehending of his crime and Agnetha (Robins), the forensic psychiatrist “navigating,” she says, “the Arctic frozen sea of the criminal brain”.

All three could easily be dramatic ciphers arguing out some political game of guilt and compassion, nature versus nurture, all in accordance with the playwright’s political agenda. But Frozen - which originated in Britain, including a production by the National, with the present US production starting earlier this season Off-Broadway with the MCC Theatre - is more complex, more interwoven, more lifelike.

Apart from the revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins, the most controversial show of the Broadway season has been the Tony Kushner/Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change. That apparent indecisiveness about the title runs through the entire chamber-opera, which features a lot of admirable moral intentions, sweatily pursuing artistic fulfilment. The result seems unnecessarily pretentious and emotionally chilly and this chill comes despite elegantly smooth staging by George C Wolfe, plus an exceptionally powerful cast led by the smolderingly ice-hot Tonya Pinkins as Caroline. But the streak of cold ambiguity running through the show like a tear in its fabric, is only one of the two major flaws in Caroline, or Change - the other is Tesori’s tenuous score.

Kushner’s story, presumably in part autobiographical, is a very simple anecdote - one of those cute little twisty tales that certain Southern writers have made into a genre - about money and the wicked role it plays in the social structure. And here - because this is true grits and Southern ham - money is coloured with race, construed as forming the big divide between white and black. The time, not incidentally, is November/December 1963.

Noah is an eight-year-old Jewish kid growing up in Louisiana with his father, a quite recently widowed professional clarinetist and his step-mother, Rose. Noah has a constant habit of leaving change in the pockets of his trousers before throwing them out to be laundered by Caroline. This so annoys Rose - who not only wants to win the boy’s love but also, to teach him the value of money - that she decrees that all such change should become the property of the hard-working, church-going Caroline, the single mother of four. Caroline needs the money but is reluctant to take from a child. Then comes Hanukkah, Noah is given a $20 bill and he leaves it, a large sum of money for Caroline, in his trousers - crisis time.

Of course, apart from the ‘change’ left by Noah, there is also - and this is meant to be Kushner’s trump card - the other ‘change’ left by history. It is 1963, civil rights is on the agenda, a statue of a Confederate soldier has just been pulled down in front of the town hall. Times are changing, then JFK is assassinate, and hopes might be deferred. Now all this sense of the world on the cusp of revolution is meant to give that trivial little fable about the spoilt Jewish kid and his loose change an epic relevance to its time. Baloney.

Then there is the music. It appears that most of Kushner’s libretto was written for an unproduced opera before being handed to Tesori, who has devised a drearily pastiche score, situated in that tempting grey area between opera and Broadway and running some kind of eclectic gamut from there and back. Pinkins’ wonderfully layered portrait, almost tormented, conveys pain, bitterness, courage and an overwhelming decency. But the essentials for either a musical or an opera are music and drama. Caroline comes up short on both.

The 2003/4 Broadway season officially closed on May 31 and they saved the worst till last. Perhaps that is a kind of charity. There have been worse plays on Broadway than Mark Medoff’s Prymate - there was, of course, the infamous, campily fun Moose Murders. Prymate is, I suppose, meant to be an exposition of the rights of animals as opposed to the rights of human beings. A worthwhile subject for serious discussion but it certainly does not get any serious discussion in a play as ramshackle and doomed as a grass hut in a hurricane. The plot gets crazier as it thickens. Prymate is not prime time and, by the way, shouldn’t it be Primate? Or is the title meant as a pun, as in ‘prying mate’. If so, the pun is as bad as the play and almost as silly.