After the Tony Awards, Broadway customarily lapses into a sluggish flow that will not speed up until late September. However, the new 2004/5 season officially started on June 1 and the first opening was the lavish revival of Donald Margulies’ abrasive and cynical Sight Unseen.
It is a neatly spiked cocktail of a play featuring four truly unpleasant people - well, in fairness, make that three. But here is the playwright’s triumph - while they may be unpleasant, they are also breathtakingly real. Strangely enough a good deal more real than the story they inhabit. Yet Margulies still offers a formidable, if messy mix of the alluring dangers of fame, the pitfalls of interfaith relationships, plus the ambiguity and frequent phoniness of the contemporary art world.
It is beautifully acted by the impressive foursome of Byron Jennings, Laura Linney, Ana Reeder and Ben Shenkman and staged by Daniel Sullivan with the naturalness of breath itself. Sullivan’s work is garnished with great settings by Douglas W Schmidt, which appear and disappear miraculously with the drop of a curtain, Jess Goldstein’s period-pointed costumes and Pat Collins’ astute lighting. Yet the play, thin in itself, seems also to skate on thin ice.
Jonathan Waxman (Shenkman) is a young painter who hit the big time money a few years ago and has continued to hit it with the regularity of a cuckoo clock. Now Waxman, just before a big London show of his work, comes to a farmhouse in Norfolk to visit Patricia (the luminous Linney), his first model and first love, who is uneasily married to a poor, grumpy but astute archaeologist (Jennings). The play is constructed in a jump-happy fashion - scene one comes first but the final scene eight is set 17 years earlier and, in between, the time frame hops around more than a bit. Margulies uses this crazy patchwork construction skillfully enough and slowly we realise Waxman is a cheat, coward, fraud and possibly a thief - yet suffused with surface charm.
All in all it is a promising young man’s play - Margulies later deservedly won a Pulitzer for Dinner with Friends - most beautifully produced. But when all is said and acted it seems to be a play with more themes than meaning. Yet any playwright who can construct such complex characters and even have them talk as such people would, clearly has a career ahead of him. As indeed he had. Luckily, unlike his painter hero, Margulies’ first work was not also his best.
While Broadway may be dormant, it is far from dead. The summer, with its tourists, is usually a box office bonanza for the big hit shows, which frequently refurbish their casts and polish up their productions. That hirsute, feelgood, feel very good musical Hairspray has just spritzed up with a new trim, style and permanent wave, to get ready for its third year. And the good news is that it is still a hit. But visitors beware, not quite such a smash, knock ‘em in the aisles humdinger it was at first.
The reason for this can be summed up in two words, Harvey Fierstein. Or, rather, the lack thereof. In the transvestite role the late Divine created in John Waters’ original cult movie from which the musical was adapted, Fierstein dominated the show. His gorgeous, overpowering but benign presence as the plump heroine Tracy’s frumpy, no-nonsense mom Edna, made it, against all odds, a stage-eating, starring vehicle.
His successor Michael McKean, TV comedian and always to be remembered for the movie This is Spinal Tap, is a good actor, possibly better than Fierstein but here lacks pizzazz and also looks like a man in drag, while Fierstein was every visible inch a woman. Another formidable task fell to Carly Jibson, who has replaced the adorable - and, like Fierstein, Tony-winning - Marissa Jaret Winokur as the ebullient Tracy and here the results are a lot happier. Jibson has just the right giggle, bounce and wistful charm.
All in all Hairspray remains a big, brash charmer, steered first by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan’s fun book and brought to port by the engaging sixties-style music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. Jack O’Brien’s supple staging and Jerry Mitchell’s energetic and period-style choreography are as effective as ever, as is the largely new supporting cast. I was particularly taken by the new sprightly pair of lovers Jennifer Gambatese and Chester Gregory II and Richard H Blake as Tracy’s aspirant rocker swain.
Those tapping feet are to be stilled and all those glittering spangles abandoned when, on January 2, the revival of that quintessential Broadway musical, 42nd Street ends its Broadway run. To give the three-year-old warhorse a final spur in the last lap, the producers have brought in the mother and son team of Shirley Jones and Patrick Cassidy. Jones plays the temperamental diva Dorothy Brock, while her son plays Julian Marsh, the almost washed-up director whose last chance at career redemption apparently rests on the show she is moodily headlining.
Jones has not been on Broadway for nearly 40 years - the last time was an ill-fated musical Maggie Flynn with her then husband, the late Jack Cassidy - and will be best remembered for starring in such film musicals as Oklahoma! and Carousel.
To be painfully frank, she is not now up to this current assignment. She sings gallantly but her voice is past its best, way past, and although her acting has a certain sweetness and honesty, her movements look more stately than sprightly. On the other hand, Cassidy is very good indeed - he has something of that dangerous glint and odd pale glitter that once made his father so effective on Broadway, together with a powerful presence all his own.
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