Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,
at Broadway's Belasco Theatre
Gratuitous Violins rating: **1/2 out of ****

Before Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown recedes to a distant memory, here's my bottom line: it wasn't a great musical but I had a good time. Seeing Patti LuPone, Laura Benanti and Brian Stokes Mitchell in the same show was a treat, even if I didn't feel totally swept up in the story.

The book, by Jeffrey Lane, is based on the Pedro Almodovar movie about a group of women in Madrid in 1987 who are driven to the breaking point by the men in their lives. While I've never seen the film I knew the musical, with a score by David Yazbek, was supposed to be a dark comedy, with over-the-top characters and a convoluted plot in the style of a telenovela.

Gazpacho also plays a big role in the musical - there's a recipe for it on the show's curtain. Since I don't speak Spanish I didn't understand all of the ingredients and the key word: frio. (It means cold, which is how the soup is served.) So the symbolism kind of escaped me.

The main character in Women on the Verge, played by Sherie Rene Scott, is Pepa, an actress who makes a living dubbing foreign films. She's distraught after her longtime boyfriend, Ivan (a very suave Mitchell), abruptly breaks up with her, via a message on her answering machine.

At the same time her good friend Candela, a frantic, not-too-bright model played by Benanti, is in a troubled relationship of her own: she fears that her boyfriend may be a terrorist, and she comes to Pepa for help.

Also in the mix are LuPone as Ivan's mentally unstable wife, Lucia; a charming Justin Guarini as Carlos, Ivan and Lucia's son; Nikka Graff Lanzarone as Marisa, Carlos' domineering fiancee; De'Adre Aziza as Paulina, a take-charge lawyer; and Mary Beth Peil as the sweet concierge in Pepa's apartment building. There's also Danny Burstein as the helpful taxi driver who chauffeurs Pepa around town.

Unfortunately as Pepa, Scott doesn't really stand out in this ensemble and I felt she was miscast. Her performance seemed a little flat, while everyone else was operating at a faster speed, more zany and memorable. Although she does have a nice solo number, "Mother's Day," that I thought was poignant.

In contrast, Benanti was an absolute delight as Candela. She was hilarious and truly seemed to capture the outrageous style that I was expecting from the musical. She made the story interesting and exciting to watch in a way that Pepa never did for me.

I also liked LuPone, whose Lucia lurked in the background, disguised in a series of large hats as she searched for Ivan. It was funny and at the same time, a sad story about an abandoned wife. Of course she has a big solo, "Invisible," which the audience ate up, myself included.

As the smooth-talking Ivan, Mitchell doesn't have a lot to do but he also gets a song, "Yesterday, Tomorrow and Today." This was my first time hearing him perform live - and I have to say it was pretty incredible. What a deep, powerful voice. I can't believe he's the same actor I used to watch as Dr. "Jackpot" Jackson on Trapper John M.D.

Despite a terrific performance from Benanti and the thrill of hearing Mitchell and LuPone, Women on the Verge seemed to be lacking something. I was entertained but I wasn't captivated. I don't know, maybe Bartlett Sher wasn't the right director for this musical. Maybe it just wasn't wacky enough.

Yazbek's score didn't leave a lasting impression and despite Burstein's opening number, "Madrid," I didn't feel transported to the Spanish capital or like I was in some kind of English-language version of a Spanish soap opera. (The song is a lively ensemble number that's supposed to set the tone but it contains some cringe-worthy lyrics involving mother's milk.)

In the Playbill, Almodovar says his films from the 1980s, coming a decade after the establishment of democracy in Spain, "reflect that explosion of freedom which illuminated everything. You could say that even grief was joyful."

Grief and joy sprinkled with a touch of craziness against the backdrop of Spain emerging from dictatorship. I get it. Unfortunately, I don't think the musical version of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown truly got it.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Gratuitous Violins rating: **** out of ****

I planned to take in the Broadway revival of Joe Turner's Come and Gone even before the president and first lady decided to drop by the Belasco Theatre for a date night. (Sadly, they beat me there by a week!)

I'd never seen a play by August Wilson and I figured that was a serious gap in my theatergoing experience. So I was excited when this production was announced.

And according to his widow, Constanza Romero, Joe Turner, the second in Wilson's Century Cycle chronicling the African-American experience, was the playwright's favorite of all his works. It was first produced on Broadway in 1988, with a cast that included L. Scott Caldwell (Rose, from Lost), Angela Bassett (in her first and only Broadway appearance. Come back!) and Delroy Lindo.

Still, by the time last Saturday night rolled around, I was feeling a bit of trepidation. I knew Joe Turner was nearly three hours long and it was my second show of the day - my fourth since Thursday. A little bit of theatre fatigue was setting in.

Well, I needn't have worried. I was totally swept up by this production from beginning to end. There is nothing like great storytelling and compelling characters to give a slightly weary theatergoer her second wind.

Joe Turner takes place in 1911 in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse operated by Seth and Bertha Holly, played with immense warmth by Ernie Hudson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson. They're a long-married couple who know each other's habits all too well.

Scenic designer Michael Yeargan has created a sparse but homey kitchen with a massive oak table in the center and a small, plant-filled garden lining the edge of the stage. The smokestacks of Pittsburgh's steel mills form a backdrop.

The Hollys' boardinghouse is a stopping point in the Great Migration of black people from the South to the North in the decades after the Civil War. They were seeking a better life, trying to find their place in a new world that was not very welcoming, in which prejudice and discrimination persisted.

Seth Holly, who grew up in the North, the son of a free black man, is one of the characters we get to know the best and Hudson, who I knew from the 1984 movie Ghost Busters, gives one of my favorite performances. Another character describes him as a "windbag" and he can be a bit disdainful of the attitudes of some of those new arrivals. But he's a good man and it's so sad to see how racism stands in the way of his ambitions.

Andre Holland made me smile with his sweet portrayal of Jeremy Furlow, one of those young ex-Southerners, an aspiring musician who fancies himself a ladies man. Roger Robinson gives a memorable, Tony-winning performance as Bynum Walker, an elderly rootworker who helps give the play a supernatural element.

And Chad L. Coleman is powerful as the mysterious and taciturn Herald Loomis, who has spent four years searching for his wife. His arrival at the boardinghouse one day with his shy young daughter, Zonia, played by Amari Rose Leigh, sets tumultuous events in motion.

One of the things I found so enthralling about Joe Turner's Come and Gone is the way Wilson packs so much of the African-American experience into the play. But he does it in a way that seems organic and natural, never forced. Bit by bit we learn more about his characters and their varied stories - where they come from, what their dreams are, the obstacles in their way.

There are also moments of great laughter and joy - like the West African juba dance in the first act and the way a neighbor boy, Reuben Scott, played by a very cute Michael Cummings, skips offstage after kissing Zonia.

Bartlett Sher, who helmed this Lincoln Center Theater production, has gotten quite a bit of attention, some of it negative, for being the first white director of an August Wilson play on Broadway.

I don't have the cultural background or theatre expertise to judge whether Sher's race made a difference. All I can say is, I was moved by the performances in Joe Turner's Come and Gone and I thought the story was riveting.

As I usually do, I went to the stage door afterward to get my Playbill signed. And I made sure to tell every cast member that this was my first time seeing an August Wilson play and I thought it was wonderful.

I was especially hoping to get Roger Robinson's signature because I knew he was favored to win the Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Play. The show ended at about 11 and he didn't emerge until nearly midnight. I'd almost given up hope but I was told he'd had visitors backstage and he was often the last one out.

Finally, he came and I told him how much I enjoyed myself, that this was my first August Wilson play. He said, "Well, I hope it won't be your last."

No, Mr. Robinson, it certainly won't be my last.

Bartlett Sher and August Wilson

An article this week by Patrick Healy in The New York Times discusses the controversy over the selection of a director for August Wilson's play Joe Turner's Come and Gone. This is the first time a play of Wilson's has been produced on Broadway with a white director, Tony-winner Bartlett Sher.

Wilson, who died in 2005, always insisted that African-Americans direct major productions of his works. He felt black directors could best interpret his plays, which deal with African-American life in the 20th century. And he wanted to provide them with opportunities that were sorely lacking on Broadway. His widow, Constanza Romero, gave the go-ahead for Sher to direct this Lincoln Center revival.

I haven't seen the play, so I can't comment on whether or not Sher was a good choice. (Broadway & Me weighs in with, as usual, a terrific and perceptive review.) But I can see both sides of the issue.

It seems to me that you're going to be pretty limiting if you start assigning shows to directors based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.

A good director should be able to direct a play that might be the furthest thing from his or her own personal experience. That should include African-Americans directing plays with white casts. And Asian-American and Latino directors, too. Who knows, perhaps their interpretation will bring something new and vital to the table.

Look at a few recent examples: Annie Dorsen directed Passing Strange on Broadway, the story of a young African-American man; and Kate Whoriskey is directing Ruined off-Broadway, about the lives of women in the African nation of Congo. Both are white. Thomas Kail, who as far as I know isn't Latino, directed In the Heights, about a Latino neighborhood in New York City.

Still, I understand what Wilson was trying to achieve - a body of work that would be performed and presented by African-Americans, both onstage and backstage.

In the examples I just mentioned it would have been nice to include some of the African-American directors who have helmed shows on Broadway with largely white casts but I don't know if there are any, at least not recently.

That, it seems to me, is the heart of the matter - the lack of black directors - not only on Broadway, which is, after all, a pretty small place, but off-Broadway and in regional theatres all across the country. (And while we're at it, what about stagehands and choreographers and costume and set and lighting and sound designers?)

It would be great if Lincoln Center, now that it's broken the color barrier with Joe Turner's Come and Gone, would do its part. Andre Bishop, the artistic director, seems to understand. In the Times article, he says, “This experience has started a conversation about opportunities for black directors, and I’m taking it very seriously.”

I hope he does take it seriously because honestly, I think as theatergoers, we'd all benefit from a diversity of voices and experiences - both onstage and behind the scenes.

Some of the comments on the Times' site have been critical of Wilson's widow for allowing Sher to direct the play. But Romero is his sole executor and I have to believe that she and Wilson discussed what would happen after his death. Romero alludes to this in a 2007 Seattle Times article:

"I lived long enough with August to feel I knew what he wanted done with his work. ... Before he died we touched base on a few things. He understood I had to make decisions that would benefit his body of work, his legacy."

Sher excitement

The New York Times had nice package of stories yesterday in its spring theater preview. There was also a great profile by Alex Witchel in the magazine of director Bartlett Sher.

I didn't know that much about Sher, and what I thought I knew turned out to be wrong. I thought he was British, because I knew there was a British actor named Antony Sher, and I figured they were brothers. Well, he's not and they're not. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. (I did learn that his name is pronounced sheer, he grew up in California, his parents went through a nasty divorce, and as a child, he broke an unusually high number of bones).

Currently, Sher is in rehearsals for Lincoln Center's revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacfic. I'm thrilled that I'll be in the audience next month for South Pacific, which begins previews on Saturday and opens April 3.

It'll be a trio of firsts: the first-ever Broadway revival of the show, plus my first time at Lincoln Center. And while I grew up watching Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals like Cinderella, Oklahoma and The King and I on television, this will be my first time watching one on stage.

Brendan Lemon, the New York theater critic for the Financial Times, is writing a backstage blog for South Pacific on the Lincoln Center Web site. In his latest post, on Feb. 20, he says that the show is now in "tech hell," with working days lasting until nearly midnight.

For me, what's most interesting is the extent to which the creative team is going to make South Pacific historically accurate, and Sher's comments on what the musical offers to an audience that, by and large, no longer remembers World War II.

In the midst of scene analysis, dance and movement work, the cast has been given a short history lesson on the war in the Pacific, Lemon writes. They've heard from professional historians and veterans of World War II.

Sarna Lapine, the assistant director, is South Pacific's unofficial on-site historian. "For the current assignment, I spent four days in Washington doing research primarily at the Naval Historical Society. I talked to people from the Marine Armory in Brooklyn, who've helped us find people to help instruct the cast in things like how to handle a weapon."

Lapine adds that she showed the script to her brother Seth, a Marine Corps major who's served in Iraq, and the two have discussed it in detail. "In many ways, he's been the most valuable resource I had as I went about trying to help everybody understand what it's like to be in the Navy -- an organization with so many rules and regulations."

For his part, Sher believes that South Pacific has a great deal of relevance for Americans in 2008. "I would say that, more than any single piece I've ever worked on, as an American artist I have been impressed by the depth and resonance and contemporary intelligence of the piece."

While race, and racism, play a big part in South Pacific's story, Sher focuses more on what he views as the central difference between America in the 1940s and America in 2008.

"In order to understand the world of South Pacific," he says, "you have to have an innate understanding of national sacrifice. You have to realize that as a nation in the 1940s we were all involved in the same struggle. We were all connected to the same thing. And the one thing we know now is that we are never connected to the same thing. We have almost no idea that there's a war going on, we don't feel connected to it, we don't feel any sense of shared sacrifice - none of it."

I think Sher brings up a fascinating point. South Pacific ran on Broadway for 1,925 performances, from 1949 to 1954. Memories of World War II were still fresh in people's minds, and it was a war that touched every American.

I haven't seen any of the plays, and very few of the movies and documentaries, that have been written about the war in Iraq. For most Americans, they have a very different feel - of outsiders looking in. I'm not sure that any work today - whether it's for the theater, movies or television - could create the same shared experience that the audiences for South Pacific had a half-century ago.