2004: The Musical Year in Review
The first major musical opening of the year was the revival of Fiddler on the Roof, and it remains with us as the year closes. The latest Fiddler was greeted by divided opinion, some finding it overly naturalistic and somewhat denatured, others maintaining that the production was as rewarding as earlier Fiddlers. As frequently happens, I couldn't help comparing it to what I recall as a heartier original. Alfred Molina was certainly right for Tevye, yet fell short of joining the roster of the finest interpreters of the role. I suspect that this Fiddler might become more of an event in 2005, when Harvey Fierstein and Andrea Martin take over.
Productions of musicals at New York City Opera tend to look underrehearsed, and its March revival of Sweeney Todd was no exception. Opinions were divided on the merits of the revival's raison d'etre, baritone Mark Delevan in the title role. But any production that brings Elaine Paige back to New York is going to be okay with me. I failed to see the point of Johnny Guitar, as the camp-classic film that was its source is inevitably more amusing albeit unintentionally than any attempt to spoof it.
The last week in March brought in two of the year's musical high points. First came Encores!' production of the Gershwins' forgotten Pardon My English, in a delirious staging that featured fine work from Brian d'Arcy James, Emily Skinner, and Jennifer Laura Thompson. Pardon My English demonstrated that unadulterated silliness can, in the right hands, be blissful. It was Encores! functioning at its best.
There was more bliss to come with Lincoln Center Theater's presentation of Barbara Cook's Broadway, a richly rewarding evening of golden-age theatre songs. No musical moment of 2004 was more memorable than Cook's hushed, wounded rendition of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "This Nearly Was Mine." But then it's probably foolish to single out one number from the evening, as "His Face," "Time Heals Everything," "Among My Yesterdays," or "Mister Snow" were just about as strong. The concert was New York's last chance to see Cook's wonderful partner in song, arranger-accompanist Wally Harper.
An unexpected delight was Irish Repertory Theater's Finian's Rainbow. Unexpected because one hadn't counted on the lush score sounding so good with the accompaniment of only pianos, or on the strength of a book that many had thought dicey. Of course, it helped that the production had the services of two of our most gifted musical-theatre performers, Malcolm Gets and Melissa Errico.
The Roundabout did New York a service by bringing back Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassins. If I was less impressed with the revival than were most critics, that's probably because I loved the show the first time around 1991, when almost no one else did. But clearly the show's time had come, and we're fortunate that the Roundabout has the wherewithal to present full-scale revivals of difficult musicals for engagements of only a couple of months.
As a lover of serious, operatic musicals, Caroline, or Change would seem to have been just my sort of show. But seeing it again when it transferred to Broadway in April, I still found the pretentiousness of Tony Kushner's libretto off-putting. Nor did Jeanine Tesori's score really get much better with repeated hearings. In its favor, the show had a fine George C. Wolfe staging and an excellent cast, headed by a vivid Tonya Pinkins. If Caroline, or Change is likely to continue to divide critics and audiences, one can only hope that more musicals as ambitious as Caroline are allowed to get a hearing.
Like the recent Dance of the Vampires and Taboo, Bombay Dreams was another unnecessary import, and it lingered on Broadway considerably longer than it needed to. While the London original was hardly a great musical, it was superior to the New York version, which unfortunately felt the need to annotate the piquant excesses of Bollywood films that were simply evinced, without explanation, in the West End version. Still, I doubt that Bombay Dreams would have received a better Broadway reception had the London version been brought over as is, without Thomas Meehan's revision.
A show that would appear to be a natural for a Broadway revival, Bye Bye Birdie, instead wound up in a middling production that closed the Encores! season. The medium reception it received probably means that Birdie is now off the list of shows to revive in the near future. The same week as Birdie, there was also the Candide concert at Avery Fisher Hall. You will be able to judge it for yourself when it airs on PBS's "Great Performances" in a couple of weeks. I found it a labored affair, with Kristin Chenoweth in expectedly good form but Patti LuPone below par. What might have been one of the year's most intriguing events ---the May 9 New York concert version of Sondheim and Weidman's new musical Bounce--- failed to materialize, leaving one to wonder when and where Bounce will get its inevitable New York premiere.
The summer brought in two major Broadway musicals. First, there was Nathan Lane starring in his own adaptation of Burt Shevelove's version of The Frogs. As a summer frolic, The Frogs was passable, but the expansion of a larkish one-act into a longer evening failed to pay off. Sondheim did supply about half a dozen new songs for the revisal, the first new Sondheim half score heard on Broadway since Passion a decade ago.
Frank Wildhorn's latest, Dracula, was condemned in the press even before it opened. Truth to tell, it was a hard show to admire, as it seriously lacked a point of view on its time-tested material, making fairly unintelligible a story that has worked so well so many times before. All of that flying through the air couldn't convince one that much of interest was going on.
If further evidence was needed, there was Brooklyn to remind veteran musical-theatre followers like myself that the sound of Broadway is changing. In place of well-constructed theatre songs, Brooklyn offered high-powered pop, soul, and r&b, styles that only skilled writers like Henry Krieger and Jonathan Larson have put to effective dramatic use. And Brooklyn was cloying, begging its audience to love its simple fable of faith and determination. Even with the impressive vocals of Eden Espinosa and Ramona Keller, I found Brooklyn almost entirely resistible.
City Opera was back with Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, a negligible revival with some questionable star casting Renee Taylor as the Queen. It was soon erased by the PBS telecast and DVD release of the original 1957 version of the same musical.
Because Amon Miyamoto's Japanese-language production of Pacific Overtures had been well received when it played Lincoln Center in 2002, many were surprised that the same director's attempt at an Englsh-language production of the same show, this one for the Roundabout, was a disappointment. Personally, I wasn't all that impressed with Miyamoto's Japanese version. So the fact that Miyamoto was unable at the Roundabout to elicit a stirring account of one of Sondheim's most rigorously difficult works did not come as a shock to this observer.
This was another of those three-months-and-out Roundabout Sondheim revivals, and it was a noble effort. But for maximum effect, Pacific Overtures requires a more inspired staging than it is currently receiving. Some members of the abundantly talented cast seemed uncertain of how to characterize roles that are often more symbolic than three-dimensional. Would director Gary Griffin Pardon My English's small-scale Chicago/Donmar Warehouse staging of Pacific Overtures --just as lauded in The New York Times as was Miyamoto's 2002 Japanese staging-- have gone over better? We'll never know. In any case, it was good to realize that the original, thrilling Hal Prince/Pat Birch/Florence Klotz/Boris Aronson production can still be experienced on videotape.
La Cage aux Folles was yet another of those revivals that I thought fell short of the original. While still moderately entertaining, Jerry Zaks's production lacked the emotional resonance of Arthur Laurents's original. But with an announced revival of The Wiz nowhere in sight at the moment, the new La Cage would appear to have a good chance of taking the 2005 musical-revival Tony. After all, its only competition looks to be Pacific Overtures which will be long gone by Tony time and the upcoming Sweet Charity.
The year closed with another Irish Rep musical, this one a real rarity, After the Ball, Noel Coward's musicalization of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan. The piece did not benefit by being scaled down, and the production made substantial alteration to the libretto and tunestack of the 1954 original. Still, it was one's only opportunity to collect even a semblance of the show, and Irish Rep deserves credit for attempting a forgotten work by a major talent.