MINORITY REPORT

The one play I disliked the most of the past season was Downstate, which to me was a really exploitative, even masturbatory, offensively titillating, false and entirely wrongheaded mea culpa for pedophiles, set in a halfway house inhabited by four of them, which honestly seemed to speak more loudly to the playwright’s fantasy life than any serious, authentic portrayal of this psychopathy. Bruce Norris happens to be the playwright and he also wrote the also wrongly lauded and almost as offensive Pulitzer Prize- winning Clybourne Park, a vapid, nasty, hideously presumptuous and also false, completely unnecessary sequel to Lorraine Hansberry’s masterpiece A raisin in the Sun.

Norris won the traditionally suspect Pulitzer drama prize for that glib tripe which purported to address racism. What it really did, like so many white male playwrights taking on the topic, such as David Mamet with his god-awful Race, was merely exploit it – and very noisily – for cheap laughs and even cheaper highly implausible melodrama. Two of the molesters here (played by the volatile Glenn Davis and ticking time bomb Eddie Torres) are Latino and brimming with machismo, one is black and flamboyantly gay ( K. Todd Freeman) and, while I’m sure Norris did not mean them to be racial stereotypes, such appears to be his limited real experience of diversity, I venture, that they are, cartoonishly so.

Exploitation would appear to be the glib name of the game of Norris on everything, including pedophilia, and his play’s intrinsic baseness was screamingly evident in the moment I was waiting for and dreading, which inevitably happened: the salacious, graphically detailed description by the central pedophile, Frank, unsubtly performed by Fred Guinan, in a wheelchair (see how he’s paid for his sins?) to be as Aw-shucks Midwestern nice-guy as Mr Rogers (that direction is in the text, positing a contrived “see, ANYBODY could be guilty of messing with kids, you never know!”), of his seduction of Andy, the twelve year old minor, who has returned as an adult, enacted by Tim Hopper, who I’m sure was not directed to play him like Charlie Brown but does, replete with a bossy Lucy-type wife (Sally Murphy, trying to make a meal of nada), to confront him.

Old school magazine gay porn before all that became truly cancelled was once rife with this sort of oh-so wrong molester boner food and it was frankly appalling to hear it resurface in such a context at Playwrights (Being Oh-so Edgy) Horizons. While I watched in silent fury, I could almost imagine the playwright having himself with the hand that wasn’t tapping a keyboard or scribbling on a legal pad, it was so discomfitingly TMI which I suppose was exactly what this brazenly shameless, manipulative dramatist desired. Thinking back on it now, he may very well have cribbed that passage from old 1980s-early 1990s issues of Stroke, Manscape, Honcho and Drummer.

I mean, who’s to say?

Me, that’s who, and I have a partner who once wrote that kind of similar stuff for those very magazines.

Pam McKinnon’s direction seemed to spotlight the work’s deficiencies and offensiveness, although she maneuvered her little crowd of actors – one in a wheelchair – adroitly on Todd Rosenthal’s claustrophobically enclosed, convincingly lived-in set.

There’s no gainsaying the cast’s courage, forceful energy and staunch commitment to the shoddy material handed to them. And it was their text that had me wincing for them throughout, viewing all that admirable but misplaced effort, trying to inhabit characters made of cardboard and emptiness. There is the inevitable suicidal which only cheaply evoked that grandmother of such scenes: the lesbian character hanging herself in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour.

K. Todd Freeman delighted the audience as Dee, the campy, noisome designated caretaker to crippled Fred, and was to become the first of a plethora of effeminate, over the top genetically male black characters which kept popping up in show after show on Broadway this season. (Call it the “Strange Loop” effect, or “And a Dark Diva Drag Queen will Lead Them.”) Dee has worshipped Diana Ross forever and spewed verbal hosannas to her queen at the drop of a hat but I wish Norris had given her a more original idol than this easy, obvious choice, blowing the chance to educate his audience about the likes of so many lesser known but infinitely intriguing ladies of somewhat more substance than glitz, from Ethel Waters, Florence Mills and Fredi Washington to Etta James, Martha Reeves and Teena Marie (who was honorary funky white girl black, always). “Your talent lies in your choice,” was the mantra of the great acting teacher Stella Adler and this is a case in point of that, in terms of Norris’ basic lack of real artistry.

The one real stand-out in the cast for me was its quietest but easily most convincing and original character, Susanna Guzman as the men’s parole officer. She brought a bone-tired authenticity to her low-key but passionate, deftly drawn portrait of a public servant, a tough cookie indeed, but stretched to the limits of her empathy and energy, and a welcome oasis of realness in the midst of an arid, overheated desert of synthetic sturm und drang.

INTO THE WOODS AND PURE, FUNNY ENCHANTMENT

What is one of the happiest experiences possible in life? For me,  it is the sight and sound of 1,900 people all conjoined in a special place called musical comedy heaven, everyone rapturously beaming away in the darkness, febrilely attuned to every clever line or lyric,  laughing with total abandon and wafted to an opulent  paradise of  entertainment.  It is, really, the rarest of events, when somehow all the different elements of book, songs, performers, director and design meld into a thrilling whole, with the air in Times square positively crackling with excitement from a preview of  “The Producers,” or either of the last two “Kiss Me Kate” or “She Loves Me” Broadway revivals, “Hamilton,” of course, and, earlier this year, “A Strange Loop.” 

To that privileged short list, add the  revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, which after the briefest of runs as an Encores! Production, was so deliriously received that it was transferred to Boadway’s St. James Theater. For we, once ink-stained, now laptop tapped-out wretches who sometimes feel, like the adage says, that we really should have been more careful, with that wish we all shared to be, at least,  a small  observational part of New York theater because so much of it just blows, this revival was a particular godsend after suffering through three resuscitations of shows which by all rights, should have been nothing but delightful – Company, Funny Girl, The Music Man – and were anything but. 

However, this time, this show,. brilliantly directed by Lear DeBessonet, with a heavy lean into the comic aspects of the work, thoroughly mined by a sterling mix of the  finest musical comedy performers in the world, has definitely provided that special kick to a lucky summer audience.  Besides making it an almost non-stop laugh-fueled comedy bonanza, hands down the FUNNIEST show on Broadway, the actors also get full, soaringly thrilling value out of Sondheim’s rich score, and manage to artfully improve the clever but incessantly arch Lapine book, in the process.

Julia “A Star is Born” Lester‘s corrosively funny Red Riding Hood is a literal scream; Gavin Creel and Joshua Henry are an ideally cast pair of patrician dicks as the two princes;  the blessedly ever-employed, always endearing Annie Golden lives up to her surname, as she always has, no matter the show, playing the parts of devoured Grandma, Cinderella’s sage mom in a tree, and the Giant’s scary-ass wife. David Patrick Kelly’s ingratiating clowning actually makes something bearable of the usually unbearably smug narrator/Mysterious Man). I have always found the show only glibly funny at best, but everybody here found their comedic sweet spot and made the whole thing a very melodic, veritable laugh riot. And, although I have always found the dramatic side of this show to be synthetic and dismayingly preachy, I found myself catching my breath at the heartbreaking urgency Patina Miller, quite spectacular here as The Witch, brought to her fraught encounter with her daughter, Rapunzel (Alysia Velez ),  moved by the Everyman soulfulness Brian D’arcy James embodied as The Baker (his choir boy face, a definite asset) and wondering if Sara Bareilles may possibly have been just a little better than the brilliant Joanna Gleason, doing her 11 o’clock number “Moments in the Woods.”

And, finally what this revival had that no other –  and I am also including the original production – possessed was a plethora of beauty to be gazed upon. By this,I don’t mean David Rockwell’s attractive but minimal set design, although I will give it to Andrea Hood’s  wonderfully observed and very performance-savvy costumes, which included a few absolute knockouts. The beauty I am really referring to is that of the actors, themselves, in a cast that is remarkable for its blessedly diverse individuality. The soul-satisfying visual magic is in the soaring cheekbones of Philipa Soo’s charmingly flatfooted Cinderella, forever tumbling to the floor in a glorious welter of burnished orange tulle.It’s in the way Joshua Henry so strappingly fits into his Prince’s dashing mufti, and when Miller’s impassioned Witch makes her sleek-haired glamorous transformation, poured into a dazzling purple brocade pant-dress, I literally gasped at her entrance because, with that SICK body of hers, and the way she insinuated it across the stage, always in hyperactive motion because of all the things she frustratingly needs and wants, she is unquestionably the most beautiful woman on the planet. Velez brings more graceful loveliness in a knockout pink chiffon frock, with her every lyrical,  lilting vocal emission. Her warbling, in that mythically high tower with her mythically long hair,  is also amusing in the way that, whenever Miller hears her daughter’s voice, wafting through the woods, the mother in her is, hilariously, instantly transfixed by the sound, as she sways in time to lilt. 

The visual felicity of the show, as well as its alchemic efficacy reaches its apex in the astonishingly expressive handsomeness of the extraordinary Kennedy Kanagawa, who is Milky White the Cow or, more accurately, the eminently skilled  puppeteer who manipulates her. The luminously droll enchantment of the show seems almost encompassed in him, starting with the wonderful free notion of child’s play with a puppet, on his part, to begin with, as well as that necessary suspension of belief on our, the audience’s part, to even believe in and accept the admittedly quite brilliant contraption he wields to such sublime effect. It’s really a double performance, for this cow and her manipulator both react simultaneously to varying events and people throughout the play. The physical and emotional harmoniousness of this is endearingly funny, but funnier still is what happens when they disagree in their reactions and the meta mutual shock and hilarity ensuing from that evokes Michael Redgrave, at his greatest in Dead of Night, playing that legendary  ventriloquist who goes mad after completely losing control over the  abusive puppet upon which his very livelihood depends. 

Redgrave was never more extraordinary, electrifying, really, then, in that, and so is Kanagawa now in this, giving, truly, one of the greatest, most unique displays of stage  mastery I expect I will ever see. The young actor had, amazingly, never done puppetry before and to say he took to it like a duck to water seems almost paltry in light of his near-holy commitment to this art, and the inarguable holiness of the results, where you see great acting and great puppetry seamlessly combined. The one essential thing which Kanagawa must have possessed, going in,  was the most exquisitely unerring timing, evident in the way he whips Milky White around the stage in the heat of many a fraught dramatic moment and then brings her to a sudden halt, with a cocked neck and quizzical eyes,as if to say: “Okay, what now?”

Even that adorable cow, designed by James Ortiz possesses the uncanny beauty I mentioned, which overflows from this Into the Woods, and is all the more awe-inspiring for the way the many who possess it seem unconscious of it; there is no preening from this cast, of actors, no less! Indeed, how could they have the time for it, as this show is constantly on the move, with Kanagawa the most active, I’m sure, with his double beauty duty.

Zeroing in on the particular splendor he brings to an already overloaded table of gorgeousness, is the intriguing way he, always in service to the text, is so blindingly versatile, going from an unimaginably diverse expressiveness of every possible human (or cow) emotion, to , during the show’s rare, more serene moments of calm, with his udderly delightful charge finally at rest, a quite rapturous, somnolent deadpan which evoked no less than the incomparable beauty of the young Buster Keaton to me, appropriate as this performance is also a silent one. 

Suddenly Rob McClure is Seymour (with a luxury assist from Christian Borle)

Rob McClure has been a modern-day musical comedy treasure for some time now and I wanted to catch him in the long-running revival of Little Shop of Horrors at the West Side Theater. He did not disappoint, serving up great musical chops, hilarious physical comedy and a special quality he has always had that no amount of stage success or schooling can buy – his innately deep humanity. That is, perhaps his greatest and most essential gift of all to the role of Seymour, the nebbishy florist who finally finds success when he cultivates Audrey 2, a uniquely mammoth specimen of flora which, unbeknownst to all but Seymour, demands human blood for it to thrive. 

The carnivorous weed, impressively gargantuan and every color of the rainbow, becomes a media sensation and suddenly customers are flocking to the once moribund tiny shop owned by crotchety Mr. Mushnick, who adopted the orphan Seymour as a child.  The new star of the store is named after Audrey, his sexy co-worker, and also  the woman Seymour secretly loves, played by  another longtime New York musical favorite Tammy Blanchard, who was so sidesplitting funny as the cluelessly imperious bimbo in How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, breathes fulsome life into this rather noxiously underwritten part in lyricist Howard Ashman‘s book, based on the Roger Corman 1960 horror potboiler which featured a very young Jack Nicholson in a minor role. Blanchard endows Audrey with her full arsenal of urban moxie and casual voluptuousness, as well as her own distinctive rubber-limbed farcical wizardry, moving across the stage at times with seemingly every arm and leg splayed out in different directions, and then there’s her rousing huge belt of a voice (which puts over her songs, the winsome Somewhere That’s Green and the anthemic Suddenly Seymour, in such a way as to shake the rafters of this intimate theater). There actually exists today a few physically gifted actresses in comedy, in the honorable tradition of Lucy and rangy laugh hunter Rosalind Russell, plus all those silent screen comediennes who soundlessy spoke with their hyperactive Jazz Age flapper bodies like Colleen Moore, Bebe Daniels, Constance Talmadge, Clara Bow and Marion Davies… and then there is Blanchard, whose ANKLES can expressively tell a story. With her own earthy likability, she and McClure have a quirkily convincing chemistry which goes a long way in putting over this show, which has always been half semi-delicious diversion and half too dark and weird, a real bummer by its end, as tragedy after tragedy befalls the cast.  

Blanchard, indeed, has her work cut out for her because if any show tried to promote a heroine like Audrey today, rather than in 1982, the year of its inception, its cancellation would be imminent, provided it even got produced in the first place.. For Audrey has basically one single component to her human makeup – she’s a victim. And, one could surmise, a masochist, the master of her fate being her boyfriend Orin, this creep of a sadistic dentist, who is responsible for the bruises and black eye she tries to conceal at work. Besides that roaring monster Audrey 2, which would have frightened the pee out me as a kid, it’s another aspect of Little Shop which really prevents it from being the adorable, family-friendly show it’s often touted to be by its various producers over the years. To put it bluntly, Audrey is no kind of leading lady I would like to expose my young daughter to – if I had one-and the fanciful musical comedy  context, where anything goes and even bad things can be softened into the dippily unreal, isn’t sufficient cushioning or adequate justification for her upsetting moments of being a human punching bag for Orin, thereby putting the show in the same dubious light as Carousel which, for all its great music, still posits a perpetual -if doomed – wife-beater, Billy Bigelow, as its hero.

As that horrible dentist, Christin Borle, in a bit of luxury casting, finds the perfect showcase for his trademark frenetic energy, amusingy playing a slew of other characters as well. His deadly encounter with McClure’s Seymour is a definite, if grisly, highlight of the show with two physically adept and attuned stage farceurs at the top of their game, performing this nastiness with the perfect skill and aplomb of some legendary comic duo (which, come to think of it, they come mighty close to being here). It becomes delirious, ever more gruesome fun, as they hectically try to outdo/kill each other in song and schtick, until Borle eventually succumbs to an interminable laughing fit on too much nitrous oxide, finally kicking the bucket after a few self-indulgent false alarms, in the most hysterically protracted, over the top death scene I have ever witnessed on any stage. Earlier, in the show,too, he was very funny as a dizzy lady customer, capturing a certain type of NYC deep-pocketed dingbat, forever ostentatiously window shopping or browsing, but rarely ever buying anything, to perfection.  

Aaron Arnell Harrington gives thunderously unnerving voice to the ravenous Audrey 2, here a skillfully manipulated large-scale plant puppet, with the jaws of death snapping shut tightly over her  sundry victims. I did enjoy the more lighthearted first half, but I guess I had forgotten just how dark this show becomes in the second with its nihilistic violence, revengeful plotting and surfeit of death taking over. The book’s dank underbelly dominates the final scenes, as that media interest in Audrey 2 begets financial success for both Seymour and the shop, while the plant’s wacko power and influence over our hapless, helpless hero burgeons, devastatingly claiming almost as many crucial victims by the end of the show as Hamlet, with its corpse-covered finale. The climax is a too facile and edgy nightmare of world domination – reflective of the paranoia of the 1950s over Communists, the atomic bomb, space invaders, you name it, when the original film was made – in the hands, or should I say leaves, of Audrey 2, who never met a man she didn’t like (to eat). The finale feels random and rushed, also quite cold and callous, closing things out on a particularly grim and sour note.  

Stuart Zagnit gives a competent if none too original performance as a stock Mr. Mushnik, and, while the three young ladies (Khalifa White, Cristina Rae and Khadija Sankoh) who form the girl group-like Greek chorus, a notion handily revived for Hairspray, bring a ton of energetic spirit to the proceedings, at this unbridled point in a long run, they often bring it so vigorously and variously, that they sometimes seem to be performing in three different shows.