Tom Riley and Bel Powley in Arcadia.(Photo by Carol Rosegg)
By Hap Erstein
Tuesday was an even better weather day in New York, with the temperature climbing into the 80s, and locals shedding their clothes like it was the second coming of summer.
My dance card was busy with interviews and, in the evening, a much-anticipated viewing of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
But first, always in search of a Florida angle on the Broadway season, I met and spoke with three former Boca Raton residents – Philip Morgaman (27 years old), Frankie J. Grande (28) and Brian Kapetanis (28) – high school pals who are the lead producers on the acclaimed new revival of Born Yesterday.
How they wore down playwright Garson Kanin’s estate to get the performance rights to the play when others had previously been turned down, how they raised the $3 million budget and shepherded it from pre-production to rehearsals to a star-studded opening night (yes, even Liza Minnelli attended and endorsed the show) is a great, upbeat story. Stay tuned.
I also stopped by the new 42nd Street Studios to talk with Diane Paulus, director of the Tony-winning revival of Hair, currently on tour, headed back to Broadway this summer and on to the Kravis Center next season. Over her lunch half-hour, she talked about mounting the show, a passion project that has turned into a cash cow.
Somewhere around 1 p.m. I noticed that my cellphone had lapsed into a coma, refused to make or receive calls. But this is New York, so I popped into one of the many AT&T stores, where a friendly, efficient sales/technician staffer performed emergency surgery on the phone and send me on my way with it in working condition in a matter of minutes.
If I could have used it inside the Barrymore Theatre, I could have called for assistance trying to understand Arcadia. Stoppard is my single favorite playwright, but sometimes he packs his scripts so densely with ideas that you feel your head will explode trying to take in all the information and processing it. I’m afraid that is the way I felt about Arcadia, and I had already seen the play, back in 1985 when it had its American premiere at Lincoln Center.
Operating on parallel tracks with characters existing in 1809 England and today, dealing with the laws of thermodynamics and British landscape gardening techniques, there is plenty of Stoppardian wordplay along the way, but also a lot of cerebral thought that eluded me. Worse, I had always heard that the original London production had been an overwhelming emotional experience, but I found both American versions to be dry-eyed head trips.
There was some nice work from the cast – notably Tom Riley, Lia Willams and Miami’s Raul Esparza – but I’m still waiting for a truly satisfying production of what many call Stoppard’s masterwork.