What are you doing next Wednesday, April 30?
Take some time that day and lift a glass to lyricist Sheldon Harnick with a toast of “L’chaim,” for he turns 90 that day. Yesterday morning, I spent some time with Harnick in his Central Park West apartment, interviewing him about his career, pegged to his milestone birthday and the release of a new double-CD retrospective album, Sheldon Harnick: Hidden Treasures, 1949-2013. (Full disclosure: The album was produced and released by Harbinger Records, a label co-founded by Ken Bloom, a high school friend of mine.)
Anyway, Harnick is in good health, is actively writing new songs and excited about a new Broadway-bound revival of Fiddler on the Roof for next season. The show turns 50 later this year.
If the mere mention of Fiddler has you thinking “They don’t write ’em like they used to,” you would have gained ammunition for that opinion by most of the new musicals this season. The advance word on the two I saw yesterday — If/Then and The Bridges of Madison County — was that they were both deeply flawed, redeemed only by the performances of their female leads, Idina Menzel and Kelli O’Hara.
The two performances are indeed terrific, but I was very pleasantly surprised overall by Bridges. Yes, it is based on that best-selling novel of chick-lit twaddle by Robert James Waller, but as adopted by Marsha Norman with an artful score by Jason Robert Brown, it becomes far more palatable, transformed into a tale of considerable emotional weight.
As you may recall — if you admit you read it, or even that you saw the Clint Eastwood-Meryl Streep movie — the plot concerns a frustrated Italian woman stuck in a loveless marriage in Iowa, until a virile National Geographic photographer arrives and they begin an affair, despite their better judgment. O’Hara is superb, and perhaps she will finally receive the Tony she earned but never won for such past work in Light in the Piazza, Pajama Game and Nice Work If You Can Get It.
Almost as good is Steven Pasquale, making his Broadway musical debut as the hunky photographer Robert. The show is doing weak business and probably needs some Tony wins to stay open, but so far, I’d say this is the one that deserves the top Tony and more business.
In the afternoon, I took in — but was not that taken with — If/Then, an original musical from Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writers of Next to Normal. Like Bridges of Madison County, the show’s message is about opening oneself to love and how our lives can be drastically changed by the vagaries of fate.
To illustrate it, though, it looks at a single, independent-minded woman named Elizabeth (Menzel) and how her life choices affect her and all those around her. That was sufficient for one act, but after intermission, the show took a sour turn with several downbeat events — an unexpected death, a sudden airplane crash and relationship break-ups between minor characters we hardly know.
And this all leads to some Hallmark card-deep adages, alas. Still, Kitt and Yorkey have written a lively rock score and a few power ballads for leather-lunged Menzel.
Next: Disney’s Aladdin