Saturday, the day I arrived, was sunny and slightly brisk. Sunday was continuous rain and much colder. The theater also was inclement.
Few Broadway shows perform on Sunday night, so I headed off-Broadway to the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, where a new musical called The City Club had its final preview prior to opening Monday evening.
With so many shows opening on Broadway at season’s end, it is hard for a small show like this with unknown, largely untested writers to get much attention, but maybe they’ve got the talent and the show will be a sleeper hit.
Well, no. Looking for clues in the program, it was not promising to note that the book writer is also a co-producer, making his theatrical debut with The City Club, a show that he concedes has “been alive in my imagination for eleven years.” None of the three composer-lyricists had ever written a musical before either, but hey, ya gotta start somewhere.
Like with a good idea, and The City Club didn’t have one, or you could not see the potential of the idea through the wince-inducing writing. The show takes place in an unspecified, generic city, where a new jazz and blues club, run by a rookie owner with a father with a murky past, has just opened.
Soon, a black-hatted thug arrives to demand protection money, a crooked police detective muscles his way into part ownership, and the governor is blackmailed into giving the club a casino license. Tough town.
The club is populated with three chorus cuties, frequently parading in their undies, a five-piece onstage band, including pianist Kenny Brawner, the show’s most authentic connection to the blues, a lead singer (Kristen Martin) who once had a thing with the club owner. Soon, a rival singer arrives, Ana Hoffman, to complicate matters romantically.
In between an undistinguished score of 21 songs, violence strikes at the club and the body count mounts, even among the show’s small cast. And if I had to guess, unless the producers of The City Club have deep pockets, this show will soon be the next casualty.
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Also in its final previews, and much more interesting if not completely satisfying is The Columnist, a play by David Auburn (Proof) about ’60s and ’70s newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop.
A closeted homosexual and rabid hawk on the Vietnam War, Alsop was a well-connected, highly influential Washington figure back in the heyday of print journalism. He is brought to life by John Lithgow, with an owlish, patrician performance that fascinates, even while the play never fully makes the case for why we should care.
It almost turns Alsop into a tragic figure, blinded by his ego and need to be right, ending up on the wrong side of history. It almost bridges from the Vietnam War to today’s unpopular conflicts in the Middle East, but ultimately we have to do most of the work on those thematic links.
No, ultimately, it is Alsop himself — his sexual orientation, his marriage of convenience, his competitive relationship with his brother and former co-columnist Stewart, the antagonism with left-leaning reporter David Halberstam — that interests Auburn. The Columnist holds our interest, but I left with the gnawing feeling that the play could have been so much more.