I had a busy day yesterday, seeing two shows and doing two interviews. Finally feel like I’m up to speed with the pace of the city.
First stop was lunch with multiple Tony Award-winning director Jack O’Brien (Hairspray, The Coast of Utopia, Henry IV) at a reliable and convenient theater district joint, Angus McIndoe’s. He’s very smart and articulate, has lots of projects in the works, including a musical about Harry Houdini, to be written by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked) and Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and slated to star Hugh Jackman. It could be terrible and still run to packed houses as long as Jackman is willing to play it.
But the subject of our interview was Catch Me If You Can, a disappointment from last season from the Hairspray creative team that will be touring next year in a non-Equity production and playing the Kravis Center. O’Brien claims it was misunderstood and underappreciated. I think it was a good idea for a musical that went off the rails with the conceit of telling the story as a vintage TV variety show. O’Brien tells me the team will be meeting soon to discuss revisions. Stay tuned.
In the afternoon, I went to one of my favorite shows, timed to the end of the season and the end of a 6-week period of fundraising for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. It’s the Easter Bonnet Competition, now in its 26th year, a celebration by the theater community of itself, in the form of skits by current Broadway show casts — often with a satirical, snarky edge — climaxing with the entrance of an elaborate, oversized bonnet, usually designed and built by the show’s tech crew.
Smash, the inauthentic but addictive TV show about Broadway, came in for some juicy digs, notably in a puppet version by the cast of Avenue Q. Also a standout were the tots from Mary Poppins, featured performing “junior” versions of such kid-inappropriate material as Medea, Macbeth and Sweeney Todd. And the cast of the long-running revival of Chicago, kidding themselves for being long in the tooth.
As I have often felt, if the shows on Broadway were half as clever as the Easter Bonnets skits, the New York theater would be a lot better off. Taking turns emceeing segments of the show were such Broadway luminaries as Jeremy Jordan (Newsies), Raven-Symone (Sister Act), Judith Light and Stacy Keach (Other Desert Cities), Julie Halston (Anything Goes) and Nick Jonas (How to Succeed…).
From there, I hot-footed to the St. James Theatre to interview Sergio Trujillo, choreographer of Jersey Boys — yup, returning to the Kravis Center next season — as well as The Addams Family, Memphis and, currently in previews, Leap of Faith (more about this in a minute). So we went next door to … Angus McIndoe’s, and chatted at the third-floor bar about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
At night, I saw Leap of Faith, but first I had dinner at Kodama, a tiny, but well-located sushi restaurant nearby. While eating, a woman at the next table leaned over, recognizing me. She had run a theater in Washington 20 years earlier when I was writing for a newspaper there in a former life. Anyway, she is working on developing a musical — isn’t everyone? — based on Shakespeare’s Scottish play. Check out www.mthemusical.com and get on her mailing list, but expect her to hit you up for money. Ah, New York.
Then, with fish breath and bated breath, I went to Leap of Faith, yet another show based on a movie, a con man-faith healer yarn that starred Steve Martin and Debra Winger, adapted by composer Alan Menken (Newsies, Sister Act) with Raul Esparza as the flim-flammer.
It’s interesting how many musicals are written about con men — from The Music Man to The Producers, from Catch Me If You Can to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels to this. The reason why, is a doctoral thesis waiting to be written. I’ll defer my opinions on the show until after it opens officially tomorrow night, but suffice it to say that anyone looking for an available theater should look to the St. James soon.