Most of my theater-obsessed friends here in New York are pretty depressed by the state of this season’s crop of musicals. And it is easy to see why, based solely on the two shows I saw Wednesday.
At the matinee, I saw a superlative production of Porgy and Bess, one of the great “they-don’t-write-em-like they-used-to” pieces of musical theater, hailing from 1935. And representing what passes for a new musical today, Wednesday night I saw Once, a terminally slight love story that is every bit as uninvolving as the 2006 low-budget film it is based on, but an hour longer in running time.
This production of Porgy and Bess, officially and superfluously known as The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, has been shrouded in controversy ever since its director, Diane Paulus (Tony winner for Hair) and adapter Suzan-Lori Parks (Pulitzer Prize winner for Topdog/Underdog) raised eyebrows for early interviews about how they were going to fix the show’s problems, which included an attempt to tack on a happy ending.
Sanity has since been restored, although this production has been edited down to two-and-a-half hours, with some score edits and script changes that continue to drive purists crazy.
But to carp about this still-magnificent show, with two terrific performances by four-time Tony winner Audra McDonald (as drug-fixated fallen woman Bess) and Norm Lewis (as pitifully lame-footed Porgy) and that towering Gershwin score, is to deserve the deeply undramatic Once, with its cardboard-thin love couple — known generically as (sigh) Guy and Girl — and its tinny, painfully simple folk-rock songs.
Its story concerns a Dublin busker/vacuum cleaner repairman (no, really) and a Czech woman who comes into his life, but never quite accepts the fact that they should be a couple. They do, however, make music together and eventually record some of it, but almost none of these songs — written by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the writers and stars of the movie version — have much theatrical quotient.
Surely this show has its proponents, but I couldn’t discern a pulse. I left the Jacobs Theatre on Wednesday night even more convinced that this season’s Tony winner for best musical will be Newsies. That is further proof that it was a bad season for musicals, but at least Newsies cannot be faulted for its energy level, while Once is a soporific snooze.