My time in New York is coming to a close, but fortunately I saw two first-rate shows today that have Tony Award written all over them. The likely winner for Best Play is The Assembled Parties by Richard Greenberg (previously best-known for Take Me Out), who stubbed his toe earlier this season with the short-lived new adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Assembled Parties, by contrast, is a major new play that is smart, articulate, has substance yet is very funny. It is two snapshots of an Upper West Side Jewish family, seen at Christmas, 1980 ― as that actor President Ronald Reagan is about to take office ― then 20 years later, on the eve of the presidency of George W. Bush. Politics is an element of the play, but it is really about family, about expectations that are not realized and a yearning for an earlier era (a theme that is also explored in Vanya and Sonia and Masha, etc.)
In an apartment big enough to get lost in, we meet the Bascovs, an affluent family whose moorings will be tested by the vagaries of life, fate and misfortune.
The matriarch of the clan is Julie (Jessica Hecht), busy preparing holiday dinners as if such hospitality efforts could cement the family and keep them from the challenges that lurk just beyond their doorway. Hecht carries the play’s emotional through line, but Judith Light steals the production as her practical, Yiddish-slinging sister-in-law, who delivers a stunning second-act monologue about a family heirloom. The play comes from Manhattan Theatre Club, so its run is limited, but that could change with some well-earned Tony wins.
And the front-runner for the Best Musical Revival is certainly Diane Paulus’s new spin on Stephen Schwartz’s faux-historical yarn of one young man’s quest for meaning in his life, 1973’s Pippin. Paulus has reinvented the show with an overlay of circus acts and magic tricks, which sounds hokey but works more often than not.
Patina Miller (of Sister Act) inherits the seductive role of Leading Player that made Ben Vereen a star, but the show is swiped away from her by Andrea Martin as Pippin’s grandmother. She really only has one scene of consequence, but it earns a mid-song standing ovation.
Paulus is artistic director of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater who made her Broadway debut just a few years ago. But she has already won Tony Awards for her first two efforts ― Hair and Porgy and Bess ― and looks poised to three-peat with Pippin.
Tomorrow: One last show, a new musical about (gulp) Alzheimer’s, and then I fly back to Florida.