For the runup to the Tony Awards on Sunday, ArtsPaper’s Hap Erstein takes a series of looks at the shows up for Broadway’s highest honors:
Here are three of this season’s Broadway musicals, vying for a box office boost from the Tony Awards broadcast Sunday:
A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder — Romance is the motor of most musical comedies, but a team of writers, designers and a director and choreographer making their Broadway debuts demonstrates that homicide can also be a very entertaining motive. And if one killing can be fun, imagine the mirth generated by eight premeditated murders.
A Gentleman’s Guide arrived early this season from Hartford Stage and its low-key, tongue-in-cheek, regional theater spirit is an important part of its charm. Based on — but not credited to, because of performance rights issues — that droll 1949 Alec Guinness movie, Kind Hearts and Coronets, which is based in turn on a 1907 comic novel by Roy Horniman, the musical is a primer on claiming one’s rightful inheritance by eliminating all those standing in the way of money and title.
We first meet Montague Navarro (a dapper, dexterous Bryce Pinkham) in prison, where he relates the quirky demises of the members of the D’Ysquith clan, as he awaits his own death sentence. As suavely comic as Pinkham proves to be, he is upstaged by the sublimely wacky Jefferson Mays (2004 Tony Award winner for his multiple-character tour de force in I Am My Own Wife).
For like Guinness before him, Mays plays all eight D’Ysquiths — young, old, male, female — in dizzying, quick-change succession. Those who saw the earlier one-man show will not be surprised that Mays can bounce among so many roles, albeit much more broadly comic this time around. The revelation is that Mays is such an accomplished musical comedy performer, trilling his way through the part music hall, part Gilbert and Sullivan knockoff score by Steven Lutvak (music and co-lyrics) and Robert L. Freedman (co-lyrics).
Hartford Stage artistic director Darko Tresnjak paces the evening expertly, so the fun does not run out early — no easy trick. Leading the field with 10 Tony nominations, A Gentleman’s Guide may be the season’s sleeper that hooks the Best musical prize.
A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE AND MURDER, Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St., New York. $50-$147. (212) 239-6200.
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Beautiful: The Carole King Musical — Surely the creators of this Carole King jukebox bio show had the mega-success of Jersey Boys on the brain when they mined the career struggles and pop tune trunk of this iconic singer-songwriter of the 1970s.
But while her song hits are superior to those catchy, but simplistic tunes of Frankie Valli and the Four Season, King (nee Klein) has nowhere near as dramatic a back story.
The first act of Douglas McGrath’s book concentrates on her early songs, like “Some Kind of Wonderful,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “The Locomotion,” which most people probably do not associate with King, because they were turned into hits by The Drifters, The Shirelles and Little Eva (King’s babysitter), respectively.
What drama there is in the show comes from her unsuccessful marriage to songwriting partner Gerry Goffin and from her long delayed decision to move into the spotlight and sing her own, highly personal material.
The reason to see Beautiful is to catch the standout, stellar performance of Jessie Mueller as King, carrying the show after promising featured roles in recent revivals of Edwin Drood and On a Clear Day. She opens the musical at the piano, plunking out “So Far Away” in a recreation of King’s milestone 1971 Carnegie Hall concert. The show then flashes back over her life, before coming full circle with “It’s Too Late,” “A Natural Woman” and the title song, but it takes an awfully long time to get there.
Along the way, King learns about writing on spec and tailoring songs for the commercial airwaves at the music factory of 1650 Broadway, under the mentorship of Don Kirschner. There she and Goffin meet the songwriting duo of Cynthia Weil and Barry Weil, with whom they become friends and amiable rivals.
The supporting cast is solid, notably Anika Larsen as ambitious Weil and Jake Epstein as Goffin, haunted by his manic-depressive demons. But understandably, the show belongs to Mueller, who conveys King’s vulnerability and self-doubts, then hauls off and nails gut-wrenching renditions of the songs that are the soundtrack of baby boomers’ lives.
There is probably a better, more insightful way to tell King’s history, but Beautiful is a crowd-pleaser that will suffice. Surely its producers are already searching for other Carole King surrogates for the inevitable national tours.
BEAUTIFUL: THE CAROLE KING MUSICAL, Stephen Sondheim Theatre, 124 W. 43rd St., New York. $75-$152. (212) 239-6200.
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If/Then — Having scored a critical and popular hit, as well as a slew of awards like the Tony and the Pulitzer with their Broadway debut, Next to Normal, expectation were high for Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s follow-up show. Perhaps that put undue anticipation on If/Then, their musical musings on fate, destiny and the road not taken.
Fair or not, their new, ambitious, but ultimately less-profound-than-it-wants- to-be show has to be considered a letdown. Built around the star presence and laser lungs of Idina Menzel, she gives a compelling performance, even when her character — make that characters — are too sketchy for their own good. If/Then is a true star vehicle, the kind they do not make anymore, because its ability to keep running once she leaves will be minuscule.
Menzel plays a newly-40 city planner named Elizabeth, who has recently returned to New York City, either to further her career or to increase her chances of finding Mr. Right. And in the pivotal premise of If/Then, she can have them both, sort of.
You see, the show hinges on the choices she makes, which are based largely on where she happens to be and who she happens to encounter in the big city. In one case, she is career-oriented Beth, who takes a high-powered job and remains single, though she becomes involved with her boss (Jerry Dixon) and briefly with an old bisexual friend (Anthony Rapp).
Then there’s Liz, who meets a soldier (James Snyder) in the park. They date, marry and have a family, before he grapples with accepting another call to duty overseas.
Confused yet? That is what audiences at the out-of-town tryouts of If/Then complained about, but that was not the problem on Broadway, perhaps because now Liz wears glasses, while Beth does not. What’s more, their divergent stories are color-coded by Kenneth Posner’s shimmering lighting, which often changes from one to the other mid-song.
Trust me, it works. No, the problem is that Yorkey’s script has lots of layers and complexities, but ultimately has little to say beyond a few greeting card sentiments. Nor do his lyrics approach anything profound enough to justify the tangled web of plot, although he and Kitt do know how to write big, belting arias for Menzel.
By the second act, the show takes a distinctly darker tone, reaching for tragic events without earning them. There’s the Iraq War which threatens to do in Liz’s husband, supporting characters we barely know who suddenly bicker and divorce and when Beth — or was it Liz? — boards an airplane, you can just bet that it is destined to crash.
LaChanze and Jenn Colella play a fairly superfluous lesbian couple, because every contemporary urban show should have one. From Next to Normal comes director Michael Greif, who seems over his head this time, and designer Mark Wendland, whose sets mirror the show’s theme, with a shiny, tilted backdrop that reflects the action with overhead views.
Nevertheless, what you are likely to take away from If/Then is its production gloss and Menzel’s power anthems. For me that was not enough, but perhaps you will see this glass as half-full.
IF/THEN, Richards Rodgers Theatre, 226 W. 46th St., New York. $67-$142. (877) 250-2929.