Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad in The Book of Mormon.By Hap Erstein
Recession? What recession? If the economy was in the doldrums this year, Broadway sure didn’t know about it.
For the commercial theater season in New York that ended May 29, Broadway shows drew $1.08 billion in ticket sales, up 5.9 percent from last season to post record-breaking grosses.
Of course ticket prices also set record highs, reaching a top of $140 for – you guessed it – Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the non-opener of the season that sucked up much of the business as well as the media coverage, while garnering some of the most brutal reviews ever bestowed on a musical, especially one that has not even opened yet. That happens this Tuesday evening – unless the show’s producers postpone the premiere yet again – and if it remains impervious to critical bashing and settles in for a long, lucrative run, expect another increase in ticket prices. Why the show is even bothering to declare an official opening is anyone’s guess.
Since it did not open this season, it was not eligible for Tony Award nominations, though Spider-Man is likely to be the butt of many jokes on the telecast this Sunday evening (8-10 p.m., on CBS). Which will surely generate more ticket sales and keep the show running far longer than it deserves to.
To be fair, I have not yet seen Spider-Man. I did go to Broadway to sample the season, but was able to dodge the Spider-Man bullet because it was on a three-week hiatus undergoing major surgery and rehearsals. Timing truly is everything.
Spider-Man aside, it was a pretty good season on Broadway, which is to say a new unexpected smash hit musical arrived on the scene (The Book of Mormon) and several worthy new plays (Good People, Jerusalem, War Horse and the one whose title you will surely not hear pronounced on the Tonyscast, The Motherf**ker with the Hat).
Expect The Book of Mormon to score a major win at the Tonys, picking up perhaps as many as 10 awards (out of its 14 nominations). Not bad for a couple of Broadway neophytes, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who were not unfamiliar with the mechanics of musicals, thanks to their long-running snarky hit TV show, South Park, and its 1999 feature film spinoff.
Parker and Stone kept their show carefully under wraps before performances began in February, resulting in a sleeper success with critics and audiences alike. Also gaining unexpectedly enthusiastic reviews was Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Motherf**ker with the Hat, about “love, fidelity and misplaced haberdashery,” which could not even advertise itself in mainstream newspapers until an acceptable way of expurgating its title was arrived at.
Seth Numrich, left, in War Horse.If it all but sneaked onto Broadway, the two Tony-nominated British imports – Jerusalem and War Horse – arrived with considerable hype and towering expectations, which both managed to live up to. While The Book of Mormon is a prohibitive favorite to win for Best Musical, the Best Play race looks to be a photo finish.
War Horse is probably not the best play on paper, but it is surely the best production of the season, and that may be enough to earn it the Tony. Based on a children’s book turned into an imaginative puppet epic, its script weaknesses are more than trumped by its theatricality, which leaves grown theatergoers brushing away tears and grown reviewers hunting for superlatives.
Jerusalem has nothing at all to do with the Middle East, but is rather about a provincial British drug-dealing, convention-flaunting scalawag holed up in a trailer in the Wiltshire woods. The three-hour play has its merits, though it could use further editing. But it is the central performance by the remarkable Mark Rylance that puts this one in the must-see category.
Although business was bullish on Broadway this season, only five new productions managed to turn a profit so far, according to Variety’s figures, and they are not the shows you would expect to reach black ink. They are: Driving Miss Daisy, The Merchant of Venice, The Pee-Wee Herman Show, Rain and That Championship Season. Of them, only Rain, a faux-Beatles concert show, is still running.
Mark Rylance in Jerusalem.The season had its extravagant flops (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Wonderland), its admired off-Broadway shows that unwisely transferred to Broadway where they fizzled out (The Scottsboro Boys, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) and its what-could-they-have-been-thinking duds (Elling, High, A Free Man of Color), but on balance it was not a bad year on Broadway, with enough standouts to justify a theater trip to New York.
Here is my take on some of the major shows of the season:
* The Book of Mormon (Eugene O’Neill Thr., (212) 239-6200) – Fans of South Park should not be surprised that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are steeped in musical theater lore, and now they have arrived on Broadway with a profane, but endearing example of the genre. Collaborating with Avenue Q composer Robert Lopez and Drowsy Chaperone director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw, they have come up with an affectionate skewering of the Church of Latter-Day Saints that also satirizes major musicals.
Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad are the Laurel and Hardy of Mormon missionaries, send to proselytize in AIDS-ravaged Uganda, which has little in common with The Lion King, as the upbeat number Hasa Diga Eebowai (a send-up of Hakuna Matata) makes clear. The result is wicked fun that even open-minded Mormons can embrace.
* War Horse (Vivian Beaumont Thr., (212) 239-6200) – Sure, Avenue Q and The Lion King have done much to legitimize stage puppetry, but their strides are nothing compared to the emotional effect of full-size horses come to life in this highly theatrical rendering of Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel. Add stunning animated projections and this production beats the movies at their own game, a feat likely to be achieved again this Christmas when Steven Spielberg brings out his necessarily literal-minded, film version of War Horse.
The story is both simple and universal, a depiction of the horrors of war as seen through a teenage boy and his hand-me-down horse, who both go off to fight in World War I, amid mustard gas, barbed wire coils and other perils. Co-directors Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris mobilize a cast of three dozen on the vast Lincoln Center stage, but it is the magic of the puppetry that makes this experience so memorable.
* Jerusalem (Music Box Thr., (212) 239-6200, through Aug. 21) – One time in your life you must see Mark Rylance onstage. Earlier this season he stunned audiences with a 30-minute monologue in rhymed couplets in La Bete, and three years ago he walked off with a Tony for his part in an inconsequential comedy, Boeing-Boeing. Now he is center stage in Jez Butterworth’s marathon fable about a rascally, drug-dealing womanizer holed up in a trailer in rural England, and nothing about these three performances have the least bit in common. If you appreciate chameleon-like acting, Rylance manages it as well as anyone in the theater today, but you probably need to see him twice to fully appreciate his skill.
Here he plays Johnny “Rooster” Byron, a pot-bellied, tattooed Pied Piper who leads a band of younger blokes, drawing them to his non-conformist ways. Chances are the play’s political resonances speak more to the Brits, but even over here, with a script that could use some paring down, it is a worthy character study as well as a great opportunity for Rylance to show his stuff.
* The Normal Heart (Golden Thr., (800) 432-7250, through July 10) – Twenty-six years ago, gay activist-author-professional loudmouth Larry Kramer wrote an angry screed against governmental and institutional indifference towards a mysterious new medical condition afflicting the homosexual community. What the play lacked in neatness, it more than made up for in heat, and now – as AIDS remains uncured, without the urgency of a crisis – this semi-autobiographical history of the early 1980s plague years in New York has been revived with its power very much intact.
Joe Mantello (Angels in America) makes a brilliant return to Broadway as hothead Ned Weeks – the Kramer character – in tandem with John Benjamin Hickey as the paranoid New York Times reporter who becomes his lover. Only theater neophyte Ellen Barkin errs as a wheelchair-bound doctor, showing her fervency by shouting her big impassioned monologue. Still, the collective effect is seismic, and perhaps this limited run will spawn other productions around the country.
Robert Sean Leonard, Nina Arianda, and Jim Belushi in Born Yesterday.* Born Yesterday (Cort Thr., (800) 432-7250, through July 31) – There is more than one way to make a political point on stage and, in 1946, Garson Kanin chose comedy to warn of Washington bullies who play fast and loose with the Constitution. If you think that is a message that needs delivering again today, so did director Doug Hughes (Doubt) who mounts a revival of the tale of a chorus cutie whose climb up the learning curve thwarts a greedy scheme by her junkyard magnate boy friend.
Looming over any revival, though, is the classic comic performance of Judy Holliday, the original Billie Dawn, and Oscar winner for the role four years later. Undaunted is young, nasal-voiced kewpie Nina Arianda, making the kind of Broadway debut that will be talked about with admiration for a long time to come. Jim Belushi and Robert Sean Leonard provide crucial support as the New Joisey wheeler-dealer and the reporter he hires to smarten up Billie. But it is Arianda who makes this production a must-see.
* Catch Me If You Can (Simon Thr., (800) 755-4000) – When a musical goes wrong, the conclusion is usually that the source material was a bad choice to be told in song and dance. That is not the case with this 2002 charming con man flick from the ubiquitous Spielberg, whose imposter-pilot-doctor main character seems tailor-made for musical comedy. The problem is that the veteran creative team – songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, director Jack O’Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell – the folks who struck gold with Hairspray, stub their collective toes with the transfer.
Instead of a straightforward rendering, the story is told with a conceptual overlay of a live TV variety show of the period. That gives hard-working Norbert Leo Butz as pursuing FBI agent Carl Hanratty (a/k/a the Tom Hanks part) the opportunity for a showstopping dance number (Don’t Break the Rules), but it flattens the score into a dull, easy-listening pastiche. Aaron Tveit (Next to Normal) is devilishly charming as Frank Abagnale, Jr., but he lacks Butz’s star power and the show loses its focus as a result.
Aaron Tveit in Catch Me If You Can.
Hap’s Fearless Tony Predictions
Quick, call up your bookie, start up an office pool, place a bet at the Hard Rock Casino. Here, thanks to my amazing analytical skills and powers of prognostication, are the winners of this year’s Tony Awards. No, really.
* Best Play: War Horse
* Best Musical: The Book of Mormon
* Best Book, Musical: The Book of Mormon
* Best Score: The Book of Mormon
* Best Revival, Play: The Normal Heart
* Best Revival, Musical: Anything Goes
* Best Actor, Play: Mark Rylance, Jerusalem
* Best Actress, Play: Frances McDormand, Good People
* Best Actor, Musical: Norbert Leo Butz, Catch Me If You Can
* Best Actress, Musical: Sutton Foster, Anything Goes
* Best Featured Actor, Play: John Benjamin Hickey, The Normal Heart
* Best Featured Actress, Play: Ellen Barkin, The Normal Heart
* Best Featured Actor, Musical: Rory O’Malley, The Book of Mormon
* Best Featured Actress, Musical: Nikki M. James, The Book of Mormon
* Best Scenic Design, Play: Rae Smith, War Horse
* Best Scenic Design, Musical: Scott Pask, The Book of Mormon
* Best Costume Design, Play: Jess Goldstein, The Merchant of Venice
* Best Costume Design, Musical: Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner, Priscilla Queen of the Desert
* Best Lighting Design, Play: Paule Constable, War Horse
* Best Lighting Design, Musical: Brian MacDevitt, The Book of Mormon
* Best Sound Design, Play: Christopher Shutt, War Horse
* Best Sound Design, Musical: Brian Ronan, The Book of Mormon
* Best Direction, Play: Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, War Horse
* Best Direction, Musical: Casey Nicholaw and Trey Parker, The Book of Mormon
* Best Choreography: Kathleen Marshall, Anything Goes
* Best Orchestrations: Larry Hochman and Stephen Oremus, The Book of Mormon