Mcavoy Makes

Fugue for Wrung-Out Tinhorns - The New York Times

December 8, 2012 THEATER REVIEW Fugue for Wrung-Out Tinhorns

By BEN BRANTLEY

The fight has gone out of the once-robust boys from “Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of sharks in a small pond. Sure, they still curse and rant and beat up on the furniture in the production that formally opened at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Saturday night, after an indecently extended preview period.

These hack real estate salesmen also slam doors hard enough to make walls tremble. They mug their way through their foul-mouthed monologues in a style that begs for (and receives) applause. The eldest of their tribe, and this production’s pacesetter, is portrayed by a grizzled Al Pacino with the exaggerated pantomiming of a boozy player in a late-night charades game.

Yet somehow their hearts just don’t seem to be into the business of scamming clients and stabbing one another in the back. It’s as if all the competitive fierceness had been sucked from them by some cosmic super-vacuum cleaner — a product that these forlorn hustlers probably wouldn’t be able to persuade anyone to buy. As salesmen, they’re as worn down and wrung out as Willy Loman at twilight.

That sense of defeat has always lurked beneath the speeding dialogue of “Glengarry.” But in Daniel Sullivan’s deflated production, which also stars Bobby Cannavale as the hotshot Ricky Roma, subtext has been dragged to the surface and beached like a rusty submarine. This is a “Glengarry” for a recessionary age. When a character in the first act mutters, “It’s cold out there now, John. Money is tight,” the lines glare in a way they didn’t in the mid-1980s.

Whether comic or bitter, dialogue is often allowed to resonate in empty air. Unlike any previous “Glengarry” I’ve seen — including the 1992 movie (which starred Mr. Pacino in the role played here by Mr. Cannavale) — this one moves slowly enough to keep you aware, at all times, of the hollowness of its characters’ talk. You may also find yourself newly conscious of plot contrivances and improbabilities.

I can understand why Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Pacino would want to reconceive “Glengarry” on their own terms. The play was given a superb Tony-winning revival in 2005, directed by Joe Mantello, and starring Alan Alda and Liev Schreiber, a highly caffeinated production that left you short of breath. If discerning theatergoers were going to revisit “Glengarry” less than a decade later, they’d surely demand something different.

But “Glengarry” was built for speed. Much of the beauty of this play comes from its revved-up rhythms. (When you read it, the words percolate on the page.) Mr. Mamet created a cast of salesmen who keep themselves alive through their relentless, aggressive talk.

They’re selling lies on a whole lot of levels, and to themselves as well as to their friends, foes and patsies. Relaxing the tension in their spiels is fatal, because that’s when we (and they) hear the falsehood of what they’re saying. They’re pitching as fast as they can out of animal need and instinct. http://theater.nytimes.com/...reviews/glengarry-glen-ross-by-david-mamet-with-al-pacino.html?src=dayp&pagewanted=print[12/10/2012 9:23:00 AM] Fugue for Wrung-Out Tinhorns - The New York Times

Though there’s poetry in their obscene talk, the collective sound that rises from them is the din of beasts struggling to survive in Darwin’s jungle. Of course they’re doomed; all animals die eventually. But in the meantime there’s fire in the fight and the friction that makes great theater.

So it comes as a shock here when the first note that’s sounded in the opening scene (set in a seedy Chinese restaurant; Eugene Lee is the designer) is one of senility. Mr. Pacino is Shelly Levene, the faded former star of a fading real-estate office on the North Side of Chicago. He’s trying to convince his boss, John Williamson (David Harbour, in the show’s most convincing performance), to give him better clients.

But why would anyone turn over important business to someone who speaks as falteringly as this guy does? Looking like a bag man coming off a bender, Shelly talks in a fretful, rambling singsong voice that sometimes gets stuck on a word like a phonograph needle. (The inflections seem partly borrowed from Mr. Pacino’s Tony- nominated Shylock in Mr. Sullivan’s brilliant “Merchant of Venice” of two years ago, but with nothing like the same passive-aggressive intensity.)

Mr. Pacino switches gears for the second act, when Shelly shows up in the office triumphant after making a big sale. But though Shelly may be flushed with new confidence, he hardly inspires it. His back bowed, his legs wide apart, he recounts his victory with the expansive, literal-minded gestures of a kindergarten teacher. We have advanced, it seems, from senility to dementia. By the way, it doesn’t look as if Shelly is addressing his fellow employees; his gaze is focused directly on us, the folks out there in the dark.

This performance places Shelly firmly and dominatingly at the center of “Glengarry,” which needs to be a tight ensemble piece. There’s not much the other actors can do to compete with or even balance Mr. Pacino’s grandstanding. Much of the cast — which includes John C. McGinley, Richard Schiff and Jeremy Shamos — goes for obvious laughs in line readings.

Mr. Cannavale, an electric presence in the “The ______With the Hat” last year, should be a natural for Roma, the cock-of-the-walk sales star. Yet he never feels as dangerous or as seductive as he needs to be here. Instead he brings to mind a strutting Damon Runyon-style gangster; you expect him to break out with, “What’s playing at the Roxy? I’ll tell you what’s playing at the Roxy.”

The production’s strange combination of comic shtick and existential weariness makes it feel rather like a long- running sitcom being filmed before a live audience that knows its characters’ signature tics and flourishes by heart. That may well be what the Broadway public of today wants. This “Glengarry” has been selling out (in more ways than one) since its early previews. When I saw the show, the audience stopped it frequently to give ovations for blustery tirades.

What with the closing notice already posted for Mr. Mamet’s dreary new play “The Anarchist,” which opened last week, this season has not been kind to one of America’s greatest living playwrights. And yes, he still deserves to be thus described. Read “Glengarry” again, and you’ll understand why. Just don’t expect to find the evidence on Broadway this year.

Glengarry Glen Ross

By David Mamet; directed by Daniel Sullivan; sets by Eugene Lee; costumes by Jess Goldstein; lighting by James F. Ingalls; technical supervision by Hudson Theatrical Associates; production stage manager, Stephen

http://theater.nytimes.com/...reviews/glengarry-glen-ross-by-david-mamet-with-al-pacino.html?src=dayp&pagewanted=print[12/10/2012 9:23:00 AM] Fugue for Wrung-Out Tinhorns - The New York Times

M. Kaus; general manager, Richards/Climan. Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, JAM Theatricals, Luigi and Rose Caiola, Gutterman Chernoff, Universal Pictures Stage Productions, Amy and Phil Mickelson, Patty Baker, Mark S. Golub and David S. Golub, Ken Greiner, Meg Herman, Kathleen K. Johnson, Stephanie P. McClelland, Harvey Weinstein, James Fuld Jr./Kirmser Ponturo Fund, Kit Seidel/Myla Lerner, Will Trice and Gfour Productions, in association with RPMedia Company. At the Schoenfeld Theater, 236 West 45th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. Through Jan. 20. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

WITH: Al Pacino (Shelly Levene), Bobby Cannavale (Richard Roma), David Harbour (John Williamson), Richard Schiff (George Aaronow), John C. McGinley (Dave Moss), Jeremy Shamos (James Lingk) and Murphy Guyer (Baylen).

http://theater.nytimes.com/...reviews/glengarry-glen-ross-by-david-mamet-with-al-pacino.html?src=dayp&pagewanted=print[12/10/2012 9:23:00 AM] ‘Tarzan’ and ‘Lion King’ Make Hamburg a Theater City - NYTimes.com

December 9, 2012 Broadway on the Elbe By PATRICK HEALY HAMBURG, Germany — An eight-hour production of Goethe’s “Faust” may be the highbrow hit of the fall at the grand Thalia state theater here, but it is an altogether different blockbuster — the Disney musical “Tarzan” — that exemplifies why modern Hamburg has become that rare thing in the theater world: a reliable profit center for producers outside of their two biggest markets, New York and London.

“Tarzan” has proved that even out-and-out flops on Broadway can go on to lucrative afterlives in this destination city for Germans, as long as the shows have the spectacle and pageantry that theater producers here say enthrall people across the country. “Tarzan,” composed by Phil Collins, delivers characters swinging on vines over audiences’ heads and generates gasps. While it closed on Broadway in 2007 after 14 months at a loss of roughly $12 million, the show (with some retooling) is in its fifth year here and has become the top-grossing production of this musical in the world, taking in $224 million so far.

“Watching the Tarzan actor and the monkey actors flying above us — it is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said Katrin Welsch, a recent university graduate who drove here from Saarbrücken, over 300 miles to the south, to take her parents to the show. “It’s like circus but with a love story and music by Phil Collins.”

More than most European cities, Hamburg, known as the Broadway of Europe in some theater circles, has seized on American-style musicals and has turned shows into tourist attractions. For example, most people going to see another Disney musical, “The Lion King,” take a five-minute boat ride across the Elbe River to reach the resplendent tentlike theater, which is visible for miles along the waterfront. And the third big-budget show here, the new musical “Rocky,” puts another famous American movie onstage.

Hamburg’s rise as a hub for musicals — and a more important city to New York producers than capitals like Berlin, Rome, or Paris — has surprisingly little to do with the main costs of doing business, like cast and crew salaries, production expenses and theater rent. (Rents here even account for a slightly higher percentage of a show’s weekly gross than they do on Broadway.) Rather, theater producers and artists here say, it’s all about the enormous audience appetite for musicals — an appetite encouraged by 25 years of producers splashing television ads and billboards across Germany, with its population of 82 million, to market Hamburg as the home of Broadway-style shows. While a few have flourished outside Hamburg — Andrew Lloyd Webber’s critically drubbed roller-skating spectacular “Starlight Express” has been running in the smallish German city of Bochum, near the Dutch border, since 1988 — no other city on the continent is as big a draw for musical-loving tourists.

“Splashy pop-spectacle shows, whether for a date night or part of a hotel’s weekend getaway package, sell far better in Hamburg than almost anywhere else,” said Thomas Schumacher, president of Disney Theatrical Productions, the Broadway-based producing arm that is staging “Tarzan” and “The Lion King” here with its European partner, Stage Entertainment.

“I would never blame my failure with Broadway’s ‘Tarzan’ on audiences,” Mr. Schumacher added. “But the visual language and expressionistic environment and special effects of ‘Tarzan’ have much more appeal in Hamburg.” The Tarzan story, also, has long been well known in Germany.

Yet just as some New York theatergoers denounce the so-called Disneyification of Broadway into a cultural theme park of shiny baubles instead of groundbreaking musicals, the evolution of Hamburg has divided people here on matters of taste as well as commercialism. For more than a century the works of Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe and Brecht have been the dramatic mainstays, drawing the elite and the bourgeoisie alike to the two major state-supported theaters, the Thalia (founded in 1843) and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus (1901), both near the historic Rathaus, the

http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/theater/tarzan-and-lion-king-make-hamburg-a-theater-city.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print[12/10/2012 9:24:16 AM] ‘Tarzan’ and ‘Lion King’ Make Hamburg a Theater City - NYTimes.com

city hall with its renowned 400-foot tower. The mere mention of the newer musicals, including recent ones like “Dirty Dancing,” “Mamma Mia!” and “Titantic,” draw winces and barnyard epithets from the unruly-haired intellectuals who run the two state theaters, and a somewhat more measured view from officials in charge of cultural affairs here.

“While it’s good to have musicals as a way to get visitors to Hamburg, I worry that these musicals are not producing anything of cultural significance that will last longer beyond the run of the shows themselves,” said Barbara Kisseler, a member of the Hamburg Senate, the city’s main governing body, who oversees the cultural budget. (It provides about $25 million a year each to the Thalia and Schauspielhaus theaters, or most of their budgets. No public money is provided for big commercial musicals.)

“You do not want Germans to give up the classics,” Ms. Kisseler said, “in favor of loud entertainment.”

Hamburg had little experience with musicals until a German entrepreneur, Friedrich Kurz, who had studied theater while living in America, became friendly with Mr. Lloyd Webber in London in the mid-1980s. Mr. Kurz recalled in an interview that he thought a German-language production of Mr. Lloyd Webber’s musical “Cats,” by then a hit in London, New York and Vienna, might be a popular fit at a shabby old music hall in the red-light district of Hamburg, given the show’s high theatricality and themes of memory and faded beauty.

“Cats” began here in 1986, the first big-budget New York-style musical ever to have an open-ended run in Hamburg. It was followed by another Lloyd Webber hit, “The Phantom of the Opera,” and both shows ran for several years. Mr. Kurz and his business partners began making deals with tourism agencies and bus tour operators to promote the musicals — and Hamburg.

“We had signs on the northern German beaches that read, ‘If weather is bad, there’s a show in ‘Hamburg,’ ” Mr. Kurz said. “It didn’t matter whether the shows were good — everyone just wanted to see what people were talking about. So they came to Hamburg.”

As did protesters. University students marched through the city against the arrival of bourgeois musicals and producers like Mr. Kurz and were particularly angry about ticket prices of more than $50 in a city where state- subsidized theaters had long kept prices low. Mr. Kurz recalled gleefully arranging for newspaper photographers to be on hand whenever protesters massed, including on opening night for “Phantom,” in 1990, when Mr. Lloyd Webber insisted on walking the red carpet in his tuxedo in spite of hecklers.

“I never spent much money on marketing because the free publicity was incredible,” said Mr. Kurz, who is now 64, and whose one attempt at producing a spectacle on Broadway — the flop “Carrie,” in 1988 — was a fiasco.

Hamburg’s musical landscape has grown to three theaters, and now the major producer here, Stage Entertainment, is building a fourth, next to the “Lion King” theater on the Elbe. (Most visitors will need to take the boat ride there too.) While Senator Kisseler, for one, is skeptical that “there are enough good musicals for four theaters,” executives at Stage Entertainment see no evidence that ticket buying would slow. They are moving to increase their own product development. While they mostly import shows from Broadway and London and translate them into German, the new $20 million “Rocky” represents their biggest effort so far in developing a musical on their own for Hamburg audiences — and, perhaps, for Broadway audiences.

“As much as we love our musicals from New York like ‘The Lion King’ and ‘Tarzan,’ we also wanted to show that Europe and Hamburg could create a solid musical that New York might want to see,” said Johannes Mock-O’Hara, the managing director of Stage Entertainment for Germany.

Mr. Mock-O’Hara was mum about the inaugural show for Stage’s new fourth theater, which is expected to open in 2014. The lead producers of the Broadway musical “Spider-Man” have talked to him about a possible production in Hamburg someday

“We think our show and its special effects could do very well in Hamburg,” said Michael Cohl, one of the “Spider- Man” producers.

Stage Entertainment will also have to find a show to replace “Tarzan,” which the company plans to close next fall — not because of a sharp drop in ticket sales but to move the production to Stuttgart in hopes of strengthening the company’s business there. While the producers do not expect Stuttgart or any other German city to rival Hamburg, they hope that a high-flying show like “Tarzan” will have wide appeal.

Ms. Welsch, the young university graduate who came to see “Tarzan” in Hamburg recently, had seen the show twice before here. But it was the first musical for her father, Reiner. During an interview at intermission he said he hadn’t made up his mind about the art form. Lingering in the lounge of the Neue Flora theater, decorated with Restoration Hardware-like sofas, he noted he had no points of comparison. Germans did not grow up on this style of musicals, he said, and he had never heard of Stephen Sondheim or even Rodgers and Hammerstein.

“ ‘The Sound of Music’?” he repeated when asked about the famous musical set in Austria just before World War II. “It sounds familiar. I had heard of ‘Tarzan.’ The music is O.K. Do many musicals have flying?”

http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/theater/tarzan-and-lion-king-make-hamburg-a-theater-city.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print[12/10/2012 9:24:16 AM]

Mess With Her, or Not: You’ll Get an Earful - The New York Times

December 7, 2012 THEATER REVIEW Mess With Her, or Not: You’ll Get an Earful

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

NEW HAVEN — Vulnerability is perhaps not the first quality we associate with Kathleen Turner — or the second, or third or fourth. Even in her Hollywood heyday, Ms. Turner was a seductress whose huskily whispered intimacies carried the suggestion that a shiv might be drawn should romance go wrong.

Portraying an aging radio actress whose career is under threat in the Long Wharf Theater revival of Frank Marcus’s 1964 play “The Killing of Sister George,” Ms. Turner captures the character’s surface qualities with ease: the bawdy humor, the leathery voice to match a tweedy exterior, the streak of sneaky sadism in her relations with her young lover.

What’s missing from the performance, unfortunately, is the one quality that might make this slightly lurid relic of British culture breathe anew onstage: a sense that underneath the armor of this battle ax is a fragile, insecure woman who feels that the demise of the beloved character she plays on a BBC soap opera will spell her own personal apocalypse.

When it opened on the West End, Mr. Marcus’s play stoked controversy for its suggestive portrayal of the relationship between June Buckridge (Ms. Turner), known even to her intimates by the name of her nurturing village nurse character, Sister George, and her baby-doll flatmate, Alice (Clea Alsip), who has her own, highly appropriate nickname, Childie. (Although as June waspishly notes at one point, the girlish Alice is actually 34.)

The sadomasochistic undertones in their relationship — when she feels Alice is getting uppity, June makes her eat the butts of the cigars she smokes — were made still more overt when the play was filmed by the sledgehammer specialist Robert Aldrich (“What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”) with the original West End star, Beryl Reid, in the title role and Susannah York as Childie. With the film ratings system newly installed, “Sister George” was slapped with an X in America and banned in parts of Britain.

The Long Wharf production, directed by Ms. Turner, uses a new adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher that, according to a program note from Ms. Turner, aims to delve “deeper into the relationship between the women at the core of the story,” in keeping with our more evolved view of homosexuality. But while June and Alice share moments of tenderness, only a serious overhaul would succeed in erasing the note of pathology in their relationship. (The play does not exactly equate the pathology and the sexuality, but it comes pretty close.)

As it begins, June is in a tempest fearing that Sister George is going to meet an imminent demise, the victim of a tragic accident or perhaps just a bad cold. Ms. Turner is explosively funny as she barrels around the stage, swilling gin as she vents her anger at the ungrateful BBC gods.

“It’s the ax, I’m sure of it,” June snarls. “We’re losing listeners, and they need a scapegoat. It’s been a year since old Mrs. Prescott was kicked by that horse.”

http://theater.nytimes.com/...reviews/kathleen-turner-in-killing-of-sister-george-at-long-wharf.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print[12/10/2012 8:52:13 AM] Mess With Her, or Not: You’ll Get an Earful - The New York Times

June’s suspicions are further inflamed by the arrival of Mrs. Mercy Croft (Betsy Aidem), the executive in charge of June’s show and an advice columnist on the radio as well. While Alice makes tea and scones, Mrs. Croft broaches the subject of June’s ungenteel public behavior, most recently an incident involving a couple of novitiate nuns June has been accused of groping in a taxicab.

For all the suggestions of a more nuanced treatment of the characters’ sexuality, the play still milks some easy laughs from period stereotypes: June is a crude portrait of the 1960s lesbian as a truck driver in a twin set. When Mrs. Croft, attempting friendly chitchat, mildly suggests that June must have been something of a “terror” back at her girls’ school, June proudly bellows back, “I was captain of the hockey team and a strict disciplinarian.”

Ms. Turner is a skilled bellower, as she was a skilled brayer in the 2005 Broadway revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Her feigned outrage when Mrs. Croft begins to admonish her over the taxicab fracas is also pricelessly funny. “I thought they were bats,” she says, pretending high dudgeon.

But the performance is marred by Ms. Turner’s shaky grasp on her English accent, which comes and goes like the sun in a London summer — which is to say it mostly goes. It’s hard for the comedy to establish an assured rhythm when the audience must take a few seconds to translate the meaning of the latest blast of thunder from the angry June.

Still, the dark humor in the play, turning on the gaping discrepancy between the brutish June and the motherly character she portrays on the radio, mostly comes through fine. But for the play to succeed as anything more than a nifty bit of cult camp, the pathos of June’s situation needs to be felt more strongly: the sense of hurt and betrayal when she discovers that Alice has been establishing her own relationship with Mrs. Croft, and June’s desperate fear that the loss of her radio role will rob her not just of her livelihood, but of her love too.

Perhaps another director might draw forth a more textured performance, but as an actress Ms. Turner doesn’t dig very deeply into June’s moments of anguish and anxiety. The character mostly comes across as a caricature, with few human contours to complicate the impression.

Ms. Alsip, with her blond bangs and mod costumes (by the ever-expert Jane Greenwood), could have stepped right off Carnaby Street of the period. Although her character, too, has her somewhat overstated peculiarities — she treats her collection of dolls as if they were her own ample brood of babies — Ms. Alsip comes closer to endowing her part with a human core. Ms. Aidem, meanwhile, does fine by the role of the Mrs. Croft, with her cool poise disguising a core of genteel ruthlessness. (Coral Browne played the role in the movie.)

Like Mart Crowley’s “Boys in the Band,” another once-controversial drama set in the then-covert world of homosexual life, “The Killing of Sister George” endures primarily as an amusing (distressing?) bulletin from a more benighted era, when portraying gay men and women onstage in any capacity marked a bold advance. Neither, I fear, retains much of the grit of deeply explored human truth: they are more cultural artifacts than enduring art.

The Killing of Sister George

By Frank Marcus, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher; directed by Kathleen Turner; sets by Allen Moyer; costumes by Jane Greenwood; lighting by John Lasiter; music and sound by John Gromada; wig design by Paul Huntley;

dialect coach, Deborah Hecht; stage manager, Bryce McDonald. Presented by the Long Wharf Theater, Gordon Edelstein, artistic director; Joshua Borenstein, managing director; in association with Andrew Zoppa, Alex Zoppa, Zach Zoppa and Stephen Palmese. At the Claire Tow Stage, Long Wharf Theater, 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven; (203) 787-4282, longwharf.org. Through Dec. 23. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Kathleen Turner (June Buckridge), Clea Alsip (Alice McNaught), Betsy Aidem (Mrs. Mercy Croft) and Olga Merediz (Madame Xenia).

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