NEW YORK -- As the nation's premier theatrical showcase, Broadway hasn't given itself over entirely to commercial entertainments and revivals. Occasionally it stages art, both new and old. That's what makes it perplexing, as today's four reviews suggest.
"Assassins"
In exploring the psychology and seamy allure of presidential assassination, this pungent musical vaudeville by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman is so fiercely powerful that it successfully breaks what I had thought was an absolute theatrical rule: Never point a gun at the audience.
When that does happen, usually because some actor waves it around, I fume. I don't know if anyone has ever been killed in a theater by a gun that was assumed to contain blanks, but it happens in real life. I hate it. It breaks the fourth wall in a way I think unforgivable.
But as the guns were aimed my way in "Assassins," for once -- and I really do think this the one exception that proves the rule -- it seemed justified. "Assassins" is about how assassination is inherent in America. Assassination is us, it says, and for once it seems right that the message be brought home viscerally by guns pointed our way. Indeed, that's a metaphor for the action of the musical itself.
"Assassins" indicts American democratic myth in two ways. Taking its idealism at face value, it finds truth in the dark obverse: Not everyone can grow up to be president, but literally anyone can grow up to kill a president. But it also critiques the larger ideal of equal opportunity by suggesting it may be just myth. It has the myth-deflating insight to note that assassination isn't always individual pathology; it can be driven by political ideas with which many agree, even as they deplore the means.
Pretty uncomfortable stuff -- hardly what you look for in a Broadway musical. And yet this vivid interrogation of American ideals seems a necessary contribution to democratic self-knowledge. And Sondheim, Weidman, director Joe Mantello, their designers and cast have plenty of show-biz pleasures to offer, too.
Overriding all is the visual metaphor of Robert Brill's set, like the underside of an old roller coaster. It can light up with the tawdry allure of the carnival midway, but there's always the promise of thrills and disaster rumbling overhead. And it takes only a flick of Jules Fischer and Peggy Eisenhauer's lights to turn that wooden forest into the Texas Schoolbook Depository toward which we inexorably head.
The founding father of this not-so-elite club is John Wilkes Booth, whose murder of Lincoln is romanticized by him and uncut by a cynical balladeer. Then come the less well-known figures, both "successful" -- Charles Guiteau (Garfield) and Leon Czolgosz (McKinley) -- and not -- Giuseppe Zangara (FDR), Samuel Byck (Nixon), Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (Ford), and John Hinckley (Reagan). All the assassins are present from the start, their stories following Booth's in time-bending order. But as the show proceeds without intermission, you quickly enough realize there's no sight of the most potent assassin of all, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Then, under the leadership of Booth, all the assassins gather in Dallas on that 1963 morning to persuade the hapless Oswald -- who's been there all along without us knowing -- to make them famous. He was planning to commit suicide, it seems, but they convince him otherwise. It is chilling.
Then I had another rule-breaking moment. After Oswald leans out the window to shoot JFK, images from the Zapruder film are projected on his chest. I couldn't look, although I wouldn't have been able to see through my tears if I had. I was almost ready to invoke a rule about not using painful documentary footage in a fiction. But it's the natural climax of this powerful show.
Sondheim's score is brilliant in appropriating such American modes as folk ballad, march, spiritual, pop and Broadway and heightening them with the perverse lyrics of murder and obsession. Nothing better illustrates his unsettling genius than "Unworthy of Your Love," the persuasive/creepy pop yearning of Hinckley and Fromme for their idols, Jodie Foster and Charles Manson.
This is an ensemble piece, although Michael Cerveris and Neil Patrick Harris are central as Booth and the Balladeer. Marc Kudisch is the lurid Proprietor of the carnival; Denis O'Hare has the flashy role of the barmy Guiteau; and Becky Ann Baker provides the most humor as the hapless Moore, a klutzy mirror-image of her intended target, Ford. James Barbour makes a case for the anticapitalism principles of Czolgosz, and young Alexander Gemignani, who earned his Equity card in the Pittsburgh CLO ensemble, makes an impressive Broadway debut as Hinckley.
Music director Paul Gemignani, Alexander's father, conducts the small orchestra located in the balcony, which increases our sense of involvement, already strong from the intimate Studio 54 environment with its small cabaret tables, the same used for the recent "Cabaret."
New York Times columnist Frank Rich claims that "Assassins" expresses the American zeitgeist better now than when it premiered off-Broadway in 1991 during the first Gulf War, specifically because 9/11 has better prepared us to believe in the darkness of human motivation.
The problem with Rich's argument is that the chief evidence the country wasn't ready for the grim truths of "Assassins" then was the all-powerful New York Times review written by Rich himself. That review more than anything else kept producers from moving "Assassins" to Broadway, where it would have had a better chance to speak to the zeitgeist than in a small, brief, sold-out off-Broadway run.
Always beware of seeing the zeitgeist in your own response. "Assassins" has always been a sardonic show of great power, as many productions around the country have shown (such as that by Pittsburgh's Starlight Productions in 1997) and New York is just now finding out.
Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St.; 1-212-719-1300.
"Sly Fox"
Revivals don't always unearth gems. "Sly Fox," a star-laden farce/satire on greed by Larry Gelbart that was a moderate hit in 1976 for George C. Scott, has a long, very funny trial scene in Act 2 that doesn't make up for slow going before and even after.
A difficulty is that Gelbart wavers between the corrective comedy of his model, Ben Jonson's famous "Volpone" (1605), and the wilder farce of his own best mode ("A Funny Thing ... Forum," "M*A*S*H"). Some productions solve that ambivalence better than others. Here, it takes too long for zaniness to set in.
As to the zeitgeist, you would think that greed is always fair game for satire, perhaps especially post-Enron, World Com, et al. But the dynamic of Jonson's play and Gelbart's transposition of it to late 19th-century San Francisco is to get us to root for the outrageously greedy con man (the title role), both because he takes such zestful joy in his schemes and because his victims are even greedier than he. At least he seems driven more by the art of the con than its outcome; the comedy has less to do with morality than with inventive joy.
So the problem may be that it takes so long for us to identify with Foxwell J. Sly's machinations. The exposition-heavy Act 1 is repetitious as Sly's gulls are introduced one by one -- Messrs. Craven, Crouch and Truckle (the names practically interchangeable) and Miss Fancy -- each led to believe by Sly's adept servant, Simon Able, that rich gifts will make them the dying Sly's chief heir.
Eventually, Sly overreaches himself, first by causing one gull to disinherit his son and another to offer to prostitute his wife, then (a greater strategic blunder) by giving too much power to the underpaid Able. Jonson plays the son and the wife straight, but Gelbart and director Arthur Penn play them as unfunny blowhard and prude. And whereas Jonson punishes his hero in the end, Gelbart allows him one last wriggle to freedom.
As Sly, Richard Dreyfuss is a standard-issue, chest-beating poseur in Act 1, while Eric Stoltz's Able ushers the repetitive gulls in and out. The comedy takes flight only in the trial scene in Act 2, where the gulls madly re-weave their conflicting stories. The peak of comic invention is Bronson Pinchot's lawyer Craven, all surreal posture and twitch, but much of the comedy comes from a swaggering, ornery judge, also played by Dreyfuss. The contrast is instructive: Dreyfuss is very funny as the free-wheeling judge, much less so strapped into the plot-heavy disguises of Sly.
Bob Dishy and Rene Auberjonois have their moments as Truckle and Crouch, and Peter Scolari is a funny, ditsy little chief of police. Gelbart's text is stuffed with the good one-liners you expect, but the whole show needs more of the anarchic zest of that mid-part of Act 2.
At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St.; 1-800-432-7250.
"I Am My Own Wife"
The most unusual show on Broadway right now is "I Am My Own Wife" by Doug Wright, best known for his "Quills." A one-man play with an improbable subject and modest theme, it would be more obviously at home in an institutional art theater, but perhaps its location is less an accident than evidence that Broadway can still welcome the occasional serious play among the commercial entertainments.
To my mind, "My Own Wife" is a slight play, all thoughtful implication but little drama. So perhaps it is odd -- perhaps not -- that it won this year's Pulitzer Prize. But it is compellingly acted by Jefferson Mays, and that performance alone was sufficient to merit its transfer to Broadway (the Pulitzer came later).
Wright and Mays tell the unlikely, largely factual story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (1928-2002), an East German transvestite who survived the Nazis, the Communists and even the media hysteria and conflicting accusations of post-unification Germany.
In appearance a large man in a simple black dress and head scarf, Charlotte devoted her life to collecting, preserving and occasionally selling furniture and other domestic artifacts of the 1890s, her particular favorites being many varieties of early phonographs and case clocks -- what we call grandfather clocks. She turned her home into a museum and miraculously escaped persecution by the Nazis and the Stasi, emerging after unification as a sort of human time capsule of culture.
Interwoven with her story is Wright's pursuit of the U.S. Army. "I grew up gay in the Bible Belt," he says; "I can only imagine what it was like in the Third Reich." Then it turns out Charlotte's miraculous escape from the Stasi may not be entirely miraculous, because she was to some extent an informer who sent a friend to prison.
The truth about all this is multiple and elusive, as are the possible "meanings" and motives of Charlotte's life and her appropriation by others. Wright speculates quietly on all these, with the play's 30-plus voices funneled through Mays, who throughout the two-hour play remains dressed as Charlotte.
It is a modest, touching performance, never sensational. Mays remains so perfectly modulated that a flick of an eyelid can get a laugh. After the Berlin Wall comes down, she makes her first foray into West Berlin. Consulting what is obviously a gay guide, she calmly notes one attraction after another, on just one occasion pausing to turn down the corner of a page -- very simple, very sympathetic, very funny.
Derek McLane's set is a spare room floating in front of a back wall of Charlotte's treasures. The clocks and flower-like phonograph horns are particularly resonant, the former suggesting Charlotte's quiet persistence through changing times, the latter symbolizing a grace and beauty to which she aspired.
The delicacy of Mays' performance is matched by the direction of Moises Kaufman, known for having written and directed "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" and "The Laramie Project." Nothing could be less overtly sentimental and yet suffused with sentiment.
At the Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St.; 1-800-432-7250.
"Intimate Apparel"
Appealing and unusual though "I Am My Own Wife" may be, I would much rather have given the Pulitzer to Lynn Nottage's equally moving, far more expansive and theatrical "Intimate Apparel." Fortunately, the American Theatre Critics Association did give it the ATCA/Steinberg Award for the best new American play produced outside New York City in 2003.
And now it is inside New York, off-Broadway at (coincidentally) a theater named for the same philanthropist Steinbergs. It is produced (not coincidentally) by the Roundabout Theatre, an institution that can afford to work both sides of the commercial/not-for-profit divide.
Nottage has written that she was inspired by a foremother who worked as a seamstress. Her picture of a slice of 1905 Manhattan life has the authenticity of research, but the production also suggests the inspiration of anonymous period photographs: "Unidentified Negro Couple, 1905," reads one shown at the end of Act 1; "Unidentified Negro Seamstress, c. 1905," reads the one at the end.
By the time we see each photo, the subjects are not unidentified at all -- Nottage has given them texture and reclaimed a lost life. Her hero is Esther, who starts the play at age 35, having worked as a seamstress for Mrs. Dickson for 17 years. During that time, many others have gone on to marriage, but plain Esther has saved her small profits. She sews intimate apparel for ladies who can pay -- both a white aristocrat (Mrs. Van Buren), who enjoys feeling like "a tart from the Tenderloin," and a black prostitute (Mayme) who likes dressing like the social elite. Both confide in Esther more than she confides in them. Her skills and integrity recommend her, and her artistry and love of fabric suggest the imagination that makes her valued.
Then Esther develops a pen pal, George, a laborer on the Panama Canal who's been told about her by a mutual acquaintance. She gets her friends to help her respond in kind to his letters, eloquent with both earthy detail and poetic flights, and the connection blossoms. There is an orthodox Jew, a dealer in fabrics, who is much taken with her in spite of the gulf between them. But George proposes, she accepts, he arrives from Panama, they marry and there they are at the end of Act 1 -- "unidentified" to each other, but well known to us.
Or so we think. In what may seem unfair of the playwright, we, just like Esther, have been kept from knowing something important about George. So the tale winds forward toward an end with George we may have seen coming, with Esther also making further discoveries about Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme. No one is all they seem.
The play, however. belongs to Esther and to Viola Davis, who plays her with a fierce integrity. Abrupt but sympathetic, shy but intense, she can glower with pain and shine with pleasure. I have admired Davis in August Wilson plays, but she has never played a woman of more uncommon dimension. "Unidentified" indeed!
Daniel Sullivan directs with clarity, keeping the story pulsing ahead. The same Derek McLane from "I Am My Own Wife" contributes a simple yet elegant stage design that shines with purpose. But the main color comes from Catherine Zuber's costumes, which speak volumes about character and status in a play where fabric is understood and clothing valued.
Esther is an unforgettable character -- more than any other I met on this trip to New York. Who will give Pittsburgh the chance to meet her, even without Viola Davis to make her shine?
Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre, Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center, 111 W. 46th St.; 1-212-719-1300.
First Published: May 23, 2004, 4:00 a.m.
