A Broadway show may linger forever in the mind of a true fan. Its actual life span, however, has a lot to do with which way the Tony Awards fall. Next Sunday the 59th annual Tonys telecast may determine, for example, the longevity of “Sweet Charity,” which tried out in Chicago. The new-play Tony Award is probably going to “Doubt,” a fine old-fashioned well-made issue drama. If so, how long will the London import “The Pillowman” (nasty, brutish, modish and long) stick around?
Theater is migratory as well as temporary. The migrations to Broadway this season have been many and productive. Two of this year’s four nominated new musicals, “Monty Python’s Spamalot” (the favorite) and “The Light in the Piazza” (the one with the cast album for the ages), tried out in Chicago. “Spamalot” killed ’em mere months ago at the Shubert; “Piazza” played a year and a half ago, to a more mixed response, at the Goodman Theatre.
In other instances, shows that were large successes in relatively small productions off-Broad-way — “Doubt” at Manhattan Theatre Company, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” at Second Stage — ended up transferring to Broadway houses with ease.
You learn a few things from a move, to which anyone who ever rented a U-Haul and bribed a few friends can attest.
Lesson No. 1: No time like the present.
When “Spamalot” opened in Chicago, everybody smelled the biggest medieval smash since the Crusades, and with a lot less controversy. Everybody could spot the dead wood in it too. Two songs in Act 1, the witch song (“Burn Her!”) and the cow song (“The Cow Song”), lay there like big slabs of unfunny. Did director Mike Nichols wait until the Chicago tryout was over to fix the show? No. The offending songs were gone practically by intermission.
Lesson No. 2, contradicting Lesson No. 1: Take your time.
Composer/lyricist Adam Guettel and librettist Craig Lucas debuted their chamber musical, “The Light in the Piazza,” in Seattle two years ago. They regrouped for a Goodman staging that opened in January 2004. They did not rush things; Guettel, whose previous full-length story musical, “Floyd Collins,” came nearly a decade earlier, works on what might be called the Stanley Kubrick timeline.
But look at the results. Continuing through the summer at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, the revised “Piazza” now sounds, looks, lives and breathes like a specialized piece that happens also to be very special. The redesigned and largely recast production directed by Bartlett Sher is now a thing of beauty. And Guettel’s score, fully and brilliantly orchestrated, now carries the heft, stylistic range and seductive power of an idiosyncratic masterwork.
As Margaret, mother of the emotionally stunted daughter caught in the spell of Italy and one of its sweetest natives, Victoria Clark (a shoo-in for a Tony) remains the sterling center of a highly burnished project. Now, however, she has worthy cohorts in Kelli O’Hara (the new Clara), Sarah Uriarte Berry (the jealous wife), Michael Berresse (the straying husband) and, crucially, Matthew Morrison (Fabrizio). Now, the cast has a collective ton of charisma it didn’t have in Chicago.
Guettel made a few choice amplifications after Chicago, and his score’s emotional extremes are more intense than before: A new Act 1 song for Fabrizio, “Il Mondo Era Vuoto” — sung in Italian — and a brief but fabulous Django Reinhardt-y jazz instrumental (“American Dancing,” which I can’t stop playing), add immeasurably to the result. The title tune, as sung by O’Hara and orchestrated to within an inch of its achingly romantic string instrumentation, finally carries the impact it deserves. In Chicago, the song already sounded like a new old classic — as if Guettel, Richard Rodgers’ grandson, took precisely what he needed from Rodgers and left the rest for lesser talents to exploit.
I still wish “Piazza” ended with something other than “Fable,” a song that makes intellectual sense for the character of Margaret, expanding on an earlier piece of music designed for an overprotective mother to comfort, and subtly stifle, her grown daughter. To me it sounds like too much, too late, losing its way in a thicket of metaphors involving fairy tales and golden apples and love’s illusions. Small matter. Pick your favorite half-dozen selections from the “Piazza” score and you have a half-dozen of the finest songs composed for Broadway since Sondheim’s peak.
Lesson No. 3: An indifferent response to yet another jukebox musical in Chicago can lead to the same, or worse, in New York. See “All Shook Up” for details.
Lesson No. 4: Play in a band with Adam Guettel, and eventually you’ll compete for the same Tony.
“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” composer and lyricist David Yazbek once played in a band with Guettel, and here they are now, both nominated for best original score. Theirs are polar-opposite sensibilities. Yazbek has written charming ditties for “Bear in the Big Blue House,” as well as producing for the band XTC. Guettel once sang in the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera. Yazbek is unlikely to write operatic arias in Italian; Guettel would have been an unlikely choice for Yazbek’s first musical, “The Full Monty” (though director Jack O’Brien offered Guettel the job first).
Yet both are fiends for that rare thing on Broadway: melody. Fresh, inventive, fervent melody. Yazbek’s a wiseacre by nature, savvy with parodies and genre riffs, but listen to the “Scoundrels” song “Nothing Is Too Wonderful To Be True.” Frank Loesser would’ve been proud to call it his own; Cy Coleman too. The “Scoundrels” cast album features a bonus track, the terrific Sherie Rene Scott singing a jazz version of “Nothing is Too Wonderful,” accompanied by Bill Charlap’s piano. Exquisite.
Lesson No. 4: Cast your show correctly, and the move from off-Broadway can go just fine.
Many wondered if John Patrick Shanley’s invigoratingly well-wrought “issue” play “Doubt,” in which a priest suspected of sexual abuse squares off with his accuser in the Bronx in 1964, would get lost in a Broadway house. It’s a four-character play that felt just right in the modestly scaled Manhattan Theatre Club space.
Now at the Walter Kerr Theatre, “Doubt” has adapted to its larger Broadway house with no loss of nuance. One of the tighter Tony races this year is between Cherry Jones (Sister Aloysius, the priest’s adversary, in “Doubt”) and Kathleen Turner, a critical and commercial success in the ongoing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” revival. I suspect the Tony will go Turner’s way. She was the one movie star this season who didn’t come a cropper in a classic. Still, Jones would be a worthy winner.
Another off-Broadway transfer, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” has settled in at Circle in the Square. Director James Lapine is a wizard: He and his designers have made the theater and its lobby into a faux-junior high school, with charming and clever touches everywhere. The show features the most surreally well-cast ensemble on Broadway. Composer/lyricist William Finn’s score is wonderful and right for the scale of this piece. I laughed just as much the second time at “Spelling Bee” as I did the first.
Cast to cast, joke to joke, in fact, it’s funnier than “Spamalot.”
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The 59th Tony Awards telecast, broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall in New York, runs 7 to 10 p.m. June 5, on CBS (WBBM-Ch. 2).
