The Queen of Versailles

 C
 
There’s a fascinating show on stage at the St. James Theatre. Unfortunately, it’s not the one that lasts for over two and a half hours and recounts the story of Jackie Siegel (Kristin Chenoweth) and her husband David (F. Murray Abraham,) The Time Share King, who set out to build America’s largest private home in Orlando, Florida in the early 2000s. No, it’s the one that starts about 15 minutes before curtain time, featuring beautifully dressed and bewigged figures at the Sun King’s court going about their rounds, raising and lowering chandeliers to trim their wicks, dusting, serving tea and cakes, and parading around a lavish room in Louis XIV’s pre-Versailles Parisian palace. It's too bad that at this point 90% of the audience is busy settling in and paying no attention to what is happening on stage. After an opening song about why the king wants to build the palace at Versailles (“Because I Can”), we move to Orlando and the Siegels. Alas, it’s downhill from there.  Although Lindsey Ferrentino’s book is largely based on the hit 2012 Sundance documentary by Lauren Greenfield, it somehow does not capture the film’s impact. Perhaps the ever-increasing excesses of the .1% in recent years have numbed us to Jackie’s insatiable quest for more. With multi-award winner Kristin Chenoweth in the lead role, Stephen Schwartz (Wicked) as composer/lyricist, two-time Tony winner Michael Arden as director and a seemingly unlimited budget for the spectacular sets and costumes by Dane Laffrey and Christian Cowan respectively, it seemed that success was a sure thing. It wasn’t. Although Chenoweth works hard to bring Jackie to life, her role is disjointed and the score does not give her much chance to demonstrate her vocal prowess. The parts of the book that don’t adhere to the documentary are not improvements. The first act comes across as an extended outline of Jackie’s life. When a tragic element enters in the second act, it feels like an add-on. If there is a clear point of view, I missed it. F. Murray Abraham’s moments on stage are few and far between. Nina White, as Jackie’s firstborn child Victoria, and Tatum Grace Hopkins, as her niece Jonquil, are both fine. The many other cast members perform admirably. Would that the score and book had been more engaging. As it stands, I was left to wonder how a show with so much going for it could so badly misfire. Running time: two hours 40 minutes including intermission.

Other

A

I’m generally not a fan of one-person shows, so I had no plans to see Ari'el Stachel’s show at Greenwich House Theater, even though I remembered thoroughly enjoying his Tony-winning performance as an Egyptian trumpet player in The Band’s Visit. However, after two friends whose opinion I respect separately urged me to see it, I relented and bought a ticket. I’m very glad that I did. Stachel is a phenomenal performer with enough energy for ten. He is also a very brave man to reveal his struggles since childhood with OCD and anxiety disorder, as well as his ongoing identity crisis as the child of a bearded Yemeni Jew and an Ashkenazi American Jew who divorced when he was a toddler. His attempts to mix with white friends was problematic once they got a look at his brown-skinned bearded father, especially after 9/11. Nor was his attempt to become a part of black culture ultimately successful. His anxiety disorder causes him to sweat profusely, which, together with the hostile environment in casting actors who present as non-Caucasian, has complicated his acting career. Over 90 minutes, Stachel relates his attempts to deal with his mental health issues and accept his identity. En route, he impersonates an impressive variety of characters, sings, dances and draws the audience into his orbit. The play is surprisingly funny, considering its themes. The production is enhanced by a simple geometric set design by Afsoon Pajoufar, excellent lighting and projections by Alexander V. Nichols and a topnotch sound design by Madeleine Oldham. Director Tony Taccone never lets the energy flag. The next time I fill out a form, I will think of this play and all it reveals about the lives of those who need to check the box “other.” Running time: 90 minutes. Closes December 6. Some performances are followed by a talkback about living with mental health issues

Maybe Happy Ending

A-

Since it has been running for almost a year and has been recognized by the Tonys for best musical, best book, best original score, best leading actor, best direction and best scenic design, there is very little I can add to the accolades that has not already been said. If there were a Tony for originality, I would have awarded that too. Darren Criss is a wonder as Oliver, an obsolete Helperbot spending his remaining years in a retirement home for robots outside Seoul, blindly optimistic that his friend, i.e. former owner, James (Marcus Choi,) will show up to reclaim him. Oliver has acquired a taste for classic jazz from James, especially for the fictional jazz pianist Gil Brentley (Dez Duron), whose song “Why Love” both opens and ends the show. Twelve years after his arrival, in a scene reminiscent of La Boheme’s first meeting between Mimi and Rodolfo, Oliver answers a knock at the door by Claire (Helen J. Shen), his neighbor across the hall, needing an emergency charge. Unlike La Boheme, it is not love at first sight. Oliver reluctantly lets her into his room and eventually into his life. Although also obsolete, Claire is a newer model Helperbot with greater sophistication and less optimism about human nature. Eventually, the two decide to undertake a trip to Jeju Island, where there is a firefly forest that Claire has longed to see and the place where James moved when he left Oliver behind. Disappointment awaits Oliver at James’s home. Claire and Oliver are each given the opportunity to erase their painful memories from their operating system to find a satisfactory ending. The acting is uniformly excellent, with Criss as the standout. The scenic design by Dane Laffrey is absolutely breathtaking. The blending of neon-bordered shape-changing boxes containing action in many locations with black-and-white projections depicting the bots’ former owners is skillfully done. The scene in the firefly forest is magical. The costumes by Clint Ramos are a delight. Michael Arden’s direction is flawless. Although the story is superficially about robots, its underlying themes delve into aspects of human behavior including the vagaries of love, jealousy, aging and mortality. The play never loses its good humor though and offers lots of laughs.  My only disappointment was that Will Aronson’s music, though completely congruent with the book (by Aronson and Hue Park), offers no “hummers."  I urge you to see the show while Darren Criss is back in the leading role. Running time: one hour 40 minutes; no intermission.

Kyoto

B+

Nine years ago, the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center housed an ambitious play about the behind-the-scenes machinations that resulted in the signing of the Oslo Accords. Now the Newhouse stage is home to another play about the preparations for and shenanigans during an important international conference, this time the one leading to the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty that committed industrialized nations to reduce their carbon emissions. Playgoers who, like me, entered expecting something similar to the play Oslo will be quite surprised: Kyoto is far livelier, more involving, and, dare I say, funnier. Scenic designer Miriam Buether has  configured the center of the Newhouse stage as a large round conference table. Some seats at the table are occupied by lucky playgoers. Each audience member is given a delegate badge for one of the participating countries. I was the representative of Togo. The first act deals with the ten years of preparatory meetings that led to the Kyoto conference and the second act covers the conference itself. Playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson came up with the brilliant idea of choosing as their narrator and central character not some advocate of climate change but the man hired by Big Oil to undermine the work of the conference, Republican attorney and ex-government functionary Don Pearlman. For ten years, he uses his many skills to delay, dilute and deter any progress toward an agreement. Lucky for us, he is played by Stephen Kunken, a fine actor I have long wanted to see in a leading role. He does not disappoint; his energetic performance sets the tone for the entire production. Jorge Bosch and Ferdy Roberts are welcome holdovers from the West End staging. Amusingly, Daniel Jenkins and Dariush Kashani both appeared in Oslo at LCT. The large cast of 14 are all fine. I liked Natalie Gold as Pearlman’s long-suffering wife. Kate Burton, as the US delegate, doesn’t get much chance to show her strengths. With so many characters, the play doesn’t have time to give more than a rough sketch of most of them. Directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin keep things moving at a breakneck pace. Occasionally the shouting and gavel pounding became excessive for my taste. I thought the first act could use some judicious trimming while the second act could have been a bit longer to make developments clearer. All in all, I admired the play’s ambition and found it more entertaining than I expected. Running time: two hours 45 minutes including intermission. 

NOTE: At the performance I attended there was an audience member with an emotional support poodle in his lap sitting at the conference table. (See them at the right of the above photo.) At one point in the second act, Kunken as Pearlman explained some esoteric point and then turned toward the man and said “Confused?” After the man nodded his head in the affirmative, Kunken said “I was talking to the dog.”

Broadway Theater Traffic Alert

 If you are planning to attend a Wednesday matinee at one of the many theaters in the 200 block of either W 45th or W 46th Streets, allow yourself at least an extra 15 minutes to get to your theater. There is a large tower under construction on 8th Avenue between those two streets and a flagman is frequently stopping traffic on both streets to allow trucks to enter and exit the site.

Little Bear Ridge Road

 B+

Samuel D. Hunter, the Bard of Boise, is back with another foray into the lives of small-town Idahoans. We meet Sarah, an irascible, fiercely independent woman who has chosen to live in isolation half an hour away from the nearest town, and Ethan, her estranged gay nephew, who has returned to town from Seattle to settle the affairs of his recently deceased meth addict father, whom he had not seen in years. Late one evening in 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, Ethan drops in on Sarah to pick up the deed to his father’s house. Sarah somewhat grudgingly invites him to stay with her while he is in town. The two make tentative attempts to connect. Ethan reveals that his writing career is at a standstill and he has split with his partner in Seattle. Sarah does not reveal that she is seriously ill, a fact that Ethan discovers inadvertently. At the local gay bar, Ethan meets James, a seemingly happy, purposeful astrophysics student. Their budding relationship is either evidence that opposites attract or that there aren’t many choices at gay bars in Idaho. A year later Ethan is still living with Sarah. James’s cheerfulness has seemingly lubricated the relationship between aunt and nephew, but a casual remark James drops provokes a crisis that surfaces Ethan’s long-time grudge against Sarah and revives her need for independence. The final scene provides a ray of hope that Ethan has begun moving forward. As usual, Hunter shows great compassion for his characters. He also brings in a sociocultural context that includes the insanity of our health system, the inanity of our television shows, the delicate balance between loneliness and dependence, the small-town drug crisis, and the chasm between those who have struggled to make ends meet and those who haven’t. We are fortunate that Sarah is played by the magnificent Laurie Metcalf and Ethan, by the excellent Micah Stock, who holds his own with Metcalf. John Drea is fine as James, making the most of a slightly underwritten role. Meighan Gerachis lends warmth to a small role in the final scene. Joe Mantello once again shows why he is one of our finest directors. Scott Pask’s minimalist set has a gray three-seater reclining sofa on a gray carpeted turntable under a revolving fan. Jessica Pabst’s costumes are apt. The title possibly refers to the location of Sarah's home, but has no apparent evocative importance. While I admired the play and loved the performances, I was not as moved as I was by the last Hunter play I saw, A Case for the Existence of God. Running time: 95 minutes, no intermission.

Let's Love!

C-

 

For the fourth time, Atlantic Theater Company artistic director Neil Pepe has presented and directed a collection of one-act plays by Ethan Coen. I had seen two of the earlier programs and had been disappointed twice. I would have skipped the latest one, lamely and misleadingly titled Let’s Love!, if not for the casting of the charismatic Aubrey Plaza, whose fan I have been since the second season of “The White Lotus.” Alas, her inclusion is not enough to rescue this trio of uninspired, unrelated short plays. The first is basically a pair of monologues in a bar, in which a white woman of a certain age (Mary McCann) tries to pick up a middle-age black man (Dion Graham). Except for a couple of one-liners, the dialog is weak and McCann’s performance is bland. The middle and longest piece features Plaza as Susan, a foul-mouthed, hard-hearted woman for whom sex is primarily a bargaining chip. Plaza is fine, but the role doesn’t give her much range. Chris Bauer is a hoot as the man she hires to beat up her ex-boyfriend Dan, a thankless, underwritten role played by CJ Wilson. His current girlfriend Faye is overacted by Mary Wiseman using an intentionally annoying high-pitched voice. The final scene of this piece, between Plaza and the ever-reliable Noah Robbins, playing a nerd she meets on J-Date, was the highlight of the afternoon for me. It has very little connection to the other scenes and would be fine as a stand-alone. The final play features Robbins again, this time as a young man on a first date with Dylan Gelula, whose dinner out is ruined by his sudden case of food poisoning, which strangely turns out to be a bonding experience that promises to be the start of a relationship. As if in recognition of the fact that Coen’s plays provide insufficient entertainment, the production adds a prelude and interludes with Nellie McKay, singing, playing the piano, the guitar and a harmonica and dressed in a variety of costumes from top hat and tails to folk singer garb. Her voice is sweet and the songs are pleasant, although they have no bearing whatever on the plays. A musical finale with the entire cast also seems unrelated to anything else, but it is fun to see Plaza play a mean sax. The set by Riccardo Hernandez is functional and the costumes by Peggy Schneider are apt. Honesty compels me to report that the audience seemed to be thoroughly enjoying everything. Nevertheless, I feel that this production was not up to Atlantic’s usually high standards. Dress warmly; the theater was chilly. Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission.