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Film & Arts Reviews On Broadway: “Orphans,” “The Nance, “The Big Knife,” “The Assembled Parties”
Film & Arts Reviews On Broadway: “Orphans,” “The Nance, “The Big Knife,” “The Assembled Parties”On Broadway: “Orphans,” “The Nance, “The Big Knife,” “The Assembled Parties”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 29 April 2013 17:33
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Orphans
Written by Lyle Kessler; directed by Daniel Sullivan
Performances through June 30, 2013
The Nance
Written by Douglas Carter Beane; directed by Jack O’Brien
Performances through June 16, 2013
The Big Knife
Written by Clifford Odets; directed by Doug Hughes
Performances through June 2, 2013
The Assembled Parties
Written by Richard Greenberg; directed by Lynne Meadow
Performances through June 16, 2013
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| Sturridge, Baldwin and Foster in Orphans (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The trio we meet in a shabby Philly apartment in Lyle Kessler’s obvious Orphans—tough guy Treat, his autistic brother Philip and their shady victim Harold, who shares the place with them after foiling Treat’s kidnaping attempt—charts a predictable path from the get-go.
It opens with Treat returning from a day of petty thievery and showing his meager wares to Philip, too scared to leave the house by Treat’s warning that he’ll die in the outside world: he’s content to eat tuna sandwiches with mayo and watch reruns of old movies on TV. When Treat brings home and ties up Harold—drunken, dapper, with a briefcase—the dynamics unsurprisingly shift. After untying the ropes, Harold ingratiates himself with Philip then Treat; soon Harold (also an orphan, he says) becomes a father surrogate to the parentless pair.
The solid 1987 movie version, directed by Alan Pakula, comprised a strong ensemble in Albert Finney (Harold), Matthew Modine (Treat) and Kevin Anderson (Philip). On Broadway, Daniel Sullivan directs with a veteran hand on John Lee Beatty’s authentically dilapidated set, while the three actors—Alec Baldwin (a poised Harold), Ben Foster (a wishy-washy Treat) and Jim Sturridge (an astonishingly gymnastic Philip)—never find the right rhythms to keep this crudely metaphorical drama together for two hours.
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| Nathan Lane in The Nance (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The Nance, Douglas Carter Beane’s best idea yet for a play, is an alternately hard-edged and corny study of a “nance,” a vaudeville/burlesque-era performer whose blatant swishiness onstage belied his offstage heterosexuality—usually.
This is the 1930s, when “deviant” love dared not speak its name. Beane introduces Chauncey, a famous nance and self-hating right-winger, in an automat, where—as is his custom—he picks up willing young men for a rendezvous. Whom he meets, however—just off the bus from Buffalo—is studly Ned, and their anonymous tryst becomes a live-in relationship, something Chauncey has studiously avoided, to avoid unneeded questions about his personal life, until now.
Labor strife and New York police crackdowns make life miserable for Chauncey and his co-performers: his onstage partner/boss Efram and dancers Carmen, Joan and Sylvie, the last with whom he jousts repeatedly over her Communist talk and his staunchly anti-FDR/New Deal position. The drama comes to a head when Chauncey refuses to be cowed by police threats and is hauled off to jail after he camps it up onstage with an in-their-face defiance.
Despite dramatic clunkiness, Beane adroitly mixes backstage, offstage and onstage happenings, with Chauncey and pals’ routines played out in their entirety—sometimes too much of a (not always) good thing. Despite its ungainliness, director Jack O’Brien cannily makes The Nance Broadway’s most entertaining new show by mixing Nathan Lane’s naturally hammy Chauncey with grounded supporting performances (except Jonny Orsini’s lunkheaded boytoy Ned). Add in the clean efficiency in sets, costumes, lighting and music and The Nance is a more accomplished as a spectacle than as a semi-serious drama.
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| Ireland and Cannavale in The Big Knife (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The recent Golden Boy revival showed there’s still life in Clifford Odets’ plays—earnestly hard-nosed morality tales—provided there’s a pitch-perfect production. The return of The Big Knife—written in 1948, long after seminal works like Golden Boy, Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!—proves that Odets doesn’t work when the staging isn’t on his wavelength.
The play concerns Charlie Castle, a studio system star—living the high life in a gorgeous Hollywood home (John Lee Beatty’s magnificent set is the best I’ve seen in awhile)—who decides he no longer wants to be chained to Marcus Hoff and Hoff Studios. He’s also dealing with his estranged wife Marion, gofer Buddy Bliss (whose flirty wife Connie Charlie has a fling with), agent Nat Danzinger, ingénue Dixie Evans and Hoff’s right-hand man Smiley Coy (what a name!), always around to fix the messes Charlie gets into.
Odets’ dialogue oscillates between poetic epiphanies and pretentious platitudes, often in the same speech. His heart is in the right place, but by making the far-from-innocent Charlie a bastion of integrity, Odets stumbles trying to find a dramatically satisfying conclusion to his hero’s murderously messy situation. Emotions and tempers flare but remain on the surface.
Doug Hughes’ soporific staging leaves his actors flailing. Richard Kind’s blustering Marcus and Reg Rogers’s rat-like Smiley are too loud, the women—Marin Ireland’s schoolmarmish Marion, Ana Reeder’s lummox-like Connie, Rachel Brosnahan’s perky Dixie—can’t escape caricature, and Bobby Cannavale—the endlessly resourceful actor from The Motherfucker with the Hat—is unable to inject needed humanity into Charlie, a protagonist who remains flat and uninteresting.
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| The cast of The Assembled Parties (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Richard Greenberg’s The Assembled Parties follows a Jewish family, the Bascovs, at Christmas parties 20 years apart—in 1980 (dawn of Reagan) and 2000 (beginning of George W. Bush). If that doesn’t underline its overly schematic approach, let me add that this family—the members of which are nearly all witty wisecrackers—is as much a maze as its gigantic 14-room Central Park West apartment (in which family members who have visited for years get lost).
The play revolves around matriarch Julie, sister-in-law Faye and Jeff, friend of Julie’s college-age son Scotty, leaving in the dust Julie’s husband Ben, Faye’s husband Mort and daughter Shelley, and Julie and Ben’s young son Tim—who at least grows up and appears in 2000. (Greenberg relegates Shelley to an Act II phone call and kills off Ben, Mort and Scotty, resorting to mumbles about shady doings and AIDS, none of which is explained or explored compellingly enough: perhaps an earlier draft fleshed out what now remains as unconvincing melodrama.)
Although the second act nods toward major revelations and insights, none is forthcoming: instead, improbable one-liners keep going, stale Reagan jokes morph into stale Dubya jokes (all natural crowd-pleasers) and Greenberg, unable to become our new Bernard Shaw, must settle for being our new Neil Simon.
Jessica Hecht’s now-standard mannered line readings—also annoying in last season’s Harvey—prevent Julie from becoming the towering heroine Greenberg has written her as, while the always amusing Judith Light trots out similarly drunken witticisms for Faye that served the actress far better in Jon Robin Baitz’s superior Other Desert Cities.
Jeremy Shamos makes Jeff a sympathetic figure, but Mark Blum, Jonathan Walker and Jake Silberman do little as the other underwritten men. Santo Loquasto’s stylishly plush set unerringly recreates the place such families live in, but Lynne Meadow’s straightforward direction does this overstuffed but undernourished play no favors.
Orphans
Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 West 45th Street, New York, NY
The Nance
Lyceum Theatre, 149 West 45th Street, New York, NY
The Big Knife
American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
The Assembled Parties
Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY
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