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Broadway Play Review—Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic”

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Friday, 09 February 2024 01:39
Written by Kevin Filipski
Prayer for the French Republic
Written by Joshua Harmon
Directed by David Cromer
Through March 3, 2024
Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY
manhattantheatreclub.com
 
The cast of Prayer for the French Republic (photo: Jeremy Daniel)
 
Joshua Harmon’s earlier plays spotlighted his strengths and weaknesses. The bluntly titled Bad Jews alternated between hilariously devastating takedowns and being strident and redundant, with characters that exist merely to show off his cleverness. He followed that with Significant Other, a dark comedy also crammed with riotously funny dialogue alongside crass and snide moments, that at least carried an emotional weight that the sour Bad Jews lacked.  
 
Harmon’s new play, Prayer for the French Republic, is both more ambitious than and an extension of these works. At his best, Harmon chronicles relationships in constant flux, usually through amusing conversations that lay bare their fraying bonds. In Prayer, the Salomon family precariously lives through two eras of intense anti-Semitism in France: the years 1944-46 and 2016-17. 
 
The family’s patriarch and matriarch, Adolphe and Irma, fearfully live in their Parisian flat during World War II.  Their daughter Jacqueline and her family fled to Cuba before the war began. But both sons, Robert and Lucien, and their families were arrested and taken away to a concentration camp. Only Lucien has returned, his teenage son Pierre in tow. The older couple, with Adolphe the proud proprietor of the family’s long-running piano store, starts rebuilding their shattered postwar lives as Lucien and Pierre try to come to terms with what they lived through.
 
Seven decades later, Pierre’s children, son Patrick and daughter Marcelle, have their own families in Paris. Patrick—the play’s cynical narrator—is at arm’s length from his sister, her husband Charles, and adult children, son Daniel and daughter Elodie. Molly, a distant American cousin from New York, arrives to stay awhile (she’s attending college a couple hours away and spends every weekend at their apartment), and her appearance coincides with ominous occurrences like when Daniel is attacked while simply walking on the street. A bemused Marcelle can't believe he won’t wear a baseball cap over his yarmulke so passersby won’t notice he’s Jewish, while Charles—a Sephardic Jew from Algeria—is starting to think the family should move to the Holy Land because it’s too dangerous in supposedly civilized France.
 
Charles lays bare his feelings to his wife in the play’s most emotionally powerful monologue:
 
I’m scared, Marcelle. You lay everything out, you lay it out so rationally, and I hear every word you’re saying, but I’m scared. We are Jews. We are Jews. The only reason we're still on this planet is because we learned to get out of dangerous situations before they got the better of us. Something is happening in the world, and it’s happening in our country, too—I can feel it. I feel it when I walk with Daniel, I feel it when I read the left-wing editorials, I feel it watching Le Pen and her base, all stirred up. Something is happening, and when that thing comes, I don’t want to have to pray so my own country will protect me from it.
 
For more than three hours, Harmon juxtaposes scenes of the Salomons 70 years apart, and although some are wry or incisive, the overall arc of the play remains shapeless, with no dramatic climax or revelation. The closest Harmon comes is the late arrival of the elderly Pierre, who is told his beloved daughter’s family is leaving France for good, but the scene is sadly more perfunctory than profound, as is the final image of several generations of the Salomons gathered around the piano at center stage to sing the French national anthem.
 
Sprinkled throughout are clumsy, clunky passages that feel like outtakes from his earlier plays. When the cousins begin falling for each other, Daniel flirts with Molly: “You want me to take my shirt off and play some Bob Dylan?” Later, after Molly tells him how sexy it is that she has a French boyfriend in Paris, we actually get such a scene, as a shirtless Daniel strums his guitar and sings “Forever Young” to her as if we’ve suddenly been dropped into a rom-com.
 
The ’40s scenes cover familiar ground for anyone who’s seen movies, plays or TV series about the Holocaust, but the scenes set in our racist present are more compelling, if only because the friction between the curt Patrick and accomplished Marcelle underlines this dramatization of assimilated Jews realizing that all that’s been accomplished since Hitler’s defeat and the creation of Israel is starting to be erased by the casual antisemitism and hatred that has surged as autocrats (and would-be dictators) have risen to power.
 
David Cromer’s direction adroitly smooths over the ragged edges of Harmon’s less than felicitous writing; Takeshi Kata’s evocative set, Amith Chandrashaker’s astute lighting, Sarah Laux’s spot-on costumes and Daniel Kluger’s excellent music and sound design give the play all the trappings of a masterpiece without actually being one.
 
The acting is, with one exception, superb, led by Betsy Aidem’s magisterial Marcelle, Nancy Robinette’s devastatingly wounded Irma, Richard Masur’s quietly shattering cameo as the old Pierre and Francis Benhamou’s sardonic Elodie—the latter even excelling in a hamfisted bar scene where Elodie destroys Molly’s oblivious liberal jargon about supporting Israel. Benhamou makes the clichés her character spouts sound truly organic, a real accomplishment.
 
Only an uncomfortable Anthony Edwards as our guide Patrick (a showy role that’s not particularly illuminating) falls short. In that he’s similar to Harmon himself, who aims high but often misses. 

MET Orchestra Presents “Fall of the Weimar Republic"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Wednesday, 07 February 2024 16:09
Written by Jack Angstreich

Lise Davidsen (L) with conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Photo by Chris Lee.

At Stern Auditorium, on the evening of Thursday, February 1st, I had the pleasure of attending a rewarding concert featuring—as part of Carnegie Hall’s current festival, “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice”—the excellent musicians of the MET Orchestra under the direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The program began auspiciously with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fuga (Ricercata) a 6 voci from Musical Offering, BWV 1079, presented in the brilliant arrangement by Anton Webern, who wrote about the score as follows: “My orchestration is intended … to reveal the motivic coherence. Beyond that, of course, it is to set the character of the piece as I feel it. What music it is!” (George Balanchine’s ballet,Episodes,is set to works by Webern, including this one for its extraordinary final section.)

The outstanding Norwegian soprano and Metropolitan Opera star, Lise Davidsen, then entered the stage for what proved to be maybe the highlight of the event, an enthralling rendition of Ricard Wagner’s magnificent set of songs, the Wesendonck Lieder, partly “orchestrated with the composer’s approval by Austrian conductor Felix Mottl,” according to the useful program note by Jay Goodwin. An enthusiastic audience was surprised when its applause elicited a fabulous encore: Wagner’s beautiful aria, "Dich, teure Halle" from his early opera, Tannhäuser.

The second half of the evening was also memorable, consisting of Gustav Mahler’s monumental Symphony 5. The composer wrote this about the piece in a letter to his wife Alma in 1904: “And the public—heavens!—how should they react to this chaos, which is constantly giving birth to new worlds and promptly destroying them again? What should they make of these primeval noises, this rushing, roaring, raging sea, these dancing stars, these ebbing, shimmering, gleaming waves?” The work opens with a fanfare and a stirring funeral march; some recurring, more frenetic music intercedes and later some dance-like passages and some more lyrical interludes. The second movement is also tumultuous while much of the ambitious, eccentricScherzothat succeeds it is enchanting and playful, if at times suspenseful, ending abruptly. The glorious, celestialAdagietto,some of the greatest music ever composed—famously employed by the immortal Luchino Visconti for his landmark 1971 film,Death in Venice—was another pinnacle of the concert, attaining an astonishing intensity. The almost pastoralfinale,has a contrasting levity, a joyous quality that recalls that of Mahler’s settings of the celebrated collection of German folk songs,Des Knaben Wunderhorn,such as the first and final movements of his magisterial Symphony No. 4; it builds to a thrilling conclusion, which prompted a standing ovation.

The MET Orchestra will return to Carnegie Hall on June 11th and 14th.

Tito Muñoz Directs Juilliard Orchestra at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Tuesday, 06 February 2024 19:17
Written by Jack Angstreich

Tito Muñoz conducts Juilliard Orchestra. Photo by Claudio Papapietro

At Lincoln Center’s Alice Tull Hall on the evening of Saturday, January 27th, I had the immense pleasure of attending a superb concert of twentieth century symphonic music—continuing a terrific season—presented by the marvelous Juilliard Orchestra, here under the remarkable direction of Tito Muñoz.

The program began brilliantly with a splendid account of Silvio Revueltas’s extraordinary, too infrequently played Sensemayá, based on a poem by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. An amazing soloist, Fangzhou Ye, then entered the stage for an excellent performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s awesome Piano Concerto No. 2. The initial Andantino movement opens reflectively but soon becomes more passionate—even volatile—for much of its length, although it ends quietly. The brisk, ensuing—and appropriately and characteristically playful—Scherzo—marked Vivace—is virtuosic, propulsive and colorful, while theModeratomovement that follows is dramatic and portentous but with some meditative—as well as some quirkier, more jocular—passages, eventually acquiring a dance-like, almost jazzy rhythm, but it also ends softly and somewhat abruptly. The finale—an Allegro tempestuoso—is more hurried in pace at the outset, but becomes more measured, even lyrical, if eventually more agitated and concludes very excitingly.

The second half of the program was even stronger, comprised of a thrilling realization of Igor Stravinsky’s dazzling ballet score, Petrouchka, in its 1947 revision. The artists deservedly received an enthusiastic ovation.

Musical Review—“Once Upon a Mattress” at Encores With Sutton Foster

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Saturday, 03 February 2024 01:37
Written by Kevin Filipski
Once Upon a Mattress
Music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer
Book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller, and Marshall Barer
Directed by Lear deBessonet; choreography by Lorin Latarro
Performances January 24-February 4, 2024
New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, NYC
nycitycenter.org
 
Sutton Foster and cast in Once Upon a Mattress (photo: Joan Marcus)
 
Occasionally role and performer combine for a happy marriage. The musical Once Upon a Mattress, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Princess and the Pea, is one example. When the show opened on Broadway in 1959, Carol Burnett played Princess Winnifred, the last hope for a kingdom desperately needing a new bride for Prince Dauntless because all other marriages will be able to take place. By all accounts, Burnett’s unique and physical style was perfect for this slightly silly crowd-pleaser whose tuneful songs by Mary Rodgers covered up for the uneven lyrics and book.
 
Fast-forward 65 years to Sutton Foster headlining a two-week Encores run at City Center. Since it’s been adapted and updated by Amy Sherman-Palladino (with whom Foster worked on the TV series Bunheads) so there are a few topical references and fewer goofy characters running around. But it all hinges on Foster, and she proves herself as physically adept—in different but equally agile ways—as Burnett. 
 
Of course, Foster’s vocal pipes and comedic facility have never been questioned, and she acquits herself magnificently in her big musical numbers, “The Swamps of Home” and “Happily Ever After,” and she can rat-a-tat the rush of quips and one liners as well as anyone. But it’s her physical prowess throughout that’s simply astonishing. 
 
From the moment she crawls over the castle wall to make her initial entrance through her bounding around the stage during “Shy” and the first-act closer “Song of Love” to, even more impressively at the end, displaying incredibly precise movements while trying futilely to fall asleep, showing herself as a gymnast nearly on par with Simon Biles, Foster's performance is extraordinary. That she does occasional Carol Burnett-like mannerisms is a bit excessive, but who cares? (Skylar Fox is credited with “Physical Comedy & Effects,” so he may deserve plaudits as well.)
 
Director Lear deBessonet and choreographer Lorin Latarro shrewdly don’t foreground Foster; for all her talent and stamina, the Broadway superstar fits easily into the harmonious musical-comedy ensemble that includes such premium hams as Harriet Harris, Michael Urie, David Patrick Kelly and Cheyenne Jackson. Meanwhile, Nikki Renée Daniels sounds as ravishing as she looks, while J. Harrison Ghee—the breakthrough star of last season’s Some Like It Hot—consolidates his singing, dancing and comic talents in the expanded role of the Jester.
 
Yet, even as the Encores Orchestra sounds sumptuous under Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s musical direction and David Zinn’s amusing sets and Andrea Hood’s colorful costumes make it a visual treasure, this is Sutton Foster’s show all the way. Which brings up the question: will this Mattress transfer to Broadway after Foster is finished with Sweeney Todd?

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