Four Plays are Better than Some
by Frank Episale
“Solidarity” from Billy Elliot
“I don’t know how you do it, Frank. Every time I look out at the theatre scene in this city, all I see is a lot of crap.” This statement was part of an email I received last summer while trying to decide what I would write about for an upcoming article. When I was an undergraduate, one of my professors confessed to the class that he had long ago stopped seeing theatre because it was so often a disappointment and he found it personally painful to see bad theatre. I myself have gone through long stretches when I’ve questioned my chosen field of study, not so much because of the terrible shows, but because of the mediocre shows. These most deadly of productions showcase bland competence and workmanlike professionalism that garner respectful applause from an audience that won’t remember the details of what they saw even a week later.
But then there are seasons like this one. Show after show, week after week, I’m reminded why I study theatre and why I live in New York. The past month has taken me from DUMBO to Broadway, SoHo to the East Village, with ticket prices ranging from $15 to $125. I generally avoid describing anything as “exuberantly theatrical,” a phrase frequently employed by critics who want to make sure they’re quoted in a theatre’s publicity material. That’s precisely what most of the performances I’ve seen recently have exhibited, though: an exuberant theatricality that rewards fans and students of the theatre but doesn’t punish novices, that celebrates the medium of the theatre without denigrating other media, that challenges the audience while also being sure to reward them. Following then, are brief responses to the four shows I’ve seen most recently, in the order in which I saw them.
Mabou Mines’ DollHouse, a radical adaptation (directed by Lee Breuer, adapted by Breuer and Maude Mitchell) of Henrik Ibsen’s most famous play, debuted at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2003 and has spent the last several years touring the world to near-unanimous acclaim. Last month, the show returned to St. Ann’s to complete the final leg of its tour. Famously, all of the men in the production are less than five feet tall, while all of the women are over six feet tall. The set (designed by Narelle Sissons), a foldable, doll house-like structure that renders the play’s title literal, is scaled to be a comfortable fit for the men and the children while the women in the play are forced to crouch and contort themselves to pass through doors or sit on furniture.
While the little people are the hook that most press releases and reviews focus on, this high-concept visual gimmick is only the beginning of director Lee Breuer’s inspired theatrical madness. Red velvet curtains descend to envelop the space, enclosing the audience in a 19th-century melodrama, or perhaps a faded opera house. Nightmare sequences featuring stilt walkers, giant puppets (designed by Jane Catherine Shaw), and lascivious musicians interrupt the narrative from time to time. Ibsen’s experiments in naturalism are gleefully tossed aside and replaced with Breuer’s experiment in melodramatic excess. A portrait of Ibsen’s rival, playwright August Strindberg, hangs on the wall of the doll house. The final scene exchanges melodrama for opera, as Nora (brilliantly played by Mitchell) is transformed into a Wagnerian valkyrie cum Rapunzel who towers over the entire set, singing a triumphant farewell aria while a chorus of puppets bicker and wail, trapped in their stifling, emotionally violent marriages. What saves the show from collapsing under the weight of its pretensions is a mischievous, relentless sense of humor that invites the audience to be in on the joke even as they gape in disbelief at the sheer spectacle of it all.
While Broadway musicals are often thought of as lavish and spectacular, Billy Elliot is subdued and visually conservative in comparison to Breuer’s DollHouse. Written by Lee Hall, directed by Stephen Daldry, and featuring music by Elton John, the new musical was adapted from the 2000 film of the same name (which was also written by Hall and directed by Daldry). Set against the backdrop of Britain’s devastating 1984 mineworkers’ strike, Billy Elliot is the story of a boy who discovers, much to his surprise, that he has a talent for, and a love of, dancing. Like blue-collar dance tales from Footloose to Flashdance, this one is a feel-good tale at heart, the poverty and oppressive moral code of the community serving primarily as a foil for the hopes and ambitions of the protagonist. Unlike those others, though, this show succeeds in keeping its class issues relatively front-and-center, and even in maintaining some political bite. “Solidarity,” a major production number half-way through the first act, takes pains to dramatize (and choreograph) the strike, while the second act opens with “Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher,” a song in which the miners cheerfully wish for their prime minister’s death.
It is tempting for many to claim that its politics are what sets Billy Elliot apart from other shows, but this is hardly the first high-profile musical to tackle such issues. Canonical musical theatre fare – from Showboat, to South Pacific, to Oklahoma!, to West Side Story, to Hair among others – has confronted class, race, and other such topical matters again and again, with varying degrees of success. Each time, the show in question is heralded as a surprise, an exception to what we imagine to be the vapid musical norm.
What really sets Billy Elliot apart from so much other Broadway fare is the palpable commitment of its cast, the infectious joy that they exude while performing. Also unusual for a musical is that the music itself is mostly forgettable; I don’t imagine that a great many cast recordings are going to be sold in the theatre lobby. This is in part because the young actors performing in the title role (Kiril Kulish, who starred when I attended the show, is one of three boys who play Billy in rotation) were cast more for their dancing than for their singing. Kulish can carry a tune, but he doesn’t own the stage until he starts to dance. The entire team seems aware of where the show’s strengths lie, though, and they play those strengths for all they’re worth. Daldry’s direction, Ian MacNeil’s elegantly effective set, and even John’s music are all designed to take a back seat to Billy and his friends when they begin to pirouette. (My mother, who was my guest at the performance, would be greatly disappointed if I did not at least mention show-stopper David Bologna, who plays Billy’s flaming best friend Michael with charisma, confidence, and showmanship that are as effective as they are calculated, and who presides over the production’s single most memorable song, a celebration of cross-dressing and individuality called “Expressing Yourself”).
Show-stopping dance numbers were ostensibly anathema to the Chautauqua lecture circuit that flourished in the rural United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A pro-science, pro-temperance alternative to religious revivals and vaudeville acts, the lectures were education-as-entertainment, and were extremely popular while they lasted. The ironically named National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA) has put together their own Chautauqua! event, an evening of lectures and entertainments that features guest speakers, slide-shows, historical reenactments, and the kind of song-and-dance diversions that eventually crept into the popular lecture circuit as it became more and more of a codified business model. In some ways a meditation on the tension between art and commerce, entertainment and enlightenment, Chautauqua! is primarily an extension of NTUSA’s ongoing project to make theatre inspired by paratheatrical events, and to demonstrate that the avant garde need be neither self-serious nor inaccessible.
While theatre is often seen as opposed to, and marginalized by, newer media, a generation of video-game playing, comic-book reading genre geeks has emerged in the downtown theatre scene and exploded the highbrow-lowbrow binary that ostensibly separates the performing arts from mass culture. At the epicenter of this scene-within-a-scene are Vampire Cowboys, a young company devoted to stage combat and genre mash-ups. VC’s most recent concoction, Soul Samurai, is Kill Bill meets The Warriors, a collision of martial arts and blaxploitation tropes that features post-apocalyptic kung-fu vampires, homeless puppets, and boundless energy. Full of winking references to countless movies, TV shows, and collectible action figures, and featuring one extended action sequence after another, Soul Samurai nevertheless manages to showcase some really good acting at almost every turn. (Paco Tolson, as samurai sidekick Cert, is particularly winning). The 5 members of the cast play 19 roles over the course of 100 breathless minutes, managing to win the hearts of the audience even as they juggle whirlwind costume changes, funny voices, and an array of movement styles ranging from Tae Kwon Do to Capoeira. Playwright / fight director Qui Nguyen and director Robert Ross Parker have produced a smart, unapologetically funny show that lays claim to story material from movies and comic books even as it celebrates theatricality and the inimitable thrill of live acting.
None of these shows is perfect. DollHouse sometimes shows signs of Breuer’s hubristic self-satisfaction; Billy Elliot, an exorbitantly expensive show about poverty, occasionally sacrifices narrative coherency for aggressive pacing, Chautauqua! drags in places and is often rough around the edges; and Soul Samurai doesn’t always maintain its high-wire balance of parody, tribute, and post-identity politics to which it aspires. Each of them, though, is a part of a season that has made me excited to go to the theatre again. I’ve got tickets coming up to La Didone, the Wooster Group’s new sci-fi deconstruction of a baroque opera, and Rambo Solo, a popcorn-fueled show about a guy who sets out to re-enact First Blood in his studio apartment.
I can hardly wait.
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