A (0:00)

Thank you very much.

B (0:00)

That's all. But we have a great dramatic finish.

A (0:03)

Oh, I'm sure you do, but Mr. Granson.

B (0:05)

Ah, hit it. Broadway. Broadway. We've missed it. So we're leaving soon and taking June to star her in a show. Bright lights, white light, rhythm and romance. The train is late, so while we wait, we're going to to a little dance.

A (0:35)

Hello all you theater lovers both out and proud on the DL and welcome back to Broadway Breakdown, a podcast discussing the history legacy of American theater's most exclusive address, Broadway. I'm your host, Matt Koplik, the least famous and most opinionated of all the Broadway podcast hosts. And we have a little bonus episode today before our final scheduled Thursday episode before the end of the year. We have two reviews that we have to do. We saw Cult of Love with Second Stage Theater and we saw Eureka Day, a Manhattan theatre club. And that is the end of 2024 of the 2024, 2025 season. All very exciting stoof. So strap in, we'll talk about both of those. The next episode after this one will be a discussion of the season so far. My rankings of all the Broadway entries of this season so far, as well as what would nominate for Tonys if I could not my predictions. We're not gonna start predictions until January and then go on from there. And I may include other things just from the calendar year. Some people on the Discord Channel asked if I would do sort of a ranking roundup of everything in 2024 or my favorites of 2024 and TBD on that. It's a lot of. Lot of thinking, a lot of hemming and hawing. So we'll see. If you haven't joined the Discord Channel, make sure to do so. The link will be in the description for this episode, but let's just get into it, shall we? I'm probably gonna go a little bit back and forth with these two plays because they're actually, they're both kind of similar and they have. They have similar strengths and similar weaknesses. And then I think both shows could sort of borrow a little bit from the other one, Cult of Love, as I said, it's Second Stage Theater, currently at the Hays Theater, is directed by Trip Coleman, written by Leslie Hedlund. If you don't know who she is, she wrote the play Bachelorette that was then turned into the movie Bachelorette with Kirsten Dunst and Isla Fisher, Lizzy Kaplan, Rebel Wilson, a bunch of amazing people in that one. And then she's written a couple other plays. I think Bachelorette was part of a series she was doing about the seven deadly sins. And then she went into film and tv. She wrote Sleeping With Other People. She wrote on Russian Doll. She's just been around. I actually didn't realize this, but she's been a guest a couple of times on Blank Check with Griffin and David, a podcast that I enjoy frequently. And she was a fun guest recently on the David lynch series. So she wrote this. And it stars Mayor Winningham and Shailene Woodley. Barbie Ferreira, I think is how you say your last name. Yep. Chris Lowell, Zachary Quinto. Bunch of different people. Christopher Sears. And it centers around a family at Christmas time. And it is a family that. It's the doll family. D A H L. A lot of plan words there for like a dollhouse, things like that. It's a family that centers around religion, for sure. The roots of this family's foundation are in religion, Christianity specifically. And we are catching them. The kids are all grown up and most of them are married and have had their own baggage and. And some of them have left their religion, the church that their family belonged to, and sort of have gone into atheism or agnosticism, stuff like that. But one child in the family has absolutely stuck with it. That's Shailene Woodley's character, Diana, and her husband, played by Chris Lowell. And the parents still are also very religious. And there's just a lot of stuff simmering. You know, the dad, played by David Rausch, I think his name was Bill. Bill has Alzheimer's, undiagnosed Alzheimer's, because Mayor Whittingham, their mother Virginia, won't take him to a doctor to get a brain scan. But he's showing all the signs. And they, you know, the. The older children want to take him to a doctor, get him evaluated. She won't do it, but she also kind of doesn't want to talk about it. There's of like, we don't talk about the big stuff. One of the daughters, played by Rebecca Henderson, Evie. She is married to Pippa, played by Roberta Calendres, who some of you might remember from Fun Home. And they are just recently married. And thus, this is the first holiday that Pippa has been allowed to stay at the house for, which is a whole to do, especially again, because this family is religious. Zachary Quento plays Mark. He is the oldest son, and he was studying to be a priest, but then left the that to go to law school. And he's been clerking with a Supreme Court justice. He is Married to Molly Bernard, Rachel. Rachel is Jewish, but she left the Jewish faith and converted to Christianity so she could marry Mark. And they're sort of at a crossroads. There is, as I said, Diana, played by Shailene Woodley, who is the only one who's really still religious and conservative. She is married to James, who was a pastor, still is a pastor, but he has recently left his church and they are expecting their second baby. It's like super back to back. And we learn more about sort of their baggage and what's going on with Diana. I guess I should say this now. Spoiler alerts. If you're planning to see Cult of Love and if you want to skip this. And then we have the final child, which is Johnny, played by Christopher Sears. And Johnny hasn't shown up yet. When the play begins, everyone's waiting for him. It's like 9 o' clock at night. And they still haven't eaten dinner because they insist on waiting for Johnny to show up so they can all eat, you know, Christmas dinner together as a family or Christmas Eve dinner together as a family. So everyone's drinking, everyone's starving. So already, like, things get a little intense. And when Johnny does show up, he shows up with a girl named Lauren, who nobody knows. Turns out that Johnny has met Lauren in rehab because Johnny is a heroin addict, has been in and out of rehab a few times over the last couple of years. Seems to be doing better now, if a little, you know, maybe flighty, I guess. And Lauren is his. They are each other's sponsors, I think is how they described it. Or at the very least, Johnny is her sponsor and. No. Yeah, Johnny is her sponsor, and he brings her to his family's Christmas because she has nowhere to go and she's still in recovery. Lauren comes from New York City and has basically been doing drugs since she was 14. And she seems pretty centered. I will say that for someone who is, you know, freshly out of rehab. But apparently she's been in rehab a couple of times, so she's got at least some clarity about her situation and her addiction. So that's the cast of characters. What exactly happens in the play is really just the conflicts between everyone. You know, there's not a major, you know, goal that we're driving towards other than waiting for Johnny, which happens, I want to say about an hour in, maybe 50 minutes in, it was hard to tell. The whole play is about an hour and 45 with no intermission. And again, takes place over the course of about, let's say, 12 hours. 12ish hours. And things start to get pretty heated immediately. One of the things that bonds this family is music. They sing a lot of church songs and some of them are bops, I won't lie. And everyone in the family sings. Some of the members play instruments. Mayor Winningham plays an instrument. The dad plays piano. Zachary Quinto, I think, plays piano or guitar. And then Johnny definitely plays guitar. And there's usually a tambourine of some sort. And it's sort of this meant to sort of be this like blanket, this medicine that calms everyone when fighting starts to happen. But it also kind of becomes a bit of a sedative. When people have genuine issues that they want to discuss. Music kind of comes and forces them to stop talking about it. And by the time the song is over, people tend to be in a happier mood because music tends to have that effect. You know, when you're anxious and you want to listen to calming music or you need to sort of have a anxious dance party like Meredith and Christina and Grey's Anatomy. Just gotta dance it out. Music can have that effect on you. It's very chemical, right. It's not always analytical, not for most of us anyway. And so it's fascinating watching in the play whenever things really start to come to a head, when music comes in and sort of cuts through that tension and when it's used almost like not a weapon, but manipulation, I guess. I was talking to a friend about this because the thing about Eureka Day and Cult of Love, and I'll get a little into the details of Eureka Day as well, is we've come to the point. Inhumanity, I guess. And Lord knows I don't study this academically or professionally, so take what I say with a grain of salt, just like my own observations. But I feel like we have gotten to the point where no one necessarily listens. Everyone waits till they can speak. And when that happens in conversations, you're not actually having a conversation. You're not learning. Nobody wants to learn anymore. Everyone wants to teach. Everyone wants to have the right answer and give the right answer, so everyone else can feel and think what they feel and think. Because in many ways, everybody just wants life to be simpler. Nobody wants complication. We all want equilibrium. It's just that some people, everyone has different viewpoints of what gets us to equilibrium. Some people, like Shailene Woodley's character, thinks that equilibrium comes from religion, comes from the Lord, from Christ. And just putting all of your faith into that and all of your love into that, what we eventually Learn about Shailene Woodley's character, Diana, is that she has a mental problem. You know, she suffers from depression, but she also suffers from these psychotic episodes. She has a chemical imbalance in her brain that she has medication for but refuses to take since she's been pregnant. And because of that, she gets worse and now starts to think that she's a prophet. Part of the reason why her husband, Chris Lowell, James Bennett, why he had to leave the church that he was pastor of, is because Diana was basically having episodes in church, as I said, she was refusing to take her medication. And she would start getting up and she would start preaching and speaking nonsense and a lot of hateful stuff, too, genuinely believing that the Lord was channeling her and was using her as a vessel for his. For his views, for his speech. And it was bothering everyone in their church, and he had to leave. And so now they're starting their own church where she is claiming to be a prophet. And her whole family, even, you know, her parents don't necessarily believe that this is the case, but her parents are very indulgent of her. And her parents are. They don't like confrontation. They don't like uncomfortable stuff. So they say a lot of yes, dear, and yes and to whatever their children are saying. They don't want confrontation, they don't want conflict. And since Diana and her husband are now living with them, we find out they are really sort of coddling her and making it even worse. And this eventually blows up into a major meltdown for Diana towards the end of the play, I guess in the third act of the play. What that entails, I won't say, just because it is very shocking. And if you do go see it, I don't want you to have that spoiled for you, because it's. It. There aren't a lot of genuine surprises in this play of cult of love. It's not really about that, as I said. This is really more a piece about a specific theme through the microcosm, I guess, is the right word of this family. And watching their relations to each other and their dynamics with each other more so than religion. Literally, the theme of family. The title of Cult of Love, for me, sort of identifies the play about being about family. You know, what is family but a cult of love? And even in a positive way, it's still kind of that, right? You. You channel yourself into those memories of being protected by your parents or being loved by your parents. When you were sick, they took care of you, took you to the movies, you know, made you dinner, clothed you. No, this is just sort of basic parental principles, you know. And of course there are so many horror stories of parents, but just let's say things go mostly by the books. You have all of those connections to them, of the person who held you and fed you and clothed you and took care of you and taught you and supposedly gave you all of this love and affection, and you in turn have love for them. Part of it is conditional of how you were treated. Part of it is also just biological. You share this, you know, chemical biological connection with someone. And on top of that, when it becomes a larger family than just you and your parents, when you have siblings and it's a lot of you, it can feel like a close knit group. And what we learned about the dolls is that they were a very close knit group when they were. When the kids were younger. It's very much giving the family and parenthood, whatever their names are. Let me look that up for a second. You'll hear this at some point during the episode, uncomfortable way. But the discussion of the TV show Parenthood, of which I, I watched and I did not say much about it in the episode. The Braverman, the great Braverman families. Something that always bothered me about that TV show and I did enjoy it immensely. But one thing that I really disliked about it was how that family did treat itself like a cult. And anyone who dared to date anyone in this family or become friends with anyone in this family had to sort of go through this really intense scrutiny from everyone. They had to pass a test essentially like, oh, if you're gonna be in part of this group, you gotta, you know, pass muster with all of us. And it's like, well, who the fuck are any of you, right? What makes you so incredible other than the fact that you all love each other? And if someone in this family is opening up their heart to someone outside, you give them a chance, you give them support. But no, that's never how it was with the Bravermans. It was always intense discrimination until proven otherwise. And it reminds me a lot of the dolls of, you know, people who are dating anyone of the children go through the same rigmarole as anybody else with certain leniencies based on traditionalism, conservatism. You know, they. I would imagine that James Bennett, Diana's husband, because he was Christian and a pastor, probably got more favorable treatment when they dated and probably was included in a lot more family activities when they dated. And then when they married, of course, just like came right on in and Rachel, Molly, Bernard, Zachary Quinto, his character's wife, being Jewish, obviously, that sort of put her at a distance from them for a while. And then even when she converted, it still wasn't quite enough. And then when they got married, that helped, but it really wasn't until Evie, the lesbian daughter, started being with her future wife. Pippa is when, you know, people started easing up on Rachel. I won't go too far into this, but in my family, we have two family members who were not very nice to new women in the family and only got nicer when there became a new woman dating someone in the family. So whoever was the last victim became sort of an ally while there was a new victim, and so on and so forth. The new victim became a new ally when there became a new victim. And it sort of feels that way with the. With the spouses of the doll children. Who knows the exact order? Rachel has been married to Mark, or at least with Mark for 10 years. And yet she still has a bit of conflict with this family. She's not as included as she should be. And there's absolutely a tier system of who gets preferential treatment. They talk about this when they're trying to figure out the sleeping arrangements because Johnny's coming, and Johnny is clearly a favorite child, and Diana's a favorite child. Mark having left Christianity and Evie being a lesbian has made things very difficult for their parents. But they try to love them no matter what. But loving someone is loving who they are. And accepting each other for being different means you have to hear each other out and come to a middle agreement, have some compromise. No one really compromises as much anymore these days. Which actually brings us into Eureka Day, which is at Manhattan Theatre Club, at the Friedman Theatre and just recently opened. Written by Jonathan Spector, who is a playwright I never really heard of before. This is his Broadway debut, I believe this should show premiered in London earlier as well as maybe in Berkeley two years ago, three years ago. Directed by Anna D. Shapiro. Most of you know her from August, Osage county and the Minutes. And did she direct Linda Vesta? No, she didn't direct Linda Vesta, but she directed this Is Our Youth, the Motherfucker with the Hat, a play that I really liked. More recently, Devil Wears Prada, Chicago, which not anymore, now that it's in London. She's the director and it stars Bill Irwin, Jessica Hecht, Amber Gray, Thomas Middleditch, an actress I never heard of. Chelsea Yukura Kurtz. If anyone knows who she is, please let me know. In the Discord Channel and Eureka Day takes place in 2018 in California at a private elementary school and follows the administrative board, where Bill Irwin, I believe, is the principal. Don and Jessica Hecht is Suzanne, a parent, and Tom Middleditch is Eli, a parent. Chelsea is Mako, and Amber Gray is Karina. They're all parents of children in school. Amber Gray is the newest member of the board. Her son has just started at Eureka Day, so she's kind of figuring out how everything works there as well as on the board. And we find out Eureka Day started as very small, sort of independent alternative school and has only just grown from there. And it's very inclusive and it's very progressive. They talk about in the administrative board, they vote by consensus. It's never a majority. Everyone has to agree, otherwise they can't move on. And one of the major things is that there is no mandate at Eureka Day for vaccination. Ha ha. How topical. And. And this isn't really important until there is a mumps outbreak. And the board of health has required Eureka Day shut down until all the kids are quarantined and it's been confined. And they are figuring out what to do because they need to reopen the school eventually because they won't ever get herd immunity. And, you know, one of the kids has gotten mumps and is in the hospital. And there are so many parents they find out who are refusing to vaccinate their children. And including Jessica Hecht's Suzanne. She is a non vaccine, a non vaxxer parent. And you're watching this group try to navigate how to move forward, how to, you know, make a difference, how to fix the problem while having everyone be happy. And you quickly learn that's not gonna happen. You know, if they. There's so much talk about, you know, ancient man. This is like one of the things they always talk about in Yurgite. Like, oh, in. In the Middle Ages, people didn't need vaccinations. And we survived. And it's like, yes. But people tended to live until 35. And the only reason that we were able to get through certain plagues was learning about immunity through certain things. For example, smallpox, one of the earliest forms of vaccination, was discovering that milkmaids were immune to smallpox. And it was because they would get these warts on their hands from milking cows. And a doctor took pus from those warts, inserted it into a child, and found that the child had immunity to smallpox. And they started doing that with plenty of people, you know, in the village and then all over the world. And that eventually led to an immunity to smallpox. And in this play, you're watching intelligent people talk themselves in circles, trying to ultimately convince everyone else that they're right, specifically Jessica Hecht's Suzanne, who is what I call a granola Karen. And I bring this up in relation to Cult of Love because as I said in Cult of Love, it's a lot of not actually accepting and not actually listening. It's all just talking and everyone has an opinion and everyone thinks that they're right. And I mean, in the very first scene of Eureka Day, they're talking about verbiage for a thing and try as they're about to send out a letter about something and they are trying to word it in a way so that way no one is offended. Oh, it's like a drop down menu for ethnicity, for, I guess, people applying to the school. Maybe that's what it was. And they're trying to have it be as inclusive as possible, cover all of their bases and again, not offend anyone. And in doing so, they are talking a thousand words a minute that are just word salad that don't mean anything. The thing you'll always hear in Eureka Day is I totally hear you, but. Or you're absolutely, totally right, but. And again, it is just everyone trying to come from their own perspective and get the the group to see it their way. And not only see it their way, but with Jessica Hecht, Suzanne do it their way. You watch Suzanne manipulate the room each time there's a conversation by lightly controlling it. She will interrupt and apologize for interrupting while she continues to talk with the lightest of tones and compliment and indulge you and say, I think this is what you mean, and then say her own thing, even if it isn't what you mean, and then compliment you for having such a wonderful opinion. And by the end of the conversation, there will be a consensus on something that, as it just turns out, happens to be what Suzanne wants. And those who had opposition kind of forgot what their oppositions were or have decided it doesn't matter that much since they seem to be in the minority. And that starts to flip as the mumps outbreak happens and we realize that the board is a little more divided than they thought. And it seems rather even at first. But then it starts to lean more towards pro vaccination and Hecht's Suzanne is not having it. And she keeps trying to speak on open conversation and understanding and reaching a middle ground while never actually coming to the middle ground. She is okay on verbiage for A letter that allows both sides to speak. But she is not okay about any kind of leniency on her part, which is just a double standard, right? And one of the characters, I think it's Meiko Chelsea Yukura Kurtz's character says like, you know, you don't know if you're right. You're trying to go with your instinct and everyone's just trying to do the best they can. She's like, we've gotten it so wrong in the past all the time. Humanity has always gotten it wrong in the past. Plastic and charred food and the things we've exposed ourselves to in the past that have given us cancer, that have given us hepatitis. And we're trying to use all the information that we have to do better. But there's so much information out there now and a lot of that information is wrong. And you don't necessarily always know who to trust. And similar to Cult of Love, talking about how Diana and her parents try to simplify everything with well, Jesus is love and I love Jesus and I put all my faith in him. And the Bible says this. Meanwhile, you could argue Evie and Mark are so now anti that, that anything associated with that is just evil and wrong because the church and the Bible go against Evie's life and, and, and what she loves and who she loves and you know, Mark's marriage with Rachel and all of that and with Eureka Day, it's. Well, the science that I trust is what I believe because it's what's simpler. And it's simpler to just say Big Pharma is all a lie and they are pushing a, an agenda on you. And I don't think any of us can sit here and say that Big Pharma is good intentioned or innocent. But to say that there's a conspiracy going around trying to turn you into a robot to put, you know, to plant a chip in you is all kinds of, let's use the word paranoid because it is a simplistic viewpoint. It's. People want to think that things are either far more complicated than they are, are far more simple than they are, and what differentiates between the two is just what's convenient to whatever person. You know, sexuality is, you know, much more complicated and multifaceted but you know, health and medicine is just really so simple or health and medicine is very complicated. But gender, oh my God, that's so black and white. Everyone has their decisions of what is just stone cold fact. And that's the double edged sword of having so much information in the World, right? And exposing ourselves to so many people's opinions. How easily influenced we can all be be when I tell you that when the Gypsy reviews came out and I posted mine on Instagram as well as my episode on the podcast, like the night before, I had quite a few people reach out to me on, you know, Instagram dm and basically were like, so how do you feel you're at. You're an outlier. Does that make you change your opinion? I'm like, no. I saw what I saw and I felt how I felt. I have my opinion. What the reviews made me think was, maybe I should go again in a month or so and see how improved Audra is if this show has gotten any faster. But there are just certain things in that show that are misguided. And no quote unquote rave is gonna influence me to think otherwise. But I can possibly be persuade to go back and check it again because of those review. I don't even know how he got back to here. I'm just talking out of my asshole now. Oh, just the overwhelming information and outlets of information and opinions that influence all of us and how easily swayed we all can be. I will get into more of all that in just a second, but first, let's take a quick break.