Transcript
A (0:00)
Thank you very much.
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That's all. But we have a great dramatic finish.
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Oh, I'm sure you do, but Mr. Gregson.
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Ah. Hit it, Broadway. Broadway. We've missed it. So we're leaving soon and taking June to star her in a show. Bright light, rhythm and romance. The train is late, so while we wait.
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Hello all you theater lovers both out and proud and on the DL. And welcome back to Broadway Breakdown, a podcast discussing the history and legacy of American theater's most exclusive address, Broadway. I am your host, Matt Koplik, the least famous and most opinionated of all the Broadway podcast hosts. And we are doing a lot late night recording session. Part of the reason why I am speaking at a, I guess, lower volume and lower register of my voice because everyone in the house is on their way to bed and I want to get this out now before the new episode this week of the Grab Bag series comes out. Because we saw some shows and we want to review some of them because we were invited to review some of them and then others we had to pay for like the commoner that we actually are. Before we get into any of that, I want to just give a quick little update to the fundraiser for my play, yours truly. Y' all have been pretty amazing about it. And in the upcoming Grab Bag episodes, you're going to hear differing amounts that we've raised because I recorded all of them in a very quick span about a week ago, week and a half ago, and there have been some updates since I recorded those. I just wanted to say we are currently at $2500 on the fundraiser. Over $2500, actually, just. Well, a little over 2,500 from 24 donations. And I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much from the bottom of my. Of my heart. It's been very moving and very inspiring to see just people come through. I'm not used to that in my life, not unless it's like immediate family. So to put something out into the world for many years and then be bold enough to even ask for anything and then to have people respond has been very wonderful and very heartening and very encouraging. So thank you very much. I want to give a quick shout out to everyone who's donated. I'll go down the list. I say this laughing because some of you guys did it anonymously. Totally fair. I think we can play a little fun music with that. I don't know. I'll figure that out in post. So. Q Music I want to say a quick thank you to our top donation oh, God, I'm so sorry. It's not Jose, but Jose. J, O S U E. Lopez, thank you very much for your donation. Our top donation so far. I want to thank Anna. Anto. Anto. Sweet. Sorry I'm so bad. A N, T, O, S, I, E, W, I, C, Z. I don't know how to pronounce that. If any of you guys heard that, I know how to pronounce it. More power to you. A N T, O S I, E W I, C, Z. Thank you very much, Anna. To my mom who donated to push us over 2,000. She's going to donate it again, but she thought she was doing it anonymously, but no, her name is up there. Thank you, Anonymous. And Anonymous. And Anonymous. Thank you, Peter Dombrowski. Broski. Thank you, Beth Livingston. Thank you, Ray Rackham. Thank you, Patty Murin and Ashley Carment. Thank you, Anonymous. Thank you, Sarah Bliss. Julie Wertheimer Meyer. Wertheimer Meyer. Michael Labadia. Labadia. Daniel Hopper. Jake Perlman. Tara Hutchison. Michael Rodrigo. Gustave Portman. That one I got Giandonado. Rosa. Rosa. I'm sorry if I butchered that one as well. Thank you, Jerry Sloan. Thank you, David Loach. Karen Bernstein. And finally, thank you, Anonymous. And that's all for that Housekeeping. I'll keep it quick because I got Red for filth about that. And what you guys all came for was to hear some reviews. I am reviewing Our Town, the Roommate and Sunset Boulevard. Sunset Boulevard, I will put last because gotta make you work for it. I am actually literally just back from seeing Sunset Boulevard, so it is fresh in my brain and I want to get through Our Town and the Roommate since they were the furthest away that I saw and I want to kind of get them on mic before I forget more of them by the minute. I also saw Drag the Musical at New World Stages. I won't speak much on that as they were still in developmental previews and making changes. All I'll say is that it is. When I saw it, it was two hours with no intermission, and I felt it should have been 30 minutes shorter, maybe even 35. It. There's a lot of fun stuff in there, a lot of other things I think they could do a lot of talent on stage. It needs cutting. It is longer than Barbie and has no reason to be. So with that in mind, let us start with Our Town, which was the first of the three that I saw. I saw it last week the night before they opened. This is the nth revival of Our Town by Thornton Wilder. Pulitzer Prize winning play for the 1930s, was made into an Oscar nominated film, has been done on Broadway multiple times, was done off Broadway by David Cromer and every high school in the country for years upon years. Many people, when they hear Our Town roll their eyes, because most likely your high school did it or your community center or some regional theater, it's a very easy play, a desirable play to produce because famously, it has no set and no props, minimal costumes. That's the whole point of Our Town, is that everything is mimed. And it has many, many roles. So you can cast a ton of people from school, from your community, men, women of different ages. And it's always just been a very desirable title. And it's very sturdy play. You know, you have to work really hard to fuck it up. And no matter how misguided or amateurish your production may be, the third act of Our Town always tends to land with audiences because it is terribly moving. And Thornton Wilder, hot take, was a good writer. Mann had two Pulitzers, both for plays that played fast and loose with the fourth wall of theater. Skin of Our Teeth really was sort of him going further, most likely dropped some acid and then was like, well, what if we really broke the fourth wall on this show? But Our Town, for those who don't know, is about the town of Grover's Corners, which has become a cultural touching point, touch point, touchpost for it's late for small town America. It takes place in New Hampshire, the turn of the 20th century, and it follows about nine years, nine to 12 years, something like that, in the lives of the residents of Grover's Corners. And the main character is known as the stage manager, and they are the narrator. They provide all insight into the town background on different characters. They will jump into the action and play different, you know, minor people in the town. And in the third act, when one of our characters moves to the great beyond, the stage manager is sort of a friendly medium between the living and the dead. In the third act, the other major characters are. Emily Gibbs. Yeah, Emily Gibbs. I'm sorry, Emily Webb. Sorry, Emily Webb and George Gibbs. Emily becomes Emily Gibbs and their respective families. Emily's mom, Mr. And Mrs. Webb. George's parents, Mrs. Gibbs and Dr. Gibbs. George has a sister, Emily has a younger brother. There are many other people in the town, including a milkman and a cop and a choir conductor with a alcohol addiction. And everyone. It's. The first act is kind of slice of life. I don't remember if it takes place over 24 hours or 48 hours. But I think it's. Yeah, I think it's within one day of Grover's Corners. And then the second act flashes forward about three years and focuses on a specific event, otherwise known as the marriage of Emily and George. And then the third act flashes forward many other years and is about the death of Emily, who died giving birth to her and George's second child. And it jumps back and forth in time a little bit. Act one starts at the rise of the sun, as the mothers are getting the house ready for breakfast, as the kids are off to school. The moms then shuck peas and talk about wanting to see the world. And then stage manager sort of flashes forward a few hours as the kids get out of school. And then flashes forward another few hours as the moms are at choir practice and Emily and George are doing their homework by the moonlight in the window. And the main characters of Emily and George are teenagers, I guess you could say, but they're about 14. So they're becoming adults, but they're not quite adults. And when we flash forward a few years in Act 2, they are about 18, 19. They have fallen in love. They're about to get married. We are told they're getting married. And then we flash back to the day that their romance blossomed. We come back to the wedding. We hear inner monologues of George and Emily, of one of their mothers, of another woman in the town in this production played by Julie Halston. And when Emily dies in the third act, we never hear from the living, or, sorry, we don't hear much from the living. The scene opens very Hamlet esque of the gravediggers and not gravediggers in our town. Gravediggers in Hamlet. It's just townsfolk in our town, as far as I remember. But once the funeral begins, we do not hear from any of the living after that. I'm pretty sure we just hear from the members of Grover's Corners who are now dead and residing in the cemetery. And they are all much calmer and much cooler than they were when they were alive. And when Emily joins them, she's eager to remember everything on earth and wanting to experience everything on earth again. And she knows that she can go back to. To experience her memories. And she's told, when you go back to relive it, you don't just relive the day, you watch yourself relive it. So she picks her 11th birthday, and she's watching her mother make breakfast, and she's moved by how much younger her mother looks and she's getting all this pain watching the people come in and out of their house for her birthday, who she knows are going to die like her younger brother Wally, and other the newsboy dies in the war, things like that. The gift that George Gibbs leaves for her in her 11th birthday fills her with pain because she knows the love they're gonna have later on. She doesn't feel like anyone in her memory is appreciating being alive and absorbing one another. And she goes back knowing that when she was alive, she took it all for granted. And that's sort of how the play ends, while also saying, you know, life is precious and. And we should really enjoy the world in which we live. And the stage manager says basically the same thing. And that's the end of the play. So this production is directed by Kenny Leon, who last season did Pearly Victorious, which was a very pleasant surprise from all of us. This season he's already done Home at Roundabout, which I thought was incredibly forgettable. I hate to say it, but I thought it was Top Dog. Underdog two years ago was really great. But that is a play that is great. That is mostly a showcase for two great actors. And Kenny Leon really just allowed his actors to play ball and both were wonderful. Although Corey Hawkins, in my opinion, was the more impressive of the two. Not that that's a hot take. In the original production, Jeffrey Wright was considered the impressive one as well, and it was the same role. I've always felt that Kenny's talents lay with casting. He's really good at knowing who he needs for what role and then how to bond everyone as an ensemble and let them run free and trust their instincts. It worked for Pearly, it worked for Top Dog. I must say, it did not work for Our Town. Now I'm recording this after the reviews have come out. And Our Town mostly got positive reviews. It got a couple of mixed reviews, one or two pans, but overall the consensus was very positive. The New York Times gave it a critics pick from Jesse Green, Adam Feldman, and Time Out New York gave it four out of five stars. I'm not gonna lie. I was very baffled by this because I went with my friend who's a Tony voter and I had other friends in the audience that night and we all collectively afterwards went, that wasn't good, right? What this production does is two things. One is that they do the whole thing without any intermissions. Our town usually has two intermissions between acts. 1 and 2 and 2 and 3. In order to do this, they Made a couple of trims, and they sped up the pacing of things. I mean, Our Town isn't the longest play, even with the majority of material. Depending on how slow you do it, it could run anywhere between two and two and a half hours. And this production runs at about an hour and 40. So there were some trims. A lot of it was just like, really picking things up. The main design is sort of gray splashed wood all over, with a couple of chairs hanging and some benches, and then lanterns streaming out out of the set, out into the audience, forming almost a question mark. And it's a nice look when you enter the theater. They don't really do much with the lanterns for the whole show. There is a reveal that happens for the cemetery. I won't say what, but ultimately the lanterns, you do find out, kind of stem from the grave site. And Jim Parsons picks up a lantern that's on the floor, and that's how the play ends. What that means is up to you. Up to me. Up to Kenny Leon, I guess you could say it's another life in Grover's Corners. Another story of a resident of Grover's Corners that extends out into infinity. It's part of our legacy. It's part of our history. I guess you could say that it maybe means something else. I'm not entirely sure. I didn't find it terribly moving. I was mostly confused. The biggest crime of this, ultimately, what I guess is Kenny's biggest take on this, which is to make it modern and universal. The tagline is our town for our time. So not making it so traditional in the style of acting, which isn't a terrible idea. And leaning maybe a bit more into the humor of it, which is also not a terrible idea. It is a beautiful play, one of the most brilliant plays written in the English language. But you don't make something come alive by treating it with historical kid gloves. Right. More on that with Sunset Boulevard. You have to have some fun with it. So I agree with that mentality. The problem is that no actor on that stage is gelling with another actor. Everyone is in a different production of Our Town. Some of them are more traditional, some of them are more modern, some of them are God knows what. But everyone is sort of clashing. Even the most impressive performances don't fully succeed for me because they clash with others. I would say that Richard Thomas as Mr. Webb is the most successful. After that, I would say Donald Webber Jr. As. Sorry, what's Donald? Simon Stimson, that's the choir director. He was my second favorite performance. Billie Eugene Jones as Dr. Gibbs is fine. It's not that big of a role. It's not that impressive. And I like Billy. He was so, so fantastic in Fat Ham and very good in Pearly. Julie Halston as Mrs. Soames is fun, but again, like in a different production of Our Town from everybody else. Michelle Wilson as Mrs. Gibbs really rubs me the wrong way. For the first two acts, she landed the plane for the third act, but not in the first two thirds. I found Zoe Deutch as Emily Webb to be fun, quirky, a little too choppy in the first two acts of Our Town. She had her moments, though. She found a lot of humor, which I appreciated, but it was a little. Performative isn't the right word, but I didn't always find it ringing true. However, unfortunately, where it really mattered is when I felt she dropped the ball, which was in the third act. That is the real emotional arc of the show, especially Emily. And I just did not find that Zoe Deutsch was able to sell it. And Ephraim Sykes as George was doing a very contemporary spin, which, again, is not the worst thing. It just wasn't gelling with what Zooey was doing. It was clashing with what Bill Eugene Jones was doing. Everybody is clashing in this show. Jim Parsons as the stage manager. I did not dislike him as much as I thought I would, but I did not like him. I don't find that Parsons on stage has the gravitas that one needs for the stage manager. This is a role that Paul Newman has played in the David Cromer revival. Helen Hunt and Michael Shannon also played the stage manager. I saw Cromer do it myself in that production, which is still the best production of Our Town I've ever seen. Parsons is very likable on stage. Again, he can find humor in many different corners of dialogue you didn't really expect. But I did not find him the anchor of this show in the way the stage manager is supposed to be. I did not find him ethereal or all knowing or even charming. He was engaging. I didn't find him charming. He tried to be a more grounded version of himself. And I will always give him credit because if you look at the works that he's done on stage, Parsons does not play it safe with his stage work. He's definitely taken his celebrity and cashed it in for projects that he believes in. I would say the only two stage shows he's done that sound like Jim Parsons projects are an act of God, which is actually the One I thought he was most successful in because he was literally playing himself. Because the whole point of that is that God comes through the vessel of Jim Parsons to preach. And it was. It's a fun play. And Parsons, I thought, sold it very well, partly because he was being Parsons. The other one is Harvey, which is a fun, sweet play that I did not get to see. But I would imagine Parsons did a good job with that and it sounds like a revival fit for him. But doing Boys in the Band, the Normal Heart, taking a chance on a new play by Paula Vogel with Mother Play, much as I hated it, even doing man of no Importance, these are risks. Doing Our Town is a risk. People don't expect this of him. And do I think he succeeds? Not really, but I respect the risk. The other performance that I haven't really mentioned is Katie Holmes as Mrs. Webb. I'm not gonna cut corners here. Cut Grover's Corners here. Katie Holmes. Mrs. Webb might be giving the worst acted performance I've ever seen on a Broadway stage. It's bad. It's painfully bad. And I used to be not a Katie Holmes defender, but a Katie Holmes believer. I thought that she was fine in thank you for Smoking and okay in Batman Begins. Roles that only exist really to have the main character react off of. She was charming in Dawson's Creek, but she just doesn't have the juice for this. And it's a shame and it's frustrating when you know so many people out there who could do it. There are women in the ensemble of Our town who I have seen on stage before and know could give a better performance as Mrs. Webb. Again, props to her for using her celebrity for this, but it's not. It's just not it. It's just not it. Again, the reviews for this one surprised me, confounded me. Honestly, I think that this play is so phenomenal and it is so easy to mistake the greatness of the play for greatness of this production. This production is not great. It is choppy. It is kind of, I wouldn't even say misguided. I just don't see any guidance with it. Something that Kenny Leon. Kenny Leon stole something from the David Cromer production, which in turn, supposedly there was another production that did what David Cromer did. And if you don't want to hear this spoiler about the David Cromer production, skip ahead about a minute and a half. The David Cromer production mostly did everything that Our Town does, which is miming props and not having any sets. And everyone was in modern day dress. And it was actually acted pretty contemporary.