'Water for Elephants' is water for the soul

 

The circus has come to town, and it’s wrapped in a new Broadway musical, Water for Elephants, at the Imperial Theatre.  Together, under the thoughtful direction of Jessica Stone, they complement each other perfectly to create an enchanting evening of escape and joy.

What I appreciated was the simplicity.  Ever since Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows began transferring regularly to Broadway in the 1980s musicals have competed to add more and more extravaganza, which I tired of long ago.  

Elephants has the element of a real life circus in it, which sounds as if it is an extravagance, but this circus is set in 1931 when skilled women and men performed with just their highly trained bodies.  To watch them soar, suspended by just a single rope, and perform their acrobatics is thrilling, a significant contrast to today’s overdone circuses like Cirque du Soleil with all its bells, whistles and high tech.  

I was transported to the circuses of my 1960s childhood.  My father took me and my friend Gina every year to both the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and the Shine Circus in Baltimore.  My favorite was the Shrine Circus because it had just one ring for me to focus on, rather than three. 

Those good memories are the basis of my appreciation for what Stone has created.  She cast seven professional circus performers to bring to life the circus at the heart of this story.

Elephants was first a best-selling book by Sara Gruen, then a movie, neither of which I was familiar with.  It’s a simple story, which as you can tell is appealing to me.  A young man, Jacob Jankowski (Grant Gustin) is all set to go into a veterinary practice with his father.  Right before his final exam at Cornell University his parents are killed instantly in a car accident.  Two days later a sign arrives in the mail, Jankowski & Son.  Broke after the bank took their house and with no other family, Jacob leaves school without taking his final to qualify him to practice and hops a train heading to upstate New York.  He sings “Anywhere”: This train is bound for anywhere./I’m going there too./Don’t care much where we end up/as long as it’s new/and free of everything behind me.”  

Once onboard, he learns it’s a circus train taking the show from town to town  He asks Camel (Stan Brown) for a job for one day so he can buy food.  The other workers see him as a threat but he assures them he’s not trying to take their jobs.  “Just a day and I’ll be gone/I’ve got nothing left to lose.”  That’s fine with Camel, who tells him, “You didn’t jump just any old train, son.  This here’s the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth.  Welcome to the circus.”

And so Jacob’s new life begins.  When the Ringmaster and circus owner, August (Paul Alexander Nolan), a dazzler in the spotlight who abuses his wife, Marlena (Isabelle McCalla), employees and the animals, finds out about Jacob’s background he hires him for “three bucks a week” as a traveling vet.

The unfurling is nicely framed by the elderly Jacob (Gregg Edelman), now a retired veterinarian living in a senior residence, visiting a contemporary circus and regaling them with tales of his experience.  “Man,” he says with feeling, “this place.  The sawdust, the smells.  It’s old but it’s new.”

Jesse Robb and Shana Carroll’s choreography never overwhelm the story.  Neither does Carroll’s circus design.  In keeping with this balance are Rick Elice’s book, Pigpen Theatre Co.’s music, Takeshi Kata’s scenic design, David Israel Reynoso’s costumes and Bradley King’s lighting.  All elements come together like clockwork.  The two hours and 40 minutes flew by.

While the acrobats are magnificent, a circus is nothing without animals.  These are people-powered puppets designed by Ray Wetmore & JR Goodman and Camille Labarre.  I loved Rosie the life-sized white elephant. 

And I loved the sweet ending, which I won’t spoil for you.  Make your own escape to Water for Elephants. 

Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli headline 'An Enemy of the People' revival

 

Playwright Amy Herzog has once again taken a beloved Henrik Ibsen classic and made it more accessible — and shorter — without cheapening its worth.  This time it’s An Enemy of the People at Circle in the Square, tautly directed by Sam Gold and wonderfully acted by Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli.

I had high expectations having enjoyed Herzog’s adaptation of A Doll’s House last year and I was not disappointed.  I’ve liked both plays since I first read them in college.  Ibsen was a revolutionary.  Many people were outraged to see a wife and mother leave her family in A Doll’s House.  I understood Nora’s need for independence and loved that a man from that time had created her.   But Ibsen was writing for long 19th century Norwegian nights.  Enemy, especially, can drag at times and come off as didactic.  Herzog and Gold’s production is well paced throughout, reducing the five act play to two hours with no intermission.  They are wife and husband collaborating on their first stage production together. 

It’s a story of greed and political self-interest that, unfortunately, is as timely as 2020.  Dr. Thomas Stockmann (Strong) is a small town doctor who discovers that the town’s water is toxic and warns of a pandemic if the situation isn’t addressed.  He could be a fictional Dr. Anthony Fauci.  All we have to do is think back four years to the fierce divide between red states and blue over COVID restrictions and we can understand Stockmann’s plight.  Fortunately Fauci wasn’t stoned as Stockmann is but had he been in a small southern town he could have faced a violent attack. 

When the play opens Stockmann has returned to his hometown on the coast with his grown daughter, Petra (Victoria Pedretti), after living in a remote region until his wife died.  This is one of Herzog’s changes, cutting out the character of the wife who in the original play is a shrill opponent of her husband’s principled stand.  I didn’t miss her.

The town had always attracted, on a small scale, people suffering from various ailments because of the healing power of its hot springs.  In Stockmann’s absence, under the direction of his brother, Peter, who is mayor (Imperioli), big plans to turn the town into a major resort and spa are well under way, creating an abundance of jobs and the promise of wealth to all who invest.

At first the doctor is esteemed for discovering the contamination.  But when he calls for all plans for the resort to be stopped while an expensive, years long rebuilding of the water system is undertaken, the townsfolk turn on him swiftly.

Ibsen, considered the father of modern drama, was a moralist. Arthur Miller said he was greatly influenced by Ibsen’s plays.  Herzog has said the same.  In Miller’s case this is most obvious in his 1948 drama All My Sons in which Joe Keller, a self-made industrialist in World War II, discovers that a plane part at his manufacturing plant is defective but allows production to continue rather than face a costly work stoppage.  When a plane crashes and kills all onboard Keller frames his business partner.  Like Ibsen, Miller knew that when taking the moral road has a high price tag many people will leave their morals on the roadside and keep going. 

The action in Enemy is well served by the scenic design  company dots, as well as the theatre itself, which is in-the-round.  In the first act simple furnishings, in keeping with Norwegian sensibilities, create a dining room, living room and newspaper office.  I was thrown at first by what turned out to be the most unusual set change I’ve seen in a long time.  Before I realized what was happening the furnished rooms gave way to a pub and the audience was invited onstage for a drink in what we were told would be a five minute break.  It turned out to be more like 20 minutes to serve the lines of people waiting.  Some audience members had been asked to take seats onstage to represent the people at what becomes a town meeting.  I didn’t see how that contributed to the scene.  They were incongruous in their sneakers and casual clothes against David Zinn’s evocative period costumes.

But the set allows Stockmann to climb onto the bar to try in vain to make his case.  It highlights him as the solitary crusader he has become, who has now been deemed an enemy of the people.  Luckily he survives their stoning and tells Petra they will go to America where things like that don’t happen.  This draws laugher and applause.  He’s probably right about not being stoned.  We used bullets now instead.

This was the most satisfying production of An Enemy of the People I’ve ever experienced.  I’m looking forward to seeing what Herzog has in store for us next.  Hedda Gabler, please. 

Watching Amy Ryan. Missing Tyne Daly

 

The main question I came away with from the revival of Doubt: A Parable at the Todd Haimes Theatre wasn’t the one the plot is intended to raise, whether a popular parish priest molested a boy who is a student in the parish school.  I questioned whether one cast member change could turn a play I found riveting in its original production into one that fell flat for me. 

Veteran theatre and television actress Tyne Daly was to star as Sr. Aloysius Beauvier, the principal of St. Nicholas School in the Bronx who is convinced that Fr. Brendan Flynn is guilty.  Daly had to bow out after being hospitalized on the day of the first preview performance.  Amy Ryan, another veteran performer, was cast and had the unenviable task of having to get up to speed to take on the role of the lead character. 

The question I will never know the answer to was would Daly have given the production the power it deserves as a fascinating exploration of the often elusiveness of truth.  The 2004 play, by John Patrick Shanley, won a Pulitzer and Tony.

Under Scott Ellis’s direction Sr. Aloysius isn’t just the angry woman she was written to be.  She is shrill and full of rage.  Her rapid fire judgments and accusations deserve to be spoken but would be more effective with some nuance in tone and volume.  She is loud and delivers like a machine gun.  Anger can be just as well expressed, and more dramatically presented, when the sharp words are alternately spoken in lower, pointed tones, with pauses for them to sink in.

This affected how I reacted to her fiery exchanges with Fr. Flynn, played by Liev Schreiber.  In the 2005 Broadway production, starring Cherry Jones and Brian F. O’Byrne, and the movie with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, I felt I was attending a verbal tennis match.  When the ball was in Sister’s court, I believed her.  When it bounced back to Fr. Flynn, I believed him.

This isn’t entirely Ryan’s fault.  Schreiber seems too nice, and genuinely committed to the Church’s reforms being implement at that time, 1964, to bring the Catholic tradition out of the rigidity St. Aloysius clings to.  The previous actors, especially Hoffman, had an aura of sleaziness about them.  Only for a moment, after Sister tells him she has investigated his tenure at a past parish, did Schreiber’s Fr. Flynn make me think he could be guilty.  He had a worried expression but only for a flicker.

The richest performance is given by Zoe Kazan as Sr. James, the young nun filled with joy and a love of teaching, especially history.  Her Sr. James at first seems girlish and intimidated by her principal but she proves to be strong-minded and concerned about not rushing to judgment.  I wish Sr. Aloysius and Fr. Flynn had been portrayed with the depth she brought to her role.  

Shanley’s play makes for great theatre for at least two reasons.  We watch it with the knowledge of the horrendous number of children who had been sexually abused by priests for years while being transferred by their superiors from parish to parish.

The play is also strengthened by the time in which it is set, especially for those like Shanley and me who were in Catholic elementary schools in the 1960s or anyone else who was observing the changes of the Second Vatican Council.  The Mass went from Latin to English so we could finally understand the words of the service we were obligated to attend each Sunday.  Sisters either gave up their habits entirely or shortened their skirts and simplified their veils. As a child I could feel the excitement even if I didn’t understand the significance of the changes.

Not everyone was happy with the new ways.  Sr. Aloysius rings true to me because she reminds me of my Uncle Mick who also was a stern, rigid individual.  As the president of the seminary in Seattle he was the same type of authoritarian ruler and was opposed to the changes in the Church.  He was the wrong person at that time, or any time for that matter, to be in charge of training future priests.  The Sulpicians, the order to which he belonged, recognized this and retired him to Hawaii, which he hated and where he died of a heart attack at 57 in 1969.

I have a personal connection to this play in another way.  The nuns are Sisters of Charity of New York.  I have been an Associate member since 2001.  Associates don’t take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience but we share in the Sisters’s lives through being welcomed in their congregational gathering and in spreading their charism of charity. 

At the Sisters’s invitation, the cast, Ellis, the understudies and any member of the creative team were invited to meet with a group of Sisters at their headquarters at the University of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale to discuss their way of life.  (I don’t know if Ryan had the time to get up there.)  Schreiber also met with Fr. Christopher Keenan who is an Associate. 

I’m assuming costume designer Linda Cho visited, or at least she found a way to be true to the Sisters’s habit, a black bonnet cap and floor-length black dress/robe first worn by their founder, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.  The former Associates director, the late Sr. Mary Gallagher, told me to get back the skirt’s pleats after a long day she’d fold the pleats back into place and put the garment under her mattress.  When she got up in the morning the pleats were restored.  I bet Cho didn’t hear that story.

These are the order of nuns who educated Shanley.  Sr. Margaret McEntee taught him in the first grade at Sr. Anthony’s School in the Bronx.  She was his muse for Sr. James and she maintains a friendship with him.  He dedicated his play “to the many orders of Catholic nuns who devoted their lives to serving others in hospitals, schools and retirement homes.  Though they have [been] much maligned and ridiculed, who among us has been so generous?”

Sr. Aloysius doesn’t resemble any Sister of Charity I’ve ever met.  We aren’t given any reason for why she has the disposition she has.  We learn that she had been married but her husband died in World War II.  She doesn’t seem to find joy in her vowed vocation or in education.  She tells Sr. James she’s glad the children are terrified of her.

Her anger seems to come from her resentment of the male dominated Church.  From the beginning she makes comments about not being permitted to enter the rectory or be in close quarters unattended with a priest, even the 79-year-old Monsignor.  She knows well the male control of the Roman Church, as any Sister would. Men rule everything, she says to Sr. James. It festers in her and so she sets her anger toward the male authority figure closest to her.  “I’ll bring him down.  With or without your help.”

But Fr. Flynn holds the power.  When Sr. Aloysius, against the rules, meets with him in her office alone, he puts her in her place.  “You have no right to act on your own,” he tells her.  “You are a member of a religious order.  You have taken vows, obedience being one.  You answer to us.  You have no right to step outside the Church.”

She, by the power of her personality, and he, by the power of his authority, are not easily stopped.  This tension should have been more convincing than it was.  Perhaps Ryan needed more time to inhabit her role.  Perhaps Schreiber had a stronger edge when he sparred with Daly.  It must have been hard for the cast to spend so much time rehearsing and preparing and then have that chemistry disrupted right at the start of public performances.  Those are two more things I won’t know.  

Unfortunately all of this spoiled what is usually a climatic ending.  This time it felt more like a conclusion than a revelation. 

Jason Robert Brown's new musical fails to connect

 

The plot of The Connector, the new Jason Robert Brown musical at MCC Theater’s Newman Mills Theater, is more promising than its execution.  The story of a gifted and ambitious young writer who shoots to stardom at his magazine by fabricating much of the content of his feature stories was inspired by real journalists.  The fictional reporter and the editor he deceives are both so unlikable, though, that I was getting bored waiting for their inevitable downfall. The show is too black and white.

Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz) serves as narrator and a young assistant copy editor focused on getting published in the esteemed journal.  She introduces the story in the opening number, “A Young Man Dreams,” about a 25-year-old man in 1944 who envisioned a monthly magazine that would speak to his generation through deep investigative reporting.   Two years later, from a townhouse in Hell’s Kitchen, The Connector was born, she sings.  “And the whole world changed, and everything stayed the same,” the ensemble chimes in.

The magazine becomes revered.  In 1981 a new editor, Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula), takes over after a stint reporting from Saigon.  He is introduced with Robin singing the same song but geared toward him: “A young man dreamed, in his room up at Harvard, that he’d someday write for his favorite publication.”

All is well until Robin has a third young man with a dream to introduce.  This one dreamed from his bedroom in New Jersey of his name on a byline in The Connector.  Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) is hastily hired based on his writing in the Princetonian, which O’Brien’s wife had read and admired.  O’Brien thinks he’s found a genius and approves story after story despite the concerns of Muriel (Jessica Molaskey), head of the magazine’s fact checking-department whose zeal for accuracy is legendary.

Big mistake.  Those two overbearing, egotistical men will be brought down by those two smart women.  No surprise.  As I said, black and white.

The idea for the show came to director Daisy Prince nearly two decades ago, inspired by the rapid rise and fall of young journalists like Jayson Blair, a New York Times reporter at that time who disgraced the paper and the editors who failed to scrutinize his work, which played loose with facts.  The idea seemed ripe now that charges of “fake news” bring into question just what information can be trusted.

Prince conceived and directs the show, with a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman and Brown’s music and lyrics.  Beowulf Boritt designed the minimalistic set and Tom Murray directs the elevated onstage and unseen orchestra.

The most dramatic – and unexpected – action of the show happens at the end, in the minute before the lights go out.  It takes an hour and 44 minutes to get there.