'The Wiz' is belting on down the road

 

If you like camp, silliness, intense neon colors everywhere and BELTING, you will love the Broadway revival of The Wiz at the Marquis Theatre.  I often appreciate camp, rarely enjoy silliness, like neon to an extent and never like belting, so it was a mostly tedious two and a half hours for me.

I’ve never seen this all-Black retelling of The Wizard of Oz so I didn’t know what to expect.  I’ve had the original cast recording for decades and love the songs. I’m glad I had that album because the sound quality last night was so poor I needed to rely on hearing the songs in my head instead of from the stage.  With songs that weren’t on the album, I was lost, especially when the Scarecrow (Avery Wilson) sang.  My friend Mary, a singer, also had difficulty understanding the words. She thought for awhile that they were lip-syncing but decided by the end that they probably weren’t.  With music supervision and orchestrations by veteran Joseph Joubert they definitely would not have been lip-syncing.

This is a shame because Charlie Smalls’s score is fantastic, a combination of gospel, soul and R&B.  The actor I could most consistently understand was Phillip Johnson Richardson as the Tinman.  I loved his “If I Could Feel.”  I also loved when Dorothy, Scarecrow and Tinman sang and danced “Ease on Down the Road,” a song that was playing in my head from my record before I even entered the theatre.  

The star of the show for me was the actual star of the show, Nichelle Lewis, making her Broadway debut as Dorothy.   At 24 she is older than Stephanie Mills, who was 17 when she originated the role in 1975, but Lewis has a youthful and energetic spirit that is endearing from start to finish.  She was every bit a girl on an adventure for me and I could understand most of what she sang, except during her extreme belts.  She’s got an easy rhythm and seemed to be thoroughly enjoying herself.  I just wish she had Toto but for some reason she goes on her journey to the Emerald City without her trusted dog, who isn’t even mentioned.  Rounding out the threesome who do join her to find the Wiz (Wayne Brady) is Kyle Ramar Freeman as the Lion.

Any subtly in the show ends early when scenic designer Hannah Beachler’s gray and white Kansas farmhouse transitions into Oz.  I liked how choreographer JaQuel Knight created the tornado from swirling dancers in gray jumpsuits and capes (costumes by Sharen Davis).  It was all busyness after that.

Schele Williams directs this production for which Amber Ruffin has updated William F. Brown’s book. The original 1975 show won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical.  I don’t expect this one to be anywhere near as honored.

Eden Espinosa is dynamic as Lempicka on Broadway

 

Many times over the years I’ve walked out of a Broadway musical thinking, I want to go back.  Never, though, have I been so enamored with a show as I was with Lempicka that I’m now considering booking a flight across the country because I want more.  More of this fascinating woman, that is. 

Tamara de Lempicka was a sought-after artist in the 1930s and 40s in Paris before falling into obscurity as tastes changed.  Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould are telling her story -- “inspired” by her life and art -- and Eden Espinosa is brilliantly bringing her to life at the Longacre Theatre in a new musical directed by Rachel Chavkin.  I was so captivated by her story and artistic vision that I reread a New York Times feature that mentioned her work will have its first major museum retrospective in the United States, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco starting in October.  I immediately wanted to plan a trip.  I was only in that charming city once, when I was in college, and have always hoped to go back.  Now I have a good reason. 

Lempicka was a strong, independent woman who painted portraits and modern women like herself in a modernist Art Deco style; a great many were nudes.  Although the story spans more than a half century, little is known about her early life except that she was born in the 1890s in Poland to a Russian mother and a Polish father whom she describes as a Jewish merchant.  We first encounter her as an old, forgotten and alone woman on a park bench in Los Angeles who tells us her story, beginning in 1916 when she was a pretty young woman married to a Russian aristocrat, Tadeusz Lempicka.  The 1917 revolution toppled that privileged life in St. Petersburg when her husband was jailed and she had sex with his Bolshevik captors to free him.  “You walked in here a little rich girl,” one of them tells her. “Now you’re walking out a whore.”

They leave Russia with their infant daughter and little money and settle in Paris in 1918.  Tadeusz, unaccustomed to work, can’t find a job.  She had always loved to paint so she began formal training and started displaying her work in the streets of Paris, taking on the role of breadwinner while following her passion.  Her work catches the attention of intellectuals and Paris’s modern set, and she was the toast of the city’s fallen aristocrats and nightclub goers. 

Andrew Samonsky portrays her husband and Amber Iman her lover, Rafaela, with whom she carries on an affair in full knowledge of her husband with whom she maintains her marriage.  Standing at least six feet tall and railing thin, Iman is soulful, with a vulnerable core.  I believed in both relationships.  “I had the great good fortune to love not once, but twice,” Tamara tells us at the beginning.  “And I had the great misfortune to love them both at the same time.”

They have beautiful voices and Kreitzer has given them lovely lyrics that movingly and clearly tell their stories and the larger one, with music by Gould.

Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography has all the sizzle and excitement a show about this artist deserves.  And Paloma Young’s costumes are a lush delight.  Scenic designer Riccardo Hernandez’s layered platforms allow the story to move easily from apartment to nightclub and to the street.

It’s been 14 years since a friend suggested to Kreitzer, a playwright who likes to write about unconventional women, that she look into the complex and glamorous life and extraordinary talent of Lempicka, who was always better known in Europe than here, saying this woman who was far ahead of her time would be a good subject.  Several well-known people already knew this.  Madonna, Barbra Streisand and Jack Nicholson are collectors.

As Kreitzer researched, she began envisioning a musical as the proper vehicle, even though she had never written one.  Over the years it had readings, workshops, regional productions and premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2018 with Espinosa starring.  The pandemic slowed its arrival on Broadway.  

The friend who came up from Virginia to see the show with me and loved it -- we were both in tears at the end -- wants to go with me to San Francisco for the art exhibit and a friend from high school who heard about my plans wants to come too.  I feel this is going to happen.  Thank you to all involved with Lempicka.   California here we come. 

'The Who's Tommy'

 The music and dancing in the Broadway revival of The Who’s Tommy at the Nederlander Theatre are fabulous but I left feeling disappointed by the production, which is directed by Des McAnuff.  After an exciting first act the story more or less falls away in the second.  And Ali Louis Bourzgui, in his Broadway debut, doesn’t have the magnetism to carry the act as the adult Tommy, or at least he didn’t when I saw him last night.  I was surprised to read in Playbill that he won a Jeff Award for his performance in the Goodman Theatre pre-Broadway production last summer.

I’ve loved the music since it was released as a rock opera concept album in 1969.  I was in elementary school but I appreciated the electrifying score.  I bought the cassette and wore it out.

Pete Townshend’s music, under the direction of Ron Melrose, is still thrilling.  And choreographer Lorin Latarro’s syncopated dances with the large chorus are exciting as they fill David Korins’s stylized, minimalistic sets.  Amanda Zieve’s broodingly dark lighting interspersed with vibrant colors and Peter Nigrini’s projections all create the perfect atmosphere for the popular rock score.

So much drama is packed, and carried out well, in the first act that there was hardly anywhere left for the book, written by Townshend and McAnuff, to go.

It’s a creepy story, starting in England in 1941 when Mrs. Walker (Alison Luff) get a telegram that her husband, Captain Walker (Adam Jacobs), was killed in the war.  She is pregnant and months later gives birth to Tommy.  I was happy to hear “It’s a Boy” again.  It’s been years since I’ve heard any of this music.

Four years later Tommy (Olive Ross-Kline last night) is at home with his mother and her lover (an unnamed Nathan Lucrezio) when Captain Walker unexpectedly comes home after being released from a P.O.W. camp.  When a fight breaks out between the men, Mrs. Walker turns Tommy away, unaware that he is now looking in the large mirror of the wardrobe.  Captain Walker shoots and kills the lover and Tommy witnesses it all.  Frightened, his parents sing frantically and insistently to him: “You didn’t hear it./You didn’t see it./You won’t say nothing to no one/ever in your life./You never heard it./How absurd it’ll/seem without any proof.”  They conclude with: “Never tell a soul/What you know is the truth.”  From that point on Tommy is emotionally “that deaf, dumb and blind kid” we know so well from “Pinball Wizard.”

Most of this, like all of the story, is told through song and pantomime.  Little dialogue is used.  That’s interesting to watch even if it distances the story.

Walker is cleared after a court rules he acted in self-defense.  The parents spend considerable time taking Tommy to doctors who lift and manipulate his tiny body trying to connect with him, to no avail.  Olive plays unresponsive beautifully, not tensing her body or allowing it to go rag doll limp.  Ten-year-old Tommy (Quinten Kusheba) is also excellent in Tommy’s unresponsiveness as he is sexually molested by Uncle Ernie (John Ambrosino) and bullied and physically abused by Cousin Kevin (Bobby Conte).

But Cousin Kevin ends up giving Tommy a surprising new way to live.  He takes him to an arcade where Tommy outplays everybody through “sense of smell” and “intuition.”  The act ends in a rousing “Pinball Wizard” performed by the Local Lads, Cousin Kevin and the Ensemble.

After all that drama and trauma Act Two dragged for me.  Even Tommy’s awakening seemed anti-climactic.  It was nice to hear “I’m Free” again but, as I mentioned, Bourzgui didn’t give it the electricity it needs.  The show is only two hours and 10 minutes.  Doing it without an intermission would have helped.