'Ragtime' revival is likely to be the best show of the season

 

As I was wiping my tears and reaching for a tissue, I caught the eyes of a woman walking up the aisle who, wide eyed, mouthed an exaggerated I know.  Such was the forcefield that is director Lear DeBessonet’s revival of Ragtime at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.  Being gripped this intensely by a production is rare for me, even though as a Drama Desk voter I attend far more shows than the average person. 

This is how it should be given that the show is built from E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 genius of a novel by the same name. It has always been my favorite of his books.  I liked the all-star 1981 film version and loved the original 1998 Broadway production so much that I went out the next morning and bought the cast recording.  I enjoyed the 2009 revival too, although I now can’t remember anything that stands out from it.

DeBessonet’s envisioning will be on my short list of most moving shows for as long as I am attending theatre.  The original was a Livent (U.S.) Inc. production, meaning it was large scale in sets and every other element of a Broadway show.  DeBessonet’s vision is the opposite, next to no scenery, thus keeping the brilliant story and engaging characters front and center.  She is aided by the powerful score, one of my favorites in musical theatre, by Stephen Flaherty (music) and Lynn Ahrens (lyrics), which won them Tony Awards in 1998 along with Terrance McNally for his book.  The songs are magnificently showcased by a 28-piece orchestra under the direction of James Moore.

Lighting designers Adam Honoré and Donald Holder lower the lights in the second, climactic act, creating the sense of foreboding that will lead to the inevitable tragic ending for one of the characters.  Scenic designer David Korins uses a turntable to give the feeling of this new era, early 20^th century, unfolding and to emphasize the swiftly moving story.  His two major props are an upright piano and a shiny new Model T, representing the main character, Coalhouse Walker, Jr.

As for characters, Doctorow brings forth three groups of fictional folks who would never have contact with each other and believably has them deeply intertwined by the end, mixing in historical figures such as J. P. Morgan (John Rapson), architect Stanford White (Billy Cohen), anarchist Emma Goldman (Shaina Taub) and vaudeville showgirl Evelyn Nesbit (Anna Grace Barlow).

Their story opens in 1906 as a prosperous WASP family living in New Rochelle, New York, a Black family from Harlem and an immigrant family from Latvia represent the changes that will take place in our country as the new century enfolds.

The WASP clan is headed by a traditional, for the time, couple, Father (Colin Donnell) and Mother (Cassie Levy, photo center), their son, Edgar (Nick Barrington), Mother’s Younger Brother (Ben Levi Ross) and Grandfather (Tom Nelis).  Only Edgar has a name because he represents the bridge into the future, and he can also predict it.  At the start of the play, he calls out to the illusionist Harry Houdini (Rodd Cyrus) after a performance, “Warn the Duke.”  We don’t see the culmination of his prophesy until the end with the start of World War I, which was triggered by the assignation of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

His second foretelling is when he and mother are awaiting a train on the platform in New Rochelle.  The widower immigrant artist Tateh (Brandon Uranowitz, photo right) and his daughter (Tabitha Lawing) are waiting for a train to Massachusetts.  After the two adults exchange pleasantries and Edgar tries to draw out the daughter, Tateh and the girl leave on their train.  Edgar says, “We know those people,” and Mother replies, “Don’t be silly.  They’re poor foreigners.”  To which Edgar counter, “Then, we’re going to know them.”  Mother dismisses this with, “Who puts such thoughts in your head.”  But the future will prove how on-target he is with his unlikely forecast.  (An interesting note about Uranowitz:  He played Edgar opposite the late Marin Mazzie in the original production.) 

Finally, Edgar predicts death in one of the final scenes.

The Black family consists of Coalhouse Walker Jr. (Joshua Henry, photo left), a rising jazz musician, his beloved Sarah (Nichelle Lewis) and their son, Coalhouse Walker III (Kaleb Johnson and Kane Emmanuel Miller rotating performances).  They become entwined with the WASP family after Mother finds an abandoned infant buried in her garden.  His mother, Sarah, is soon found by the police and Mother, in a move that was fully out of character with her background, assumes responsibility and has the two take up residence in her attic.   She makes her decision alone because Father is off on a year-long expedition with Admiral Perry (John Rapson).

Mother reflects on her decision as well as Sarah’s in one of the many moving songs “What Kind of Woman?”  “What kind of woman/Would do what I’ve done?/Open the door /to such chaos and pain!/You would have/ gently closed the door,/And gently turned the key/And gently told me not to look/, For fear of what I’d see./ What kind of woman/Would that have made me?

The final, and permanent, coming together involves Tateh, after he has become a successful movie maker posing as a Baron, and Mother, two parents who meet, as far as they are aware, for the first time and connect over their love for their children. They are in Atlantic City, where Father has moved his family to shelter them from the vengeful path Coalhouse has taken following the desecration of his cherished Model T and the death of Sarah that follows.  While Coalhouse is pursuing a murderous spree, Mother and Tateh find peace on the beach watching their little ones play harmoniously together and sing a duet of another gorgeous song “Our Children:” “See them running down the beach./Children run so fast/Toward the future/From the past./There they stand,/Making footprints in the sand,/And forever hand in hand,/Our children./Two small lives,/Silhouetted by the blue,/One like me/And one like you./Our children./Our children.”

All the songs are rich and perfectly sung, lovingly for “Our Children” and forcefully for “What Kind of Woman?” and, thank God, they are never belted and aren’t amplified to within an inch of their life the way far too many Broadway songs are.  At the center is “Wheels of a Dream,” which Coalhouse sings to Sarah while he is still full of hope for the future.  “Yes, the wheels are turning for us, girl,/And the times are starting to roll./Any man can get where he wants to/If he’s got some fire in his soul./We’ll see justice, Sarah,/And plenty of men/Who will stand up/And give us our due./Oh, Sarah, it’s more than promises./Sarah, it must be true./A country that let’s a man like me/Own a car, raise a child, build a life with you.”

It is also the song the entire cast of 41 comes on stage to sing at the conclusion. 

Linda Cho’s costumes are exquisite, especially Mother’s rich Victorian gowns, like all her family’s clothes in shades of white and cream, representing the privilege and purity of their place at that time.

All the performances are stirring, although my friend and I had some trouble understanding the words in Sarah’s songs.  I felt Lewis was rushing them and her volume was too high.  But that’s one small complaint in an otherwise perfect production, which played to one of the most enthusiastic and appreciative audiences I have experienced in a long time.  It’s early in the 2025-26 season but I feel I have already seen the best show of the year.

 

Elizabeth McGovern returns to the New York stage as Ava Gardner

 

I don’t recall ever hearing such noticeably tepid applause as I experienced last night at New York City Center following the performance of Ava: The Secret Conversations. This is especially significant because the star of the show, and its playwright, is Hollywood darling Elizabeth McGovern. 

This is obviously a passion project for the long-time Lady Cora of “Downton Abbey” fame.  When the original playwright dropped out, she decided to pen the script herself.  This seems to have blinded her to how thoroughly unlikeable she was making the characterization of the 1950s and 60s film legend Ava Gardner.  Eighty-five minutes of watching and listening to that vulgar, profanity-spewing person was miserable.  I saw the woman next to me look at her watch three times.

McGovern based her script on the book The Secret Conversations by British journalist Peter Evans and Gardner.   Directed by Moritz Von Stuelpnagel, it is set in 1988 when Gardner is recovering from a stroke in her sumptuous London flat.  (Scenic design by David Meyer.)  It’s more about Gardner’s three disastrous marriages – to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra – than the woman herself.  Her relationship with the physically and emotionally abusive Howard Hughes is also highlighted.  All of these famous folks are pictured in projections by Alex Basco Koch and portrayed by Aaron Costa Ganis who is also onstage as Evans interviewing Gardner.  His accent goes from believable English to the kind of exaggerated English we use when pretending we are British.  It also sounds American at times and I’m sure I heard some Brooklyn in there as well.

McGovern, looking slim and striking in Toni-Leslie James’ Hollywood glam costumes, also hams it up, making Gardner a caricature. 

Gardner died at 67 in 1990, the year her cleaned-up version of her life appeared as Ava: My Story.  Evans later gained the rights to his notes and tapes for his book, which was published after his death in 2013.

Ava: The Secret Conversations premiered in London, where McGovern has lived for decades, in 2022 and had a run at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles the following year.  After New York it is scheduled for Chicago and Toronto.

Joy comes to town

 

 Joy: A New True Musical is a rags to riches story about a divorced, recently fired Long Island woman who makes a fortune inventing a different kind of mop.  A mop?  Yep, it’s unfathomable why millions of people would fall in love with a mop but that’s what happened to Joy Mangano whose unlikely story is being told at the Laura Pels Theatre with Betsy Wolfe starring. It is based on Mangano’s memoir,  Inventing: Dare to Build a Brave and Creative Life.  A 2015 film starred Jennifer Lawrence.

The show, with a book by Ken Davenport, begins with young Joy (Nora Mae Dixon) sitting alone in front of a box of her inventions. She pulls out her favorite, a glow-in-the-dark dog collar.  In “The Shape of Things” (music and lyrics by AnnMarie Milazzo), she describes its usefulness: I see a dog collar glimmer/ brightly lit up/ made out of cardboard and glow tape/ like a bike reflector for a pup. It shines like a star/ so my neighbor’s dog won’t be hit by a car.

It’s a great idea, one that makes somebody else lots of money years later because she didn’t pursue her idea.

It takes the grown-up Joy getting fired from her airport job to spur her to action. With a house full of people she is more or less supporting -- her teenage daughter, Christie (Honor Blue Savage), her mother, Toots (Jill Abromovitz), who hasn’t gone out in years and spends her days on the living room sofa watching TV in her robe, her father, Rudy (Adam Grupper), and her ex-husband, Tony (Brandon Espinoza), who lives in the basement with her father – she energetically begins trying to sell the product she invents by accident, a mop with an super absorbing cotton top that can be tossed in the washing machine for use again and again, and that can be wrung out without someone bending over.  While this might sound as if it were happening in the 1950s, she invented the mop in1990 when she was 35.  Why anyone at any time, much less the 90s when the whole world was on the verge of changing with the creation of the Internet, would get excited about a housecleaning tool, with the unlikely title of Miracle Mop, is beyond me but as the musical’s title indicates, it’s a true story.

The first act is a frenzy of the core cast and the 11-member ensemble coming on to say why they feel frazzled, especially the women. Director Lorin Latarro does a great job of controlling the swirling action. 

All of this makes for a fun first act but in the second act the novelty starts wearing out. Joy achieves phenomenal success on QVC convincing all those frazzled people that her mop will save them time for other things.  This in spite of a disastrous start when she freezes in front of the camera on live TV.  Because of her father’s carelessness in managing her business affairs, she ends up in court on the brink of bankruptcy and fighting for her patent. 

Choreographer Joshua Bergasse, who nicely handles the chaos of the show, has a cute number with the five QVC judges, the SUITS dancing to “We Sell Stories.” As a giant QVC sing descends they sing: We’re a heritage of the same old boys. It’s a department store/ Laid out on your living room floor/ Reinventing how to make a sale/ We are blazing a trail/ Place and order and it’s in the mail. 

 

While all of this seems like a lot of fuss over a mop the show clearly is about far more.  It’s about honoring your creativity, fighting for what you believe in and never giving up. Wolfe portrays it all well. 

'Rolling Thunder' features some of the best music of my life

 

Rolling Thunder: A Rock Journey at New World Stages is Boomer heaven, a two-hour evening of 17 of the top songs of the late 60s and early 70s, which I have always felt had the greatest music of my lifetime.  These songs and a sense of freedom were part of the joy of that era, and the six talented performers evoke those memories with the songs.  But this time was also marked by tragedy.  The Vietnam war, which began in 1955 and continued until 1975, is the backdrop of the show and the songs reflect that as well.

 A program note says the characters are a composite of real people, “their essence and personalities distilled from research, actual letters and interviews with Vietnam veterans.”  Bryce Hallett, an Australian journalist and former arts editor at the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote the book and Kenneth Ferrone directs. 

Projection designer Caite Hevner creates the environment with scenes of the jungle in Vietnam and the soldiers’ letters describing the intense heat and humidity as they carried 90-pound packs on their backs.  Photos and news clips of protests at home, against the war and for civil rights, portray this turbulent and unique time in our history.  We hear from Presidents Johnson and Nixon and Walter Cronkite on TVs.  (My friend and I looked at each other and smiled.  He was our long-time neighbor, and wrote the introduction for my first book.)

After a dramatic opening of the cast singing “Magic Carpet Ride,”  we are introduced to the characters, spotlighted one by one.  Thomas (Justin Matthew Sargent) tells us how he came to join the Marines.  He saw an officer on his college campus and was inspired by his confidence and his uniform.  He thought, “That’s how I want to look.  I’m going to be a Marine.”

Johnny (Drew Becker) says people thought he’d gone mad when he enlisted in the Army “but I’ve been thinking about my one big chance for adventure, to see a bit of the world while I could.”

Linda (Cassadee Pope), Johnny’s girlfriend, says she understands why he’s going.  “I barely blinked as I watched the plane disappear among the clouds.  Johnny’s dad put his arm around me.  We didn’t say a word.”

Andy (Daniel Yearwood) says the training at Fort Campbell was mindless and tough.  “I wasn’t cut out for it.” 

Mike, who also plays Jimi and others, (Deon’te Goodman), a Black soldier like Andy, writes to his childhood friend after hearing he’s been drafted.  “Some of the guys don’t take well to the fully integrated units.  Take your riffle to the mess and the latrine.”

Andy’s Mom, who also plays Nurse Kelly and others (Courtnee Carter), writes to her son.  “I’m so worried.  Please take care and try not to lose yourself.  I will keep your room just the way you left it.  And remember, don’t go drinking that water!  I hear it’s been contaminated from all the chemicals they’ve been spraying.  I love you, sweetheart.  Mom” 

I remembered every one of the songs they sing, even though I was only in elementary school for the 60s.  “Black Magic Woman,” “Born to be Wild,” “Eve of Destruction,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “War” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and the others are songs I haven’t heard in decades yet they instantly transported me back in time.  Chong Lim and Sonny Paladino provide the arrangements and orchestration and Paladino conducts the five-piece onstage band and plays keys.

Before the final scene the following appears as rows upon rows of names scroll up the length of the stage:

More than 2 million lives were lost and 3 million people were wounded.

Hundreds of children were left orphaned.

About 9 million Americans served on active duty during the official Vietnam War era between 1964 and 1973.

58,151 died and 153,303 were wounded.  61% of those killed were younger than 21.

1,875 are still unaccounted for.

The show concludes with “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

After the enthusiastic standing ovation all those currently servicing, veterans and family members were asked to raise their hands and were thanked as we applauded.  Then the tone shifted as we were invited to sing along with a medley of songs.  A woman in the audience shouted, “Can we?”  The answer was an enthusiastic “Yes!”

It was a blast to sing my lungs out with songs of my youth accompanied by a rock band in an off-Broadway theatre, not caring if I was off-key occasionally because everyone else was singing and the music was so pulsating no one would have noticed.

In photo, by Evan Zimmerman, are: Pope, Becker, Yearwood, Sargent, Carter and Goodman.

Jean Smart returns to Broadway in 'Call Me Izzy'

 

The minute Jean Smart stepped onto the stage at Studio 54 the audience greeted her with enthusiastic applause.  I said to myself, She must be from television.  When I checked the Playbill after the show I found I was right.  She comes from “Hacks,” in which she played Deborah Vance, and “Designing Women,” where she played Charlene Frazier.  I’ve never seen either or even heard of the first.

The last time she was on Broadway was a quarter of a century ago in The Man Who Came to Dinner, which I saw but don’t remember her.  Theatre is obviously in her blood, though, because she ably holds the stage for 80 minutes in Jamie Wax’s one-woman play Call Me Izzy, directed by Sarna Lapine.  I do wish she had a better play for her return.

Smart portrays Isabelle Fontenot whose first battle, of many to come, is as child insisting on being called Izzy.  At 17, right out of high school, she marries Ferd Scutley, five years her senior and leaves her childhood trailer park in Mansfield, Louisiana, to settle into another with him.  It’s not long before Ferd begins beating her.  To escape, at least mentally, she writes poetry, having fallen in love with the genre in fourth grade after being chosen over the whole class to recite Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.”

For reasons I don’t understand unless it’s that the playwright thinks it’s cute, Izzy writes her poems on the toilet seat cover using toilet paper and an eyebrow pencil.  Are we to believe there’s not a single pen or piece of paper in the trailer she can take into the bathroom with her, or that she couldn’t buy them when she does her grocery shopping?  (Sets by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams; lighting by Donald Holder).

Eventually, though, she gets some notebooks, filling hundreds of them, she tells us, and hides them from Ferd.  It’s no spoiler to tell you what becomes of them because the play is predicable from start to finish.  Ferd discovers them and burns them. 

Along her journey Izzy has impressed people.  A high school teacher visits her shortly after she’s married, coming while Ferd is at work.  She brings a thick envelope containing a letter of recommendation and an application for a full scholarship to LSU, saying she wants Izzy to continue writing.  But as you can imagine, you-know-who isn’t about to go for that.  After seeing the envelope and reading the contents he storms out, coming back drunk.  He hurls, “like a grenade against the wall,” all the Precious Moments figurines Izzy has collected since she was a girl.  When he is through Izzy sweeps up the pieces and dumps them in the trash with the application.

“It’s alright,” she tells us, breaking the fourth wall as she has from the start to tell her story.  “I’m a married woman now.  And Ferd needs me.  And we never talk of it again.” 

Her second significant friend is a neighbor two trailers down who introduces her to the library where she gets a card and begins reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, then plays.  But doesn’t the neighbor notice the bruises or hear the beatings?  There can't be that much space between trailers that she doesn’t hear what’s going on.

Izzy will prevail, of course, although not before the beating that finally sends her packing, ending up where all the plucky runaway heroines end up, at a bus stop, heading to an unknown but surely successful future, based on all that has come before.  She vows to keep writing her poems but declares never again on (expletive) toilet paper.   

One-act plays are challenging.  They can be brilliant, like this past season’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in which Sarah Snook (another TV star, from “Succession”) took on all 26 characters in Oscar Wilde’s classic, or they can be deeply moving, like Rueben Santiago-Hudson autobiographical play, Lackawanna Blues, which had me still crying as I walked up the aisle after his long, well-deserved standing ovation.  In both of those the material as solid.  

Another hackneyed story of a battered wife triumphing over her abusive husband doesn’t cut it for me, especially one set 1989 as this one is.  That subject’s been done so many times.  I know domestic violence is still a problem but the play would have been more effective if Wax had set it 10 or 15 years earlier.  This story wouldn’t have been familiar back then.  Police reporters never wrote about domestic violence because it was considered a private matter.  I remember that as an intern at The Baltimore Sun.  

But the 70s brought the Women’s Movement to the forefront.  The 70s also featured popular made for TV movies, back in the days when television was ABC, CBS and NBC only.  These kinds of stories were regulars, usually starring a popular TV star, especially in the sweeps months (when ratings were assigned) of November, February and May.  That’s what Call Me Izzy reminded me of.  Many, many seats were empty when I was there Friday night.

  

The producers have added an additional element to the show, The Izzy Project, a social impact campaign to “extend the conversation beyond the stage” with talkbacks on a variety of subjects, such as overcoming adversity and how to recognize the warning signs of abuse.  For subjects and dates, visit https://callmeizzyplay.com/resources. https://callmeizzyplay.com/resources.

Jeremy Jordan stars in 'Floyd Collins'

 

I was disappointed by the production of Floyd Collins at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. I have wanted to see this musical since 2006 when I heard Brian Stokes Mitchell sing “How Glory Goes” on his first, self-titled, CD.  He sang it with such feeling that I got up to check the disc case to find out more about it.

I learned that the music and lyrics were by Adam Guettel and that it was from a musical called Floyd Collins, which I had not heard of.  It’s easy to understand why it was unfamiliar to me.  It premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 1996 and played for only 26 performances.  From time to time after I became aware of the show I would see it listed for performances in regional theatres but I had a long wait for it to make its Broadway debut this spring.

It wasn’t the acting and singing or the production values that disappointed me.  It was Tina Landau’s book, which made the show seem both too long and at the same time underdeveloped.  This is her second show on Broadway this season.  She wrote the book for Redwood, which was wonderfully staged but suffered with her clichéd story. 

In the case of Floyd Collins Landau, who also directs and provided new lyrics, had a real life story to work from, and one that was certainly dramatic.  In the Kentucky hills in 1925 Floyd Collins, a farmer and cave explorer, became the most famous man in the country for a time after becoming trapped 200 feet underground for 14 days in what was called Sand Cave.  His well-being and the attempts to free him not only made national news but attracted crowds at the cave’s opening as well as opportunists and other vendors who set up attractions that turned the rural area into a country fair and carnival with fireworks and balloons. 

Broadway favorite Jeremy Jordan left his role as Gatsby in that Broadway show to take a pay cut to play Floyd.  His enthusiasm for the role is obvious in his performance but enthusiasm was less obvious in the audience.  Many, many seats were empty the night I was there. 

Jordan nicely spans Floyd’s emotional journey, which is impressive since he portrays most of it from a tilted platform representing his confined condition.  (Stark set and lighting by dots and Scott Zielinski.)

Going into the cave at the start Floyd is enthusiastic.  After hollering down the opening and hearing an echo he imagines a bright future for himself.

“My losing streak is over, boy.  Gonna find my treasure underground.  This cavern’s gonna be the biggest attraction ‘round these parts and this time folks are gonna pay me to tour her wonders.  They’ll be tearing up this mountain.  They’ll be camping in the snow.”

He sings his first solo, “The Call”:

If I follow that sound,

I could find what I’m lookin’ for.

It could be glory callin’,

Callin’ me.

He retains his optimism for a few days even after his left ankle gets crushed under a huge rock, rendering him unable to escape.  His younger brother, Homer (Jason Gotay), is able to reach down to comfort him and his young sister, Nellie (singer/songwriter Lizzy McAlpine in her Broadway debut), father, Lee (Marc Kudisch), and the town folks keep vigil above ground. 

A reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal, Skeets Miller (Taylor Trensch), comes to interview Floyd.  He’s small in size — like a mosquito, hence his name — so he is able to talk to Floyd from just above where he’s trapped and becomes emotionally involved, so much so that he eventually crawls down with a jack and crowbar, risking his own life, to try to rescue Floyd.  After his story is published interest in Floyd picks up quickly.  (In real life Miller won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the tragedy.)

By the start of the second act reporters have come from New York City, Chicago, Bowling Green, Butte, Savannah and more to report on the man “buried while still alive.”  Dressed in navy suits with matching bowler hats (costumes by Anita Yavich) they do a little syncopated dance in their zeal (dance sequences by Jon Rua). 

All the while Floyd is losing hope as the days pass until he comes to accept this is the end for him and he calls upon God: “I’m ready now, Lord.  I know I weren’t no Sunday school mama’s boy.  But faith is hoping for something, believing what you can’t see.”  Then he shouts: “I HAD FAITH ALL MY LIFE.  I want to ask you something.”

Which he does in the lovely  “How Glory Goes” in which he wonders what heaven will be like:

“Is it warm?

Is it soft against your face?

Do you feel a kind ‘a grace inside the breeze?

Will there be trees?

“Is there light?

Does it hover on the ground?

Does it shine from all around,

or just from you?”

As he continues his final exploration, this one in song and imagination, he sits up, finally free in impending death.  

“Are we ev’rywhere?

Are we anywheres at all?

Do we hear a trumpet call us

and we’re by your side?

“Will my mama be there waitin’ for me,

smilin’ like the way she does

an’ holdin’ out her arms,

an’ she calls my name?

She will hold me just the same.”

 

Miller comes on to give his final news report: “The prisoner’s body was wedged so tightly there was no longer any room at all between his chest and the cave ceiling.  A cave cricket perched on his nose, nibbling away at the tip.  The cause of death was listed as starvation and exhaustion.  The carnival at Sand Cave packed up and went home.”

Floyd finishes his song:

“Only heaven knows how glory go,

what each of us was meant to be.

In the starlight, that is what we are

I can see so far.”

He stands, walking into the open space, lifts his arms and turns in a slow circle, as if ascending into the light around him and follows it until he disappears into it as the stage lights blacken.