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.