Talk Rad!o

The actor was fantastic. The play mediocre.
There’s nothing between Liev Schreiber and Barry Champlain, the pompous, conceited radio talk show host he plays. Make that embodies. Chain smoking, pouring shot after shot of Jack Daniels and arrogantly dismissing his callers, Schreiber is every bit Barry. He rolls his eyes, slouches in his chair and gestures to his control room team, a restless personification of agitation.
As a Drama Desk voter, I love strong competition in a category. I’ll have a hard time choosing between Schreiber and Frank Langella of “Frost/Nixon.” The play, however, doesn’t belong in the best revival category. It left me with the feeling I had missed something, as if I had come in at the middle and didn’t know how things had progressed to that point. I don’t understand why Barry’s girlfriend, Linda MacArthur (Stephanie March), chooses that evening to leave him after putting up with him all along. I don’t know why he ends up in a raving diatribe this evening -- except for the possible effect of all that drinking -- because I don’t see any motivation for all his anger in the first place.
That anger is certainly apparent, though, right from the start. He enters the studio, perilously close to air time, complaining about people who drive 10 miles an hour and about others who cut people off. Then he sits down to launch into his opinions with callers, telling one that drugs should be legalized to “put the CIA and the Mafia out of business at the same time” and when another expresses an obsessive love for his cat, he tells him to “stop hanging around with the pussy and go get some.”
His program director, Dan Woodruff (Peter Hermann), comes on at one point to give some background narration, telling of Barry’s early success on the air and how it affected him. “He’d seen God -- in the mirror.” When Barry later developed laryngitis, he became depressed. “He missed the sound of his own voice,” Dan says. “Talking is living.”
Well, he definitely does plenty of that. So do his callers, especially one who ends up coming to the studio and going on the air with Barry. That’s when the play began to get tiresome to me.
A question we ask in journalism when deciding whether something is worth writing about is: What makes this night different from any other? It’s borrowed from the Passover question, but it’s meant to help the journalist decide if the event is newsworthy. What makes Barry the way he is and why is he even more so tonight? Those are the unanswered questions for me in this play. And they’re pretty big questions to leave unanswered.

Blackbird

I chose not to see this play at first because the subject sounded too sordid -- a young woman confronting the man who had had a sexual relationship with her when she was 12 and he was 40. I relented, though, and saw it last week after it received three Drama Desk nominations -- Outstanding Play (David Harrower), Outstanding Set Design (Scott Pask) and Outstanding Lighting (Paul Gallo).

As it turns out, I was right -- it is sordid, but it’s also compelling theatre. I had figured I could do my duty as a voter and leave early if my suspicions were correct. I didn’t leave. It was far too riveting.

What baffles me is why our nominating committee overlooked Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill who made this 90-minute drama so intense. It wasn’t the play that did it for me, especially with its depressing ending, it was their command of their roles that kept me in my seat. Neither conveyed one false movement, gesture or expression. Ms. Pill makes Una’s pain heartbreakingly raw and Mr. Daniels is convincingly disgusting as the overweight, middle-aged man who destroyed her life 15 years earlier. These are delicate roles that could have been ruined by overacting or sentimentalizing. Ms. Pill and Mr. Daniels hit just the right notes throughout their tension-filled encounter.

Mr. Pask’s set enhances the atmosphere -- a trash strewn lunchroom in a bland industrial-type building that Una characterizes as the kind of plain, one-story structure people drive by on the highway and wonder what goes on inside. It keeps the audience right there with them.

This isn’t a play I would recommend to the average, occasional theatregoer. It’s too dark. It should, however, be required for any student of the theatre. Mr. Daniels and Ms. Pill are outstanding actors in this play, no matter what the Drama Desk nominators decided. They deserve to be seen -- and recognized for their performances.

Legally Blonde

I came out wanting to dance, or at least sashay, my way though the theatre district. I woke up feeling the same way. This go-girl musical is frothy and fun from beginning to end. I loved it.
I had enjoyed the movie, but the musical is even better because it’s live and soooo High Energy. I couldn’t always understand the lyrics, but the message was loud and clear. After seeing the show I felt ready to shop -- and conquer the world in my spare time
“Legally Blonde” is the funniest show I’ve seen in a long, long time. The situation, of course, is great -- a ditzy Malibu blonde whose boyfriend dumps her because she’s not serious enough. Vowing to get him back, she applies to Harvard Law School so she can be near him, even though her father tells her “law school is for boring, ugly people.” I loved the stuffy Harvard admissions board’s consideration of her application, with her 4.0 -- in fashion merchandising! -- a letter of recommendation from Oprah and a glossy color head shot; she’s the only applicant to send one. “Is that the face of Harvard Law,” a board member asks. They reluctantly decide to admit her under the umbrella of “multiculturalism.”
The visual gags are great, such as when Elle shows up for her first class in a fuchsia tank top emblazoned with Harvard in rhinestones. Her sorority sisters are a blast throughout, popping up as a Greek chorus, in the style of a 1960s girl group, to sing/comment on the action and empower Elle.
At first I missed Reese Witherspoon because she was so great in the film, but it didn’t take long for Laura Bell Bundy to win me over. She embodies Elle’s sensibilities; she’s delightful in pink sweats -- “pink is my signature color” -- conveying Elle’s logic with complete seriousness, including her deadpan horror at “someone who wears black when no one’s dead.”
And can she dance! She’s the star of Jerry Mitchell’s energized choreography, and she really owns her space, Elle-style, when she sings. I was high at intermission after her act one curtain closer, “So Much Better.” I was ready to head out and conquer the world too, not that anything short of a fire would have gotten me out of the theatre early. That spirit was capped beautifully at the end with the empowering “Find My Way.”
In the language of Elle and her sisters, “omigod you guys,” you have just got to see this show!

Mary-Mitchell Campbell

I wrote this feature for the May 4, 2007 issue of National Catholic Reporter.

By rights, Mary-Mitchell Campbell should have died at 21. That was when she misjudged a curve on a mountainous road in North Carolina, causing her car to flip over several times. When it finally came to a stop, dozens of people rushed toward it, certain the occupant would either be dead or seriously injured. It took four of them to pry her out. When they did, she emerged with only a cut on her elbow.

Before the accident she had been praying. Then the violent crashing and sensation of tumbling over and over. But as the car slowed, Ms. Campbell recalls feeling peaceful and knowing everything would be fine. But, she soon realized, never the same.

“It was a turning point. I felt there was definitely something I was supposed to do.”

It took the 2004 presidential election a decade later for her to find out what.

“I was watching so many people be mean to each other,” she says, curled up on the brown leather sofa in her Manhattan apartment. “The country was so divided. It felt like we had lost our connection of how to treat people. I woke up one morning and decided, ‘I have got to do something.’”

What she did was put her career as Broadway musical director and Juilliard professor on hold for several months to work in an orphanage in India. The experience was so profound that she is now building an orphanage of her own there -- she expects to purchase the land this spring; completion will depend on fundraising.

“I felt responsible for what I knew,” she says, sipping from a cup of carryout coffee her assistant has brought her. “It meant everything had to be different. My entire way of living had to shift and all my priorities.”

She sold her house in New York to put the money into her project. She lives now in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper, Upper West Side with Coleman, a five-year-old shepherd mix named after songwriter Cy Coleman who was an early mentor. She still teaches at Juilliard as music director in the drama division, having become one of the youngest persons ever to serve on the faculty at the prestigious school when she was hired at 29 in 2003. She still takes on major Broadway shows, last season serving as musical director for the revival of “Sweeney Todd” and this season doing the same for the revival of “Company.” Between several trips a year to India, she does these things, and many more -- including serving as music director for Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang camp’s annual fund-raising gala and performing at such venues as the White House and Carnegie Hall. That’s an awful lot of accomplishment for someone who’s only 33.

“It’s important to show I can do both, still have a fruitful career and be an active and responsible citizen,” she says.

The India project is only one of Ms. Campbell’s charitable endeavors. She also sends Juilliard students and young Broadway performers to offer arts education to young people in Homestead, FL, and Port Elizabeth, South Africa. She formed a nonprofit corporation to package it all, calling it ASTEP for Artists Striving to End Poverty. It operates with about a half million dollar budget, an executive director who used to be her personal assistant and a couple hundred volunteers in various capacities from the theatrical community. Board members include Broadway stars Kristin Chenoweth, Gavin Creel and Raul Esparza.

Both worlds coexist in Ms. Campbell’s apartment. While one bedroom houses ASTEP’s administrative functions, the living room nurtures the performing artist. An oak upright piano is against one wall with photographs framed atop and hung above, including one with Ms. Chenoweth, a close friend, after they had both performed at the White House.

“Our focus is on children in all our decision-making, but I’ve seen the lives of the artists change so dramatically as well. I watch them come back much better artists with so much to say and the need to say it, especially the Juilliard kids who have a lot of technique but not always the passion. They come back and really flourish.”

She calls it the ripple effect. The children use drama and dance to deal with their real-life problems involving drug abuse, crime and domestic violence and the performers experience the lives of people growing up in extreme poverty.

“I feel like there’s really a solid shift with people taking hold of the idea that art can change the world. I always believed it, but I’ve seen it so much now I really believe it. There’s something sacred about the space created when artists create together. Walls come down.”

While Ms. Campbell is helping tear down walls in the lives of the poor, her musical talent propelled her forward before the usual show business walls could even form. At 3 she asked for a piano for Christmas, even though she had never played one. She didn’t get it, but by the time she was 5 she could walk up to any piano and play by ear. At 7 she was taking lessons and got a piano of her own after a man who owed her father money, and who also just happened to own a piano store, paid off his debt with the instrument. By 10 she was playing in restaurants in her native Wilson, NC, “making decent money.”

She came to New York after graduating with a degree in piano performance from Furman University with her husband, a saxophonist who was pursing a career in finance. In a time-honored tradition, she took work as an office temp, but only for three months before her career began to take off. “It was almost like the Red Sea parted. It was a shock.”

The marriage ended as their careers went separate ways. Now Ms. Campbell finds herself one of a rare breed -- a female musical director on Broadway. For “Company,” she received, in many cases, better notices than the show as a whole. In review after review she was singled out, with praise like “the show simple wouldn’t work without the excellent orchestrations by Mary-Mitchell Campbell,” with another citing her “truly miraculous new orchestrations.”

“My success with my career is a byproduct of my helping other people,” she says. “It’s not what I thought when I made the decision it was more important than Broadway. God rewards you in ways you weren’t expecting. I feel very grateful.”

Related web site
www.createsomethinggood.org

Frost/Nixon

Nixon should have learned the first time. Many people feel he lost the 1960 presidential election in part because of the contrast between his pasty, sweaty appearance and that of the youthful, confident John Kennedy in their televised debate. But when David Frost lured him into a series of interviews in 1977, Nixon’s hubris got the best of him. With a handkerchief and makeup artist at hand, he expected to sail through his conversations with the lightweight talk show host.
Wrong again, Mr. Nixon. The story of this encounter and what led up to it is the subject of “Frost/Nixon,” the engaging new play by Peter Morgan, brilliantly acted by Frank Langella (Nixon) and Michael Sheen (Frost).
It’s easy to see why Nixon expects a cakewalk. No one has any faith that the playboy interviewer can play hardball with the former president of the United States. “I spent yesterday watching you interview the Bee Gees,” one of his advisors says when Frost announces his intention to go after a Nixon interview.
After outbidding serious journalists like Mike Wallace by agreeing to Nixon’s $600,000 demand, Frost puts up $200,000 of his own money to get the process rolling. Still, the networks aren’t interested, nor are advertisers. Frost expects biggies like IBM and General Motors but ends up with Weed Eaters.
When the time actually comes for the series of taped interviews, Nixon skillfully evades Frost’s questions, “flicked away like no more than a fly,” one of his advisors says. “It was like watching a dead man come back to life.”
The stress builds as Frost tries to make the best of it. The play is so artfully written that even though we know the outcome, we feel the pressure heating up. Frost becomes the victor, though, in the final session, getting Nixon to admit he participated in the Watergate burglary coverup and that he had let down the America people. And the four 90-minute shows that result from the nearly 29 hours of taping end up capturing the largest audience for a television news show in history.
Director Michael Grandage makes great use of the cat and mouse game between the two men, giving us what seems like split screen glimpses into each side’s comments before and after the tapings. He also has mounted a couple dozen TV monitors as one large picture behind the men’s chairs so the audience can see the close-ups, just as we would if we were watching at home. This technique proves most powerful at the end after Nixon confesses and we see his pathetic, bewildered face.
It is then, after all the excitement of the chase and evasion, we understand that the conqueror should have been more apparent from the beginning. Although he had never voted and had no political interests, Frost was bound to be the victor. As one of his advisors says, “He understands television.”
A lyric from the “Springtime for Hitler” number in “The Producers” would have been appropriate for this show:
“It ain’t no mystery,
If it’s politics or history,
The thing you gotta know is,
Everything is show biz.”
“Frost/Nixon” is politics and history -- and show biz at its best.

Inherit the Wind

This is the second excellent production of a play from the 1950s I have seen in the last month, and both times the shows featured themes that should have made them dated by now. Unfortunately, homophobia and debate over teaching evolution are as timely now as they were when “Tea and Sympathy” and “Inherit the Wind” were originally presented.
I saw my first production of “Inherit the Wind” in the early 1980s at Baltimore’s Center Stage and wouldn’t have imagined that a quarter century later its story would still be current. “Wind” is a fictionalized retelling of the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial, named for John Scopes, a science teacher in Tennessee tried and convicted for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in violation of a state law forbidding the teaching of any theory that conflicted with the biblical account of divine creation. The fiery case pitted famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow against three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.
The fictional defense lawyer, Henry Drummond, played to perfection by Christopher Plummer, knows human nature when he asks his young client, “You don’t believe this kind of thing is ever finished, do you?” He wants Bert Cates (Benjamin Walker) to fight for the right to teach evolution as a way of opening doors for the next person to do so. And yes, people are still fighting this fight.
Even if the issue weren’t so relevant today, this revival of “Inherit the Wind” would be well worth seeing. The two hours flew by, filled with strong performances across the board -- Brian Dennehy plays Matthew Harrison Brady, Mr. Plummer’s sparring partner -- great staging that includes seating audience members on stage to give the appearance of a full courtroom and a lively gospel quartet that had us clapping along before the show began.
As it happens, this production is both well staged and timely. When people are afraid to hear something counter to what they’ve always believed -- then or now -- they react strongly. “The right to think is not on trial here,” the judge, played by Terry Beaver, says.
“The right to think is very much on trial here,” Drummond shoots back.
But Brady is unmoved. “I do not think about things I do not think about,” he says smugly. He is supported wholeheartedly in his fight against the teaching of evolution by the townsfolk, who carry signs proclaiming “Take Back America for Christ.” I’ve received phone calls and mail expressing this same message.
I wonder what the authors, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, would have thought if they could have peeked into the future and seen their story still playing out today. Would they have bothered to write the play? Theater, after all, is meant to make people think, but too many people don’t think about what they don’t think about.
One person in town does understand, Rachel Brown (Maggie Lacey), Cates’ girlfriend and fellow teacher. “It’s not as simple as that, black or white, good or bad,” she says.
She’s right, but one has to think to understand this. The others are too busy accepting unquestioningly what they’ve always heard. Drummond understands the reason. When Brady dies at the end of the trial, Drummond defends him as a great man who “got lost looking for God too far up and far away.”
As do so many people, which is why “Inherit the Wind” will likely have a future full of timely revivals. An even older source than this 52-year-old play tells us so. It’s from Proverbs, chapter 11 verse 29: “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.”

A Moon for the Misbegotten

One would think the subtitle of this revival was “Comedy Tonight” the way the audience laughed heartily throughout. But Eugene O’Neill wrote only one comedy, and “A Moon for the Misbegotten” isn’t it.
Laughter is appropriate, of course, in the first act. It’s the natural reaction to the shenanigans of Josie and her father as delightfully enacted by Eve Best and Colm Meaney. It’s tremendously fun to watch them, especially in the scene where they make sport of T. Stedman Harder (Billy Carter), the neighbor who despises them.
The second act, however, is not funny. This is where a broken man, overcome by alcoholism and guilt, pours out his grief to the woman whom he secretly loves and who has secretly loved him for years, and she offers him forgiveness. It is the only O’Neill play in which a tortured character actually receives absolution. “I am the one person who loves you enough to forgive you,” Josie says. It should evoke a sense of connection to this man’s -- and woman’s -- pain and loneliness. But at the performance I saw Friday night the audience laughed almost continually. The only reason I can figure for this inappropriate response is Kevin Spacey’s take on the role of Jim Tyrone. He had an almost vaudeville-like delivery; I half expected him to hold up a pretend cigar Groucho Marx-style as he raced through his lines. But Jim’s despair is not the stuff of comedy. “I knew I was lost with all hope gone,” he tells Josie. “All I could do was drink myself to death.” That kind of hopelessness shouldn’t draw a laugh.
I have seen this play at least two times before, once at Baltimore’s Center Stage, where excellence is the norm, and again when it was last revived on Broadway in 2000 with Cherry Jones and Gabriel Byrne, and I’ve seen the Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards version on video. Each time I was able to come to a sense of sadness for Jim and Josie, but his time I only felt it for Josie. Ms. Best shines as Josie in the second act, portraying her vulnerability and the virginal quality that I felt with Ms. Jones but not Ms. Dewhurst.
While Ms. Best was fabulous with this side of Josie, I had more trouble with her in the first act. It was hard to see this acclaimed British actress as the great cow of a woman O’Neill envisioned. Besides being physically far from a great cow, she seemed too wholesome and girlish to bring off Josie’s tough false bravado. Ms. Jones achieved this balance better than either Ms. Best or Ms. Dewhurst. (Both Mr. Byrne and Mr. Robards were right on the mark as Jim. I don’t remember the names of the actors I saw at Center Stage, but they were solid.)
I enjoyed this performance in spite of my problems with Mr. Spacey’s Jim because I cherish this play and I tried to focus on the characters, and actors, I loved instead of this one actor’s unfortunate portrayal. My desire for this interpretation of Jim is similar to Josie’s desire for her Jim: “May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace.”
Amen!