The Whoopi Monologues

 

My friend Ruth and I left The Whoopi Monologues at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater happy.  As we walked across the Lincoln Center plaza we laughed as we talked about the funniest moments.  Unfortunately, they were all in the fifth of the five monologues.  If it hadn’t been for Kecia Lewis’ hilarious descriptions of menopause our reactions would have been quite different.  We agreed this was because it was the only one that sounded like Goldberg, who wrote all five, at least as we know her through movies.

This new show is a reimagining of Goldberg’s 1984 self-titled one-woman Off-Broadway production in which she played six characters.  Director Whitney White, who was nominated for a best director Tony for last season’s Liberation, updated the monologues and reimagined the show as an ensemble piece for five actresses, one of whom is Kerry Washington, who is a producer. 

New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow lavished the original with praise.  “Quickly we realize that Miss Goldberg is not simply a stand-up comedian but a satirist with a cutting edge and an actress with a wry attitude toward life and public performance,” he wrote.

I wish I had seen that production because I like Goldberg and would have appreciated hearing her present her own work live.  Director Mike Nichols was so intrigued by the review he attended a performance and loved it enough to take it to Broadway where it opened in October 1984.  That production prompted an HBO special the following year titled “Whoopi Goldberg: Direct from Broadway.”  (Interestingly, Lurleen, the menopausal character, wasn’t in Goldberg’s original show but was added for a 20^th anniversary production on Broadway.)

The monologues in this show are: Fontaine, in which Kara Young plays a drug-addicted Ph.D.; Blonde Girl, with Kai Heath as a young girl who wishes she had long blonde hair so she wears her tan jacket (costumes by Qween Jean) on her head and Jamaican Lady for which Danielle Pinnock overdoes the accent.  I found all irritating.  The fourth, Washington’s, is Surfer Girl, in which she plays a 13-year-old Valley Girl (greatly overdoing the word like) who gets pregnant from a one-night stand.  She turns to a priest who slams closed the confessional window on her and, when she won’t leave, sends her to the nearby nuns who also send her away.  Turning to her mother for comfort, she is put out on the street.  This was the most moving of the monologues and would have been even more so if the Valley Girt talk had been toned down.  I am always happy to see Washington back onstage.

And then Lewis’ Lurleen, boldly attired in gold, red and black with heavily braided hair flowing from a top notch (hair and wigs by Nikiya Mathis).  She’s delightfully angry and sassy, complaining about how unprepared she was for how hot she’d be during menopause.  Not from outside but from deep within.

“Ooh, and there ain’t no celebratory feeling to it.  It ain’t like erectile dysfunction.  Oh, you know what I mean, when you see those commercials for erectile dysfunction always everybody having a big party.  The women are always smiling at the men because they know there’s a pill that’s gonna keep that man hard for 19 hours.”

But not the women experiencing menopause.

“They look like they about to slit their own throats.” 

And they’re not interested in sex.  But her husband, thanks to that pill, is raring to go.

“I say, ‘Look here, wrap that thing back around your neck and walk away.”

She’s given hormone pills to control the hot flashes but then is told they cause cancer.  “And you say, ‘Wait a minute, you can keep a man hard for 19 hours but you can’t find a way to balance out a hot flash?’”

While this was our favorite, audience members -- who were mostly women in a variety of ages, Black and white -- were engaged throughout, so much so that I wondered if some had been planted or were prescreened as they are for Every Brilliant Thing.  Many had no sense of the fourth wall separating audience from performers.  They engaged with the actors through enthusiastic comments and the actors reached out to high five those in the first rows. 

It’s a high-energy show, 90 minutes with no intermission. 

Dolly Parton's coming to Broadway

 

Dolly: A True Musical, a bio-musical about that phenomenal country singer who needs no last name (it’s Parton) is coming to Broadway’s St. James Theatre in December, with an opening night of Jan. 19, Parton’s 81^st birthday.   The show will chart her rise to fame and feature her greatest hits.  She’s the book’s co-writer with Maria S. Schlatter

“My whole life has been a musical,” she said in a statement.  “A great ole opera really and I can’t wait to present it to you on Broadway.  I hope you enjoy watching as much as I’ve enjoyed livin’ it.”

Tony winner Barlett Sher will direct, with Mandy Moore choreographing.   

Casting has yet to be announced.  Quite a while back Kristin Chenoweth talked about wanting to play Dolly, one of her inspirations growing up in Oklahoma, in a Broadway musical.  Unfortunately, at 57, she may have aged out to play Dolly in her early years.  She’d be a good one, though.  I love her 2011 CD of country music, Some Lessons Learned, for which she wrote two of the 13 songs.  One is called “What Would Dolly Do?” or “WW Double D?”

The musical had its world premiere last summer in, appropriately, Nashville.

This will be Parton’s second time on Broadway.  She wrote the music and lyrics for 9 to 5: The Musical, which premiered in 2009.

LCT to revive 'The Sound of Music'

 

Lincoln Center Theater, which has brought us so many excellent musicals over the years, including the current revival of Ragtime, will present The Sound of Music next spring starring Jasmine Amy Rogers, the powerhouse star of last year's Boop! The Musical.  Lear de Bessonet, in her second year as the theatre’s artist director, will direct.  She directed Ragtime, which won this year’s Tony Award for best new musical revival.

 

James Earl Jones to be honored at the theatre that bears his name.

 

A larger-than-life bronze bust of James Earl Jones will be unveiled June 16 in the lobby of the 48^th Street theatre where he made his Broadway debut in 1957. Previously the Cort Theatre, it was renamed the James Earl Jones Theatre in 2022, becoming the second Broadway theatre renamed for a Black artist, following the August Wilson Theatre in 2005.

Jones died in 2024 at 93. 

Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf star in 'Death of a Salesman'

 

I have never seen such a depressing production of Death of a Salesman as director Joe Mantello’s revival at the Winter Garden Theatre.  My introduction to this 1949 Arthur Miller classic came in 1972 when I saw it at Baltimore Center Stage when I was 17.  I knew nothing of the story and left the theatre devastated at Willy’s death.  To me it was a sad play but not depressing.  I felt this way through three degrees in English, one of which is an MFA in playwriting.  Deeply flawed though he is, I cared about Willy and saw his humanity.

When I heard Nathan Lane had been cast in the role I couldn’t fathom him as Willy.  He has such a distinct speaking voice, one that to me is like fingernails on a chalkboard, and he is always Nathan Lane no matter what character he is playing.  I didn’t feel that way initially in Salesman but when he first raised his voice, which he does far too often, the voice I heard was Max Bialystock, his Tony Award-winning role in The Producers.  I don’t know if I would have heard that just from having seen the 2001 musical but I had listened to the cast recoding a couple of weeks before I booked the show so throughout I heard Max.  And except for a fleeting moment at the end, I didn’t feel his humanity.

I also didn’t like Laurie Metcalf’s Linda because she also did too much shouting, directed at her ne’er-do-well adult sons Biff (Christopher Abbott) and Happy (Ben Ahlers).  A strong Linda is a welcome change from the doormat Linda I had always seen until Sharon D. Clarke’s spot-on portrayal in the powerful revival four years ago.  When Wendell Pierce’s exceptional Willy hollered at her or belittled her she’d take it patiently and as soon as he turned away would offer a gesture or facial expression that made clear she wasn’t hurt or overcome by him.  It was the first time I ever felt Linda loved him and in Pierce’s performance I felt he loved her.  It was the only time I’ve seen this play as being about a marriage and not about a father and his sons.  They had excellent chemistry together.  I felt Metcalf’s Linda loved Willy fiercely but I felt no marital chemistry between them.

Adding to the gloom is Chloe Lamford’s scenic design that looks like a set from a gangster movie.  What looks like a long-abandoned, decaying warehouse contains metal furniture that looks as if it belongs in a prison — a table, two benches and two straight chairs.  Jack Knowles’s lighting is bleak and fog wafts around throughout.  Willy’s red 1964 Chevy is center stage, the dominant figure, which makes sense because he arrives in it from his day as a traveling salesman to start the play and leaves in it to die in it, crashing it so his family can collect the $20,000 insurance. 

Just before his exit, in the climatic scene when Biff tries to force Willy to see “I am a nobody,” I felt the strongest connection in the production when Biff got on his knees and cried in Willy’s lap.  When he left, Willy sat dazed, marveling that Biff loved him.

I’ve never had much sympathy for Biff except when I saw Kevin Anderson in the role opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2012. I also saw the 1999 production starring Brian Dennehy.  I didn’t care for their portrayals of Willy either.  And I saw the show at Syracuse Stage in 1983.

I never liked Happy in any of the productions I’ve seen either because he’s such a cad, using women for one-night stands and boasting about it.  In this production, though, he had a certain winning charm.  Ahler’s baby face softens Happy’s crudeness.  I love this actor’s portrayal of Jack Trotter on the Broadway-rich HBO series “The Gilded Age,” a servant who invents an improved alarm clock and becomes rich.

It’s interesting that the productions I liked the most were the two with all-Black casts.  The 1972 show I saw in Baltimore was the first time for such casting in this country.  Miller came to the opening.  It took a half-century for Broadway to follow but that production had the same gut-punch force for me as my first.  Both of those will always be Death of a Salesman for me.

Kelli O'Hara and Rose Byrne booze it up in Noel Coward's 'Fallen Angels'

 

I had been looking forward to Fallen Angels at the Todd Haimes Theatre.  A play by Noel Coward starring Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne sounded like a great way to spend an evening.  Unfortunately it wasn’t.  Under Scott Ellis’s direction the women overact, using exaggerated English accents that quickly became annoying.

They play two friends, Julia Sterroll (O’Hara, right in photo) and Jane Banbury (Byrne) , who had an affair with the same man, Maurice Duclos (Mark Consuelos) years ago, before they were married, and are now expecting him to visit.  In the dining-drawing room of Julia’s spectacular London apartment (fabulous Art Deco set by David Rockwell), dressed in Jeff Mahshie’s gorgeous gowns, they booze it up until they are staggering.  O’Hara is a marvel at physical comedy.  She collapses so completely and quickly that it was as if she has no bones.  Crumpled on the floor she looks like a human puddle.  It’s also a hoot watching them try to navigate their lighter to light their cigarettes at the end of long holders.

When he does show up, two days later, making the appearance of a dashing Frenchman, they learn that he has taken the apartment between theirs, which are two floors apart.  The women are thrilled to go see it, leaving behind their dull, startled, husbands, Fred Sterroll (Aasif Mandvi) and Willy Banbury (Christopher Fitzgerald) who soon hear the sounds of laughter and frivolity drifting down.  Lighting designer Kenneth Posner has the chandelier do a nifty little dance as the good time of the reconnect lovers picks up speed.  

Coward wrote the play when he was only 24.  It premiered in London in 1925 and hasn’t been seen on Broadway in 70 years.  To me it was just 90 minutes of silliness but the audience was laughing uproariously throughout. 

'Schmigadoon!' is one of the funniest and most creative shows of the season

 

My guess is that people with little knowledge of mid-20th century American musicals will still enjoy Schmigadoon!, the new musical comedy at the Booth Theatre, if for no other reason than the joy of director and choreographer Christopher Gattelli’s lavish, full-scale dance numbers that were a cherished feature of that Golden Age. For those of us who have loved the genre since childhood, book, music and lyrics writer Cinco Paul’s show is a funny and appreciative nod to shows like Oklahoma!,Carousel, The Music Man and, of course, the one apparent from the title.

Even before the first number we get a hint of what we’re in for.  The show begins with Melissa Gimble (Sara Chase) and Josh Skinner (Alex Brightman), doctors who meet at a hospital vending machine, which quickly converts to a bed and they realize they want more of each other than just a one-night stand.

Several years later, though, their relationship has devolved into arguments highlighting their differences, one of which is that she loves musicals and he hates them.  After joining a couples retreat to see if they want to continue together, they wander off and get lost in the woods.  After crossing a small foot bridge they end up in the cheery square of a tiny hidden town in about 1918 where “life is a musical every day,” they are told by a leprechaun, and they can’t leave until they find true love.  Schmigadoon! meets Brigadoon and Finian’s Rainbow.  (Colorful scenic design by Scott Pask). 

They are greeted with the entire cast smiling, dancing and singing their hearts out in colorful period costumes (by Linda Cho) for the “Schmigadoon!,” Paul’s homage to Oklahoma!:  

And there’s hope for all

Whether great or small

There’s no fol-de-rol

Bring your parasol

And we call it Schmiga –

Schmiga!  Schmiga! Schmiga! Schmiga!

S-C-H-M-I-G-A-D-O-O-N!

Schmigadoon!!!

Then everyone goes about their business as if nothing happened, another laugh at the old musicals.

Josh thinks they’ve stumbled into a theme park and wants to get out fast.  It will take a few more of those big song and dance numbers for him to realize he’s actually in a musical and then he really wants out.  Melissa, musical lover that she is, enjoys it and makes friends with the locals.  In one of the most hilarious scenes she counsels a young couple who are about to have a baby after the town doctor refuses to help them because they are having a child “out of wedlock.”  Melissa and Josh had already gotten the no premarital sex experience when they were required to book separate rooms at the hotel so they couldn’t continue “living in sin.”

The expectant mother, Nancy (Lyrica Woodruff), tells Melissa she knows the baby must come out but she can only think of two ways and they both seem “CRAZY.”  Melissa tells her it will come out her vagina.  Freddy (Zachary Downer) is shocked to hear the word.

Melissa tells him it’s just a word and nothing to be afraid of.  “Let me see if I can make it easier for you”.  She sits on the examining table and reaches for a guitar – musical instruments are always at the ready in old time musicals – and patiently educates them, in song, of course, “Baby Talk.”   Hear in your mind Julie Andrews singing “Do-Re-Mi” to her young charges.

Genitals are how we reproduce

Ovaries make eggs for you and me

Urethra is how the sperm get loose

Cervix is where they can swim free

Fallopian tubes are where both of them meet

Uterus is where cells start to sprout

Placenta is how they get to eat

‘Til the baby comes straight out –

Freddy won’t say vagina but Melissa reproves him, saying it’s a medical term and don’t turn it into something dirty.  “Now sing with me:”

Genitals 

All: are how we reproduce

Melissa: Ovaries 

All: make eggs for you and me

The back and forth continue until all end in ‘Til the baby comes straight out the vagina

With this kind of play off of classic musicals Schmigadoon! Is one of the cleverest shows of the season.  

Paul has said the show isn’t just a parody.  He wanted to write songs that sounded as if they were unused discoveries from a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.  For Gattelli,  Schmigadoon! isn’t making fun of the old musicals but rather honoring the thrilling large dance numbers.  

The characters are recognizable too.  A big hit with the audience was Carson (Ayaan Diop), a precious little boy with a super high voice who is being raised by his schoolmarm older sister, Emma (Isabelle McCalla).  Think Winthrop and Marian Paroo from The Music Man.

Schmigadoon! is produced, in part, by Lorne Michaels, the creator and long-time producer of “Saturday Night Live” and is based on the award-winning Apple TV+ series of that name.  The stage show played last year at The Kennedy Center.