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Picks
Shows Worth Seeing:
Pal Joey
By Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart
New book by Richard Greenberg
Studio 54
254 W. 54th St.
Box office: (212) 719-1300
Joe Mantello’s new production
of Rodgers and Hart’s final collaboration, Pal Joey,
makes a strong case for the contemporaneity of a musical now almost
70 years old. The smartest thing the producers did was ask the
playwright Richard Greenberg to rewrite Hart’s book. Greenberg
has the perfect louche sense of humor to keep this gritty story
skipping along without sacrificing its bite. The original book
really was dated in its handling of sexual naughtiness, and since
the title character’s caddish behavior is the pivot of the
plot, that was a serious problem. Greenberg’s punchy update
is true to the essence of the work and shows up how unsparing
the original plot was. At bottom, it’s a play about hopelessness
and desperate self-delusion—truly proto-Sondheim in its
focus on complex destructive psychology and its lack of a happy
ending. Matthew Risch, the understudy who became Mantello’s
headliner when Christian Hoff was injured in rehearsals, is perfectly
adequate but not stellar as Joey Evans, the Depression-era club-performer
and cad who never learns his lesson and never gets his comeuppance.
And that’s as it should be. The character was written to
be second-rate. The casting of dazzling stars like Gene Kelly
and Frank Sinatra in the past actually distorted the story. Combine
the accidental boon of Risch’s casting, then, with beautifully
nuanced performances by Stockard Channing, Jenny Fellner and Martha
Plimpton (in her musical debut) in the key female roles, and terrific
work by Graciela Daniele as choreographer and Scott Pask as set
designer, and you’ve got a very powerful mixture. This show
seems to me the best revival of the season so far.
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Billy Elliot: the Musical
Directed by Stephen Daldry, Book and lyrics by Lee Hall, Music
by Elton John
Imperial Theatre
249 W. 45th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
Curiously enough, this eagerly
awaited musical adaptation of the movie Billy Elliot
is almost as good as its hype. The story about a boy from a gritty
northern English coal-mining town who discovers a passion for
ballet was always irresistibly charming—just the sort of
triumph-against-the-odds, home-town-boy fairytale Hollywood got
rich on. The British adaptors of this show have been unusually
clever, though, in giving the tale strong theatrical legs. Elton
John’s rousing anthems and ballads pull all the right heartstrings
to make the audience cheer for both the boy’s success and
the victory of the union in the 1980s miners’ strike that
forms the play’s social background. But since that strike
ultimately failed—the Thatcher government famously broke
the union—the play’s impassioned cries of “solidarity”
have decidedly funereal overtones, and the story of the boy’s
individual triumph has particular poignancy against the bitter
failure of his loved ones’ collective action. This incongruity
gives the work a modest political complexity that other Cinderella
stories lack. The show is also wonderfully inventive. Director
Stephen Daldry (who also directed the movie) has inserted bizarrely
fluid choruses of cops and miners, for instance, who spread their
good and bad energy willy-nilly while sweeping through windows,
gyms and kitchens. At one point, Billy dances a strangely anomalous
pas de deux with his imagined older self, who seems to
provide the only viable adult role model he can muster. There
are half a dozen inspired creations of this kind, as well as superb
performances by (among others): Haydn Gwynne, who finds just the
right mixture of stoniness and congealed syrup for Billy’s
dance teacher; Carole Shelley as his wacked out grandmother; and
the three child-actors who play Billy (I saw Kiril Kulish). It
feels decidedly odd to endorse a blockbuster London import in
this way, but, well, this show deserves to be seen.
