The FlipSide

By: Kevin Filipski

Monday November 20, 2006

Welcome to the FlipSide. What is the Flipside? Well, anything Kevin Filipski wants it to be. This time out, Dylan on Broadway, Mary Poppins, and more.
Now that it's fall, the New York theater season is in full swing, with a show built around the music of Bob Dylan (but not for long-it's closing soon), star turns by such big names as Nathan Lane, Nathan Lane and Cynthia Nixon, good old-fashioned plays by the likes of Bernard Shaw, and good old-fashioned musicals by the likes of Disney.

Since choreographer Twyla Tharp did so well by Movin' Out, the elegant modern-dance ballet she set to Billy Joel songs a few years ago, why does she fail so miserably with The Times They Are A-Changin', based on the more influential Bob Dylan catalog?

Apparently, Tharp didn't want to repeat her Movin' Out success, so she came up with the dubious idea to set this show at a circus. This conceit allows her to choreograph dancing and movement with performers dressed as clowns and animals (there's even a contortionist!), but what exactly do powerful Dylan songs like "Desolation Row" and "Masters of War" have to do with this industrial-wasteland setting? In such a bizarre context, only Dylan's most straightforward songs ("Just Like a Woman," "Lay Lady Lay," the title song) have a chance to work dramatically or emotionally; for the rest, Dylan's tumbling, pseudo-poetic lyrics drop to the stage inertly.

The hard-working performers are reduced by Tharp's desperate attempt at excitement to jumping on three trampolines at the front of the stage; and, while it's interesting to hear strong voices belt out Dylan's tunes, but it's all for naught. Would that Tharp had simply aped her earlier triumph by turning Dylan's tunes into another narrative ballet, then The Times They Are A-Changin' would have truly been something original.

Mary Poppins is an adaptation of the classic Disney musical with Julie Andrews, which is why seats will be scarce for-oh, at least the next few years.

What's best about this sheerly entertaining show is that, out of all the Disney extravaganzas to take the Broadway stage recently-The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aida, Tarzan - this relies least on machinery and visual overkill. (For the record, we see Mary "fly" only twice throughout the nearly three-hour show.)

That's a good thing, for at heart, Mary Poppins is the sentimental story of a family saved by a nanny; hence, the human element should take precedence. And here it does: although staged to a fare-thee-well by Richard Eyre-aided by Matthew Bourne's elaborate but fluid choreography and Bob Crowley's wondrous sets and costumes-Mary Poppins relies on its talented cast, which is excellent from top to bottom.

Musical veterans Daniel Jenkins and Rebecca Luker give touching portrayals of the harried Mr. and Mrs. Banks, three rotating pairs of children are the precocious Jane and Michael Banks, and Ashley Brown's perfect portrayal of the perfect nanny will undoubtedly make her a huge star.

New songs are mixed in with the classics from the movie ("A Spoonful of Sugar," "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"), and the new "Anything Can Happen" is the show's climax. Mary Poppins is surely old-fashioned, but when it's done this well, who cares?

Simon Gray's play Butley has returned to Broadway as a vehicle for Nathan Lane, who apparently can bring audiences to anything he acts in. In its original incarnation in the early '70s, Butley was bolstered by a stunning performance by Alan Bates, who later repeated his Tony-winning triumph in the film version directed by Harold Pinter (available as part of Kino's American Film Theater series on DVD).

Even now, Bates' charismatic, magnetic portrayal of the cynical, bisexual professor who's losing his wife and his male lover on the same day remains a potent display of acting. In Nicholas Martin's production, Lane does many things well-most notably handling the accents and spitting out the one-liners-but he's not as successful embodying this gregarious character who's irresistible to both men and women.

On the plus side, Martin's direction is adroit, the rest of the cast is perfect, and Butley itself is the type of serious (but humorous) character study that must succeed on if the Great White Way is to remain a viably creative outlet for playwrights. And if Lane's presence helps assure that, then more power to him.

Coming on the heels of her Tony-winning portrayal of a mother dealing with her young son's death in Rabbit Hole, Cynthia Nixon now tackles the teacher who leaves an indelible mark on her students in a revival of Jay Presson Allen's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which won Maggie Smith an Oscar for the 1969 film version.

Would that Scott Elliott's direction had more imaginativeness; for instance, he never successfully integrates the play's framing device of a student looking back on her years with Miss Brodie, and he's hit and miss with his actors. Lisa Emery (the headmistress, Miss McKay) and Caroline Lagerfelt (Sister Helena) are adequate, but among the students, only Zoe Kazan (Sandy) creates a full-bodied character, even making a difficult and lengthy nude scene seem entirely natural.

As for Nixon, her untamed accent-at times she sounds like a Scottish lass by way of Budapest-is an annoying distraction. And she's more believable in Miss Brodie's moments of anger or passion but seems surprisingly lifeless otherwise, quite surprising coming from this intelligent actress.

If you don't know the "twist" at the end of Neil LaBute's latest provocation, Wrecks, fear not: you won't hear about it here.

A solo tour de force for Ed Harris-who gives a brilliantly detailed portrayal of a widower pondering the vagaries of fate as he prepares to bury his beloved wife - Wrecks is a 70-minute monologue that seems to signal a new direction for LaBute. Much of the play is descriptive, often vivid exposition as Harris tells of his life before and after he met his JoJo. Even though much of the success of the play's first hour-when we come to care for this character, flaws and all - is due to Harris' splendid, nakedly honest acting, LaBute's writing reaches poetic heights not heard before.

But then that final twist arrives, another clever LaBute switcheroo: he utilizes a double pun on his title to keep us guessing, but it still reeks of arbitrariness and destroys whatever sympathy we originally had for Harris's characterization.

For all its volatile subject matter, My Name Is Rachel Corrie is a modest character study about a young American's earnest attempt to draw meaning from her life. Rachel Corrie was an American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting in Palestinian territory. Katharine Viner and director Alan Rickman created the play from Corrie's own writings-letters, e-mails, journal entries.

As the play's early scenes in Washington State show, Corrie was an articulate girl yearning to become a woman, and her decision to go to Gaza is based on that. Notwithstanding its sympathies, My Name Is Rachel Corrie is as evenhanded as possible: since Corrie's own words make up the entire 90-minute play-at least until the end, when a witness to her death is heard-Israeli oppression of Palestinians is discussed in this narrow context, with no sense of a broader canvas. But this is a play about an activist's decisions leading to her death, not a wide-ranging polemic about global conflict.

Megan Dobbs gives a persuasive, unaffected performance as Rachel, catching all the nuances of this likeable, bright, idealistic woman.

Set in a northern Manhattan suburb, Simon Mendes da Costa's forgettably slight comedy Losing Louie takes place in the '60s and the present day simultaneously. We watch Louie's extramarital affairs alongside his estranged sons' attempts to come to an understanding on the day of their father's funeral some 40 years later. The lone stab at originality is having the action continuously occur in Louie's bedroom: e.g., as Louie walks out of the room, one of his grown sons walk in and a contemporary scene begins.

Such chronological sleight-of-hand has been done before, but better writers use it to plunge into deeper comedic and dramatic waters. Making Manhattan Theater Club's production tolerable is the inexhaustibly creative director, Jerry Zaks, and his top-flight cast: Matthew Arkin, Scott Cohen, Mark Linn-Baker, Rebecca Creskoff, Patricia Kalember, Michele Pawk and Jama Williamson, all first-rate comic performers, camouflage this coarse comedy's many defects.

The difficulties in adapting a non-fiction book like Barbara Ehrenreich's best-selling expose Nickel and Dimed are apparent in Joan Holden's theatrical version: streamlining Ehrenreich's stories about minimum-wage earners barely scraping by gives Nickel and Dimed dramatic momentum, but Ehrenreich's themes about how demoralizing this current state of affairs is for all Americans is obscured.

Still, as staged by Dave Dalton, Nickel and Dimed effectively summarizes the book, thanks to Margot Avery as Barbara and a supporting ensemble of ten actors and actresses who take on a variety of roles.

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