“But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns. Don’t bother, they’re here.”
- A Little Night Music
Sometimes There Are Second Acts in Broadway Casting
August 25, 2010
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Strange but true: The best new show in town this summer isn’t a new show at all, technically. The Broadway revival of “A Little Night Music” sings with new subtlety and emotional force now that the celebrated veterans Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch have taken over the key roles of Desirée Armfeldt and her caustic mum.
I still have some qualms about the overall tone of Trevor Nunn’s production, but Ms. Peters’s heart-stopping rendition of “Send In the Clowns”and the astringent comedy of Ms. Stritch make the show a top priority for any serious theatergoer. (A telling and typical text I received just after the curtain went down from a friend I’d urged to see it: “Bernadette Peters gave the performance of her life — and one of mine.”)
This isn’t the first time that I’ve enjoyed a replacement cast as much as or more than an original one. And if the prevalence of movie-star casting in revivals is going to take a firm hold in musicals as it has in straight dramas — Ms. Peters succeeded the Tony-winning Catherine Zeta-Jones in the role of Desirée — I strongly suspect it won’t be the last.
Coincidentally the most notable recent case of a show improving with a new leading lady in it I can recall also involves Ms. Peters — although she was on the disappointing side of the transformation in that production. When she starred in the Broadway revival of “Annie Get Your Gun” several years back, the critical reception was mixed. I found her singing to be gorgeous but the role something of an ill fit. Then the country singer Reba McEntirestepped into Annie’s britches, and a so-so musical instantly became a delight. (I can’t help reflect that if the show were produced today, the nationally better known Ms. McEntire would have been favored to open it over Ms. Peters. Which is probably more ominous than cheering, but never mind.)
Although it may be disappointing for those who live outside New York to see replacement casting, there is such a wealth of theater talent in the city — and such a dearth of new material for them to perform — that you can see some pretty amazing performances fairly deep into the run of a long-running musical.
The first cast of the revival of “Chicago” was on the whole unsurpassed, I suppose — although Ann Reinking was out the night I saw it, so I can’t really lay down the law here — but I caught some pretty fabulous performances from others over the years: Ute Lemper’s wacky but compelling Velma and Melanie Griffith’s vocally and terpsichoreally challenged but touching and funny Roxie, to name just two. Michael Berresse, a journeyman Broadway hoofer when I caught him in the show, was the best Billy Flynn of the good half-dozen I saw over the years.
I wish I’d caught the fabulous singer Carolee Carmello when she was in “Mamma Mia!,” and I definitely wish I’d caught Kerry Butler in “Rock of Ages.” I’m curious to return to see “Next to Normal” with Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley. I found this serious-minded show about a wife and mother with bipolar disorder a little strident in its tortured emotionalism, and judging from my colleague Ben Brantley’s recent reassessment, it seems the new stars have brought a more temperate tone to the show.
A reader had been urging me to see Laura Osnes and either David Pittsinger or William Michals as the leads in “South Pacific,” replacing Kelli O’Hara and Paulo Szot, but I’m afraid I never got around to it, to my regret. You cherish some performances so strongly that you may not want to let any other memories get in the way, and that was definitely the case with me and “South Pacific.”
There are also notable cases in recent years when truly successful recasting has proven problematic. Everyone expected “The Producers” to run for eons when it opened to tumultuous box office and rapturous reviews. But the alchemical perfections of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick proved to be hard to replicate when those stars left the show, and the first actor to take over from Mr. Lane, the great British actor Henry Goodman, was rather unceremoniously let go before his performance was even opened to critics.
Replacements tend to be more prevalent in musicals because plays and play revivals tend to have shorter runs. But Estelle Parsons mixed her own potent brew of grandmotherliness and malice when she took over from the Tony winner Deanna Dunagan as the dragon lady in Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County,” ensuring that Mr. Letts’s acrid family drama lost none of its sting.
It’s also sadly the case that most play revivals these days are star-driven projects, and there may be little audience for a show once the marquee name has left. It’s also hard to imagine that any actor of sufficient box-office appeal would be willing to take over from, say, Denzel Washington or Viola Davis in the recent revival of “Fences.” Still, it’s too bad the first Broadway revival of August Wilson’s important play had to limit its scope to accommodate the commitments of a superstar’s schedule.
The Tony Awards recently considered creating a new award honoring actors who do not open in the original production. It does, after all, seem a bit arbitrary that only the original cast members of a show can be eligible for Tonys, as is the case under the current rules. (Tony trivia fact: Only one actor has been nominated for a role he didn’t originate on opening night — Larry Kert, who took over from Dean Jones as Bobby in “Company” shortly after the show opened.)
But the replacement Tony Award was scrapped before it even got off the ground. (It was announced as a possibility but ultimately not awarded during the season when Jonathan Pryce took over from John Lithgow in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and Eileen Atkins donned Cherry Jones’s nun’s habit in “Doubt.”) The logistics of getting voters in to see all significant replacements in a season was a problem, and a single award encompassing male and female performances, and roles in both musicals and plays, would also seem to present too many challenges.
Still, the gesture was nobly intended and might have helped remove the stigma of replacement that still exists on Broadway to some degree. Given the increasing trend of major-name replacement casting, I suspect that stigma will evaporate on its own. The excitement caused by the recasting of “A Little Night Music” will surely help the cause too. When the books are closed on the theatrical year 2010, I suspect the recasting of the production will prove to have been one of the most significant events of the year.
Theater Talkback: Are Musicals Losing Their Voices?
Theater Talkback: Are Musicals Losing Their Voices?
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times The cast of the New York Philharmonic’s production of “Company.”
“We didn’t need dialogue! We had faces!” The famous lines spoken by Gloria Swanson’s decrepit silent-movie goddess Norma Desmond sprang to mind the other night at Avery Fisher Hall during the New York Philharmonic’s concert version of “Company.” I imagined there might be a few old-time Broadway performers in the audience muttering similar sentiments to themselves as they watched Lonny Price’s vocally vacuous presentation of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical. “Back in my day, we had voices!” I could picture one seething through his or her teeth to a colleague at intermission.
Patti LuPone’s powerhouse, this-is-how-it’s-done-kids performance of her big solo, the show’s celebrated “Ladies Who Lunch,” seemed infused with determination to give the aficionados of full-throttle Broadway vocalizing something to cheer about. For much of the rest of the evening, accomplished singing was all but absent, a particular oddity in a production backed by the full forces of a world-class orchestra.
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Catherine Zeta-Jones in the 2009 Broadway production of “A Little Night Music.”
The cast of Mr. Price’s concert staging featured television actors in many of the parts: Neil Patrick Harris (“How I Met Your Mother”) in the central role — or should I say centrifugal role? — of the eternal bachelor Bobby, as well as Stephen Colbert, Christina Hendricks of “Mad Men” and Jon Cryer of the hugely popular “Two and a Half Men.” Resourceful comic actors and likable personalities, they all made appealing contributions to the evening, but brilliant singing was not among them.
Mr. Harris is not a stage neophyte. He played a lead role in “Rent” and previously appeared as Tobias in a Philharmonic concert presentation of Mr. Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.” He is a competent singer with a nice voice. But the show’s clarion anthem “Being Alive” was underpowered, and didn’t really bring the evening to a rousing emotional climax, as ideally it should. (And certainly did when Raul Esparza played the role in the last Broadway revival.) Ms. Hendricks was a perfect delight in her book scenes as the daffy flight attendant April, but her thin, breathy singing in “Barcelona” — hardly a song that requires operatic agility, true — was nevertheless disappointing. Of Mr. Colbert’s few bars of solo vocalizing, the less said the better.
Are we entering an age when being able to sing to a high standard is no longer a requirement for making appearances in even first-class musical theater productions? The unhappy answer is probably yes. The casting of movie stars has been de rigueur for revivals of classic plays for some time now on Broadway, but in the past couple of seasons we’ve seen the trend encroaching on musical theater terrain, too.
Catherine Zeta-Jones won the Tony last season for her performance in “A Little Night Music.” Ms. Zeta-Jones, like Mr. Harris, is not without a certain basic level of singing skill, but her rendition of the show’s immortal “Send in the Clowns” lacked the delicacy and emotional truth that Bernadette Peters, with her decades of musical theater experience, brought to the song when she took over the role. In the same season, the central role in the revival of “Promises, Promises” was played by Sean Hayes, a star of the television series “Will and Grace.” Mr. Hayes’s preparation for the role was clearly evident in his carefully tended vibrato, but there is a difference between a well-drilled student and a naturally gifted musical performer.
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Daniel Radcliffe as J. Pierrepont Finch in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”
This spring a new revival of Frank Loesser’s“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” was built to showcase a powerhouse movie star: Daniel Radcliffe, the post-boyish star of the Harry Potter movies. Mr. Radcliffe, too, certainly does not embarrass himself as the enterprising J. Pierrepont Finch, the conniving white-collar mini-Machiavelli in this peppy 1960s musical. But his light, reedy voice lacks the zest and heft that can turn Loesser’s songs into occasions. In Mr. Radcliffe’s interpretation the big Act 2 solo, “I Believe in You,” seemed to be over before it had begun. (The Encores! revival of a lesser Loesser show, “Where’s Charley?” was ultimately far more enjoyable, built as it was to showcase a cast of unfamous but vocally gifted performers.)
Certainly the history of the Broadway musical includes shows that have been built around stars with minimal singing talent: Lauren Bacall in “Applause” and “Woman of the Year,” Katharine Hepburn in “Coco.” One of the most beloved musicals of the 20th century, “My Fair Lady,” was tailored for the modest singing abilities of Rex Harrison. And the advent of amplification certainly didn’t help matters.
But if current trends continue, one of the signal pleasures of the Broadway musical, the irreplaceable excitement of hearing a truly gifted singer interpreting some of the greatest American popular music ever written, may fade away entirely. The current generation of musical theater luminaries who have headlined major new musicals or revivals – Audra McDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Kelli O’Hara, Mr. Esparza, Brian Stokes Mitchell among them – could prove to be the last. That’s an infinitely dispiriting thought when I recall how much heady musical rapture they have brought to theatergoers over the past decade or so.
My purpose is not to dismiss the talents of the television and movie exiles who certainly deserve credit for undertaking the considerable challenge of appearing in a Broadway musical. But beautiful singing voices are rare and particular gifts, and musically exciting performances are among the vital elements that contributed to the growth and power of the American musical as a mass art form.
At a time when the hugely popular “American Idol” has enshrined a fine voice (of a particular flamboyant kind, it’s true) as a prize-worthy endowment worthy of national celebration, it seems a dismaying irony that Broadway should be moving in the other direction, relegating the possession of a solid singing voice into the optional category, several notches below celebrity on the list of necessary requirements.
Does anyone else share my anxiety?
