When I saw Catherine Zeta-Jones screech through “Send In the Clowns” during the Tony Awards telecast, looking and sounding like she just escaped from Nurse Ratched’s ward, I felt relieved I didn’t shell out those 110 buckaroos for a ticket to the first-ever Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. But, almost miraculously, that same week of CZJ’s Tony fiasco, just like a pink ribbon-festooned thunderbolt from the big musical theater palace in the sky, Night Music’s producers announced that Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch, musical theater legends and consummate Sondheim interpreters, would replace CZJ and Angela Lansbury as the actress Desiree Armfeldt and her mother for the rest of the run (well, until November 2010). The shriek that emanated from my loft upon reading the news was something that would not have been out of place in Nurse Ratched’s ward, for sure. I absolutely had to see this production – the ultimate musical theater aficionado fantasia; Peters and Stritch performing Sondheim together is the Broadway musical equivalent of a foie gras-white truffles-champagne dinner. And it is quite the marvelous production (despite my pre-existing quibbles with the work itself, and the mystifying artistic decisions that director Trevor Nunn made), with Peters, in my book, giving the definitive rendition of “Send In The Clowns”, arguably the definitive Sondheim song, and Stritch, mesmerizing, unapologetic Stritch, performing a unique, will-never-be-seen-anywhere-else interpretation of “Liaisons”, another classic of the Sondheim catalog.
I’m a big supporter of new plays – I love that sense of anticipation and discovery when you’re waiting for the curtain to rise on a play you’ve never seen or read before. As an audience member, I bring with me to the theater my preoccupations and my priorities, my opinions and my biases, so the new plays that attract me the most are the ones that traffic in big, global themes, that recognize they are part of a bigger world and enthusiastically engage with it: August: Osage County and its generational dysfunction or Ruined and its socio-political gender struggles (ok, so I just mentioned two Pulitzer Prize winners that received their world premieres in Chicago. Yeah, so shoot me). I’m quite skittish then with plays that seem to be to be too introspective, too preoccupied with their emotional responses, plays that a New York Times theater review I once read characterized as “hothouse” plays – delicate, sensitive, bent over by the weight of their own brooding. And really, really focused on their playwrights’ worlds, rather than a world at large. In Chicago last weekend, I saw the Gift Theatre Company world premiere production of Andrew Hinderaker’s Suicide, Incorporated; in New York this past week, I managed to catch the Tony-nominated Next Fall by Geoffrey Naults. I laud the playwrights for releasing new voices to the cosmos; both, though, lacked the wondrous edge, the sock-to-the-gut experience that I look for in the best new plays. And in Next Fall’s case, “best new play” is a phrase I would never, in a million years, attach to it.
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