British actor Robert Shaw received top billing in Jaws, but the biggest divo on the set was the shark.

Nicknamed “Bruce” after director Steven Spielberg’s lawyer, the mechanical Carcharodon carcharias malfunctioned for most of the film’s production, which took place for 159 days in 1974 along the east coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

 “The shark is not working” became a constant refrain during the film’s long shoot, leaving the three principal actors — Roy Scheider as a local police chief, Richard Dreyfuss as an ichthyologist, and Shaw as the grizzled shark hunter, Quint — marooned together for weeks at a time on board the Orca, a 42-foot former lobster boat.

The Shark Is Broken, a one-act play by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, aptly timed for the film’s 50th anniversary this year, and running through October 5 at Maryland Ensemble Theatre (MET), is a behind-the-scenes dramedy that imagines the chats, spats, feuds, and fisticuffs that occurred during all that downtime.

Each Jaws actor has his own coping strategy befitting his nature. Roy Scheider (Steven Todd Smith) strips down to his Speedo to sunbathe, Richard Dreyfuss (MET Ensemble member Willem Rogers, nailing Dreyfuss’s hand gestures and boyish giggle) neurotically frets about his career, and Robert Shaw (Capitol Steps alum Kevin Corbett), an alcoholic who died at age 51, drinks like a fish and taunts Dreyfuss.

With a nod to Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, director Gené Fouché wisely confines the action to the ship, a thoroughly detailed replica of the Orca courtesy of set designer David DiFalco, creating a sense of claustrophobia that’s only heightened by the MET’s intimate venue.

But the dramatic stakes are low (we know that Jaws became a blockbuster), and the ironic, meta-humor is lazy, such as when Shaw, predicting Spielberg’s future directorial moves, asks, “What next, dinosaurs?” Or when he declares that no future president could be more immoral than Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon.

The Shark Is Broken is billed as a three-hander, but Steven Todd Smith has little to do here besides showing off his lithe, Scheider-esque physique and breaking up fights between Dreyfuss and Shaw.

Willem Rogers is gifted the play’s funniest lines as Dreyfuss (often at his character’s expense), but even those feel like warmed-over Woody Allen routines: “Jews should stay away from water. Nothing good ever happened to any Jews on the water.” 

The play’s co-writer Ian Shaw, the son of Robert Shaw, used his father’s drinking diary as source material, and he is unsparing here in his depiction of his father’s struggles with alcohol. When Rogers’s Richard Dreyfuss throws a bottle of Shaw’s bourbon overboard (true story), you believe that Shaw the elder is capable of murder.

As written by Shaw the younger, Shaw is also surprisingly generous. In an invented scene, Corbett’s Shaw rescues Dreyfuss from a panic attack with a spontaneous rendition of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state”), perhaps to remind us that Robert Shaw toured with the Old Vic and was directed by Gielgud.

And yet the real drama in this play exists off stage, in the father-son dynamic between Ian Shaw and his father, who died in 1978 when Ian Shaw was only 8, and in whose career footsteps he followed.

Ian Shaw not only co-wrote The Shark Is Broken but also played his father in previous productions from the West End to Broadway. It’s only by reading The Shark Is Broken as an Oedipal struggle between the two Shaws that the play makes a claim on our emotions. Ian Shaw may have spent his life avoiding associations with his more famous father, but this play is rather transparently his attempt to measure up to his father’s formidable talent. To quote the tagline from Jaws: The Revenge, “This time, it’s personal.”

Jennifer Clark’s fastidiously accurate costumes succeed in turning actor Kevin Corbett into a believable facsimile of Robert Shaw, and Corbett does yeomanlike work delivering the famous U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue from Jaws that serves as the play’s climax. But without a Shaw in the captain’s chair, The Shark Is Broken is just treading water.

Running Time: 100 minutes with no intermission.

The Shark Is Broken plays through October 5, 2025, at Maryland Ensemble Theatre‘s Robin Drummond Main Stage, 31 W Patrick Street, Frederick, MD. Tickets are $15–$36, and can be purchased by phone at 301-694-4744, online, or in person at the MET box office, open Tuesday to Thursday, 12 – 6 p.m., Fridays 12 – 4 p.m., and one hour before performances. Pay What You Will discounts are available for students, seniors, and military starting at $7, for each performance, while supplies last.

An ASL Interpreted performance will take place September 19, 2025, at 7:30 p.m.

COVID Safety: Facemasks are strongly encouraged but not required. MET’s Safety policy can be found here.

The post ‘The Shark Is Broken’ at Maryland Ensemble Theatre lacks bite appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

BOOK REVIEW
Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir
by Jeffrey Seller
Simon & Schuster, 2025

I remember when the phrase “theater kid” became an insult. It was back in 2013, when former theater kid and Broadway alumna Anne Hathaway was campaigning for an Oscar for her performance as Fantine in the film version of Les Misérables. Since then, the term has become shorthand for excessive enthusiasm and earnestness.

Search for “theater kid” on YouTube these days and you find a video that asks, “Why are theater kids so cringe?” Over on Reddit, a typical thread begins with a slash to the jugular vein worthy of Sweeney Todd: “Theater kids are some of the most annoying people you will ever meet, no matter what age.”

So I thought Andrew Garfield was rather brave when he proudly self-applied the sobriquet in an interview with Vanity Fair, telling the magazine that as a child, theater “saved my life.”

Jeffrey Seller, one of the masterminds behind the Tony Award–winning musicals Rent, Avenue Q, In the Heights, and Hamilton, and the only producer to have mounted two Pulitzer Prize–winning musicals, doesn’t make that claim as flatly in his new memoir, Theater Kid, but it’s clear from the circumstances of his hardscrabble childhood in suburban Detroit that theater — specifically musical theater — saved his life, too.

In that sense, Seller’s book bears a strong resemblance to Act One, Moss Hart’s memoir of growing up poor and ashamed in the Bronx and rescuing his family from poverty after the triumphant Broadway opening of his 1936 play, You Can’t Take It with You.

Seller, we learn, was a shy, bookish, adopted, gay teen, who stuck out conspicuously in his family, which for the first 100 pages of this book is constantly threatening to unravel due to the outrageous behavior of Seller’s father, an opera buffa character who resembles a “Jewish Paul Bunyan” and works as a part time children’s clown when he is not missing car payments, bedding other men’s wives, or stealing food from a baby.

As a high school student, Seller watches the 1980 Tony Awards on TV, where he “escape[s] into another world” watching Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin sing a duet from the new Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical Evita, which “pricks his ears in wholly new ways” and leaves him transfixed. He buys the double cast album and memorizes every word.

Seller’s talent as a producer quickly emerges. While working for a youth theater troupe in high school, he convinces the board of directors to ditch Punch and Judy–style puppet shows for more substantial fare with good parts for children.

Later, while working as a drama counselor at a summer camp in Michigan after his freshman year of college, he implores a troupe of distracted ninth grade thespians to block out all the external forces that threaten to interfere with their performances — sibling rivalries, parental divorces — so they can put on the best show possible of Aesop’s Fables.

His supervisors bristle at his sternness, but Seller insists that the students aim higher. Theater, he says, “gives them the chance to make something. It’s not easy, it demands creativity and commitment.” The phrase “Can we do better?” becomes his mantra.

It’s a question that Seller will continually ask himself and his collaborators, who will eventually include Jonathan Larson and Lin-Manuel Miranda, once he moves to New York City following his graduation from the University of Michigan and launches his career as a producer after an unsatisfying start as a theatrical booking agent.

We are fully halfway through this 368-page book when he meets Larson after an assistant urges him to attend a “rock monologue” called Boho Days by the lanky 30-year-old composer who longs to break into the theater and ditch his day job waiting tables in SoHo. The idea of a “rock monologue” intrigues him.

Larson’s songs, Seller writes, “make the hair on my arms stand up, make me laugh and cry, fill me with awe and hope.” Larson’s autobiographical musical, about a theater kid who yearns to make it in New York, feels like Seller’s life. The next day, Seller writes him a handwritten letter, earnestly making his case for why Larson should take a chance on him as a producer.

The direct approach works.

Two weeks later, Seller is fired from his theatrical booker job and the path before him is clear. He and Larson meet, hit it off, and convince each other that they are just the sort of young strivers who can shake late 1980s Broadway out of its creative slump and revolutionize the art form with true-to-life characters and genuine emotion. Phantom is the biggest show on Broadway, but the spectacle doesn’t speak to them.

“Those aren’t our stories, those aren’t our characters, that’s not our music. I’m making musicals for our generation,” Larson tells him.

When Larson says he is contemplating making a modern-day La Bohème set in the East Village, “a show about people living with AIDS and not dying from AIDS,” Seller, 30, realizes this is their shot.

Now comes the best section of the book, as Seller shows us how a new musical is produced bit by bit, link by link, drink by drink. “Art isn’t easy,” as Sondheim famously said, and Seller and Larson work incredibly hard to bring their latter-day La Bohème to life, laboring over lyrics, changing focus, cutting characters, scrapping songs, and adding new songs.

Rent starts out with a reading at the New York Theatre Workshop in March 1993, and although the opening number “slams like a jolt of energy,” Seller finds that the energy dwindles, and he can’t latch on to any character or find the plot.

Over hamburgers, he offers Larson a straightforward assessment: Stop writing a collage and tell the story of La Bohème, with a beginning, middle and end.

“I’m going to do this,” Larson tells him. “You’ll see.”

Real life tragedy right out of a Puccini opera strikes when Larson suddenly dies of an undiagnosed aortic dissection in 1996 after the musical’s final dress rehearsal before its off-Broadway opening.

I’ll confess that Rent has always left me as cold as a Paris attic flat in the 1830s, but it’s a testament to Seller’s gifts as a storyteller that I was wiping away tears as he describes how the first preview became a sing-through of the musical in Larson’s memory.

Seller and his producing partner Kevin McCollum would later bring Rent to Broadway, where it would go on to earn 10 Tony nominations and win four, including Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Book for Larson. In the process, the pair would also work to democratize theatergoing by introducing the first Broadway rush ticket policy and lottery ticket policy.

In the summer of 2003, a group of guys from Wesleyan University were developing a new musical called In the Heights, and McCollum showed up to a draft presentation at a small theater on 42nd Street. Seller is honest enough to admit his mistake in declining to attend that fateful evening; he might have tried to take credit for being the first to discover the musical’s now-famous creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Unfortunately, having given over so much of his memoir to his early childhood, Seller doesn’t have much space left to describe his partnership with Miranda, for whom he produced In the Heights and the mega musical Hamilton.

But I am grateful for the scene in which Seller describes his initial reaction to the song “96,000” from In the Heights. “How did a twenty-four-year-old composer understand the life experience of a seventy-five-year-old woman? This was the first time I wondered if Lin’s gift was divine.”

I have sometimes wondered the same about Stephen Sondheim, and once Seller raises the stakes that high, I craved more philosophical musings from him on the value and import of musical theater.

Great musicals like West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof “enriched our culture, our civility, our community,” he writes. I wanted to hear more about what his musicals did to change us for the better. On the last page of his memoir, Seller argues that Rent did accomplish what Jonathan Larson set out to do, “create a Broadway that was about our characters, our stories, our music.”

And maybe that’s enough.

The post How a misfit kid became a megahit Broadway producer (book review) appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

BOOK REVIEW
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life 
Atria Books, 2024

I keep getting fooled by the titles of new Sondheim books.

As I wrote for this publication, the title of James Lapine’s 2021 book — Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created “Sunday in the Park with George” — promised a memoir by the book writer and director of the 1984 Broadway musical about George Seurat. But apart from a brief introduction, the book turned out to be an oral history featuring interviews with roughly 40 people involved in the show — valuable in its own right, but not a traditional memoir.

Now I’ve fallen for another piece of marketing sleight of hand with How Sondheim Can Change Your Life, the new book by theater historian Richard Schoch.

The title of Schoch’s book promises to impart shareable life lessons from Sondheim’s oeuvre (16 full-length musicals written over a 50-year period and lyrics for four more), but the author quickly abandons that premise in favor of a collection of backstage anecdotes, trivia, and critical close readings of Sondheim’s lyrics, organized neatly by show.

Much of the arcana Schoch unearths should be familiar to Sondheim fans at this point, such as the fact that Sondheim wrote his most well-known tune, “Send in the Clowns” from the musical A Little Night Music, specifically for Mary Poppins actress Glynis Johns, who possessed a distinctively smoky singing voice but couldn’t sustain a note.

More impressive than these bits of Sondheim trivia are the close readings of Sondheim’s lyrics, which are smart and perceptive, notably Schoch’s argument that the unresolved ambivalence of the song “Sorry-Grateful” from Company is the true emotional core of Sondheim’s 1970 acerbic dark-comedy musical, not the show’s climactic 11 o’clock number, “Being Alive.”

Schoch’s thesis is all the more convincing when one considers that “Being Alive” wasn’t originally written as a paean to marriage. The original text of the song ended with the show’s perpetually single protagonist, Bobby, sneering that marriage leads to “happily ever after in hell.” (According to Sondheim scholar Sandor Goodhart, director Hal Prince convinced Sondheim to alter the song on the first night of the show’s Boston run, as he found it “too negative” and “too bitter.”)

I was grateful for how Schoch helped me to read Company in a new way, but I found myself wishing that the author had taken a bigger stab at extracting replicable life lessons from Sondheim’s works, notwithstanding such ostensibly didactic chapter titles as “How to grow up.”

I wanted to learn more about his personal relationship to Sondheim’s work — how a lifetime of studying Sondheim’s canon shaped his personality, his political worldview, and his progress as a writer.

Perhaps Schoch felt that such sustained, personal engagement with his subject wouldn’t allow his book to be taken seriously, or that memoir as a literary genre has fallen out of fashion of late. Perhaps he would have been right.

But consider that the best part of theater actress Alexandra Silber’s (no stranger to the DC stage) 2018 memoir, White Hot Grief Parade, is the chapter in which she explains how, as an 18-year-old mourning her father’s death from cancer, she identified strongly with the character of Little Red Riding Hood from Sondheim’s 1987 collaboration with James Lapine, Into the Woods, a postmodern take on Grimms’ Fairy Tales, written against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis.

Traumatized by the violent death of her entire family, Little Red Riding Hood is suddenly aware that she is “alone in the world — a child with nothing but a wolf-skin coat on her back.”

But she is not truly alone, as Silber points out. Beside her is Cinderella, helping her to “face the world as a stronger and smarter woman than before.”

Like Silber (and no doubt for many of you reading this), Sondheim changed my life. He’s still changing my life, even after he’s gone. His lyrics are so dense, and his characters are so universally relatable, that his musicals, like Shakespeare’s plays, continue to yield fresh insights and reveal new pleasures with each revisiting.

And, like Silber, I owe a particular debt to Into the Woods.

As a teenager coping with my father’s suicide, struggling to understand how a parent could suddenly vanish under a giant’s boot or by their own hand, Into the Woods taught me the blunt truth that “sometimes people leave you, halfway through the wood.”

But the musical also taught me how to forgive my father and showed me a path out of grief.

People make mistakes.
Fathers,
Mothers,
People make mistakes,
Holding to their own,
Thinking they’re alone.
Honor their mistakes
Everybody makes
Fight for their mistakes
One another’s terrible mistakes.

Today, I honor my father’s memory as the vice president of communications for a national mental health nonprofit, using my words and my work to prevent suicide and increase equitable access to mental health care.

My father’s tragedy, as a friend of his recently told me, was that he didn’t know how to reach out to others for help. He thought he was alone. But, as Sondheim reminds us, “no one is alone.”

The post How to read Sondheim and how he can change your life (book review) appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

There are plenty of musicals that feel dated now, but is there a show that has improved with age?

I saw one example last night at the Kennedy Center Opera House: fresh from its Tony Award–winning run on Broadway, a robust revival of Company, Stephen Sondheim’s sophisticated and acerbic musical that created the dark-comedy-musical genre.

When it premiered in 1970, Company was revolutionary in exploring dating and marriage in the modern age of technology. As Sondheim wrote in his memoir Finishing the Hat, Company is about “the challenge of maintaining relationships in a society becoming increasingly depersonalized.”

In that sense, Company is more relevant than ever. As writer Derek Thompson observed last month in The Atlantic, America’s “social metabolism” has slowed to such a degree that the U.S. Surgeon General has declared an “epidemic of loneliness.”

The musical’s theme — striving for connection but fearing commitment — isn’t the only way in which this Company feels timely and relevant. Bobby, originally a single, male Manhattanite, is reimagined here as Bobbie (an appealing Britney Coleman), a woman who struggles to find real connection in a “city of strangers” hunched over their smartphones.

Far from a mere gender-bending casting stunt, turning Bobby into a woman, which Sondheim personally approved prior to his death in 2021, benefits the production in two ways: as an apt observation of the difficulty educated women currently face in finding suitable men to marry and as an explanation for why Bobbie’s impending 35th birthday looms so ominously in the character’s mind.

An actual ticking biological clock on stage raises the dramatic stakes for Bobbie, who has no shortage of caring friends or potential bedmates but who fears the loss of freedom and individuality that marriage portends.

The idea of marriage isn’t made any more attractive here by the fact that Bobbie’s married friends are endlessly bickering or breaking up, and her engaged friends are fleeing the altar (“Getting Married Today,” a hilariously neurotic Gilbert-and-Sullivan-esque patter song dexterously sung by Matt Rodin).

Here the bride and groom, Amy and Paul, are reimagined as a gay couple, Jamie and Paul, with one post-Obergefell addition to the show’s book: “Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.”

Not all these vignettes are as entertaining as “Getting Married Today,” partially because Coleman is often a passive player in them, voyeuristically spying on other people’s domestic life like a housebound Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.

Nor do these vignettes fit together with any temporal logic. How can Bobbie be experiencing all these dates and visits to friends’ homes in the span of one day, her 35th birthday? Of course, this is no fault of Coleman’s. Sondheim and book writer George Furth wrote these scenes as little, self-contained one-act plays.

The creative team led by director Marianne Elliott wisely leans into this confusion rather than attempting to cover it up. Several hints exist that these events may only be happening in Bobbie’s head, from Neil Austin’s ethereal, purple-red lighting to the way supporting characters emerge from surreal places (a refrigerator, a cake) to the exaggeratedly large birthday balloons in the shape of the number “35” that tower menacingly above Bobbie like Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.”

The musical works best when Bobbie isn’t relegated to a third wheel and interacts one-on-one with the other characters, most notably in “Barcelona,” Sondheim’s spin on the French aubade, a song about two lovers interrupted by the coming of dawn.

In this scene, Bobbie has a one-night stand with an airheaded airline attendant named Andy (Jacob Dickey), and the two playfully squabble over whether he should report for duty or stay snuggled under the covers with her. When he finally relents, she lets out a plaintive protest of even this tiny trace of commitment: “Oh god!”

Sondheim saves his best material for last in Company, an acid-tongued Act II solo (“The Ladies Who Lunch”) from Bobbie’s older, wealthy, married friend Joanne (Judy McLane, who steals the show in a fur stole).

Delivering a drunken toast, Joanne castigates Bobbie for her role as a perpetual spectator — “always on the outside looking in” — and warns her not to fritter her life away on trivial pursuits like the suburban matrons who “meet themselves at the schools, too busy to know that they’re fools.”

That leads Bobbie to an epiphany that though “two is dreary,” “one is impossible.”

In the show’s famous 11 o’clock number, “Being Alive,” the Kennedy Center’s 11-piece orchestra swells beneath Coleman as she stands at center stage to declare that “alone is alone, not alive.”

As the song goes, “Life is company.”

I’ll drink to that.

Running Time: Approximately two hours and 45 minutes, including one intermission.

Company plays through March 31, 2024, in the Opera House at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F St NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets ($45–$169) at the box office, online, or by calling (202) 467-4600 or toll-free at (800) 444-1324.

The program for Company is online here.

COVID safety: Masks are optional in all Kennedy Center spaces for visitors and staff. Read more about the Kennedy Center’s mask policy here.

The post Raise a toast to reimagined ‘Company’ on tour at Kennedy Center appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

A bit hasty with my morning ablutions yesterday, I was looking less than my best as I headed into Shirlington’s Signature Theatre to see Sweeney Todd, and I briefly contemplated ducking into the barbershop next door to the theater for a shave.

But when I recalled the plot of the Stephen Sondheim musical, based on a mid-19th-century penny dreadful about a London barber who murders his clients and turns them into meat pies with the help of his downstairs neighbor, I changed my mind.

To allow a perfect stranger to apply a straight razor to your bare neck requires a significant level of trust in one’s fellow man, something Sweeney Todd can no longer do after being exiled to Botany Bay on a trumped-up charge by a corrupt judge who coveted his wife.

That was Todd’s real crime, he tells a young sailor at the start of the show — foolishly trusting in other human beings. “The cruelty of men is wondrous as Peru. You are young. Life has been kind to you. You will learn.”

Todd’s other tragic flaw is that he is so blinded by the need for revenge to assuage his mortally wounded male ego (the judge has metaphorically castrated him with his “vulture’s claw” by stealing Todd’s wife and child and depriving him of his place in his family and in society) that he can no longer recognize his fellow man or woman, not even when the very people he loved and lost are standing right before him.

He even becomes a stranger to himself, dissociating from his former identity, that of Benjamin Barker, and choosing the sobriquet of Sweeney Todd, a variation of Tod, the German word for death.

Director Sarna Lapine, an experienced interpreter of Sondheim musicals who has Sondheim in her DNA (her uncle, James Lapine, wrote the book for and directed Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Passion) wisely avoids creating a cartoon monster in this Sweeney Todd, but the elegant actor who plays him at Signature, Nathaniel Stampley, seems too composed, too much in control throughout this performance, even after his initial plan for murderous revenge against the judge (John Leslie Wolfe) and his solicitous beadle (Christopher Michael Richardson) goes awry and his rage spirals into full-on omnicide (“They all deserve to die — even you Mrs. Lovett, even I”).

“I’m alive at last and I’m full of joy,” Sweeney sings when he begins his second-act killing spree. But I didn’t quite believe him. There’s more of Eichmann than Edmond Dantès in his Sweeney, and his murders feel officious, even perfunctory.

Jesse Belsky’s lighting design marks this dramatic shift with a transition from pale moonlight to volcanic orange and red, but this Sweeney remains an icy and cold-blooded killer.

The orchestra sounds measured too. With a complement of 15 professional musicians, conductor Jon Kalbfleisch’s pit contains slightly more than half the number called for in the original orchestrations. Sweeney Todd is a quasi-opera, and it merits a big sound. But I didn’t quite hear the Bernard Hermann–esque slashes evoking Psycho in the opening “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” or the Wagnerian unresolved erotic tension in “Pretty Women.”

The fireworks in this show come courtesy of the vocal pyrotechnics and acrobatic acting of Bryonha Marie’s Mrs. Lovett — baker of the self-described “worst pies in London” — and Rayanne Gonzales’ Beggar Woman. Marie’s performance deserves special attention here. If Angela Lansbury, who originated the role on Broadway, played Mrs. Lovett as flighty, and Annaleigh Ashford, Tony-nominated this year for her performance in the Broadway revival, plays it as comedic, Marie plays it as both, with an added dose of winsome sensuality.

The show is most alive when Marie is on stage, most notably in “God, That’s Good,” where she holds court in the dining room of her newly thriving pie shop wearing a candy-cane–striped dress courtesy of costume designer Robert Perdziola that makes her look like Mrs. Claus from Hell.

Katie Mariko Murray and Paul Scanlan, both gifted singers, make something solid out of small roles as the young lovers Johanna and Anthony. Harrison Smith’s Tobias Ragg feels like the most authentically Dickensian presence in this production, but the actor is perhaps a tad old to be playing a surrogate child to Mrs. Lovett. As a consequence, their duet together (“Not While I’m Around”) doesn’t feel appropriately maternal and her willingness to sacrifice him isn’t as shocking as it could be. (I can’t help but see glimmers of Sondheim’s fractious relationship with his own mother in the relationship between these two characters. On her death bed, Sondheim’s mother is reported to have told her son that her only regret in life “was giving birth to you.”)

Scenic designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams wisely avoids sequestering Sweeney in a second-floor barbershop where his murders are at a safe remove from the audience. She makes us watch — and even be complicit in — his killings. But I wish she had trusted the Signature audience to get all the deliciously dark double entendres in “A Little Priest.” Instead, she hangs life-size body bags oozing bloody entrails all around the stage, as if to explain the punchline — “they’re talking about grinding people into pies!”

This company, richly deserving of its reputation as the home of Sondheim in America, knows that one doesn’t attempt to upstage Sondheim’s words. They’re always the star of the show.

Running Time: Approximately two hours and 35 minutes, including one intermission.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street plays through July 9, 2023, in the MAX Theatre at Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Avenue, Arlington, VA. For tickets ($56–$103), call (703) 820-9771 or purchase online. Information about ticket discounts is available here.

The program for Sweeney Todd is online here.

Closed captions are available via the GalaPro app.

COVID Safety: Masks are always optional but strongly encouraged in the lobby and other public areas of the building. Face masks are required inside the performance spaces on Thursdays and Sundays. Face masks are optional but strongly encouraged inside the performance spaces on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Signature’s COVID Safety Measures can be found here.

The post Signature Theatre’s ‘Sweeney Todd’ fails to draw blood appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

In tribute to Stephen Sondheim, who died November 26, 2021, at the age of 91, we republish this essay with videos about one of the many great songs he left us—and its new meaning now. —Editors

Originally published February 2, 2021

In January, a 35-year-old, single Londoner named Gagan Bhatnagar talked to The New York Times about the unique psychological challenge of enduring the coronavirus pandemic as a single person (“A Pandemic Is Hard Enough. For Some, Being Single Has Made It Harder”).

“The first few months I thought: ‘This is OK, I can work on myself,’” Bhatnagar told the Times. “But then it just dragged on. One day I realized it had been three months since I had touched a human being.”

Reading Bhatnagar’s account, I cannot help but think of Broadway’s most famous bachelor, Bobby, the main character in Company, Sondheim’s 1970 musical about the pleasures and perils of marriage (Bobby the bachelor was reimagined as Bobbie the bachelorette in a witty and welcome 2018 revival).

In “Being Alive,” the closing number from Act II of Company, Bobby, a single New Yorker who feels alone on his 35th birthday party, sings a bitter discourse on marriage:

Someone to hold you too close,
Someone to hurt you too deep,
Someone to sit in your chair,
To ruin your sleep…

Someone to need you too much,
Someone to know you too well,
Someone to pull you up short
And put you through hell…

But the tone and the text of the song shift as Bobby gradually sheds his cynicism and embraces his vulnerability. “Someone to hold you too close” moves to “Somebody hold me too close,” and his initial anger becomes an urgent plea:

Somebody hold me too close,
Somebody hurt me too deep,
Somebody sit in my chair
And ruin my sleep and make me aware
Of being alive, being alive.

Somebody need me too much,
Somebody know me too well,
Somebody pull me up short
And put me through hell and give me support
For being alive.

For Bobby, finding someone to love becomes, in the words of Sondheim scholar Sandor Goodhart, a matter of “existential survival.”

I never understood how high the stakes were in this song until now, as we creep up on the year anniversary of the pandemic and its forced social isolation.

The ending of Sondheim’s musical is (typically) ambiguous, and it’s not clear whether Bobby finds a partner or simply leaves his birthday party and resumes his life among a “city of strangers.”

But as the pandemic has made clearer, loneliness exacts a bitter cost. We humans are social animals, and, as Martin Buber famously said, “life is meeting.”

In that spirit, let me share with you my top ten versions of “Being Alive,” in no particular order, all of which you can currently find on YouTube.

So many great performers, men and women alike, have put their individual stamp on this song, and each of these renditions reveals something different, from Adam Driver’s searching to Bernadette Peters’s doubt to Raúl Esperza’s anger.

Dean Jones

The original Bobby, former Disney star Dean Jones, puts his whole being into this song. I love when the rest of the original cast, including Elaine Stritch, there in the studio to record the cast album, bursts into spontaneous applause for Jones right after he nails that final note, a G#.

Julian Ovenden

What a journey Ovenden takes you on in this version, live from the BBC Proms 2010 – Sondheim at 80 concert. I love the slow buildup to the big finish here. (Was that the Howard Dean scream at the very end?)

Adam Driver

This is the version, from Driver’s 2019 film Marriage Story, with which the public (i.e. non-Broadway fanatics) is probably most familiar. While Driver isn’t quite singing here — this is more of a recitative — his exploration of every word and syllable in this song brings the audience closer to Sondheim’s text than perhaps any other version.

Patti LuPone

Patti LuPone’s version is technically flawless. I just wish she showed a little more vulnerability here, got in closer touch with the character.  To me, this sounds like Evita singing “Being Alive.” But wow, those pipes.

Neil Patrick Harris

Neil Patrick Harris is a thoroughly convincing Bobby. Notice the tears faintly swelling in his eyes during this performance.

Bernadette Peters

I have heard Peters perform “Being Alive” several times in concert, and it’s obvious why her version brings down the house every single time, whether it’s an intimate venue or Carnegie Hall. Notice how her voice breaks just a little on the penultimate word in the song. That’s acting, folks.

Barbra Streisand

This live version from 2016 is like butter. As Streisand’s voice ages (she’s 78), she imparts this song with more truth, wisdom, and vulnerability.

Rosalie Craig 

Craig, the star of the 2018 gender-swapping revival, is endearing here. I find myself rooting for her Bobbie to find happiness.

Ramin Karimloo

Karimloo, a former Phantom, is one of the best male singers on Broadway, and this version shows you why.

Raúl Esperza

This is “Being Alive” par excellence. Esperza’s pain is palpable here, and no other performer has taken bigger risks with Sondheim’s song. If I had to pick one version of “Being Alive” to recommend, this would be it.

Bonus: Norm Lewis

Talk about dramatic range: Norm Lewis, the most formidable Javert, melts your heart in this excerpted version of “Being Alive,” a promo for Signature Theatre’s Simply Sondheim revue (now playing through March 26, 2021, in HD on Marquee TV).

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When I finished James Lapine’s new book about the making of the musical Sunday in the Park with George, my first reaction was to channel another Sondheim/Lapine collaboration, Into the Woods:

What was that?!

The title of Lapine’s book — Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created “Sunday in the Park With George” — promised a memoir by the book writer and director of the 1984 Broadway musical about George Seurat. Or at least a traditional narrative.

So I was stunned that after a few introductory pages that take us from the Mansfield, Ohio, native’s first trip to Broadway at age 11 (to see Dick Van Dyke in Bye Bye Birdie) to his early directorial experiments in New Haven and New York, the author vanishes.

One of those early experiments, Photograph, a theme-and-variations play based on photographic images, formed the protomatter of a musical that he and composer/lyricist Steven Sondheim would labor over a two-year period from 1982 to 1984 to create: The story of French pointillist painter Georges Seurat’s own struggle, 100 years earlier, to create his masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

We are just beginning to hear Lapine’s version of that story when the book transforms into something resembling a deposition in a civil lawsuit. I initially felt confused by this, even a little cheated.

Why am I reading 200 pages of transcribed interviews about a musical that received a Tony nomination for Best Musical, and won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama? Was the process of making this musical so traumatic or tortious as to warrant a legal investigation?

To answer that question, Lapine presents transcribed interviews with some 40 players involved in the making of Sunday in the Park with George, from original cast members (including Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, who played George Seurat and his aptly named mistress, Dot) to producers to musicians to costumers and even the graphic designer who made the poster.

You can’t quite call this approach journalism. In journalism, you marshal your interviews into a story. As Patinkin’s George Seurat might say, you have to bring order to the whole.

Lapine describes his book as a “mixed salad” consisting of memoir, oral history, and a primer on how to make a musical. He defends this unusual structure by pointing to the unreliable nature of memory and by arguing that, in memoir writing, “emotional recall often wins the day over fact.”

He may be right about both points, but does any of us really read memoir for the literal, objective truth? Isn’t emotional recall — how the author felt about the events he’s describing — always more interesting than a mere recitation of facts?

Perhaps Lapine didn’t trust himself to write a memoir about a show for which he feels such ambivalence.

“Working with Sondheim was a dream come true,” he writes. “On the other hand, my memories of directing the production remain complicated and occasionally painful. At least, that’s the feeling I have carried with me all these years.”

I agree that viewing this book as an oral history is essential to understanding what it’s attempting to do. Judged by that standard, it’s a grand succès.

Putting It Together is not, however, a passive pleasure. Wading through these transcripts and keeping track of dozens of interviewees, with only intermittent patches of narration and sparse, Kubrickian chapter titles to orient you (“1983”), isn’t easy. Then again, as Sondheim tells us, neither is art.

The story of how Sunday in the Park With George came to be is fascinating.

In 1982, Lapine was a hot new item in New York theater, having made his debut by directing an avant-garde production about Gertrude Stein in a SoHo loft, funded by Jasper Johns (moral: you never know until you ask, so ask). Sondheim, already a legend in musical theater, was in a rut after the critical shellacking he had received over Merrily We Roll Along.

Sondheim invited the younger Lapine to his Turtle Bay townhouse, perhaps hoping to be reinvigorated with a little of Lapine’s downtown energy. Despite their generational and geographical divide, the two men instantly bonded over their shared interest in Buñuel films and blunts. They shared a joint, tossed photographs on Sondheim’s Persian carpets, and somehow came up with the idea to make a musical about Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

Lapine immediately started writing the book, unsure of where he was heading, only knowing that the first act would end with a recreation of the painting.

The two men made a pilgrimage to the Art Institute of Chicago for an up-close-and-personal look at the painting, where museum staff showed them X-ray photographs that had been taken of the canvas, revealing the many revisions Seurat made to his masterpiece during the two years it took him to complete it. “We were really able to get a sense of Seurat’s obsessional nature: the exactitude of his work and the precision of every brushstroke on the canvas,” Lapine writes.

Remind you of anyone?

The musical, directed by Lapine, with music and lyrics by Sondheim, opened off-Broadway in 1983, with Patinkin as George, Peters as Dot, and a young Kelsey Grammer, pre-Cheers, as Young Man/Soldier. At the first preview, audience members fled.

I’ll let Lapine and Sondheim describe the scene:

LAPINE: It was not a good start.

SONDHEIM: It was terrible. I remember the look on your face. You had never been walked out on before. You had never experienced that because you had been writing for off-Broadway, where nobody ever walks out because the weirder or more boring the show is, the happier they are to be there. I wanted to say, or maybe I did, “It happens to me all the time, James. Get used to it.”

LAPINE: The actors could feel the resistance of the audience. They were also pouring sweat onstage. I really thought I was going to have a heart attack that night, and I was kind of hoping I would so I wouldn’t have to come in the next day.

SONDHEIM: Welcome to commercial theater . . .

The best parts of Putting it Together read like this, funny and brutally honest. Occasionally, these recollections transport you. There is one scene, in which Patinkin describes meeting Sondheim for the first time, that is so perfectly composed, it almost approaches art.

PATINKIN: In ’78, while I was doing Evita, I was at a party at Hal Prince’s house, and there was a back room that had a baby grand piano. I didn’t want to hang out with the crowd, so I went into the room and sat on the couch next to a lady. I didn’t know who the lady was at first, and we started talking. It turned out it was Angela Lansbury, and it was an extraordinary conversation. And, as I’m talking to her, I realize it’s the wrong guy sitting there—it should have been my late father. How he loved this woman. The first time I visited New York — my bar mitzvah gift — my dad took me to see her in Mame. And as I’m having this thought about my dad, a guy walks in the room and Angela stands up and says, “Mandy, I’d like you to meet Stephen Sondheim.” And at that moment, I did not have it together in my head that he was the guy who wrote West Side Story, but a click went off, because my roommate Ted Chapin had shown me this album he had of a Sondheim benefit concert where Sondheim’s name was spelled out with Scrabble tiles. “Well, you’re the guy on the Scrabble album, aren’t you?” and Steve said, “Yeah.” I said, “You performed that amazing song ‘Anyone Can Whistle’ on that recording, right?” and he said, “Yeah.” And then I asked, “Could you play that for us now?” So he sat down at the piano for just Angela and me, and sang “Anyone Can Whistle.” That’s the first time I met Stephen Sondheim.

The book wisely avoids paeans to Sondheim’s brilliance, but if it has a fault, it’s that it contains too many professions of insecurity. Peters is afraid to play an old woman. Lapine intimidates Patinkin. Lapine is afraid to work with Patinkin. Everyone is afraid to audition for Sondheim. The insecure actor has become a cliché at this point.

What’s more interesting, and worth the price of admission here, are the scenes in which actors reflect on their struggles with the material, a piece of art about a piece of art.

In one standout scene, Brent Spiner, of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame, who played Franz in the Off-Broadway and Broadway productions, remembers confronting director Lapine, saying, “I don’t have a character. Where is my character?” Lapine said, “You’re not a character, you’re a color.” And Spiner replied, “Oh, well, would you mind telling me what color?”

At its best, Putting It Together is not just a book about the making of Sunday in the Park with George. It is also a book about the art of making art. And that journey, we learn, can be chaotic.

But from that chaos, Lapine manages to assemble a tableau vivant. After 200+ pages of interviews full of kvetching and catharsis, Lapine ends with the full script of Sunday in the Park With George, and the book, just as the show and painting that inspired it, snaps firmly and forever in place.

Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created “Sunday in the Park with George” by James Lapine is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and on sale now.

SEE ALSO:
Putting It Together – ‘Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution,’ by Todd S. Purdom book review by Geoffrey Melada
The Baron of Broadway, ‘Unmasked: A Memoir’ by Andrew Lloyd Webber book review by Geoffrey Melada

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Broadway has been dark since March 12 due to the coronavirus pandemic, the longest shutdown in its history.

With theaters shuttered from Broadway to the Beltway, musical theater fans have an opportunity to revisit old productions.

Until this week, I hadn’t listened to Sondheim’s Into the Woods since 2014, when Disney adapted the 1987 Broadway musical into a feature film.

The movie, to the surprise of no one, least of all the composer, sanitized some aspects of the musical, from its sexual subtext to its dark and violent second act.

Hearing the original cast album again this week, as racial and economic unrest continue to boil over and a novel coronavirus pandemic stalks the land, I am finding new meaning and relevance in Into the Woods, and even a prescription for surviving this moment.

For those needing a brief refresher, in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s show, new and familiar storybook characters go questing in the woods in Act I and achieve their goals: Cinderella marries her prince, Jack climbs the beanstalk and steals the giant’s gold, and the childless Baker and his Wife conceive a child.

Then, in Act II, things fall apart. No one lives “happily ever after” in this postmodern fairy tale.

To be fair, few characters in folk literature do. As Sheryl Flatow reminds us in the liner notes to the LP, the most gruesome moments in the show – the blinding of Rapunzel’s prince and Cinderella’s stepsisters – come straight from the original source material.

Still, the violence in Act II is shocking, the more so because it represents such a dramatic shift from the lighthearted tone and witty wordplay of Act I (“We’ve no time to sit and dither, while her withers wither with her”).

“Wake up. People are dying all around us,” says the Witch, as a second giant, seeking revenge, begins a murderous rampage.

This giant is an enemy the likes of which the characters in Into the Woods have never faced – an immutable, implacable force of nature that respects no borders (“Nothing but a vast midnight, everybody smashed flat!”).

Desperate, the common folk turn to the Royal Family for help, but the government proves utterly incompetent – first ignoring credible, early warnings of the threat posed by the giant and later fleeing the castle like Louis XVI when danger finally arrives at their doorstep in the form of a giant’s boot.

As a result of this failure of leadership, the people, confused and frightened, turn on each other in a destructive orgy of blame and sacrificial violence (“You’re responsible! You’re the one to blame. It’s your fault.”)

The result is chaos, followed by even more death.

The parallels to our current situation are unavoidable. “There has to be a clear coherent sustained communication, and that has absolutely not happened,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease expert at Vanderbilt University told The New York Times last Saturday. “We’ve had just the opposite and now it’s hard to unring a whole series of bells.”

As the Times went on to observe, some of the country’s most prominent leaders have soft-pedaled the severity of this crisis, refused to wear masks or adhere to social-distancing guidelines, and called for the reopening of states while the virus has continued to spread.

“With no clear message from the top, states went their own ways.”

The same thing happens to the characters of Into the Woods, until they finally coalesce as a community and work together to slay the giant who poses an existential threat to their society.

As the survivors Cinderella, the Baker, Little Red Ridinghood, and Jack sing in the show’s penultimate song (“No one is alone”):

Just remember:
Just remember.
Someone is on your side.
Our side.
Our side.
Someone else is not.
While we’re seeing our side –
Our side …
Our side –
Maybe we forgot:
No one is alone.
Hard to see the light now.
Just don’t let it go.
Things will come out right now.
We can make it so.
Someone is on your side,
No one is alone.

The message for us in this moment is clear: People are dying all around us. But if we can learn to see beyond ourselves and work together – wearing masks, adhering to social distancing, avoiding unnecessary travel – we can slay this giant in our midst.

Into the Woods reminds us that, even in the darkest midnight, “no one is alone.”

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Four years ago, I walked into what was then the Barnes & Noble in downtown Bethesda and asked for a sales clerk’s assistance locating one of Jimmy Buffett’s greatest hits CDs.

She was stymied.

Would it be in the country section? Rock? Folk?

Indeed, Jimmy Buffett’s distinctive sound is hard to pin down.

His music blends Caribbean, country, rock, folk, and pop music into a good-natured concoction variously classified as “trop rock” or “Gulf and western.”

If anyone deserves a jukebox musical to showcase their songwriting oeuvre, it’s Jimmy Buffett.

This week, the national tour of his semi-autobiographical musical Escape to Margaritaville dropped anchor at National Theatre for a one-week engagement.

The score features some 25 Buffett tunes, including some new songs written for the show as well as his most famous hits from “Fins” to “Volcano” to “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”

With a book by TV writers Greg Garcia and Mike O’Malley and music and lyrics by Buffett himself, the show is named after Buffett’s 1977 hit “Margaritaville.”

Like the boat that brings boozy tourists to and from the fictional Margaritaville Hotel and Bar where the action is set, this show is big, rollicking, and has sprung a few leaks.

The story centers on Tully (Chris Clark as Don Giovanni in flip flops), a part-time guitar singer and full-time seducer of vacationing women, and his romantic pursuit of an uptight, career-minded volcanologist named Rachel (Sarah Hinrichsen).

Like the hero of Escape to Margaritaville, Buffett started out playing for drinks at the Chart Room Bar in Key West’s Pier House Motel.

Tully’s motto is all play and no work. Rachel can’t wait to check her work email the moment she arrives on the island. They have no chemistry, not even when Tully is serenading her with Buffett’s most gentle ballad, “Come Monday,” or when the show sends them to bed together.

I kept waiting for Rachel to channel Dot from Sunday in the Park with George and sing “We Do Not Belong Together.”

The leads’ lack of chemistry is unaided by the clichés and insipid one-liners in the show’s book. “I’m going to cheat,” pronounces Rachel’s best friend and fellow vacationer Tammy (Shelly Lynn Walsh), and “not just on my diet!”

Escape to Margaritaville first set sail at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse in 2017.

The show also played in New Orleans, Houston, and Chicago before it premiered on Broadway in February 2018.

“When the writers came along, it was very important that they were part of that group of people who were basically Parrotheads [Jimmy Buffett fans],” Buffett told WTOP. “It was important that the music was a part of their lives and it wasn’t just a writing assignment. Authenticity was absolutely important. They knew the songs enough to stitch together a story.”

In retrospect, it might have been better if the writers hadn’t been so devoted to the material.

Perhaps then they could have avoided the overly literal takes on Buffett’s songs.

In “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” for example, one character gorges on an actual cheeseburger on stage. In “Margaritaville,” another character munches on sponge cake while another searches for a lost shaker of salt.

The writers don’t give Buffett’s songs enough credit. They’re rich, self-contained stories (especially “He Went to Paris,” which is the source of the show’s one, true emotional revelation), worth exploring as metaphors. Or perhaps the writers don’t give the audience enough credit.

There is one truly funny, self-aware line, delivered courtesy of Ted (DeVon Buchanan), the Black musical agent who discovers Tully playing in a bar: “Acoustic guitar, songs about the beach, Hush Puppy shoes … White people love that kinda shit.”

The show contains other pleasures, most notably Walt Spangler’s gloriously kitschy bamboo tiki bar, evoking the old Hawaii Kai Restaurant in Midtown, and Kelly Devine’s inventive choreography.

The National Theatre audience took special delight in Devine’s impressionistic take on a scuba lesson. The two leads, suspended from wires, “dive” through a sea of cerulean silk banners held up by members of the chorus.

The orchestra, led by Andrew David Sotomayor who pulls double duty on keyboard, brings Buffett’s songbook to life without ever upstaging the actors. Note to every Broadway pit: This is how you use an orchestra to complement, not compete with, the drama on stage.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the supporting leads, who are so compelling that one almost wishes the show were about them. Peter Michael Jordan (Brick, the bartender ) possesses a clear, sweet tenor and a disposition to match. His love interest, Tammy (Walsh), is the show’s strongest singer and a natural comedienne. Best of all, their chemistry is real. They belong together, as do J.D. (Patrick Cogan) and Marley (Rachel Lyn Fobbs) – the island’s pilot and hotelier, respectively.

Escape to Margaritaville is a license to chill for a city of Type A people who live to work. I just wish it had more thoughts in its Parrothead.

Over the course of two and a half hours, you’ll sing along to familiar tunes, toss beach balls in the air, and have a few laughs.

But come Monday, you’ll have forgotten every word.

Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville plays through October 13, 2019, at the National Theater, 1321 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC. For tickets, call the box office at 1-800-514-3849 or go online.

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You can’t miss Betelgeuse. A star in the constellation Orion, this supergiant is red as flame and one of the 10 brightest stars in the night sky.

At approximately 10 million years old, Betelgeuse (pronounced “Beetlejuice”) is not long for this universe. High mass stars like these consume their fuel quickly before exploding. As spectacular as it appears in the heavens now, Betelgeuse is bound to go supernova.  

As I headed out of the National Theatre Sunday night, following the opening night of Beetlejuice the musical, I couldn’t help but think of the show’s celestial namesake.

A new stage adaptation of the 1988 fantasy/comedy classic which starred Michael Keaton in the titular role, Beetlejuice (directed by Alex Timbers with music and lyrics by Eddie Perfect and a book by Scott Brown and Anthony King), is bright, bold and impossible to miss.

But it’s so supercharged with manic energy and competing ideas that I can’t imagine how it will sustain itself when it heads to Broadway (Beetlejuice opens at the Winter Garden Theatre April 25).

Alex Brightman of School of Rock fame is here as the “ghost with the most” – the most lines, the most laughs, the most stage presence. Whereas Michael Keaton had only 17 minutes of screen time in the movie, Brightman’s bio-exorcist in a black and white striped suit haunts the National Theatre stage for most of the show. He never wears out his welcome.

Brightman never imitates Keaton’s performance. He and the creative team have created a totally sui generis specter in this Beetlejuice. The show’s narrator, he breaks the fourth wall to tease the audience, tell jokes and confide his puckish schemes.

His humor runs the gamut from the highbrow (“Death is sort of my oeuvre/I make crossing over so much smoother”) to the low brow (“I’ve been dead for millennia/Giving houses enemas”) to the downright unprintable. Imagine comedian Sam Kinison playing the Las Vegas Hilton in Hell.

But where the show’s producers miscalculate is in enlarging the role of Lydia Dietz to match him. In an interview with Nicole Hertvik for DCMTA, Beetlejuice composer Eddie Perfect revealed that “Sweeney Todd” sparked his interest in musical theater as a child. But Lydia is no Mrs. Lovett.

Sophia Anne Caruso is a skilled singer with an impressive range. But Lydia can’t be Beetlejuice’s foil or his lover – she’s far too young and naïve. When she and Beetlejuice play haunted house together, the effect isn’t just creepy. It’s felonious.  

Which brings me to the other problem with Lydia. In attempting to buttress the film’s paper-thin plot, the creators of Beetlejuice have given Lydia a dramatic arc. She’s not just going through a goth phase here; she’s grieving the death of her mother whose funeral opens the show (“This is a show about death”). Perfect’s elegiac ballads for Lydia are so earnest that they seem better suited to “Dear Evan Hansen” than this farce.

Caruso owns her solos, but there are so many of them that they have the cumulative effect of stepping on the show’s momentum. Case in point: Right after a deceased boy band aptly titled “Boy Inferno” (they died in a fiery plane crash) serenade Lydia and her father Charles, earning some of the biggest laughs of the night, Lydia breaks up the party to give us another emo power ballad. You believe Caruso’s grief, but you wish she’d run off to boarding school with Hamlet and leave us to our fun.

Beetlejuice’s fatal flaw is that it can’t decide whether it’s a harmless Gen X nostalgia vehicle or an angsty Gen Z drama. It courts both audiences with the same manic zeal.

But Beetlejuice the movie didn’t succeed because of its rich characterization. It was a hit because of its original visuals, Danny Elfman’s darkly beautiful score and its dry humor.

Many of these pleasures abound in the musical version, too, from David Korins’ Tim Burton-inspired set design to William Ivey Long’s costumes evoking Mexico’s Dia de Los Muertos to Kenneth Posner’s ethereal lighting. Connor Gallagher’s choreography steals the show in the famous “Day-O” dinner scene, a movable feast that will turn you off pork forever. And Scott Brown and Anthony King’s book contains numerous zingers, the best of which comes courtesy of Dana Steingold as a Girl Scout who’s faint of heart. “Being a Girl Scout is a breeze, even if you’re born with a congenital disease.”

Other departures from the movie feel like missteps. In the film, the parents, Charles and Delia, were snobs and social climbers. You took the ghosts’ side against them. Here, Adam Dannheisser and Leslie Kritzer are so funny in their respective roles – especially Kritzer as a New Age life coach — that I missed them after they’d been scared out of their house by its former inhabitants.  

As to the Maitlands, after their delightful duet in Act I there is sadly little for Adam (Rob McClure) and Barbara (Kerry Butler) to do in this show, except watch events unfold helplessly from their attic.  

It’s all downhill after the dinner scene. Even the fanservice in Act II feels forced, such as when the man with the shrunken head and the football team show up to wave at the audience.

Daylight come and me wan’ go home.

Beetlejuice plays at the National Theatre through November 18, 2018. For tickets, call the box office at (202) 628-6161 or go online.

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Starting August 14, Stephen Sondheim’s musical Passion will play at Arlington, Virginia’s Signature Theatre, starring Natascia Diaz (West Side Story) as Fosca and directed by Associate Artistic Director Matthew Gardiner (West Side Story, Sunday in the Park with George).

Based on Ettore Scola’s Italian film Passion d’Amore, which was itself adapted from an 1869 novel by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, Passion opened on Broadway in 1994, with a cast that included Marin Mazzie (Clara) and Donna Murphy (Fosca).

Set in 19th century Italy, the one-act musical is about a handsome young soldier stationed in a remote province who is obsessively pursued by the sickly sister of his superior officer.

Not exactly standard musical theater fare.

But the score is ravishing. Perhaps Sondheim’s most lyrical and romantic work, Passion features several well-known songs, including “Happiness,” “Loving You” and “No One Has Ever Loved Me.” The original Broadway production received the 1994 Tony Award for Best Musical and netted Donna Murphy her first Tony for Best Actress in a Musical.

I recently spoke with Signature’s Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer, who has twice directed Passion, most recently at the Kennedy Center starring Tony nominee Judy Kuhn. What follows are highlights from our conversation.

Geoffrey Melada: Judy Kuhn told me that Fosca is one of the best roles in musical theater for women because she is so intelligent and complex. Do you agree?

Eric Schaeffer: She is a great character and such a complicated one. You make these assumptions that you know who this person is, but you don’t really know. She is not the kind of character who comes on stage and you know all the colors they hold. She’s always turning. You just never know how she is going to react to things.

She is very intelligent, very realistic. She says, “I know I am not beautiful, but it’s not what’s on the outside which counts.”

Is Fosca the key to Passion?

In the original Broadway production, Donna Murphy became the center, but the play is a love triangle, with Giorgio at the top and Fosca and Clara the other two at the bottom. Fosca’s rival Clara is her opposite.

Is Clara the Kardashian of the 19th century?

(Laughing) Clara’s only concern is beauty, beauty, beauty. Everything is so plastic today – people’s personalities, people’s looks. This show is ahead of its time.

Because Giorgio’s love affair with Clara is so “ordinary,” and his true passion is for an ugly woman?

Fosca isn’t ugly! She’s just plain. She’s not an ugly witch. In my production and Matthew’s production, we keep her real. Both times we’ve done it, we didn’t add warts, pimples, she’s just a plain, simple, haunting soul there, which is kind of beautiful.

Passion has been described as Sondheim’s most personal work. It is based on an epistolary novel, and its characters write letters and “read to learn.” Is that why people see Sondheim in this work?

When he was writing it, for the first time in his life, he was in love. I think that really had an effect on him writing the show, finding true love. It’s probably his most personal work. It is a little jewel in the crown that way.

How does Matthew plan to stage Passion, taking advantage of Signature’s black box?

Passion will be a different experience for people. The physical space of our black box will be designed so that the audience is in Northern Italy. You can’t escape. You’re going to feel the obsessions, that passion. Matthew’s production is going to be very different than how they’ve seen it before.

How else is Signature rediscovering this show?

We are using the original Broadway orchestrations. Other theaters are always reducing orchestrations. You will hear [the musical] how Sondheim wrote it and intended it to be done, which will be beautiful in this intimate space. I’m also excited for the costumes. [Costume designer] Robert Perdziola is amazing. He did our A Little Night Music with period costumes. I’ve seen the costume sketches for Passion and they are to die for!

Sondheim’s shows are as densely literate as Shakespeare or Stoppard. Do you have conversations with your actors about Sondheim’s words?

Of course. It’s all so connected, like clues, the words he chooses. Whether it’s a song or a sentence that one of his book writer collaborators has written, his lyrics give so many clues as to the character. That’s an important asset when you’re doing the show and making it your own. Look at all the different productions, how they’re reinterpreted differently. You can only do that if it’s great material. He truly is the Shakespeare of our time.

How many Sondheim productions has Signature mounted?

Passion is our 29th Sondheim production. We’ve done more Sondheim than any theater in America.

How have you managed this? Audiences and critics have always been ambivalent about Sondheim. He writes dissonant scores about dark subjects. Follies on Broadway lost its entire investment.

People have come to appreciate what he’s done over his entire body of work. People are still discovering it. We’ve cultivated an audience that knows and wants a Sondheim musical. One season we didn’t do one and I heard from audience members saying, “Where is the Sondheim?” We have grown the audience to appreciate it. I was in Harris Teeter last week and a woman came up to me to ask, “When are you doing Assassins?” Hopefully, we have created a lot of Sondheim fans in the world today.

People know we have such an affinity for him and his work, we will give the best performance possible. People trust us with Sondheim and know they will see a high-quality production. They know that we’re going to present it in a new way. Honestly, you can go back again and again to the material. I’ve directed Sweeney Todd four times, and every time I’ve learned something new.

Passion plays August 14 through September 23, 2018, at Signature Theatre – 4200 Campbell Avenue, in Arlington, VA. For tickets, call (703) 820-9771 or go online.

The post Eric Schaeffer Discusses Signature Theatre’s Upcoming ‘Passion’ appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Last month marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. As threats to his life mounted, King seemed resigned to his fate.

“I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

The next day, he was assassinated.

Like Moses, the biblical prophet he consciously echoed in his final speech, King never made it to the Promised Land.

As I watched the opening of Camelot (book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe) at the Shakespeare Theatre Company last night, I kept thinking of King’s “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech and wondering: Which is the crueler fate for a leader, to glimpse the Promised Land and never reach it, or to find paradise, as Britain’s legendary King Arthur did, and lose it?

These are the sorts of questions that linger after you see a classic American musical (re)interpreted by Alan Paul, who brought us 2015’s Helen Hayes Award-winning Man of La Mancha.

The director has a gift for mining the books of Broadway musicals for their political subtexts and bringing these implications to the surface where they enrich and enlarge our experience.

At first glance, Paul tells us in a director’s note in the program, he saw in Camelot little more than pageantry and pretty songs. But, as he observes, the Arthur legend—especially in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, which is Lerner and Loewe’s source material—is about an enlightened, benevolent leader and the heavy cost of leading and loving one’s fellow man and woman.

In Alan Paul’s be-knighted hands, Camelot at STC is a musical about the romance of politics and the politics of romance. In this elegant and economical new production at Sidney Harman Hall (the original production was nearly three hours and has been trimmed here), director Paul aims his bow at the audience’s head and its heart — and finds both of his marks.

Ken Clark (King Arthur) and Alexandra Silber (Guenevere) are two of the smartest actors to play these roles, and they are exciting to watch as they conceive of a new order of chivalry — one in which the accused have rights, commoners (“the folk not noblessely obliged”) can seek redress in courts of law, and might is used for right.

You can see the wheels turning in their heads as they imagine the Knights of the Round Table and a higher purpose for King Arthur and Britain. When this leader promises to drain the swamp, he means it.

Clark and Silber are serviceable singers, though Silber’s soprano is shaky at times, and she experienced pitch problems at the end of her Act II duet (“What Do the Simple Folk Do?”).

Coming to the musical rescue is Nick Fitzer, whose Lancelot du Lac brings pizzazz and a powerful baritone across the Channel from France. Just as occurred in 1960 when Robert Goulet originated the role on Broadway, Fitzer’s rendition of “If Ever I Would Leave You” brings down the house. This despite choreographer Michele Lynch’s dubious decision to put a league’s distance between Lance and Guenevere during this tender love song.

Scenic designer Walt Spangler’s bed of crimson rose petals redeems the bad blocking in this scene, and it’s a brilliant choice to have those petals remain on stage long after Lance and Jenny have consummated their forbidden passion. As they swirl together on stage, the rose petals resemble a pool of blood, a leaking wound that threatens to engulf Arthur’s castle and country and cannot be ignored.

Forcing Arthur to confront the reality of Lance and Jenny’s betrayal is his bastard son, Mordred, played by Patrick Vaill with a heavy Scottish brogue and the even heavier burden of having to speak truth to power. Vaill wisely plays Mordred not simply as Arthur’s rival but as his conscience.

When Arthur charges Mordred to bring him proof of his wife’s treasonous affair, this is the true test of Arthur’s leadership. As king, he could end the “Mordred probe” at any time, but for the sake of justice and an informed populace, he allows his special prosecutor to complete his work. He puts his faith in the law, and that is why history remembers Arthur, his Round Table and what it stood for.

Rounding out this cast are the Peabody Conservatory-trained Melissa Wimbish in an enchanting cameo as Nimue; STC stalwart Ted van Griethuysen, who brings gravitas to the role of Merlyn the magician; and Floyd King as King Pellinore, on hand with a jest or a jape just when we need to lighten the mood.

And the mood is increasingly dark. Ana Kuzmanic’s technicolor costumes —tangerine, daisy, candy apple green — evoke the liberated 1960s in Act I, particularly in the “The Lusty Month of May.” But watch as her palette gives way to deep purple and funeral black in Act II.

As the lights begin to go out on Arthur’s vision of Camelot, so too do they dim on Spangler’s stage. By the show’s finale, lighting designer Robert Wierzel renders the action in a soft glow, soft as candlelight, perhaps to remind us that Camelot never existed, or existed only in our dreams.

Running Time: Two hours and 30 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.

Camelot plays through July 8 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Sidney Harman Hall, 610 F Street NW, Washington, DC. For tickets, call the box office at 202-547-1122, or go online.

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