It comes with the territory, of course. Out-of-touch relatives suddenly call up and want to know what I can recommend in the way of Broadway musicals.
The answer is: not much.
The 1999-2000 Broadway season is just ending its 43rd week — nine to go and sinking fast. And so far its only conventional musical of real quality — despite the sterling efforts of designer Bob Crowley in the lackluster “Aida” — has been “James Joyce’s ‘The Dead.'”
But even that luminous production is more a Richard Nelson play with appropriate music than a proper musical.
Which leaves us with the two dancicals: Lynne Taylor-
Corbett’s underrated “Swing!” and Susan Stroman’s overrated “Contact.”
I have just seen the latter in its new space at Lincoln Center, where it moved from the tiny Mitzi E. Newhouse auditorium to the larger space upstairs, the Vivian Beaumont.
As both theaters have a kind of thrust stage, the show needed only a modicum of expansion, and while I still very much enjoyed the second half, starring ultra-cool Deborah Yates and ultra-bewildered Boyd Gaines, the earlier dancelets left me as chilly as an Eskimo in an icebox.
By all means go. But if you believe that time is money, plan your arrival to coincide with intermission.
Still, whichever way you cut it, neither “Contact” nor “Swing!” — both using pre-written music and no book — is a true Broadway musical.
So I find myself wondering, whence the genre? It’s apparently gone with the wind, departed like Gilbert & Sullivan and the Viennese operetta.
Life being what it is, I was sadly reminded of this irrefutable fact by those who delve into the catacombs of Broadway’s musical heritage, the City Center Encores! series.
The resuscitation last weekend was “Tenderloin,” a Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick musical I missed on stage when it was new in 1960. Like so many musicals that sound wonderful on the cast album but flop on stage, the trouble is in the book.
The story concerns a crusading minister trying to clean up sexual vice a century ago in the graft-ridden Tenderloin district, which was roughly in the area of contemporary Chelsea.
It runs out of steam about two-thirds into the first act.
No matter. The music and lyrics have the thump and whump of Broadway, starting somewhere in the orchestra pit and clambering up through the stage floorboards. It’s authentic stuff — tourist-candy “Aida” it ain’t.
The partly staged production was by the admirable Walter Bobbie, and while the also admirable David Ogden Stiers seemed oddly muted in the leading role of the minister, there was much to admire in the voluptuous Debbie Gravitte, the sparky Jessica Stone and, best of all, the gravelly Kevin Conway as the amiably corrupt police chief.
This flawed and tough “Tenderloin” remains wonderfully recognizable as possessing the true-blue Broadway blood.
Speaking of flaws, I did not enjoy Nicky Silver’s new effort, “The Altruists,” at the Vineyard, which had nasty people behaving nastily and was graced with little wit, though cult diva Veanne Cox handled her neurotic arias with brio.
Nor did I find much more joy in Kenneth Lonergan’s “The Waverly Gallery,” at the Promenade Theater. Lonergan first caught everyone’s attention with his striking play “This Is Our Youth” a couple of seasons back. He should have called this one “This is Our Senility”!
As a theater piece, it is little more than a presumably autobiographical memory play (complete with young sensitive narrator) of the final decline to Alzheimer’s of a beloved but eventually tiresome grandmother.
However, it is beautifully acted throughout, and, as the grandmother, veteran Eileen Heckart — one of the great joys of our stage — is super superb. But not enough so to save this unfinished draft of a play.
