When I started pounding the Broadway theater beat more than 30 years ago, I was amazed to discover that replacement casts on Broadway normally went unnoticed, unhonored and unreviewed. Stars quietly disappeared, with other performers taking their place with nary a critical word. When I proposed to review new people in old shows, editors and Broadway producers alike seemed alarmed. But I persisted, and soon it became common practice to review major cast replacements.
Three decades later, I think this now-general practice has helped maintain standards in long-running shows. It may even have prompted major stars to be more willing to do that which was once thought unthinkable – step into a show as a replacement.
Now, in these days of interminable long runs, keeping up with the incoming Joneses has become something of a critic’s burden.
Last week, I caught up with”Ragtime” at the Ford Center for the Performing Arts for the first time since its New York opening in January last year.
This is a genuinely epic show – the perfect millennium musical. E.L. Doctorow’s original novel, cleverly encapsulated into Terrence McNally’s adroit book, sums up the very roots of our fast-passing century, its spirit and its topics.
The present cast – and it is almost all changed from the premiere – is also extraordinarily good. At the performance I saw, there were two well-schooled understudies (Ron Trenouth pinch-hitting for Michael Rupert and Joe Locarro in for Scott Carollo) who fit in without a tremor.
As the hero, Coalhouse Walker Jr. and his girl Sarah, Alton Fitzgerald White and Darlesia Cearcy lack the effulgent charisma of Brian Stokes Mitchell and Audra McDonald (who doesn’t?), but together with Donna Bullock and Joseph Dellger, they gave the show a pristine punchiness that you might expect in the first week or so of a run but not necessarily well into a show’s second year.
*People customarily refer to the mystery-thriller as the theater’s most endangered species, but it isn’t really. The most uncommon beast in the theatrical jungle is the historical play (a.k.a. costume drama) which has been rare ever since Shakespeare’s monarchs merrily went on their murdering ways.
And when costume dramas do turn up, they are usually as cutely glib as James Goldman’s meretricious “The Lion in Winter.” But right now at the McGinn/Cazale Theater (that hospitable shelflike space above the Promenade Theater) the Blue Light Theater Company has a marvelous historical winner, Helen Edmundson’s “The Clearing.”
I have long admired Edmundson for her poetically deft adaptations of Tolstoy novels for Britain’s Shared Experience Theater, but I have never before seen one of her original plays.
“The Clearing” is set in County Kildare, Ireland, between 1652 and 1655, the time of Oliver Cromwell’s savage regime with its oppression, genocide and what we would nowadays call ethnic cleansing.
Timely – because it reminds the world that Ireland’s hatred of its conquerors reaches back far beyond those 19th-century potato famines – it is also beautifully written and dramatized. Like Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” it shows ordinary people caught up grinding cogs of extraordinary history.
Robert Preston (Michael Countryman) is the decent – well, half-decent – English-born landowner; Madeleine (Alyssa Bresnahan) is his passionate Irish wife; and Sir Charles Sturman (Sam Catlin) is the military governor and their devious nemesis.
As with “The Crucible,” this play is a fascinating tapestry of the interplay between fate, human nature and conscience. Neatly, if modestly, staged by Tracy Brigden and handsomely acted by all – but especially by the emotionally rent Bresnahan, a bewildered but weak Countryman and the stealthily suave Catlin – “The Clearing” emerges, totally unself-consciously, as a document for our time.
It is a truly moving, important play in its own right, but should be seen by anyone who wants to make emotional if not political sense out of Ireland’s ongoing turmoil, even at the end of our own century.
*Downstairs at the Westside Theater, there is currently one of those occasional cult experiences that becomes translated into a theatrical phenomenon: Eve Ensler in her one-woman show-and-particularly-tell, “The Vagina Monologues.”
It is as smooth as satin. Ensler is a gifted actress and a shrewd, if regrettably smug, performer. Her text is drawn from interviews she apparently conducted with many women regarding their sexuality and sexual awareness.
Some of her vignettes – her descriptions of Betty Dodson’s pioneering sex clinic, for example – bear the imprint of truth; others have the gloss of fiction or theatrically heightened reality.