As Broadway gears up for its customary, who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire fiesta known as the Tony Awards, the big question is whether a show is better the second time around.There are currently three second-timers on New York
stages. Two are from Britain – Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” and Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar.“ The Yankee entrant is Arthur Miller’s “The Ride Down Mt. Morgan.“
And the final answer? Two are hits and one is a mile-wide miss. Guess which is what?
Stoppard’s 1982 drama is the real thing, marking the first time that England’s brainiest playwright stepped out from the witty, intellectual shadows to show life as it’s lived in all its steam and consequences.
But the new production of “The Real Thing,” with its original cast intact from last year’s staging at London’s Donmar Warehouse, offers something more as well: a superb lead performance by Stephen Dillane that gives us insight to the real Stoppard.
Wry and painfully charming, Dillane (give that man his Tony right now!) embues the beleaguered dramatist Henry with seemingly everything we’ve read about Stoppard himself.
He brings utter conviction, for example, to his character’s love of cricket – a passion that Stoppard shares with the likes of Harold Pinter. (For many British intellectuals the game is much like basketball is to Spike Lee.)
Dillane’s convincing and natural performance also reminds us of a powerful irony, that Stoppard himself left his own wife for Felicity Kendal, the actress who was so marvelous as the tempting Annie in the original “Real Thing” in London.
But it is not only Dillane’s performance that makes this “The Real Thing” so much better on Broadway the second time around.
Director David Leveaux, unlike his predecessors Peter Wood (1982) in London and Mike Nichols on Broadway (1984), brings a rueful brilliance to its theater box of plays within plays, of art within life and life within art.
And he gives the play’s roaring comedy a hollow after-laugh of truth.
And while Dillane’s Henry III is superior to the flamboyant version from Jeremy Irons (not to mention the more harried Roger Rees in London), his Cressida-like heroine is here played by the succulently sensual Jennifer Ehle, a sumptuous far cry from the sexless Glenn Close.
The whole cast, including Sarah Woodward and Nigel Lindsay, is for a playwright to die for. If you have only one show to see in New York make it real and make it “The Real Thing.”
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The new “Jesus Christ Superstar” is no mega-
star, however.
I well remember one late night back in 1970, when Rice and Lloyd Webber – a shy, young yet confident pair – come to my apartment for advice. I had no real idea who they were and certainly no concept of who they would become.
At the time they’d had a sensational success with the double album of “Superstar,” which was No. 1 on the U.S. charts. They explained that they had made enough money to last both of them a lifetime – ah, sweet innocence of youth – and now were only interested in art.
How could “Jesus Christ Superstar,” they wanted to know, be best produced on Broadway – profit considerations aside ? I gently suggested, if I recall correctly, that it was more of a rock oratorio than what they were calling a rock opera. In other words, forget about the staging.
But if they really wanted a producer, I said, they could do worse than David Merrick. And, indeed, they did – they went with Robert Stigwood.
The new production is based on the touring version that Gale Edwards, a fine Australian director, devised for the re-opening of London’s historic Lyceum Theatre in 1996. The two best things about it then were Royal Shakespeare Company actor Zubin Varla as Judas and the striking, sculptured setting by John Napier.
On Broadway both are missing.
The scenery is now adapted from Peter J. Davison’s original touring concept and the performances are mediocre at best. With its odd costumes, it all looks like “West Side Story” seen from the perspective of Cecil B. DeMille’s bible and some Middle East crisis report.
There are still two or three good tunes, but everything seems banal. And, kids, it’s still an oratorio – not an opera. P.S. It’s not a good oratorio.
Standing in dramatic contrast is Miller’s exhilarating “Ride,” a play about a cheerfully selfish, morally amoral and smug bigamist whose double-dealings are revealed in the hospital to wife No. 1 and wife No. 2 after a serious car crash.
Patrick Stewart has the rowdy role of a lifetime.
This neatly imaginative David Esbjornson staging was good off-Broadway at the Public Theater, and it’s even better now, partly through a few tightening rewrites and newcomer Katy Selverstone as the brusque careerist wife No. 2.
The admirable Frances Conroy co-stars as the long-suffering Waspish wife No. 1 in Miller’s sardonic triangle.
By the way, have you noticed lately a rise in fortune for that long-endangered dramatic species, the heterosexual comedy?
That love once too unfashionable to speak its name seems to be alive. Wow!