• Junk, 11/16/17 (Thurs), Lincoln Center
• Torch Song, 11/17/17 (Fri), Broadway
• Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, 11/18/17 (Sat), off Broadway
• Time and the Conways, 11/18/17 (Sat), Broadway
• The Band’s Visit, 11/19/17 (Sun), Broadway
• Brigadoon, 11/19/17 (Sun), Encores!

A brief visit to New York on the way elsewhere. Shows I missed this time included Dear Evan Hansen (tickets impossible to get in the lead actor’s final days) as well as Hamilton and Bruce Springsteen (tried half-heartedly and unsuccessfully for the lottery for both). I decided against the revival of M Butterfly, one of my favorite shows, when I heard that the author had added a part describing how the Chinese guy disguised his “package”, which sounded much too literal for a show about illusion. (And I didn’t need another apparent reference by Hwang to small Asian penises, an obsession he needs to overcome.)  

Junk was high on my list this time because of its author Ayad Akhtar, whose excellent Invisible Hand was another drama involving financial shenanigans. Junk is a high-powered show about the notorious junk bond king Michael Milken, not-so-thinly disguised here as one Robert Merkin (Steven Pasquale). Merkin has set his sights on the small Pennsylvanian manufacturer Everson Steel, which is sustaining its loss-making steel operations through profits from its pharmaceutical and other subsidiary businesses – making the parts greater than the whole, a perfect storm for Merkin. The company’s owner Thomas Everson, Jr (a very good Rick Holmes) is well aware what will happen to his workers and the company, which his grandfather and father built from nothing, if Merkin should succeed with his hostile takeover. Unfortunately he does not have the tools to fight the wave. The takeover bid triggers an all-out war from which no one emerges unscathed. The multi-level storyline is painted on a large canvas all over the map featuring a teeming number of vividly drawn characters. It veers at times into melodrama, like the beautiful mole embedded in the steel firm by the financiers and the suicide toward the end. But it is constantly engaging and doles out just enough information to allow us to follow the financial technicalities, numerous persons and interlocking storylines without difficulty.

The tale is peppered with memorable characters – my favorite was the patrician Leo Tresler (a superb Michael Siberry) who can’t give up the old nobler ways – and sidelines like the informant, insider trading, racism, sexism, betrayal on many fronts, suicide and more. Jews are shown as ruthless ringleaders in the scandal and do not come out looking good, though an explanation of sorts is offered (they were apparently excluded from the banking community through the 1960s, forcing them to look elsewhere to push their way in). But everyone is tainted in some way; even the decent journalist finds she has a price in the penultimate scene when one of Merkin’s associates makes her a financial offer she can’t refuse in exchange for non-publication of her damning book. The play ends on a clever foreshadowing of the housing crisis.

The two-tiered, three-columned set (which often flashed numbers or colors or video images) kept things efficient, with set pieces like chairs or sofas rolled in as needed. Director Doug Hughes’ adept handling of the 23-strong cast maintained a cinematic flow; the play seems almost tailored for a film treatment (and should get it). The guy trying to protect his factory from the financial predators reminded me of Other People’s Money, and the story feels likes it been done before. But rarely so stylishly. Recommended.

Torch Song: A revival of the autobiographical work that made Harvey Fierstein a star. The “Trilogy” in the original title was amputated and the text pared back reportedly because of fear of short modern attention spans, but it still consists of three distinct parts: (1) Arnold (Fierstein’s fictional counterpart), a drag queen, looks for love but finds Ed instead, (2) Arnold finds love with a young stud, (3) Arnold, having lost his love, has adopted a son and must deal with an overbearing mother who has not yet adjusted to her son’s sexuality. The show’s first half (the first and second acts of the trilogy) is entertaining but written mainly for laughs, with situations and characters that don’t feel real. Arnold is too jumpy and sarcastic, like a real-life Roger Rabbit. For all the clever repartee, it’s hard to know just what he is looking for; he says love, but I hadn’t a clue what he meant by that, especially when he fell for a ditsy young model who would have seemed the polar opposite of his type. It felt more like desperation. A complex character is one thing, but a muddled characterization is another. That applies as well to Laurel (Roxanna Hope Radja), the wife of Arnold’s first lover Ed, whose startlingly understanding attitude to her husband’s confused sexuality was not realistic as presented here.

The staging was clumsy early on when Ed (a likeable Ward Horton) was onstage alone speaking to an invisible Arnold, complete with miming gestures, which was high-schoolish. That improved greatly in the second story as the characters cleverly interacted in varied configurations in a single bed. Still, I went into intermission wondering what the point was.

Then came the last of the stories when Arnold, now raising a gay teenage foster child, gets a visit from his unsuspecting mother. The furious confrontation between them felt like it was unfolding as it happened in brutal but realistic dialogue. This was a different experience entirely, elevated by a spectacular performance by Mercedes Ruehl. It was brilliantly written and movingly presented, especially the way that the young model’s fate is revealed and how the mother eventually comes around (I think – I wasn’t sure about her departure at the end). Arnold’s stated need for love is undermined by his own intolerance; most notably, his refusal to allow his ex to come out on his own time shows little understanding of how difficult it is for others to accept their own sexuality. The play sends mixed messages in that sense. Also, Arnold’s soon-to-be-adopted son is impossibly smart and sarcastic for his age, an approach that puts comedy over realism, and Feinstein again tends toward easy sitcom laughs through much of the act. But the scenes with the mother take the show from the funny bone straight to the heart.

Michael Urie was forever waving his hands around and in constant movement, which got irritating after a while. He seemed to be trying too hard. It was impossible to avoid hearing Fierstein’s voice, which was maybe not Urie’s fault given the material, but he seemed to be channeling the voice and speech patterns, especially in the opening monologue. He didn’t manage to give the role a stamp of his own. That said, he does deliver the laughs and is an amiable presence, which may be good enough. Michael Rosen as Arnold’s true love Alan was unable to do much with his character (and isn’t he supposed to look like a model?). It was hard to glean what Arnold sees in him. Still, for all the shows flaws, the ride was fun, and if the evening boils down to half a terrific show with lots of nice quips, that’s half more than most shows.

Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train: Angel (a terrific Sean Carvajal), a bike delivery guy, is in jail for impulsively shooting the derriere of a loathsome cult preacher, who then dies of a heart attack during the operation – turning the shooter’s action into first-degree murder. Angel is so nervous that he can’t even say the Lord’s Prayer straight, and he questions what he’s doing there at all (“All I did was shoot him in the ass!”). Meanwhile, his prison mate Lucius (Edi Gathegi, also superb), in jail for murdering eight men, seeks to avoid extradition to Florida and likely execution. A sympathetic prison guard is soon replaced by one much harder-edged who treats the prisoners like soon-to-be jettisoned junk. (From his previous job in the Department of Sanitation: “People go through life discarding things…What they don’t understand is that once they have discarded an irreplaceable item, it is lost forever.”) Lucius thus takes to religion and exercise with equal intensity, including one monologue delivered impressively while doing pushups and such (“Lord, deliver me from me”). He spouts off his views of life and tries evangelistically to win over his fellow prisoner. He rhapsodizes on the pleasures of the one hour of sun they are allowed per day, and declares that it’s the dead Lexus-driving preacher who should have been locked up for trying to brainwash Angel in the first place. His own murders have extenuating (if not necessarily forgivable) circumstances, and he gradually emerges a sympathetic character.

This is not a show about the evils of the prison system given that both prisoners are guilty at least by objective standards, but it humanizes them and gives them a voice. The amazing second-half dialogue between the two in particular becomes a meditation on justice and life and death. A tight cast with uncompromising performances and a starkly simple set of two separated cells that expertly highlight the characters’ isolation. The dialogue pulls no punches. Stephen Adly Guirgis, author of the inimitable Mother** With A Hat and Between Riverside and Crazy, proves himself again as one of the best playwrights currently writing in English. Strongly recommended.

Time and the Conways: Revival of a JB Priestley play of 1937 that, though apparently popular in London, is being revived on Broadway for the first time since its debut. The latter half of the title refers to an upper-crust family that starts out in 1919 fully intact from the devastation of the Great War, concerned mainly with parties and marriage and other trifles. The title’s former half refers to the changes that take place in the years to follow, as the family members are all shown bitterly destroyed by 1937 (the year the play was written), having squandered all their many advantages. A time-trip back again to 1919 and the completion of the initial scene shows how that squandering began.

Mrs. Conway, her four daughters and two sons are holding a party celebrating the end of war. The mother has dreams of a bright future, mainly concerned with getting her children married, and the children, other than one brooding aspiring author, are blithely assuming that all will go as it has. Shifting to 1937, life has changed drastically: the favored son has become a drunk, the married daughters are unhappy with their husbands, the unmarried daughter is still an old maid, and the lower-class son-in-law revels in the despair of the family that once looked down upon him. The family is in deep financial difficulty and will need to sell assets in order to finance the conversion of one of their properties to an apartment complex. The son-in-law banker refuses flatly to help, warning presciently of a next war to come (still two years away at the time of writing), and others are unable to contribute.

Among the general gloom, the underperforming older son Alan alone seems happy, not only because of his lack of ambition but from his understanding of time as past, present and future all happening at the same time, which he says man can only perceive linearly. He believes we need to perceive the whole of the experience rather than individual moments, a notion that he tries to explain in the early time period to the anguished author.

The theory sounds rather dubious, since it would mean that all life has already happened and that nothing we do matters. But even so, does everyone have to be so miserable? The grimness seems rather exaggerated. The final scene, having reverted back to 1919, shows the beginnings of the end: the mother insults the low-class banker, the daughter refuses the hand of a good man for the playboy son, and so forth. All this lays the stage for what we’ve just seen. The would-be writer daughter, stepping out of the picture, has a premonition of the future that we have all just experienced, and Alan promises her he will help her in the years to come.

The tedious plot development might have been the result of the stolid acting. The actors were more concerned with getting the right accent than the right character, with many exaggerated moves underlining the action that would have been perfectly clear (in a subtle British sort of way) if they had just spoken the lines properly. They were not giving us much credit. (Interestingly that seemed to affect the British actors in the show as well.) This is why I usually avoid seeing British shows in New York, especially such drawing-room dramas. The worst of the bunch was the star, Elizabeth McGovern, who was so mannered that it would have harmed the play irreparably even if everyone else had been perfect, which they weren’t. The only credible performances were an unrecognizable Steven Boyer as the lower-class son-in-law and Gabriel Ebert as Alan. Junshin also liked Matthew James Thomas (previously Broadway’s Pippin) as the playboy son.

Rebecca Taichman, who did so well by Indecent, did amateur work here. She failed to realize cohesion among her cast and did not show much vision. The only real coup came after the first 1919 portion, when the entire future set was lowered from above as the past receded into the distance in a dazzling image. The reverse occurs as well when the past returns, and the set recedes yet again at the show’s end as the budding author steps out into her future. A wonderful image, helped by evocative lighting. Overall, though, it’s hard to judge the show on the basis of this ill-considered production. I was embarrassed to have taken my actor friend along, though he noted positively that even bad acting and direction have their lessons. A true glass-half-full view, though I would say the glass was significantly more empty here.

The Band’s Visit: A small-scale musical about an Egyptian musical group on a tour in Israel that gets lost due to bad Hebrew pronunciation (I’m sympathetic) and ends up in a village in the middle of nowhere with no way out until morning. The meeting of the outsiders and bored small-town folks, based on an actual occurrence and resulting film, drives the story. I had assumed this was going to be some comment on the modern Middle East, but it was blissfully free of politics, concerned rather with the need for connection and love. It’s a charming setup, though marred by some dumb plotlines, like the boy standing motionlessly and impossibly before a phone booth all night hoping for a call from his girlfriend, or the sappy pursuit of the gloomy girl by the shy guy, or the wife’s frustration at her husband’s idleness (at least as presented here). The main stories, though, are credible and presented with moving understatement, especially the interaction between the bandleader and Israeli woman Dina, which does not go in the expected direction.

David Yazbek (The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) finally delivers a worthy score with music that sounds vaguely Israeli/Arabic, a beautiful fit with the setting. There was one power ballad, but that fortunately passed quickly. His lyrics still have bum rhymes and tend to go for easy laughs (the line about Sergeant Pepper should be excised – he needs the lyrical equivalent of a dramaturge), but the ballads are genuinely lovely. David Cromer resisted the temptation to ramp up the emotions artificially and kept an admirably relaxed pace throughout, helped by a revolving stage.

Among a fine cast, Katrina Lenk gave a wonderfully dry performance as Dina, matched by television star Tony Shalhoub’s determination above all as the band’s leader to maintain his propriety. Ari’el Stachel was also a standout as a player who loves Chet Baker. In a nice touch, several cast members among the band actually played instruments (loved the post-curtain-call number). There was just enough Hebrew and Arabic on stage to keep things interesting. While the raves for this modest piece seem overdone, its beautiful restraint distinguishes it from the usual fare. Very much worth seeing.

Brigadoon: I’ve always thought it strange that Encores hadn’t gotten around to this inexplicably near-forgotten classic about the town that comes to life once every hundred years. Most of the reviews characterized it rather disdainfully as old-fashioned, which is true in its Oklahoma!-inspired structure, but since when did romance, fantasy and glorious music/dance go out of style? I wasn’t going to miss the rare chance to catch this show, which was being presented in a gala production with a huge cast and orchestra.

The production was out of this world in every way. The stage, light on scenery in this limited run, burst with color and life in a seamless progression from story to song to dance and back, handled expertly by Christopher Wheeldon as both director and choreographer. Grand opera couldn’t have been any grander. Most notably, Wheeldon went for full-on ballet rather than Broadway dancing, which worked spectacularly. I’ve never seen a better danced version of the show, helped by the immensely appealing Robert Fairchild as the jilted lover (including an amazing sword dance). The entire cast was tremendous. Kelli O’Hara was never so radiant in a role that seemed tailored to her talents. I hope she records these songs some day. Patrick Wilson was as usual a bland presence acting-wise but did a superb job on the songs (“From This Day On” was fantastic), so all is forgiven. Among the rest, Ross Lekites was a supremely well acted and sung Charlie Dalrymple.

I’ve run out of superlatives for Encores, and I have a habit of saying that every production is their best yet. So let’s just say that this is as good as it gets. I suppose a production on this scale of this fabulously old-style musical isn’t viable for Broadway, and I know that O’Hara for one is already scheduled to do The King and I in London next summer (and reportedly Japan thereafter, though I’ll believe that when I see it). Since productions of this show, much like Brigadoon itself, only come along once in many years, I’m thrilled to have caught it. A joy from start to finish, and a perfect rendering of a solid-gold piece from Broadway’s Golden Age.