It was about halfway through the first act when a thought occurred to me: You know, I thought to myself, this is probably the one and only musical I’ll ever see in this lifetime that’s all about urban planning. Here you go, publicists. A free quote for your placards. THE BEST MUSICAL EVER ABOUT URBAN PLANNING FROM THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU THAT OTHER MUSICAL ABOUT SCHIZOPHRENIA!
If/Then is a vehicle for Idina Menzel that has a premise similar to Sliding Doors, the Gwenyth Paltrow movie of several years ago. At a point somewhere in the the show’s first ten minutes, the show’s superstar urban planner Elizabeth faces a choice of whether to leave Madison Square Park in order to accompany Anthony Rapp to a housing protest, or to follow a free-spirited LaChanze to listen to a hunky guitar player. (I’d always go with LaChanze, given that choice. I mean, the lady is seriously fierce.) From that point on, the musical splits into two timelines. In one, she’s Beth, a single and lonely career gal climbing the ranks of local and state government; in the other, she’s Liz, wooed by a handsome and determined soldier.
Since both timelines play out in the same spaces, weaving in and out of each other over the course of five years onstage, figuring out which life is which can be a little bit of a chore. The director and designers, however, have made it a little easier by bathing the stage in warm oranges and reds whenever we’re with Liz and in dark purples and blues whenever Beth’s on the stage. At some point it apparently wasn’t enough, and the costume designer stuck a pair of Tina Fey glasses on Liz that Beth never wears. Just in case there was any doubt.
Everybody in the theater was there to see Menzel. The show wouldn’t have the legs it apparently has without her wry and slightly acidic presence. And everything about If/Then seems structured around her. The songs showcase her voice, the comedy is custom-built for her style, the very plot seems to be engineered to expose her to as many shades of Tony-nomination-culling experience as could possibly be wedged into three hours of stage entertainment—romance! pregnancy! job satisfaction! near-death experiences! sadness, sorrow, and loss! Minus a Shirley Temple-style tap number with performing seals, If/Then pretty much packs in everything it can for its star.
Except, that is, perhaps some memorable songs. I take that back. There was one catchy number Menzel sings as both Liz and Beth when her characters go to bed with the wrong people. “What the Fuck,” it’s called. I’ll remember that one for a lifetime not only because it’s a plucky ain’t-I-adorable little ditty larded with the most obscenities in a musical number I’ve ever heard outside of South Park: The Movie, but because of the reaction of the couple sitting next to me, during it.
“I don’t like this,” moaned the man of the couple, who had to be in his mid-eighties. “You don’t like this?” asked his wife. “I really don’t like this!” he moaned, rocking back and forth. “You really don’t like this?” she asked. “No, I really don’t like this!” he said, in distress. Back and forth they discussed whether or not they liked this while Menzel what-the-fucked her way across the stage. Finally they both agreed they didn’t like it. (They left during intermission. More leg room for us.)
However, every other single musical number in the show is agreeable enough, but even while I listened to any individual song I found the memory of its melody draining away. The songs are the Olestra of musical theater, slipping in one cavity and out the other without contributing any nutritive value whatsoever. The fact that just about every song is a folk-inflected Wicked-y, Frozen-y power ballad meant to showcase Menzel’s pipes gives them all a homogeneity that, no matter how pleasant, doesn’t leave much of an impression. I found If/Then intellectually engaging and mature in a way that’s rare with Broadway material, but no one’s ever going to walk out of it humming the songs.
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That was the reverse of the problem I had with Heathers. Lawdy. I walked out of Heathers: The Musical a couple of weeks ago with a good four or five of its tunes firmly wedged in my brain. They still haven’t worked their way out. The musical, of course, is based on the 1989 Winona Ryder/Christian Slater film of the same name, courtesy of the guy who brought us Bat Boy and Legally Blonde: The Musical. The movie has never been on any of my favorites list—it’s too dark and dated a satire really to work. I suspect it’d be largely unable to be remade at all now—would anyone, in this post-Columbine era, seriously greenlight a project in which a kid brings a gun to school and fires it at students in the first scenes and gets a mere two days of suspension? (In the stage production, the writers wisely change the confrontation to a slow-motion fist fight.)
The Off-Broadway version of Heathers, god knows, is no classic theatrical endeavor. It’s not aspiring to be mentioned with the same reverence as Gypsy or Company. It aims squarely to be the musical theater equivalent of a Hollywood B-movie—goofy, fun, and enjoyable without being remotely deep or artistic. On those terms it succeeds. Since it can use as diverse (or not) a cast as one has at hand, and since the stage set is minimal (at New World Stages, all they had were a couple of movable short staircases), it’ll have a long, long afterlife in college and regional theater. And the show’s not without its shivery pleasures. The moment when Veronica’s classmates line up to form a welcoming arch of three-ring binders to introduce the three Heathers, complete with heavenly chorus, was magical.
But oh my god, the songs. Although a lot of the rhymes struck me of the “Let’s Put This Super-Obvious Rhyme Here As A Placeholder But Let’s Try To Remember To Make Up Something Better Before It Hits Off-Broadway Okay? Ooops!” school of songwriting, the music itself at its best is a pop-Broadway amalgam designed to assault those portions of the frontal lobes devoted to musical pleasure. The Heathers’ anthem of high school totalitarianism, “Candy Store,” was the first to worm its way into my brain; before the end of the first act, “Big Fun” and “Dead Girl Walking” had joined it. I winced and kept my face covered during the dumb high school jocks’ anthem, “Blue” (you know, as in “balls”), but found myself whistling it over the exit music an hour later.
And the show’s big ballad, “Seventeen,” in which the leads wish for a more normal high experience with a significantly lower body count, is as lovely as anything I’ve heard in years. Where If/Then was a big production with big names saddled with sweet yet forgettable songs, Heathers is the show your almost-sort-of-clever best friends staged in a garage that somehow had all the cool songs with the killer hooks.
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When we walked into Bullets Over Broadway at the beginning of the month, I kept telling myself, “The seats were cheap. The seats were really cheap,” and wondering if I could make it to intermission. (Which is the point at which I walked out of the nadir of my theatrical experiences, Mamma Mia!)
Bullets Over Broadway is, of course, based on the Woody Allen trifle of the same name, and features a score consisting solely of 1920s period songs. It rolled into town at the peak of the Woody Allen Oscar controversy earlier this year, and the buzz around town was that its star, Zach Braff, was anxious to get out of his contract before the thing opened. To say I went into it with low expectations is something of an understatement.
Then I found myself utterly charmed by the damned thing by the middle of the first number. That’s when Heléne Yorke stumbled out of a gaggle of chorus girls during the “Tiger Rag” and started braying in a Brooklyn accent at the top of her considerable lungs and I shed my curmudgeonly reserve. By the time she presented “The Hot Dog Song” with all its phallic subtlety, she’d won herself a new fan.
Yorke (whom I’d only known as the sweet blonde from Masters of Sex) and Nick Cordero as the poetic mobster are the two standouts of the production. Zach Braff, the show’s nominal star, was so witlessly frantic in the Woody Allen stand-in role that he was almost an absence, but I would watch Yorke and Cordero in anything. Another revival of Guys and Dolls would’ve been perfect. Still, consider how little I thought I’d enjoy it, Bullets Over Broadway turned out to be as lightweight and effervescent as champagne bubbles, and nearly as much fun.
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Low expectations were also what I had for the Marsha Norman/Jason Robert Brown musical adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County. I’d avoided the book at the peak of the mania surrounding it. I’d seen the Meryl Streep movie and thought it pretty good, but somehow a musical didn’t really sound all that appealing. Given the pedigree of the book’s author and the composer, however, I expected to be pleasantly and prettily bored all evening.
My friends were equally appalled as well at my attendance. When I posted on Facebook that I was at the theater for the performance, the comments began to pour in asking what bet I’d lost, or wouldn’t I’d rather be having a nice root canal instead?
But you know what? I found The Bridges of Madison County absolutely ravishing. Just breathtaking. Kelli O’Hara was beautiful and in lovely voice as the Italian housewife stranded in Iowa one hot summer, and Steven Pasquale sang strongly as well as the photographer who sweeps her off her feet. The fact that Pasquale removed his shirt at regular enough intervals to keep audience interest from flagging didn’t hurt.
I suspect that the musical, which closed quickly, was a victim of our own pop culture prejudices; the original The Bridges of Madison County novel wasn’t good, and people bought it by the armfuls anyway. It’s still a cultural punchline. It’s uncool. Theatergoers everywhere had the same reaction to Bridges as they might have had to a musicologist’s serious plea for the reconsideration to add back into the musical canon the works of Milli Vanilli: Too soon. It’s simply too soon.
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The last show I’ve seen in recent months was also the one about which I knew the least: the Roundabout revival of the Jeanine Tesori musical Violet. We settled on it purely by chance at the TKTS booth—we’d heard it was good, but despite the fact we knew zip about it, we went to see it anyway out of whim.
I’m glad we did, because it was unabashedly lovely from start to finish. Violet stars Sutton Foster as a young woman taking a bus trip across the South to beg a faith healer to remove a hideous axe scar from her face. (I know, it sounds great, right?) She’s accompanied, then befriended, then eventually wooed, by a pair of Army soldiers returning from leave to their base.
The music’s a mix of folk and gospel, and the numbers range from the comical to the heartbreaking. Cast members play multiple different roles in the title heroine’s cross-country journey, and there’s scarcely a misstep in the entire production.
It’s difficult to explain what sounds like a wandering, plotless story so gem-like and special. Sutton Foster had a little something to do with it; she glows in the role. In Violet’s first moments, she steps center stage into a pool of light and looks heavenward, saying nothing. The girls sitting immediately behind me, whom I am pretty sure were fans of Foster’s show Bunheads (with their attenuated frames and long hair pulled back into ponytails, they looked the type) immediately burst into tears, and the chick hadn’t even done anything. By the end of the show, when Foster’s Violet was truly aglow with the light of love and a newfound faith, the girls and their mother were bawling loudly.
So was I, girls. So was I.
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