11 June 2023 Tony Sunday

[scenicdesign71]

After watching the ceremony on TV with my mom, I came home just now to find my neighborhood weirdly overrun by thousands of glamorous people in eveningwear for some reason.

"A spark / To pierce the dark...", as someone once wrote.

Yay Parade and Kimberly Akimbo and Leopoldstadt and Topdog/Underdog and all the people.  (Full list here).

[KathyB]

I think someone should start a GoFundMe campaign for @scenicdesign71 to be able to see Parade. I was excited about it from just the three-minute snippet that showed on the telecast, and I'm wondering if there will be a touring show. (My guess is no.) I was not that excited about Kimberly Akimbo from its performance on the telecast--I somehow got the impression that what was shown tonight was not the best representation of the show, and some other part of the show would better show off the acting, directing, score, etc. I do want to hear the cast recording. Any cast recording with Victoria Clark on it can't be bad.

I have several other questions about the Tony Awards that range from stupid to merely silly. 

I am not looking forward to Monday, at least not until 6:30 pm. At that time, I will be watching what I very much hope is the last NBA game of the season. Go, Nuggets!

[scenicdesign71]

Ha, that's such a sweet thought, @KathyB!    There's still a couple more months, so with luck things will pick up for me before Parade closes.  I can't find any mention of a possible tour so far, but who knows: with the Tony win and the national exposure of that three-minute snippet, it's not impossible (though I suspect it would likely tour without Platt or Diamond).

Sweeney came off somewhat better in its clip than it might have; perhaps Groban's picking up in intensity, or perhaps his performance plays better to a closeup camera than to a 1,500-seat theater, but I found him a bit more persuasive in last night's excerpt than I had at the Lunt two months ago.  (The choice of song, while a no-brainer in many ways, also helped insofar as it kept Ashford's Lovett out of the picture).  I'm still not a fan of many of Hoggett's movement choices, but the dramatically roving camera last night managed to sweep up much of it into a generic, not-too-distracting overall sense of kinetic turbulence.  My general sense remains that, apart from a handful of more-or-less diegetic dance moments -- the "Poor Thing" party minuet, the duo's final waltz -- Sweeney doesn't need or want choreography as such; in this context, it tends too easily toward decorative (not to say camp) posturing, which is far likelier to damage the mood than to enhance it.

I'm not insane for doing a(nother) spit take when Sweeney was not only nominated, but somehow won, for Best Sound Design: Jesse Green made a point of flagging its win as one of only two genuine surprises in the entire evening.  (He tactfully doesn't elaborate, but I think it's probably safe to infer bafflement -- to put it gently -- rather than "what a happy surprise" approval).  That the much-touted 26-piece orchestra fails to produce any discernible power or volume is disappointing, to say the least (rumor has it that a deliberate decision was made to err on the side of a "natural", "unamplified-sounding" sound, but I'm not alone in thinking they fatally overshot that mark).  That a shockingly high percentage of Sondheim's and Wheeler's words are rendered unintelligible and/or inaudible (by poor projection and inexcusable "accents," as well as inadequate sound support) is appalling.

Camelot came off rather poorly; it's not a great show, or a great revisal, but it felt far more lame on TV last night than it had in the theater the other week; apart from Jordan Donica's voice, no one was being done any favors by the three minutes of TV exposure.  While I agree with what Sorkin was trying to do in principle, the show remains a promising story idea still not convincingly welded to a remarkably dud-free collection of beautiful melodies whose lyrics, too quaint by half even for their time, have downright curdled with age.

Into The Woods's clip -- "It Takes Two," beautifully performed by Sara Bareilles, Brian D'Arcy James and, not least, Kennedy Kanagawa and friend -- confirmed my (mild, but definite) regret at having missed it.

And & Juliet has, if anything, only dropped lower on the list (or off it entirely) of shows I'd only consider seeing if it was free.  I keep hearing that the book is clever; but constantly pausing the story to be deafened by weirdly Broadwayized pop anthems would, I suspect, exhaust my patience long before intermission.

[scenicdesign71]

My general sense remains that, apart from a handful of more-or-less diegetic dance moments -- the "Poor Thing" party minuet, the duo's final waltz -- Sweeney doesn't need or want choreography as such; in this context, it tends too easily toward decorative (not to say camp) posturing, which is far likelier to damage the mood than to enhance it.

Speaking of those two moments -- have I mentioned?:

In this revival, the "Poor Thing" ballet -- which, in fairness, I've yet to see realized anywhere with quite as much clarity as I might ideally like, given its chillingly elliptical lyrics -- has been visualized as wholly incomprehensible mush, the movement abstracted into absolute meaninglessness and dimly, sloppily sorta-silhouetted against the topmost sliver of Lien's upstage arch -- where, in any case, atrocious sightlines make the whole exercise aggressively confusing and 100% pointless, from every seat in the house.

And the final waltz scarcely even qualifies as such, disintegrating almost immediately into outright, if awkward, grappling.  Almost from the instant Groban lurches into "Mrs. Lovett, you're a bloody wonder...", Ashford is eyeing the very large upstage oven in fight-or-flight battle mode, and if her lyrics suggest some admixture of self-delusion and panicked playing-along, there's no inkling of either one in her actions or demeanor -- understandably so, since Groban's playing naked aggression, undisguised by even the flimsiest hint of seduction -- which turns her chattery responses into utterly unmotivated and bizarre wastes of precious breath.  With apparently zero interest in the dramatic irony or specific character dynamics on which the scene is built, Kail and Hoggett have opted to simply ignore them, leaving us instead with a labored and clumsy tussle between Ashford [5'4"] and Groban [5'11"] which is appropriately hard to watch, mindlessly gripping for the first second or two, and not even slightly suspenseful or surprising.  It's just another story beat to get through, with increasingly creaky effort and no more compelling point than to finish the show so we can all go home.

There may be a feminist rationale, or one about character closure -- which, sure, I guess, if your idea of final showdowns hews to the Marvel-ish -- but the implementation here is so lazy and maladroit, like so much else about this production, that it ends up serving neither the material as written nor whatever semiadjacent point it is that these particular interpreters think they're trying to make.  (I've been unsettled for decades by some viewers' passionate conviction that Mrs. L. is the story's evil mastermind and "true" villain, and Sweeney her hapless puppet; in addition to badly distorting the story and both characters, I've always thought this interpretation carries an ugly whiff of misogyny.  This issue isn't solved at all, and indeed might actually be worsened, by giving her an extra thirty seconds of awareness and "agency" in which to resist her death, as Kail has done, rather than having her sail into the oven semi-blindly, as in the traditional staging.  But it does boil down the two characters' relationship, in the end, to a cartoonish and subtlety-free matter of brute conflict, I guess graspable by viewers whose sense of drama requires the structure of sports events or comic books).

As for the random Dickensian fashion parade adorning "Ladies in Their Sensitivities" to no perceptible purpose, narrative, thematic, ironic or otherwise; and the inclusion of only a single pie throughout all of "God, That's Good" (the one Toby's so jazzed about), keeping the ensemble's hands free for more of Hoggett's precious silly-ography -- both still have me unhappily stumped.

Ditto Groban's hand-jive during "The Letter", pointedly not actually writing it, or pretending to -- because why be so boringly literal-minded? -- but instead mirroring the quintet's inscrutable Hoggett moves as Sweeney silently reviews what he has, I guess, already written?  Is it ASL, for deaf audiences who have improbably somehow managed to follow Kail's mushy visual storytelling this far, only to confront a key plot point being delivered solely and entirely via sung epistle?  Or maybe this gestural fidgeting is the occult means by which this Sweeney, taking dictation from the singers, laser-engraves letterforms on paper with his invisible eye-beams.  Your guess is as good as mine.

These kinds of staging choices stand out as especially "Look, Ma!  I'm a director!", but there are many more moments that register as merely, un-showily dull and/or inept.  The entire denouement (roughly from the BW's "Where are you, Beadle?" onward) seems disorganized and hard to follow, and too sluggish and unfocused to be worth the effort of trying.  This isn't the first production where Toby's disappearance into, and later re-emergence from, the cellar remains frustratingly unclear, but it's especially perverse in one where traps are used elsewhere for both scenery and people.  If you've got a full show deck anyway, why on earth wouldn't you give Toby a nice simple flush-hinged trapdoor to climb down into, preferably center stage or somewhere equally sightline-friendly, maybe even with some nasty fumes issuing forth through rancid light as he does so?  Here, Matarrazzo's exit and re-entrance (after "hiding" in the shadows among some wide-open trusswork at the base of the crane tower) are both so flaccidly-staged and murkily-lit that his ostensible disappearance, and the search for him, become puzzling non-events, while his reappearance at the end is so hard to see that it's not at all clear what's happening or why -- or indeed, for an awkwardly long time, who he even is.  Suffice it to say: after an already spotty evening (to put it kindly), most of the Final Sequence seems somehow to have defeated this creative team entirely, for reasons as to which -- given the (you'd think) idiot-proof power and precision of the writing -- I can't hazard the vaguest guess.

Cutting the factory whistle from the entire show certainly doesn't help; far more than a decorative sound effect, it is a legitimate element of the score -- a 27th instrument, if you will -- and removing it isn't remotely the "clean" or easy cut that Kail and co. seem to imagine: its absence leaves quite a few gaping holes in the mood and pacing, which no one here has bothered to address, if indeed they even noticed -- and the final scenes are among the worst-affected.

With "Poor Thing" and the Final Sequence (the two plot hubs between which the rest of the story hangs) both so incompetently staged, my Sweeney-virgin date was lost enough to turn to me as soon as the houselights came up -- both at intermission and again at the end of the show -- for clarification on numerous key plot points.  He's an extremely intelligent guy who has seen plenty of theatre, including, under my influence, several Sondheim shows.  Sweeney shouldn't be the one that's tripping him (or anyone) up.  But I was sadly unsurprised that this production did.