Tony Break

I just wanted to take a break from my reviews of individual shows to jot down a few of my preliminary thoughts on the Tony Awards this year. I didn't get to watch them (being in Europe right now, and all), but I've seen the results and I have to say they came as a bit of a shock. 

The choice between Matilda and Kinky Boots seems to me to be a choice between several polar opposites: 

1) Subtle vs. Pedantic

While Matilda transforms a novel that seemingly resists adaptation in the form of a Broadway musical, Kinky Boots is the literal mold for most blockbuster hits (let me be clear, by "blockbuster hit," I mean a flashy, expensive musical that might last a year or so—I have higher standards for what I would call "great shows"). While the former uses the basic building blocks of language to spin an entrancing tapestry of stories that enchant through alienation, cleverly mock mediocrity, and encourage everyone to be the author of their own stories, the latter loudly proclaims at the end: "Just be with dignity. Celebrate yourself triumphantly. You'll see, just be." As if Broadway spectators had never heard that one before. 

2) Quiet vs. Loud

The defining song of Matilda is entitled "Quiet," in which Matilda stands on a block and sings a lovely, simple tune while the adults scream silently in the background. In contrast, her mother sings "Loud," proclaiming that "the less you have to sell the harder you sell it." This is essentially the motto of Kinky Boots, though they would never admit it. If their only message for audiences is to be themselves, they sure do make a racket saying it. Ms. Lauper's music isn't unpleasant (as indeed several numbers in Matilda are, and are supposed to be), but it's nothing special. It is loud. It is relentless. It is, well, just like everything else. 

3) Groundbreaking vs. Ripoff

While Matilda distinguishes itself by being nothing like other musicals in every way, Kinky Boots operates based on a traditional recycling of tired standards: the set, the music, the book, the plot, the dancing, the cross-dressing. The set in Matilda is unique and bold, the music is chaotic, the lyrics are subversive, the plot is genius (Roald Dahl, and no one can possibly disagree with that), and the use of cross-dressing should hopefully be a lesson in innovation to future shows even despite Mr. Carvel's unjustified loss. 

4) Discipline vs. Sloth

Matilda is a tediously-worked adaptation of a popular novel that has already been adapted into an equally popular film. Such work is evidenced by the beautiful product you see on stage: not quite the book, but something else. Definitely not the movie. The children are expertly trained, right down to their accents (which they maintain even during complicated songs and dance numbers). The fantastic balance between scenes and songs never fails to catch the audience off guard. And Mr. Carvel, whose performance cannot be lauded enough, has accomplished what might be the most incredible feat that any actor might have done: he has faithfully reproduced pure evil in all its unbalanced eccentricities. All this while Mr. Porter of Kinky Boots strutted about the stage in exactly the way Fierstein has done many times before. 

On the other hand, Kinky Boots never surprises the audience, who even with no knowledge of the film on which it is based (at least, this is how I experienced it), can easily predict every second that is still to come. The music does not fit with the story, the British accents are all lost in the extremely American tunes, and the entire show operates based on a shabby alternation between the perky group numbers and the trite slow ballads. They might have transferred the story over to this side of the pond, because the accents were actually quite infuriating, indicative of a much greater sloth that one can equally discern by looking at Mr. Fierstein eat one of his new hotdogs. Kinky Boots is a lazy musical, capitalizing on habits and pre-fabricated techniques. Nothing original, the musical might be compared to a coloring book written by someone else and filled in by Lauper and Fierstein, or maybe a set of legos. 

I could go on, but it's getting late and I'm tired. All I can say to conclude is this: perhaps it would have been too much of a statement, giving Matilda the Best Musical Tony Award. Such a choice might have implied that a group of children can put on a better show than Lauper and Fierstein and all the traditional transvestites in New York City. Perhaps such a choice would have reminded us that the West End is winning the unofficial battle of the arts. And I'm sorry Neil Patrick Harris, but no matter how big and flashy your opening number might be, Broadway cannot survive on that alone. This isn't your fault, though. It isn't Harvey Fierstein's either. It's mine. I shouldn't have hoped that whoever seems to be running the show could actually recognize brilliance. Rent only got 4 Tony Awards as well, and Wicked failed to win Best Musical to a funny show that just recently had to move Off Broadway to compensate for plummeting ticket sales. The Tony's have a long history of making the wrong call, and why should I have thought this year would be any different? 

Fortunately, it is not with that traditional Broadway flair that Matilda operates, and the Tony Awards clearly are not meant for such musicals. I think Matilda says it best: "If you think the ending is fixed already, you might as well be saying, you think that it's okay. And that's not right." Well, I think these awards were fixed, and that such behavior is the very reason for Broadway's latest failures. It's not right, and since I cannot do anything about it but continue to spend my money on Matilda, I will just have to content myself by putting the final period on this post.  

Jekyll and Hyde

When I was about 8, we went to see Jekyll & Hyde the musical. And while my friend Alexandra claims that taking children to a musical like that is child abuse, my brother and I knew what we were getting into well before we stepped foot in the theater. You see, we had been listening to the CD nonstop—I liked the pretty songs, and he liked the horrifying songs about murder. It was a great musical that we could both agree to like, but for totally different reasons. The CD alone gave me nightmares. Specifically Robert Cuccioli's voice, and his complete transformations from Jekyll into Hyde and vice versa. As I grew older and continued to listen to the CD, I was able to appreciate the complexity of his interpretations of what were otherwise mediocre lyrics. In college, I read the novel, and was surprised to see that it wasn't at all like the musical and that an extended theorization of the duality of man really had almost nothing to do with it: the novel is structured as a sort of mystery, recounted by the middle-aged bachelor friends of Dr. Henry Jekyll who were very surprised by his sudden, inexplicable friendship with a strange, little man named Edward Hyde. At the end, they have the not-so-surprising revelation that Jekyll was Hyde all along, which nowadays isn't particularly shocking since the name of the novel itself has become synonymous with good and evil. One of my Writing Seminars professors at Hopkins interpreted the novel as a commentary on homosexuality. For him, Hyde wasn't evil at all, but was gay, and that sort of behavior wouldn't be tolerated from a reputable doctor like Jekyll, so he "transformed" into Hyde in order to act however he wanted. The place where Hyde is "seen" committing the murder (though there is some doubt about that), my professor said, was essentially the red-light district, where upper-class people could get female or male prostitutes. 

I won't comment on that interpretation, but you can see that they would have to beef up the plot for a musical. So, Dr. Henry Jekyll now has a fiancée, Emma, who tolerates his obsession with finding the key to separate good and evil within mankind. The reason he's trying to do that, we learn in the first scene of the show, is to save his father, who is locked away in an insane asylum. Since that's not enough to keep the show going, they add in two more details: first, Jekyll asks permission to experiment on mental patients, and is denied; second, he attends a show at a cabaret/whore house and meets a prostitute (who, of course, has a heart of gold), Lucy. The musical that follows is the extended pondering on good and evil, the duplicity of men, told through the struggle of one man split into two that I was expecting from the novel (since I saw the musical first). It's a gripping tale when you're 8, mostly because of all the people being murdered all the time. Needless to say, I have very fond memories of my first and only encounter with a Frank Wildhorn musical. 

My first year in grad school, at the end of spring break, I went to Baltimore and took a little trip to DC to see 1776 at Ford's Theater. It was essentially history overload: the founding of America onstage where Lincoln was assassinated. The most shocking part of the whole thing for me, though, was when Dickinson (or rather, the actor playing Dickinson) walked onstage and told John Adams: "Mr. Adams, you are nothing but an agitator." Well, I am pretty sure my heart skipped a beat—it was Jekyll/Hyde from the CD! I hadn't looked in the program, but I was 100% sure. I knew that voice. During intermission, I verified, and I was right. That was indeed Robert Cuccioli on the stage. Side note: he is currently playing the Green Goblin in "Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark." I would go see him, but I wouldn't see that show again, not even if you paid me. 

Anyway, back to Jekyll & Hyde, the show. They recently restaged it, and put the new production on Broadway (in the Marquis Theater, in the Marriott) for a limited engagement. Starring Deborah Cox (who I have been told is a famous R&B singer) and Constantine Maroulis (who I guess was on American Idol), this production is trying a little too hard to be cool, which surprised me, considering it always seemed like a "cool" musical to me. What more could you want in a musical to make it exciting? Jekyll & Hyde has drugs (sure, medicinal, but they have surprising effects), sex, prostitutes, murder, horrific transformations, beautiful music, a person being set on fire, etc. It might have seemed over the top to me had I been a little older, but this new version took everything to a new extreme. 

The production opened in the mental hospital with Jekyll's father (a song called "Lost in the Darkness," Jekyll's heartwarming ballad to his father about how he will cure him at all costs), except instead of a simple man on a hospital bed, the father was stretched out across a metal board, held up facing the audience by a straight-jacket. The border of the stage lights up, and he screams. I guess it would have been scary to the eight-year-old me, but so was the Earthquake ride at Universal Studios. To the 23-year-old me, it was ridiculous. Who needs that? No wonder these tickets were so expensive! All that for just the first thirty seconds? And to make matters worse, "Lost in the Darkness" wasn't particularly recognizable. Maroulis sang well, he had a beautiful voice, but what had they done to the song? Then, they added one. For me, that was the last straw—why are they changing everything? This would be the question I would ask for the following three hours. "Murder, Murder" was barely recognizable (the addictive division of the standard 4/4 meter into two groups of three and one of two was eliminated); "Dangerous Game" had become a pop number, a shadow of the intense foreshadowing of the murder that would follow; and the worst part, "Confrontation," the song in which Jekyll and Hyde, portrayed by one man alone, battled it out on stage in front of you, resorted to the use of special effects to facilitate what would have otherwise required an impressive feat from the lead actor. 

I can see now why people hate Wildhorn musicals. I can see now why critics would complain about Jekyll & Hyde being too showy and not having enough substance. But what I cannot see was why the new director took these criticisms (which, as far as I can remember from something I saw when I was 8, were not really valid—sure, there were special effects, but they were necessary for the plot) to their logical extremes. The truly frightening scenes in the original were not overdone. The first transformation of Jekyll into Hyde was accomplished by a simple injection, followed by a clever development of the lead actor's mannerisms, voice, etc. The voice got deeper, the music became more intense, and finally he was hunched over the table, hair everywhere, and the entire theater went silent except for the clock. Using his left hand to write in his journal (whereas before, Jekyll had been right handed), Hyde writes: "4:00, and all is well." Then, he exclaims: "Free" in a voice that was no longer human. That is how I remember it, as a man writhing onstage seemingly in agonizing pain, being overcome by his darker side. In the new production, Maroulis has a line of green test tubes which turn red one by one, he straps himself into a strange contraption that fills him with this strange fluid by his arm and by his head. It is absurd, and result: not in the least bit scary. Same with "Confrontation." While the original was as simple a staging as possible: one man, center stage, fighting with himself, turning rapidly from one character into another, a constant reminder to the audience that they are indeed two parts of one whole, the new one is nothing like that. Projected fire everywhere, a digital Hyde threatens Jekyll, who sits helplessly in his living room, surrounded by these graphics. 

And the worst part is, I honestly believe that Maroulis could have done it. When he wasn't trying desperately to give these songs new life—something that didn't need to be done—he portrayed an obsessive Jekyll, a tortured soul who just did not know where to draw the line. And he portrayed him well. On the other hand, Deborah Cox was a delight, and I'm not just saying that because she very rarely strayed from a more traditional interpretation of her show-stopping numbers. The only main character who really perfected her British accent (Maroulis should take some lessons from the American children in Matilda, all of whom never lose the accent for even a second, not even while they sing), Cox brought life to an otherwise dull and stereotypical character. Her extraordinarily versatile voice, while not a traditional one for Broadway, fit nicely with the numbers, and her musicality was phenomenal. I almost considered buying one of her CD's, but it really wasn't my style of music. 

Overall, what I learned from the experience was that Jekyll & Hyde can still captivate, even in this new form. I saw it with my friend Alexandra, who knew absolutely nothing of the show or the story going in, and who immediately bought the new cast recording in the train leaving NYC. She didn't know the original, so she didn't know what she was missing. But I guess that reaction is just indicative of something timeless and gripping that is buried deep in this extremely under-appreciated and often-poorly-done musical (think of the filmed version, which is a good two and a half hours of David Hasselhoff shaking like a scared puppy as he tries to sing with vibrato...while the only thing he really knew how to do was rip his shirt off). That something—whether it be the original Robert Louis Stevenson tale, the music which, no matter how much you hate Frank Wildhorn, is still quite lovely, or just the fluidity with which the tale is translated into a piece of theater—is still there in this new production, but you clearly can't be too critical if you want to find it.