BROKENNESS, BRAVADO, AND HOW ARTISTS MUST BRAVE THEIR OWN AUDIENCES

SOME THOUGHTS ON ATTENDING THE THEATRE AND BALLET IN NEW YORK

(Above: Gillian Murphy and Thomas Forster in American Ballet Theatre’s Giselle at The Metropolitan Opera. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor.)

On Sunday I attended the final performance of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance at Signature Theatre directed by Eric Ting with a remarkable cast that was giving one of the greatest ensemble performances I have ever seen which either went past acting or stopped just short of it - not sure which - since it was so behaviorally anchored incongruously in the stillness of transcendence even in the chaos of emotions and kinetic energy that filled the little front porch and its stoop on the stage as a group of friends from high school readied themselves for their 20th class reunion even as they realized they still had not readied themselves for life without knowing that we all, in not doing so in our knotted ways, ready ourselves for the end of it. I was reminded of Salman Rushdie’s line from Midnight’s Children: “We all owe death a life.” But owing and paying up are two different things. Culture for me - and theatre specifically - is a way of honoring the profundity of each, a way of paying up by paying witness to the denial of death by artistically honing a heightened way to honor life and yet, in some way, the more transcendent the theatrical experience the more deeply I sense a kind of death at the curtain. (“Curtains” has even become tough-guy lingo for the death of something.) There is an exhilarated sense of sadness at the end of a great piece of theatre, which I feel even more so at its final performance. I find it both healing and yet as if something embedded in humanity but not human in its source has been halted before I could be fully healed by it. Maybe that is why I keep going back and sitting in audiences. I keep haltingly trying to heal.

I really did go back to see The Comeuppance because the first time I went to see it an actor in that ensemble in his character’s fit of fury within that transcendence broke the door leading into the house from the set’s porch and the play had to halt before it was ready to do so. The performance then was cancelled - it was about an hour into it - because the brokenness could not be fixed. We were all offered tickets to a later performance and, as I walked around midtown later contemplating the oddity of the occurrence, I more deeply focused on my own brokenness - emotionally and spiritually - and how it had manifested itself in my breaking my shoulder in Paris on April 30th, and then thought about my surgery in Santa Fe to fix it on May 16th and how now in these still early weeks of healing afterward I am still trying to feel fixed. It has all been shot through with a new kind of pain for me, constantly embedded in my human body not just burrowed into my soul which causes the belief, burrowed beneath the burrowing, that I even have one.

I flew back to New York the first week of May after breaking my shoulder - it became the crucible that I folded into this spiritual and cultural pilgrimage I have written about here in this column, a pilgrimage that is a furtherance of my life already lived in recovery - and sat in audiences with my brokenness embedded in me in a new way as I saw Parade and Kimberly Akimbo and Some Like it Hot and a program of new dances at New York City Ballet. Although I have in the past appreciated and loved the work of the artists who created Some Like It Hot, I ultimately found it manically mediocre. It wasn’t bad. It just seemed to be willing itself to be better - which was what I was doing sitting there trying to like it more than I did. Parade and Kimberly, on the other hand, had musical ensembles as good at the dramatic one which gave life to Jacobs-Jenkins’s characters, and both productions richly deserved their Tony awards, especially director Michael Arden who reimagined Parade as a march from its time into ours no matter that, in doing so, it might step on the toes of some of the tourists in its audiences. Parade was rousing in its tragic indictment of society whereas Kimberly Akimbo was rueful in its acceptance of a society more private and personal in its slights and its own tragic outcome. Parade was purposeful in its sense of rectitude and how discomfortingly wrong the right is still in this country. Akimbo was purposeful in its rather wrecked sense of joy where right and wrong hold hands and give each other comfort.

As I continued on my walk around midtown, I sensed my physical brokenness and my emotional one holding hands themselves and my wrecked body seeking its soul to believe in; a theatre experience, halted because of its broken set as it was honing in on its broken characters, had even given me that too to experience. Here are some other things I’ve thought about and experienced - honed in on - after my surgery and returning to the theatre with a new sense of recovery and the realization that applauding others - the simple act now of clapping my hands again - is a signal too that, however haltingly, I am healing.

(Above: Alex Newell who won a Tony for their role in Shucked. Photo by Emilio Madrid)

(1) THE THRILL OF THE THROATY TRILL

Alex Newell and Lea Michele appeared with each other playing ambitious teenagers with a theatrical bent on the television series Glee and now as mature artists have become reigning Broadway divas, each with a singular bravado that, like all such divas, offer us their own catharsis as they, conduits for the gift of such outsize talents, allow us to borrow it in their performative presence as if it were our own. Sounds like a religious narrative more than a show-biz one, and diva-worship is indeed seeded with this seam of religiosity that lends the term an even deeper explanatory meaning. Gleeful? Ravenous is more like it. We share their gluttony for their own bountiful gifts and become gluttons with them. To experience them is that hoary repast, a feast for the senses, yet as newfangled as it is old-fashioned - another anchoring incongruity, a re-past, as it were (and is) - in the way each of these artists fits into the cultural heritage of homosexuals seeking the outside catharses of oversize singing talents that swing with a feminine swagger.

Other than the serene Victoria Clark, who won the Tony for her role in Kimberly Akimbo and who is more generous siren than self-generating diva, a Cassandra for our own catharses instead of for her own, Michele in Funny Girl and Newell in Shucked, are giving the two greatest musical performances on the Broadway stage at the moment. Shucked is a woke Hee Haw - let’s call it a He/She/They Haw - and Newell certainly wakes us up with their ballad of self-reliance. In a previous column I interviewed Suzy Eddie Izzard and asked her if she would consider playing Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? and she said she has decided to play only cis men and transgender women. I hope Newell does not follow her lead and some producer with a bravado all his or her or their own cast them as Effie in Dreamgirls. They would make theatre history in that role. After her critical and commercial triumph as Fanny Brice, Michele can name her ticket on Broadway and it is rumored that she might be in either of the upcoming productions of Chess or Cabaret. After seeing her in the role of Fanny, I think she can do no wrong on the musical stage. But I hope she makes the right decision.

(2) NEW YORK, NEW YORK IS BETTER, BETTER THAN I WAS LED TO BELIEVE (AND SO WAS THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW) ]

I saw Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, beautifully directed by Anne Kauffman, during its last week on Broadway and my first week back in NYC. I was swept away by Hansberry's brilliance during the first act and the first scene of the second before I longed for her to have had more time to work on the final scenes that her dying from cancer at the age of 34 precluded her from really doing. Her death is one of the great losses of the American theatre and for the first time I realized the dramatic arc from her work to that of Tony Kushner's. As I watched this production overwhelmed by her talent and passion and wit and empathy and anger and erudition, I realized that her spirit lives on in him; she is the sign in Tony Kushner’s window.

(Above: Colton Ryan photographed by Matthew Priestley for Schön magazine.)

If the Hansberry play is about a specific time in downtown New York - the early 1960s - with a specificity of the societal and political battles being waged personally and publicly, the musical New York, New York, set as well in the even more specific years of 1946 and 1947, is timeless in its concerns which, like the city itself, is a cacophony of cultures and hopes and ethnicities. It was criticized for its being too much of an amalgam with too many narrative threads with some of its Kander and Ebb (and Miranda) songs too shoehorned into the evening. But once shoehorned in, the production stretches its choreographed feet, which have been done so by director Susan Stroman, to fit the musical numbers. I did turn to a friend at one point during the show and appreciatively whispered, “This is deeply weird.” But, come on. New York is, too. The creators captured how at the heart of this city the deeply weird find each other as well as a home to feel deeply less so. This musical is almost avant-garde in its turning the precepts of Broadway productions on their wigged heads; it’s head-spinning in audaciously daring to do so. Nothing proves this more than the brilliance of Beowulf Boritt’s sets, which also won a Tony. We think we are seeing a normal Broadway production. But because it is about a town where those who have never felt normal feel at home, what we are seeing instead is maybe the most experimental take on the Broadway musical I’ve seen in a while.

Stroman (who’s never met a prop she couldn’t cleverly employ) doesn’t rely on that crutch here that can ironically cripple her more innate talent as a director. Anyone who can elicit the most idiosyncratic performance I have ever seen from a leading man in a musical - or stand back and give him rein instead of reining him in - receives, well, props from me since Colton Ryan is either giving the worst performance I’ve seen in a musical in a long time or the best. I came down on the side of the best. He is an amalgam of Jimmy Cagney and Imelda Staunton. His rendition of “A Quiet Thing,” a Kander and Ebb song from Flora the Red Menace shoehorned into New York, New York’s second act, is at first shockingly inappropriate and then, shorn of all pretense before Ryan preeningly pronounces a final “Quiiiiii -ye-aaaah- Ta …Theeeeeennnn ….gah…..” oddly, yes, deeply , weirdly moving. He had me in tears.

When Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York came out in 1977 it too was misunderstood as a mess when being a mess of marvelous POVs was, well, the point. I’m from Mississippi. When you say to someone, “You’re a mess,” you are giving them a compliment because there is no way to describe the amalgam of them that goes into their being so marvelous. Roger Ebert: “Scorsese's New York, New York never pulls itself together into a coherent whole, but if we forgive the movie its confusions we're left with a good time.” I was left with more than a good time at the Broadway musical New York, New York. I was left with a sense of forgiveness for that deeply weird 19-year-old kid from Mississippi who moved to this city and who thought he had to be forgiven for his weirdness. Sometimes we seek the wrong kinds of forgiveness. Forgive yourself for seeking it. Here’s to you, New York, New York.

(Above: Doug Wright and Sean Hayes in Chicago where Good Night, Oscar premiered at the Goodman Theatre before moving to Broadway. Photo by Anthony Vazquez for the Chicago Sun-Times.)

(3). SEAN HAYES IS AS GREAT AS I WAS LED TO BELIEVE IN GOOD NIGHT, OSCAR

One of the most deeply weird cultural phenomenon in America was the celebrity and popularity of Oscar Levant, a mordant wit and talented composer and pianist who during the years in which New York, New York took place in the 1940s was the highest paid concert pianist in America. He was also a drug addict - pharmaceuticals were his downfall - who suffered from mental illness, both these aspects of his life becoming discomfiting facets of his celebrity until it could feel at times as if here were a Rodeo Drive clown caught in the horns of his addictive dilemmas. Even writing a play about him must have been met with reactions from producers thinking it was a deeply weird idea, but Doug Wright, a writer who can take the deeply weird and work his narrative magic to make the public both fascinated and empathetic with what they would not think themselves capable of caring about, has fashioned a play filled with heart and wisdom to showcase Sean Hayes’s star turn at its center. It is more than an impersonation. At first it feels like a visitation - all tics and shakes and droopy eyes shifting into shiftiness - but then Hayes limns the liminal with a life force all his own, as all great actors do, and ultimately with his own expertise as a pianist as well which very few of them can. He won a Tony for playing an Oscar - as Levant might have said. He captured all the colors and hues of the man. It is both devastating and astonishing in equal measure. And it is Broadway at its best.

I ran into Wright at the Belasco Theatre where Good Night, Oscar is playing the night I saw the production . He told me he had written the role for Hayes when I wondered aloud who could play the role if it ever toured since Hayes’s tour-de-force performance of “Rhapsody in Blue” at the climax of the play is so integral to the theatrical experience. I guess an actor could fake the playing of it to a recording but it would not be the same experience for the audience. Levant was a brilliant one-off. Perhaps Hayes’s portrayal of him in this play as well as the play itself written to showcase his singular double talents as an actor and pianist are one-offs themselves. Now that would be deeply weird.

(Above: The last photograph taken of Oscar Levant - the day before he died - by Candice Bergen, then a photojournalist, who was doing a story on him for Esquire. In the story she filed, “Good Night, Oscar Levant,” she wrote about having spotted him at a luncheon that the Walter Matthaus gave for the Charlie Chaplins in April, 1972. “The weather was sublime,” she wrote. “The kind of the day that strangled you with the joy of living …Sulking in the shadows, a spectral silhouette, loomed the face that launched a thousand analysts. Was I seeing a ghost? I thought Oscar Levant had been dead for years. … His feet sat passively in slender, shining wing tips reviewing the passing parade of patent leather boots and white Gucci loafers. It was as if he were a British colonialist struggling to be maintain civility amidst savages. ‘Oscar Levant’ - the name was a household word like ‘polio’ or ‘anemia;’ a name synonymous with merciless humor, hypochondria, insomnia, insanity, George Gershwin, and chain smoking. He was a brilliant, sickly legend - terrified of living and petrified of dying.” )

(4)) ENTHUSIASM IS NOT RESPECT

To circle back for a moment to the overly gleeful audiences at Funny Girl and Shucked, I want to get something off my chest: one of my biggest pet peeves is sitting in an audience that won’t allow an artist to complete a song without interrupting him or her or them with whoops and applause so that you can’t even hear the notes it is whooping about. As Michele and Newell were ramping up to hit their hight notes in their shows, the audiences anticipated what they were about to hear and then could hear nothing but the sound of themselves.

The audiences are also clap-happy at American Ballet Theatre. The company is dancing beautifully this summer season at the Metropolitan Opera - even on that vast stage so uninviting to dance. Gillian Murphy and Thomas Forster in Giselle and Isabella Boylston and Daniel Camargo in Swan Lake were especially fine in the the two productions I saw. But the audiences treat it all as if they are at a sporting event and applaud their own thrills at witnessing exquisite toe work or leaps or spins - to use the civilian terms - so that there is applause at inappropriate times which interrupts an appreciation of the artistry that is about fluidity and completion of set pieces within a choreographed whole. Audiences at New York City Ballet and the Royal Ballet in London and the Paris Opera Ballet do not do this. Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon seemed to understand that problem in the way he staged his version of Like Water for Chocolate which opened the summer season for ABT. The work is so fluidly of one piece that the audience held almost all of its applause until the curtain. But they’ve been making up for it at the more classic ballets that have followed, clapping madly in the midst of ballets as if points were being scored instead of pointe work being artistically articulated to scores rising stirringly from the orchestra.

It’s like being at Wimbledon. But this is theatre and ballet not serve and volley.

(Above: Harper photographed by Alex Reside for GQ magazine.)

(5) WILLIAM JACKSON HARPER

I just wanted to write this actor’s name since he gave the best performance in a play I’ve seen in ages. Simple. Grace-filled. Soulful. No histrionics. There was a mystery to it for me even as he left me in sobs at the end. I won’t even go into it because in mentioning him and the performance I want to evoke the sense of mystery submerged in the sublimity of the simplicity he mined. William Jackson Harper. I will never forget the Sunday afternoon I spent with him as Kenneth in Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust directed by Knud Adams at the Roundabout Theatre.

(6) GLIBNESS CANNOT GLADDEN A HEART

I went to see the Brittany Spears musical Once Upon a One More Time with a glib chip on my shoulder. I certainly didn’t consider myself the audience for it. I don’t think I have ever purposefully listened to a song by her. But by the end of the show I was up cheering and dancing and felt a filling-up of an unexpected joy. Earlier in the week, I was visiting the Morris-Jumel Mansion uptown at 160th and Edgecomb and a young man offered to take my photo standing on the house’s steps between its giant columns. He was wearing a Brittany Spears t-shirt. I told him I had seen the show and asked if he had.

“Of course, I have,” he said.

I told him of my unexpected joy for having seen it myself. “They worked hard to give me that joy,” I said.

“Joy’s not work,” he said.

(7) ACT UP, FIGHT TEARS, FIGHT AIDS

I came back early to New York at the end of June to attend Larry Kramer’s memorial service at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street. The speakers included, among others, Tony Kushner and Anthony Fauci and George Wolfe and Calvin Trillin and three veteran members of ACT UP - Peter Staley, Ann Northrop, and Eric Sawyer. John Cameron Mitchell, who played the young Larry at the Lortel in Kramer’s The Destiny of Me, sang “Make Believe” from Show Boat by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein which was sung by his character in the play on that same stage. It was a perfect evening. Larry would have loved it. “I hope it moves,” I glibly said afterward. It was videoed and will be up on YouTube soon. So in a way, I guess it is.

Larry had initially titled the play The Furniture of Home, a phrase found in W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” the same poem from which he got the title for his The Normal Heart. I thought a lot about that when I was sitting there crying and laughing through the service that was a deeply, yes, cathartic experience. There was a different kind of diva-worship going on that evening and I realized that Larry - a great playwright who was a theatre queen aborning in The Destiny of Me - was our ur-diva, we gay theatre nerds, one who brought his sense of the theatrical and even his own brokenness to political activism. I wondered sitting there that night: Do we ever really heal? Or is sitting in a theatre even cathartically remembering this great man just a way of rearranging our brokenness the way the furniture is rearranged in the homes in which we grew up now embedded within us. I always thought New York would be mine in some way, my home. I didn’t run away from home in Mississippi at 19 to attend Juilliard’s Drama Division but instead more deeply finally ran toward a home: New York. Attending the the theatre and ballet here is certainly a rearrangement of the furniture within me in some way. But always feeling the need to heal - not being healed - is my truest home. Maybe it’s just the human condition. That is what death owes to life, that embedded need within us to arrive at death’s broken door on this nothing-but-a-set we call life which always halts before we think it is supposed to do so. Behind its brokenness is where healing finally lies. That is what we are all finally running more deeply toward.

Brokenness.

Healing.

Catharsis.

Theatre.

Ballet

Death-defying divas.

Life-affirming joy.

“Others find peace of mind in pretending,” John Cameron Mitchell sang with such beauty and hope and deeply wondrous weirdness though his tears and mine. “Couldn't you? Couldn't I? Couldn't we …”