I caught Next To Normal on Broadway last weekend, and among the things that amazed me about this exciting new musical, was how much the show has improved since it was mounted off-Broadway at Second Stage last year. The creators have tightened and thematically focused the show, and eliminated only the things that did not work. The mixed-tone and somewhat silly moments that were in the show's off-Broadway stint have been eliminated, leaving an intensely moving work that is the most emotionally rich Broadway musical since "LightIn The Piazza." Next To Normal is, by far, the best musical of the 2008-09 Broadway season, anchored by amazing performances by Alice Ripley and Aaron Tveit. Ripley will almost surely win the Best Actress in a Musical Tony, and Tveit should have won the Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. Just one problem - he was not even nominated. By far the biggest slight of the Tony nominations, I cannot fathom how his incredible Broadway debut was passed over in favor of five other, less than stellar and far inferior, performances.
I also loved all three plays that make up The Norman Conquests trilogy, which I caught in a three-play-in-a-day "marathon" last Saturday. I had feared that the show might be getting unjustifiable great reviews, but this production deserves all of the praise that has been heaped upon it by both the London and New York critics. The shows are funny, extremely witty and emotionally genuine. The acting ensemble is simply priceless, although I cannot avoid singling out Amanda Root's particularly brilliant performace. Director Matthew Warchus, who earlier worked his comic magic on a rather limited God of Carnage script, proves with "Norman" that he is the best comedic director working in English language theater today.
Speaking of undeserved critical praise, the lackluster and uneven Broadway revival of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come And Gone was a major disappointment for me. While this revival is graced with one excellent performance (by Roger Robinson) the rest of the acting is either mediocre or downright bad. "Joe Turner" may be my favorite Wilson play, so this production was especially problematic for me. Director Bartlett Sher's otherworldly take on the material, which is beautifully staged from a technical perspective, is just plain wrong for this material. This production was woefully inferior to the small scale "Joe Turner" that was mounted by LA's excellent Fountain Theater a few years back.
There is not much good that can be said about Craig Lucas's The Singing Forest , whose closing performance at the Public I caught a week ago. I was impressed by this play at a reading I saw a few years ago at South Coast Rep, although I recognized that a full staging would be difficult to pull off. While I still feel that some of Lucas' writing here is very good, at least as staged at the Public, this play is an unworkable mess.
There is more excellent theater playing in New York right now than in any year in recent memory. Do yourself a favor- go to New York and patronize sample some of this outstanding work. Combining my various recent NY posts, here in order of preference are the shows now playing in New York that I would recommend: Next To Normal, The Norman Conquests, Our Town, Ruined, Mary Stuart, and reasons to be pretty.
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