Hilton Als

During the intermission, I found myself wondering how Daly and her excellent director, Stephen Wadsworth, would keep all this intellectual and emotional splendor aloft. Though they’d captured my heart with the first half, there was the worry that exhaustion or lack of imagination would cause the acting or the directing to topple ... What Daly understands about her role as Maria Callas is that Callas can’t put herself on: she doesn’t distinguish between her life and her performance. Her life is a career, and her career is her life—a fact that becomes even clearer in the second act, when she must deal with a strong-willed diva-in-training, Sharon Graham (the appropriately haughty Sierra Boggess).

Like 'Gone with the Wind,' 'War Horse' (a National Theatre of Great Britain and Lincoln Center co-production, at the Vivian Beaumont) is virtually critic-proof. The show—an epic tale of a boy and his horse, based on Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s book, and performed by humans and puppets—is beyond dramaturgy, and it’s too big and emotional for anything as small as opinion. It’s a force of nature, or, more accurately, a show about the nature of man, which the co-directors, Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, shape with the utmost control and artistry. Everything about it works, especially the animals—horses, birds, even a goose—which were created by the Handspring Puppet Company. (Actors manipulate the puppets to convey the animals’ souls.) In a way, the ambitious choreography of the piece—there are thirty-five actors in the cast—makes “War Horse” as much a dance work as a theatre piece. I don’t know who wins here, Thespis or Terpsichore, but why choose?

The original production was all brassy orchestration, sparkly costumes, and shallow characterizations. As I remember it, the director of that staging, Arthur Laurents, tipped it in the direction of the Dindons—the thrust of the show was Georges and Albin’s need for the Dindons’ approval, and hence the straight world drove the events onstage. Johnson goes a different route; he focusses, instead, on the heart of the material—whether Georges and Albin’s relationship will survive the emotional and political rupture that their son has instigated. Like John Doyle, in his direction of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” a few years ago, Johnson strips the Broadway from “La Cage aux Folles” and gives the text, and the actors, a new dimension. His production is not the heterosexual’s fantasia of gay life; it’s something real, felt, and deep.

Will someone who’s associated with “Hair” (in revival at the Al Hirschfeld, under the direction of Diane Paulus) do the production a favor and turn the shit down? Let’s start with the sound design. As conceived by Acme Sound Partners, the show’s big crossover hits—“Aquarius,” “I Got Life,” “Good Morning Starshine,” and so on—still sound like themselves, melodically speaking, but the lyrics, not to mention the actors’ intonations as they sing sweetly of new beginnings, eternal hope, and the earth’s bounty, are overwhelmed by an ear-piercing treble, which not only raises the majority of the vocals to a pitch that bats might recognize but lifts the brass section of the onstage band into a series of sensation-numbing crescendos.

Much like “West Side Story,” the musical purports to be about young heterosexual lovers, but its most dramatically fulfilling relationships are between men. Single and vaguely sleepy and hyperkinetic all at once, Usnavi can’t seem to connect with women, unlike his best friend, the infinitely more manly Benny (Christopher Jackson). The woman Benny loves is named Nina (Mandy Gonzales); her parents run the gypsy cab company where Benny works as a driver. The play is heavy with plot, but one quickly tunes out the mechanics of it for the charms of watching Usnavi hang with Benny in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes (who wrote the book) have rendered a simple and not at all offensive world, and brought little that is new to the familiar Broadway spectacle of earnest, smiling immigrants singing and dancing for our delectation.