Scott Brown

It’s a self-described “rock opera” set in a self-created “Recent Past,” and it purports to evoke, with a single tear and a power chord, the confusing days of the terror-stricken early 21st century, when we yo-yoed from cowed powerlessness to inchoate fury. Well, confusing and inchoate this show most definitely is: Its version of youthful anomie is so far off the mark, and such a muddled conflation of vague Gen-X nostalgia and generic rebellion sample tracks, that the effect is almost comical. But mostly just irritating.

Hodge adds something new: a touch of sputtering rage that's neither heroic nor pathetic. Too agitated to hold stage center, he jerks himself around, looking for release, but finding only an audience. And for once, the performer delivering this fight-song doesn't seem to assume his listeners share his feelings or his fight. For all the spittle and vibrato on display, Hodge's number feels strangely like a private moment. This Albin is not articulating a credo. He's simply furious.

Every moment is a furious fight for life, an act of flop-sweat corpse puppetry worthy of Weekend at Bernie’s. Practically from the moment the curtain parts—courtesy Thing, the bodiless hand—you detect the grim, gray whiff of obligation. The Addams Family, like so many large-scale theatrical entertainments today, feels every inch a Musicalized Property. (To call it a “musical” suggests more joie de mort than the show can muster.) It’s a Broadway spectacular only because it must be, not because any of its creators felt particularly inspired. Alas, one can put the defibrillator paddles to a dead body only so many times before it starts to smoke, and long before the night is over, the air in the Lunt-Fontanne is a gritty haze of unrequited effort. “When you’re an Addams,” the ensemble sings (in an instructive, repetitive, highly unpromising opening number), “you’re happy when your toes are in the mud/You smile a bit the moment you smell blood.” Poe, this ain’t. But hey, it could be worse, considering the soupy lyrical terrain on which Andrew Lippa insists on building his flimsy, prefab songs.

In A Behanding in Spokane, Martin McDonagh’s latest and lightest abattoir food fight, Christopher Walken is very much himself—which is to say, he’s reliably Walkenesque, a walking Walken impression far superior to the kind your stupid friends do at parties. Playing a vengeful psycho in search of his severed left hand (did I really need to tell you Walken plays a vengeful psycho?), he remains that familiar symphony of jigs and twitches we’ve come to love, burning holes in the fourth wall with anthracite eyes that seem terrifyingly lidless, until he winks. And wink he does, more than once, at his oft-bewildered co-stars—Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan as two young hustlers who disastrously attempt to sell him another man’s hand, and Sam Rockwell as Mervyn, the distractible sad-sack hotel clerk who admires him—and, by extension, at us. Watching Walken/Carmichael savor his own cigarette smoke, and his own travel-worn oddness, is like walking in on something autoerotic, then staying to watch. Which we can’t help doing, even if we sense a certain flogging futility in the proceedings. Walken is a little too perfectly matched with McDonagh (The Pillowman, The Lieutenant of Inishmore). They’re two tic-ish synthesists for whom quirk can quickly become an end in itself.

Half-light can be forgiving—to the aging, to the vain, to the furtive philanderer—but in Trevor Nunn’s stunning, twilit, devastatingly good new production of A Little Night Music, it’s as punishing as the equatorial sun. Even at intermission, Nunn withholds full illumination, dimming the house lights to a low smolder. He’s clearly trying to induce an exquisitely heartbreaking case of seasonal affective disorder in his audience, and, fiendishly, he succeeds. “Perpetual sunset,” the chorus sings, “is rather an unsettling thing.” So is this beautiful re-Bergmanized revival of Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim’s elegiac sex farce (based on Smiles of a Summer Night), with its restored Nordic tilt, its bracing draughts of carnal realpolitik, and its ghostly blue ache of some-requited love. “It’s the latitude,” says the jaded ex-jade Madame Armfeldt (Angela Lansbury), explaining the madness of Scandinavians to her granddaughter (Keaton Whittaker). “A winter when the sun never rises, a summer when the sun never sets, are more than enough to addle the brain of any man.”

But it might as well have been called Language, which, in Mametland, is all that exists. (When the client worries that a particularly damning quote will be “taken out of context,” Lawson replies dryly, “Well, that is the definition of a quote.”) Characters? Not so much. Lawson (ably embodied by Spader, with only a soupçon of Boston Legal’s Alan Shore) is the only somewhat human entity onstage—Brown is little more than a gadfly/wingman/janitor, and Susan is, well, “fragile,” and therefore treacherous. Sex, race, loyalty, betrayal—it’s all just lecture Legos for Mamet. He makes the ineffable all too effable, and eff you if you can’t take it.

Although Memphis is a mock-up of a phony, it does intend to convey a serious message: Rock and roll, it seems, was not invented by white people! Of course, this being Broadway, a white guy is still the star: Chad Kimball plays Huey Calhoun, a stand-in for real-life Memphis D.J. Dewey Phillips, the motor-mouthed firebrand who was among the first to play R&B “race records” for white audiences and famously gave Elvis his radio debut. Unlike Dewey, Huey doesn’t put Elvis on the air—indeed, he seems to exist in an Elvis-less Memphis, where white people sing and dance about only one subject: the inability of white people to sing and dance. It’s just as well: No ersatz Broadway Elvis would fit onstage with Kimball. With his 78 rpm delivery and quicksilver tenor, he’s a perfectly contoured stone skipped briskly across the show’s sluggish surface. He sells a passable eleven o’clock number, “Memphis Lives in Me,” as an aching, ringing heartland anthem.

So why does God of Carnage, for all its witty anarchy and farcical cheek, feel a little flabby in the gut, a little punch-drunk and glass-jawed—and, even at 85 minutes, a little padded Maybe because it’s all too easy. This fight feels fixed: the punches telegraphed, the reversals rehearsed. The cozy bassinet of gentrified Brooklyn (where child-rearing is art form, fashion statement, and blood sport, all in one) is about as big a bull’s-eye as the boulevard affords. (Reza’s longtime translator, Christopher Hampton, has repatriated the story from a tony Paris arrondissement to Cobble Hill.)