Scott Brown — Theater Critic

The Scottsboro Boys isn't a precision-guided social endoscopy: It's a single, stunning blow to the temple. And on its own discomfiting, blunt-force terms, it's utterly successful.

Apart from Gaines, we're treated to two very famous voices, and very little else. John Lee Beatty's scenic design is a sepia box, a few sticks of furniture and a staircase: Video projections of historical moments through the decades fill the substantial void for anyone who might decide, mid-play, he'd rather be home, Netflix-ing the film version. And when the lights are at general-wash, the whole thing looks strangely scuffed and ugly, a cross between a half-vacated college dorm and one of the nicer basements from the Saw series. I felt like I was watching a hastily organized radio play, and half expected a station-break from the Guy's All-Star Shoe Band.

Lauria does little to scrape off the bronze and find the man inside. And why should he? Neither Simonson's script nor director Thomas Kail seems to be asking him to. Lauria's merely called upon to roar and rant and aphorize, and occasionally double over in pain, a nod to the colon cancer brewing in his gut. (Clutching a protuberant belly and vowing never to let some doctor put a scope 'up there': It's the male-melodrama equivalent of the tragic cough into the blood-speckled hankie.) Occasionally, Lauria prowls the outer boundaries of the man's son-of-immigrants insecurities, but there's precious little time for detail work between barking fits, and these declamations are clearly where he's put the bulk of his preparation.

With all due respect to his excellent co-stars, David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley, and the fine ensemble that embroiders the show's frilly edges, Rylance is clearly the show's raison d'être. His performance as the irresistibly loathsome street clown Valere - a lowbrow bête noire visited upon the tidy playwright Elomire (Pierce) - is the grand prize at the bottom of a box of confetti.

But then, who’d be suicidal enough to want to get between Stewart and an audience? No one gets at the tragic dignity of a powerful man in irresistible decline quite like Stewart (and here I direct your attention, without shame, not only to his work in Macbeth and The Ride Down Mount Morgan, but to his towering, tumbling, still-unequaled performance in the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation). “Sound!” he declares, triumphantly and foolishly, “The crown prince of phenomena!” Embarking on a long and ultimately nonsensical digression about how sounds and smells emanate from the innermost self, Stewart’s Robert witlessly reveals himself a gaseous and empty person, vulnerable to the slightest pinprick. But Stewart himself is a creature of such remarkable vitality, it’s a little hard to buy him as a guy at the end of his powers.

It’s the individual personalities who sparkle here, and make Pitmen more than just a good-hearted, Geordie-accented lecture series. Christopher Connel turns in a deceptively modest performance as Oliver Kilbourn, the group member most torn between life in the mine and the promise of weightlessness offered by the beckoning art world. David Whitaker, as dim, avid Jimmy, brings unexpected depths to a mostly comic role. (He’s tasked with the perhaps inevitable “Titian”/”Bless you” gag and reacts to modern art with the classic “How much did you pay for it?”)

When mother and daughter must ultimately test each other’s moral mettle, we find that these two are not only from different worlds but also from slightly different productions: Two vivid, idiosyncratic performances collide here, dampening each other into gray noise. Even as great geysers of Acting were expended, I can't say I felt a single human emotion roll over me, beyond a high indistinct agitation. Both look incredibly relieved when they get to turn away from each other and disappear into some vast Shavian speech. Yes, Kitty and Vivie are each other’s nemeses, but we should feel their kinship as much as their existential incongruity. That piquant dissonance never materializes. Lost in themselves, and mewed in by Pask’s maze, Jones and Hawkins never find each other, not even long enough to land a punch. Under the tears and the histrionics, they seem to mean nothing to each other. Thus, we’re treated to the tidy geometric outline of Shaw's social critique, but without the stochastic human fierceness of his dramatic art. And that feels like a bit of a hedge, doesn’t it?

When mother and daughter must ultimately test each other’s moral mettle, we find that these two are not only from different worlds but also from slightly different productions: Two vivid, idiosyncratic performances collide here, dampening each other into gray noise. Even as great geysers of Acting were expended, I can't say I felt a single human emotion roll over me, beyond a high indistinct agitation. Both look incredibly relieved when they get to turn away from each other and disappear into some vast Shavian speech. Yes, Kitty and Vivie are each other’s nemeses, but we should feel their kinship as much as their existential incongruity. That piquant dissonance never materializes. Lost in themselves, and mewed in by Pask’s maze, Jones and Hawkins never find each other, not even long enough to land a punch. Under the tears and the histrionics, they seem to mean nothing to each other. Thus, we’re treated to the tidy geometric outline of Shaw's social critique, but without the stochastic human fierceness of his dramatic art. And that feels like a bit of a hedge, doesn’t it?

To pin down precisely what Brief Encounter is (a para-cinematic mock-expressionistic play with music? A self-conscious post-Luhrmann meta-movie-musical onstage?) would quickly exhaust the Earth’s dwindling supply of hyphens. I’ll settle for “cabinet of wonders,” which seems to get at the false-bottomed delights of this sui generis theatrical event from director Emma Rice and her eager-to-please Kneehigh Theatre troupe. Ferried more or less intact across the East River from St. Ann’s Warehouse to Studio 54, Brief is built atop filmmaker David Lean’s dour postwar chiaroscuro of the same name, about an impossible affair carried on by two married, decent, highly un-Byronic souls. (The 1945 film was based on Noel Coward’s star-crossed stage melodrama Still Life, and Rice has restored some of Coward’s original dialogue.)

With those doleful eyes, that wide permafrost smile set at a perpetual three-minutes-to-irony, and a crinkly mezzo that slingshots from brassy to bruised, Sherie Rene Scott (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Aida) has steadily established herself as New York’s leading comic divette. Does that mean we care about her life? Scott, smartly, assumes we don’t. In Everyday Rapture, a self-deconstructing micro-revue tracing her transformation from Kansas Mennonite to “Broadway semi-star,” Scott uses the blimp-hangar that is the American Airlines Theatre as an echo chamber for her wit, backed by her “Mennonettes” and an eclectic set list that ranges from Judy Garland to Tom Waits to, yes, an erotic Mr. Rogers tribute medley. Tom Kitt’s typically brilliant arrangements are half the reason for showing up; the other half is Scott, whose lambent ease with the absurd (cleverly refined by director Michael Mayer and book co-writer Dick Scanlan) makes Everyday much more than just another maudlin auto-cabaret.

Unlike the company whose storied fall it chronicles, Enron clearly telegraphs its intention to defraud the consumer: 'When we tell you [this] story, you should know it could never be exactly what happened. But we're gonna put it together and sell it to you as the truth.' This proviso is delivered by a lawyer, who adds: 'I could tell you how the world works, but I don't have the time, and you don't have the money.' That gets broad laughs—and broad laughs are what's for sale here. Subtlety is not a commodity that Lucy Prebble's fast, flashy, feckless Epcot ride of a play is trading in: If twelve-gauge potshots at the likes of Schwarzenegger and Lehman Brothers are your taste, you won't be disappointed.

Davis, with every wary sidelong look, firm demurral, and careful burst of laughter, perfects and completes Washington’s already tremendous performance. Her approach to Rose turns the trope of the dutiful black mother on end, and suggests a world inside her domestic redoubt that even the play can only begin to imagine. Leon may have missed a few opportunities to coax a bit more vulnerability out of Washington; one climactic second-act scene in particular falls badly askew as a result, suggesting grotesque comedy where none is called for. But Davis finds a way to supply it on the side. It’s tremendous work from a rightly revered actress of uncommon subtlety. Playing wife to a god, of any size, is no small thing.

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.

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.)