“I have concepts of a plan” announced former and future president Donald Trump with a straight face as he discussed what might follow the Affordable Care Act at his one and only debate this summer. No laughing matter but the idea of “repeal and replace” has been part of our stages for years now, as the older guard and its fusty way of doing shows with things like, you know, sets and lighting gives way to younger talent with “concepts of a plan” to revitalize warhorse properties. Thus, with mixed success, a bloodstained Oklahoma!, or an all-femme 1776, or any number of shows given weird, spartan, or weirdly spartan productions. Let’s see what the kids are up to this fall.
At the St. James, Sunset Blvd., Billy Wilder noir by way of Andrew Lloyd Webber musical kitsch, has been vandalized by director Ivo van Hove…sorry, scratch that, director Jamie Lloyd. But his work is indistinguishable from the Belgian bulldozer, who for a quarter-century in New York has been smashing his way through the likes of The Misanthrope, West Side Story, A View from the Bridge, etc. If you’ve seen, say, his stage adaptation of the film Network, you’ve seen the lot of them–the minimal-to-the-max concepts include lots of video, and typically a live outdoor segment; a sterile production light on set; near-darkness; blood. I think Lloyd adds one chair to his van Hovesque staging of Sunset Blvd., bringing the total to two onstage. The famous old car that rumbled across the Glenn Close productions of the show? Garaged.
So, fine. Take it all away, bring it down to next to nothing. What do we get in return? What’s the plan? Well, the opening and closing credits on the outsized video walls are a nice touch, but just about the only “movie” thing about the show, which is otherwise consumed by celebrity as images are mirrored and reflected. And devoured by its star, Pussycat Doll-turned-ALW muse Nicole Scherzinger, as silent film queen Norma Desmond, forever unhinged in search of her comeback in the sound era. Rail thin and as slinkily costumed as Vampira the former pussycat is more feral cat at the St. James, as if landed on Earth to begin Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s a completely Martian performance, with some of the oddest, campiest diction choices ever, endlessly stringing out the line “I’m…the…greatest star of…all!” to audience laughter. The supposed compensation is that, isolated in pools of light, the pop star sings the hell out of the standards “With One Look,” “As if We Never Said Goodbye,” and “New Ways to Dream” to lusty applause and standing O’s. But the musical, somewhat frail to begin with in its 30th anniversary year, is ravaged (there’s not much else to it besides that diva turn and the frantic Shubert Alley video sequence that opens the second act) and if you know little about the material you’ll be lost for a good long stretch, as hot chorus guys and dolls do not an actual supporting cast of agents, managers, and other Hollywood hangers-on make. It’s a vacuum of a revival, running near-empty on concepts that are as antique as Norma’s car now.
I wasn’t keen on director Sam Gold’s revival of An Enemy of the People last season, the one with the onstage bar. I kind of knew then what to expect from his Romeo + Juliet, at the same venue, Circle in the Square. Shakespeare classics are like taffy pulls, able to withstand lots of stretching, and this owes something to the loose Delacorte summer stagings in Central Park and Baz Luhrmann’s hit 1996 film. It skews Gen Z/millennial, with a young, aggressive, hiply costumed cast sporting Hello Kitty backpacks and dancing about a stage lit like a Cirque du Soleil rave. As you can see teddy bears in a shopping cart are carted around, and the first act tends toward the antic, with the Juliet of Rachel Zegler (the Maria from Steven Spielberg’s excellent redo of the R + J musical knockoff West Side Story) strutting like a pop princess and singing songs contributed by Jack Antonoff. She’s fine but Kit Connor, British star of the streaming sensation Heartstopper, is entirely at ease with the language and makes a dashing Romeo, so much so that at one point an audience member took a photo of him shirtless (not cool as the flash went off but this is what social media has wrought).
Gold seems to put everyone in the cast up on catwalks as the show progresses and unveils a large, and literal, flower bed for R + J to cuddle in. Its “violent delights” are very energetic but the second act is obliged to grim up, and the spatial dynamics of the final tragedy are confused in the absence of a set. (A performance of “We Are Young” breaks the mood, too, as the colorful lighting fades.) Something more straightforward would have hit the emotional bullseye but what can I say, my 16-year-old daughter (a fan of the old school 1968 movie) enjoyed it and Connor is a real one up there, as the kids say. Perhaps see a weekend matinee of this then hit the spoofy & Juliet in the evening for a double feature.
I’m privileged to see so much theater. But you can’t see everything, and I’ve missed my share of award winners over the years. The only show I truly regretted not seeing, Gatz, is back at the Public for what’s touted as its final NYC engagement, after drawing almost cult-like crowds in 2010 and 2012, when I was on kid duty. At last I took my seat and for eight (!) hours was borne ceaselessly into the past for Elevator Repair Service’s one-of-a-kind adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic, which celebrates its 100th year of publication in 2025.
Gatz, as you may recall from your college syllabus or the film and TV versions derived from the novel, is the actual name of Jay Gatsby, American lit’s premiere self-made-up man. This is a humble Gatz of a show, quite unlike the lavish musical playing on Broadway, which is little more than a few dazzling moments ready for TikTok. The concept is that an office drone (Scott Shepherd, extraordinary) stuck in a dreary, wood-paneled, 9-5 prison picks up the book and begins reading aloud. Amidst the DOS computers and non-functioning fax machine he becomes the first-person narrator Nick Carraway, and for about 40 or so minutes we hear from nobody but him as he goes about his routines. Gradually his fellow workers (superbly played) become the characters in the novel, spouting dialogue but never fully leaving behind their plebeian selves. (There is no interaction or interchange beyond what Fitzgerald devised.) Incidents like rowdy parties are dramatized in unexpected and humorous ways–indeed, much of the show is funny, something I hadn’t expected. (Fitzgerald is amusing, intentionally and sometimes quizzically, which Shepherd gently mocks with a raised eyebrow.) The plan is to bring us closer to the text, and by the last of the four acts we are fully immersed, without ever leaving the confines of that modest, mildewed space.
Whenever a performance exceeds, say, three hours, time itself becomes a subject. It certainly is in the book; watching it read and enacted reminds us that much more of it is spent on Carraway’s solipsistic memories of Gatsby, a figure by turns larger and smaller than life, than it is on the thwarted, and almost childlike, romance of Gatsby and Daisy, which takes center stage in more conventional retellings. I found the entire experience exhilarating after an otherwise exhausting week–Obamacare for the soul and something to look back upon fondly in the time to come. For once the concepts formed a plan that worked.
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