Before Sunday’s awards, we take a look at the hottest hits on Broadway
LOVE & MURDER, MOTHERS & SONS | The musical ‘A Gentleman’s Guide,’ above, is filled with catchy songs and star-making turns, while Terrence McNally’s gay drama ‘Mothers and Sons,’ below, delves into more serious issues. (Photo courtesy Joan Marcus)
CLINT HASSELL | Contributing Writer
andrewguy@aol.com
The Tony Awards are Sunday, and that means a host of new plays and musicals will be enshrined in the gay collective consciousness for all time. But as of now, chances are you haven’t seen most of them.
We can help with that. Here are our reviews of some of the new hottest tickets right now. Expect to see some of them on the podium Sunday night.
In the musical Bullets Over Broadway — book by Woody Allen, based on his 1994 film — a playwright (Zach Braff) secures financing for his latest play from a wealthy gangster (Vincent Pastore) on the condition that he cast the gangster’s talentless girlfriend (Helene Yorke). When the girlfriend’s bodyguard (Nick Cordero) begins making terrific suggestions for improving the play’s script, the playwright must decide if he is willing to compromise his artistic vision in order to secure rave reviews and financial stability.
Bullets has incited the ire of Broadways purists for not containing an original score (it’s set in 1929 and uses standards of the era a la 42nd Street), the musical numbers are incorporated well into the show with only the finale, “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” being too familiar to feel organic.
Braff (of Scrubs fame) can sing and dance, as can Cordero. But the real star is Yorke, who manages to walk the fine line between annoyingly dim-witted and plucky and adorable. Her bawdy, double entendre-laden “I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll” provides the show’s most entertaining moments.
For a tuneful musical, Bullets’ book offers incredible depth. A philosophical question, “Is one person’s life more or less important than the entirety of Shakespeare’s plays?” reenters the narrative in the second act in such a poignant, unexpected way that the audience literally gasped. And brave is a show that dares to murder a main character.
Does Bullets Over Broadway deserve the Tony for best musical? With too many extraneous characters having little to do, and an ending that’s too tidy (in three lines of dialogue, characters that have been unfaithful to one another realize that they were meant for each other), no. But it is a show you can enjoy seeing over and over.
In Terrence McNally’s Mothers and Sons, a woman (Tyne Daly), who lost her son to AIDS 20 years earlier surprises his former lover with a visit. She has followed his life over the past two decades, hoping that he has suffered as much as she. But he hasn’t seemed to — he’s married to a younger man, and the couple has a child.
Mothers is more similar in tone to McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! than to his musicals (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Ragtime, Catch Me If You Can). Relatively thin on plot, it serves more as a vehicle for characters to debate topics both serious (the effect of AIDS on the gay community, gay parents) and offbeat (gay funeral etiquette, the social hierarchy in Dallas). Despite heavy subject matter, it show does entertain. The backstory of the characters is revealed masterfully through mostly polite/sometimes strained conversation.
The show’s one misstep is in its grasp of the characters’ motivations. Does the mother blame her son’s ex-lover, or is she seeking reconciliation? Does he respect or condemn her? It’s difficult to discern, as the dialogue takes the characters’ emotional arc through several unexplained hairpin turns.
Mothers and Sons has been nominated for two awards (best play and actress in a play) and both are deserved. It’s the kind of show Uptown Players will eventually jump to produce, and with the right leading lady, could do McNally as proud as Broadway has.
In A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, a commoner (Bryce Pinkham) discovers that he is actually a member of an aristocratic family, and ninth in line to inherit an earldom. Torn between his love for two women — both above his station), he decides to engineer the deaths of the eight heirs that precede him. The trick of the show? All eight heirs — including a reverend, a gay beekeeper, a theater diva, a socialite, a fatherly banker and a pompous adventurer — are played by the same actor (Jefferson Mays).
Guide is a fairly predictable lark. Even those who haven’t seen Kind Hearts and Coronets (the 1949 film similarly adapted from Guide’s source material) will be able to foretell the plot twists. (That being said, stay for the added scene after the curtain call, which both pays off a hilarious joke established early in the first act and dispenses entirely with the film’s inconclusive ending.) The show is a fun mélange of double entendre, energetic farce, physical comedy and knowing winks to the audience. Expect to hear the whimsical “Better With a Man” at Broadway Our Way next year.
While Mays has the flashier role, the true star is Pinkham. Mays’ heirs are so flatly satirical that they are barely distinguishable from one another, and the majority of his characters are barely cameos being killed off in hilariously morbid ways. Pinkham takes the stage for virtually the entire show, which is guided by his breathless narration and boundless energy.
Guide’s set is fantastic — the stage-within-a-stage design allowed a curtain to be lowered and the set to change without interrupting the action — and should translate well to a touring production.
A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder at the Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St. AGentlemansGuideBroadway.com.
Bullets Over Broadway at the St. James Theatre, 246 W. 44th St.
BulletsOverBroadway.com.
Mothers and Sons at the John Golden Theatre, 253 W. 45th St. MothersAndSonsOnBroadway.com.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition June 6, 2014.
