Tom Stoppard

by Kirk Woodward

[On 22 October, I posted “Tom Stoppard & Leopoldstadt” on Rick On Theater.  It’s an assemblage of different pieces about the playwright, including a short biographical sketch.  As an introduction to the post, I gave a little background of my initiation to Stoppard’s work.  Here’s an edited version of that introduction:

[Tom Stoppard is one of my favorite playwrights; since I first encountered his work some fifty-odd years ago, I have reveled in his wordplay and his convoluted logic and intellectualism.  I first experienced Stoppard’s work while I was in the army and stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  I attended several plays at the five-year-old Actors Theatre of Louisville, just 45 minutes north of the army base.

[Louisville, as it happens, is the hometown of Kirk Woodward, my college classmate and the author of the report on Hermione Lee’s new biography of the dramatist.

[I saw three plays at ATL, the third of which knocked me out because I’d never before seen anything like it: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  The deconstruction of Hamlet, the verbal play, the twisty logic, the philosophical underpinning, the fundamental question of how we know what we (think we) know, all made my mind spin and my mouth gape.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern immediately became one of my top favorite plays. 

[I’ve seen many of Stoppard’s plays since then.  I did one of my first acting-class scenes from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  Later I played Moon in The Real Inspector Hound and I used a speech from Jumpers as an audition piece for a number of years.  I haven’t caught all of them, but many of the plays listed below have been part of my theater experience.]

Tom Stoppard: A Life. Lee, Hermione. 2022. Vintage Books, New York. 872 pp.

I saw the play Leopoldstadt on Broadway in New York City on December 1, 2022, and it has stuck in my mind ever since. I went to see it because a family friend, Brandon Uranowitz (b. 1986), a three-time nominee for the Tony Award, plays two prominent roles in the play. I was not disappointed; his performance is stunning.

But so is the entire play, and it has been on my mind ever since. In scope and in impact, it is powerful. It was written by Tom Stoppard (b. 1937). I have always thought of him as one of the younger generation of playwrights; it came as something of a shock to realize that he is now 85. Clearly I needed to learn more about him, so I bought Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee.

The most striking aspect of the book description above may be the 872 pages. If you’ve had an ambition to meet Tom Stoppard, you might want to read this book instead. It would take you about as long as it would to fly to England, and by the end of the book you’d feel you’d known him personally.

Hermione Lee (b. 1948), noted for biographies of the novelists Willa Cather (published in 1989) and Virginia Woolf (published in 1996), was asked by Stoppard to write this biography, which follows an earlier one with the same title by Ira Bruce Nadel (b. 1943), published in 2002 and credited by Lee as “thoroughly researched [and] detailed.”

Those words certainly apply to Lee’s book. Stoppard invited her to write it; he told friends to cooperate with her, and he made a staggering amount of documentation available to her. The result is highly readable – a triumph for the author, and a tribute to the enormous activity with which Stoppard has filled his life. I found it difficult to read anything else until I had finished it.

Lee peppers her book with references to Stoppard’s skeptical attitude toward biography. She writes:

There have been moments when he clearly regretted setting this book in motion, and would have preferred me not to be asking personal questions about him of his friends, or reading his archive, or asking him about his past. For all that he is a public and highly visible personage, he is also a reserved, shy and embarrassable private man, protective of himself and of his family. Sometimes he has been baffled by the whole process and by the questions I’ve asked him. This can’t be any use to you, can it? he has often asked, in mid-conversation.

Lee’s biography is “critical” in the sense that it takes a thorough look at Stoppard’s writing. It is hardly critical of him as a person, although it acknowledges contradictory and sometimes difficult elements of his personality:

One young playwright, who adores him but has witnessed him in critical mode, added to his adjectives [describing Stoppard]: “And a tiny bit evil.” One grand old woman of the world, an old friend of his, said to me: “Beware of the charm.” A theatre director noted that he used his politeness to get what he wanted from people. A woman who has often worked with him notes that he is not influenced by anyone when he wants something his way. “Solitary” and “private” are frequent adjectives. Many people who know him have said they don’t feel they know him well. They don’t know who his close friends are and they aren’t even sure if he has any.

I quote this passage at length because it’s pretty much the worst anybody has to say about him. Lee often puts the best construction on his behavior; on the other hand, in the strenuous world of the theater few people are saints, and Stoppard’s dealings with people appear to be honest and aboveboard.

Certainly Lee gives him the benefit of the doubt when she can. Of his breakup with the splendid performer Felicity Kendal (b. 1946), for example, Lee writes that

Though she keeps the private story of their life to herself, she speaks of him to this day with fondness, humour and respect. If there was pain and sadness, it was well managed, and outweighed by affection and loyalty. It is one of the striking features of his life that he has stayed friends with his ex-partners.

The facts, as far as they can be known, seem likely to be true (although it took time for Stoppard and his first wife to reestablish an equilibrium after their divorce), but it certainly is not tabloid-style journalism.

Two other aspects of Lee’s writing to note: she occasionally uses British slang that might not be familiar to Americans (but, after all, she’s British); and if she uses the word “he” without a clear antecedent, as she frequently does, it refers to Stoppard.

I have seen little of Stoppard’s work and read little more; Lee’s book convinced me that I have missed a great deal in two ways: she convinces me that his work has great value, and that there is a huge amount of it. Stoppard seems to have been a non-stop (if I may put it that way) writer.

His plays are certainly his best-known output, and he has said that he’s “a theater writer who does other things.” Indeed he does – essays, letters, journals, speeches, media appearances, radio and TV dramas, nearly everything except social media (which he avoids).

I was astounded by the number of movies he’s been associated with, whether he was credited or not: examples include Brazil (1985), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989, in my opinion the best of that series), The Russia House (1990), Shakespeare in Love (1998, his project from inception and a Best Picture Oscar and Golden Globe Award winner for him and his co-author Marc Norman), and Star Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005). By any account, that’s a wide variety of films, and it’s just a sampling.

But, as Lee says, “Stoppard was, after all, a playwright, not a historian, a biographer, an essayist or a philosopher – though he feeds off all those genres.” “Feed off” he does – he is an astonishing researcher. Lee says

His process was always the same. He read and read till he had taken on more than he could handle. Then he plunged in and made it up as he went along. There had to be a point where he stopped beating himself up for not knowing X, Y, and Z, and began writing without knowing X, Y, and Z. It was a lesson he had found hard to learn.

What does he research? The answer is “just about anything,” which can include topics from history, science, philosophy, mathematics, religion. His play Travesties (1974) is a good example.

The initial idea came from a not then published novel which mentioned that Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state (1870-1924); the psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961); the novelist James Joyce (1882-1941); and Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), an influential literary figure of his time and an important figure in the Dadaist and Symbolist movements, were all in Zurich, Switzerland, at the same time in 1916.

If the name of Tzara is unfamiliar, in a way that’s the point: Stoppard has exhaustively researched the period, its events, characters, and themes, and created a celebrated play out of a mix of elements some of which are almost certainly not common knowledge. This has given him a reputation as a playwright more interested in the intellect than in human behavior – an opinion that can be challenged, as we will see below.

Still, although Lee doesn’t make the following point, it seems to me easy to see Stoppard as a playwright descended, not directly, from another playwright often accused of over-intellectualism, namely George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).

There are resemblances: both Shaw and Stoppard came to England from other countries (Shaw from Ireland, Stoppard from Czechoslovakia); both began their careers in journalism; both wrote prolifically and startled their audiences by the emphasis they put on intellectual activity.

And both were involved in social movements of their times. Shaw had numerous theories on how economies and governments should be organized – he was among other things a fervent Socialist. Stoppard has focused on freedom of expression, particularly in nations like Czechoslovakia when the U.S.S.R. controlled Eastern Europe.

Both in fact could be labeled as playwrights of a “theater of ideas,” but that label would get us almost nowhere. There are ideas of all sorts; the question is what they mean to people who use ideas as a way of explaining themselves, the world, and what’s important to them.

Stoppard is certainly known for esoteric choices of material in his plays. Lee makes a good case, however, that human relationships are at the core of the plays, and that “all this material had to be turned into a drama that would make people laugh and weep, as well as think.”

She describes how Stoppard’s son Ed, viewing his work, came to ”see that the actors needed to find the key to it – as often in his father’s plays – through the emotions, not the ‘cerebral’ side.” When asked how the actors should approach his play Rock ’n’ Roll (2006), a play about the role music played in the opposition to the Communist government in Czechoslovakia, Tom Stoppard said, “Tell them it’s a love story.”

Stoppard describes his approach to writing plays in similar non-scientific terms – he researches like crazy, then plunges into writing the play. “If you can steel yourself just to blunder off into the dark, and keep alert to the way it might go, then God will come to your aid.” (He is not conventionally religious, which makes his choice of words particularly interesting here.)

Shaw, like Stoppard, was accused of writing plays that are “all talk.” Their styles, though, are different; Shaw tends to focus on one subject per play (on which he is thoroughly informed, at least in his own opinion), while Stoppard enjoys creating a mix.

Writing his play Saint Joan (1923), Shaw read most of the major accounts of Joan’s of Arc’s life (c. 1412-1431), and carefully studied (and used) the transcripts of her trial. That amount of research was sufficient for his purposes. Had Stoppard written the play, one can imagine his bringing in astronomy, quantum physics, and numerology as well. If he had, no one would have been surprised.

But although abstract thought may take a role in Stoppard’s work, there is a definite personal side to it, as Lee makes clear – a fact never more evident than in Leopoldstadt (first performed in London in 2020, where it won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play that year). The story behind the story is fairly well known by now: Stoppard’s family was Jewish, but he was only dimly conscious of that fact until the 1990’s (see “Tom Stoppard & Leopoldstadt” – especially “Brief Biography”).

His family were Czech Jews, and when the Nazis arrived, some escaped, most did not; all his grandparents died in concentration camps. Stoppard situates the play’s story in Vienna rather than in Prague, but he dramatizes the same drift in Austria from casually insulting anti-Semitism to the brutal onslaught of the Germans, with the same results as his family experienced.

The last of the five scenes in the play shows a character very much like Stoppard – urbane, British in manner and outlook – coming face to face with the facts of his heritage. The scene is sobering and affecting. The preceding scene, in which the Nazis invade the family residence, is terrifying and I still have not gotten over it.

There is a great deal more to Lee’s book than I have described here, of course, including fascinating details like his expectations of actors (frequently, what he insists on is good diction) and his way of working with directors (open to their suggestions, but stubborn about what he wants).

Is Stoppard a great playwright? Asked the question, he replied with animation that it was too soon to tell. One thing is certain: Stoppard has greatly expanded the assumed limits of what a play can successfully do, by bringing in elements of the complexity of life that previously had not found much of a place in theater.

He has done this with both imagination and intelligence, not sacrificing the importance of plot and the complexity of human relationships. His plays answer the question, “Should theater entertain or educate?” by demonstrating that life is complex – more complex than the question itself.

*  *  *  *

[I was listening to the local CBS news on 21 November last, and its occasional “Broadway and Beyond” segment was on Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt.  Brandon Uranowitz, who plays a Stoppard-like character in the autobiographically inspired play, was featured in an interview with the correspondent Dick Brennan.  Uranowitz, who was the principal spokesperson on the segment (other than Brennan) spoke about the play and anti-Semitism—past and present.  (As Kirk notes above, Uranowitz is a “family friend.”  The video is available at “Leopoldstadt” star Brandon Uranowitz reflects on new Broadway play's important and timely story - CBS New York (cbsnews.com)).]

“‘LEOPOLDSTADT’ STAR BRANDON URANOWITZ REFLECTS ON
NEW BROADWAY PLAY’S IMPORTANT AND TIMELY STORY”
by Dick Brennan 

NEW YORK -- The new Broadway play “Leopoldstadt” shows the horror and heartbreak an extended Jewish family faces when the Nazis occupy Austria during World War II.

Actor Brandon Uranowitz sat down with CBS2’s Dick Brennan to talk about the rise of antisemitism on stage and what’s happening today.

It is a searing family drama of love, tragedy and human suffering sprawled over decades. The play follows an Austrian-Jewish family through the joy and prosperity of the turn of the 20th century and then into the darkness of Kristallnacht [“The Night of Broken Glass,” 9-10 November 1938] and the scourge of Nazism.

It is in part based on the life of Tom Stoppard, one of the most successful playwrights in Broadway history, and features a giant cast [38 actors] portraying a family tree that withers under the burden of hatred and oppression.

“I think if you’ve never experienced what it’s like to be oppressed or be marginalized, it can be very difficult to step into the shoes of someone who has,” Uranowitz said.

Uranowitz takes on two roles, Ludwig and Nathan, over a five-decade period from 1899 to 1955.

“There’s a very terrifying parallel between that apartment and this theater, and everything that’s happening outside of it,” he said.

Today’s headlines prove that antisemitism never really goes away.

“‘Leopoldstadt’ is sort of bringing to life the kind of Holocaust education in a pop culture sense,” said Scott Richman, regional director for the Anti-Defamation League.

Richman says the play sends an important signal to society at precisely the right time.

“I’m really glad that a show like this, which has a message about the Holocaust and where hate can lead . . . is a very important message,” he said.

Generally what awaits Uranowitz outside the theater is adoration from people who may have experienced what they just saw or who’ve had family who did, and he says they become an important part of the play itself.

“Any time I’m rehearsing a play, it always comes up that like, well, we’ve gone as far as we can, until we introduce the last character, which is the audience. And it does feed their performance, it uplifts their performance, and it validates their performance,” Uranowitz said.

“If there was some one thing, one theme . . . that is a message of this play and that perhaps might resonate beyond the doors here. . .” Brennan said.

“For me, the biggest thing about the play is memory and remembering,” Uranowitz said. “I think my biggest hope for this play is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum or it doesn’t exist in an echo chamber. I don’t want the themes of this play, to just be presented to people who already understand them and know them.”

Uranowitz is a three-time Tony nominee who has worked in film and TV, including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” so what keeps him returning to the theater?

“Theater to me is just, it’s my life blood because there’s nothing else like it in the world. And you know, when you do film and TV, you sort of jump into the middle of a scene, you jump into the middle of an ‘act,’ and in theater, you start at the beginning and you go through the middle and you go to the end, and you experience something in real time with people and then it’s done. And there’s something ethereal about it. And yes, we do it eight times a week, yes, it’s repetitive, I guess, but every single performance is entirely unique because everyone here [in the audience] is different. What we’re bringing into the theater every day is different and that informs how we talk and listen and react. Theater to me is the greatest thing on Earth because there’s nothing else like it, and we all experience this one thing together and then it disappears,” he said.

“Leopoldstadt” is running at the Longacre Theatre through March 2023.

[Dick Brennan joined CBS2 (WCBS, channel 2 in New York City) in 2012 as an anchor and reporter. In addition, he anchors on the digital channel CBS News New York, which is also seen on the News at Nine on WCBS’s Long Island sister station WLNY-TV (channel 55 in Riverhead, Suffolk County, New York).

[Brandon Uranowitz, a stage and screen actor, is from Livingston, New Jersey, and turned 36 last July.  Growing up in West Orange, New Jersey, he began performing at age six.  By the mid-’90s, he was appearing professionally in regional and Off-Broadway New York City productions.

[Uranowitz graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2008 with a degree in theater arts and made his Broadway debut in the 2011 jukebox musical Baby It’s You! (pop and rock hits of the 1960s), which ran for 33 previews and 148 regular performances.

[He’s best known for his roles as Adam Hochberg in the musical An American in Paris (2014-15; see reports on ROT by me and Kirk Woodward, posted respectively on 2 August 2015 and 13 November 2015) and Mendel Weisenbachfeld in the 2016 Broadway revival of Falsettos (see Kirk’s report on 5 January 2017).

[A three-time Tony Award nominee, Uranowitz received nominations for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for those performances in addition to a 2019 nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in Burn This.  His other Broadway credits include Prince of Broadway (2017) and The Band’s Visit (2018). 

[I first saw Uranowitz on stage in Washington, D.C., doing Arnold in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (see “Torch Song Trilogy,” 5 October 2013.)  He was nominated for the Helen Hayes Award—the D.C.-area regional counterpart of the Tony—for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Resident Play.]

'Falsettos'

by Kirk Woodward

[After making some very pertinent and interesting comments on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (6 December), frequent guest-blogger Kirk Woodward returns now with his assessment of the current Broadway revival of William Finn and James Lapine’s Falsettos.  This time, Kirk provides a more standard performance assessment, but he has an interesting (and, I think valid, from his description—since I haven’t seen the production) take on the performance. Pay particular attention to Kirk’s opinion of Lapine’s direction because not only is it perceptive in its own right, but it makes a point about some (I’d say many) published reviews: they don’t cover directing very well.]

When I read about the current revival on Broadway of the musical Falsettos (music and lyrics by William Finn, book by Finn and James Lapine, directed by Lapine, opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on October 27, 2016 for a limited run of fourteen weeks), I ordered tickets immediately for two reasons. 

I wanted to see Brandon Uranowitz, who plays Mendel, the psychiatrist, in the musical. He is a family friend and a Tony Award nominee for his performance as the composer in the musical An American in Paris.

I also wanted to see Christian Borle, who plays Marvin in Falsettos and is unquestionably one of the finest actors on the musical stage. I have written about both of them in this blog (see Kirk’s “An American In Paris (Part 2),” 13 November 2015, and “Something Rotten! 1,” 11 May 2106)

Falsettos was created by combining the second and third of a trio of one-act musicals. The first of the three, In Trousers, entirely written by William Finn, premiered in 1979 at Playwrights Horizons and introduced the character of Marvin, a man who comes to realize that he is gay and ultimately leaves his wife and young son.

Mr. Finn collaborated on the books of the next two musicals with James Lapine, who directed them. The story of In Trousers leads to that of March of the Falsettos (premiering in 1981, also at Playwrights), which finds Marvin trying desperately to discover or create some kind of viable family amid the chaos of his relationships with his ex-wife (Trina), his current lover (Whizzer), his son (Jason), and his psychiatrist, who is also Trina’s psychiatrist and who falls in love with and marries her.

By the end of the show Marvin has left Whizzer but has achieved some rapport with Jason. March of the Falsettos becomes Act I of the musical Falsettos.

Act II of Falsettos is the third of the one-act plays, Falsettoland (premiering in 1990 at Playwrights). In the course of this piece Marvin and Whizzer resume their relationship, while the family wrestles with the details of Jason’s bar mitzvah. Two more characters, a lesbian couple, join the fractured but real “family” scene: Dr. Charlotte, a medical doctor, and Cordelia, a caterer specializing in Kosher food.

The dates of these plays and of the combined work Falsettos, which opened at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway in 1992, are significant, because 1981 was the year of the first clinical diagnosis of AIDS (for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome; it is also known as HIV, for Human Immunodeficiency Virus), and by 1990 the brutal disease was ravaging the gay community, and, although not then acknowledged as such, was well on its way to terrorizing the entire world.

The AIDS epidemic was at its height when the various components of the musical first opened. AIDS is a looming presence in Falsettoland – Whizzer contacts the disease. There is no cure available for him (nor is there today; however, much progress has been made in controlling the disease). Dr. Charlotte treats him, and his painful death has the effect of bringing Marvin’s formal and informal family together in a real if uneasy kind of working truce.

Wisely or not, people take AIDS more for granted today, but Falsettos is valuable also as a family story, a quirky but significant one. The show has significant strengths beyond the historical: the family story; the sympathetic portrayal of varying kinds of sexual relationships, both homosexual and other; the meaty roles for the seven actors; and the sizzling score by William Finn, who writes songs that sound like conversation that has somehow been nuzzled into musical form.

The seven characters I have identified are the only ones in the play, a remarkably small size for a cast of a Broadway musical, but then the show originated off-Broadway, where small musicals are more common, and almost all of Mr. Finn’s creations have opened off-Broadway.

His other shows include A New Brain (1998), an autobiographical account of his experience with brain surgery, and the song cycle Elegies (2003). His writing tends to be autobiographical, although this was not the case with his delightful The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005).

So, to the 2016 Broadway production of Falsettos: the acting did not disappoint. Not just Uranowitz and Borle, but the entire cast, are wonderful. The show stopping number of the musical is “Trina’s Song,” performed with mountingly manic energy by Stephanie J. Block in the role of Marvin’s ex-wife.

I was charmed by the lesbian couple played by a businesslike Tracie Thoms (Dr. Charlotte) and an exuberant Betsy Wolfe (Cordelia, the caterer). Anthony Rosenthal (Jason) is a match for the older cast members, and Andrew Rannells is just right for the role of Whizzer, who must come across as both sketchy and valuable.

And yet, and yet… the production left me with an unsatisfied feeling. I have only seen it once before, in a community theater production that presented the material realistically. The current version has a divided personality. The acting is realistic; but the production, with James Lapine returning as director, is remarkably abstract.

When the audience enters, it sees a bare stage with a huge gray cube in the center, like a giant irregular construction by Rubik. The audience certainly anticipates that the cube will be taken apart and used as furniture and other set elements, and that’s what happens, very ingeniously. (The set, by David Rockwell, is beautifully augmented by Jeff Croiter’s lighting).

As a result there are no pauses between scenes; also as a result, however, the actors are continually moving blocks around, which however smoothly choreographed nevertheless continually pulls the audience out of the play as it watches the gray geometric shapes being rearranged by actors looking to make sure they set their pieces exactly on their “spike marks” on the stage floor.

I attended the show with a friend who genuinely did not like this approach. “I don’t come to Broadway to see off-Broadway shows,” my friend said, “but I may want to hire this cast when I’m ready to move.”  I’m not sure there’s not something to her remark.

Put in its simplest form, she wants sets that appear to move by themselves! She referred to this production as a “black box show,” that is, a studio theater presentation rather than a Broadway show. Perhaps her attitude is a little extreme, but if there’s strength in a typical Broadway show, surely one element is the audience’s satisfaction when a play is surrounded by an environment that embraces it.

One thinks on the other hand of productions like the director John Doyle’s 2005 and 2006 productions of Sweeney Todd and Company respectively, in which the actors both performed their roles and played musical instruments. That and similar approaches are clever, but do they really serve the play, or do they pull our focus out of it? Is the play the thing, or do we leave mostly thinking that that director really is a clever fellow?

Lapine doesn’t go to extremes in Falsettos, but his directorial hand shows in every moment of the play, which is so thoroughly directed that the actors come to seem like marionettes – so much so that when in the song “March of the Falsettos” the cast actually act like marionettes, the concept of the number doesn’t seem particularly startling.

In the second act, in particular, it seems to me that this approach does not serve the play, robbing it of a good deal of the emotion necessary for us to understand how the new ad hoc family is finally able to coalesce. When Marvin and Whizzer stand face to face and sing “What Would I Do?” practically down each other’s throats, for the entire song, it seems to me that the staging almost combats the emotion of the scene. Borle’s and Rannells’ acting is strong enough to prevail; but should they be put in that position?

Lapine “puts people in positions” throughout the entire production. He is a clever and imaginative director; but I still left the theater feeling I’d seen a display, rather than a story. The cast has been hard at work; but for me the aftertaste that’s left is the effort, not the people.

I might well be accused of inconsistency here: in my recent article “A Note About Hamilton” (6 December 2016) on this blog, I championed productions in which a director invents what I call a “new theatrical language” for the piece.

That is emphatically not what Lapine does in Falsettos. Nothing in his staging is “transformative.” Using blocks instead of furniture has been a theatrical staple for decades. Virtually every director wants to “physicalize” the action of a play. Lapine does both, but to the extent that the result feels like busywork, falling far short of what in the Hamilton piece I call a Bright Idea – not giving the play a different locational concept, just making it hyperactive.

Most of the reviews that I have read do not focus on Lapine’s direction at all. Falsettos generally received positive reviews, led by Charles Isherwood in The New York Times (27 October 2016), who wrote that “there’s hardly a moment in the exhilarating, devastating revival of the musical “Falsettos” that doesn’t approach, or even achieve, perfection.”

High praise indeed. Where reviewers had reservations, they tended to be about two things. One involves the issues of whether or not the play accurately portrays gays and Jews. (I was taken aback by the vitriol of Hilton Als’ New Yorker review of 7 November 2016 – “hideously cheap sentiment . . . one of the most dishonest musicals I have ever seen.”) I have no competence to answer such questions.

The other reservations tended to be about the set design. Isherwood’s review typifies the praise:

David Rockwell’s set resembles a child’s building blocks, which are manipulated by the actors. Placed against a shifting Manhattan skyscape, it’s an ingenious illustration of what we are watching: people laboring to arrange a comfortable life for themselves and their loved ones, and continually having to readjust it.

The reservations may be represented by Alexis Soloski’s review in The Guardian (27 October 2016):

The set, by David Rockwell, with its chintzy cutouts of the Manhattan skyline and peculiar cube of furniture, is one of the ugliest to galumph onto the stage in recent years.

Christopher Kelly, in the Newark Star-Ledger (27 October 2016), is no kinder:

The set design . . . mostly consists of what appears to be a rubber foam cube, made up of many pieces that are removed from the cube and used as furniture or props. More than once, you worry the pieces of cube are going to fall on someone's head.

Actually, you do, sometimes. On the other hand, the use of the component pieces is consistently clever, a real triumph of engineering. But the important point is that a set designer’s work must reflect the director’s approach to the play; the set is not an equal among equals, but one component in an overall approach that’s coordinated by the director (or should be). Whether it’s “attractive” or “ugly” is fundamentally irrelevant; the important question is how well it serves the play.

To my mind the Falsettos set illustrates what I see as Lepine’s desire to tinker with the show, as though he were trying to include in the new production all the possibilities he’d thought of since the first Broadway production opened in 1992.

Isherwood says that Lepine’s “work is so sharp it’s as if he were seeing the show with a new pair of eyes.” Yes, but is that what the show should be about? Christopher Kelly, in the Star-Ledger, comes a little closer to my opinion, referring to “sometimes awkward staging” and saying:

Lapine directed this revival, just as he did the 1992 Broadway original -- and my guess is that "Falsettos" ultimately needed someone not quite so close to the material to make it resonate fully with a contemporary audience.

We are blessed these days with a number of outstandingly talented directors, and James Lapine is one of them. The risk involved in all that talent is that directors may come to feel their job is to make the production “go” or “work.” The script and the actors do that – or it doesn’t get done.

If our primary impression of a show is that the director put a lot of effort into it, surely that’s not a mark of success but of failure – at least, of failure to respect the play being produced. That’s a subjective judgment, no doubt about it, but it’s one we need to make.

[Kirk’s remark about reviews not saying much about Lapine's directing is a truth about most reviews in general.  Directing usually gets short shrift (except for comments about pacing occasionally).  I think the reason for that is that few reviewers (or anyone else, really) understand what directors do.  I once edited the newsletter for an organization (now unfortunately defunct) called the American Directors Institute that was formed for that very reason: that most people—not just lay people, but theater pros as well (including reviewers)—don’t know what directors actually do beyond moving actors around the stage.  ADI’s mission was to try to introduce directing to the public through panels and conferences—and Directors Notes, its newsletter.  (Geoffrey Shlaes, ADI’s artistic director, once approached renowned theater critic, editor, writer, and historian Eric Bentley to be the keynoter for one of ADI’s conferences, and he disparaged directors as unnecessary.)  Anyway, reviewers can't very well criticize directing if they don't know what it is, can they?]