"'Great Performances': The Arts Interrupted" – Part 2

 Produced and directed by Akisa Omulepu 

[This is the second (and final) part of the transcript of “The Arts Interrupted,” the PBS program first aired on Great Performances on 14 May.  If you have just joined this blog, the continuation of this post won’t make a lot of sense if you haven’t read Part 1, posted on 3 June; I recommend going back to read the start of the transcript before reading Part 2.

[I’ve provided the first names of people who speak on this program, but for full identification of any who first appear in Part 1, readers will have to return to that post.  (Newly-appearing figures are identified below.)]

VANESSA WILLIAMS: Maintaining a performing arts career is a daunting proposition, even in the best of times.  This past year, it seemed inconceivable for a relatively new artist to gain recognition.  So, it must have been an unexpected thrill for singer-songwriter Somi to learn of her first Grammy nomination.  With it, the world was introduced to a brilliant artist who, I have a feeling, is here to stay [Somi sings “Holy Room” (2017)].

♪ I can’t hold these burdens anymore ♪

♪ Love feels like a holy room

♪ Washed my feet

♪ Leave ‘em at the door

♪ Your love feels like a holy room ♪

♪ Soothe my sorrows and clean my heart ♪

♪ Holy room

SOMI: When I found out I was nominated for a Grammy, um, of course I was overwhelmed.  I was really humbled by the outpouring of love, kind of honoring that moment, sort of a landmark in my career and a reminder to keep going—that’s what it felt like.

But I think the fact that the nomination came in in the midst of a global pandemic, um, was even more humbling.

WILLIAMS: Somi’s Grammy-nominated album started out before the pandemic, as a concert for German public radio, recorded in May 2019.  Once the pandemic stopped artists from touring or performing, Somi realized she could offer her fans something new and timely.

([Somi] vocalizing)

♪

(vocalizing)

SOMI: I decided to call the album “Holy Room” because in listening to a live recording in the midst of a pandemic, when I first heard it, I had no intention of releasing it as an album, but it had been recorded for radio broadcast in Germany.

And so when I was listening back, it took me back to that thing that makes me feel most alive.  And I thought that if I was to share . . . If I were to share that with my audience, then surely they might be reminded of leaning into the thing that makes them feel most alive, too.

(vocalizing)

♪

WILLIAMS: For Somi, like so many artists, there wasn’t just a loss of income or career opportunity, but also the joy of performance.  Performing with other artists, connecting with audiences just disappeared almost overnight.

SOMI: I think what I miss most about being on the road is the sense of community that can only be fostered not only on the bandstand with my band members . . . (chuckling): Who I miss dearly.  But also that sense of community that can only show up in that exchange of storytelling between artist and audience.  I feel my most powerful on stage.  And I miss the magic, you know.

(applause)

Thank you so much, danke schön [‘thank you’ in German].

(applause)

WILLIAMS: In the past year, we’ve all learned that a stage can be almost anywhere.  So, Illinois-born Somi, whose parents hail from Rwanda and Uganda, with a Grammy-nominated German radio concert, still found a way to let her fans hear some new music.

World music indeed!

♪

Somi has reached a whole new audience in these strange times.  But she’s not alone.  The COVID age has revealed so many new stars for us to appreciate.

– ♪ . . . left unchanged

♪

♪ It’s so funny how quickly

♪ We forget the sweet . . .

WILLIAMS: Artists comment on, critique, and often challenge the culture itself.  They bring new ideas in fresh forms, they force us to think differently, and they interpret the events of our times in ways that enlighten us all.

So, that was a big assignment during lockdown in the Year of the Plague.  As COVID raged on, another crisis engulfed America.

♪ When the moon is in the seventh house ♪

WILLIAMS: Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr., married for 50 years, were two-fifths of the Fifth Dimension R&B and pop ensemble.  In April 2021, they released a new album, “Blackbird,” Beatles songs with a new relevance, they say, in the context of the racial reckoning and the Black Lives Matter movement.

(“Blackbird” playing)

♪ Blackbird fly

♪ Blackbird fly

♪ Blackbird fly

DAVIS: Many people don’t know “Blackbird” was a Civil Rights anthem, written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon in 1968 after they saw the Civil Rights struggles and resulting violence.

♪ Blackbird singing in the dead of night ♪

DAVIS: Blackbirds were a hymn to the soul of the young women, men, and children we were losing.

McCOO: Martin Luther King [civil rights leader assassinated on 4 April 1968 at 39].

Malcolm X [human rights activist and spokesman for the Nation of Islam assassinated on 21 February 1965, aged 39].

Medgar Evers [civil rights activist murdered at 37 on 12 June 1963].

We remember the cross being burned on the lawn of our first home [22 March 1977, Encino, California].

♪ Blackbird singing in the dead of night ♪

♪ Take these sunken eyes

♪ And learn to see

♪ All your life

WILLIAMS: Marilyn and Billy have long musical and political memories.  The Fifth Dimension had an inclusive and diverse 1960s audience, even at a time of racial division and political turmoil, some of which they witnessed firsthand.

DAVIS: It was 1968.  We were performing at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago.  At that particular time, somebody threw a stink bomb, cleared out the whole place.  Once we got outside, to our surprise, all hell had broken loose.

(people shouting)

We were trying to get to our car, to get into cars so we could get out of harm’s way.

(people shouting)

We’d never seen anything like that before, because it was like a riot in the middle of the street.  I mean, all of this commotion going on.

– On Michigan Avenue.

– On Michigan Avenue!

You know, and, and the things that’s happening out there today, I mean, it’s like it’s all happening again.

♪ Set sight on pride  [”Africa” by Scott Patterson]

♪ For the power

SIMONE ECCLESTON: I’m going to channel James Baldwin, right?

And so he has this quote, you know, “The role of the artist is much like the role of the lover.

“If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you do not see.”

And so I like to think about that in relationship to this period, because this period has been a time of tremendous change.

We’ve been in the midst of two crises, right?  When we’re thinking about the public health crisis, as well as the crisis in regards to race and racism in America.

(crowd chanting, clapping)

And our movement for social justice.

And so, like, within this context, artists have helped to bring light to the darkness and have helped to hold us accountable, and get us privy to the things that sometimes history would like to have us forget.

(crowd chanting, drum pounding)

OSKAR EUSTIS: George Floyd’s murder had a transformational effect on The Public Theater.  Were we doing enough to oppose the horrible racism of this society?  Were we doing enough to oppose police violence?

But even more important: were we doing enough as an organization to examine our own practices, to make sure that our own practices were genuinely anti-racist?

To make sure that the way we worked actually tackled the horrible legacy of slavery upon which this country was built?

♪ One message  [“Africa,” Patterson]

♪ No life in hatred

♪ Live for all kind

(holding note)

♪ Yeah

♪

WILLIAMS: There’s no denying that the past 14 months have been a time of immense sadness and loss, of dreams deferred and, for some, dreams shattered and impossible to realize.  In addition to losing jobs, workplaces, and the irreplaceable spirit of collaboration, we’ve lost something far greater: beloved and much-admired colleagues.

♪

♪

♪

ECCLESTON: I would definitely consider this to be a moment in which the arts are further democratized, right?

And I would also, you know, like, I think that it’s beautiful that audiences nationally and internationally have been able to, you know, tap into or access performances by world-renowned artists in the comfort of their homes.

What we were able to do is turn the Kennedy Center Opera House, a venue that is often only seen during Kennedy Center Honors, into, like, what would be the backdrop for performance.  And so we presented presentations with Renée Fleming and Vanessa Williams and, like, Grammy Award-winning artist Robert Glasper.

♪

♪

MAN (on recording, echoing): Are you a god?

Are you an angel?

♪

ECCLESTON: You know, we were really excited about being able to kind of, like, lean in and experiment to create content for audiences. 

ANNE HUANG [Executive Director, World Arts West, San Francisco]: During live, pre-COVID live performance, um, live performances, it was very difficult to bring all of that together in-person.

And actually, in the virtual world allow World Arts West and the many dance companies we serve use the rapidly improving Zoom technology. 

MAURE ARONSON [Executive Director, Global Arts Live, Cambridge, Massachusetts]: During the pandemic, it was very important for us to continue to support artists not only through virtual streams, but to put money in artists’ hands so that they could continue to create new work. 

STANLYN BREVÉ [Director of National Programs, Performance Network, New Orleans]: I feel like, um, there is this hope.  I feel like there is this unsustainability that has come to the surface, um, and really, artists are leading, you know, this whole movement of reimagining.  The COVID crisis saw performers reaching out to their social media fans and followers online. 

WILLIAMS: Past and present company members of Broadway’s “Wicked” performed one of the most popular viral moments—no pun intended—with a virtual performance of “Defying Gravity.”

♪ Something has changed within me ♪

♪ Something is not the same

♪ I’m through with playing

♪ By the rules of someone else’s game ♪

♪ Too late for second-guessing

♪ Too late to go back to sleep

♪ It’s time to trust my instincts ♪

♪ Close my eyes and leap

♪ It’s time to try defying gravity ♪

♪ I think I’ll try defying gravity ♪

♪ And you can’t pull me down

WILLIAMS: Why do we care about the arts?  Why do the arts matter?

– Arts have given me a voice.

– A sense of purpose.

– The freedom of expression.

– I have a power.

– A safe space.

– It gives students a home.

– A home.

– A home.

– Long-lasting friendships.

– So many friends.

– People in the arts become my family.

– A family.

– Community.

– A huge community and I finally felt like I was worth something.

♪

♪ There’s a place where we don’t have to feel unknown ♪  [“You Will Be Found” from a high school production of Dear Evan Hansen]

WILLIAMS: If the enthusiasm of those kids is any measure, the arts not only matter, but the future of the arts looks promising.  And as the year rolled on, there were reasons to be optimistic, or at least feel that the big gray COVID cloud had a tiny silver lining.

♪ So let the sun come streaming in ♪

♪ You’ll reach up and you’ll rise again ♪

♪ If you only look around

♪ You will be found

WILLIAMS: Isolation and harmony, fragility and resilience, oppression and hope.  These are the emotions of our time and the subjects my dear friend Renée Fleming and I explored in “A Time to Sing,” a unique event at the Kennedy Center.

[A Time to Sing: An Evening with Renée Fleming and Vanessa Williams was presented at 8 p.m. on Saturday, 26 September 2020, at the Kennedy Center.  An invited in-person audience of 40 sat on the stage of the Opera House while Fleming and Williams performed on a specially-built platform over the first rows of seats.  The concert was also streamed live to paying viewers at home.]

DEBORAH RUTTER: Good evening to all of you.

We welcome you back to the Kennedy Center for our very first on-stage in the Opera House in more than six months.  My name is Deborah Rutter, the proud president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.  This tonight is proof that the show truly must go on.

(“What the World Needs Now Is Love” playing [Fleming and Williams singing])

♪ What the world needs now

♪ Is love, sweet love

♪ It’s the only thing

♪ That there’s just too little of ♪

BOTH: ♪ What the world needs now

♪ Is love, sweet love

– ♪ No,  not just for some

♪ But for everyone

♪ Lord, we don’t need another mountain ♪

♪ There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb ♪

♪ There are oceans and rivers enough to cross ♪

♪ Enough to last till the end of time ♪

BOTH: ♪ What the world needs now

♪ Is love, sweet love

– ♪ It’s the only thing

BOTH: ♪ That there’s just too little of ♪

♪ What the world needs now

♪ Is love, sweet love

– ♪ No, not just for some

BOTH: ♪ But for everyone

♪ Lord, we don’t need another meadow ♪

♪ There are cornfields and wheat fields ♪

♪ Enough to grow

♪ There are sunbeams and moonbeams ♪

♪ Enough to shine

♪ Oh, listen, Lord

♪ If you want to know

BOTH: ♪ What the world needs now

♪ Is love, sweet love

– ♪ It’s the only thing

BOTH: ♪ That there’s just too little of ♪

♪ What the world needs now

♪ Is love, sweet love

– ♪ No, not just for some

♪ But for everyone

♪ Everyone

– ♪ Everyone

♪ No, not just for some

BOTH: ♪ But for everyone

(holding note)

(cheers and applause)

Thank you!

FLEMING: Thank you.

WILLIAMS: Singing for that small audience in the grand Kennedy Center Opera House gave us hope that one day soon, every single one of those seats would again be filled. 

And now, there’s even more reason to hope.  With vaccines approved and being distributed, the possibility of a return to normal life began to flicker like the ghost light.

For performers and their audiences, for the support industries and their employees, the hope began to grow that the bright lights might shine again soon.

HARI SREENIVASAN [Anchor, PBS NewsHour Weekend, on TV]: Good evening and thanks for joining us.

A second coronavirus vaccine is approved and millions of doses are expected to be shipped out starting tomorrow, as infections rise and hospitals in many states report intensive care units are near . . . .

(cello playing “Ave Maria” [Yo-Yo Ma at a vaccination clinic on tape])

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA [playwright and actor]: So I’m emotional today.  I’m going to be talking to you mostly in Broadway quotes, ’cause that’s where we are.  I can’t help but have the sense of empty chairs at empty tables.  I’m thinking of those in the Broadway community we’ve lost over the past year.

I am thinking of Terrence McNally [prolific and esteemed playwright who died from complications of COVID-19 on 24 March 2020 at 81].

I’m thinking of the great Nick Cordero [actor and singer who died on 5 July 2020, aged 41, of COVID-19], who is my age [also 41] and we lost to this terrible virus.

And I’m thrilled to be here at the opening of a vaccination clinic for Broadway workers.  And that’s everyone.  And if you worked on Broadway or you worked off-Broadway, you work in the theater, if you worked in the wardrobe department, if you were a stage manager, if you were a front-of-house staff, you were an usher, you are welcome to this incredible facility on 47th Street which I have just toured.

We want to gather again.  And we want to tell stories in the dark.  We cannot do that if we don’t feel safe, and if you don’t feel safe.

So the first step in that process is getting our vaccination shots.  And I can’t wait to be in a theater with you again.  Thank you so much.

ARONSON: There were so many things learnt during this pandemic, but overall, and so many crises that we dealt with, but overall, what we learnt was, stay connected to your community, stay connected to your artists, continue to be resilient, persevere, create a space where we can gather.

REMINGTON: The arts inform us of who we were, they tell us who we are, and they also point the way to what we aspire to be. 

FORBES: And I think what’s gonna be so important for, as our cities come back in line, as our communities come back in line, that, quite frankly, it’s artists who will lead the way to teach us, to heal us, to teach us to feel again.  Just to, to guide us in that way, in that modality about how we are able to sort of access the parts of ourselves that we, quite frankly, have not been able to access throughout this pandemic.

JORDANA LEIGH: You know, I look at photos from all these great performances that I’ve been to before the pandemic, and it does feel like another life to me at this moment.  And I think that what happens after this pandemic leaves, it’s gonna be another life, as well.

ECCLESTON: I’m excited about being in community, being in fellowship, and being able to experience the transcendent power of live performance.  I’m just excited to see who we’ll be as a community as we come back and experience each other anew, and our artists anew, and our community.

JANICE SINDEN: For me, that’s the most uplifting part of this, is seeing a community come together to say, “This is going to be very hard, and very real, “but at the end of the day, we’re gonna do this together and we’re gonna come back strong.”

EUSTIS: What this last year has done is issued an enormous wake-up call and a chance to reset.  And that reset for The Public is doubling down on our mission.  Doubling down on the idea that the enormous diversity of voices is America’s great strength.  That we need to give agency to those who have been denied agency, historically, in this country.

WILLIAMS: This past year, we have seen “Great Performances” from every space imaginable.  The marriage of arts and technology has expanded accessibility to the arts and more opportunities for performers to be seen and heard.  Digital distribution has allowed audiences to discover new talent who we’ll follow for years, and new ways of performing that bolstered our enthusiasm for live events.

And if you have a pulse, I know you want to walk through those theater doors, smile at your neighbor in the next seat, commit to two hours in the darkness, and expect to shed tears of joy when the artists once again ply their craft live on stage.  It can’t come soon enough.

The arts may have been interrupted, but they’re comin’ back!

I’m Vanessa Williams for “Great Performances.”

♪

ANNOUNCER: To find out more about this and other “Great Performances” programs, visit pbs.org/greatperformances.  Find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

[The program will be streaming on the PBS website until Friday, 9 July 2021, at 11:59 p.m. EDT.  It can also be viewed on video at https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/pbs-for-the-arts-about/12512/.]

"'Great Performances': The Arts Interrupted" – Part 1

Produced and directed by Akisa Omulepu

[The Great Performances presentation of “The Arts Interrupted,” a look at the toll taken on the performing arts in New York City and around the country by the coronavirus pandemic, premièred on Friday, 14 May 2021, at 9 p.m. on WNET, Channel 13 in New York City (and on various schedules on other PBS stations around the nation). 

[The transcript for this hour-long broadcast us too long to publish on Rick On Theater in one post, so I’ll be putting it up in two parts.  Part 1 below will be followed by Part 2 on Sunday, 6 June.]

Take an inside look at how arts organizations nationwide are surviving the pandemic and how they are maturing during the country’s reckoning with systemic racism, featuring interviews with artists and performances made during lockdown.

ANNOUNCER: Next, on “Great Performances”. . .

During pandemic times, how have performers survived the arts interrupted?

OSKAR EUSTIS [Artistic Director, The Public Theater, New York City]: I went into the hospital on March 12 with COVID.  And when I came out five days later, the theaters were shut down and it’s been shut down ever since. 

ALEJANDRA DUQUE CIFUENTES [Executive Director, Dance/NYC]: The way in which arts and dance and cultural workers make a living disappeared with it.

DANNY BURSTEIN [Tony-nominated actor, “Moulin Rouge”]: We’ve missed the exchange of dialogue.  We’ve missed love on a very deep level.

I think what I miss most is that sense of community that can only show up in that exchange of storytelling between artist and audience.

(vocalizing)

VANESSA WILLIAMS [Grammy, Emmy, and Tony nominee]: Isolation and harmony, fragility and resilience, oppression and hope.  These are the emotions of our time.

I’m Vanessa Williams, your host for a look at how performers during the pandemic survived the loss of the arts.

ANNOUNCER: Join us when “Great Performances” explores “The Arts Interrupted.”

♪♪

Major funding for “Great Performances” is provided by. . .

. . . and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.

Major fund (horns honking)

Good evening, and welcome to “Great Performances.” 

I’m Vanessa Williams.  Like all live theatrical events, “Great Performances” looked very different this past year.

JANE KRAKOWSKI [Tony for Nine, 2003] (on tape): I’m at home.  Unlike you, my seats are numbered because the theater is my life.  And right now, I’m seriously missing the live theater experience.

WILLIAMS: Broadway stars Jane Krakowski, Daniel Dae Kim [The King and I, 2016], and others introduced special encore presentations of their shows from their homes.

DANIEL DAE KIM (on tape): Good evening, I’m Daniel Dae Kim.  Welcome to “Great Performances,” and tonight’s “Broadway at Home” presentation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I.”

WILLIAMS: “The Grammy Salute to Music Legends” was produced in dozens of different locations and all remotely.

–  ♪ Time after time

WILLIAMS: Stars appeared on Zoom for “Movies for Grownups” [an annual award by the American Association of Retired Persons for entertainers over 50 and films that address viewers of that age].

HODA KOTB [broadcast journalist, television personality, and author] (on tape): Let me be the one to congratulate you on your big award here.  Just tell me what it means to you, George [Clooney], to be recognized by the A.A.R.P.  [Clooney (then 56) received AARP: The Magazine’s Movies for Grownups Awards 2018 Career Achievement Honor.]

CLOONEY: I suppose the most important thing I could say is thank you very much to all of the people and to A.A.R.P. for this distinguished honor, and I can use the word “distinguished,” because you have to be distinguished to be in A.A.R.P.

Scott Yoo [conductor and violinist; host of PBS 2019 music miniseries Now Hear This] invited us to “Now Hear This” with the orchestra socially distanced.

YOO: A once-in-a-lifetime feat today was every performance for the genius that was Mozart.

I’m Scott Yoo and I hope you can “Now Hear This.”

(playing softly)

WILLIAMS: And a new “Romeo and Juliet” was performed in a theater, but not on stage.  [Shakespeare’s play was performed backstage at London’s “shuttered” (due to COVID) National Theatre; Great Performances, April 2021.]

♪

All performing artists were forced to adapt to a new way of reaching audiences when the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world and the lights turned out.

Tonight, I’m coming to you from New York’s legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem.  Again, things look very different.  Although I’m feeling right at home onstage, the seats here at the Apollo, like seats in most theaters around the world, are empty.

This special edition of “Great Performances” will take you on a journey through the events of this past year that brought us here.

We will never forget 2020.  From the COVID-19 crisis to the Black Lives Matter movement, with its rallying cries for social justice, it was a year that profoundly changed our lives. 

It’s also how art and performance inspired us, keeping us going through the dramatic highs and the devastating lows.

While ghost lights, like this one, kept burning in theaters, artists have pointed us to an even brighter light—the light at the end of the tunnel.  [See “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 1,” on Rick On Theater, 14 August 2020, for an explanation of what a “ghost light” is and how it got that name.]

Our journey begins with a question: What do you do when the lights go out?  We’ll find out together.

But first, let’s go back to what so many of us call the “before times,” when the arts were in full swing and Broadway saw the debut of a much-anticipated musical, “Moulin Rouge.”

(fingers snapping)

(“Lady Marmalade” playing)

DANNY BURSTEIN: The opening night of “Moulin Rouge” [Thursday, 25 July 2019] was one of the most exciting nights of my life.

I’ve been in 18 Broadway shows.  I’ve never experienced anything like it before.  There’s, there are so many different people who contribute to a Broadway show: costume designers, lighting designers, set designers, painters, the stage hands . . . .  They’re artists in their own way.  You walk into that theater and everybody is on the same page.

This particular company was very close, and it’s also easily the most talented group of people that I’ve ever worked with: actors, singers, dancers—people who could do anything.

[Karen Olivo and Aaron Tveit singing]

SATINE: ♪ Suddenly the world

♪ Seems such a perfect place

–  ♪ Come what may

–  ♪ Come what may ♪

BOTH: ♪ Come what may

(holding note)

♪

♪ Come what may

(song ends, cheers and applause)

WILLIAMS: But then, the applause stopped.

(applause stops abruptly)

March 12, 2020, just hours before the curtain was to go up on the matinee performance of “Moulin Rouge,” performances were canceled.  The show became ground zero for COVID, as 25 members of the company, including leads Danny Burstein, Aaron Tveit, and Karen Olivo, contracted the virus.

And on that same night, all of Broadway went dark.

BURSTEIN: We’ve missed community.  We’ve missed the exchange of dialogue.  We’ve missed love on a very deep level.

And that isolation, I’m hoping, you know, abates very, very soon.

WILLIAMS: The Metropolitan Opera closed, along with Carnegie Hall, the Blue Note, and across the country, the Kennedy Center, the Troubadour in Los Angeles, comedy clubs, concert arenas, and nightclubs—every place where performers unite a group of strangers with their unique talents—shut their doors.

EUSTIS: To me, it was like the opening episode of “The Walking Dead,” because I went into the hospital on March 12 with COVID, and I was actually in the hospital when the theaters shut down.

And when I came out five days later, the theaters were shut down and it’s been shut down ever since.

It took me probably longer than it should have to recognize that this was going to be a long haul, and every step along the way, um, it has posed new challenges.

WILLIAMS: The impact has been immeasurable, devastating an entire industry with financial losses in the billions.

Likewise, support industries were also hard-hit.  Restaurants and bars, both in New York’s Theater District and near performance venues around the country, shuttered.

Most performers make barely enough to survive, and now their day jobs in dance studios and gyms were also gone.

KAMILAH FORBES [Executive Producer, Apollo Theater, NYC]: So the pandemic has truly rocked the artistic community, um, not only from the institutions.  I mean, we saw immediately overnight that we’re facing eight, close to $8 million in revenue losses, like, within the blink of an eye, when we had to close our doors.

But truly, who really became impacted were the individual artists. 

CIFUENTES: We in New York City, being a city that is so dense in activity for dance and the arts in general, but also so dependent on a[n] international audience and on a healthy local audience, when the city shut down, the way in which arts and dance and cultural workers make a living disappeared with it.

EUSTIS: When the shutdown happened, every single person who worked in the New York theater—every artist, every actor and designer, director—was instantly a hundred percent unemployed.  Everybody lost their jobs.

The nonprofit theater had the additional issue . . . .  We had a staff of about 250 people, and all of our earned income vanished overnight, and trying to figure out how to live up to the responsibilities that we had to our staff, as well as to the freelance artists who make up the bulk of our workforce, um, was incredibly challenging and difficult.

WILLIAMS: So, what did they do when the lights went out?

Brilliant, creative people were not to be held back.  No matter what the challenge, singers gotta sing, actors gotta act, and dancers got to dance.

(“The Music and the Mirror” [A Chorus Line, 1975] playing)

So they dance in the streets.

♪

Artists forged on, finding new avenues for their amazing gifts.  Performers surprised us in a different way.  And played music in their living rooms.

♪

(singing in Spanish [“Chan Chan” by Los Angeles-based Afro-Cuban band Changüí Majadero])

♪

(singing in Spanish)

♪

WILLIAMS: Leave it to performers to invent new ways to touch our emotions.

(distant applause, objects clanging)

(car horns, applause)

(singing operatically [Brian Stokes Mitchell singing out his window])

We were inspired by the 7:00 clap and how we could really charge our community to stay strong.  [For the “7:00 clap,” everyone went to his or her window, balcony, or front yard at 7 p.m. and clapped to thank the healthcare and essential workers during the early days of the pandemic.]

And so we called on artist friends and we did a social media campaign, which was called “Humanity in Concert.”

ROSEANNE CASH [singer-songwriter and author; daughter of Johnny Cash]: Hi, Roseanne Cash here along with John Leventhal [musician, producer, songwriter, and recording engineer; married to Roseanne Cash].

Thanks to Lincoln Center for putting this together and inviting us.  Um, we wanna dedicate this song to the maintenance crews and cleaning crews at all the hospitals across New York City and across the country, actually.  They, um, risk their lives right along with the healthcare workers.

–  Amen.

–  We really appreciate them.

This is a traditional Scottish song called “The Parting Glass.”

(playing slowly)

♪ Of all the money e’er I spent ♪

♪ I spent it in good company

♪ And all the harm I’ve ever done ♪

♪ Alas, it was to none but me

♪ And all I’ve done for want of wit ♪

♪ To memory now, I can’t recall ♪

♪ So give to me the parting glass ♪

♪ Good night and joy be with you all ♪

♪ Of all the comrades e’er I had ♪

♪ They are sorry for my going away ♪

♪ And all the sweethearts e’er I had ♪

♪ They wish me one more day to stay ♪

♪ But since it fell unto my lot ♪

♪ That I should rise and you should not ♪

♪ I gently rise and softly call ♪

♪ Goodnight and joy be with you all ♪

♪

♪ Goodnight and joy be with you all ♪

(song ends)

WILLIAMS: While performers had to find new ways to share their work, New York’s Public Theater was one of the first to put that work in front of an audience.  Playwright Richard Nelson reunited the actors who had portrayed his fictional family the Apples in four earlier plays for a brand-new play, created specifically as a Zoom production.  [From 2010 to 2013, Nelson wrote and directed four plays centered around the Apple Family; all four plays premièred at the Public.  On 29 April 2020, the Public live-streamed a new Apple Family play, What Do We Need to Talk About?]

Oskar Eustis found it difficult to contemplate this at first.

– That’s just the starting point.

– You know what it’s about.

– Actually, I don’t.

– Richard, it’s people telling each other stories while they wait out a plague hundreds of years ago in Italy.

EUSTIS: I spent about two weeks after I got out of the hospital in this ridiculously self-righteous theatrical pose.

“We are a theater company, we’re not a film studio. 

“We’re not a television station, we’re not a radio station.

“We will produce theater again when audiences can come together and we won’t be,” and it was just a joke.

It was a terrible response.

And after about two weeks, I realized that essentially what I was saying is that, “Well, as long as there is a pandemic, I’m relieved of the obligation of fulfilling our mission.” 

And of course, that isn’t true.  Just because there are really difficult circumstances doesn’t mean we get to stop trying to fulfill our mission.

The first idea that came to me was Richard Nelson’s idea of bringing the Apple family back together to do a Zoom play.

And Richard came up with this idea within two weeks of the pandemic hitting.  And it led to our first digital production, “The Apple Family’s What Do We Need to Talk About?”

– All right, this week I was Skyping with Gideon, he’s my friend at Bard [College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York], and a writer friend of his, and we’re commiserating about canceling the play this summer.

– The musical.

– Right, so they were, they were trying to figure how to do something to keep going, do theater somehow to just kind of, you make the point that we’re not done, we’re not finished.

– Mm-hm.

– So we quickly, we think of something like this, what, you know, what we’re doing on Skype or Zoom.  We stream it, we put it on YouTube, it’s . . . .  You know, they’re not the same, of course, but it shows that we are not giving up.

So, what to put on?

I suggest, maybe, “Skin of Our Teeth”?

– I don’t know that.

– It’s sort of about the end of the world.

– Oh, that’s a good idea.

– (chuckling)

EUSTIS: And I’m so proud of that show, because Richard is an extraordinary artist who brought together this company of actors who he had worked with over a decade and created the Zoom play.

The play wasn’t a film of a play.  The play was a Zoom call, so actually was the medium that it was transmitted in.  And it was seen in 37 countries, all 50 states, I got fan mail from Kazakhstan.

It was a fantastic success and was the beginning of our digital efforts, which have continued to this day.

WILLIAMS: Innovation and experimentation was to be found all over the country, in theaters and concert halls large and small.  Away from the biggest cities, the arts, tourism, and community often intersect—in places like Great Barrington, in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, where one theater company made a valiant effort to still put on a show.

Oh, yeah!

♪ Oh, bless the Lord, my soul

♪ Oh, bless the Lord, my soul ♪

IVETTE FELICIANO [shoots, produces, and reports on camera for PBS NewsHour Weekend]: Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the stage actors’ union, Actors’ Equity Association, has only approved two theaters to resume live performances in the U.S.  Both of them were in the Berkshires.

The first was Barrington Stage Company, which staged the one-man show “Harry Clarke” in early August.  The second, Berkshire Theatre Group, is now performing the musical “Godspell” through September 20.  The actors in Berkshire Theatre Group’s “Godspell” talk about their dilemma at the beginning of the play.

– The COVID-19 pandemic took away everything I worked my whole life for. 

– I felt alone, abandoned, unessential, and just completely unnecessary. 

– My entire business relies on human connection. 

– When theater shut down, so did I.

RALPH REMINGTON [Director of Cultural Affairs, San Francisco Arts Commission]: What this time has showed us is that, how resilient our artistic community is.  And how creative, even in their own lives, artists are. 

JANICE SINDEN [President & CEO, Colorado Center for the Performing Arts]: The resilience of our artists and our performers is amazing.  They have, at every turn, figured out ways to lean in, whether it’s through virtual programming through the classroom and our education outreach or whether it was finding ways to do play readings, workshops, lots of heavy work thinking about what the future of theater is.

And there’s been lots of engagement and telling the stories of the people in our community, and there’s no one better than local artists to really depict those, those tragedies, as well as those stories of resiliency.

CIFUENTES: When we think about artists and their role in society, and we think about what we cannot return to, is, we cannot return to seeing art as simply the thing that we engage with when we have a little expendable income.

SIMONE ECCLESTON [Director of Hip Hop Culture and Contemporary Music, Kennedy Center]: This moment has definitely been, um, a prime example of the democratization of art.  The Kennedy Center really leaned into the fullness of its identity as the nation’s performing arts center and the nation’s cultural center.

WILLIAMS: Since many major arts organizations also have an education mission, they quickly identified the unique challenges that come with in-home learning.  Many stepped up to help fill the gap between schools and students under lockdown.

JORDANA LEIGH [Senior Director of Artistic Programming, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts]: The first thing we did was, we ended up doing pop-up classrooms, um, which were performances and concerts for kids, and those were performances really geared towards young people, because we realized parents were at home and that their kids all of a sudden didn’t have school, didn’t have that structure that they were relying on, so what could we do to support our community immediately?

– For this next part, I want everybody to join in.

– I think you all should beatbox with me.

– Hold on, I promise you, it won’t be hard.

– We’re gonna start off using two words: boots and cats.

– We’re gonna go slow and speed it up.

– On a count of four, here we go.

– One, two, three, four.

WILLIAMS: The lessons introduced kids to diverse art forms, from beatboxing to playing guitar and singing in Spanish.

– I’m Sonia De Los Santos [bilingual singer in Spanish and English, born in Monterrey, Mexico], welcome to “In Casa Con Sonia.”

(singing in Spanish)

WILLIAMS: Once more, performers turned to emerging technology to share their talent.

♪

♪

WILLIAMS: For every challenge, there is a solution, and with every crisis, there’s an opportunity to shine.  This crisis provided a chance for artistic innovation.  Performers and their companies refused to be hampered by barriers and created new forms of performance: dance on a video screen, virtual theater, and even opera—in a Detroit parking garage.

YUVAL SHARON: Hi, I’m Yuval Sharon.  I’m the artistic director for Michigan Opera Theatre and I’m the director of “Twilight: Gods.”  I am delighted to welcome you to this performance.  It is a performance in which you are a very active participant in the event.

This is how you’re gonna be experiencing the opera: behind the wheel of your own car, because you will be driving from level to level of the parking garage to see the scenes on each individual level.

WOMAN (actor): So . . . Siegfried is dead?

Siegfried is dead.

♪ Build his pyre

♪ Like a strong grove

♪ The riverbank

♪ Now a pile

♪

♪

WILLIAMS: Let’s see the visual ingenuity of a ballet performed by real dancers with animation [Scribble by Ballet X (Pennslyvania)].

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

WILLIAMS: Let’s enjoy the dazzling ensemble of the Juilliard School with their unique performance of Ravel’s “Bolero.”

(playing “Bolero”)

♪

♪

♪

WILLIAMS: Young artists found ways to perform on all kinds of social media, from Instagram and Facebook to YouTube and TikTok.

ENSEMBLE: ♪ And we will come back home

♪ And we will come back home

♪ Home again

♪ And we will come back home

♪ And we will come back home

♪ Home again

♪ And we will come back home

♪ And we will come back home

(singing warm-up)

♪ Spend a day warm on the sand

ENSEMBLE: ♪ I bet you that sand is hotter ♪

– ♪ I bet you on land they understand ♪

♪ Bet they don’t reprimand their daughters ♪

ENSEMBLE: ♪ I bet they don’t do that

– ♪ Bright young women ENSEMBLE ♪ Oh, yeah

– ♪ Sick of swimmin’

WOMAN: Run, run, run, run, run, tendu, derrière, fifth.

Plié and stretch, plié and stretch.

Glissade, royale, glissade, royale. [ballet movements]

Glissade, royale, glissade...

(“Attack” by KERIMKAAN playing)

(woman vocalizing)

(“From Now On” from “The Greatest Showman” [2017 film about P. T. Barnum; music and lyrics by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul] playing)

♪ From now on

♪ And we will come back home

♪ And we will come back home ♪

♪ Home again

[As I announced in the introduction above, I’ll be posting “The Arts Interrupted” in two parts.  Please come back for Part 2 on Sunday, 6 June—there is much of interest to come.

[The program will be streaming on the PBS website until Friday, 9 July 2021 at 11:59 p.m. EDT.  It can also be viewed on video at https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/pbs-for-the-arts-about/12512/.  The performance samples that Great Performances has selected for this program are well worth seeing and hearing; I recommend catching them.]

'One Man, Two Guvnors' (PBS)

 

The Public Broadcasting Service announced that it would broadcast Richard Bean’s Tony Award-winning comedy One Man, Two Guvnors as an episode of Great Performances.  I didn’t see One Man live when it was on Broadway, so I watched the Great Performances broadcast that night.  Since the New York theaters have been closed since March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, I decided to write up my impressions of the performance for Rick On Theater just as I would do for a live show. 

One Man, Two Guvnors had its television première on the evening of Friday, 6 November 2020, on Great Performances, the PBS anthology series dedicated to the performing arts.  The video, part of the program’s “Broadway’s Best,” is actually a live performance recorded in 2011 by London’s Royal National Theatre and released as National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors, produced by David Sabel and directed for the screen by Robin Lough. 

National Theatre Live is an initiative of the National Theatre which broadcasts performances of the theater company’s productions (and some from other theaters) live via satellite to cinemas and arts centers around the world.  (Except for the ensemble, who were cast in New York, and one featured role, the cast of the National Theatre video is the same as the opening-night Broadway cast.)

One Man is an English adaptation of The Servant of Two Masters, a 1745 Commedia dell’arte-style farce by the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-93; see my ROT reports “The Servant of Two Masters (Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2012),” 9 July 2012, and “Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters (Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 2005),” 29 July 2012). 

Richard Bean (b, 1956) was born in East Hull, a port city on the Humber estuary in Yorkshire, near England’s east coast.  He studied social psychology at Loughborough University in Leicestershire (about 105 miles south of Hull), and then worked as an occupational psychologist. 

Bean worked in a bread plant for a year and a half after leaving school.  This was the setting for his second play, Toast (1999; see my report on ROT on 19 May 2016), which I saw as part of 59E59 Theaters’ Brits Off Broadway.  (There’s a bit of a biography of the playwright in that report.)

Between 1989 and 1994, Bean also worked as a stand-up comedian and went on to be one of the writers and performers of the BBC Radio show Control Group Six which was nominated for a Writers Guild Award.  (Control Group Six, a series with an experimental format that interspersed unrelated sketches in an unfolding storyline based on a dark-tinged, futuristic thriller, ran in two series in 1995 and 1997.)

One Man, Two Guvnors opened under the direction of Nicholas Hytner (Tonys for the 1994 Lincoln Center revival of Carousel and the 2006 Broadway début of The History Boys—which also featured James Corden, the lead in One Man) at the Royal National’s Lyttleton Theatre on 24 May 2011, closing on 19 September. 

It toured the United Kingdom for five weeks in September and October and then opened at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End on 21 November and ran until 25 February 2012 when it transferred to the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 2 March; the London production of One Man closed on 1 March 2014. 

The show won Best Play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for 2011 and was nominated for a 2012 Olivier Award: for Best New Play.  One Man went out on a second UK tour in 2012 and ’13 and an international tour in 2013.  Then it had a third UK tour in 2014 and ’15.

A Broadway mounting premièred at  the Music Box Theatre on 18 April 2012.  The limited engagement concluded on 2 September, a run of 159 regular performances, and received seven Tony nominations; Corden won a Tony Award for Best Actor In A Leading Role In A Play.  One Man was also nominated for and won three Drama Desk Awards: Outstanding Actor In A Play (Corden), Outstanding Featured Actor In A Play (Tom Edden), and Outstanding Music In A Play (Grant Olding). 

In addition to the National Theatre Live video (and now the PBS broadcast), Fox Searchlight Pictures and Damian Jones have signed on to produce a feature film adaptation of One Man, Two Guvnors.  Oli Refson is writing the screenplay.  Though no casting, including the lead role of Francis Henshall, has been announced, playwright Bean and stage director Hytner will serve as executive producers.  No release date has been announced.

According to a BBC News report, Bean had to change parts of the play for a U.S. audience before it opened in New York.  For instance, the author remarked that he had to rewrite all the cricket references because we Americans don’t understand them.  He indicated some other local jokes that he felt wouldn’t go over on this side of the Atlantic were also replaced.

“But Bean, a former stand-up comedian, promises that the changes won't be too drastic,” added reporter Tim Masters, who interviewed the playwright for the British Broadcasting Corporation.  “The reason that the play works,” explained Bean, ”is that it is end-of-the-pier British comedy and obviously we’re not going to destroy that.”  He was referring to the bawdy, old-fashioned style of broad comedy provided by British music halls, often located at the end of the pleasure piers in seaside resorts.

The PBS broadcast is the London edition of the play, so the British jokes, of course, hadn’t been excised.  There are indeed several jokes, some of them extended or recurring, that must have made more sense to the Brits in the house (who laughed uproariously at every one) than they did to me.

One example was Lloyd Boateng (Trevor Laird), Charlie’s friend from Jamaica’s repeated references to Parkhurst.  Lloyd says that was where he learned to be a chef (he owns a pub that “does food” and is catering the party that opens the play) and where he learned about “true love.”  Well, obviously it’s some place where those experiences wouldn’t be expected and it must be a place where it would be incongruous for them both to occur. 

I guessed correctly, but I had to look it up to be certain: the reference is to Her Majesty’s Prison Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, once one of the toughest jails in the British Isles where many notable criminals were incarcerated.  A Brit would obviously know this without recourse to Wikipedia; it’s not as funny if you have to look it up later.

Playwright Richard Bean reset One Man in the British seaside resort town of Brighton in 1963.  The plot centers on an out-of-work musician named Francis Henshall (James Corden, currently the host of CBS’s Late Late Show), recently fired from his skiffle band, who becomes a bodyguard/minder for Roscoe Crabbe, a petty East End crook.  

Little does Francis know that Roscoe, supposedly in Brighton to collect £6,000 from his fiancée’s father, is actually dead and his twin sister, Rachel (Jemima Rooper), is now masquerading as her brother, killed by her boyfriend, Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris).  (Is everybody following this?) 

There’s a repeated joke about whether Roscoe and Rachel can be “identical twins” if they’re of different genders.  It’s a mark of the intelligence of many of the characters that they can’t comprehend this distinction.  (One character even discourses on the scientific difference between monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins.  Now there’s an apt topic for low comedy for ya.)

To complicate matters even more, when the perpetually ravenous Francis sees the chance for an extra meal ticket, he takes on a second job with Stanley, an upper class twit who’s hiding out from the police and waiting to be reunited with Rachel.  To prevent discovery, Francis must keep his “two guvnors” apart, an increasingly difficult predicament as the two are both staying in the same pub named The Cricketers Arms, resulting in farcical mayhem.

Roiling events still further is local mobster Charlie “the Duck” Clench (Fred Ridgeway), who had arranged the engagement of his daughter, Pauline (Claire Lams), to Roscoe despite her preference for over-the-top amateur actor Alan Dangle (Daniel Rigby).  (So, an over-the-top actor in an over-the-top farce.  How does Bean come up with this stuff?)

(By the way, I tried to find a British slang explanation for calling someone a “duck,” but I was unsuccessful.  The context seems to be that Charlie’s cheap—a skinflint and chiseler—and Lloyd says of him in one exchange, “Man!  They don’t call you ‘Charlie the Duck’ for nothing!  Tight man!”)

Even more complications are prompted by several letters, a very heavy trunk, a number of unlucky audience “volunteers,” an extremely elderly waiter named Alfie (Tom Edden), and Francis’s pursuit of his twin passions: food and drink, and Charlie’s “women’s-libber” bookkeeper, Dolly (Suzie Toase).

One Man got James Corden a Tony (2012’s Best Performance By An Actor In A Leading Role In A Play) and led to his gig as the host of The Late Late Show.  (I only watched the first show of TLLS and decided I didn’t like it—or Corden—so I haven’t followed it.)  I didn’t much care for the play—it was like a semi-literate Benny Hill sketch (i.e., not Monty Python!  Or even Fawlty Towers). 

I’ve blogged before on TV versions of plays—The Originalist, for one (see my report on ROT, 17 July 2017), before I saw it live—so this isn’t unprecedented.  I also actually like silliness—as ROTters may have noticed in my reaction to Something Rotten! (see my report, 14 May 2016), plus my report on A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (16 October 2014), which had me howling in my seat!—but I draw the line at that really low humor the Brits love, but which makes me cringe.

(“That real bottom-of-the-barrel English humor is an acquired taste, I think,” my friend Kirk Woodward said to me when I told him my thoughts on writing up the performance of One Man, “based mostly on the fact that Pat [Kirk’s late wife], a deep-dyed Anglophile, didn’t like it either.”  My sense of the British taste for “knickers humor” isn’t so much that it’s “acquired,” but that it’s something its fans never grew out of. 

(Why the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Shaw, and Eliot has such a love affair with that knickers stuff is a mystery to me.  They still do Punch ’n’ Judy shows and—have you ever seen a “panto”?  They’re a combo of juvenile and prurient.  I say it’s a case of national arrested development.  That’s just MHO, of course.)

One example of what I mean—Bean’s frequent not-so-subtle allusions to sex.  One of Charlie’s party guests is his lawyer, Harry Dangle.  He’s the father of Pauline’s fiancé, Alan.  His law firm is Dangle, Berry, and Bush.  In addition to the puerile references to a man’s groin and genitalia (I hope I don’t have to spell that out for you!), there’s the added frisson of “Dangle, Berry” sounding awfully close to ‘dingleberry.’  Enough said?

(It’s not as if One Man, Two Guvnors is an all-out, sex-obsessed knickers farce.  It’s not.  Chris and Rooper find themselves hobbling around near the end of the play with their pants down around their ankles—but the joke is more about watching them try to walk around the stage with their trouser down than seeing them in underwear.  Earlier, Chris does make an entrance shirtless—but what’s supposed to be funny there is that he’s wearing a rug both on his chest and his back!  Both bits are more silly than funny—but, again, that’s just me.)

I found Bean’s Commedia travesty self-indulgent and the script a pastiche of bits from crusty old British farces that reminded me mostly of the Carry On franchise of 1958-78 with its bawdy  music-hall humor—right down to the casual homophobia, racism, sexism, ageism, and xenophobia. 

Bean points his insult gun at a wide range of topics, including women (and men), actors, The Beatles (especially Ringo), lawyers, cops, boarding schools and boarding school alumni, gays (and lesbians), religion(s), and old people. 

At least in passing, the play pokes stereotypical fun at foreigners like Spaniards and Italians, and countries like Canada (boring) and Japan, but Australia, where everyone apparently loves opera, comes in for the most frequent jabs. 

By the way, the Aussie’s obsession with opera is a new one on me; I’d never heard that about them.  What’s more, the juxtaposition of Australia and opera doesn’t seem nearly funny enough to merit three mentions.  Must be a Brit thing.

The problem is that while Bean’s parodying dated and bigoted tropes, he’s also perpetuating them.  It’s a shame because at the time he was composing One Man, Europe in particular was embarking on a rapid descent into xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-refugee politics that soon caught on here as well.  We have just debarrassed ourselves of a president who based his appeal and many of his policies on those sorts of forces.

What the play celebrates (if that’s the right word) is stupidity and ignorance.  The frequent refrain from Pauline Clench is a confused “I don’t understand!” and after one such cry, Alan, her beloved, declaims, “This is why I love her.  She is pure, innocent, unsoiled by education, like a new bucket.” 

The idea of a woman so empty-headed it renders her irresistible is surely a conceit we don’t need to go back to.  (See what I mean about the Carry On flicks and Benny Hill humor?  In case I didn’t make myself clear: I’m not a fan of Benny Hill and his genre of imbecilic “comedy.”)  But Pauline’s not the only example of this gambit. 

Her father’s the one with the difficulty over identical and fraternal twins, and Francis, the title character, isn’t terribly swift upstairs, either.  (“You’re not exactly a Swiss watch, are you,” says Stanley, one of Francis’s guvnors, to him—though that product of a British public school isn’t terribly bright himself.)

I thought stupidity as a virtue went out with the Three Stooges (whom I admit, I could never stand, even as a little boy).

I have to say, despite my obvious distaste for the play—Goldoni ought to be spinning in his grave, along with Giorgio Strehler, the Italian director whose métier was classic Commedia farce, especially Servant of Two Masters—the stage work was quite good.  It doesn’t hurt that the British have always been good at physical comedy; we Yanks have only caught up some in the last couple of decades or so.

There was a lot of physical humor in One Man, just as there would be in a Commedia dell’arte performance—pratfalls, stunts, faces, mime, and more—and it was all handled very well.  Hytner and his physical comedy director, Cal McCrystal, put the actors through their paces.

One of the best-performed bits was a tumble Francis takes right at the top of the show.  When James Corden enters, he tosses peanuts in the air and catches them in his mouth.  On his last toss, he back into an armchair which topples over backwards, taking Corden with it.  After a second or two, up he pops, announcing, “I got it!” and sticking out his tongue with the peanut upon it.  (Obviously, the last bit of this gag only really works visually on camera.)

There’s a caveat here, though.  I felt that almost all the physical turns, which were contrived and stock (as they were in Commedia dell’arte as well, of course), were also gratuitous.  They barely connected to the plot—they were “set pieces,” routines that could have been dropped in almost anywhere, and in any farce irrespective of plot. 

The best bit of physical acting was performed by Tom Edden as Alfie the ancient waiter in The Cricketers Arms.  Alfie’s 87, a World War I vet, and has nearly every frailty you can imagine: he’s deaf, suffers from tremors, has a balance problem, wears a pacemaker—and it’s his first day on the job.

Edden’s made to look like a cross among Boris Karloff, Marty Feldman as Igor in Young Frankenstein, and Christopher Lloyd as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family.  He performs spectacular pratfalls as doors are slammed into his face and he goes from zero to 60 in nothing flat when his pacemaker is turned up to 9.  

He does an almost unbelievable tumble that goes from teetering in the edge of the top step with his back to a flight of stairs to almost falling on his face on the landing—and just as we think he’s going to recover, he swivels and falls headfirst down the stairs (out of our sight, of course).

But he ought to have won his Drama Desk Award  for one gag alone: his slow, jittery cross with an empty soup bowl with a spoon in it on top of a plate from the serving table at center stage to the door to the dining room at stage left—raising such a clinking, clattering racket that before he can reach the door, Francis grabs him, opens the door, and shoves Alfie into the room just to stop the noise.  Talk about your coup de théâtre!

All the actors are good at the direct address to the audience, which is used a great deal in One Man—the breaking of the fourth wall.  They all do it well, but Suzie Toase’s Dolly uses it best.  Her character’s a stock mid-20th-century farce figure, the man-hungry woman, but Bean imbues her with a kind of wisdom no other character in One Man possesses. 

Toase uses the direct address exchanges as little lessons she aims at the women in the audience (but which have significance to the men as well).  Her asides seem more part of her character than those of the others; theirs somehow seem like shifts in gear.

Corden, however, is the master of ad libs and interaction with the audience.  One Man has a lot of audience participation, including three spectators who are brought onto the stage.  He handles the ad libs with complete confidence, as if it’s all scripted and rehearsed—and as if it isn’t the most terrifying thing an actor can be asked to do.

I’ve had occasion to have to improvise with fellow actors on stage—when something goes amiss and we had to cover—and I can tell you that every time it happened, my heart was in my throat and every minute that passed until we got back on track creeped along at a 10 to 1 ratio: one minute of real time seemed like 10 minutes inside my head.  Having to improvise with a member of the audience is scarier still!

In one bit, Corden brings two young men up to help him move a heavy trunk,  He’d done a solo attempt to lift it to no avail.  In the banter, after setting up the gag, Corden asks the two men, “Have either of you two got your Equity card?” He’s referring to the membership card for the British actors’ union, formerly officially titled the British Actors’ Equity Association.  Of course, neither man was a union member, it was just banter and everyone chuckled.

But whenever I see a bit like that in a show, I always wonder what would happen if the spectator was a union member?  What would the actor do if the “volunteer” pulled out his Equity card as Corden asked?  What would he do?  What would the stage manager do?  It’s just a fantasy I have—but I wonder if it’s ever happened.

Not all the volunteers get off so easily as Jess and Corey.  Take Christine, whom Corden brings on stage at the end of the first act when he’s frantically serving dinner to his two guvnors, each in a different dining room off stage while he’s in the middle trying to wait on them and steal food for himself from their orders.

Poor Christine is pushed around the stage, at one point shoved under the serving table.   She’s soaked with water when a crèpe Suzette flames up out of control (intentionally), and then she’s sprayed with fire extinguisher foam.  Finally, she’s led off by a stage manager, soaking wet and covered in white foam.

She has to be a plant—no one could treat an actual spectator like that and not get sued or even arrested for assault.  Christine’s dress was probably ruined—at the very least it would cost a lot to clean it.  But if she’s an actress planted in the audience for this scene, she’s excellent at playing the surprised and unwitting civilian, and sounding like a non-professional when she speaks.  I have no idea.

I can say, it made me uncomfortable to watch this all unfold.  I certainly left the play for quite a while as this went on.  I’m not sure that’s a good outcome.

As you can probably tell from the Drama Desk Award for Music in a Play that One Man, Two Guvnors is a play with music.  (Yeah, I know—Duuh!)  Don’t mistake that with a musical, in which the songs and dialogue are integrated (hopefully) and the music helps move the plot along.  In One Man, the songs are interludes—they aren’t character- or plot-driven and they’re mostly sung by singers outside the narrative of the script.  (They are joined occasionally by actors from the play—but not characters.)

In this case, the singers and musicians are a pop band led by Grant Olding, who also wrote the music and lyrics.  (He won that Drama Desk Award.)  Since Francis Henshaw was a member of a skiffle band, The Crave, as Olding (or Bean) named this combo, is appropriately also a skiffle band. 

(I won’t give an elaborate definition of skiffle music, but it’s an old American folk tradition that was given a revival in the U.K. in the late 1950s and early ’60s.  Some of the instruments played by a skiffle band are homemade or improvised; Francis, for instance, had been a washboard player before he was fired.  The Beatles, some of you may know, began as a skiffle band, first known as the Quarrymen, in the late 1950s.)

The Craze is made up (in the video; it was changed in the Broadway mounting) of Olding on lead vocals, guitar, keyboards, accordion, and harmonica; Philip James on guitar, banjo, and back-up vocals; Richard Coughlan on double bass, electric bass, and back-up vocals; and Ben Brooker on percussion including washboard and spoons, drums, and back-up vocals. 

Except when they need more room on stage and the bass and drums move below the platform, stage right, the band plays “in one” in front of the closed front curtain.  Dressed in skinny mauve suits (let’s remember the year in which the play’s set—who remembers Carnaby Street?), with Olding wearing Buddy Holly glasses, The Crave stand behind mikes that rise from the stage and sing during scene changes.

The lyrics comment on, but don’t reiterate, the characters and, to a lesser degree, plot developments of the play.  They sort of capture the mood of the play at that moment.  I confess that to my musically un-learned ear, the tunes largely sound repetitive, serving mostly as time-fillers.

After the first number, the combo was joined in succeeding songs by Corden on a small xylophone (he seems quite adept) and then Martyn Ellis  (who plays the lawyer Harry Dangle) on uke and vocals.  Ellis actually does a solo until he’s joined by Daniel Rigby (Alan) accompanying him with body percussion (he slaps his chest with his open hands).

Claire Lams, Suzie Toase, and Jemima Rooper (Pauline, Dolly, and Rachel), in blond bouffant wigs and early ’60s crinoline dresses do an Andrews Sisters-/ McGuire Sisters-style number and finally, Oliver Chris (Stanley Stubbers) performs a solo horn-honking routine on a dozen small brass bulb horns mounted on a rack.

Because National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors was an international broadcast, reviews were published all over the world.  I’m going to try to sample a range of outlets, since all the reviewers saw the same performance, and we’ll see if there are any differences in regional or media-type coverage. 

(I’ll be particularly curious to see how Australian reviewers felt about One Man, considering how many times playwright Bean branded Down Under as a “terrible godforsaken place.”  A Sydney Morning Herald story reported that Bean turned down the application of an Australian theater company to produce One Man, Two Guvnors because of the jokes at the country’s expense.

(“If it’s Australian actors doing that material it’s not going to work,” explained Bean, “but if Australian audiences see English actors doing it, they’ll understand it and it will be fine.”)

Here’s a survey of selected reviews from around the world and across the country.  I’ve restricted myself to reviews of National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors rather than the live presentation at the Lyttleton.

In The Times of London, Clive Davis watched the streaming version of the NT Live performance.  When his companion began to lose interest in the production before the end of the first act, he confessed that “to be frank I could understand why.”  James Corden’s “insane energy is what carries the convoluted storyline,” Davis judged..

“Even so,” he wondered, “can’t you have too much of his popeyed rants and hyperactive clowning?  This is a comedy that starts with the dial turned up to ten and never looks back.”

The Times writer continued: “At nearly three hours including an interval, it’s also much too long,” adding, “The musical interludes could all be ditched.” 

Davis acknowledged, “I didn't particularly enjoy this production,” but he pondered: “Would I have laughed more if I had been sitting next to flesh-and-blood people rather than my cat?  I'm not sure I would.”

Also from London, The Arts Desk’s Aleks Sierz dubbed the play a “gloriously silly farce . . . starring the irrepressible and Tony-award winning James Corden.”  In the scene in which Francis tries to serve his two guvnors dinner at the same time while keeping them apart from one another, Sierz felt that “the show’s slapstick reaches a pitch of intensity that is both viscerally funny and mind-bogglingly imaginative, with great comic work by Tom Edden as Alfie.”

“The show’s typical edginess means that we are encouraged to laugh at this oldie’s disability,” pointed out the reviewer, “which is disturbing as well as hilarious.  As in most classical farce, pain is funny—and we giggle so as not to cry.”

Corden’s “boyish charm . . . makes his incompetence charming as well as ridiculous” and his “confident bonhomie is particularly evident in the audience participation sequences.”  Sierz also parcels out praise for Rigby’s Alan, Chris’s Stanley, Rooper’s Rachel, Lams’s Pauline, and Toase’s Dolly.

The review-writer proclaimed Hytner’s production “dazzlingly brilliant” and added kudos to associate director Cal McCrystal who staged the clowning “to magnificent effect,” making it “satirical, bawdy and crowd-pleasingly funny.”

Matt Roush, writing for TV Insider, an online newsletter published by NTVB Media (which also puts out TV Guide, among other publications), called One Man, Two Govnors a “side-splitting farce” upon watching the PBS broadcast, and proclaimed Corden “a slapstick virtuoso.”

“Running himself ragged as Francis, . . . Corden dominates the stage with his tireless physical and verbal comedy,” wrote Roush.  “Highbrow it’s not,” the reviewer admitted, “but just try to contain the belly laughs when he’s joined by the miraculous . . . Tom Ed[d]en as a doddering ancient waiter.”

Roush observed, “Though based on a play from the commedia dell’arte era, the rhythms are pure vaudeville, with corny jokes, hammy overacting and campy musical interludes.”

“[I]f you were to ask me . . . what were the two funniest performances I’ve seen over too many years of playgoing,” mused Steven Suskin on New York Stage Review, “I would have an instant answer.  One was given by Phil Silvers, at an underpopulated matinee of the 1972 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

“The other,” continued Suskin, “a 2011 performance which nine years and some 400 (?) shows later still sets me laughing as I type this, is that of James Corden in Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors.”  Suskin first saw the Bean farce in London, but relished the chance to see it again when it was live-streamed.  (He went on to see it twice more in New York.)

“I was pleased and somewhat surprised to find that nothing was lost in the [transfer to the screen],” expressed Suskin.  “You did not have that same thrill of live theater, which in the case of One Man included Corden pulling volunteers and watercress sandwiches out of the orchestra seats,” acknowledged the reviewer.  “But the broadcast worked just as well, with the closeups on screen amplifying the power of the physical humor and stoking the overall hilarity.”

Touting the April 2020 broadcast by the National Theatre over the Internet, Suskin advised “those of you with an interest in comedy might do well to watch One Man, Two Guvnors twice or thrice this week.  I mean, what good is sitting alone in your room. . . if you can spend the hours laughing?” 

The NYSR writer is obviously a Fan—with a capital F—of James Corden.  “I won’t even try, at this point, to describe Corden’s performance,” affirmed Suskin.  “He was all over the stage, all over the floor, juggling plates and characters and plotlines with such voraciousness and such relish that you (and the thousand other customers) gave up on decorum and laughed yourself past exhaustion to exhilaration.”

“James Corden might not be a vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic,” declared Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune, “but he . . . sure is therapeutic.”  He went on to characterize Corden’s turn in One Man as “so consistently hilarious that you might just fall off your couch and knock out the dog with your tumbling laptop.”

Continuing with his healing theme, Jones added, “They should be piping this glorious thing into hospital wards with the oxygen.  Laughter heals, folks!  And, yes, you can snort and guffaw right into your mask.”

For what Jones dubbed “one of [the National Theatre’s] greatest hits of all time,” Hytner mounted a “rip-roaring production” that “nods not just at Commedia but British pantomime and American vaudeville, with Corden a presence both retro and contemporary.” 

Jones concluded that One Man “might not be the funniest thing you ever saw, but it will be right up there, I promise, and at just the right moment.”

Apparently, at least as far as the NT Live production is concerned, the Aussies just overlooked the jibes at their homeland.  I found two reviews of the streamed performances, and neither one even mentioned the Australia jokes.  (I didn’t examine the reviews of the London production’s tour of Australia or the two or three local productions—it seems that Bean’s reluctance eased later and he allowed Australian companies to stage the play.)

In the Rock City Jester of Canberra, Australia, John Lombard labeled One Man Two Guvnors, “a fizzy farce set in the swinging sixties.”  Characterizing the production as “hilarious,” Lombard reported that Bean “spices the elaborate plot by making the monied patriarchs of the [Commedia] original into genteel mobsters.”

With a “sublime” cast “with irresistible energy, immaculate timing and crafty character observation,” director Hytner, the reviewer affirmed, “tells the story with panache, wisely anchoring the comedy in aching longing.” 

Lombard found, “The sense of time and place is extraordinary, with cockney accents [they’re actually northern English accents], popping primary colour costumes and slight rattiness in set perfectly evoking 60s Brighton.”

The review-writer also felt the skiffle band The Craze “are the cherry on top of the sundae, with their musical interludes adding tremendously to the sense of fun and place.”  Lombard concluded by asserting that the “National Theatre’s One Man Two Guvnors is a banquet of entertainment.”

Nary a mention of the Australian put-downs!