Dance & Choreography

 

[I have published few articles on dance on Rick On Theater.  That’s mostly because it’s one of the areas of the performing arts about which I know least.  (Others are music and the electronic fields of theater tech, namely sound and lights—but at least I’ve worked in or with those aspects of theater to some extent.)

[While doing some research on the topics covered in the responses to "‘Morley Safer's Infamous 1993 Art Story,’" posted on ROT on 2 April 2024, I read an interesting article (from the New York Times in 1990, republished below) about defining—or ‘redefining’—dance (with respect to ballet) for the contemporary dance company and audience.

[Then I came across an article in this April’s issue of Dance Magazine about innovation in theatrical choreography to suit the “nontraditional” stage and set designs of some recent Broadway productions.  I decided to put these two pieces, one very recent (one of the shows discussed just opened and is still running) and one 34 years old, together for the blog.  They won’t close the gap between posts on dance and those on acting, directing, and playwriting . . . but they’ll narrow it a smidge.

[Previous posts on ROT on dance include “Dance & Acting,” posted on 9 June 2010; “Visual & Spatial Structure In Theater And Dance,” 11 December 2016; “Joan Acocella: Critic, Historian, or Critic-Historian,” 31 May 2019; and “Reconstruction of Ballet,” 30 July 2019.  There are also several performance reports of shows in which dance was material, such as “Chéri,” 20 December 2013, and “An American in Paris,” 2 August 2015, among others.] 

“How Three Broadway Choreographers
Create in Nontraditional Theater Spaces”
by Rachel Rizzuto 

[Rachel Rizzuto’s article from Dance Magazine was published on the journal’s website on 15 April 2024. 

[There are six stage productions mentioned in the discussion below.  Rather than insert a brief identification of each one as they occur, I’m going to list them all in the afterword following the text of Rizzuto’s article in the order in which they appear in the report.  Since I’ll be listing them separately from the article, I’ll include more detail than I would in an insert.]

Even conventional Broadway prosceniums can present plenty of challenges for choreographers: steep rakes, gargantuan moving set pieces, awkward sightlines. But what happens when a show’s creative vision includes a total overhaul of the theater’s playing space, eliminating the familiar stage-and-seating setup in favor of something more immersive? What goes down with the dancing when the physical boundaries between the audience and the cast become less defined—or even nonexistent?

The choreography steps up to the challenge, of course. Shows like Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 (2016), Here Lies Love (2023), and this month’s new revival of Cabaret made avant-garde stages their own.

Letting the Movement Evolve

Choreographer Sam Pinkleton joined the Great Comet creative team during its second off-Broadway iteration, in 2013. That version was performed in a small custom tent—a naturally intimate environment. Its 2015 American Repertory Theater run was in a more traditional space, where it began experimenting with some of the elements featured in the 2016 Broadway production at the Imperial Theatre. Pinkleton found himself with onstage audience members to involve, a series of cascading staircases to navigate, and a cast of 30 (up from 16 in 2013) at his choreographic disposal.

What saved Great Comet from getting lost in its new digs, he says, was the creative team’s focus on its original intention. Scenic designer Mimi Lien “was really fierce about maintaining a level of intimacy,” Pinkleton says. “She wanted every person in the room to have a personalized, specific experience to this show that is only theirs.” The entire creative team, led by director Rachel Chavkin, was aligned on this mission. Pinkleton used the staircases Lien designed to connect the main and upper levels of the theater as tiny stage spaces for individual performers to interact personally with theatergoers.

Julia Cheng, choreographer of the 2021 West End version and current Broadway revival of Cabaret—which eliminates some of the orchestra seating to create a small stage space in the round—met spatial challenges by focusing on choreographic authenticity. Cheng’s movement training is in street styles, like hip hop and waacking, and she wanted to capitalize on the way those genres naturally lend themselves to an up-close audience experience.

“Those styles are about holding space, and that requires a different skill set,” she says. She created what she refers to as the prologue to the show, when arriving audience members encounter a small group of dancers and musicians “already vibing,” as if the theatergoers have walked into a club. “The prologue ended up becoming a show in itself,” she says. She let her dancers’ particular strengths shine, too. “I wanted to draw out their fortes, their specialisms from the underground and subculture—forms not usually represented on the musical theater stage.”

Sometimes choreographers even help shape transformative theater designs. When working with choreographer Annie-B Parson on Here Lies Love, scenic designer David Korins knew there needed to be give-and-take between the show’s unusual, immersive playing space—one long catwalk, with the audience below on either side, plus smaller spaces throughout the theater with room for a performer or two—and its movement vocabulary. “I think Annie is an extraordinary visual storyteller,” he says. “There were tentpole moments we wanted to accomplish, and in those, she really held her ground—‘If we’re going to do this, then we need to do that.’ When she had a sense of that, you listened.”

Rising to the Challenge

In revamped theater spaces, changes that might at first seem like challenges can actually offer opportunities for innovative thinking. Pinkleton found that to be true on Great Comet, where he had to convey a sense of closeness in a large house without a central meeting place where the entire cast could fit. Eventually, he landed on placing dancers throughout the house—on the staircases, in the aisles, on platforms, in an audience member’s lap—and choreographing intentional eye contact. “It was, ‘I am looking at you in the sixth row and waving at you and saying I’m glad you’re here,’” he says. “That became more important than asking people to kick their leg on five.”

From Korins’ perspective, the disparate stage spaces of Here Lies Love allowed Parson to create a different kind of Broadway dynamic. “Annie could stage these beautiful, isolated islands of dance and movement,” he says. “You might be looking at two people dancing in unison, but they’re doing it 150 feet away from each other. That tension and connectivity between the bodies in space was really effective.”

For Cheng, the task of choreographing in the round was a welcome one, not a thorn in her side. “When I’m in the club cyphering, that’s my comfort zone: You’re in the circle, there’s a community around you,” she says. “It’s sometimes difficult to get that in a really big space.” She saw typical theater choreographic taboos—turning one’s back to the audience, for example—as a chance to offer unexpected perspectives. “I don’t mind having a back to the audience,” she says. “I think that’s interesting.”

Overhauled theaters, with their myriad challenges, require a special kind of mind-meld between the members of the creative team. When all of a show’s leaders are invested in the same idea, however out-there it might seem—what Pinkleton calls “everybody working on the same show”—that’s when the real magic happens. When it does come together, Pinkleton says, “it doesn’t feel insane. It feels inevitable.”

Broadway Theater Revamps of the Past

Most revolutionary staging choices in Broadway’s history have had the same aim: to get the audience closer to the action than a proscenium stage can.

✦ Before transferring to what’s now known as the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, Man of La Mancha (1965) opened at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre in Greenwich Village, which boasted an experimental stage with the audience seated on three sides. Jazz dance pioneer Jack Cole was nominated for a Tony Award for his Latin-influenced choreography, described as “blistering” and “orgiastic” by one critic.

✦ The 1974 Broadway production of Leonard Bernstein’s often-revised Candide ripped out much of the Broadway Theatre’s orchestra seating. This meant that many audience members had an immersive experience with Patricia Birch’s choreography, which New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes likened to a rocket booster.

✦ For its 1998 revival, Cabaret transformed the former disco nightclub Studio 54 into a Broadway house—but with a small thrust stage surrounded by tables and chairs, to lend an authentic­ Kit Kat Klub vibe. Choreographer and co-director Rob Marshall used the audience’s nearness to highlight his raw, rough-edged choreography.

[Here’s the list of productions named in Rachel Rizzuto’s report:

•  Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812: 14 November 2016-3 September 2017 (336 regular performances) at the Imperial Theatre; book, music, and lyrics by Dave Malloy; “pop-opera” based on the 1869 novel War and Peace (first translated into English, 1889) by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910); commissioned and premièred Off-Off-Broadway by Ars Nova (2012), further developed and produced by the American Repertory Theatre of Cambridge, Massachusetts (2015); directed by Rachel Chavkin, choreographed by Sam Pinkleton, with a cast including Denée Benton (Natasha) and Josh Groban (Pierre); 2 Tony Awards, 10 additional nominations (including Best Choreography); 4 Drama Desk Awards (including Outstanding Director of a Musical; not choreography)

•  Cabaret (official title: Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club): 21 April 2024-Present (32 regular performances as of 19 May) at the August Wilson Theatre; book by Joe Masteroff, music by John Kander, and lyrics by Fred Ebb; based on the play I Am a Camera (1951) by John Van Druten and The Berlin Stories (1939) by Christopher Isherwood (1904-86); transferred from London’s West End at the Playhouse Theater from 15 November 2021-Present; both London’s Playhouse and New York City’s August Wilson Theatres have been refurbished as the Kit Kat Club in an arena-theater format; directed by Rebecca Frecknall, choreographed by Julia Cheng, set designed by Tom Scott, with a cast including Gayle Rankin (Sally Bowles), Eddie Redmayne (Emcee), Ato Blankton-Wood (Clifford Bradshaw), Bebe Neuwirth (Fraulein Schneider); 9 Tony Awards nominations (not choreography); 5 Drama Desk Awards (no awards)

•  Here Lies Love: 20 July-26 November 2023 (150 regular performances) at the Broadway Theatre; music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, lyrics by Byrne; disco-pop bio-musical of life of Imelda Marcos (b, 1929), First Lady of the Philippines (1965-86), based on the concept album by Byrne and Slim (2010); the musical, almost entirely sung through, has little dialogue (hence, no book-writer), instead projections at the side of the stage by projection designer Peter Nigrini provide text that explains crucial facts; originally produced by New York City’s Public Theater; the Broadway Theatre was transformed into a disco ballroom; directed by Alex Timbers, choreographed by Annie-B Parson, set designed by David Korins, with a cast including Arielle Jacobs (Imelda), Jose Llana (Marcos), Conrad Ricamora (Ninoy Aquino), Lea Salonga (Aurora Aquino); 4 Tony nominations (including Best Choreography); no awards

•  Man of La Mancha: 22 November 1965-26 January 1971 (2,328 regular performances) at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre (Greenwich Village; demolished in 1968), Martin Beck Theatre (renamed the Al Hirschfeld in 2003), Eden Theatre (East Village; converted to a movie house in 1976, now called the Village East), and Mark Hellinger Theatre (acquired by the Times Square Church in in 1989); book by Dale Wasserman, music by Mitch Leigh, lyrics by Joe Darion; based on the life and works of Miguel de Cervantes (1547?-1616); directed by Albert Marr, choreographed by Jack Cole, with a cast including Joan Diener (Aldonza/Dulcinea), Irving Jacobson (Sancho Panza), Richard Kiley (Don Quixote/Cervantes); 5 Tonys (including Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical), 2 additional nominations (including Best Choreography)

•  Candide: 10 March 1974-4 January 1976 (740 regular performances) at the Broadway Theatre; book adaptation by Hugh Wheeler, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Richard Wilbur r (with additional lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, John La Touche, and Bernstein; based on the novel Candide (1759) by Voltaire (1694-1778); Broadway Theatre was transformed by platforms on the stage and in the auditorium for the action instead of changing scenery; directed by Harold Prince, choreographed by Patricia Birch, set designed by Eugene Lee, with a cast including Lewis J. Stadlen (Dr. Pangloss/Voltaire, et al.), Mark Baker (Candide), Maureen Brennan (Cunegonde); 5 Tonys (not choreography), 3 additional nominations (not choreography); 5 Drama Desks (including Outstanding Choreography, Outstanding Set Design, Outstanding Director)

•  Cabaret: 19 March 1998-4 January 2004 at the Kit Kat Klub (Henry Miller’s Theatre was renamed for 8 months while Cabaret was in residence; when the show moved to the former night club, the theater reverted to its former name; it was renamed the Stephen Sondheim in 2010), Studio 54 (2,377 regular performances); text and script details are the same as for 2024 revival above; produced by Off-Broadway Roundabout Theatre Company; inspired by the 1993 London production at the Donmar Warehouse; directed by Sam Mendes, choreographed by Rob Marshall, set and club designed by Robert Brill, with a cast including Alan Cumming (Master of Ceremonies), Natasha Richardson (Sally Bowles), John Benjamin Hickey (Clifford Bradshaw), Mary Louise Wilson (Fraulein Schneider); 4 Tonys, 6 additional nominations (including Best Choreography, Best Direction of a Musical); 3 Drama Desks, 7 additional nominations (including Outstanding Choreography, Outstanding Direction of a Musical, Outstanding Set Design of a Musical

[Rachel Rizzuto is a choreographer, performer, teacher, and dance writer.  She’s a contributing writer to Dance Magazine and Dance Teacher magazine.  Rizzuto earned her MFA in dance from the University of Illinois in 2021. She graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with a BFA in dance and a BA in English.]

*  *  *  *
“JUST WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED DANCE?”
by Jack Anderson

[Jack Anderson, the New York Times dance reviewer in 1990, launches a discussion of how ballet has changed with respect to current ballet troupes and their audiences by introducing a debate he asserts was generated by productions of two ballets by the New York City Ballet in the summer of 1990. 

[Anderson, whose article was published in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the New York Times on 12 August 1990, doesn’t really explain why these dances, one a première and the other a revival of a 18-year-old creation, initiated such a controversy, so I did some research, and here’s what I found.

[In his review of the first piece, the début of Peter Martins and Robert La Fosse’s A Mass, Anderson labeled the dancing “choreographically controversial” (“‘A Mass,’ a Surprise City Ballet Premiere,” sec. C [“The Arts”], New York Times, 29 June 1990), a description that applies to both ballets.  That’s the crux of the debate.

[A Mass, which premièred on 27 June 1990 and was repeated on 1 July, is a Missa Sicca (literally, ‘Dry Mass’), a medieval Roman Catholic rite that takes the form of the Mass, but without communion.  As staged by Martins to choral music composed by Michael Torke, it was largely a processional composed of 100 dancers.

[Anderson observed, “The question to be asked is not whether ‘A Mass’ contains choreography, but whether its choreography is expressive.”  He described the movements as “kinetic austerity” and concluded, “‘A Mass’ was curiously vague.”

[Jerome Robbins’s Watermill débuted at NYCB in 1972 and was revived for the first time since 1979 on 12 July 1990 with a repeat on the 16th as part of the troupe’s Festival of Jerome Robbins’ Ballets.  It was set to music composed by Teiji Ito and Edward Villella, the original lead dancer in the première, returned to NYCB to reprise his performance.

[Named for an eastern Long Island resort town (Water Mill, in Suffolk County) where Robbins vacationed, the ballet was described by NYCB founder George Balanchine, Robbins recalled, as “about there being no time” (Anna Kisselgoff, “Jerome Robbins, a Creator from Head to Foot,” sec C [“The Arts’], New York Times, 3 June 1990).  Dance reviewer Kisselgoff felt that it was an “attempt to treat what Mr. Robbins called ‘the unstated’” in contrast to the literalness he’d dealt with earlier.  Robbins called the work “contemplative” and “internalized.”

[Kisselgoff characterized the feel of the production as the “slow-moving time sense derived from Japanese Noh theater,” a solemn and deliberate performance form suffused with the perspective of Zen Buddhism (see my post “Noh Theater of Japan,” published on ROT on 11 April 2023).  Thus, she later concluded, the audience that was “primed for toe shoes and the fasted dancers in the world was suddenly invited to watch one of ballet’s prime movers—Mr. Villella—in near stillness for an hour” (Kisselgoff, “Villella Returns to ‘Watermill,’ a Robbins Meditation on Time,” sec. C [“The Arts”], New York Times, 14 July 1990).

[This lack of movement, or, in the case of Martins and La Fosse’s Mass, balletic movement, primed the ballet world to ask ‘What is a ballet these days anyway?’]

This summer, two City Ballet productions — ‘Watermill’ and ‘A Mass’ — fueled the debate over what constitutes a ballet.

Choreographers choreograph dances. Dancers dance dances. Ballet dancers dance ballets.

Those statements are not quotations from a first-grade reader for young dance students. Instead, they constitute a primer for adult dancegoers and, even though they may sound self-evident, they point to matters of the utmost artistic importance.

They are especially worth considering because of the uproar that occurred at the New York City Ballet earlier this summer. Two productions — a revival and a premiere — caused the fuss. Those ballets were accused of being “not really dance.”

As part of its festival of Jerome Robbins’s ballets, the company presented “Watermill,” Mr. Robbins’s allegory of 1972 that traces the course of a man’s life in solemn slow motion to music by Teiji Ito [Japanese-born American composer and performer; 1935-82]. The troupe’s final performances in late June featured “A Mass,” a new work by Peter Martins [Danish former ballet dancer and choreographer; b. 1946; Co-Ballet Master-In-Chief of New York City Ballet with Jerome Robbins, 1983-90, and Ballet Master-in-Chief, 1990-2018; dancer, choreographer, film director, theater director and producer Robbins, 1918-98, was Ballet Master of the New York City Ballet, 1983-90)], the company’s ballet master, and Robert LaFosse [dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher; b. 1959], a principal, that consisted largely of ceremonial marching to a choral score by Michael Torke [composer of music influenced by jazz and minimalism; b. 1961].

Some members of the audience disliked both. Certainly, the pieces have their peculiarities: “Watermill” takes place in such a symbolic realm that its events can seem unduly remote from reality; “A Mass” never invests its Christian symbolism with genuine spiritual significance. Such criticisms point to deficiencies of content. But other observers went even further: They asserted that neither work was really a ballet; the most disgruntled even argued that neither work was dancing in any sense of the word.

These objections raise serious issues that transcend the virtues or faults of any single season’s offerings, issues that have been debated over the years. For instance, in 1957 Paul Taylor [dancer and choreographer; 1930-2018; founder of the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1954] offered a notorious concert in which his dancers scarcely moved at all, and in the 60’s and 70’s Minimalist choreographers devoted themselves to such simple physical actions as walking and skipping. 

[The Paul Taylor concert Anderson cites was Seven New Dances, performed one time on 20 October 1957 at New York City’s 92nd Street Y.  New York Social Diary (The 92nd Street Y presents Paul Taylor Dance Company: Celebrating the Past, Present & Future of Modern Dance, Hosted by Alan Cumming | New York Social Diary), a website that styles itself as “a social, historical, and cultural chronicle of life in New York City,” characterizes the dance program as

a series of movement and music studies in collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg [painter and graphic artist; 1925-2008; designed costumes for Seven New Dances] and John Cage [American experimental composer; 1912-92] that sought to ask essential questions regarding “What is dance?” and “What is music?” Inspired by gestures, postures, and “pedestrian” or “found movements,” Taylor created a wholly unique performance of modern dance . . . . In one dance, “Epic,” Taylor performed a series of simple gestures for 13 minutes to the sound of telephone time signals. In another, Taylor and a fellow dancer posed on stage – in complete stillness – for four minutes before the curtain came down. . . . “Events II” features two women in 1950s cocktail dresses shifting between poses on stage to the sounds of rain as a gentle breeze billows across the stage, catching their petticoats in the wind. The 1957 performance became famous, not necessarily for its artistic momentum, but for its raw questioning of what modern dance is. While audiences left throughout the evening, it was the review by Louis Horst in Dance Observer that cemented the performance as one of the most famous in dance history: the review was simply four inches of blank space.

[Horst (1884-1964), originally a composer and pianist, helped define the principles of modern dance choreography.  His famous review appeared in Dance Observer, a monthly journal he founded in 1934 (it closed down at his death in 1964), in the November 1957 issue where he wrote out “Paul Taylor and Dance Company” with the date and location of the performance, and left the rest of page 139 blank.

[In the New York Herald Tribune of 27 October 1957 (sec. 4 [“Theater – Movies – Music – Dance . . .”]), reviewer Terry Walter quipped, with reference to the program’s title, that “there were seven items, they were new but they weren’t dances.”]

To deny any work presented by a dance group the right to be called a dance or a ballet necessarily involves asking just what is a dance or a ballet. What, for that matter, is choreography? The only all-inclusive answers to such questions sound like baby talk. Dances are what choreographers create and dancers perform; ballets are created by ballet choreographers.

“Ballet,” “dance” and “choreography” resist easy definition, in part because the arts to which they refer are constantly developing. Possibly in an effort — an unsuccessful one, it turned out — to prevent people from complaining that “A Mass” was not “really ballet,” the program note for it read “staged by,” rather than “choreographed by,” Mr. Martins and Mr. LaFosse.

However, what they provided was certainly choreography, if choreography is thought of as the art of organizing movement in space and time. The results of such organizings are dances. Of course the boundary lines between dance and other related arts have never been fixed, and it is occasionally difficult to distinguish dance from mime or from the imagistic movement-theater associated with such an experimentalist as Robert Wilson [experimental theatrical stage director and playwright; b. 1941; also worked as a choreographer, among other things].

Although ballet may seem superficially easier to define, it, too, is hard to pin down. Ballet certainly involves a training method that has been evolving since the 17th century. But what makes a choreographic composition a ballet and not just a dance? The five classroom positions of the feet? Not all ballet choreographers use them in every work. An erect, turned-out stance? That aspect may also be rejected by some choreographers: for instance, they will almost certainly do so in order to depict grotesque characters. Thus, it’s back to baby talk: ballets are what choreographers devise for ballet-trained dancers.

Does this mean, then, that dances are dances and ballets are ballets simply because people who call themselves choreographers say they are? This critic would assent to such an extreme view. And adopting it does not rob the terms dance and ballet of all meaning. Rather, it involves a recognition that by calling their compositions dances or ballets, choreographers are asking the audience — for whatever possibly quirky personal reasons they may have — to regard those compositions as part of a tradition that includes other works labeled dances or ballets.

However, when some dance lovers grumble that a work is “not really dance,” they are not concerned with abstruse esthetic points. They simply mean that, for them, the work is not sufficiently virtuosic. When “Watermill” received its premiere back in 1972, it was booed by some members of the audience because its star, Edward Villella [ballet dancer and choreographer; b. 1936], was given no opportunity to display his athletic prowess.

Although dancing can — and frequently should — dazzle, dance should never be equated with virtuosity alone. This is easy to do today when dance schools are producing remarkably agile performers. Yet, to make dancing solely a matter of physical dexterity may be to limit the range of its expressive potentialities.

Fine choreographers devise movements not necessarily because of their difficulty, or lack of it, but because those movements are meaningful in a specific theatrical context. What makes a dance satisfying is not the quantity or the difficulty of its steps, but their appropriateness to a given situation.

Choreographers should always feel free to invent any kinds of sequences or phrases they wish, be they simple or complex. And it should never be forgotten that if choreography is an art of organized movement, anything a dancer does on stage is dancing.

[Jack Anderson (1935-2023) was a poet, dance critic, and dance historian.  His reviews of dance performances appeared in the New York Times (1978-2005) and Dance Magazine (1964-70), and his scholarly studies in dance history and his eleven volumes of poetry are highly regarded.]

"Unopened": 'A Pray by Blecht'

 

[The third installment in the New York Times “Unopened” series is the paper’s co-chief theater reviewer Jesse Green’s report on the demise of the Broadway plans for a musical with the unlikely title of A Pray by Blecht (and no, that’s not a typo).  It ran in the “Arts” section of the Times of 5 November 2020; the online version of the story was posted on 2 November under the headline “A Golden Team, a Terrible Title and a Show That Vanished.”

[As I observed in the introduction to the second installment of “Unopened,” the individual articles in this series aren’t connected (except by the common theme), but reading them all gives a (dismaying) picture of the traps and hurdles that have scuttled more than a few Broadway-bound endeavors.  I recommend, for those who are just joining the series, going back to parts one and two, posted on 26 February and 1 March, to read about the founderings of Lone Star Love in 2007 and Face Value in 1993.]

“A TOP TEAM, BUT THE SHOW VANISHED”
by Jesse Green

Would you like to see a new musical from the people who brought you “West Side Story”? For better or worse, you probably never will.

How do you top “West Side Story”?

If you’re Leonard Bernstein [1918-90], Stephen Sondheim [b. 1930] and Jerome Robbins [1918-98], the answer is: You don’t.

Well, you try. Ten years after the composer, the lyricist and the director-choreographer of that show (along with its book writer, Arthur Laurents [1917-2011]) changed the musical theater with their contemporary take on “Romeo and Juliet,” they rejoined forces to develop another project.

The idea was Robbins’s. He thought that one of Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or teaching plays, could make a good musical, being short and pointed and fable-like. In 1967, he asked Sondheim to read “The Measures Taken,” the first in a collection of four translations, for possible adaptation. When Sondheim balked, finding the material too inert, Robbins told him to read the next play in the book.

That one, “The Exception and the Rule,” is about a rapacious oil merchant (read: capitalism) who races another merchant across a desert to win a lucrative deal. Accompanying him are a guide and a porter; when the three get lost, and the porter (read: exploited labor) tries to help the merchant, the merchant misunderstands the gesture and shoots him. Naturally, being of the ruling class, he is acquitted: Self-defense, the judge decides, applies even if the threat is imaginary.

Sondheim, eager to work with Robbins, whom he called “the only genius I had ever associated with,” thought this story might work, even though he found most of Brecht [1898-1956], and especially the teaching plays, “insufferably simplistic.” In his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” he wrote that there was “too much Lehr in each stück” — too much teaching in each play — “to hold my attention.”

Indeed, his attention waned after “taking a stab” at two songs. Giving up, he suggested that Robbins get Bernstein to write both music and lyrics. But Robbins instead asked Jerry Leiber [1933-2011], the word half of the pop songwriting team of Leiber and [Michael] Stoller [b. 1933], to work with the maestro. Though the odd couple did complete some numbers, the show stalled out. Most do, usually for their own good.

But “The Exception and the Rule,” as it was then called, had a gleam of possibility that kept it from dying completely. Perhaps it would be an exception itself, as “West Side Story,” which almost fell through several times, was in its day.

What looked like the key arrived when the playwright John Guare [b. 1938], then known for surreal way-off-Broadway comedies, joined up with a great idea for the adaptation.

The story would now take place in a television studio where the Brecht play is being readied for broadcast. The tension between the star actor playing the merchant (who was to be white) and the supporting actors playing the guide and porter (who were to be Black) would parallel the class paranoia of the inner scenes, while adding an element of racial paranoia to the mix. Sondheim, noting that the Brecht would be chopped up by scenes set in the present, “and thus not be so relentlessly Brechtian,” rejoined the team.

By April 1968, a New York Times theater column trumpeted a January 1969 opening for the new musical. Later that year, the producers announced that the Broadway star Zero Mostel [1915-77] would play the lead. It seemed a mere glitch in its inevitable success when, in October, the show, budgeted at $600,000 [$4.6 million today] and now bearing Bernstein’s awful Spooneristic title “A Pray by Blecht,” was postponed until the following fall.

[Spooneristic is a word I haven’t heard much lately, so if you’re unfamiliar with the expression, it means ‘having the form of a spoonerism.’  A spoonerism, according to Wikipedia, “is an error in speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched . . . between two words in a phrase.”  

[An example, from one of my middle school teachers, is “duddy stubble hall” for “double study hall” (which is where I first heard the word spoonerism—my teacher called herself out on it).  An intentional spoonerism, from comedian George Carlin (1937-2008): “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.”  

[The speech error is named after William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), an Oxford don and ordained minister who was renowned for mixing up the syllables in spoken phrases.]

And then: nothing.

It was so dead that Bernstein, nine years later, describing it as “a big wonderful show that could have been,” got its title wrong. He called it “The Measures Taken.”

What happened? According to “Look, I Made a Hat,” in which Sondheim relates “almost all” of the tale, the golden collaboration was “no fun at all”; he stepped away again after he and Bernstein, who treated him as if he were “still an apprentice” from “West Side Story” days, wrote eight songs. Robbins quit soon thereafter: In the middle of auditions, he excused himself to Guare and Bernstein, left the theater and took off in a cab to Kennedy Airport.

Perhaps it is better that some shows should die so that others might live. After “A Pray by Blecht” collapsed, Sondheim went on almost immediately to write “Company,” “Follies” and “A Little Night Music.” Guare’s 1971 play “The House of Blue Leaves” jump-started his career. Bernstein and Robbins would each return to Broadway, albeit with mixed success, while continuing to excel in classical music and ballet.

Yet it was Robbins, the runaway, who couldn’t let the idea die. In the spring of 1987, at Lincoln Center Theater, he directed a multiweek workshop of a new version of the show called “The Race to Urga.” Sondheim attended only two rehearsals, which (he recalled in an email) were inchoate and disorganized.

“I couldn’t tell anything about it,” he wrote, “except that it seemed (as I’d always thought it was) self-consciously Important instead of spontaneous and exuberant, which is the chief saving grace of any Brecht play (and was Brecht’s intention).”

Guare, who provided the necessary new lyrics, recently declined to comment on the experience, having “closed the door” on it ages ago.

One person was happy to comment, though: Zero Mostel’s son Josh [b. 1946]. In the 1987 workshop, he was cast (after Kevin Kline [b. 1947] apparently withdrew) in the role originally intended for his father.

By the time the show was performed for invited audiences in May of that year, he recalled, Robbins had given up on the white vs. Black theme; Joe Grifasi [b. 1944] played the guide and Thomas Ikeda the porter, still unfortunately referred to as the “coolie.” But Brecht’s warning about the dangers of unlimited power remained — and not just in the coda, during which planted actors rose from the audience to sing about revolution. Robbins himself was a warning about unlimited power.

“Working with Jerry was torture,” Mostel said. “Thomas Ikeda literally passed out in my arms in rehearsal, from exhaustion. At our last show, Bernstein fell down the stairs trying to get out of there. Jerry was nasty even to Guare, a very sweet guy. He was so controlling and paranoid he wouldn’t tell us what time the performances were until right before they started.

“But I have to say the songs were brilliant. And the book was one of the best of any musical I’d been in. Some friends brought a 6-year-old to the show, and he said, ‘Is that all?’ — which is a pretty good review. It should have moved forward, and the reason it didn’t is that no one could stand Jerry.”

That’s a shame; a musical exploring the prerogatives of class (and the power imbalances inherent in the theater) would be exceedingly timely now. At one point, Sondheim has a police officer sing proudly of his beat, “Thirty natives and all so quiet,” to which his partner replies, “Thirty-seven before the riot.”

That’s a lyric that needs no alteration to work as satire, or tragedy — or at any rate a stageworthy bit of Lehr — in 2020.

[Readers of Rick On Theater may note that I’ve mentioned the Brecht play The Measures Taken in a number of posts.  It was produced in New York City by the experimental theater troupe Shaliko in 1974 and I used it as an illustration in my discussion “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” posted on 25 September 2013. 

[After try-outs in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, the groundbreaking Broadway production of West Side Story opened at the Winter Garden Theatre (at 50th Street and Broadway) on 26 September 1957 and ran 732 performances before closing on 27 June 1959, a year and nine months later. 

[The production was nominated for five Tony Awards in 1958, including Best Musical (WSS lost to The Music Man), and won two (Best Scenic Design for Oliver Smith and Best Choreography for Robbins; the production also won Carol Lawrence, who played Maria, a Theatre World Award.

[Unlike the other Broadway attempts that didn’t make it to opening covered by this series, A Pray by Blecht was never even seen by a public audience.  The Lincoln Center workshop, performed as The Race to Urga before an invited audience, occurred in April and May 1987.

[Next in “Unopened” (7 March): “The Bob Dylan musical that tried to find a way—way before ‘Girl From the North Country.’”]

'On the Town'

Wanna see a T. rex fossil dance?  How ’bout a clan of cavemen?  Then head down to the Museum of Natural History.  No, not the one in Central Park at 79th Street—the one at the Lyric Theatre on 42nd Street west of 7th Avenue.  That’s where On the Town is on stage.  The current revival of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green’s World War II musical is, if nothing else, a romp, mostly a throw-back to the heyday of old-fashioned musical comedy—before it had to be rechristened “musical theater” or even “musical drama”—with a little tweaking for the 21st century.  It doesn’t deal with anything serious or substantial; it’s all about having fun—the audience in the theater; the sailors and their girls in a Lifesaver-colored New York, New York (that dancing T. rex is lemon yellow, for example); and, we trust, the dancers, singers, and actors on stage and the musicians in the pit.  My companion, Diana, said she hadn’t realized how “corny” the book of On the Town is, but I enjoyed myself despite the execrable weather outside (a drenching rain).

1944’s On the Town is a legendary American musical, with book and lyrics by Comden and Green—their first collaboration for the Broadway stage—and music by Bernstein (his first Broadway score).  To complete the foursome, Jerome Robbins, whose ballet for the American Ballet Theatre, Fancy Free, that premièred on 18 April that same year, had been the foundation of the musical, was brought in to choreograph, also his first musical theater gig.  (The original Broadway outing that opened on 28 December at the Adelphi Theatre, now demolished, was directed by the veteran—and immensely successful—George Abbott.)  It ran over a year, accumulating 462 performances; Comden and Green were among the interracial cast, appearing as Claire de Loone, a not-so-repressed anthropologist, and Ozzie, the lead sailor who meets her at the museum, respectively.  In 1949, MGM, which had helped finance the stage show in return for the movie rights, turned On the Town into a film starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly (as Chip and Gabey, the two other principal swabbies), but the studio replaced all the songs except “New York, New York” with Hollywood fare.

Later productions of On the Town didn’t meet with a great deal of success.  The London première in 1963 closed after 63 performances, the 1971 and ’98 Broadway revivals ran for only 73 and 69 performances each (despite the presence in the cast of Phyllis Newman, Bernadette Peters, and Donna McKechnie in the ’71 restaging).  The 1998 version had been a transfer by the Public Theater from its summer season at the outdoor Delacorte Theater which had been a popular hit, but apparently suffered from the move indoors.

Concert presentations have been popular, starting with a 1992 semi-staging by Michael Tilson Thomas leading the London Symphony Orchestra which then was remounted with the San Francisco Symphony in 1996.  New York City’s Encores! presented a concert version of On the Town in 2008, directed by John Rando, who staged the 2014 Broadway revival, and featuring Tony Yazbeck as Gabey, a role he repeated in the staging I saw. 

The English National Opera placed the musical in its repertory in 2007.  New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse mounted a revival in 2009 and in 2013, Rando directed a production of On the Town for the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with essentially the same cast as the one that opened at the Lyric (formerly the Foxwoods, after a slew of previous renamings) on 16 October 2014.  The current staging started previews on Broadway on 20 September 2014, accumulating 288 performances as of this writing (28 June).  The Hollywood Reporter has reported that the revival’s producers are planning a National Tour in the 2015-16 season to coincide with the centennial of Bernstein’s birth.  (Some listings indicate that On the Town plans to close by 1 September to go out on the tour, but the Internet Broadway Database, maintained by the Broadway League, doesn’t list a closing date.)  My friend Diana and I saw the performance at the Lyric on Saturday evening, 27 June; we picked up tickets for the two-hour-and-thirty-five minute show (with one intermission) at TDF’s discount TKTS booth in Duffy Square.

I won’t do a detailed synopsis of the plot; it’s so well known and far too easy to look up.  I’ll just say that it’s set in wartime New York City and tells the story of three sailors, Chip, Gabey, and Ozzie, on liberty from their ship for a mere 24 hours.  (At pre-set, there’s a giant American flag filling the proscenium, and then the orchestra plays “The Star-Spangled Banner”—substituting for a formal overture—bringing the audience to its feet, the first time I’ve seen that in an American theater, though the Brits still do it.)  During their day in the Big City, they plan to see all the famous sights and “pick up a date . . . .  Maybe seven . . . .  Or eight” on their way.  They do less well with the first goal than the second, as Gabey, the romantic, falls in love with the photo on the subway of the new Miss Turnstiles, Ivy Smith (there was an actual Miss Subways contest from 1941 to 1976); Ozzie, the stud, meets Claire de Loone, an anthropologist working at the Museum of Natural History, and they get “Carried Away” (the raucous number, written by Comden and Green for themselves, that includes the dancing T. rex—an honest-to-God hoot); and the schedule-making, sight-seeking Chip (whose family name is Offenblock—get it?) finds trouser-chasing Hildy (for Brunhilde, no less) Esterhazy in wait in her cab for a likely passenger.  The story’s mostly improbable—especially if you actually know New York City!—but no one cares, because it’s all a helluva fantasy and part of the fun is seeing the shipmates get into difficulties (they start right out when Gabey removes the poster of Ivy from its frame and an old lady rats his theft of city property to a cop) and then get out pretty much by dumb luck.  You know they will, but it’s how it happens that’s the heart of the play.  So, hang on, for just as Hildy gives Chip a whirlwind, high-speed tour of the entire city (she can’t wait to get him to “Come Up to My Place”), Comden, Green, Bernstein, Rando, Joshua Bergasse (the choreographer who drew from Robbins’s spirit), and Beowulf Boritt (the set and projection designer) give us one helluva view of this “vistor’s place”!  (The New York City PR organization has recently—just about when On the Town opened—launched an ad campaign to urge New Yorkers to “See Your City.”  If city-dwellers don’t want to be actual tourists in their hometown, a visit to On the Town comes close to being a virtual substitute.  But with singing and dancing.)

(A joke in Comden and Green’s book is that Chip has a guidebook his father gave him from the older man’s visit to the City in 1934.  Most of the places in it the sailor’s supposed to see—“I promised Daddy I wouldn't miss on any”—were gone by 1944, like the Hippodrome, which closed in 1939; the famous Woolworth Building, which Chip reads was the tallest building in the world, no longer holds that title, Hildy tells him, now that they have the Empire State.  Since the play’s first run, however, many of the places named in the libretto are also gone now, too; the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where the men’s ship is docked, closed in 1966, for instance, and though the Woolworth Building is still around, Woolworth’s five-and-dimes aren’t.  Nonetheless, the Bronx is still up and the Battery’s still down—and the people still ride in a hole in the ground!)

Diana’s right, of course: On the Town is silly.  I don’t know if Rando and the Barrington Stage Company hoked the play up to sell it in Pittsfield (I’d never seen the musical on stage before, oddly enough, just the bowdlerized movie), but there are some obvious insertions.  (This production has a racially mixed cast, but that turns out not to be a 21st-century innovation: the 1944 Broadway staging included African-American performers and Ivy was played by Japanese-American dancer Sono Osato.)  Director Rando indulged the urge to tweak the script and score with “additional material” supplied by playwrights Robert Cary and Jonathan Tolins which sometimes calls attention to itself.  A running gag throughout the show, for example, is the same two women (Flossie and her Friend)—in the subway, on the street, in an elevator—whom we overhear in mid-conversation.  Flossie’s obviously having an affair with her boss, Mr. Godolphin.  At Carnegie Hall, we see two men entering one of the rehearsal rooms—and they’re having the same conversation about Mr. Godolphin, clearly a bit of re-casting for the present day that’s not likely to have occurred in 1944.  But, as I’ve admitted many times on ROT, I have nearly no critical distance when it comes to these old-time musicals, so little of this detracted from my enjoyment. 

So there’s little point in discussing the book—it’s no more than a vehicle for the songs and performances.  It’s probably worth noting that Bernstein’s music, though substantial and lovely, produced only one iconic song, “New York, New York.”  As befits a play derived from a ballet, however, almost all the songs are dance numbers, and the execution of both the singing and the dancing, including the choreography of Joshua Bergasse, was almost universally superb.  Bergasse, best known as the choreographer for the TV series Smash (2012–2013), is also certified by the Jerome Robbins Foundation for whom he teaches the dances in another Bernstein-Robbins collaboration, West Side Story.  He seems to have set about to spiff up Robbins’s original choreography for On the Town (which only survives as fragments), drawing on the character of Robbins’s work rather than reinventing it entirely.  (I may not have seen On the Town on stage before, but I have seen Robbins’s theater work, including 1989’s Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.)  His work and that of his dancers is sprightly and acrobatics-packed (for the most part—the exception is “Imaginary Coney Island,” Chip’s dream about meeting Ivy after having lost her earlier, which is romantic and heartfelt).  Bergasse was nominated for the Best Choreography Tony and the Outstanding Choreography Drama Desk Award for 2015.

Some reviewers back in October complained that Rando’s pacing was haphazard and uneven.  I didn’t find that, and maybe over the ensuing eight months, the performance has evened out in the huge Broadway theater it now occupies (the Lyric, at 1,930 seats, is the second largest house on Broadway), acquiring its rhythm.  The director has managed to take what Ben Brantley called in the New York Times “a seemingly limp 1944 artifact,” and breathe vibrant, delightful, silly life back into it.  (Rando was a 2015 nominee for the Tony for Best Direction of a Musical.)

The six principal performers, Clyde Alves (Ozzie), Jay Armstrong Johnson (Chip), Tony Yazbeck (Gabey), Megan Fairchild (Ivy), Alysha Umphress (Hildy), and Elizabeth Stanley (Claire), each do outstanding work in the voice and footwork departments, establishing their own styles and personalities even when dancing and singing in pairs and groups.  (Johnson has a flair for physical comedy, especially visible in his wild ride in Hildy’s cab.)  They all sing wonderfully, and each actor has his or her unique delivery style, with particular emphasis on Stanley’s Claire.  (The singing is marred to an extent by the miking, which flattens everything out and makes it hard to determine where a voice on stage is coming from.  I’m sure it’s easier on the singers, but, as I’ve said before, I still wish the theater’d go back to the way they did it before amplification became the norm.)  Fairchild is a principal ballerina with the New York City Ballet, but the others are all theater and Broadway vets who here simply validate their chops as musical theater up-and-comers.  Fairchild makes an impressive début—she’s the only one of the main six who wasn’t in the BSC production and this is her first performance outside the ballet world—and she won the 2015 Theatre World Award for her role in On the Town.  Overall, and I don’t intend this as faint praise, the whole ensemble is charming and delightful, particularly in fulfilling their main purpose: delivering fun.  (Yazbeck was nominated for the 2015 Tony for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical and Stanley was a nominee for the 2015 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical.) 

Beyond these, some wonderful characterizations are salted through the production, including Jackie Hoffman’s portrayal of Maude P. Dilly, Ivy’s dipso voice teacher at Carnegie Hall (Hoffman plays a number of other old biddies, each a gem of a comic turn); Michael Rupert’s Pitkin W. Bridgework, the over-indulgent fiancé of Claire de Loone; Lucy Schmeeler, Hildy’s rheumy roommate as played by Allison Guinn; and Jess LaProtto, who plays S. Uperman (that’s right!), Hildy’s dyspeptic taxi-company boss.  These are essentially vaudeville blackout performances (lest we forget that Comden and Green started with short comedy sketches), but they’re wonderfully eccentric and perfectly presented.  (The timing by this cast is universally flawless.  If there’s laugh to be had, even a cheap one, they find it.)  I must make one special acknowledgement, to Nicholas Ward as the dock worker who sings the real opening number (before “New York, New York”), “I Feel Like I’m Not Out of Bed Yet”: his deep, rich baritone is awfully reminiscent of Paul Robson, with the same soul and heart I hear on recordings of Robson’s “Old Man River.”  A gorgeous rendition of the longing to stay home with his woman and baby in his warm bed, rather than face the pre-dawn cold and hard labor of dock work. 

The sets (Boritt), costumes (Jess Goldstein), and lighting (Jason Lyons) all add immensely to the bright fantasy that is On the Town’s New York City.  Boritt’s skeletal scenery, like the drawings in an expressionistic comic book (sorry, graphic novel), are augmented by his whimsical, flashing projections of the skyline (especially as seen from Brooklyn), looming streetscape (whizzing past as Hildy careens around the city “from Yonkers on down to the Bay” with Chip), Coney Island (the setting for that dream ballet) and Times Square (another ballet milieu), and much more.  Lit by Lyons, the stage of the Lyric can’t be mistaken for any real New York City, but the one in the fantasies of all who don’t actually live here (and some who do, I’m sure)—the one evoked by the iconic song nearly everyone thinks of in connection with the city where “no one lives on account of the pace.”  Goldstein’s costumes just as strongly suggest the different kinds of “Manhattan women” (and a few men, too) the boys meet during their one-day liberty.  And then there are those Navy whites!  I’ve always found it funny when dancers are dressed as swabbies—maybe it’s the bellbottoms that wiggle and flap or the middy blouses that ride up and the neckerchiefs that flop around—and On the Town makes terrific use of this phenomenon. 

There was lots of press on this production—including out-of-town papers like the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune—which I suppose isn’t surprising given its iconic status in the world of musical theater.  The reviews were generally on the same wavelength for the most part, although there was some disagreement about the effectiveness of Boritt’s sets as well as Rando’s directing—and about half the notices panned Jackie Hoffman’s comedy and half lauded it to the skies.  (One thing upon which everybody but one journalist agreed was the marvelous performance given by Megan Fairchild in her first speaking role and Broadway début.)  

In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli called On the Town “Leonard Bernstein’s joyous musical” and observed that “Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s book and lyrics still crackle and pop after all these decades.”  She complained, however, that since On the Town is “already written funny, . . . director John Rando’s frantic oversell can feel a little desperate.”  Further, “It’s also hard to get past Beowulf Boritt’s pedestrian, pastel-colored set and his eyesore projections, which do little to bring the ’40s to life,” said the NYP reviewer.  “But that can’t dim the glittering gem that is ‘On the Town,’ with its delirious, high-energy score, which seamlessly incorporates Tin Pan Alley, boogie woogie and even a Brecht-Weill pastiche.”  Vincentelli, however, reserved special praise for “[t]he show’s golden asset,” Megan Fairchild, who’s “graceful and strikes breathtakingly beautiful lines.”  Pronounced Vincentelli ,“The show explodes with unfettered joy every time she’s onstage.”

Declaring On the Town “a show about sex that you can take the whole family to,” the New York Times’ Ben Brantley called the production at the Lyric a “jubilant revival” and a “merry mating dance” that “feels as fresh as first sunlight.”  The Timesman went on to say, “If there’s a leer hovering over ‘On the Town,’ . . . it’s the leer of an angel.”  In his rave review of the revival, Brantley had high praise for all the actor-singer-dancers, including the supporting cast, as well as the designers, choreographer, orchestra, and director.  (Music director James Moore, conducting a 28-piece orchestra, used the original 1944 arrangements for the score.)  Characterizing On the Town as “fizzy and frisky” in the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz said that not only do the play’s sailors “get lucky,” but “[t]he audience does, too.”  The show “feels like a big, juicy kiss,” Dziemianowicz wrote.  The director, said the Newsman, “mines the script for all its boisterous humor and smartly makes space for hushed interludes” and he also praised the entire company collectively and individually, noting, “The look of the show is chipper and bright.”  Dziemianowicz did cavil about Boritt’s set designs, describing them as “head-scratchers”: “Set pieces add modern flourishes but overdo the cartoonishness. That includes clear plastic skyscrapers and a lemon-yellow T. rex.”  “Even so,” the News review-writer concluded, “it’s a helluva entertainment.”

“When did you last see a big-budget musical that made you want to shout with joy?” asked Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal.  Then he announced that On the Town “is everything a great show should be,” adding that “anyone who isn’t thrilled by this tinglingly well-staged production needs a heart transplant.”  Nonetheless, Teachout admonished readers that On the Town “is far more than a piece of fancy fluff, and while John Rando, the director, is a recognized master of comic timing who could make a funeral funny, he never skimps on warmth.  Neither does his cast . . . .”  Heaping plaudits on the designers, music director, and ensemble, the WSJ reviewer instructed readers, “I urge you to see it as soon as you possibly can.”  USA Today’s Elysa Gardner warned us that the director, choreographer, and music director “have mined the show . . . for all its raw poignance, without sacrificing any of its jazzy wit or exuberant romanticism,” resulting in a show “that will leave you both exhilarated and haunted.”  “The superb cast has great fun,” reported Gardner, but admonished us, “Great musical theater doesn’t require total escapism, after all, any more than unconditional happy endings,” referring to the touchingly sad finale, “Some Other Time,” when the squids and their new-found girlfriends say goodbye shipside, knowing they may never see each other again—as the boys go off to war.

In the Financial Times, Brendan Lemon called the production a “joyous, amusing revival” in which “sailors on shore leave have never seemed so deliriously horny.”  Linda Winer of Long Island’s Newsday described this On the Town as an “altogether loving, good-humored, skimpy-looking but imaginative frolic”  that “just is a breezy, peppy, pleasantly libidinous valentine to New York-New York.”  Winer, like several other reviewers, lamented the lack of reference to the fighting of World War II (they all seem to forget that, my comment above aside, this was intended in 1944 to be escapist theater from that very concern), scolded Jackie Hoffman for “overdoing four comic cameos” (including Maude P. Dilly), complained that “the two big ballet scenes don't build into more than serviceable pastiche,” and took director Rando to task because he “doesn't delineate Gabey's two pals . . . enough.”  Winer concluded that On the Town “needs a throat-catching sense of the world outside to make it more than diverting.”

Rex Reed stated in the New York Observer, in one of the only truly negative notices, “The latest (and best) in a long line of mostly second-rate Broadway revivals . . . brings back all the songs from the original 1944 stage production . . . .  But the star wattage [of the 1949 film] stayed home . . . .”  The gifted actors, Reed added, “erase no golden memories of MGM magic.”  Complaining that Yazbeck, for all his obvious talent, is “no Gene Kelly,” Reed persisted in comparing the 2014 Broadway revival to the Bernstein-less MGM flick; even the shipmates’ three dates “couldn’t fill Vera-Ellen’s  toe shoes . . .  can’t carry Ann Miller’s tap shoes . . . [or] lacks the endearing charm and comic timing of Betty Garrett.”  (Those would be the movie’s Ivy, Claire, and Hildy.)  The Observinator went on to dub the revival “a very good summer stock production,” adding that “what it does best . . . is serve as a reminder of what a monumental job . . . the MGM geniuses . . . did . . .,” explaining, “They knew how to edit, condense and shape, achieving the kind of sizzling momentum the current (uneven) On the Town often misses.”  Reed summed up with: “You won’t be bored by all the gridlock in On the Town, but there’s so much of it!  And it’s entirely too long for its own good.”  (Oh, and Reed was the sole writer to pan Fairchild’s Miss Turnstiles, declaring that “she can’t act, and on the rare occasions when she does speak, her articulation is full of rocks.”)

In New York, Jesse Green described On the Town as “a heartbreakingly youthful work: both about youth and by youth” (Comden, Green, Bernstein, and Robbins’s average age when they created the musical was 27!); the “crowd-pleaser” revival is “as big and breakneck and beautiful as ever.”  Green complained of some “insufferable missteps” that carried over from the original to the revival, such as a “plot [that] is somewhat random” and “the effortfully silly character names” (Chip Offenblock, Claire de Loone, Pitkin W. Bridgework), but the play “triumphs over” them.  Green also affirmed that “the musical aspects of the revival . . . are first-rate,” praising both the singers and the orchestra.  He does quibble with some aspects of Boritt’s scenic design and projections, and even some of the principal acting and Rando’s insertion of “shtick” in both the songs and dances, which “begins to suggest that director John Rando does not trust the material.”  In the end, though, the man from New York urged: “If for no other reason than ‘Some Other Time’—and there really are plenty—get yourself, by warship or taxi, to On the Town.”

In the New Yorker, Robert Gottlieb used most of his review to compare the new On the Town, not to the movie (for doing which he took Rex Reed to task) but to the original 1944 première, which he says he saw when he was 14.  He spent about half his column describing his youthful experience of that surprising event, then, disparaging the reviews of Reed and Ben Brantley, who’s report made him “prepared to loathe” the revival, until “the wonderful songs started turning up, and the very capable dancing”—of which he caviled “there may be a little too much.”  The 2014 production, “a big, brassy spectacle worthy of Vegas,” Gottlieb reported, “is a lot of fun on its own terms.”  The New Yorker review-writer asserted, despite some “longueurs,” that “there are high spots” as well.  Compared to the “touch of amateurism” in the original, in the revival “there isn’t a moment of anything but slick professionalism, but there are worse crimes.”  Gottlieb concluded, “This is the ‘On the Town’ that can make it in today’s showbiz, and I’m glad that today’s audience is eating it up and restoring it to its proper place in the pantheon.”

Acknowledging that out of On the Town’s “paper-thin premise, the original collaborators spun loopy magic,” the Village Voice’s Jacob Gallagher-Ross declared, “And director John Rando’s new production delivers the goods: . . . the gushing effervescence of just-uncorked Champagne.”  “It’s a confection, but a delightful one,” Gallagher-Ross affirmed, and he advised, “Somewhere inside every jaded New Yorker, there’s an awestruck, aw-shucks sailor, still besotted by the city and crying for some shore leave.  So indulge your inner rube and take in the new revival of On the Town, an evergreen entertainment whose brash charms have not faded with time. . . .  They don’t make musicals like this anymore, and you’ll leave wishing that they did.”   

In the entertainment press, Adam Feldman of Time Out New York, delivered his “Bottom Line”: the On the Town revival is a “major production of a fairly minor work,” which he said “seems a bit like a well-mounted exhibit at some Natural History Museum of Broadway: a stuffed lark.”  The man from TONY found that, “though frisky and enjoyable” and the company does “their best to deliver a night of re-creationist recreation,” the play “does not have the strongest legs.”  In Entertainment Weekly, Thom Geier called the revival “spirited and surprisingly frank,” but sadly quipped, “The Bronx may be up, as the song goes, but the battery sometimes runs down on this production—which only occasionally hits the ebullient heights of the Empire State Building.”  Calling the On the Town revival “still a helluva show,” Marilyn Stasio said in Variety that director Rando “has given the kid-glove treatment” to the production, while Bergasse’s choreography is “classic in design and elegant in form” and “although the young and vital cast is light on acting chops, the dancing is sensational.”  Stasio, however, thought that “the show’s comic elements are much giddier than they need to be,” but “that must have seemed like the safest way to go with the show, given the limited acting range of some key players.”  “But who’s going to go to the mat on that,” the Variety reviewer added, when the “lyrics alone are enough to make any old grouch break out in a grin,” and “the sheer exuberance of the music (God bless that orchestra) gives wing to the ecstatic joy of the dance.”  David Rooney of the Hollywood Reporter dubbed the “vibrant Broadway revival” of On the Town “transporting entertainment” in which director Rando “embraces both the strengths and weaknesses.”  Rando, wrote Rooney, “is unapologetic in presenting the old-fashioned material at face value,” directing “with a mostly light touch.”  The HR review-writer ended by declaring that in this “beguiling” revival, “there’s ample pleasure on offer.” 

The cyber press came to mostly the same conclusions about this production of On the Town.  David Gordon observed on TheaterMania, “Bigger isn’t always better,” complaining that the small, human staging at BSC had grown outsized, “pushing the humor to the furthest reaches of the third balcony of this massive house.”  On the other hand, however, the TM reviewer added, “there are six central performances so exceptional that they make up for said deficiencies.”  Gordon warned, “As funny as On the Town is, it is also sneakily poignant, resting on an emotional transparency that here is only apparent in fits and starts” and “the cast members fall too often into easy laughs that are more distracting than they are funny.”  The on-line review-writer ended with, “But we should be thankful no matter what,” even though “[w]ith a little more faith in the material and a little less desire to push for laughs, Rando would have a perfectly calibrated production on his hands.”  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer found the Broadway revival of On the Town, like its Pittsfield predecessor, “a wonderfully performed and staged musical,” only the new incarnation is “bigger and more Broadway-ish.”  With praise for all the artists, performing, design, and directorial, of the new mounting, Sommer concluded, “For a night on the town, with unforgettable numbers like the moving ‘Lonely Town’ with its dreamy dancing you can’t beat this On the Town for old fashioned fun, glorious music and breathtaking dancing.”

New York Theatre Guide’s Casey Curtis quipped, “There is a candy store in the lobby of the Lyric Theatre.  It serves beautifully displayed and wrapped sweets.  This is exactly what you should expect inside the Lyric Theatre as well when you see ‘On The Town.’”  Curtis explained that the “show is a feast for the eyes and ears, a beautifully wrapped sweet,” but warned that “the sugar rush leads to a bit of a crash as the plot is thin as cellophane”; “nonetheless,” the NYTG reviewer concluded, “this is a high quality confection.”  Director Rando, Curtis affirmed, “impressively finds comedy at every turn”; Boritt’s designs “are delightful,” and choreographer Bergasse “stages one superb dance number after another.”  “Candy is not nutritious,” the cyber reviewer summed up, “but there is a reason we love it—it makes us feel good.  ‘On the Town’ will make you laugh and bring delight . . . .”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray called On the Town, “a swanked-up” revival that’s been “choreographed to a frothy fare-thee-well.”  Even though “this is hardly the best imaginable mounting of this show,” Murray felt that “it comes close enough to be worth a trip.”  Most important, the characters “have and reveal fun, which is all that On the Town really has on its mind,” which makes the play “simply put, what musical theatre should be.”  Murray found, however, that “flaws begin to creep in—not big ones, mind you, but lesser problems that, after a while, add up.”  He named the erratic direction, the production’s inconsistent energy, and the uneven cast as well as Rando’s “urge to implement minor tweaks to the script and score.”  Murray’s final assessment, though, is that “when it’s allowed to be itself, in all its glittering ’40s glory, there’s no greater show—or time machine—in town.”  Steven Suskin of the Huffington Post reported of On the Town that “this romp of a spree is cookin’ with gas” and the spirit of the four creators remains “in sparkling shape.”  Rando and Bergasse, Suskin asserted, “have precisely the right touch” and the revival “hits the jackpot” with the six principal actors.  The BSC-derived revival of On the Town, summed up Suskin, “is a dandy singing & dancing spree.”