Little Dancer, Inspired by Degas Sculpture, Premieres at Kennedy Center, 2

[I recently posted a collection of three Washington Post articles on the Kennedy Center première of a new musical, Little Dancer, inspired by the famous wax sculpture by Edgar Degas.  The Post’s extensive coverage of this new musical provides an inside glimpse at how a new musical is mounted, what goes into the production, and how it’s promoted and scheduled for viewing.  I’ve chosen a half dozen pieces from the paper to present on ROT because I think the blog’s readers would be interested in this phenomenon.  The first three articles—an examination of star Boyd Gaines’s efforts to develop the character of artist Degas, the review of the art exhibit built around the original statue planned to coincide with the opening, and the review of the musical’s presentation—were posted a few days ago.  (I urge readers to go back and read the first installment, before or after reading the selections here.)  Below are three other articles discussing the preview-performance practice, the treatment of the female characters in the play, and how set designer Beowulf Boritt was inspired by Degas paintings.]

“BACKSTAGE:

‘LITTLE DANCER’ FINALLY SET TO OPEN AFTER MONTH OF PREVIEWS”

by Rebecca Ritzel

[This article was first published in the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 19 November.]

There’s a splashy party planned in the Kennedy Center’s upstairs atrium Thursday to celebrate opening night for “Little Dancer.” That news may come as a surprise to anyone who has already seen a performance of the musical’s world premiere, noticed advertisements or read glowing endorsements of the show on social media.

There have been no formal reviews of the musical about artist Edgar Degas and his ballerina muse because the production is still not officially “open.”

Since Oct. 25, the cast has been performing nightly in the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. But technically, the show is in “previews” – an extended period during which the creative team continues to make changes and the press is not allowed to attend. (Post theater critic Peter Marks’s review will appear Thursday night online and Friday in print.) The musical will close on Nov. 30 after just 10 days of official performances to allow the Kennedy Center plenty of time to prepare for holiday programming.

Ticket prices for “Little Dancer” range from $65 to $120.

While a month of previews is typical before a show opens in New York, the lag time between “Little Dancer’s” first performance and its opening is a record in Washington for an “out-of-town tryout,” a commercial production of a show with Broadway aspirations.

Max Woodward, the Kennedy Center’s longtime vice president for theater programming, said director and choreographer Susan Stroman and her creative team told him upfront that they were starting from scratch, and they made their decision to come to Washington only after he agreed to an extended preview period.

“This is the longest we’ve ever had,” Woodward said. “I don’t think it’s a trend.”

And yet, long preview periods could become the new normal as unions continue to differentiate between pre- and post-opening rehearsals and producers keep Washington on the list of just five cities in North America that can support a pre-Broadway run.

The other four, according to a panel of producers who spoke at a recent American Theatre Critics Association conference, are Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Toronto. Each city has its pluses and minuses: Chicago offers a tax break, Toronto offers slots on a subscription series and D.C. offers willing partners at the Kennedy Center and the National Theatre, which has comparable dimensions to a Broadway house.

Kristin Caskey, president of Fox Theatricals, a co-producer on the D.C.-launched musical “If/Then,” blames rehearsal logistics for the extended previews. With two shows on most Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays and an off-day on Monday, creative teams have just three weekdays to tweak the show and implement changes in rehearsals. Three or four sets of changes are reasonable for a new musical, said Caskey. “So, basically, that puts you at 3¹/₂ weeks right there.”

The rehearsal rules are set by Actors’ Equity Association, the union that negotiates Broadway contracts for the Kennedy Center and shows like “If/Then” at the National. According to Equity, the actors can initially rehearse for 8¹/₂ hours a day, counting breaks.

The week before the first public performance, known as tech week, that work period extends to 12 hours, with up to 10 spent rehearsing. After the first public performances, the total working hours for performances and rehearsals is capped at 10. But once the show is finally open, actors can only rehearse for a total of eight hours per week.

As recently as Friday, the “Little Dancer” cast was called for five hours before its evening show. Cast members have needed the extra rehearsal time, Woodward said. More music has been added, and some dance numbers have been cut.

It is possible, however, to get a new musical off the ground in fewer previews than the Kennedy Center has allowed. “If/Then,” began previews on Nov. 4 of last year and opened on Nov. 19. In Chicago this year, Sting’s musical ran in previews for 13 days. (“The Last Ship” has since opened on Broadway.)

The only recent new musical that appears to rival “Little Dancer” when it comes to lengthy out-of-town previews is “Aladdin,” which ran for 17 days last year before opening in Toronto.

On Dec. 9, previews begin in Arlington for another regional theater musical with Broadway aspirations: singer Sheryl Crow’s adaptation of the Barry Levinson film “Diner.” Actors will be paid less because they are not working on a Broadway contract, and the Signature Theatre’s agreement with Equity allows for 50-hour workweeks once performances begin, making no distinction between before and after the Dec. 27 press opening.

What the runs of “Diner” and “Little Dancer” have in common – besides the hope of good things to come – is a dilemma that puts them at odds with a Helen Hayes Award regulation requiring voters to see a show during the first half of its run. In Toronto, Broadway tryout producers feel strongly that such advanced viewing for award voters is not appropriate.

“We want them to see a show that is set and finished, like the press,” said John Karastamatis, a spokesman for Mirvish Productions. Signature Theatre concurs and will also not allow Helen Hayes voters to see previews.

But the Kennedy Center appears to have forgone a polished production in favor of buzz from the theater community, and that wager may have worked.

“Word of mouth has been very, very good for us,” Woodward said.

Regardless of whether Signature successfully launches “Diner” to Broadway, the theater has other springtime plans about which to be excited. On March 30, celebrated director James E. Lapine will come to town to accept the theater’s sixth annual Sondheim Award at a black-tie gala to be held at the Italian Embassy. Lapine has been at the helm of the original productions of “Into the Woods,” “Sunday in the Park with George” and many other musicals. He is also the screenwriter of the forthcoming “Into the Woods” film.

“James has been my good friend and collaborator over the course of 32 years, and it’s about time I thanked him ostentatiously,” Sondheim said in a statement.

In the District, the Shakespeare Theatre Company – with its rush ticket promotions and $35-and-under cheap seats – has long been one of the most accessible venues in the District. Monday, the theater announced it will open its doors even further by offering 1,000 no-cost “Free Will” tickets to every show. Although some tickets will be distributed to specific “community partners,” an average allotment of 150 to 200 seats will be available every Monday at noon and distributed in person, online and over the phone.

[Ritzel is a freelance writer.]

*  *  *  *

WOMEN IN ‘LITTLE DANCER’S’ GAZE

by Sarah Kaufman

[The following piece appeared in the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 24 November.]

For all its glamour and luxury, the Belle Époque had an ugly side. The decorative arts and haute cuisine were flourishing in Paris in the late 19th century, but the era’s booming opportunities did not extend to its slums – nor to the majority of Frenchwomen.

The narrowness of women’s lives at that time gets expansive treatment in Susan Stroman’s new ballet musical, “Little Dancer.” In unraveling the back story of the once-scandalous sculpture by Edgar Degas, titled “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” director-choreographer Stroman, collaborating with writer-lyricist Lynn Ahrens, fills this production with strong-willed and outspoken women of all ages.

These are sharply drawn characters, witty and wisecracking and sometimes utter messes. They evoke the little-known wretchedness of an age celebrated for its beauty. But in the optimistic and ultimately uplifting view of this show, they are survivors.

As Broadway veterans, Stroman and Ahrens are a couple of survivors themselves, and in “Little Dancer” they betray a bit of a rebellious touch. They are unafraid to address a poetical and feminized subject – the ballet world – and make it appropriately woman-centered. In so doing, they give voice to many who have gone through history unnoticed and unsung. When was the last time laundresses, embittered alcoholic single moms and hard-working ballerinas got to belt out their dreams?

There are so many ways in which “Little Dancer,” finishing its world-premiere run at the Kennedy Center this week, is a corker. It features the ravishing Tiler Peck of New York City Ballet as Degas’s young model, Marie van Goethem, for one thing. The clear, open style of her dancing is a marvel, particularly the way she lingers at the height of her movements, conveying all the power and ease, authority and transcendence of a great star.

Then there’s the stagecraft, which, while relatively simple (no explosions, no outsize costuming, no flying effects), is transporting and magical. The songs, the music by Stephen Flaherty: I could go on. But one of the most striking elements of this show, and the least talked-about, is the wide lens it focuses on women’s existence in a society where they were easily swept into the gutter.

Paris of 1881, when “Little Dancer” takes place, was bracing itself against the onrush of modernity. Grim realities – poverty, child labor, girl sex slaves – were best ignored. Nothing epitomizes this better than the firestorm of ire Degas ignited when he exhibited his sculpture, daring to place a lowlife and potential strumpet on a pedestal.

In Degas’s day, as polite society fretted over the moral decay it saw in so many artists, ballet wasn’t seen as a high-minded pursuit. Degas stepped on a lot of toes in bestowing his snub-nosed adolescent with an insolent grandeur.

He wasn’t the only rebel, of course. That same year, a feminist named Hubertine Auclert published La Citoyenne, France’s first suffragist newspaper. Going beyond voting rights, La Citoyenne also looked at how women were treated in primitive cultures across the world and argued that Frenchwomen’s lives were not always better.

Auclert had a point. Rich wives may have had comforts, but they were essentially decorative property, without a voice. And poor women stayed poor, or got poorer.

In “Little Dancer,” the art of ballet becomes a cruel example of how civilization and oppression were entwined. A delight for the audience, it was often harsh behind the scenes. Ballet was a last resort for poor girls, who in some cases were a step away from streetwalking. If a dancer was not already a prostitute, she had a good chance of becoming one. Leering male patrons, such as the top-hatted gents in so many of Degas’s ballet paintings, haunted the Paris Opera Ballet’s hallways.

This hard lot was surely on Degas’s mind as he created his figure in wax, with her tough, muscular neck, strong spine and faraway gaze.

In fact, the real-life Marie van Goethem didn’t have much of a future. Her older sister was a prostitute. Her widowed mother was an alcoholic washwoman. Marie’s little sister eventually had a dance career, but as for Marie? She made it into the Paris Opera’s lowest rank, then vanished from history.

Stroman crafts a dream ballet to propose some possibilities about what happened to Marie. We can make our own guesses from the role models around her throughout the show. There is Marie’s older sister, whose fortunes rise and fall with the attentions of her johns. There are impoverished laundresses like her mother. There’s a ballet teacher with warmth but no power in the company’s male hierarchy; there’s a well-married and overbearing dance mom. Degas has an elderly, humpbacked, maltreated maid, and there are other young ballerinas, all but pushed by company officials into the arms of wealthy men. A grown-up version of Marie serves as a narrator, looking back on her youth, although we never discover what kind of life she grew into.

There is but one independent, self-supporting ray of hope: painter Mary Cassatt, who was Degas’s friend in real life. (She was also a noted clotheshorse, and a character ideally gift-wrapped for costume designer William Ivey Long, who dresses her as if she’s just unpacked the fashions of Paris’s top designers.)

At other key points in “Little Dancer,” Stroman makes the bold, brave choice to tell the story in dance terms. She lets movement speak what the characters – who are mostly unschooled and unsophisticated – do not have the words to express. Peck’s first solo tells us about the lighthearted joy and freedom that dancing brings to Marie; these notes only deepen and become more urgent as the story proceeds.

In the song “Laundry,” Marie’s mother and her laundress co-workers muse in the wash house about how they, too, once had dreams like Marie does, and they slip into a ballet-style reverie of roughened, weighted, wistful grace.

“C’est le ballet,” as the recurring song by that title makes clear with its quarrelsome, keening notes, takes on a sardonic meaning, along the lines of “business as usual.” The business of hustling for money, that is. This hasn’t changed much. Nowadays, donors/sponsors are a critical force in ballet companies. Some company Web sites and printed programs list who each dancer is “sponsored by,” turning an artist into a billboard for a benefactor’s name. Dancers are expected to turn up and schmooze at parties for funders; I’ve even heard of company members being required to serve tables at donor dinners. No matter how it’s framed, this is all in the name of easing money out of bulging wallets.

“Dancers are determined and never quit,” sing Marie and her younger sister, played by Sophia Anne Caruso with the magnetism of a future CEO tucked into a little girl’s body.

It’s all so ineffably poignant. Marie’s harshest treatment is dealt by the ballet company she loves – and by her own mother. Degas’s attentions, artistic and paternal, seem to do Marie little good in her own lifetime.

Yet through him, she left a mark for posterity. And in the musical about her life, others like her get to make a mark, too. They give us a lot to think about.

[Sarah Kaufman is the dance critic for the Washington Post.]

*  *  *  *

“FOR SET DESIGNER BEOWULF BORITT OF ‘LITTLE DANCER,’ WINDOWS INTO THE SOUL”

by Rebecca Ritzel

[This article was originally published in the “Backstage” column of the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 26 November.]

In Edgar Degas’s most famous paintings set in a dance studio, three two-story windows spill light into an otherwise gray room where ballerinas in white tulle stretch and strike balances before a ballet master. There’s often a violinist in a corner, or a worried stage mother preening on the sidelines. The French impressionist would continue to paint that scene for decades, even after that studio burned down and the Paris Opera relocated to the Palais Garnier. Like Degas, set designer Beowulf Boritt was deeply attached to those windows, and when he was charged by director Susan Stroman with creating the sets for the new musical “Little Dancer,” there was never even a discussion or a question.

They would replicate those windows onstage.

More than a dozen Degas paintings and sketches – from big-picture settings to scraps of background wallpaper – are mirrored in the musical. Nearly all are works Boritt saw in person during the more than two years he spent working on his designs for “Little Dancer.” (The show closes Sunday at the Kennedy Center; limited tickets are available.)

“Every scene in the play is a sketch that he could have done,” Boritt said. “I had taken a course on Impressionism in college, but I actually spent the first three or four months trying to learn more about him. I looked at what was shown in the paintings and what we wanted to copy.”

In every city where he worked, he would visit museums and take pictures of the Degas works, covertly if necessary. And Boritt, 44, has worked in many cities. The son of an opera singer and history professor who weren’t worried about burdening their child with a literary name, he’s away from his New York base working on high-profile shows about three months a year.

He designed the current touring productions “Annie,” “Rock of Ages” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” which opens at the Kennedy Center Dec. 16. Other recent projects include “Chaplin” in St. Petersburg, which allowed for a side trip to the Hermitage, and the West End production of “The Scottsboro Boys,” his first collaboration with Stroman, dating back to a 2010 off-Broadway production.

“He is a true artist with the heart of a storyteller,” Stroman said via e-mail this week. “I knew that was exactly who we needed to bring the world of Degas and ‘Little Dancer’ to life.”

A few of the many Degas works featured in the show include his paintings of laundresses washing and ironing, sketches of debonair men with dubious intentions lurking backstage at the ballet and “The Absinthe Drinker.” (Although historians know the despondent woman in this painting is actually an actress friend of the artist’s, in the musical she’s the Little Dancer’s alcoholic mother.)

Not all of Boritt’s projects require museum-quality replications. His big break came a decade ago, when “Putnam County Spelling Bee” became a surprise hit. Now on Broadway, Boritt’s work is featured in the revival of the Bernstein musical “On the Town,” with sets that are more simplistic than those in “Little Dancer” but much more vibrant. His central idea was to focus on the silhouettes of the Manhattan skyline and create images that remind theatergoers of how shiny and big New York must have looked to sailors docking on the East River.

“These guys were supposed to be a bunch of hayseeds who show up in New York for the first time,” Boritt said of the three sailors who look for love onshore in the musical. “It’s a sleek, magical place to them.”

The link between the two shows, besides the designer, is their ballerina stars: New York City Ballet principals Tiler Peck in “Little Dancer” and Megan Fairchild in “On the Town.” And therein lies a special challenge. The average Broadway or touring-show stage floor is a maze of grooves and tracks to aid in moving scenery. Going up on pointe with a toe stuck in the middle of a track would be disastrous at worst and less than pretty at best.

For “On the Town,” Fairchild ended up deciding to dance in rubberized pointe shoes, which limits her mobility slightly, but is safer, and also allowed for Boritt and his team to use a shinier, more reflective flooring.

For “Little Dancer,” though, Boritt challenged himself to use as few tracks as possible. The major set pieces are five giant rotating panels kept off to the sides, and the flooring is marley vinyl, buffed and treated daily with a coating called “Slip No More.” The major obstacle that Peck and the other ballerinas must avoid is the trap door at center stage, “We worked forever trying to make that as smooth as it could be,” Boritt said. “There are still slight cracks, but Tiler learned to dance around it.”

That trap door allows for a replica of the Little Dancer and a pedestal for Peck to stand on to be raised and lowered. The musical’s finale finds her at center stage, re-creating a scene you can see every day the National Gallery, where tourists admire Degas’s original statue. Marie van Goethem, Degas’s real life model, never became a star dancer, but she’s inspired many a museum-goer to hold her shoulders back just a little straighter.

“That statue is so stunningly beautiful,” Boritt said. “In all likelihood, [Marie] didn’t come to a very happy end. I’d like to think that maybe we are giving her a happier afterlife, because she’s become such a symbol.”

[This concludes my series of Washington Post reports on the new musical Little Dancer.  Should the Post run more informative coverage of the play and its production, I’ll be sure to bring it to the attention of ROTters.  I do have in reserve the New York Times’s review of the première, but I’m holding it in reserve against the possibility that Little Dancer makes it to a Broadway stage.  In that event, I’ll run some of the New York reviews of the new play and I’ll include the Times’s review of the Kennedy Center pre-Broadway presentation as part of that package.  I expect that’ll be an interesting comparison if it comes about.]

Little Dancer, Inspired by Degas Sculpture, Premieres at Kennedy Center, 1

[The world-première production of the new musical Little Dancer began performances 25 October at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Eisenhower Theater.  The opening was on 20 November and performances continued through 30 November. The play’s title refers to the famous Edgar Degas wax sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, c. 1881).  Degas’s model was a teenaged ballerina from the Paris Opera Ballet dance school, a young Belgian named Marie van Goethem.  Degas created many wax copies and bronzes of Little Dancer after he sculpted the original, but that statue, purchased by Paul Mellon in 1956, was given to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1985.

[“Part fact, part imagination, and set in the harsh backstage world of the Paris Opera Ballet,” KC press releases state of the ballet musical, “Little Dancer is inspired by the young ballerina who posed for Edgar Degas and became, inadvertently, the most famous dancer in the world.  Torn by her family’s poverty, her debt to the artist and the lure of wealthy men, Marie struggles to keep her place in the ballet corps—a girl on the verge of womanhood, caught between the conflicting demands of life and art.”

[Workshopped by the Lincoln Center Theatre Company in August 2014, Little Dancer features book and lyrics by Tony Award winner Lynn Ahrens and music by Tony Award winner Stephen Flaherty (both 1998 Best Original Musical Score, Ragtime); the Kennedy Center production was directed and choreographed by five-time Tony winner Susan Stroman (Best Choreography: 1992, Crazy for You; 1995, Show Boat; 2000, Contact; 2001, The Producers; Best Direction of a Musical: 2001, The Producers).  (Ahrens and Flaherty were also responsible for last year’s flop Rocky and Stroman staged both 2013’s Big Fish and last season’s Bullets Over Broadway which together totaled only 254 performances.)  The cast included four-time Tony Award winner Boyd Gaines (1989 Best Featured Actor in a Play, The Heidi Chronicles; 1994 Best Actor in a Musical, She Loves Me; 2000 Best Featured Actor in a Musical, Contact; 2008 Best Featured Actor in a Musical, Gypsy) as artist Edgar Degas, three-time Tony Award nominee Rebecca Luker (Best Actress in a Musical: 1995, Show Boat; 2000, The Music Man; 2007, Mary Poppins) as Adult Marie, and New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck as Young Marie.  The production also had set designs by Beowulf Boritt, costume designs by William Ivey Long, lighting design by Ken Billington, sound design by Kai Harada, and music supervision by David Loud; Shawn Gough conducted the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra.  Plans for a Broadway transfer are under consideration, but no announcement has been made.

[The Washington Post did comprehensive coverage of this pre-Broadway première, publishing articles on many aspects of the show and its production.  Because this provides a glimpse into the inner workings of a Broadway-level musical in production as well as the business of producing and promoting a major commercial show, I’ve collected a number of the articles and will post them on ROT as a sort of record of this work.  For the first installment of this examination, I’ve selected three pieces from the Post, starting with an article about star Boyd Gaines and his work as an actor to get into the role of the painter Edgar Degas, Rebecca Ritzel’s “Getting into Degas for ‘Little Dancer.’”  Then I’m presenting a side bar on the simultaneous art exhibit at the National Gallery of Art which was built around Degas’s original statue of Little Dancer, “As Disturbing As Enchanting” by Philip Kennicott, the Post’s review of the exhibit.  That art review is followed by Peter Marks’s “‘Little Dancer’ at The Kennedy Center, with the Accent on ‘Dancer,’” the Post’s review of the opening of Little Dancer, the musical, on 20 November.]

“GETTING INTO DEGAS FOR ‘LITTLE DANCER’”

by Rebecca Ritzel

[This article first appeared in the Weekend magazine of the Washington Post on 24 October 2014.]

Just as Edgar Degas began painting dancers after becoming fascinated by backstage life at the Paris Opera, actor Boyd Gaines became intrigued about the musical “Little Dancer” after spotting ballerinas roaming backstage at New York’s Lincoln Center. It was spring 2010, and the four-time Tony Award winner was starring in a play at the venerable performing arts complex. Gaines also came across director Susan Stroman, with whom he had worked on the Tony-winning show “Contact” in 2000.

“I saw all the ballerinas and Stro, and I would say hello,” Gaines recalls. “I was curious as to what she was doing, because it’s always something interesting.”

“Stro” – as she is known in the theater world – was at Lincoln Center workshopping “Little Dancer,” the original musical that begins previews Saturday at the Kennedy Center. Gaines says that, back then, he had no designs on the role of Degas but that he remembered the project. Then, months later, Stroman contacted him: There was to be another round of workshops. Would he like to play the famous impressionist?

Gaines wasted no time. He told Stroman yes and hurried to the Metropolitian Museum of Art to do some homework.

“The research that I started out doing initially was just going out and looking at as much as I could,” the 61-year-old actor says during a dinner break from rehearsals at the Kennedy Center. “Fortunately, there was much I could see in New York, but I did that not knowing what the future of the show would be.”

In 2011, while Gaines was working in London, he took in the Royal Academy exhibition “Degas and the Ballet,” which included 26 studies Degas made before sculpting “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” the subject of the new musical, and on a side trip to Paris, he visited the impressionist Musée d’Orsay. Then there were books – volumes of photographs, biographies and books of letters that Gaines can quote from off the top of his head.

“Hopefully, [all the research] gives me a feel for the man who surfaces in the playing of the scenes,” he says. “He’s a fascinating person, very complicated, obsessed and incredibly passionate about art and the making of art itself.”

Gaines holds a sketchbook during much of the time he’s onstage in “Little Dancer,” and will be drawing scenes staged by Stroman and her design team to evoke famous works by Degas. (Don’t ask to see his sketches; he claims they’re terrible.) One, obviously, is the “Little Dancer” statue itself, of Marie van Goethem, Degas’ 14-year-old model from the Paris Opera (played by New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck). Another is “The Absinthe Drinker,” a portrait of a woman sitting dejectedly in a café, a glass of the alcohol in front of her. In the musical, that woman is Marie’s mother, and the rumpled man next to her, the van Goethems’ ne’er-do-well landlord. Those fictional characters are examples of the liberties that composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens took to craft a narrative inspired by static works of art. (In reality, both figures in the painting – an actress and an artist – were friends of Degas.) In the same way, Gaines says that in portraying Degas, he has cherry-picked from his knowledge of the artist.

“This is not a docudrama,” he says. “I have used art historians – stealing at will, and using what helps, and discarding what doesn’t – in order to make the text and lyrics come alive. The story that we are trying to tell is not historically accurate, but it has bits and pieces of the truth in it. Hopefully, the audience will find it truthful.”

Locally, there’s at least one art historian who’s not bothered by the changes: Alison Luchs, the curator of “Degas’s Little Dancer,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art that opened earlier this month to coincide with the musical. The West Building space – usually used to exhibit European paintings – houses the statue itself and about a dozen of Degas’ dance and opera works, including two recently acquired from the Corcoran Gallery.

When it comes to Degas and “Little Dancer,” Luchs says, “there is room for imagination,” because so little is known about Marie, other than that she was dismissed from the ballet company in 1882. “I believe someday we are going to find an answer, but I almost hope we don’t,” she adds.

The exhibition also includes an 1882 graphite drawing of Degas by French artist Paul Mathey. Degas is shown from an odd angle and appears to be peering at a framed painting. His top hat sits before him on a chair, and his one visible eye is heavy-lidded and sad. The drawing, Luchs says, reminds her of the pictures she has seen of Gaines in the show. “He certainly has the look down,” she says of the actor’s full beard, tailored costumes and pensive bearing.

Both Luchs and Gaines remain committed to learning more about the artist, and both are excited about a lecture Nov. 15 by leading Degas scholar Richard Kendall and his wife, dance historian Jill De Vonyar.

By that point, Gaines will be more than halfway through the musical’s run at the Kennedy Center. Many actors might consider that too late to keep investing in a character, even for a show that is likely headed to Broadway. Not Gaines.

“If Richard Kendall is giving a lecture, I’ll be there,” he says.

[Rebecca Ritzel is a freelance writer whose writing has appeared in more than 20 publications in the United States, Canada, and the U.K.  Ritzel regularly contributes arts and entertainment articles to the Washington Post, the Washington City Paper, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer.]

*  *  *  *

“REVIEW: AS DISTURBING AS ENCHANTING”

by Philip Kennicott

[Edgar Degas’s groundbreaking statuette of a young ballerina that caused a sensation at the 1881 impressionist exhibition takes center stage at the National Gallery of Art in an exploration of Degas’s fascination with ballet and his experimental, modern approach to his work.  Degas’s Little Dancer is presented in conjunction with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ world-premiere musical Little Dancer, which ran from 25 October through 30 November 2014.  This review originally appeared in the “Arts & Style” section of the Washington Post on 19 October 2014.]

The best Degas exhibitions take you past the prettiness and straight to the heart of weirdness that makes his work, despite overexposure, always worth further effort. “Degas’ Little Dancer,” a one-room show at the National Gallery of Art, gets straight to the matter, looking under the waxen skin of the artist’s most famous and beloved sculpture and then at a cross section of his fascination with young ballerinas over time. And in almost every one of the 15 works on display, there is something troubling and odd.

In an oil painting made around 1879, “The Dance Lesson,” a young dancer sits in the foreground, apparently lost in thought, or merely exhausted, staring at the floor with her head resting on one hand. But she seems to be sitting on a string bass, which, even given her diminutive frame and the instrument’s substantial bulk, is a very bad idea. In a painting that once belonged to the Corcoran, the “The Dance Class,” a spiral staircase frames two views of the young women, some of them merely legs and skirts descending the circular stairs, another glimpsed through a gap in the metal or wooden form, in a more idealized attitude, as if on stage and fully enveloped in the theatrical fantasy of a performance.

And then there is the Little Dancer herself, which an X-radiograph reveals is made not just of wax, but also clay, rope, wire, padding, paintbrushes (for her arms), and wood and other organic materials. She is, in a sense, made of trash, or at least utilitarian stuff. Knowing this changes our sense of her, from a simple girl with her eyes closed, perhaps anticipating the next step she must take, or wishing she were someplace else, to a more complicated and perhaps pathetic figure. She isn’t pretty or ugly, but a classic example of what the French call “jolie-laide,” which not only combines attributes of both but also suggests a deeper sense of conflict between appearance and inner life.

Making figures out of wax had a long history before Degas made this sculpture – as a preparatory step toward casting something in metal and as a tool for the study of anatomy and the display of anthropological and zoological specimens. The tradition lives on today, in etiolated form, in commercial wax museums. Making sculpture from stone or metal idealized the figures represented; making them out of wax was more disturbingly naturalistic, forcing an encounter with something more organic and more organically connected to flesh and blood. White marble was the stuff of admiration, even worship; brown wax invited a different kind of objectification, something to be studied, dissected and penetrated.

The last of those should be taken with all its implications. The brochure accompanying the exhibition dances around the facts (“Most dancers made very little money and often looked elsewhere for support”), and it doesn’t use the word prostitution, which is unfortunate. Very likely, the girl who posed for Degas (we know her name and have a vague sense of her family and early career on the stage) exchanged sex for money. She certainly had no choice in the matter.

Ballet, at the time, was closely linked to prostitution; the impoverished girls drawn to the ballet were not only forced in many cases to seek income by selling sex, they worked in a system almost perfectly designed to exploit. They were at the mercy of men who made subjective judgments not just on their beauty but their skill, as well. And ballet, like other art forms, offered those men a fantasy of ideal femininity, which could also be pursued through patronizing courtesans, prostitutes and dancers.

In both dance and sexual exploitation, men experienced the great gulf between the fantasy and the means of realizing it. The ideal is never real, the voluptuous swan or handsome prince is in fact an athlete, sweating and straining, and at the behest of the choreographer’s whim. This is not to say that dance is prostitution or that sex workers are to be valued less than artists. But a man like Degas, with a visual fixation on young female dancers, and a deep love of the theater and the society around it, would probably have looked at the young women who were so beautiful, so available and so essential to both artistic and erotic fantasy, and wondered: What is inside them?

It seems likely that the strongly articulated dichotomies in this exhibition – between the whole and the part, the ideal and the real, practice and performance, means and ends – are symptoms of this desire to go from surface to depth, to possess or subjugate intellectually, emotionally and physically the young dancer. Women, for millennia, have been the locus of this frustrating sense that we can never get at the essence of what we most desire, and great violence has been done to them, particularly through religion, by making them embody irreconcilable opposites such as purity and degradation. So the young dancer who sits on the string bass isn’t just doing something odd and unlikely, she is connecting the ground, the bass, the well-springs of desire, to our most seemingly refined, articulated and elusive embodiment of the beautiful.

As our values have changed, as euphemisms like “protector” (i.e., older man who pays girls for the illusion that he is still desirable) have been unmasked, the question of what Degas was doing has become more urgent and painful. Did he capture this girl’s humanity, her defiance of the ugly and exploitative milieu into which she was thrust? Was there a morally redeeming aspect to his visual fixation on the young dancers of the ballet? Or is he working comfortably within the self-satisfied paradigm of misogyny? Those are exactly the questions that must be asked of the new musical, “Little Dancer,” which is inspired by Degas’ statue. It may seem like an obvious thing to do, even a noble one, to give voice to this young woman. But it is complicated, too, and as the work of Degas reminds us, the lines between representation and exploitation are porous. Degas’ dancer isn’t just a sweet girl lost in the moment; she is also Frankenstein and Pygmalion product, a male construction, and no matter how long you stare at her face, you will never know if she is saying no, or yes.

[Degas’s Little Dancer, which opened on 5 October, was on view in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art through 11 January 2015.  Philip Kennicott is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Art and Architecture Critic of the Washington Post.  He has been on staff at the Post since 1999, first as Classical Music Critic, then as Culture Critic.]

*  *  *  *

“‘LITTLE DANCER’ AT THE KENNEDY CENTER, WITH THE ACCENT ON ‘DANCER’”

by Peter Marks

[Peter Marks’s review of the Kennedy Center première of Little Dancer appeared in the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 21 November.]

Love of ballet flows from every pore and plie of “Little Dancer.” The new Kennedy Center musical showcases most rewardingly the technical gifts of Tiler Peck, a beguiling New York City Ballet star cast here as the gamine model for the celebrated Degas sculpture of the show’s title.

That ardor for the dance form and its classical rigor are filtered through the becoming choreography of director Susan Stroman, who, in the footsteps of Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins, has created as a finale for this musical – still, it seems, deeply in progress – a delightful dream ballet, with Peck at its center.

But musical theater doesn’t live by dance alone. In many of its other particulars – having to do with plotting, character development and expressing interior life through song – “Little Dancer” feels as if it has only scratched the surface of possibility of its story, about the hopes of a talented young dancer, both immortalized and dashed on an artist’s pedestal. So Stroman, composer Stephen Flaherty and book and lyrics writer Lynn Ahrens would seem to have more work to do if “Little Dancer” is to sweep out the cliches and present itself as more than just another pretty face.

The venture is an intriguing one-off for the Kennedy Center: an original musical produced entirely by the institution and conceived under its past president, Michael M. Kaiser. Having recruited a top-tier assortment of Broadway pros – other major roles are filled by Boyd Gaines, Karen Ziemba and Rebecca Luker, and the designers include William Ivey Long (costumes) and Beowulf Boritt (sets) – Kaiser put this project on a promising path, and on a scale of ambition commensurate with the center’s place in the arts ecosystem.

The results in the Eisenhower Theater – where, after a nearly four-week preview period, the show officially opened Thursday night – reveal a fairly pedestrian tale, buoyed at times by a romantic musicality redolent of Belle Époque Paris and a smart, eye-catching design. The towering, rotating panels of Boritt’s set resemble artists’ stretched canvases, on which projection designer Benjamin Pearcy splashes a changing pattern of vibrant, colliding colors, enhanced by Ken Billington’s lighting. (This is, after all, the age of impressionism.) Long, too, is entirely in his element here, dreaming up outfits for the women worthy of Toulouse-Lautrec’s vision of the Moulin Rouge, as well as tutus for the dancers that give them the air of soignée sprites.

As the show is inspired by an object, albeit a dazzling one – the expressive Edgar Degas sculpture whose original wax version is in the National Gallery of Art – the show’s creators had a formidable assignment: making a statue breathe. To do so, Stroman, Ahrens and Flaherty used the mysterious fate of Marie van Goethem, the Paris Opera Ballet student who posed for Degas, as the linchpin of their musical. The insufficiency of the exploration of Marie, however, is the show’s biggest weakness.

If another musical tale set in the impressionist era, James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” is about the relationship between an artist and his painting, “Little Dancer” is the story of an artist and his subject. Marie is such a vital character that she has been split in two here: At the beginning of the musical, an older, sadder Marie, portrayed (and sung lusciously) by Luker, visits Degas’s atelier just after he has died, in hopes of seeing the artwork. It’s this scene that triggers the musical’s warmest, most memorable melody, “C’est le Ballet,” but also triggers the question that dogs the entire evening: Why exactly does Adult Marie keep popping up?

We will, eventually, get an answer, but in the interim, Adult Marie feels less like a person than a narrative device, and why and what she’s remembering, and for whom, are lost in the onrush of subplots and pirouettes. The story of her younger, more carefree self, embodied by Peck, unfolds more concretely. The impoverished Marie is competing with richer girls for a featured role in the latest Paris Opera Ballet production and trying to provide for her little sister (Sophia Anne Caruso) and alcoholic mother (Ziemba, agile as always).

Peck’s Marie is a little sunnier than might be expected of a girl who has known hardship; there’s a beaming indefatigability about her that reminds you of Annie Warbucks or a Disney heroine. More oddly, though, among the show’s two dozen songs, none is a number that lets us inside Young Marie’s thoughts. Why does she so desperately want to dance? How does she feel about the handsome street singer (Kyle Harris) hanging around, forever seeming ready to burst into “On the Street Where You Live”? Why does she risk her ballet career by sneaking off to pose for Degas? An idea suggests itself: Maybe Luker is there to interpret Young Marie’s feelings in song and Peck, in dance. It proves an idle notion.

A lack of development also afflicts the bond between Marie and Degas, played by an impressively crusty and, owing to the artist’s failing eyesight, short-fused Gaines. Not until late in the second act and the song “A Box of Things” are they accorded a duet of any moment. The withholding inclination of this show unreasonably restricts our access to the characters, leaving us waiting in vain to discover more about them. At the same time, it bogs down an audience in unrewarding side stories, such as the travails of Marie’s older sister Antoinette (Jenny Powers), who escapes penury by attaching herself to a refined Parisian brute (Sean Martin Hingston).

The more finely wrought diversions of “Little Dancer” occur when Stroman and her corps of dancers remind us that this is indeed a musical about ballet. These dance sequences offer the most invigorating exposure in a musical to the beauty of the form since “Billy Elliot.” Stroman’s choreography here betokens the passion for dance she infused so exhilaratingly into “Contact,” her Tony-winning triptych of dance-theater pieces.

Whenever Peck is sent leaping and spinning, it’s as if the hindering tethers on “Little Dancer” come off, too. And the musical is set free.

[Little Dancer: Music by Stephen Flaherty, book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens. Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman. Sets, Beowulf Boritt; costumes, William Ivey Long; lighting, Ken Billington; sound, Kai Harada; projections, Benjamin Pearcy; music supervisor, David Loud; orchestrations, Doug Besterman and Larry Hochman; music director, Shawn Gough. With Janet Dickinson, Jolina Javier, Polly Baird, Lyrica Woodruff, Juliet Doherty and Michael McCormick. About 2 hours, 40 minutes. 

[Coming up in a subsequent post will be articles on the way the women of Degas’s era and the milieu of the Paris ballet are portrayed in the play, what inspired set designer Beowulf Boritt, and why this production played in preview until just ten days before it closed.  Other related articles on the Kennedy Center première of Little Dancer include “The Arts of Perseverance from an Iconic Ballerina,” a discussion of director-choreographer Susan Stroman’s work on the show by Sarah Kaufman; “Tiler Peck: A Dancer Takes Her Next Big Leap,” a profile of the New York City Ballet dancer who plays the young Marie, Degas’s model for the sculpture, by Peter Marks; “Making Art Sing Is Hardly a Walk in Park,” a consideration of how visual art may be “illustrated” by music by Anne Midgette; and “Flaherty and Ahrens: 30 Years in the Life,” a profile of the collaborators Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens by Nelson Pressley.  All four pieces appeared in the “Arts & Style” section of the Washington Post on 19 October 2014.]

Bullets Over 'Bullets Over Broadway'

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward, a frequent guest blogger on ROT, has come through with another interesting contribution.  Having caught a performance of Woody Allen’s musical stage adaption of his film Bullets Over Broadway, Kirk provides his assessment of the play and the production and as usual, he uses the performance as a way to discuss something more general (dare I say “universal”?) about musical theater.  Readers of ROT will know by now that that’s a subject about which Kirk knows a little something; he’s written on the genre before: “The Scottsboro Brecht,” 12 February 2011; “Theatrical and Popular Songs,” 2 October 2011; “The Jukebox Musical,” 7 October 2011; “Lady Gaga: Artist for Our Time,” 1 November 2011; and “Lady Gaga and Once,” 5 May 2014.

[Given the subject of this post, readers might also want to turn back to my own article “Movicals,” 20 September 2013, and the republished pieces in “More on Movicals,” 21 February 2014.]

I saw the Broadway musical Bullets Over Broadway the Musical, at the St. James Theatre in Manhattan, on Wednesday, August 7, 2014, and by that time the show, which opened on April 10, 2014, had already posted its closing notice for August 24, 2014, by which date it would have run for 33 previews and 124 performances. This makes it, in financial terms, a flop; it cost a reported $14 million to produce, and it will not have made back any of that investment.

Still, there are flops and flops. The show is bound to have a performance afterlife in university and community theater productions. What’s more, it had an afterlife with me too. I left the theater feeling I’d seen an enjoyable but maybe not terribly memorable show. Memorable, however, is what it turned out to be; I found that the next day I was thinking extensively about it, and I came to realize that I’ve learned something important about musical theater because of it.

Bullets Over Broadway is based on a film written (with Douglas McGrath, who this season is represented on Broadway by the book for the musical Beautiful) and directed by Woody Allen. Obviously Allen is a well-known figure, with so many accomplishments to his name that his biography in the program for Bullets reads, in its entirety, “WOODY ALLEN is a film director, actor and writer. His career spans more than six decades, and he has contributed to nightclubs, concert, television, theatre, literature and music.” Indeed he has. In 1994 the film version of Bullets Over Broadway was nominated for six Academy Awards. In 1996, Allen directed a musical film, Everyone Says I Love You, with a score made up of songs from previous decades. In 2014 he combined the two approaches: Bullets Over Broadway, the stage musical, has a score with songs like “Runnin’ Wild,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” and Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave,” in addition to some less known blues numbers. 

But films and Broadway musicals are significantly different creatures. It is relatively easy for a director to control the tone of a movie; Allen is a master at it. On the other hand, a Broadway musical is notoriously difficult to control, no matter how smooth the process can seem when the results are successful. A song, a situation, a character can run away with a musical, leaving the rest of it looking lost and forlorn. (A good book on this subject is Second Act Trouble by Steven Suskin, published in 2006.)

Woody Allen has experience as a theater director (with the Atlantic Theatre Company), but considering the complexity of the musical theater form, he was wise to enlist as director and choreographer for Bullets the formidable Susan Stroman, who has done remarkable work with shows such as The Producers, Crazy For You, and the stunning John Kander and Fred Ebb musical The Scottsboro Boys. 

Stroman has the notable ability to understand her assignment. In the case of Bullets, her task was to make the show “go” with machine-like (I almost said machine gun-like) force, so the audience would be carried through certain complexities.

Because . . . there are complexities in the show. It has levels. The most obvious level, perhaps, is the one that must have made it seem likely that the musical would be a financial success: as its title suggests, it promises theatricality. That was Stroman’s department, and she and her colleagues made the most of it. In addition to the vigorous and satisfying dancing (she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Choreography), she staged the show like, well, like a bullet, with plenty of fast-paced movement. Stroman knows how to shape a song, a scene, or an act, so its climax occurs at just the right moment.

But speaking of bullets, here’s the next level of complexity: the musical is about gangsters who kill people. It’s not that the subject of killing is off limits in Broadway musicals, going at least as far back as George Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet in the musical On Your Toes (1936), right up through Sweeney Todd. Certainly the violence in Bullets is cartoon style – there’s no blood. But the gangsters of Bullet’s plot are real gangsters, whose jobs involve killing people rather casually, unlike the gangsters in, say, Kiss Me Kate, Guys and Dolls, and The Drowsy Chaperone, who are basically song and dance men in extra large suits. 

Allen needs a certain amount of realism in his gangsters to set up the contrasts in his story, because the next level of the show is a serious theme, set up in an early discussion along these lines: Suppose you could save either the last copy of Shakespeare’s plays, or the life of a down-and-out bum. Which would you save? The show works this question out in varied ways. The Greenwich Village group we see at the beginning of the first act is art- (and politics-) obsessed, and at least one member of the group thinks the question is no contest – he’d save the art rather than the (allegedly valueless) human being. Later in the show he may rethink his position.

The gangsters, of course, wouldn’t save a life for love or money – quite the contrary - unless ordered to by the Boss. Human life has no value for them. One of Allen’s inspirations in the movie and play is that one of the gangsters becomes so involved in the world of art that he potentially might – not surprisingly, considering his line of work – kill for it. Meanwhile – a fine twist – the people in the show who are dedicated to the arts are willing to sell out their artistic values altogether, just to make a little money in the field.

This theme of value in life and art is not just tossed at the audience. It’s embodied in the story of the play, in ways both obvious and subtle. It is not, however, particularly embodied in the songs interpolated throughout the script, and that may be a weakness in the show. Another weakness is that the play-within-the-play is not particularly interesting. But at any rate Allen is not making easy points about life and art – he’s tackling them in meaningful ways, and expressing them through character.

I will mention one more level of complexity in Bullets (there may be others I haven’t noticed). Allen’s humor adds a level of complexity of its own to the work, because it’s earthy but it’s also sophisticated. This is not the place to rehash the art of Woody Allen’s comedy; volumes, quite literally, have been written about it. The point is that in most Broadway musicals the jokes are so massively structured that it would take a very dull audience member to miss them. There are a few jokes like that in Bullets, but at the performance I saw, the big laughs were few – and the smaller laughs were frequent, as someone here, someone there, caught something clever that Allen had written for a character. “Humor,” Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “is a concealed pair.” In other words, humor – humor that’s well executed – contains real complexity inside itself. Allen knows humor.

What then did I learn about musicals by seeing Bullets Over Broadway? I realized that in any successful musical, the elements are of a piece – not identical to each other, but basically homogenous. Annie Get Your Gun and Pippin are very different shows, but in each the various elements connect closely to each other. In Bullets Woody Allen took the risk – a perfectly sensible one for him to take, considering the nature of his art – that he could combine disparate elements into a musical that “worked.” 

This was not a case of ineptly connecting the parts; it was a worthy, even “artistic” endeavor, but it didn’t entirely succeed. For the most part reviewers did not agree with Allen. Two of the three New York daily papers disliked the show; other reviews were similarly mixed. The reviews didn’t agree with me either – no notice I read indicated that the show had any significance at all. Instead, reviewers were mostly irritated because it wasn’t funnier. Woody Allen has been fighting that very battle for years – “why isn’t he funnier? He used to be funny.” Reviewers often review careers, not plays. That’s Woody Allen’s lot in life.

I should note that Bullets was nominated for six Tony Awards. I already mentioned Stroman’s nomination for Best Choreography, and Allen was nominated for Best Book, a nomination I’d say he certainly deserved. Nick Cordero received a deserved Featured Actor nomination, and he had some fine colleagues on stage: Zach Braff of the TV series Scrubs; Vincent Pastore from The Sopranos once again playing a very believable gangster; and the splendid Marin Mazzie and Karen Ziemba, among other members of the play-within-a-play. There were also nominations for costumes (Ivey Long), sound (Peter Hylenski), and, particularly notably, for Scenic Design (Santo Loquasto) that featured settings whisked up from under the stage while the previous scene was just finishing, and one astonishing set that whirled around the stage at the climax of the play like a Tilt-A-Whirl.

None of those nominated won. They’ll have to be satisfied with the values of art.

[Kirk will be back with more interesting and provocative examinations of topics theatrical and other.  I know some of what he’s got in the works or on his mind, but it’s too soon to preview them.  I can only attest that each idea he’s considering is well worth hearing and I urge ROTters to come back often to catch his contributions to the dialogue.  In the meantime, ROT readers are invited to return to the blog in a few days for an archival report on one of Woody Allen’s self-directed productions, A Second Hand Memory which I saw at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2004.] 

'The Last Two People On Earth'

In a crowded month of theater for me, as well as a somewhat varied one (one straight play—plus another one at the end of November—one monodrama, one dance-theater piece), comes now a self-described “apocalyptic vaudeville” presented by the Classic Stage Company (in association with Except For This LLC, executive producer Staci Levine; and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts).  Aside from the theater’s own promotional blurb (“It’s the end of the world as we know it.  A flood of biblical proportions leaves us with only two people on Earth, who discover their common language is song and dance”), I had no idea what to expect when Diana, who shares the CSC subscription, and I went down to the Lower East Side to the Abrons Arts Center, the performing and visual arts facility of the renowned Henry Street Settlement, on a snowy, blustery, and cold Saturday, 14 December, for the evening performance of The Last Two People On Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville co-conceived and performed by Mandy Patinkin and Taylor Mac singing a mix of music by Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sondheim, R.E.M., The Pogues, Paul Simon, Randy Newman, and others.  (The two remaining co-conceivers are Susan Stroman, who choreographed and directed, and Paul Ford, the show’s musical director.)  It was the opening night of 18 performances which are scheduled to end on 31 December. 

 

The Classic Stage Company was founded by Christopher Martin at Rutgers Presbyterian Church on West 73rd Street in 1967 and has made its home on East 13th Street in the East Village since 1985.  (Martin, who focused the theater’s repertory on European classics, was forced out in 1985 when the company’s board insisted that the theater shift direction to more popular American fare.)  CSC still maintains a commitment to “re-imagining the classical repertory for contemporary audiences.”  Over the years, I’ve seen quite a few productions there, including a fascinating two-part revival of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in November 1981 (and a less fascinating original play by David Ives—better known now for Venus in Fur, 2010, also at CSC—about Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish philosopher, entitled New Jerusalem, 2008).  (I have a report on a Washington, D.C., revival of Ives’s Venus in Fur on ROT; see 11 July 2011.)

The Abrons Center, at 466 Grand Street between Pitt and Willet Streets, was originally built as the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1915.  (The Henry Street Settlement, a not-for-profit social service agency, was founded in 1893.)  The Abrons has been a performance venue continuously, but under various names, starting with the Neighborhood Playhouse: Henry Street Playhouse (1927), Harry De Jur Playhouse (1967); from 1970, Woodie King, Jr.’s New Federal Theatre occupied the De Jur.  (NFT has moved its administrative offices, but it still produces at the Abrons, among other venues.)  The current building, incorporating the 1915 theater, opened in 1975 and was landmarked in 1989; a complete renovation occurred in the 1990s.  The facility houses the 350-seat Playhouse (the original Neighborhood Playhouse), the 75-seat black-box Experimental Theater, and the Underground Theater which accommodates 99 patrons.  Over the decades, some illustrious performers have appeared at the Abrons, from contemporary figures like the late Lou Reed, Philip Glass, and Rufus Wainwright, to artists out of performance history like Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Aaron Copeland, Eartha Kitt, Orson Welles, and Agnes de Mille.

The 65-minute “workshop presentation” of Last Two People is “fully staged” by Stroman (Crazy for You, Tony – choreography, 1992; Show Boat, Tony – choreography, 1995; Contact, Tony – choreography, 2000; The Producers, Tony – choreography and directing, 2001) with live music performed by a trio led by Ford (Mandy Patinkin in Concert: "Dress Casual" – musical director, 1989; Mandy Patinkin in Concert: "Mamaloshen" – musical arranger, 1998; Celebrating Sondheim – musical director, 2002; An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin – conceiver and musical director, 2011).  Stroman was also the director and choreographer of the short-lived Broadway movical Big Fish which opened in October and will close this month and she will do the same services for the upcoming Bullets Over Broadway, another movical, scheduled to open next April.  Diana believes the producers are thinking Broadway ultimately, which may be so, but my guess is Last Two People is headed first for ART, the co-producer.  (When Diana called to find out where the Abrons is and how long the show runs, the CSC announcement said it’s 100 minutes, considerably longer than it actually is.  I suggest that, as a workshop—a program note even warns that the songs may change without notice—this incarnation of The Last Two People On Earth is still being tweaked and developed and may end up longer than the version Diana and I saw, which is probably wise if a Broadway or commercial Off-Broadway run is under consideration.  I guess we’ll find out.)

The New York Times theater writer Charles Isherwood called the pairing of Patinkin and Mac a “startling matchup” because “they come from radically different worlds.”  Patinkin is, of course, a Tony-winning Broadway actor and singer whose credits include Evita (1979 – Tony, 1980), Sunday in the Park With George (1984), The Secret Garden (1991), and The Wild Party (2000), as well as several concerts on Broadway (produced by Except For This and Staci Levine).  He famously starred on TV in Chicago Hope (1994-2000) and Criminal Minds (2005-2007), both of which shows he left precipitously; Patinkin currently appears in the Showtime series Homeland (2011-present).  Mac is a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter (one of his songs, “Fear [Itself],” is in the show), cabaret performer, performance artist, director, and producer who often appears in drag.  His past projects include Good Person of Szechwan at the Public (2013); A Midsummer Night’s Dream at CSC (2012); and The Lily’s Revenge (book, lyrics, and concept by Mac based on Noh plays) at HERE Arts Center, New York (2009); The Magic Theater, San Francisco (2011); Southern Rep, New Orleans (2012); and ART (2012).  The Village Voice crowned Mac the “Best Theater Actor” in New York for 2013.

Patinkin and Mac (the “characters” don’t have names—which works out fine since there’s no dialogue anyway) are survivors of a global flood that has wiped out everyone on earth except the two of them.  They find that their only common language is song and dance.  Sort of like Gogo and Didi of Waiting for Godot (coincidentally on stage uptown starring another intriguing pairing of performers), Patinkin and Mac keep each other company, entertaining one another by recounting the history of humankind to “chronicle the rise and fall and hopeful rise again of humankind, through music.“  (Ironically, the CSC illustration for the show depicts Patinkin and Mac in bowler hats, making them look like some portrayals of Estragon and Vladimir in Godot, including the current Broadway version.  The illustration also brings to mind René Magritte’s surrealistic paintings The Son of Man and Man in the Bowler Hat.)

As for the performance itself—well, who’da thought Mandy Patinkin, whom Jesse Green calls a “shvitzy warbler” in New York magazine, could be a clown?  Okay, he’s not Bill Irwin or David Shiner, but he does mime and sight gags in baggy pants—his are “dad” jeans, but what the hey!—and a bowler hat and carries—wields is perhaps a better word—a cane!  Who knew?  I don’t know Mac’s work at all except by rep, but I gather this is right in his wheelhouse.  Hell, from the evidence of this brief encounter, I’d guess not much isn’t in Mac’s wheelhouse!  If I had to characterize this pairing, I’d say, in a very loose sense, that Mac (an “adorable genderkind”) is a postmodern Stan Laurel (he even vaguely resembles Laurel) and Patinkin is a sort of grumpy, stern Oliver Hardy.  (Well, they are in a fine mess, though Mac didn’t get them into it.)  I still don’t think clowning comes naturally to Patinkin—this is a character he’s playing, and it’s still a little studied and controlled—but Mac is a natural buffoon.  Neither his body nor his face are as rubbery as either Irwin’s or Shiner’s, possibly the best clown-mimes working this side of the Atlantic today (I saw them in Old Hats last spring and reported on the performance on ROT on 22 March), but he’s immensely flexible nonetheless, and apparently endlessly inventive and imaginative.  The program doesn’t say who came up with the idea for Last Two People, but I suspect that Mac contributed most of the gags that punctuate the narrative the songs and dances lay out.  (My guess: Patinkin and Ford, who’ve collaborated a number of times, together came up with the song selections.) 

The teaming of Patinkin and Mac, of which New York’s Jesse Green says “an unlikelier duo” is “hard to imagine,” is not only surprising, it’s not a natural fit, either.  Mac’s organically goofy and silly—his face is changeable depending on things like where he’s facing and what he’s wearing on his head.  Patinkin’s a classically-trained actor-singer (he went to Juilliard), not an improvisational performer (from what I can tell), and being loose and unfettered doesn’t seem to come instinctively to him.  While Mac is comfortable in his role in Last Two People, enticing Patinkin to stay when he threatens to leave after a disagreement or devising ways to feed themselves or pass the time, Patinkin is more studied, rehearsed, and planned out.  This was the opening performance—there were no scheduled previews—so I presume Patinkin will loosen up some as the work progresses before an audience, but Mac’s already there.  It’s a small distinction, perhaps, but it makes the match-up uneven in some performative aspects and unbalances the production, as if the two singers were in different shows with the same script.  Again, this may be the consequence of the first night plus two actors with different kinds of backgrounds and it will even out subsequently.  (Then again, maybe it won’t, either.)

The physical production holds some little pleasures and even a couple of surprises.  William Ivey Long’s costumes, since there’s only one for each performer, are the easiest to handle.  Mac is dressed as a traditional vaudeville clown: baggy pants, threadbare cut-away, bowler—all in black.  He also carries a cane and has various props (including a full dinner setting plus three apples) stashed in his pants or in his coat pockets.  He also wears a vest, but it’s not a once-elegant black one, it’s an olive-drab, canvas commando’s vest.  (He is a survivor, after all, of a global flood and washed up on the stage—we never learn where the two are: it’s up to our imaginations—in an orange inflatable boat, like some kind of clown-universe SEAL.)  Patinkin, beardless here in contrast with the hirsute Saul Berenson on Homeland, wears work clothes: the baggy jeans I mentioned, flannel shirt, kerchief  (or bandage) tied around his forehead.  Mac provides the bowler and cane from the rubber boat (which somehow also holds a host of other useful items like two bentwood chairs and an inflatable, life-sized naked female doll).  Like Didi and Gogo, they are Nobodies and Everymen at the same time. 

Beowulf Boritt’s scenery is also simple but highly effective.  It’s been a long time since I saw a show with a front drape, but upon entering the Abrons auditorium, a traditional proscenium house of the early 20th century, we’re confronted with a curtain, painted to depict an apparently endless, dark blue body of water with what looks an immense, gray cliff beyond.  Two empty, round spotlights are side by side rising from the stage level in the center.  When the main drape rises, the stage set is revealed: a decaying, free-standing proscenium arch (the theater’s actual stage doesn’t have an arch), circa 1910-ish, blue with gold maple leaves or medallions; there’s a huge steamer trunk up center left.  The lighting by Ken Billington and sound design by Daniel J. Gerhard, which included piping the live music by Ford on piano, Tony Geralis on keyboard, and Paul Pizzuti on drums into the house from behind the scenery, helped establish the apocalyptically vaudevillian atmosphere physicalized by Boritt’s set.  There were also some wonderfully low-tech special effects, which I presume were developed by technical supervisor Aurora Productions.  After Mac flings the inflatable lady off stage lest Patinkin see it, it comes sailing back during a windstorm a few minutes later, flying across the stage above everyone’s head on an obvious harness and pulley like a tiny zip line!  (Eat your heart out, Spider-Man!)

The show starts with the sound effects of a great storm.  I don’t know how someone would interpret this without having read the promos for the performance; maybe it’s obvious to the uninitiated, but it seems ambiguous to me.  (Unlike some vaudeville-inspired shows, like the Irwin-Shiner Old Hats I mentioned, Last Two People doesn’t use title cards or captions for the scenes.)  Though I had expected two people to emerge through the curtain to stand in the light spots, that doesn’t happen and when the curtain rises, Mac is revealed arduously pulling his rubber boat on stage from the right wing.  Singing an English translation of “The Song of the Volga Boatmen” (“Yo heave ho!  Yo heave ho!”), he’s pulling from a seated position with his back to us, scooting a few feet to the center of the stage after each successful tug until he manages to get the boat on to the platform.  Then he unloads the accouterments for a picnic, taking the dinnerware out of his pants and setting them all carefully on a table cloth he’s spread out next to the large trunk.  When he pulls an apple out of his pocket, shines it up, and places it next to him, right by the trunk, a hand snakes out surreptitiously and snatches the fruit.  Finding it mysteriously missing, Mac takes out a second apple and repeats is action, only to lose it again the same way.  The third time Mac repeats this business, he watches the apple and grabs the hand and Patinkin emerges from the trunk, to the great shock of Mac that there’s another survivor of the flood. 

We know from publicity that the two don’t understand each other (though there’s no dialogue, so we have to take on faith that this is so), until one of them starts to sing and the other picks up the song and they realize that this is how they can communicate.  This leads to a rendition of Thomas Haynes Bayly’s 1833 composition “Long Long Ago,” a song about love.  The rest of the story unfolds through song and some dance and pantomime, as the two last people on Earth go through friendship, conflict, near breakup, and reconciliation. 

The score covers songs from the 19th to the 21st century, from traditional tunes to show music to pop and rock numbers, including comic pieces and serious and even melancholy ones, but the styles are all mixed and no thought seems to have been given to matching or blending them.  That’s not actually a fault, but I did wish that so many of the songs weren’t so familiar, especially the show tunes.  Songs that well known, at least for me, arrive pre-stocked with a lot of context and Patinkin and Mac don’t necessarily intend for that meaning to carry over into Last Two People.  Rogers and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” (South Pacific, 1949), for instance, is given an ironic and mocking rendition which fights with the straightforward, sincere plea against bigotry that I know from the musical.  Sometimes, of course, the familiarity helps in this new setting, as with the closing number, the children’s camp round “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”  In the end, though, this is a small quibble.

Now, right at the outset, the narrative of Last Two People gets a little sticky if you don’t take it on a metaphorical level.  The premise of the vaudeville is that the arc of Patinkin and Mac’s developing relationship relates the story of humanity and, potentially, its revival.  The songs are often about love and one early number is E. Y. Harburg and Burton Lane’s “The Begat” (from 1947’s Finian’s Rainbow), which is about . . . well, procreation (“Sometimes a bachelor, he begat”).  Ummm, how does that happen with two guys?  (Parthenogenesis, anyone?)  Before I got to the show, I wondered if Mac would be doing one of his drag roles (as he did in the Public’s Good Person, in which he played Shen Tei, the title character—as well as her male alter ego, Shui Ta, roles usually played by a woman), but he doesn’t.  (I recently saw an e-card with the text, “I'm not saying you’re not my type, I'm just saying if you and I were the last two people on Earth the human race would die out,” but that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on here.)  The characters Mac and Patinkin are playing don’t seem androgynous or genderless, and maybe I’m being too literal once again—but when they sing about love and, let’s face it, sex—a late song is “Real Live Girl” by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh from Little Me in 1962—well . . .”I’m so confyoooosed!” as Vinnie Barbarino used to say. 

All told, for 65 minutes, even on a miserable evening on the New York streets, The Last Two People On Earth is an entertaining, intriguing, and provocative piece of theater.  The theme is a little daunting if taken seriously, but the form is unusual and engaging and seeing Mandy Patinkin in an uncharacteristic role and getting the chance to see Taylor Mac for the first time was more than worth the price of the ticket.  There’s some opinion, it seems, that Last Two People has intentions of being more than an off-beat cabaret comprising a peculiarly eclectic selection of songs accompanied by rudimentary vaudeville dances like the cakewalk.  There may be plans for a more performance-art style presentation with more physical acting, something more postmodern, which could account for the missing 35 minutes.  I have no idea if this is correct, or where it comes from (I saw it in cyberspace, and we know how accurate that is), and I can’t evaluate what isn’t there, of course.  But it’s thought-provoking.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens next with Last Two People and how it ends up when the team’s finished workshopping it and they decide it’s ready for prime time.  I’ve only seen one report about that future and that only said that Mac and Patinkin plan to tour the show to theaters around the U.S. before returning to New York for an Off-Broadway run in 2014.  My guess about an ART visit is just that: a guess, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

[At the time I composed this report, no reviews of The Last Two People On Earth had appeared, either in print or on line, and that may be because the performance is billed as a workshop, so there won’t be any coverage.  That makes it difficult to do my customary survey of published notices, so readers of ROT will just have to go with my assessment and see what else they can find on their own.]