musical Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Theater: Parade; Maybe Happy Ending

from Atlanta to Seoul

By happenstance, I saw two theatrical productions in three days, Parade and Many Happy Ending.

In February 2024, Proctors Theatre in Schenectady held an event to announce the 2024-25 Broadway schedule for Proctors and Cap Rep in Albany.

When they discussed the musical Parade, which would start its tour at Proctors, an older gentleman on a screen said essentially that it was a sad and depressing story, but it was good. That could not be the “sell” the Proctors’ folks wanted to hear.

The musical won the 2023 Tony Award® for Best Revival of a Musical and was nominated for a Grammy Award® for Best Musical Theater Album.

Katherine Kiessling of the Times Union wrote, “The heart of the show is assigned to Leo and his wife Lucille, played by Max Chernin and Talia Suskauer. The pair is charged with embracing the Franks’ rough edges—his aloofness and her initial desires to cling to her privileged life and flee the hardships of her husband’s trial—and eliciting empathy.”

They are a Jewish couple in the nineteen-teens Atlanta. He’s from Brooklyn, but she’s a native of Georgia. He runs a pencil-making factory. A young female employee is killed, and Leo is suspected.

Variety asked about the 2023 revival: “Will audiences take to a disturbing but captivating musical that deals with racism, antisemitism, and injustice?” Newspapers superimposed on the stage area ensure the audience knows the outcome before the production begins.

It’s very well done and important. While having a downer of an arc, it’s not all depressing, and it was worthwhile. My wife and I attended the January 11 program. It will be touring throughout the country through September 7.

Made in Korea

Two days later, my daughter and I were in Manhattan working on a project. We contacted one of my nieces and her Significant Other. They secured four rush tickets for Maybe Happy Endings at the Belasco Theatre for January 13. The show opened on November 12.

“Inside a one-room apartment in the heart of Seoul, Oliver (Darren Criss, probably best known from Glee) lives a happily quiet life, listening to jazz records and caring for his favorite plant…

“When his fellow Helper-Bot neighbor Claire (Helen J. Shen) asks to borrow his charger, what starts as an awkward encounter leads to a unique friendship, a surprising adventure, and maybe even…love?”

The Will Aronson and Hue Park musical reminds us that “love is never obsolete.” It was delightful, not just because of the storyline, dialogue (“She’s a 5” was particularly funny), songs, and performances, which included lounge singer Gil Brentley (Dez Duron) and James and others (Marcus Choi).

Maybe Happy Ending uses specially made video projections, plus a fantastic physical space. “The musical exists in the relatively constrained spaces of the Helperbot retirement home, but there are also a series of flashbacks to Oliver’s time working with James in his house and Claire’s time working for her owner. Then, when the two robots eventually leave their apartments, there’s an entirely new landscape and horizon to contend with. And all of this takes place in a single unbroken act…”

Technology

Laffrey’s solution was to create a “machine that moved us through this world.” He used a “giant mechanism that encompasses the whole stage and fills it with moving pieces. For most of the show, the audience’s view is comprised of one or two boxes, one for each of the robot’s rooms—those boxes can slide horizontally, meaning there’s occasionally a single room and, more often, two side-by-side. The stage also has a central turntable, upon which some sets (James’ house, for instance) rotate.

“Simultaneously, Laffrey designed four huge black panels trimmed with neon. These panels, which are positioned in front of the stage where a curtain would be, slide up and down and side-to-side in order to act like a camera lens’s iris, opening wide to show the whole stage or narrowing to focus on a single piece of action. It’s a tool that occasionally makes the musical feel more like cinema than theater—the audience is seemingly viewing the play through a giant lens.”

A Korean-language version of Maybe Happy Ending opened in Seoul in 2016, and its English-language premiere was in Atlanta the following year. The show was very enjoyable, though sitting in the fourth row of the balcony, I had difficulty seeing some limited action in front of the stage.

MJ, as in Michael Jackson

jukebox musical

My wife and I went to Proctors Theatre on Wednesday, December 4th, to see the touring company of the Broadway musical MJ. We had planned to attend the following weekend, but a more intriguing offer arose.

I thought it was funny when several dancers were working out on stage, and some people behind us complained. “Why are they stretching now? Why didn’t they do that backstage?” They didn’t recognize that this was part of the actual show, as I had suspected. “Five minutes before Michael!”

It isn’t easy to separate the show from what one already knows about Michael Jackson, and I know a lot. The trick about these so-called jukebox musicals is that you can’t just have a whole string of songs together in a “then he sang” order.

For instance, I thought Michael’s mother Katherine, who was supportive without being harsh, was involved in one of the early great performances, singing I’ll Be There with Little Mike and contemporary Michael. Here’s a guide to the songs.

It’s like the 1992 Dangerous concert that MJ and his troupe were preparing for. You have to have a narrative flow. Michael was an artist with a vision who never wanted to hear “No.” Everything had to be bigger and better, even when it didn’t make sense financially.

A different Joe Jackson

The production made much of this, rooted in his never-satisfied father, Joe, who pushed his sons to form what became the Jackson 5. He could see that Michael had the greatest potential for success. Joe was a failed musician who put his dreams aside in favor of factory work and raising a family of nine. He was living through Michael, and he could be brutal to his son. You can’t live on your laurels.

The MTV reporter who hung out around the rehearsal intimated some of the rumors about Michael sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, getting plastic surgery, and bleaching his skin. Michael mostly sidesteps them.

Possibly the most interesting feature is that the same actor plays the guy playing his father and the guy playing his manager, and sometimes, they blend together in Michael’s mind.

Ultimately, I think it was a decent musical, although I thought the first half of the Lynn Nottage script was much stronger than the second.

I was reading someone’s comment that the main character (Jamaal Fields-Green) occasionally disappeared. Many interviews I’ve heard featured that high-pitch, fairly monotone vocal pattern.

I enjoyed the show for what it was, though I was happy that songs were unfamiliar to some of the audience so I could experience the performers. The MJ tour continues through August 2025.

Mildly off-topic: Unreleased Michael Jackson Tracks Discovered in Abandoned Storage Unit

Rebel Without A Cause; SIX

Divorced, beheaded, survived

I haven’t attended enough cultural/entertainment events for my tastes of late. While I did go to the reopening of the Spectrum Theatre on April 24, I haven’t been able to get there since, and I want to soon.

I saw Rebel Without A Cause, the first James Dean movie I ever viewed. Experienced with a 21st-century lens, Jim Stark (Dean) seems less a rebel than, in the words of ScreenRant, “a troubled youth struggling to find his place in a society he sees as hypocritical and devoid of meaning.”

Indeed, it is the high school clique that almost immediately scorns him without much provocation who are at least as broken as he. The knife fight between Jim and Buzz (Corey Allen), a few years before West Side Story, is said to reflect the “social pressures of male teenagers.”

Surely, Jim is frustrated by his ineffectual father Frank (Jim Backus), who allows Jim’s mother Carol (Ann Doran) to uproot the family at the first sign of difficulty.

Control

Jim’s one male friend, Plato (Sal Mineo), is a real outsider, abandoned by his parents, needing “to assert some control over a world in which he feels powerless and invisible.”

Jim’s classmate Judy (Natalie Wood, later in West Side Story) evolves from her disregard for Jim as her classmates did, while missing her old relationship with her father (William Hopper from Perry Mason), to Jim and Judy becoming surrogate parents to Plato.

Indie Wire makes the case that Plato is the first gay teenager on film while avoiding getting stopped by the restrictive Hays Code

It’s an interesting slice of life, with Ray (Edward Platt from Get Smart), the cop specializing in dealing with youth a sympathetic character. Even if it is “overwrought and cloyingly melodramatic,” I still appreciated the chance to see it on the big screen.

Famously, the three leads all died too soon. In a gallery of Lost Photos From a Legendary Hollywood Archive, Dean is captured just a month before he died in a car crash at the age of 24 on 9/30/55, even before the film premiered. Natalie Wood drowned at sea in 1981 at the age of 43. And Sal Mineo was murdered in 1976 at the age of 37.

Divorced, beheaded, died…

SIX, which my wife, daughter, and I saw at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady I don’t think is that compelling a book. I had listened to the music beforehand. But for what it is, it does the thing extremely well. It was an 80-minute rock show with a sextet of Henry VIII’s queens.

The Times Union review by Katherine Kiess is about right. “Styled as a ‘Renaissance Idol’ belt-off…they compete in a glamor-coated trauma Olympics to see whose marriage was the worst.”

You can tell it was a rock show because they namechecked “Schenectady!” a half dozen times before the “LED wall panels and cathedral windows that become everything from a church confessional to a dating app screen.”

The four-piece band, the Ladies In Waiting, cooked. And the singers were excellent. So it’s perhaps not great theater but, as the Los Angeles Times noted, it is “unapologetically revisionist. That’s why it’s successful.” And entertaining enough.

For Good

Because I knew you

All of life’s riddles are answered in musical theater*. In this case, For Good, from Wicked.

Recently, I was talking with a friend of mine. They wanted to get in touch with an old friend of theirs. The two had been really close for a time, but then the friend inexplicably pulled away. I knew that other person less well, but I, too, recognized the unexplained pulling away.

So I’ve been there. Haven’t you? For several reasons, one old friend is at the top of my mind, which has generated an oppressive degree of melancholy in me. When I heard this Tiny Desk concert of four songs from the show performed by Alyssa Fox and McKenzie Kurtz, it was the last song that struck me. It’s because Stephen Schwartz, who was at the piano, told the process of writing the song (at 17:26), which involved him asking his daughter what she would say to her best friend if she knew she would never see her again. Then he wrote it down.

I’ve heard For Good several times. My wife and I saw Wicked at Proctors Theatre in November 2012. Yet I HEARD the song differently this time, probably because of Schwartz’s story.

Elphaba and Glinda

I am recommending this to my friend, and myself.

I’ve heard it said
That people come into our lives
For a reason
Bringing something we must learn
And we are led
To those who help us most to grow
If we let them
And we help them in return
Well, I don’t know if I believe that’s true
But I know I’m who I am today
Because I knew you…

It well may be
That we will never meet again
In this lifetime
So let me say before we part
So much of me
Is made of what I learned from you
You’ll be with me
Like a handprint on my heart
And now whatever way our stories end
I know you have re-written mine
By being my friend

*The actual quote is, “All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” It’s from the 1991 film Grand Canyon and is spoken by the character played by Steve Martin.

Morissette and the Temps

Otis Williams

In May 2023, my wife and I attended two musicals at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady. The first was Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill: the Musical, based on her 1995 album and more of her songs. The second was Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations.

The Morissette piece was interesting because it had a narrative not driven by the songs. Instead, Diablo Cody wrote the book and seemed to plug in the appropriate tune for that narrative arc.

The story revolves around a Connecticut woman named Mary Jane Healy. She’s writing the annual Christmas letter. She brags about her husband Steve’s work promotion and son Nick’s early admission to Harvard. And, oh yeah, her adopted daughter Frankie’s art. Things are not so perfect in suburbia, however.

The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “Electrifying, visceral and stunning. JAGGED LITTLE PILL takes a stand against complacency.”

The review headline in the Albany Times Union by Steve Barnes calls the show “pushy, overambitious, loud.” The last sentence and a half: “The show, in its own weird way, has the integrity of committed beliefs. Whether that’s your kind of theater is another matter.”

It is undoubtedly MY kind of theater, a narrative that hits on several hot-button topics, including prescription drug addiction and rape by a familiar. I accept “pushy” and even “loud.” But it was clear that the Thursday matinee audience, except for an older couple who walked out after the first song in the second act, You Oughta Know, was enthralled by the material and the actors performing it.

Jagged Little Pill played on Broadway from December 2019 to March 2020, then from October to December 2021. It’s been touring since August 31, 2022, and will be touring in Buffalo, Boston, KC, and elsewhere at least through September.

Motown

Ain’t Too Proud is a standard jukebox musical. It tells the story of Motown’s leading male singing group from the point of view of Otis Williams, the only remaining member from their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.

Before the program began at our Saturday matinee, my wife asked if the group had stayed with its original members. Er, no. Indeed, the group’s evolution drove the narrative: Elbridge Bryant was replaced by David Ruffin, who was replaced by Dennis Edwards et al.

The music and the performances were top-notch. The TU’s Barnes calls it a “resplendent cavalcade of Temptations’ hits,” even as he questions the jukebox musical genre.

My issue was more prosaic. The show takes some liberties with the facts, probably to trim a full show. For instance, I would have concluded from Ain’t Too Proud that the Temptations reunion show took only a couple of years after Eddie Kendricks left the group in 1971.

Actually, it took place in 1982, and I attended it at the Colonie Colosseum in Albany County, NY. Glenn Leonard was one of the seven, not Damon Harris, who left the group in 1975.

I had to actively say to myself, “Self, these details don’t much matter to the audience.” And there were things the show got correct, such as Berry Gordy refusing to let the group release War as a single; it became a #1 hit for Edwin Starr.

Like JLP, Ain’t Too Proud’s run (Mar 21, 20190 -Jan 16, 2022) was interrupted by COVID. The show has been touring since December 2021. It’ll be touring the US Midwest, South, and Western Canada, among the locales, through February 2024.