An Unsentimental ‘Fiddler’
New York — The answer is an unqualified “yes”: LinManuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” on stage at the Richard Rodgers Theatre and sure to run on Broadway for years, really is all that.
As the ensemble sings in the first number, the world — or at least the world of musical theater — will never be the same, in the wake of this hip-hop homage to an oftoverlooked founding father, whose story is told here by actors of color playing Hamilton, Jefferson, Washington and nearly everyone else.
Enough with the gushing; you can read plenty of that — all of it warranted — elsewhere.
But easy as it is to see “Hamilton” as a monument unto itself, what struck me in each of the five Broadway shows I recently saw were the variations they played on the question posed by Aaron Burr in the first lines of Miranda’s musical: Just “how does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore” and immigrant emerge from “squalor” and “grow up to be a hero and a scholar?”
In answering similar questions, all five shows — emphatically including “Hamilton” — wrestled with a dilemma at the heart of the American dream: How does one reconcile its liberating promise of fully expressing oneself with the frequently conformist dictates of the larger community — particularly when one is an outsider and that community is prone to circle the wagons?
Spanning our history from colonial New England to the here and now, these five shows underscore what the always generous Miranda would be the first to admit: “Hamilton” is part of a larger, ongoing conversation taking place on our stages about what it means to be an American.
Rethinking Miller’s ‘Crucible’
In his extensive notes to “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller described Abigail Williams — the ringleader of the frenzied girls whose accusations led to the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 — as a “strikingly beautiful girl” who had “an endless capacity for dissembling.”
True enough. But why? In the current Broadway revival of Miller’s play, which I saw at the Walter Kerr Theatre in previews, director Ivo Van Hove and his all-star cast prove more interested than Miller himself was in answering this question.
They arrive at much the same place as Stacy Schiff did in her recent book on Salem, in which she observes how powerless girls like Abby (Saoirse Ronan) and Mary Warren (Tavi Gevinson) were, in a colony where most of the girls naming names were orphans, servants or both.
If Abby dissembles, this production suggests, it’s partly because she can’t otherwise be heard; she has no rights. John Proctor ( Ben Whishaw) may be this play’s hero, but he’s also abused his power in sleeping with Abby; I’ve never felt more sympathy for her in the early, sexually charged scene in which she makes clear to Proctor that she’s not going away.
Nor, for that matter, have I ever rooted harder for Abby than I did in the scene here where she warns the selfrighteous, imperious and intimidating Deputy Governor Danforth (Ciarán Hinds) that she’s also got his number — and is perfectly willing to take him down if he refuses to do her bidding.
Abby may be no angel. But in a production that’s set within a schoolroom — and in which the girls are dressed in school uniforms — she has few ways of being heard or taken seriously.
The primary lesson Abby has absorbed in class is that expressing oneself in Puritan New England is a zero sum game. One can be whipped into submission, as Mary is by Proctor. Or one can leverage what one has to control others. And in this male-dominated theocracy, what Abby has is sex — and men’s sexfueled fantasies of witches, underscoring their fear of women.
The wonder of this production is that one simultaneously feels sympathy for Abby as well as Proctor and his wife (Sophie Okonedo); in one scene, Proctor himself is reduced to a student, chalking an answer on the blackboard to a minister’s question.
In the 1692 New England presented here, nearly everyone is treated as a child, writing what others prescribe under God’s law rather than creating the story of the self. Philip Glass’ original score highlights this yearning for all that goes unsaid, in a world where speaking one’s mind could have fatal consequences.
Give it up for ‘Hamilton’
Like each of the five Broadway shows I saw, “The Crucible” is as much about the playwright’s present — 1950s McCarthyism, for Miller — as an imagined yesteryear like the 17th century. Nowhere is that clearer than in “Hamilton,” set in the 18th century while boldly staking the claim that the American Revolution belongs to everyone, here and now.
Yes: the actors enacting Miranda’s story are dressed in modified period costume from the neck down, and Miranda’s lyrics in this nearly entirely sung-through piece include fragments from period documents like Washington’s Farewell Address.
But the only white lead is King George. He’s surrounded by actors of color sporting contemporary hairstyles while engaging in rap battles over thorny policy issues — when they’re not fighting brilliantly staged battles like Yorktown, involving armies comprised of women as well as men (stunning choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler).
Watching “Hamilton” unfold on David Korins’ set — an old-fashioned world of wood featuring a double turntable that recalls Harlem dance parties as well as the passage of time since the American Revolution — it’s hard not to see Miranda’s triumph as a fulfillment of Jefferson’s dream of universal equality.
As imagined by Miranda here and in his Tony-winning “In the Heights,” that dream belongs to outsiders from elsewhere as well as entrenched natives like Washington, Jefferson and Madison; Hamilton, much like Miranda’s own family, hails from the Caribbean.
Miranda’s inclusive America confirms what Burr belatedly learns: We’re best when we see ourselves as the sum of our parts, in a world where there’s room for all of us to be fully ourselves, together.
In “Wonder of Wonders,” her excellent book on “Fiddler on the Roof,” Alisa Solomon notes that Miranda has regularly acknowledged how “Heights” borrowed structure and theme from “Fiddler.” Set in 1905, “Fiddler” is another show asking whether there’s room for those who think differently, be they Jews in Russia or individuals within Judaism itself.
Both of these issues receive heightened attention in the first-rate Broadway revival currently playing at The Broadway Theatre. Directed by Bartlett Sher, it stars Danny Burstein as Tevye and Jessica Hecht as Golde.
“Fiddler” has been revived so often and is so well known that it’s become a tradition akin to the one celebrated at the top of the show, in which the reasons for doing things a certain way are often no longer apparent, reducing what’s left to sentimental vignettes or even kitsch.
Sher strips all this away; in his grainy and gritty production, even an early song like “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” is less dreamy than dark, as three young women confront the dismal prospect of loveless marriages to potentially callous or abusive men.
Like Abby in Miller’s “Crucible,” Tevye’s daughters are searching for a means of expressing themselves within a traditional theocratic community, much as Anatevka’s villagers are trying to be true to themselves within a murderously intolerant Russia — and much as Jewish immigrants like Tevye would attempt to live the dream of selfhood after emigrating to America.
Sher and his cast get it, while also calling to mind Europe’s current refugee crisis. We see all this instead of a venerable period piece in everything from the cast’s fresh-scrubbed and newly vital characterizations to changes in something as iconic as Jerome Robbins’ original choreography — another tradition, here, undergoing a remarkable transformation.
Even as he honors the Jewish folk dances Robbins had incorporated into the show, choreographer Hofesh Shechter has injected strikingly contemporary dance — highlighting the tension between communitarian tradition and individualized expression, as dancers embody what makes them different, moving toward freedom even as they nominally fall into line.
Tapping a new story in ‘Shuffle Along’
It’s dancing that made a blockbuster of “Shuffle Along,” a 1921 musical created by and starring black theater artists that Langston Hughes called the start of the Harlem Renaissance.
It’s currently in previews at The Music Box, courtesy of George C. Wolfe and a cast that includes Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter and an ensemble of ferociously good tap dancers under choreographer Savion Glover.
Wolfe gives us the original musical’s song and dance while scrapping much of the substandard book and replacing it with his own. The full title of this repurposed production explains what he’s up to: “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.”
Most significant in what “followed” is all this show did to open doors for black performers on Broadway, enabled at last to appear as themselves rather than in blackface.
One senses the importance of 1921 for 2016 when watching McDonald’s Lottie Gee sing “Love Will Find a Way” to her male lead. The 1921 show’s black creators hover in the wings, wondering whether white America would buy the revolutionary idea of black actors expressing love for one another on stage.
While we listen to McDonald’s magnificent vocal instrument climb toward the heavens, the answer is clear on the creators’ faces. As they watch an imagined 1921 audience watching Lottie Gee, one sees relief and then joy once it becomes clear that this longago audience was loving what it saw — making it possible for a 2016 audience to watch and love McDonald.
The old and the new are continually folded into each other in “Shuffle Along,” in which “42nd Street” meets “Dreamgirls.”
Even one’s program holds another, designed to resemble a playbill for the original production and filled with information involving the black theater artists who created “Shuffle Along” and made this adaptation possible. As Mitchell suggests in a moving final speech, theater allows the furniture to get rearranged like this, so that everyone can have a seat in the room.
Making a house into ‘Fun Home’
Furniture gets rearranged a lot during the course of “Fun Home,” the musical based on lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about growing up in the 1970s in a tightly wound family in which Bruce — her repressed, obviously gay father — eventually killed himself.
Winner of five 2015 Tonys — including best musical, best score (Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori) and best book (Kron) — most of its original cast remains intact almost a year after its opening within the intimate, in-the-round confines of Circle in the Square.
“We rearrange and realign/ is balanced and serene,” sings 43-year-old Alison of her father’s vain hope that a perfectly arranged house might somehow create an ordered and intact life. A committed house preservationist, Bruce (Michael Cerveris, in a Tonywinning role) constantly shores up the old as a bulwark against the new.
“You have to study the forms, you have to learn the rules,” Bruce tells his tomboyish young daughter — on stage as Small Alison, along with college-aged Medium Alison and the middle-aged Alison, looking back and remembering these two younger versions of herself.
Bruce is ostensibly talking about drawing, but he’s actually describing his severely circumscribed life, lived in fear of being himself. Conversely, Alison will gradually grow into her true self — leaping out of the closet, as she tells us, just months before her father stepped in front of a truck.
For all the sadness in this beautifully wrought musical, it can be surprisingly funny; Alison’s journey toward the light makes it so. Leaving the house of her father, she creates “Fun Home,” inhabiting a more inclusive world where anything is possible. A brave new world, like the one being born in “Hamilton.”
“There’s a million things I haven’t done,” Hamilton sings in the opening song of Miranda’s musical, buoyed by the promise of all he might do in a country giving free rein to his prodigious talent. “Just you wait. Just you wait.”