Broadway shows demonstrate good times can be hard to sustain
Performances profile conflict, communities
NEW YORK - When the United States closed its airspace on Sept. 11, 2001, 38 planes carrying 6,000 passengers from all over the world were diverted to Gander, Newfoundland — nearly doubling its size.
The Newfies rose to the occasion, feeding and housing them in an outpouring of generosity that remains one of the few positive events during that troubled week. It’s now given rise to “Come From Away,” a feel-good musical by the husband-andwife team of David Hein and Irene Sankoff that recently opened on Broadway.
At a time when Americans feel hopelessly divided, “Come From Away” reminds us of a moment when it seemed we were all playing for the same team — not just here at home but in relation to a world community that offered America warm and unreserved support.
But like each of the five shows I saw during a recent visit to New York, “Come From Away” is also acutely aware that such good times can be hard to sustain.
Much as we might wish to overcome our isolation and join together, a variety of forces — including differences of class and race; economic instability and greed; social media; and the sheer difficulty inherent in squaring our private obsessions with the greater good — conspire to tear us apart.
One even sees this in the generally upbeat “Come From Away,” in which communal aspirations are baked into the show’s very structure: Each of the dozen actors plays multiple characters, most of whom are themselves composites of many people whom Hein and Sankoff interviewed, including Newfies and passengers.
Few of these individual stories stand out; in a way, that’s the point. However briefly, unity prevailed.
For all that, this unabashedly — sometimes overly — sentimental show includes a late song titled “Something’s Missing”; the title speaks for itself, referring to far more than the feelings of a stranded mother whose firefighting son goes missing in New York.
Yes: Lasting friendships and even a marriage grew out of those four days in Newfoundland. But for nearly all those there as well as most of us, life soon returned to normal.
Moreover, that short-lived era of good feeling was never truly universal. A recurring subplot in “Come From Away” involves an Egyptian traveler (Caesar Samayoa) subjected to suspicion and worse. None of it was warranted. His treatment is a reminder that Sept. 11 spawned plenty of fear and hatred; we’re still living with the fallout.
Alone together in ‘Dear Evan Hansen’
The tension between the community we want and the alienation we feel is at the heart of “Dear Evan Hansen,” the latest and easily the most impressive collaboration between Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (music and lyrics; book by Steven Levenson). It’s the best new musical I’ve seen this season, and a serious Tony contender come June.
Evan Hansen is a lonely high school senior, crippled by anxiety and depression, whose therapist has assigned him the task of writing himself letters as pep talks. Connor, a disturbed and unlikable classmate, steals one of them; when Connor kills himself shortly thereafter, he’s found with Evan’s letter.
Connor’s parents quite naturally misread it as Connor’s suicide note, and assume Evan must be the friend they’d never known Connor had. Evan reluctantly plays along, for both altruistic and selfish reasons: He wants to help a family in pain, but he’s also been crushing forever on Connor’s sister, Zoe — even though he’s never managed to say a word to her.
Things quickly spiral out of control from there; highlights including a faked email correspondence and increasingly elaborate lies involving a friendship that never was, supplemented by a social media campaign to keep Connor’s memory alive.
Numerous ballads explore the disconnect in Evan’s life — and so many of ours — between the virtual selves and communities we create online and who we really are. “I’m tap-tap-tappin’ on the glass,” Evan sings in a gorgeous early number, “waving through a window/I try to speak but nobody can hear/So I wait around for an answer to appear.”
As sung by the remarkable Ben Platt, with a plaintive wail that shifts into a heartbreaking falsetto, Evan speaks for all of us who are alone together — hungering for connection and community every time we go online, while simultaneously recognizing what Evan sings elsewhere: “we’re a million worlds apart.”
David Korins’ scenic design and Peter Nigrini’s outstanding, deliberately disorienting projections drive this message home: They feature towering banks of images from Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, each giving us a jangling, fractured world while never letting us forget the single bed of the boy who sleeps amidst them, longing for love and lost in the noise.
Worlds apart
Two well-acted productions — one the revival of a rarely performed Arthur Miller play and the second a new play marking the long-delayed Broadway debut of playwright Lynn Nottage — provide searing indictments of a predatory economic system that destroys families and communities.
Miller’s “The Price,” which debuted on Broadway in 1968, revolves around two brothers disposing of their late father’s surviving property: ten rooms of fine furniture squeezed into an attic, where he’d lived out his last years after losing everything in the 1929 stock-market crash.
Wisconsin natives Mark Ruffalo and Tony Shalhoub play the brothers, who’ve chosen very different paths.
Nearly 30 years ago, Victor (Ruffalo) gave up dreams of a career in science to become a cop during the height of the Depression; doing so allowed him to care for Dad while brother Walter (Shalhoub) was pursuing his single-minded goal of becoming a doctor and getting rich. The two men haven’t seen each other in the 16 years since their father died.
Ruffalo gives another of his fine performances as an everyman, living a plainspoken life of quiet desperation in which he’s forced to reckon the high price he’s paid for the sacrifices he’s made. He’s kept his nose clean and done no harm, but Ruffalo suggests a man whose altruism is mixed with fear; haunted by his father’s demise, Victor has lived small because he’s afraid to live large.
Meanwhile, Shalhoub’s Walter is wracked with guilt and shame; by living large and for himself, he’s grown small. Walter calls his brother a failure, but Shalhoub’s bobbing and dodging betrays a man who wonders whether he himself is the loser: He’s amassed wealth, but lost his soul.
“The Price” gets tangled in its overly convoluted plot following intermission; as is often true with Miller, it’s also prone to stilted speechifying. Given its timely themes and the all-star cast presenting them — Ruffalo and Shalhoub are joined by an excellent Danny DeVito as a furniture assessor and Jessica Hecht as Victor’s long-suffering wife — I’d still recommend it.
Better still is Nottage’s “Sweat,” which toggles between 2000 and 2008 within impoverished Reading, Pa. When their jobs move to Mexico, two generations of workers in a steel-tubing plant watch their world and friendships collapse; the bar where they’d once enjoyed time together becomes the scene of an ugly fight that sunders them forever.
Nottage, who is black, is particularly good at profiling how such hardship breeds racism; while written before last November’s election, “Sweat” also explains why disenfranchised workers might vote for someone like Trump.
Reflecting the two-plus years she spent talking to people in Reading, Nottage’s dialogue is note perfect, credibly capturing these workers’ cadence as well as their mix of nostalgia, rage, love and despair.
Nottage is also extraordinarily empathetic toward all of them, giving everyone an aria allowing their individual stories to be told. That doesn’t stop most of the characters in this nine-actor ensemble from doing something awful – including becoming a scab or beating one; locking out a striking son; or allowing envy to curdle into racism, destroying a decades-old friendship.
A shimmering ‘Sunday’
With its cerebral focus on the meaning and making of art, James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” might seem to be worlds removed from the gritty concerns of a play like “Sweat.”
But while watching the glorious, currently running revival of “Sunday” that features Jake Gyllenhaal as George and Annaleigh Ashford as Dot, I realized as never before how much this great musical is about so much more than an artist’s all-consuming vision.
It’s also about the way art inspires those of us viewing it to see differently, connecting dots in paintings and life to create different colors and forge new communities.
Gyllenhaal doesn’t have Mandy Patinkin’s voice. But he’s much warmer, and his George’s relationship with Ashford’s Dot has more chemistry than what one saw in the legendary Broadway debut featuring Patinkin and the sublime Bernadette Peters.
Gyllenhaal makes us focus less on an artist’s isolation and more on relationships, fueled by the sort of empathy and love that makes an imagined community like the one in Seurat’s “Sunday” possible.
Sure: As with each of the five shows discussed here, “Sunday” spends considerable time cataloging all the ways our communities decline and die. The painting assembled at the end of Act I comes undone at the top of Act II, as those within it drift offstage after memorializing the now-dead Seurat.
And yet: After all the trials and tribulations endured by George’s great grandson in the best Act II of this classic I’ve yet seen, the ghosts from that longago painting eventually reassemble.
Forever brought together by Seurat’s painting and Sondheim’s music, they collectively embody the hope that we might yet achieve the last and most important of those ideals Seurat champions throughout this piece: Harmony. “So many possibilities,” Gyllenhaal says, in the optimistic last line of the show. He’s right.