2019 BEST OF B'WAY
THEATER CRITIC CHRIS JONES’ SHOWSTOPPERS
Even before the ball drops in Times Square Tuesday night, Broadway already has grossed more than $1 billion — and it’s only halfway through the season.
Much of that ch-ching came from shows that rely on customers who can remember sticking quarters in jukeboxes — listening to the likes of Tina Turner, The Temptations, Alanis Morrisette and most of the seemingly hundreds of numbers sampled to widespread delight in “Moulin Rouge!” And if 2019 brought us an anti-romantic “Oklahoma!” that ended not with Curly and Laurie headed off to wedded bliss but covered in their own blood, it also revealed that audiences loved “Beetlejuice,” a.k.a. The Show That Would Not Die, a whole lot more than snooty critics. (Guilty).
But there were plenty of high-quality success stories, including the sexiest production of a Harold Pinter play ever to be seen on Broadway (thanks mostly to Tom Hiddleston), a celebration of the authority goosing fun of tabloid newspapers in “Ink,” and a trip to hell and back in “Hadestown,” as hosted by the incomparable Andre De Shields.
The best shows of the year are a diverse collection — revivals, new plays, hot musicals, family attractions, political statements — all together reminding us that great artists are to be found in all corners of the business and on many different Midtown streets.
Broadway is not just one of New York’s biggest economic assets. In 2019, it also was a place to argue about politics, ponder the inevitability of death, better understand racial division and the Constitution of the United States, and have an old-school laugh at a man in a dress. With a really good voice and a big heart, toots.
Which were your 2019 favorites?
These are mine:
1. “Hadestown”
Stylish, audacious and thoroughly original, “Hadestown” was the perfect dystopian musical for a year in which America seemed to be going to hell. An eye-popping fusion of Andre De Shields, “Westworld” and Bourbon Street anarchy, “Hadestown” avoided the trap of literality in its interpretation of the music of Anais Mitchell, allowing the politics to seep out like steam from a punk.
Director Rachel Chavkin’s production was ferocious all right, but never shrill nor in lockstep with the musical down the street. Here was a show that asked where trust ends and caretaking begins, and that did not claim to know the answer. And unlike so many musicals these days, this show did not run scared from the transformative power of romantic love, a human entanglement so deep in the Broadway DNA that it hurts.
2. “Betrayal”
Was Jamie Lloyd’s great revival the best Harold Pinter production ever to be seen on Broadway? The decades-long competition is formidable but I vote yes. Why? The production of this three-handed romantic thriller was lean enough to key into the play’s theme of how the over-educated literary classes are doomed to fail at love and succeed only in having an existential crisis.
And it was human enough to make you care for its hapless spouses and adulterers. Hiddleston even managed to cry through the invasion of a cellphone, indicative of the hell of having your heart on display.
3. “The Sound Inside”
Dense, sophisticated and complex, this enveloping story of a Yale creative writing professor with cancer and a keen sense of the complications of
her own narrative was Adam Rapp at his best.
Rapp, the closest the theater can get to David Foster Wallace, is often misunderstood by directors and actors, but the combination of the cold, existential, Dostoyevskian eye of director David Cromer and the intellectual vulnerability of the luminous Mary-Louise Parker meant that audiences were able to explore both the clinical and the heart-pulling dimension of the demise that surely awaits us all.
Edward Albee once called the experience of seeing death in both the future and the present the “360-degree view.” That is what the smartest play of the season on Broadway offered.
4. “All My Sons”
Forget that folksy old Joe Keller, or the idea that Arthur Miller had sympathy for smalltown industrialists who became pawns of ruthless wartime capitalism. In Jack O’Brien’s revelatory revival, the actor Tracy Letts turned the purveyor of lethally cracked cylinder heads into an all-American monster, far closer to Jeffrey Epstein or Bernie Madoff than any other interpretation I’ve seen.
Such men as these always cause a lot of collateral damage, of course, and here we had Annette Bening on hand to show us what happens to enablers who retreat from what their eyes see and the mind tells them. A cautionary tale, rivetingly told.
5. “What the Constitution Means to Me”
Heidi Schreck’s solo tour de force decided that a Broadway show could be part a progressive political lecture, part a personal confessional autobiography of the writer and performer, and part a manifesto for feminist reform of the Supreme Court and its way of thinking.
Yet she never abandoned what matters most in the theater: Clarity, truth, vulnerability, and care and understanding for an audience that wants to hear someone else’s story, but also use it in their own lives. Sure, there was catnip for feminists sick of orginalist fallacies. But Schreck revealed enough of her own personal and intellectual struggles to make us realize that the Constitution, and by extension America, are messy entities with unsolvable problems that always depend on the kindness of strangers.
6. “Ink”
Those compelled by Rupert Murdoch and his clan now have the HBO show “Succession” for their schadenfreude, but James Graham’s savvy play about the Sun newspaper, ground zero for today’s tabloid culture, revealed more about how the Australian mogul harnessed human need and failing for journalistic profit.
Director Rupert Goold’s production was cold and cynical, but then how else should you treat this particular subject?
“Ink” was stained with casualties, but it also pointed out that Murdoch has thrived because his publications are fun: entertaining to read and thrilling to create.
7. “Hillary and Clinton”
The Clintons remain the most fascinating enigma in American public affairs, their marriage an endless source of curiosity. Not everyone on Broadway understood, though, that such a living couple are best explored artistically with the kind of elliptical remove that Lucas Hnath’s very clever play afforded us. Laurie Metcalf brought her no-nonsense stoicism to a character trapped in a Sisyphean life of ups and down; John Lithgow embodied how geniality can cover a multitude of sins. Continued on page 12
It wasn’t so much that they looked like Bill and Hillary, of course, but that they caught their essence, and their ability to reflect back to us so much of what has been going on in America.
8. “Slave Play”
Self-protected, youthfully certain of its truths and scathing of much white liberalism, “Slave Play” was unlike any other Broadway show, ever. But the politics were never allowed to subsume the inherent theatricality of the writing, and of the playwright, Jeremy O. Harris, who refused to sit quietly as playwrights are supposed to do.
“Slave Play” wasn’t really about what most people thought it was about — sex, interracial marriage, therapy — but it was a sometimes affectionate takedown of the white critical establishment, luring the old-school tastemakers into loving a play that argued for their destruction. Brilliant. And never dull.
9. “Tootsie”
A show with a near-impossible task given the aged ideas of the its source movie, “Tootsie” nonetheless managed to be the funniest show in town, unspooling gag after gag in its need to win us over to a fundamentally unsympathetic protagonist, and adding a delightful jazzy score from David Yazbek.
Thanks to one of the best musical performances of the year, or any year, from Santino Fontana, it made for a good night out on the town. Nothing wrong with that. Life is hard.
10. “Kiss Me Kate”
For all the trends toward revisionism, the directing of Broadway musicals remains a craft that takes experience, talent and respect for the material. That is precisely what Scott Ellis — and his star, Kelli O’Hara — delivered with this charming revival of a Cole Porter musical with a score that just won’t stop smooching.
With an eye toward the moment, Ellis and O’Hara subtly refocused the show as a tribute to the women and men of the theater, turning the work into a kind of precursor of “A Chorus Line” while still celebrating its place in the golden age of musicals, when the songs and the performances always revealed things more than people today think.
The old school knew way, way, more than today’s trendsetters realize.