Year of dystopia, warnings, counterattacks
Not for the faint of heart: Best of Broadway in 2019
No year in Broadway history has so upended the idea of what actually constitutes a Broadway show as did 2019. On the main stem, we were served up personal stories, chili, absurdist flatulence, rancid beetlejuice and romantic musicals fully shorn of their belief in the power of love.
Who ever thought they would see an “Oklahoma!” that ended with Laurey and Curly covered in human blood?
We went to hell and back, and I don’t just mean your credit card bills from Telecharge, and we found out that the human capacity for betrayal doesn’t change much, all thing considered. We loved the music of Tina Turner, marveled at the tenaciousness of the Temptations and laughed at a man in a dress. Maybe. It depended. As with any season, some of the offerings were tough pills to swallow, but this showcase of theatrical creativity still is booming and bristling, eight times a week. These are restless times. Radical moralism is in vogue. But Broadway still expects people to open their wallets. The consumption of art remains a voluntary act. So it still pays to embrace complexity.
Here are the 10 best Broadway shows of 2019, ranked:
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 or in lockstep with the musical down the street.
2. “Betrayal”: Was Jamie Lloyd’s eye-popping revival the best Harold Pinter production ever to be seen on Broadway? The decadeslong 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 overeducated 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.
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.
4. “All My Sons”: Forget that folksy old Joe Keller, or the idea that Arthur Miller had sympathy for small-town 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 an all-American monster, far closer to Jeffrey Epstein or Bernie Madoff than any other interpretation I’ve seen.
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.
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?
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.
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, but it was a sometimes affectionate takedown of the white critical establishment, luring the oldschool tastemakers into loving a play that argued for their destruction.
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.
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.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic. cjones5@chicagotribune.com